Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Mark Lewis Jones, Julian Wadham, Sinead Keenan, Rory Keenan, Nicholas Briggs.

The glass is never half full for the Doctor. There should be a point in the Doctor’s life where someone sits him down and examines in depth, just what would happen if boredom ever got the better of him! For even in the smallest detail of finding himself cut off from his Tardis on a stretch of lonely beach, there is always a house on an island in which the allusion to an Agatha Christie novel will appear.

The great question that always abounds with a seemingly unending amount of pleasure is like Agatha Christie’s great novel, And Then There Were None, or whichever version of the name you may have read first, just how many people will die before the mystery is solved in what alludes to the fourth incarnation of the Doctor’s life love of the Gothic.

In Justin Richards’ The Darkness of Glass, the Doctor and Leela find themselves embroiled in a mystery so sinister that the prospect of a terrifying outcome so shattering is possible. Glass is the key to all on the cut off island that the travelling explorers find themselves in, Glass is a transparent conduit, it allows light where darkness shields itself, it sheds a certain degree of the apparent to become obvious. However, like all glass, the image can be distorted, even to a slight degree and the more light that shines through it, the chance of fire, of carnage, can be a resulting factor.

With Julian Wadham crossing over from Big Finish’s The Avengers series with great humour and style and Sinead Keenan delivering a dream of a performance as Mary Summersby, The Darkness of Glass, is not without its gravitas and full acting enjoyment. In his role as Joseph Holman, it is possible to imagine what Mr. Wadham would be like as future incarnation of The Doctor, certainly in audio format.

Whilst The Darkness of Glass is perhaps not out of the ordinary, it certainly doesn’t have the appeal of many of the Big Finish stories from the last 16 years, it is not by any means one in which to miss. Just for Tom Bakers deliberate enthusiasm throughout this particular story alone, is worth delving in head first, glass doesn’t only reflect the image after all.

Doctor Who: The Darkness of Glass is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.

Ian D. Hall