The Unzal Incursion (audio story)

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The Unzal Incursion was the first story in the audio anthology The Third Doctor Adventures: Volume Seven, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Mark Wright and featured Tim Treloar as the Third Doctor, Daisy Ashford as Liz Shaw and Jon Culshaw as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

Publisher's summary[[edit] | [edit source]]

Under the supervision of the Doctor, the Brigadier and Dr Liz Shaw, UNIT are getting ready to activate Hotspur: their new, advanced early warning system.

But something goes wrong. Can it be that UNIT has been betrayed from within? Suddenly bases are falling across the globe, and only the Doctor and his friends are able to escape.

Not knowing how far the conspiracy goes, the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier become fugitives. Their investigations lead them to the Fulcrum military training facility. And something beyond the Earth.

Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]

Part one[[edit] | [edit source]]

The Brigadier is given a demonstration of Director Dankworth's advanced Fulcrum training course for soldiers, which is complete with drones and simulations and which Sergeant Attah and her squad, soon to be seconded to UNIT, fail. Although the Ministry of Defence has been impressed by it and is requiring the British Army to complete the programme, the Brigadier is more sceptical and explains to Dankworth before he leaves that the Doctor was unable to visit due to an urgent matter. Dankworth has Harper activate a neutralising agent once the soldiers are asleep and begins to condition them, during which she is contacted by the Unzal, who provided the conditioning techniques, and promises them that the incursion will go ahead as planned.

The Doctor has grown lonely whilst Liz has been working on the Hotspur Network, an early warning system for alien invasions, and assists her in the final two weeks before launch. Following the launch ceremony at UNIT HQ, Liz becomes despondent at returning to the role of the Doctor's assistant as he works to repair the TARDIS control console, which the Doctor shows to the newly-recruited Attah when she visits the laboratory. He uses his sonic screwdriver to realign the polarity of the quantum oscillators, which causes Attah to have a fit and alerts Dankworth and Harper as well as the Unzal. Once Attah recovers from the fit, she arrests the Doctor and Liz at gunpoint and the Unzal order Dankworth to activate everybody who has been conditioned. Private Robbins and the rest of Attah's squadron are activated and take the Brigadier prisoner.

Attah has the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier imprisoned and informs Dankworth that she has taken control of UNIT HQ through a direct cerebral communications link. Robbins attempts to secure the Hotspur Network, but Liz's security subroutines lock him out and she refuses to hand over the codes necessary to disable them. Dankworth, keeping this obstacle from the Unzal, thus orders Attah to take the captive trio to the Fulcrum, but they manage to escape thanks to the Doctor's martial arts and Liz puts the base under lockdown. They lock themselves in the laboratory and hold onto the TARDIS console as the Doctor activates it in an escape plan which Liz says is not going to work. The soldiers break in.

Part two[[edit] | [edit source]]

The Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier materialise inside the garage and drive off in Bessie, leaving the console behind and avoiding a hail of gunfire. Uncertain of who has been compromised, the Doctor decides against contacting the Ministry of Defence and the Brigadier directs him to the Hercules at UNIT airfield so that he might make use of its laboratory. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to incapacitate Attah and her soldiers whilst the Brigadier prepares the Hercules, allowing the three of them to escape.

Whilst Attah informs Dankworth of her failure and is sent Fulcrum drones to assist, Liz regrets that the network that she has created is a security risk and uses the plane's transmitter array to access the frequency which harms the soldiers, finding that it is a conditioning web which brainwashed the soldiers. She tracks the source to West Sussex, which the Brigadier realises must be the Fulcrum. The drones attack the Hercules and Dankworth makes contact to warn the trio to comply with her orders, but the Brigadier refuses and Dankworth orders the plane to be shot down despite Harper noting the risk to Liz. The plane is hit and the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier brace for impact.

Part three[[edit] | [edit source]]

With the understanding that the Doctor and the Brigadier are expandable, Attah and her men head to the crash site and arrest Liz. She has three drones take Liz to Dankworth at the Fulcrum whilst she leads a search of the wreckage for the Doctor and the Brigadier, the latter of whom has suffered a dislocated shoulder which the Doctor resets before they head to the Fulcrum on foot. They evade aerial drones and attempt to keep ahead of Attah and her men, but the soldiers arrive at the Fulcrum before they do and the Doctor has to render Robbins unconscious to gain access.

Liz refuses to obey the Unzal and learns from Harper how sustained exposure to the Fulcrum signal leaves people open to suggestion. Due to the lack of time before the planned incursion, Dankworth resorts to a riskier and more painful means of conditioning her to get her to give up the Hotspur codes and puts the machine to its maximum level despite Harper's protestations. Whilst the Doctor and the Brigadier capture Attah and attempt to decondition her, Liz gives up the codes and Harper uses them to gain control of Hotspur. The Unzal command Dankworth to use the network to cloak their primary vanguard from humanity as the incursion begins.

Part four[[edit] | [edit source]]

Harper masks the Unzal vanguard's tracer shadow from detection and takes Liz to begin conditioning on Dankworth's orders. Liz is soon joined by the Doctor and the Brigadier, whom Attah has escorted to the base as prisoners, and the trio are given an audience with the Unzal, who are aware of Time Lords and the Doctor's exile. The Unzal offer the Doctor freedom from Earth in return for his assistance in turning the Unzal Hegemony into a galactic power and the Doctor realises from their lack of resources and choice of the word "incursion" that they only intend to take over the United Kingdom. Dankworth is unable to explain what she has to gain from this, however, and collapses as a result of her conditioning. With Dankworth out of action, Liz attempts to take back control of Hotspur, but Harper removes her chameleon shroud and reveals that she is an Unzal.

The Doctor, the Brigadier and Liz flee with Attah, whose conditioning the Doctor was successfully able to break. The Doctor sends the Brigadier and Attah to delay the drones and the conditioned soldiers from launching a coup against the British government and goes with Liz to deactivate Hotspur and disrupt the conditioning web. When he returns to the Unzal, he offers himself as their ambassador in return for being given passage to a more advanced society, a ruse allows Liz to get access to Hotspur and undo the masking. Once the ruse is given away, Harper subjects the Doctor to the conditioning machine, but the Doctor overloads the network to unravel the web and restores all those conditioned to normal. The Royal Air Force launches an attack on the oncoming Unzal fleet and Dankworth shoots Harper, after which the Doctor demands that the Unzal reveal who has been helping them given their scant resources. The Unzal do not answer and depart.

Attah returns to work at UNIT, apologising unnecessarily to the Brigadier for giving into the conditioning, and the Hotspur Network is switched back on. Liz is sympathetic towards the amnesiac Dankworth, whom she visits at a psychiatric hospital, and the Doctor notes that her conditioning being beyond that of those affected by the Fulcrum is inexplicable, as is the Unzal's sudden bellicosity and advanced technology. He deduces that the incursion was an attempt to test the Doctor and UNIT ahead of an attack by an unknown force. In the hospital, Dankworth repeatedly writes in her diary the phrase, "You will obey me".

Cast[[edit] | [edit source]]

Crew[[edit] | [edit source]]

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

Footnotes[[edit] | [edit source]]

  1. ↑ BFX: The Unzal Incursion

External links[[edit] | [edit source]]

v • e
The Third Doctor Adventures
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Volume 6
Volume 7
Volume 8
Volume 9
Volume 10
The Return
of Jo Jones
Volume 12
Volume 13
Volume 14
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