Earthfall

UNIT #1.2

Released: 9 November 2015

Listened: 3/30/23

This story has the shortest running time of the set, less than 40 minutes. So not a lot gets done, but that’s not terrible. It seems Big Finish has a limit on the number of main characters per story, so Shindi is sent off to Geneva so that we can introduce Lieutenant Sam Bishop (Warren Brown). Sam is established as ultra-competent action hero dude, which you’d think would make Josh jealous, but Sam seems to always be in the field, so they don’t interact much. In this case, Sam and Osgood are in the Gobi desert, tracking down a Nestene energy unit that fell to Earth a bit early (as they do). This gives Osgood a lot of opportunity to complain about how she’s not cut out for field work, and for Sam to demonstrate his competence. Meanwhile, Kate confronts Simon Devlin, having put together the 3D printer connection. Turns out Simon had a congenital condition in his skull, so he had it replaced with a plastic one, which is the sort of thing you can do if you’re ultra-rich. Except oops, that gave the Nestenes a direct line to his brain. It’s a little hard to fault the guy; I doubt he anticipated that. Andrew Smith writes this one, and he’s always pretty good at making the bad guys at least partially sympathetic, but so far it’s by-the-numbers storytelling.