The Eleventh Hour - A Review

Dear Santa...
...a review of The Eleventh Hour. WARNING - one very bad word, and thpoilers.



"Remember what I told you when you were seven..."


The Eleventh Hour, apart from anything else, is a showcase of brilliant moments in which Matt Smith becomes the Doctor. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it happens; I just know it's somewhere between him landing in Amelia Pond's back garden in that ancient, brand new, impossibly blue box and him standing on the roof of a hospital telling the Atraxi to 'Basically, run.' He becomes that old/young, awkward/over confident man we have been waiting for all this time. Fourteen years, in fact, since some of us (ahem....) fell in love with the eighth Doctor and had him snatched away before he was even fully born. Or at the very least four months, since David Tennant said he didn't want to go. Or two years, since the last proper series of Doctor who. Or just since we were seven.  


"Like a name in a fairytale..."

I have seen the Eleventh Hour 5 times (at the time of writing) and still it manages to captivate me every time. It, and the new Doctor, and even his companion, are a barrel of contradictions. The series seems a little more mature and yet filled with childlike magic, triumphant yet humble, fun and heartbreaking at the same time. The Doctor is at once an old man and a young boy, a genius and an idiot, kind and intolerant, ugly and beautiful (seriously, how does he do that? One second I'm like 'ooh, yes' and the next I'm like 'Ew, no. He's got a head shaped like a wotsit (yes, a wotsit)'). He's a history teacher trapped inside the body of a schoolboy. Even Amy is a child pretending to be grown up. 
So far (for me, anyway) this season of Doctor Who has proved infinitely rewatchable and shows you something new each time. Some people have complained this has been a largely 'tell, not show' series but I disagree. The Van Gogh story came over so well because we can see how good a painter Van Gogh was instead of being told how wonderful Agatha Christie was without giving us any evidence to back it up with. And this series has made me cry (twice; during Vincent and the Doctor, and the end of the Big Bang, which made me cry and punch the air in triumph at the same time), not because I felt obliged to, but because I was genuinely moved.  
I think I like the Eleventh Hour so much because I went in with such low expectations and was totally blown away by how good it was.
The pre credits scene, in which the Doctor hangs from the free falling TARDIS and narrowly avoids having his brand new manhood amputated by Big Ben, seems strangely disjointed from the rest of the story. It's a sequence which I now believe to be one of Steven Moffat's ironic final nods to the Rusty Davies era (and this episode is peppered with them. I'm not sure if it is a final salute to the man who, for all his faults, brought Doctor Who back home, or a piss take). 
After this, the episode starts with a little girl sitting in her bedroom praying to Santa for someone to come and fix the crack in her wall, and lo and behold, here he is. It takes him a while, but he fixes it.  
I start to love this new Doctor when he walks into a tree. 
"Are you alright?" 
"Early days... steering's a bit off..."
I love him even more when he starts spitting food all over little Amelia's kitchen: 
"Give me yogurt. I love yogurt" (eats yogurt). "What's this?" 
"Yogurt."
"It's fucking disgusting."
It's a lovely ice breaker, and allows us to meet the Doctor and Amelia Pond properly in relatively safe, comforting surroundings eating fish custard and ice cream. They discover the Doctor's first meal together (I really want to try 'fish custard' now. Although I feel a bit cheated as apparently Matt Smith didn't actually eat fish fingers but a sort of coconut slice thing dipped in custard*), and the Doctor shares Amelia's fear over the crack in her wall. Like no other Doctor/Companion pairing ever, they are both children when they meet. 
The Doctor certainly seems 'newborn' to start with: he uses his new limbs awkwardly, and is surprised at the very world he finds himself in - just look at his reaction when he tips the water out of Amelia's drinking glass. 
Just one thing; why does Amy's house have two flights of stairs when it is a two storey building... and how come the Doctor doesn't notice? Or does he?

"Twelve years and four psychiatrists..." 

