Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen

I have always felt Colin Baker was one of the most underrated actors to have portrayed the Doctor. A lot of this had absolutely nothing to do with Baker himself, but was due to outside factors beyond his control.

Baker's debut adventure The Twin Dilemma was not a particularly well-written story. I haven't seen it in some years, but as I recall it was okay. Most other Doctor Who fans have a much, much less positive view of that story, though. And first impressions often leave a long-lasting opinion.

Second, as I understand it, Baker wanted to play his incarnation of the Doctor as a darker, more alien figure. Accordingly, he had hoped to have a somber, austere outfit to suit his characterization. Instead, the producers of Doctor Who saddled Baker with the opposite: a tacky, tasteless, multicolored monstrosity of a costume.

Third, in the mid-1980s, the then-management of the BBC had little confidence in or love for Doctor Who. The show was not receiving the support it needed to function as an effective production.

Nevertheless, despite all these obstacles, I believe Colin Baker did the very best he could, and I look quite fondly upon his all-too-short tenure as the Doctor.

Attack of the Cybermen is Baker's second story, and a tremendous improvement over The Twin Dilemma. Really, I believe Attack of the Cybermen should have been Baker's debut story.

The writing credits for Attack of the Cybermen list "Paula Moore" as the author. In reality, it was written by Eric Saward, with a plot assist by Ian Levine. The reasons for Saward not getting credit are complicated, and get covered in "The Cold War" making of feature on the DVD.

The plot of Attack of the Cybermen is a bit complex. The Doctor's old foes the Cybermen have traveled back in time to 1985 to prevent the destruction of their home planet Mondas, an event chronicled in the 1966 serial The Tenth Planet. Crossing their path is the alien mercenary Gustave Lytton (icily portrayed by Maurice Colbourne), who had previously been stranded on 20th century Earth in the Saward-penned Resurrection of the Daleks, broadcast the year before.

Onto the scene come the Doctor and his companion Peri (played by Nicola Bryant), who have detected Lytton's distress beacon. The Cybermen capture them all and take them back to their base on the planet Telos, last seen in the classic 1967 serial Tomb of the Cybermen.

As you can see, there are a lot of references to previous Doctor Who stories in Attack of the Cybermen. I guess a newcomer to the show could be confused. Luckily, I had already read the novelizations of The Tenth Planet and Tomb of the Cybermen, and seen Resurrection of the Daleks on television. So I was pretty clear about what was going on when I first viewed Attack of the Cybermen in the mid-80s.

Admittedly, there were a couple of confusing plot points that didn't get cleared up for me until a few years later, when Saward novelized Attack of the Cybermen. But really, that's minor, and this story is a lot more straightforward than, say, Time-Flight, which is nearly impenetrable.

In any case, Saward's dialogue is cracking and clever. He writes some very memorable, often humorous lines.

One odd thing about Attack of the Cybermen is the animosity the Doctor has towards Lytton. The two of them barely met in Ressurection of the Daleks. But in Attack of the Cybermen the Doctor acts like he knows Lytton well, and cannot stand the sight of him. Admittedly, the last time the two saw each other, Lytton did take a shot at the Doctor, barely missing, so that would explain some of the Doctor's anger.

Colin Baker does a good job as the Doctor in Attack of the Cybermen. As Peri puts it, he is still somewhat "unstable" from his recent regeneration, prone to mood swings and temporary absentmindedness, though he soon settles down (mostly) by the end of the story. Baker's Doctor is brash, egotistical, and sarcastic. But on several occasions we see that underneath all the bluster, he is a caring, sensitive individual with a burning desire to set right injustice and oppression. And, when confronted with his mistakes, he is contemplative and remorseful. There was tremendous potential to Baker's Doctor, and it was unfortunate that his tenure on the show was cut short prematurely.

Attack of the Cybermen, like a number of other stories by Eric Saward, is quite violent. A lot of people have complained that Saward's violence is gratuitous. Perhaps at times it was. But a look at Doctor Who's history shows that, from the very beginning in 1963, many stories had high body counts (especially the ones with the Daleks). Typically characters would be killed off by a laser blast or disintegration ray, a bloodless death. The difference between this and how Saward wrote is he portrayed killing as a nasty, messy, violent business.

Another difference is that, before Saward's tenure as a Doctor Who script editor and writer, most stories' casualties were not particularly well developed. This is especially blatant in the early 1970s, when numerous UNIT soldiers would be wiped out by whatever alien menace was invading Earth that month. The majority of those killed were nameless grunts who would die ten seconds after coming onto the screen. There was no real impact when they got killed. In contrast, many of the characters Saward killed in his stories were developed beforehand. They had names and personalities, and we would get to know them before they were dispatched in a particularly awful manner. When they died, it often felt genuinely sad and tragic, a real waste of life. Saward didn't glamorize violence; he showed how brutal and ugly it really was.

There is some great incidental music on Attack of the Cybermen by Malcolm Clarke. He is one of my favorite Doctor Who composers from the 1980s, and his work on this story is just perfect.

On the other hand, the story has some weak set design. They Cybermen's base on Earth looks too similar to their command center on Telos. When the story cuts between the two, there's some confusion over which location is which.

More significantly, the Cybermen's tombs on Telos look nothing like they did in Tomb of the Cybermen. In 1985, Tomb was missing from the BBC archives (it was fortunately re-discovered in the early 1990s) but there were photos of the sets available. So if the designers wanted to, they could have easily checked to see what the Telos tombs looked like. Instead, they re-designed them completely. It's very jarring, especially nowadays when Tomb of the Cybermen is easily available for viewing. Besides, the 1967 sets look much better than the 1985 ones.

The DVD of Attack of the Cybermen has a lot of great extras. Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Terry Molloy, and Sarah Berget provide an entertaining audio commentary. The aforementioned "The Cold War" feature is an informative half-hour behind-the-scenes piece. "The Cyber Story" is a 23 minute history of the Cybermen, with plenty of clips. I enjoyed being able to view a couple of minutes of The Tenth Planet. I've never seen that serial, because the final episode is missing. Someone at the BBC actually lost it back in the 1970s. Maybe one of these days it'll finally show up. Either that, or the BBC can redo it in animated form, as they did very effectively for the two missing episodes of 1969's The Invasion.

In any case, while not perfect, Attack of the Cybermen is an entertaining, intelligent story. The acting is top-notch, and Matthew Robinson's direction is solid.

As far as Colin Baker goes, in addition to this story, also check out Vengeance on Varos, Mark of the Rani, and Revelation of the Daleks to see him in top form. And, if you have the opportunity, pick up the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays he has starred in. The Marian Conspiracy, Excelis Rising, Project: Twilight and Arrangements For War are just a few of the Big Finish productions that demonstrate what Colin Baker can do as the Doctor when given very well-written material to work with.