"Remembrance of the Daleks"

You want a good serial to really grab you.

"What the hell am I watching?" This was my first reaction when "Remembrance of the Daleks" started playing mere hours ago. It's been a while since I've seen this, and a while since I've watched a Seventh Doctor serial in general, and it was a slightly weird experience. I've read a lot of rather negative reactions to the McCoy era lately and it had perhaps coloured my expectations, because at the very beginning "Remembrance of the Daleks" seems rather naff, and my immediate thought was how I had really remembered the serial and the era. I suppose my question is this: is "Remembrance of the Daleks" legit? And I think the answer is that by and large yes, it is legit. It's a pretty darn well-written and well-paced story with a good amount of content and nice effects which doesn't get bogged down in the usual navel-gazing which tends to afflict a Doctor Who anniversary story. It instead establishes its credentials as a tribute to the past through setting and theme, and while this may seem a little laboured at points it doesn't get in the way in the manner that a bunch of past Doctors and companions would have.

The response to a post-Hinchcliffe naysayer.

Put simply the Doctor and Ace show up near Coal Hill School in 1963, back when things all began in "An Unearthly Child." Trouble is afoot as the Daleks have arrived to sequester the Hand of Omega, an ancient Time Lord device used for stellar manipulation. Worse still, both the Imperial and Renegade Daleks are after the Hand and are duking it out on Earth. Both sides are using human agents for their own ends and need to be outplayed by the Doctor so that he and his supporting cast of two-dimensional soldiers and scientific staff can survive to the end of the story. There's plenty of action, lots of Daleks yelling at each other and having shoot outs, some memorable dialogue, a lot of rather frantically-resurrected back-story and what was in my opinion an incredibly impressive shot of a Dalek shuttle landing in the schoolyard that makes any CGI crap churned out for the New Series look like unbelievable garbage by comparison. The music gets a bit funk dog on occasion but I can live with it.

You won't find good reviews down there.

To be perfectly honest with you, dear offended New Who fan, I'm not a massive enthusiast for Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor. Don't get me wrong, he's on the right side of the median line as all the Classic Doctors are, but I don't find him as watchable as the Big Four, Colin or P McG. He's more sort of hovering around the Six out of Ten mark with Davison, who is looking slightly uncomfortable about proceedings. He's entirely watchable in this, but I don't especially love him in the role. It's not like with Tom, who can sell practically anything no matter how bad the script or how many refreshments he's had at lunch, or William Hartnell, who can fluff lines left and right and still be pure class from start to finish. McCoy gives a somewhat more workmanlike performance as the Doctor, pressing the right buttons and certainly feeling like the Doctor but perhaps not quite with the extra flourish that the character has been afforded in some incarnations. He does come across as rather masterful and abrasive despite his diminutive size and eccentric appearance, though, so I have to give him credit for that.

"It was John's idea. Do you like it?"

As for the rest of the cast there's not a great deal to say for them individually. Sophie Aldred's a bit panto as Ace, but then again she always is, isn't she? Something about her makes me think of a giant overgrown baby on occasions, but I can't think why. There are also some incredibly unflattering shots when she's in the leather jacket where she just looks disproportionate, like she has a tiny head and legs and a massive upper torso. There's a weird bit in the Boarding House, too, where she says good morning to Mike in a way that made me think that they'd slept together the night before. Later he asks her out to the pictures. I don't know. Mike himself is fairly horrendous, and a very dull character for whom I felt absolutely no sympathy. In fact I found it darkly thrilling in a very evil way when he got fried by the Sith Lightning of the little girl. Captain Gilmore's incredibly unmemorable as well, and beyond him there's no one really to talk about in terms of the protagonists apart from Rachel and Allison. I have no idea why they're even there, although I assume Rachel is meant to be a sort of analogy for the Doctor in his secondment to UNIT, sort of like how Liz was meant to be back in Spearhead? Who knows. Allison is cute but neither of them have any purpose in the story.

"Yes, more than half the Troughtons are inside for safekeeping."

