Revenge Of The Cybermen: Ranking - 222

 Revenge Of The Cybermen

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 19/4/1975-10/5/1975,  producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Gerry Davis with Robert Holmes (uncredited), director: Michael E Briant)

'Now that the cybermen have feelings, what next? Rage of the Cybermen? Grief of the Cybermen? Disgust Of The Cybermen? Boredom of the Cybermen? Smugness of the Cybermen? Shyness of the Cybermen? Love Of The Cybermen?' 

Ranking: 222

If you were to ask the average fan to come up with the perfect DW story...well they wouldn’t agree about anything because there is no such thing as an average DW fan and all episodes, stories, doctors, monsters and plots are loved by somebody and debating this stuff is an endless DW fan past-time. But just say they did, as a common denominator they would probably come up with Tom Baker (most popular Doctor?), Sarah Jane Smith (most popular companion?) up against a popular monsters (say for a second you can’t have Daleks…well that’s the Cybermen right?) with Kevin Stoney in the credits (most popular supporting humanoid?!) Behind the scenes you’d have Philip Hinchcliffe in as producer, Robert Holmes as script editor and maybe even re-use the sets from another really popular story (‘Ark In Space’). In short you’d have ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’, the story that more than any other (outside possibly ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ from the same season) ticks all the boxes. BBC video certainly thought so, ignoring the advice of most fans and making this the first ever Dr Who video available, on the understanding that if it was a big flop there might never be another one. So if all the ingredients were there, what happened? How did ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ become the whipping boy for at least two different generations of Whovians?

Well, context and expectations are everything. Say you saw this on first broadcast, as the finale to the most gripping season of Dr Who there had been in years, directly after ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ so you’ve just seen how well Dr Who can do returning monsters. You’ve been waiting for a return of the Cyberman for six years since your older sibling/parent/neighbour/friend/ dog/pet cybermat told you how scary there were – and if they were that scary in black-and-white what the hell must they be like in colour? You’ve heard about that cast, fallen in love with that production team and especially the new Doctor, seen in the credits of the Radio Times that they’ve even got one of the original Cyber-writers. And you get…this, the B moviest Dr Who B movie that ever there was. Your expectations are just too high. Ditto if you saw this in the 1980s. You’ve just bought your first home video player and you’re the first in the street to own one. You search in vain for videos of science-fiction you’ve actually heard of and to your shock see a Dr Who video. It’s the only one and even though you’ve never heard of it, it must be good right? What sort of idiot would release an unpopular video first? It costs you £90, that’s £300 in 2025 money, you’ve saved up for ages and then you sit down to watch it and you watch…this. If E-bay had existed in 1983 there would be a lot of secondhand copies thrown away out of disgruntlement.  

So is it up to ‘Genesis’? Heck no. While I’m not the sort of fan who thinks ‘Genesis’ is the perfect story (far from it) there’s a tension, a seriousness, a higher level of storytelling that puts it above any small ambition to entertain that this paltry little story has. Is it worth £385? Gosh no. I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the price I paid for the DVD in the sale to be honest, but then it was a twin-pack with ‘Silver Nemesis’ (and that one isn’t anybody’s idea of a perfect Dr Who story). This story clearly has none of the ‘magic’ that’s there in all the other stories from Tom Baker’s first season, which whether you think it’s the pinnacle of Dr Who or not (and I don’t) clearly have…something special going on for it, a chemistry of the people in front and behind the cameras. However see it the way I did, in a jumble of stories from other eras, after reading in so any guidebooks about how this was the worst thing that happened to Dr Who ever and…it’s not that bad. ‘Revenge’ is actually quite good. The cast really are good, even if the characters they’re playing are as one-dimensional as those flexi-discs you used to get stuck to cereal cartons. The writing makes a few salient points, even if none of them are wholly original. There’s some really good location footage in Wookey Hole, a location that was crying out to be in a Dr Who story at some point. You certainly can’t accuse this story of being ‘boring’, the way you can a few of the ‘classic’ stories.This isn’t one of those flops where everyone is phoning it in either - everyone is trying their hardest to make this work. This is the thing though: you can only enjoy it if you already aren’t expecting much from it. If you come to ‘Revenge’ thinking it’s in any way special or inventive or important it will let you down. If you come to it expecting the worst you’ll be pleasantly surprised. 

Especially if you know the difficult circumstances behind making it. Worried that incoming inexperienced Phillip Hinchcliffe was inheriting a blank sheet of paper, outgoing producer Barry Letts put together a basic season, inviting lots of regular old hands to write scripts and ensuring that there were at least two big audience-pullers in Dalek and Cybermen stories. Alas, though that’s one-time script editor and Cyber co-creator Gerry Davis on the credits, the end result has very little to do with what he originally wrote and only a minimum of connection to what he was asked to re-write (which you can now hear thanks to Big Finish – see below in the ‘prequels’ column). Davis, having not seen the programme in a while or been updated how it worked now, sent in a very Troughton-esque script (complete with individual episode titles: ‘The Beacon In Space’  ‘The Plague Carriers’ ‘The Gold Miners’ and ‘The Battle For Nerva’) about a base under siege. Only it was a weird kind of base: asked to come up with an idea for what the ‘Nerva’ beacon set from ‘The Ark In Space’ used to be, Davis decided it was a giant floating casino in space where the players had been wiped out by a giant space plague. Just as a lot of casinos are run by undesirables on Earth as a cover up for something else (take your pick from mafia gangs and outright crooks) so this one is secretly run by the Cybermen luring Humans in with a promise of money and giving them a promise of death instead on their way to running the universe. If nothing else it would have been a fun and quirky script, big on the claustrophobia Davis made his name in (with just one set there would be nowhere for the survivors or the Tardis crew to escape), recycled in part in Gerry’s 1978 series ‘Vega$’ (which is a more down to Earth version set in a casino, without the silver giants or space plague). Script editor Bob Holmes wasn’t keen: he sent in a few notes, explaining that Dr Who actually had budget for more than one set nowadays and to drop the casino angle (weirdly he also suggested that Davis had pitched it for the same younger audience Dr Who used to have rather than the adult audience they were trying to grow – which makes you wonder what gambling obsessed pre-teens he was hanging around with).  Holmes liked the plague angle though, so that got moved to the front, with the casino now a base in an asteroid and with the addition of lots of new sets and a bunch of minor miner characters back on the nearest planet. Only Holmes wasn’t that keen on this version either. Eventually Gerry got paid off, with the option of keeping his name on the credits (which he kept) and Holmes set about tweaking the story, relegating the Cybermen to the sidelines and bringing the miners forward (who became the Vogans). If you’ve come here from our ‘Ark In Space’ story then you’ll know that, by a strange quirk of fate, that expensive space station set ended up being built for two stories – both of which were re-written so substantially that the events that were intended to take place there never actually happened! In the end neither of its authors were that fond of it: Davis didn’t like the changes Holmes made (despite being characteristically polite when asked by fans and interviewers, the correspondence between them shows a different story) while the Cyber-trappings he’d been handed to begin with were everything Holmes wanted to get away from.

The story as finished is a typically well made Holmesian story, full of entertaining double-acts and something extra going on under the surface, but it feels as if Holmes is so trapped by fitting already made sets and already cast characters in some cases that he has no room to breathe. More than any other of his written/re-written scripts (even ‘The Power Of Kroll’ has a gigantic squid) this one falls back on things Dr Who had done before without anything new to fill the gaps: a fight between the ‘old guard’ and the ‘new way’ (see ‘The Sensorites’ and the two Peladon stories), a space virus (just like ‘The Silurians’) and an exploding bomb (every other story), the Doctor thwarting a planned cyber invasion and Sarah Jane being possessed, all elements done many times elsewhere and usually better than here.You can tell that Holmes’ heart isn’t truly in it and hard as the cast try to make it seem as if this really could be the end of the world we’ve seen various Doctors escape far worse so many times you lose all manner of tension. It doesn’t help that you don’t actually care that much about what’s going on. The setting of Voga never really comes to life either: in the final draft it’s been changed to a military base orbiting Jupiter, where soldiers keep an eye on asteroids that might attack Earth, which must be one of the daftest settings in all of Who. The space station clearly needs to orbit a planet so they’ve chosen the biggest one, Jupiter, but any asteroid they see from there is going to be sucked in by Jupiter’s massive gravitational pull anyway, it isn’t going to hit the Earth: this setting needs to be a ship in outer space (only Holmes’ hands are tied, of course, with sharing the budget with ‘The Ark In Space’). Plus what are they going to do about it exactly? Blowing an asteroid up would just send large chunks scattering in all directions and while they might do less damage in one go it would surely cause a lot more damage in smaller pieces back on Earth (you only need one small chunk of asteroid to cause harm if it falls in the right place to wipe out all life, as the dinosaurs might or might not have found out, depending which scientist you read). Honestly the casino was a far less silly setting. The Vogans who live on the planet Voga and get mixed up in everything are a peculiarly faceless bunch too, despite some of the best casting around, not least because they’re wearing the weirdest masks ever seen on the series (asked to make them different to both the Cybermen and his own Draconians from ‘Frontier In Space’ mask maestro John Friedlander went for a half-way stage where the actors got to use their real mouths but everything else was covered; allegedly they were moulded on Arnold Ridley’s face, Godfrey from Dad’s Army, after the actor needed a cast for another role and the Dr Who story hadn’t been cast yet, but then that anecdote was from David Collings and he might just have been pulling our leg). You just don’t believe in this place or why people are there.

