Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Mirror Effect (audio story)

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Mirror Effect, or simply The Mirror Effect, was the fifteenth Bernice Summerfield audio story produced by Big Finish Productions. This was writer Stewart Sheargold's first audio story for Big Finish. It begins a very long character arc for Irving Braxiatel whose motivations are questioned throughout the course of this story and continue to develop through the Benny stories.

Publisher's summary
Do you believe in the mirror or do you believe in yourself?

Under the ice on a cold world lie the derelict remains of the lost Grid 4 Mining Station. Inside the station is a mirror, an ancient alien artefact, its existence known to few. Inside the mirror is one Professor Bernice Summerfield, and she can't get out. Trapped and alone in a place she cannot trust, with her friends distorted and turned against her, she is haunted by fears and reflections.

And inside Bernice Summerfield is a little baby creature that wants her to be mother.

Plot
Benny and Jason appear in an icy mining station and go looking for Braxiatel and Adrian, who have appeared in the base camp above and found a human corpse with a neck wound. Benny and Jason are attacked by the knife-wielding Dr Carnivel who stops as soon as she makes Jason bleed and claims that she knows the two of them, having worked with them on the expedition here before passing through a mirror. Copies of Benny and Jason returned, she says, and led to the team killing one another until only she was left.

Carnivel shows the mirror to Benny and Jason, who recognise it as the one that they passed through on the Braxiatel Collection to arrive here. Braxiatel makes contact with Benny and Jason through Carnivel's communicator and Adrian starts working on the lift so that they can regroup. Benny appears to Braxiatel at the base camp, but he soon realises that she is a reflection; she accuses him of engineering Peter's conception so that he could collect a human-Killoran hybrid and attacks him, but Adrian comes to his rescue and smashes her. Braxiatel suspects that she was created from his mind.

Believing that the mirror might lead back to the Collection, Benny prepares to pass through it before realising that Carnivel has been through it before and is actually a reflection, but Carnivel pushes her in and Adrian follows. Benny and Adrian arrive back in the mining station, which looks older, and they head back to the mirror chamber, uncertain as to whether they will go further into the trap or get closer to returning home. They find Braxiatel and Jason's bodies and Adrian feels something in his mind, so Benny runs and finds four more mirrors, one with Jason in and one with Adrian. They ask her to choose which of them is Peter's father, but Benny denies their existence. She is pulled through a mirror and her memory becomes hazy.

Braxiatel tells Jason that he believes that the mirror at the Collection is a reflection of the real one and forbids him from following Benny and Adrian so as to avoid them all entering an endless loop. When Jason deduces that Braxiatel has been through the mirror before, Braxiatel does not give an answer nor tell him what is on the other side. Jason sees Benny, who kisses him and says that Peter is half him. She then transforms into Adrian, who reminds him that he is not Peter's father and claims that Benny's love for Peter will lead her to fall in love with him and not Jason. They fight and Adrian, a reflection, is shattered. Jason goes to destroy the mirror with explosives, but Carnivel punches a hole in the lift's casing and leaves him to die in freezing water.

Benny is knocked out and sees a reflection of herself. Her reflection says that she is a being trapped within the mirror and that she sent the different parts of herself out for help, but now she has to rely on others to keep herself sane by reflecting what people do not like about themselves. With each mirror that Benny has passed through, the creature has take something from her: her memories of Peter's birth and her relationship with Jason and Adrian. She wants to be reborn into the world outside of the mirror as Benny's child.

Braxiatel confronts Carnivel. He tells her that he does not care for Jason or Adrian and is only interested in Benny, shooting Carnivel as she muses on the true purpose of the Braxiatel Collection. He then rescues Jason, telling him that the water is in his mind and opening the door. Jason accuses him of being so twisted already that the mirror is unable to create a reflection of him and that he had to manipulate him, Benny and Adrian so that they could enter the mirror on the Collection. Braxiatel hypnotises him into forgetting these thoughts and experiencing a migraine whenever he questions his motives or actions in the future.

After facing his own reflection, Adrian four mirrors and Braxiatel gets him to pull the being, which is now in the form of a baby, from the real mirror. Benny is pulled through with it and accuses Braxiatel and Adrian of using her and trying to kill her child, but Braxiatel snaps her out of it by reminding her of Peter. Jason, despairing, has set up the explosives to destroy the mining station and Braxiatel has Benny and Adrian join him in creating a mirror to the Collection with their imagination before they explode. They emerge with Jason and the explosion destroys the mirror.

Jason is left in a coma because of his migraines and Braxiatel suggests that they have him sent off the Collection to a Calfadorian medical satellites. Joseph claims that he will have to start charging to babysit Peter because of his behaviour, but Benny believes that he enjoys it. After Benny updates Wolsey, Peter says his first word: daddies.

Cast

 * Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
 * Irving Braxiatel - Miles Richardson
 * Jason Kane - Stephen Fewell
 * Adrian Wall - Harry Myers
 * Joseph - Steven Wickham
 * Doctor Carnivel - Beverley Cressman

Crew

 * Cover Art - Adrian Salmon
 * Producer & Director - Gary Russell
 * Executive Producer - Jason Haigh-Ellery
 * Music - David Darlington
 * Sound Design - Andrew J Swann
 * Writer - Stewart Sheargold

Worldbuilding

 * Professor Marcus Devris was an authority on the planet.
 * Demeter was a guide and robotic excavator.
 * Braxiatel gets Ms Jones to call a doctor for Jason.

Continuity

 * Benny does not want Joseph talking in baby-speak to Peter. (AUDIO: Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Green-Eyed Monsters)
 * This audio is one of the first instances of Irving Braxiatel heavily manipulating the people on the Braxiatel Collection. Braxiatel's manipulations of people and time increased heavily over the years, culminating in events such as turning Jason Kane into a Cyberman in AUDIO:The Crystal of Cantus and the events with the Deindum in AUDIO: Resurrecting the Past.
 * Carnivel calls Braxiatel "Cardinal" which was the rank that he held on Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Inquiry, Pandora, et al.)
 * Jason mentions the loss of Dellah. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)