The Darkening Eye (#3.06)

  Big Finish, Companion Chronicles


I haven’t experienced a Companion Chronicle with Nyssa as the main protagonist. This story includes, Nyssa, Tegan, Adric, and the 5th Doctor meeting the Dar Traders, who trade in death. It’s an odd trading system where they want to experience death without actually dying so they “take” people’s deaths in exchange for something else the Dar Traders have – information, technology, and so on. The story is framed by Nyssa, who is talking to someone with a deadly disease about treating him for that disease. And she tells him a story of something that happened to her, many years before.

The TARDIS team lands on a derelict space ship and encounter the Dar Traders, who talk very mysteriously about them being touched by death and the Doctor having died multiple times. The ship breaks apart and Tegan, Adric, and Nyssa end up on the traders’ ship. They are shown a case made of black star material, which they open and find a person inside of. Previously some Dar Traders had gone into the case and come out changed, not in a good way. So things about this casket are not quite what they seem, as well as the person inside of it.

Suffice it to say, this is a more complex plot as the stories go and yet I really enjoyed it. I didn’t get confused by anything, it was very clear, yet mysterious and complicated. Excellent stuff! I won’t ruin anything except to say that Nyssa ends by telling the sick person that they must trade, which was the Dar Trader motto. So she becomes a bit more of a sinister person in that moment, speaking that sentence. Another complexity to Nyssa – tough “love”!


Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) and Derek Carlyle (The Dar Traders)

Writer: Stewart Sheargold

Director: Ken Bentley

Release: December 2008

© Laura Vilensky 2019