Hogan Reviews

“Cybergene” was one of the more hyped Big Finish boxsets in recent years and much like TV story “Asylum of the Daleks”, which suffered from a fan backlash when it didn’t in fact have “Every Dalek Ever!” in it, this box having loads of different Cybermen on the cover and promising much the same you’ll be unsurprised to hear it had a similar backlash from hardcore fans, made worse by the fact its audio so it’s hard to know which Cybermen featured at all beyond one or two obvious ones. Ignoring all that though, what is the story like by itself? It’s… fine. Basically a decent War Doctor story that happens to feature Cybermen. Let’s take a look…

The story opens up with The Doctor (Jonathan Carley) arriving on a bleak war-torn world via his TARDIS being intentionally redirected and soon meeting the locals, who are being forced to fight the war unless they’re injured, and if they are they’re soon healed in a nearby “factory”. The Doctor visits said factory only to find a scientist called Nesta (Mitra Djalili) who has developed the technology to replace damaged limbs and internal organs with cybernetics on a factory conveyor belt set up. The Doctor knows where this is leading so destroys the machinery before being captured and sent to the front line, where he and his fellow soldiers are caught in an explosion of time, being pulled out of the time bubble long enough in the future for there to be classic Mondas Cybermen roaming around. The Doctor does some investigating and finds out that nobody knows who their enemy is and there doesn’t seem to be a civilian population at all, so upon further digging he finds a space station about the planet and along with Nesta heads up to them via a T-Mat and finds out that the whole planet is broken up into various zones battling with each other and some scientists, Nesta included, were given the knowledge of how to create Cybermen all for one purpose: the Time Lords want to create a large army of Cybermen to throw at the Daleks in order to slow them down and so they’ve rigged this planet to do just that. The Doctor even tries to use their own tech against them but only ends up accelerating the time for the planet below, creating a race of “Ultra Cybermen” who then, of course, turn on the Time Lords and attack the space station. The Doctor and Nestra flee in the TARDIS to end Part 1.

Part 2 oddly doesn’t follow up on that cliffhanger really, instead The Doctor and Nesta arrive on a post-apocalyptic world and meet a genius scientist called Davius (Nicholas Khan) who is the last man alive on his planet and claims to know the two of them as they’ve appeared before him every 100 years for the past however many centuries. We hear him getting visited by some Time Lords and given an implant that gives him his eternal youth and the eventual knowledge of how to build Cybermen and then spend the majority of the runtime hearing The Doctor and Nesta figure it all out as they re-meet Davius every 100 years and Nesta tries to convince him his ideas to save his people will have the opposite effect as it did for her. One of the later visits saw The Doctor figure out that the thing implanted in Davius had something called the “Cybergene” in it, a piece of tech that unites all the new Time Lord bred Ultra Cybermen and allows them to have none of the old weaknesses that Daleks know how to exploit. The Doctor actually breaks Davius free from control briefly, but it doesn’t stick. Eventually they return to the first time they met him (from their POV) and Davius and his Cybermen capture them and use The Doctor as a hostage to bring the Time Lords that put him through this hell to him for revenge as he has managed to break free himself, at least enough to want revenge over creating more Cybermen (not that there’s anyone left to convert anyway…) Davius is defeated and the visiting Time Lords mention to The Doctor that there are several of these Time Lord “Firebreak” Cyber-planets created to stall the Daleks, leading to The Doctor and Nesta fleeing in the TARDIS again, knowing that each planet is a danger to the whole universe…

I’ll cover Part 3 in the Spoiler Section but suffice it to say it’s not any kind of remarkable “All the Cybermen! The Cybermen finally enter the Time War!!” massive theatrical blowout but instead an interesting look at just how desperate the Time Lords were at points and how low they stooped in the War rather than the usual “Daleks are bad” affair. In that sense it was good, but even then Part 2 being essentially a repeat of Part 1 was a bit of a pace-killer…

The Continuity:

This would certainly be a cool image if it were for a live action episode…

Obviously I’m not going to mention every Cyberman story or anything but their first appearance in the First Doctor story “The Tenth Planet” is mentioned, Cybermen from Second Doctor stories “The Moonbase”, “The Tomb of the Cybermen” and “The Invasion” are specifically namechecked by The Doctor via observational dialogue, and the “Cybus Cybermen” from the Tenth Doctor era are definitely one of the other Cyber-races as we hear a few mutterings of “Delete”, their attempted catchphrase that didn’t take off. Also there is mention of the “Cyberiad”, a linked network all Cybermen are on, which was a concept introduced in the Eleventh Doctor story “Nightmare in Silver”.

Overall Thoughts:

“Cybergene” would’ve been much warmer received had it a different cover and market campaign because it’s not bad by any means and in fact I quite liked the first and final parts, it’s a repetitive middle that lets it down. Not a big Cyber-blowout or a big Time War Cyberman story, but it a perfectly fine War Doctor story dealing with corrupt Time Lords rather than Daleks for a bit (BIT) of a change…

Part 3 sees The Doctor and Nesta arrive in a large Cybertomb looking for answers and finding that they’re all in cold storage due to their own act as the Daleks came up with a deadly “infection” in the “Cyberiad network” that caused the Cybergene in their heads to kill them, the idea that the Daleks and the Cybermen are killing each other amuses the Doctor in a way that no other Doctor could really get away with, made me smile hearing his cheerful reaction to the news anyway. They eventually make their way to a set of pods that contain themselves, The Doctor realising that they’ll have to go into the TARDIS and head back in time in order to avoid a paradox, and as they do they’re spotted by some freshly arrived Cybermen who are soon confused when they find the intruders already frozen in a pod and that they’d been there for several decades. The Doctor and Nesta arrive in the past and meet up with two Time Lords in Captain Rorval (Glen McCready) and Ensign Zolan (Tracy Wiles) who are there to extract the Cybergene to start the whole project in the first place. They all go through some traps, Nesta, who found Zolan’s corpse in the future, tries to save her to prove time can be rewritten and therefore go back to her own world and stop herself from creating her Cybermen (spoiler: it doesn’t work) and The Doctor extracts the Cybergene, leading to Nesta wanting to see the it destroyed, knowing doing it now would mean the Time Lords plans would be undone, and The Doctor claims to do just that… but is lying, and when Nesta unfreezes in the future only to find Ultra Cybermen in her face she finds out. The Doctor and Nesta and captured and here the Cybermen reveal they have overcome the Dalek virus and are planning to wake all their brothers up.

After the obvious escape sequence Nesta is irate that The Doctor didn’t change history but The Doctor shows that while the Ultra Cybermen will still be created he has planted a bug in the Cybergene that causes them all to essentially explode, much to the joy of the Time Lords watching on from Gallifrey, who now regret essentially creating a third powerful faction in the Time War and making things all the more bleak. Sadly though Nesta soon falls to the floor with a terrible headache, The Doctor confirming that much like Davius she was given a Cybergene implant to give her the Cyberman plans and therefore she’s just been killed like all the other Cybermen. She acts shocked that The Doctor would do this to her, but let’s face it even if he wasn’t the War Doctor one life in exchange for all the countless billions that would’ve been killed by the Cybermen is an easy choice. Nesta dies hoping that she’s finally done some good…