Hogan Reviews

A seven-part full cast audio drama set during Season 7?! The crew at Big Finish would have to work pretty hard for me not to like this one and thankfully they delivered a really good story regardless. Fits the criterial of being entirely Earth based and having a cast of mainly human characters or human-looking characters even though budget obviously isn’t an issue here plus threw in plenty of fun twists and turns. Let’s take a deeper look!

Intelligence for War opens with a random barman called Ken (Keith Wickham) being attacked by a WWII era Nazi soldier (also voiced by Keith, hey, it’s a small role!) and then quickly cutting to The Doctor (Tim Treloar) reading about it in a local dirt rag and becoming interested. Liz (Daisy Ashford) chastises him for taking such an obvious bit of nonsense seriously before deducing that the only reason he is taking it seriously is due to the small chance it could be time travel technology being used, technology he might be able to use to make the TARDIS work again. The two head to the sleepy village where it happened and find out that similar incidents have happened since, including one poor old man being stabbed by a bayonet and it’s not long before The Doctor and Liz encounter an alien monster the Time Lord knows well from a unseen adventure on a battlefield, managing to fend it off. Meanwhile the Brigadier (Jon Culshaw) is approached by a Col. Matthews (James Howard) who claims to have evidence that Liz Shaw has betrayed him.

While The Doctor and Liz try to track the monster down The Brig and Matthews arrive and the latter places Liz under arrest and carts her off, The Doctor having to let it go for now as the alien creature takes president. Eventually they track it down to a house where a tourist called Denise (Georgina Hellier) is staying and The Doctor figures out it shapeshifts into an enemy that whoever sees it has faced before in order to instil fear amongst a populace, and soon that it was actually just a regular local who had some sort of alien device attached to him. As this is going on Liz is interrogated by Matthews who brings up leaked UNIT documents and her time at Cambridge University where she was part of an anti-war group. During this Matthews and Liz mysterious swap roles, with Liz asking Matthews about Cambridge and the like, before switching back, making Liz think some sort of alien tech is being used to intentionally confuse her.

Lovely cover, touching on all the Season 7 goodness it can muster!

This is where things settle down for a while, as all seven parters tend to do in the middle, as The Doctor travels to a secret UNIT bunker where they store alien weapons and then shortly after that breaks Liz out the military blacksite when he believes her about the potential alien tech being used during the interrogation and the two believe her time at Cambridge is still a definite connection to track, as well as the mysterious Denise The Doctor met at the village. This soon splits the cast into four as The Doctor meets up with Denise and finds out she’s an alien from the “Malnik Empire” that was fed up of her race’s constant war and is hiding on Earth; The Brigadier starts to try and take down Matthews politically and then in person; Liz meets with an old college acquaintance or two and starts to search for her old lecturer who instil the anti-war sentiment into her; and that very lecturer in Lincoln Hall (Jason Forbes) meets a girl called Syvia (Yasmin Mwanza) who is very interested in who he thinks should be removed from society…

It’s a really fun story with a great cast and a plot that just keeps twisting enough to keep you interested.

The Continuity:

Not much, really. All the alien races are new and it doesn’t really connect to any specific story. Liz mentions going back to Cambridge one day and she does indeed do that, but that’s not really connecting to a specific story or anything…

Overall Thoughts:

“Intelligence for War” did exactly what I was hoping it would do in telling a really fun Season 7 story complete with seven episodes, lots of running around on Earth and some fun twists and turns. I can’t say it blew me away but it kept a smile on my face for its roughly three hour runtime, and that’s good enough for me!

While The Brigadier is treated to an illusion where he has to retire due to injuries with Col. Matthews being the man he must tell all his secrets to as a replacement The Doctor finds out that a weapon Denise had been carrying around in a case is a sentient device that has taken human form and is going to try and forcefully “recruit” humans to bring back to the Malnik Empire as foot soldiers. This of course ends up being Sylvia, who is using Lincoln’s ideas of removing the rich and powerful for the betterment of society in order to pick who to mind-control and take with her to Malnik. Syvia sends out a wave to test his theory but found the conditions too generic so narrows it down a bit but during the earlier test she takes control of Liz’s mind for just long enough to find out about the secret UNIT bunker of weapons.

This leads to a final showdown as Sylvia breaks into the bunker thanks to her hypnotised army and begins to steal the weapons only to be confronted by The Doctor, Liz and Denise, the latter of which Sylvia hates due to the fact she’s a deserter but reading Liz’s mind again changes Sylvia’s perspective enough that she agrees to head back to Manlik with Denise to try and change things and end the war. They set off a chain reaction as The Doctor and Liz run for it but the recently arrived Col. Matthews will hear none of it and runs head-first into the bunker to “take out the alien threat”, dying in the process. Apparently he was trying to discredit UNIT so their powers can be transferred to him and his division, including forcing a scientist to leak those files in the first place and using alien tech from the same source during interrogation, presumably how he knew of the UNIT bunker to arrive in time.