I know Caitlyn Blackwood is Karen Gillan's cousin, but my God, the resemblence betwen them is eerie, even more so when Caitlyn returns later in the series a few months older and with longer hair. As another aside, I think I know why a few people have had trouble empathising with/liking Amy Pond. Little Amelia is adorable. She's the first character we meet in the Eleventh Hour and we like her even before the Doctor crash lands in her garden. Amelia is such a sweet, lonely, quirky little girl - in the first scene we see her praying to Santa, she's scared of nothing except a crack in her bedroom wall, and packs her teddy bear before she runs off with the Doctor. And then suddenly she's this grown up, scowly girl in a short skirt. In addition she has an adorable boyfriend whom she treats almost like he doesn't exist, and she's a kissagram = every parents worst nightmare. Even the Doctor is stunned. 
"You were a little girl five minutes ago!" 
"You're worse than my aunt."
"I'm the Doctor. I'm worse than everybody's aunt." 
Come to think of it, I think that line was the moment I thought 'Hello Doctor'. But then this entire episode is an exercise in 'Hello, Doctor'. 
That sentence also sets the tone for the Doctor's relationship with Amy. To the Doctor, she will always be a little girl - he calls her 'Amelia' in Victory of the Daleks, in the same tone a parent might use to snap at a child. He also has a habit of kissing her on the forehead, and he's absolutely horrified when she tries to make a move on him. The way he comforts her in Vincent and the Doctor is like a father comforting his daughter - "Life is a pile of good things and bad things, and the good things don't always cancel out the bad, but vice versa, the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them less important." (perhaps the best quote in the entire series, ever, except possibly the Doctor's speech to Susan at the end of the Dalek Invasion of Earth)
I do like the older Amy, but I would love little Amelia to have one proper adventure, just once. 

"Just trust me for 20 minutes..."

The scene where the Doctor asks Amy to trust him is another beautiful character moment, this time between him and grown up Amy. I get the feeling he is also asking the entire audience to give him 20 minutes in which to prove he is the Doctor.  
But what is with the blue light that flashes over the Doctor and Amy in this scene? It might be there to add poignancy to the moment, but I find it annoying. Or is it something else? Because you learn that when watching a Stpehen Moffat episode, nothing is quite as simple as it seems. Or it is as simple as it seems, but with a twist that not so much a twist as wrenching the simple right out of its socket and giving it a Chinese burn until it squeals. 
As the story starts to roll on its own momentum, the Doctor employs several RTD style tactics to set up a trap for Prisoner Zero. A borrowed laptop, the number '0' transmitted across the world via Facebook and Bebo as a message for the Atraxi, texting instructions for Amy to 'DUCK!', although, to be fair, that one harkens back to 'Blink' and Sally Sparrow finding a 40 year old message on a wall telling her to do just that. 
I read in another review (probably at Behind the Sofa) that Steven Moffat ironically laid the RTD era to rest using his predecessor's own methods, resetting the clock back to zero and literally rewriting the last five years of time, chips, and Rose Tyler.    
It's true that the story rattles along almost like Smith and Jones or Rose for the first 40 odd minutes, a light companion focused story in which we meet a cross section of the future companion's friends and significant others, as well as get a feel for the new Doctor, with a few comedic turns thrown in to keep people interested. And then suddenly, when the clock changes from 11:50 to 0:00, everything changes, just a little bit. It's a subtle change of pace, but it is there, and it is Steven Moffat saying, "This is my show now, Russell. Mitts off." 


"A perfect impersonation of yourself..."

"And we're off..." says the Doctor, before he explains the wonderous trick he has played on Prisoner Zero, in leading the Atraxi to the hospital where their prisoner is. Not only that, but he has a phone full of pictures of the accused that he can show to the Atraxi. He's done it, saved the world in 20 minutes, proved that he is the Doctor. And to do it with such extraordinary style and knobs on is a bonus. "Who da man!?" is one bit of self congratulary nonsense that I will allow. 
But Prisoner Zero has another card up its sleeve. When it decides to turn on Amy, we realise that things are going to be a little different from here on in. No Sonic Screwdrivers, no fancy gadgets, just the Doctor talking to Amy from within her dream, manipulating her thoughts to get her to dream about Prisoner Zero in its true form. Brilliant. 
This scene also introduces one of the big themes of the series - the impact that dreams/the human mind have upon reality, and the power of words and their superiority over weapons. This theme recurs time and time again throughout the series: 

Amy asking Professor Bracewell about his first love stops him from detonating. 

Amy links the Doctor and the Star Whale in her mind, and this enables her to save it.

The phrase River uses in 'The Time of Angels' - "When our dreams no longer need us, the time will be upon us, the time of angels".

Amy's Choice. Nuff said. 

The way we see some scenes through Van Gogh's eyes in Vincent and the Doctor. 

The Doctor using Craig's contentment to destroy the ship in his attic in the Lodger, after it has sucked out its victims dreams of escape and freedom.

