United

UNIT #4.4

Released: 23 May 2017

Listened: 4/11/23

We’ve reached the end, and it’s time to get the band back together, or most of it, anyway. The Silurians are using modified dinosaurs to control the sea and airspace around Britain, and everybody Colonel-level and above is out of the country and can’t get back. It’s pretty contrived, but that gives Kate the excuse to delegate to Mike Yates, with Jo and Benton as his advisors, as they’ve fought Silurians before. Josh and Osgood manage to teleport back in to help. Kate is mostly left giving orders from outside. Yates and Benton get to work prepping a military response, because that’s their job. Jo, though, objects strenuously. She still wants to pursue diplomacy, because it’s what the Doctor would have done. So she goes along to help Osgood, displaying a much greater technical knowledge than she ever has before. I know she learned from the Doctor and Cliff, but this seems a bit of a stretch. And, of course, being Jo, she goes off to try to negotiate without telling anybody else. At this point, I think Mr. Fitton was in trouble: we’ve established that just killing all the Silurians isn’t the right thing to do, but also that Jastrok is a fanatic and unwilling to negotiate. So that seems to leave our heroes with no options, but this is Doctor Who, so we can always come up with a deus ex scientia to save the day. And it does feel a bit like a deus ex, but you really can’t write a Silurian story that doesn’t end with “and then they all went back to sleep,” because that’s the rules that we’re stuck with now. So: the story is fine, and all the stories in the box are fine. What we paid our admission for is to see UNIT team up with 70s UNIT, and we certainly got that. In fact, as we’ll see, establishing Jo as an occasionally recurring character and friend of Osgood will pay off down the road.