A Day in the Limelight for the Brigadier. Called to meet old friend Col Heinrich Conrad in UNIT's Schloss in Germany, he discovers that Konrad is bed-ridden and delirious, and his subordinate Major Schrader is both in way over his head, and too stubborn to recognise the fact. Then, when night falls, the Brigadier learns why everyone is on edge. At night, the old soldiers are all coming back...
Tropes:
- Actor Appeal: A faux-Pertwee episode has to have something Pertwee would have loved doing, and in this one he gets to parachute into a German castle.
- Call-Back: "The Silurians" was very recently, and the Doctor is still sour at the Brigadier for massacring the sleeping Silurians. The Brigadier's internal monologue reveals he was more conflicted about it than he appeared, too.
- Haunted Castle: The Schloss.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Colonel Conrad ultimately holds the army of ghosts at bay long enough for everyone to escape, before the airstrike hits.
- Living Memory/Electromagnetic Ghosts: The ghosts, which are imprinted in the castle walls, but can only be released by having the appropriate psychic stimulus around.
- The Neidermeyer: Schrader, who's out of his depth, incompetent and conflicted by loyalty to Col Conrad. It ultimately causes him to go over the edge.
- Night of the Living Mooks: Also an Army of The Ages - the Schloss is attacked night after night by all the soldiers who've ever visited it.
- Trial by Friendly Fire: Schrader calls in an "Arclight" protocol to UNIT control, which is only to be used in extreme circumstances. It means "level the site with firebombing", and Schrader orders it while they're still within the castle.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Conrad was, to the point where he also took part in the alien drug trials that killed all his men and caused the "haunting".
- Shout-Out:
- The Brigadier mentions "the Null" as one of the threats UNIT has faced. James Swallow also name-dropped it (or used a similar concept with the same name) in his other Doctor Who novels and his Warhammer 40,000 novels, and actually featured it in his Star Trek: Titan novel Synthesis.
- The idea of ghosts being "imprinted" in the wall of an old building and being affected by people with latent psychic abilities is reminiscent of Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape. Most of Jon Pertwee's earliest episodes were heavily inspired by Kneale's stories.
- Super-Soldier: The cause of the whole mess was UNIT's experimentation with an alien plant in the hope of creating psychic super-soldiers.
