Attack of the Cybermen

"Didn't go very well, did it?"

Why, after ignoring this blog for six years, have I suddenly returned with a review of a mostly forgotten and otherwise disreputable mid-80s serial? Back in late 2014 and early 2015, I found myself with some real blocks trying to write these reviews, and, finally, the lack of any momentum or progress killed it. And the longer I got out from it, the more many of my early reviews here were a source of embarrassment, and I simply didn't bother. 

It wasn't a matter of the show's quality - I loved Series 9, found Series 10 to be uneven but with brilliant highlights. Unfortunately, I've been considerably less enthused with the last two seasons (I like Whittaker, but find Chibnall's showrunning to be about as effective as it was on Torchwood), and I guess haven't watched as much Who in general for some time. Still, after feeling deeply dispirited by Chibnall's Revolution of the Daleks on the heels of the dreadful Timeless Children, I rewatched several other New Who stories just to remind myself of how deeply I love this show. And then discovered BritBox on Amazon, which has virtually all of Classic Doctor Who, and started revisiting serials I had seen only once a decade or more ago and wanted to revisit.

And, for some reason, last night I had an urge to rewatch Attack of the Cybermen. Although its reputation is dire, I had recalled more or less enjoying it at the time even while registering some complaints with the script. And then felt the need to make it clear to the internet that I Had Opinions About A Thing.

Someone's been sneaking Cyber-snacks.

 

A bit of background on the production of this story, since this introduction isn't incredibly long or self-indulgent enough yet. But for those who don't know, it's important to understand in order to grasp what happens in this serial. Because this was Doctor Who on the knife's edge of its cancellation, and Attack of the Cybermen is the show trying to dance on that knife and splitting open its own veins.

John Nathan-Turner, popularly nicknamed "JNT", had become the show's producer in 1981 entirely through his accounting wizardry without any real creative background. He had a great passion for the show, however, and with Season 18's script editor Christopher Bidmead, (script editor being somewhat similarly to a lead writer in today's world, although they didn't necessarily write any scripts themselves) he had crafted a grand artistic success, if not a ratings one. He followed that up with the first season of the Fifth Doctor's era, which was a huge ratings success and was largely well-received. Bidmead had left after his first season, however, leaving JNT to hire first an interim script-editor for the first half of the season, and then scramble for a permanent person for the position. He chose Eric Saward, off the back of his pretty solid script for The Visitation, but who was otherwise almost entirely inexperienced outside of a few radio programs.

Still, Saward's script for Earthshock, which brought back the Cybermen after a lengthy hiatus, had resulted in a hugely popular serial, and the show's nostalgia-heavy 20th season was largely well-received. The nostalgia element, with every episode harkening back directly to some older element with returning villains, had been aided by series uber-fan Ian Levine, who became an unofficial advisor for the show.

With Levine's help, then, for the 21st Season, the show brought back two sets of old villains for the serial Warriors of the Deep. The result was a disaster. A chaotic production disrupted by Margaret Thatcher's snap election of 1983 resulted in an utterly botched adaptation of its script. Most memorably, the serial's big monster, the Myrka, ended up being literally just an ugly pantomime horse, garish overlit to boot. But the script was so wretched that James Cameron could have broken a Hollywood budget record on it and it still would have been absolutely terrible.

 And, unfortunately, Michael Grade, controller of BBC1, noticed. He had never particularly liked the show, but this was a true embarrassment, and he believed Doctor Who should not be kept on the air. Given its strong ratings, he couldn't kill it right off, but he was ready to. The rest of Season 21 largely went well, building to a tremendous climax with the Fifth Doctor's farewell story, The Caves of Androzani, not only one of the greatest episodes of the show, but one of the great works of science fiction in 1984, a particularly great year for the genre.

However, that wasn't the end of the season. For some bizarre reason, JNT decided that the first story for Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor would air as the final serial of the season. However, the production had run out of money by the point, the scripts were unfinished and lousy (the writer at one point made the excuse for a delayed script that his typewriter had literally exploded), and, on top of everything else, JNT, Saward, and Baker had all wanted to make this new Doctor dark and mysterious and strange... and had botched it utterly (not Baker's fault, in fairness). The result competes strongly with Warriors of the Deep as one of the leading contenders for the worst episode of Doctor Who ever, as well as the worst work of science fiction of 1984, all the more crushing a failure after the triumph of Androzani.

