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“CLOSURE: A DARK, TENSE MORAL DILEMMA”

Following the light-hearted frolic of Making Myths, the Buried Treasures anthology swerves dramatically into serious, unsettling drama with Closure. Written by Paul Cornell – Benny's original creator – this second story reconnects much more strongly with the themes and tone of the Time Ring Trilogy. Gone are the gags and banter; in their place are grim war crimes, horrifying experiments, and a fierce moral quandary that asks just how far Benny is willing to go to shape the future.

The set-up is simple yet chilling: Benny uses her Time Ring to travel fifty years into the past to interview a woman and her newborn child about atrocities yet to come. The child in question will grow up to become a brutal tyrant, responsible for unspeakable acts committed during a vicious war. Benny’s mission – whether to guide, intervene, or possibly kill the child – slowly comes into terrifying focus.

A RELENTLESS ATMOSPHERE OF TENSION

Closure immediately establishes a heavy, oppressive atmosphere. There’s no elaborate soundscape here; just two women talking in a villa, the horrors lying largely in Benny’s increasingly graphic recounting of the war crimes she’s witnessed. Cornell masterfully layers the horror, allowing the story’s darkness to creep slowly under the skin. The atrocities Benny describes are unsettling, vivid, and extremely effective at conveying the sheer desperation and moral collapse in the final days of the conflict.

It’s not a story for the faint-hearted. The idea of possibly murdering an infant to prevent future evil hangs uneasily in the air throughout, and Cornell refuses to flinch from the implications. This isn’t a breezy "What if?" dilemma – it’s real, bloody, and brutal, and it pushes Benny into some of the darkest corners we’ve seen her inhabit.

LISA BOWERMAN SHINES AS A DARKER, FIERCE BENNY

Lisa Bowerman delivers one of her best performances yet as Benny. She captures a harder, colder edge to the character – a woman burdened with knowledge and desperate to do what’s right, even if that means making horrific choices. Her growing frustration, her disgust at the atrocities, and her utter lack of sympathy for the child's mother (played effectively by Sarah Mowat) are all brilliantly realised.

The story’s slow drip-feed of new revelations keeps the tension ratcheting upwards. Mowat plays her role with suitable distress, initially passive but growing increasingly desperate as Benny's story unfolds, culminating in emotional confrontation.

A TWIST THAT REDEFINES THE STORY

Just when it seems clear where the story is headed, Cornell pulls the rug out from under the listener. Benny’s true mission isn't to kill the baby or to steer the mother into raising him differently – it’s to ensure the mother survives an assassination attempt that would otherwise leave the boy motherless, setting him down the path to monstrosity. It's a clever, powerful twist that redefines everything Benny has been saying and doing up to that point.

It elevates Closure from a grim thought experiment into a profound meditation on nurture versus nature, responsibility, and hope even amid horror. Benny isn’t here to extinguish a life – she’s here to save one.

SLIGHT PACING ISSUES, BUT A GRIPPING PAYOFF

The story does take a little while to find its footing. The first few minutes feel slightly aimless, meandering between small talk and vague tension before finally zeroing in on the central dilemma. Once it locks in, however, it becomes increasingly gripping, culminating in a genuinely emotional, thought-provoking climax.

This isn't a story of big sci-fi spectacle or elaborate worldbuilding – it's intimate, uncomfortable, and powerful.

📝VERDICT: 9.7/10

Closure is a triumph of atmosphere and character-driven storytelling. Paul Cornell’s dark, gripping script digs deep into moral complexity, while Lisa Bowerman delivers a stunning, steely performance as a Benny willing to do whatever it takes to prevent future atrocities. Despite a slow start, the emotional payoff is powerful, cementing this as one of the standout entries in Benny’s early Big Finish adventures. Grim, tense, and utterly compelling.

Closure is another lost little chapter of the Bernice Summerfield stories. Originally part of the Buried Treasures, and nowadays just a sort of freebie with another set, Closure is a very dark story full of war crimes of all sorts of varieties.

It is a very grim listen. In Buried Treasure, after the empty kookiness of Making Myths, this is a bit of tonal whiplash. Lisa Bowerman and Sarah Mowat once again do what they can with the material, but it is tough getting through the content. The idea of the story - going back in time to stop a war criminal - is interesting enough, but I feel as though the writing is overtly clumsy and really struggles with the material at hand. Really, this is just best viewed as a bit of trivia in the history of Bernice. I don't really think it is of value beyond that as all it really served was to bring down my mood a bit with some difficult material.

Closure does remind me a bit of ...Be Forgot, a short I recently read that deals with Benny coping with the fallout of a different cataclysmic war. In comparison, I think the written short better navigates that material because there is something of value to Closure - I'm just not sure it is fully realized, preferring graphic content over something more thought through.

29.10.2022
BFDW: Bernice Summerfield: Buried Treasures
e02: Closure

That, on the other hand, is nothing short of a masterpiece. I'm almost tempted not to spoil it away in a slim chance you ever listen to this. Nevertheless, a synopsis alone should be interesting enough:

Bernice, a historian and an archeologist, goes back in time to when a ruthless dictator was a baby. There, she meets his mother. They talk.

How brilliant is this? I love how they spin the usual trope to have a meaningful story about the nature of violence and its cyclical nature, how it affects us through generation and how to break out of it. Today especially it hits very hard. 5/5, it's the best a short-form sci-fi can be.

A very well done 2-hander. Be warned, it is gruesome.