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

 

 After the walking plants it seems only right to follow it with the story that gave us talking slugs. Also fittingly, 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 ‘Time and the Rani’ ‘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 6^th Doctor should be and getting the end of season 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. Here there’s one fatal flaw that dominates everything: 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 DW run. We needed a darker, edgier Doctor after Davison though and I like 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 which after three years of Davison talking about morals to monsters and then more often than not shooting them anyway makes a refreshing change. 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) is a good call I think. There’s nothing that wrong with the actual story either I don’t think: 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 and Maurice Denholm’s Azmael, the Doctor’s old mentor, is a great character we should have seen more of. The dilemma is, though, some really bad mistakes are made along the way with the god ideas. The Doctor’s instability is pushed too far without explaining why. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me that this new incarnation would be snippy to Peri, the person that inadvertently caused his regeneration but we needed one or two scenes of him exploring his frustration, not a dozen scenes including him strangling her for good measure. This maybe wouldn’t matter if the story looked big and epic but the low budget only emphasises the wrong aspects: 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 5^th 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. This is the one time we needed a whole season to get to know the Doctor again, to see how aspects of him that are unlikeable straight away calm down and change over time, but no – producer JNT didn’t want people to wait to see what the new Doctor would be like and so added this story to the end of the season, with a six month gap before anyone got to see sixie acting ‘stable’ (as much as he ever did). The plan was always going to be to soften the character by degrees after starting with a bang that made him unlikeable, but when your ‘hero’ has just been replaced by a big-headed twonk and it’s a wait between seasons so no wonder so many people thought DW wasn’t for them anymore and watched something else. Because of all this Colin Baker has gone down in folklore as the Doctor nobody liked, not least because that’s what the controller of the BBC said and sacked him.  But they’re all wrong: Colin’s great in all his stories, it’s his character that isn’t. Thankfully he’s become a popular Doctor now thanks to his Big Finish audios for many good reasons, several of which are already here in his debut. To appreciate his Doctor though you need to know what comes next including spin-off audios made a quarter of a century later, to not watch this story back to back with ‘Androzani’ and perhaps above all to read the novelisation instead.

+ 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.  The gastropods meanwhile are pure slugs, like a folk memory of the Optera crossed w the Tractators but much more workable than either. They have one of the best motives of monsters in DW too: instead of power or control or using the the planet’s core as a space shuttle to explore the universe with (?) they’ve run out of food and want some more.

- 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.

Terror Of The Vervoids: Ranking - 224

 Terror Of The Vervoids

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Mel, 1-22/11/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: John Nathan-Turner (uncredited), writers: Pip 'n' Jane Baker, director: Chris Clough)

'I think we should go back to our 'roots' on this series of Dr Who...Oh that's what you've included in the script eh? Great...wait, walking plants wasn't quite what I meant!'

Ranking: 224

 

 On the day that Trump gets indicted it seems apt to have a story where a brash man with no taste in clothes is put on trial for mass genocide, although I suspect the Doctor’s arguments about false evidence and tampering from the prosecution will stand up in court better than the orange menace’s. Yes, it’s the Trial of a Timelord part three, this time the defence which has been submitted from the Doctor’s future that he hasn’t lived to do yet – and no, I don’t know how that works either (I would suggest if you ever end up in court not relying on the defence ‘I’m going to do better in the future’ because I don’t think it works at all on Earth). Nor can I explain how the Doctor ends up walking off at the end of the trial with the companion he’s never met before this future scenario, Melanie Bush. Nor why the production team thought they could a) get away with that name and b) get Bonnie Langford back in her immediate post-Violet Elizabeth Bott days in to play her. Like the rest of the trial this story doesn’t quite work, but for a whole host of different reasons to the others. This one is another of those occasional doctorwhodunnits featuring dome weird guest stars and some even weirder monsters that are easily the rudest ever seen in DW (just beating Erato, the Crature from the Pit in the final). As carnivorous planets they’re the sort of monsters that would give DW a bad name anyway, with their sudden ‘gas emissions’ and the fact their foliage is wrapped around some leggings and trainers emblazoned with a very Eartj-bound brand, even if you hadn’t seen their heads which resemble male genitalia sticking out of female genitalia. They are, apparently, meant to resemble tulips which they sort of do, but you have to question just how much action anyone in the production team was getting that everyone signed off on this and let it through. Everyone might have gotten away with it had this been one of DW’s darker, edgier, maturer stories but instead it’s one of the more childish, with a whole plot centred round walking plants picking people off. To give them credit, though, this is easily Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker’s best script for the series. They ‘get’ the sixth Doctor and how his ego-trips and desire to be the focal point in every room is really defensive bluster for how unsure he feels and with this story coming from his ‘future’ he’s mellowed a lot since we first met him, Colin Baker nailing the subtle changes in the script. Mel, too, is about as well catered for as she ever is, the same hyperactive optimistic overgrown toddler she always is but also one who cares for and is open-minded to all the aliens she meets and loyal to the Doctor to a fault. She even gets her definitive moment as early as her first episode when she screams at just the right pitch for the musical ‘sting’ at the end of the first cliffhanger and have it seem entirely in character; not many actresses could pull that off.  The guest cast all get distinct identities and something to do as well and there’s a nice sense of tension as the bodies pile up, reducing the suspect list to two (and it’s not the one I was expecting the first time round). Considering how quickly this story was written, at the absolute last minute, it’s highly impressive and professional, give or take the Vervoids. The difficulty is, it’s more Midsummer Murders than Poirot or Sherlock, a cosy one-pipe problem, and if the whole of the Doctor’s trial defence is that he’s relying on how brilliant he is in the future, well, he doesn’t really do a lot does he? The Valeyard picks up instantly on how quickly the Doctor commits genocide by killing off the plants to save a few straggler Humans and compared to other stories that we know he could have used, even if the production team of course didn’t, he really does very little (I mean, saving the world from Davros in ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, 27 planets in ‘Journey’s End’ and Gallifrey itself in ‘Day Of the Doctor’ seem more obvious candidates). The Doctor’s argument? He got involved because somebody ‘asked’. So that’s alright then. Trump will probably try the same argument (although I suspect he’s more Slitheen than Vervoid). The real problem with going small though is that with a whole season built round a ‘trial’, with the Doctor’s life and possibly the series on the line, it needs to epic and spectacular – and this story would feel small-fry even in an ordinary DW series.  

