46: The Invasion - Episodes 5 - 8

Before Watching

Shall I tell you the truth? OK, I will. I did watch this story when it was first broadcast, but other than a succession of images – mostly to do with marching Cybermen, I hadn’t any real memories of the specific story details. Then last summer I was browsing through a British Heart Foundation charity shop (other charity shops are available) and saw that they had a copy of Ian Marter’s Target novelization of the story. Yeah, of course I bought it. So I read it that evening – and yes, I rather enjoyed it too. So I pretty much know what’s going to happen in the rest of the story – the Cybermen will appear, but the story really has been Vaughn’s story so far, and it is going to continue to be so. I haven’t a problem with that.

What I will be interested to see is just how the story can juggle all these foregrounded characters – on the goodies side you have The Doctor, Jamie, Zoe, Isobel Watkins and the Brig and the UNIT boys. Then on the villains’ side you have Vaughan, Packer, the Cyber Planner, and half a dozen Cybermen. Somebody is going to lose out, even in an 8 episode story. I’m pretty much hoping it will be Isobel Watkins. There’s something about her, some indefinable quality which manages to get on my wick and set my teeth on edge. To be fair to Sally Faulkner, the actress who played her, I think she was actually written stupid and incredibly self-centered, but knowing this doesn’t make it any less annoying when she persists in calling the Captain her ‘dolly soldier’. Dolly Soldier?! What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I don’t want to be horrible, but this is one area in which maybe this story can be criticized. As I understand it the original idea was for Professor Travers to be in the story, but Jack Watling was unavailable, which is why they created the character of Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel. Presumably, had Travers been in the story, then part Isobel plays would have been taken instead by Anne Travers, the Professor’s daughter (as opposed to Deborah Watling, who was Jack Watling’s real life daughter.) Anne was a scientist, and more than that a grounded, strong, believable character, and would have been far better in my opinion than this self centred airhead.

Well, as I said, I read the novelization last summer, so I know that even though we’re four episodes in we’ve still got a lot of story to go, and wasting time here won’t accomplish that. So let’s go.

After Watching

Again, ladies and gentlemen, the plan was to not force myself to watch more than two episodes in an evening. Well, that went by the board again, as this set of 4 episodes (disc 2 on the official DVD) were another single sitting job – not because I had to, but because I wanted to. So that means I really enjoyed it, right? Of course – but that is, I enjoyed it on its own terms, as a fine adventure yarn, rather than a piece of great Doctor Who. I’ll try to explain that.

I can’t help thinking that the middle episodes, up to maybe halfway through episode 7, really start to get away from The Doctor, and for the first time since Hartnell’s first season it feels as if the Doctor isn’t really the star of his own show. I think that I know what the problem is too. It’s all in the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT. In this story he becomes little more than a UNIT operative. Ah – you might say – but isn’t that what he is in the Pertwee era a lot of the time, and that seemed to go perfectly well. Yes and no. The Third Doctor’s relationship with UNIT was a little more complicated than it seems to be in this story. In the Third Doctor’s time his relationship with UNIT was pretty much a marriage of convenience. Stuck in Space and Time after being tried by the Time Lords at the end of “The War Games”, UNIT provide a useful base for him to work at trying to get the TARDIS working, and breaking the Time Lord’s Edict. In return, UNIT get to call him their Scientific Advisor, and can avail themselves of the use of his services from time to time. It’s fair to say that the Doctor does not always help UNIT willingly, and there’s often friction between him and the Brig over the methods that UNIT uses – ie – if it’s green, bomb the hell out of it. Well, coming back to “The Invasion” it really is all far too cosy. The Doctor slots quite nicely into the organization, and there’s never the hint of the slightest conflict between himself and the Brig, which maybe would have added a little something extra to the story. After all, the second Doctor is, in my opinion, the least ‘establishment’ of all of the Doctors, and it might have been fun to see how UNIT might have reacted to a little of his inspired anarchy.

Doesn’t Kevin Stoney continue to be outstanding, though? There’s a wonderful, wonderful scene in which Professor Watkins is brought to him, and Watkins wearily concedes that he will have to do as Vaughn says, since Vaughn will surely torture him, and he cannot stand torture. He expresses his desire to kill Vaughan, and Vaughn hands him a gun, and tells him to shoot. You can’t tear your eyes away from the screen while he’s on here – it is played to absolute perfection. Of course, you know that Watkins, a decent man, is not going to be able to shoot Vaughn, because murder is wrong – but then he does! Three bullet holes appear in the chest of Vaughn’s jumper! It transpires that Vaughn has been part cyber converted. What a fabulous, fabulous scene – probably one of my favourite scenes of all of the ones I’ve watched since we started with “An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC”.

