Customer Reviews

Doctor Who - Revenge of the Cybermen [VHS]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It's been seven years after the 1968 story The Invasion that the Cybermen put in a full appearance, apart from a cameo in The Mind Of Evil and Carnival Of Monsters. As the Cybermen were overused in the Troughton era, coming out in four stories in three years, perhaps a long absence was necessary. But guess what? It would be another seven years until Earthshock in the Peter Davison era.

The adventure starts aboard the space station from The Ark In Space, where the TARDIS crew are waiting for their wayward time machine. The Doctor opens a door and a body leaning on the other side falls toward him. But in a sterile atmosphere, with "no sign of injury" and "nothing to indicate a cause of death," what could have happened? The Doctor, Harry, and Sarah have to tiptoe through a trail of bodies sprawled along the corridor. Captured by Commander Stevenson and his second-in-command Lester, they learn that a plague is responsible. With the discovery of a Cybermat, the Doctor realizes who's behind the deaths of 47 crewmen.

Key to this is Voga, the legendary planet of gold instrumental in wiping out the Cybermen in the Cyber Wars centuries ago. Two factions, the long-haired Councillors wearing tatty fishnet robes, and the Guardians, with clipped shorter hair and wearing black vests with gold pinstripes, are at odds with each other, although the cautious but kindly Councillor Tyrum is clearly the wiser as opposed to the audacious and ruthless Guardian leader Vorus.

A Cyberleader makes his first appearance here and this is one of the most curious ones ever. He has an obvious non-British accent and speaks of Voga in a hateful tone. How can creatures of logic use words like "unhappily," and "it is good"? Even the Doctor says, "For a moment, I thought he was going to smile."

The Doctor also has fun taunting the Cybermen: "You have no home planet, nothing. You're just a bunch of tin soldiers skulking around the galaxy in an ancient spaceship." And thanks to the glittergun, Cybermen were nothing but "gold-plated souvenirs that people used as hat stands." Ouch and double ouch!

The Cybermen are the same as in The Invasion, with the handlebars on both sides of their heads, but with slight modifications.

One item of curiosity: the Seal of Gallifrey is apparent in Councillor Tyrum's chamber, appearing on his table, and on Vorus' uniform. Was there a Gallifreyan influence on the Vogan civilization, i.e. a time agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency? The symbol later appears in The Deadly Assassin so I wonder if the series producer coopted it to become the Seal of Gallifrey. Interesting. Another is Sarah's remark of travelling for weeks, meaning that there were further adventures after Genesis Of The Daleks, the previous televised story.

Michael Wisher who plays the worrying Magrik, has an offscreen role as crewman Colville. Busy guy, considering he was Davros in the previous story, Genesis Of The Daleks. Kevin Stoney (Tyrum) also appeared in another Cybermen story, The Invasion, playing Tobias Vaughn.

Goof: English words on a Cybership's screen? Uh, hello?

Revenge Of The Cybermen is a perfect season closer and was the last story of Tom Baker's debut season, but as the second Nerva Beacon story, was filmed back-to-back with The Ark Of Space so they could continue using the same set before it was taken down.
Some have criticized this for story weakness, but in terms of story entertainment, it works.

Okay, I admit I gave this episode four stars just to catch your eye. I'm that kind of deceitful, attention-grasping loser. But now that you're here, I'll be honest and say that I do indeed consider this an episode scorned by vengeful fans, who hate it for all the wrong reasons. I would give it a solid three and a half stars, or better.

"Cybermen" is Tom Baker's only tangle with this staple villain of the Dr. Who series; the clanking, droning, mechanical men bent on...gasp!...conquest of the universe (why do machines always want to conquer the universe?) He twice battled both the Daleks and the Sontarans, and crossed swords with the Master at least three or four times, but for the tin men, this his is his sole contribution. Apparently, fans of previous doctors found the Cybermen as they are portrayed in this episode to be extremely lame and toothless, and felt a good villain had been wronged with a weak portrayal. I have admittedly little interest in the other doctors, being a Baker freak, so I can't really say, though I admit the more mobile (and combustible!) versions I saw in "The Five Doctors were more threatening.

