BBC Sounds, May 22, 2022

Spoilers

The girls discover the different sides to UNIT…

There’s quite a lot of meta elements to this week’s episode of Redacted, penned by (and also guest featuring) Ken Cheng. It’s set entirely within the UNIT base where the girls have been taken, but things aren’t quite as they appeared at the end of episode 5 – for a start, they’re dealing with Dr Petronella Osgood, rather than Kate Stewart, which changes the dynamic quite considerably. (For the purposes of this, the Zygon element is not relevant, and I suspect those who went to the now late and lamented Time Fracture will recognise this incarnation of Osgood.) Intriguingly, given how much Osgood bases herself on the Doctor, we don’t get into that side of her at all… so far. We also get the aforementioned meta references to numbers of case files (one that suggests Flux hasn’t happened yet as far as UNIT are concerned even though it’s 2022) but also a definite move forward with regard to the Doctor herself.

There’s something of a mixed tone to this – we’re not quite sure whether the UNIT soldier guarding the girls is all he seems to be (although that could simply be the mode of performance), and there’s some slapstick comedy involving a certain variant of a common Doctor Who item. But then as the episode draws toward its conclusion, things get a lot more serious and the cliffhanger is very much based in the characters.

Verdict: Don’t be put off by the homage to the 1990s repeat season that begins the episode – this feels like a pivotal instalment. 7/10

Paul Simpson