Well, we did get to see some more of the Cybermen too. I think I’ve already mentioned that this mark 5 cyberman ( I count the Moonbase and Tomb of the Cybermen separately, since despite their many similarities there is a clear difference in the hand arrangement.) is my favourite design – although there’s also a lot to be said for the mark 7 (Earthshock)  design too. Visually, director Douglas Camfield really gets the best out of them as well. The scenes marching down the steps of St. Paul’s and past The Horn pub are remarkable in as much as they really are every bit as good as the iconic photographs lead you to believe. It would have been nice to get some verbal confrontation between one of them and the Doctor, or Vaughn, but no, in this story it all happens through the Cyberplanner, which is a bit of a shame, and detracted a little from the story for me.

When we got to the denouement, there were echoes in it of the ending of “The Wheel In Space”. What I mean by that is the the Cybermen still need to be guided in from space by a radio signal. Alright, this time it’s the great cyber bomb which is going to destroy the earth, but the principal is the same. How do we deal with it – switch the flippin radio off. Not rocket Science. Mind you, rocket science is what they use to shoot down the cyber ship. I wonder why Derrick Sherwin decided to have UNIT ask the Russians to borrow a rocket to launch a missile at the cybership, rather than the Americans? I wonder what would have really happened in 1968 if the western world had asked the Soviet Union – Can we borrow one of your lovely rockets, please?

I think that “The Invasion” demonstrates just which different factors have to all work together to make a good Doctor Who story. By rights, 8 episodes should be too long to sustain a single story, and really and truly there isn’t really quite enough plot to keep you going here. What makes it work is good – and in some cases great – acting, terrific direction, and design which is far better than it has any right to be for the money that the show could afford to spend. No doubt about it, this was the shape of things to come.

What Have We Learned?

The Cybermen don’t actually have to do that much – just be there looking impressive

UNIT have remarkable resources at their disposal

Kevin Stoney is a class act whenever he is the chief villain

We can add hand grenades and intensified emotions to the ever growing list of things which can kill Cybermen

46: The Invasion - Episodes 1 - 4

Before Watching

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 9^th 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.

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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 4^th 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. 

43: The Wheel in Space

Before Watching

Well, it’s David Whitaker again, so I expect the unexpected. Can he do for the Cybermen what he did for the Daleks last season? Well, possibly so, but then again possibly not. Maybe I’m wrong, but of the Hartnell and Troughton Cyberman stories, this one alone doesn’t seem to have any great fan following at all. I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet” “The Moonbase” and “Tomb of the Cybermen” very much – I’ll say more about watching “The Invasion” as a very young child when we get to it. All three of those stories have their admirers and defenders, though, as well as their critics. The poor old “The Wheel In Space” doesn’t seem to be much of a magnet for positive comment at all, though.

Well, some stories come into fashion and then go out of fashion again, some stories with a lowly reputation deserve a better one, and some stories have a lowly reputation because that’s all that they deserve.  Which one this turns out to be we’ll find out over the course of the next couple of evenings.

After Watching

You know, I got quite nostalgic when the mercury fluid links in the TARDIS started going tonto at the start of this one. It made me quite nostalgic for the first season, when those pesky fluid links were always seeming to cause trouble for the crew. David Whitaker, who wrote this story, based on Kit Pedler’s outlines, was the script editor for the first season, so that’s probably why he chose to use this malarkey to explain the TARDIS making an emergency materialisation on the Silver Carrier, an abandoned and drifting spaceship.

Right, on board the carrier there is a servo robot. This is a very curious looking thing. It has a pair of stubby, articulated legs, a huge stubby, well, fat, body, a head and arms. Now, I know I’m picking unnecessary holes, but the thing is, any good cyberneticist would tell you that it is extremely difficult to make any robot ‘walk’ on articulated legs like a human (unless it’s a costume with a little man inside) so if they could do that, why couldn’t they put all of its gubbins into a smaller and neater body? It just looks odd. Mind you, the tubby one is a murderous little imp too. It nearly does for the Doctor and Jamie and they need to be rescued by astronauts from the Wheel.

