UNIT : THE WASTING

With the death of Colonel Dalton in the previous adventure, Colonel Chaudhry (Siri O’Neal) is joined this time by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney).  After a story dealing with time experiments, one dealing with an invisible alien vampire, and the third with a right-wing uprising, it seems that the only box left to tick is the plague that turns people into flesh-eating zombies.  And so begins UNIT : The Wasting, the final episode in Big Finish‘s first series of UNIT adventures.

UNIT : The Wasting takes us back to a couple of things that were mentioned at the beginning of the series, almost as though the intervening adventures were meaningless time fillers.  All the middle stories have told is us that I.C.I.S. is a xenophobic migrant-hating right-wing group of white caricatured extremists.  There’s very little to tell us how they achieved their great rise to fame, overwhelming UNIT.

None of the time was spent exploring the new regular characters.  Even now, in this final episode, the vast majority of the story is Chaudhry rescuing Brimmicombe-Wood (David Tennant) – some great leader in U.N.I.T. who went missing in the first episode.  All of this we’re told.  He’s not been in a previous adventure so we don’t learn any of this through the narrative.

And this is the main problem with these UNIT adventures.  It’s all been “tell, not show” when it should have been “show, don’t tell”.  Well over four hours of narrative, and we know nothing about any of the key characters.  We don’t know why Brimmicombe-Wood has the high regard that is bestowed upon him, when it’s fairly clear he’s just a big shouty bully with zero leadership skills..

As such, when it turns out that he’s the primary villain responsible for I.C.I.S., we really don’t care.  And no amount of David Tennant’s voice bullying, shouting, and swearing at everyone does anything to change that.

In short, these UNIT adventures have been an exercise in a massive missed opportunity.  Rather than explore a core group of new characters that could sustain a series of adventures, we’re just effectively just told to accept these characters without knowing anything about them.  Over four hours later, we still don’t know anything about them.

This is odd because it feels like they’ve set up the series to continue (which it didn’t).  All the other key characters (that happen to be male) are killed off or otherwise disposed of, leaving UNIT headed by political officer Chaudhry with Lethbridge-Stewart set up to become the on/off Scientific Advisor.  You can almost sense the modern TV series using this as its guide when it reinvented UNIT with Kate Stewart in charge.

In the final analysis, these UNIT adventures are adequate time fillers, but nothing that you’re going to miss nor anything you’re going to regret that it ended.  The series either needed to present us with interesting new characters with the time used to explore those characters, or it should have brought back Yates, Benton, and the Brigadier for a proper series of “classic UNIT” adventures.