Ahhh,1985, the year when it all went pear shaped. Suddenly Dr Who's supporters were gone from on high and in came Michael Grade and the infamous hiatus. By the time this story was shown we knew the series was on trial, and I don't remember TIMELASH being particularly reassuring. 

At the time I was only 14, and couldn't really understand the fuss about season 22, but revisiting it paints a slightly different picture. After the Davison era- a good doctor who still had a lot more to offer when he bowed out, and generally very strong stories, particularly in his final season, we suddenly got Colin Baker's radically different portrayal and more violent stories. Old monsters galore appeared in place of new ones. Out of six stories, four harping back to the past was too many. Particularly when only REVELATION really did its returning characters justice. ATTACK is very watchable but fatally derivative and the gore content lost the public fairly quickly. MARK OF THE RANI was entertaining for the Master/Doctor/Rani banter but didn't have much of a plot to it, and was ultimately just another blast from the past wasting the Master yet again. THE TWO DOCTORS had some good ideas but was too long and ultimately dull. And REVELATION?

Thankfully this turbulent season was to end on a high note. REVELATION is excellent. 

>From its very opening it drops you right in the thick of things. The Doctor and Peri encounter the mutant, Natasha and Grigory break into the base, Kara gets harrassed by Davros and hires Orcini to bump him off. The story sets itself up beautifully, on contrast to VENGEANCE ON VAROS say, where the opening Varos scenes are excellent but the stranded-in-the tardis-cue-whining-marathon bits are dreadful. It's not a good start to an adventure when the Doctor's first scenes make you cringe, and fortunately REVELATION is much better. The Sixth Doctor's regeneration troubles have eased out, Colin Baker is in confident command of the role, and Peri has ceased to be a brainless bimbo. 

And so the story progresses- more of the Daleks in part one would have been nice, but Oh, well...the excellence of Davros in this tale more than makes up for it. Part One contains much that is great- the glass dalek scene is powerful, Terry Molloy's davros rises to the great characterization that the script offers him, and the direction is polished throughout. 

Part Two is even better. The Doctor is captured, rival Dalek factions get their best battle, and the showdown with Davros is excellently done. This really was a great final story for Davros- bringing him back again in REMEMBRANCE was unnecessary, and it's great that in the new series the Daleks got the chance to function without him again. The DJ gives a nice surreal touch to the proceedings, and the regulars shine. 

Ironically, considering the shadow hanging over the series,

things looked healthy by the end of REVELATION. The Doctor and Peri's relationship was starting to settle down, Colin Baker gives his best performance in the part, and the viewing figures were climbing steadily back up. A great pity that things weren't allowed to continue on their natural course at this point.... 

There were several tragedies resulting from the cancellation, but I am not sure that season 23 itself was one of them. The bits we've seen in book form and in articles largely reveal more old monsters in more half baked

plots. MISSION TO MAGNUS is crap, the auton/rani/master story sounds too overcrowded again, ULTIMATE EVIL could have been Ok but feels desperately underwritten ( I realise things were only in draft form att he time maybe, but even so it is shallow) and NIGHTMARE FAIR, while OK, doesn't fell like a Toymaker scheme- more the Master's league really.Autons and Ice warriors would have been good, but they needed better stories- like DYING DAYS for example......but it might have been better than TRIAL, which tries very hard but wasn't what the series needed right then. It needed radical new stories with dynamism and drive and originality... and we got MYSTERIOUS PLANET. 

The real tragedy was that when the series returned it felt like no one noticed. The habit of DR WHO was broken and the series never recovered. There should also have been a new producer- JNT delivered excellently in season 18 and the Davison era but thereafter things faltered badly. 

And of course there was Colin Baker. I find him a patchy doctor at best- fine with a good script and good direction but unable to transcend weaker material as all the previous doctors could, including Davison. By the end of season 22 he WAS the Doctor- however in MYSTERIOUS PLANET he was dreadful and the TRIAL format gave him little room to progress in characterising his doctor. And when he was boooted out we got McCoy, the all time worst doctor. I am not as much of a Colin convert after Big Finish as many seem to be as I still find his performance in audio these stories irritating at times,and I still wonder whether he was ever a suitable choice for the part, but I do think he was denied a chance to do better. Not just by Grade, but by JNT and Saward as well. Oh well..

At least REVELATION gives him a chance for greatness. Definitely one of the eighties' best.

I'm falling to pieces! I don't even have any clothes sense...

Lots of 'bad' stories are often just mediocre, but seem worse due to being directly after brilliant stories. Revenge of the Cybermen isn't so bad, but when you've just seen Genesis of the Daleks? The Long Game after Dalek? Pretty much every Season 17 story after City of Death? Lets face it, no story could have started up after The Caves of Androzani and not suffered.

I, however, was fortunate to see this on video without having seen the masterpiece beforehand.

It ultimately dulled the pain, but it didn't help. I wish I was a funky rebel Who fan, able to hold up the most pathetic of stories and scream it's genius, but sometimes the majority are right. Not always, but when The Twin Dilemma ended up the least-liked official Doctor Who story, it was not by bad luck.The Twin Dilemma is bad. And worse, it's important. It's the first story of a new Doctor. It needs to be good, or at least, entertaining. And it fails. Anyone who has seen the new Children in Need special (which I insist on calling Afterlife), you can see the whole point of this story - the Doctor's regeneration is going wrong just when he needs to get his companion to accept him - done far better in seven minutes.

It gives me no pleasure to say it's a stinker.

In a way, the troubled background of the story (Anthony Stevens collapsed while writing it and his typewriter blew up, forcing Eric Saward to take over at the last minute) means it's got a better excuse for being crap than Resurrection of the Daleks which had plenty of time to have its wrinkled smoothed out only for the writer to simply make even bigger problems. However, the gloss to Resurrection means a first viewing leaves you bouncing with exploded Daleks and a massive death toll. It may not survive anything other than a cursory viewing, but Resurrection still beats Twin.

OK, the problems with Twin are if not obvious then at least very noticeable.