"Revenge" is an underrated episode for several reasons. First off, it makes excellent use of the underground caves in which it was primarily shot; given the show's modest (meaning pathetic) budget, Dr. Who episodes were generally stronger when shot on location than when they were entirely confined to sets. The costume design is very good, the script clever and full of double-crosses, the villains suitably evil (excluding the admittedly boring Cyberleader), and the plot imaginative and well-developed. I also thought the regular cast (the Doc, Harry & Sarah) and the guest starts worked very well together.

The story is, I think, one of the better and more inventive of the series, since it does not depend on the standard formula of A) the Doctor delivering some or other race from oppressive masters or B) the Doctor foiling yet another conquest of Earth by aliens. "Revenge" is about an earth beacon designed to monitor space traffic around Jupiter is quaranteened when a plague breaks out on board. Only three crewmen and a smarmy scientist named Kellerman, who is on board to study a newly discovered moon of Jupiter, remain alive on the dismal space station. Cue the Doctor and friends, who as usual arrive just in time to be blamed for causing the plague. Of course, the Doc quickly figures out that the plague is not a plague at all, but a poison delivered by a nasty mechanical slug which, as it turns out, answers to Kellerman, who controls it like a homicidal radio-controlled car (but then he's a homicidal guy). The Doc recognizes the technology as that of the Cybermen, and when he realizes Jupiter's new moon is in fact the blasted remains of planet Voga, whose population are the Cybermen's natural enemy, he puts two and two together: the tin men, still smarting from the beating they took in their last war with the Vogans, have arrived to wipe them out once and for all. Unfortunately, he does not do his addition in time to stop the Cybermen from showing up and knocking everybody cold with their silly head-mounted stun guns, and then forcing them to carry into the planet core the bombs which the metalheads plan to use to blow the planet to bits, thus eliminating the universe's most ready supply of gold (which said Cyberman find lethal) and allowing the Cyber army to, well, conquer everybody.

The story moves to the planet, where it turns out a scheming Vogan bigshot named Vorus has been planning all along to lure these last remnants of the Cybermen back to Voga and then blast them into tin foil with a big ass rocket. This is the story's nicest twist, and features a very unexpected double cross, but Vorus' scheming backfires all the same, and now it is a race to see which side's ultimate plan will carry the day.

This episode has some silly moments (those head-mounted guns are as intimidating as slingshots that shoot marshmallows), the Cybermen are indeed dull villains with their plodding gait and monotone voices, and there are some logical inconsistencies you can drive a truck through (if gold kills Cybermen, why are guns which fire gold bullets useless against them but handfulls of gold dust thrown into their chest apparatus fatal?...why isn't the gold-dust-laden air poisonous to them? Why don't the Vogans, the arch-enemies who defeated them in the space war, have weapons that would kill them?) But I feel none of these things does enough to drag "Revenge" down. It is a good, solid, fun episode from, if you will pardon the pun, the show's "golden age" and it deserves a second chance.

I'm honestly baffled to see so many positive reviews of "Revenge of the Cybermen" here. According to the critical literature on Doctor Who, and in my own humble opinion, this story is one of the great clunkers of the Tom Baker era. If fans label creaky stuff like this a "classic," and encourage new viewers to check it out, we'll only perpetuate the unfair stereotype that the original Doctor Who was always cheapo rubbish.

In fact, many episodes of the original Doctor Who possess true intellectual sophistication, witty humor, and even effective production design (given the budget). "Revenge of the Cybermen," on the other hand, confirms all the negative stereotypes that Doctor Who was badly acted, badly made, and written by hacks. Almost every aspect of this production falls flat - including the static Vogon masks, the cardboard characterizations of the humans, the irksome music, and the menace-free Cybermen. In short, this serial isn't fit to kiss the posteriors of "The Caves of Androzani," "The Deadly Assassin," "The Aztecs," or any other genuine classic of the original series.

With that said, I can be a little kinder to this serial now. Parts of it are ... OK. The setup in Episode One, which involves a "plague" spreading through a space station, is somewhat creepy and involving. It would work better if the characters had real personalities, but it works OK as is. And Episode Three is pretty good, because that's when the Cybermen really get involved in the action - plus, the Doctor gets some great mocking dialog, as he baits the Cyberleader at length.

