6.1 Game Theory by Matt Fitton
Sam Bishop is missing. Lost at sea, imprisoned with a valuable hostage, UNIT’s troubleshooter will need all his skills to survive. To save their comrade, Kate Stewart and Osgood are offered a deadly challenge. But this game might be impossible to win…
6.2 Telepresence by Guy Adams
Testing salvaged equipment, Osgood leads Colonel Shindi and Josh Carter on a strange expedition into uncharted territory. A virtual world. When the team is attacked, Kate tries to assist. But it seems the technology itself is doing all it can to keep her apart from her people.
6.3 Code Silver by Guy Adams
The Cybermen are coming. Across the barriers between universes, conquering all before them. Conquering and converting.
As her troops fight a relentless enemy, Kate battles to lock down the threat. But how long can UNIT resist?
6.4 Master of Worlds by Matt Fitton
The Cybermen are close to victory. A world under Cybercontrol. A new paradigm to expand the Cyber-race.
Fresh from the Time War, the Master arrives at the hour of Earth’s greatest need. But he really doesn’t care…
UNIT: CYBER-REALITY
The UNIT series should be better than this. Unlike the main Doctor Who releases, where Big Finish has to dance around the lack of main cast availability, this range has its original TV cast members along with an established regular audio cast and is released on a regular schedule. We’ve seen how successful this can be with Torchwood – those releases have been high quality almost across the board, and some have been true masterpieces. But the UNIT series is content just to ramble along telling generic, uninteresting action stories, and “Cyber-Reality” is nothing more than the next non-entity in line.
We haven’t seen much of Sam Bishop in this range because Warren Brown has been the hardest actor to get in studio. But he’s here for the whole of “Cyber-Reality,” and the result illustrates exactly the problem with this range: we learn nothing about his character and there’s no development whatsoever. The same applies to everyone else: Shindi and Osgood spend much of the story under Cyber-control. Does this affect them? No. Will we see any fallout from this in future sets? Almost certainly not. Josh gets his obligatory once-per-box-set mention of his plastic skeleton, but we’re in the sixth set of these and not once has a story spent any time on what this has meant for his character. And then there’s Kate, who’s still driven-but-with-a-heart. Her father is mentioned, but that doesn’t go anywhere either. It’s the same characters, in other words – the same set of boring clichés who never develop. You could listen to these sets completely out of order and you wouldn’t even notice.
The first two stories, “Game Theory” by Matt Fitton and “Telepresence” by Guy Adams, deal with the Auctioneers from the Encounters set. In one story, Sam is imprisoned with a “fellow hostage” that tests his reactions; in the other, Josh and Shindi explore a virtual world with real-life consequences. But nothing comes of these stories – there are no major revelations, no plot twists. They’re mostly here to tread water until the Cybermen show up, which finally happens at the end of part two. The third story, “Code Silver” by Adams, introduces a new breed of Cybermen from a different universe. These Cybermen have unique abilities, including the Borg-like ability to adapt to enemy weapons on the fly, but they still have the same end goal: converting everyone in the universe into Cybermen. As mentioned above, they half-convert Osgood and Shindi, and Osgood naturally and immediately becomes the smartest mind in the Cyber-collective. This is a bit outlandish, but as it fits with her character we can roll with it. Apart from that, though, there’s nothing different here; the Cyber-plan superficially engages with our society’s obsession with mobile devices, but beyond that it’s the same thing we always see.
All of that sets up the fourth story, “Master of Worlds” by Fitton, in which the “War Master” shows up for no good reason! His TARDIS has landed on Earth in need of repair, coincidentally right in the middle of the Cyber-invasion, and he’s forced into cooperation with UNIT to save the day. Which he does, almost entirely without effort. It’s genuinely funny how he first meets the Auctioneers and almost immediately kills them all out of boredom, something this listener has been longing for ever since their introduction. As soon as the Cyber-plan becomes obvious – transmit the conversion signal not just into our universe, but into all universes – the Master devises an elegant solution, but he spends most of the story running around with UNIT and unable to intervene. He’s wasted, in other words, just like everything else in this set. He has a conversation with Kate about the Brigadier, which goes nowhere. The only mildly interesting part is some foreshadowing about Osgood’s upcoming encounter with Missy, but even there we already know what happens.
There’s little to add, in the end. The production is excellent, for what that’s worth – Ken Bentley is very good at directing action on audio and Howard Carter’s sound design is admirable. The performances are good for what they are. But ultimately what we have is a story that brings together UNIT, the Cybermen, and the Master – and exhibits absolutely no ambition in doing so. It’s yet another massive wasted opportunity from a range defined by it.
4/10