So, in 1985, coming into Season 22, Doctor Who desperately needed to come out strong. Saward took the reins personally, and worked closely with Levine to devise a story bringing back the popular Cybermen that would tie into two decades of continuity. Because script editors weren't suppose to write multiple stories and Saward was already writing the season finale, he convinced his ex-girlfriend to write a draft and keep her name on whatever he rewrote. And Saward, JNT, and the production needed to nail this one. Prove that it was, indeed, worthy of continuation and funding by the tax-payers of Britain. Prove that the Sixth Doctor could be as iconic and fascinating as his predecessors. Prove that JNT and Saward could actually deliver worthy drama. 

So, naturally, our story begins in a literal river of crap, as maintenance workers wade through London's sewers. They're surprised to find a wall that shouldn't exist, and are then mysteriously killed by something mysterious that definitely isn't the villain listed in the title. 

This opening scene shows off the serial's best asset, though, the direction of Matthew Robinson. Robinson is a rare Classic Who director who isn't best remembered for his contributions to Who - after this, he was appointed the lead director on EastEnders, and later became executive producer of the show, was promoted to head of drama for BBC Wales, and ended up producing a bunch of films in Cambodia. (It probably doesn't help, though, that the two scripts he was assigned to direct in Who were this and Resurrection of the Daleks, neither of which are well-remembered despite his strong direction in both.) Robinson shoots the serial with vivid atmosphere and lots of punchy visuals and editing; it feels more like an ambitious low-budget movie than a ropey no-budget TV show. Notably, the sewers are dramatically underlit to a degree rarely done on the BBC at the time, and all the more effective for it.

Attack then moves to the Doctor and his companion, Peri, in the TARDIS. And the early TARDIS scenes are rough. The costumes, of course, are wretched; I sometimes forget just what an endless eyesore the Sixth Doctor's costume really is. Peri's, of course, is a major improvement, though, as usual, it's skimpy in a way that doesn't seem to match her character, emphasizing her curves and her boobs bouncing around. (For those who don't know, JNT was gay, but wanted Peri to always be dressed sexily "for the dads".) It's also an extremely bright, saturated pink, as though it's trying to make sure she isn't invisible standing next to the Doctor.

Can't you just feel the love?

But costumes are one thing, the dialogue is a whole other can of awful. Not only do Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant evidence no chemistry here, but the banter is just the Doctor being a total kneebiter and ignoring Peri calling him on it. And every time she tries to turn it into light, fun banter, the Doctor just spits in her face:

"I was, in fact, taking you to Earth."
"Bit of an anticlimax after all that journey."
"Ungrateful wretch."
"Well, what do you expect, applause?"
"A bit of gratitude wouldn't irretrievably damage my ego."
"Come off it, Doctor. No one is more surprised than you are that we came through it."

What, exactly, are they expecting us to feel here? Saward and Baker both had ambitions to make the Doctor a more threatening and frightening figure, but even if JNT's insistence on that jacket wasn't blowing any chance at that, there's a difference between a mysterious and frightening figure and just a total dick. It was a questionable choice to begin with, but one that might have worked. Even setting aside the early days of William Hartnell's First Doctor as the beginning of his character arc from villain to antihero to hero, Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor could totally be frightening when Troughton wanted him to be, and Sylvester McCoy would prove the same afterwards. 

But the Doctor being a scary figure requires emphasizing their alienness, their elaborate planning to fight unimaginable power and evil, and how far they're willing to go in that fight - not being an abusive bastard to their companion. It gets the whole affair off on a horribly wrong foot.

These scenes are intercut with Lytton, Maurice Colbourne's mercenary last seen working for the Daleks in the previous season, working with a crew on earth to pull off a diamond heist through the sewers. These scenes are pretty generic bank robbery stuff, but there is a degree of fun in just bare competence at this sort of thing, which contrasts unfortunately with the TARDIS scene without elevating the proceedings much.

Thankfully, when the Doctor and Peri finally arrive on Earth ten minutes in, their banter improves massively, and, with decent material, Baker and Bryant turn out to actually have some chemistry; further, the Doctor's repairs to the TARDIS chameleon circuit malfunctioning have a whimsical charm too often missing in this era. And with more comedic material, Baker shines; when he's being funny or weird, his brash Doctor shines.

"I suddenly feel conspicuous."
"Not surprised in that coat."
"No, it's more a question of having organized a surprise party and forgotten who it's for."