If the name ‘Voga’ rings a bell then maybe you recognise from Douglas Adams’ blobby green poets in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ (he almost certainly got it from this story, though they’re nothing alike) or you recognise the mythological story about an island of gold. It’s what greedy ol’ Christopher Columbus was searching for when he accidentally discovered America instead (I’ve always wondered if he was working from  a genuine tip-off but overshot and went too far North and that the legend was actually about ‘The Aztecs’ further South, as for them gold was so common it was in everything – much to their downfall when the Spanish turned up). Which leads in to the story’s biggest clunker: The Cybermen, those invincible silver giants who are close to being indestructible, now have an allergic reaction to gold. Sadly it’s all downhill from them from now on, as The Doctor only has to waft a bit of gold in their faces and these impenetrable humongous forces do the cartoon equivalent of standing on a chair and going ‘ugh, get it away from me!’ They’ll never seem quite as scary again. Had the Doctor only known about their allergies to gold when he first met them in 1966 and invited them to, say, a ‘cash my gold’ kiosk their previous encounters would have been one heck of a lot shorter. Plus it’s daft: why would a bunch of cyborg conversions suddenly develop an allergy to gold? They’re not supernatural werewolves! Back in the days when this story was set on a casino that at least made some sort of sense: casinos are after all full of gold and it was meant to act as the werewolf equivalent of a ‘silver bullet’, with an explanation that the metal had particular magical pseudo-science properties that meant Cybermen were afraid of it, explaining away millennia of Mankind’s obsession with this rare and precious metal (which we’d just forgotten that we once hoarded to keep the Cybermen away rather than pay bills). Gold has no relevance to this story, except that it just happens to be what the Vogans have been mining on their amazingly accurately titled planet(which just happens to mirror an ancient Earth legend). But Holmes, with a deadline looming, has no time to rewrite the ending and can’t think of anything better, so in it goes. In fact its final ending is even worse, because how is it solved? (half-spoilers, because believe me you’re going to be disappointed anyway, it might as well be now…) Basically the Doctor gets tied up in the part of the cybership where he can communicate their dastardly plan to the planet Voga and the most ruthlessly efficient race in the universe basically neglect to tie him up properly. Oops! There is, at least, a decent plot twist in there that people often miss, buried as it is in all the nonsense: The Cybermen ‘lose’ not just because the Doctor tricks them but because their logical way of thinking means they never think for a second the Vogans would sacrifice themselves for a cause they won’t live to see. In an era of IRA bomb attacks and terrorism growing in the world it gave this story a contemporary sheen, the sense that you were dealing in a new era of fanatics, not tacticians.  

The way the Cybermen are treated in this story goes further than that though: Holmes doesn’t understand them at all. If you were a child watching this who was too young to see their last appearance (‘Wheel In Space’) you’d have no idea of their tragic backstory, that they were once ‘people like us’ (just a little taller) who’s planet was sent out of orbit through no fault of their own and who slowly converted their bodies to cope with the new climate, until there was nothing left but a logical brain that carried on trying to survive long after any real ‘Human’ (or ‘Mondasian’) part of them was left. Holmes thinks of the Cybermen as robots and that makes them far less scary. Colour has not been kind to them either: being silver they looked good in black-and-white, half in the shadows; in colour grey tends to fade into the background. The Cyber leader has had his jug handles painted black, just so we can see which one is which, something that just seems silly (it’s odd they didn’t go with an added dome the way the 1960s did). The costume department thought the ‘accordion ‘n’ cutlery’ look was silly so gave them a big redesign, one most fans think of as ‘the’ Cybermen (and which will still be around as late as ‘Silver Nemesis’ in 1988) but for me they don’t look as scary: the whole point of the early Cybermen was that they were home-made, put together out of desperation and were all slightly different; this lot just look like a faceless army. After six years away almost nobody who’d worked with The Cybermen was left in the show and it was discovered in a panic that nobody could quite remember the ring modular settings to distort the voices. Besides, director Michael Briant thought it would be better to have actors working in ‘real’ time rather than having people re-act to pre-recorded tape so a new voice was cobbled together, that lost the ‘bottom end’ of the actor’s voices in post-production and had added echo. It just sounds silly. Full marks to Christopher Robbie for his performance as the latest in a long line of Cyber Leaders though – it’s a shame he wasn’t invited back (you might remember him as superhero The Karkus in ‘The Mind Robber’!) Even without te vocal issues, though, they’re not right at all, with dialogue that’s full of wild fury (not unlike The Daleks) rather than cold, hard Cyber logic. Even the body language is all wrong: just check out the one who speaks with his hands on his hips as if he’s performing at Eurovision and about to whip his Cyber-trousers off. The Wookey Hole filming, which would have been perfect for any smaller monster, also causes problems with the six-seven foot actors having to stoop at times. You can’t be scared of a monster that stoops, it’s official. Worst yet is the way the Cybermen are treated in this story, expected to behave like any other villain and invade. Cybermen don’t have the legs for that, not in those bulky suits. They shouldn’t be walking and talking, they should be standing still and scaring. They were made to loom, not lumber. The Doctor, once more terrified of The Cybermen than any single other menace and who triggered his first regeneration is now reduced to mocking them for being ‘pathetic tin soldiers skulking round the galaxy’ – and if even he isn’t scared of them why should we be?

The Cybermats are treated a little better. I prefer their redesign compared to the Cybermen one, moving the metal rodents back to the original conception, which had been to have them like silverfish. Unfortunately they’re not very mobile though (a case of having so many electronics in the nose that it meant they kept toppling over, so most of the time you see them it’s the actor holding them up to their necks and going ‘aaaaah!’ and you can tell). I have a soft spot for cybermats though and if you’d never seen them before (it had been six years after all) you can understand why people’s instincts were to go towards them and touch them, before dropping down dead. Like the first wave of many a cyber invasion they make some kind of sense – it’s later things get a bit weird.

That plague plot never quite works either. Gerry Davis intended it to be like the ‘Moonbase’ virus, with the creepy look of people’s veins coming up red, as if they were slowly turning into Cybermen part by part, with cyber technology coursing through their body. Holmes, always more into hammer horror than science, just has a lot of corpses littering the floor which isn’t quite the same thing. We know, of course, from covid how quickly viruses can spread (and full marks to the Vogans for wearing masks, which is more than 99% of Humans seem to be doing despite the lives it would save, even if the numpties cover everything but their mouths) but there’s no sense of scale to this story. We’re told how scary the virus is – we don’t really see it. We don’t really know how many planets its spread to or how many people it’s killed. We don’t even know which life-forms are susceptible to it. Those of you who, like me, spent lockdown going through old Dr Whos looking for clues on how to ‘cure’ viruses are unlucky too: The Doctor sends sick patients through a transmit beam to safety, because ‘everything that isn’t Human gets taken out by the beams’. That seems an oddly specific thing for a Transmat beam to do but also leads to a rather unfortunate continuity problem: shouldn’t Sarah Jane be entirely naked when she passes through, with all her clothes left behind? And shouldn’t the Cybermen who use it be a collection of wired, gloves, boots and an accordion? Compared to the way plague is handled in ‘Dr Who and The Silurians’ and even ‘Praxeus’ (for all its other faults as a story) the threat just doesn’t come through.  At least we’re saved the equivalent of the giant prawn from ‘The Invisible Enemy’ I suppose.

