Iceberg

The Doctor takes a side-trip away from the TARDIS on board a life-boat within the time machine; it outwardly resembles a Chinese version of the London Polive Box the rest of the ship is modelled on. Leaving Ace and Bernice, the Doctor arrives on Earth in 2006 just as a team called FLIPback is working at averting a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field in Antarctica. Nearby is the pleasure cruise ship SS Elysium. And even closer, under the ice, are the Cybermen.

Loved it. LOVED it.

It's a different kind of take on the Cybermen this time, and despite the action taking palce in Antarctica and the family tradition of military service in the Cutler family, this one actually owes more to The Invasion than it does to The Tenth Planet. Chronologically, Invasion would have been the first real Cyberman attack on Earth as it was contemporary to when it was broadcast - the late 60's - whereas Planet was placed in the future (at the time) in 1986. But hold up - wouldn't the Cybermen on Mondas have been recognized? And how would Cybermen have made it to Earth ahead of the planet? And the vast differences in technology (despite the passage of time on television) are a bit jarring as well.

David Banks explains it all. At least, in his words. There's never been a deep look into the Cybermen and their origins in the classic series; they came from Mondas, Mondas went boom, they took over Telos, they started to die out, and then the Doctor wiped out what was left with the Nemesis statue. David Banks, however, having played a Cyberleader on television in every one of their appearances from 1982 to 1988, wanted to get into the heads of the Cybermen more than he already did, and he began to draft his own history of the Cybermen in a book called, simply, Cybermen. Iceberg, his only contribution to the New Adventures range (and the one with the most gratuitious use of the word "fuck"), takes his theories on Cyber-evolution and Cyber-proliferation and winds them into the threads left dangling from the two 60s invasion stories, with brief revisits to each of them from the points of view of simple citizens at the time. And then he takes a Cyberman survival unit that escaped Zoe's deadly rocket strike, drops them under the Antarctic ice, and then brings in the Doctor without companions to deal with them.

Yes, Iceberg was actually written to run parallel with another novel, Birthright, where Ace and Benny are stranded with a dead TARDIS and have to reconclie some of their own differences plus Ace's lingering distrust of the Doctor. But that's about all that I can say about that one; the actual story escapes me. The Doctor always needs someone along for the ride, though, so enter one Ruby Duvall, journalist, along on board the cruise ship to report on the work of the FLIPback team. Ruby's not a bad one to have along; she's plucky, she's smart, she knows how to pull her t shirt down to cover her bum (so the book says) and she's the first companion in any continuity to visit the loo.

And speaking of innovation - the concept of the Jade Pagoda as a sort of half-TARDIS for the Doctor to leave in when he pleases is an interesting one. It must be a character quirk of his, though, as nothing on Gallifrey resembles anything vaguely Japanese. It only comes up again one more time in this series before the idea is forgotten in the mists.

I never really found any flaw with Iceberg. It was enjoyable right through to the end. It drew a lot of fire for the swearing, most of it from fanboys (yes, the term includes girls too) who actually thought it made the series too adult. This from an audience largely in their 20s and early 30s by this time. I was 22 myself when it was published and I found it refreshing to be treated like an adult. But, hey, I was never one to sit around at fanclub executive meetings and giggle when someone said something naughty - I think one time when I did show up someone took exception to my Madonna Blond Ambition World Tour t shirt because she was cleverly naked on it.

But what do I know. I just liked Iceberg.

NEXT EPISODE : BLOODHEAT

Silver Nemesis

In the year 1988, a comet called Nemesis draws ever closer to the Earth in a decaying orbit. The Doctor knows all about it; he originally launched it into space from Earth in the year 1638 to keep it safe from the power-mad Lady Peinforte; for inside is a statue made of a living silver metal fashioned in her image. Using black magic, Lady Peinforte travels forward in time to 1988 to reclaim the statue, but its legend has attracted a group of neo-Nazis and an advance party of Cybermen; all three determined to have the power of the Nemeis for themselves, and to destroy the Doctor and Ace.

It sounds better than it actually turned out.

The approach of the comet makes from page news of a tabloid that Ace is seen reading in a garden, but when the comet actually makes planetfall there's no-one there to see it; the police arrive after the fact, the area isn't cordoned off, there's no media, and if as the script claims the crash site is outside Lady Peinforte's country home and just a few yards from Windsor Castle, why was no-one evacuated? There's tourists and everyone wandering about as if everything is fine, and the Doctor and Ace even have a chance encounter with the Queen so lax is the security there.

Speaking of tourists, why the Cybermen? They contribute absolutely nothing to the story, except to fall victim to one of the Doctor's little games to draw them out so he could wipe them out with some old Gallifreyan technology... exactly how he "nailed the Daleks" as Ace puts it. Sure they have a fantastically loud gun battle with the neo-Nazis which manages to fail to attract the attention of the military with its supposed proximity to Windsor Castle, but come on surely the Cybermen deserve a little better than this. And lo their whole vulnerability to gold is back, like an old cliche, and now just touching it kills them (Lady Peinforte shoots arrows at them with gold heads) whereas before the fifth Doctor had to absolutely grind gold into the Cyberleader in Earthshock and the results were not as immediate. The Cybermen we're seeing in the late days of the classic series are nowhere near the quality of the ones we saw in the 60's, but thankfully when they returned in 2006 all was not lost.

