I might have been a bit hasty in my last blog where I said that Tomb should have remained lost forever. I think I should have saved that comment for the next cyber story, The Wheel in Space. Having just put myself through the six episodes (over the course of three days, I just couldn't face it in one sitting) I've come to the conclusion that if you want to have an example of really bad Doctor Who then you should probably select Wheel. On so many levels it's a complete and utter failure. In a rare mood of charity I will perform a partial defence of the story. It's six episodes (always difficult to pull off without using the 4+2 format) and only two of them survive. One of these is episode three (that's the padding episode in a story that's largely padding anyway) and all six episodes seem to have windows with very little dialogue that have lost their impact by being audio only. But even taking this aural aspect into account, the story still sucks.
I could be verbose and highlight just how dull this story is, I could go into great detail about how slow moving and padded it feels or how it could probably have been condensed into a three parter without dropping anything significant but, quite frankly, I'm not sure I want to waste my time on that. I could also say how little the Doctor actually does (unlike in Tomb where he's indirectly responsible for all bar one death, in this one he does so little that he's not really responsible for anything) but instead I'll try and focus on the two really REALLY awful things about this story, namely the science and the cybermen. Seriously, it's as though the presence of cybermen instantly drops the plausibility of the science down several powers of ten.
Firstly, we have the return of the cybermats (though sadly not the really cute small ones, just the adult versions). This time around they seem to have picked up the trick of being able to pass through solid objects. It might just be the fact we don't have the footage but I've always understood it that the eggs that they're launched from the Silver Carrier in somehow pass through the hull of the Wheel. There's an associated pressure drop (oh the memories of The Moonbase) but it's not something I've ever really seen picked up on. It's one of those talents that make you think "so why don't the cybermen do this at the end?". The cybermen's return was signalled in the trailer, even if it's not really suggested until episode two which does remove some of the mystery from the story. What wasn't signalled in the trailer was the absolute insanity of their plot. The cybermen ionise a star in the Messier 13 cluster which somehow causes it to go nova. I'm not entirely sure how this works as it's usually gravitational collapse of an absolutely massive star that causes this. To go nova, a star usually burns its way through its hydrogen supply to become a red giant and then burns its helium to the extent that it implodes so violently that the energy released is approximately the same as that released by an entire galaxy (only for a few days mind you). You could almost see that as a valid threat if it weren't for one absolutely tiny problem. The Messier 13 cluster is just over 25,000 (twenty five thousand) light years from the Earth. The whole cluster is barely visible with the naked eye from the earth, so if one star in it goes nova then we'll see a glow in the sky but not much more. Still, somehow the energy from this star that's been forced to go nova diverts a cluster of meteorites into the path of the wheel. If the star going nova explodes with such force that it can effect the path of meteorites 25,000 light years away from it, then I think the wheel has got other issues to worry about along the lines of it getting smashed to pieces itself. Still, not to worry. The cybermen have engineered the Silver Carrier to be 87million miles off course and carrying a handy supply of the fuel rods for the wheel's X-ray laser to replace the rods that the cybermats ate. All this so that two cybermen can be smuggled on board the wheel to repair the laser and then provide a homing signal for the smaller cyberships to... sorry I think at that point my brain completely gave up and went on holiday.
The cybermen, by the way, are now in a three fingered design but with blunted tips which must be hell to try and pick anything up with. They still have their chest units (which glow to kill people in this one) but the purpose of the rather cumbersome devices eludes me (especially as, in Tomb, the cybercontroller didn't wear one). One cyberman is killed off by having his chest unit covered in the spray plastic that Jamie uses to damage the laser. However, the other cybermen are seemingly quite capable of space walking (and, of course, we saw the cybermen on the moon's surface in Moonbase) which suggests that these units aren't there to enable them to breathe. Their exact purpose will be questioned further in future stories.
