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 18th 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…
Previous ‘Genesis
Of The Daleks’ next ‘Terror Of The Zygons’
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