The problem with the Daleks in this story is that they're rubbish. I prefer the Renegade Daleks to the Imperial Daleks because I think they look more soldierly and professional, but they also look a bit cheap. In the final confrontation where McCoy's harrassing the black Dalek and it's wobbling back and forth like it's going to shit itself you can actually see the trainer-clad foot for a second of the bloke within who's rocking the prop from side to side, which killed my suspension of disbelief stone dead in an instant. I also don't particularly like the idea of them needing to use the little girl in their battle computer for her creativity. The Doctor remarks that the Daleks are otherwise over-reliant on logic and reason and have no creativity or intuition to aid their battle plans, but that makes absolutely no sense to me. It seems to be a misunderstanding dating back to "Destiny of the Daleks." They're not robots, nor purely logical like the Cybermen. Daleks are completely capable of emotion.

A video game advocate's nightmare.

The only caveat is that they only experience negative emotions: hate, anger, disgust, the diabolical thrill of power and triumphing over defeated, degraded enemies. I can only imagine we were meant to expect that Davros was sitting in the chair wearing a virtual reality helmet or something before the girl turned around, but given that he's always been part of the Imperial faction that seems like a pretty serious assumption they want us to make. In the end, of course, Davros isn't playing the two factions against each other. It's just a little girl who somehow shoots lighting from her hands. A decent twist, but a bit of a twist for twist's sake.

I have nothing bad to say about this.
This looked awesome.

Returning to the Imperial Daleks, I'm not a huge fan of the design. The Doctor mentions inside the shuttle that they largely lack an aesthetic sensibility, so it doesn't really explain why they dress up in white and gold. I realise that it's meant to subvert our expectations by turning this traditionally positive colour imagery on its head but in terms of internal consistency it doesn't make a great deal of sense. I don't mind the mothership bridge set but I think Davros looks utterly ridiculous in his giant globe chair thing, covered in those spiralled analogue telephone cords and with a microphone in front of his mouth. He looks a right knob when he runs away at the end too, although I daresay that was intentional. One of the problems with this episode is that a lot of the Dalek-related tension involves the Daleks confronting something, yelling "Exterminate", and spending so much time yelling "Exterminate" over and over again without doing any actual exterminating that by the time they're ready to actually follow through, someone shows up and rescues whoever is in danger. I always thought that this should have been established as part of the Daleks' character - that they waste time prior to the attack thrilling in their victory, that all the yelling is a sort of psychological wind-up to the climactic moment when they discharge their weapons in fury, but that might be too Freudian an interpretation for early evening family viewing. I find the Special Weapons Dalek a slightly bizarre addition, too. Sometimes it seems like the regular Dalek gun can do anything, but apparently not. Why is it so dirty, anyway? Not a huge fan of the rivets, either. Looks like something slapped up in a metalwork shop, not an alien killing machine. I like the exterior design of the shuttle, however, and that the Imperial Daleks have recovered something verging on humanoid form, albeit apparently with lobster claws. Terry Molloy gets the job done as Davros, and when I criticise the costume I shouldn't go too far, because I like the black mouth, teeth and tongue, which in lieu of eyes are kind of mesmerising. The confrontation between Davros and the Doctor is pure ham and cheese, and the bit where Davros utters "You tricked me!" is completely play school but I like the fact that the Doctor is acting and Davros isn't. It's a nice contrast.

Twice the size, twice the relief.

The plot itself I find rather bizarre. I like the idea that the Doctor is trying to trick the Daleks into blowing themselves up, but I don't understand why he goes to all the trouble of burying the Hand of Omega knowing full well that someone is bound to try to dig it up again. The effects aren't too bad to show it hovering along in my opinion, but it's awfully convenient that the priest at the cemetery is blind. Didn't any passers-by notice this huge metal box floating through the air? Also, are we meant to believe that the First Doctor brought the Hand of Omega all the way from Gallifrey and hid it in London for the specific purpose of tricking the Daleks, whom he hadn't met yet and knew absolutely nothing about, but then decided to just leave it there when he pissed off to prehistoric times and so on, and then hundreds of years later for him personally decided that he ought to pop back and deal with it? It writes an awful lot into the character's motivations from days gone by, and is a rather hard sell beyond the means of the story. What's more, we get a bit of Cartmel Masterplan leaking through as the Doctor implies that he was around in the days of Omega and Rassilon. Thank god that never got off the ground. Why does he claim to be President-Elect of Gallifrey, incidentally? Was he just bluffing? At the end he says the Hand is going back to Gallifrey, too. Why did he bother taking it in the first place, then?

