The only hope for civilisation is for androids and humans to work together but the Cybermen are preparing to release their frozen army.
The only hope for civilisation is for androids and humans to work together but the Cybermen are preparing to release their frozen army.
CYBERMAN: TELOS
I don’t know if there are any recurring themes in my Big Finish reviews, but there are certainly a couple of recurrent critiques. For example, I can’t count the number of times I’ve criticized Big Finish for unsatisfactory resolutions to story arcs — and I’m adding another log to the fire after hearing “Telos,” the fourth and final chapter of the Cyberman miniseries. After four complete stories, the fascinating backdrop of the human-android Orion war isn’t explored in any depth whatsoever, and after “Telos” we still don’t know what started the war or why it’s still being fought. We’ve seen this allegory in Doctor Who before, though, right? Both sides realize the war is pointless and resolve their differences? Nope! Instead, we’re told that humans and androids will put their differences aside to team up against the Cybermen — but considering that the androids in “Telos” distrust everything Barnaby says to the point of utter lunacy, and the only positive human-android relationship in the entire thing is based on sex, this concept is completely unbelievable. Nonetheless, the dialogue goes to great lengths to pound the idea into the listener’s head — lines on the order of “too bad nobody will ever know we teamed up!” had me laughing out loud, and not in a good way.
Which begs the question: what on earth is Cyberman supposed to be about? It’s not about the futility of war, or two sides overcoming their differences, because these ideas aren’t explored in any meaningful sense. It’s not even about the usual Cyberman themes of the horrors of conversion and forced conformity — all we hear is a robotized Karen Brett having an unconvincing identity crisis. As far as I can tell, Cyberman is nothing more than an empty action epic pitting humans against androids against Cybermen. And even the Cybermen themselves are ludicrous! Look, the Cybermen were never supposed to be invincible supermen. Yes, they enhanced themselves at the expense of their humanity in order to survive the death of their planet, but crucial to the concept is the idea that they’re always on the edge of survival. Yet here they’re shown to be so advanced that they built planetary vaults that survived the destruction of Telos itself, and so powerful that they rampage through an entire brigade of superhuman android soldiers without taking a single casualty and survive several massive explosions. Leaving aside the fact that they collapse at the sight of nuclear fuel rods, the only reason their plan doesn’t work is that only a few of them go to Telos in the first place — if they send even one extra ship, they win! Meanwhile, all the androids and humans that know about the plan are killed except for Barnaby and Samantha, and they’re left floating in a ship without hyperdrive. Looks like the Cybermen win this one after all! And rightfully they should — the idea that there are billions of Cybermen just waiting to be reactivated removes all subtext and turns them into generic metal monsters. So why shouldn’t they win? They’re bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, and they massively outnumber us — and nothing in this miniseries says that we stand a chance in hell against them, emotions or not, androids or not.
The preceding rant shows what happens when I try to digest something completely without substance. Empty spectacle I can handle — but ill-considered, badly-written empty spectacle I cannot, even with good production and good performances. And so, after two solid opening chapters, the Cyberman series plummets sharply downhill and ends in this.
Don’t waste your money or your time.
3/10
Series average: 5.8