Attack of the Cybermen Part Two

The one where Lytton undergoes Cyber-conversion...

When you take a step back - which isn't hard to do during this era - it becomes plain just how ridiculous Attack of the Cybermen is. It's all show, and no depth. There's so much going on, entire subplots appear from nowhere and are dropped into the mix in an effort to raise the stakes. But all they really do is confuse and annoy. There are so many ideas thrown into this hotch-potch of a script that it begins to feel like I'm watching tangled wool (now there's a simile for you!).

Part 1 didn't exactly feel straightforward, but for the most part I did feel that I understood what was going on. With part 2 comes a wealth of extra elements which might have felt quite neat individually, but collectively they destroy any sense the story may have had to start with. I'm really not sure how anyone could adequately summarise the plot of this story in one or two sentences.

I may be wrong in my understanding of some of this, so excuse me if that is the case. What I can gather is that the Cybermen want to change history by preventing the destruction of Mondas, as seen in The Tenth Planet. They intend to do this by redirecting Halley's Comet (remember that from part 1?) and crashing it into Earth, thus saving Mondas (it baffles me why Eric Saward and Ian Levine go to all the trouble of referencing the events of The Tenth Planet, but fail to mention that the (First) Doctor was present for it).

That's all relatively understandable, I think I 'get' that. But then there's all the Telos stuff which feels much weaker and tenuous. We're told that following the destruction of Mondas, the Cybermen were attracted to Telos because of the amazing refrigeration technology of the indigenous Cryons, and I suppose this must be what goes on to become The Tomb of the Cybermen (again, no reference is made to the fact the (Second) Doctor was there before). The Cryons weren't in The Tomb of the Cybermen because they'd supposedly been wiped out (so that works).

But then there's this time vessel the Cybermen have acquired. We don't ever find out whose time vessel it is, or where it came from, just that it landed on Telos and the Cybermen captured it (presumably killing the crew). We do see the time vessel, and it looks unlike any time machine we've seen before, so it's probably not Time Lord tech. Cryon Flast tells the Doctor the Cybermen don't fully understand how the time vessel works, but it seems they understand it enough to be able to fly it from A to B. It's also stated that the time vessel landed, and was acquired by the Cybermen, on Telos, but the Cybermen then refer to it "approaching Telos" and we see it coming in to land. That doesn't add up.

I must admit I am fascinated by who the owners of the time vessel were (there must have been at least three of them in the crew, as Lytton says it takes a minimum of three to fly it). I wonder if it was ever said in the original drafts of the script, of which, I'm betting, there were probably very many - but not nearly enough!

And then there's Lytton's role in this whole thing. There's an awful lot of info-dumping going on in part 2 (usually when the Cryons open their mouths) and we learn that Lytton never planned to carry the diamond heist through in the first place. Stranded on Earth after the events of Resurrection of the Daleks, he sent out a distress signal (I'm guessing that's the one the Doctor traces in part 1) which was picked up by, of all people, the Cryons beneath the surface of Telos, a planet located in the star system Tremulus Three (it's in the novelisation, if you're wondering!).

The Cryons told Lytton that their planet was under attack by the Cybermen, so Lytton, being the kindly gentleman mercenary that he is, agreed to help them rid Telos of the Cybermen. To achieve this he needed to trick the Cybermen into taking him with them to Telos, so it's a damn good job the Cybermen were actually in London, beneath the streets of Fleet Street, in 1985. Thinking back, I can't quite get my head around why the Cybermen are on Earth at all (they also have a base on the dark side of the moon, but I'm not clear why). If they are there in order to somehow redirect Halley's Comet, why do they pack up and leave once they discover the Doctor's TARDIS? He wasn't part of their plan in the first place, was he?

Once Lytton gets to Telos, he does precisely nothing to help the Cryons, and instead meets up with Stratton and Bates (how does he know of them?) to try and steal the Cybermen's time vessel and scarper. My head really hurts just trying to reason all this through. What an absolute dog's dinner this script is.