 

The duo arrives in I. M. Foreman's Scrapyard on 76 Totter's Lane - which, you see, is the scrapyard from An Unearthly Child. This serves no purpose in the story beyond being an in-joke. One could stretch, I suppose, that echoing back to the Hartnell era sort-of works with the story being deeply wrapped into several of the 1960s Cyberman stories,  given that Hartnell's last story was the Cybermen's first, but it's tenuous at best. And, more to the point, it actually foreshadows that the Cyberman references will ultimately function merely as empty continuity masturbation. (For a sharp contrast, it's worth looking at how Remembrance of the Daleks similarly harkened back to An Unearthly Child with actual purpose and thought three years later.)

While Lytton and the bank robbers wade through the sewers to get to the diamond vault they're knocking off, the Doctor and Peri, after futzing around for 10 minutes trying to find the plot, run into two evil policemen. The Doctor instantly beats the snot out of one of them, while Peri cleverly deals with the other one. It's an exciting little scene, and slightly shocking for the Doctor's quickness to a violent approach. Baker pulls off the physicality effectively, but whether or not a more violent Doctor is overly jarring is probably up to the viewer. It's certainly different.

At any rate, having still not arrived at the plot, the Doctor and Peri enter the sewers and muck around themselves. If that seems like the entirety of the first episode is either walking around in a river of poop or trying to get to the river of poop, that's because it mostly is. In Season 22, in order to come in line with the rest of the BBC, where half-hour dramas had largely be eliminated in favor of hour-long dramas, Doctor Who had doubled the length of its episodes, now lasting a full 45 minutes. Given the problems the era had with pacing half-hour episodes, unfortunately, the result here unsurprisingly consists wheel-spinning for somnambulant periods. 

But, finally, Lytton and his thieves make it to the wall that shouldn't be there, and it blasts open to reveal the Cybermen. And, points to Robinson, the reveal works. Their dramatically-lit and edited appearance is genuinely frightening in a way the Cybermen rarely have been. Of course, then they start talking, and they're just daft, clumsy evil robo-men, but hey, at least they got one good moment out of them.

We learn that Lytton isn't just a mercenary, but from a race of mercenaries, which might be the single most Eric Saward thing ever written. And now we cut to the planet Telos, which Robinson makes appropriately alien, and, slowly, the actual plot comes into view. The Cybermen were stalking around the London sewers because, you see, in the story The Invasion they stalked around the sewers. But also, they're on the planet Telos, where they burst out of cellophane walls because, you see, they did that in Tomb of the Cybermen. And they're on both places now because, you see, in The Tenth Planet, they drove their own home planet Mondas, parked it next to Earth, and tried to destroy Earth so Mondas wouldn't literally melt for reasons that I think kind of made some sort of magic crazy person sense in The Tenth Planet, and anyway now they're going to redirect Halley's comet to strike the Earth to ensure Earth so Mondas survives. And they have two leaders whose respective ranks are never clear - Cyber Leader, played by David Banks because that was his role in Earthshock (even though he died there) and Cyber Controller, played by Michael Kilgaroff because he played that role almost twenty years earlier in Tomb of the Cybermen (even though Kilgaroff is visibly... rotund for a Cyberman after 20 years). If that sounds like a bunch of incoherent, masturbatory continuity nonsense, well, it is.

'member when the Doctor fought the Cybermen in those Tombs?
Yeah, I 'member!

And, honestly, that might be forgivable if the story built up to some kind of point and/or was entertaining. Unfortunately, Lytton getting out of Poop River, London doesn't get the Doctor out of it. The Doctor doesn't arrive at the plot until 38 minutes into a 90 minutes story. He then gets captured by the Cybermen, who have already captured his TARDIS with remarkable ease. And he spends almost the entire second episode in a prison cell. He escapes with the help of a Cryon, a member of the native race of Telos, and gives the Cryon his Sonic Lance so it can suicide bomb the Cyberman base. He then gets out of there while other characters solve the plot, and, in the final scene, uses a Cybergun to kill the Cyberman leaders at a point where their deaths don't particularly matter since the base is about to blow, but fails to save Lytton. 