Where I REALLY object to this story though is that no-one seems to know who the cybermen are, inspire of every kid knowing about them in The Moonbase. We later learn that Zoe's a 21st century girl, so how come everyone knew about them in 2070 but not in this story? It's a kick in the teeth for the cybermen who, so far, only really have the claim to fame that they were Earth's first contact. I still don't find the cybermats particular menacing (even if episode three has one of the weirdest attack scenes ever in Doctor Who's history when they gang up on Kemel) and the "metal plate + transistor = protection" goes completely over my head. Sadly we've got that again in The Invasion so I'll deal with it then.
The Wheel in Space is a total mess and, most offensively, it's a tedious slow mess. This could so easily have been a snappy three parter but no, it's six episode of dull dialogue (where there even is dialogue not long shots of people in corridors) and a plot that makes absolutely no sense. There's no threat of cybertisation and the cybermen are just generic baddies in this with nothing to make them particularly memorable. What's more it presents us with a future where we still record onto tape, giant lava lamps make up essential parts of space wheels and people wear outfits that look like they're made from sleeping bags. Perhaps man kind really shouldn't go into space after all...
Showing posts with label seconddoctor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seconddoctor. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Attack on the Cybermen 03 - Tomb of the Cybermen
I think I've had my moment of realisation. Sadly it's not the one I'd hoped for. I'd hoped that it would be "Wow, yeah... the cybermen really are great" and that I could post something glowing tonight. However, I've had the next best thing I guess. I know where my dislike of the cybermen has come from. It's not a brilliant thing to realise, because it's probably going to make me stand out even more from fandom with my opinions than I already do.
I don't like the cybermen because of "Tomb of the Cybermen". It's four episodes that should have remained lost forever, soundtrack included.
Right then, more than usual, this post is going to act as therapy for me. It'll probably open up all kinds of other cans of worms but hey, that's the great thing about therapy sessions, you never know what you'll end up hating. Errrrr, so I'm told. At its heart, I'm sure there's a good story here. The cybermen, weakened through lack of resources, set a trap with the intention of luring the greatest minds there, pinching their bodies and slowly rebuilding the cyber race. I'll admit that, simplified down to that level, it's a reasonable idea. The problem comes when you expand it to include the detail of their precise plans and then it REALLY goes pear shaped (not, unlike, the cyber controller). It doesn't help that what we get in this story doesn't really then tie in with Attack of the Cybermen, a story which I'll reach soon enough. Throw in some very dodgy production values (yes, I know, it was the 60s, shoestring budget and all that), a Doctor that doesn't feel overly Doctorish and you end up with a story that let me down on so many levels that it couldn't help but put me off cybermen for a very long time.
I'll happily admit that the first 16 minutes or so of episode one aren't too bad. The production clearly wants to be a feature film, the TARDIS console room even has an echo (which doesn't quite tie in with the visuals as in some shots it still looks very small) and the music sounds vaguely cinematic. The explosion looks semi-decent (though when we get to the studio footage it doesn't really look like a set of doors that's just been blown into accessibility) and, in a nice piece of continuity to The Moonbase, the TARDIS seems to "land" rather than materialise. We've got the stylised cybermen on the walls (which does tie in well with the whole trap aspect of it) and the inside of the main room in the tomb looks... okay, so once we're inside the tomb itself then a certain element of cheapness starts to enter the production. Cheapness I can forgive if the story's half way decent but, sadly, once the plot proper starts up then my ability to watch without wanting to throw something at the screen starts to drop. It's a story based, allegedly, around logic. Yet nothing in it seems in any way, shape or form, logical to me. Maybe it's just the story's attempt to be wrong with authority. All of the dialogue involving the mathematical sequences sounds, to my slightly mathematically inclined ears, as though someone's given the writer a scientific dictionary and told them to just use words at random without bothering to look at what they mean. The first one to make my teeth grind was when we're told that the logic sequences are based around a binary to digital conversion. Given that binary is basically digital logic, yeah... my brain probably should have taken a holiday at that point but instead it stayed to be told all about sequences and logic functions. It really, really should have taken a break.
