Alice Wells
- You may wish to consult
Alice (disambiguation)for other, similarly-named pages.
Captain Alice Wells was a UNIT officer. In 2000, she had several lengthy conversations with the captive Sontaran Brak over a few days in connection with a covert Weapons Crisis Committee in Geneva.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
Alice was the scion of a line of soldiers, with her grandfather having lost an arm in a Belgian trench and her father having been a RAF pilot in World War II. Both of them told her war stories as she grew up, though she always got the sense that they were keeping the worst of it to themselves. As an adult, she began her military career in the British regular army, but was later recruited into UNIT. (AUDIO: Old Soldiers [+]Loading...["Old Soldiers (BBV audio story)"])
Interviews with Brak[[edit] | [edit source]]
Three months after joining UNIT, Alice, who had thus far only been assigned to paper-pushing jobs within the organisation, got her first real field test when she was assigned to investigate a possible connection between the Sontaran warrior Brak, who had been held captive on Earth for decades and been the source of several technological advancements, and the dangerous Cobalt Blue weaponry which had been causing a series of incident. After Brak let slip that he had in fact been the one to introduce such technology to Earth altogether, divulging the formula to Winston Churchill during World War II, she persuaded him to accompany her to Site B9 in Geneva to testify before the Weapons Crisis Committee and help the authorities deal with the fallout of Cobalt Blue malfunctions.
Persuading Brak to cooperate entailed several long, meandering arguments regarding human hypocrisy and the relative validity of human and Sontaran values. Over time, Wells managed to get a better understanding of Brak's psychology "than [she] ever wished to", coming to understand his alien values better, but eventually blowing up at him with a highly emotional put-down of his destructive, self-pitying pettiness. Almost to her surprise, Brak granted that she was right and building was better than destroying, agreeing to testify after all. However, shortly after Alice left his quarters, he was ambushed by a Sontaran envoy. After the latter denied Brak the chance to return to Sontaran territory, viewing him as irretrievably corrupted by human thinking, Brak goaded the envoy into lethally wounding him, hopefully giving him the glorious, Sontaran warrior's death he desired; Alice found him dying in his room and frantically called for a medic. (AUDIO: Old Soldiers [+]Loading...["Old Soldiers (BBV audio story)"])
Although he actually survived for twenty more years on life support, continuing to supply the British government with advanced technology, (HOMEVID: Fog [+]Loading...["Fog (home video)"]) Alice was given to understand that Brak had succumb ed. She subsequently recorded a melancholy report, giving her conclusions on his character and theorising that due to the cultural barrier, his advice might not have been as decisive as she had hoped, even if he had been allowed to testify. Indeed, during his conversation with his would-be executioner, Brak had clarified that his ultimate aim had been to manipulate humanity into becoming a militaristic power akin to the Sontaran Empire, as he viewed creating a worthy foe for the Empire to be one of the only honourable courses of action left to him in his captivity. (AUDIO: Old Soldiers [+]Loading...["Old Soldiers (BBV audio story)"])
He would later mention Alice Wells to Giles as an "old friend" shortly before his suicide. (HOMEVID: Fog [+]Loading...["Fog (home video)"])