Maybe the reason this story doesn’t quite wok is the end of term silliness, as the acting causes even seasoned professionals who should know what they’re doing to struggle to seem even vaguely believable. For one of the best things about ‘revenge’ is the great cast, while one of the worst is how they’re wasted. This is the only thing in his long career Kevin Stoney wasn’t  magnificent in, with Tyrum a poor third part in Who to go alongside such great roles as Mavic Chen (see ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’) and Tobias Vaughan (‘The Invasion’), two of the greatest supporting roles in the series. But then he does have that dialogue to read out and he has a whacking great mask on his head for most of the story. David Collings, an actor who will go on to steal the show in both ‘The Robots Of Death’ and ‘Mawdryn Undead’ (and is perhaps best remembered for being ‘Silver’ in ‘Sapphire and Steel’ – this story would be over much quicker if they’d had a crossover with ‘Gold’!) struggles as Vorus. Which is a shame because their clash, over whether Voga should stay isolationist or expand into the outer universe, is a god hook to hang the script on and one that Holmes obviously cares about more than Cybermen. It’s that age-old debate that’s been running ever since the hippie Thals met the Nazi Daleks head on (in, umm, ‘The Daleks’), with Dr Who one of the few series children watched with their parents and which could discuss what sort of world they’d inherit. For once, though, it’s the other way around: it’s the elder man who’s the pacifist and the younger one who wants to go to war (a sign, perhaps, of how the audience were growing up and how dead the ‘hippie dream’ was by 1975 with punk on the way; perhaps things have changed enough for this to be a discussion between the hippie baby boomer children of the 1960s and their Generation X younger siblings?) For all the changes, though, Dr Who still chooses the hippie approach: Holmes clearly sides with Tyrum who might be boring but is a safe pair of hands (not that many Whovians can get past the idea of Kevin being a ‘goody’ for a change) over the reckless, hot-headed Vorus. That leads to an interesting debate in and of itself, though, because this isn’t just a discussion of war: Vorus wants Voga to take its place in the outer universe, to be part of things again, while Tyrum wants to separate it: in Brexit terms it’s a re-run of ‘The Monster Of Peladon’ that seems oddly un-Who like (practically every other story but that one is about how Earth especially is part of a bigger universe and can’t separate itself from other worlds). The other characters, alas, are just forgettable.

This is, at least, a really strong story for the regulars. Tom Baker has been straining at the leash to have more input into his Doctor and feels comfortable enough in the role to push for ideas against crew members more experienced than him. He got on particularly well with the director, who allowed all sorts of things future directors would just automatically say no to and many of the best gags in this rather sombre story are his: The Doctor emptying his pockets of all sorts of things and then spending the next few scenes playing with his re-discovered yo-yo while authority figures try to get him to be serious, something that endeared him to a generation of youngsters more than any other scene. The ‘three monkeys’ shot when he’s taking refuge with two Humans, Lester and Stevenson,his hands over his eyes (while theirs are over their mouth or ears). The banter with Sarah Jane Smith that makes them seem like the best of friends (which they really were by now, in real life). His impassioned plea that ‘Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!’ right after his friend has fallen into the biggest trap there is and set a bomb off on his head. Holmes has seen Ian Marter in action by now and tailored Harry’s good-natured bubbling to fit the actor better: he’s less jolly hockey sticks in this story and more a good-natured bumbler, behaving the way most of us probably would if we were whisked off into space (well, me anyway). Sarah gets the short straw, given that she’s infected early on and sent out the way as atypical damsel in distress, but even then Elisabeth Sladen makes the most of what she gets, making Sarah stoic rather than wet. They feel like a team, this trio, who really do have each other’s backs and who act as one even more than the Cybermen do.

If you have to have lumbering Cybermen, too, Wookey Hole is the place to have them despite the stoop. The director came across the Iron Age caves by chance on holiday in Somerset and thought they’d be a great idea for a Dr Who story, so the next time he got handed one he submitted a request for location filming there. It wasn’t too far out the way from TV centre (not like, you know, going to Scotland or something ridiculous – see next story ‘Terror Of The Zygons’, where West Sussex doubles for Loch Ness) and had caverns, caves, tunnels, lakes, stalagmites: everything you could ever need and which seemed suitably ‘alien’. What’s more the owners were actually Madame Tussauds – yes, the waxworks! – who were getting on famously with the production team now that they had a Tom Baker model that was one of their most popular exhibits (by a funny coincidence Tom Baker had sort of been there before in fact: Wookey Hole was where they kept the waxworks when the Museum was shut for repairs as the airy but dry conditions kept the waxworks in better nick than being indoors). So Dr Who was granted use of the opening three chambers and made very good use of them, while being ‘inside’ meant that the crew could control the lighting better, filming most of the day without having to worry about natural light (although the thick cave walls also blocked out the use of walkie talkies, which the floor manager traditionally used to pass on information from the director, causing holdups while they did things the old fashioned way by passing messages on). However even when the plot is being silly there’s a nice lot to look at across this story. However something didn’t seem to want them there. One of the chambers was named ‘The Witch’s Kitchen’ after an 18^th century myth about the biggest stalagmite which seemed to end in a pointy witch’s hat, said to be a witch who was turned to stone. One of the cave guides spooked cast and crew by telling them to be careful ‘because the witch doesn’t want you here’. An electrician between scenes decided he would show he wasn’t spooked by getting a cloak and hat from the costume department and placing them on top. Soon after a ladder broke without explanation and he tumbled to the floor, breaking his leg. Assistant floor manager Rosemary Hester collapsed out of the blue and a replacement had to be bussed in. Unit armour Jack Wells fell sick a day later and had to drop out too. During a night shoot the director, unable to sleep, came to look around for the next day and spotted a man in subterranean gear. Heading back to the main entrance he went to ask if they were doing maintenance work and if he should come back later, but the security guard was puzzled: no one had been in or out since his own team had left that day; Hinchcliffe was spooked when, asking around later, he found out a diver had died there not long before. The planned stunt with the boat on the lake went wrong: the boats always worked fine on the surface but always played up the minute they got into the tunnels. Stuntman Terry Walsh wasn’t required for it, but he felt that something bad was about to happen so dressed up in his frogsuit ‘just in case’ to much teasing. When Elisabeth Sladen went to move the boat it went out of control, heading straight for the cave wall. She had no choice but to leap out at the last moment into the lake and sank like a stone – that might have been her last scene if not for the quick-thinking Walsh. Other members of the crew kept seeing people out the corner of their eye or hearing whispers from people who weren’t there  (a real shame they weren’t doing, say, ‘Ghostlight’ or ‘Hide’ or ‘Listen’ one of those Dr Who scripts heavy on supernaturals or we’d be raving about the special effects to this day). So it was a jittery cast and crew that came out linking into the light and as such you can forgive a lot of them for not quite giving of their best and understand why Dr Who has never been brave enough to film there again since. Even so, as a location on screen the caves look fabulous.

