Finally, the Time Ring takes the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Harry Sullivan back to space station Nerva, where they hope to part company with the friends they made there. However, the Time Ring takes them a bit too far into Nerva’s past, placing them on the space station thousands of years ago, before the solar flares engulf Earth. And there’s something on board that’s affecting the crew...
Once the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry discover the countless bodies littering the corridors of the space station, they know something’s afoot. With a bit of fiddling with the locking mechanism of a locked door, the trio come across four survivors trying to maintain Nerva and its objective.
Before the solar flares, Nerva was commissioned to orbit what appears to be an uninhabited asteroid off the planet Jupiter (how very close to Earth...). The asteroid’s presence hasn’t been updated on the star charts of incoming space ships, so it is up to Nerva to warn space ships of its presence to avoid crashing into it. This assignment is said to take thirty years. This means that at the time, Nerva was more of a beacon than a space ship harbouring hibernating humans, like in The Ark in Space. The space station, however, was wrong about one thing: the asteroid, renamed Voga, holds an alien race in its core.
When the Doctor is notified of Voga, he recalls its nickname, the Planet of Gold, and realises that the Cybermen are involved.
The Cybermen are a mostly cyborg race. They used to be a humanoid race, until they kept “upgrading” themselves with technology and artificial parts for self-preservation. Usually their main goal is to upgrade the rest of the universe. However in this story, the Cybermen want revenge.
The reason why the Doctor connected Voga with the Cybermen is because of the Cyber-Wars. Voga is well-known for having the largest supply of gold in the universe, and when the humans realised that gold is the Cybermen’s only known weakness, they could use the gold to overthrow the Cybermen and end the Cyber-Wars. This happened, but one ship survived (as it always happens on Doctor Who), and is now ready to destroy Voga and regain the power they lost. Little do they know that they’re up for a taste of their own medicine...
Once Sarah has been affected by the very poison that took the lives of most of the Nerva crew, the Doctor sends Harry, Sarah in his arms, via transmat to Voga for the cure. Sarah and Harry are then taken by the Vogans inhabiting the asteroid (should it be called an asteroid or a planet?), and have been informed by the Vogans that they are planning to launch a rocket heading straight for the Cybermen.
With both the Cybermen and the Vogans racing to destroy the other first, the Doctor must pick the side he wants to help and aid them until the other is destroyed.
This is my first classic Doctor Who arc featuring the Cybermen. The first time I saw them was in the two-parter with David Tennant (Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel), and they were a different kind of Cybermen compared to the classic ones. In series two of the revival Who, the Cybermen were created on parallel Earth by the Cybus Industries. They’re upgraded versions of the human race, similar to the Cybermen of old. Although the look of the old Cybermen is much different from what I’ve seen of the new series, they have the same sort of objective: to be the dominant figure of the universe. I did notice, though, that while the new Cybermen want to upgrade everyone in the cosmos to be like them, the older Cybermen don’t seem to portray that. Like the Daleks, they want total control. Perhaps it’s just in this story where they aren’t quite the same? I’d have to watch The Tenth Planet with William Hartnell as the First Doctor to understand them more.
The character development award for this story goes to Harry Sullivan. When he was first introduced in Robot, he was UNIT’s military doctor who thought that “police boxes don’t go careering around all over the place,” but after he steps into the TARDIS, messes about with the controls, and is uprooted to a space station in the distant future, his aspect of life is changed forever. He asks much more questions than he did before, and he slowly grasps the concept of travelling through time and space. However, being the awkward third wheel of the Doctor’s usual bicycle, he often gets picked on by the Doctor. Whenever something happens out of an act of clumsiness, the Doctor always glares at Harry, and while the Doctor walks away, Harry asks Sarah, “What’ve I done now?” Deep in the gold-lined caves of Voga, Harry accidently causes a rock slide, knocking out the Doctor. When the Doctor comes to, he laughs at what Harry has done and shouts, “HARRY SULLIVAN IS AN IMBECILE!” Even though Harry may be the subject of the Doctor’s fun at times, he’s also very quick-thinking and agile. Just goes to show that his UNIT training pays off.
I’ve noticed that the Doctor gets put in oodles of danger in this story. He is forced by the Cybermen to go to Voga with a bomb strapped to back to plant even more bombs in Voga’s core. He gets tied up with Sarah and is stuck on the vacated Nerva, which the Cybermen programmed to crash into Voga. He suffers from the rock slide that Harry unfortunately caused. He was minutes away from being detonated. It’s absolutely crazy. The director of this story was obviously trying to put the Doctor in more peril so the viewers could realise that what the Doctor does is dangerous, and it seems like going from one whirlwind to another.
One thing that kept bothering me was the Gallifreyan symbol for the Seal of Rassilon on the walls of the Vogan structures.
At first, I was thinking, “The Time Lords are here! Whaaaaaaat?” but after the end of the third episode, my hopes gradually diminished with the absence of the Time Lords. Only after the arc finished did I Google search why it was there. Turns out, it’s the Vogan symbol, but the show’s designer liked the symbol and kept it for the Time Lords in future episodes. Darn...
One thing still doesn’t get resolved for me: what happens to space station Nerva? In The Sontaran Experiment two stories back, the astronauts the Doctor was talking to said that Nerva doesn’t exist, that it’s just a legend. So what happens to it? Is there something in this episode that I missed?
Revenge of the Cybermen is the finale of the twelfth season of Doctor Who, and the end of Tom Baker’s first. I must say this story is not particularly as spectacular as its predecessors such as Robot and Genesis of the Daleks, but it does have a certain air of finality to the never-ending adventures of season twelve. Since the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry took off in the TARDIS at the end of Robot, they haven’t had any time to stop and breathe. When I first began my classic Who marathon with Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen in The Time Warrior, I always thought that the adventures of the Doctor and his companion would be something along the lines of going off on a trip in the TARDIS, wind up on some alien planet, get involved in a tussle with some villainous aliens, and then pop back to UNIT for tea and a discussion about what just happened. Season twelve has definitely widened the playing field for Doctor Who, and I just hope that it won’t fall into a rut in the next season.
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