Amy's memories being used to trick the Doctor into visiting Stonehenge. 

And the obvious one in the Big Bang, the seed planted in the head of little Amelia Pond when she was seven, ready to bloom on her wedding day and bring the Doctor back from the brink of unreality. 

Oddly, the three episodes which don't fit in this theme are the weakest of the series - Vampires of Venice, and the Silurian two parter. 
At the end of all this, the Doctor emerges fully fledged and victorious, having used only a mobile phone, his own genius, and a little's girl's dreams. 
I love the phonecall where the Doctor tells the Atraxi to get "back 'ere. NOW." It echoes Rusty again, but I don't care.


"You've summoned the aliens back again. Aliens of death. And now you're taking your clothes off..." 

Rory is fantastic from the word go. He is both similar to the Doctor and yet the perfect antidote - he's bumbling, understatedly intelligent, curious, utterly devoted to Amy despite the way she treats him, and all he wants is a safe, comfortable life with the girl he loves. He doesn't want adventure, but he'll take it, if it means he gets to be with Amy. There is something about him right from the start - he isn't just the companion's boyfriend, he is a companion in his own right. In light of what happened in the finale, perhaps there really is more to Rory than meets the eye. Especially as his nurses badge says he qualified in 1990, when reason says he would have been about four. But you don't want to listen to reason, any more than you want to grow up. 


"I've put a lot of work into it..." 

What is so important about the phrase 'Twenty minutes'? The Doctor asks Amy to trust him for 20 minutes in this episode, Amy loses 20 minutes of her memory in The Beast Below, and the Doctor says 20 minutes until the Pandorica opens at one point in that episode. In the same episode, he then waxes lyrical about a life form that has a 20 minute life span, even saying afterwards that there was no point to him mentioning it. And 20 minutes after the Doctor begs Amy to trust him, Matt Smith bursts through the image of Tennant's face and stands proudly in front of the Atraxi in his new outfit. The message could not be more clear. "I'm the Doctor. Basically, run." And they do. 
I don't tend to like those "I'm the Doctor. Don't mess with me." scenes, except the one in the Pandorica Opens, and this one was definitely a bit OTT. Yes, we can all see Matt Smith is the Doctor. Shut up about it now. However, I do like that the Atraxi never once takes its eye off the Doctor until it is safely out of reach as it flees. 
 

"I am definitely a mad man in a box..."

As a final note, am I the only person who actually likes the new theme tune and title sequence? 
As a final final note, I have another unanswered question. when we flash back to little Amelia sitting in her garden waiting for the Doctor, she hears the sound of the TARDIS and looks up, smiling. And yet, a second later we see grown up Amy waking up, two years after Prisoner Zero and fourteen years since fish custard. What happened? Either the little version of Amy really hears the TARDIS and is whisked off for an adventure with her magic Doctor, or grown up Amy was having a dream about her hero when her dream was interrupted by the sound of the real TARDIS. Perhaps the Doctor didn't go to the Moon at all after he left Amy and Rory to try out his new TARDIS. But if he did pick up little Amelia for one adventure, why doesn't grown up Amy remember it? I think I'll pass this one over to the hard core theorists, before my head explodes. The same theorists who realised there were two Doctors running about on board the Byzantium. 
By the way, I started out not liking the new TARDIS design - On the first glance, you half expect everlasting gobstoppers to start popping out of the time rotor, or at the very least Johnny Depp in a mad hat and wig, but it has slowly grown on me. It's a TARDIS of dreams and ideas and connections, not just 'knobs that do stuff'. The typewriter, the glass dildo thing, the hot and cold taps, the weird thing that looks like a 'jack' (you remember that game...), and the gramophone. I'm only surprised it isn't steam powered. 


"Thank you, Santa." 

Thank you for Karen Gillan, and Caitlyn Blackwood and Steven Moffat. But especially thank you for Matt Smith. I take back all the horrible things I said about him. He's wonderful. He may be only 5 years older than me, but what does age matter to a man who can cure you of being grown up? 


"What did you tell me when I was seven?"

"That's not the point. You have to remember it." 




*Having now tried fish custard, I can honestly say that it is entirely and utterly wrong, and you should definitely try it.

And yippee doodle, I got through the entire review without using the phrase 'Amy's crack'... 

