Dark Eyes is a 4-disc boxset, so I am following my usual tactic of treating this as a selection of the first disc and leaving the set available for re-selection.
Doctor Who: Dark Eyes: The Great War
Starring: Paul McGann as the Doctor and Ruth Bradley as Molly O'Sullivan
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) of four, with no internal episode breaks.
Silly? No.
Standalone? No.
Recommended? As an episode in itself, definitely no.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and for the final arc of Eighth Doctor Adventures.
Before listening
I have only heard the first 4-episode Dark Eyes boxset, not the full 16-episode saga. This boxset was originally conceived without the intention of there being a Dark Eyes 2-4, so I think I can reasonably evaluate it without their context.I think I've heard The Great War two or three times. It picks up right after To the Death; the Eighth Doctor has witnessed horrible things and is in a frame of mind where he would happily break every law of time in order to destroy the Daleks. Dark Eyes isn't quite the full-blown Time War, but it is a skirmish on the brink of it.
From what I recall, the Time Lords have a circuitous plan that calls for having the Doctor take an Earthwoman, Molly O'Sullivan, out of the timestream for a while. My recollection is that she is being used as an incubator for something the Time Lords want, and their plan does not particularly require her to survive past harvesting. They don't tell the Doctor the whole story, though. Within The Great War, very little information about the plan is presented. From what I recall, the Doctor shows up in World War One, saves Molly from Daleks, and takes her on as a companion, with an immediate lead-in to the next episode.
I was disappointed by Dark Eyes as a followup to the Eighth Doctor Adventures series. In particular, I found the climax to be too much of a Star Trek resolution instead of a Doctor Who one; it was primarily about different pieces of made-up technology interacting with each other, not primarily about power structures and psychological weaknesses. That, however, isn't particularly relevant to The Great War specifically, and I am looking forward to relistening to The Great War as an isolated episode, a position I haven't previously heard it from.
After listening
This was not as self-contained as I thought, making my reaction fairly uninformative. They are still in WW1 France at the cliffhanger.The nature of the Time Lords' plan at this point is almost entirely unclear. Manipulative Time Lord Straxus has gotten the Lord President (who isn't Romana, which raises questions to me about Gallifrey's timeline) to sign off on some plan that requires the Doctor. After a conversation that mostly isn't presented to the audience, the Doctor is in WW1 France using his sonic screwdriver to locate someone giving off a detectable energy signature, who turns out to be Molly, an Irish servant who has followed her mistress into war volunteering. Where the British medical unit is expecting cordite and mustard gas, there are energy weapons and "time winds", and the cliffhanger reveals that the Daleks are responsible for these anachronisms.
While the Time Lord and Dalek machinations are very unclear in this episode, the wartime setting is fleshed out fairly well, with a long letter home from Molly establishing historical details. On the other hand, there are a few scenes where there are just a bunch of sound effects and no immediate way for the listener to know what they signify. I am vaguely remembering now that scenes like that might have been something that happened throughout Dark Eyes and hampered my enjoyment repeatedly.
The Doctor does not come across as trustworthy or likeable; there are multiple occasions on which he spouts a string of anachronisms with no attempt at explanation, then gives up the conversation instead of trying to explain.
At the beginning of the story, the Doctor is taking the TARDIS to the end of the universe, which is forbidden by the Time Lords. His explanations for why he is doing this don't make much sense, suggesting there might be some secret motivation, but I don't remember any such motivation being revealed within the first Dark Eyes boxset. A version of end of the universe shows up in the much earlier Eighth Doctor audio Zagreus, but I don't think there's any connection here.
The concept of hope as a tool of manipulation appears early on, with Straxus using it as a tool to get the Doctor to work for him. Since this is a Nicholas Briggs story, and a motif of Time Lord/Dalek duality appears in it, I think it's safe to say this is connected with the way hope is used in Dalek Empire, and that parallel adds a bit of richness to the particular scene that I hadn't been aware of the first time I heard it.
The Great War is not a story I can recommend simply because it's not, in itself, coherently a story. The only conflicts that get resolved within the episode are scene conflicts, not story-length conflicts, and the ending doesn't actually end anything.
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