There is a long and proud tradition in science fiction of terrifying tales where there is essentially no bad guy, but where systems engineered for a particular purpose will do it irrespective of any inconvenient facts – or inconvenient lives – that get in the way.

That’s squarely the territory in which Una McCormack lands both us and her Tardis crew in Counterstrike, a new short trip from BBC Audio.

When the Doctor and Belinda, in search of a Vindicator reading to help them omniangulate their way back to Earth in 2025, stop off on a green, pleasant, but apparently uninhabited planet, there are almost instantly a couple of things that concern them. 

The first is a number of facilities which look freshly constructed and are empty of life. The second, a swarm of drones.

And the third…

Well, the third is that the planet appears to be at war, base versus base – despite the absence of anyone who could be pressing buttons or sending swooping squads of death-drones at one another.

This, to coin a phrase, is another fine mess the Doctor has inadvertently landed them in.

Feel The Craft

All of that is some finely crafted threat potential, but McCormack’s a better writer than to simply stew us in the mystery and then swoop in with a solution at the end.

Instead, she also gives us a story thread of a couple of the people who sent the machines that built the bases and the drones.

They’re not supposed to be up and active yet, but from a monitoring station gazillions of light years away, project manager Hazzet (we dare you not to hear it as Hazard, given the situation and Clare Corbett’s reading) has noticed anomalous life on the previously uninhabited planet. They’ve noticed the base versus base conflict. And they’re deeply concerned.

There’s a deliciously painted game of stakes here – Hazzet’s people need the bases on the uninhabited world to be a success. Theirs is a world heading for the same kind of fate as ours – overpopulation, pollution etc, which means the bases are part of a project to save the lives of their people without being douchebags about it. Hazzet’s people don’t want to invade inhabited worlds, but to find some that are ripe and right for colonization and new beginnings.

So what has gone wrong?

The answer to that unfolds in a very logic-gate way across the course of McCormack’s story, and if you’re a fan of dramas like The Martian, Counterstrike will appeal to you on that basis – solve one problem, reveal the next, solve that one, and maybe, just maybe, you get to go home.

Problem Solving

For the Doctor and Bel, the problems are solid, complex and existential – first, avoid getting shot to death by drones, then work out why the bases are there, then work out why they’re empty. Following an unfortunate separation, the stakes of their individual intellectual battles are raised, and all against the background of a ticking clock as the bases threaten to destroy them (and each other).

Meanwhile, Hazzet and her colleague on the night shift, monitoring the existence of the bases from far, far away work the problems they face from their end – why is the uninhabited planet suddenly inhabited? Why are defence programmes kicking in when there appears to be nothing offensive to have triggered them? And most importantly, can they save the intruders before the end of the shift without referring the problem up the chain of command – which could well mean the end of the project and the failure of their world-saving endeavour?

Despite the heft of its hard science-fiction premise, there’s something pleasingly clunky and realistic about the technology in Counterstrike, which eschews Star Trek notions of instantaneous transport across illimitable distance, instead preferring the more Einstein-friendly idea that getting a very large number of light years by teleportation is going to take a while and involve considerable buffering – a fact which only serves to ratchet up the tension in the third act of the story. 

But that clunkiness of technology makes each of the monolithic problems our Tardis team face feel significantly more real and difficult than any slick solution would make them, and that adds to McCormack’s tension build-up – you get a genuine dopamine hit every time our heroes on both sides of the problem work something out to avoid increasingly imminent death and failure. 

Show Me The Twinkle!

There’s a note that chimes very much in tune with the vibe of Season 2 about the way the doctor ultimately solves the final problem here though, adding back at least a little of the magical mystery after a deeply satisfying slog through questions, problems, and inconvenient physics. And the post-drama resolution is so twinkly it should probably come with a “God bless us, every one!”, as it resolves the questions of how the whole scenario turns out.

That means that ultimately, Una McCormack balances her story between the stage-by-stage satisfaction of a problem based in digital systems simply doing what they were designed to do, with the slightly War Games (the movie) tension of trying to get such systems to understand that we live in a different fundamental reality to them, and there are unanticipated consequences to factor in, against the twinkly, sparkly grin of pure Fifteenth Doctor entertainment of, say, a Joy To The World.

That’s a winning combination, and if Clare Corbett on reading duties never especially comes close to evoking Ncuti Gatwa’s intonations, she otherwise delivers great value in the other characters in the story, and she pitches her reading just right so it delivers all the upgrading tension as she goes along.

Counterstrike is a solidly enjoyable slice of unseen footage from the Season 2 quest to get Belinda Chandra back in time for her next nursing shift, and it serves both her and her Doctor extremely well. That means that as listeners, you’ll be satisfied – and perhaps just a little smug – you invested in it as the long wait for Christmas 2026 begins. Tony Fyler

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