Reviewed: Counter-Measures Series 4

Tony Jones is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This time last year, we left the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group at rather a cliff-hanger. Sir Toby Kinsella and Group Captain “Chunky” Gilmore kidnapped, Allison Williams on the slow road to recovery from brain damage and she and Rachel Jenson both under a strange mental influence leaving them unaware Sir Toby and Gilmore have been replaced. The first thing would surely be to sort this all out; wouldn’t it?

Too easy, instead this series dives straight into a wonderful story of monorails and new science from the joint pens of Mark Wright and Cavan Scott. The side-step takes you by surprise, though this doesn’t diminish the story of a cult, mad scientist and a mini government conspiracy — they don’t care who invents something useful, if it confers favour they’ll take it. During the various goings on Allison gets exposed to a fabled substance and this seems to help clear her lingering mental problems. By the end of the story status quo is restored, London is saved from a vision of the future and both Rachel and Allison realise something is not right at Counter-Measures.

Director Ken Bentley wrote the second story, The Keep and this gets Sir Toby and Gilmore back on-stage, though only to a super-secure prison, designed by Toby himself. Their task? Escape from an escape-proof location! Where this story excels is in the way it brings back some of the elements of earlier stories without over-egging them. It is all done with great skill and takes the excitement up another gear. It also takes on a certain gritty darkness showing how far this series has evolved since its appearance in 2012.

The final two stories, Rise and Shine (by John Dorney) and Clean Sweep (by Matt Fitton) form a pair that resolve the issues from the first two stories, and bring in many more elements from the wider Counter Measures canon. They provide a powerful resolution meaning things can never be the same again for the team. The stories give us great insight into how far certain people are prepared to go to protect their values, and the use of ideas from earlier stories provides a way to show us how some of the characters, in particular Rachel Jensen, have developed over the series. It is not possible to say more without enormous spoilers, which is a great shame as these are good stories and the overall boxset is as good as any of the others, indeed better in many ways. It does make this a set of stories that needs other content to fully appreciate.

As ever there is no news on what happens next, and in a crowded schedule Big Finish has a lot of new titles to focus its love and attention on. It would be a shame if Counter-Measures were to be left on the shelf, but at least there are no dangling threads from this story.

Available now this can be picked up from the Big Finish website at the pre-release price of £30 CD, £25 download, until the end of July; details here: Counter-Measures: Series 4.

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