You may have noticed the Doctor accomplishes close to nothing in the story, and mostly just tries to catch up to a story that hums along without him. It's possible for a story to work with a minimal use of the Doctor, but if much of the episode is just following him failing to make it to or affect the plot, and he doesn't even spend the time doing anything Doctorish, how is this supposed to work? Yes, when he's not asked to be an unpleasant dick, Baker has a brash charm and humor that's fun and a physicality that effectively feels like it comes out of nowhere, but the script doesn't care to let him do much of those fun things. He does get multiple scenes casually wielding guns, though, almost as if he's really a space mercenary at heart.

That could, theoretically, be at least somewhat forgivable if said story was itself engaging, but it's mostly not. Even given that the entire first episode is walking through a sewer and that the second half has all the action, there's very little going on here. The Cybermen get that frightening first appearance, and easily take over the TARDIS, but otherwise are easily killed by their own guns, regular Earth pistols, the Doctor stabbing them with his Sonic Lance, and even a nice whack to the head with handheld metal pipe that straight decapitates them. They stumble around so slowly that gunfights feel hilariously slow even with Robinson's general skill with action. And their original concept, that of horrific mirrors of humanity with all emotion removed, is barely present except for a single line of dialogue about the weakness of emotion; they're just generic clanging tin men. Although when Lytton stabs the Cyber Controller, he bleeds green, which I guess is kind of weird.

And what of Lytton? After all, Saward's real interest here seems to be Lytton. It feels like he would honestly rather be writing a TV show about Lytton rather than Doctor Who. (Indeed, Saward recently revived the character for a comic-book miniseries.) Lytton knows more about what's going on in the story than the Doctor ever really does. Maurice Colbourne has the right charisma for such a rogue. After being cagey for most of the story, it's revealed that he's actually working for the Cryons, not the Cybermen. And the story's climactic moment ultimately rests on Lytton having his hands brutally crushed by the Cybermen (which is far bloodier and more shocking than I remembered it being), getting half-converted, yet still fighting them before dying. And so the Doctor's final line muses that "I doon't think I've ever misjudged anyone as badly as I did Lytton."

 

But why? Lytton was a mercenary perfectly happy to work for the Daleks! And here, he's still just a merc, just not for the bad guys. He doesn't seem to have had any change of heart, the Cryons just happen to be the ones who hired him. And the Doctor wonders why Lytton didn't tell him he wasn't hired by the Cybermen, and Peri remarks the Doctor never gave Lytton a chance, but even when Lytton did have a chance, he was needlessly mysterious. If the story's point is that Lytton was misjudged, it's a misjudgement on the part of the writer, not the Doctor.

So, if the story is a slog that adds up to nothing, what is good here? Well, the production, mainly. Telos feels like an alien world rather than just a random quarry. Both the location shooting and the studio work are atmospheric and feature an effective variety of shots. The Cryons are pretty well-executed; played entirely by women, with sing-song voices and strange gestures, and a pretty cool design, they're probably one of the best one-shot aliens of '80s Who. Sure, they'd probably look better in black and white, and the closeups show the seams, but it's still some good work. And Saward at least tries to make them distinctive individuals, even if he doesn't do quite enough.

There's also one other element that works, and it's a distinctively Saward one. As the story comes to a close, most of the supporting cast is killed off, the rest are in incredible danger, and the Cryon plan seems on the verge of failure. The all-hope-is-lost moment builds a deep tension. This tension is sadly lacking in the rest of the story, but climactic tension is something Saward is great at building to. Unfortunately, here, he doesn't pay it off, and it largely whimpers to a close, with the Doctor's brief rolling about and gunning down the Cyber leaders feeling like an afterthought.

Basically, Attack of the Cybermen is a lousy story occasionally salvaged by the execution, which is as good as could reasonably be expected for such a cheap TV show with such a tight schedule. But Saward seems to this day proud of this story, happily taking credit. (Levine also takes quite a bit of credit when asked.) Because, you see, Attack of the Cybermen is what Saward and JNT wanted Warriors of the Deep to be: a boring river of grimdark, meaningless crap, sure, but with, like, shadows and slick editing and a kinda cool monster under the circumstances. And if anyone wants to know why Doctor Who was canceled, this episode is one of the best examples of why. If this is what they think the show should be when it's working, then it deserved to die.

 Thankfully, the next story is an astounding improvement, making a pretty good case that the show shouldn't be canceled, just that maybe teh reins should be given to someone else, because there's great potential in the various elements here. Sure, it's not enough, ultimately, to save the show, but, thankfully, it lasted enough more years to go out on a high note. Eventually.

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