Let's take a breather and consider some other elements of the story, such as the design. Marjorie Pratt's tomb sets are perfectly fine in themselves, but in no way resemble Martin Johnson's much more iconic tombs seen in The Tomb of the Cybermen. If you're going to set a story in the same place as an earlier one, why not make it look like that place? You might not have been able to watch The Tomb of the Cybermen for reference in 1984, but there were plenty of photographs to look at.

Less successful is the storeroom where the Doctor spends far too long chatting with Cryon Flast. It's just a load of boxes, a scattering of polystyrene snow and frost, backed by simple black drapes. Since when did a storeroom have black curtains for walls? The Cryon caves aren't too bad, but you would expect them to look colder, with more evidence of ice and frost about.

The Cryons themselves are rather wonderful, I think. They might look like actors in vacuum-formed masks, but the masks are quite well done, despite it being obvious there's an actor peeping out from beneath. If the masks are supposed to be the Cryons' actual heads, then they fail, but if you think of the masks as actual masks worn by the Cryons, then you can just about get away with it. I do like their icy Elizabethan ruffs and extra-long fingernails, and the imaginatively choreographed way they move, their arms and fingers constantly moving. The Cryons' chilly voices are nicely done too. All credit to the actresses in the costumes - Faith Brown, Sarah Greene, Esther Freud and Sarah Berger - who give the Cryons a convincingly feminine, yet hardy, presence.

Brown's Flast is particularly impressive, happy to sacrifice herself to destroy the Cybermen (I love that slow zoom-out director Matthew Robinson pulls as Flast buries the sonic lance into the vastial and resigns herself to her explosive fate). Flast suffers a brutal end when the Cybermen throw her out into the warm corridor, and she begins to boil. Brown, known best for her comedy routines on variety shows at the time, plays Flast perfectly straight, and as a result her cruel death is felt by the viewer. That bit where she lunges pitifully toward the Cyber Leader, who simply looks on blankly as she dies, is great. The death of Varne later in the episode is also effectively done as she bursts with some kind of energy or light as she expires (and how refreshing when the Doctor tells Rost: "I'm sorry").

Somehow the Cryons have managed to tamper with the Cybermen's refrigeration, and some of the occupants are breaking out, deranged and unstable. This makes for a couple of genuinely shocking moments when a crazed Cyberman bursts out of its tomb. The first time this happens I actually jumped in my seat as the unstable Cyberman grabbed and destroyed its non-crazed colleague, then flails about disturbingly as the Cyber Leader fights with it. It's directed very well by Matthew Robinson, as is the second time this happens when a Cyberman smashes out of its tomb and grabs Peri. It's a slice of horror movie quality amid the otherwise pretty tiresome running around and info-dumps.

What else?

• Griffiths, played by Brian Glover, continues to be my favourite thing about the entire story. Somehow the character has come to represent sanity amid the nonsense, in no small part down to Glover's truthful performance (he finds the time to lament the deaths of Russell and Payne, for instance). "Look, I'm finding all this a bit disturbing," he says when imprisoned in the TARDIS. "Cybermen, now Daleks. Time travel, in an organ!" His demise is swift and cursory at the end, and that annoys me because...
• ... What is the point of Griffiths, Stratton, Bates and even Lytton for that matter? Stratton and Bates bicker their way through the story intent on escape, team up with Lytton and Griffiths, who are also intent on escape, but they all end up pointlessly dead. They play little active role in the plot at all (the Doctor doesn't even meet Stratton and Bates), but we spend time following their stories until they get mercilessly gunned down by a Cyberman at the end. And it all means and amounts to nothing.
• It's both weird and cool seeing the Cybermen in the TARDIS, operating the controls at the console. They kind of suit it!
• The Doctor says that Mondas attacked Earth in 1986. "Next year?" exclaims Griffiths. "That's almost now!" I love Griffiths!
• Isn't it thoughtful how the Cybermen consider how skimpily dressed Peri is and that she will be cold on the icy planet of Telos, allowing her to go and change her clothes into something warmer (but still luridly pink). But for every thoughtful Cybermen there is a grumpy one, as shown when Peri wanders off too far and a Cyberman advances on her, growling menacingly. That's actually quite unsettling.
• "Cybermen have one weakness," claims the Doctor. "They'll react to the distress of their own kind." Really? Since when? And what about that other "one weakness" of theirs: gold?
• Why does Lytton enlist the help of heavies Griffiths and Payne (and undercover cop Russell) for his fake diamond robbery when he could more easily use his two mute policeman friends? I'm sure uncredited actors Michael Jeffries and Michael Braben would have appreciated the work.