+ This is the last story Colin Baker filmed in the role of the Doctor for television (this story being broadcast before but made after ‘The Ultimate Foe’) and as with so many of his stories he’s the best thing here by miles. He’s softened his Doctor from mean bully to tetchy and twitchy and he’s always doing something highly watchable that isn’t in the script, be it striding across a room to rolling his eyes to the comedy of pretending to follow Mel’s exercise bike regime to pulling the multiple faces needed in the endlessly repetitive ‘Trial’ cliffhangers. By now the 6^th Doctor feels like a seasoned traveller with all the tough edges knocked off him, a benevolent Uncle with a hatred for injustice rather than an angry young man who loves clashing with others for the sake of it in everything from arguments to that sodding coat. His Doctor works a lot better with Mel’s than the 7^th Dr’s character too I think – she needs a larger than life protective soul to bounce off, not an odd mysterious eccentric playing the spoons.  In other words, while BBC controller Michael Grade was arguably right that some things had to change to make the series better in this era the star was even more arguably the part that was working, at least by the end. Thankfully the Big Finish range of 6^th Doctor series finally makes good on this most maligned of Doctors, returning to this later softer side and adding multiple years, several new companions and a lot more gentleness to his character.    

- We’ve never had sentient plants in DW as such, not even so much as a Triffids, so I can see why the Bakers had a bash at writing them in. Preventing the Vervoids from talking, though probably sensible from a biological point of view, was a blow for the monsters though who never get a chance to put their side across about why they feel the need to destroy humanity. It’s the designers, though, who really dropped the ball: their shuffling gait, the gas pipe placed in a most unfortunate place, the Adidas advertising, the fact they look as if they’ve just wondered in from a Playboy centrefold: the Vervoids rival The Gel Guards, the Ergon, The Fish People, The Myrka, The Bandrils and The Taran Wood Beast as DW’s silliest monster (though I still say The Myrka wins in a close contest).

The Beast Below: Ranking - 225

  The Beast Below

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 10/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin, Pat Mills,  director: Andrew Gunn) 

'Where do you weigh a (space) whale? At a whale-weigh (space) station of course!'

Ranking: 225

In an emoji: 🐳

A whale crossing space, man’s inhumanity to man and a British colony in the 29th century fleeing the mess they’ve made back home on Earth make for the sort of timeless Dr Who story that could honestly have been made in any era (well, any time before the 29th I guess to be pedantic). And it sort of is this story, with ‘The Beast Below’ having what must surely be one of the longest whale-sized gestation periods of any Dr Who script ever. Surprisingly the credits don’t mention it, but a version of this story was first submitted by Pat Mills for the 4th Doctor era as ‘Song Of The Space Whale’, heavily rewritten for Peter Davison’s first year in 1982, rewritten again for his second (when it would have introduced Turlough as a companion and been linked to The Black Guardian), was revived for the 6th Doctor and Peri as part of season 23 that got cancelled (and replaced by ‘Trial Of A Timelord’- you can hear that version as the Big Finish ‘Lost Stories’ audio ‘Song Of The Megaptera’ and very good it is too) then stuck in a drawer and forgotten until being extensively rewritten and finally making it to screen in 2010. With admittedly an ocean full of differences. And while the story is timeless and half of the additions improve it beyond measure to anything we would have had in the 1980s, the other half of the changes, well, don’t, with all the strengths and weaknesses of the Steven Moffat era magnified: fantastic ideas, often glorious one-liners and a script that never stays still long enough to get boring full of such imagination that it makes you ask ‘what were they drinking?!’But also a story that makes less and less sense the more you think about it, with too many promising ideas that are dropped without fulfilling their potential when something more interesting comes along and occasional scenes that make you wonder ‘what were they thinking?!’ 

