Program note: I’ll have a post on the new series’ “Deep Breath” tomorrow. I need a second viewing and some thinking time in order to have a fully-formed opinion.
“That didn’t go so well, did it?”
The Story
The TARDIS pics up a galactic distress signal coming from Earth in 1985, exactly where it shouldn’t be, and the Doctor and Peri land to find the source, since the presence of a stranded alien on Earth in that time is potentially disastrous even if the alien has friendly intentions. The source turns out to be Commander Lytton, leader of the Dalek mercenaries in Resurrection of the Daleks, last seen on Earth after apparently breaking free of their mind control. Lytton’s got a criminal gang plotting a diamond heist, but it appears his real goal is to contact a party of Cybermen who’ve set up a base in the sewers beneath London. The Cybermen have captured a “time vessel” which they’ve used to travel to 1985 from both the future and from their adopted home world of Telos. In 1986, one year from the series’ current “present,” the Cybermen attacked Earth from their original home planet Mondas, which was destroyed in the attempt (as seen in The Tenth Planet back in the Hartnell era) and now they plan to use their captured timeship to change history and prevent Mondas’ destruction— by destroying Earth first by causing Halley’s comet to crash into it. As the action shifts to Telos, the Doctor must join forces with the surviving native people of Telos, the Cryons, in order to stop the Cybermen before the Earth is destroyed.
Review
The quote at the top of the page isn’t my verdict on this story; in fact it’s not a bad story at all. Certainly far, far better than last week’s The Twin Dilemma, although that’s a textbook example of faint praise. The sad fact is that there’s no story of the Colin Baker era that I really like, but Attack of the Cybermen isn’t bad. In fact if they’d all managed just this level of quality— well, I’d still call it one of the weaker eras of Dr Who’s history, but the Classic series probably wouldn’t have gone into the popularity decline that eventually led to cancellation. We might well be talking about Peter Capaldi as the twentieth Doctor instead of the twelfth.
As it stands, Attack of the Cybermen shows a lot of promise, especially in the performance of Colin Baker as the Doctor. The Doctor has recovered from his instability (though Peri still has her doubts) and Baker finally gets the chance to show his Doctor as he’s going to be, and the Doctor really is in there. He has a certain childlike quality— in fact we can cover both the positive and negative aspects of the Sixth Doctor with the two adjectives childlike and childish. His ego is front and center, and he has a tendency to rush in without thinking, aflame with certainty that he must be right, but he’s equally quick to admit it if he discovers he’s wrong. And he goes through this adventure with a sort of happy fascination. You get a sense watching this story that just as the newly-regenerated Doctor is new to us, so his adventurous life is suddenly new to him. They should never have done the insanity story from The Twin Dilemma: they should have let the Sixth Doctor’s regeneration story look like this all the way through.
Besides the Doctor, we actually get some attention (amazingly, for the first time since they were first introduced) to the Cybermen’s threat that “you will become like us.” In the background of their headquarters, both on Earth and on Telos, are chambers with humans undergoing the process of cyber-conversion and several of the story’s minor characters— and one major character— get caught and suffer that fate. We’re shown a labor party where partially converted humans (“rejected” by the process for some reason) are used as slave labor under full Cyberman guards. It’s long overdue for the series to actually show us the Cybermen following through on their old threat. The Cryons are intriguing aliens, graceful creatures that can only survive in freezing temperatures and have something of the harmless look of the Sensorites from long ago. Lytton is an interesting character, whose scheming keeps us wondering what side he’s really on.
But for all the positives, there’s the frustration of the distinctive weaknesses of this era. The story is full of missed opportunities and bad decisions. We spend a lot of our time watching the escape attempt of two of the half-cybermen prisoners, a subplot that eventually comes to an end without having the slightest bearing on the main plot. The people in the cyber-conversion chambers never show any reaction or anything to drive home an awareness of what’s being done to them: they’re just background props (except for the one major character who gets a reaction at the very end). Though intriguing in themselves, it strains credibility that the Cryons are native to the planet Telos, since they can’t survive there without engineering refrigerated cities. How’d they survive before developing that technology? (Plus we haven’t had an alien with such a convenient name since the First Doctor landed on the desert planet Aridius.)
The Cybermen are far too easily beaten in combat: there’s no mention of their “weakness to gold” but no need of it. Back in the day the Cybermen were invulnerable to just about everything and it needed all the Doctor’s cleverness to find a way to stop them. These Cybermen go down before ordinary bullets, they have their heads knocked off by men swinging metal pipes, they fall right and left to people who get their cyber-guns away from them.
The Cybermen’s weakness is part and parcel of the level of violence throughout the story, which is the one thing that almost every reviewer notices. The script was written by Eric Saward (see below) who’s finally got a new Doctor he can turn into the hard-fighting action hero he’s wanted for some time, but could never do with Peter Davison. The Doctor gets a one-outing-only replacement for his sonic screwdriver: a “sonic lance” which differs from the former tool in that instead of being used to pick locks, it can be shoved into Cybermen’s chests. The Doctor fist-fights Lytton’s henchmen, takes down Cybermen with their own guns, and in general plows through the story more like the hero of an American cop show of the era rather than the Time Lord we’ve known.