Okay, the Wheel. We’re back into fairly familiar territory here. The Wheel – a space station shaped like a wheel, hence the name – is the base which is going to undergo siege. For the first couple of episodes at least this proved to be quite a leisurely story. The Commander, named Jarvis Bennett in this one, I think, is similarly hardboiled to all the others we’ve seen since “The Tenth Planet”. Right, I don’t like to be nasty to actors who are doing the best job that they can in circumstances where rehearsal time was probably extremely limited, and the opportunity for retakes even more so. But I have to say this, the guy who plays Jarvis Bennett is noticeably bad. He starts off at full shriek, and never takes it down even half a notch. This means he has nowhere to go, and indeed his characterisation doesn’t. Just a little soft pedalling in just one or two scenes would create light and shade in his performance, which would make such a difference. There is none, which means that although he certainly isn’t wooden, he comes across as rather hammy and trying too hard. As a digression, purely for pleasure I recently watched Sylvester McCoy’s “Dragonfire”, the last story to feature Bonnie Langford. (Incidentally, that is probably the first time I have written a sentence containing the words- Bonnie – Langford – and – pleasure – without also containing the word – isn’t.) Now, poor old Bonnie Langford, she does get some stick for her acting, but then when you watch a show she’s in, you can see why. It’s not that she isn’t trying – it’s that she is trying too hard. She is acting,and that’s the problem, because you can actually see and hear that she’s acting. Compare her to Sophie Aldred, a proper actress, in the scenes with just Mel and Ace, and it’s all the more obvious. Well, it’s like this for me with Bennett. He has obviously latched onto the idea that his character is a vicious, bullying bore, and by crikey he’s never going to let you forget it in any line that he says.

It’s highlighted too by the fact that there is actually some good acting surrounding the ham that Bennett is providing. Gemma Corwin, played by Anne Ridler particularly shines. She might not be a sultry siren like Tanya Lernov, nor have the pixieish cuteness of Zoe, but she’s strong, intelligent and resourceful, and it’s a tragedy that she gets killed by the Cybermen, and to add insult to injury, at the end of the story control of the base is assumed by brainless Zoe-hating surfer boy Leo Ryan. When Tanya entwines her hand around his towards the end I almost threw up.

Leaving aside performances, then, there certainly seems to be a bit of a bullying culture all round on board the Wheel. Which brings me to Zoe Heriot, played by Wendy Padbury. Right, I need to be careful what I say here. I fully appreciate a couple of facts: -

One) - The ladies who played the companions in the 60s are all old enough now to be my mother (although only just about old enough in Deborah Watling’s and Wendy Padbury’s cases)

Two) In the shows themselves, they were all in their early 20s (apart from Barbara – special case), which means that I am certainly old enough now to be their father.

So any comments I make about their attractiveness or otherwise can get very icky.

Fact is though, that Wendy Padbury’s Zoe is extremely cute.

Not that any of the blokes on the base seem to think so. In fact, the men certainly, and also some of the women on the Wheel, seem to have it in for Zoe and bully her because she has the brains of a supercomputer, with all of the social sophistication of one too. In particular there’s the afore mentioned Leo Ryan, a blonde haired bloke who only has eyes for Tanya, the Russian crew member, who is, to be frank, a complete jerk towards her. I’d love to tell him one of my favourite quotes, from no less an authority than Bill Gates “Remember to be nice to geeks. Chances are that you’ll end up working for one.” She makes for an interesting character, since this is the first attempt at a companion who is supposedly as intelligent as the Doctor himself. Bet she’s screaming with the rest of them before the end of episode 4 – I told myself within a couple of minutes of her first appearance.

The Cybermen, then. As for design the baggy suits are gone, being replaced by a costume which is pretty much just one step away from the classic “Invasion” Cybermen design. The main difference is that the helmets look pretty much the same as in “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb Of The Cybermen” apart from the fact that tear drop holes have been added to the eves, and a dribble hole to the bottom of the mouth. Their physically impressive appearance is emphasized by the fact that there are some seriously tall actors inside these costumes. Personally, I found the reconstructed scene where Cybermen were hatching from eggs (yes, honestly) visually intriguing, although extremely difficult to understand in the context of what Cybermen are actually supposed to be – that is, humans who have replaced their bodies with mechanical bodies.

I do think that the Cybermen are wasted in this story though. For one thing some of their menace is detracted from by the way that they tend to rock back and forward while they are talking. I don’t get that, apart from the fact that it gives the actors something to do. The strange device which is giving them orders looks as if it has been built from a couple of coat hangers and a water balloon. Then there is the party of Cybermen who walk across space – and I don’t mean spacewalk either – to the Wheel, flapping movements with their arms being their only concession to the fact that they are in space.

