Holy crap, this was a spine-chilling debut. Right from the get-go the music set the tone, and the interspersed voiceover narration hints of much darker things to come. I like that women are playing such major roles. Good conscious choice on Nicholas Briggs’s part. This hour flew by! ( )

With James Swallow's Cyberman 2 miniseries coming up later this year, I figured that now was an appropriate time to finally get around to listening to Nicholas Briggs's original Cyberman miniseries, which was first released back in 2005. Briggs is of course the voice of the Cybermen, both for Big Finish and BBC Wales, and he’d also penned Sword of Orion, their hugely popular encounter with the eighth Doctor. And he had experience spinning a Doctor Who monster off into its own set of adventures, as he’d been the man responsible for Big Finish’s epic Dalek Empire maxiseries.

I’d known that Cyberman was connected to Sword of Orion, but I hadn't realized quite how much. As Part 1 opens, humanity is still involved in the Orion Wars that formed the background for that audio drama, battling the androids who want their freedom from human oppression. Scorpius focuses on a smattering of characters involved in this conflict, but mostly and principally Admiral Karen Brett, who as the story opens is the commander of the Redoubtable. The Cybermen are very much kept in the background of Scorpius, making their first appearance as a hologram early on, but not showing up in person until halfway through.

Scorpius couldn't really be listened to on its own-- it's clearly one-fourth of a larger story-- and that makes it somewhat hard to judge. We have a lot of good setup here, but future installments will have to pay this off in a suitable fashion. I can't really critique it as a story when I don’t yet know the story! But it is a more than satisfying release, leaving me eagerly anticipating the next installment in the series with Fear.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.