Tuesday Who Review: Tomb of the Cybermen

With the casting of Patrick Troughton in 1966, Doctor Who took a distinct turn. No longer was the Doctor an old, grim figure lecturing everyone in sight about the consequences of interfering with history; now he was a short, funny, cosmic hobo with a penchant for dissembling madly, acting like a madman while secretly gaining control of any situation he blundered into. (Tom Baker would make this an art, but Troughton was the one who started it.)

The monsters were different, too. The Daleks were written out at the end of Season Four per a request by their creator, Terry Nation, and so the Cybermen stepped up to the plate as the Doctor's most consistent enemy. This meant that "cyber" quickly became a prefix in the Doctor Who lingo - Cyberman, Cybermat, Cyberleader, Cyber-Controller, cyber-conversion... have you cyber-had enough already?

Tomb of the Cybermen remains both the earliest intact Cyberman story and the earliest intact Second Doctor story, and it deals with the Doctor stumbling across an expedition to Telos, which appears to be the name of both the planet and the city where the Cybermen ruled, "long ago."

They (or rather, the Doctor, but he lets the archaeologists take the credit) solve a number of puzzles and eventually gain access to the tombs themselves, where a horde of (read: about 8) Cybermen lurk, waiting to put their master plan into action. Evidently the Cybermen were on the verge of extinction some five hundred years ago and had themselves frozen. They engineered an absurdly complicated security system around their tomb so that only the smartest of adventurers could find them. The plan was then to convert these adventurers into "the new race of Cybermen." Unfortunately, somebody who can outsmart the Cybermen's security systems can also, ipso facto, outsmart the Cybermen. They really should have seen that coming. (Also *Spoiler Alert* they really should have put their "revitalisation unit" down in the tombs with them, instead of in the city above.)

As it turns out, though, the Cybermen aren't the only ones with a plan - three unscrupulous bankrollers of the expedition intend to form an alliance with the Cybermen, using the other archaeologists as sacrifices to be cyber-converted (and suddenly I'm reminded of the subplot of the first Alien movie). They generally cause mayhem with the Doctor's plan... but that doesn't matter, because the Doctor's actually the most unscrupulous of the lot, luring everybody down into the tombs and risking their lives, never fully enunciating the extent of the danger, all in the name of attempting to seal up the Cybermen in their tombs forever.

(And of course, the Cybermen being the series' main villain at this point, there is the requisite scene where the Doctor makes one mistake that sets the stage for the silver monsters' return... and it's annoyingly egregious. How did nobody notice that annoying noise the Cybermat made as it scuttled away from the city?)

Sets: lovely. You have a hard time believing the usual complaint that the studios were small and cramped when you see the main room of the Telos city - it's fairly impressive for 1967 standards.

Stunts: god-awful. Special mention goes to the dummy Cyber-Leader, whose head gets detached as it's thrown across the room... only for its head to be back in place when it rises from the dead to necessitate one more sacrifice from the expedition team.

Politics: god-awful, rare for Doctor Who. In The Tenth Planet, the Cybermen's first appearance about a year previously and set in 1986, they'd had a black astronaut. This time around, the cast's sole black member is, I kid you not, an indentured servant. Seriously?

Filler: gah. Aside from making Victoria scream, what exactly is the threat presented by the Cybermats? They're the size of large rats, they move slowly, and they're defeated by a surprisingly big electric wire... but their attack is the big action event of Episode Three.
...On the other hand, Episode Three also has a wonderful scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the story and is all character development, where the Doctor, for what is probably the only time in the entirety of the show, talks about his family.

Bottom line: Patrick Troughton shines. The man was positively magical, and anybody who doubts this after watching Tomb clearly wasn't watching very much, or indeed at all. To a small but substantial degree, the entire story is just backdrop for Troughton to run rampant over, especially the aforementioned "family" scene - it starts with him mock-surrendering to an overly jumpy Victoria, and concludes with him telling her to get some sleep, and let the "tired old man" - that's him - stay on watch, right before the literally incredible Cybermat attack. The scene was clearly written in as filler, but Troughton sells it perfectly.

And at the end of the day, that's the huge difference between the Troughton and Hartnell doctors- Hartnell very much didn't want to be involved, where as Troughton's Doctor saw himself as being on the front line in the battle between good and evil. As a result, Troughton is much more in the foreground than Hartnell ever was. The Doctor was still using his brain more often than his fists, and leaving fights to his younger companions (or, as was often the case during Troughton's tenure, flight; "When I say run... run!"). It wouldn't be until his next incarnation that he started regularly trading blows with evil... and in full color too.