Review: Sword of Orion

From her debut in the 1930s, Charley Pollard's first adventure in the TARDIS takes her to the far future, in the Garazone Sector. She and the Doctor pay a leisurely visit in search of something for pet Vortisaur Ramsey, but wind up trapped aboard a vessel and accused of murder. And a mysterious race of cybernetic life-forms are about to awaken . . .

And so the Eighth Doctor meets the Cybermen for the first time. Almost every Doctor has had an encounter with the fearsome race, from the eerie cloth-faced creatures of The Tenth Planet to the beefier fist-clenching plotters from Earthshock. Here, the Cybermen appear quite late in the story, and don't make too much of an impact.

Their voices, as provided by Nicholas Briggs and Alistair Lock, are a little deeper, meatier and more threatening than they've been in the past, making them sound like a formidable force right from their first appearance. However, in general, they don't work brilliantly on audio, despite having massive potential to do so. For instance, despite all its flaws, the Tenth Doctor episode The Age of Steel made great use of the sound of the Cybermen, showing us glimpses of their bodies accompanied by a spine-tingling crunch of metallic feet before we met them properly. Sword of Orion could have done something similar here, really using the audio medium to its advantage, but it doesn't. Granted, it was released five years earlier, but in the wake of the new series Sword's Cybermen fail to impress.

Additionally, Sword really doesn't bring anything new to the Cyber race, instead opting to amalgamate elements of previous adventures. Rather than a nostalgic "Greatest Hits" of the Cybermen, drawing on their best features whilst also incorporating new ideas, we get a plot that feels dull, derivative, and worn-out. In the second story of the Eighth Doctor's first season, the audience should be taken in new and refreshing directions, but Sword of Orion feels old-fashioned and unoriginal - and that feel is just reinforced by a cast of two-dimensional supporting characters.

Despite some brilliant work from leads Paul McGann and India Fisher, especially in the early scenes of Episode One, this play isn't as good as it would like to be. To be honest, no amount of sound design or character development could lift it above average.

Writer Nick Briggs reveals in the sleeve notes that Sword is adapted from a 1980s fan production, and whilst I haven't listened to the original, it seems like very little has been modified or updated from that version, and perhaps it's because of these origins that Sword of Orion feels like it might have been more successful as a Sixth or Seventh Doctor story. As an Eighth Doctor serial, it's not the type of thing these audios should be doing - there's a lot of potential, but it comes twenty years too late.