Day 322 — November 18th 2021
Attack of the Cybermen Part Two
Attack of the Cybermen — Part Two
This is absolutely the episode I’ll have given the low score to last time around, because it’s notably weaker than the opening instalment. For some reason I’d gotten it into my head that we still had a bit of London material in this one, with the Cybermen continuing to skulk around the sewers, but there’s not a single frame of it — we spend the entire episode on Telos.
The biggest problem with that is that all of Telos looks so drab and boring. Photos from the location filming at Gerrards Cross for the planet’s surface show it to be a bright and vibrant setting, with some proper orange sands, but for the actual episode they’ve decided to drain all the life and colour out of it, desaturating to the point where part of the episode look like they might be in black and white. I can’t decide if this is a conscious decision to make it feel more like The Tomb of the Cybermen, or if they’re just trying to make the place look cold and have gone a bit far.
That sense of everything looking flat and dull continues inside the tombs themselves, which are probably the biggest missed opportunity in this story. The design of the tombs in 1967 were pretty iconic, and it seems bizarre that they’ve gone to all the trouble of returning to the same location for the exterior and hiring back Michael Kilgarriff as the Cybercontroller only to end up making the sets look so incredibly different — and significantly worse. At the very least, they could have stuck some of the Cyberman head motifs up around the place! The first episode of this one was made better because the action was taking place in nice settings; the locations and the sets all looked fantastic. Without those distraction here there’s more time to focus on other areas, and that’s not a good thing because the other areas aren’t… good.
First of all we get the introduction of the Cryons to the story — the natives of Telos who were forced into hiding when the Cybermen took control. They’re not the most successful alien species the programme has ever produced, with the kind of cheap design that I always think the general public thinks of when they picture ‘Classic’ Doctor Who. I can’t fault them for putting the work in during rehearsals to give the species a consistent manner of performance, but it all just ends up looking a little silly — there’s aspects where this looks like a GCSE drama performance, as the Cryons work their hand movements into every scene and try to modulate their sing-song voices. There’s flashes in there where it feels like they might almost be quite fun, largely in the moments when Flast gets to be a bit pessimistic with Doctor Who, but they end up being more annoying than anything else.
You’ve also got Lytton’s redemption in this one, which feels like a bizarre turn of events. He’s presented in Resurrection of the Daleks as being someone who simply works for them, and I can buy the idea that he’s happy to sell his services to the Cybermen in this one. But then it’s revealed that he’s actually working to help free the Cryons and save the Earth from being destroyed. At the very end Doctor Who bemoans the fact that he’d misjudged the man, but he made his judgement on exactly the same info we had. It’s also strange that Doctor Who seems so worked up about the man given that they only spent a few seconds on screen together in their last story.
As for the rest of the guest cast… it’s nice to see the story with Stratton and Bates finally link up with the main story, but when they reach the end of their journey and all end up dead I found myself wondering what the point was. I think Eric Saward was aiming for the feeling of Caves of Androzani Part Four — that sense of crushing inevitability as everyone is slowly picked off one by one, but here it just comes across as a waste of time. I think you could get away with it if their actions had any material difference to the outcome of the story, but as it is they just feel like they were there to pad out the story and for no other reason.
Overall this one is just a bit of a disappointment, especially after I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much there was to enjoy in Part One. I’m going for a 2/10.