First off the scene where the Doctor strangles Peri. Now, on the one hand, it sets up one of the theme of the stories - the newly regenerated Doctor isn't so much mad, he has no self control. He sees a course of action and continually exaggerates it until it gets silly. Even his attack on Peri is justified in the plot. Here is a woman he risked total death to save and... she doesn't even thank him. She calls him old, ugly, rude and insults his fashion sense but expects him to applaud hers. Can you honestly blame the Doctor for being annoyed at Peri? But then it starts. The paranoia - Peri got the Doctor killed, Peri's not sorry, Peri's rude to him, was it all a plot? Is Peri some kind of saboteur trying to kill the Doctor? Is he going to let her get him killed again? Can he risk her killing anyone else? No, he's got to kill her now!

Of course, it's ridiculous and stupid. But that's the horror of the regeneration crisis, the Doctor can't help himself. When he realizes how dangerous he can be, he comes up with a simple and effective plan - put himself out of harm's way until he's settled down. Except he gets carried away: he's becoming a hermit, thriving on desolation, chanting in Latin and requiring eternal atonement! No wonder the production team wanted this idea for a regeneration story, it's brilliant - a Doctor going rogue, trying to stop himself screw up everything and somehow helpless...

And like so many brilliant ideas, Twin buries them under gastropod slime.

Like the gastropods themselves. This is the series that, twelve episodes previously showed the most horrific and stomach-churning insectoid grubs imaginable in the Gravis and his Tractators. I'm shocked that Doctor Who's cash-strapped ingenuity didn't step in and re-use them - not only were the monsters already made and shown to the public, there's not much difference between these slugs wanting to move planets and these grubs wanting to move planets. It would have been very interesting to see the blunt, coarse Sixth Doctor up against an enemy the Fifth Doctor defeated by never having an angry word with. Instead, we get the wittily-named Gastropods.

And they are rubbish.

We only see Mestor do anything, but apparently there are two other slugs waddling around, not even noticing that there's a huge blue box marked POLICE blocking their empty corridors. Mestor looks crap too - fat, cross-eyed and morbidly obese. Its embarassing to see him wobbling on his throne waving his paws on either side of his dumbfounded face. And why is there a frog outfit on a pole beside his throne? Why does he fancy Peri? Why is he supposed to be scarier because he is "half humanoid half slug" a phrase the Doctor trots out over and over again? Why does he have these mental powers? Why does Mestor go all the way to Azmael's room for a quick Q & A he could have done via telepathy, especially when he could have sent a vision of himself like he does to Titan 3? Why is he apparently determined to blow himself up? Just... why, full stop?

And the most painful thing is that Mestor could have been terrifying. Yes, even with that costume. His origins seem to be less oversized garden pest, more Skagra from Shada, who was determined to become a God by making his mind and personality spread like a disease, washing across civilization. We get a tantalizing glimpse of this, with Drak dropping dead and Azmael being possessed. There are a few moments when Noma implies that its not him talking, but Mestor when he euphemistically says that he does what Mestor 'would have wished' and he 'too, has duties' - but its all undone when it turns out Noma was genuinely working on his own bat. The suggestion that anyone might just turn out to be possessed by Mestor would be great thriller material, as well as explaining why the hell anyone puts up with this ranting, rude megalomaniac. It could also explain why no one realizes this last, desperate plan is so obviously doomed to failure and no one notices - because Mestor is blocking their thoughts.

A creature whose mental powers can control an entire planet would surely be calm, disarmingly polite... a bit like Noma... but Mestor shouts things like "Never argue with me again!" and goes to all the trouble of zapping workers to death instead of the cheaper bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head. It's not embarrassing when the Doctor denounces Mestor as crap, because he is. It's embarrassing because a story that is meant to establish that the Doctor is more cunning and cleverer than his opponent sets him up against an incredibly stupid slug. That looks stupid. And fancies Earth women.The Twin Dilemma also crystallizes the part of the Sixth Doctor's era I hate. Not the continuity, the companions, the costume or Colin Baker, but the no unity of action. It happens again and again. This story encompasses Earth, Titan 3 and Joconda and only the last one is in any way relevant to the plot - and we don't get there to episode three, where the plot finally starts. The first scene of the story should be (an unseen) Mestor ruthlessly executing the thief (in front of assembled masses to prevent further rebellion), not Rom and Re playing backgammon. We don't even see the regeneration sequence again, and it's far more important to the plot than it was in Robot and it was repeated then as well.

Why does the story stop at Titan 3 anyway? Why not have the Doctor simply mis-steer the TARDIS straight to Joconda and have him mistake its raped landscape mistaken for the quarry he was aiming for? Why do we abandon Earth after the worst episode - we never get to see Rom and Re meeting up with their parents, for Elanor and her boss be glad to see Hugo's alive and well. And if we're not going to see them undergo the whole 'growth over the adventure', why the hell include them in the first place?

In fact, the twins themselves baffle me. What on Earth inspired anyone to have a story where identical twin geniuses are kidnapped? It would make more sense for Azmael to be stealing some nifty computer designed for it - hell, I bet I wasn't the only one expecting the twins to be revealed in episode four to be badly-programmed androids (and would explain why we never see their mother). The twins are like Adric clones - something Saward flags up in his novelization - where you would expect something more like Chloe and Radcliffe from The League of Gentlemen. They should be creepy, speaking in unison, ideally freakier than their kidnappers. But they're not even as interesting and need to wear different colours in order to be told apart (colours also inexplicably mirrored in the pens they use, their backgammon set, their home computers and the ones the Jocondans helpfully provide).

Come to think of it, why have their memories removed? In prose, I might get that, having a novel hinge on these twins trying to remember where they are, where they came from and to be revealed at the conclusion. But we already know. And the amnesia does nothing to stop the twins asking awkward questions, causing trouble and whinging. Remove those circles and does the plot change? No! Hell, I don't even care they've been kidnapped, because their first scenes show them to be arrogant, emotionless, smug, gormless and rude. When they're kidnapped my sympathies are for Professor Sylvest when he gets home, not for dumb and dumber. Why is their "game of equations" so dangerous anyway? Looks like a dull computer game to me. And if its so dangerous, why on Earth allow the twins access to the computer to use it anyway?