So even if the plots a bit derivative and the actors aren’t used to their best at least it looks good – and goodness knows there are Dr Whos around with dumber ideas and more wasted actors (and monsters). ‘Revenge’ really isn’t that bad – perhaps more than any other Dr Who story certainly from the 1970s, it’s a B movie (one so Bond-like at times it even recycles a prop, the radio transmitter disguised as a clothes brush featured in ‘Live and Let Die’ a couple of years earlier: it was physically handed over by Roger Moore himself, at the BBC for an interview, for which he received the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence), one full of daft ‘it’s behind you’ thrills and spills you aren’t meant to think about too much. Give or take the duff masks (it is a sad fact that half this story is actors in blank Cyber masks talking to Vogans in near-blank masks, which doesn’t make for gripping telly) and variable performances it’s pretty handily made too, as B movies go, with a pace that never lets up and always something going on. It’s just sadly not that great either, certainly not that deep, without the usual ideas that linger in the mind after watching a really good story. Something that rather sums this story up is the archive shot of the Voga rocket sent into space…which still has ‘United States’ written on the side (because they got it from NASA). Great ideas, lots of mistakes in the execution of the details. ‘Revenge’ was an odd choice for a season finale (especially as it was recorded before ‘Genesis’) and an even odder choice as a first Who video (legend has it that, not quite knowing what they had in their archives yet, the BBC asked fans at a Longleat convention what story they most wanted to see again and ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ won. Only it was still missing in 1983 so they obviously couldn’t put that out and rather sheepishly went with a Cybermen story featuring the Doctor who won the poll votes as best instead). It’s a funny story this one: all the ingredients are there for a cracker but it never quite comes together.  The result is far from worthless. You still get all those ingredients working, particularly the 4th Doctor-Sarah Jane combo at their most instinctive and natural, it’s well acted (even behind masks speaking stilted dialogue this cast are too talented to be bad), the location’s nicely spooky and different (and suitably alien!) while there’s a lot of action to distract you from the plot. Certainly other Dr Who stories, even from the same era, mess up individual parts a lot more than ‘Revenge’ ever does, but then that’s arguably because they tried harder – this story isn’t really trying, just filling in a hole that everyone inherited from Barry Letts that nobody really wants to fill. It will be another seven years before we get another Cybermen story after the backlash this one got. Which is logical, but harsh. The thing is, though ‘Revenge’ doesn’t deserve the reputation it gets. This is a story too good to be awful and made to sit on the naughty step like the really bad stories; it’s made by one of the best writing/editing/casting/directing teams the series ever had. It’s just nowhere near as good as it should be with all that going for it.  

It’s sad that, if he’d still been watching (reports differ as to when he stopped), ‘Revenge Of the Cybermen’ would have been the last story William Hartnell ever saw before he passed away. This story got a boost in ratings for its last three episodes partly because of the news as a generation who’d moved away from Who became nostalgic. Though it’s fitting it should be during a Cybermen story (see ‘The Tenth Planet’) and in a way fitting that it should be one that recycled so many ideas created in the Hartnell era (plague, invasion, brainwashing) it’s a shame it wasn’t a better one to remember him by.

POSITIVES + The sets. It was a clever idea to recycle the pricey ones from ‘Ark In Space’ for the next story in production (with less manpower needed changing the sets over) and to set the action there again but thousands of years earlier and lighting and shooting it so that it looks very different at times. By 1975 standards it really does feel like a fully functioning space station rather than just a set and the 'missing' parts of the corridor with stars chromakeyed in are an extra touch most directors wouldn’t both with that’s really effective at making it look as if we’re in space. Even here, though, it felt as if ‘Ark’ used the same sets better, making them seem more claustrophobic and threatening. You might notice the distinctive spiral symbol on everything too and wonder when the timelords are turning up: actually this was designer Roger Murray-Leach’s first go at the Gallifreyan symbol for the ‘Seal of Rassilon’, which everyone liked so much here he decided to recycle for ‘The Deadly Assassin’, figuring everyone would have forgotten about the planet Voga by then. Of course, he reckoned without Dr Who fans who have been trying to retcon the two planet’s possible links ever since…

NEGATIVES - The title, which must be the silliest the show ever had. Cybermen famously don’t have feelings, so they’re the one alien race who shouldn’t feel the need for revenge, even against the Doctor. Why not give the ‘revenge’ title to the Daleks? They live for little else! Gerry Davis' working title 'Return of the Cybermen' wasn’t exactly poetic either but for the silver baddies’ first appearance in seven years it would have made a lot more sense (as the inventor of the Cybermen he was apoplectic this title got used, even more than what was done to his scripts. He never worked for the show again, a huge loss to the series).

BEST QUOTE: ‘The Cybermen disappeared after their attack on Voga at the end of the cyber-war. Not the same as dying out, commander. They’re utterly ruthless, total machine creatures’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Gerry Davis’ original abandoned script ‘Return Of The Cybermen’ was dug up by Big Finish for their ‘lost stories’ range in 2021 with Tom Baker returning to the role alongside Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter Sadie Miller as Sarah Jane and Christopher Naylor as Harry – not the first ‘casino’ script, sadly, but the rewrite halfway between Davis’ original ideas and Holmes’ re-write. What a revelation! This story might not be quite up there with past Davis classics like ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Moonbase’ but it is one heck of a lot better than ‘Revenge’ ever turned out to be, very different in feel and style despite being set on the same set (Space Station Nerva) and having much the same plot. Nerva has been placed into quarantine after a mysterious space plague, which adds an even greater air of helplessness when The Cybermen turn up. They’re very much the unstoppable force of old rather than the rather weak-kneed 1970s Cyber-versions, ruthless in the way they’ll do anything to stop humans getting near the one thing that can kill them. There are no Vogans and no mention of a civil war or even much mention of another planet beyond the space station bar the gold reserves (the regulars never leave Nerva, which only adds to the sense of claustrophobia the writer was so good at). Davis writes for the 4^th Doctor and his flippancy hiding seriousness well, but doesn’t really get Sarah or Harry quite right (to be fair it’s usually the script editor who tweaks those bits into shape: Harry hadn’t even been cast when the first draft was written, though Sarah’s more of a surprise having been around the longest of the three regulars by this stage; the new voice cast cope very well in difficult circumstances: no one can ever match the originals and Sadie especially must find it very hard playing her mother’s character, but these are more than impersonations and really get the flavour of the pair of friends). Had ‘Revenge’ gone out like this it would probably still have suffered comparisons to ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ but it would in time have gained quite a following I think, every bit as dark and sombre in tone unlike the sometimes jokey version that ended up on our screens. This adaptation by John Dorney isn’t strictly what might have ended up on screen either, being a composite of two of Davis’ rewrites and had to be okayed with the BBC first so that it didn’t infringe on the copyright of the existing episodes! Well worth hearing and much much better than what we got: honestly Holmes and co had a nerve changing this.   

‘Wolfsbane’ (2003) is a ‘Past Doctors’ novel by Jacqueline Rayner set after ‘Revenge’ and before the trio of adventurers get back to UNIT HQ when they’re still using the ‘time rings’. It’s a story that digs a bit deeper into why Harry so abruptly decides to leave time-travelling because he has a pretty rotten time of things in this book, split from the 4^th Doctor and Sarah once again and landing in Berlin in 1936. He does get to meet The Doctor sooner than he feared – unfortunately it’s the 8^th version, who’s just as confused and lost as he is. The pair are quickly involved in a weird plot involving Arthurian legends and werewolves, while the 4^th Doctor and Sarah, safe in the era of whenever the heck the UNIT stories take place, try to research what happened to their friend. Despite seemingly being un-aged in ‘Zygon’ and ‘Android’ it turns out Harry spent quite a few years waiting for either or both Doctors to get him home and he feels abandoned, with lots of dark nights of the soul wondering what the people he loves are up to. On the plus side you get to spend a lot of time in the head of one of the companions who was given shortest shrift on TV; on the negative side it never quite feels as if Rayner got Harry quite ‘right’; his well-meaning old fashioned-ness, which comes from a desire to do the ‘right thing’ and protect everyone, which ought to make more sense back in the 1930s, just makes him come over as patronising and you can kind of see why The Doctor leaves him behind to be honest. There aren’t nearly enough werewolves in this book either!    

Previous ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ next ‘Terror Of The Zygons’

The Twin Dilemma: Ranking - 223

 The Twin Dilemma

(Season 21, Dr 6 with Peri, 22-30/3/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Anthony Steven, director: Peter Moffat)

'A Peri is a supernatural being of Persian folklore descended from fallen angels and cast out of paradise until atoning for their sins...Or it means a beautiful and graceful girl. Mind you, Tegan means 'darling' or 'loved one', Sarah means 'princess', Barbara means 'exotic' and Dorothea means 'God's gift' so ha, what does the dictionary know? 