Then there's the cybermen's plan. They freeze themselves in a huge tomb (which seems to contain less than a dozen of them) and hide the controls to it behind "logic" puzzles. Luckily for us, there's a convenient "reverse" function to pad the plot out. Now, one huge problem that I do have with this (on the science front), is the whole freeze thaw process. Every substance has something called a specific heat capacity. This is the energy that you have to put in to raise the temperature of one kilogram of it by one degree. The cyber tomb is a fairly sizable affair, several levels high and quite a few cells wide and the ice over it looks fairly thick. So there's got to be a good few kilograms of ice covering it up. Throw the lever and, kapow, the ice all melts in seconds. What's more, the floor isn't covered with water all of a sudden (oh how I would have loved to have seen a health and safety risk assessment for that in the 60s) so there is, presumably, extra energy put in to change the water into steam (calculated using a slightly different concept called specific latent heat). Basically, there must be a HUGE power source needed to get all that done in about 5 seconds. Even weirder is that when the system goes into reverse, the ice magically forms over the tombs once more which means that there's probably some sort of water wall that has to pour down over them and a huge heat pump to take the energy away from the water to get it to turn into ice. So, apart from wasting huge amounts of energy on the thawing process, the cybermen also have a recharging room where they can recharge one cyberman at a time. Still, there only seem to be about 9 of them on Telos so it doesn't matter, the queue won't be that long.
Something that is very present in this story is the threat of being turned into a cyberman. You belong to us, you will be like us, we now have a catchphrase. For the time being though, I'm going to hold off on commenting on the threat for one very good reason. I don't actually understand it and want to know more about it. I don't, for one moment, expect I'll learn much about it in future stories but it's a nice idea. All we really know from this story is that it seems a fairly mess-less process to give Toberman a three-fingered cyber-arm instead of his own. Just why this design of cyberman thinks that three fingers is a good idea I'm not too sure. Sadly the costume budget doesn't stretch to much past a silver glove with three pointy fingers but I know that in future stories we learn there's a reason that the cybermen look like normal men in baggy silver suits. Still, a man in a baggy suit is still better than the really rough looking one we see at the end of part one (though, admittedly, part two gives a non-sensical reason for this, just why would a cyber weapon be designed to destroy a cyberman?).
Then there's the cybermat. Forerunner and far superior to the modern series' cyber-shayde, this first appearance of the cybermat raises a huge number of questions that never really get answered in this story. Firstly, why are there two sizes? Is the implication supposed to be that these are organic devices that actually grow and mature? Secondly, why is everyone so frightened of them? I used to have pet rats (I miss them terribly at the moment) and to be honest I was more afraid of Psycho at feeding time than I ever have been of the cybermats. They just look so fragile that one encounter with a cheap Doc Marten knock off and they'd be history. Or, at the very least, you could jump over them. Finally, the Doctor knows about them, another part of this mythology that I'm building up in my mind that the cybermen are "significant". I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a "missing" Hartnell story that features the Doctor's first encounter with silver style cybermen and cybermats, it would explain a lot. (Dear Big Finish....)
Okay, so the cyber plan sucks, the cybermats aren't a plausible threat in this one and they'd be better off as heating engineers than galactic invaders. But there's another reason why I truly dislike this story. With the exception of the poor guy who died trying to open the doors in episode one, every other death in the story is thanks to the presence and actions of the Doctor. He opens the doors into the weapons testing room, he presses the button that opens the hatch to the tomb, he's the idiot who puts the cybercontroller into the revitalisation chamber without a decent plan for not letting him out... Yes, Doctor, you are responsible for a LOT of deaths in this one. You're also seemingly responsible for the magic production of a cloak but that's a minor crime compared to the blood on your hands in these four episodes. You opened the tombs, you caused the deaths. It's your fault.
Finally, some other random things I really don't like about this story:
- the weird gurgling noises the cybermen make in the battle scenes. Wha??? Did they cybertise Bill and Ben?
- Toberman being one of the few instances in Doctor Who where someone being hypnotised doesn't make their acting more wooden
- Victoria, the victorian, selecting a mini skirt
- the cybermen saluting the emergence of the cybercontroller seems a rather emotional response
- the cybercontroller not having a chest unit (yes, it makes him look different, but it leaves you wondering why the rest have them in the first place)
- locking the baddies in the weapons testing room along with the ummm weapons.
