It’s probably because it got me at a very
impressionable age – 4 or 5 as I recall, but the Invasion style Cyberman is the
image that pops into my head whenever I hear the word ‘Cyberman’ It was the
first time that they had the helmets with the full ’earmuffs’ for want of a
better word. Following on from the suits first seen in “The Wheel in Space”
these had costumes made of rubber diving suits sprayed silver. One of the
iconic images from 60s Doctor Who – in fact from the whole of classic Doctor
Who, is the Cybermen walking down a set of stone steps with the dome of St.
Paul’s in the background, an image every bit as arresting as the image of the
Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”.
Going on what I’ve seen in the 4 previous Cybermen
stories, though, maybe the Cybermen do have most appeal to younger children,
for I’m afraid that I’ve started to find myself falling out of love with them
as a feature of classic Doctor Who. I’ll try to put that into context.
An imposing visual image is great for a
Doctor Who monster/villain, and it’s a really important starting place. But in
the same way that a well-conceived and written monster is going to struggle
with viewers if it looks ridiculous in the first place, a visually interesting
monster is not going to be enough if it is just a one dimensional motiveless
malignity. Which, come to think of it, is an accusation that can be levelled at
the Daleks. We’ll take a look at the comparative strengths and weaknesses of
Daleks and Cybermen afterwards, I think. So, coming back to Cybermen –
they were once humanoids from earth’s twin
planet Mondas whose reliance on mechanical replacements for body parts
eventually led to them becoming essentially cyborgs, who have also removed
useless things like emotions from their organic brains. Ok – so far so good.
What are they like, then?
The Cybermen are warriors, bent on the
conquest and domination of other races. Ok – why?
They are superior to other races,
therefore it is logical that other races should be converted to Cybermen as
well, since they would then be a higher form of life too. Ah, now here we have
a problem. You see the Cybermen have been defeated in 4 consecutive adventures
by human beings. So shouldn’t they come to the conclusion that logically,
through beating them 4 – 0. The humans are therefore superior beings, and they,
the Cybermen, should leave them alone?
Ah.
Part of the problem I’m having with the Cybermen
at the moment is that they are so physically superior to their human enemies
that they shouls be able to carry out their plans through sheer brute force.
Look, take the Moonbase. The Cybermen can function perfectly well in a vacuum.
So why don’t they just walk up to the outside of the Moonbase, and start
punching holes in the dome. The base would have run out of tea trays sooner or
later, surely. They seem to go out of their way to make things difficult for
themselves, and this is something which becomes difficult to accept after a
while.
Daleks v. Cybermen
I don’t know that you can argue that the
Daleks and the Cybermen were the two most iconic monsters to feature in classic
Doctor Who. There’s a host of well-conceived, well realised monsters who
appeared in one story, and never returned, and there are even some other
popular monsters who appeared in more than one story – the Autons, Ice Warriors
and Sontarans being three that spring to mind off the top of my head. None of
them though featured in anything like the number of stories, and generated
anything like the amount of speculation about back story as the Daleks and Cybermen.
Were the Cybermen conceived as an
alternative to the Daleks, bearing in mind Terry Nation’s desire to take his
creation off to America and attempt to make a series about them? That’s one
view that has gained a certain amount of support over the years. Me, I don’t
know. The fact is that Season 4, which saw Hartnell’s regeneration into
Troughton, while it featured the first two Cybermen stories, “The Tenth Planet”
and “The Moonbase”, also featured two Dalek stories. After that, though, Terry
Nation did take his Daleks off to the USA, and it wasn’t until the 9th
season that they’d return in “The Day of the Daleks”. In the meantime, 2 Cybermen
stories featured in Troughton’s series 5, and one, “The Invasion”, in Series 6.
In this story, “The Invasion”, it is the Cybermen who are used as the monsters
in the first UNIT story, which was very much a dry run for Bryant and Sherwin’s
plans to create an Earthbound series from season 7 onwards, which suggests that
at this time the Cybermen were looking to be the number 1 monster of the show.
All of which makes it all the more
perplexing that there was no Cyberman story throughout the Jon Pertwee Era,
until Season 12, which was Tom Baker’s first. I think that there’s maybe an
answer to this in the fact that maybe Kit Pedler didn’t want to come up with
another Cyberman story, and the production team might have been wary of asking
another writer to start from scratch with them. Maybe, also the team were wary
of having a monster come back for a second crack at invading Earth. The Daleks,
for example, didn’t return after “The Day of the Daleks” until season 10 and
crucially after the Time Lords had lifted the ban on the Doctor travelling
through time and space.