The good parts first. This is a truly brilliant and oh so Dr Who plot and I can see why so many production teams tried to make it. Especially this one as it touches on so many of the issues Moffat holds dear in his own concepts: there’s a space whale travelling with the remnants of the United Kingdom on its back across the stars to a new home (like many a spaceship in the 29th century in the old series) whose been captured as an ‘engine’ out of greed but (spoilers) came out of love and didn’t need to be locked up. The idea of a space whale being used by the very humans it was trying to save very much suits the Moffat era of a child’s eye view of the universe who don’t understand why adults always have to make everything so dark and complicated when people (and animals) really aren’t that different and tend to do things out of love automatically unless they’re been cowed into reacting to fear first. Adults on first meeting tend to be automatically wary of each other and suspicious of differences until learning to trust and relax, but children tend to be trusting first and wary later if earned. And the space whale might be fully grown but it still acts instinctively like a child and clearly has an affinity with the human children (whom it refuses to eat – presumably on moral grounds, though for all we know maybe they just don’t taste very nice and it’s a bit like humans throwing tiny fish back into the sea?)They can actually make a sort of semi-realistic space whale on screen properly in 2010 too (the main reason why so many production team reluctantly dropped this story) and it really does look amazing. Like many a Moffat story there are no obvious heroes (besides the whale) or out and out villains (even the worst person in this story thinks they have no choice but to carry on the charade or millions of humans will die) and certainly there are no easy solutions and is all too plausible a story of man’s cruelty (if you’re content to believe in a whale that crosses outer space anyway). Like all the best drama (and indeed the best Dr Who stories) you can sympathise with everyone in turn. We can understand the Doctor’s anger that humanity has chosen to look the other way and forget. We can empathise with Amy, the new companion in only her second story, out of her depth and panicking, forced to make the same decision to remember or to forget and finding out that space travel isn’t always as fun as it sounds. We can see why so many of the local population, on learning the horrible truth, have chosen to look the other way rather than the alternative: perishing in space. And most of all we sympathise with the space-whale, who would gladly give humanity a lift on its back for free if only they'd thought to, y’ know, ask in the first place. You can see why so many production teams tried to make this story down the years because it asks so many big questions – and why it finally found a home in this era, which has more answers than most about the importance of trust and kindness, contrasting how the universe ought to be a magical place but humanity keeps getting in its own way. Unfortunately a lot of the Moffat era gets in its own way too, with lots of clunky bits added from elsewhere that don’t always fit that well, comedy scenes and OTT dramatic sections that no writer in the 1980s would have dreamed of putting on telly (and viewers were starting to get a bit sick of in 2010 too). 

 The original is a much more typical Dr Who story without as big a heart, a runaround with the Doctor or companions being arrested and escaping until the big showdown when they learn the truth of what’s going on (something they learn from the voting machines in Moffat’s script, one of his best additions). There’s no rebel Queen, far less politics and no story arc of Amy running away from her problems or the Doctor getting cross at humans (although the 6th Doctor does to gets to shout a bit in ‘his’ version – well, it is the 6th Doctor after all). There is, though, a computer thinking with a brain not a heart (this being 1980s Dr Who, when computers were the biggest scariest change happening to society) which the Doctor solves by infecting with a virus that makes it release its hold on the poor animal. In their place come a deeper sense of this starship as an actual place, with the very wonderful idea that every country fleeing a doomed planet Earth had their own spaceship (and the story’s best gag, perhaps the season’s best gag, that Scotland have their own breakaway shuttle, although I’m sorry that they missed the ‘Wales on the back of a Whale’ pun) with a whole backstory and a government which add a whole dimension and bite lacking in the original(s). There’s also, however, a much more convoluted plot, supporting characters who don’t get to make much of an impact, lots of this year’s big themes overlaid on top where they don’t really fit, a lengthy showdown that seems to go on forever and a lot more camp slapstick so broad they would never have tried even during the original run’s campest and most slapstick era (1987). Worst offenders are the Northern dialect Queen Liz10, Elizabeth’s multiple-grand-child whose black and streetwise, a great one-line gag that gets less funnier every time she re-appears (even if it seems more cutting than they meant it in 2010, given this was the era before Harry started (space)shipping Meghan and Haza’s family started puling faces at the skin tone of their children) and the awful scene where the whale has to, well, poo the Doctor and Amy out of its system (an oddly juvenile gag for such an intelligent plot). 

