The Coup
Called out of retirement to participate in a press conference following an apparent attack in the heart of London, Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart finds that life as a member of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce hasn’t changed a bit; a helicopter attacks the limo carrying him to deliver his speech. The driver is killed in the attack, but Lethbridge-Stewart’s steady aim helps to bring the helicopter down – where he discovers that its crew consisted of one human and one Silurian. Convinced that this incident has something to do with the planned handover of UNIT’s responsibilities within British borders to a new agency called ICIS, Lethbridge-Stewart takes drastic measures to preserve UNIT’s authority – even if it means blowing decades of covert operations involving alien invaders wide open.
written by Simon Guerrier
directed by Ian Farrington
music by David DarlingtonCast: Nicholas Courtney (The Brigadier), Siri O’Neal (Colonel Emily Chaudhry), Scott Andrews (Scott), Matthew Brenher (Silurian voices), Sara Carver (Captain Winnington), Michael Hobbs (Francis Currie)
Notes: The Coup was one of two stories included on a free CD given away with Doctor Who Magazine, along with the Bernice Summerfield/Cybermen adventure Silver Lining. Neither has been released separately or for individual sale. Lethbridge-Stewart says that he encountered the Silurians 30 years ago, though this raises the thorny continuity question of what years were depicted in the Jon Pertwee era; if one sets those TV stories in the same year that they were first broadcast, that puts The Coup in the year 2000, 30 years after 1970. However, Sarah Jane Smith, introduced at the beginning of Pertwee’s final season as the Doctor, later claimed (in Pyramids Of Mars) to have met the Doctor in the year 1980, which would place the first Pertwee season around 1975 or ’76, which would place The Coup in the present day of its release, 2005. (It’s also worth noting that the Brigadier himself said “Yes, Ma’am” to the Prime Minister on the phone in the Tom Baker story Terror Of The Zygons, which, despite being broadcast in 1976, would appear to be set during the Thatcher era, again lending credence to the UNIT stories being around 5 years ahead of their time.) It’s also possible that Lethbridge-Stewart’s memory fails him, but given that he’s still a crack shot with firearms in this story, that doesn’t seem likely. Lethbridge-Stewart was a General when he retired, a rank to which he’s risen in many of Doctor Who’s “expanded universe” media.
LogBook entry by Earl Green
A planet appears in the path of the TARDIS, moving so fast that a collision is unavoidable. Charley and C’rizz each awaken in a virtual reality of their past lives, but they each quickly figure out that the Kro’Ka is behind the illusions and are freed. When they awaken, they find not only the Kro’Ka, but Rassilon as well, who claims that he has nursed them back to health after the destruction of the TARDIS. But he shows them that the Doctor has survived as well, and he appears to have found company – a woman who has found him wandering through the jungle of the planet’s sole land mass. Charley and C’rizz both demand to be set free, but before he releases them Rassilon tries to put doubts in their minds about the Doctor – and each other. He’s at least partially successful, as the two TARDIS travelers go their own way in the jungle.
A diversion in the time vortex throws the TARDIS off course, toward a rough landing on a distant backwater world. The Doctor steps out of the doors and almost immediately blacks out. When he comes to, he is stunned to find that he is being tended to by Peri, who he hasn’t seen since the ill-timed intervention of the Time Lords whisked him away for his trial and left her helpless – 19 years ago in her personal history. She escaped her situation and obtained a spacecraft, but it crash-landed here months ago. She also claims that the Doctor was found unconscious after falling off of a mountain ledge. To make matters worse, the TARDIS has been confiscated by the local religious leader, who has placed it in the village temple and claims it is the vessel of the villagers’ goddess. When the Doctor finally gains access to that temple – normally denied to those not instructed in the local faith – he’s horrified to see that the TARDIS’ outer shell has been critically damaged, leaking chronon radiation and causing deadly time distortions. The only way the Doctor may be able to save this society – and Peri – is to give up his travels and set the TARDIS to self-destruct…assuming the villagers will let him.
With UNIT’s work now out in the open, Colonel Emily Chaudhry finds her duties as UNIT’s public relations officer growing more complicated by the day. The latest operation – making a very visible show of transporting discarded nuclear weapons to keep the press and public’s attention away from a smaller convoy transporting pieces of an apparent alien spacecraft – proves to be no exception when both the spacecraft convoy and its decoy convoy are attacked almost simultaneously. UNIT’s commanding officer, Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, is kidnapped, but no one else is taken. The spacecraft is quietly spirited away by a group who wishes to use its technology to further its secret space-time experiments. But the experiments continue to go horribly wrong, resulting in commuter train crashes with massive casualties, a major disruption of the British banking system, and even a jetliner crash directly into Windsor Castle. Colonel Chaudhry and the rest of UNIT try to piece together the puzzle and find their missing CO, but when a new CO, Colonel Dalton, is assigned to take over, he seems like a poor fit: he knows nothing of UNIT’s past work, and shows no interest in learning. Worse yet, Chaudhry discovers that he may have ties to ICIS.