The Tertiary Console Room: Review - UNIT

"It'll get worse before it gets better..."

A consistent aspect of Big Finish's approach to these mini-series has been a determination for the final instalment to end each run strongly. All three Dalek Empire series did it, as did Sarah Jane Smith. Even the woeful first season of Gallifrey concluded with by far its best story in A Blind Eye. The problem with these unwritten rules is that they never last forever and UNIT finishes with another poor script from the writing team of Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett. As with their first story, The Wasting suffers from a lack of strong plotting but while it's certainly superior to the miserable Time Heals, it cannot help but be an anticlimax...

Arguably, The Wasting's worst aspect is how detached it feels from its predecessor. Joseph Lidster's The Longest Night was a hugely ambitious piece that involved a conspiracy at the heart of government to provoke a race war amongst Britian's multi-ethnic communities to allow the right-wing extremists at ICIS to seize power and impose their new order. Yet none of this has any bearing on anything that happens in The Wasting. The Internal Counter Intelligence Service is still at large, seemingly more powerful than ever, despite their soldiers slaughtering British civilians under an illegally obtained declaration of martial law - a conspiracy that the Prime Minister had proof of yet has done nothing about. There's no fall out from the riots, nor any sense of reuniting Britain's diverse population. Aside from the brief visit to Colonel Dalton's grave at the start of the play, it's as if Lidster's story never happened and if you have a story that creates so many consequences you can't just ignore them as McLaughlin and Bartlett have done here as it severely undermines the idea of these stories being a series. Such decisions make this story a disappointment before it has even begun.

If the failure to follow-on successfully is the greatest fault of McLaughlin and Bartlett's script, can the quality of the story itself overcome this setback? Unfortunately, the answer is no as the writers make many of the same mistakes they did with Time Heals where a succession of incidents failed to germinate into a cohesive whole instead of using a convincing, strong plot in the first place. The Wasting is structured better with two plots twisting together involving a fatal contagion which is spreading remorselessly across the world and the resolution of the UNIT-ICIS conflict. What disappoints is that the former is built up as being this really serious threat with plenty of hype about how's it's tearing countries apart with some believing it to be divine retribution and others attacks from their neighbours, but it fades into the background far too easily while the rival organisations duke it out with each other.

From a listener's point of view, taking in the whole run, a resolution to the ICIS storyline is necessary as the cliffhanger ending in the hope of a second series has become tremendously passé. McLaughlin and Bartlett share this view as they give the final battle of the acronyms the lions' share of their attention but in doing so they make the plague seem rather incidental. When you are following a story that has so successfully given the right degree of dramatic weight to its big, widespread plot it is not a good idea to introduce another plot with potential for similar scope and then just let it fade away after twenty minutes before resolving it as quickly and as conveniently as possible at the end. The Wasting would have been far better had the writers either focused exclusively on the plague, with UNIT taking on the zombies, or on the struggle between the two rival military groups.

The basis of ICIS's plan to finish UNIT off forever is to frame them and this is a good idea, which, if executed well, could have been a successful anchor for the plot to work around. But it's not and the ham-fisted manner in which this development is employed ruins its effectiveness. For one thing, it's difficult to see why the shooting of British citizens would be so provocative here because ICIS already committed this same act themselves in the previous story and got away with it. Secondly, there is, at least, a potential threat to public safety that might demand the use of deadly force to prevented the infected victims from making diner of, say, passing journalists and their cameramen. Perhaps more importantly, our resident hack Francis Currie sees through the ruse in about ten seconds and it becomes incredulous to think that no one else does. Moreover, why would UNIT as a whole be condemned for the actions of the few? With the attack against the victims on video, surely the perpetrators would be top of the arrest list and the upper echelons of UNIT would only come under fire if it could be proved they gave their soldiers carte blanche for a shoot-to-kill mandate. All of which ignores the fact that the attackers were caught on video and should be easily identifiable as non-UNIT personnel. There's no attempt to show that ICIS have people in high places forcing their witch hunt through and so the whole thing seems incredibly short-sighted and naïve on the part of the authors.