Perhaps the best thing Moffat does to the original script is turn it into the ‘other’ style of script we used to get in the 1980s – the veiled political subtext. Note the Doctor’s dark and bitter comments about humanity ‘forgetting’ the truth every five years ‘because that’s how democracy works’. The 2010 election was one of the most divided in Britan’s history, so close to the wire that it was only decided by natural enemies the Conservatives and Lib Dems working ‘together’ (although in this context ‘working together’ ended up being like the way The Rani treats The Master in ‘The Mark Of the Rani’ or how Garron treats Unstoffe in ‘The Ribos Operation – Nigel Plaskitt would make a fine Nick Clegg when they come to make the inevitable TV movie about this era). Even though the election wasn’t until the month after this story was transmitted, we all knew this was going to be tight and the political mud flinging had been going on for at least a year and it was a nasty, bitter campaign from both sides: The Conservatives were quick to point out the credit crunch happened on Labour’s watch, conveniently forgetting that it was a worldwide issue (and one Gordon Brown’s policies had cushioned the UK from compared to other countries, until the Coalition’s policies of austerity made it far far worse and last far far longer). For their part Labour were quick to show that the problems all stemmed from Conservative policies in the 1980s and 1990s, conveniently forgetting that they’d had thirteen years to put them right and hadn’t. Both sides were pitched as polar opposites even though their electoral promises were pretty much the same (and both were dangerously close to centre so that there wasn’t all that much difference anyway). David Cameron was a nasty piece of work, so posh it wouldn’t surprise me if he kept his own space whale to torture in his swimming pool in between hopeless out-of-touch comments in the House of Commons and who made even Davros look cuddly. Gordon Brown was, by contrast, a malfunctioning robot who seemed to have problems even speaking like a normal person. They weren’t exactly the most hopeful and uplifting of choices. The phrase I heard a lot at the time was that people couldn’t decide on the lesser of the two evils and were forced to vote against who they felt were the evil of the two lessers. Here, freed of the ties to the rest of Earth as they drift in space, Starship UK’s government have become more deranged and shadowy, forcing people to vote in booths to give them a mandate to rule - but then wiping their memories once they’d made a decision, a plausible extension of what was happening at the time of transmission. Protesting is difficult and dangerous: if you’re brave enough to go through with speaking out then you’re space food (quick thought: how come a space whale eats people? Wouldn’t it prefer, ahem, fish and (space)ships?!?), so no wonder most people choose to ‘forget’ the truth of what’s driving the spaceship instead. So what you have is a society built on a lie that doesn’t really know what’s going on and in a situation like that the change needed to make things run properly can never happen. More than that, though, it feels as if Moffat is trying to make an allegory here that the ‘space whale’ is the working classes – sometimes called the ‘engine room’ of Great Britain - tortured into working hard, their screams muted to the people in power who don’t have to mingle with them and treat them as faceless statistics, convinced the poor are only poor because they’re idle, when left to their own devices most people would work hard to help the people close to them anyway.. I’m not sure if I’m too happy about being compared to a massive mute brute, but it’s the sort of contemporary point in a futuristic setting this show was born for, sly and subtle enough to get away with it in a way dramas that came right out and said this sort of thing would get into trouble for, there if you want to look for it, but part of a story that still works if you don’t. It’s very fitting for a Who story as this show tends to hate whichever government is in power, the closest the 21st century series has come to the occasional political gems of the past, like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ or ‘The Sunmakers’ and I admire the bravery, whatever the execution. 

 The take on Royalty is a bit more…confusing, but then so it Britain’s relationship with its figureheads to begin with. Liz 10 is a direct descendent of our Queen and somehow is still in nominal charge (she’s on the stamps and everything) but she doesn’t actually get to have a ‘real’ say (much like 21st century UK Politics, where the King or Queen officially has to declare laws to have them passed as bills, but don’t have any democratic say as to what those laws are –they just read a bit of paper and would be in trouble if they refused). They’re a much older representative of the establishment than government but are, for some reason I’ve never entirely understood, far more loved by the British at large. They seem exactly the sort of rich out-of-touch dictators the Doctor would overthrow on any other planet, but in this series (as mentioned in this very story) the Doctor has been known to save The Queen when a spaceship was about to crash into Buckingham Palace, sort-of protected her from Nazis and Cybermen (although I’m still not entirely sure which Royal that was supposed to be in ‘Silver Nemesis’) and even snogged the Virgin Queen. People here tend to feel as if they ‘know’ the Royals, even though all they see is the ‘face’ they put on for the media. Here Moffat tells that story in reverse: this is a Queen who is made to be the face of the government but she does genuinely care about her people, using a physical ‘mask’ to go undercover and find out what they really think and how they really live. Only whenever she finds out the truth, every ten years or so, and is faced with the choice of abdicating or forgetting, she too chooses the easier option of having her memory wiped so she starts again. It’s symbolic of every relationship the Royals have had with parliament every since Cromwell lobbed Charles I’s head off in the English (not so) Civil War (and as another aside I’m still anxiously waiting for a Dr Who set in this time period, not least because I’m intrigued who it would ‘side’ with: this is a show that’s always been against authority so it’s not a natural Royalist – but equally it’s not a lover of dictators pretending to be democratic and removing the fun in people’s lives either, so it’s not exactly a natural Roundhead). It’s another neat throwaway idea, the idea of a black Queen with a regional accent, but it’s all a bit odd how its shown on screen: why do the powers that be turn a blind eye to Liz 10’s investigations to the point of giving her a mask to do so and brainwashing her every time she discovers things rather than, say, just bringing in another Royal whose less likely to ask questions? (There is some Prince Andrew DNA in there after all – he could just make out he was at Pizzaus Expressus and never found out anything. *Insert the sort of ambiguous joke that won’t get me locked up in the tower about him having a use for all the lost children the whale didn’t eat here*) They just never do enough with an idea that doesn’t really have legs to last the whole episode. Also, the excruciating scene where Liz 10 declares ‘I’m the bloody Queen mate – I rule’ while posing Lara Croft style, is one of those dumb, clumsy, tone-deaf scenes non-fans like to beat us over the head with from time to time. 