"I require the complete Dentistry of the Daleks!"

This probably all sounds very negative about "Remembrance of the Daleks" but none of these awkward bits of plotting or pointless supporting characters really diminish the overall appeal. It clips along at a decent pace, more or less carried, I would argue, by McCoy's engagingly consistent performance as the Doctor, and while there is a fair bit of pointless spectacle it's nothing too offensive. We get the impression that Mr Ratcliffe was a Nazi sympathiser and that Mike is a bloody racist but it's not especially overplayed, used mainly in compliment to the attitude of the Daleks, but overall that notion is possibly not given the attention it deserves, which might have happened had the silly Hand of Omega plot been scrapped. I like Ace's reaction to the racist sign in the Boarding House window, too, but no one really follows through with these points, and for all the Doctor's moralising about the fate of the living beings inside the Dalek cases he doesn't have too much compunction about blowing up the ship, does he? Let alone Skaro and its sun - I assume the planet was abandoned by that time. Why did it have to be Skaro's sun, anyway? And didn't the Daleks check the Hand? Of course they didn't. The Renegades can't even tell when McCoy and Ace are hiding behind a shelf. Also what's with the bit where McCoy goes to the café? What the hell was the point of that?

"What do you mean, 'Not as good as Revelation'?"

The thing about "Remembrance of the Daleks" is that it's the kind of Doctor Who serial that transcends these shortcomings, where something like "The Armageddon Factor" might get bogged down in them. It might not be one of the great serials of all time, but as far as Eighties Who is concerned it manages to keep up largely through the mere fact that it never particularly becomes boring or unnecessarily stupid. Is it legit, though? I think it's about as legit as was possible by that time. In terms of its style it actually made me think of what New Who would be like with the majority of the most cringe-inducing dialogue cut, the story given a bit of complexity and room to breathe and direction and music that wasn't just faux-Hollywood crap. It feels jarringly different to previous material, even Colin serials from mere years before, but I think it still feels more or less like its heart is in the right place. I think it benefits from largely not being a proper Davros story, his inclusion being very limited, and even though the plot is a bit all over the place by the end it still has a certain charm, although the prospect of Earth being caught in the middle of a Dalek civil war is never realised with great effectiveness. As far as Dalek stories go, it's decent. As far as Anniversary stories go it steers clear of a lot of traps. It's nonsensical at times, but works itself out, and is regularly quite corny, but also easy to watch. "Remembrance of the Daleks" is a robust offering which, much like the Dalek civil war, showcases two distinct yet inseparable sides of Eighties Who.

"The Armageddon Factor"

"Anyone else have a thirst?"

I could go to enormous lengths doing some complete review series of the "Key to Time" season of Doctor Who but frankly I couldn't be arsed. I watched "The Armageddon Factor" for the first time in probably about eight years or so the other day and I suppose my question is this: does it hold up? As the anti-climactic and, I believe, rather unloved finale to one of the Classic Series' few seasons with a major over-arcing plot, I think it's fair to say that "The Armageddon Factor" is going to be in few people's lists of all time classic Fourth Doctor serials (although I could understand it holding a place in the heart of some). There's a fine art to penning the six-part season finale of Classic Who, but during Tom's tenure it's a bit hit and miss, isn't it? We've got the episodes allocated to "Genesis" for Season 12, "Shada" unfinished and "Logopolis" only a four-parter, which places "Armageddon Factor" in competition with "Seeds of Doom", "Weng-Chiang" and "Invasion of Time." I don't think "The Armageddon Factor" is really in competition with the first two, to be honest. I'd have to rewatch "The Invasion of Time" to be sure but I seem to remember that one being rather underwhelming, so maybe in that regard "The Armageddon Factor" takes pride of place as the most mediocre season closer of the Fourth Doctor era.