But the rest of the story doesn't work. The two Vogon characters have the same tedious argument over and over again, and never rise above being dull "types" (specifically: cautious old guy, hotheaded young guy). The location shooting at Wookey Hole is fairly effective, but the intercutting between these real caves and the overlit studio-set caves is highly distracting. The action scenes, meanwhile, fall totally flat; is there anything exciting about watching sparks fly out of a Cyberman's helmet, and a Vogon extra falling over very slowly in response?

In short, the serial is 95% a clunker, despite the always-entertaining presence of Tom Baker. However, the DVD package of special features is surprisingly decent. It comes with a making-of special, "The Tin Men and the Witch," in which various members of the production team frankly own up to the production's shortcomings. It's interesting to hear from producer Philip Hinchcliffe that he recognized the weaknesses of "Revenge" and tried to compensate for them, but lacked the time and money to do so effectively. (For an interesting point of contrast, watch the making-of documentary for the equally weak "Silver Nemesis," in which the production team acknowledges none of that serial's flaws.)

Other DVD features include a period interview with Tom, and a fun/nostalgic documentary about collecting Doctor Who on videotape during the early 1980s. All in all, I think the DVD more than does justice to this pretty awful serial. So I'd give * or ** to the serial itself, and *** to the DVD, which averages out to about **. This one is for dedicated fans only, I think.

In this extended Who story, The Doctor, Sarah-Jane and Harry return to the Nerva-Beacon, the space station seen in the earlier serial "Ark in Space", but at an earlier point in its existence. Now Nerva is filled with corpses - men killed by a mysterious plague spread by small robots called "cybermats". The Doctor also realizes that the station is orbiting the planet Voga - a world-sized hunk of gold. Because gold is famous as the only known weapon against the insidious "Cybermen", a race of mechanized men intent on conquering the universe, the Doctor realizes that they are responsible for the outbreak on Nerva. Down below, different Vogan factions argue over the fate of their world - with the established government intent on keeping their planet under wraps. Were the gold planet to make itself known, it would invite certain attack from the remnants of the evil Cybermen. (In an aside, the Doctor notes that the Cybermen were stopped because of the "glitter-gun"). Unbeknownst to the ruling Vogans, a rogue faction has its own plans - lure the last of the Cybermen to Voga, and destroy them with a huge missile they are feverishly working on. (The human Professor Kellman, initially revealed as an agent of the Cybermen, actually works for these rogue Vogans.) With the Cybermen gone, these Vogans will lead the planet out of its fearful hiding and take their place as the planet of wealth. The Cybermen appear too early, however, trapping the Doctor and the last of Nerva's crew on the station. Strapping huge bombs to Harry, the Doctor and Kellman, they force our heroes to travel down into Voga, where the bombs will destroy the planet. Beamed down Voga before the strike, Sarah-Jane is captured by suspicious Vogans and must convince the captors that she doesn't work for the Cybermen.

FOR ALL OF YOU DR. WHO FANS: My knowledge of the Cybermen is pretty limited, so I can't really compare this to their other episodes, and I just loved this one. (The Cybermen were pretty scarce in comparison to other Who-fiends like the Daleks - they wouldn't appear until "Earthshock" in the Davidson years, and had missed the critical Pertwee years completely) I'm biased towards it because it was one of my first Who episodes, because I loved the settings (both the Nerva station and the dark and watery caves of Voga) and mostly because you've got Liz Sladen as Sarah-Jane and that can't be bad. The Cybermen can't rely on their superior numbers as they had in previous stories and would again on "Earthshock", but the script gives them incredible resilience to other weapons (though living in a planet made entirely of the only substance known to harm Cybermen, the Vogans' weapons are harmless against them; the Cybermen however dispatch their enemies with nifty guns mounted in their helmets). It's also a great Tom Baker episode (it was still his first season), having him stare down the Cybermen despite their obvious might. "You're just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers scuttling about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship! " he says of them. If anything, this is the episode where we hear the Doctor utter that unforgettable phrase "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!"

FOR THE REST OF US: this is even a better show. Doctor Who has a simple premise which it works to great effect - the timelord who travels through time and space, and the poor human slobs who have to tag along with him. The show can easily go from 12th century China to London of the distant future; from South Croyden to the planet Skaro, though you never feel lost. This is mostly due to the wonderful characters (I loved the conflict between hawk and dove Vogans, a pristine example of how Dr. Who plunks us down on worlds we've never heard of and immediately establishes complex relations between its inhabitants.) Cheesy special effects abound, but that's part of the show's charm (compare to the superior effects of the less sucessful "Space 1999").

