Time Heals is Big Finish’s first “full” UNIT adventure from 2004, before the new TV series reinvented the organisation. It stars Siri O’Neal as Colonel Emily Chaudhry, providing some continuity with the previous mini-adventure UNIT: The Coup. Also featuring Nicholas Deal as Colonel Robert Dalton, with Nicholas Courtney guest-starring as General (Brigadier) Lethbridge-Stewart.
Colonel Chaudhry is forced to deal with the newly arrived Colonel Dalton, who is sceptical of UNIT’s remit and believes that the bizarre concepts he encounters belong only in “Star Trek”. Unexplained incidents of two trains crashing into each other, when one should have been thirty minutes further down the line, and planes crashing in the sky lead them to following a strange radiation heat signature.
Meanwhile, at home, Lethbridge-Stewart is encountering his own bizarre anomalies, with half-hours suddenly going missing from his memory. He tries to work around his problem on his own, before working out what it all means and alerting Chaudhry with his findings.
The climax brings Chaudhry to a warehouse protected by I.C.I.S. soldiers, whilst Colonel Dalton finds himself on a nuclear submarine that’s losing containment.
If you like lots of gunfire, fighting, an bullying from soldiers, with naive dialogue straight out of the “boys book of soldiering”, then UNIT: Time Heals is probably for you.
The story comes across as a series of ideas, with little to make them gel. The reason for the incidents is (probably) fairly predictable, but the cause of them isn’t adequately explained in the narrative.
The (very) short scenes of the Brigadier (sorry, “General”) inserted into the adventure from time to time are definite highlights, but he comes across as an anachronism. The new regular characters of Chaudhry and Dalton don’t come across as people you’d like to meet, more caricatures than characters, which makes the inserts of the Brigadier having you pining for the likes of Mike Yates and/or Benton to be here.
It’s possible that future episodes in this series will help make characters out of the two leads. I hope so. Nicholas Courtney doesn’t return to the series until the final episode, so Chaudhry and Dalton really need to step up to the plate.
On the whole, UNIT: Time Heals feels like a 20-minute story stretched into its CD-length duration of 70 minutes with all of the characters taking it in turns to say “What’s going on? Well, I could tell you, but I need to keep stringing the listener along for the duration….”
An adequate tale involving UNIT, but not an engrossing one.
You must be logged in to post a comment.