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“NIGHT THOUGHTS – A FORGOTTEN EXPERIMENT WRAPPED IN GOTHIC RAIN”

A rainy experiment that just about lives… but only in the end.

Night Thoughts, Edward Young’s grim slice of gothic horror for Big Finish’s Main Range, sets its moody tale in a suitably remote Scottish manor, drenched in rain and foreboding. It’s an evocative location for a haunted house tale, brimming with psychological unrest and decaying academia. Originally penned as a potential story for the unmade Doctor Who Season 27, this audio marks Big Finish’s first foray into adapting a TV script-that-never-was—and the DNA of that era shows.

It’s grim. It’s quiet. It’s a bit too clever for its own good. And it's haunted by the ghost of what might have been.

HAPPY THE RABBIT WILL SEE YOU NOW

Perhaps the most unsettling presence isn’t the house or its guests, but a stuffed rabbit named Happy. Voiced by Lizzie Hopley through the character of the disturbed maid Sue, Happy sounds like he could have stepped straight out of Child’s Play. Hopley’s performance makes both Sue and her fluffy mouthpiece genuinely eerie—and later, heartbreakingly tragic. One of the few vivid elements of the story, Happy the Rabbit becomes the unlikely highlight of the piece and even gets the final grisly laugh.

Meanwhile, Hex hears strange voices and experiences visions, lending some tension to the proceedings. But for all the story’s talk of nightmares, visions, and philosophical dread, little of it lands emotionally. It tells us characters are disturbed, but rarely shows us why.

PART FOUR TO THE RESCUE

It’s not until Part Four that Night Thoughts begins to justify itself. Major Dickens (the great Bernard Kay, in his swansong Doctor Who role) is finally unveiled as the true villain behind a twisted experiment: the deliberate death of a child, orchestrated in order to prove that she can be brought back. It’s a horror conceit that’s genuinely arresting, morally complex, and fits the Seventh Doctor’s era like a glove. The Doctor’s ultimate choice—to travel back in time and persuade the academics not to go through with it—is beautifully in character, and a smart, non-violent resolution.

Dickens' comeuppance, delivered at the paws of a vindictive Happy the Rabbit, is darkly satisfying in its absurdity. It’s just a pity it takes so long to get there.

AN ATMOSPHERE LOST IN THE FOG

The first episode is all rain and shadows and cryptic dialogue, but little actual plot. The pacing stumbles often, and while the atmosphere starts thick, it grows thinner the more the story explains itself. By Part 3, once the pseudo-science behind resurrection is laid bare, the sense of mystery deflates rather than intensifies.

There’s also a tangle of indistinct characters—various aging academics who are difficult to keep track of and don’t do much to earn our investment. Philip Olivier’s Hex is given a fair amount to do, but Olivier himself seems oddly disengaged. Meanwhile, Bernard Kay—normally a scene-stealing presence—is surprisingly underused and gets lost in the shuffle until it’s too late to make his menace truly resonate. Joanna McCallum's Bursar similarly fades into the fog, offering a stiff performance that never fully connects.

GOOD INTENTIONS, GOTHIC EXECUTION

There’s a fascinating moral thread buried beneath all the rain and rabbits: the ethics of resurrection, the cost of tampering with life and death, and the temptation of brilliant minds to cross lines they shouldn't. All very Seventh Doctor. But the script is so tonally muddled and structurally slow that these ideas never come to life with the punch they deserve.

As a curiosity from the unmade Season 27, Night Thoughts holds academic interest. But as a standalone story, it feels more like a ghost of a better script, haunting the halls of a perfectly good concept.

📝THE BOTTOM LINE: 5/10

Night Thoughts promises spooky gothic horror and delivers on some fronts—Happy the Rabbit is terrifying, the setting is atmospheric, and the final act lands with some weight. But sluggish pacing, indistinct characters, and a clunky tonal mix leave much of the story feeling distant and foggy. Despite a strong finish, it takes far too long to matter.

The Monthly Adventures #79 - "Night Thoughts" by Edward Young

Where to start with Night Thoughts? A story that is widely loved, uses my favourite TARDIS team and has a synopsis miles up my alley and yet is bizarrely one of the worst Monthly Adventures I’ve come across so far. Originally conceived as a story for the show, this missing adventure was adapted into an audio drama years before The Lost Stories range was ever launched and honestly, I think it should’ve stayed on the shelf. If I had to describe Night Thoughts with one sentence it would be: imagine an author with no talent tried to write The Chimes of Midnight.

