Reviewed by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Dennis Haysbert, Scott Foley, Max Martini, Michael Irby,
Robert Patrick, Regina Taylor, Audrey Marie Anderson, Abby Brammell
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £39.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 833 minutes | Created by David Mamet
I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of The Unit, but unfortunately never got round to seeing the second and third, so, as I'm sure you can understand, I began watching the fourth season with trepidation. I was worried that by sitting down with the 22 episodes for review, I simply would not have a clue what was going on and the experience would be completely ruined.
Luckily, I was wrong. You could quite happily watch what is sadly the final season of the show immediately after a viewing of the original series, and you'd still understand it. The main plot device centred around Robert Patrick's character that started on the very first episode had obviously been simmering in the two interim seasons, and it's safe to say that in the final series, it reaches boiling point!
For those of you reading who haven't seen The Unit before, it's about a small group of world-class American soldiers working top secret missions all around the world to defeat terrorism. This group is The Unit, and as far as anyone who isn't in it is concerned (and there aren't many), it simply doesn't exist. And if anyone knew it existed, there could be hell to pay.
All but one of the main four soldiers in The Unit (Haysbert, Foley, Martini and Irby) are married, which makes up the other half of the show. When we're not being treated to some great combat and harrowing suspense in Iraqi deserts or Syrian prisons, we calm things down a little by looking into the daily lives of the soldiers' wives living on the base. But things aren't too calm — the women have their own dramas, and season four sees them getting more involved in the action than they would certainly like.
The fourth and final season kicks off in unrelenting fashion with the perfect blend of action and suspense. Right from the get-go, that storyline involving Robert Patrick fires off and is so damn dramatic that the end-of-episode cliffhangers will have you either selecting the next episode faster than if you were competing in a finger marathon, or ejecting the disc and frisbeeing the next one into your DVD player. It's that good: suspenseful, exciting and tense as hell.
If only the series could maintain the level of those three elements. When the season gets to around the halfway mark, the quality begins to decrease. With it starting out with such brilliant episodes full of excitement and concluding the major story that had been stewing for four years somewhere in the middle, it's anti-climatic. The first half is so fantastic, that most of the episodes after the first 12 leave you unsatisfied because they don't reach the standard of those that came before. Thankfully, the decline in quality is not steep enough to make you forget or dismiss the first half of the season, so it still adds up to a cracking 13 hours.
An annoyance with the show is that it was canceled after the fourth season aired, so it doesn't wrap up the story how you'd like because obviously a fifth was expected to be produced, and has probably been written. Only time will tell if another network decides to buy it and resurrect the programme, but it's doubtful at this stage.
EXTRAS ★★ Making of featurettes for two episodes: Into Hell and Shadow Riders; a character profile feature (Snake Doctor: A Leader Among Us), and deleted scenes.