Azmael doesn't grab me either. Why does he insist on calling himself Professor Edgeworth? If he had established this identity on Earth in order to infiltrate the twins' room, I could buy it, but he just teleports in and teleports out again. The character is written a bit like the Doctor in Caves of Androzani, a tired Time Lord desperate to save the day any cost. Part of me wishes it wasn't Azmael but Maxil involved, ironically regenerated into Peter Davison. You could believe him when he tells the twins either they help him or they die, and you can see him grimly setting the base on Titan 3 to explode because he honestly can't risk the Doctor interfering. Maurice Denham does a wonderfully tired old man, even though he does resemble that big-headed monster from an Original Star Trek episode (I do love his sad "I can if I have to" as he uses his mind power to freeze the twins in mid-stance).

Colin Baker's first full story. And he's far from perfect. I've met the man, he's a lovely human being and Big Finish have proved both he and the Sixth Doctor got a short rift. Here... he's intermitent. Sometime he's acutely embrassing (though not as embarassing as Peri's sobbing at the end of part two - the only time Doctor Who makes me want to hide behind the sofa), but I don't look at these moments and think 'Colin, you're crap!' I think Colin is deliberately acting badly, for the moments to show that the Doctor isn't thinking straight. Watch the bit where the Doctor makes a ludicrously overblown and passionate speech that just because there's a minor mystery to be solved the whole universe is about to fall about and only HE and PERI can POSSIBLY stop it, only for Peri to meekly ask "How?" and the Doctor blows out his cheeks, shrugs and changes the subject. That's brilliant, that is, fantastic.

However I can only really appreciate it because I know it's the latter that speaks of natural Colin Baker than the former. The Doctor is given countless stupid things to say, but knowing its awful doesn't stop it being awful. Just as good as the moments when you're not sure if he's having a fit or not: when the Doctor goes on about how old and useless he is, it's said with rising hysteria rather than self-pity; when the Doctor calmly and reasonably insists he and Peri leave the TARDIS to face, if not certain death, then a horrible, harsh life; and when he suddenly starts baiting Mestor. The moment where the Doctor's wandering mindset causes him to deride existence as boring and laughing hysterically is wince-inducing, but the moment were he goes Hannibal Lector on Peri/Piri is definitely scary.

But it happens in the first episode! That's what's wrong with it, not the act but it's timing!

Imagine it happening not just after the Doctor's finished changing, but instead happens towards episode three. The universe is in danger, the Doctor needs to get in action but we can see his thought processes have got muddled, he's moving off topic, getting enthusiastic, and now he thinks Peri is the danger to him and she can't reason with him and the Doctor attacks her - bang! Cliffhanger! And it's made all the more poignant because we know, like Maddox in Warriors of the Deep, the Doctor doesn't want this to happen...

The whole relationship between Peri and the Doctor is skewed. She starts off by treating him with open contempt and when she finally realizes the Doctor is not in the best of moods to be taunted with, she instantly becomes meek before finally snapping. Yet, this happens in the first episode! If you're going to have an emotional arc to the four episodes, it shouldn't be over in part one and then get repeated. I admit, Peri's tirades against the Doctor are brilliant (her taken-aback shout of "I'm not letting a manic-depressive paranoid personality like YOU tell me what to do!" is killingly funny), but they are not consistant. Peri has as many mood swings as the Doctor, being quiet and contemplative while tending Hugo to blubbing at the thought the Doctor's dead to giving the impression she'd want to do the deed herself. Peri was timid around the Fifth Doctor (did she have a crush on him?), and it would have been more effective if that had stayed until the end of the story where she finally snaps and earns the new Doctor's respect. The bit where he marvels she still cares about him is a case in point - he should be touched, not baffled!

The suit, also, is another thing I'd do differently. Actually, I don't hate it (my biggest issue is that it's a bugger to draw), but it is a massive problem. The Twin Dilemma might look like the cash-starved end-of-season four-parter it is, but it's doing better than The Caves of Androzani (where spy cameras are studio cameras, personal computers remote controls and laser guns replaced by machine guns with sparks added in post-production). The reason Twin looks worse is because its decked out in awful greens, purples, silvers, blues and browns. And why? Because of that coat! There's a whole chunk of The Sixth Doctor Handbook explaining that due to the way TV works, brighter colours cause others to fade out so everything in The Twin Dilemma had to look so gaudy otherwise they would litterally wash out by the coat. As Eric Saward notes in his novelzation, all the colours clash and don't add up to anything - a bit like the story itself. It would also, in my humble opinion, have been better had the Doctor not chosen the bloody outfit in the first place but rather grabbed the first thing to hand because the TARDIS was out of control and needed something to wear. Four episodes go by and the only person who thinks the Doctor looks stupid in the coat is Peri - hardly the evidence needed to show the Sixth Doctor is 'totally tasteless', is it?

The problems are shared by the plot. Anthony Stevens seems to have been making it up as he goes along and Eric Saward is constantly building up elements only to end up ignoring them. Mestor wants no link between Joconda and the twins' kidnapping... but he has the power to wipe out entire space fleets by just thinking it! Mestor tells Azmael to reveal what he knows in the belief learning the mission will be benevolent will convince the twins to cooperate - which begs the question why he didn't do this from the beginning, and maybe just write a letter to the twins asking for the answer on the back of a postcard? If Mestor is so powerful, why doesn't he slam the planets into the sun instead of going through the charade? And why is his plan's aim appear to be to increase his species but not himself when every other scene shows him to be an arrogant megalomaniac? What are the 'consequences' the twins foresee about the planet juggling, because it clearly isn't the one the Doctor twigs to? Why does Noma, clearly a smart cookie along the lines of Lytton, honestly believe Mestor is benevolent? If the Gastropods eat everything and food is running out... why don't they just eat the Jocondons? Why does Azmael have a couple of handy 'anti-Gastropod' juice hanging around and never used it? Just how and why did Mestor have the X3773 captured, and why doesn't he change the number plate if he doesn't want it traced? How come he can communicate with Azmael, but Azmael needs a pager to talk back to him? And why oh why does Hugo pull a gun on the Doctor and threaten to kill him if he becomes unstable when he's never seen the Doctor unstable? As far as Lang knows, the Doctor's just a prima donna!

