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 | Reviews for Night Thoughts |
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There are 7 reviews so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
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| This play is so drably complicated ... |
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| By: | Phil Ince, Standing over your imminent grave |
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| Date: | Thursday 16 March 2006 |
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| Rating: |   1 |
... because it is truthless.
This lousy production is populated by beings nominally human yet without a trace of plausible human behaviour. There is no drama because there are no characters.
Psychologically scarred children discover their secret father and are immediately healed. Sociopaths bluster and rant. Suicides jibber and screech. Favoured Doctor / companion combos read huge swathes of stilted, incompetent fanwank in the direst, most leaden prose.
Meritless, laborious and entirely unentertaining. Avoid.
Bernard Kay manages to salvage something but his fellow performers are almost beyond awful; a regrettable inevitability given their talents and this script.
This play is so drably complicated because it is truthless.
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| Not another haunted house |
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What is it with this doctor and houses, that aside it was a good story and created a dark cold atmosphere you could sink into. The doctors solution was a little to easy but over all enjoyable.
The first two installments of Night Thoughts are fantastic. The regulars are all brilliant, as are most of the guest cast, and there are some exquisite moments of horror and intrigue. The whole build-up is ruined in parts 3 and 4 however. Shame.
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| Psychologically Unconvincing |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 3 January 2007 |
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| Rating: | 3 |
Bernard Kay, yes, always liked him. The rest? Best forgotten, I think. Phil Ince's review states in a more extreme manner much of what I think about this. I liked the opening operation scence, and thought, with Hex's dreaming the same thing, and the cover, that this might be a "Celestial Toymaker" kind of alternative reality story. Instead, it is 1/2 teen slasher execept the slasher is after the olduns this time, and 1/2 1950s scientist discovers terrible breakthrough in the basement story. The worst part of it all is that again, where Big Finish scripts attempt to go "psychological," they just miss the mark completely. The motivations are all wrong, the behaviors cliched and unconvincing, and everyone, Ace and Hex especially, is just plain stupid. After all, the Doctor leaves Ace with the Bursar because, as he says, he "trusts" her, and then she goes running off to the attic, leaving the Bursar all alone to face the killer. Stupid, or what? And what a way to justify someone's trust. And sure, go out in the pitch black of a Scottish forest in the Winter where there are open bear traps, just to prove how intelligent you are.
| By: | Doug, Pocono Summit, PA, USA |
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| Date: | Friday 6 April 2007 |
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| Rating: | 2 |
I was skeptical about whether I'd actually want to listen to this one before starting it, and I didn't read the reviews here first. Imagine my surprise to find that by the end of disc 1 I was actually quite impressed with it. The rating for disc 1 would be an 8 - excellent sound design, a dark, claustrophobic atmosphere, and a suspenceful whodunnit. We have a very wet, cold island, a strange house complete with atmospheric cellar and attic and a mysterious hooded night figure, a long disused chapel building nearby, and a freaky teenaged girl. The trouble is that all that was built up in the first two episodes is destroyed by the last two episodes. Disc 2 would get a rating of 1, and the fall of the story in its second half all but destroys the value of the first half.
The previous reviews state the situation pretty well. The second half of the story is utter chaos. All of the mystery that has been built up is unraveled in what seems the worst possible ways, turning the suspenseful, atmospheric mystery first into a bad soap opera, then into a bad sci-fi B-movie, and finally, at the very end, into a really nasty slasher story. Yuck!
It seems that my first instinct about Night Thoughts was on target.
| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Wednesday 27 February 2008 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
This story is rated badly by many other reviewers Ive noticed. This is my own personal review for this story.
Right, for a start, this is one of my favourite Doctor Who stories ever.
Let me explain why....
Some people could say that the old haunted house scene has been done too often. No such thing as too often with creepy old haunted houses. I like old houses. Theyre creepy and always have sinister tales associated with them.
Sylvester Mccoy leads a BRILLIANT cast in this VERY WELL CRAFTED TALE of lies and time travel experiments and vengeful corpses.
This story for me has all the things i ever needed to keep me hooked on doctor who. the characters are well portrayed and acted. The right actors have been given the right roles. I paritcularly like Liz Hopley as Sue, who really does do that flaming rabbits talking flaming scarily. Shes got a brilliant voice. You believe her to the core.
Another good piece of casting is in Bernard Kay, always a great actor, including his list of Doctor Who appearances previously. Here he plays the rather sour Major Dickens with obvious relish and the feel i get is of a really twisted character.
And for once the cliff hangers are great and unexpected in this one. Edward Young has written Doctor Who worthy of the screen. Ed has written Doctor Who that I love. This is the kind of story i want to see much more of please.
A good old horror story without the visual blood and gore but with a brilliant storyline and scares aplenty anyway. The whistling and the bear traps and the gravanax and the drowned mothers all lead to make this story one of the best stories Big Finish have done.
And if the story is as bad as a lot of people make out, then how come actors still get involved with the story. If it is that rubbish, then id think the actors would have seen that tooa and would have vocalised it. This story is the best seventh doctor story so far in my book anyway. Apart from No Mans Land of course.
| By: | Harry Ross Gorman, Bromborough, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Wednesday 29 August 2018 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
This story has a great atmosphere and the first episode is definitely a stand out in terms of mystery and engagement. Overall all the characters are engaging and have very believable motives. The only problem with this story is that it is not sure what it is trying to be in some places and I think the time travel element is not need as I think the reasons would be best left to the imagination. Besides from that, Lizzie Hopley gives a stand out performance as "Happy" and that ending is absolutely worth any story that could be put before it.