By Rose Ghost

A Burning House (an Eleventh Doctor short story)

The Doctor frowned down at the young, bearded man sat in the wooden chair. Steven Taylor - a space pilot that the TARDIS crew had met inside the towering Mechanoid city, just before the climactic battle between the Mechanoids and the Daleks. A battle that ended in the flaming destruction of the city, from which the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki had barely escaped via climbing down a mile long abandoned cable on the city roof that led to the ground below. They had expected Steven to accompany them in their escape, but he had returned to the city for his mascot, a panda bear toy that had kept him sane during his years of imprisonment, and whilst Ian tried to stop him, he had been beaten back by smoke. Ian had been the last to descend the cable from the city, hoping Steven would follow, but just as he had reached the ground the cable had burned away. The four travellers had given Steven up for lost.

Yet now Steven was here, claiming to have climbed down that same cable. The Doctor knew this was untrue, but he detected no malice in the younger man’s attitude. He undoubtedly could not remember exactly how he had escaped the city and was filling in these gaps in his memory with ideas of what most likely happened. The same was surely true of his claim that he had managed to simply push open the TARDIS doors, while the Doctor and Vicki were saying their goodbyes to Ian and Barbara inside the Dalek time machine. The Doctor knew for definite the TARDIS doors had been locked.

Despite the fact that he was giving young Taylor the benefit of the doubt, there were still unanswered questions about him. How had he really escaped the burning city? How had he got aboard the locked Ship?

The Doctor mused on these puzzles after sending Vicki off to help Steven get cleaned up. He would find the answers, eventually.

***

“Oh, you sexy thing!”The Doctor pushed through the doorway of the TARDIS, letting the Police Box doors swing shut behind him. He ran across the new floor, bounded up the new steps and surveyed the new console with relish.

Regeneration. Man and machine. A new Doctor and a new TARDIS, working together in harmony. Oh, it didn’t get better than this!

His fingers flew across the new controls, feeling their way instinctively to where they needed to be. Then he paused.

What about Amy? She had waited, little Amelia Pond, she had waited a long twelve years for him to return from his five minute ‘hop’ into the future to stabilise the TARDIS. She deserved her first flight.

But not yet, he reasoned. Need to run things in a bit, make the process less bumpy, less scary for the unseasoned time traveller. Quick test flight should do it, Moon and back, easy.

Fingers flying again, the Doctor set the TARDIS in motion, little knowing that Amy Pond was standing outside, watching him leave her behind for the second time in her life.

***

Smoke. Thick, grey, dense smoke. The fires were raging throughout the Mechanoid city, but Steven Taylor had passed up his chance to leave, his first chance in two years, because of Hi-Fi.

Hi-Fi was his mascot, a small panda toy given to him by his maternal grandmother when he was six. Everyone else had given him spaceship toys for his birthday, because his obsession was already making itself known to his family. But Granny Drake had always been different, an independent thinker, and that’s why he had loved her most out of everyone in the family, beside his parents. So it was that Hi-Fi had accompanied him all through regular school, pilot training and even onto missions. He and the bear were inseparable.

So he couldn’t just leave it behind to escape down the cable with the others. He would find Hi-Fi and join them, follow them down and escape this cursed planet forever.

He spotted the bear at last, near the door to the sleeping quarters. Tucking the little fellow into his jacket, he turned back to the steps leading to the roof, but a blast of smoke caught him right in the face and he fell to his knees, coughing.

The smoke was getting thicker as the flames came closer. Steven’s head started to spin. He tried to push up from his knees but fell back to the floor, unconscious.

His last sensory moment before blackness swallowed him was the sound of trumpeting elephants…

***

The Doctor ran around the console, flicking switches and pulling levers. The grating roar of the TARDIS landing slowly died back as the time rotor ceased its rhythmic rise and fall.

Just a quick peek through the doors and off again, he decided as he extended the air shield a couple of feet beyond so he could actually step onto the Moon’s surface.

His first thought was that this wasn’t the Moon. Unless it was a smoke filled room in a base upon the Moon. A smoke filled room with, as his eyes adjusted to the haze, a body laid on the floor a few feet away.

With no thought for his own safety, as ever, the Doctor plunged out into the smoke and knelt down beside what he could now see was a man. He turned the figure over, to look for a pulse, and gasped. Then coughed as his gasp swallowed smoke-filled air.

Head swimming now, he staggered to his feet and got his hands under the armpits of the man. Even though the TARDIS was just feet away, it seemed like it took forever for him to walk backwards through the air shield with his burden and collapse to the floor, coughing.

