Sword of Orion

Main Range #17

Released: 26 February 2001

Listened: 7/24/21

For her first TARDIS trip, Charley draws a spaceship! (We assume it’s her first trip, although it doesn’t have to be.) Kind of a grubby spaceship, as it’s a wrecker trying to salvage an old space battleship, but still. An old space battleship with frozen Cybermen on it, in fact, which makes this the first Big Finish appearance of Cybermen, in production order. The story is based on an Audio Visuals story, so this isn’t the first time Nick Briggs has voiced the Cybermen, but it’s well before he did so in the new series. This production also features Mark Gatiss in a small role and Big Finish stalwart Helen Goldwyn. The wrecker has a small crew of well-drawn characters, some of whom have a smuggling sideline, others are just down on their luck, but they’re all pretty tired. It’s a good thing they have personalities, because the Cybermen don’t actually show up until the middle of Part 2, and don’t get to their “implacable force” habits until Part 3. There’s more going on here than initially meets the eye, though, as the concept of the Orion War and androids seeking emancipation is introduced here. For her part, Charley does pretty well at coping with culture shock for a girl from the early 20th Century. There’s plenty of tech she doesn’t understand, but she’s normally game to go along, aside from a tendency to refer to everything as “electrical.” As often happens in early Big Finish, the story doesn’t climax so much as it just ends, with the Doctor as much a victim as anyone else, and in this case, a high body count. It’s a decent second episode for Charley.

--- The “Cyberman” series (two seasons of it) spins off at this point, but I’m not going to cover it at this time. ---