A whole series of articles could be written about the fan controversies over taking the Doctor in this direction. Here’s my take: Although the new series has occasionally made out that the Doctor claims to be a pacifist (and then some villain tries to accuse him of hypocrisy about that), he really never has been a pacifist of any kind, nor in the Classic series did he claim to be. The Doctor Who universe is a melodramatic one of white hats and black hats, with monsters and alien forces of overwhelming evil and aggression, and the Doctor has never hesitated to rain destruction down on the heads of those that threaten the innocents in their path. It’s just that he generally finds a more clever way to do it than punching them out— he has to. The classic Doctor Who monster/alien is dangerous and scary because it cannot be stopped by any means available to the ordinary people in its path, and the Doctor has to find some other way to defeat it. A villain who goes down to ordinary human bullets is far less worthy of Dr who storytelling. So I don’t mind a Doctor who is ruthless to his enemies. He always has been. But I do mind Doctor Who stories in which the monster is such a pushover that the Doctor could be replaced by Starsky & Hutch and they’d do just as well as he did.
But the biggest flaw of Attack of the Cybermen is this: the whole story revolves around retconning a continuity contradiction between two stories from back in the sixties. If it had come during the celebratory season 20, it might have been justifiable. But now it seems that Dr Who has entered (in the words of a Doctor Who Magazine article on this era) “permanent celebration mode.” The show is drifting into being about its own past, and locking out fans not obsessive enough to have collected all the Target novelizations.When this story aired, VHS had arrived but only one single Dr Who story had been released on home video: Tom Baker’s Return of the Cybermen. There were no plans for that to be part of a series of releases. Tomb of the Cybermen, featuring Telos, was among the missing episodes at the time, and the fourth episode of The Tenth Planet was also gone (and still is). There was no prospect of either of these stories ever being seen again, and only the most dedicated and obsessive fans had even the vaguest recollection of them. Subscribers to DWM (which existed by this time) might have known there was a problematic trivia question about whether the Cybermen came from Mondas or Telos, or that we were only one year away from when they supposedly attacked Earth in 1986. The wider audience can only have found themselves scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on.
Details
The Doctor begins the episode having decided to finally fix the TARDIS’ chameleon circuit. He appears to succeed: the TARDIS gets away from the police box shape, but as the ship moves from place to place several times in this story, at every appearance it takes the form of something even more out of place than before. “She’s just out of practice,” the Doctor says when the TARDIS, in a junkyard, assumes the form seen at right, but when at the very end of the story the ship returns to familiar police box form, he gives it a reassuring pat and you can see on his face his decision to leave well enough alone in the future.- John Nathan-Turner, ever the publicist, let slip that the Doctor would be fixing the chameleon circuit and (as with the TARDIS’ destruction in last season’s Frontios) talked to the press as if this would be a permanent change. Of course it wasn’t, and was never intended to be.
- Attack of the Cybermen is credited to writer Paula Moore but was really written by Eric Saward. Paula Moore was a friend of Saward’s who let him use her name as a pseudonym to avoid the still-in-force BBC edict against script editors writing for their own series (a contrast to today, when the “showrunner” is expected to also be head writer). There’s some dispute over authorship. Ian Levine, employed at the time as the show’s “continuity advisor,” claims co-authorship while Eric Saward denies he contributed to the story. I have no idea who’s right, although the fact that the story centers on clearing up sixties’ era continuity certainly gives Levine some credibility.
- A major change occurred as season 22 began with this episode: by edict from above, Dr Who switched to 45-minute episodes, from the 22.5-minute episodes it had broadcast since the beginning. The change represented the BBC trying to give Dr Who a nudge to modernize: when it premiered in 1963, the shorter episode length and serial structure were the norm for BBC shows in all genres. But by the mid eighties, only sitcoms still had half hour episodes and dramas (including science fiction and fantasy) had switched to 45-minute standalone episodes, with at most the occasional two-parter. In short, the same format that most American television had used since the beginning. Dr Who’s serials increasingly looked out of date.
A 2-part story in the new format would have the same length as Dr Who’s most common 4-part length, but the structure would change. Writers for the series had always paid attention to the structure of individual episodes as well as the overall story, not just by including a cliffhanger at the end but also in designing the way the story unfolded. The same 90 minutes in 2 parts rather than 4 would allow a story to develop in a different way, with more room for character development and subplots, without the need to produce a satisfying installment in only 22.5 minutes.
Dr Who fans, hearing that the change was coming, were united in their outrage that the sacred format was going to be touched. “It will never work,” they proclaimed with one voice (by this time I was among them, despite the fact that I’d only ever seen episodes edited together into 90-minute features on PBS).
John Nathan-Turner listened to the fans— unfortunately. With hindsight, what he really should have done is redesign the series around 45-minute standalone episodes, like the new series. Instead he didn’t even let the writers take advantage of the change into 2 parts from 4.The stories from this season all look, and are paced, exactly as if each was made up of the full number of shorter episodes. Watch closely and you’ll realize that Attack of the Cybermen even has needless cliffhangers stuck in the middle of each of its two episodes: exactly halfway through part 1, the Doctor gets in a tussle with an imposter policeman, only to find another one holding a gun on him. At the exact same point in part 2, a Cryon turns straight to camera and ominously intones that the Cybermen plan to destroy Earth.
The opportunity provided by the time change was thus missed, and “it’ll never work” became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because of course a 45 minute episode really doesn’t work if it’s structured like 2 shorter episodes. The experiment would be dropped after this one season, leaving Dr Who to look increasingly out of date.
Next Week:
“Vengeance on Varos,” 2 episodes