Their purpose it turns out is to take over the Wheel and use the radio transmitter to direct the Cyber fleet to the Earth. OK – that’s simple enough, and there’s no way that it was a story that should have taken 6 episodes to tell. So you get the whole convoluted Trojan Horse story of the Cybermen sending cybermats in spheres which melt into the hull of the Wheel – good trick if you can do that – and the cybermats, which are larger and more impressive than those in Tomb, destroy the Bernalium which is used to power the Wheel’s laser cannon. Thus the crew on the Wheel send a couple of men to bring bernalium from the silver carrier, and they get hypnotised into carrying the Cybermen over in the bernalium box etc. etc. It’s all so unnecessary. The Cybermen have all this power and hardware – it just doesn’t compute that they wouldn’t have their own sat nav.

Also the same problem that dogged the other Cyberman stories is evident in this one. At the climax, they are just so easy to defeat. The Doctor boosts the repaired laser cannons – bye bye cyberships. Effective, but not very uplifting.

So all in all, something of a disappointing end to Season Five – a story which for me is only really at all memorable for the introduction of Zoe.

What Have We Learned

Quick setting plastic is the latest addition to the every growing list of things that can kill Cybermen

Nerd baiting will be just as popular in the future as it is today

37: Tomb Of the Cybermen

Before Watching

Well, for once, this isn’t actually a before watching at all. I’d better explain that. Before this experiment started, last summer in fact, I found out that the Watch digital channel was showing old episodes of classic Who, and, joy of joys, one Saturday they were screening the Tomb of the Cybermen in its entirety. I set the Tivo box to record it, and a couple of days later, when the family were all off doing whatever it was they were doing, I watched it all.

The danger with watching what you have always anticipated to be a classic, without actually having seen any of it before, is that you find all your illusions are shattered, and that actually, it maybe isn’t all that much to write home about. The thing is, though, this wasn’t a critical viewing, like the way I’ve approached all of the 30+ stories I’ve reviewed so far. This was just for pure pleasure, and while I admit that the story certainly isn’t without its flaws, I sat there with a big silly grin all over my silly old face for the whole two hours.

Still, it’s not good me pretending that this is a first time watch, or even a first time for ages watch, as is going to happen when we get to Pertwee, Baker and Davison. So if this turns out to be a more critical, in the correct sense of the word, well, I can only apologise.

After Watching

You can’t really fault the start of the first episode. The location shots, albeit taken in a quarry by the look of things, make Telos look appropriately bleak and inhospitable. In general the design work on this story, and the look of the whole thing is pretty impressive, bar for a couple of things which I shall come to in due course.

So, our heroes have landed on Telos at the same time as an Earth Archaeological expedition, searching for the Tombs of the Cybermen. The members of the expedition are worth spending a few moments discussing. The first thing I noticed, and I don’t like being critical of actors and actresses, but I have to say that in my opinion, the poor devil who plays Hopper, the American accented captain of the Earth ship, gives probably the worst acting performance I’ve yet to see in the course of writing this blog. I’m sorry, but he’s absolutely dreadful – so wooden you practically want to give him a wipeover with Mr. Sheen every time he opens his trap.

Well, Hopper isn’t the most important character by a long chalk, and so if his was the only jarring note, we could probably gloss over it. But, and I’m fully aware that I’m not the first person to make this point, we do need to look at some of the claims of racism which have been levelled at this story in the past. The man who has provided the funds for the archaeological expedition, Eric Klieg, aided and abetted by a lady called Kaftan, is the chief human villain of the piece. Klieg is a suitably foreign sounding name, especially when compared with the comfortably anglo-saxon names of most of the other expedition members. It’s difficult to tell precisely in monochrome, but he certainly appears to have a Mediterranean complexion. Kaftan is a likewise exotic name, and just in case we miss the point, it’s fairly clear that Shirley Cooklin, the actress playing her, has had what appears to be fake tan smeared all over her face. Very cheap fake tan as well, judging by the clearly visible streaks, to which my eye is irresistibly drawn every time she is shown in close up. When we looked at the last story, “”The Evil of the Daleks, one jarring note was the presence of Kemel, Maxtible’s mute Turkish servant. Kaftan too has a huge mute servant, Toberman, played by black actor Roy Stewart.

I want to defend the show, I really, really do. I want to say that look, this was the 1960s, and so you can’t blame the show for making the kind of crass, lazy stereotyping which other shows of the same time went in for. But I can’t. This isn’t a defence, not when you consider why it is that people value Doctor Who as a show so much. The whole point is that it ISN’T like other shows. I don’t think that the show is DELIBERATELY following a racist agenda either here or in “TheEvil of the Daleks”. But I’m very disappointed that nobody apparently stopped to consider just what message using Kemel and Toberman in this way did send out, intentional or not.