Doctor Who works on many levels, and there are many reasons why fans love it. The great scripts, the cheesy special effects or the camp quality. "Revenge..." succeeeds and fails at the same time. And I've discovered that fans either hated, loved it, or just tolerated it. The real problem with "Revenge..." is that it's tedious and contradictory throughout the whole story. "It's the end of the season and we've run out of money" budget and production nightmare doesn't help it. You could count so many flaws and plot holes in this one, but the biggest error that sticks out like a sore thumb is the Cybermen's attack(just two of them) mow down the Vogan army without getting injured. Don't the Vogans use gold for their bullets? But besides the MANY things to gripe about, there are some redeming features in this clinker. The regulars, including Tom Baker, are great. Baker's quoting from Macbeth to a dead Cybermen is hilarious! The Vogans aren't that bad(one has to wonder if this story should have been called "Vengeance on Voga"), David Collins bringing life into Vorus. The continuity from "The Ark in Space" scores big with me. And the Cybermen, return with very little fanfare after over a five year absence, really aren't that bad. At least they're given some lines, unlike earlier Cyber stories. If you're an incredibly undiscriminating Who fan, this might be the video for you, others might want to steer clear. So bad, it's good. Could "Revenge..." be the "Plan 9 From Outer Space" of Doctor Who? Hello?

"Revenge of the Cybermen" was filmed before the Fourth Doctor had made his TV debut, so the producers of the show decided to play it safe by bringing back an old favorite, the Cybermen, a staple of the Patrick Troughton years who were put on hiatus during the Jon Pertwee period.

The story itself is unremarkable: The Doctor, Harry and Sarah Jane return to the space station Nerva at an earlier period (reusing the set from "Ark in Space") to discover it's being used as a beacon warning space traffic of an asteroid orbiting Jupiter. The crew is afflicted with a deadly "plague," which is actually poisoning by Cybermats in preparation for an invasion by the Cybermen. The asteroid is the planet Voga, which the Cybermen hope to destroy because it is rich in gold, the element deadly to them. Meanwhile, the Vogans are plotting to blow up the Cybermen on the space beacon with a rocket called the Skystriker.

As recounted in the "making of" documentary included in the Special Features menu, the old Cybermen costumes had been in mothballs for seven years and were entirely unsuitable for color television and had to be redesigned. The results were quite good, although the same cannot be said of the costume design for the Cybermen's rivals, the Vogans. The scenes on Voga were shot in the caves of Wookey Hole, where the crew experienced several unusual incidents that could be described as hauntings.

Not to be missed is "Cheques, Lies and Videotape," a new documentary in the Special Features menu describing the challenges faced by Doctor Who collectors seeking back episodes of the show in the early days of videotape. As late as the Peter Davison years, early episodes of the program were available only as bootlegs, usually copied over and over until they were virtually unwatchable.

OK I'll admit, this episode kind of does a dis-service to the series in the way that it draws attention to the junky, klunky, kitchy cheapo Sci Fi TV that actually WAS the essence of Doctor Who. This is amongst the first episodes I remember seeing as a kid, and I don't think I was very impressed by the look of it even back then (some of the dead bodies in the quarrantined section of the Beacon are so obviously mannekins that I am surprised they were allowed to get away with it -- sooo fake). But what I am still impressed by is the story and the charictarizations of the principal players. Even the Cyberleader exudes a sense of "person"; he seems to have a twisted sense of humor under that silver spray painted wetsuit of his. And like the "Genesis of the Daleks" episodes, I am struck by how unremittingly grim the elements of the story are for a *family* oriented show. Not only are all of the humans from the Beacon slaughtered to serve the plot, but dozens and dozens of bug eyed Vogans bite the dust in a hopeless, one sided battle against the Cybermen -- why did they bother? So they could die on camera, of course, and show how ruthless the Cybermen are. Unnecessary IMHO, but whatever. I think that Vorus is one of the great anti-heroes of the Dr Who series, and love the part where the slimy Professor Kellman gets his poetic justice [ever notice how these Professors never have a first name? odd] and Lester's scene of ultimate self sacrifice -- that look on his face as he twists the release harnass is well worth sitting through all the dreck. This is also probably the most claustrophobic episode of the Baker years, shot entirely either on the Beacon or the caverns of Voga. After watching it you may want to take a stroll just to feel some wind on your face. Recommended.