The clever bit I do like, though, is the whole idea of the statue itself. It is fashiond out of a living metal, as I already said, called Valedium, which was supposed to be the ultimate defence for Gallifrey. None of it should ever have left the planet, according to the Doctor, but I think we can all guess who was responsible for that. My continuity-obsessed mind wonders if maybe we're going to hear about this stuff again when the new series mentions the Time War again.

Jay and I watched this together, but it was a "special" version released on VHS with previously cut material restored to the edit, but in a pretty sloppy way without the music being redone to cover the edits. And Jay pinged this little gaffe right away: in the early moments of episode one a neo-Nazi somewhere in South America manages to plot the landing point of the comet, but the actual co-ordinates are way off given that Windsor is close to the Greenwich meridian. Boo, I say. And for the sake of nostalgia, since this is the 25th anniversary story, the comet's landing date is 23 November 1988. November in England looks fantastic; everything green and verdant almost as if it was the height of summer. I realize even an effects powerhouse like the BBC can't change the weather, so why even bother with the whole 23 November thing?

Included with the "special" version of the story is a behind the scenes special made for PBS about the making of the serial, full of all sorts of technical wonder and humourous moments with the cast and crew. We're wondering if this little gem will make it to the DVD release whenever that happens, or if they'll just go ahead and shoot an all new feature. The special has a lot of moments where we can get comment from then-producer, the late John Nathan-Turner, the man everyone wants to blame for the decline in the quality of the series. It's easy to blame the dead, but when JN-T is there on camera saying that the ultimate responsibility for everything the show ends with him, then I think it's warranted. Silver Nemesis is complete and utter crap; it's not well thought out, it's boring and thankfully it's only three episodes long. Even the cover of the VHS is terrible, totally out of whack with the the rest of the series, which is why I used the cover from the Target novelization.

I'm done.

NEXT EPISODE : THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY

Real Time

Cybermen. The mere mention of them sends the Doctor to the planet Chronos where a temporal wave has decimated an archaeological expedition. With Evelyn in tow he realizes that the Cybermen are indeed active on the planet, as well as a new breed of Cyberman made flesh by a nanovirus. The Cybermen have conquered the Earth in the past a result of a temporal anomoly, and unless the Doctor can figure out how to restore the timeline, both Human and Cybermen face extinction.

Real Time marked a real turning point for Doctor Who; originally it was not a Big Finish audio release but designed exclusively as a flash-animated webcast on the official BBC website. Until this point the series had covered all mediums except for the webcast, and here it was at last. There was something more to it though; this was the first BBC-commissioned Doctor Who production since the ill-fated eighth Doctor premiere movie shown on FOX television in 1996. The BBC were showing signs of taking Doctor Who seriously again, even if it was starting out small and relatively inexpensive, and the reaction from fans spurred two further webcasts before the series finally came back on the air in 2005.

As for the story itself, it's pretty simple, not very complicated, and could have been done without the Cybermen. It doesn't do much for their history, seeing as the Cybermen here are temporal anomolies. Their voice processing is kept on par with the last few television appearances they made, which is at odds with their sound in The Gathering and The Reaping. And this is the first time a Cyberman is made to sound distinctly male or female; their conversion process at this point is sloppy and only half-arsed, with only so many spare parts handy to turn humans into Cybermen. Evelyn comes close to breaking through Cyber conditioning and by asking the Cybermen questions, and then narrowly escapes being converted into one herself.

As the cover illustration shows, the Doctor undergoes a bit of a modification in appearance, with his wildly coloured coat being replaced by a blue one that would have been better suited to the blue outfits of Necros back in Revelation of the Daleks. The blue attire sticks around for a while after this point (insofar as clothing matters much in an audio) and it's probably more of a comment on Evelyn's presence with her being able to talk to him and even provide him with some guidance in their travels.

Now it's time for a break from the audios. This long stretch of Colin Baker audio material is cool but there's something to be said for the visual side of things in Doctor Who. There is still a lot of material to go before Colin Baker's sixth Doctor makes his exit, mind you, in audio and novel form, but here's a video to use as a halfway point. It's not Doctor Who per se, but it takes place within the Doctor's universe and although he is not in it, his presence is felt not only thematically, but in the presence of the other cast members - the companions he has left behind...

NEXT EPISODE : DOWNTIME

Killing Ground

The Doctor takes Grant back to his home planet of Agora to find that the Cybermen have taken over and are using the planet as a breeding ground for new stock. The Doctor's reputation precedes him, though, and the Overseers of the colony are ready, and he is captured and put in a cell to await the arrival of the Cybermen on their next visit. Grant joins up with a rebel faction, but on a world where the leaders have embraced the life that the Cybermen offer, is there much hope of success?