The last scene doesn't work. I wish it did. The Doctor's line ("And whatever else happens, I am the Doctor - whether you like it... or not.") is delivered firmly but not angrilly, and the smile between him and Peri makes the story end on a happy note. But there's no resolution - otherwise we wouldn't have most of Season 22 where the Doctor and Peri are arguing all the bloody time. The line is given such heavy emphasis you wonder if the Doctor was originally supposed to say the same thing in episode one, only this time Peri actually believes him.

Oh, and the cliffhangers... Not good. Not good at all. I can forgive episode one as we see the Doctor's face (just in time for it to be blown off), but Peri's strange snorting sobs are off-putting. The extremely long lingering shots on Colin Baker's face for the other two are bad. Really bad. Especially the final one, where the Doctor is clearly staring straight at camera and looking gormless - and not at all like the genuine smile he was giving to Peri seconds earlier. You would have thought someone would have noticed and done something... And the music is terrible - bar the scene where Azmael detects the TARDIS following his ship and, not recognizing it, wonders what it might be as a militaristic version of the theme tune plays.The Twin Dilemma just doesn't work. And that's not just bad, it's a tragedy. Because new Doctor stories are the only stories in Doctor Who that HAVE to work. There are crap Dalek stories, Cybermen stories, companions can have bad arrivals and worse departures, and even regeneration stories have been known to below par. But a story introducing a new Doctor just can't afford to go wrong, and The Twin Dilemma hits the ground burning - there are good elements but the don't gel and we're left with a bad start to the Sixth Doctor, a terrible continuation of The Caves of Androzani and lacklustre end to Season 21. Eric Saward easily improved the whole story for his novelization, which proves that Twin was one rewrite short of greatness. JNT was not perfect, but fighting to keep the half-thought-out The Twin Dilemma in Season 21 rather than finish it in Season 22 was the only big mistake he'd made since taking the reigns.

If there's a story Big Finish are going to replace in the canon, don't let it be Shada, let it be this.

You can see a clear progression with Eric Saward's Doctor Who work. 'The Visitation' is a nice, textbook straightforward romp. 'Earthshock' is an action movie-type story, with a fairly easy to follow plot for the most part until it all goes a bit mad at the end. 'Resurrection of the Daleks' was a slickly-directed collection of set pieces linked by a somewhat schizophrenic narrative. And 'Attack of the Cybermen' is a mess of indistinct plotlines, continuity references and two-dimensional cyphers. And yes, it is a Saward script. If Paula Moore did have any input, Saward script-edited this one to the extent that it's very much his story.

When dull Hinchcliffe fans bleat on about how dependant the JNT era was on past continuity, they often don't really have much of a case. Generally, the references were harmless. It's fandabbydozy if, say, you can name which stories the clip reel in 'Mawdryn Undead' references, but if it's about all you've seen it doesn't overpower the plot. However, 'Attack of the Cybermen' is something of an exception. To full appreciate what's going on, you could do with knowing that Mondas was destroyed in 'The Tenth Planet', that the Doctor thought the Cybercontroller dead from 'Tomb of the Cybermen', that there are Cybermen in the sewers most likely left over from 'The Invasion', and that Lytton was in 'Resurrection of the Daleks'. And that's not to mention the references like 76 Totter's Lane...

But the biggest problem 'Attack of the Cybermen' has is it's horribly dull. The thing takes until nearly the end of the first episode before it threatens to really get going. Until then, we have to put up with Lytton and his bunch of Sweeney rejects bumbling around, and the Doctor and Peri mucking around looking for a distress signal. The running joke of the 'fixed' chameleon circuit is amusing for about nine seconds of its' first appearance, while the references in the score to Steptoe and Son and Phantom of the Opera are cring-inducing. Colin Baker, having been hammy and fun in 'The Twin Dilemma', is hammy and irritating early on, having to deal with the clunky mood-swings in the script - notable the dreadful "Unstable?!?" moment. He settles down a bit later on, though the script lets him down, notably the overwrought scenes with Vlast and when he orders the shooting of Russell. I always got the impression that the violent overtones of Season 22 were not so much Saward's attempts to subvert the gentle fifth Doctor, but in fact his belief of how the character should be, turning the Doctor into some sort of revenge figure.

Still, Colin does well from the script compared to poor Nicola Bryant. While I don't think she's as bad an actress as is sometimes made out, she certainly can't save bad scenes. She also suffered from a part that was heavily underwritten. Here, Peri's largely superfluous, simply nagging and whinging at the Doctor for the most part.

Saward is far more concerned with Lytton. While Maurice Colbourne gives an efficient performance, the character's scripting is odd. We have the Doctor's moral quandry about misjudging Lytton [who he never met in 'Resurrection, but still...], but the character does very little to show he's any different than he was - remember, the Cryons are paying him to help them. Colbourne is never quite able to imbue the character with any more depth than that of a well-spoken heavy.

However, Lytton does better than most of the guest cast. Brian Glover's much-praised performance as Griffiths isn't actually all that much cop, the character being a standard slightly-squeamish henchman. Terry Molloy is similarly bland as Russell. The idea of getting Michael Kilgariff to reprise his role as the Cybercontroller is inexplicably bad seeing as the role basically entails being quite tall, wearing a costume and shouting a bit. That he's fat seventeen years on hardly helps the menace factor. David Banks does fairly well as the overshadowed Cyberleader, but the Cryons are a faceless bunch, not helped by silly costumes and cod-alien dialogue. But by far the worst element are Stratton and Bates.

