Who Review: Revenge of the Cybermen

About bloody time. I saw parts 1-2, what, a week ago? Anyway, I think I'd rate this story a little bit higher if it weren't the freaking cybermen. I'm sorry, but no matter how evil you make them, men in silver suits are simply not as impressive as men in tin cans, and trying to take these guys seriously is next to impossible (and this is before they got that inane delete catchphrase).

It's well worth watching, because things get nicely turned on their heads and you spend most of Episode 3 rooting for the "bad" guys, i.e, the "evil" Vogans and the human "traitor." Okay, the word "traitor" probably shouldn't be in quotation marks because he did kill a bunch of people. His death is horribly anticlimactic though; rocks fall, everyone dies. It's really the only major let-down of the show. Well, that and the last five or so minutes. Having stopped the main plot, the Doctor must now deal with the inane backup plot; smash the space station into the planet. While the Doctor is still on board. After he's only been merely tied up. By himself.

We can draw two conclusions from this:

1) the Cybermen are stupid, and were never, ever properly realized on Doctor Who. I maintain that the best Cybermen episode ever is Star Trek TNG's "The Best of Both Worlds." But beyond that, the cyber-backup plan is hopelessly dumb.

2) they Cyber-stupidity is the result of some hasty editing that led to the last episode needing 5 extra minutes of stuff. The behind-the-scenes interviews kind of lend some weight to this idea; Hinchcliffe and Holmes had about a bazillion re-writes, and then the director came in and demanded even more. (Oddly, Hinchcliffe spent most of his interview defending the episode's shortcomings and complaining that he didn't have enough money. I thought most of the money was impressively well spent - the location work is fantastic - and the real shortcoming is the Cybermen, which weren't really budgeted for.)

Revenge of the Cybermen gets a 7 out of 10. It's a very solid story, certainly doesn't require a lot of thought to follow it in terms of who the goodies and the baddies are, and it's only let down by a couple of things.

Planet of the Daleks suffers in part because it followed Frontier in Space, but also just because Planet was, frankly, bad. In contrast, while whatever serial followed Genesis of the Daleks was always going to suffer, it's still one of the better serials of the season.