It’s been ten years since the final assault on Telos, the last act of the Great Cyber War. Thanks to the Glittergun, humanity prevailed – and the half-machine Cybermen were utterly obliterated.
Out on the furthest fringes of the galaxy, however, they left their mark – in the form of a giant Cyber-head, hundreds of feet high. A monument? A memorial? A tomb? The Doctor, the Cybermen’s most indefatigable adversary, sets out to investigate… but he fails to return to his TARDIS. Leaving the Ship, his two companions – brave Highlander Jamie MacCrimmon, and super-intelligent Zoe Heriot – find a stranger in the Doctor’s place. A stranger in a coat of many colours, who insists that he’s the Doctor – transposed in time and space with one of his former selves…
But why here? Why now? Has the universe really seen the last of the Cybermen..?
LAST OF THE CYBERMEN
We’re almost at Big Finish’s landmark 200th release – which means they’re way beyond the number of stories produced by the classic TV series, incidentally – and the “Locum Doctors” trilogy rolls on with “Last of the Cybermen,” an Alan Barnes script that pairs the Sixth Doctor with Jamie and Zoe, companions of the Second. Is this the story that makes innovative, intelligent use of the trilogy’s concept? Well, this is the monthly range, so you should know the answer by now: of course it isn’t.
Unless something astonishing happens in the final part of the trilogy, it’s already obvious that this “Locum Doctors” concept is a failure. Yes, “Last of the Cybermen” unites Colin Baker with Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury, but so what? What is done with this idea to make it interesting? Sure, there’s a brief period where they don’t trust him but he ingratiates himself through his knowledge of Doctor Who trivia, but beyond that, what happens? The Doctor comments that his earlier self would have done the smart thing and left before anything went wrong. Eh? We’ve had twelve (or more) Doctors and not one of them has ever turned tail and fled at the first sign of trouble. So what was the point of introducing the Sixth into this story? There’s absolutely nothing about it that’s unique to him or his personality – it’s just a generic Cyber-themed runaround with the same old clichéd bits about possession hammered into your skull. Admittedly, it does more with the concept than “The Defectors,” but don’t let that fool you into thinking anything interesting happens here.
Here’s the problem with “Last of the Cybermen:” we’ve done this before! Big Finish already teamed the Sixth Doctor up with Jamie and Zoe in “Legend of the Cybermen,” even if it wasn’t the “real world” – so what on earth was so important about this story that they had to do it again? Tales of the Earth-Cyber wars? The “Cyberman” miniseries handled those, along with multiple Doctor Who audios set alongside. I said this in my review of “The Light at the End,” but it bears repeating: Baker, Hines, and Padbury are repertory players for Big Finish. The fact that they are starring in the same audio is in no way significant or remarkable, even if they are all playing their famous Doctor Who characters. Something else needs to be done with the story, and “Last of the Cybermen” completely fails in that regard.
I admit that it’s not like Barnes doesn’t try to make the story unique, but his attempt merely renders it incomprehensible. What appears to be a straightforward tale degenerates into a morass of time travel, unreliable narrators, and varying perspectives without any attempt at a cohesive theme or message. Episode 4 starts in media res, which would be fine if it added anything to the story or if any of the previous three episodes had followed suit. Instead, it comes across as an author attempting to show off rather than any sort of attempt at narrative cohesion. The Cybermen want to slave Zoe’s mind to a Cyber-computer so that the consciousness of the “Super-Controller” – and yes, that is a stupid name – can be carried in her body. Frightening stuff, right? You wouldn’t know it from the characters, who barely seem bothered by the situation – apart from Zoe’s comically unconvincing scream that concludes Episode 3.
Alan Barnes has been the script editor of the monthly range for years and he has written countless Doctor Who audio stories, and he STILL can’t produce a script that isn’t full of jarring audio dialogue. Is it really so hard to avoid having characters constantly describing their surroundings to each other? Isn’t it disturbing that literally every single other regular Big Finish writer has figured out how to do this but their script editor hasn’t?
What on earth is the point of this? It’s a generic Cyberman story with absolutely nothing new to say and absolutely nothing that hasn’t been seen dozens of times before across multiple forms of media. It unites a future Doctor with past companions and then does absolutely nothing worthwhile with the idea. It has possibly the worst Cyberman voices on record – Nicholas Briggs is usually excellent at his monster voices, but these are very obviously him with a funny voice under a slight filter. And the less said about idiotic regional caricature Lanky the better. Yeah, it has some funny parts. Yeah, the direction by Ken Bentley is fine, and the sound design from Nigel Fairs expertly recreates much of the atmosphere of “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” But none of that makes up for the atrocious script and the dearth of ideas, two elements that have become a sadly common part of the monthly range. Once upon a time, this range was the exemplar of all Doctor Who, demonstrating the very best the series had to offer on a monthly basis with only the occasional misstep. Now it’s a sad parody of its former self, a nostalgia-driven death march that barely scrapes mediocrity with every release thrust upon the unsuspecting buyer. “Last of the Cybermen” is nothing more than another entry in this interminably long line.
Terrible.
3/10