Ranking: 223

 

 We’ve been infested by slugs lately, dear reader. They arrived during the ‘Seeds Of Doom’ review (yum, all those Krynoids to munch) and have been hiding ever since, leaving silvery trails at night all over the carpet (one even looked like the diamond Pertwee logo). But during re-watching ‘The Twin Dilemma’ last night what is hopefully the last one came out into the open and I was able to shoo it out the door (I did wait until the closing credits though – I’m not a monster). So I for one am perhaps the only Whovian in the world grateful that ‘The Twin Dilemma’ exists. After all, most fans hate this one with a passion and shudder when they hear it’s name. It’s a regular at the bottom of story polls (usually alternating with ‘Time and The Rani’ or in more recent polls ‘Fear Her’ ‘Orphan 55’ and ‘The Timeless Children’)  and was the point at which the ratings began to fall away drastically, with so many people put off by this season finale that a lot didn’t bother to come back the following year. I can well understand why this piece of cheaply made nonsense flopped so badly hot on the heels of ‘The Caves Of Androzani’,  a tightly plotted gritty tense drama and it was a colossally stupid move giving us just one story where the new Doctor is an absolute arse (who’s even rude about the Peter Davison regeneration everyone has come to know and love and is still grieving for) before taking a long break off the air and leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Some of the effects are laughable, the Gastropod costumes risible and like many a 1980s season finale the money clearly ran out before we got to this story.

But I’ve got a bit of a twin dilemma with this story myself. You see, despite this story’s critical pasting to the point where it’s bottom of many fan lists, over the years I’ve grown quite fond of it and admire it in a way i don’t similar turkeys like ‘Orphan 55’ ‘The Timeless Child’ or ‘The TV Movie’. Those stories are all, for different reasons bad television and bad Dr Who, story ideas that were already flawed before production mishaps piled mistake on top of mistake. It’s hard to envision a version of any of these stories that ‘works’, even if they’d been by my favourite writers, given the perfect place in a series running order (towards the end but not so much the end it matters if it all goes wrong) and given a budget Hollywood could only dream of. There is, however, a great story in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ somewhere that takes a lot of brave courageous moves but a combination of misdirection over who the new 6th Doctor should be and getting the end of season budget short straw means that what does end up of those concepts on screen ends up becoming badly mangled, to the point where this relatively brave and mature story that takes a brave and mature stance on who this incarnation might be ends up looking like bad children’s television.

You see, unlike a lot fans who thought this plot was stupid, I also think that writer Anthony Steven is the one writer who’s been asked to write about a ‘regeneration’ story and considered that in a wider sense beyond what happens to The Doctor. Steven is another refugee from Who producer John Nathan-Turner’s ‘other’ series ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ (like Johnny Byrne) and JNT had particularly admired his ability to write organic stories that resulted from the tension between characters who clashed rather than artificially constructed plots about something else. That was what JNT was looking for in a story that would have The Doctor as unlikeable and untrustworthy, a deliberate contrast to the Peter Davison Doctor who was safe, solid and unreliable. For even poor Peri wouldn’t trust him, thanks to a bit of post-regenerational trauma that would leave the Colin Baker version unstable. After all, the Doctor did just give up a ‘life’ to save her – and even for a selfless being like him there must be some residual resentment rolling around in there. JNT figured that if the viewers at home could no longer rely on The Doctor to do the right thing, the way they once did then it would keep them on the edge of their seat wondering what would happen. JNT also wants his second every regeneration story to be different to his first, ‘Castrovalva’, where The Doctor was weak and helpless: he wanted this new Doctor to be the centre of attention. It’s an idea shared by the new leading man, who wanted his Doctor to be darker and more alien and slowly learn to soften round the edges, basing his characterisation on ‘Mr D’arcy’, the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ protagonist who seems like a total pain the first time you meet him but who you slowly grow to like (well, barely if I’m honest – Jane Austen is no Elizabeth Gaskell when it comes to three-dimensional characters). Colin’s original idea, too, was to have the Doctor seem alien by remaining calm in the face of danger then blowing up at the smallest thing going wrong – something that never quite comes across in his portrayal but sounds a good one to me. So Steven, who has never written for the show before and doesn’t know it that well, is asked to go away and write a story that’s basically two people who don’t like each other stuck in a lift together for an episode (even if the Tardis is a pretty big lift) and where the lead saves the day but nearly ruins it quite a few times along the way too.

Not being a Whovian Steven doesn’t see regeneration the way past writers/script editors like Gerry Davies/Kit Pedler, Terrance Dicks, Barry Letts, Christopher H Bidmead or Bob Holmes do. For them regeneration is a spiritual change as much as anything else, where karma catches up with each Doctor and he has to pay for some fault, changing into a new person because he’s learned something. He stays basically the same Doctor all the way through, with the same moral compass and drives, but the way he goes about best saving the universe changes with each lead actor. But Steven doesn’t see it like that, he sees regeneration as a physical change, a ‘violent eruption of atoms’ where everything is different and the Doctor has to re-learn his identity all over again. After all, if the Doctor’s body physically changes so dramatically, why would their brains stay the same? Why wouldn’t their brains re-set too? So, given that he’s asked to make the new guy shifty anyway, the writer makes the new Doctor schizophrenic and gives him an identity crisis, a breakdown if you will that has him veer from being so up himself it’s not true to panic attacks of anxiety and self-loathing. The Doctor has been regressed to childhood but with an adult ability (hence all those long pontificating words), back at the stage all toddlers go through when they learn to be independent and that the world doesn’t exist purely to suit them (the point at which many children learn to have tantrums – one or two adults never grow out of them or thinking life revolves around them). He also struggles with telling truth and fantasy apart, especially trust issues, attacking Peri for being a ‘replacement’ even though it’s him who’s the replacement (and it’s worth nothing that Peri only stops him from strangling her completely by shoving a mirror in his face so he sees who he is for real).A lot of fans criticise the way they made the new Doctor unstable and violent and I’d probably be one of them if I had to wait a whole year to see what happened next, but luckily I wasn’t one of them which means I can see what this story was trying to do a bit more: this is a Doctor who has lost all his yardsticks to judge himself by and is now back at the beginning again, resentful of having to prove himself morally all over again and caught between moments of adoration and self-hatred. For this Doctor isn’t as up himself as the guidebooks usually say: instead he’s a narcissist with self-doubt, who will make some self-effacing quip after a grandiose one, or who decides, a few seconds after being proud of his new self, that he’s a menace that ought to be locked away from people as a hermit. Like a child learning to see themselves from another person’s perspective it’s a rollercoaster ride of trying to work out where he fits, as hero or monster and his brain isn’t yet adept enough to see that everyone is a bundle of contradictions who largely keep their suffering to themselves. As Peri, the closest thing to a parent substitute, yells at him at the end of episode one ‘We all have to repress our feelings from time to time’. The Doctor is still struggling to think beyond the self because everything is so new to him. The schizophrenia this causes is also half of the pun behind the title ‘The Twin Dilemma’ as The Doctor slowly learns across this story to integrate the whole of his personality, good and bad. Note also that the new Doctor says the old one was ‘on the verge of a nervous breakdown’ after being so relentlessly good for so long: this one intends to embrace his darker, shadow side and become more whole (up until the point where he realises that he’s strangled Peri anyway. Although given the look on her face she’d probably prefer that to being The Doctor’s assistant when he becomes a hermit).

The other half revolves around actual twins, in a story that’s more or less an extension of that idea, of thinking beyond yourself. For there’s long been a fascination with twins who have a relationship with each other that the vast majority of the public can never have: someone who’s been with you your whole life through, who grew up in the same womb from the same genes and who often shares much of the same DNA. There’s long been a history in science fiction of making twins who share the same face and near enough the same brain that allows them to finish off each other’s sentences both special and creepy. Many times they’re given telepathic abilities that make them seem alien. Because most of the Human condition is to struggle to look for a connection, to find someone who thinks like you – and twins seem to have a head start in this and know things other people don’t. But Romulus and Remus (their dad must have been a Roman historian) are an extreme set of twins who are impossibly bright child prodigies  and have the ability to do complex mathematics. In terms of the plot there only needed to be one of them (and the casting took an age, as the casting director could only find one girl and one boy and JNT wanted matching boys – things were desperate until actor Les Conrad, who played one of the gunrunners in ‘Androzani’ mentioned he had twin boys who’d done a bit of acting at school but never in front of the cameras. Things were in such a panic that their equity cards arrived virtually the first day of filming and poor Paul Conrad had to have his name credited under the pseudonym ‘Gavin’ as there already was an actor with that name on the books). But having twins, of having a pair of people who didn’t ‘need’ to separate themselves the way The Doctor does and always has someone around to enforce who they are makes a fine contrast. They’re also vulnerable for that reason though, gullible and selfish enough to be hired by an alien slug who wants them to move a few planets around using their calculation. They’ve never stopped to think about how what they’re doing might affect the rest of their home planet Joconda or even the rest of the universe. Like The Doctor they need to do the Doctor Who thing and learn to see things from the point of view of everyone, not just themselves.

