Masters of Time

UNIT Nemesis #4

Released: 12 July 2023

Listened: 4/28/23 - 5/1/23

One Way or Another

We’re into the fourth and final boxed set for this story, which is called “UNIT: Nemesis: Masters of Time.” Which is awfully generic, and could mean just about anything. It’s been a few months in story-time since the last box, so this story needs to recap where we are and set up the new status quo. Which it does mostly by info-dumping, unfortunately. The Vulpreen have taken over the Earth, but they’ve time-locked most of the population centers, except for some out-of-the-way places where they’re manufacturing arches and unimaginatively named “super arches.” And Missy is working with them now, but she doesn’t appear in this story, which is annoying. It’s written by John Dorney, who’s one of my favorite writers, but this one is just disappointing. Dorney says he was going for a “single take” kind of story that focuses on one character’s perspective. Unfortunately, the story requires parallel perspectives from Kate (breaking into a Vulpreen base with Harry and Naomi) and Osgood (imprisoned in said base with Jimmy and Josh). So the story ends up being Kate’s perspective for 20 minutes, then rewinding and starting over from Osgood’s perspective. Which I really think was a mistake; some tight cross-cutting would have ramped the tension better. We also run up against the limitations of audio, in which Kate’s team conducts the chattiest stealth infiltration ever, as well as explaining the plan as she goes, instead of, say, working out the plan in advance and briefing people. The only thing worse than that is Osgood talking to herself in her section, while she’s trying to be stealthy. And the Vulpreen don’t seem to be very clever either, even though they’ve got UNIT outgunned, outnumbered, and have the ability to freeze time. Overall, it’s a pretty disappointing start that isn’t giving me a lot of hope for this box.

Traitor’s Gate

This story has a reasonably tight focus, with most of it being on Osgood. She’s a prisoner, being held in the Tower, because the Vulpreen want access to the Black Archive. Osgood uses the memory-wipe feature to stall for quite some time, which you think the Vulpreen would notice sooner than they do. In fact, the Vulpreen just aren’t very bright in this story, or any of the stories, really. This time, we’ve got the trope of the villain who can’t trust his underlings, so he has them executed whenever they fail him, which means the underlings don’t trust him and want to take him down, and around and around. We get the introduction of the “time knife” in this story, which is basically a knife that can cut through Vulpreen time-stops, among other things. Either the Vulpreen are bad at naming things, or maybe Andrew Smith is. While all this is going on, Kate and Josh sneak into the Tower through the submarine dock. It’s supposed to be a reverse parallel to Andrew Smith’s “The Battle of the Tower” from Series 2, but the parallels really aren’t that strong. We get two new minor characters: Ashley the Ravenmaster of the Tower, who has somehow stayed hidden all this time, and Lorraine, a schoolteacher who’s joined the resistance. Both seem prone to heroic self-sacrifice, because that’s what minor characters do around here, evidently. There’s a twist around Lorraine that’s sadly obvious, and once again Missy is mentioned frequently, but doesn’t appear. Sarah Grochala is one of Big Finish’s newer writers, and I understand she’s skilled at mysteries, but I think she was tasked with moving some pieces around, and simply did the best she could.

The Destiny Labyrinth

The last three boxes have featured one episode that seems to be a distraction from the main plot. This box doesn’t have that, but it does have this runaround instead. Kate, Osgood, Josh, and Jimmy are chasing through various arches after Lorraine, hoping to find Missy. Missy has changed the rules on the arches: several are now one-way, and they move through time as well as space. They waste some time determining that they’re at prehistoric Niagara Falls. It’s a stretch that Osgood can figure this out just by looking, and then they don’t actually do anything with the setting. They hop over to 1530s France, where Josh needs some medical attention, so they enlist an apothecary named Michel, who turns out to be Nostradamus. Alison Winter seems to have done her homework on Nostradamus, and uses him as a macguffin to guide Team UNIT through the proper arches. Oscar Batterham does a good job portraying him as kind, intelligent, and capable, but it’s still odd that he’s in the story at all. They all spend a while on a Pacific Island during WWII that just serves to split the party. The story makes a lot of use of Missy’s hypnotic powers, which never really came up on TV, and seem to be a lot stronger than the Master’s ever were. He was able to plant the idea that people in power should trust him, but he usually wasn’t able to hypnotize people into being double-agents of their own accord. Missy’s thralls are able to run long cons on our main characters and make independent choices, which seems a bit much. And they’re all dead by the end of this story anyway. Some good elements in this story, but I’m not excited about where the whole arc is going.

True Nemesis

It’s time for an ending, and there’s a lot still to do. For one thing, Michelle Gomez actually has to turn up this time. It seems that Big Finish was only able to get her for one story, which makes it seem like they swapped the Eleven out for Missy because of actor availability, although Andrew Smith says that was always the plan. Missy realizes, which the Eleven didn’t, that the Vulpreen are refugees from an aborted timeline, and shouldn’t be around at all. That’s the cause of all the time-glitches going back to the beginning of this arc. She can use them to conquer the universe, then get rid of them and take over. Probably. Kate spends a while trying to tell Lord Varliss what happens to every group who’s ever teamed up with Missy, and of course he doesn’t believe her. I can see where Andrew Smith is going, trying to have Kate and Varliss talk it out rather than shoot it out; Andrew Smith is always one for humanizing the bad guys. But Varliss has been one-dimensionally evil up until now, so it’s odd that he becomes reasonable once he loses most of his resources. I don’t really buy the scene where Missy gets taken off the board; she’s smarter than that. Maybe they’re just following the new-series pattern of her improbable deaths and unexplained returns. Harry and Naomi return in this one, to do basically nothing, and get shunted off to the Seventh Doctor stories offscreen. And because most of the world was time-locked while this was happening, the general public neither knows nor cares. This boxed set, and the entire arc, was disappointing to me. Sam and Shindi are apparently gone and never mentioned. Jimmy looks to be a Sam replacement, but he doesn’t have much to do. Josh’s special abilities are never mentioned or used. The Time Lords involved don’t seem as clever as they should be, and the Vulpreen are basically cartoon villains. I understand that Big Finish are trying to do things differently, switch up some writers, bring in new ideas. That’s important, to keep things fresh. But this arc didn’t do it for me, and that’s a shame to say about a 16-story arc. (9/1/23)