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Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen: Part 1 starts as the Doctor (Colin Baker) & his companion Peri (Nicola Bryant) are on the TARDIS admiring Haley's Comet whizz past when they receive an intergalactic distress call from Earth during the year 1985, unable to ignore the call the Doctor lands the TARDIS in central London & sets about finding the source of the distress call along with Peri. The trail leads to the sewers under London where they encounter a Cyberman who have a base down there as they turn unsuspecting Londoners into Cybermen in an attempt to (literally) rebuild their race. Meanwhile sinister things are happening on a distant planet called Telos where the Cybermen have enslaved humans to plant explosives under the surface, but for what purpose? Why are the Cybermen under London? What is their plan & how will the Doctor save the day?

This Doctor Who adventure was the first story of season 22 & the second to feature Colin Baker as the Doctor, directed by Matthew Robinson I think Attack of the Cybermen is a great Doctor Who story. The script by Paula Moore has a nice easy blend of light hearted comedy & sci-fi. There's a fair amount of fun to be had during this two parter although thankfully it never descends into complete farce, the fact that the Doctor fixes the chameleon circuits on the TARDIS so it will blend in with it's surroundings only to turn into a church organ in a scrapyard, some of the dialogue is pretty amusing without being totally daft & it certainly brought a smile to my face on several occasions. Of course that's not to say it forgets about the scary sci-fi element, there's plenty of Cybermen menacingly lurking around the sewers of London & their sinister plan to turn us into them, there's distant planets & some decent action plus there's a connection to some earlier Doctor Who stories for the die-hard fans. It moves along at a great pace & I never bored, this is at the point where Doctor Who episodes ran for 45 minutes rather than traditional 25 to 30 minutes previously. The downside is that's it's all rather silly & is impossible to take seriously but when something provides this much fast paced good natured fun & bags of entertainment who cares?

This being a BBC funded programme the budget was probably pretty damn low so don't expect brilliant special effects although as a whole the effects are aren't too bad at all. I love the Cybermen, I must admit I've always watched & enjoyed Doctor Who & I have to say the Cybermen are my favourite monsters from the entire show, period (obviously I was glad to see them make a very welcome return in the new series where they look as good as ever). They don't look silly & make for an effective enemy, the one thing I don't like about the Cybermen in Attack of the Cybermen is the voice, it sounds like a guy in a helmet which to be fair what it is but I'd have liked a cold electronic robotic voice to make them even more emotionless. There's a few decent action scenes & laser fights plus I liked the way the Cybermen made their initial entrance & emerged from the shadows of the sewer tunnels for the first time.

Attack of the Cybermen: Part 1 is a great start to a great story that has just about everything I like about Doctor Who, if you hate Doctor Who then obviously stay well clear as you'll hate it but anyone looking for a bit of sci-fi fun to pass a hour & a bit (both episodes combined) then you could do a hell of a lot worse than Attack of the Cybermen.

It is hard to really know where to begin with this episode. We have writers arguing about who wrote the thing, a Doctor still settling into the role, a side kick that while kind on the eyes, is just a dreadful character played by an even worse actor.

The good news. We have a nice premise building. A distress signal that should not exist. A great bad guy in Maurice Colbourne - who died well before his time. Creepy dark tunnels and finally strange looking policemen.

The policemen turn out a bust - who they are or why they are here is never explained, they just sorta stop turning up halfway through the episode. The tunnels, we discover are full of Cybermen- with more of them lurking behind the Moon.

The Doctor stumbles into all this, seems to have the guts of the problem worked out without actually telling anyone, anything, and Peri wandering around with an American accent that actually hurts the ears to listen to Things have got to get better for episode 2....don't they....I mean really, they have too don't they.

