My favorite Sixth Doctor episode. I love Cybemen episodes and this is one of my favorites. I love seeing the Doctors noble side in this one. A little dark, but has some nice light humor.
Time Ramvent Day 1: Attack of the Hartnell
Welcome to Time Ramvent, the art challenge where I celebrate 60 years of Doctor Who by drawing fan art for a podcast that rams Doctors into Doctor Who stories that don't belong to them.
Today's episode is William Hartnell's 'Attack of the Cybermen', in which Ian and Barbara are considerably better than Stratton and Bates, the viewers' heads explode from all the Cyberman lore being dumped on them, and the Cybermen's heads explode from the Doctor bludgeoning them to a gruesome red pulp. Slaughter-aligned First Doctor for the win.
In December of 1986, the time traveling alien known as the Doctor (Doctor 1) and his companions arrived at the South Pole Space Tracking Station and ended up confronting the Cybermen for the first time as the Cybermen’s planet (Earth’s lost sister) was draining Earth’s energy. While the Doctor managed to stop the Cybermen’s destruction of Earth and turning it’s population into Cybermen, the strain was too much and the Doctor regenerated for the first time into his second incarnation (Doctor 2) ("The Tenth Planet", Doctor Who, vlm 1, TV) The cybermen’s homeworld of Mondas was destroyed by Earth. ("Attack of the Cybermen", Doctor Who vlm 1, TV)
I rewatched this serial on 3 May 2023. This story was the first one purposefully made with ~45 minute parts rather than ~25 minute parts. The serial is also credited as written by Paula Moore but the actual writing process — who wrote what and how much — is disputed.
We begin in the tunnels under London. It’s 1985 and of course something weird is going on. Meanwhile in the TARDIS, the Doctor is trying to fix the chameleon circuit and Peri is still wary of him… understandably. Also in London we see a familiar face — Lytton from Resurrection of the Daleks — plotting a theft of diamonds via the sewers. Then the Cybermen appear and the heist plot takes a serious swerve, all the way to another planet. It’s Telos, where we get a bit of a hint as to the true horror of the Cybermen. In that context, I don’t think the hand-crushing is gratuitous. Still nasty, though.
There’s an odd sense of humour to the music, as well as the TARDIS trying out various looks. Also a bit of slapstick among the body horror; I do think so much of this and the next season were wasted potential. Thirty-eight years ago I didn’t much enjoy many of these serials, but I do now in part because I can imagine what might have been.
Amy’s Choice saw the introduction and, to date, only appearance of the Dream Lord, a strange being who infiltrated the TARDIS and forced the Doctor, Amy, and Rory into a dreamscape to inflict his cruel games on the trio. But as the episode wrapped up, it became much clearer who the Dream Lord really was: a darker side of the Doctor.
This is perhaps the first time in the modern era of the show…