When I was younger I remember all the hype about this story. Second to Tenth Planet this was the other holy grail. DWM had comments from the uberfans telling us how wonderful this story was, how it was an absolute classic... then the wretched thing turned up on video. Take one teenage fan, tell him that the world's best Who story has just been found... then show it to him and make him realise that it's a pile of kak, a nonsensical mess of a story with production values that didn't even let it fall into the style-over-substance category. Tomb of the Cybermen, you let me down. And you ruined cybermen for me for the next few decades. I despise you.
I don't like the cybermen because of "Tomb of the Cybermen". It's four episodes that should have remained lost forever, soundtrack included.
Right then, more than usual, this post is going to act as therapy for me. It'll probably open up all kinds of other cans of worms but hey, that's the great thing about therapy sessions, you never know what you'll end up hating. Errrrr, so I'm told. At its heart, I'm sure there's a good story here. The cybermen, weakened through lack of resources, set a trap with the intention of luring the greatest minds there, pinching their bodies and slowly rebuilding the cyber race. I'll admit that, simplified down to that level, it's a reasonable idea. The problem comes when you expand it to include the detail of their precise plans and then it REALLY goes pear shaped (not, unlike, the cyber controller). It doesn't help that what we get in this story doesn't really then tie in with Attack of the Cybermen, a story which I'll reach soon enough. Throw in some very dodgy production values (yes, I know, it was the 60s, shoestring budget and all that), a Doctor that doesn't feel overly Doctorish and you end up with a story that let me down on so many levels that it couldn't help but put me off cybermen for a very long time.
I'll happily admit that the first 16 minutes or so of episode one aren't too bad. The production clearly wants to be a feature film, the TARDIS console room even has an echo (which doesn't quite tie in with the visuals as in some shots it still looks very small) and the music sounds vaguely cinematic. The explosion looks semi-decent (though when we get to the studio footage it doesn't really look like a set of doors that's just been blown into accessibility) and, in a nice piece of continuity to The Moonbase, the TARDIS seems to "land" rather than materialise. We've got the stylised cybermen on the walls (which does tie in well with the whole trap aspect of it) and the inside of the main room in the tomb looks... okay, so once we're inside the tomb itself then a certain element of cheapness starts to enter the production. Cheapness I can forgive if the story's half way decent but, sadly, once the plot proper starts up then my ability to watch without wanting to throw something at the screen starts to drop. It's a story based, allegedly, around logic. Yet nothing in it seems in any way, shape or form, logical to me. Maybe it's just the story's attempt to be wrong with authority. All of the dialogue involving the mathematical sequences sounds, to my slightly mathematically inclined ears, as though someone's given the writer a scientific dictionary and told them to just use words at random without bothering to look at what they mean. The first one to make my teeth grind was when we're told that the logic sequences are based around a binary to digital conversion. Given that binary is basically digital logic, yeah... my brain probably should have taken a holiday at that point but instead it stayed to be told all about sequences and logic functions. It really, really should have taken a break.
Then there's the cybermen's plan. They freeze themselves in a huge tomb (which seems to contain less than a dozen of them) and hide the controls to it behind "logic" puzzles. Luckily for us, there's a convenient "reverse" function to pad the plot out. Now, one huge problem that I do have with this (on the science front), is the whole freeze thaw process. Every substance has something called a specific heat capacity. This is the energy that you have to put in to raise the temperature of one kilogram of it by one degree. The cyber tomb is a fairly sizable affair, several levels high and quite a few cells wide and the ice over it looks fairly thick. So there's got to be a good few kilograms of ice covering it up. Throw the lever and, kapow, the ice all melts in seconds. What's more, the floor isn't covered with water all of a sudden (oh how I would have loved to have seen a health and safety risk assessment for that in the 60s) so there is, presumably, extra energy put in to change the water into steam (calculated using a slightly different concept called specific latent heat). Basically, there must be a HUGE power source needed to get all that done in about 5 seconds. Even weirder is that when the system goes into reverse, the ice magically forms over the tombs once more which means that there's probably some sort of water wall that has to pour down over them and a huge heat pump to take the energy away from the water to get it to turn into ice. So, apart from wasting huge amounts of energy on the thawing process, the cybermen also have a recharging room where they can recharge one cyberman at a time. Still, there only seem to be about 9 of them on Telos so it doesn't matter, the queue won't be that long.
