Big Finish 8th Doctor New Adventure, August 2009
Shades of The Matrix concept in here but reduced to robots on an enormous space station instead. This story is full of moments of danger and insanity as I really did think that Lucie or the Doctor would be killed, or at the very least hurt, several times throughout this storyline. The Doctor does what the robots cannot – figures out the problem with the life cycle of the space station and the robots. Servo becomes the hero through poetry and has some rather fun moments, despite the danger of the cannibalists all around.
Though Minerva’s a bit of a Deus ex Machina, it doesn’t quite work out the way it usually does and everything’s good in the end, right? I really enjoyed this audio as it starts off with some horrible, horrible moments that had me cringing in my chair and going ewwwww. I almost turned it off! Some great sound effects there. This story is just so different from the rest that it’s hard to quantify, difficult to give it a rating. But Jonathon Morris has written a few other offbeat stories for Big Finish as well: Bloodtide (with the Silurians), Flip-Flop (where the Doctor and Mel try not to meet themselves), and The Haunting of Thomas Brewster (where TB makes life annoying and a bit miserable for the 5th Doctor and Nyssa).
This is a great story but I’m not sure of the motivation of the cannibalists, ultimately. Which is what this story is titled, which is probably a misnomer. Because it’s ultimately Servo’s story and the cannibalists go through their own machinations to “get” everyone, ultimately. They’re like little robot pirates! Dumb ones and mean ones and gullible ones and scared ones. It’s a little pirate ship of doom!
Paul McGann and Sheridan Smith (with Clifford Rose and Rhys)
writer: Jonathan Morris
director: Jason Haigh-Ellery