The Cybermen capture Lytton, and the Controller insists that he tell him how the mercenary plans to steal or destroy "his" time vessel. Why bother to ask, it doesn't matter any more? Stratton, Bates and Griffiths are dead, and Lytton is in their custody, so how he planned to "steal or destroy" the time vessel is irrelevant now, surely? In any case, Lytton refuses to tell the Controller, so the Cybermen punish him by crushing his hands, resulting in a particularly bloody scene where Lytton's fists are mangled. And if you think that's too graphic for Saturday teatime family viewing, Lytton then undergoes part Cyber-conversion, looking half-man, half-Cyberman. Linda McInnes's zombie-like make-up job on Maurice Colbourne is brutally frank.

The climax is predictably violent, with Lytton stabbing the Cyber Controller, who flails about spurting green goo (onto the camera lens). The Controller then pummels Lytton to death while other Cybermen arrive and start shooting at anything that moves (mainly each other). Amongst all this the Doctor gets trigger happy too, a sign that the Sixth Doctor has no compunction in handling firearms, or using them. This is not the Doctor we're used to, or that I admire.

Everything blows up at the end thanks to Flast's vastial bomb ("It'll make a very loud bang"), and the Doctor and Peri wend their merry way, the Doctor tokenistically regretting the fact he misjudged Lytton. It's tokenistic because the writers seem to think that's how the Doctor should feel, rather than what he would feel. The Doctor barely knows Lytton, and what he does know of him isn't exactly encouraging. He's told that Lytton was helping the Cryons, but there's absolutely no evidence that he ever did, or planned to, and in any case the Doctor didn't know this until quite late on. 

Attack of the Cybermen is a very, very weird concoction of ideas that simply do not fit together. They could be made to fit together and make a cohesive story, but Eric Saward, Ian Levine and the errant Paula Moore certainly weren't talented enough to do it. The Doctor is pretty irrelevant to the entire thing. The only thing he does which changes the course of proceedings is to bring the thermal lance to Telos so that Flast can blow up the vastial. Flast is the real hero of the story, not the Doctor.

It's a mess, a real mess. Things happen for no good reason, and things are said for even less reason. You can tell it's been cobbled together by committee, but a committee who don't seem to be attending the same meetings. There's so much fan service paid that it plays like Cyber-continuity bingo, just to impress the hardcore fans. The destruction of Mondas in the year 1986? That's The Tenth Planet, TICK. The Cybermen have a base on the dark side of the moon? That's The Moonbase, TICK. The Cybermen are frozen in their ice tombs on Telos, and have a dome-headed Cyber Controller? That's The Tomb of the Cybermen, TICK. Cybermen roaming the sewers and attacking public servants? That's The Invasion, TICK. The Cybermen want to crash something into the Earth and observe the fall-out? That's Earthshock, TICK.

Pitiful, really.

First broadcast: March 12th, 1985

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The jump-scares when the deranged Cybermen break out of their tombs.
The Bad: Virtually anything to do with plot, story, dialogue and narrative.
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (story average: 4.5 out of 10)

Word repetition: 4 

NEXT TIME: Vengeance on Varos...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Attack of the Cybermen is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Attack-Cybermen-DVD/dp/B001P5GIOQ