#24 Bernice Summerfield: The Mirror Effect

My Randomoid Selectortron has landed on two heavy, morally complex (for Doctor Who) two-disc stories in a row. If another one like that comes up, I might have to manually select something light before going back into the darkness...

Bernice Summerfield: The Mirror Effect

Starring: Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield, Miles Richardson as Irving Braxiatel, Stephen Fewell as Jason Kane, and Harry Myers as Adrian Wall
Format: one full-cast CD with no episode breaks

Silly? Not deliberately, but some surrealistic moments go over the top.
Standalone? No. This story is a turning point in ongoing interpersonal relationships among the main characters, depending on earlier Bernice Summerfield installments and setting up later ones.
Recommended? If you are interested in the larger Bernice Summerfield arc, yes.

My reactions to The Mirror Effect contain spoilers for it and for Braxiatel's character arc in subsequent Bernice Summerfield audio releases.

Before listening

I am pretty sure I have heard this one exactly once before. It involves an artifact (with standard Doctor Who scientific handwaving applied, but basically magical) that causes Bernice's archeology team to encounter dark shadow versions of themselves. I remember the setting being surreal and dreamlike. I also remember that, at the time I listened to this, I'd already been spoiled about things Braxiatel does later on in continuity and about the fact that events in this audio hint at a Braxiatel masterplan. If I hadn't known that, I probably wouldn't have ascribed much significance to the relevant dialogue lines.
There is darkness in this story, but I am pretty sure it doesn't focus on it in the way Just War does. Characters' motivations are examined in unpleasant lights, but I am pretty sure not in the intense, lengthy way Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars does. I am comfortable proceeding to The Mirror Effect without first taking a breather on lighter fare. I seem to recall Adrian and Bernice having good dialogue, both together and separately, and if the setting is as abstract as I'm remembering it'll be a nice change from grittier locales.

After listening

I tried to get through The Mirror Effect while also doing something else, then gave up maybe halfway in when I realized I wasn't following the rather complicated plot. I then came back to it later in the day, lying down with my eyes closed to avoid distractions, and actually rather liked it.
The fuzzy memories I wrote about previously were inaccurate. I had remembered the presence of overlookable hints about Braxiatel, but in fact The Mirror Effect is the point in Bernice Summerfield continuity in which it becomes explicitly obvious that Braxiatel has a master plan, has had it for a long time, and is willing to do things to protect it that Doctor Who storytelling generally depicts as outright evil.
The setting was indeed surreal. It is at one point ambiguous whether Bernice and company are in a location that's part of a complete alternate timeline or are just in a self-contained artificial dimension. I'm pretty sure that by the end it's unambiguous that it's the latter, but it's still ambiguous whether past events described as happening in it are based on an a "real" alternate timeline or are just a fiction invented whole-cloth by the story's monster as part of its trap. This ends up not mattering much to the narrative resolution, but uncertainties like this are part of the mood of the story. Between the ambiguous nature of the setting and the fact that characters are more than once replaced by evil doppelgangers between scenes, it is a very unstraightforward story to follow compared to other Bernice Summerfield audio dramas.
I mentioned remembering Adrian having good dialogue; taken in isolation without having heard any other Adrian audios recently, that does not seem to be the case to me now, but I'm not remembering his earlier appearances well and it's possible his dialogue works better given more context. Bernice does have some good dialogue, although also some overly histrionic dialogue particularly towards the end. There is a heightened level of emotion for much of the story and the writing is relatively non-naturalistic.
The Mirror Effect is not an audio drama to be listened to in isolation. It takes place at a specific point in the relationship among its characters, depends at times on the listener already being aware of the state of that relationship, and advances the relationship. It is, however, a worthwhile piece of the larger Bernice Summerfield story and certainly should not be skipped in the course of a delve into the history of the range.