• Kate's competence. For the first time since The Power of Three and a few odd parts of Day of the Doctor, Kate comes across as the competent, sensible and self-assured leader of UNIT she was intended to be. No matter what the story throws at her (and it throws a lot!) Kate is forever taking it in her stride, dealing with the situation and turning things around. Best of all it doesn't come across as her just being effortlessly perfect, she recognizes the danger they're in but keeps a level head thanks to her experience, and when she CAN'T talk her way out of a situation the faith she demonstrates in her team is justified when they pull through for her because she HAS turned them into a team and taught them the value of thinking outside of the box. There are several references to the problems she has encountered both within and without UNIT due to her pushing for an emphasis on scientific research over military action and this plays out throughout the story. She has to overcome efforts to undermine her or push UNIT in a different direction, and again and again it is demonstrated that her way of running UNIT is superior because it actually allows for adaptation and improvisation. By the end of the story where she is put into the power of the main antagonist, she maintains an air of complete and relaxed authority that feels earned, endlessly frustrating her nemesis who keeps pointing out how outclassed and powerless Kate is but completely failing to shake her confidence. There is in particular one scene that really stands out, where Kate is visited in Geneva by a Government Minister who completely belittles her, puts her in her place and makes it clear he is the guy in charge.... only for her to calmly, smoothly and completely undercut him, put him in HIS place and leave him humiliated. He isn't a strawman though, and she doesn't just get the best of him because that's what is written in the script - every moment feels earned, we've had Kate's place in the hierarchy of UNIT established and how that related to the UK Government, and we know this Minister is coming at things from an entirely ulterior motive. Kate has already rumbled his game and uses his arrival and so-called authority as confirmation of her suspicions, and it becomes clear that his attitude is entirely based on fear of exposure and he hasn't got a leg to stand on, and she knows it.
  
  Also, just as an aside, for the first time in what feels like forever the story doesn't harp on or call undue attention to the Brigadier. There are two references to him in the entire story, and both feel completely natural. A character complains to another that Kate is even more trouble than her father could be, another mentions off-hand to Kate,"I knew your father, good man" and.... that's it. Kate is firmly established enough now (and was before this) that the writers no longer seem to feel compelled to ram Kate's parentage down our throats.
  
  
• The clear division between episodes. Each episode of the story feels like it's own contained thing while still flowing smoothly together into a greater whole. My experience with Big Finish's big recent releases show this is something they have become better at and it's shown to good effect here. Episode 1 is all about setting the stage, revealing the mystery, the major players and the initial threat. Episode 2 takes place in Geneva where the strands of the mystery begin to come together, putting the UNIT team outside of their normal element and showing how they deal with an external threat and watch out for each other - there is no I in team for this group. Episode 3 puts them firmly back on home soil for a slight deviation on the classic Base-Under-Siege format, as the alien menace attacks their Tower of London base and we get to see how Kate's team handles this when they're so clearly outmatched, forced to fall back again and again as they're overwhelmed.... but always with a Plan B in mind. Episode 4 wraps everything up, tying together every plot point but also holding up as its own individual story and ending with a nice little post-climax epilogue to wrap up any loose ends. Every time I finished an episode I felt excited to hear what happened next but also like I had been given a satisfying story in its own right, something I could just listen to by itself.
  
  
• A manageable cast. UNIT: Extinction introduced a large cast and didn't quite manage to give them all the time they needed for development - Josh and Sam in particular felt like they were essentially the same character. Happily things are pruned down here, concentrating on a core main cast of Kate, Osgood and Josh, with Sam only appearing in the fourth episode by which point there feels like there is room for him. The dynamic between all three is good, though I still don't quite buy the romantic tension that is supposed to be present between Osgood and Josh (in fact there is a much more believable burgeoning relationship between Osgood and another character who is killed halfway through the story). While the extended cast is still quite large, they spaced out well enough that the story doesn't feel cluttered, everything is able to hang comfortably off the framework of the main cast which is just large enough to allow for a manageable variety of combinations.
  

• Orientalism? Others may disagree, but listening to the story I got a very uncomfortable sense of Orientalism from the alien antagonists. The "Tangobushi" are essentially alien ninjas who rush about hissing, blindly following orders and committing suicide when they fail to achieve their goals. Their leader/spokesman talks about his mystic powers that come about from a combination of technology and spirituality, speaking arrogantly of his superior culture before slowly coming to the realization that the humans have potential and perhaps there is much he can learn from them. I really cringed while listening, it feels like something that belongs more in a 1970s or 80s production, and listening to the behind the scenes stuff they do openly discuss their (noble!) intentions to play off the sense of the aliens having an Eastern influence, though somewhere along the way they seemed to lose their original intention of tying in to the "Ancient Aliens inspired our culture" theme. Clearly they intended to paint the Tangobushi and their parent race (an off-shoot of the "Extinct" species revived in The Diary of River Song) as massively advanced and beyond 21st Century humanity, but they end up coming across as stagnant and short-sighted and the Eastern theme feels more like "other"izing Asians as alien and potentially dangerous. It's nowhere near as bad as the yellow-face make-up used in The Talons of Weng Chiang but it still feels pretty out of place in 2016.
  
  
• A disposable supporting cast. While the core cast is well handled, and to a lesser extent so are the main antagonists (at least the human ones), the supporting cast is frustratingly disposable. Characters appear and have a large part to play in one particular episode but are then unceremoniously removed (often fatally) because they're not excess to requirements. An old school friend of Osgood's plays a prominent part and there is some interesting stuff going on with his paranoia as well as the suggestion of romantic tension between the two, and a subplot is set up of Osgood bringing him into UNIT on the scientific team.... and then he's killed off and apart from a brief sentence he's completely forgotten about in spite of his supposed close connection/history with Osgood. An American General set up as a possible antagonist only to become an ardent supporter of Kate's helps develop the internal politics element of the story but then the writers seemed to realize that other things that would happen in later episodes wouldn't make much sense if he was still around (the Government Minister sets up a false narrative to try and remove Kate from the picture, getting the support of military-minded elements within UNIT's top brass) so they quickly get rid of him. A mercenary group is introduced early in the story in order to prevent UNIT from just immediately solving the problem they were facing, get talked up for their professionalism/skill/danger and considered every bit the equl of UNIT.... but then disappear until the final story when they're seemingly just there to be cannon-fodder.
  

Cleretic fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Jul 20, 2016