It doesn't help that they're in the most superfluous of many pointless subplots which Eric seems to have crammed into the story for no readily apparent reason. We're subjected to these two idiots legging it from a work party, indulging in disguise japes, meeting up with Griffiths and Lytton and then being sharply killed off. Of course, the alleged characterisation hardly breathes life into this strand of the story. Stratton is shouty, Bates is a bit wet. Eat your heart out Bob Holmes. What really seals it is that the chap playing Stratton [he doesn't deserve me actually checking to see who played him] gives what's probably the worst performance in the series' history. That's a history that includes turns from Christopher Robbie, Dolores Grey, Leee John, Rick James, andJon Pertwee in the second half of Season 9. The chap seems to have decided to simply shout his lines at poor Batesy at all times in the hope this will work. It doesn't, and the result is excruciating.

By the second episode the plot is ludicrously contrived. We have the Cybermen planning to blow up Earth using a comet to save Mondas, but to help their cunning plan they lock up the Doctor in a room stacked with explosives, not even bothering to remove his sonic lance first. It must be some sort of Cyberarrogance programming, as they don't bother taking Lytton's knife off him later either.

But then this is the worst bunch of Cybermen we've ever had. Worst than the chaps with the balaclavas and silly voices in 'The Tenth Planet', and worst than the Monty Python and the Holy Grail-inspired squad that spend most of 'Silver Nemesis' running away from a bow and arrow. Cybernetic monsters from the future aren't very scary when ninth-rate London hoods and labourers take then out with pistols and spades. I smoke twenty cigarettes a day and eat junkfood constantly, but I'd quite fancy myself in a fight against an 'Attack' Cyberman.

It's all based on coincidences and large lapses of logic. It's stupid and boring. Thankfully, it was to be the rough nadir of the show in the 1980s, and very gradually the show would bounce back. Thank God.

Imagine if you can the most annoying, pedantic, anally-retentive fan you can: the kind who harasses strangers when they hear their kids humming the theme tune, whose heads explode every time WOTAN calls the Doctor “Doctor Who” and who have to shield their eyes from the Seal of Rassilon in the Vogan control room. Now imagine what happens when you give this fan a degree of creative control in how an episode is made. Alternatively, instead of imagining it, you could just watch Attack Of The Cybermen. I know that Ian Levine bashing is so commonplace now that it can be boring to read, but I’m not letting that deprive me of my share – it’s really the writing and Levine’s insular continuity references that bring this episode down. It’s generally well made (apart from the score), as with the case with any episode it’s the writing that’s make-or-break.

When not wallowing in its own filth, this episode borders on the average. The introduction is well shot (even though the Cybermen’s P.O.V. shots are so heavily distorted it makes them look nearly blind) and the sewer set is large and impressive, although very often characters are brightly illuminated even when their torches are switched off. Oh well, I’ll put it down to creative licence and dramatic necessity.

The location filming is also good, and it also introduces the terrific Maurice Colbourne as Lytton, the one continuity reference I’m actually happy with (he had only been in it the last season, after all). Terry Molloy is reasonable outside of his Davros mask and Brian Glover puts in a good performance that saves his comic-relief character. Payne’s comment that Griffiths is allergic to nylon is funny, an example of the flash of wit that occasionally permeates the episode. 

The regulars come off less well though, having to endure the same self-conscious banter that the Davison team had to endure as introductory material. The Doctor’s comment of “here we go again” is ironic, but Colin Baker’s overacting is rescued by his final, sweet coda to Peri of a promise not to hurt her. In general though they are very poor; I don’t know if it was Levine or Paula Moore responsible for their scenes, but they come off as being written by amateurish fans. While original characters get some decent lines the Doctor is portrayed as the self-conscious eccentric that we (OK then, I) used to be when playing Doctor Who when we were little. His pompous, facetious dialogue sounds like Adric’s from Earthshock, and the worn-out ‘distress call’ routine is the oldest clichй in the book.

The policemen serve no function other than to look mean; their purpose is never explained either here on in their previous story Resurrection Of The Daleks. The Totters Lane scene is extremely annoying, potentially a nice nod to the fans ruined by the fact that the Doctor actually has to make something of it – his excited “look!” when pointing to the sign must have come off to the casual audience like a child showing off their snappy new socks. Also, Malcolm Clarke’s awful score grates, here sounding like an electronic version of the Steptoe And Son theme. There is no point in changing the TARDIS either; Levine was simply indulging himself. The Doctor referring to Peri by a multitude of other companions’ names must have also seemed very odd: “why would he call her Jamie?” asks Mr. Jones from down the road. This is so annoying, as parts of this episode have real potential.

Payne’s death is quite creepy, scary without being too intensive (that comes later). It is shortly followed though by the Doctor gleefully duffing up a fake policeman; the Doctor goes against the series ethos so much I wonder if it was worth having that ethos in the first place.

There is little point in hiding the Cybermen from shot as their name appears in the opening credits (in capital letters, no less) and I would imagine that they were what the 8.9 million viewers were there to see (a significantly higher figure than the rest of the season). However, there is some seriously nifty direction keeping them out of sight and that’s always good to see, however worthless it may be. Their proper introduction is very good, as one is seen coming towards Lytton and his team Tenth Planet style – although the ‘March Of The Cybermen’ theme from Earthshock seems a bit cheesy and melodramatic when there’s only one of them on screen. There is a sense that this was written for the ordinary four-part format, as their reveal comes about halfway through the episode and would make for a good cliffhanger. Bullets kill Cybermen here, but this can be reconciled with the knowledge that they are being severely weakened by Cryon interference. In any case, it’s better than their usual aversion to gold which is one continuity reference mercifully absent. Their voice modulation here muffles their speech, and Brian Orrell is annoying as the Cyber Lieutenant. Their ship on the dark side of the moon is a smug nod to The Invasion (as is their presence in the sewers in the first place) but at least in this case not one that affects the understanding of the story.

