Time Heals
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
A mysterious death and a mangled body on a beach at Southend gets UNIT’s attention, and Colonel Chaudhry and Colonel Dalton arrive to investigate. What starts out looking like an investigation best handled by immigration officials takes a more sinister turn when a recorded emergency call repeatedly refers to “vrkolak” – a particularly nasty Armenian vampire legend. Chaudhry finds clues about how the illegal immigrant found dead on the beach arrived in Britain, and traces those clues back to a man who artfully dodges almost all of her questions about bringing illegal immigrants into the country as laborers. Dalton, in the meantime, finds another man just smuggled into the U.K. from Kosovo – a man who claims to be a professional vampire hunter, on the trail of the vrkolak (a claim which the still-skeptical Dalton finds incredibly had to believe). Dalton, despite now having caught up on UNIT’s past, can’t bring himself to accept that he and his officers are participating in a vampire hunt; he also accuses Chaudhry of believing in the unexplained far too readily. But before the sun rises again, something may happen to forever change Dalton’s mind.
Lt. Hoffman is caught in the middle of a terrorist bombing of a pub in London, but lives long enough to call Colonel Dalton and identify the attackers who sweep through the rubble, murdering survivors, as Scottish. Other attacks follow, and the media quickly dubs the night “Britain’s 9/11.” As Colonel Chaudhry races to meet reporter Francis Currie, who calls her claiming to know who’s behind the rapidly escalating series of attacks, Dalton listens as reports emerge in the news media about Muslim attackers – not Scottish. More suicide bombings take place, and Major Kirby of ICIS puts pressure on the Prime Minister to put Britain under martial law – and to put ICIS in charge. When Chaudhry meets Francis Currie, she’s amazed when the reporter tries to strangle her. She incapacitates him and finds that he’s under some form of mind control – and increasingly, it appears that all of the incidents involve similar mind control, all seemingly triggered by random phone calls from “help lines.” But Chaudhry and Dalton soon find that the trail leads to ICIS itself – and that even UNIT’s finest aren’t immune to the mind control.
The Brigadier receives an urgent but cryptic summons from his old friend, Colonel Heinrich Konrad, of UNIT’s force in West Germany. The message brings Lethbridge-Stewart to an ancient fortification, the Kriegskind, which is now home to a secret UNIT detachment. But rather than being greeted by Konrad, Lethbridge-Stewart is met by his distinctly nervous second-in-command, Schrader, who assures him somewhat unconvincingly that nothing is amiss. The Brigadier pulls rank and is horrified to discover that his old friend is in critical condition in the base’s sick bay, claiming to be the only survivor of some unspecified incident and warning that “time is against me.” Later, Lethbridge-Stewart sees for himself what Schrader didn’t want him to see: medieval swordsmen engaging UNIT troops in a pitched battle, capable of wounding men heavily armed with modern weapons but apparently taking little damage themselves. Lethrbridge-Stewart makes an urgent call to his scientific advisor; the Doctor parachutes into the base hours later. Both men stumble across evidence that they are indeed facing yet another threat of alien origin – but this time, UNIT has brought this menace upon itself.
Notes: Davros first appeared in 1975’s 
Notes: Michelle Ryan may be best known on both sides of the Atlantic for starring as Jamie Sommers in the short-lived NBC remake of The Bionic Woman. This marks the second appearance of Noma Dumezweni as UNIT’s Capt. Erisa Magambo, first seen – albeit in an alternate timeline – in season four’s