The Night of 1000 Stars (2014)

After enjoying the previous story, I started to listen to The Night of 1000 Stars. The only thing that I knew about this adventure was that Louise Jameson was returning as Leela and the author was James Goss who is making his debut in this range. This is an unusual adventure because it just features Jago, Litefoot, Leela and Ellie. This story forces this foursome to look at themselves in a way that they would rather not and as the story progresses we learn about a different aspect of their lives which caused them to feel remorse. The use of Remorse as a threat to our favourite characters is a brilliant idea and it’s used very well and is one of the main reasons why I rate this story so highly. It’s a simple idea but it allows us to learn new things about characters that we have known for years and that’s a hard thing to pull off.

It’s a brave thing to do to just do this sort of story as it doesn’t feature any supporting characters, doesn’t feature other locations and doesn’t have any breaks in the story (like things happening the next day or in another part of the country).  The introduction of Leela in the story was a brilliant idea and Louise Jameson continues to show how the character has developed under Big Finish. The performances of Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter were superb as usual but we got something in this story that I wasn’t expecting and that is Jago and Litefoot at each other’s throat. I was thinking that this can’t be right and I wanted it to stop, that was the point that I realised that the story was working and Benjamin and Baxter should be praised for still pulling out superb performance after all these releases. I moaned about the lack of Ellie in the previous story and that was because I think that Lisa Bowerman is just as an important part of the series as Jago and Litefoot are. Here we get a lot of Ellie and it shows how good Lisa Bowerman is as Ellie because Ellie has been through a lot during the previous six series and her loses have been just as great as Jago and Litefoot have had.

There’s a lovely moment when there is a mystery and to which of the four is remorse and it reminded me of the movie ‘Devil’ where they have a lift and one of them is the devil. This is done a lot better because I didn’t see the revelation about Leela coming. I thought at the beginning that it was a surprise that she was back and that it wasn’t given the sort of time that I would have expected but James Goss has done a good thing of distracting us from this point and never allows us to think about it until he’s ready for us to. We are reminded about the current predicament of Jago and Litefoot which I liked because I was worried that they had forgotten about the fact they were suppose to be on the run but it isn’t just a blink and you’ll miss it mention but does get mentioned much more than I was expecting.

I was really impressed with this story and I would go so far to say that this is one of if not the best Jago and Litefoot story that there has ever been and credit should go to everyone involved for still been able to impress me to this degree. If the last two stories in the series are better than this one then I am in for a treat. I think that this story isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea and that’s because this isn’t your usual Jago and Litefoot adventure and when people don’t get what they usually want then they will be harsher to it. This wont happen here because I loved this story.