 Or maybe this story is more about authority figures of a different type? Though it’s more of a Russell T Davies thing to do, I do wonder if this story isn’t a little bit about Moffat being in the scary position of running the show he’s loved since childhood and all the guilt and panic that comes from not wanting to let anyone (including his inner seven year old) down – as it was, in all likelihood, one of the first if not the first he sat down to write as ’showrunner’ rather than ‘guest writer’ (with more of an eye for budget and time deadlines and all those sorts of grown-up things). Running any show and working out what you stand for is a hard job: it’s easy to say that, if you ever get the chance, you’ll use your voice for good and break all the rules and attack all the right people who deserve it– but at the same time, if you get into too much trouble your paymasters at the BBC get mad and start interfering, you get annoyed letters from all the people who don’t agree with you, the audience stops watching and you’ve ruined the series for future generations. It’s a difficulty Davies and Chibnall have wrestled with too: how far and how subtly do your push an ‘agenda’ without your audience running off screaming and looking the other way? (While, equally, if you try the opposite how long can a series lie this last if it doesn’t have anything ‘big’ to say and is pure escapism without any teeth to bare?) This is a story that hedges its bets throughout, making a comment without quite coming out and saying it and giving Moffat wriggle room until he works out what he really wants to do with this opportunity. It’s fitting then that it’s a story ‘about’ the battle between speaking the truth and risk having to ‘abdicate’ or vowing to forget the truth and carry on as if you never meant to do anything like that in the first place. In the end Moffat’ll choose the much easier path and forget about this aspect of writing altogether, before it kicks back in during the series 10 that he wasn’t expecting to write and when he didn’t need to risk being sacked (‘Thin Ice’ and ‘The World Enough’ particularly are his two edgiest scripts for the series). 

 It’s not just the script that’s a bit woolly, the acting is to and there are a few duff performances all round that don’t make the most out of this story’s excellent ideas. The cast and crew are still new to this as well, the second story in production under Moffat’s tenure and neither of the regulars has got it quite right yet: Amy is unlikeably haughty and aloof rather than defensive and street-smart or toughness hiding vulnerability as she’ll become. Karen Gillan has a nasty habit, soon reigned in once she sees the rushes and adjusts to the character, of acting very broadly, giving every big revelation a double-take and eye goggle or declaring a lot of her speeches. Matt Smith is worse: he’s too self-conscious and hasn’t got his tongue round the complicated speeches Moffat’s written for him yet, still feeling his way into the bowtie and tweed suit instead of wearing it naturally the way he will by his next story. Smith will always struggle most with doing rage and anger convincingly (something Moffat quickly realises and keeps to a minimum from now on, though it’s the Doctor’s de facto methodology here, closer to the aloof regeneration Peter Capaldi will be) but he’ll get there by the end of his run – here, though, he has to do that shouty thing a lot and it doesn’t suit him very well yet (you can tell, in retrospect, that this was written for other Doctors first who have more natural gravitas, although even the 6th didn’t shout this much in the audio version). Matt’s good at light but struggling to do dark convincingly, Karen’s good at dark but not so hot on the comedy, looking all at sea in a whale’s mouth or forcing the comedy too hard (for now anyway: they learn impressively quick these two). 

