Big Finish Main Range
I found this a most disappointing audio for a Cyberman audio. They are my favorite Dr. Who monster as they are the most plausible to me. Daleks? Scary but too alien to really be plausible. Cybermen, though, are one possible future where we become too other, too conformist, too dependent upon machinery to run our bodies as we want to live forever. I wouldn’t mind living forever but not at the cost of love, pain, joy, happiness, and moments of clarity. Though some days…
Anyway, basically, this is a standard Dr. Who adventure. There are conflicted good guys on this planet who see the light of truth but too late. The standard greedy bad humans who follow orders blindly or just want the power bad enough to betray their fellow humans. Then the Cybermen do their normal cyber-thing, which is good and fine but it seems like everything should’ve come to a head much sooner due to the location of the Cybertomb. On a volcano? Yeah, they might just wake up from those heated corridors though they’re not technically frozen when they’re waiting around. So who knows. I am certainly no Cybertechnology guru!
<possible spoilers ahead so read on at your own peril>
The best part of this audio is the one-episode audio at the end. I don’t know the name of it but it was poignant and about the most interesting characters in the main storyline, the androids from the Orion war. We’ve seen them before in The Sword of Orion but now we get to see a team in action, hunting for Cybertechnology to help their cause. This one-parter is a really touching epilogue and the Doctor has some rather preachy things to say about what it means to be human, but the story just grabbed my imagination and didn’t let go. I will be thinking about this particular one-parter long after I’ve forgotten the main storyline.
Sylvester McCoy
Writer: James Swallow
Director: Nicholas Briggs
Release: September 2008