Wrenching myself back to the review then, Troughton’s Doctor is probably the most mischievous and quietly anarchic of all of the Doctors, apart, possibly from Sylvester McCoy’s 7^th Doctor, and here he is at his most mischievous and delightfully irresponsible. Actually, the more I watch of Patrick Troughton, the more I’m drawn to the conclusion that some of the best features of McCoy’s Doctor were those that made him like Troughton, at times. He pretty much aids and abets the party in getting into the tombs, and reanimating the Cybermen, and you suspect that this is motivated by a sense of curiosity as much as anything else. In fact, this is actually a terrific story for Patrick Troughton. He acts rings around all of the guest stars playing the human characters, which isn’t difficult considering the rich vein of cardboard that Gerry Davis has mined for their characteristation. George Pastell as Klieg and Shirley Cooklin as Kaftan, for example are very one-dimensional. It’s a bit of a shame that they are so clearly going to be the human villains of the piece that you know it within a minute or two of each one opening their mouths. Going back to Patrick Troughton, he gets a very touching scene with Victoria. It’s a plus point for the story that it acknowledges that Victoria had to join the crew after her father died saving the Doctor in the end of the previous story, The Evil of the Daleks. This was actually the end of the previous season, and so it would be very easy to decide that there’s no need to make any reference to the circumstances under which she joined the crew now. I think it’s a strength of the show that this story does, and it adds just a little more light and shade. As did Hartnell before him, Troughton excels at these little moments of tenderness and pathos, discussing, as he does, the fact that he too has family who now ‘sleep in his memory’ most of the time. Poetry, that. Actually this is a good story for Deborah Watling’s Victoria too. In her scenes with Kaftan she gets to show that she’s made of stern enough stuff to be worth her place on the crew.

As I have already said, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. But. . . if I engage my critical faculties there are a few observations I can make. Firstly, barring the uneven level of performances of some of the guest stars, it’s pretty tense, exciting and enjoyable right up to the point when the Cybermen reanimate and break out of their tombs. This doesn’t look bad now, but in the mid 60s it must have seemed state of the art. However, once the Cybermen come out of their tombs, well, for me this is where the story runs out of steam somewhat. There’s the usual faffing about, threatening to convert the humans into Cybermen but not getting on with it and doing so which we’ve come to expect in previous Cybermen stories – although to be fair at one point they do give Toberman a rather effective pair of cyber arms. At one point they even go back into their tombs – which does rather beg the question why they bothered getting out of them in the first place.

One difference between this and its two cyberman predecessors is that this is the first time we see a human traitor trying to form an alliance with the Cybermen. We’ve had this happen with the Daleks before – and believe me it will happen again, and again . . . – but not the Cybermen. Klieg and Kaftan belong to the Brotherhood of Logicians, who have reached the far from logical conclusion that the emotionless Cybermen will be so grateful for their release that they will form an alliance with them.

Another development from the previous two Cybermen stories is that for the first time we get to meet the Cyber Controller. We know that this is the Controller, partly because he tells us so, and partly because he looks so different from the others. He doesn’t have the usual piano accordion on his chest, and he has a large painted dome on top of his head in which you can see his brain. Now, a slight digression here. The Cyber Controller in this, and Colin Baker’s “Attack of the Cybermen” was played by an actor called Michael Kilgarriff. Michael Kilgarriff also played the robot in Tom Baker’s first story “Robot”. Michael Kilgarriff was a sometime client of the company that my Mum worked for in South Ealing in the mid-late 80s. She said that he was a very large man, and she found him very, and I quote, ‘actorly’, and rather gruff and brusque. One day, after much urging from my younger brother, she explained to him that we were massive fans of Doctor Who, and would it be possible for him to autograph something for my brother? (I may be wrong, but I think this might have been his copy of the David Banks Cyberman book) A complete change came over the man immediately – he was all smiles, and absolutely delighted to provide the autograph. So obviously a man who had some affection for his time on the show, and delighted to be approached about it.

So, it isn’t the greatest Doctor Who story, and it certainly doesn’t do to analyse it too much. The story really doesn’t go very far, and the effect of Toberman throwing the cyber controller – who by this time has been replaced by a dummy in a suit – really isn’t good. But let your inner child out for a couple of hours, while you’re watching it, and like me, you’ll probably have a big silly grin all over your own face too.

What Have We Learned?