You only need to compare this tale to the similar ‘End Of The World’ to see where the problem lies: both tales are second in their run for the new Doctors/showrunners/companions and have the newbie enter the Doctor’s world after a debut where he was in their world and struggling to keep up wit the implications, especially as humanity is in big trouble in both futures. Both stories are presented to us as a kind of ‘date’ (although Amy having the hots for the Doctor is played more as an escape from the responsible life she was expecting to lead) but whereas Rose’s changing thoughts about The Doctor changed subtly, over the course of forty-five minutes, as she realised that just because he came from space didn’t mean he was perfect or that she was his only love, this Doctor and Amy can’t decide if they like each other or not, changing their minds between most scenes until we end up in a shouting match and an all-forgiven finale (although I do like the Doctor’s reactions to Amy’s first sight of an alien planet and garbled questions: a sarcastic ‘Oh no, you’re a cheery one!’ There’s another obvious influence too: Amy wanders round an alien planet, lost, in her nightie while her alien companion is at home at last just like Arthur Dent in one-time Who script editor Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, only he was in a dressing gown). It’s exhausting trying to keep up, as if all the notes of the space whale story are there, but somebody jumbled up the sheet music, so no wonder the performers are a bit lost. Following how breezily note-perfect everyone was in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ as if they’d been doing this sort of thing all their own lives (recorded fourth in the run when everyone did know what they were doing more but even so, it wasn’t recorded that much later) it’s a slight disappointment: you’re not left at the end of this story waiting for next week so you can travel with this pair again the way you did at the end of last week’s. To be fair, though, it’s very early days for both actors – not just their work on Doctor Who but in TV as a whole. In retrospect it’s amazing they found their space-time legs as quickly as they do and a brave decision to have three leads (once Rory gets going) who were all in their early-mid twenties and comparatively inexperienced. I wish they’d done this story later in the run though: this is one of Moffat’s sassiest, smartest scripts and it needs to be delivered perfectly for added punch, while this might be the only story where both lead actors drop the ball (the very first story they recorded ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’ is the other but that one’s a bit easier to fudge, with River Song doing so much of the work). 

 The supporting characters fare worse: Liz 10 is a one-joke character who doesn’t get much of a real personality and she’s a waste of Sophie Okenodo, an actress who was in huge demand back in 2010 (and one of the few Dr Who stars to have a Bafta) but who was impressively loyal to the show she’d helped out when it was off the air, in 2003’s aborted animated comeback ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. The script wastes Terence Hardiman too, the title star of the Sarah Jane Adventures’ biggest influence, Gillian Cross’ glorious series ‘Demon Headmaster’, with a character who doesn’t do much more than skulk about in a dungeon. The child characters too come and go: it feels as if brave protestor Timmy is going to be the main person here, a sort of mini-Doctor whose courageous enough to ask questions, but then we switch to his friend Mandy whose more ordinary, only for the script to sidestep her too for hi-jinks inside a whale’s mouth as Amy comes to the fore. 

 This is early days for Steven Moffat too of course and while he’s used to running other programmes (such as the superb ‘Press Gang’) he’d never been in charge of a programme quite this big. His takeover from Russell was (relatively) last minute too: Russell would have run this show forever if his partner hadn’t got ill and its pretty late on in the day when he finally did make the decision to leave (hence the ‘filler’ year of specials in 2009). Russell always said in the press that Steven’s were the only scripts he never tampered with when they were submitted (if only because he couldn’t always understand what was going on!) but out of all the Moffat scripts this is the one that most needs an editor to make the most of the bits that work and tone down or edit the bits that don’t. By his own admission this is the least favourite of Moffat’s own scripts for Dr Who and he calls them ‘a mess’ in one interview: they’re not that bad by any means but they are muddled, with people’s motivations unclear and tonally its all over the place, like many a Moffat script struggling to juggle what Russell did so effortlessly, the wide spectrum of viewers the show had. Some scenes are pure ‘Torchwood/New Adventures’, oddly adult gags about Amy’s short skirts and wedding night and political digs that small children wouldn’t get. And other scenes are as juvenile as this show ever was (far more so than ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ even at its silliest), the most notorious of which is the Doctor and Amy covered in gunk and goo and slime and sliding down a whale’s mouth. Moffat will get much better at combining the two, but here more than any other script of his the gulf between some of the lines, sometimes in the same scene, is huge. 

