Scorpius

Scorpius was one of the earlier attempts of mine to get into Big Finish Doctor Who stories after a few false starts. To its credit, this was part of the audios that did ultimately make me an ongoing Big Finish listener.

I think where this audio suffers though is people, myself included, probably go into this series expecting a horror show. The Cybermen are supposed to be creepy. They are supposed to be a nasty monster created in a cauldron of human suffering. They are a means, just like in any good science fiction, to explore ideas of morality and technology through a fictional lens. More than anything, I think the Cybermen at their best should make you deeply uncomfortable. That they are being chopped up humans put through factory processing is what most compels me about these villains.

So, when Scorpius kind of plays out as a slow burn, with mostly introductory content to the rest of the series and, in my opinion, not nearly enough Cybermen in this Cyberman story, well, yeah, I can't help but look back on this as a pretty intense sense of disappointment. I never got engaged with any of these characters and while I did appreciate the more quite and subtle aspects of horror we are going for here, I definitely did not find myself hooked like I would have preferred, or would have left me eager to pursue the rest of this series. While it wasn't terrible, I would struggle to recommend this one. We'll have to see if the rest of the series changes my views on the Cybermen range, but for now I'm not exactly excited to do that nor do I plan on pursuing this plan in the immediate future. You never know, though.