Let sleeping Cybermen lie

The Brotherhood of Logicians are a bit dull

33:The Moonbase

Before Watching

I invite you to come back to with me to a few days after Christmas 1975. My younger brother has received money, and spent some of it on buying the Target Books novel “Doctor Who and the Cybermen” by Gerry Davis. This is the novelization of “The Moonbase”. He has read it, and now it’s my turn. I thoroughly enjoy it, and it goes right up there with “Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen” as my favourite Doctor Who novels.  OK – 3 – 2- 1 – you’re back in the room. Even though this was 40 years ago, I can still remember the basic plot of the novelisation pretty well. In some ways, it’s a virtual reworking of “The Tenth Planet”, although I recall that I didn’t enjoy that novel anything like as much as this one.

Well, you’ll maybe recall that I did enjoy watching “The Tenth Planet”, so my hopes for “The Moonbase” couldn’t be a great deal higher than they already are. Two episodes exist, but for the other two the BBC, as they did with the last episode of “The Tenth Planet”, commissioned a team of animators to reproduce them using the original soundtracks. The animation for the last of “The Tenth Planet”, well, we’re not exactly talking Disney Pixar standards here, but it looked good, and although the animation itself was limited, it did the job far better than any recon I’ve yet watched. In fact, I’m having to do the mental equivalent of pouring a bucket of water over myself – it’s not fair to raise my own expectations so high that the story couldn’t possibly be expected to live up to them.

After Watching

Okay, now that I’ve watched it, the question I’m sure that you’re dying to know the answer to is, did “The Moonbase” live up to my expectations?

Yes, it did.

I enjoyed the novelization more than I enjoyed the novelization of “The Tenth Planet”, and I enjoyed the story itself more than I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet”. It does make such a difference when there are official animations of the missing episodes to watch. I draw the comparison to “The Tenth Planet” deliberately, for the similarities between the two stories are fairly clear. Both are set in an inaccessible base – on the moon in this one. Both of them are staffed by an international crew. Both bases are attacked by a party of Cybermen, who initially managed to take over the base, before being repulsed when the humans discover one of their weaknesses. Of course, there are differences. In “The Moonbase” the base exists to house the Gravitron, a gravity device that has the power to control Earth’s weather. The Cybermen intend to seize said Gravitron, and use it to devastate the Earth by manipulating said weather. When asked if they are doing it for revenge they strenuously deny it, being emotionless as we know that they are. Alright, so they’re just gits, then.

Actually these Cybermen are great. They look good today – how good they would have looked in the mid 60s I can only imagine. The cloth heads have been replaced by shiny metal helmets, and the overhead headlamp has been made smaller and incorporated into the helmet itself. Their hands are now no longer human, and not only part of the costume, they had become a sort of three pincer arrangement. These have the added bonus of allowing the Cybermen to shoot electricity out of them and zap anyone who gets close range. Having said that though, this only tends to happen in the first two episodes. For some reason they start using guns after that. Not really sure why. Finally the chest unit is a lot less bulky than the original, and in fact is the classic chest unit that would remain part of the cyberman costume until the complete redesign for Earthshock in the Davison era.

The cyber voices have changed as well. Instead of trying to make them sound inhuman through varying the rhythms of normal speech, they have a flatter, yet at the same time more conventional delivery, with a more heavy electronic treatment. It works very well, because it does sound like the artificial voicebox which can be used by people who have had theirs removed.

I can only judge by the animation I saw, but the first episode really looked rather good to me. Alright, the spacesuits are very unconvincing, even for the 60s, but they didn’t spend very long in those, thankfully. Jamie takes a giant leap for Mankind and knocks himself out at the foot of the base, necessitating the visitors seeking medical help. Once the travelers get into the base, the tension starts to ramp up. The scientists on the base are being decimated by an unknown virus. This is a nice touch, not giving away immediately that this is the work of the Cybermen. If I remember correctly they reused this tactic in Tom Baker’s Revenge of the Cybermen. The first hint we get that the Cybermen were involved is a shadow, then we see one skulking around near the sickbay. It must have been even more effective when first viewed, since the title wouldn’t have told the viewers that the Cybermen were involved, as tended to happen with Dalek stories. At the risk of being accused of hyperbole, there’s parts of this first episode which remind me a little of Ridley Scott’s first “Alien” film, where the remaining crew members know that the alien is on  the ship hunting them, and they are searching along cramped metal corridors for it.

