Hooklight is a twelve (!) part story that was released across two six-episode boxsets, but unlike the ill-fated “Last Day” double-whammy from last year this is actually coherent and enjoyable! While not perfect, particularly in the second half, Hooklight succeeds at a grander form of storytelling (even if it borrows heavily from the narrative structure of Lord of the Rings) and introduces genuinely interesting characters that have a chance to develop and breathe thanks to the extended runtime. Let’s take a closer look!
The Doctor (Peter Davison), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) and Tegan (Janet Fielding) end up in the “Land of Morning”, a collection of planets in the early days of the universe that few visit. While the TARDIS is recovering they head to a local museum where the team notice the odd sight of a lit lamp sitting on a pedestal, and when talking to the museum’s head Dr. Kessica Myles (Celia Imrie) they find out it wasn’t lit when she last saw it. Some quick book nosing and The Doctor is worried so takes Tegan and Kessica to the planet where the vast majority of Morning’s knowledge is kept while Nyssa and Adric are told to keep an eye on it, but sadly the light itself is sentient and begins to influence Nyssa’s mind. As this is happening an evil force of ring wrai… of people called the “Nighguar” head to where the light is and in order to counter them the leader of Morning, King Halcyon (Alan Cox) decides to blow the entire island off the face of the planet. The Doctor tells Adric to run to the TARDIS, which he does but it heads off to another time with just him on board, but luckily Nyssa manages survive as well, along with the lamp.
It’s here we find out that The Doctor believes it to be the fabled “Hooklight”, the very first light that ever entered the universe at its creation and is extremely dangerous, having the ability to freeze anything it wants in time for all eternity. The only way to destroy Hooklight is to take it to Mount Doom, a.k.a. the Forge it was first created in, and so begins the quest, but with Nyssa succumbing to the tempting voices from the light it will be no easy task. I’ll stop the Lord of the Rings comparison now… As the story progresses everyone splits up, starting with The Doctor and Kessica meeting up with Halcyon and find out he’s a clone of a clone of a clone many times over and that the Halycons have been ruling over Morning for many generations but getting more and more insane with each copy, and soon The Doctor is pushed through a portal back in time by one of the Halycon’s robots. Nyssa and Tegan originally go to the “DawnBrides” who can aide their journey to destroy the Hooklight and even get a DawnBride assistant called Sabine (Ruby Crepin-Glyne) but when they arrive on a certain swampy planet Nyssa is fully possessed, Sabine and the other DawnBrides accompanying them are killed and Tegan is sent off to another planet entirely. All things seem grim, but the possessed Nyssa arrives in the past of Morning and meets the fabled Oracle, who helps seal it for a time. The Oracle, as you’ll see on the cover, is none other than the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), who is taking some time off from the Time War to give his old self a hand while also recovering from a nasty eye injury (hence the eyepatch!).
The Part 1 cover, that gives nothing away at all…
While all THAT has been going on Adric meets a man called Davlin Crux (Kieran Bew) who apparently knows The Doctor and thinks, as he turned up in the TARDIS, that Adric is a new incarnation of the Doctor and the young lad just runs with it, thinking he can be The Doctor if he wanted, which is all well and good until a special chamber that can only be opened by regeneration energy appears and Crux shoots Adric expecting to create the required energy as he and The Doctor planned, but obviously that doesn’t go well. Luckily Adric’s species is hardy and Crux manages to save him. How Crux knew the Doctor is seen as thanks to being pushed into the past The Doctor meets Crux a good while before he meets Adric and it’s here where he puts in place a whole bunch of technobabble to try and stop the Hooklight from destroying the universe in the present as he knew it. Crux is a fun character by the way, a Captain Jack style loveable rogue who is also the last of his kind thanks to the original Hooklight experiments.
Tegan on the other hand wound up on a snowy world where she soon meets the lonely Oskar (Shogo Miyakita) and eventually, over three years, the two become an item and settle down together. Most of this happens in Episode 8, which is entirely just this story and therefore serves as a breather or a pace killer, depending on how you see it. I thought it was interesting but given we know Tegan doesn’t really change personality-wise … ever, seeing her more reserved and weary tipped me off about how this was therefore going to end, and made me a little bummed out, but I’ll leave that until the Spoiler section…
It’s a fun story, with some good characters and doesn’t wait around in the same place too long either, but by the end it had ran its course, and the ending itself is quite naff, so… not perfect, but a good effort, especially for something that’s six hours long…
The Continuity:
The original dummy cover for Part 2, put up for pre-ordering and such but almost immediately switched out to the real one…
Not a lot, which is nice for such a lore-heavy story as all the lore is entirely new! Some plot ideas aren’t but I’m not exactly going to list all the times a Doctor’s companion has been possessed or how many times a character has led a normal life away from the Doctor only to be pulled back in tragically… I’d be here a while…
Overall Thoughts:
The actual cover for Part 2, which spoils a Part 1 surprise front and cen… front and to the left, I guess.
“Hooklight” could’ve been a disaster given its runtime, but thankfully writer Tim Foley managed to pull off a good twisty turny story that doesn’t hang around in once place too long… well, apart from Episode 8 anyway. The ending is flat, there are moments where it drags and the Lord of the Rings comparison does go a bit too far when people start using magic spells and fighting giant spiders on the way to destroy the powerful and evil object in the one fire-filled area where it can happen, but it’s still a good listen, and I hope Big Finish take more risks with storytelling like this again, it reminds me of their older, less BBC-influenced days…
In the final few episodes the cast slowly get back together, we see the origin of several things, like the “Nighguar” are actually the original Halcyon’s Night Guard who were transformed by the Hooklight in the distant past, that sort of thing. The Eighth Doctor may not meet up with his earlier self but he does meet both Tegan and Adric and give them some further advice and generally oversees his older (younger?) self as The Fifth Doctor traps and eventually destroys the Hooklight thanks to the sacrifice of already-dying-due-to-illness-anyway Kessica, who takes it into herself instead of Nyssa and then dies with it inside her, very reminiscent of how the Word Lord from classic Seventh Doctor story “A Death in the Family” was dealt with. Doing so undoes a lot of things however, the island is no longer destroyed, its inhabitants are saved and wouldn’t you know it, all of the Doctor’s companions lose their memories of the events, in fact, not JUST the events of Hooklight but the events of several of the other audios set before it, for some reason. If Big Finish are starting to become shy about fitting in too many stories in between TV episodes then we’re in for a LOT of mind wiping in out future, let’s put it that way…
Hogan Reviews 