6.2: Attack of the Cybermen

In which it all goes even wronger.

Broadcast: January 1985

Watched: January 2021

Attack of the Cybermen, Part One

“We’ve spent too long in the TARDIS” – ah, the theme of the era. They do get out before the 15 minute mark at least.

Anyway. This is a violent mess but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would? I did think it’d be horrible, mind. It clips along at least. But the lack of effort to link the various subplots is annoying, and there is no way of making a scene with cybermen plotting to each other not terrible. The dialogue is barely comprehensible.

Weird caps in the titles in opening credits. It’s like they’re shouting at us. And what is the point in keeping the monsters secret in the opening sequence in the sewers if you’re going to put their name in the f*cking title?

Peri still being obviously scared of the Doctor is good continuity but a bad choice. I’m not sure the return of the creepy Resurrection policemen is welcome either. I do like Colin wanting to help a stranger alien, and obviously having filthy thoughts about the Terrible Zodin. The bit where he starts a fight with an armed policeman is baffling. The Doctor telling Peri to shoot an undercover cop is *mental*.

Oooh the Earthshock music! Awesome. The appearance of the cybermen would be better if this story had a different title.

Lot of pointless continuity. The list of companion names the Doctor keeps calling Peri. Totter’s Yard (that definitely isn’t Shoreditch by the way). The dramatic sting when Lytton says “the planet... Telos” because everyone obviously remembers an 18 year old story which at this point doesn’t exist. [1967’s Tomb of the Cybermen, not rediscovered until 1991]. How the f*ck does the Doctor remember Lytton, with whom he shared one scene?

Is this the first time they properly play the “Cybermen will make you like them” angle? Huh, one of the background cybermen is black rather than silver. WTF? Also these cybermen die too easily. And too many people shout “No” at the cliffhanger. Which has the same final line as Earthshock 1 with a slightly different pronoun.

Still. An improvement on Twin at least.

82 to go.

Attack of the Cybermen, Part Two

“It didn’t go very well, did it.” Took me the length of the episode to get through the first 10 minutes because I kept getting distracted by Twitter, which is never a great sign. Anyway.

Even more than Resurrection, which at least manages to stay quite action-y in part two, this is a come down from part one. The two big problems everyone knows about:

1) The violence. The cybermen randomly beating the Doctor up to teach him a lesson. The bit where they literally torture Lytton. In Earthshock, even in Resurrection, I could understand the dramatic reason for it – to say that the old monsters we haven’t seen in years are bigger than the normal ones – but here the explanation just seems to be “Eric Saward”. There are moments, like when the cyberleader complains that the Doctor has lied to them, when I’m not entirely certain the script editor isn’t on the monsters’ side.

That at least is a vision for the show: we think it’s the wrong one, but presumably the people making it didn’t so there is at least a logic in it. The more baffling one is:

2) The fanwank. This is the closest the show ever comes to making a Gary Russell story. [A writer from the interregnum famous for absolutely ramming his books and audios with continuity references] To get the most out of this episode it helps to have some knowledge of: the Time Lords and their policy on intervention (although exactly what they do to push the Doctor towards this problem is not clear); the laws of time (to the extent that they are ever consistent in Doctor Who); and the events of 1966’s The Tenth Planet, 1967’s Tomb of the Cybermen, and 1984’s Resurrection of the Daleks. Why the f*ck would you do that, *in your season premiere*?

This line sums up the problem: “Look, I’m finding all this a bit disturbing. Cybermen, now Daleks. Time travel in an organ.” Griffiths says “Daleks” because the audience knows they’re important... but there’s no reason whatsoever he’d have picked up on this as an important word.

Anyway, those are just the problems everyone always talks about! To them I would add:

3) Bad dialogue.

“Cybermen have one weakness” – no they seem to have quite a lot of weaknesses actually, for a start they can be killed with bullets. FFS. Then there’s:

PERI: Well, why not on their own planet? I assume they had one. What’s the matter?

GRIFFITHS: What is the matter?

LYTTON: Yes, Doctor. What’s the matter?

Oh F*CK off. Unlike the first episode I think this is actually quite badly written. Did the balance of Saward [generally assumed to be the co-writer] and [credited script writer Paula] Moore’s contributions change?

4) Bad plotting. Why do the cybermen from the tombs attack the ones that aren’t from the tombs? Cyber-conversion seems to be a surprisingly quick process – must take about five minutes with Lytton, which is silly. The Stratton/Bates/Griffiths scene takes up a lot of time and goes nowhere – like Styles and the self-destruct sequence.

The Doctor says “I must help him!” in lieu of actually doing anything that might help. “Why didn’t he say something?” The Doctor is right: there’s no reason beyond false drama for Lytton not to have said he’s working for the Cryons.

Lastly, it’s a bit weird how, the moment he can, the Doctor wants to leave – okay a bomb is going to go off which will destroy cyber control, but it isn’t very Doctor-ish.

5) Non-specific bad production choices. The cybermen voices are not easily or entirely comprehensible. Lot of stupid design in this story. The cryons (whose name is annoyingly Terry Nation, and who have really irritating voices). The cybercontroller’s big head.

I think the biggest problem, though, is:

6) The last line. “I don’t think I’ve ever misjudged anybody quite as badly as I did Lytton.” No, the guy was a f*cking mercenary – he wasn’t one of the good guys, he just happened to be working for the nice aliens on this occasion, and the Doctor is more upset for him than anyone else. That Saward thinks this is the lesson here is... telling.

Other observations: the Faith Brown Cryon seems to be coming onto Colin. How exactly does Lytton know about regeneration? [Someone replied with the observation that there’s a sort of cosmopolitan class in Doctor Who that seem to know all the mythology.] I do quite like that it turns out to be his distress signal the Doctor was tracking.

The Tomb sets are also good even if we don’t see them properly (“I’d forgotten how big they are [even though we can’t see them because the budget, even now, doesn’t stretch]”). There’s even some good model work when we see a spaceship land.

Does Tenth Planet explicitly take place in 1986, or this is a retcon? [It does, there’s a wall calendar.]

Last thing: the chameleon circuit breaks again, and is never even mentioned? The TARDIS turns back into a police box, the Doctor sort of tuts a bit, but it doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the end of the story, so they just ignore it? Did I miss something? [I did not.]

[Some time later]

Getting angrier about Attack the longer I sit with it. Who’s Next says it’s a candidate for the worst story – I was ready to push back on that after episode 1, but I’m less sure now, if only because it’s one of those that gets worse the more that you think about it. 

I don’t think running Twin, then Attack, should be fatal for the show: Time-Flight, then Arc, are two godawful stories ending and then beginning a season back to back, too, and the rest of season 20 is actually really good. But the ways in which they’re bad – plotting and dialogue, and bad decisions rather than lack of resources – are unnerving. Also, they’re setting a new direction.

Colin has still not done anything to make me warm to him. I think maybe my grand unified theory is that “If you want to make your new Doctor more dangerous, you don’t cast an RSC wannabe and put him in that coat”.