I am afraid I rather lost patience with Night Thoughts; there is so much that is crap about it. The central plot issue, Edie's death, simply made no sense at all: why kill her so ceremonially on the operating table, rather than slip her a poison pill? The Seventh Doctor's behaviour is utterly inconsistent. The bit with Ace and the bear traps is just stupid. The cast do well but the material is nigh unworkable.
Steve Lyons' work is always interesting, and Time Works is no exception: the Eighth Doctor and friends end up in a society obsessed with timekeeping, enforced by mysterious clockwork robots (a foreshadowing of The Girl in the Fireplace, unintentionally no doubt). The story combines the standard overthrow of alien oppressors (though not the king, this time) with some plot-convenient timeslips, so is not particularly special, but the dialogue is cracking, the world-building unusually convincing, and the cast, especially McGann, on top form. The best of these three.
