A series of five (well, four and a half) audios from Big Finish, featuring the now retired General Sir Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and his successors at the head of the British branch of UNIT, portraying them as a sort of military X-Files, but locked in combat for Britain’s security with the Internal Counter Intelligence Service (ICIS). UNIT’s new commander, Ross Brimmacombe-Wood, is played by none other than David Tennant. I enjoyed them very much.

UNIT 0 – The Coup: an introduction to the series, revolving around the Brigadier and new UNIT spokesperson Emily Chaudhry (played by Siri O’Neal), with also recurring journalist character Francis Currie (Michael Hobbs). The Brigadier expiates his own past crimes by cutting a deal with the Silurians, more of whom have now woken up and started infiltrating London. A very short play but memorable.

UNIT 1 – Time Heals: I felt this was the weakest of the plays, mainly because I didn’t really understand What Was Going On. Stephen Carlile, playing the evil scientist’s sidekick Kelly, sounds unnervingly like Matthew Waterhous as Adric. But even though I didn’t really get the plot, I loved the atmosphere, and the instant chemistry between Chaudhry and her new colleague (after Brimmacombe-Wood’s disappearance) Robert Dalton (played by Nicholas Deal).

UNIT 2 – Snake Head: Chaudhry and Dalton go to the seaside to investigate what turns out to be a heady combination of illegal migrants and invisible Albanian vampires. As a Balkanist myself I was on the lookout for gross errors; I didn’t hear any (though Goran is an unusual name for a Kosovo Albanian, it’s not completely unknown). I thought the story tackled this volatile political issue as well as any story in this genre ever can. My one minor reservation about it is that the invisible vampire turns out in the end to be an invisible vampire, rather than having some scientific explanation.

UNIT 3 – The Longest Night: This turned out to be a truly prescient choice of plot, with suicide bombers striking around London and paralyzing the city – it went on sale in March 2005, just four months before this happened in real life. Big Finish takes on racism and extremism, frankly far more effectively than in their earlier play The Fearmonger. The sense of tension and uncertainty was brilliantly conveyed, and the shock ending of killing Dalton (having already killed off the Deputy Prime Minister) is very effective. This is probably the best of the four-and-a-half plays.

UNIT 4 – The Wasting: Now we have old Who meets new Who meets spinoff, with Lethbridge-Stewart phoning an unheard Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter, alas, not being available), David Tennant appearing at long last as Ross Brimmacombe-Wood, and the whole thing being directed by Nicola Bryant (who also makes an appearance as one of the minor characters). The plot is a bit wobbly – again, going back in history, we have, as in The Invasion, a Russian-launched missile resolving the issue, though not quite as much off-screen as in the Troughton story; and the plague killing off much of humanity was originally the Silurians’ plan, so in a sense they get a bit of closure by helping the unheard Harry Sullivan to cure it. But the acting is superb, especially David Tennant (who recorded this not long before getting the job of the Tenth Doctor), and Nicola Bryant must deserve much of the credit for it all seeming to hang together as well as it does.

So, in summary, these are all good fun; if you want to listen to just one to sample, make it #3, The Longest Night.

One side issue: I was comprehensively spoiled for important plot twists by reading the Wikipedia entry for UNIT, and while normally I don’t especially mind, in this case it really did impair my enjoyment of the plays. Hoping to preserve others from being caught the same way, I deleted the key sentences from the WikiPedia page; they were immediately restored by another editor citing WP:SPOIL: “It is almost never acceptable to delete information from an article because it constitutes a spoiler.” WTF?