This quality turns into a streak with Steve Lyons’ “The Eternity Contract”, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa story for the volume, and like Short Trips, it’s one of the highlights.  This is a story exploring the concept of death through a surreal setting, this time a house eternally caught in a storm.  The story starts with someone dying in a car crash and the Doctor and Nyssa on a completely different planet being attacked by an alien wolf, and all ending up at this house where they are informed they are dead.  The rest of the story is Steve Lyons’ musing on the various ways people can find themselves dead, and the setting of a halfway house for the dead clearly has its roots in other pieces of fiction but he uses it very carefully.  The Doctor and Nyssa are the only two who both refuse to take their scenario at face value and have the potential know how to escape and uncover just what is actually happening here.  The eventual reveal is one that is far closer to something published by Virgin, the master of the house Nicholas Carnon made a deal with Death, yes that Death, to borrow six souls for his own purposes, those that he replaces every so often whenever he gets bored.  It’s quite a cruel scenario but it also allows Lyons to slowly dig into how the Doctor and Nyssa are after the death of Adric and make this story a celebration of life and death as part of the natural order of things.  9/10.