THE HUMAN FRONTIER
When two tribes go to war
This ambitious Big Finish Original is so overflowing with cool sci-fi ideas that you’d require a small fortune to put everything on screen. Unfortunately, what with alien monsters, a tense space scrap and two rival factions of relocated Earthers among the many elements, there’s so much going on that the plot sometimes struggles for coherence.
The story kicks off on the titular colony ship, where two of the crew get an unexpected wake-up call from their lengthy hibernation – and find out the hard way why commanding officers in Star Trek generally avoid romantic liaisons with the staff. An intriguing spanner is thrown into the works, however, when they discover another lot of humans who, despite leaving Earth centuries later, travelled faster-than-light and set up shop on their new world 300 years earlier. But not even being the last humans in the universe means they have to be friends – even when they’re trying to uncover the shared history of the species.
Making clever use of a non-linear narrative, cliffhangers and characters’ conversations with their AI implants, The Human Frontier makes sure you’re always eager to peel away the next layer of its many mysteries. Yet despite all the cool stuff colliding in the script – dictators, mysticism, Prime Directive violations – the drama’s four-hour run time still feels overstretched. Much of the dialogue is workmanlike, and several of the performances too broad to convince. The music, meanwhile, could definitely have been dialled down a couple of notches – when it’s loud throughout, it’s hard to have a dramatic crescendo. Richard Edwards
Actor Genevieve Gaunt’s mother, Fiona, played moonbase psychiatrist Dr Helen Smith in the 1973 TV series Moonbase 3.