The moonbase set itself, and the model work for the exteriors are pretty impressive work for the time that they were made. I use the work of Gerry Anderson as a comparison. Now, I freely admit that what was being produced by Gerry Anderson in the early and mid 60s was very clearly aimed at the kids, as compared with Doctor Who, which always was a show for the family, and this is an important distinction to make. Even a mediocre Doctor Who script is considerably more complex and interesting than, let’s say, a Fireball XL5 or Stingray script, which is not a criticism since that’s the way it was meant to be. However, where they are worthy of comparison is in their use of models. You can argue that in the mid 60s, when Anderson was making Thunderbirds, the models his productions were using were pretty much state of the art, and as good as it got – certainly on television anyway. This shouldn’t come as a great surprise. His philosophy was to treat every episode as if it was a blockbuster movie – from “Stingray” in 1964 onwards all of his shows were shot in colour, even though it would be 3 years before the first colour television programmes were shown in the UK. From Thunderbirds in the mid 60s onwards, a man called Derek Meddings was Visual Effects Supervisor, and it’s worth noting that he went on to work on many Hollywood blockbusters of the 1970s, and his work was more than once nominated for an Oscar. So it’s not a bad idea to compare model work in Doctor Who to What Anderson were producing at the same time. And in terms of “The Moonbase”, the model of the base itself certainly holds its own. Yes, it’s maybe not quite up to Moonbase Alpha from Anderson’s Space 1999, but that was quite a few years in the future. Much less impressive is the Cybermen’s spaceship which lands on the moon. It’s a rather unimpressive flying saucer shape, and the effect is of a similar quality to the spaceship shots in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. The sets inside the base, though, are rather good, especially the main control room, with the dome looking out onto the surface of the moon.

I rather enjoyed the performances of the actors playing the humans. It was nice to see Andre Maranne popping up as Benoit, the very French member of the crew of the base. He was an actor who got a lot of work in British films and TV shows of the 70s playing French men. He’s probably best remembered for being Andre the restaurateur in the Fawlty Towers episode “Gourmet Night”.

As regards the relationships between the travelers, well, for the first time there was a little bit of macho posturing between Ben and Jamie once the latter started to recover from his illness. Allowing for the fact that this was family viewing, and so there are only ever going to be hints about the travellers’ feelings for each other, in this story it’s clear just for that moment or two that Ben thinks of Polly as his territory. I can’t quite make up my mind either how well Polly is served by this story. I mean, on the one hand it is Polly who comes up with both the idea of attacking the Cybermen’s chest units, and using acetone to do it. On the other hand, she does more screaming than usual, and the Doctor is very dismissive towards her when she asks what she can do to help, and he tells her to make coffee for everyone.

Whatever you do, it’s probably not a good idea to analyse the science in this story very much. For example, unless I’m much mistaken, Polly and Ben put the plastic dissolving Polly cocktail into plastic plant sprayers. Which don’t dissolve, although the Cybermen’s chest units do. Then the gravitron sends the Cybermen and the Cybership off into space, and everyone hopes that this will be the last that we see of the Cybermen. Why can’t the ship wait until the gravitron is switched off and then zoom around and pick up the Cybermen drifting around? Oh, and the Cybermen use a laser to cut a hole in the dome of the base, which is plugged with a plastic drinks tray. Don’t try this one at home, kids.

Nevertheless, overall, I think the part of me that will always be 10 years old, that I mentioned in the last review, was always going to love this serial. And it’s fair to say that suspending your disbelief, and watching this one as you would have watched it as a kid is by far that best way of enjoying it. Watch it to enjoy the Cybermen tramping across the moon towards the base, kicking moondust as they go. Enjoy them rising like butterflies on their Kirby wires as they drift off into space.

What have we learned?

If you don’t like the British weather, then all you have to do is to invent the gravitron and sort it out.

The Cybermen’s chest units are made from the same sort of plastic that Easter eggs are held in their boxes by. 

29:The Tenth Planet

Before Watching

Well, here we are then. William Hartnell’s 29^th story – his swan song. An important last, but also an important first too. The first regeneration scene. The first appearance of the Cybermen – I’ll say a bit more about them later. The first ‘base under siege’ story – that’s a Doctor Who staple that’s going to recur, especially through the coming Troughton Era. If you look at the four Patrick Troughton Cybermen stories – The Moonbase – The Tomb of the Cybermen – The Wheel in Space and The Invasion – two of them – the Moonbase and The Wheel in Space – are both ‘base under siege stories.

Cards on the table – I always loved the cybermen more than the Daleks – you’ve probably picked up my mixed feelings about Skaro’s finest as you’ve worked your way through previous reviews. This is partly just an accident of History. Although I have a very early memory of Daleks being assembled on a production line from The Power of the Daleks, I only really remember watching whole stories from Patrick Troughton’s last season, and thought that the Cybermen in The Invasion were amazing.

My first exposure to the Tenth Planet was in the Target novelization. Now, one of the first Target novelizations made from the early years was Doctor Who and the Cybermen, which was based on The Moonbase – and I loved that one. Yet when I read the novelization of “The Tenth Planet” I didn’t think it was a patch on the later story. Add to that fact years of reading about cybermen with cardboard chest units and Swedish accents, and you’ll understand why I can’t help approaching this one with more than a little trepidation.

