Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Target: Revenge of the Cybermen

The travellers materialise 'in a control room', not on the transmat, which is a shame I think. I like the way they finally get back to where they were heading 6 episodes ago on screen.

The walk down the corridor full of corpses stayed with Sarah as a traumatic memory for the rest of her life.

The guns, both on Voga and on the Beacon, are 'blasters' and not projectile weapons. The lines left by the 'plague' on the victims' faces are black (like in The Moonbase).

Voga has no boats and no little train. Harry doesn't notice the gold until they're in their cell, so the humourous 'We weren't after your gold - well, not really' bit is lost. Sarah, unforgivably, says 'We can't just sit here counting our money' rather than the immortal 'We can't just sit here glittering'. Why, Terrance, why?

Kellman is found cowering in his room by a Cyberman (not strolling nonchalantly down the corridor). Also, the Cyberleader has to ask who he is: on screen he already knows. A yoyo is added to the items found in the Doctor's pockets. Kellman asks what the plan of Voga is, which is odd because he's spent months studying the planetoid and ought to recognise a map of it when he sees one. (There's a general running-down of Kellman, Terrance perhaps feeling that treachery should not be shown as being big or clever).

The Cybermen use Cyberweapons, not their headlamps. They (like the Daleks) didn't even attend the Armageddon Convention, let alone sign it. The comment about the morality of war is transferred to the narration. In several places their lack of emotion is emphasised, with explanations that what sounded like triumph in their voices wasn't actually that. (!)

When the Doctor sees the bomb packs, he makes a joke about going camping, which doesn't amuse the Cyberleader. 'Very hard to get a laugh out of a Cyberman,' he thinks.

There's a lot of narrative manoeuvring (some involving brackets) to explain why Kellman doesn't tell the Vogans about the bombs straight away.

Harry, seemingly as unhappy about the plot holes as we are, demands to know how the Vogans won the Cyberwar if their weapons can't affect the Cybermen. They just supplied the gold, humans did the technical bits, explains Tyrum.

This lame explanation obviously really annoys Harry, because he makes a murderous attack on Kellman when he hears about the bombs, then basically drags him to his death in the side tunnel. The tunnel, incidentally, is concealed behind a 'dusty arras' - this was the first place that I read the word 'arras' and it led to some confusing mental images when doing Shakespeare at school later.

The Doctor calls Harry an idiot, not an imbecile. I'd call him something a bit stronger myself, the way he's written does not make him a likeable character here.

There's no secondary control system on the Beacon - the Doctor instead unlocks the main controls, with a big spanner.

The later scenes on Voga are quite confused and it took me a while to work out what was happening on screen for comparison purposes: Magrik (the coughing rocket technician - in perfect health on the page) gets shot by the guards when he tries to launch the Skystriker. In the Target, he's called away after the launch to deal with a leak (!), and does not reappear, so the Commander can still say that no-one knows how to work the controls.

Tyrum resolves to posthumously honour Vorus - he prefers a martyr to a live rival. It's a pity we couldn't leave him with that thought, but unfortunately his last action is to yell in fear at the approaching Beacon. Harry says everything's fine when he comes up on the transmat, but I'd've thought a quick Voga resolution scene wouldn't have hurt.

We get a final TARDIS interior scene - as someone pointed out to me, Harry never gets one of these on screen - and we see the Space/Time telegraph. The Brigadier, UNIT and 20th-century Earth seem like 'an infinitely remote dream' to Sarah and Harry - rather a good way of reminding us how far DW has moved on in season 12.

The telegraph, by the way, has a little screen which the Doctor uses to zoom in on the source of the transmission - Loch Ness!*

*You can discover what happens next in 'Shallow compares "The Loch Ness Monster" with "Terror of the Zygons"'.

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