There is a pleasing interlude with some good location shooting for Telos, and Stratton and Bates are a good duo that provides some actual quality for a moment. After that though we come to probably the worst derivative indulgence of them all: Michael Kilgarriff as the Cybercontroller. Nobody considered that even though the character had been great in The Tomb Of The Cybermen (and that was due more to Sandra Reid’s costuming and Peter Hawkins’s voice) that hiring a middle-aged actor with a beer gut (no disrespect) as opposed to an actor actually suitable for the role twenty years on. They hired a person no longer right to play the part of a Cyberman and all because he’d been in it before – and what makes it doubly pointless is that The Tomb Of The Cybermen was at the time completely missing, making Kilgarriff’s prior performance entirely irrelevant anyway. Back on Earth though, there is some reasonable back-history delivered and I have to say that the black Cyberman looks incredibly cool.

I’ve always said that the great thing about a good cliffhanger is that you get to see it twice, while the dreadful thing about a bad cliffhanger is that you have to watch it twice – and this is the worst cliffhanger I’ve ever seen. An amazingly inept scene shows Russell shooting at a dummy Cyberman, followed by him shouting a half-hearted “no!” and making no effort to dodge a Cyberman’s fist. This is followed by Peri’s appallingly-delivered final words, although in fairness to Nicola Bryant I don’t thing even Meryl Streep could have made the line “no! NO! NOOOOOOOO!!!!” work.

After the break, it goes on to talk about The Tomb Of The Cybermen as if all the people watching had seen it. Such a busy story necessitates here a large expositions scene and while it does help a little in explaining what is going on to the audience – and it’s the non-fans who are the show’s bread and butter – what is going on, although it does create a rather boring plot for them as the Cybermen’s plan revolves around rescuing a planet that is only ever mentioned in passing. I feel that they would care more about the idea of it attacking Earth in one year’s time; in fact they’d be better off just avoiding this story altogether and watching The Tenth Planet instead.

The rogue Cyberman is again from The Invasion, but it isn’t so bad as it doesn’t have to be to work – and the scene where its fist bursts through the doorway decapitating another Cyberman is a genuine jump moment; one thing you can’t call this story is badly directed (apart from that cliffhanger, obviously). The Cryons sound good and have some nice lines but are conceptually clichйd, and they would have been less cheesy if they were simply called Telosians. A good theme in this story though is the aliens’ difficulty with Griffiths’s Cockney dialect.

The hatchway taking Lytton and Griffiths to the surface is an old fork-lift truck pallet that I used to carry about when I worked at B&Q, which spoils the illusion slightly. I’d also say that the hatchway echoes the one in The Tenth Planet but it might be a coincidence and in any case I’m getting bored of all these continuity references. 

The Doctor has a decent scene with Flast, even if it does concern that stupid plot. The revelation that the Cybermen can’t time travel properly is interesting despite meaning very little. Also Rost and Varne have a good rapport, the line “you never were very bright” reminding me of the twins Cora and Clarice from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels.

The Cyberman that flaps aimlessly at its burning arm damages their credibility still further and shows how far they fell outside the black and white years. The hand-crushing scene is undermined by the old cut away – cut back directorial trick and by the fact that the blood is very obviously painted onto some undamaged hands – but it’s the thought that counts and the thought is very unpleasant indeed. Thank you Mr. Saward, shining light of narrative justification. The other surplus characters are polished off in quick succession, showing Saward’s stupid philosophy that if there aren’t x number of deaths per episode then it won’t be any good. While I’m on the subject the mortality rate in this story (not counting Cyberman extras or the regulars) is 85.7%, which is very excessive considering the numbers involved; it’s not that they die (Horror Of Fang Rock had a mortality rate of 100% and was superb), but that they die pointlessly through a sense of requirement that it should happen regardless of circumstances.

The TARDIS changes back to a police box (why change it in the first place?), and Lytton’s death is actually quite poignant. The action scene with the Cybercontroller is reasonable but standard, and I’m getting tired of seeing empty Cyberman suits exploding. The end is very annoying also, as the sonic lance (why get rid of the sonic screwdriver if you’re just going to replace it with something else that does the same thing?) being used to detonate the vastial – to reiterate, a made-up gadget is put into some made-up powder and everything goes boom. And the lead Cyberman’s gesture of “run, lads!” doesn’t help either.

When I was young I used to like this; I’d seen the stories it references so that didn’t worry me, and I just rode the wave of pyrotechnics. Looking at it objectively though this is a silly, inward-looking and very anal episode that probably put more nails into Doctor Who’s coffin than any other. The Cybermen can be such good monsters when written well, but when put in the hands of people who forget that the programme’s audience might not be as knowledgeable as them they become what any other monster would be in such circumstances: mediocre at best.

Some dates are indelibly etched on our minds. For me, one such date is 5th January 1985, a time pregnant with possibilities if you were a Doctor Who fan. Me, I was a music fan and I was into girls, That day I hooked up with my new girlfriend, Sarah, hit the town, bought U2's Unforgettable Fire. Oh and I was looking forward to watching Attack of the Cybermen. What a title! I still love it. Cybermen. Attacking. What more could you want? Twin Dilemma was a false start, wasn't it? Colin Baker was great in it, a little theatrical, perhaps but he boded well and made a dramatic contrast to Peter Davison. The story was complete tosh, the production values were poor, the twins were... Best not to dwell on the inadequacies of this tale, everything would be put to right in ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN! 

Yes, Attack of the Cybermen. This got 9 million viewers, you know. I'm sure Mr and Mrs Joe Shmoe and little Jimmy looked in the paper to see what was on TV and came across Doctor Who and one look at that title and, well, you'd have to check it out, wouldn't you?