Refers To Both Episodes On board the Tardis The Doctor receives a distress call from Earth 1985 . Meanwhile mercenary Lytton plans committing a £19 million heist using some London villains

This kick starts season 22 which remains a divisive series in the annals of fandom . Nearly every fan loved this series with its mix of nostalgia and uncompromising violence which unfortunately alienated the mainstream audience and led to BBC 1 controller postponing season 23 and demanding that the horror and violence should no longer have a place in the show . This effectively ended the show which was once a drama mixing adventure with horror with sci-fi but would become in the late 1980s a children's programme with embarrassing humour

Attack Of The Cybermen is a curious mix of good and bad . Episode one got 9 million viewers and episode two got 7 million viewers . Considering the atrocity that was The Twin Dilemma I might have been surprised if Attack got as many 9 thousand viewers . Obviously the public gave the show the benefit of the doubt but the production team blew it . You can see the thinking behind their quixotic plans since Cybermen are legendary monsters but you've got to put them in to a strong story where as Attack is a run around with obsession with meta-reference This may well indeed annoy the audience who have no interest in hearing about the Tombs of Telos etc etc but by far the most alienating aspect to the production is the sixth Doctor which considering the show is called DOCTOR WHO is a serious problem . Revisiting the fifth Doctor's era I was constantly surprised how enjoyable the series was helped in no small part by Davison's human and likable portrayal in the title role . Colin Baker is an entirely different matter . Again some credit must be given to JNT and the production team in making the sixth Doctor entirely different from his predecessor but at the same time watching a Doctor that is unlikable isn't a great experience . His costume is gaudy , loud and unrealistic mirrors that of his personality and Baker's performance also mirrors this . His character interaction where he frequently clashes with Peri in a petty manner is another audience unfriendly aspect . Bryant is not a very good actress though thankfully JNT spots what her assets are . Both of them

Of the other performances . Maurice Colbourne is excellent as Lytton and one wished the character could have remained in the show a little longer . Brian Glover is let down by his dialogue and it's impossible to believe his character would spout lines like " I wish I had your presence of mind " ( The dialogue isn't the highlight of the story or indeed the era ) but he does his best . The actresses playing the Cyrons would be relatively well known but why spoil this by putting them in silly looking costumes ? Perhaps the biggest debacle is recasting Michael Kilgarrif as The Cyber Controller who has a stomach that literally resembles a spare tyre and undermines the character totally

In summary this is a story produced to impress the fans and give them a rush of nostalgia . It was appreciated at the time as was the no holds barred kill everyone off while torturing a couple of characters that led to a few complaints to the Radio Times while two million switched off . With hindsight it's very lazy stuff and since we can all watch the remaining Cyberman stories including Tomb you can see how inferior it is compared to the classics it pays homage to

It's taken yet another watch of this title to convince myself that it's truly as bad as I remember it. Every time I do this, I realize that it's much worse. Others have criticized the story for being convoluted... it's not. The story is reasonably simple but the way it is explained is convoluted.

(Spoiler section) Far future cybermen accidentally reach Earth earlier than expected due to Time Travel accident. They plan to divert Halley's comet into the earth to destroy it. This will change history as it will prevent their home planet from being destroyed by the Earth in the immediate future. They need help from their colleagues in the far future and return home (with the doctor in tow). Before they can return to the task, they get blown up.

It's pretty simple really. Except that you've only got two episodes to tell the story in. You've got an unstable newly-regenerated doctor to deal with, a recurring villain (Lytton) with a moral (and an over-long introduction), a sub-story about a subjugated race of beings, another sub-story about two prison escapees who want to steal back a lost time machine and a third sub-story about the repair of the Tardis' chameleon circuit.

If they'd just left the main story and not loaded it up with useless additional material, it would have been fine.

One of the big issues with the whole thing is a writer's disagreement between Ian Levene and Eric Saward which results in the crediting of a non-writer (and in fact, non-person), Paula Moore, with the story. The DVD goes into the details. Even funnier than the acid tongue in which these two talk about each other is the fact that they're upset about wanting credit for a writing nightmare like this. If they ever agree on which one is the writer, we'll know who to blame.

