📝7/10

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time! This time: it’s a war no one notices!

MY SCATTERED AND TOTALLY IRRELEVANT NOTES:

From the humour-ridden Planet X, we move onto a much darker and depressing The Very Dark Thing, set during the end of the war that ravaged the Unbound Universe.

It’s delightful to listen to David Warner calmly enjoy the planet's beauty. At the same time, Lisa Bowerman furiously and frustratingly lashes out at him and Kerry Gooderson, all the while the big bad war closes in on them.

The singing rivers, wild unicorns, and temperamental gravity make for an interesting setting for the adventure. It’s pretty eerie how distracting the singing rivers end up being.

We learn early on that the titular dark thing is something unknown and mysterious slowly creeping up on our heroes (and lurking in the corner of one’s eye; a very Moffat-ish idea); this adds tension to the otherwise fairly simple plot.

The story very effectively explores the effects of total war and the dangers of miscommunication, polarisation, blind hate, and recklessness. Deirdre Mullins perfects a bitter, vile fleet admiral hell-bent on finishing the war no matter the cost.

Megatz and her emotional turmoil turn up the emotional dial quite nicely in the third act, while we also experience the very tense decision-making leaders often find themselves in during wartime.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

The unicorns make me think of the mix of sci-fi and fantasy in Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark.