Doctor Who - Revenge of the Cybermen and Silver Nemesis

The BBC have chosen to give us two "classic" Doctor Who stories on DVD - a boxed set of Cybermen adventures. I suppose it makes marketing sense to do it this way, but it is just a shame that the two stories they've chosen are, well, a bit shit.

First up is Revenge of the Cybermen. And it is appalling. The story is split between a space station and Voga - the planet of gold. Or Wookey Hole, to you and me. The latter setting works quite well - at least until the Vogans appear, with their tiny motorboats and stupid electric locomotive. But it isn't just the Vogans' equipment that undermines them as a credible alien race. They also look rubbish. Their masks make then look like Michael Foot with severe liver failure. They are largely indistinguishable from each other, and the only two that stand out are the wheezing, doom-mongering leader and the "let's blow 'em all up" would-be leader. I can't even remember what, if anything, the individual Vogans are called. Because, basically, I don't care.

Up on the space station, there are bland, generic space-farers and a faintly shifty civilian all trying to cope with a space plague. Except it isn't a space plague - it is a Cybermat attack. And the Cybermats fail to look in any way like a threat - rather, they resemble giant metal turds. Furthermore, when they attack, it is painfully clear that they are basically giant sock puppets controlled by the person being attacked. Still, all this should have be rendered irrelevant when the Cybermen finally arrive on the space station.

Except the Cybermen are the weakest element of this already incredibly weak story. They are dressed in spray painted seventies style boiler suits, and for reasons that defy understanding shoot from their foreheads - meaning a Cyberman attacking you in this story resembles someone having a neck spasm. They are also led by the most notorious Cyber Leader in the show's history - a pompous Cyberman with a special half black head strutting around with his hands on his hips. It is ridiculous to think that he is meant to be the leader of a band of logical, emotionless killers. He's actually the cybernetic equivalent of Captain Mainwaring. Furthermore, the script sets up the Cybermen as desperately fighting for survival. Unfortunately, it does so by undermining a famous foe of the Doctor in a story where the production values are already working to undermine that foe. The Doctor calls the Cyber force "just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship", and that it exactly how they look. The Cybermen in this story are pathetic.

About the only thing this story has going for it are the performances of Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter - they are a great TARDIS team and each actor plays their role with admirable gusto and a certain level of conviction. However, every single other story featuring this crew is better, and almost all of them are already available on DVD. Go to them first.

Silver Nemesis is better, although not by much. It at least has some ambition - taking time travellers from the Elizabethan era, neo-Nazi's led by a survivor of the Third Reich, and Cyberman and pitting them against each other in a race for an ancient Time Lord weapon. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is some awkward fish-out-of-water comedy stylings for the Elizabethan pair, and a lot of running about in fields and then a warehouse/hanger for the different parties in the story. Likewise, after years of over-familiarity with the main character, this story tries to make the Doctor mysterious again. However, this too is undermined by the way it is realised in the show, since it is basically done by one of the guest characters going "oooo, isn't the Doctor mysterious" all the time. Still, I'd rather Doctor Who was overly ambitious than not trying at all - ambitious and a bit silly is better than pedestrian and dull.

The problem with Silver Nemesis is two-fold. Firstly, it tries to suggest darkness in the central character, but is actually far more childish than the other stories being produced at the time. Ace in particular suffers. In every other story from this era, she is a feisty, brave character - sometimes abrasive and naive, but far more interesting than your standard Doctor Who companion of the classic series era. Here, she is a bit whiney, a bit pathetic, and seemingly scared by the concept of Cybermen when, within the continuity of the show, a few weeks before she'd taken on a Dalek assault squad single-handedly. This feels like what it is - a jobbing writer creating a story about what he thinks Doctor Who is, rather than creating a interesting story that actually fits with the overall tone of the show.

But a far bigger problem is the treatment of the Cybermen in this story. They look impressive - they actually look as if someone has spent some money on them. They get a decent looking spaceship. Unfortunately, though, that's it. The rest of the presentation again undermines them. They have the booming voices typical of eighties Cybermen - that it meant to make them sound impressive but actually makes them sound like boorish and pompous public school teachers. They are also utterly inept and incredibly vulnerable. They are taken down by Nazi gunfire, arrows tipped with gold and - wait for it - Ace shooting them with gold coins using a catapult (again, also undermining Ace - since when was she Dennis the Menace?) Their cyber signals can be intercepted and overcome by jazz music. And they are fooled by a really rather obvious trick from the Doctor - in fact, exactly the same one he'd used to defeat the Daleks just weeks before this story was originally broadcast. The Cybermen in this story are pointless - which in a way is even worse than them being pathetic. If they were removed from this story them it wouldn't have a detrimental affect on it.

The problem with these DVDs isn't so much that the stories are far below par - there are plenty of ropey and disappointing Doctor Who stories if you look hard enough. The real disappointment with this set is it takes two classic era's from the show's history - the early Baker years and the later McCoy years - and one of the most famous monsters from the show's history - the Cybermen - and show us at the same time the worst elements of all three. If you watch Earthshock or Tomb of the Cybermen then you'll know why the Cybermen are famous. If you watch Genesis of the Daleks or The Seeds of Doom then you'll see why the Fourth Doctor is famous, and likewise the same for the Seventh Doctor if you watch adventures such as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy or Ghost Light. Anyone watching these stories for the first time really will end up wondering what all the fuss is about.