"You're next! You're next!"

"The Armageddon Factor" seems to take its cues from a few noteworthy sources I would argue, particularly "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and the science-fiction of Isaac Asimov with a hearty dose of pulp good-vs-evil fantasy thrown in as thickener. Opening on the beseiged world of Atrios, where the deliberately bad propaganda film is barely of a higher standard of production or acting than the programme itself, I got a distinct Orwellian vibe, although it might appear to some as being a bit of a cut-price "Genesis of the Daleks" as well. The surface has been bombarded with nuclear warheads and the population is confined to a complex of bunkers all under the control of the sneering Marshal, John Woodvine making me think of a slightly pantomime British Kevin McCarthy for some reason, while his subordinate Shapp looks more like The Inimitable Jeeves than a military adjutant. Simultaneously we have Lalla Ward's introduction to Doctor Who as the rather wet Princess Astra, matched only by Astra's even more sodden boyfriend Merak the chief surgeon. I notice that the hospital set only gets used in the first episode. Could they not afford to pay the extras after that?

"K-9, your nose laser will show them that I can't be banned for life."

I don't know what to say about Tom Baker. What is there left to say about him? He gets the job done no matter whether he's overplaying it or completely steaming. I never find a point where I'm watching Tom and want to knock some sense into him. He's just watchable, albeit relatively unremarkable in this one. I'm not sure how much love there is around for Mary Tamm's Romana but frankly I like her and I think she's a good companion for the Doctor, although I suppose I find her a little superfluous in this one and in some regards I can understand why she was unsatisfied with the role. The main villain of the piece, the Shadow, is like every generic Dark Lord character imaginable rolled into one, and I honestly don't see the point of him. He's boring and completely undeveloped, and has an evil laugh which he seems to utter at every conceivable opportunity just to ram home how evil he is. I don't quite understand why he just sat on his arse this whole time letting the Doctor and Romana assemble the rest of the Key. Was it part of his plan all along? It seems rather fatuous to think that you'd just be able to outwit the people who got all five other segments and not have to do anything yourself but there you go.

Has the show already peaked?

So Atrios is at war with Zeos and the Marshal is getting desperate for victory. There's a lot of stuffing around on Atrios for the first two episodes more or less, we head for Zeos in the third and fourth episodes and finally to the Shadow's planet in the fifth and sixth, which resembles a planet in the same way they do in Bomberman games, which is to say a space station on the outside which is inexplicably a cave on the inside. I guess the Shadow is just a fan of naturalistic interior décor. I like the Atrios costumes and weapons, to be honest, and I quite like the exterior shot we get of the Marshal's ship - I'm surprised they bothered - but too much of it is just plodding around studio set corridors. There's absolutely no location work in this serial so we're relying on the production team to be as convincing as possible. Do they manage it? Enough for my purposes, but not in a way that holds up to much scrutiny. The sets on the Shadow's planet seem positively lazy, every jagged tunnel having a flat studio floor, but I understand that time and budgetary considerations must have been horrendous. Zeos probably gets the worst of the lot, being nothing more than some empty, drab beige corridors and the command room.

"Almost as good as a Prime."

I must say I do like the Mentalis prop, and I really like the idea that Zeos is deserted and that Mentalis is running the whole show on its own. I particularly like the way K-9 interacts with Mentalis, to such a degree that this box with flashing lights on it has a touch of character all to its own, revealed through K-9's pomposity regarding the computer. That being said, I would have preferred had the mystery been as a result of the Zeons having all pissed off early on in the piece and left the computer to do the work, or that they'd installed the computer but then all been killed (little to the knowledge of Atrios) rather than having Drax install it on behalf of the Shadow. The scenario where the war is engineered by the Shadow, as unpleasant as it is, is to my mind far less disturbing than the initial implication that the war is being fought to no purpose whatsoever, at no one's design. Beyond that the journey to Zeos seems to mostly exist to just cause the other characters to be transported to the Shadow's planet in the most staggered manner possible to better drag out the plot over six episodes.

