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The Earth's government is under Cyber-control. The only hope
for the future of civilisation as we know it is if androids
and humans can work together. But the Cybermen intend to activate
their master hibernation vault on the planet Telos, releasing
billions of Cyber-troops...
Blimey,
you wouldn't believe the confusion that this CD has caused
within the offices of Sci-Fi-Online Towers. Picture the scene
as I tried to explain to my editor, Darren Rea, that this
review was nearly ready to go live...
Rich:
Daz, my review of that Telos CD is nearly finished.
Daz:
Telos CD? What Telos CD? Telos don't do CDs, they do books...
Rich:
No, it's not from Telos, it's from Big Finish.
Daz:
Make your mind up! I can see how you might get those two companies
mixed up, seeing as how they both publish books featuring
characters spun off from Doctor Who novels - namely
Time Hunter and Professor Bernice Summerfield respectively
- but really, do try and get your facts straight.
Rich:
No, I don't mean Telos the publisher, I mean Telos,
the last of four discs in the Cyberman mini-series
from Big Finish.
Daz:
Oh, I see. As in the planet Telos, the adopted home world
of the Cybermen.
Rich:
Exactly.
Daz:
Well, that's a minute and a half of my life I'll never get
back.
In
fact, Telos never actually appears in this audio drama. As
the episode opens, our heroes discover that the planet has
been blasted into fragments in a cosmic collision, a revelation
that effectively places this series after The
Tomb of the Cybermen and Attack of the Cybermen
in Cyber-history. The Cybermen don't seem to have much luck
with their home planets, do they? Their original habitat,
Mondas, also blew up (in The
Tenth Planet). I wonder whether the Cryons
(the indigenous inhabitants of Telos, seen in Attack)
managed to escape.
However, Cyber-technology is nothing if not durable, and the
master hibernation vault remains intact in one of the fragments
of Telos. It's a race against time as the androids and Liam
Barnaby (Mark McDonnell) struggle to locate the vault before
the Cybermen can activate it and consequently hundreds of
similar vaults throughout the galaxy.
Though
dramatic, I didn't find this instalment quite as exciting
as the
last one, owing to both its small cast complement
and its shorter than usual running time (55 minutes, preceded
and followed by numerous trailers). The development of Sarah
Mowat's character Karen Brett - enslaved to the controlling
mind of invading machine-creatures, but with her human spirit
struggling to resist - is very similar to what happened to
her character Susan Mendes in the Dalek Empire series.
Whether
this really is the end of the story or whether, a la Dalek
Empire, another series is in the pipeline, remains to
be seen. Certainly Paul Hunt (Barnaby Edwards) and the CyberPlanner
(Nicholas Briggs) are not defeated outright, but are rather
left waiting, like Rimmer at the end of the Red Dwarf episode
Timeslides,
for something to happen any moment now...
Nevertheless,
this has been an enjoyable series, and I would not be disappointed
if I were to hear that Nicholas Briggs wanted to Telos - er,
I mean, tell us - more.
Richard
McGinlay
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