As a plague sweeps across the world, UNIT in Britain faces collapse. Only Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood and the Brigadier can save it.
As a plague sweeps across the world, UNIT in Britain faces collapse. Only Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood and the Brigadier can save it.
UNIT: THE WASTING
I’ve noticed a recurring problem with Big Finish’s arc stories: questions posed in the first story are answered en masse at the conclusion, making the stories in the middle frustratingly inconclusive and rendering the final story overcrowded and nonsensical. Fortunately for the UNIT series, “The Wasting” resolves the plot in believable, logical fashion, and doesn’t even leave any loose ends. It helps that Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett are concluding their own script from “Time Heals,” in that they could present mysteries like the disappearance of Brimmicombe-Wood (David Tennant) and the alien spaceship and know how they were going to end up — but, of course, there weren’t any hints about “The Wasting” in either “Snake Head” or “The Longest Night.” The Big Finish UNIT has the same problem as the classic series UNIT — no budget to show that the organization has more than four or five members — and so, with Dalton and Hoffman dead, the Brigadier is drafted back into the series to help run things with Chaudhry. Nicholas Courtney is absolutely delightful, showing a great rapport with Siri O’Neal, and the story features some wonderful nods to the past, up to and including a sort-of-appearance by Harry Sullivan!
Unfortunately, “The Wasting” is too ambitious for its own good. A scene where Chaudhry addresses all the personnel at UNIT HQ is laughable — we don’t hear a word from any of them, but then we hear about 50 footstep effects as they march out of the room. Many of the battle scenes are painful: the gun effects vary wildly in volume without any context, and the action sequences are beset by characters spouting off expositionary dialogue. Tennant may be brilliant in this — yes, he’s gnawing on the scenery, but he’s more than talented enough to pull it off — but he’s given some terrible dialogue, especially in his final fight scene with Chaudhry. There’s also very little sense of place: I can’t say whether this is down to David Darlington’s sound design or Nicola Bryant’s direction, but the ICIS base sounds like the streets of London, which sound like the tunnels, which sound like a missile base somewhere in Russia. After the tight urgency of the first four productions, “The Wasting” is shockingly limp, which is not what is wanted in a series finale.
A brief word on the presentation of the media in the UNIT series: it’s appalling. Francis Currie (Michael Hobbs) acts like a vampire, drawn to tragedy and desperate to feed upon suffering. He celebrates the plague outbreak without any perceivable irony. In short, he’s a slimeball, and his moment of heroism halfway through “The Wasting” doesn’t redeem him in my eyes. Chaudhry and the UNIT troops complain about the media throughout the series, and the news is only shown to be beneficial when they manipulate it into spreading their message — for a series so devoted to the causes of liberty and multiculturalism, it certainly seems to hate the idea of a free press!
In sum, “The Wasting” is almost opposite to “The Longest Night” — while its predecessor was an exciting action thriller with silly politics, “The Wasting” presents enjoyable character moments interspersed with boring action sequences. It wraps things up competently enough, but the series finale should have been better than this.
5/10
Series average rating: 7.0