Something that is very present in this story is the threat of being turned into a cyberman. You belong to us, you will be like us, we now have a catchphrase. For the time being though, I'm going to hold off on commenting on the threat for one very good reason. I don't actually understand it and want to know more about it. I don't, for one moment, expect I'll learn much about it in future stories but it's a nice idea. All we really know from this story is that it seems a fairly mess-less process to give Toberman a three-fingered cyber-arm instead of his own. Just why this design of cyberman thinks that three fingers is a good idea I'm not too sure. Sadly the costume budget doesn't stretch to much past a silver glove with three pointy fingers but I know that in future stories we learn there's a reason that the cybermen look like normal men in baggy silver suits. Still, a man in a baggy suit is still better than the really rough looking one we see at the end of part one (though, admittedly, part two gives a non-sensical reason for this, just why would a cyber weapon be designed to destroy a cyberman?).
Then there's the cybermat. Forerunner and far superior to the modern series' cyber-shayde, this first appearance of the cybermat raises a huge number of questions that never really get answered in this story. Firstly, why are there two sizes? Is the implication supposed to be that these are organic devices that actually grow and mature? Secondly, why is everyone so frightened of them? I used to have pet rats (I miss them terribly at the moment) and to be honest I was more afraid of Psycho at feeding time than I ever have been of the cybermats. They just look so fragile that one encounter with a cheap Doc Marten knock off and they'd be history. Or, at the very least, you could jump over them. Finally, the Doctor knows about them, another part of this mythology that I'm building up in my mind that the cybermen are "significant". I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a "missing" Hartnell story that features the Doctor's first encounter with silver style cybermen and cybermats, it would explain a lot. (Dear Big Finish....)
Okay, so the cyber plan sucks, the cybermats aren't a plausible threat in this one and they'd be better off as heating engineers than galactic invaders. But there's another reason why I truly dislike this story. With the exception of the poor guy who died trying to open the doors in episode one, every other death in the story is thanks to the presence and actions of the Doctor. He opens the doors into the weapons testing room, he presses the button that opens the hatch to the tomb, he's the idiot who puts the cybercontroller into the revitalisation chamber without a decent plan for not letting him out... Yes, Doctor, you are responsible for a LOT of deaths in this one. You're also seemingly responsible for the magic production of a cloak but that's a minor crime compared to the blood on your hands in these four episodes. You opened the tombs, you caused the deaths. It's your fault.
Finally, some other random things I really don't like about this story:
- the weird gurgling noises the cybermen make in the battle scenes. Wha??? Did they cybertise Bill and Ben?
- Toberman being one of the few instances in Doctor Who where someone being hypnotised doesn't make their acting more wooden
- Victoria, the victorian, selecting a mini skirt
- the cybermen saluting the emergence of the cybercontroller seems a rather emotional response
- the cybercontroller not having a chest unit (yes, it makes him look different, but it leaves you wondering why the rest have them in the first place)
- locking the baddies in the weapons testing room along with the ummm weapons.
When I was younger I remember all the hype about this story. Second to Tenth Planet this was the other holy grail. DWM had comments from the uberfans telling us how wonderful this story was, how it was an absolute classic... then the wretched thing turned up on video. Take one teenage fan, tell him that the world's best Who story has just been found... then show it to him and make him realise that it's a pile of kak, a nonsensical mess of a story with production values that didn't even let it fall into the style-over-substance category. Tomb of the Cybermen, you let me down. And you ruined cybermen for me for the next few decades. I despise you.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Attack on the Cybermen 02 - The Moonbase
Okaaaaaaaaaay, it's time for magic tea trays, sound on the moon's surface and a plan so loony that it could only mean it's time for the next cyber story. Whereas in Tenth Planet I could find things to recommend it (the appearance of the cybermen mostly), I might struggle a little on this one.
