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(4 60-MINUTE EPISODES)

 DECEMBER 2009

assumed the mantle of Big Finish’s Executive Producer, leaving him with insufficient time to personally pen its long-mooted sequel. As James Swallow was already writing Kingdom of Silver, a Doctor Who audio drama with some ties to Briggs’ nascent Cyberman 2, he was the obvious choice to step into the breach and script the series - and, as it turned out, an inspired one too.

For the most part, Swallow’s take on the Cyberman series feels like a logical extension of Briggs’s. Stylistically, he preserves and even elongates the introspective monologues that punctuated, and to a certain extent defined, the first series, as well as the inherently coarse, dangerous feel. Thematically too, he tackles the same big questions about what it means to be human, and how that humanity can be tainted, or perhaps even lost, by trying to protect it. Where the two writers’ visions diverge, however, is in the portrayal of the Cyber threat itself, and particularly in the scale of it.

Swallow’s love of the eponymous Cybermen is clear throughout the series, though he seems more reluctant than Briggs to resurrect all of their ancient accoutrements. Inspired largely by real-life images of American troops occupying Basra, the Cybermen of this series are more symbolic than they are monstrous; a silent threat lurking around every corner. I must admit, when I heard that the Cybermen were getting their own spin-off series, I had wondered how they’d be portrayed in it. After all, unlike a Dalek, who has complex emotions and neuroses to probe, the Cybermen are defined by their uniformity and lack of personality. Accordingly Swallow doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel in the way that Dalek Empire did for the Daleks – instead he just builds the biggest damned Cyber-wheel that anyone’s ever seen. Rather than being a tale of covert conversions, far-flung battles and political machinations, Cyberman 2 is the story of Earth under complete Cyber control. To quote Doomsday, it’s not an invasion - it’s a victory. And what really makes it sting is that we let them win.

The series’ opening instalment, Outsiders, paints a haunting picture of a planet under Cyber control. Through the eyes of cabbie Hazel Trahn, Swallow shows us Greater Britannica with “Special Commando Units” at every road block and on every street corner. Paul Hunt, now President of Earth, has declared martial law, and slowly but surely the human race is being constrained and converted. However, little does Hunt know that the rise of the Cybermen has provoked a decisive response from humanity’s enemies, the Orion Androids - they have deployed an indiscriminate weapon that will annihilate all life Earth, and the clock is ticking.

Much like the previous series, Swallow’s story follows four characters along four separate threads. Mark McDonnell’s Liam Barnaby finds himself on board the Novograd, an Earth civvie ship that’s been commandeered by the crew of a military vessel that was lost in battle to “the Synthetics”, its two very different crews constantly at each other’s throats as suspicion and paranoia run rampant. Barnaby’s android love, Hannah Smith’s Samantha, is separated from him early on as she is forced to flee the Novograd and make her way to Earth, where she intends to put paid to the Cyber threat before her people can put paid to the planet. Hazel, meanwhile, stumbles upon the conversion of her sister’s whole town, and is dragged kicking and screaming into a war that she didn’t know was being waged. And all the while the “Cybrid” President presides over humanity’s downfall, his scornful spokeswoman (Jess Robinson of Patient Zero fame) reluctantly pumping out his propaganda as he does so.

Barnaby’s thread is the most thrilling element by far. A strained homage to The Cruel Sea, the scenes aboard the Novograd are wrought with terrible tension, and carried by some mesmerising performances. Toby ‘Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf’ Hadoke is terrific as the paranoid and psychotic Captain Louis Richter, while Ian Hallard’s oily Chessman does a sterling job of assuming the slippery role occupied by Hunt’s character in the first series.

However, the newcomer’s story is probably the most moving. By turns mundane and extra-ordinary, Jo Castleton convincingly portrays a perfectly likeable, everyday woman who sees her dull, safe old world torn down and can’t think about anything but getting it back. This leads her down a dark path that sees her take up arms against “the tinnies”, and very quickly reach a point where she’d gladly lay down her life to see them stopped. Eventually her path crosses with that of Samantha, allowing Swallow to rehearse some of the issues explored in the first series, but this time from a much more relatable angle. It’s one thing to depict the supreme commander of Earth’s military, who’s spent years fighting androids, overcoming a burning prejudice in the most intense of fashions, but to hear an ordinary woman’s media indoctrination being challenged is every bit as interesting, and a far more delicate thing to pull off. The scenes between Hazel and Samantha are amongst the series’ most affecting.

For her part, Samantha is portrayed a little differently to how she was in Cyberman. Her unspoken feelings for Barnaby in the first series are now full-blown love, Swallow replacing the carnal (if that’s the word!) lust of the first series with a torn-apart romance that echoes that of Alby and Suz in Dalek Empire. Together Swallow and Smith do a wonderful job of showing how Samantha’s feelings (and that’s what she claims they are, binary codes being no different from biological ones) influence her actions and give her strength, leading to a conclusion that’s as heartbreaking as it is frenzied.

Only Paul Hunt’s thread of the story disappointed me a little, largely because actor Barnaby Edwards didn’t really have anyone beyond a disgruntled lackey and a Cyber-Planner to spar with. Accordingly, much of the maddening conceit that characterised his character in the first series is lost, in favour of an altogether more tragic, but ultimately less memorable, portrayal.

The production itself is stunning to hear. Kelly Ellis and Steve McNichol’s sound design is bo-th exquisite and evocative, and their Terminator 2-style theme music fits the Cyberman series like a glove. I particularly enj-oyed its acoustic reprise at the end of the final episode, signifying the removal of the heartless machines from the equation.

The series is packaged beautifully too. I’m all for Big Finish releasing their spin-off series – or at least those that purport to form a larger narrative – in box sets as, let’s face it, we’re hardly likely to purchase just the odd instalment, and better still it allows Big Finish to create stunning packaging like this. Alex Mallinson’s classy artwork warrants special mention as when listening to this series, its events weren’t played out in my mind’s eye in gaudy colour, but Sin City monochrome. The disc of collected CD Extras is also nice to have as the casual conversations found therein detail not only the conception and production of Cyberman 2, but Cyberman too, compensating for the lack of behind the scenes features accompanying the first series.

Overall, I enjoyed Cyberman 2 every bit as much as did the series that spawned it, if not a little more so. It is, in many ways, the “ultimate Cyberman invasion” story in the same way that Dalek Empire is the “ultimate Dalek invasion” story, which is ironic, given that it isn’t Briggs’ name on the by-line. More importantly than that though, Cyberman 2 brings this epic space opera back down to “street level”, allowing those of us who aren’t Presidents, military high-ups or androids to place ourselves right at the heart of events, and become rapt in them.