In a remote manor, a group of old friends gather to complete an experiment a decade in the making, but old secrets threaten to get in the way. Stranded by a violent storm, the Doctor, Ace and Hex find themselves isolated with the strange group, and at the mercy of a killer in the night.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

All the pieces were in place for this one to be a born and bred classic - there was nothing that should’ve held it back. A fantastic, isolated setting that gives way to a creepy murder mystery with some pitch perfect atmosphere; what could possibly go wrong? Night Thoughts is one of those stories that just feels disappointing because it had so much promise. The actual concept of it all is brilliant and by far the best thing about it: a group of scientists trying to make up for a past mistake gather every year in a remote manor, but this year, there’s a killer on the loose. Simple yet astonishingly effective. Throw in some great imagery, and this was shaping up to be something truly magnificent. And really, there is some genuinely creepy stuff here. The hooded killer using a tape recording of the Doctor to trick victims into a false sense of safety was a stroke of genius and led to the bone-chilling Part One cliffhanger that instantly set the tone. For the first half of this story, the atmosphere was truly on point and I was decently immersed. And then it got worse. And it got worse. And worse.

Let's start with the characters; every murder mystery hinges on its cast, the whole plot surrounds working out which one is the killer after all. Night Thoughts dares to offer us a roster of one-dimensional cardboard cutouts that either lack any kind of character at all or are painfully melodramatic. I think the worst offender is our main antagonist - General Dickens - who is both somebody who possesses a single character trait and is also laughably bad as a villain, feeling like a pantomime character got trapped in a horror story (seriously, listen to how many f**king times he talk about bear traps, it’s hilarious). Any good part that may have been hiding in our cast is, however, pretty quashed by one of two things: for one, the dialogue is terrible. Not astonishingly bad but it's got that amateurish feel a lot of the audios have, where characters will just narrate everything around them really unnaturally so as to convey things to the listener. Secondly, nearly every single action taken by any character is completely senseless.

It’s going to be hard to describe to you just how moronic of a script this is because you can find an example of something dumb in every clichéd, boring scene in this supposed “horror story”. I think the first time I realised just how bad it was going to be was when a character was killed and we jumped confusingly to after they had already discovered the body off-screen, where two characters were casually talking about how it was annoying they had to put it in the freezer. A man has just died and that’s what you’re worried about? This story makes zero sense, it changes plot on a dime and acts like the viewer can just guess what’s happening. Scenes are presented muddily, it’ll just throw random details in without set up and characters will act in completely illogical ways that somehow conveniently work. There’s a weird obsession with eyeballs that’s never properly explained, there’s a scene where Hex gets trapped by a stuck door that then it resolves by being magically unstuck, Ace gets a dressing gown cord stuck in a bear trap and then puts her leg in one, but light enough so that it doesn’t go off. Don’t know what bear traps activate when fabric touches them but not when stepped on but oh well. There are a hundred different moments I could touch on like this that just completely lost me, I had no idea what the story was about by the end.

Not to mention the tonal disparity. I said before that the plot changes on a dime but I don’t think I expressed that well enough. One second it’s a murder mystery, the next it's a really dark story about time travel and euthanasia, the next second we’re chasing a zombie dressed in bear skin around a Scooby-Doo house. It really wants to be a serious and grim chiller but then is so ridiculous and clichéd it feels like a bad b-movie. I was laughing out loud listening to this and know for a fact that was not the intention.

The final act is probably the worst. I haven’t really touched on our main cast yet but they’re all awful; Ace and Hex are written as if Young’s only experience with them was somebody else’s poor description and McCoy is putting in a really bored performance for a Doctor that feels strangely flat. The absolute worst scene however comes in the third act; it’s revealed that a decade ago, the scientists accidentally euthanized a girl they thought was dying but was actually recovering and have been trying to send a message back in time to stop themselves. It gets overly convoluted with stuff about some of them actually knowing she was well but that doesn’t matter, the girl dies, they try to avert it. And lo and behold we have yet another f**king web of time argument, because we haven’t gone through that ten bajillion times already. And what’s worse is we get a scene of the Doctor callously trying to murder a little girl with carbon monoxide. He eventually doesn’t go through with it, but the one-dimensional performance mixed with the overall lack of subtlety mean it just looks like children’s hero The Doctor tried to suffocate a 10 year old.