Another tale by Steve Lyons, Killing Ground follows the adventures of the Doctor and Grant for the last time in print. This isn't Grant's final chapter, mind you, as he appears in some short fiction and a comic I believe, but as far as the printed adventures brought by Virgin's Missing Adventures range, this is it for the duo. I never got a feeling of a close bond between the two, although I'll admit I don't remember a great deal of this novel (it was published in 1996), but I will maintain that the Doctor is best left to have a female companion in a one-to-one situation. Remember the fourth Doctor travelling alone with Adric? We sat there waiting for someone new to come along. The only time it really ever worked was with the second Doctor and Jamie. Grant's not a bad companion per se, just not one of the best. Good try, though, for the first companion outside of the televised series.

Why am I dwelling on this point? Because I can't remember much else. I do recall that the tale didn't do a great deal for the furthering of the Cyber-race and I was disappointed that there were not a lot of them in it, nor were they in it a great deal to start with. There are references to the expanded universe of the Cybermen as envisioned by David Banks, the man who played the Cyberleaders in four televised adventures and then who penned the ArcHives tales of the Cybermen, so some strings of non-canon material are drawn into the framework of the novel series (which themselves are not exactly regarded as canon but the fact that they were okayed brings them a lot closer than other material out there).

Let's move on.

NEXT EPISODE : THE WORMERY

The Reaping

While visiting a lunar history archive, Peri discovers that a childhood friend's father has passed away, and she begs the Doctor to take her to the funeral in Baltimore. Their arrival on Earth in 1984 is not the happy homecoming Peri had hoped for; her mother, Janine Foster, has split with Peri's stepfather Howard over Peri's disappearance on Lanzarote, and a lingering anger between mother and daughter remains. The Doctor undertakes an investigation into the dead man's past and discovers that he had come into contact with the Cybermen in another of their attempts to repopulate their species before they vanish from the universe, and the graves of the recently departed may contain a threat to the future of humanity...

I was a bit thrown by the decision to make The Reaping as a 2-part story instead of a 4-parter as was the arrangement for the previous discs following Revelation of the Daleks, but it made for good storytelling regardless, building to one big climax point as opposed to breaking the story up into smaller ones. The strength of the adventure lies not in the pace, though, but in the tension created from Peri's sudden return to her normal life after no explaination of her absence - indeed, her mother thought she was dead as did her friends. There's a fun flashback at the start of the adventure to Lanzarote the morning of Peri's fateful meeting with the Doctor and Turlough; Nicola Bryant manages to perk up her voice a bit and sound like the teenager she was back then. And speaking of voices, Peri's mother, Janine, is played by the incredible Claudia Christian who sci fi geeks will know best as Ivanova from Babylon 5.

This play is the prequel to the earlier-reviewed The Gathering, wherein the fifth Doctor meets Tegan again in Australia. The surviving members of The Reaping appear in it as well, bringing a Cyber-conversion unit with them as spoils of the adventure, as it promises to cure cancer if used properly. I'm not a huge fan of the intertwining storyline when it operates like this; a similar experiment was done with the novels Blood Harvest and Goth Opera in theVirgin Books range and it worked okay, there was always the problem, though, of keeping continuity straight. I'll say this much though; I don't like the ending.

NEXT EPISODE : I, DAVROS - GUILT

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

The Gathering

While Peri and Erimem are in Monte Carlo on their mission, the Doctor carries on with unfinished business of his own and ends up following a trail that leads him back to Earth in 2006, and more specifically to Brisbane, Australia, and the 46th birthday party of Tegan Jovanka. But it's not all fun and happiness; Tegan has moved on with her life and is not eager to revisit her danger days with the Doctor, but someone has brought something alien to Brisbane, and danger is not far behind.

Now I'm not going to throw too much plot detail around, as this adventure is in effect a sequel to The Reaping, an audio adventure with the sixth Doctor... which is in the future as far as the series is concerned but set in the past, in 1984. Just looking at the cover art (a new feature to my blog!) you might be able to guess what alien menace is involved, so I'm not going to say any more about that angle.

Let's talk about Tegan. Indeed, let's talk about the Doctor and Tegan. The fact that we have a Tegan audio is a fantastic thing as Janet Fielding for years insisted she would never return to the role she left behind, but was persuaded finally to do "just one". Not since Sarah Jane Smith has there been a companion who's dynamic with the Doctor was such a source of amusement and joy to the viewers, although the two could never be more different; where Sarah made the business of time travel with the Doctor her life, Tegan spent most of her days grumbling about where the TARDIS had landed them this time and looking for a way out until she finally left out of disgust at the violence that follows the Doctor. Hence his return to her life is not greeted with joy, exactly, and when people start to die Tegan feels like it's the good old days. Oh yeah, and seeing as she's 46 now she actually looks older than him, which would annoy anyone.

