In this four-story box set, Kate Stewart, Osgood and the UNIT team confront an alien invasion by the Nestene Consciousness and its army of plastic Autons…
1. Vanguard by Matt Fitton
While UNIT attend a ’skyfall’ incident under the eyes of watchful journalists, reclusive billionaire Simon Devlin is planning a product launch that will change the world…
2. Earthfall by Andrew Smith
Lieutenant Sam Bishop and Osgood are deployed to the Gobi desert in search of a Nestene energy unit. But there are Autons in the sand dunes…
3. Bridgehead by Andrew Smith
Captain Josh Carter has gone undercover inside Devlin Futuretech. But his safety is jeopardised by the activities of investigative journalist Jacqui McGee.
4. Armageddon by Matt Fitton
As UNIT leads the fightback on every front, every continent, against an implacable army, Kate Stewart must look to the past for some clue to defeat the plastic menace.
UNIT: EXTINCTION
After years of being restricted to only the Doctors and characters from the “classic” series of Doctor Who, Big Finish finally acquired a license to the “new” series and proceeded forth with a raft of new material. The first hint of this came with the appearance of new series Daleks in Gallifrey VI, but “UNIT: Extinction” is the first full example, bringing Kate Stewart, Osgood, and others together in a four-story box set from Matt Fitton and Andrew Smith. Unfortunately, this first trip into a new era is wholly unmemorable and stands as a colossal disappointment instead of a bold leap forward.
The plot, in a nutshell: the Nestene Consciousness has returned to Earth, and it is once again animating the planet’s plastic supply into killer Autons. Without the Doctor around, it’s up to UNIT to avert the invasion. But wait, you ask, didn’t we basically get that story in “Spearhead from Space” and then again in “Terror of the Autons?” Yes! If you’ve seen those stories, there’s very little reason to listen to “UNIT: Extinction,” as it hits almost all the same beats, starting with the plastic spheres crashing to Earth from space and finishing with a horrible monster manifesting in a glass tank. It completely lacks the inventiveness of its predecessors, though – it attempts to draw modern relevance through the use of 3-D printing, but that means no scenes of familiar plastic objects coming to life and menacing the populace. So the Autons are just killer robots.
The worst part by far, though, is the characterization. You’ve got Kate, played by a curiously flat Jemma Redgrave – though she does finally pick it up by the final episode – about whom we learn virtually nothing. You’ve got Osgood, and while Ingrid Oliver’s performance is very good, there’s really nothing to her other than “awkward yet heroic geek.” And then we have the new supporting characters, like Colonel Shindi (Ramon Tikaram), and Captain Carter (James Joyce), and Lieutenant Bishop (Warren Brown). Who are they? What are they like? Well, Carter’s a bit reckless, but other than that? Are these supposed to be the new recurring characters? Because right now they come across as a faceless group of generic soldiers – how fitting that they’re fighting Autons, right? And then there’s Simon Devlin (Steve John Shepherd), one of the most generic villains in recent memory. Shepherd chews the scenery to shreds, aided by no-really-they-wrote-this lines like “SEIZE HIM!” and drooling over “my master” and so forth. And then there’s Jacqui McGee (Tracy Wiles), perhaps the only interesting character because of her unusual relationship with UNIT. How can you write over three hours of modern audio drama without even attempting to get in the heads of your characters?
If there’s one good thing about “UNIT: Extinction,” it’s the global scale and believable design of the action. It’s nice to have a global invasion threat that doesn’t focus exclusively on London, and here we have scenes in Mongolia and Puerto Rico, among other locations. The music and sound design from Howard Carter is similarly expansive and inspiring, as is Ken Bentley’s direction. I also very much appreciated Bentley (and the scripts) allowing the sound design to tell the story – there are multiple action scenes without characters standing around describing everything, and it’s still quite clear what’s going on. Imagine that! That said, the ending is still a disappointment: after three episodes of globe-trotting action, the solution is to grab the anti-plastic from “Rose” out of the Black Archives and toss it in the Nestene tank? Really? This is both the initial foray into new series territory and the start of a new series of box sets. It should be ambitious, it should be inspiring, it should be insightful – instead, it’s a well produced but totally unimaginative action epic that stays in the mind mere moments after the credits roll. If this were a TV pilot, I wouldn’t bother with episode 2.
Mediocre.
5/10