Review by Jacob Licklider

Brigadier Winifred Bambera is a Doctor Who character who is interesting. Appearing on television in Battlefield played by the wonderful Angela Bruce and created by Ben Aaronovitch, had the show lasted past Season 26 there was a good chance she would reappear especially since Andrew Cartmel had what would become the ‘lost story’ Animal in his head as a story at the time. So it became puzzling that in the Virgin New Adventures, while UNIT featured heavily especially in books like Blood Heat, No Future, and Eternity Weeps, Bambera herself would only appear twice, in Head Games and The Dying Days as cameos. The UNIT stories of the New Adventures were more concerned with deconstructing the UNIT family and the Pertwee era as it was the era many of the writers grew up with and were fond of. She had a similar cameo in the novelisation of Downtime by Marc Platt, but after that didn’t appear in any of the novels by BBC Books. Then in 1999 Big Finish acquired the Doctor Who license and begun their takeover of Doctor Who dominating the early 2000s until the revival, yet Bambera only appeared in Animal released in 2011. So it became a surprise with the success of the UNIT spin-off, Angela Bruce was brought back in the second set of UNIT: Nemesis as a backdoor pilot for UNIT: Brave New World, a currently two set release giving Bambera her own UNIT team in the late 1990s post-Battlefield, focusing on incursions from Earth itself and not the standard alien invasions.

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