Sigh-bermen

It is intensely frustrating to rewatch Season 12 and to find yourself enjoying Revenge of the Cybermen more than officially rubber-stamped classics like The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks; because for all that is good about it, you can't help but admit that those who think of it as the season's embarrassing clunker do have a case. And that case is the Cybermen themselves.

There is so much that is good about Revenge. The excellent reuse of the Nerva Beacon sets, the chilly and paranoid space-plague scenario, a pretty fair stab at an alien race in the Vogans. The supporting cast is great, even if Kevin Stoney's incredible face and presence is wasted under a ton of prosthetics. Kellman and Vorus make for interesting and contrasting villains, there are great setpieces like the Doctor escaping from Kellman's electrified room, and the grand finale of the story arc, with Nerva Beacon plunging down on a collision course with Voga, the Doctor and Sarah bound and helpless on the bridge, is the most ambitious and pulse-pounding moment of the Hinchcliffe era yet (certainly on paper). The underground sequences shot at Wookey Hole are awesomely atmospheric and the direction is generally top-notch. What's not to like?

Well, in many ways Revenge is the anti-Genesis. Genesis is a boring, derivative Terry Nation script that succeeds because it single-handedly revitalizes the Daleks by introducing the electrifying figure of Davros, their creator. Revenge is a tense, interesting (try to tell me that Vogans aren't infinitely more interesting than Thals!) Gerry Davis script that fails because, well, it ruins the Cybermen, so thoroughly and devastatingly that they still haven't recovered from it.

The Cybermen are my favorite Doctor Who monster. This despite the fact that many of their sixties episodes are lost; Tomb, when it turned up, was less good than its hype, and I don't like Invasion that much at all; Revenge and its 80s successors - well, I'll get to them; and the new series Cybermen have been ridiculous at worst, and second fiddles to the Daleks at best. I can only conclude that the Target novelizations had a considerable effect on me in my teens.

Because the idea of the Cybermen is great. Humans who have removed every part of themselves that makes them human and "weak", and want to carry out the same upgrades on everyone else they meet. I always tell ST:NG fans that the Borg are pretty cool and all, but they've got nothing on the Cybermen. But pointing to any episodes that might prove this has never been easy.

The Cybermen of Revenge, while they do look awesome, are a disgrace. Their leader displays a full gamut of human emotions, as you might well expect from a serial in which they're bent on "Revenge". They have no interest in cybernizing anyone, preferring to utilize humans in a variety of damnfool schemes that don't make any sense, and which Cybermen would doubtless perform more efficiently. Worst of all, Revenge is the story in which the Cybermen suddenly develop the most preposterous weakness since DC's Green Lantern was powerless in the face of the color yellow. Despite the fact that there is no reason at all that Cybermen should need or want to breathe, suddenly, for no apparent reason, gold is fatal to them if inhaled. I'd harp on about how nonsensical their plan to blow up gold-rich planetoids such as Voga is, but really, worse was to come in the 80s. I still have nightmares about droves of Cybermen dying in agony from being hit by gold coins fired by a teenage girl's catapult, and not in the good way.

I don't know why it has proved so difficult for generations of Who scribes and script editors to get the Cybermen right. Thankfully the gold weakness seems to have been scrapped for the 21st century, but they still can't seem to get the cold, implacable logic and the body horror right. When the Cybermen's most recent idea of a cunning plan is to build a giant Cyberman the size of a mountain and stomp Victorian London into smithereens with it, it's no surprise that they mostly need humans like Lumic and Miss Hartigan to do their thinking for them nowadays. It's a crying shame.

All the Cybermen need is one show in which their true potential and horror is realized, and they could take their rightful place as the scariest monsters in the Whoniverse. Unfortunately they haven't had anything close to that since the 1960s, unless you're a big fan of Earthshock, which I can't say I am. That Russell T Davies' team considered them only as cut-price Dalek substitutes was evident from their new catchphrase of "Delete! Delete! Delete!" - how unimaginative was that? But if someone would present them with the love they deserve again, as heartless, soulless metal vampires making the world more efficient one upgrade at a time, man, that'd be a story to watch. Come on Moffat! You can do it!

In the meantime, I still think Revenge is underrated in Season 12 because of its dodgy place in Cyber-history. Pretend they're not Cybermen or something, that the allergic-to-gold concept didn't send us on a horrible downward spiral that would end with the sickening crunch of Silver Nemesis, and I think you'll find a lot here to love. It's more full of ideas than anything else in Season 12, and somehow more fun. And if those aren't the things we ought to love Doctor Who for being, then what are?