Day 202 — July 21st 2021
Revenge of the Cybermen Parts One and Two
Revenge of the Cybermen — Part One
I’ve been agonising over what to do with this story for months now. I think I’ve actually been weighing up the options for longer than I’ve been doing the marathon, because I remember discussing it with a friend in December when trying to work out the calendar for the year to ensure I fit in the entire Old Testament and reached The TV Movie on New Year’s Eve.
The debate is this; do I watch the original version of Revenge of the Cybermen broadcast in 1975, or do I skip it and instead listen to the recently released Big Finish audio based on early drafts of the script?
As with most 1970s stories, I can’t remember what sort of scores I gave this one last time around, but I do know that when I think of Revenge I tend to think ‘bit naff’ at the same time, so that’s probably an indication. The new version is intriguing, though, because it offers a fairly valid alternative, as it’s based on an earlier version by the original writer, before Robert Holmes stepped in an made changes (I don’t know if they were merely suggestions which Gerry Davies carried out, or if he rewrote wholesale as with The Ark in Space). I’ve always heard that the original version was considered too much of a throwback to the 1960s and that Holmes wanted something with a bit more depth, but I might not be against a throwback — hey it worked for Planet of the Daleks a few weeks ago!
I’d still not decided which way to go when I got up this morning, but I’ve ultimately decided to stick with the original for two reasons. The first (and main) one is that I want to be able to compare my scores for each Old Testament story like-for-like when I get to the end of the year. I want to see how much stories have changed in my estimations for better or worse. There’s several stories (hello, The Highlanders) which I know I disliked in 2013 and enjoyed much more this time around. But there’s far more stories for which I honestly can’t remember what I thought, and certainly not what I scored. If I’m going to do it properly so I can compare them all, then I need to watch all the same stories, and I know it’d bother me when I go to make a graph next January and have to omit these four episodes because I listened to a different story in their place.
The second reason is that while I’ve heard really good things about the recasts of Sarah Jane and Harry, there’s so few episodes with Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter together, and I want to savour each and every one of them, because they’re brilliant. So Return of the Cybermen goes back onto the ‘I’d like to hear that, one day’ list, and I go off to see if Revenge of the Cybermen really is a ‘bit naff’ as I imagine it to be.
And… well, I mean this first episode is fine. I’m giving it a 6/10 which isn’t a bad score by any means, and there’s quite a lot going on in this episode which I really like. Harry asking to keep the Time Ring only to watch it vanish in front of him is brilliant (as is Tom Baker’s reaction which feels so incredibly warm and welcoming that I think it’s the first time since Troughton’s era that I’ve looked at Doctor Who and thought ‘I’d like to be your friend’).
Even though we start with some fun light humour, things turn dark very quickly, and while I’m not usually a fan of my Doctor Who being too brooding, I love the moment where they open a door only for a dead body to collapse in front of them, having been propped up against the other side. It’s such a great way to kick start the mystery, and I reckon you could get away with copying this opening beat-for-beat in a new episode and no one would bat an eyelid. Why waste time on set up when you can just stick a dead body in front of the heroes and say ‘go on, then, solve that’.
The dead bodies don’t stop there, either. When we get back out into that beautiful Nerva corridor set, it’s littered with them! Loads of them! A friend mentioned afterwards that he hates that moment because the bodies are all plastic mannequins, but I’ll admit I didn’t even notice. I watched this one on BritBox on the iPad rather than on a larger modern telly, so maybe that helped to hide the effect a little more? Who cares, it worked for me.
We’re then introduced to a relatively small guest cast, and then even one of them is killed off before the episode’s through. It’s a bloodbath, this one, and it’s done surprisingly well. Certainly better than I was expecting.
And yet… oh, it’s just not grabbing me! All these great moments and ideas, and it’s moving at a hell of a pace (Doctor Who’s uncovered the baddie among them already!), we’ve been presented with the set up in two different locations — Nerva and Voga — and we’ve even been touching in with the Cybermen on their own ship. But in spite of all this, I find myself not really caring about any of it.
Fingers crossed the story can suck me in a little more as all these disparate elements start to intertwine — I’m especially looking forward to seeing the Cybermen arrive on Nerva, because I was expecting them in the cliffhanger here and they never arrived!
Revenge of the Cybermen — Part Two
Oh lord, we’ve spent a lot of time in this episode down on Voga and I have to say that my interest in anything which happens there is pretty much nil.
I don’t think it helps that the design for Voga is pretty rubbish. I praised Rodger Murray-Leach to the heavens earlier in the season or his design of the Nerva Beacon, but I’m afraid I have to say his work on this one certainly doesn’t compare. The main rooms on Voga, with their painted marble effect, ends up looking a bit like a dodgy All You Can Eat buffet, and not — as I suspect was the intention — like a classy palace on a ‘planet’ of gold.
The other thing that’s bothering me is just how far the design work stretches… because I’d argue that the answer is ‘not far enough’. Take, for example, the little boats that the Vogans use to cross the water in their caves. They’re just the little boats you’d have found if you rocked up to Wookey Hole in the mid-1970s, I’d wager. The same is true of their ‘sky striker’ — it’s just stock footage of a rocket. I think I’m right in saying that a later episode even showcases a great big US flag painted on the side.
It just means that I’m constantly reminded that this is all taking place on a tiny budget in a BBC studio, and it just doesn’t hold together for me. That said, I don’t think I’m ever happy, because when they do try to modify things to fit in — as with the little carts they drive around in, which appear to have been altered to look like they might be made of rock, or at least camouflaged — I think they look equally rubbish and wish they hadn’t bothered!
The Vogans themselves aren’t a great design either — having come from the brilliant Davros mask in the last story they stand out all the more, and for the wrong reasons. The masks look fairly poorly applied, giving them a static ‘fake’ appearance, which means try as the actors might (and oh boy, they’re trying) they can’t get any emotion through. I can’t help but wonder if they might have been better off just making the actors up to look like little old men in general, rather than trying to get the effect of old alien men?
Still, I won’t be totally negative — this story sees the introduction of the Seal of Rassilon (although, of course, that’s not what it is yet) and I think it actually looks quite effective here. The table, with an emblem at either end, works surprisingly well.
And we get the arrival of the Cybermen on Nerva at the end of this one, which is everything I wanted it to be. The design of the Revenge Cybers isn’t my favourite — they’ve tried to update the versions from The Invasion and gotten it slightly wrong, I think. They aimed for ‘chunkier’ and simply got ‘cuddlier’, which isn’t really what you want from the Cybermen. But the design does incorporate one of my favourite ever Cyberman ideas; having the guns built into the headpiece.
They use the idea to great effect here, with the Cybermen hauling themselves through the doorway and immediately shooting down everyone in sight! It’s fantastic, and I honestly can’t remember the last time the silver giants were as effective as that. It’s just a shame that the scene accounts for about ninety seconds at the end of an episode I’ve had no interest in. It’s a 3/10 for this one.