"Birds and bees, Gallifreys..."

While the Doctor actually using the Key to Time to trap the Marshal in the time loop is, I think, a reasonably interesting idea, I find the notion of causing this to happen just by slotting in a piece of squeaky polystyrene which Tom knocks up in about five seconds between scenes utterly implausible and ridiculous, especially given that he walks in wearing an apron and forging gear like he's been working at the smithy or something. As for events on the Shadow's planet, well, it's all a bit pointless really. The Shadow controls Astra, then he controls K-9, then a guy called Drax who is conveniently a Time Lord shows up from behind some green polystyrene and builds a shrink gun for no particularly necessary reason, Romana gets trapped in a box and a guy in a black robe stomps around in front of a miniaturised Tom completely oblivious to the two doll-sized Time Lords squeakily conversing at his feet. What's the deal with Drax, anyway? He just sort of shows up and then pisses off again, and with his non-RP accent and buzz cut he's like Eccleston from before Eccleston was Eccleston, which is no mean feat. Did they really need to hide inside K-9 to enter the Shadow's inner sanctum? When they get there he just stands around like an absolute plum while the Doctor grabs the Key to Time and shines a white light from who knows where in his face.

"Yes, Mr Wooster, sir."

As for the resolution of the season arc, well, it's shit, isn't it? I like the idea that Astra is the sixth segment of the Key to Time, although it seems to give the altogether more reserved Romana pause than it does the Doctor from an ethical standpoint. I almost feel like it would be good if she didn't get restored at the end. Might knock some spine into Merak. Speaking of which, there's a hilarious bit at the beginning of episode six where Shapp and Merak stand around like tape recorders recapping plot points about which they knew absolutely nothing prior in the story purely for the benefit of the audience. I like Shapp. I like the way he's on the one hand a bit of a stuck up bureaucrat but on the other he's kind of curious and helpful. His pratfall into the transmat chamber after being stunned by one of the Shadow's servants is absolute gold as well. He staggers back in shock and topples over like he's just been shown how little he's going to get paid at the end of shooting. Shapp would have been a good companion. Speaking of which, I forgot to say anything more about K-9! Well, he's K-9. He appeals to my inner eight year old boy. He's okay.

"Bring my pile cream at once!"

I like the Doctor's ruminations, exaggerated and otherwise, about the kind of power they get to wield with the Key to Time, but honestly these questions of the corruptive nature of power really get glossed over in a story that really doesn't know what it's about. I suppose we're meant to admire the Doctor's savvy and moral conviction in outwitting the Black Guardian but honestly, he was just some funny-looking old man on the TARDIS view screen. How was he even going to get the Key? Would Tom have to press it up against the glass? That's it, then. The Doctor disperses the Key again, installs the randomiser in the TARDIS and off we go. We never actually see the White Guardian again and balance doesn't get restored to the universe. Why did they bother gathering these things in the first place? Was the guy who Tom spoke to back at the start of "The Ribos Operation" even the White Guardian? Who knows. They don't care, and neither do we. It was just a rather half-arsed McGuffin thread linking the serials together anyway. Their main strength is as Tom adventures.

Thinking of that next crisp beer.

In the end I've got to say that "The Armageddon Factor" is, to my mind, not a very noteworthy piece of Doctor Who. As a resolution to a season-long storyline it really doesn't resolve anything in a satisfying way, it's about two episodes too long, the villain is an idiot, characters show up and vanish for practically no reason and it all looks and feels rather cheap. That being said, I think it opens in a rather confronting way, and that the bare essentials of something worthwhile lie deep beneath. As a four-parter concerned exclusively with the war between Atrios and Zeos it might have been an interesting story, but sadly that was not to be. Perhaps the resolution of the arc needed a whole separate serial to itself independent of finding the pieces, but I dread to think what a six-part finale would have been like under the obvious limitations if they didn't even have the plot-momentum of finding an additional segment. It's not an amazing send off for Mary Tamm's unfortunately short stint in the role of Romana, either. "The Armageddon Factor" is one of those archetypal Doctor Who stories, really, the kind that everyone's forgotten about and where the scope and ambition is to a greater or lesser extent undermined by the execution. Still, much like the sixth segment, it's not without its place.

