Big Finish Doctor Who/Recap/074 Night Thoughts

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


In an old mansion on a remote Scottish island, the Doctor, Ace and Hex seek shelter with an odd group of academics from the nearby university. While Hex is disturbed by similarities to his recent nightmare about a very strange operation, a whistling figure stalks the halls of the mansion, and the key to surviving the storm may lie with a young girl and her sinister stuffed companion.

High Octane Nightmare Fuel ensues.

Night Thoughts contains examples of:

  • Creepy Child: Sue may be a bit older than the usual example at 16, but her childish demeanor and disturbing tendency to speak only through Happy the Rabbit makes her more than qualify.
  • Creepy Doll: Happy the Rabbit, as well as the eyeless doll in Hex's dream.
  • Dreaming of Things to Come: Hex's nightmare, which involves a group of people arguing around an operating table; the "patient" is a doll with no eyes. Turns out to be a psychic distress call symbolically representing Eadie's death.
  • Everything's Worse with Bears: Ace and the Bursar are terrorized by a stuffed (in the taxidermy sense) bear that keeps moving when they're not looking... and breathes.
  • Eye Scream: A recurring theme. Let's leave it at that.
  • Ironic Nursery Tune: The hooded figure whistles "Oranges and Lemons" while it kills people and gouges their eyes out.
  • Karmic Twist Ending: When the Doctor, Ace and Hex leave, Major Dickens is the only member of the original group left alive, albeit tied up and awaiting the police. The Doctor wonders aloud how Eadie managed to stay alive so long, and reveals there's a slim chance her corpse could still be wandering the island if circumstances aligned just right. Cut back to the Major, who hears a sound and assumes it's the cops-- but instead sees a familiar figure, one with no eyes, the voice of Happy the Rabbit, and a very sharp pair of shears...
  • Moral Event Horizon: The Major purposefully misdiagnoses Eadie's symptoms in order to set up the proper conditions for the time experiment, so he could become famous for being the first person to bring the dead back to life.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The purpose of the academics' experimentations at the mansion turns out to be to send a message back in time preventing them from euthanizing a girl who was misdiagnosed with a terminal illness. Of course, it doesn't go exactly as planned.
  • Taxidermy Is Creepy: Hartley the taxidermist's occupation ends up playing a fairly significant role in the story. Specifically, he's to blame for all the Eye Scream, since his removal of Eadie's eyes for use in his stuffed animals triggers her mother's suicide and fuels Eadie's revenge.
  • You Can't Fight Fate: The academics' attempts to change the past by preventing Eadie's death fail because the effects of the Bartholomew Transactor are temporary and only succeed in briefly creating a paradoxical timeline where Eadie lived, resulting in her living corpse roaming the island.