The twins are also the first time Dr Who realises that it’s now been running so long that it kids of sides with the ‘adults’ now, not the children. You might remember that a lot of our 1960s reviews are about generations, given that Dr Who was the one show parents and children watched together. As a general rule the 1960s wonders what the future might be like when the baby boomers watching on first transmission grow into adults and take their hippie ideals with them, the 1970s sees their stop-start progress into adulthood and the 1980s wonders ‘what the hell just happened?’ as Britain falls head first into a Thatcherist trap of capitalism and greed. ‘The Twin Dilemma’ is the first story, though, that realises that there’s another generation that’s come along and, well, they’re a bit weird aren’t they? The twins are that 1980s invention, the teenage coder. They spend their days in their bedroom punching numbers into what looks like a cross between a gameboy and an i-pad, don’t go outside to play with other children and don’t connect with the ‘real’ world. Yes, this is the first Dr Who story to tell the nation’s youth to put the screens down and play outside and hug a tree, possibly decades before you might have expected it. The adults are more than a bit scared of them and their abilities, which now have such power that they don’t relate to or understand at all (‘in my day we thought pocket calculators were the height of technology’ you can hear the audience saying) which is the wrong way round from how the 1960s series imagined the future, with the children of the day growing to be the adults in charge – they’ve been sidelined again. They reject their mother coldly and are rude to their mentor, Azmael, as if they have no responsibilities or empathy to anyone if they have each other.   But in keeping with the Dr Who ethos the twins aren’t monsters. They’re kind kids who, once they learn what’s really going on, are as brave as anyone we see in the show and rather horrified at what they’ve nearly done (admittedly that doesn’t come over that well given that they’re acting newbies, but equally they’re not all that bad. There are definitely worse child actors in other episodes. And their lisps are quite sweet, showing how young they still are despite all that power they’ve been given on a plate without being taught how to use it).  

That sense of schizophrenia comes up again in Azmael’s story arc. He’s one of The Doctor’s  oldest friends (not that we’ve ever seen him on screen, though he mentions a riotous night out drinking at a fountain with the Tom Baker Doctor – presumably the Doctor was on the ginger beer as the actor was careful to never be seen by kids to drink) and the ‘best teacher he ever had’ (don’t let Borusa hear you say that Doctor!) As The Doctor so often does Azmael is working undercover, trying to get close to the evil Gastropod Mestor. Only to do that Azmael has had to ‘pretend’, to become something he doesn’t want to be, to the point where he himself is having a mild form of breakdown. For that’s another stage of becoming independent in childhood, learning that you have a responsibility to do things you don’t want to do but that need doing (although, admittedly, for most children it means doing chores or attending school rather than blowing up suns and moving planets). Interestingly the original plan, suggested by ‘fan advisor’ Ian Levine, had been for Azmael to be the ‘hermit’ mentor The Doctor mentions in ‘The Time Monster’ (and quite possibly the man he meets in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’), a sort of spiritual guru who helped The Doctor think beyond himself when he was little (and must have had a profound effect on him given how insular and selfish most timelords appear to be but what a hero he’s become). This would mirror well with the idea of The Doctor trying to become a hermit himself and shutting himself away – even though his real hermit mentor knows that it’s only through engaging with people and being in a community with them that you really learn life’s ‘truths’ (it’s also why the twins learn to look beyond themselves and why Mestor sending his protégé into space without caring for them as individuals makes him a ‘baddy’ in a very moral story). It’s a shame they took that aspect out as it would explain a lot of The Doctor’s continued instability, seeing his spiritual guru who helped him see beyond himself apparently acting selfish.
I wonder too if there’s some wider satire going on here. For this is, at the heart of it, a planet of bird-like people the Jacondans and find freedom who’ve become pressganged into work by their invaders, the slug-like Gastropods. Bear in mind that the slugs literally stick people into place with the slime they ooze, which traps people to the floor like concrete (with the detail that the monsters smell repellent, like rotting vegetables – we hardly ever hear about smell in Dr Who stories). The Jocondans ought to be able to fly away (both literally and given their technology figuratively) but they’ve gone too far the other way, staying out of a sense of duty and obligation the Gastropods really don’t deserve. They’re both really interesting races, at least on paper: the Jacondans have a back story and myths and legends, believing in a sun god who brings them life – which is why they’ve stayed out of duty of their world when the Gastropods come along and see them as a ‘punishment’ from their God. Its only when Mestor talks about exploding their sun they start to have second thoughts (and this idea of becoming independent from religion and thinking for yourself is another of those steppingstones towards identity. Of course, in reality the costumes for the Gastropods especially are stupid, the actors stuck in suits so dense that they can only act with their tiny little arms and voices muffled by the thickness of the costume; the Jacondons seemed to get all the costume budget.  They can’t cope without the other and have grown dependent, but while the Jacondans are long suffering the Gastropods remain ambitious, with a plot of spreading their eggs across the universe, oblivious to the harm this might cause other alien races. They’re the two extremes of this idea, the selfless and the selfish, which The Doctor and to some extent the twins ate trying so hard to learn. That’s actually a really interesting idea for a Dr Who story and one unlike any other in the series’ history a psychological look into the impact people have on each other, even though this is a series that’s always been about community (going right back to the tribes in ‘An Unearthly Child’) and the impact that we all have on each other and the duty of care that comes with it. Mostly the JNT years have had writers who remember Dr Who from their childhood or who were avid fans of it from yesteryear so for me I really like this slightly different take from someone coming to the series fresh.

Of course most fans don’t see any of this because that’s a hard sort of plot to put over successfully on screen. All you see on first broadcast is a madman being hysterical and strangling his assistant in a story that looks super cheap (all the money having run out by the time of this final story) and has a couple of first time actors being creepy in a story that’s basically a fight between some over-sized birds and some daft looking slugs, like some gonzo David Attenborough documentary about survival of the fittest. This story looks as bad as everyone laughed at Dr Who for being (it’s the episode Ricky Gervais takes off in ‘Extras’). It doesn’t help that Mestor the Gastropod’s plan is one of the most absolute bonkers in the history of the series: he plans to spread his eggs into the universe by…having the twins move a few planets around using mathematics (what?) and the gravitational effect blowing up a sun (how?)  Mestor, for all his supposed genius never seems to have stopped to think what that means for his eggs: space is big. I mean you might think it’s a long way to the shops but that’s peanuts compared to space, as Douglas Adams would no doubt have pointed out had he still been watching Who at this point. The explosion will scatter them in different directions at random, meaning that most of them will die in space and the few that land will no doubt land on uninhabited rocks unfit for life. Even on the infinitesimally small chance that one of the eggs lands on a planet where it can survive there will be no mummy or daddy to help hatch it and even if by chance it somehow does survive into old age it will die alone, unable to mate. Not exactly a foolproof plan of conquest is it? It doesn’t help that the planet Jaconda looks cheap and nasty in the TV studio and boring outside it, Colin being the first Doctor unfortunate enough to wind up in a quarry in his very first story (our old friend Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry where Sylvester McCoy will wind up in his debut ‘Time and The Rani’ too, alongside some filming in Springwell Quarry, Hertfordshire).   

