Menu
So now that you’ve listened to the story, I wonder how you found the ending. Personally, I needed just alittle bit more information about what was causing the whole thing. I didn’t need to know exactly what it was, but I was interested in the significance of the core that they’re heading for, as I don’t think it’s ever really explained. The obvious solution is that the thing is coming form the core, but why?
We can possibly infer that the shadowy creature is a daemon by the fact that it looks up when someone mentions the god Emperor, but beyond that, who really knows? Atleast in ‘The Faith and the Flesh’ we knew that it was a daemon of Tzeentch.
As I said in my spoiler free review, I thought the character’s started out as faceless archetypes but to me they didn’t really stay that way. For example, Suma, the Engineseer starts off as a typical Ad Mech who is insensitive due to lack of understanding of human emotions. But what I think defines her is her self-destructive thirst for knowledge. True, pretty much all Ad Mech share this trait but there was something unique about how she kept interfacing with the ‘Refuge’ even when she knew it was killing her.
There are other examples of this, like how Arq pretended to be friends, (or lovers?) with her former captain until she killed him and took his sword, or Halitz’s obvious PTSD and well earned survivors guilt that is elaborated on as the story unfolds. I also liked how Dovarr was being set up to betray the others but actually ends up taking one for the team. It’s the second time I’ve fallen for obvious misdirection in a Warhammer audio drama. (The first was ‘Perfection’ by Nick Kyme).
I also was a fan of the cyclical feel at the end, when Halitz lures in more people for the ‘Refuge’ to feed on. But again, it was alittle cliché. Stephen King’s ‘In the Tall Grass’ is the first of many examples to come to mind.
We should also touch on the elephant in the room; the obvious parallels with ‘Event Horizon’. Small crew goes to a ship where they find out that everyone went mad and killed themselves, their own ship gets destroyed, stranding them, they die one by one, a ship comes to rescue them and the cycle continues. To be fair, ‘Event Horizon’ was partly based on Warhammer and you can’t blame Black Library for trying to make it their own. Though, it felt to me like a bad copy and I think we’ve yet to see Warhammer Horror really lean into some of the totally freaky stuff from the 40k universe. I remember listening to a certain scene in ‘Fear to Tread’ and thinking “Man, I hope Warhammer Horror is as creepy as this, and so far, it just hasn’t been.
I will end on a positive note, however and say that I liked how they used the title and had each character realise that the only way out was death.
I thought this audio drama had a lot going for it, but the ending didn’t deliver on the build-up for me.
The Emperor Protects