But there was no time to waste in recovery. Through the murk beyond the still open TARDIS doors, he heard a familiar battle cry.

“Seek-Locate-Exterminate!”

Slamming the doors shut, he ran back up the steps to the console. He had to wipe his streaming eyes twice on the back of his jacket sleeve as he carefully set the controls for a short hop.

The TARDIS dematerialised, just as a Dalek entered the room, gave a cursory glance around with its eye-stalk, and then was instantly crushed under the weight of the collapsing roof.

***

For the second time in two days, a blue, seemingly wooden box appeared out of thin air in the jungles of Mechanus. The pilot, the same man despite looking many years younger and in fact being many years older, peered out cautiously.

Yes, this would do. Far enough away from his earlier TARDIS and the Dalek time machine, which he would probably be arguing about with Ian and Barbara right now. The Doctor smiled, lost in memory for a moment.

A faint groan from behind him brought the Time Lord back to the present. Steven was starting to stir. The Doctor had given the pilot an injection to overcome his smoke inhalation and it was now time to set him back onto the path of his destiny.

It didn’t take long to drag Steven a little way into the jungle, close to one of the city’s massive ‘legs’, and facing the right way that when he got up, he would head towards the TARDIS. The other, earlier TARDIS.

The Doctor was going to leave him there, and let history happen as planned, but something was nagging away at the back of his mind. Something troubled him still, some vague memory of this time that didn’t quite fit.

So it was that he watched Steven stir from behind a tree. The young man got shakily to his feet and stumbled off in the right direction, attracting the attention of some of Mechanus’ carnivorous plant life, which he managed to fend off.

The Doctor followed, slowly and carefully, as Steven found the clearing where the other TARDIS had landed, the Dalek time craft beside it. There was nobody about. Good, the other, earlier Doctor, along with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, would still be inside the Dalek craft.

Steven struggled over to the TARDIS, his strength obviously failing. He pushed against the door, but it was locked. Slowly, he slid down the fake wooden exterior, unconscious once more.

That was it! The Doctor remembered now, the question that had nagged in his memory, the thought from so long ago. He had solved the puzzle of how Steven escaped the burning Mechanoid city, when the cable he claimed to have climbed down had burned away before he could use it. But the other mystery, the locked box puzzle, was here for him to solve also.

Aware he could be spotted by his earlier self at any moment, the Doctor rushed across the clearing, his own TARDIS key in hand. It fitted the lock perfectly, turned with ease and the door creaked ajar. Picking Steven up once more, the Doctor slapped his face lightly. As the pilot began to come round again, the Time Lord propped him carefully against the edge of the TARDIS and retreated.

Just as planned, Steven’s eyes opened. He felt forwards with his hand, brushed the door open and staggered forwards across the threshold, pushing the door shut behind him by reflex.

Another dash across the clearing and the Doctor locked the door behind the pilot. He had just made it back to cover when he heard raised voices.

A smile creased his young/old face as he watched his earlier self emerge from the Dalek time machine, shouting and blustering with rage while Ian and Barbara tried to persuade him to let them try to get home in the craft. How young he was back then, trying to act all gruff and pompous, because he thought that was what people expected when they saw his elderly seeming exterior.

Shaking his head at the callow youth still arguing with his companions, the Doctor headed back to his own TARDIS. He needed to rectify the lateral balance cones, then try again for the Moon. Then back to Earth to give Amy her much delayed trip in a time machine.

Mark Simpson

Revenge Of The Cybermen

The hardest things to review in life are not, as Ness Bishop once suggested, the things you like the most, but the things which you have to justify your affection for and you know that, given enough space to do so, as I have been given here, you won’t be able to.

Revenge Of The Cybermen is one such thing. Like Time And The Rani and Trial Of A Time Lord, I know it is duff, but I can’t help loving it nevertheless. Revenge is like some cousin coming to a party where you know they’ll start their embarrassing routine on the dance floor well before nine, but you still want them to come.

