Revenge of the Cybermen by: Gerry Davis and directed by: Michael E. Briant

 

Revenge of the Cybermen stars Tom Baker as the Doctor, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and Ian Marter as Harry Sullivan with Jeremy Wilkin as Kellman, Michael Wisher as Magrick, Kevin Stoney as Tyrum, David Collings as Vorus, and Christopher Robbie as the Cyber Leader.  It was written by: Gerry Davis and directed by: Michael E. Briant with Robert Holmes as Script Editor and Philip Hinchcliffe as Producer.  It was originally broadcast on Saturdays from 19 April to 10 May 1975 on BBC1.

 

When Barry Letts was outlining what would become Season 12 of Doctor Who he realized that 1972’s Day of the Daleks was a smash hit and decided to try again, this time with the Cybermen who hadn’t been seen on screen through the entire Jon Pertwee era.  He commissioned Cybermen co-creator Gerry Davis to write the penultimate serial for the twelfth season under the title Return of the Cybermen.  The stipulation was that it had to use the same sets as what would become The Ark in Space (still at that time Christopher Langley’s Space Station), initially being exclusively studio bound.  The premise was that at some point in the past on the Nerva Beacon the Cybermen are using their Cybermats to infect the members of the station with a plague.  A man called Kellman has smuggled a few Cybermen aboard to help destroy an asteroid filled with gold and the Doctor would use the Cybermants to destroy the Cybermen by filling them with gold, which would be introduced as the greatest weakness of the Cybermen.  Davis would write these scripts, expanding them to include material on the asteroid once money was allocated to allow location filming, however Robert Holmes would perform extensive rewrites on these scripts, changing the title to Revenge of the Cybermen and changing many of the key characters and events.  It would be these rewrites that would mark one of this era’s very few missteps, as Holmes and Hinchcliffe’s disdain for returning monsters clearly comes across in the way that the scripts turned out, focusing more on the Vogans, the inhabitants of the planet of gold.  Big Finish Productions found the initial scripts different enough that Return of the Cybermen was adapted into an audio drama in March 2021.

 

The Cybermen in Revenge of the Cybermen don’t actually do anything until the second half of the story.  They are in a few shots on their own spaceship in the first two episodes, but the cliffhanger Part Two is where they actually enter the plot, invading Nerva Beacon.  The first cliffhanger is Sarah Jane being attacked and poisoned by a Cybermat which is used to get her and Harry down on the planet so the plot can focus on the internal politics of the Vogans.  The Vogans are all portrayed by brilliant performers, essentially brought down to bit parts.  Kevin Stoney, Michael Wisher, and David Collings, the former two having been in Doctor Who before, and the later going on to guest in classics like The Robots of Death and Mawdryn Undead, are all clearly putting in the effort to make these characters interesting, but the Vogan conflict is all about trying to join the rest of the galaxy to destroy the remnants of the Cybermen.  It’s one of those conflicts that feels like it’s just trying to pad out the first two episodes, especially when you take into account that the original scripts confined action to Nerva for the first two episodes and that the Cybermen were revealed to already be on Nerva at the end of Part One.  Jeremy Wilkin’s Kellman provides a human villain who is revealed to be a triple agent, working for both the Cybermen and then for the Vogans who also has a plan to defeat the Cybermen.  The Cybermen’s plan is start by attempting to blow up the planet with Cyber-bombs, strapping them to the Doctor and Stevenson and sending them down to the planet, leading to the Part Three cliffhanger where they are crushed and Harry Sullivan tries to get the bomb off the Doctor, which the audience knows will set it off.  This leads to the story’s most famous line, Tom Baker’s exclamation of “Harry Sullivan is an imbecile”, though the entire plotline fails and the Cybermen move to Plan B: just pilot Nerva into the planet with the Doctor and Sarah Jane on it.  The story is really just an excuse to get a collection of tense set pieces together without any real sort of through line.

 

Michael E. Briant is in charge of direction here and along with the genuinely great performances, everyone in the cast is giving this their all, are genuine saving graces in the story.  Briant sets up several really clever shots and makes great use of the caves at Wookey Hole for several great action sequences between the Vogans, the Vogans and the Cybermen, and Harry and Sarah Jane.  Harry and Sarah spend most of the middle of the story together trying to make the Vogan plot make some sort of sense, even if it really doesn’t.  There is this chemistry between Marter and Sladen which makes it even more of a shame that Marter would leave the show in the very next story making it a real shame.  This story is also special for really developing the threads of the Doctor and Sarah Jane’s relationship teased in The Ark in Space.  They are literally tied together for most of the fourth episode which makes for a lot of at least fun.

 

This story has particular note as the first Doctor Who story to be released fully on home media, being chosen as the inaugural VHS release in 1984.  That decision initially was to be another Cybermen story, The Tomb of the Cybermen, as voted by fans, however, at the time the serial was missing in the BBC Archives so this story was chosen in its place, edited into an omnibus format with absolutely no restoration (the Restoration Team wouldn’t come into existence until 1992 meaning any of the pre-1973 stories would be particularly rough around the edges).  In fact it would be the VHS release of The Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992 which would cause the restoration of the old tapes to begin.  This is a story that’s restoration does look great, once again thanks to Briant’s direction.  Though one odd production decision to be made was to have the serial scored not by regular composer Dudley Simpson, but Carey Blyton who previously composed Doctor Who and the Silurians and Death to the Daleks.  His use of woodwinds doesn’t really work for the Cybermen, and the rearrangements done by Peter Howell for the story really show through making the score one of the more obtrusive aspects of the story.  It is most definitely the weakest of Blyton’s three scores, feeling more like a greatest hits of the other two, changed slightly to fit.  It also follows the action almost too on the nose at points where it really shouldn’t be doing that musically.  There’s also the Seal of Rassilon making its first appearance here which is a great design, but would be used much better in The Deadly Assassin as a Gallifreyan symbol.

 

Revenge of the Cybermen is one of those stories which actually would have worked better in its earlier draft.  It is only brought up by some genuinely great performances by Baker, Sladen, Marter, Collings, Stoney, and Wisher, though many of their talents are wasted.  It is perhaps mostly the issue of Robert Holmes for not trusting Davis’ scripts and ideas.  4/10.