Looking forward past that, the Daleks
featured in 2 Tom Baker stories – season 12’s “Genesis of the Daleks” and the
disappointing season 17 story “Destiny of the Daleks”. Robert Holmes and Philip
Hinchcliffe, the great script editor – producer team who made the first 3
seasons of Tom Baker’s tenure – were not great fans of the Daleks, and even
persuaded Terry nation to pen “The Android Invasion” rather than another Dalek
story. The Cybermen did not feature again until Peter Davison’s first season,
when they were exhumed to marvelous effect in the highly praised “Earthshock”.
Not for the first time the Cybermen had undergone a radical redesign, and this
firmly reestablished them as a recurring monster throughout the rest of the run
of the classic series.
The Daleks, of course never needed such a
radical redesign. In fact you could argue that the most obvious redesign of the
Daleks occurred between their appearences in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and
“The Chase”, where two horizontal metal bands around the top of the Daleks’
bodies were replaced by vertical bars, which I believe were supposed to be
solar cells, which enabled the Daleks to convert solar energy to static
electricity.
I always used to wonder who would win in a
fight between Daleks and Cybermen – a question which was pretty clearly
answered during David Tennant’s time in the ‘new’ series. (It seems odd to talk
of something which is 10 years and 8 series old as new). If you had to fight
one, certainly, you’d be better off fighting a cyberman. Apart from anything
else, there have been so many ways to kill a cyberman over the years, while the
Daleks are tough critters, even if it is remarkably easy to sneak up behind
one, and put something over its eyestalk, while you bash its gun out of its
housing.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Hmm – I know I’m rambling on a bit here,
so let me just tell you how I’m going to review this story, and then we’ll get
on with it. If you cast your mind back to “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, you’ll
maybe remember that I reviewed it in three installments of 4 episodes each.
That worked well enough as far as I was concerned, and so I’m going to split my
“The Invasion” Review into two parts.
After
Watching
This isn’t the first animation I’ve seen. Off
the top of my head “The Reign of Terror”, “The Tenth Planet”, “The Moonbase”
and “The Ice Warriors” all have animated episodes. I have to say, though, that
episode 1 of “The Invasion” is my favourite. I’m not really sure what made me
like it more than the others, unless, maybe, that it is a particularly good
episode – which it is. Actually, the first 4 all are.
Let’s have a quick look at the story so far. The
TARDIS’ technical issues continue at the start of the first episode, as it
materializes in space since the landing control is stuck. Don’t question it,
just go with the flow. A spaceship on the far side of the moon fires at it, and
it only just manages to materialize on Earth at the last second. Now, one of
the original ideas of the story was, I think, that they would link up with
Professor Travers from “The Web of Fear” and “The Abominable Snowmen”, but Jack
Watling was unavailable, and so the characters of Professor Watkins and his
niece Isobel were substituted. The Doctor calls on Professor Watkins to ask for
his help in repairing the TARDIS circuits which have been damaged, and finds
that he has not been seen for a while. He decides to pay a call on International
Electromatics, the firm he has been working for, and meets the boss, Mr. Tobias
Vaughn. Vaughn is particularly interested in the TARDIS circuits, and the
Doctor has little choice but to leave them with him. As he and Jamie leave
Vaughn, two shady men trail them, and eventually pick them up in a car, which
then takes them to an airbase. Much to his surprise, the Doctor is reunited
with the former Colonel Lethbridge Stewart from “The Web of Fear”, now promoted
to Brigadier. The Brigadier is now running UNIT – that’s United Nations
Intelligence Taskforce. UNIT themselves are investigating Vaughn and IE, and
the Brigadier enlists the Doctor’s help.
Meanwhile, Zoe and Isobel have become bored
waiting for the Doctor. They go to IE to find them, and Zoe ends up giving the
computer in reception a stroke. The two girls are captured and put on ice by
Packer, Vaughn’s security chief. When they return to Isobel’s flat, Jamie and
the Doctor learn that the girls have gone to IE, and stage a rescue operation,
after another encounter with Vaughn and Packer. With the help of a UNIT
helicopter they escape. Vaughn isn’t daunted, as he has hypnotic control over
General Rutlidge, who has the power to order the Brigadier to cease the UNIT
operation. This doesn’t stop the Doctor, since together with Jamie he takes a
canoe along the London sewers in order to gain secret entry to the IE
warehouse. It is in the sewers that they catch their first sight of a Cyberman
being activated. Phew!