Episode one opens with one of those moments that will probably end up leading to a blog article all of its own, namely just how on earth does the TARDIS travel? When I was younger (and didn't think so much about these trivial things) I just assumed that it vanished from point A, travelled in the vortex and only re-appeared at point B. However, this and many other stories, suggests that it must regularly stick its nose out of the vortex from time to time to see where it is. This means that it can be caught by the animus, or the Intelligence or, in this one, the gravitron. We then get it seemingly hovering above the moon's surface before nipping back into the vortex and out again to do its materialisation trick on the surface. Which, to me, seems rather a lot of effort but then again I'm sure the Time Lords had a reason for it other than "because it looks good".
My first major problem with this story is the Doctor's lack of knowledge. I'm not talking about his 1888 medical knowledge, it's more his lack of knowledge of the gravitron. Last time we found out that the cybermen were significant in Earth's history (and in this one we're told that every kid knows there were cybermen once) and the Doctor seems to have notes on them in his diary (which would suggest they're important enough for him to have read up on them or he's encountered them off screen as well). The cybermen recognise him from off screen adventures and everything suggests that the Doctor's been in this sort of time period before... yet he doesn't know about the gravitron controlling the weather from the moon. There's a part of me that desperately wants the TARDIS to have a sense of humour function in its telepathic circuits and have it wipe parts of the Doctor's memory every time it lands so that he doesn't know exactly what's going to happen outside and therefore change it deliberately. Anyway, the gravitron controls the Earth's weather from the moon. The story is set in 2070, it seems to be fully up and running (though some bits suggest that it's still relatively new and having teething troubles) but I'd guess that it was probably first mooted at least twenty years previously.
Oh yes, the gravitron itself makes no sense. I'm not disputing the fact that gravity could, somehow be used to control the weather. I'm not disputing the fact that it would be very useful to be able to control the weather. I'm just thinking that putting it on the moon and thus only allowing it to control the weather on the parts of the Earth that are in the direct line of sight from the moon might not have been the best place for it. Thankfully it'll be relocated to the earth in time for the Ice Warriors to play havoc with it in a season or two's time where we can then think about controlling the weather at night.
Back to the plot but keeping with the bad science aspect of the story, the cybermen gain access to the base by cutting a hole in it and walking in. At a real push I can imagine some sort of airlock being set up on the outside of the base and them just about getting in without the base being drained of air... but for some reason I find it very difficult to believe that they managed it without anyone noticing. You would have thought someone would have at least heard it happening or spotted a huge stack of sacks where there hadn't previously been one... Ah well, we're talking about a base populated by people who think it's a good idea to control the earth's weather from the moon is a good idea. They've got it coming to them. They also have exceptionally flimsy looking space suits that look as though they'd tear if you even showed them a jagged boulder on the moon's surface. THIS bit of the story I think is quite reasonable. If man kind has been dumb enough to put the vital weather control centre on the moon and leave it without suitable security other than a dozen or so middle aged scientists then it's going to be an ideal way for the cybermen to take over the world with the minimum of effort. I'm surprised they didn't have to get in line and queue for the right to do it. Where I don't quite get the cyber plot is the seemingly random way they infect people with the sugar. Don't they care who or how many they get? I mean if everyone went on a diet and cut sugar out of their tea then the cyberplan would have been screwed.
In a nice nod to Tenth Planet, Ben (in his temporary role as science boffin) remembers that the cybermen are vulnerable to radiation. However, he (and the others) can't think of a suitable source locally to use against the cybermen. It's a good job then that, say, the cybermen never have to walk across the moon's surface where they're going to be bombarded with radiation almost constantly. Instead Polly suggests a cocktail of solvents which, if the telesnaps are to be believed, don't just dissolve their chest plates but also seems to completely dissolve the cybermen as well. I really hope they're using them in a well ventilated area. Not only do the cybermen not like the cocktails, the Doctor works out that they have a thing about gravity as well, which is why they need "living" humans to work the gravitron controls for them. This is where my lack of understanding about the cybermen starts to kick in. They're terrified of radiation, but can walk across the moon's surface without any problem. They're worried by "gravity" in the gravitron control room yet humans can work in there for 12 hours before the sound levels drive them nuts. They're REALLY easy to dissolve. The list of their weaknesses is really starting to grow now.