After Watching

The story turned out to be set in 1986. It looked like the production team were deliberately going out of their way to stress the multicultural nature of future society. On the base itself there seemed to be more Americans than anything else, but also a British boffin who looked like a bearded Elvis Costello. There is also a terrible Italian cliché. It was interesting to see that the two astronauts were a white Australian, and black American, who seemed to be the commander. I felt genuinely cold during the scenes set outside the base during the snowstorm. So far so good.

Right, the cybermen. There’s nothing I can probably say that hasn’t already been said. The hands were conspicuously still human. As for the voice. Well, maybe it is just me, but they didn’t sound the least bit Swedish to me. There was some electronic treatment of the voices, but they weren’t as highly treated as I thought they would be, and the first cyberman to speak actually has quite a posh English accent, for all the fact that he is varying the rhythms of his speech as far away as he can get from the rhythms of normal speech. In fact, if anything it his voice reminds me just a little bit of Michael Palin playing the leader of the knights who say Ni. Which just isn’t threatening. Their voices needed to be both deeper and more mechanical. Although having said the fact that there is not the slightest irritation in the cyberman’s voice when he keeps repeating his question about the humans’ names and ages does underline the fact that the cybermen have no emotions. In fact these are the most emotionless cybermen we will ever see. They are less instantly threatening than they will become, but actually far more convincing in what they claim to be. As regards their appearance, it’s nowhere near as bad as some have claimed it to be. Having cast tall actors works, and this is emphasised by the light on top of their heads I didn’t realise from stills photos I’d seen that the big circular thing on the bottom of their chest units was actually a detachable weapon, and that’s actually an important plot point, since it enables  Ben and the base personnel to use them on the cybermen. In fact Ben is almost in tears when he fired on a cyberman. I think that on reflection the decision not keep the cloth masks for their next appearance was the right one, though.

Having read up on this since watching the whole story, I now know that William Hartnell was taken ill at the end of episode 2, which is why he spends all of episode 3 spark out on the floor. It shows how much of a template this story was for much of what would come later when there were scenes which looked very familiar to me from later stories – taking back the base and holding off the invaders – crawling along a ventilation shaft (to be fair it was the male companion who did it in this story. The commanding officer (General Cutler in this story) going off tonto and losing it completely is something which will become quite a familiar motif as well. Cutler’s solution is to try to nuke Mondas, and the wrongness of being so ready to bomb what you don’t understand is another motif which will recur.

As regards the story, it really helped that it was only 4 parts. Any more and it would have needed some serious padding. As it was, though, this story surprised me since the Doctor did little or nothing to save the day. The main plot point is that Mondas, the home of the cybermen, is Earth’s virtual twin, having left the solar system a very long time ago. When it comes back, it automatically begins absorbing energy from earth. It seems that this is a natural process, since the cybermen cannot turn it off when they realise that Mondas is going to be destroyed if it keeps absorbing energy. The only solution they can come up with is to destroy Earth to stop it. So basically all the people on the base have to do is to stop them destroying Earth long enough for Mondas to absorb enough energy to destroy itself.

I was struck also by the way that the goalposts have continually shifted in the destroying a cyberman stakes. In the book of The Moonbase – and I’ve no doubt, in the show as well – the cybermen’s chest units are destroyed by a cocktail of chemicals including nail varnish remover, and the army of cybermen are destroyed by a  gravity device which is used to control Earth’s weather. In “Revenge of the Cybermen” they have a previously unknown susceptibility to gold. In this first cybermen story it’s radiation, the slightest hint of it and they start dropping like 9 pins. Well, some of them. For the rest, they are apparently drawing all of their power from Mondas, so when Mondas dies, so do they. Pretty convenient, I’d say.

The great irony of the current situation with The Tenth Planet is that the first three episodes exist, but the 4^th, containing the first ever regeneration scene, does not. Footage of the regeneration does, but that’s all. Still, it must have come as a hell of a shock when it happened without tons of warning and pre publicity which is the norm nowadays.  Off the point completely, watching the animation of episode 4 it struck me how much Michael Craze’s voice is like Bradley Walsh.

Overall, then, it’s remarkable how far the show has come by the end of this story.

What Have We Learned?

Earth had a twin planet called Mondas

Originally cybermen were not evil, in fact they had no concept of good or evil, just survival.

The original Mondas cybermen were susceptible to radiation.

Whatever species the Doctor belongs to (we didn’t know at the time) he can change and regenerate