Sword of Orion by Nicholas Briggs

For the second of their Eight Doctor releases, Big Finish took the step of reviving the Cybermen from hibernation, continuing where ‘Storm Warning’ left off by still being recognisable Doctor Who, but also taking some cues from the TV movie in terms of scale. Having said that, there are a few problems with the Cybermen on audio- you lose the sense of physical presence, but they’re often also at their most effective when standing silently in the shadows. There’s also the issue of their most disturbing feature, only infrequently touched upon- the impact of knowing that these creatures were once human beings and sacrificed their emotions and physical humanity for superhuman strength, endurance and survival. What we get is a story influenced by some of the Cybermen stories with a futuristic setting- most notably their modus operandi is derived in roughly equal measures from ‘The Wheel in Space’ and ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’- while also populating the story with sufficient supporting human characters to allow the Cybermen to skulk in the shadows until they’re needed and also leave some plot strands hanging to be picked up later.

Having said that, the story begins at a fairly sedate but purposeful pace, with Ramsay the Vortisaur’s sickness leading to Doctor and Charley to the Garazone system and thence onto a salvage ship whose crew have already mistaken the TARDIS for a potentially valuable piece of scrap. This does mean that we have a reasonable period of time to get to know the human crew of the Vanguard before things start to go wrong; it’s a recognisable situation, as the established crew are forced to come to terms with a new broom in the form of new Captain Deeva Jansen’s more professional approach. Nicholas Briggs’s script is particularly good at setting up the dynamics of the situation and using situations analogous to everyday life to set up his drama; the attention to detail is also equally effective when it comes to Charley stumbling over words like "airlock" and "android", because they aren’t in her vocabulary- a small point often over looked in Doctor Who when characters from the past are faced with unfamiliar technology. As Charley’s second story, ‘Sword of Orion’ isn’t a bad one- she has plenty to do, lots to say and India Fisher communicates her enthusiasm and curiosity well, without forgetting that Charley is a product of the early twentieth century with her own period’s values and taboos.

One of the story’s strengths is the sense, cultivated over the length of its four episodes, of taking place in a social and political context. In a galaxy dominated by a war between humans and androids, a sleeper ship full of Cybermen suddenly becomes a strategic asset as, under the cover of making overtures to the dormant Cybermen offering an alliance, the Earth Alliance (from Babylon 5?) looks to gain infrmation about the Cyber-conversion process in order to make its own army of Cybermen to stand up to the androids. Some Cybermen stories have been known to over-egg the pudding when it comes to showing how the Cybermen became what they are; here, we not only witness Grash, Chev and the other crewmembers being subjected to the early stages of the process (and Grash’s termination when his personality proves too strong) but also face some of the questions that Star Trek can only answer with an overdose of sentimentality- we’re not asked what it means to be human, but whether an android which can pass for human has the right to be treated as human, whether it’s worth giving up one’s humanity to achieve certain ends and whether an android can be capable of trust and altruism. The questions aren’t asked overtly, but they’re in the background of the action and there for the sympathetic listener to pick up.

Performance-wise, it’s a fairly quiet story in that there’s no commanding presence; Briggs’s Cybermen don’t allow for David Banks-style domineering Cyberleaders, while Michelle Livingstone as Deeva doesn’t stand out either and supposed guest star Lee Montague (from Butterflies, but whom I also saw opposite Deborah Watling in Wife Begins At Forty in Weston-super-Mare) doesn’t really add much to the part of Grash that most other actors couldn’t have done. It’s a story which majors in atmosphere, in the sense that the Cybermen may be lurking somewhere in the darkness- but also, in some of the ideas which it brandishes in the later episodes, with the idea that what the human race itself can conceive of may be even more terrible than the Cybermen themselves.