Who Reviews Attack of the Cybermen by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes on the attack.

Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor had a difficult beginning, having his immediately post-regenerative story tacked on to the budget-poor end of Peter Davison’s final season. In the mission to give viewers a more spiky, unlikeable Doctor who would mellow his way into our hearts, it was catastrophic to tack The Twin Dilemma on at the end of the season, give us a Doctor by turns cowardly, vicious, violent, arrogant and distracted, in a coat like a migraine and with a vivid sense of self-righteousness, following the death of a popular Doctor in circumstances of unparalleled heroism in The Caves of Androzani…and then to roll the credits and disappear for a season-break. It left the after-image of an unlikeable Doctor on fans’ collective retinas, the impression that this was what the Doctor was like now, and as he clearly says at the end of his first story, if we didn’t like it, that was on us.

That meant that when Attack of the Cybermen finally arrived, the first post-regenerative story for Colin Baker’s interpretation of the Time Lord arrived with more to do than it seemed to understand. It was silently facing the mission of trying to win back trust lost by the bizarre combination of The Twin Dilemma and the season break.

Sadly, Attack of the Cybermen was not the story to do that very specific job. Its storyline is creative, but absurd in its nuts and bolts, and relies on an odd combination of knowledge of two 1960s Cyber-stories (neither at the time available to give hardcore fans or casual viewers a refresher in Cyber-history), and the invention of storytelling elements that appeared secondary and even entirely tangential to the main thrust of the plot. So – complex, fannish elements, plus a what-the-hell side-plot. What else could possibly be added to make Attack of the Cybermen unwatchable? How about sewers? We like a good pranny-about in sewers with Cybermen. There’s no earthly nor Telosian reason for them to be messing about in the sewers in Attack of the Cybermen, and it’s never made clear whether the sewer-group were intending to do the disrupting of the orbit of Halley’s Comet themselves (which, incidentally is the only element in the whole story that justifies the use of the word ‘Attack’ in Attack of the Cybermen) although it seems somehow unlikely as the leadership of that party decide to summarily swan off with Lytton almost the moment he arrives.

The first half of the story is more or less relentless faffing about – Peri and the Doctor following a distress call to London (does anyone to this day understand the bit where it’s a stroke of genius that an alien wanting rescue bounces the signal around so they can’t be found? Just checking), Lytton, Griffiths, Russell and the unfortunate Payne going to work on their ‘diamond job’ (with the neat additional layer of plot that Russell’s an undercover cop investigating Lytton), Halley’s Comet…cometting about, and the Cybermen turning occasional council workers into Cybermen in the sewers, because after all, you’ve got to do something when someone writes a story about you. The addition of the Bates and Stratton time-ship escape plan, with the CyberTellytubby Controller, back from the Sixties dead with a very Eighties Cyber-do, just adds to the madness – the Cybermen, kings of machine logic, are using the crew of a stolen time ship…to mine the surface of the planet on which they live, so that when they leave, they can blow it to bits and conduct a scientific experiment of deeply dubious value, while giving themselves nowhere to retreat to should things in the wider universe get a bit hot again.

Yeah.

OK.

Let’s spin on beyond the crashingly awful end of Episode 1, with the death of Russell by a thump on the shoulder and the ‘No! No! Nooooo!’-ness from Peri. Episode 2 continues in much the same senseless vein – the Cybermen are planning to rewrite the web of time by preventing the destruction of Mondas…by destroying or disrupting Earth to such a point that the Tenth Planet Cybermen win their encounter with Eighties Earth. So – an extra dollop of fan-knowledge needed there to get the most from Attack of the Cybermen.

And then the Cryons turn up.

The Cryons are quite clearly a couple of lesser celebrities wrapped in plastic and bubble-wrap, and peculiarly, half of them go with a brave, irritating sing-song vocal choice, and the other half think ‘Balls to that – who’s gonna take me seriously in Equity after that?’ and speak fairly normally.

More than that though, the Cryons re-write the history of the story we think we know – they’re the original inhabitants of Telos, and they’re dab hands with refrigeration tech, because they’ll boil if exposed to temperatures above zero. The so-called Tomb of the Cybermen? Built by this lot, working as slave labour, despite the fact that it would surely make more sense for the Cybermen to assimilate their knowledge and then indefatigably build their own tombs. As with the time-ship crew, there’s no real reason for the Cryons to still be alive, other than they’re damned useful to tell the story that is Attack of the Cybermen.