The real fatal flaw that dominates everything though: timing. See this episode out of context it looks a bit cheap, a bit wild and is a bit under par, suffering from the old 1970s problem that the last story of a season tended to be the one that made up the budget shortfall. See it in the order it was meant to go out (following Peter Davison’s heroics in ‘Caves Of Androzani’) and it’s the biggest slide from the sublime to ridiculous within two consecutive stories in the Dr Who run. The differences between these two isn’t a dip, it’s a chasm. That story was dark and gritty, written by Bob Holmes to exploit all the ways that he felt the 5^th Doctor wasn’t working to take his idealism and throw him against a story that’s a struggle to survive (a struggle he loses). You feel every bruise, every bump and The Doctor could have regenerated multiple different ways before dying in the perfect 5^th Doctory way by giving his life to save Peri. ‘The Twin Dilemma’ immediately undoes all that good work by having The Doctor try to kill her anyway and having him act like a big kid having a tantrum in a series that suddenly seems to be made for adults again. Everyone pulled all the stops (and indeed the budget) out for Androzani, which feels as close to a big movie as you can have on a 1980s BBC budget and which made the 5th Doctor seem more noble and moral than he ever got to be in the rest of this run. This story makes the new Doctor look like a git floundering around on a planet made out of tinsel full of bright colours and looks just like a pantomime. ‘Androzani’ is also the perfect season finale that, even though I see flaws where a lot of fans don’t seem to, nevertheless stays in your memory long after you’ve watched it and makes you think more fondly of the Davison Doctor in retrospect than you did across the rest of his three years. However it isn’t the season finale. People have talked a lot about the mistakes JNT made with this story (one he went to his grave defending as a genius story that fans didn’t understand) but the biggest one by far was giving us a regeneration mid-season for only the second time (see ‘Power Of The Daleks’) but by far the biggest was ending on a story where The Doctor is at his most unstable and unlikeable and having fans sit on it for the ten month break the series was off the air. No wonder people never tuned back in when all they’d seen of The Doctor was an obnoxious loud mouth degenerate regenerate who strangled his assistant and who’s big idea to solve the story was to throw acid in the face of the baddy (a last minute replacement by Eric Saward, who hated the original expensive ending in space where Mestor wasn’t even seen – even so it can’t possibly have been as bad as what we got).

I do like the plan though to have a darker Doctor who is gradually softened across time to become nicer, very much like the one Steven Moffat had for the 12^th Doctor, who himself suffers a similar identity crisis and only slowly learns to become a ‘good man’ on aggregate (because he can’t tell from the jumble of memories inside him and has to make a few mistakes to get there). We needed a darker, edgier Doctor after Davison rather than just a straight copy and I’m one of those fans who likes Colin Baker’s portrayal a lot: there’s an unpredictability about him that hadn’t been there since Hartnell and you’re never quite sure what this Doctor’s going to do in any given situation: fight, sulk, pontificate or save the universe. After three years of Davison talking about morals to monsters and then more often than not shooting them anyway makes a refreshing change. So does having The Doctor going back to being the loudest thing in the room around which everything else revolves: the 5^th Doctor had a tendency to hide in the corner and moralise while no one else listens to him, but this one just takes charge whether he fully knows what he’s doing yet or not. Finding something distinctive to do with the character after so many people have played them must be daunting, but the idea to seize on the pure theatricality of the Doctor that’s been lurking under the surface for four previous Doctors (and, let’s face it, all of them since to a degree) is a good call I think. I wonder, too, if Saward (who resented the casting from the beginning and thought Colin was awful in his Blake’s 7 appearance ‘The City At The Edge Of the World’ – to be fair the part is written for an OTT ‘Brian Blessed’ type) was having fun at his producer’s expense. For the Doctor we have throughout his run but especially here must surely be modelled on JNT or at least his worst qualities: he’s loud, brash, arrogant, keen on publicising himself and has a shock of curly hair. JNT was also known for his loud Hawaiian shirts and brash dress sense and larger than life personality (this is a change: I reckon David Whittaker based the 1^st Doctor partly on himself and the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks put more than a little of themselves in the 3rd Doctor but usually script editors write themselves in as the companions. This Doctor acts like a bully and then expects everyone to be his friend, sulking when he doesn’t get his own way and remembering petty feuds. Wjich if you’ve read a few of the other JNT era reviews might sound familiar. Of course this Doctor isn’t as good in a crisis and doesn’t have a head for numbers ut even so there are times when Saward seems to be…laughing, both at Cplin and his boss. Only when Russell T Davies becomes comfortable does he make the 10^th Doctor an exaggerated version of himself. Eric is still the only Doctor ‘originator’ who appears to have based The Doctor on someone he doesn’t seem to like…) 

Colin also acts his socks off despite difficult circumstances indeed, a naughty boy let loose in a school full of bowl-cut headed goody-two shoes (he even sits cross-legged for much of the story, like children do at schools even though it cripples their backs as adults). He was JNT’s only choice for The Doctor (much against the advice of script editor Eric so he revealed years later) and impressed him twice: once during his guest appearance in ‘Arc Of Infinity’ (as Commander Maxil who shoots the 5^th Doctor – ‘I was after his job even then’ Baker later joked in conventions) where the cast really warmed to him and again at the wedding of Who assistant floor manager Lynn Richards where he had the guests in stitches with his jokes and anecdotes. Part of being in a long-running show is the ability to get on with people and, despite the regeneration he plays, by complete contrast everyone who’s met the real Colin loves him (well not his ex wife Lisa Goddard or her close mate BBC controller Michael Grade as things turn out but that’s another story for another time: most people do). His bulk and curly hair also meant a great visual contrast to Davison. What’s more, unlike last time (when Davison demurred for a long time and other actors turned the part down) Colin leapt at the chance: he was the show’s original fanboy (give or take William Hartnell) and had always been open about wanting to be in it. For a time he was even room-mates with David Troughton and the pair used to watch dad Patrick’s Who stories together it’s why they got on so well in ‘The Two Doctors’ as they’d met a few times). Colin was practically Who family already and his enthusiasm for the role was infectious especially after the long faces Davison had been pulling across his final year. JNT and Colin had both independently come up with the idea of a darker, shiftier Doctor too, while the producer approved of Colin’s plan to start using long words and get kids looking things up in dictionaries again. Had they had a full year to prepare this Doctor, to work out the rough edges and work out a proper decent arc for the character, I really do think he might have been a fan favourite that beat Tom Baker’s seven year record (Colin’s ambition when he started). After three years of Davison for me it’s a welcome change – you could certainly never accuse this Doctor of being bland even if they do got a bit too far the other way...   

Alas it was not to be for a series of unfortunate decisions that ended up with this story being a huge rush that didn’t give the actor time to give his best. One of the reasons Colin said yes straight away was that he and his wife had just had a baby, Jack, in September 1983 and he could do with the extra money and a regular wage, more or less the time he was announced to the press. But unfortunately Jack died in October, a victim of infant cot death, and dad was understandably distraught. The last thing he cared about was what sort of Doctor he was going to be so his conversations with the production team became thin on the round as he threw himself into becoming the figurehead for the Foundation For The Study of Infant Deaths. No one would have blamed him for dropping out there and then, but one of the reasons Colin took the job was for the higher profile it would give the charity – to this day a lot of the money he makes at conventions goes directly to it and there have been many fan-organised fundraisers for it. Colin had just two months before he had to appear in front of the cameras and if his performance is even more wild and erratic than even the script for an unstable Doctor demands, well, there’s a good reason why. Unfortunately by the time he works out how to play a more friendly version of The Doctor the next year fans have stopped watching and the long gap means this one is burned in their brain. 

Something else that really doesn’t help: the technicians strike of 1983. The run of four stories at the end of season twenty-one were all affected by a technician’s strike. Already it’s resulted in the postponement and remount of ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ and eaten into deadlines for ‘Planet Of Fire’ and ‘Caves Of Androzani’. However it’s ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that’s worst hit, losing one of its three production blocks entirely (while even JNT’s ‘danger money’ kept in reserve for things going wrong could only add an extra day). Director Peter Moffatt was hired because he was known to work at speed and get things done on tight deadlines but even he found this story a struggle to get done on time, getting this story on time only by working up to the wire and doing overtime at home (he even had the rough cuts copied onto video so he could take them home and work out timings for ‘preliminary edits’ to be done the next day in the editing suite). Things aren’t helped by having two young actors who have never been in front of camera before. There’s also no time for Colin to be eased into his character,  no time for the japes and jokes he’ll become known for (though he did have an unofficial competition with Kevin McNally – Hugo – over who could get away with annoying Nicola Bryant the most. Colin won after biting her bottom in the scene he’s meant to hiding behind her. They didn’t know each other too well at that point and she had been teased mercilessly by Peter Davison about how awful Colin could be – without realising he was joking – so took it all at face value and kept her distance. Colin took her out to lunch to say sorry and they’ve been best friends ever since – their chemistry, which only really arrives by the end of the story, will become one of the best things about the 6^th Doctor era but admittedly they really do seem as if they hate each other in episode one). It’s not as if the strike meant extra rehearsal time either: instead Colin was roped into spending his extra time doing all the publicity Peter Davison hated doing and he was suddenly on everything: Blue Peter (with a competition to win one of the egg props!), Breakfast Time (where he and Nicola got a call from Anthony Ainley!), Saturday Superstore, Russell Harty, Pebble Mill…Not since Jon Pertwee had a Doctor done this much promotion (the first two of these five are on the DVD).