 One thing Moffat’s always been strong at though (especially on ‘The Eleventh Hour’) is presenting a child’s eye view of the universe, with stories that often make fun of adults for making a cosmos so alive with wonder and magic so dark and mundane. This one especially does a good job at being childlike without being childish though. We follow children for much of this story and they’re the only people brave enough to speak out about the ‘truth’ without caring about traditions or consequences. The country isn’t big and sprawling and overwhelming but small and compact, like a school with layers, each city coming with its own ‘deck’ as if its made of Lego. Politics is a straight choice between two buttons, without the complexities, nuances and contradictions of running the world. The ’Winders’ are very much an adult’s eye view of adults (especially teachers!) too, who are either happy with you or angry, with no subtleties and faces that keep changing depending how you behave (one of the last things to click into place in a child’s development is the idea that humans can balance two feelings at one, that you can love someone to bits and still be frustrated with them at times without it being contradictory). There’s a cute animal at the heart of the story and massive spaceships that actually look like scifi spaceships, not the dirty realistic smoke-belching rockets of other Dr Who stories, both things with massive children’s appeal. We know that Moffat wanted to grab a whole new audience that would be ‘his’ generation but even so he abandons the pretty quickly after this (Churchill is not a natural kiddie attention grabber, even with Daleks) and this story feels far less cynical than that. So much so that I have to wonder… as this story at least partly written when Steven really was a child himself? (Perhaps after watching ‘The Ark In Space’, a 4th Doctor story also set in the 29th century spaceship breakout following ‘solar flares’ and which itself is a sort of fan homage to ‘The Ark’).We know that Russell T Davies was sat at home during his childhood writing his own Dr Who comics and that bits of those stories ended up in his scripts for the show as an adult (the scene of the Tardis travelling down a motorway in ‘The Runaway Bride’ for one). Is this story Moffat’s equivalent that he’d been carrying round with him for decades, just on the off-chance he got to write for the series properly one day? (Maybe even after reading about the cancelled original story and wondering what it might have been like? – the original is rather cartoonlike too, probably because writer Pat Mills wrote for the comic strips; he finally gets an on-screen credit for being co-creator of Beep The Meep and ‘The Star Beast’, an actual comic strip adaptation; interesting how both of his stories contain the word ‘beast’ in them). If so then you have to say he was one smart kid; all this story is lacking is the experience of how a great script will inevitably end up on screen after other people like directors and actors get their hands on it. 

 Tying into this is the way that so much of the story is about growing up, as if an old idea from childhood is being revisited through the eyes of an adult. Amy spends the story (and indeed most of series five) fleeing her responsibilities. At first, before we meet Rory properly and learn how sweet and caring he is, we think it’s her fiance she’s fleeing, but later stories will tweak this and make it plain it’s being an adult that scares Amy most (after all, we know from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ that bad things happen to adults around her and she was a child handed far too much responsibility for one so young: if adulthood is all responsibility as so many adults like making out to their offspring then it makes sense she’d be particularly scared of it after such a taste of it). There’s a telling line cut from the first draft of the script where Amy mentions an aunty once telling her that ‘your wedding day is the day you have to grow up’. The Doctor, her one-time imaginary friend, is painted here as ‘Peter Pan’ to her ‘Wendy’, with a time machine that can mean she can stay a child always, forever on the cusp of growing up but never quite getting there and she’s an eager participant. Just look at the scene where 12 year old Mandy talks about not being able to vote till she’s sixteen and she looks petrified at the idea. It’s another childhood source that’s in this story too though: ‘Pinocchio’. Part of this story takes place inside a whale for a kick-off, but it’s more than that: this is a story all about the consequences of lying, when it would have been better all round to tell the truth. This entire society is based around lies, that the space whale needs to be tortured to work properly when really it came to help. Every time adults learn the truth and look the other way, made complicit in the lie, they become more like wooden puppets every day, doing what they’re told. Speaking the truth gives you freedom and the responsibility to the truth is another aspect of responsibility and being grown up (so the voting on this ship is all ‘wrong’ –in this scenario only the youngest like Timmy should get to vote because they’re the only ones not worried about the consequences). As much as people like to make out that Pinocchio is a cute story about a puppet coming to life, it’s really a harrowing tale about innocence and trusting the wrong people to keep you safe, learning the hard way when to speak your truth and when to hold your tongue (and this is a story where the Doctor and Amy do just that, inside a whale’s mouth). The Doctor, then, is Jiminy Cricket, the ‘conscience’ telling people how they should act and cross with them when they don’t listen. And let’s face it if any fictional character was going to sing ‘hen You Wish Upon a Star’ it’s him. Right up until the last act anyway when Amy earns her stripes as a companion by working out the solution that even the Doctor doesn’t see and becomes a ‘real live companion’ of her own. 

 The ideas are great then – but they don’t fit together to tell a story quite right. It’s like a piece of a puzzle is missing. There’s just a little bit too much going to fit comfortably inside a 45 minute episode – not the first or last time we’ll be saying that about a Moffat script. Out of the three showrunners in the modern era he’s the one who’d be most comfortable with the olden days of four 25 minuters stretched out across a month: he needs that extra time to explore his ideas and has a natural gift for changing a story’s direction just when it’s getting boring, which is how the best Dr Who writers used to use cliffhangers in the olden days. Here though, at half the length and no week’s pause between installments, it means we never get to the bottom of a good idea before another comes along to replace it. Moffat himself, a sharper critic of his work than either of his colleagues, calls this story the most disappointing of his Dr Who scripts because it ended up quite ‘muddled’ and sadly he’s right. People come and go without proper motivation and act out of character even for the brief time we’ve known them because the plot needs them to: the Doctor, especially this playful childish regeneration, is usually a lot more forgiving than this (especially after being all over Amy and wanting to make the missing years up to her last week), while Amy has seen too much bad stuff in her life to just randomly start messing with dark holes on alien planets (she’s brave and would absolutely do it if the Doctor asked her, but she isn’t foolhardy given the life she’s had and would be more likely to comfort a crying child than investigate what’s been scaring it). Amy also starts talking about her impending marriage at the most inappropriate times (it feels like Moffat had to fit this bit in somewhere and it wouldn’t go anywhere so he just dropped it in at random). Ditto the Doctor casually mentioning that he’s the ‘last of his kind’, something Amy doesn’t even react to (though she clearly heard it, given her comments later on comparing the Doctor to the whale). Why does a pre-recorded Amy leave herself a message of warning to run away? It’s not as if she heeds the warning or tells anyone about it and it feels as if this is going to be a major timey wimey sub-plot that never quite arrives. Most of all though, why would Amy choose to ’forget’ that a colony of Humans she’s barely met is being powered by a space whale? She doesn’t know the implications of people dying if the whale flies off and she’s one of life’s natural protestors, forever in trouble at school as we’ll soon see. The plot point that fitted Peri or Turlough or whoever the 4th Doctor’s companion was going to be in the first draft (Romana?), companions that are more naturally timid and afraid or used to seeing bigger pictures might side with the humans, but Amy has a low opinion of humanity anyway – she’d totally side with the whale every time, even at pain of ending up lunch. Things might be different if this was starship Scotland and she was saving Scottish people of course, but it isn’t: to Amy these people are foreigner sassenachs anyway. 