The inconsistencies continue – the Tombs we see in Tomb of the Cybermen (in one of the clips that had survived, and which there was at least an outside chance fans had seen) were pretty tight-fitting Cyber-wombs. In Attack – huge rooms, that fit several people easily and a decaying Cyberman lying on the floor, rather than encased in plastic like several of their predecessors in The Invasion, Earthshock etc. ‘The Cybermen have one weakness,’ the Sixth Doctor tells us, pulling the face of a Cyberman blithely open and ignoring a history that includes radiation, gravity, gold dust and nail varnish remover. ‘They’ll respond to the distress of their own kind,’ he assures us, flicking a switch that makes a diode light up in the Cyber-face. So – an engineered ‘emotional’ response then? We really don’t think they will, but OK. The Cybermen have captured the leader of the Cryons and then, as you do if you’re ruled by logic, put her in a cell filled with highly explosive material, with just one sliding door and a guard between her and blowing the whole of Cyber Control to smithereens. Then they throw their arch-enemy, a Time Lord with a gift for innovation, into the same cell, without checking whether or not he has a handy explosive-detonating device in his pocket. Top class logic there, Cybes. Similarly, they allow a trio of time-travellers to escape simply for the ‘scientific value in seeing how they intend to evade their destruction.’ At which point, as a viewer you’re thinking ‘You’re just making it up to sound cool now, aren’t you?’

As the first story of a new season, Attack of the Cybermen entirely fails to reassure its audience about the new Doctor – in a depressing denouement, he shoots the Cyber Controller at point blank range (don’t get squeamish – the ‘nice’ Fifth Doctor did something similar in Earthshock), we see Lytton tortured, his hands bleeding and presumably useless after the grip of two Cybermen (though he nevertheless manages to form a fist around a sonic lance to stab the Cyber Controller), and crucially, the Doctor gets it wrong. He misjudges Lytton’s motives, goes back to try and save him, and ultimately fails, leaving behind him only a massive explosion that presumably kills most if not all of the people we’ve met over the course of the story. So we end the story feeling this new Doctor is no more likeable than he was at the end of The Twin Dilemma, confirming casual viewers in the notion that perhaps Doctor Who is a thing they no longer need to catch.

As a sequel to Resurrection of the Daleks, it’s equally senseless if subjected to any scrutiny, with a body-count at least as high and rather more visceral. It never makes sense for three lines together, demands a degree of show-knowledge of casual viewers that they were unlikely to have, distorts and confuses existing fans by re-writing and ‘timey-wimeying’ the storylines of at least a couple of Sixties classics, and for the most part it doesn’t even serve the Cybermen well.

But you know what?

I love Attack of the Cybermen.

Yes, it makes no sense at all, yes it features a Tardis-changing-shape gag that’s absolutely never as funny as it should be, and yes, there are the Cryons, but as the first story of a season, it’s powered along by some canny bits of characterisation and a handful of key performances that make it worth the re-watch decades on. It’s not even really the Doctor’s story, it’s Lytton’s – the story of a money-soldier sickened by his trade, doing a job for the ‘goodies’ for once in his life. Maurice Colbourne is flawless as the mercenary. Brian Glover adds value wherever he appears, and Attack of the Cyberman is absolutely no exception to that rule. Terry ‘Davros’ Molloy, out of make-up, is a highly effective policeman till he’s Cyber-thumped to death (about which, incidentally, no-one seems to bat an eye afterwards).

Michael Attwell as Bates the miserablist time-ship crewman is superb and adds a darkness to proceedings that casts everything in a pall of ash. David Banks turns in another fine Cyber Leader, faaaairly similar to his Leaders in Earthshock and The Five Doctors, but less flippant certainly than the first. Even Michael Kilgariff, brought back as the Cyber Controller more for the fannish sentiment of it than because it made particular sense, delivers the nonsensical dialogue he’s given with oomph and relish. More than any other though, it’s Colin Baker’s performance that roars through Attack of the Cybermen and makes it sing. His ‘rather angry’ Time Lord is such a flash and dash of difference and colour and a very loud voice that you do begin to see how good a Doctor he could be, if given material that served him better. Ultimately, Attack of the Cybermen is too much of a blended shake to really be many people’s favourites – it’s frequently overlooked in favour of the story that followed it, Vengeance On Varos, and there are good reasons for that. The writing and tone of Attack of the Cybermen do Colin Baker’s Doctor and the public perception of him no favours at all. But in the performance at the heart of the chaos, Baker shines. Next time you put Attack of the Cybermen in your player of choice, look past the nonsensical plot, the bleak Sawardian violence-fetish and the fact that the story seems determined to under-power its lead, and watch Colin Baker try to fly against the odds, and  you’ll see the potential his Doctor had – the tender care of Faith Brown’s Flast, the righteousness of the Time Lord Furious, and the smile that, when it comes, makes you comfortable in the presence of this Doctor, safe in the knowledge of his protection, for all the story itself sets him against impossible odds and gives him a judgment call that ultimately, like the storyline of Attack of the Cybermen itself, goes badly wrong.