The strength of Mrs Constance Clark’s character as a companion has, in the stories I’ve listened to so far, been her experience of WW2 and how the writers of her stories have chosen to place her in locations and communities which give her a very different perspective on what we see in Criss-Cross.

This Short Trip, read by Miranda Raison, has the 6th Doctor and Constance arrive in what turns out to be a small German town. Constance’s realisation that normal families in Germany live in fear in the same way English ones do.

The real fear of bombing raids here, though, is superseded by a more alien threat from the skies – although one cleverly grounded in German propaganda of the time. A fairly well known poster bearing the legend Verdunkeln (which translates as ‘black out’) depicts a British plane with a skeleton throwing bombs down to the German town below. A small boy that the Doctor and Constance encounter is truly terrified of the poster and when they return him home to his family, they discover that his fear is more rational than it may have first seemed. Something is terrorising the town and feeding on light. To push the horror even further, this cloaked figure will even take a human’s eyes because of the light it can see detected in it.

Constance’s shift in perspective over the war is well-played by Raison. Seeing innocent children who are terrified of a faceless threat from above really does hit her and make her reassess her position over who the actual enemy is.

The story is a little vague on a couple of counts. The origins of the creature are left undetermined with the Doctor merely supposing that it existed in the upper atmosphere and had flown to close to Earth (like Icarus) attracted by the burning fires of bombing raids, and crashed – becoming stranded and desperate. Whether it is an alien or some unknown native predator is left hanging.

The dating of the story is also vague. I have placed this in 1944 simply to fit into my marathon at this point (having only recently learned of it’s WW2 placing) but it could be at any point during the war when the British were bombing Germany.

Overall, it’s a good, atmospheric story which cleverly builds on the poster’s image.