This Sleep of Death

UNIT #8.1

Released: 30 April 2019

Listened: 4/21/23

This boxed set is called “Incursions,” which could mean anything at all, really. This one is written by Jonathan Morris, and calls back to his Main Range story “Static,” which is one of the creepier Big Finish stories I’ve ever heard. Bottom line: UNIT has jurisdiction over Abbey Marston, which has been proven to be a place where you can bring back the dead, so long as you put them back when you’re done. This is the sort of thing that UNIT should probably destroy, but a power like that is just too useful to ignore entirely. So what could drive Kate to use it? When there’s a hidden threat to the whole human race, and only a deceased UNIT soldier knows where it is. Except that very little is what it seems in this story. After the last boxed set, Osgood seems a little more tentative this story, not necessarily because she’s learned, but because she’s being written by someone else. Both she and Josh are remarkably skeptical of the whole back-from-the-dead thing, and you’d think that two seasoned UNIT operatives would be a little more open-minded. The previous story also involved a fair bit of body-swapping, which comes up again here, but it’s kept to a minimum because it’s only a one-parter, and frankly, the rules around that are complicated. But it means that Ingrid Oliver has to play yet another Osgood-but-not-Osgood, which is getting a bit overdone (even though the Zygon complication hasn't appeared in this series yet). Once again, there’s no mass slaughter, unless you count an awful lot of people who were already dead to start with. It’s not as creepy as the original, but I didn’t expect it to be.