Let’s get one thing out into the open. I like the Cybermen a lot. In fact, I would go so far as to say I love them, but that would bring strange mental images accompanied by the sounds of ‘Excellent!’ and ‘The biggest bang in history,’ so we’ll just leave it there. In contrast to my fondness for other alien beasties in Doctor Who, my appreciation for the Cybermen comes not from the actual stories they played a part in, but from what they represent. I still remember that cold winter evening when I first made acquaintance with the Cybermen, in the novel Doctor Who And The Cybermen, based on the Pat Troughton serial The Moonbase. They are terrifying to me because, unlike the Daleks and the Master and the Kandyman, they represent what we could become, albeit in a very science fictionalised sense. More and more people today are gaining artificial limbs and organs, and Kit Pedlar, back in the original Tenth Planet scripts, asked a question, a very important question, when does someone like that stop becoming human? And, like the Borg (which TNG nicked the idea for from the Cybermen) they don’t particularly want to kill you, they will if it serves their purpose, but more often then not, they will turn you into one of their own. Their motives are never really domination, just survival.

So it’s good that I like the Cybermen for the ideal behind them, rather than their stories, because there’s only four out of nine (or ten if you include The Five Doctors) Cyber-stories that I actually like by virtue of their being good. And I’m very sorry to say that Revenge Of The Cybermen isn’t one of them. I so wanted Revenge to be good. Cybermen. Tom Baker. Sarah Jane in combat pants. It is the perfect recipe. The best Doctor/Companion team up against the best monster. And before I go on, I would just like to point out that I am completely in love with Sarah Jane Smith, so excuse all references to her combat pants and any other item of her clothing.

Unfortunately, that recipe is marred by the writing. It is one of those rare occasions when the writing of the story is the reason for its downfall, rather than bad sets and dodgy SFX. I’m sure Gerry Davis is a nice bloke, and two of the Cybermen stories I do like were written by him. But Revenge could have been so much better.

How, for instance, do the Cybermen manage to walk around on Voga? There’s tons of gold lying around. And for that matter, how can gold disable a Cyberman (or by the time of Silver Nemesis a mere suggestion of gold knocks them down dead)? Baker, in this story, makes some codswollop remark about it being the ideal non-conductive (or was that conductive?) metal. And in Earthshock, Davison says that it clogs up their breathing apparatus(?). Please, Gerry, the Cybermen already have enough weaknesses without introducing another. You feel as if the gold angle was a leftover from the original outline of the plot, which involved a casino. It’s fair enough that there should be a small planet which a very large gold content. I remember reading some scientific speculation that the core of the planet Jupiter was one big diamond, so anything’s possible. Except the Cybermen being vulnerable to gold of course.

And while the gold might be an important angle in this story, as I mentioned earlier, by the time of Silver Nemesis, it has become ridiculous. You can almost imagine Sylvester McCoy producing a piece of pyrite and waving it at the Cyberleader, who then runs away, abandoning his plans to turn Earth into his new Cyber army.

The other main problem with the story is its characterisation. After Genesis Of The Daleks, which is highly praised (even by me) for its characters, Revenge returns to thinking ‘Dr Who is a kids show, therefore they won’t mind if we just stick a character in and have him do stuff.’ We never really get a true sense of all the potential political intrigue on Voga. And why does Kellman work with the Vogans? The crippling fault I believe though, is the actual story. Given Davis’ seeming belief of Doctor Who as a kiddie show, the plot itself is quite complex.

However, the plus points of the story are very strong. The first is the design. I like the new Cybermen, with their head-mounted guns. It makes so much more sense than them carrying around guns. Unless of course you want a cocky Australian or a unstable Doctor to shoot things, of course. The location shooting at Wookey Hole is also very good, but brought into sad contrast with the caves shot in studio. Wookey Hole sounds like its real, you get lovely echoes and everything, and the studio sounds like, well, a studio. Reusing the main set from this seasons best story, The Ark In Space, was a nice idea, especially given the seasons overarching loose plotline. It saved money and the fact that the Ark design itself wasn’t too bad to start with can only help.

The story however has been, to some extent, in light of The Deadly Assassin and almost every Gallifrey story after that, is the sight of the Seal Of Rassilon splattered all over Voga. Whether it’s reappearance in The Deadly Assassin was proof that the Time Lords interfered in the Cyberwars, or just of a lazy designer, we’ll probably never know, but I, being the obsessive fanboy I am, tend to prefer the former while in my heart knowing it’s the latter.

         Revenge Of The Cybermen brought to a close, after only twenty episodes, Season 12 of Doctor Who, the shortest season so far. Despite my fondness for it, Revenge does leave a bitter taste in the mouth, and one, given Zygons’ relocation to the start of Season 13, where Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes would begin to make their mark on the show proper, that would have lasted a very long time.
Mark Ritchie