Day 321 — November 17th 2021
Attack of the Cybermen Part One
Attack of the Cybermen — Part One
This is one of the rare stories where I can absolutely remember the scroes I gave (to both episodes!) during my last marathon. I think the reason it’s stuck in my head is that this story was the first — I think — to receive a 2/10, which was the lowest I went to on that occasion. Having decided to champion the Colin Baker era and finding The Twin Dilemma a bit more of a slog than I’d hoped, this was the story which finally broke me.
As you can imagine, I’ve not been relishing reaching this one again. I’ve been harsher with my scores during this marathon (last time I avoided giving out any 1/10s at all, where I’ve already dished out ten of them this year), but then again I’ve also been more generous at the other end. There’s several stories which I know fared poorly with me before but which I’ve enjoyed significantly more this time around, like The Highlanders. So I went into this with an open mind, and…
…I liked it! Hooray! Okay, so I didn’t love it. It’s getting a 6/10 which is hardly a score to set the world alight, but it’s double the score I think it got last time, so that’s not a bad markup. The stuff which has worked best for me is all the London material, and I’m sort of sad that we don’t have more of it. There’s something bizarrely ordinary about seeing four blokes sat in a car in the middle of the city, and because it’s such a rare sight for the show it makes it stand out all the more. I wish there were more of this aspect before we dive off into the sewers.
See also Doctor Who and Peri wandering about the streets. Have we ever seen him wandering about a regular residential street like this? There’s the sort of fancy ‘heart of the city’ places used for The War Machines and The Mind of Evil, but this feels like something completely brand new, and I love it. I also find, somehow, Colin’s costume works when shot on film. It mutes the colours a little, but he still stands out as being apart from the world around him. I could watch him and Nicola Bryant running up and down these streets for ages, and I wish there were a bit more of that and a bit less standing around inside the TARDIS. It’s 14 minutes before they set foot outside the ship in this one, and although the policemen have been following them around in the background, they don’t interact with them until just past the 21 minute point. I’d do away with all the ‘fixing the Chameleon Circuit’ rubbish, drop Halley’s Comet, and simply open with them arriving in a scrap yard and setting off in pursuit of the distress call.
Ah yes, the scrap yard. People often talk about 1980s Doctor Who becoming a bit navel-gazing and self referential, desperate to please the fans. There’s been hints of it creeping in since John Nathan-Turner took over, in the form of flashback montages and the return of old characters and monsters, but I think Attack of the Cybermen is the moment when it all becomes a bit much. This one’s littered with references to other things. Obviously it’s a sequel to both The Tenth Planet and The Tomb of the Cybermen, but we also get references to Tegan, Zoe, Susan (twice!) and Jamie, and even the Terrible Zodin. I’ll forgive the return of Lytton and his policeman pals from the previous season because at least the way they wandered into the sunset there made it the perfect set up for a return.
We even land in the junk yard on Totter’s Lane, where we first encountered the TARDIS back in 1963, and Doctor Who gets to have a quick moment of nostalgia. Which is ironic because it doesn’t look anything like the same place, and it’ll change all over again when we come back in a few seasons’ time. I should say here that I’m not a fan of returning to Totter’s Lane, and I’m glad that they avoided it when Coal Hill came back in the Capaldi era, aside from a sign on the school wall in the 50th. There’s only one time I’ve ever been a fan of bringing the location back, and that’s when the TARDIS is parked there in The Harvest, but the whole place has been raized to the ground and replaced with a multi-storey car park. Neatly, the TARDIS lands in Bay 76.
It’s a shame to leave the sunny streets of London and vanish underground, but it has to be said that the sewer sets here are fantastic. There’s a few shots where you get a sense that they’re surprisingly large, and in contrast to one of the oft-repeated criticisms of this era they’re lit really carefully, with huge pools of darkness in which the Cybermen can lurk. There’s some genuine tension to all of this which really works for me, and there’s a fantastic shot of Doctor Who and Peri as they discover the body of a recent Cyberman victim.
The other benefit of being back in contemporary London is that we get some proper down to Earth guest characters in this one, and Griffiths has to be my favourite of the bunch. He gets all the best lines, and it’s his comic relief which has stood out in the story for me so far. There’s plenty of examples I could choose from, but I think my favourite is his response to the revelation that Lytton is from another planet;
Griffiths: ‘You said you came from Fulham.’
I’m pleased to add him to the list of guest characters who get to enter the TARDIS, but he’s one among many in this episode, because Lytton, Russell, the Cyberleader and five regular Cybermen all get to hop in for a ride to Telos in the closing moments.
As for the Cybermen themselves, ooh it’s nice to have them back. I always used to think of the Cybermen as my favourite Doctor Who monsters, but in recent years I’ve started to doubt myself on that. Just as I thought I might have been wrong in thinking that the Cybermen redesign was great in Earthshock, I was wrong to think I wouldn’t like them here, because they’re just so much fun. David Banks’ Cyberleader is the campiest thing in creation, and how fantastic is the black-painted ‘Cyberscout’ looming out of the shadows? We get plenty of great Cybermen action in this one once we start cutting to Telos, and from the number of sparks and explosions I think the production team remembered how good that looked in The Five Doctors.
All in all a positive start, and I think it gives me some hope for where things might go across the rest of this season.