With Dalton gone, the role of Chaudhry's counterpoint is afforded to Nicholas Courtney, reprising the role of Lethbridge-Stewart once again. This gives him a much more significant role than the implausibly well-placed bystander he was in Time Heals but he lacks chemistry with Siri O'Neal and their scenes lack energy and urgency. This is especially unfortunate given the majority of the play is spent with the two of them debating the plot. Despite his promotion and knighthood, it seems McLaughlin and Bartlett really aren't comfortable thinking of Lethbridge-Stewart as anything other than "the Brigadier", sinking as low as having Courtney spout off a preposterous scene where he tells Chaudhry to refer to him by that rank. As cringeworthy moments go, this is right up there with the pompous introductory speech Lethbridge-Stewart makes in the webcast Death Comes To Time and, equally as bad, that whole burst of dialogue in Zagreus about the state of the companions' underwear. Unbelievably, this tackiness is actually surpassed in the final moments of the play when Chaudhry offers and Lethbridge-Stewart accepts a position he's wholly unqualified for with the whole scene being nothing more than a transparent ploy to retain Courtney's presence for a hypothetical second series.

A consistent aspect of UNIT the series has been its refrain in indulging in excessive continuity. Moments such as "the John Smith scenario" have been fun and appropriate, but the return of Lethbridge-Stewart lets in lots of reminiscing about the good old days with Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton. While that's only slightly distracting, far more serious is the writers reintroduction of Commodore Harry Sullivan which gives them the excuse to create another lame off-screen resolution to the problem in the same manner of Lethbridge-Stewart's role in Time Heals. While it's obviously impossible to have scenes of Harry working under pressure to discover the cure to the plague, such a dramatisation would give greater balance to the plot of The Wasting. By utilising a character who you can't really bring back without recasting flouts the first law of audio drama that you must show your audience what is happening rather than tell them. If a different character had been used instead, say, a UNIT scientist introduced earlier in the season, and then this fannish tendency to pander to the past of Doctor Who could have been avoided. Especially when it's so at odds with the modern approach the majority of this series has taken to dealing with UNIT.

In my review of The Coup, I speculated that the question of ICIS's leadership needed to be addressed and, unsurprisingly, The Wasting does this but like much of the rest of the script it isn't handled particularly well. In the Doctor Who Magazine preview piece of the series 24 is mentioned as one of the influences for the writers of the series. In that show's first season, the penultimate episode features a similar twist used in The Wasting where one of the characters is revealed as a traitor. In 24, it's a real shock because over the course of the previous twenty-three episodes we've come to like, trust and even respect the character in question so the betrayal really hurts because of that. With The Wasting the character revealed as the leader of ICIS has only been in maybe ten minutes of the entire series so the affect is nowhere near as affecting because we don't this character with everything we've been told about them simply hearsay.

There aren't particularly many candidates as to who this character is, and it's easy to guess what Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood's role in this drama is. While he is a holdover from Jonathan Clements' excellent Doctor Who Unbound adventure Sympathy For The Devil, we can't expect him to be the same character and it seems crass and naïve for the writers to believe we would to achieve a shocking effect. I have no problems with making him the villain, but it's a totally underwhelming revelation because of his limited involvement in the series as a whole. This makes the confrontation between Chaudhry and Brimmicombe-Wood far less dramatically interesting as it could have been because we share none of the horror that she feels at his betrayal, as he's just another villain of the week, rather than something more important.