The Doctor is never fazed by this; indeed he has gotten used to popping up in his friends' futures and either not having aged a day or with a whole new body - look how often he does it to the Brigadier. The only thing that does rattle him though is the suggestion that Tegan is only grouchy because she loves him. This I blame on the new TV series, seeing as the Doctor has changed into not just a good friend to travel with but some unattainable sex object, and the notion is starting to creep into revisionist fan factions' work. Still, it's pretty much a given that it is not going to make its way any further back than Peter Davison's Doctor. Unless there's something we don't know about Vicki and some grandpa complex she might have had.

NEXT EPISODE : OMEGA

Spare Parts

The Doctor and Nyssa arrive on a cold grey world on the edge of a nebula where no planet should be. The people of the planet are dying; an underground city with its technology stalled in the 1950s holds the last of the inhabitants as their rulers make a last desperate effort to save their race. The planet is Mondas. And the people are destined to become the Cybermen.

FANTASTIC. There are not enough words to describe Spare Parts, so fantastic is going to have to do. Every minute of the script is a delight to hear; Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton deliver one of their best performances as the Doctor and Nyssa in this format. The spectre of Adric's death in their last encounter with the Cybermen still hangs over them both; the Doctor knows that Mondas is heading back towards Earth eventually to arrive in 1986, he knows the patterns of history, but Nyssa sees a chance to stop the development of the Cybermen before they can begin their conquest.

Writer Marc Platt takes a look farther back into the past of the Cybermen than any other to date, illustrating the plight of the common people who are slowly dying and being replaced by artificial limbs and organs. The things being done to the people are truly chilling, the fate of Yvonne Hartly being particularly frightening, and the final rise of the CyberPlanner out of the group mind of the Planning Committee a delight to hear. And speaking of hearing, and sounds, the voices of the Cybermen are recreated to match the originals from The Tenth Planet.

More of the audios should be like this: simple plot, incredible performances, and real relevance to the series as a whole.

NEXT EPISODE : CREATURES OF BEAUTY

Earthshock

A chance materialization in an underground cave system in the 26th century brings the TARDIS crew into contact with a military group investigating the slaughter of a group of archaeologists. The scientists were masscred by a pair of androids protecting a massive bomb, and behind the androids are the Cybermen, once more intent of destroying the Earth. With the bomb deactivated, the Cybermen resort to their fallback plan of ramming the planet with a huge freighter powered by antimatter, but when the freighter enters a time warp it ends up arriving at Earth during the time of the dinosaurs and triggering their extinction upon impact - with Adric still on board.

The Cybermen make their return to the series after an absence of about seven or eight years, and to heighten the impact of that return they have been re-styled and updated once more to be taller and more machine-like. The Cyberman head changes to include a glass chin, and inside can be seen the mouth of the actor much akin to their original appearance in 1967 when they still had teeth and their eyes could be seen rotting away within their masks. They still look like men in suits, though; as the Cyber army awakens and marches through the hold of the freighter (and there are a lot of them this time) they pass by the camera and we get a full of view of... well.. Cyber-bum. And it's not a bad bum, but are we supposed to believe that the Cybermen replaced everything in their bodies from brains to nervous systems to internal organs, but left their bums alone? A bad edit, in the end. The other point of contention with the Cybermen is their voices; now deep and booming and not as flat and computer-like as before, they still sound as if there is some trace of emotion inside them. Daleks are allowed to hate and go into a rage but Cybermen are supposed to be driven by logic, and logic would not see the Cyberleader crushing a communicator in apparant rage when his plan falls apart.

Another first for the series this time: the TARDIS is invaded by the Cybermen and occupied for a time in part four.

Earthshock features some interesting effects as well, including a flashback sequence with the first, second and fourth Doctors as the Cybermen review their history with the Doctor's interferance with their plans. This was my own first glimpse of vintage Doctor Who clips from The Tenth Planet and The Wheel in Space back when I first saw this adventure broadcast on Channel 17 on a Saturday afternoon back in... well whenever it was.

Cybermen aside, Earthshock has a defining moment like few other adventures; the death of a companion, in this case, Adric. Trapped on board the freighter as it hurtles down onto Earth, he becomes the third companion to die in the series, joining Sara Kingdom and Katarina. Do we miss Adric? Not especially, but the impact of his death is felt by everyone on the TARDIS crew, and it is driven home by the final credits of part four beind scrolled over black in silence as opposed to the usual theme music and starfield sequence.

Earthshock got the revisionist treatment recently and was put out on DVD with a new GCI effects option, replacing the laser weapons from firefights against the Cybermen with better effects and creating a new sequence showing the freighter hitting Earth. I did not watch the original version when I viewed Earthshock, choosing to see the show from a different light this time. Fans keep squawking about the retouching of the effects but the in the end the show still goes on, Adric still dies, the Cybermen are still back, what's the problem?

I think Jay said it best, even though we did not watch this one together : "Adric. Boom. You're dead. We get it,"

At least now the TARDIS will be a bit less cramped.