Ironically then, for a story thirty-odd years in the making, the overall impression of ‘The Beast Below’ is a potentially great story that just needed a bit more time, to edit out the parts that ended up a bit, well, fishy. Of all the stories in Moffat’s era it’s ‘the one that got away’ and would have been catch of the day had the production team just relaxed their hold on the fishing rod a little and let it soar. Or better still had Steven submitted this to Russell and got a level of feedback to sort out the oddities. But even this early in the new production things are going too quick and time and tide on TV programmes wait for no showrunner, even (especially?) shows about timelords. The result is a story I’m glad they tried (especially after so many attempts in the past), which has some great ideas, a brilliant message about humanity’s inhumanity and lots of great moments to keep you watching and some cracking lines (Dr Who has got it in for one of the places I live again. Hmm…I ought to be cross about hat but it Lancashire does happen to look exactly like the inside of a whale’s mouth…) but still ends up oddly slightly unsatisfying, a promised beast that turns out to be a tiddler underneath it all.  Even as one of the era’s more average stories though it’s still worth watching though of course: you’ll have a whale of a time in fact. 

 POSITIVES+ Ah yes, the whale. When we see it in space it’s a thing of beauty and a real triumph for the effects team - about the only element of Dr Who that hadn’t changed with the showrunner and main cast and it was clever of Moffat to rely on their experience as much as he does when everything else is new. You can totally believe this whale is real and without speaking a word (that we can understand, anyway) it has more character than many villains in entire seasons of Dr Who. The shots of it against the backdrop of industrial cities, spread out on its back, is one of the all-time great ‘extraordinary hits the ordinary’ moments in the modern series, on a par with the Edwardian sailing ships of ‘Enlightenment’. 

 NEGATIVES – Alas the whale’s not so magnificent from the inside. You have to pity the poor set designer who was asked to cone up with the inside of a whale’s mouth and even more so the poor actors who end up sliding down a chute that’s meant to be an oesophagus (but just looks like your common or garden playground slide) into gloop. This scene is oddly childish for an episode with such deep themes and you can just imagine some of the curious newcomers gripped by ‘The Eleventh Hour’ who don’t understand how unusual this is for Dr Who turning off because ‘it’s only a kids programme innit?’, thinking the previous week must be the anomaly. The effect is so like watching 1980s kids TV gameshow ‘Fun House’ that you half expect Queen Liz to turn out to be Pat Sharp in disguise. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘What are you going to do? ‘Do what I always do…Stay out of trouble. Badly’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A mini-sode titled ‘Meanwhile In The Tardis #1’ fills in the missing time between the end of ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and the start of ‘The Beast Below’.  Basically a deleted scene  it’s three minutes of Amy being in awe of the Tardis interior and being ruder about the Doctor’s appearance. Something only Amy would notice: she asks if the bulb in the Tardis light ever needs changing and asks how it can possibly be made of wood. For his part the Doctor looks as if he’s regretting inviting her along. A useful catch-up for any fans who’ve used the re-boot as a jumping on point, it does its job but a bit more clumsily than the episodes proper. You can find it on the series 5 DVD and blu-ray.

As mentioned a lot in this review ‘The Song Of The Megaptera’ is a Big Finish recording of a ‘Lost Story’ intended for the cancelled season 23. Written by Pat Mills, more usually known for his work in the world of Dr Who TV comics, it’s an excellent adventure with a space whale that swallowed a ‘time core’ and has since been hunted through space by Humans wanting to harvest its abilities. The story is just like ‘Moby Dick’ but in space and while the plot beats are different the sense of disgust with how humanity treats magical space creatures is much the same, with Colin Baker even angrier than Matt Smith.

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