The nature of the twist and other strange decisions such as the lack of any urgency to the search for Brimmicombe-Wood (if indeed there was one) and killing off one of your leading characters in the third play are all highly suggestive that UNIT may have been a long way off what was originally planned. Had David Tennant been present throughout, then the final revelation about his character would have been far more powerful and striking. It could be that his increasingly high profile prevented him from committing to recording the full series or perhaps Big Finish deemed it inappropriate for him to play three leading roles in three separate mini-series in quick succession after Dalek Empire III and the marvellous The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright. This might explain the substitute character of Dalton, and also why The Wasting feels so disappointing as it lacks the exploration of his relationship with Chaudhry which was a significant factor in making the middle two releases so enjoyable. I can't help but feel that McLaughlin and Bartlett's story would have been far more effective had Dalton been revealed as the traitor and leader of ICIS in the end because it would have secured the shock they were attempting with Brimmicombe-Wood. And when you consider all those hints of suspicious conduct that plagued Dalton throughout his appearances, it really seems like a missed opportunity.

The unveiling of Brimmicombe-Wood's villainous tendencies peps up the drama a little, any chance of exploring the different philosophies and ideologies of UNIT and ICIS are swept away by plenty of gung-ho action with the morality of each side poorly justified. What's worse is that the action sequences are rather flat, with intrusive dialogue proving far too descriptive to simply let the sound alone convey what's happening.

The single redeeming factor of the play is its cast, who all try hard with their parts despite clunky dialogue and the superficial plot. It's not the first time Tennant has played a villain for Big Finish and, like Kurtz in Colditz, he brings a real relish to his part as Brimmicombe-Wood taunts Chaudhry for her misplaced faith in their friendship contrasting brilliantly the ambiguity he brought to heroes such as Galanar and Arkwright. Siri O'Neal has been the most consistent performer throughout the series and she impresses in showing Chaudhry's strength in adversity but she doesn't play off Nicholas Courtney as well as she did Nicholas Deal and it means she's not as interesting to listen to as previously. Michael Hobbs' journalist Francis Currie provides some much needed fun here with very wry delivery as the character steps in places where he shouldn't although Currie's naivety about the taped evidence seems out of character. The only performance that stands out for all the wrong reasons is that of "Nora Brande" - the pseudonym taken by director Nicola Bryant for her role as Sergeant Willis. Playing it with high-pitched variation designed to make her sound like she's attended too much finishing school, it's awkward and false proving so distracting that every time she speaks the illusion of the drama is shattered. As she's not playing Peri, there's no reason why Bryant couldn't have used her own natural tone as heard in The Church Of The Crown as that would have been far more convincing. Instead, that gets deployed only a couple of times for brief cameos as a newsreader when the Willis-whine would have been far better deployed for its brevity.

There are two potentially strong plots within The Wasting but when the authors combine them together, neither is given sufficient depth to provide satisfying drama. The plague is hyped up immensely but never receives the attention it needs to make us believe in the gravity of the situation and the way that all the important questions about what it is and how to stop the spread of the disease are all answered off-stage is incredibly shabby. The UNIT-ICIS conflict should have been given even more focus than it is, but The Wasting may have been doomed to failure ever since they decided upon the identity of the villain and the decisions to introduce them here. As a result, the whole climax to the series lacks emotion and intensity.

UNIT has been a wildly inconsistent series in terms of both style and the quality of the stories. The former is certainly an advantage as it's given the series a good degree of variety but the latter is the biggest disappointment because two key stories - the first full adventure and the finale - have failed to match the rest. The Coup was an engrossing, fast-paced and perfectly pitched introduction offering a symbolic changeover between the old UNIT and the new. Time Heals then tried to do the same but fudged it by featuring Lethbridge-Stewart in the most peripheral role imaginable but its weak plotting marred the story. Snake Head and The Longest Night were the highlights - two totally different stories but each excelling in different ways with Clements' showing how UNIT could operate on a small-scale basis, dealing with unexplained threats while Lidster's play showed how effective the organisation could be on a much larger stage. Unfortunately, Lidster's story was so big that it demanded a more thorough examination of its consequences than McLaughlin and Bartlett were prepared to give it, making it seem that UNIT would have worked better as a proper serial drama in the same vein as Dalek Empire rather than the half-hearted middle ground we actually got. Individually, there are three excellent stories in this series but the important first full and last plays let the side down and consequently UNIT never reaches its potential.