Doctor Who - he's back and it's about time. An apposite description for this story, but first lets go back to 1982 and Earthshock. It was a revelation. Episode 1 is still premium Who. Anyone watching it for the first time was genuinely enthralled by the time the closing credits began. The Cybermen were back and we'd had no warning! (If the 2005 series can deliver a similar coup then I'll eat all the celery you can set before me.) Unfortunately the remaining 3 episodes don't really live up to the 1st. The fact that it is virtually plotless doesn't really matter. it's simply a vehicle to reintroduce an old enemy and kill off a hapless companion. The dinosaur twist is neat but there are roughly 60 minutes of meandering narrative and chatty, boastful Cybermen. I reckon the more they talk, the duller and more ridiculous they become. For my money, The Invasion represents the Cybermen at their best, keeping them in the background, tantalisingly. All the talking is done by the Cyber-Planner. The Cybermen look great: sleek, functional and with blank, impassive faces (no 'scary' grimaces here). Revenge of the Cybermen doesn't muck up the design and the 'head-guns' are a GREAT idea, think about it, it makes total sense - it's logical However they have become rather talkative, not Gerry Davis' fault, I feel but it's obvious that Robert Holmes dislikes writing for them. He was the wrong (re)writer for the story because he likes to create CHARACTERS and that's not a trait the Cybermen truthfully have as The Invasion (and Tomb of the Cybermen) nicely demonstrates.

Attack of the Cybermen represents the nadir of a self-destructing series. The seeds were sown with the re-introduction of the Master in Keeper of Traken. A perfectly fine story, as was the atmospheric Logopolis. At a pinch his presence in Castrovalva was acceptable, but Time Flight? The King's Demons? The Five Doctors? Etc, etc... Overkill. This exercise had already been tried from Terror of the Autons onwards and to dubious effect but at least it was novel at first. Season 20 brought back an 'element from the past' for every story and in the process alienated casual viewers and didn't exactly enthrall the fans either. A year later, and we had some reason for optimism:The Awakening, Frontios and, of course, The Caves of Androzani. Otherwise there was a worrying preoccupation with old villains and, increasingly, unwarranted violence. The blood and gore was laid on even thicker in the following season (Lytton's torture, general torturing in Vengeance on Varos, rat-eating and an inappropriate stabbing in The Two Doctors. Revelation of the Daleks at least had the black wit of it's script and the sheer verve of Graeme Harper's direction to carry it along. It's Colin Baker's best story by a country mile.

Michael Grade wasn't the enemy of Doctor Who. The main problem with the latter Davison, early C. Baker stories lay squarely with the production team. There is no unifying vision for the voyages of the Doctor. Whether we like them or not, we can see what Hinchcliffe/Holmes, Letts/Dicks, Williams/Adams, Lloyd/Davis, et al, were trying to achieve. They set an overall tone; they aren't necessarily trying to be original but they ARE trying to tell good Doctor Who stories. John Nathan-Turner presided over some great (or at the very least, interesting) stories: Warriors' Gate, Kinda, Enlightenment, Caves, Revelation, Greatest Show in the Galaxy and most of Sylvester McCoy's last season. But there is no overall tenor to the seasons that contain them, no direction (well, not until Andrew Cartmel came along...). Shock tactics are employed - virtually everyone dies in Resurrection of the Daleks, some horribly. The aim of Eric Saward and Nathan-Turner seems to be to make the series more adult. Inferno showed how this could be done without resorting to needless violence. The Green Death has a great, topical story and some chills but no gratuitous injury or maiming. The Dalek Invasion of Earth is surprisingly grim, even now, but Verity Lambert and co. doesn't smash the viewer in the face with it. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against violence, per se, in Doctor Who or any other drama but just using it for effect is an empty and somehow degrading gesture. Nathan-Turner didn't seem seem to be interested in scripts, just recurring monsters, guest stars and strait-jacketing, inappropriate costumes (all his Doctors, Tegan, Nyssa, Adric, Turlough, Peri...). His best script editor was Cartmel.. He made the series more cohesive. You can argue the pros and cons of his version of the Doctor but at least he gave it some thought, and with Ace he brought character development into the series. Again, it's arguable whether or not you agreed with the way he did it but he tried and, more or less, succeeded. Saward simply wasn't reined in enough and in any case he shared Nathan_Turner's desire to make the series great by simply apeing the past. It's a shame because he showed a flare for dialogue and witty one-liners ("mouth on legs") and his debut, The Visitation, is a sound, traditional tale. 

Where does all this leave Attack of the Cybermen? It's akin to a dodgy Easter egg: thin, tasteless chocolate - hollow - wrapped in crinkly tin foil and containing sweets that leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Could you sustain yourself on such a diet? Colin Baker couldn't and neither could the viewers. Attack of the Cybermen is no better or worse than most of the stories that surround it and that's not a good thing.

Attack of the Cybermen - such a good title, promising much and delivering nothing. I haven't seen Sarah for years and The Unforgettable Fire saw U2 slide into bombast and self-importance. Ring any bells?

It’s a thought-provoking little story, is this. Far richer than the average Dalek story, (and certainly far richer than the average 1980s Dalek story) Revelation Of The Daleks presents disturbing subtext after disturbing subtext in a gleefully unafraid way, as well as making the Daleks cool again (not as easy as it sounds) and even managing to coax a decent performance out of Terry Molloy. By far the most surprising element though is that it was written by Eric Saward, who just the previous season gave us the dismal Resurrection Of The Daleks, which served as nothing more than an exercise in pointlessly killing of extras. I suppose you have to commend someone for being able to learn from his mistakes.

Possibly the most remarked on aspect of the story is that the Doctor’s role is de-emphasised to an extraordinary degree, essentially relegating him to the role of a moral commentator. By contrast, Image Of The Fendahl for example also did this but this was a means of presenting some interesting guest characters and still allowed room for the Doctor to save the day in the end; here, although there are some excellent characters it feels like the Doctor has been forgotten about which, while innovative, is fundamentally unsatisfying.

The story begins with the Doctor though and presents some brilliant location footage, all the more notable for being the last broadcast story to have its exterior scenes shot on 16mm film – John Nathan-Turner’s obsession with being hip and modern removed this excellently atmospheric format from the programme from the following season. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Our first glimpse of the guest cast begins as it means to continue, presenting Jobel and Tasambeker at the height of their grotesquery (from which they never descend) as they crack graphic jokes about decomposition. These people don’t have redeeming features beneath their callous exteriors; they are not being cruel as a way of distancing themselves from reality such as was presented in programmes like M*A*S*H; they’re just a bunch of sickos. Jenny Tomasin puts in a very annoying performance, but seeing as her character is supposed to be annoying she gets away with it in a way she wouldn’t were she playing another part.

