Brigadier Bambera is persuaded to help stop a Soviet-era weapon getting into the wrong hands…

Robert Valentine starts off this new era for UNIT in audio form, providing stories that could have appeared in the Wilderness Years between the end of Survival and the 1996 TV Movie. Angela Bruce reprises her role from Battlefield – with various elements from that suitably tied off – and she settles quickly back into the role she last played over 30 years ago: as Ben Aaronovitch’s script for the TV serial made clear, she’s of a very different background to Lethbridge-Stewart but at heart, both of them are professional soldiers, who will do what is required to get the job done. Both also are affected by the loss of people under their command, as this makes clear with a quite savage opening sequence, but that doesn’t stop them making the hard calls. In the extras Valentine refers to GoldenEye as one of the touchstones, and Judi Dench’s line in that as M about making sure Bond is clear that she does have the balls to send a man out to die has resonances here.

There’s inevitably a bit of a feel of a pilot episode to Rogue State, with the introduction of Liz Sutherland-Lim’s Dame Lydia – Bambera’s boss who feels like she’s stepped out of an updated ITC series – and Alex Jordan as Sergeant Jean-Paul Savarin, who will no doubt get fleshed out further as the series goes on. (One thing that I hope continues though is his taste in reading matter – particularly given the series referred to published a load of stories purely in French that have never appeared in English!) Wilf Scolding is our bad guy for this story, and his Roman Krojač definitely has the wrong hands!

Jack Townley’s sound design and Borna Matosic’s score are distinctive, and give this series its own feel with veteran director Scott Handcock ensuring the storytelling is clear.

Verdict: A solid start that promises a different sort of UNIT tale. 8/10

Paul Simpson

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