Every Dark Thought (audio story)

Every Dark Thought
Main character(s):	Bernice Summerfield
Main enemy:	The Valeyard
Main setting:	Unnamed planet
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writer:	Eddie Robson
Director:	Scott Handcock
Music:	Ioan Morris
Sound:	Foxyason Music
Cover by:	Simon Holub
Release details
Story number:	130
Release number:	1
Release date:	25 September 2018
Format:	1 CD
The Story So Far
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Next →	Empress of the Drahvins

Every Dark Thought was the first story in the Bernice Summerfield box set The Story So Far: Volume Two. It was the first time Benny encountered the Valeyard.

Publisher's summary

The Doctor has asked for Benny's help digging up some mysterious ruins. He claims they contain the secret of eternal life. Why would the Doctor want that?

Plot

to be added

Cast

• Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
• The Valeyard - Michael Jayston
• Professor Liyi Chen - Liz Sutherland-Lim
• Chorus - Mark Elstob
• The Caragot - Ross Ford

References

• The planet Ogoychao has a tourist resort on the mountain with expensive cocktails.
• The Doctor has taken apart the whole console to find a fault, preventing the TARDIS from travelling correctly. He believes either the lateral stabilisers have fallen out of phase, or there's an imbalance in the helmic regulator; possibly both.
• The Doctor is thousands of years old.
• He explains that the Cloister Bell sounds throughout the TARDIS, but he doesn't know where it is.
• The Doctor has tea and a fruitcake from Christmas, 1888.
• The Caragot are parasitic gastropods with bonded cybernetic armour, a genetic experiment that ran rampant. There are no more than 100 of them. They integrate people that look "nutritious", making their intelligence part of their own and possibly killing them (the faces can be seen under their skin), but the victim can be de-integrated before digestion. They deploy a steam bomb that leaves structures intact.
• The Doctor explains that the translation circuit is less reliable with written language.
• Liyi hears everyone speak Mandarin.
• The code to access the caves is "purity - love - afterlife."
• After the Caragots attack, a member of the archaeological team begins to mention something "under the Centauri Convention.
• Chorus is a non-human from Kensior Beta, whose people don't live centuries.
• The "riculi" are the dominant lifeform on Ogoychao, living tunnels whose bodies are "here" but "not here," existing in another dimension and displacing rock when they pass through it. Their excretions treat ageing like a disease, and the Doctor theorises there may be micro-organisms in the liquids as he can hear them talking faintly. They can specify elixirs to order, as they analyse a person's body as they walk through the tunnels, learning how their biology works.
• The Valeyard, although he never uses the name, claims Bernice can subliminally sense that he is the Doctor, and claims he cannot be averted, only postponed, that he will always be the Doctor's future.
• He explains that the weight of everything he's done will break him, the obligations wearing him out, the constant thoughts of all the people he never saved and won't save. This will make the Valeyard free of the Doctor's guilt and his code.
• He "splintered" from the Doctor before his final incarnation, a causal imbalance, meaning he only has this life and cannot regenerate. As such, Benny doesn't consider him to be a true regeneration of the Doctor, saying that he's a twisted little fragment that "just fell off the back of a lorry."
• The Valeyard plans to enslave the Caragot.
• The Valeyard mentions the Web of Time, implying he still respects it.
• Benny guesses that the TARDIS controls won't respond to the Valeyard because he's not a proper Time Lord.
• The Valeyard is worried that if he regenerates he'll "revert to type."
• When wondering if the Valeyard survived the cave explosion, Benny muses that since the Doctor always managed to survive, the Valeyard might too.

Notes

• This is the first time Bernice Summerfield encounters the Valeyard, although that title is never used in the story.

Continuity

• Benny has met the Doctor when he was younger, (AUDIO: Benny's Story) and when he was older. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation)
• The Cloister Bell rings. (TV: Logopolis, et al.)
• The Doctor has a knife from an 18th century Chinese assassin. (TV: The Talons of Weng-Chiang)
• The Doctor implies to Benny that she's not the only archaeologist he's travelled with. (TV: Silence in the Library, COMIC: The Swords of Kali)
• Benny mentions the Doctor doing his "big picture" stuff. (PROSE: Theatre of War, AUDIO: The Shadow of the Scourge)
• The Valeyard mentions the Doctor trying to deny him his right to exist. (AUDIO: The Brink of Death)

External links

• Official Every Dark Thought page at bigfinish.com