NEXT EPISODE : TIME FLIGHT

Revenge of the Cybermen

The Doctor, Sarah and Harry finally return to Nerva via a Time Ring given to them at the start of their adventure on Skaro only to discover that things have changed there. They have returned to the beacon at a time thousands of years before the solar flares devastated Earth and now just have to wait for the TARDIS to drift back to them. But there is a problem on Nerva: put into service to guide space traffic around a new planet around Jupiter, the beacon has been ravaged by a plague that has left all but four members of the crew dead. The Doctor does not believe that it is actually a plague and his suspicions are confirmed when Sarah is attacked by a Cybermat and injected with poison. Crewman Kellman has apparantly been working with the Cybermen, and the new planet is of interest to them: it is Voga, the planet of gold. Gold, it is revealed, is the one substance to which Cybertechnology is vulnerable as it is non-corrodable and destroys a Cyberman's inner workings. The Cybermen plan to destroy Voga with a series of bombs but all the while they are victims of a double-cross; Kellman has planned with the Vogans to lure the Cybermen onto the beacon and blow it up with a rocket.

Um. Right from one of the best Dalek stories ever we go into what is one of the weakest Cybermen adventures ever made. Not seen since The Invasion in 1969, the Cybermen are slightly redesigned for their first colour appearance, but unlike previous adventures where there were armies of them on screen, here we only have four of them including their Cyberleader - the last of the species apparantly. The Cyberleader is done all wrong by the actor playing him, he sounds too emotional and actually shouts and gloats, and even makes the odd ironic quip, which is something that has never happened before. Until 1992 this was the earliest Cyberman adventure that existed intact, so it was actually the introduction story for an entire generation of fans who had never seen a Cyberman on screen before. The new Cybermat design is a lot bigger and more sinister than the previous ones, though; it has no eyes and flows across the floor more like a silverfish. And it jumps. Okay it's a CSO jump but a jump nonetheless.

The production values of the adventure are very good despite the bad presentation of the key villans; extensive location work was done in some caves for the Vogan planet sequences, including Sarah and Harry arriving via transmat and many many chases down corridors. Again there is the problem of going from the filmed locations to the studio sets built to represent the caves, but one gets used to that sort of thing with Doctor Who. Eventually.

Revenge of the Cybermen was actually the first VHS Doctor Who adventure I ever bought, sometime back in the summer of 1989. I remember hauling it around downtown Toronto all day with me and after a Blue Jays game at the SkyDome coming home very late and sitting up for another 90 minutes to enjoy it. It still hasn't hit DVD release status yet and my copy has held up very well over the years, but it would make a good addition to the DVD library I think. Well, they all will in time, but some would just be more fun. The only sticking point is the special effects again; as the adventure is set of Nerva just as with The Ark in Space the new CGI effects would be a nice touch but it might prove more challenging this time around as the beacon does not just sit still the whole time; it is actually set on a collision course with Voga by the Cybermen. The entire sequence of the collision course uses a lot of CSO already and some astonishingly well timed performances by Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen.

The TARDIS turns up just in time and the three travellers leave for Earth, having received a summons from the Brigadier to help him with some mystery. The next televised adventure was made for this season but for some reason it was put off to serve as the season premiere, so viewers were left with a bit of a gap before the adventures of the Doctor and company resumed. As a result there is a gap perfect for some additonal adventures, so let's look at two of them before resuming.

NEXT EPISODE : WOLFSBANE

The Invasion

The TARDIS comes back together in space after the Land of Fiction is detroyed; the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find themselves flung back into their own universe, orbiting Earth. Within seconds of their arrival the find a missile has been fired at the TARDIS from the dark side of the moon, and they make an emergency landing on Earth. In an attempt to get help to repair some damage to the TARDIS, the Doctor journeys to contact Professor Travers but finds instead that he has moved to America and left his home in the hands of Professor Watkins and his photographer neice Isobel. Watkins works for a company called International Electromatics, which is in turn run by Tobias Vaugham, a powerful businessman. IE are the Microsoft of their day, with their printed circuits in absolutely every piece of computer equipment in the world, and they are also being investigated by the newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) and it's new commander, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart. But there is more to IE than meets the eye, and Vaughan is revealed to be an ambitious traitor allied with the Cybermen in their newest attempt to invade Earth.

This is the fourth time the Doctor has confronted the Cybermen in this incarnation. And once more they have changed their appearance to look less like they were assembled in a hurry, and their voices are different as well. The CyberPlanner from the previous Cyberman story makes an appearance as well, as does the entire Cyberman invasion fleet. The Doctor does not have much in the way of direct confrontation with the Cybermen, just with Vaughan, who has been partially altered by the Cybermen and has a mechanised body like them, but his brain is still very much human, complete with greed and arrogance. Vaughan was played to incredible perfection by Kevin Stoney, who was last seen selling out the Solar System to the Daleks in the form of Mavic Chen in The Dalek Masterplan.