"Attack of the Cybermen"

What could be more appropriate for this blog than to start a foray into reviews of the Classic Series by looking at none other than the second ever Sixth Doctor serial? For some reason over the ages the Sixth Doctor has received an absurd amount of stick from some people for one reason or another and I cannot fathom why. I am certainly a Colin Baker fan. He's definitely the best of the Eighties Doctors, and while some would argue that's not saying much I'd have him up with the first four, P McG and the Smith in terms of Doctors who are more or less unimpeachable in my mind. People will have a big whinge about how his personality's too bombastic or his outfit is too ridiculous but you know what? His personality's that of the Doctor. So's his dress ensemble. Honestly he doesn't go wrong, and his performance in this serial is absolutely spot-on. He captures the sense of magnanimity, which is to say 'justified pride' as it were, perfectly, for which his appearance and expressions are completely perfect, yet he's also deeply compassionate and deviously clever. I'll get to all that.

Anyway, the Doctor and Peri show up on Earth and devious deeds are afoot. There's a lot of stuff about trying to find some kind of alien signal which might be a distress call and might not and isn't coming from where they think it is and it's being relayed and someone's watching to see who shows up and so on and it's not very well explained but it's covered up by lots of excellent banter between Peri and the Doctor as they stride about looking around which is rather funny and touching and does a good job of making you feel like something important's probably happening. I think it's meant to be that Lytton had been stealing stuff to build a transmitter for... some... reason...? It has something to do with sending a distress call to the Cryons for whom he was working but I'm not sure why he was doing it since they lacked the means to rescue him anyway. I'm not going to lie, the plot's pretty messy. There are these guys who want to steal the time ship the Cybermen have captured but it hasn't actually turned up yet, there's stuff about Cybermen wanting to blow up Telos as part of a science experiment and there's a rather awkward continuity tie-in where the Cyber-Controller is trying to prevent the events of "The Tenth Planet" from happening and while it's implied at one point that doing so would cause a paradox no one seems terribly bothered about the whole issue and that really it's a matter of the Cybermen being up to no good and the Doctor having to save the day. These elements have their place though. The plot with the Cryons raises the stakes regarding Telos. Similarly the two prison escapees, Stratton and Bates, as unrelated and pointless as their plot seems to be especially since they never encounter the Doctor and get shot and killed without ever impacting the main plot in a serious way despite quite a significant amount of screen time, do permit a nice exploration of life under the rule of the Cybermen, where failed Cyber-conversions are forced to perform mine-laying work in quarries which, as the Classic Series always does, somehow manage to convey an inexplicable sense of extraterrestrial alien wasteland.

There are some pretty brutal moments in this serial, and I'm not surprised that it had people whinging back in the Eighties when people thought it was just a kid's show. The diseased, mad Cybermen who are covered in sickly green mold and stumble around attacking even their own kind are pretty horrific to watch and the scene where Lytton's hands are crushed by the Cybermen so that blood runs down his fingers and he collapses in pain is fairly intense. It's all very satisfying, actually. There's a pretty high body count and as usual any bit where a Cyberman gets killed is rather shocking. The effects of the green fluid squirting fountain-like from their bodies, the small explosions which break out everywhere along their limbs and torso and they way they moan, spasm and stagger about can be extremely grotesque and it all rather effectively conveys how much the Cybermen have made themselves into monsters. The bit at the end where the Doctor runs into Cyber Control and mows down about four Cybermen, including the Controller and Leader, on his own are pretty visceral and intense and it's disturbing to see a real situation where the Doctor's completely run out of options and it's kill or be killed.

