Tony’s relishing the Silence.
The concept of UNIT
Silenced makes an appealing amount of sense. In the first New UNIT box set,
Kate Stewart’s team battled the Autons, a classic UNIT foe. In the second, they
battled a brand new creation, the Tengobushi. In the third, they confront their
part in the New Who universe, and battle a species invented for Matt Smith’s
Doctor – the Silents.
And at least, unlike the
Weeping Angels and the Vashta Nerada, both of which Big Finish has also brought
to audio, the Silents do speak actual words. Which, when you consider that
their catchphrase is ‘Silence must fall’ is just a touch ironic.
But the challenge of making
the Silents work on audio is one of audience patience and storytelling momentum.
You forget everything about them the minute you look away. How are you going to
construct four hour-long episodes around a creature whose influence
specifically makes you forget them the moment you’re not looking at them?
What’s more, there’s a
degree of motivational challenge to using the Silents as a Big Bad in the wake
of where their on-screen storyline went. Frankly, they fizzled out as priests,
taking confession from anyone who needed absolute secrecy (Just asking: how does
that work? As soon as you complete your confession and look away, you forget
you’ve just been to confession…). Clearly, if they’re still beggaring about on
Earth and getting in UNIT’s way, we’re dealing with ‘bad,’ Kovarian Chapter
Silents.
The issue of audience
patience and narrative thread though does come up during the course of the four
episodes here, not least because rather than a single four-part arc, UNIT
Silenced feels like one three-part story, and an entirely separate,
follow-up, one-parter – a sensation enhanced by events coming to a head at the
end of Episode 3, and an entirely different scenario being used for Episode 4.
That said, the first three
episodes are superbly satirical, in the best traditions of Robert Holmes back
in his UNIT days. That’s especially impressive when you realise that UNIT
Silenced was probably written before the Brexit campaign was actually run,
and while Donald Trump was either still battling to become the Republican
nominee, or had won the nomination but was being dismissed as the joke he
actually remains. What makes it impressive is that the story builds to a UK
election with a pompous, pointless blowhard spouting meaningless drivel to the
British publish, challenging a sitting Prime Minister – and winning. Certainly
viewed in hindsight, it’s a beautiful satire on the political process and the
ability of unmitigated cretins to get elected to the highest offices in the
land. At least, as is actually said by Osgood along the way, if it’s the
Silents that are responsible, it means that the British people haven’t gone
entirely mad.
Yes – UNIT Silenced
actually finds a way to make you wish the Silents were real, because at least
it would explain 2016.
The first episode, House
of Silents, is a warm-up: before anyone storms the Bastille, there are
secret meetings, conclaves, plans drawn up in safe houses. You’d think the
Silents, with their very particular gift, would have no need of such safe
houses, but that’s to reckon without the solution to The Year of the Moon.
There, as punishment and safeguard, the Doctor arranged to implant a mortal
hatred of the Silents into the psyche of everyone who watched the Moon landing
– in a perverse twist of fate, these are Silents that are fighting for their lives,
fighting for the right to live unpersecuted lives fifty years after that one
small step.
The Silents are gathering
in one house – the house of a blind philanthropist – to make their plans. The
challenge of narrative when using the Silents is explicitly laid before us in
House of Silents, because UNIT has the house under surveillance, Colonel Shindi
(Ramon Tikaram) back on duty…but of course, nothing is ever recorded. The way
that problem is eventually overcome is ingenious, and the Silent ‘cell’ is attacked,
but it hardly matters. The Silents have come up with a plan, and it involves
getting a cretin named Kenneth LeBlanc elected Prime Minister.
In Square One,
the problem of using the Silents is baked right into the title – UNIT has
forgotten it ever encountered the Silents, and only the persistence of an
internet whistleblower, and of former journalist Jacqui McGee (Tracy Wiles
reprising her role from UNIT Extinction), convinces Kate Stewart to investigate
anomalies in her memory. Three box sets in, there’s a solid delineation
developing among Kate’s top team, Captain Josh Carter and Lieutenant Sam Bishop
(James Joyce and Warren Brown) more or less running down paths beaten out for
them by Yates and Benton respectively – the posher, more gung-ho Carter
(emboldened by his plastic skeleton) more reckless than the team’s military working
class problem-solver Bishop. That difference comes to the fore in the
mid-section of this box-set, as the Silents recruit Josh Carter for Team
LeBlanc and he becomes the idiot politician’s chief of security, abandoning his
UNIT role.
Throughout the course of Square
One, we learn more of the Silents’ dilemma as a hunted species on Earth
with no escape, and every human predisposed to kill them on sight. We also get
a sense of what the Silents are truly capable of with their powers of
suggestion, especially in the age of Youtube and viral videos. Just think about
it for a minute – how many cute cat videos are out there? Are they all really that cute?
But do you watch them anyway?
Ever wondered why?
Writers Matt Fitton and
John Dorney shamelessly work the Silents into questions like that, using them to
answer many questions about modern life. The rise in cute cat videos is part of
a cunning Silent plan. Obviously.
The episode helps extend
the powers we saw the Silents use on-screen, and perhaps more to the point,
give them some sort of coherent plan, rather than just an urge to turn up now
and again to scare the willies out of people and/or randomly lightning-zap them.
Silent Majority sees the nation lose its mind and elect
LeBlanc as Prime Minister, a role in which he’s actually supremely
disinterested in terms of actually doing the job (ahhh, remember when
that was fiction?). But as UNIT struggles to retain the Silents in their minds
through clever technological solutions (akin to the eyepatches from the TV
series) and repeated briefings, handwritten notes and drawings, LeBlanc becomes
Prime Minister and Josh Carter, like Yates before him, realises he has been
given a part in something bigger and darker than he ever imagined. As Osgood
asks: ‘What do the Silents gain from the election of LeBlanc? Surely there are
plenty of politicians they could overpower without choosing someone so…’
Quite. The answer to that
question, to the credit of Fitton and Dorney, makes more sense than anything in
The Year of the Moon ever did. The Silents are fighting fire with fire,
trying to overpower the message the Doctor laid into the human subconscious.
UNIT’s solution is scrappy, but – and this is where the box set feels like it
makes a miss-step – the Silents quickly abandon the battle for another front.
Months pass before the
final episode, In Memory Alone, takes place. UNIT has defeated
the Silents. Everyone knows that, especially UNIT’s leaders. The defeated Prime
Minister has been reinstated, and there are shenanigans on an international
space platform, Bishop and Osgood becoming astronauts to go and sort out the
issues. Then astronauts start dying, and the two UNIT operatives flip switches
that expose the spy satellites of all nations. The Silents have got one final
gambit up their tailored sleeves – getting the hell out of Dodge and leaving us
to destroy ourselves. It’s this complete storyline shift that makes In Memory
Alone feel like a single-episode sequel to the main story here, a Moonraker in
the James Bond franchise. And while there’s some good scary stuff with Silents
In Space, the tonal shift feels like an oddity, like a bonus disc rather than
Episode 4 of a coherent story.
UNIT Silenced has some
mountains to overcome – the difficulty of fighting a villain you can’t
remember, sustaining listener interest as you go around in the same loop a
number of times, the motivation issue etc. For the most part, Fitton and
Dorney, aided by some canny direction choices from Ken Bentley, and served by a
cast getting better and better the more they work in the audio medium together,
pull off what seems like too tall an order. Yes, In Memory Alone feels
like an Easter egg, rather than a fully-fledged fourth part of the same story.
But in the political satire, in solving the motivation issue, and in giving the
Silents more coherence in audio than they ever had on screen, Big Finish does
more than enough to declare this box-set a triumph.
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