You’ve probably noticed that the first Cyberman
in the story doesn’t appear until the last few seconds of the 4th
episode – halfway through the story. Considering that this is a story which
provided us with many of our archetypal images of classic series Cybermen you’d
think that this is a drawback. And you’d be wrong to think so. Without any word
of a lie, I am thoroughly enjoying this story so far. There’s so much to enjoy
here, after all.
There’s Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughan for a
start. He hasn’t been in the show since the previous epic length story, “The
Daleks’ Master Plan” where he brilliantly played the dastardly Mavic Chen. In a
totally different way, Vaughn is every bit as good a villain as Chen, and
that’s saying something. There are some actors who bring something special to
the show in every story they appear – I think of the great Philip Madoc, of
course, and of the Bernards – Kay, Horsfall and Archard - and Kevin Stoney firmly
belongs within this illustrious band. A quick google tells me that he makes a
third and final appearance in the next cyberman story – “Revenge of the Cybermen”
from Tom Baker’s first season. Vaughn, in some ways, is a close cousin of Chen.
Chen, if you remember, betrayed his race while allying himself to the Daleks,
believing that he would be able to double cross them when the time came, never
expecting them to double cross him. Vaughn has already announced his plan to
use his allies to conquer Earth, and then use the machine that Professor
Watkins is in the process of perfecting to dispose of them. His baiting of the
brutish Packer all adds to the texture of the show, and the depth of his
characterization.
Actually, I say brutish, for on the page, that’s
what Packer is. Yet on screen there’s something else going on here, I think.
Hacker is played by Peter Halliday, and while being in no way puny, he isn’t
the huge dominating physical thug that you might have expected, And yet it
still worked. It took me a while to work out why, and then it struck me –
rather than being the school bully himself, Packer is actually the school
bully’s crony. I don’t know if you ever used to watch Grange Hill, but if you
did you’d maybe remember the most noteworthy of all the bullies, one ‘Gripper’
Stebson. Gripper always had a couple of weasel faced individuals hanging around
him. That’s who Packer is, and that’s just how Peter Halliday is playing him. A
brainless thug wouldn’t care about his boss double crossing the Cybermen, and
he wouldn’t are about Unit’s response to firing at their helicopter, while
Packer does. Nice work, in a show which really isn’t short on acting quality.
This is the first appearance of UNIT in the
show, and it’s pretty different from what we came to know and love in the Jon
Pertwee era. In Jon Pertwee’s time, UNIT was always more about the Task force
than the Intelligence. This is the opposite. The Brigadier first appears in a
very hi tech control room inside what looks like a Lockheed Hercules transport
plane, and UNIT have clearly been doing their homework in gathering information
and intelligence on Vaughn. In fact, I found myself asking – what happens to
the Brig between this story and Spearhead from Space to make him lose his
imagination and so much of his effectiveness? Come to think of it, what the
hell happened to the control room on the Hercules too? Someone should look in
the Brig’s suspiciously large garage, me thinks.
In many ways the experience of watching this is
uncannily reminiscent of watching a Jon Pertwee story – hardly surprising what
with UNIT, and being set on contemporary Earth, I suppose. But there’s the
whole tone of it as well. It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, but I
don’t necessarily think that this is the kind of story that plays to Patrick
Troughton’s strengths. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he is as good in the part as
ever, only after the first couple of episodes I can’t help starting to get the
feeling that the Doctor himself is getting lost in the story. Maybe it’s just
that there’s so many goodies competing for your attention – Kevin Stoney’s
masterclass in acting villainy, UNIT, the nagging doubt in your mind that maybe
the Cybermen really aren’t going to ever make an appearance at all. Well, we’ll see.
I mentioned that the first appearance of an
actual Cyberman didn’t happen until right at the last gasp of episode 4. That’s
true, but this doesn’t take account of the Cyber Planner. Now, in “The Wheel In
Space” you might recall that the Cybermen were not led by a Cyber Controller
with a big head and no accordion on his chest, but by a cyber controller made,
so it seemed, out of a water balloon and half a dozen wire coat hangers. Now
the cyber planner in the Invasion is at least a little more impressive, and housed
behind a sliding door in Vaughn’s office. I don’t know, though, for me having
the Cybermen led by this machine makes them more and more like dull robots –
which is not how the Cybermen were conceived, I’m afraid.
What
Have We Learned?
The
Colonel has been promoted
UNIT
seems to have a lot of money to play with in the 60s – and must have been the
victim of severe government funding cutbacks by the time that Jon Pertwee first
darkened their doors.
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