I can't say enough good things about this story. It was made as an 8 episode adventure but of course, some got lost, and we're missing episodes 1 and 4. The VHS release of the adventure has the missing episodes bridged by narration from Nicholas Courtney himself, the man who played the Brigadier and went on to be a fan favourite. The missing episode soundtracks are on CD as well, but as the bulk of the story is available to watch it's not like it suffers too much from their absence. The Cybermen do not actually appear until the end of episode 4, which makes for a lot of amospheric build-up in the meantime with creepy music and a lot of location work outside the imposing IE headquarters building in London. When the Cybermen finally do launch their invasion there are some amazing shots of the fleet in space, as well as the UNIT rocket attack to fend it off. And let's not forget the incredible location work, with the Cybermen throwing the covers off manholes and emerging from the sewers to march down the streets of London, and the steps of St Paul's cathedral. Fantastic stuff - oh to have been a child in 1969 to have seen this on televsion and be blown away by it.

The Invasion served extra purpose in establishing UNIT in the show's lore. After the Yeti invasion UNIT was put together with the specific aim to protect Earth from invasion from other worlds, and who better to run it than the Colonel who was on hand for the Yeti. Only promote him to Brigadier. So now the Doctor has an ally on Earth in modern times, and in a few more adventures he's going to need one.

But in the meantime...

NEXT EPISODE : THE KROTONS

The Wheel in Space

After leaving Victoria, the Doctor and Jamie find themselves in trouble as the TARDIS breaks down in space. The Doctor averts disaster by removing the time vector generator from the ship while it repairs itself, and he and Jamie find themselves on a rocket in deep space. The rocket has drifted towards one of Earth's outer defence stations, where a crew of scientists are constantly on guard against meteor showers that threaten the solar system. Once on board, though, the Doctor and Jamie discover Cybermats have infested the Wheel, and the Cybermen are not too far behind in another attempt to invade the Earth.

Again, another 6 part adventure but with a very simple plot. And not that many Cybermen, really; an advance party of two is all it takes to get the Cybermats into action and begin the subversion of order on the Wheel by taking control of the minds of the technicians. The advance party are in contact with their new leader, the Cyber Planner, which is not even a Cyberman but a brain in the middle of a mechanical apparatus - another example of the evolution of the Cybermen. The Cybermen themselves have changed again since their last appearance in Tomb of the Cybermen, their heads are redesigned and their hands still have only three fingers but they are more mechanical looking. A new sort of Cyberman war cruiser is seen in episode 6 as well. This makes the third time the second Doctor encounters them, and the fourth in the series as a whole; their appearance rate is something like twice a season now, which is something even the Daleks never had. Perhaps with Terry Nation having taken away his creations the big push was on to create a new menace in their place, and they do quite well.

A new companion named Zoe Herriot joins the TARDIS crew at the end of the adventure after helping deal with the Cybermen. Zoe is a computer programmer and analyst but somewhere in her training a bit of her humanity has been repressed. She is not completely without emotions like the Cybermen themselves, but she does have a tendancy to spit out the facts regardless of how disturbing the people around her may find them. By her own admission she does want to feel things and experience emotions, and attempting to stow away on board the TARDIS seems like just the ticket. Jamie immediately forms a bond with her based on teasing her when her knowledge does not cover everything she encounters, and she in turn is condescending towards him when his own lack of smarts gets him in trouble. The Doctor is patient with Zoe when she rambles about logic, teling her that logic is just a way to be wrong with authority, but he takes her along willingly at the end, perhaps seeing the real person within trying to get out. And to brace her for what is to come, he re-tells the events of The Evil of the Daleks, which would be the first ever rerun on BBC 1 of Doctor Who.

The Wheel in Space is another of the incomplete stories, with episodes 3 and 6 restored on the Lost in Time DVD collection. The rest makes for entertaining audio on a BBC Radio Collection CD, but this time the narration is provided by Wendy Padbury, who played Zoe herself.

With the TARDIS crew back up to capacity, season five closes, and mere weeks away would be the start of season six, and a series of events that would drag a lot of the Doctor's past out into the open...

NEXT EPISODE : THE DOMINATORS

The Tomb of the Cybermen

Her father is dead, and Victoria is now being hosted by two men she barely knows: the Doctor was apparantly working with the Daleks to buy time, and then managed to destroy them, and Jamie risked his life to sneak through a Dalek-infested Victorian estate home to rescue her. And now she is alone, save for these two men who travel inside a police box. Victoria accepts the nature of the TARDIS eventually and seems to adjust fairly well to the events around her, if not to the notion of wearing a skirt that ends above her knee. She also will have to get used to the Doctor's habit of landing in danger, for the TARDIS lands on Telos, a planet taken over by the Cybermen after the destruction of Mondas. It is some time in the future, and there hasn't been a Cyberman sighting in 500 years, and a group of archaeologists financed by some shady logicians and their big burly muscle man servant are looking for their remains. The Doctor immediately joins the group, as he knows well enough the dangers of Cybermen. A traitor in the midst of the group has ambitions of reviving the Cybermen and gaining influence with them, but once the Cybermen are active again it becomes obvious that the Cyber City on Telos is not exactly a tomb but a trap to lure people in and convert them to Cybermen to prop up the numbers of their dying race. As with the previous Dalek story, the commander in chief of the menace is revealed, in this case it is the Cybercontroller, who is more imposing than his underlings and is styled slightly differently. Here we first hear the new mantra of the Cybermen : "We will survive," (cue Gloria Gaynor).

