Amazon Prime Video announced today that it has greenlit Blade Runner 2099, a live-action limited TV series set in the world of Ridley Scott’s beloved sci-fi film. Scott will serve as an executive producer on 2099, while Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) will be the showrunner.
A teaser trailer has arrived for animated Star Trek spin-off Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 as part of a panel at Star Trek: Mission Chicago, a three-day Star Trek fan event filled with exclusive panels and reveals devoted to the wildly popular — and ever-expanding — sci-fi franchise. Star Trek: Lower Decks, which premiered in 2019 and follows the lower decks-residing crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos, will begin streaming its third season exclusively on Paramount+ later this year and is already renewed for a fourth season.
Review by Ian McArdell
Bayban Ascending is the latest tie-in audiobook release for The Worlds of Blake’s 7, Big Finish’s spin-off range exploring wider elements in the Federation universe. While born of necessity, due to the sad passing of a number of core cast members, the range has opened up all sorts of interesting stories away from the Liberator.
Review by Ian McArdell
Survivors: New Dawn sees three further adventures for Abby Grant and Jenny Richards. Some twenty years on from the initial outbreak of ‘The Death’, this sequel series has caught us up with the two remaining central characters from the show.
Review by Ian McArdell
The Terra Nostra returns us to the criminal organisation first glimpsed in the Blake’s 7 episode Shadow, for a set of stories in the shady underworld of the Federation. Taking their inspiration from the Mafia, the Terra Nostra seemingly stretched throughout the galaxy and it was heavily implied that they existed as a form of Federation soft power within the criminal classes. This boxset also draws together strands from the previous two in The Worlds of Blake’s 7, The Clone Masters and Bayban the Butcher – notably the story of the psycho-strategist Hinton.
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Review by Ian McArdell
Bayban the Butcher grants Colin Baker’s famously off-the-hook villain centre stage. Although best known for playing the colourful Sixth Doctor, he gave an entertainingly big guest performance years earlier in Blake’s 7; Bayban, a self-aggrandising baddie with a penchant for alliteration, came up against Vila in Series C’s City at the Edge of the World.
This self-titled boxset follows an appearance in the recent Avalon series and there’s an audiobook origin story, Bayban Ascending, due in February too. While Bayban apparently died at the end of his only onscreen appearance, it seems you can’t keep a good berserker down. Continue reading
Review by Jacob Licklider
As The Two Jasons was brought forward from its initial January 2022 to October 2021, Big Finish Productions commissioned two further Bernice Summerfield audiobooks to replace that slot plus an additional slot for February 2022. The January slot was taken by The Weather on Versimmon by Matthew Griffiths, a novel released during the box set era of the Bernice Summerfield range to coincide with the release of Road Trip, the second box set. Luckily, unlike the initial five Bernice Summerfield novels, while plot points are referenced, but not integral to understanding that box set or the events of this book. This is essential as I have not heard any of the box sets yet. The plot sees Benny with Ruth searching for her son Peter who has gone missing. They find themselves on the planet Versimmon which is essentially a world of ecological artists, but the weather seems to be going haywire. There’s a hailstorm as climate change begins to ravage the planet for reasons that nobody is entirely sure of why as fauna has begun to join the flora.
Review by Ian McArdell
Ghosts and Demons is the latest story from the world of Terry Nation’s Survivors. While the audio dramas have pushed the timeframe on to the late 1990s with New Dawn, this story is firmly lodged within Series 1 of the television show (set around the time of the episode Something of Value). Indeed, the challenges our heroes face during the story are rooted in the events of that episode. As with some of the best of the full-cast range, Ghosts and Demons offers us multiple ways into the story by following the experiences of the characters through the early stages of “the death”. In most cases, it’s tragedy; for others, it’s freeing.
Review by Ian McArdell
New Dawn 1 is the first of two 3-story boxsets which picks up the tale some fifteen years after we last heard from Terry Nation’s Survivors.
Although it eschews a move into double figures, making a fresh start with the subtitle New Dawn, this is effectively the tenth audio series. With six new episodes adding to the thirty-six already released, there’s now more Survivors on audio than were made for television in the mid-1970s, which is a remarkable achievement. However, it’s not the Seventies that we are concerned with here; though it’s not specified, by my reckoning the events of New Dawn occur somewhere in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Abby Grant returns: Fifteen years after she went into hiding, having prized her conflicted teenage son Peter from the clutches of the quasi-military operation he’d become a part of, and despite his crimes, the pair fled.
Review by Ian McArdell
Released as a tie-in to the full-cast boxset The Clone Masters, is the latest Blake’s 7 audiobook from Big Finish. As well as building on the events of that excellent three-part drama, which saw the destruction of the Clone Masters and their living city, this story goes back to the well; the civilisation of genetic manipulators and their culture were first introduced in the Series B episode Weapon. Here, writer Trevor Baxendale develops the stories of various characters who were caught up in the machinations of Servalan, weaving them into an exciting tale.
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