The Cybermen are pretty well performed in this one, and with the addition of the black-coloured Cybermen along with the guards at the dig site, the operators on Earth, the corrupted ones in the Tombs and the ones in Cyber Control you get a feeling like this is a serious operation going on without needing to see masses of them all at once. The Cyber Controller and the Leader have plenty of good opportunities to say "Excellent!" and rub their wicket-keeper hands together with logical glee and the Cyber conversion process is made to look as unpleasant, undignified and degrading as ever. The bit where the Cyber Controller walks in at the end seemingly victorious and declaims without preamble that "Emotion is a weakness" to the Doctor is classic Cyberman behaviour and right on the money as far as the tone of the episode is concerned. Indeed I would have even liked more exploration of the issues surrounding Cyber-conversion but as such larger-than-life, self-assured villains they are perfect foils for the Sixth Doctor. It also only makes it funnier when, for instance, the Cyber Leader takes Peri away from the others for the express purpose of letting her get warmer clothing to wear on Telos or when, after discovering that the Vastial supplies are about to explode right at the end, one Cyberman makes the universally-recognised hand gesture to "leg it" to his buddy and they both plod out as fast as they can before an enormous explosion destroys Cyber Control. One thing which I found a bit confusing in the second episode is it's never entirely clear where the Tombs are in relation to Cyber Control. Are they directly underneath or connected by caves and tunnels over a certain distance? It all seems to depend on how quickly they want someone to get from one location to another.

Regardless the set-pieces are all done well, particularly the Doctor's frustration at the Time Lords for manipulating him into arriving and the scene where the Doctor and Peri take out the Cyber-converted Policemen, which is both funny and exciting. There was even a part when Lytton was grabbed by the Cybermen which genuinely made me jump. One thing I'll say about Lytton, though, is that while it's nice to have an alien on board and to have the Doctor thinking he's misjudged someone I'm not entirely sure how honourable Lytton's commitment to the Cryons was. I mean yes he was helping the underdog and not allying himself with the Cybermen the way he did with the Daleks but it's still implied that he was doing it for an absolute truckload of diamonds or access to the time ship, not just out of the goodness of his heart. I guess the point is that he stuck to his guns and was willing to help a noble cause for a price? Nonetheless it seems like helping the Cryons is a rather peripheral side-benefit to the fact that he's going to nab himself a time machine. Either way it was a very effective way of making the Doctor question himself and his normal behaviour. Lytton himself is well performed and manages to stop the fake heist scenes at the beginning from being too boring or annoying and he's a good addition to the episode.

As for other characters, I'm not sure how charitable I can be to the Cryons. I like their design, even if the costumes are a bit cheap-looking, and while I can imagine that people who lived in cold might move and speak rather slowly, at times they come across as kind of weird and inscrutable for no reason and it's not really clear what their motivations are. At times they seem kind of suicidal and like they've accepted the loss of their planet and the fact that it'll be blown up and at other times they want it back from the Cybermen. It's not really helped by the sheer complexity of the plot and the fact that it just doesn't get enough explanation. In spite of this you still have a reasonable sense of what's going on, and it does make me feel that the two forty-five minute parts is a good length for a story. That, however, is especially due to the complete change of setting from London in the first episode to Telos in the second which makes the scenario seem expansive and prevents the locations, especially the inevitably dull back streets and sewers, from becoming stale.

There's also Peri to be mentioned, and I really feel like there couldn't be a much more suitable companion for the Sixth Doctor. Although she fulfils the classic companion role of asking a lot of questions so that the Doctor can provide us with exposition her curiosity is well-lampshaded by the Doctor's occasionally exasperated responses and her conversations with the Doctor are, as I stated, very enjoyable to watch. She doesn't really have much of a role plot-wise besides as an observer but she does go above and beyond the call of duty by very generously being incredibly easy on the eye and working with the Doctor rather than complaining or second-guessing him too much. As I implied at the beginning, however, it's Colin Baker's performance as the Doctor which is the real stand-out and is what makes this episode so good to watch. The plot may not make too much sense but at least it's there and it's very watchable, and while the "The Tenth Planet" stuff is too much continuity the jokes with the Chameleon Circuit are nice nods to early concepts which were integral the show and grounded the Sixth Doctor well for his second adventure. I think that, rather than the obvious choices, and story issues aside, you probably couldn't go too far wrong with "Attack of the Cybermen" as a quintessential piece of Doctor Who and that it's a pretty strong indicator of how much more Colin Baker deserved in the lead role.