Time's Horizon

Dark Eyes #2.3

Released: 12 February 2014

Listened: 11/17/21

Pieces start coming together in this story. There’s a gap between this story and the last for Molly and the Doctor, but not a big gap, and she’s starting to think it’s time to go home. There’s also a much longer gap for Liv, as they all meet up on a spaceship at the edge of the universe, although that’s a fuzzy definition. Unfortunately, the Eminence is also hanging out here as a big orange cloud. The Eminence is one of those Big Finish baddies they come up with once, and then re-use in multiple stories in unrelated ranges released around the same time. There’s quite a bit of jumbled timelines going on here. For the Eminence, this is apparently the first time it meets the Doctor, although it’s come back from the end of time, so who knows what’s going on there. For Liv, this is after “The Traitor,” and as a result, she has a very poor opinion of the Doctor. And herself, because she joined an exploratory sleeper ship with three other people to get as far away as possible from anyone who knows what she did on Nixyce. But for the Doctor, that hasn’t happened yet. And there’s a time traveler who popped back a few hundred years to set all this up, but it went terribly wrong for him. The other three crew members are well-drawn secondary characters, as Matt Fitton often writes, each quite driven toward their own goals. Molly shows signs of being a seasoned companion, which she hasn’t done before. She’s clearly of her own time, but has enough experience to handle the strangeness of being in a sci-fi environment. She and Liv bond over their medical training, and Molly displays the empathy that makes her a good nurse. She gains Liv’s trust almost immediately, which is no easy trick. The plot, again, resolves quite quickly, especially defeating something as powerful as the Eminence, but that thread isn’t completely over. The interaction with Molly and Liv makes this a good one.