«A much maligned classic!»
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.
[Wednesday, July 09, 2003]
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