A bread-and-butter DW story. This is only Charley’s second adventure, so giving her a “preview” of how things usually go with the Doctor makes sense. I only realised now how clever of BF it was to make Charley an early 1900’s girl: she gets to say “this is some sort of *insert simple mechanism here*!” and demand some explanations for hightech space gizmos quite naturally, which helps us to understand what they’re all seeing and dealing with. I thought this episode was a lot more natural in inserting the cues and descriptions for things than “Storm Warning”, which was more on the nose with its ‘say what you see’ lines.

Man, there were just too many people on that ship. Did this story really need 6 (or was it 7??) crewmembers? I literally finished listening to it less than 1 hour ago and cannot remember their characters. Deeva, the ‘Captain’/spy, is the standout, of course. The android twist came a bit too late to really be a twist, sadly. This was a pretty standard Cybermen story as well, I don’t have much to comment about it. 

The Doctor and Charley are a good team, and bounce off of each other nicely with their little quips. As always, Paul and India’s performances are great. There’s not a great deal of characterization going on, but Charley learns that humanity’s future is not all bright, and people can be racist even in space. Overall she deals with being in space and meeting aliens and all very well! The bit where the alien shopkeep Grabbed her was super unnecessary. I guess the writer’s idea was to show Charley takes no shit can defend herself, but it’s a very outdated and lazy way of showing that. Yeah, yeah, this came out in the 2000’s, but still.

The mystery of Ramsey’s size was answered for me when Charley said he was too big to move. That guy on the R101 that wanted to take him home as a pet really was a loony.

Now, I do know the Cybermen came before Star Trek TNG introduced the Borg, but everytime they said “Resistance is… useless” I snorted a little bit.  

“Sword Of Orion” marca a primeira aparição dos Cybermans nos áudios da BIG FINISH sendo uma continuidade direta dos eventos de “Storm Warning” (introdução de Charley) - Sua primeira metade possui uma narrativa bem cadenciada e técnica apresentando vários personagens e elementos de uma vez só (dando um leve impressão de um certo excesso), é verdade que seus diálogos e termos técnicos dificultam um pouco a compreensão do andamento da problemática apresentada. Mas não se engane, mesmo estruturado e comportando dessa forma, ainda sim nesse meio temos vários elementos relevantes e importantes para o progresso de sua história. O aparente excesso de personagens acaba se tornando um dos pontos fortes do áudio, está certo que muitos deles estavam ali apenas para serem vítimas dos Cybermans, porem o percurso até chegar a esse resultado (de serem vítimas) em alguns casos acabam sendo algo bem feito e até mesmo impactante. Sem dizer que alguns deles acabam ganhando um destaque de peso, como por exemplo a Deeva e o Grash que se tornam grandes coadjuvantes. A Deeva acaba sendo a mais interessante e notável, o mistério por trás de sua personagem nos faz a todo momento ficarmos nos questionando, “quem é ela?” e “de que lado ela está?”, tudo isso em meio a revelações e reviravoltas que deixa sua personagem mais complexa até a chocante e arrepiante conclusão de “Sword Of Orion”. O Grash tem o papel do famoso “babacão”, tendo atitudes ignorantes não dando chance de explicações para os personagens principais e mais a frente se tornando uma marionete dos vilões. E para finalizar eu não podia deixar de falar nos Cybermans, que mesmo estando inseridos em uma premissa básica que é converter humanoides e expandir sua raça, ainda sim são bem executados com direito a uma voz única que o “Nicholas Briggs” deu a eles, dando uma certa originalidade a essa versão dos vilões cinzas.

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.