Monday, July 25, 2011

Target: Attack of the Cybermen

We join the story with Charles Windsor Griffiths as he makes his way to the 'job'. The sewermen are completely omitted.

When Griffiths meets Russell, we find that the latter has a manner that occasionally reminds Griffiths of a policeman. Gustave Lytton is known as successful criminal - the narrator tells us that he's been at it for two years, committing component thefts. (Much in the style of the plot in Robot.) The Met actually supplied the explosive for the diamond robbery, because they think that when he uses it, his identity will be unmasked.

The pre-blag conversation doesn't take place in the car. The weather is wet (not fine as on screen).

When we do join the Doctor and Peri in the TARDIS, there's a long digression about the regeneration process, Peri's college relationship with someone called Chuck and an unseen adventure on Vespod Eight. Halley's Comet doesn't show a tail on the scanner, Peri asks why not and the Doctor explains that it doesn't form until the comet nears the sun. Peri knew that, it seems, and was just checking his memory. (She asks so that she can bore us?)

The address of the scrapyard isn't mentioned, so presumably it isn't 76 Totters Lane. The Doctor does not play a tune on the organ exterior of the TARDIS.

Peri knows how to handle a gun in the garage scene because she was taught by her father. (The Planet of Fire novelisation suggests she was only a child when Howard was her stepfather, so either there's a conflict here, or her father taught her when she was very young indeed).

The disarmed policeman turns out to be carrying an assortment of weaponry including two grenades and a canister of tear gas. Good anticipation of New Labour policing there. The Doctor tells Peri that he recognises both coppers from his previous visit to Earth, but that his memory is still too scrambled from regeneration to remember who they were accompanying.

Lytton said he came from North London, not Fulham. It's a shame to lose this very funny line in the adaptation.

Russell holds a knife to the Doctor's throat, then threatens to shoot him and Peri with the gun he takes off him. Again we have here a policeman who's 20 years ahead of his time.

There's no 'Shoot him, Peri' and no business about prison sentences.

The Doctor knows Lytton's first name is Gustave, but when Peri asks him how he knows that, he can't remember.

During the TARDIS scenes, Griffiths gets annoyed with Lytton's rudeness, and is about to stick one on him when Peri intervenes to calm things down.

The narrator explains that Briggs and Stratton are the former crew of the time vessel that Lytton hopes to steal. They crashed on Telos and were captured by the Cybermen. Their Cyber-conversion failed, which is why they have only the prosthetic limbs.

When they arrive on Telos, a shivering Peri plunges her hands 'deep into the cavities of her armpits'.

The reason the Cyber-controller has the Doctor locked in the fridge is to humiliate him, and soften his will to resist. When the Doctor meets Flast, he notices that she's grotesquely disfigured.

After delivering the 'we should have killed her' line, the not very bright Varne twiddles her moustache 'like an Edwardian paterfamilias'. What a strange place Mr Saward's mind is.

As the Doctor runs through the tombs after escaping, he sees many dead Cybermen. They've been systematically poisoned in hibernation by the Cryons - this has been threatening the survival of the Cyber-race, and it's implied that that's the motivation for the Controller's plan to change history by preventing Mondas from being destroyed.

Griffiths has a smile on his face when he's dead, because at least he went out in style, on an alien planet with millions of pounds' worth of diamonds in his pocket.

The Doctor's final line about having misjudged Lytton has a narrative purpose: it shows Peri for the first time that his new personality is able to display compassion.

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