Having given up on taking over from the inside, they puncture a hole in the side of the dome. One wind machine in the studio later to artistically blow things around whilst the characters are chatting and trying to find the oxygen masks... the hole gets covered with the world's strongest tea tray. Seriously, it has atmospheric pressure on one side and a total vacuum on the other. That thing should have buckled its way through the hole in an instant rather than staying there (presumably till someone needs to deliver a round of drinks). They're then defeated by being lifted off the moon's surface by the gravitron which strangely leaves the TARDIS in place along with all the rocks and dust...
So the story (once more) sucks.
So what of the cybermen? After all that's the reason I put myself through the four episodes.
No one seems to comment on their re-design. The Doctor clearly expects it (and just which cybermen was careless enough to have a chunk of material ripped out of its trousers anyway? Another sign that they're really pretty pathetic) and even Polly calls them cybermen in spite of them really not looking too much like they did last time we saw them. Was there another cyber story between Power of the Daleks and the Highlanders? It might explain a lot. I have to say that I'm not too impressed with their new look and would have liked a little more comment about just how they survived the destruction of Mondas (other than "they just did"). They're sarcastic (the "Clever, clever, clever" line has baffled me for a long time) but don't know about feelings. Except bemusement when their laser doesn't work. They've started taking over humans with sonic control (controlled from the vacuum of the moon's surface) and yes they look pretty imposing when they march across the moon's surface (good thing they don't need to breathe or anything) but there's no real fear of being cybertised in this story. They're actually pretty generic thug villains this time around.
It's sexist, it's laughable and it's scientific nonsense. In the past I've not found The Moonbase too much of a chore to get through but this time around, actually engaging my brain whilst I watch it... well my brain was hunting for the off switch. How did this crud survive when other, much better episodes, were lost? Oh well, at least the music's good.
Episode one opens with one of those moments that will probably end up leading to a blog article all of its own, namely just how on earth does the TARDIS travel? When I was younger (and didn't think so much about these trivial things) I just assumed that it vanished from point A, travelled in the vortex and only re-appeared at point B. However, this and many other stories, suggests that it must regularly stick its nose out of the vortex from time to time to see where it is. This means that it can be caught by the animus, or the Intelligence or, in this one, the gravitron. We then get it seemingly hovering above the moon's surface before nipping back into the vortex and out again to do its materialisation trick on the surface. Which, to me, seems rather a lot of effort but then again I'm sure the Time Lords had a reason for it other than "because it looks good".
My first major problem with this story is the Doctor's lack of knowledge. I'm not talking about his 1888 medical knowledge, it's more his lack of knowledge of the gravitron. Last time we found out that the cybermen were significant in Earth's history (and in this one we're told that every kid knows there were cybermen once) and the Doctor seems to have notes on them in his diary (which would suggest they're important enough for him to have read up on them or he's encountered them off screen as well). The cybermen recognise him from off screen adventures and everything suggests that the Doctor's been in this sort of time period before... yet he doesn't know about the gravitron controlling the weather from the moon. There's a part of me that desperately wants the TARDIS to have a sense of humour function in its telepathic circuits and have it wipe parts of the Doctor's memory every time it lands so that he doesn't know exactly what's going to happen outside and therefore change it deliberately. Anyway, the gravitron controls the Earth's weather from the moon. The story is set in 2070, it seems to be fully up and running (though some bits suggest that it's still relatively new and having teething troubles) but I'd guess that it was probably first mooted at least twenty years previously.
Oh yes, the gravitron itself makes no sense. I'm not disputing the fact that gravity could, somehow be used to control the weather. I'm not disputing the fact that it would be very useful to be able to control the weather. I'm just thinking that putting it on the moon and thus only allowing it to control the weather on the parts of the Earth that are in the direct line of sight from the moon might not have been the best place for it. Thankfully it'll be relocated to the earth in time for the Ice Warriors to play havoc with it in a season or two's time where we can then think about controlling the weather at night.