Jay joined me for this viewing once more, and he was quick to spot the updating of the Cybermen from the last time he saw the in The Tenth Planet. The design has not changed since The Moonbase, nor have the voices, but a few of the costumes end up a bit worse for wear by the time episode 4's cedits roll; witness one Cyberman's face almost fall off while trying to fight its way out of the tomb area, and then on its descent back down the ladder its suit it torn right out under the arm. The direction of Tomb is quite sharp by comparison to other episodes, with its freaky Outer Limits music and some fades between scenes to show the passage of time, even some crafty pans and sharp zooms that Jay found impressive. As for the development of the regular cast, Jamie keeps getting better and the Doctor makes some interesting comments about his family, implying that they are dead but he can remember them any time he wants. He also makes a rather moving speech to Victoria, telling her that their lives are different than anyone else's in the universe, and nobody else can do what they are doing. This perfectly sums up my own love of the show; no-one else does what the Doctor does, no-one else is the Doctor. I showed that clip to Parker, my wise cracking 7 year old nephew, and he nodded and said that's how he feels when we go places together, giving me my own little bit of Doctor euphoria.

Tomb of the Cybermen has some cool nostalgia attached to it. Okay I was not even born when it was broadcast, but until 1992 the whole serial, all four episodes, did not exist at the BBC archive, and there were always these fans going on about how good Tomb was, and Doctor Who Magazine did a whole special on it, and there was a script book published. And then one day I was at my friend Mike's place working on the fanzine our then-fanclub put out, and the call came from another friend, Luca, who had just gotten his Doctor Who Magazine with a stop-press insert announcing that Tomb of the Cybermen had been FOUND, all of it, in Hong Kong. There were many cries of delight, seeing as the classic series had been off the air for a few years at that point, and hey, old episodes that many of us had never seen were just as good as brand new ones. It's the sort of moment every Doctor Who fan dreams about, when their favourite missing episode finally comes home. My own is Marco Polo. There are some pessimists in the fandom community who consider themselves the authority on the odds of a missing episode turning up again, and they love to make statements about the slim odds of any more turning up. One in particular waved his well-fed jowls about it in a documentary attached to a "missing years" tape released a few years back, and shortly after that came the return of Dalek Master Plan episode 2, proving that when it comes to Doctor Who one never can tell for sure.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

The Moonbase

After leaving Atlantis, the TARDIS is caught in a gravitational field and makes a rough landing on the moon in the Earth year 2070. The crew discover a massive base on the moon equipped with a Gravitron, which is a device used to control Earth's tides and in effect control the weather, but the base is under seige from some kind of disease which is slowly rendering the base staff catatonic and riddled with black veins. The disease is the work of the Cybermen, who have returned 84 years after the destruction of Mondas to attempt to take over the Earth by destroying its weather. Polly, Ben and Jamie manage to fight off the initial occupying forces using chemicals to attack the weaker spots of the Cybermen's bodies, and a full invasion force begins a march across the moon before the Doctor realizes that the Gravitron holds the key to defeating his foes.

Magnificent. I loved The Moonbase despite only being able to watch episodes 2 and 4. The Cybermen return in style after an update and facelift, getting rid of the human hands and the visible parts of the human bodies they once had in favour of their new standard look of a metal body, chest panels, and the helmet with the blank eyes and mouth. The voices have also changed to be more like that which would come out of a synthesizer, giving them an overall effect more like a robot than ever. Rather than being vulnerable to radiation as in The Tenth Planet, their new heart and lung chest plates are made of plastic and are rendered useless when spracyed with a combination of acetone, benzene and alcohol from the base's stores. And when the Cyber army makes its march across the lunar surface, okay sure, we see the laces on their boots, but they manage not to cast shadows on the backdrop walls and there are so many of them... at least 10 that I counted on screen at one point. And they are more lethal with their weapons; both Polly and Jamie are zapped with some kind of energy ray projected from a Cyberman's hand, and they are also armed with blaster weapons and a large energy cannon that is fired very effectively in episode 4.

Still the victim of being a last-minute addition to the crew, Jamie is sidelined for the better part of episode 2 with a head wound, and when he does recover he's not given enough to really work with. Ben and Polly are still very much the prime companions for now. The Doctor has a delicious dark moment when he sums up the Cybermen in episode 2: "There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things. Things that act against everything we believe in. They must be fought," but he returns to his clowning ways soon enough.

I'll say this about every episode of Doctor Who at some point, but I really wish I could have seen all of this one. The existing 2 episodes were restored brilliantly on the Lost in Time DVD so there is at least that much to enjoy.

