Sword of Orion

There’s nothing wrong with Sword of Orion, but its nothing a Who fan hasn’t seen before either. A collection of marked-for-death misfits stumble on something nasty, the Doctor just happens to be in the neighbourhood, and turns up just in time to prevent fullscale invasion - although too late to preserve the cast intact.

The first quip I thought of finishing that paragraph with was "the plot’s the same, it’s just the details that change". But in this case, the details aren’t all that unusual either. The crew - whose names I never caught - were walking cliches. We had the shouty, angry, "nasty for no reason" one, almost certainly due a sticky end; the "nice, simple, definitely dead" one; and the female one who seems purely included merely to make up a gender balance, and to be killed. It may have originally seemed innovative to give the extras charactersisation and depth, so we feel sympathy for their inevitable deaths - but the average Who fan is immune to the trick. They’re not helped by a script chock full of "Is that you BobAAAAAAAH!"s and, "Oh look, my transistor’s on the blink again - must be a perfectly natural, non-threatening explanation"s. And as everyone else has noted, the killer twist wasn’t that much of a twist, and I’m speaking as someone who is easily surprised.

It’s perfectly worthy - and the ole’ "something creepy in the ducts" routine works maybe better on audio than the TV. While we’re on the advantages of not being able to see the special effects, time to turn to the sole success of the audio.

The Cybermats were a very silly let down in a very classy episode on TV - "the Monty Python’s killer rabbit" of the Whoniverse, if you like. We’re meant to believe that it is the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on, but even when it’s killing stuff we can’t help but go "aaaaaaah".

Here, they are brilliant. Partly because we don’t have to look at their cute little googly eyes stuck on toilet-brushes. But mostly for showing them through their effects. The slow disabling of the ship, the flickering lights and failing engines are far scarier than the attack by clockwork mice we got in Tomb of the Cybermen. For the first time, I get a sense of why the Cybermats are a useful part of the Cyber-army - their attack on the Vanguard is crippling, and a logical way to keep the humans in one place.

And the Doctor? I’m sorry, who? Normally, even the most tedious episode can be lifted by the regulars - today he, along with everything else, was resoundingly ordinary. I’m not yet getting a sense of Charley either - it’s a long time since I’ve hated a companion on sight, but neither has she yet proved why she is so universally loved.

6/10, for being dull and unimaginative