Sunday 10 April 2011

Attack on the Cybermen 08 - Attack of the Cybermen

I really thought that, by this story, we'd had more cybermen tales in the series.  However, given that this one lifts and borrows from most of the others it just makes it feel as though we've had twice as many.  With so many things pinched and reworked from other stories, it's no wonder that this one feels a right mess.

Okay, the cyber plan is "simple".  Go back in time (using stolen time technology) and stop Mondas being destroyed by making Haley's comet slam into the Earth.  The Doctor recognises this as catastrophic.  Peri sees this as a pretty bad move.  The cryons (oh so tempting to add an extra "a" into that word) aren't too sure it's a wise move... yet the cybermen don't seem to have a problem with a paradoxical change to the web of time on a cataclysmic scale. However as they also seem to know a great deal about the time lords, piloting the TARDIS and other odds and ends about which they were previously clueless, the first question has to be "where did they get their knowledge?" The precise dating of this story (well, the Telos sections anyway) are a little hard to place. They seem to be the same design as the Earthshock cybermen (even though the controller should be the Tomb design) but not quite the Revenge design.  I'm wondering if there are off camera adventures involving the cybermen in which they pick up all their 80s knowledge of all things "time".  Speaking of off camera knowledge, given the Doctor barely met Lytton in "Resurrection of the Daleks", just how is he so familiar with him here?  So yes, the plan's a bit of a suicidal one that only the cybermen think is a good one.   We won't be chalking it up to a mastery of logic and lacking in emotions (check out the two cybermen who run from the explosion at the very end by the way, they're DEFINITELY showing emotion... and campness).

Right then, which bits have we had pinched wholesale?
Tenth Planet - the Mondas "plot"
Moonbase - actually nothing specific seems to have been stolen from this one
Tomb - well it's set in Cyber tombs BUT they're clearly not the same ones from Tomb of the Cybermen and they seem to be serving a different purpose. However, they're clearly referred to as the tombs so we have to assume that the production team intended it to be a reference (hence the controller)
Wheel - the stupidly insane plot's a tribute to Wheel in Space's masterpiece of bad science
Invasion - the sewers and the ship on the dark side of the moon
Revenge - the double dealing traitor and the race that's supposed to have died out
Earthshock - well most of this story was pinched from earlier ones anyway...

The main problem is I spent most of episode one waiting for things to start.  It felt as though it was the plot of a 25 minute opening episode stretched out to 45 with the aid of running around corridors (sorry, streets this time and sewers), gratuitous shots of cybermen being destroyed (this story presents them at their weakest with a new method of killing them turning up nearly every ten minutes in episode one!) and Peri jiggling.  There were a few nice lines ("You said you came from Fulham") and one of my favourite pieces of music being used as the incidental music (no, not the Steptoe theme) but all in all the first 45 minutes just left me thinking "this is an utter mess of continuity errors".  The errors are right through the first episode up to the closing seconds where the console room doors magically close themselves instantly (Peri goes to close them, the lever explodes, the cybermen march in and then suddenly they're closed).  With the Mondas plot kicking in in part two things just get worse and worse... By the end of the second episode I'd reached the point of wanting it to be over just to stop the assault on my mind.  Too many things coming from the screen that didn't make sense (along with the disappointment of seeing how badly dated all the circuitry behind the roundels in the TARDIS looks) and too many heart sinking moments as the cybermen get dispatched with so many conventional weapons.  Yes, they've never been indestructible but when it gets reduced to a solid thwack with a piece of pipe you know things have gone too far.

Attack of the Cybermen highlights the problems that the series was having in the 80s.  Thankfully most of Colin's other stories rise massively above this one but as a season opener, as a cyber story and as an attempt at a continuity fest it fails on almost every level.  As a needlessly violent way to put flashes and bangs on the screen though....

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