DOCTOR WHO, MONTHLY ADVENTURES:

8th Doctor #2 (#17 Overall)

SWORD OF ORION

Doctor: Eighth (Paul McGann)

Companion: Charley Pollard

May 2023

Having now listened to both Storm Warning (a pseudo-pilot for the Eighth Doctor and Charley) and The Chimes of Midnight (a pseudo-first-season-finale), I decided to go back and try out a few of the standalones that come between them—there’s a point in Chimes where the Doctor lists all the things he wouldn’t have been able to do without Charley that in particular made me want to go back and try some middle ones, despite their middling reviews. I opted for The Sword of Orion, both because it has Cybermen and because it’s Charley’s first outing in the TARDIS. And it’s...fine? I dunno.

I do feel like those middling reviews were pretty accurate, because now it’s time for me to give my own middling review. The Sword of Orion feels very ambitious sometimes in what it wants to try—the Orion War, android politics, scrapping crews, a derelict ship full of Cybermen, something something Telos. But at the same time, it feels weirdly contained to six or seven barely-distinguishable members of a scrap crew and their #girlboss captain. It also has some weird gender politics tossed in there for flavor. And it feels, in the end, like the sort of episode that wants you to come off of it with some deeper understanding of humanity, of morals, provoking the kind of deep thought that stories like...I dunno, Farewell Great Macedon or the like do, but it doesn’t feel like it hangs together well enough to actually pull it off. It didn’t for me, at least.

This might have been a story I would’ve enjoyed more were it a TV story—then, at least, we could have gotten some fun action sequences with the Cybermen. I feel like Cybermen don’t really translate very well to audio; maybe it was just this episode, but I found it really quite difficult to understand them often.

Let’s talk about the “weird gender politics” I mentioned. It feels sort of like a continuous train of intentionally-written sexism, but also like this...doesn’t really go anywhere. In an early scene, Charley is...well, somewhere between “accosted” and “flirted with” by an alien on a space station market before she runs into the Doctor again. To me, this works just fine: it’s an example of the sort of culture of the market, it isn’t especially prolonged or too uncomfortable to listen to. Let’s talk about the scrappers and the captain.

The situation is this: on the scrap ship, there are about 6 crewmembers (it’s testament to how much I couldn’t tell them apart that I don’t know how many there are). There’s also a new captain: Deeva Jansen, who the scrappers...seem to not exactly respect, as such. Especially in the case of Grash (great name), who repeatedly and vocally disrespects her, even going so far as to briefly stage a mutiny. Grash (and all of the scrappers except one, Chev) is a man; Deeva is a woman. And basically all of this disrespect is vocally predicated on the fact that Deeva is a lady. Grash is supposed to be an antagonist: he’s responsible for basically all of the infighting among our non-Cybermen characters (inasmuch as Cybermen are ever characters), but his sexism is never really mentioned or brought up beyond Deeva defending herself—not even by Chev, who makes up 1/3rd of the story’s female cast and is aligned with Grash basically at all times. There’s also a weird one-off line about the cybermat maybe “never having seen a girl before” that Grash or someone around him makes about Charley, which is just. Odd. It’s not enough to leave a bad taste in the mouth, but it’s an acquired taste at the very least.

Charley is interesting here. This is not nearly as good a story for Charley as Storm Warning or The Chimes of Midnight are: she does a lot of running around with the Doctor and talking about what to do next, but frankly, she doesn’t end up contributing a whole lot to the story unfortunately and is kept as a captive by Grash & co for a short while, too. The first episode is best for “Charley in a wild new world!” but her reactions aren’t as strong to the rest of it. I mean, on the one hand, this proves her as someone who adapts quickly to new situations, but on the other...I dunno, man! I was looking for something for Charley to do here but she also doesn’t really get a whole lot of bantering with the Doctor, either. She feels underutilized here, especially compared to her gung-ho attitude in the last story.

This story kind of bungles its android message, enough that I was actually confused about what its message exactly was supposed to be.

Here’s some spoiler thoughts:

So, in the end, it turns out Deeva is trying to learn about the cyber-conversion process to use Cybermen to help the humans win the war against the androids (the androids want human rights). Except, no, actually Deeva is an android—but she’s still trying to learn about cyber-conversion, this time...to convert human captives and make them fight? At the end of the story, it’s left unclear whether or not she survives—well, okay, it’s left clear that she does survive, but basically in stasis floating in space. And she sacrifices herself to save Charley. I don’t know: there’s a lot of potential floating around a war between androids and humans in the Orion constellation (not least of which that it sounds cool as hell), and it’s brought up well throughout the parts, but characterizing the one android in the show as “dubiously moral” in the way that she’s looking to exploit the human captives they have is a questionable way to portray the representative of the side of the war that just wants human rights. Like, there’s a whole conversation where it’s discussed what the androids want, and it’s “to be treated like people.” So that’s a problem—but there’s this half-hearted about-face (double, triple about-face) at the end? I don’t know. It leaves me confused, I guess.

Overall Thoughts:

Sword of Orion is a serviceable, if not great, story. It’s fine: it has the Cybermen in it. It has some strong ideas that are executed...less than strongly. Listen to it if you want to get more of a handle on Charley and the Doctor before Chimes of Midnight, but you really don’t have to—in fact, there might be another of the stories coming in between that’s better. Listen to the first episode if you want Charley and the Doctor exploring a space bazaar: that one’s pretty solid and is the best in terms of “first trip in the TARDIS” story (a format I’m always quite fond of). But really, Sword of Orion is eminently skippable.