It’s down to Peri to handle most of this story, a big responsibility for an actress who was herself only on her third story and third month and hadn’t had a lot of experience in front of the cameras either. Yet Nicola is excellent: we’re used to seeing her sarcastic to alien threats and monsters and holding her own and she does the same with Mestor with some withering put downs. But look how she acts when she’s alone with The Doctor: this is where she’s most terrified, with the person who should be keeping her safe. Fans complain that she’s a victim in this story but she spars with The Doctor too (and while it will get wearing by story nine it’s quite a fresh change here after everyone kowtowing to Davison), telling him ‘I never saw anyone who loved themselves so much without reason!’ She’s also clearly dead guilty at the old Doctor giving up his life for her though she never says anything (not even a ‘thankyou’!) This is all new: other companions have been doubtful of their Doctors before now (especially ‘Castrovalva’ ) but they’ve hung around out of pity and because they’re kind. Peri hangs around out of guilt, because she wants to do the Dr Who thing and save the person who saved her, but this Doctor really doesn’t make things easy for her. She plays every scene slightly differently to match his shifting moods to, as if trying to see what will work with him: scolding him like a parent,  joking like his best friend, treating him with the condescension of a nurse with a patient, appealing to his better nature for help. It’s not Peri’s fault none of it works.
There’s nothing that wrong with this story then – nothing a bigger budget and being the start to a full series rather than the end of another wouldn’t have fixed. Yes the plot doesn’t make the most of its ideas (and you can tell that Saward wrote most of the second jhalf when the story becomes less metaphorical and more ‘normal’ – Steven was incredibly late with his deadlines and became too poorly to do re-writes, though it’s his excuse ‘I’m sorry Im late, my typewriter blew itself up and I had to get a new one’ that’s gone down in the production office’s folklore). Yes, the twins are a bit wet but then they are playing mathematical geniuses (and even then not as bad as some say, considering neither had much acting experience) and the Jacondans are a bit Sylvanian Families, but there’s a neat 'Village of the Damned' factor in there somewhere. The acting is pretty fine all round:Maurice Denholm’s Azmael, the Doctor’s old mentor, is a great character we should have seen more of. Edwin Richfield, who did such a good job as Captain Hart in ‘The Sea Devils’ does as well as anyone can in a suit like Mestor’s. Unbelievably Hugo is played by the same actor (Kevin McNally) that played Professor Jericho in ‘Flux’ (they couldn’t be more different). Yes the new Doctor is a big headed twonk, but already by episode four he’s calming down and becoming more likeable. There are more than a few duff sentences along the way 9’May my bones rot for obeying it!’), but Steven gets Dr Who more than Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker ever did and if this script is 50 Saward’s then it’s some of his better work, especially when The Doctor speaks (he calls his regeneration a ‘stroll in the park of psychic tranquillity’ at one point, which is a neat way of putting ‘regeneration’). Yes the Gastropods look absolutely ridiculous, but I’ve seen worse. The music is pretty decent, Malcolm Clarke adding a ‘harpsichord’ to his synth score, which helps underscore either how intelligent or how pompous the new Doctor is (depending who’s side you’re on). Yes the story slows down a lot in the middle (ironically becoming sluggish during the part where we see the most slugs) but it’s not as slow or dull as some others and it has a proper beginning, middle and end a rarity in this era. There are some pretty decent model shots, including a nifty looking freighter ship. Above all its brave and had this not been the end of a season would have been the right time to do it: for the first time since the 2^nd Doctor there were no other changes happening with the same companion, producer and script editor who knew what they were doing (in theory) – with everything else running like clockwork this is the perfect time to experiment with the lead. It’s not their fault that a strike meant everything else collapsed so nobody really felt in control all story along. I would never ever claim that ‘The Twin Dilemma’ is a long lost masterpiece or anything given that it’s cheaply made with a wonky script and some daft costumes but…There have been a lot worse haven’t there? It’s not really that bad is it? Is it? Surely I can’t be the only fan who thinks this story is ‘disappointing and cheap’ rather than ‘the worst bit of television ever made’? (Notoriously when W H Smith asked the BBC for a Dr Who ‘exclusive’ on video that no one else would sell this one got nominated because everyone figured no fans would actually pay to own the thing anyway; actually thanks to Smith’s promotions it became the 6^th Doctor’s biggest seller not to have Daleks in it). Or is it me having the identity crisis and those pesky slugs have warped my brain and this story truly is as bad as everyone always says it is? Answers on a postcard…

POSITIVES + There are a couple of rather good and impressively different monster designs in this story (and when did we last have two races who weren’t related in the same story?) The Jacondans are a really good 1980s design, very different to anything else the series ever did, velvety and whiskery. They’re noble, peace loving people despite the horns. The gastropods meanwhile are pure slugs, like a folk memory of the Optera crossed w the Tractators. Only when they stand up do they look as stupid as everyone says. They’re also the most 1980s monster imaginable (they’re wearing deely boppers!)  

NEGATIVES - That costume. I’ve read the reasons behind why they gave Colin Baker such an outfit: this is a Doctor whose all about bad taste, who liked everyone staring at him and why would an alien wear just one thing when they can wear several clashing things at once? These arguments are all nonsense though: yes this Doctor likes making an entrance but through his own brilliance not what he’s wearing. He’s actually got good really good taste in other things and name-drops more theatre, literature and film quotes than the others - he just looks down on everyone else for not being able to match him. Plus no self-respecting alien with all of time and space at their disposal would choose something that so screamed ‘1980s Earth’ as this. Colin wanted a dark coat but JNT over-ruled him on the grounds that he would look too much like The Master. There’s no reason to go the other way though: perhaps this new regeneration suffers from colour-blindness too? Of course the big question is why The Doctor has this coat in the Tardis wardrobe anyway as it’s a rare costume he gets from there rather than nicking from someone (other options on the rails are the costumes worn by the 2^nd and 3^rd Doctors in ‘The Five Doctors’, the 4^th Doctor’s scarf, costumes worn by Tegan and Romana, a Vogan Guard Uniform (‘revenge Of the Cybermen’. How the heck did The Doctor get hold of that?!), some trousers from the Manussians in ‘Snakedance’ (ditto!) and even Dayna’s costume from Blake’s 7!) There’s this awful thought that one day the Tardis is going to land on a planet where everyone dresses like this…  Please pity poor costume designer Pat Godfrey who has been blamed for the costume ever since but who was dead set against it. he had six versions rejected by JNT for not being ‘tasteless’ enough and sent this version in more in hope that he would say she’d gone too far and wanted one of the old ones back again. She was horrified when he said it was perfect. Even so, it sort of works (if you turn the contrast on the TV down): this Doctor is the epitome of someone tasteless who think she has the most perfect taste and doesn’t realise everyone in the room is laughing at him.

Colin hated the coat but added his own touch to the lapels, a cat badge added every story, an actually pretty pricey addition from a specialist shop in Earlham Road, London considering we don’t see it much. Colin liked the Rudyard Kipling quote ‘I am the cat who walks by himself and all places are the same to me’, though he felt it applied to the Doctor if you added ‘and times’. His Doctor is very much a cat, haughty and working alone, whereas most Doctors had been pack animals (fun can be had deciding which Doctors should have which pet: I see the 4^th Doctor with a string of giraffe badges, the 9^th is clearly a whippet (all planets have a North), the 12^th is a grizzly bear and the 11^th is a duckbilled platypus. 

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘I can sense some massive danger to the universe’.  Peri: ‘I thought you were the danger to the universe!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: This story, slugs and all, was ruthlessly parodied in the finale of Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant comedy Extras’ (2007), in which Gervais (as extra-turned-proper-actor Andy Millman) is so desperate for work he agrees to appear in the ‘deeply camp’ series in which he plays a giant slug. David Tennant gets to do some manic running around and is clearly having the most fun, but then kills the alien with salt in a rather un-Doctorily cruel scene (admittedly that part is straight out of ‘Image Of the Fendahl’ but the costumes has to have been inspired by Dilemma…) Like most of Ricky Gervais’ work it’s funniest when he’s laughing at himself and making his character the butt of the jokes rather than other people.

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