While episodes of Big Finish's first UNIT series are sold separately and have narrative time gaps between them, I nonetheless feel that they are best treated as a tightly linked serial, based on my previous listening. I am overriding the Selectortron in order to enter the UNIT series from its beginning:
UNIT: The Coup
Starring: Nicholas Courtney as Lethbridge-Stewart, Siri O'Neal as Emily Chaudhry, Michael Hobbs as Francis Currie
Format: one half-CD-length episode, originally on a Doctor Who Magazine bonus disc but now a free download
Silly? No.
Standalone? The groundwork is laid for a new UNIT status quo, and a trailer at the end promotes subsequent stories, but there is a satisfying ending with no direct cliffhanger.
Recommended? Highly.
My reaction to this story includes spoilers for it and slight spoilers for the rest of the first UNIT series and for other Big Finish audios featuring Lethbridge-Stewart.
Before listening
The first UNIT series is one of my favorite arcs from the earlier part of Big Finish's history. I have listened to The Coup in particular somewhere around four times, which is a lot for me. The Coup was not originally released as part of the series itself, but rather as a teaser episode on a CD bundled with an issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Nonetheless, having listened to the entire series, I believe it is best to treat The Coup as an integral opening installment, not an optional side story.The Coup sets up three things: a hypernationalistic British organization acting as a rival to UNIT's international one, contact with a new group of Silurians, and the Brigadier coming back out of retirement (again). Unless there is a last-second cliffhanger I'm not recalling, it ends on a satisfying note of closure with a newly purposeful UNIT looking ahead to a challenging but bright future, and listening to it on its own wouldn't feel incomplete.
One detail of the first UNIT series has not aged well, for completely unforeseeable reasons. The rival organization to UNIT also goes by an acronym, its full name being the Internal Counter-Intelligence Service. In audio, ICIS is pronounced with a soft C, giving the same pronunciation as the English-language news media's preferred acronym for a certain real-world organization. If they brought ICIS back for an audio today, they would have to do something different with the name.
Continuity-wise, it seems easiest to assume this UNIT series is disconnected from other Big Finish media, including subsequent UNIT series. The momentous resolution with the Silurians goes unmentioned in further-future stories that would have a reason to mention it, we never hear of ICIS again, and a similar memory hole seems to apply to another near-future Lethbridge-Stewart story from early in Big Finish's history. As I treat continuity as an interesting well of trivia for future writers to draw from if desired, not as a requirement for a story to work, the fact that the events of the first UNIT series have been swept under the rug saddens me but does not in any way cause me to devalue the series.
I am looking forward to relistening to The Coup once again, and thinking about what to write for this blog will probably lead me to mentally explore angles of the story that I hadn't previously.
After listening
I had remembered this story as being one in which the Brigadier comes out of retirement. This is true in the context of the series as a whole, and hinted at in the trailer at the end of The Coup, but within this story it isn't quite that. Lethbridge-Stewart basically sacrifices his career in order to save the world one last time, and the fact that he still has a career in later episodes comes as a surprise to everyone. The end of The Coup involves a sort of handoff of UNIT leadership from him to Colonel Chaudhry, but the trailer at the end reveals he's not actually done.The climax of this story is a speech. Doctor Who has several well-known climactic speeches in it, but this one serves a different function. Typically, a Doctor Who speech is there to drive home a point for the audience, or for the Doctor to motivate some other character to action. In this case, the speech is itself the main action. Lethbridge-Stewart decides to say certain unexpected things at a certain time as the key play in a dangerous gambit, and the action scene that follows the speech does so with the inevitability of dominoes.
I had forgotten how the UNIT/ICIS rivalry started; at the beginning of this story, UNIT and ICIS seem to be working together without conflict, and it isn't until Lethbridge-Stewart makes his stand that they clearly split. This makes The Coup even more important to the overall series arc than I remembered.
Early in the story there are a couple points where there are a lot of sound effects and not enough description of what the listener is supposed to understand is happening. This was a problem many earlier Big Finish audios shared, but fortunately in this case it goes away after the first couple tracks. The performances are, in my opinion, excellent. David Tennant's UNIT character (this is well before he was cast as the Doctor) is mentioned by name but does not appear within The Coup. A Silurian's vocal treatment is a little hard to understand, but this works for the way the Silurian is used in the story.
You should listen to The Coup. It's excellent, it's short, it's free, and it's also on Big Finish's Soundcloud page if you don't have your Big Finish account handy to log in and download it. If you like it, the four episodes that follow from it are also highly worthwhile.
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