I base my rating of a story on whether or not I was entertained, and if what I just watched left me with a good feeling. This story accomplishes both. I find it hysterical that critics of Doctor Who stories use lack of realism as an argument, as if someone traveling through space and time in a police box is realistic! Cheap sets? Use your imagination. We all have it; it's just that some of us know how to utilize it better than others. Revenge Of The Cyberman is one of the better stories of Tom Baker's first season as the Doctor, certainly better than the "classic" that preceded it.

Here are the DVD Features for The Revenge of the Cybermen. With the release of this story, the whole of Tom Baker's debut season is now available on North American DVD.

DVD FEATURES:

- All 4 episodes of the story, digitally remastered and restored.

- Graphical menus, episode and scene selection features, and subtitles for the hearing impaired.

- Optional commentary track by actors Elisabeth Sladen and David Collings(Vorus), producer Philip Hinchcliffe and production designer

Roger Murray-Leach.

- Information Text subtitles option. Displays pop-up production trivia throughout the story.

- "The Tin Men and The Witch" A new 25-minute featurette about the making of the story featuring interviews with producers Philip Hinchcliffe and Barry Letts and director Michael E. Briant.

- Location Report. A 6-minute segment from a contemporary news magazine program that interviewed Tom Baker during the location shooting in the caves for this story, before he'd debuted to the British public. This interview was also seen on the DVD of The Ark in Space.

- "Cheques, Lies, and Videotape" A 28-minute featurette about the Doctor Who "black market" of videotape trading during the 1980s in Britain when repeat showings of older episodes were few and far between.

- Photo Gallery. 5 minutes of still photos taken during the making of the story.

- Coming Soon Trailer. A 40-second trailer for the forthcoming release of Time and the Rani.

- PDF Materials. Place this disc into your computer and you'll have access to PDF files containing the original 1975 Radio Times TV listings for this story.

- 1 Easter Egg. Go to the Special Features menu, highlight "Cheques Lies and Videotape" and press the left arrow. A Doctor Who logo will appear. Click on this and you'll see the outgoing animated BBC Video logo from the original 1983 VHS release of this story (the first ever Doctor Who VHS).

There are probably two types of people that watch this episode: those who saw it before and cherish it, and those that never saw it and have to decide if they like it or not.

Of all the old serials, this one had a special place in UK Doctor Who history, because it was well liked enough to be the first video tape of Doctor Who to be sold in stores. In America it was one of the first serials seen on our screens in 1979. Naturally it was always well known because it was the one serial with the cybermen between the two eras of the monsters' popularity and regularity on the program: none had been shot for 6 years previous and for 7 years after. Once they came back they never really left, even being introduced into the new series soon after it began.

However, typical of most all cybermen stories, the monster could have been replaced by almost any other monster. They are a good marketing tool, but little else; all writers since the creators never fully exploring the ideas of the "mechanical mind" and its relationship to organic thought and natural biology, especially relating to a zeitgeist or larger context in society. However, such strictures are pretty much crap when pertaining to this obviously serial-adventure story written for pure enjoyment.

It was a show crammed into the budgets and schedules of the time, and ultimately was a kind of red-head-reatarded-step-son "shoved under the stairs" in terms of production. They reused some sets of the Ark In Space, obviously. Everything was evidently wood and pool tubes and silver spray paint and mannequins for dead people. People in the cybersuits were clumsy and bumping around. Some of the dialog was odd and still makes this story better than forgettable.

But what does it ultimately come down to? Fun. It's a fun story. If you followed this season from beginning to end, this wasn't a brilliant end, but it works. The season starts with a robot and ends with "robots", though the episodes between the bookends were far better.

On the DVD is a great commentary with Hinchcliffe, Sladen, Collings, and Murray-Leech. Some of the stories are fascinating, especially the ghost stories from when they filmed down in Wookey Hole caves where people had died and a "witch" (oddly shaped stalagmite) cursed the tourist trap. There is a special about the making of the episode, and another about the history of Doctor Who on video tape in the UK.

If you like/love the show: great DVD.
If you don't like the show: go away.