The new UNIT series has now clocked up a full 24 hours of
drama. Its sixth box set presents us with an infiltration by the Cybermen of
our reality and an advancement of the growing threat posed by the mysterious
Auctioneers. The UNIT series has so far been a peculiar one. It is hardly Big
Finish’s finest achievement, despite the absconding of Jemma Redgrave and
Ingrid Oliver from the TV series over to the audio world and a team set-up that
most blockbusters would die for. Despite some irresistible gimmicks (Old UNIT
vs New UNIT/an Auton invasion via 3-d printers) the stories have not yet really
taken off. Only in Silenced did the
potential of the UNIT format really shine. Silenced
was a political thriller, genuinely scary and ambitious in terms of its story
structure and presentation with rich characters and a real sense of global
threat. Above all, it felt vividly relevant.
Sadly, Cyber-Reality
is another step backwards. The main problem with UNIT is that it is not really
sure what sort of a series it wants to be. Is it action-adventure, political
thriller, sci-fi, character drama or none of the above? It often tries to be
all of them at once and fails at conveying any approach successfully. There is
no winning formula for a UNIT story, in the same way that there is most
definitely for a Counter-Measures or Jago & Litefoot tale. (We’d start in
Sir Toby’s office or the Red Tavern where the regulars would be greeted with
some new mystery to solve, for example.) After 24 hours of UNIT, I’m still not
sure what to expect of a typical episode, other than Kate Stewart being badass
and Osgood being technical. The fifth boxset decided for the first time to tell
stand-alone stories so perhaps the series is still finding its feet. I’m not sure what the other regular
characters do other than offer cannon fodder we know will never see the front
line. James Joyce plays a nondescript Captain Josh Carter (whose name even
after a full day’s worth of listening I had to look up on the Big Finish
website). I’m not even sure I’d recognise Joyce’s voice if I heard it in a
different production, so utterly nothing
is his character. Warren Brown plays hardman Sam Bishop, a character who really
should be Mr Charisma, the James Bond of the pack. Unfortunately, he’s played
by Warren Brown, an actor more wooden than Sweden. The only other regular of
note is Ramon Tikaram’s Colonel Shindi who offers at the most a re-assuring
presence, Tikaram putting in a solid, distinguished performance. One of these
three characters has an auton body but I’m not sure which, so irrelevant has
that particular sub-plot become. It has to be said, Jemma Redgrave herself is
not the most versatile actor, but her performance in this sixth series is
markedly better than those before: in Code
Silver she is desperate and vengeful and a force to be reckoned with.
Ingrid Oliver is reliably consistent as Osgood but Osgood is by no means a
second lead; at best she’s a techie.
Please be advised, SPOILERS follow.
To be fair, the opening episode of Cyber-Reality does pack a punch. Matt Fitton opens with a thrilling
pre-titles sequence, diving straight into the peril and promising a rip-roaring
yarn. The following hour is indeed tremendously exciting, with Kate and Osgood
suddenly in the hands of an unknown captor, given orders and time limits to
complete dangerous tasks. Sam Bishop is also all at sea for want of a better
pun. He’s repeating the same set of events over and over again, every time discovering
his whereabouts in the Bermuda Triangle. This is an unnerving adventure which
calls into question the nature of the realities we are hearing and the best the
boxset has to offer by a mile, ironic considering that there are no Cybermen
and no Master to be heard. It also sets up the very real threat the Auctioneers
pose as this series’ big bad. However, their agenda is ultimately and simply to
scare UNIT away and by the end of the boxset they are no longer very threatening
at all.
Guy Adams continues apace into Telepresence. At its heart, there is a strong idea here: entry into
another universe via VR headsets, but with the added caveat that death in the
VR world could well mean death back home. For the most part, this is a
thrilling tale, with each action set piece coming swiftly on top of the one
before. The only trouble is, even after 5 box sets, the regular characters are
still in no way relatable. I don’t know who Colonel Shindi or Josh Carter are,
so the tale ends up feeling only superficially exciting without a genuine sense
of jeopardy. Even on their journey across a parallel war-torn London, we don’t learn
a thing about them. Only in the aforementioned Silenced do we see the characters outside of their UNIT roles and
they seem so much more alive and interesting. Here was a golden opportunity to
get to know them and they’re busy imagining they can jump really far.
Sadly, things then take a complete nosedive. The third episode
is a chore to get through. It does allow Jemma Redgrave a starring role (for
the first time perhaps feeling like a worthy replacement for Sir Alistair) but the
narrative is overcomplicated, overtechnical and to be honest, very dull. Nick
Briggs’s Cyber voice is a weird mix of Tenth
Planet and Nightmare in Silver
and becomes very annoying very quickly given the vast amount of curiously emotive
Cyber dialogue. There is no real sense
of place and the scenes become difficult to imagine. For all its technicality,
the plot boils down to: the Cybermen are coming so Kate finds a big gun.
This is exacerbated in Matt Fitton’s finale, Master of Worlds, in which (SPOILERS)
the Master turns up and saves the day because he wants to find his TARDIS. It’s
that crass. Since Dark Eyes 3, I’ve been
unconvinced by Matt Fitton’s ability to write dialogue for the Master. At the
best of times, his general dialogue is workmanlike rather than imaginative, but
his Master’s voice, as it were, is childish, petulant and sarcastic, lacking any
genuine wit. As a result, Derek Jacobi ends up sounding more like his bitchy Stuart
Bixby from Vicious than the Gallifreyan
King of Evil. At one point, Kate snarkily remarks that all her soldiers earned
their respective titles. He jibes back with, “Could you say the same of the Doctor?”
Even without the presence of his nemesis, this Master can’t help but get his
handbag out for him at dawn. The story goes from one nondescript location to another,
finally ending up on the Sea Base Fort from The
Sea Devils which UNIT had absolutely no involvement with whatsoever, not
that it makes a difference. One shouty, noisy scene bleeds into the next until
finally the Master switches the story off.
It’s always been a bit of a fan myth that Cybermen can’t
choose a decent plot. To a degree one could argue that were true, but Cyber-Reality does nothing but add fuel
to that argument. Once the Cybes turns up, you might as well stop listening.
Overall: 4/10
JH
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