#EMBRACE THE DARKNESS HOW TO#

This story is one where a lot of attention has been paid to making sure it works well in the four episode structure it’s built for. It’s in many ways as neatly structured as Seasons of Fear, with its three individual parts each in different time periods leading up to a final runaround. And so each episode has a distinct purpose and job to do within the story. Episode one sets up the world, its cliffhanger slotting the final puzzle piece in, episode two ends with the Cimmerians attacking, and episode three ends with the Solarians. Terror of the Zygons – to pick a story that really embraces the “change the tone weekly” approach well – does it in part so that after four weeks of Zygons the audience is still fresh.Įmbrace the Darkness is perfectly structured along these lines. And it’s a reaction against the slow pace of serialization.

#EMBRACE THE DARKNESS HOW TO#

The “change the premise slightly every episode” approach ultimately developed as a response to the failings of structure and pacing in much of the Hartnell era, where stories would often expand or contract arbitrarily to fill the space allotted to them, with little thought about how to structure them on an episode-by-episode level. The problem, however, is that the structure exists to solve the problems of serialization. But there’s always a structure, and you learn to write to your structure. But those flaws are largely intrinsic to any episodically serialized story – mainly that the half-hour format is a straitjacket. For television, at least, it’s a good structure, albeit with some flaws. For instance, there’s a pretty good Doctor Who structure in which each of the four episodes represent a different phase of the story, with cliffhangers that reveal new information that change the stakes. The result of this, or at least a result of this is that the basic structure of the audios is at times wonky. On top of that, the audios are fundamentally tied to the structure and logic of classic Doctor Who, which is to say, everything must be a four-parter of approximately half-hour parts.

So the shape and structure of it are up in the air. Unlike books on tape, it’s not an adaptation of something else. Unlike radio drama, it’s not serialized or transmitted live. Sure, radio drama does, and books on tape do, but this isn’t either of those. Two-CD sets featuring self-contained four episode audio adventures aren’t something that really has a lot of precedent. And, more to the point, that its medium is actually relatively new. The first thing to realize is that it’s a story at odds with its medium. Embrace the Dark is old-fashioned, yes, but it doesn’t trade on an explicit image of the past in the same way that The Sword of Orion does, or even, for that matter, in the same way that Seasons of Fear did. Here there’s less of a clear sense of that. The Eighth Doctor audios hadn’t done something so self-consciously sci-fi since The Sword of Orion, and that was a deliberately nostalgic throwback. It’s more than a little jarring to go from Seasons of Fear to Embrace the Darkness. In news, a military coup to unseat Hugo Chávez fails, and the Queen Mother’s funeral takes place.Īudios, then. Gareth Gates is at number one with “Unchained Melody,” which lasts almost the whole month before Oasis unseat them with “The Hindu Times.” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Nickelback, Marilyn Manson, Britney Spears, and Shakira also chart.

Embrace the darkness