The design of the story is excellent, with subdued visuals for once (one curious thing about the Nathan-Turner era is how the money was spent on the stories with the best scripts; corned ham with cheese like Timelash had to get by on a shoestring. Not that I’m complaining about the results here, but I feel if they’d spread the money a bit more generally the season as a whole would have been better). However the incidental music, while by no means bad, has a very synthetic feel to it which contrasts starkly to the earthy look of the story.

Outside, the Doctor meets the mutant – an horrendously scary scene, made all the more harrowing by the sudden and jolting cut to the ruined face of the creature, one of the few moments of the show to genuinely make me jump and a reason I’m so glad that director Graeme Harper is working on the new series. Suddenly, the mutant scene changes from being scary to being poignant, which only goes to show the breadth of this story, even though it is slightly odd that the monster is so articulate. Then again, this is Doctor Who where aliens, mutants, savages and Viking warriors all went to grammar school.

Another oft-mentioned aspect of the story is how good the Daleks are. First of all, Harper’s direction is brilliant; he shoots the Daleks from low angles, increasing the illusion of size and power, and also only shows us them briefly: he utilises quick cuts, extreme close ups and long shots, and also the occasional nice moment where a Dalek suddenly moves across camera shot just for a second. These half-glimpses increase their menace while also hiding the essential prop-look that they so often had. Also, Saward’s writes them David Whitaker-style, keeping them in the background and using them as part of the story rather than the focal point of it. Keeping them on the periphery allows us to forgive their dialogue, which unfortunately never really elevates above catchphrase level; unfortunately their voices are terrible, even worse than in Day Of The Daleks: squawky, nasal, and lacking any real modulation. This has been fixed to a small extent for the new sound mix on the DVD release, but they are still poor. It is weird to see the Daleks just as a normal part of life on Necros – it just shows the unconventional world the story presents.

The grave robbers are also good, Grigory’s drinking another reason why this is the most adult Doctor Who story ever. The interplay between him and Natasha is excellent, for here we get two allies who don’t like each other. Also, his line of “I’m a doctor, not a magician” is a nice riff off Star Trek. On the subject of double acts the obsequious but treacherous double act of Kara and Vogel is also good, although I have to keep reminding myself that they sell human flesh as food. Is this really what I’m watching?

The interplay between the Doctor and Peri is good, being far less whiny. There is a sense that their relationship has suddenly developed, as if there have been a lot of unseen adventures between Timelash and this story. The watch scene is good – irrelevant, but a nice little moment of characterisation.

Now…the glass Dalek scene. If this isn’t one of the most shocking and stomach-churning scenes the show ever produced, then I’m Lord Lucan. It is done on a total whim, and is unnecessary to the story (any other episode would have just told us about severed heads being converted into Daleks, rather than actually showing us), but this more or less sums up this adventure: it has several elements that could be excised, but they are unbelievably good all the same and it is by leaving them in that this story is elevated to what it is. The hair-raising performance by Alec Linstead as the head of Stengos further amplifies the power of the scene, and on a final note I should say that this scene happens to come exactly twenty-five minutes in; in any other season it would rank as one of the best cliffhangers ever.

Moving on, Lilt wants to slice up a woman’s face with a knife. ‘Nuff said.

Orcini and Bostock are wonderful, the only truly noble guest characters (and that includes the rest of the goodies, if there are any). William Gaunt gets the best lines in the episode, which he does justice admirably. The exposition is laid on here, but in general it is very good as it is presented at an even pace – the advantage of having a forty-five minute format is that there is less of a need to make the plot so obvious as the audience doesn’t have to remember it for so long.

The way Jobel talks to his subordinates shows the difference between his public and supposedly private personas, and his reference to drug use is also notable (anyone would think I’m keeping a score of all the adult references in this story). After all this, the cliffhanger is somewhat mundane, being presented for no very good reason like a lot of other elements of this story such as the statue of the skeleton in Davros’s laboratory, but without their originality.

The second episode carries on in fine style, with Orcini’s ‘sword’ monologue being a high point of the story. The DJ shows his serious side, becoming a likeable character for the first time. His weapon is rather odd though: sonic cannons aren’t new to this show but in this case the credibility of a gun that fires a beam of rock music is questionable.

Looking at Tasambeker and Jobel, the sexual undercurrents become quite uncomfortably obvious, with lechery, submission / aggression and lust all playing over the minds of the characters, even being used by Davros for the purposes of manipulation – the only time this aspect of psychology has ever been used in the series. Jobel’s death is very violent (get used to it, there’s more coming), and his wig falling off is a nice touch. Tasambeker’s death, which follows on immediately, is also well done, particularly because the extermination special effect is at it’s very best in this story. There are a lot of deaths here, but they are dramatically justified, unlike for example Resurrection Of The Daleks which merely presents a load of extras with no other purpose than to get mown down.

The flying Dalek is a nice idea, but pointless and in execution is confusing as the extreme close ups required to make it convincing only serve to make it less clear what’s actually happening. Like the voices this has been corrected to an extent on the DVD release (the CGI effects are excellent) but the scene is essentially inadequate, which is a real shame.

The story begins to wind up now (translation: my review starts to wind up now because it’s getting late). Kara’s stabbing is unbelievably graphic, as is the shot of Davros’s hand being blown off (his fingers are seen scattered on the floor). The Dalek factions battle it out, mysteriously losing the ability to shoot straight. On that note, the Doctor is a remarkably good shot for someone who claims never to use firearms.

And with that, it’s all over. Therein lies the story’s major failing, that the Doctor may as well never have been there in the first place. However, not even this can cause the story to fail: in a period where the show was treading water, here comes a story that takes risks and dares to be dangerous. The safe method of relying on previous stories had failed to win in the crowd, and this one succeeds by dicing with controversy in a way that leaves Vengeance On Varos, which received much more criticism, far behind. This is a story that cries to us, “I’m going to appall and horrify you, and you’re going to love me for it”. And we do.