Night Thoughts

Main Range #79

Released: February 2006

Listened: 12/6/20

If the last few stories have been getting darker, this one goes all the way for dark and creepy. It’s got the isolated setting and small cast of a “base under siege,” it’s got a series of mysterious murders in a manor house straight out of Agatha Christie, and eventually it’s got a big chunk of timey-wimey and paradoxes. It doesn’t have a known baddie, though, opting instead for a dose of creeping horror. But parts of the story don’t work so well. Characters keep secrets when it seems like they don’t need to, and the parts that they reveal hide other secrets purely for plot reasons. There’s a subplot involving mental illness that no one seems to take seriously enough (even Hex, who might know better), and it’s resolved far too easily for logical sense. The paradox skirts on the edge of time-travel rules as we know them. Ace and Hex seem oddly directed, sometimes being scared as you would imagine, but other times treating a scary situation far too lightly, and also not really listening to each other’s concerns, which they certainly would by now. And the actual ending doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, given what’s been set up in the story, but I think the writer was just going for maximum creepy. And as far as the creepy goes, it certainly succeeds. This probably isn’t one to listen to alone at night if you can avoid it.