Night Thoughts was a brilliant story written by the wrong person. What should’ve been a chilling horror story ended up being a tonally confused, indecipherably written and embarrassing mess that hits just about every problem you can get in a Big Finish audio drama. The only thing saving it is promise; even within the story, the first part consisted of decent set up, just a shame it was so mind-numbingly confusing and botched from then on. A really disappointing listen overall, if you want a creepy Doctor Who murder mystery, just listen to The Chimes of Midnight.

3/10

Pros:

+ Builds a fantastic atmosphere in the first half

+ The initial conceit and a few ideas are fantastic

Cons:

- The dialogue needs work

- Every action every character takes is illogical

- The sidecast is either bland or melodramatic

- The script is confused and mind-numbing

- Our main cast is at their worst

- Tries to be dark and serious but is utterly laughable

Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#079. Night Thoughts ~ 9/10

◆ An Introduction

Long before BigFinish launched their highly successful range ‘The Lost Stories’, an unmade television script was actually submitted to this range. Obviously a few changes had to be made to accommodate the audio medium, and also because everyone’s favourite Liverpudlian had just joined this TARDIS team, but it’s a story that is still fondly talked about seventeen years later.

◆ Publisher’s Summary

'I warn you, things could get very nasty here before they get better.'

A remote Scottish mansion. Five bickering academics are haunted by ghosts from their past. Reluctantly they offer shelter to the Doctor and his companions Ace and Hex.

Hex, already troubled by a vivid nightmare, is further disturbed by the nighttime appearance of a whistling, hooded apparition.

Ace tries to befriend the young housemaid, Sue. Sue knows secrets. She knows why the academics have assembled here, and she knows why they are all so afraid. But Sue's lips are sealed, preferring to communicate through her disturbing toy, Happy the Rabbit.

And then the killing begins. Gruesome deaths that lead the Doctor and his friends to discover the grisly truth behind the academics' plans, and – as the ghosts of the past become ghosts of the present – to recognise that sometimes death can be preferable to life.

◆ The Seventh Doctor

After two rather experimental adventures, we get to hear this TARDIS team working together in much more conventional surroundings. Sylvester McCoy has really settled into the audio medium by this point, and he’s really connecting with his two companions too. His performance in ‘Night Thoughts’ honestly took my breath away.

The Doctor’s discipline is mainly that of macro cosmology, but he dabbles in other fields. He’s a traveller who likes to experience and observe, and yet he finds the more things change, the more they stay the same. He doesn’t think much of Major Dickens (“One of them has cancer… cancer of the soul”).

◆ Ace

‘Night Thoughts’ features a brilliant performance from Sophie Aldred, who is thankfully out of that weird “Just McShane” storyline!

Ace starts the story by falling head-first into a freezing cold lake, and is understandably in shock. She can remember her mum crying for days when her gran died, she was only three, but the memory is sort of burned onto her mind. Over the years, she has been through a lot with the Doctor, and is convinced she should have been able to handle what she saw at the bottom of the lake.

◆ Hex

Following the experimental madness of both ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘LIVE 34’, we finally get to hear Philip Olivier in a more conventional adventure, and his performance in ‘Night Thoughts’ is genuinely marvellous.

Hex isn’t one for dreams, or reading too much into them, but he had an extremely vivid nightmare last night – there was a kid’s toy on an operating table, and a man named Hartley being forced to operate on it. He’s trained as a staff nurse. The poor bloke gets the shock of his life when looking for a midnight snack, completely forgetting that Dickens put Hartley’s body in the chest freezer! Hex tells Sue that they have something in common, never knowing their mothers. He was brought up by his gran, though he thought she was his mam until he was six – he’s on Sue’s wavelength, and sweetly gives her a bear hug.

◆ Story Recap

1996, Gravonax Island. A group of university professors are carrying out experiments to send a message through time, when they are interrupted by the arrival of a woman named Maude, and her two daughters, seeking shelter from a dreadful storm. The academics welcome them with open arms, but one of the daughters, Edie, soon went blind. Major Dickens soon diagnosed her with Gravonax Poisoning… a terminal disease.

To avoid painful suffocation, the academics carried out what they call “compassionate euthanasia”, and buried her somewhere on the island. Stricken with grief, Maude later committed suicide by drowning herself in the nearby lake. It was presumed her younger daughter died with her.

2006, Gravonax Island. The Doctor, Ace and Hex arrive to find the same group of university professors hunkered down at Sibley Hall… and then a spate of murders and suicides start, before the horrifying truth is finally revealed.

They discover that Dickens misdiagnosed Edie, and she was only suffering from a simple eye infection. But he had an ulterior motive this entire time, wanting to use the temporal experiments to resurrect Edie. All he wanted was to be famous for bringing someone back to life, which would certainly impress his old comrades back in the armed forces.

