With UNIT’s work now out in the open, Colonel Emily Chaudhry finds her duties as UNIT’s public relations officer growing more complicated by the day. The latest operation – making a very visible show of transporting discarded nuclear weapons to keep the press and public’s attention away from a smaller convoy transporting pieces of an apparent alien spacecraft – proves to be no exception when both the spacecraft convoy and its decoy convoy are attacked almost simultaneously. UNIT’s commanding officer, Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, is kidnapped, but no one else is taken. The spacecraft is quietly spirited away by a group who wishes to use its technology to further its secret space-time experiments. But the experiments continue to go horribly wrong, resulting in commuter train crashes with massive casualties, a major disruption of the British banking system, and even a jetliner crash directly into Windsor Castle. Colonel Chaudhry and the rest of UNIT try to piece together the puzzle and find their missing CO, but when a new CO, Colonel Dalton, is assigned to take over, he seems like a poor fit: he knows nothing of UNIT’s past work, and shows no interest in learning. Worse yet, Chaudhry discovers that he may have ties to ICIS.
written by Iain McLaughlin & Claire Bartlett
directed by Jason Haigh-Ellery
music by David DarlingtonCast: Nicholas Courtney (The Brigadier), Siri O’Neal (Colonel Emily Chaudhry), Nicholas Deal (Colonel Robert Dalton), Robert Curbishley (Lt. Will Hoffman), Matthew Brenher (Captain Dodds), Michael Hobbs (Francis Currie), Stephen Carlile (Kelly), Alfred Hoffman (Meade)
Notes: Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, a character originally established in the alternate universe of the Doctor Who Unbound story Sympathy For The Devil, doesn’t actually appear in this story; apparently he’s a UNIT fixture in the “normal” Doctor Who timeline as well (if, indeed, any such thing can be said to exist and can be described as normal). For the record, UNIT seems to have terrible trouble with nuclear convoys (one is hijacked by armored knights from a parallel dimension in Battlefield, the first story of Sylvester McCoy’s final season as the Doctor) and with the transportation of spacecraft (as seen in 1970’s Ambassadors Of Death).
LogBook entry by Earl Green