(Note: Review Of Both Episodes)

Attack Of The Cybermen: the sixth Doctor's second TV story and the first story of actor Colin Baker's first full season as the Doctor. Since it was first aired in 1985, the timing of the story (just weeks before the show was put hiatus by the BBC) as well as fans looking at the story itself in terms of its performances, production values and script has made it one of the most discussed stories of the old series. What are we to make of the story then?

The quality of the performances are varied at best. Colin Baker was still settling into the role of the Doctor and was still being played as an irascible and at times downright unlikeable, something that hampers the story as it makes it hard to sympathize with the Doctor. Nicola Bryant seems to still be finding her feet as well, which doesn't do the story any favors either. The supporting cast fares a bit better particularity Maurice Colbourne's Lytton and the excellent double act of Jonathan David and Michael Atwell as the Cybermen's prisoners Stratton and Bates (though they actually do exceedingly little in the actual story). Others such as the various actresses playing Cryons and Michael Kilgarrif's Cyber-Controller don't comes across anywhere near as well thanks to their costumes and the script (the latter also affecting Brian Glover as Griffiths).

As a production, it's adequate at best. The largely Earthbound first episode comes across the best with some good location work and some good sewer sets. When the story leaves Earth, it runs into trouble. Despite attempts by director Matthew Robinson and his cameramen to make Telos look interesting, it comes across as a dull quarry (which is exactly what it was). The Cybermen's base and tombs come across as being dull and cheap, something made even more surprising since this was the first story of the season and there was certainly a bit more money to spend on the production. The music of Malcom Clarke also varies greatly in quality from effective (such as the Cybermen theme he reprises from his own Earthshock score) to wildly inappropriate (the odd, almost humorous pieces of music used for the robbers and during scenes in part one). Even at its best the story can't make up for its biggest problem: the script.

This story has long been controversial for its use of continuity. The story is heavily based in the Cybermen stories of the past including the destruction of their home-world of Mondas from their debut story The Tenth Planet, the Cybermen using the London sewers from The Invasion as well as the Cyber-Controller and the titular tomb of the Cybermen from the (then missing) 1967 story of the same name. There's also Lytton from the previous year's Resurrection Of The Daleks as well as the TARDIS chameleon circuit (which functions on and off throughout the first episode). This was to be televised Doctor Who at its most continuity heavy with the result being a tangled skein that it is all but impenetrable to many fans, let along members of the general public. Doctor Who in the mid-1980s has often been criticized for its over reliance on the show's continuity which is something that, when the era is viewing on whole, seems odd until stories like this where its easy to see where that thought came from.

And some of the continuity usage seems to be downright cynical as well. John Nathan-Turner hit upon the idea of changing the outside of the TARDIS, ditching the familiar police box shape and mined the notion for all it was worth to publicize the show in the lead up to Attack being broadcast. While that's not necessarily cynical in its own right, spending a chunk of already limited screen time to tell an already over-packed story simply to annoy some fans certainly is.

On the flip side of that is the use of elements from Tomb Of The Cybermens from the tombs right up to bringing back a frankly unsuitable Michael Kilgarriff simply because he'd played the part 18 years earlier. It feels as though that what the production team was trying to do was to remake Tomb Of The Cybermen for a generation of fans who (as far as was known in 1984-85) would never get to see it. It was an attempt to please the fans that instead meant that the story served simply as an example of what happens when loose ends and memories of a story thought to be lost forever were forced to fit into a story already too complex for its own good.

This story then, like much of the Colin Baker era, is the story of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Doctor Who's fate was on the line and it needed, perhaps more than it had previously, to be a popular success. What it instead served up was a story that jumbled continuity together, mixed into a story that was made even more complex and the public walked away from it and never came back. Attack Of The Cybermen then wasn't a new beginning... it was the beginning of the end.

The Doctor is drawn to Earth in 1985 by a strange signal. On arrival he gets caught up in a bank heist that has far more sinister motives than money. Deep in the London sewer system the Doctor meets one of his greatest foes, the Cybermen. What are they doing in London, and who sent the signal?

Meh.