Im kinda generous with this score because im really an interesting setting kind of guy, if a story has a cool setting which i can picture while i listen, even if the story is a bit dull i can really enjoy it and sadly that is the case for this one, the market scenes at the beggining are really immersive but pretty much everything afterwards is a fuzz for me and i actually listened to the story like three times, they get on a ship alongside a crew and encounter cybermen (another reason why this story is rated a bit higher than it probably deserves, i love cybermen) a bit dissapointed by this story because it should ve been way better but the beggining and specially the final minutes are so cool to imagine that i cant just say its bad

18.05.2022
BFDW: The Monthly Adventures
e17: Sword of Orion

Dull and procedural. The main conflict is 1st-grader level and not even in the events of the story. The story in question is filler. The Doctor is dull, the companion could be cut from the story and nothing would change. Racism bad 1/5

MR 017: Sword of Orion

First use of the Cybermen... yaaaayyyyy..... Yeah, this one is fairly procedural. If you've ever seen a classic who Cyberman story, you've seen this. It's like Apocalypse Element and Genocide Machine, just standard Dalek faire that I checked out of. No surprise that Nick Briggs wrote both this and Mutant Phase, which was also pretty boring.

The Doctor and Charley go to a space station bazaar, which is definitely the most interesting sequence in the whole story... only to accidentally go onto a scrap ship that runs into a Cyberman ship. It turns out the captain of the scrap ship is a double agent in the Orion war between the humans and androids, who are trying to be treated as equals. The captain is secretly an android in disguise, looking to steal Cyberman conversion secrets to convert humans they capture in war.

It's not as interesting as it sounds. All of that comes out in the last twenty minutes. The rest of it is just by the books. There's a cybermat infiltrator and then there's a mutiny against the captain and then the Cybermen convert and mind control people ect ect ect. The bits that would make for an interesting story are not until the end, but by that point we no longer care.

It's a shame too because the idea of an android war is interesting. Like if Data from Star Trek inspired a revolution rather than tried to work legally for android rights. Ah well.

I do like seeing Charley adapting so well and so immediately to travel, though. Charley is from the early 20th century and here she is on a space station and space ship and she rides in a hovercar and she doesn't miss a beat. She adapts incredibly well, even arguing for android rights for a hot minute at the end. That's a great characterization for her as this person who has such a wanderlust that she's willing to just accept whatever. That's why we love her.

HOW IN THE HELL DID I NOT LIKE THIS ONE THAT MUCH?

The Monthly Adventures #017 - "Sword of Orion" by Nicholas Briggs

Nicholas Briggs seems to have a brand of story. Good ideas using established things from the show (Gallifrey, Daleks, Cybermen) and then writing a story void of any substance to include these ideas. There is so unbelievably little in Sword of Orion to talk about it’s genuinely impressive. I am surprised this story lasts two hours. It is fine, I don’t dislike pretty much anything here, but I also do not care about one bit of it. Not sure what I can talk about, let’s just get into it.

Exploring the grungier side of space travel, the Doctor and Charley are pulled into a fated expedition into a derelict, where the remnants of a far off war and an old enemy prepare to collide.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This is going to be a really short one, so we’ll just begin. Nicholas Briggs is a writer whose actual writing, what’s physically on the page, is fine. The narrative is simple but works (most of the time), the dialogue sounds genuine, the characters are believable, his stories just lack substance. The one thing he seems to truly excel at is worldbuilding, his worlds all feel vast and real and it is easily my favourite thing about Sword of Orion. In the first part, we get a small section of Eight and Charley exploring a futuristic bazaar and it’s by far the best sequence. The sounds, the characters, the places we go to, the ideas we come across. It’s a world I can get invested in and once we get on the ship where we spend a majority of our time, we’re still getting bits and pieces of lore, like the war between Androids and Humans that incites the whole plot. It’s most interesting when it’s feeding us bits and pieces through characters like undercover-android Deeva, who I will mention as being the only interesting member of the cast. Usually I don’t just highlight one character but she is literally the only one I can remember the name of.

And that’s not a joke, there are about five more characters filling out the side cast, I am convinced they are all just the same person. I think one was called Ike, not sure about the rest. The elephant in the room I do have to mention is that this is the Cybermen’s first appearance in the Main Range. They do nothing. Absolutely nothing, they wander around a ship for four parts as the plot goes on around them. A lot more could’ve been done with them for their debut and we’ll have to wait until Spare Parts for a better story. Other than that, I really don’t know what to say. There have been a few stories like this, such as The Mutant Phase - also by Briggs - that just feel devoid of substance. There is nothing in the story I frankly want to talk about, it’s all fine or forgettable. And I can’t even bash that, I enjoyed it, simply because there was nothing for me to like or dislike.

Sword of Orion was about as fine as a story can get. Creating a pros and cons list for something like this story is especially hard because every element I’d usually highlight’s just in the middle somewhere. I can’t rate it that low because I didn’t dislike listening to it, but definitely not something you’d regret skipping.

5/10

Pros:

+ Great worldbuilding, loved the glimpses of future society

+ Deeva stood out as the one interesting member of the side cast

Cons:

- Sidecast made almost entirely of near identical characters

- The Cybermen are underutilised and a non-entity

- Void of any substance