Back to the plot but keeping with the bad science aspect of the story, the cybermen gain access to the base by cutting a hole in it and walking in. At a real push I can imagine some sort of airlock being set up on the outside of the base and them just about getting in without the base being drained of air... but for some reason I find it very difficult to believe that they managed it without anyone noticing. You would have thought someone would have at least heard it happening or spotted a huge stack of sacks where there hadn't previously been one... Ah well, we're talking about a base populated by people who think it's a good idea to control the earth's weather from the moon is a good idea. They've got it coming to them. They also have exceptionally flimsy looking space suits that look as though they'd tear if you even showed them a jagged boulder on the moon's surface. THIS bit of the story I think is quite reasonable. If man kind has been dumb enough to put the vital weather control centre on the moon and leave it without suitable security other than a dozen or so middle aged scientists then it's going to be an ideal way for the cybermen to take over the world with the minimum of effort. I'm surprised they didn't have to get in line and queue for the right to do it. Where I don't quite get the cyber plot is the seemingly random way they infect people with the sugar. Don't they care who or how many they get? I mean if everyone went on a diet and cut sugar out of their tea then the cyberplan would have been screwed.
In a nice nod to Tenth Planet, Ben (in his temporary role as science boffin) remembers that the cybermen are vulnerable to radiation. However, he (and the others) can't think of a suitable source locally to use against the cybermen. It's a good job then that, say, the cybermen never have to walk across the moon's surface where they're going to be bombarded with radiation almost constantly. Instead Polly suggests a cocktail of solvents which, if the telesnaps are to be believed, don't just dissolve their chest plates but also seems to completely dissolve the cybermen as well. I really hope they're using them in a well ventilated area. Not only do the cybermen not like the cocktails, the Doctor works out that they have a thing about gravity as well, which is why they need "living" humans to work the gravitron controls for them. This is where my lack of understanding about the cybermen starts to kick in. They're terrified of radiation, but can walk across the moon's surface without any problem. They're worried by "gravity" in the gravitron control room yet humans can work in there for 12 hours before the sound levels drive them nuts. They're REALLY easy to dissolve. The list of their weaknesses is really starting to grow now.
Having given up on taking over from the inside, they puncture a hole in the side of the dome. One wind machine in the studio later to artistically blow things around whilst the characters are chatting and trying to find the oxygen masks... the hole gets covered with the world's strongest tea tray. Seriously, it has atmospheric pressure on one side and a total vacuum on the other. That thing should have buckled its way through the hole in an instant rather than staying there (presumably till someone needs to deliver a round of drinks). They're then defeated by being lifted off the moon's surface by the gravitron which strangely leaves the TARDIS in place along with all the rocks and dust...
So the story (once more) sucks.
So what of the cybermen? After all that's the reason I put myself through the four episodes.
No one seems to comment on their re-design. The Doctor clearly expects it (and just which cybermen was careless enough to have a chunk of material ripped out of its trousers anyway? Another sign that they're really pretty pathetic) and even Polly calls them cybermen in spite of them really not looking too much like they did last time we saw them. Was there another cyber story between Power of the Daleks and the Highlanders? It might explain a lot. I have to say that I'm not too impressed with their new look and would have liked a little more comment about just how they survived the destruction of Mondas (other than "they just did"). They're sarcastic (the "Clever, clever, clever" line has baffled me for a long time) but don't know about feelings. Except bemusement when their laser doesn't work. They've started taking over humans with sonic control (controlled from the vacuum of the moon's surface) and yes they look pretty imposing when they march across the moon's surface (good thing they don't need to breathe or anything) but there's no real fear of being cybertised in this story. They're actually pretty generic thug villains this time around.
It's sexist, it's laughable and it's scientific nonsense. In the past I've not found The Moonbase too much of a chore to get through but this time around, actually engaging my brain whilst I watch it... well my brain was hunting for the off switch. How did this crud survive when other, much better episodes, were lost? Oh well, at least the music's good.
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