Attack of the Cybermen

A distress call brings the Doctor and Peri to London in 1985. The Doctor expects to find a stranded alien but instead encounters Commander Lytton, one of the surviving Dalek duplicates who escaped the year before. Lytton appears to be working for the Cybermen who have established a forward base in the city sewers, but their plans reach beyond just converting the odd hapless human; the Cybermen are preparing to leave Telos and use Halleys Comet to strike the Earth and avert the destruction of Mondas, altering history for all time.

So it's a prequel to The Tenth Planet and at the same time a sequel to Tomb of the Cybermen, complete with an updated version of the CyberController directing things from Telos. They say they even went back to the same quarry where they shot Tomb but who can say for sure; one heap of sand and rock looks pretty much the same as the next. Thing is, though, Mondas was the primary home of the Cybermen as we heard in Spare Parts, and when it was destroyed they Cybermen retreated to Telos to re-establish themselves; Attack is also the story of the Cryons, a race of humanoids (primarily females) who were there first, who built the refridgerated cities that the Cybermen invaded and used as their tombs. Virtually extinct, the Cryons still engage the Cybermen in guerilla warfare, doing what they can to stop them in their plans. The Doctor spends a great deal of time locked up with what appears to be their leader, a Cryon named Flast, who has accepted that they have lost the war against the Cybermen but they must do what they can to keep Earth safe.

These Cybermen just reek of desperation, and not without cause, seeing as they are dwindling in numbers and this is a final gamble to preserve their species. Being logical machines though they seem to have overlooked Blinovitch and the reasons why their plan wouldn't work anyways, but they're going to try with the aid of a stolen time ship and the captured TARDIS. The Cybercontroller is played again by Michael Kilgarrif, even if the years seem to have given him a bit of a full-figured look, unique amongst the Cyber ranks. And he has a different kind of helmet design, although the transparent dome where his brain should be visible is covered over with silver probably to keep the censors happy.

As the season premiere, Attack of the Cybermen sets the tone for everything to come, starting with the new 45 minute episode format, which effectively reduced the season length from 22 weeks to 16. What it also did was demonstrate the new levels of violence that the production crew decided to introduce, starting with Cybermen chopping people down, people being shot, Cybermen being blown apart or their heads knocked off, people being half-converted into Cybermen, a Cryon being thrown out into a warm corridor to boil and die, and the brutal crushing of Lytton's hands. Yeah, it's all here, I ain't kidding. Lytton even becomes a sympathetic character now; as the fifth Doctor predicted, the Dalek conditioning of the duplicates began to wear off and Lytton is free of it, but he's still in the end a mercenary for hire. Just one who knows that the Cybermen should be stopped.

Did I like it? I found that it came close to going too far. But in other respects it didn't go far enough. I would have liked to have seen different Cyberman models sharing the screen; it's not gone unnoticed how their appearance changes slightly with each appearance, which is something one can easily attribute to the constant upgrading of their forces, so why not have some more classic-looking Cybermen on Telos and keep the new Earthshock-model on Earth as they are obviously the newer breed trying to save the old? I mean hey if we can do it in a comic strip (which is still some time away at this point) why not on TV?

NEXT EPISODE : VENGEANCE ON VAROS