Big Finish has released story details of their sequel to Sky, Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s 70s SF series, Before the Chaos out in August.

The original ITV series followed the titular Sky, a time-travelling alien stuck on contemporary Earth. When nature itself rejected Sky and tried to expel him from the planet, three human children had to help their unusual new friend return home.

The audio series picks up fifty years later, with Sky (Cloud Quinn) arriving on Earth once more and finding his old friend Arby Vennor (Edwin Flay) in a nursing home. He makes new allies too, including Arby’s niece Bex Briggs (Jessica Hayles), her friend Kyle Braddock (Samuel Morgan-Davies), and journalist Jack Diver (Conrad Westmaas). Together they discover that Earth is under greater threat than ever…

The three episodes, all written and directed by Gary Russell, are:

Apotheose 

Two teenagers, the executive of Youngwell Corporation, a discredited journalist and an old man in a nursing home are brought together when a mysterious voice calls from within an ancient burial mound in the heart of Stanton Cheyney. The crows are flying, the public are chanting, and something malevolent is about to make itself known…

Deitropism 

Sky is reunited with old friends and is now a TV superstar. A spy has infiltrated Youngwell Corporation and Jack Diver is trying to uncover secrets. Someone has a secret wrapped inside their genes and someone else is going to discover that the trees are not quite what they seem…

Calyx 

As the survivors of mankind struggle to live beneath the biomass of plant life that literally envelops the planet, cutting off the sunlight and the air, an old enemy of Sky’s finally manifests, determined to make things worse.  As the hunt for the Juganet becomes more and more desperate, Bex Briggs discovers that one should never stand still for too long in this terrifying new world order…

Writer, director and producer Gary Russell said: “I love the original; it was a show I had grown up on and seen a thousand times, because I’ve got it on a nice shiny disc. Jason Haigh-Ellery turned around to me one day and said, “Look, we’ve got the rights from Bob Baker to do a new version of Sky.” I think he could see the passion and fervour and begging in my eyes. He said, “Do you want to do it?”, and I said yes, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. I’d been thinking since 1975 about what you could do with this show, so I was very keen to sit down and get on with it.

“Jason said to me, “Do you want to do a remake?”, and I said “No, I want to do a sequel.” I wanted to pick the story up 50 years later, and therefore I knew that the only character I needed to bring back – other than Sky, obviously – was Arby. The idea of Arby, the hero of the original, being this broken old man sitting in a nursing home somewhere – I thought, that’s your good launch pad. It’s about a redemption for him.”

A second volume, Into the Chaos, is due in June 2026. Sky: Before the Chaos is now available to pre-order as a digital download to own for just £19.99, exclusively here.

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