NEXT EPISODE : THE MACRA TERROR

The Tenth Planet

The TARDIS arrives at the South Pole in the year 1986 just as a standard orbit by a manned space capsule starts to go awry. The Doctor, Ben and Polly encounter a hidden base in the ice where an international team commanded by the growly General Cutler and tracking the capsule and trying to guide it back to Earth. The Doctor discovers a power drain affecting the capsule and accurately predicts that another planet is about to appear in the sky, and then he predicts that they will receive visitors from that planet. Cutler doesn't care and is suspicious of the time travellers, but he has bigger things to worry about when the base is overrun by natives of the planet, now known as Mondas; they are mechanical with visible human hands, their faces wrapped in fabric but their eyes and mouths still disturbingly visible as if they are rotting beneath the coverings. All emotion has been removed from their brains, they are the Cybermen. Their planet is Earth's twin but has drifted off its orbit, and desperately low on energy it has returned to gather energy from Earth. Mondas does indeed begin to suck at Earth's power but times have changed since they were twin planets and there is a lot more energy going around in industry and technology, and under the overload, Mondas burns out and the Cybermen are destroyed. The Doctor becomes steadily weaker as the adventure unfolds, only barely managing to set the TARDIS in motion before he collapses onto the floor. Ben and Polly rush to his side, and as they watch, he regenerates into a completely new person...

Oh where to begin.

The big news is the regeneration. William Hartnell has been the Doctor for the last three years at this point, and he wants to leave the role, citing health reasons for the most part but in a letter he apparantly sent to a fan he states that he was having creative differences with the BBC about the direction the show was moving in, and then left. Regardless, the problem of replacing the lead character was solved by introducing the concept of regeneration, a process unique to the Doctor's people wherein an old worn out body can undergo a complete cellular renewal and continue to live, but completely altering its physical appearance as a side effect. This would be a big risk on any program, but as Doctor Who is still very much on the go here in 2005, obviously one that the fans were ready to buy into. The regeneration is handled well on screen, slowly blending the face of William Hartnell into that of his successor, Patrick Troughton.

Then there are the Cybermen. It is hard to believe that these mummified creatures would go on the be one of the series' most notorious monsters, but they would indeed return numerous times over the series, seeming to update their appearance every time. These Cybermen were a very primitive breed, with bits of their previous human physionomy still very much visible as stated above. One of the Cybermen alludes to them still very much posessing organic brains, just with their emotions surgically removed along with their hearts and most of their organs to ensure their survival. There is a tremendous opportunity to explore the background of the Cybermen, and it will come in the Big Finish audio Spare Parts, but that's not for a while. One of the creepiest things about these Cybermen is the dull dead processed voices that come from their mouths; the mouths open but do not actually move with the words they speak as if there is a speaker buried within them.

I recruited my friend Jay for viewing purposes once more, and we noted the stylized titles for the adventure, but realized that the computer sounds of the control room were provided by the same effects that were used for WOTAN so recently inThe War Machines. Jay made note of a more professional look to the opening of the show, but that goes right out the window when the snow machine is parked right beside the camera to simulate a blizzard as the TARDIS arrives. The staff of the Antarctic base are all from different nations and are played a bit too over the top, with some not-too-convincing American accents and a really lousy Spanish dude complete with girlie mags and pin-ups by his bunk. Polly is of course ogled by the men seeing as there are no women on the base (so it's 1986 but there are still no women in the military eh? Actually that's really the only thing that was inaccurate about the social dynamic in the episodes, at least from what I can remember of 1986) and reverts to her typical 60's girl role by offering to make evryone coffee in a time of crisis. "Why doesn't she just take a dictation and be secretary too," Jay says from his chair. The concept of the United Nations working as one on a space program is interesting, even if they appear to have Americans running the bases, but then come the scenes at the UN buildings in Geneva where everyone wears distinctive tribal outfits to represent their nations and show us just how multicultural the world is in 1986. Uh, yeah.

The Tenth Planet is unfortunately incomplete, with episode 4 missing somewhere in the ether (although it is suspected that someone somewhere has it and is hanging onto it just to be a dick... dude, if you're reading this, you ARE being a dick, give it back to the BBC dammit). For the VHS release episodes 1 through 3 were cleaned up and episode 4 reconstructed using the intact audio tracks, stills, and a few choice moments of moving images recorded with film off a television screen during the original broadcast. The regeneration clip did mercifully survive as it was used in another program and lifted from it, so at least the first glimpse of the Doctor's truly alien ability is there to be seen. The reconstruction was done very well, and if enough material had been available a similar approach to the missing episodes from The Reign of Terror would have been a nice project, rather than forcing Carole Ann Ford to sit and read from a teleprompter.

So that's the end of the first Doctor. Gone. On with the new. The BBC are rolling the dice that people will still watch the show even though the character they have been with for three years is as good as dead to them, with a strange newcomer at the helm of the TARDIS. What better way to keep viewers onside though than to pit the new Doctor against his oldest foes....

NEXT EPISODE : THE POWER OF THE DALEKS