◆ Memories of Hinchcliffe

‘Night Thoughts’ is another incredibly dark story for this TARDIS team, but perhaps in a more traditional sense. The location of Sibley Hall feels like it could easily have been written for the Hinchcliffe era, with an unknown killer roaming round in the dark with a dodgy recording of the Doctor’s voice, a bunch of hypodermic needles and a spoon to gouge out people’s eyes! I think it’s fair to say that this story isn’t afraid to be gruesome with its imagery.

◆ The Orphan

My favourite aspect of ‘Night Thoughts’ is honestly the plot involving Sue, who later turns out to be Maude’s younger daughter. She’s spent her entire life in care, and now finds herself in the exact place her mam and sister perished. She’s emotionally damaged and vulnerable, and much praise should be given to Lizzie Hopley for her performance in the role.

To think that the person playing Sue would go on to write my all-time favourite BigFinish release (‘Sonny’).

◆ Military Intelligence: Contradiction of Terms

If there is one downside to ‘Night Thoughts’, then it would have to be the character of Major Dickens. Whilst he is very clearly meant to be an unhinged and militaristic psychopath, I found him incredibly one dimensional.

Martin Day would create a similar character for a story coming up called ‘No Man’s Land’, and I definitely think Lieutenant-Colonel Brook is a more convincing army head-case than the Major.

◆ Sound Design

We conclude ‘Night Thoughts’ by discussing its post-production, and this is where the adventure really comes to life. I can clearly picture Sibley Hall in my mind as this grand-old Gothic structure, isolated on this lonely island, surrounded by leafless and barren trees forming shapes in the night. Gareth Jenkins deserves so much credit for creating a really haunting atmosphere with his sound design.

A bleeping heart monitor and the pumping of a ventilator, as Major Dickens forces the academics to operate. Stormy weather batters the island, and owls howl in the night wind. A crackling radio broadcast inside of Sibley Hall. Thrashing water, as Ace falls into the lake! A rewinding tape recorder, as the killer captures the Doctor’s voice. Heavy breathing from the killer in the cellar, right before they murder Joe Hartley… whistling to the tune of Oranges and Lemons as they leave. The crackling of a roaring fireplace. An old-fashioned bear trap clamps shut, narrowly missing Ace’s legs! The taxidermied bear falls onto the Bursar with a thud… killing her instantly. Major Dickens has his eyes removed in gruesome fashion at the end of the story.

◆ Music

The other half of ERS Studios is handling the score for ‘Night Thoughts’, and I must commend Andy Hardwick for his excellent use of the piano here. It really builds upon the excellent atmosphere brought about by the writing and sound design. Oddly enough, it also reminded me a lot of Ben Bartlett’s music for one of my favourite television series, Vera.

◆ Conclusion

“Mother dead! Father gone! We think your sister’s drowned!”

A military man gave a terminal diagnosis to a girl who only had an eye infection, all so he had a corpse to use in his deranged experiments. Major Dickens thinks he can resurrect Edie, but time is a force of nature that you can rarely change.

‘Night Thoughts’ is yet another dark story, and I can definitely see why it was rejected by JNT (you’d never have gotten away with doing a story this gruesome on television).

This TARDIS team has really hit its stride now, operating like a well-oiled machine, and Edward Young clearly has a great understanding of the characters. Whilst I wish Dickens was less of a cackling villain and had a bit more depth to him, this is still a really enjoyable slice of horror Who. I’m now also petrified of taxidermied bears.

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: LIVE 34

I think this one is a bit overhyped. It's good, especially for it's atmosphere but I don't think the story is all that remarkable or experimental. The first half is pretty much excellent, you have a really unique and varied cast of characters who all feel quite real trapped in a really haunting setting slowly getting picked off. That alone gets it the rating I've given it.

The time travel plot is halfway there to being quite good but it really relies on a lot of new time travel concepts being introduced. Like the whole idea of the machine not being strong enough to change time so people can only be revived temporarily. That just doesn't sit with my idea of how time works. I also really don't like how willing the Doctor was to kill someone, It wasn't even given a clever justification, only that "time will become unpleasant" or something to that effect which really feels like a weak excuse for the Doctor to do that. Granted he didn't follow through but he certainly seemed willing enough for a bit.

It's a great story for Hex though, in particular his bonding with Sue. I'm starting to really like him as a companion, excited to see where it all goes.

Next Story: The Veiled Leopard