#22 Bernice Summerfield: Just War

Having just heard the opening moves of UNIT's dangerous game, I am looking forward to the next time the Randomoid Selectortron brings me to that particular series. Now, though, it brings me to...

Bernice Summerfield: Just War

Starring: Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield, Stephen Fewell as Jason Kane
Format: one continuous full-cast drama with no episode breaks, on 2 CD
Silly? No.
Standalone? This is the last part of the "Time Ring Trilogy" and does not quite fully recap some relevant previous events. This leaves some character motivations slightly unclear, but the main action of the story still works without those details.
Recommended? Yes. Because of the way Big Finish's shipping pricing works, it's best to get the entire Bernice Summerfield Series 01 bundle, unless some other better discount applies.

My reaction to this story includes spoilers for it and slight spoilers for preceding and subsequent Bernice Summerfield audio stories.

Before listening

I believe I have only listened to Just War once. It is a dark story filled with brutality, and not one that it would occur to me to revisit in search of a good time. Bernice, after a time travel incident at the end of her previous two-disc story, finds herself facing the German army in World War Two. I don't remember the title being used as a pun at any point in the story, but I think there may be an intentional double meaning: while the Germans are after a science fiction plot device and Bernice wants to get back to the future, the bulk of the story is not science fiction adventure, just war.
This audio was very loosely adapted from a novel. The novel involved the seventh Doctor, Bernice, and two other companions, and did not involve Jason Kane. I haven't read the novel, but Jacqueline Rayner's adaptation of Lance Parkin's book simply works as an audio story and I recall no detectable seams.
I am looking forward to this listen very much. While Just War is darker than I usually seek out, I remember it being the artistically strongest release of the first Bernice Summerfield season. (For simple entertainment value rather than artistic merit, I'd recommend Oh No It Isn't! over Just War.) I don't remember whether there are four half-disc episodes or two full-disc episodes; the format in which I blog my reaction will depend on that.

After listening to disc 1 of 2

Just War starts in a bar, where Jason Kane drunkenly blurts out his memory of events in the previous episodes to bring you mostly up to speed. It is not yet World War Two, and Jason has had enough alcohol to be revealing bits of future history to a German who has never heard the anachronistic word "radar" before and makes a note of it. The story then skips ahead considerably. Jason has become a captain in the British intelligence services and his equally time-stranded ex-wife Bernice is trying to survive in occupied Guernsey. For most of the disc, Jason is just receiving intelligence reports and reacting to them, but he gets involved in the action further on.
One point which is not mentioned in the initial recap, and which is rather important, is the reason Jason and Bernice can't just both return to their own time immediately: Bernice and Jason's time rings only work when they use them both together, and while they arrived in the same part of Earth's history they don't know each other's position and don't have any way of communicating with each other.
The script goes out of the way repeatedly to establish that while Bernice is an experienced time-traveling adventuress, getting involved in a historical war on Earth is different. The German officers are not the Daleks. A nineteen year old German is as unsure of himself as any nineteen year old. An older, higher-ranking German officer is an active sadist in a way that gives him more direct pleasure than any of the staple Doctor Who monsters would exhibit. Likewise, Bernice is not the Doctor. When she shoots a German officer, she does so with regret but without hesitation.
To my surprise, disc one just ends at the end of track seven with no theme music and no plot twist to create a cliffhanger. Just War seems to have been written and edited as a single movie-length episode, despite the physical length constraint of the CD medium.
As of the end of the disc, Bernice and Jason have each been separately taken prisoner. Meanwhile, the Germans are working on some type of aerial superweapon, which is possibly Jason's fault for having described future technology.
This story is just as dark as I remembered it, and the pace is unrelenting. I am not going to continue to the second disc immediately, but I do look forward to hearing the rest later.

After listening to disc 2 of 2

Disc 2 picks up from where disc 1 ran out of space with no recap, theme music, or other introductory device. Bernice and Jason spend a great deal of it still captured by the Germans before effecting an escape. The tactical mechanics of the escape are somewhat dubious, and it signals a transition from bleak war story to action adventure. The aerial superweapon was very much Jason's fault; Bernice had left some anachronistic technology on past Earth, but the Nazis wouldn't have been aware of it if Jason hadn't said anything. Bernice and Jason end up dramatically stealing it and escaping from Guernsey in it. The shift into adventure mode is all the starker for the chillingly banal Nazi brutality that precedes it.
On this disc, Jason explains what he did during the time gap between the opening scene and the main action, and Bernice likewise explains what she was doing before the start of the story. These explanations tie in with preceding Bernice Summerfield audio dramas and expect the listener to have heard them, but aren't too important to active events.
Just War ends slowly and painfully, with Bernice and Jason back in the future but Bernice still badly traumatized. I remember thinking that the start of the next Bernice Summerfield audio, Dragon's Wrath, doesn't pick up from here properly at all.
There is a clever piece of storytelling regarding Nazi ideology: the Nazis would otherwise believe that Bernice is from the future, but they are convinced that their cause is invincible, and therefore anyone from Earth's future would necessarily have been raised a Nazi. Bernice accidentally leaves a diary behind in which she had written far too much information about yet-to-happen events of the war, but the Germans are unable to accept it as real. The execution of this plot thread is better than my summary description might make it sound.
Just War is as excellent as I had remembered, and also as full of darkness. It works best in the context of the full first season of Bernice Summerfield, both because of its continuity links to the previous installments of the Time Ring Trilogy and because of the sheer tonal range the series demonstrates, with this the darkest and the series opener Oh No It Isn't! the lightest. I highly recommend that season, with this as its climax (and Dragon's Wrath just a forgettable but listenable outlier).