The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: Earthshock

 EARTHSHOCK (Part One) 08/03/2022 

Well, that was rather brilliant! The Cybermen are back and (from what we saw) they look pretty amazing! The episode focused on a a military expedition investigating the disappearance of 7 Palaeontologists and Geologists in a cave system on Earth somewhere. One survivor, Professor Kyle, directed the group who were shadowed throughout by a couple of black, amorphous androids. One by one, several were picked off by the androids and turned to mush until the main group encountered the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan in the cavern where Kyle's group were originally attacked (and killed).

Earlier, in the TARDIS, Adric aired some of his problems to the Doctor who didn't take it well. To be frank, I totally support Adric. The Doctor, in his new incarnation, has had fuck all time for Adric and treated him quite badly. I fully understand how Adric must feel having had his life tutor taken away, and the Doctor's reaction was incredibly petty and childish. Granted, Adric didn't score points for pointing this out but still, I can see his point of view. It's rather nice to have the Doctor less-than-perfect, and even have his companions question him. Adric expressed a wish to return to Terradon and both Nyssa and Tegan questioned the Doctor's reluctance, and Nyssa encouraged Adric to try and find a way to do it. Then they split up, Adric doing his calculations and the others exploring the caves where the TARDIS had materialised. Really nice caves, too. They didn't jar with the location footage which was quite closely cropped but effective.

The Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan were ambushed by the military team (above ground, the soldier monitoring the team's movements noted that one of the strangers, presumably the Doctor, is ectopic - meaning that his organs are in unusual positions, not that he has two hearts) after finding a metal hatch behind a rockfall. This is presumably why Kyle's team were killed as, once this had been established, we found out that the ones controlling the androids are the Cybermen (cue cliffhanger)!

It was actually a brilliant episode which didn't give anything away and ramped up the tension really well. It's about bloody time the Cybermen made a comeback! It's great to see them again and they look incredibly good (from the slight bit we saw of them). I'm really looking forward to the next episode. This season really is making its mark as one of the best since the show began!

 EARTHSHOCK (Part Two) 09/03/2022 

The thing about Big Bads is that they've always got to have some convoluted plot to justify them being there. It's great to see the Cybermen back, though, and they look fantastic - an updated riff on the look from The Invasion and Revenge Of The Cybermen. They have a bomb and are trying to blow up the Earth... probably because there's some huge conference going on (this is based on information given later in the episode by the one and only Beryl Reid, she of The Killing Of Sister George and The Little Grey Rabbit Stories fame!). They controlled the bomb by remote control, so the Doctor, with Adric's help, managed to deactivate it. 

The androids were a nice red herring quickly disposed of,  then the Doctor took the TARDIS, along with Professor Kyle, Captain Scott and the soldiers who escaped being turned into mush, to a freighter captained by Beryl and a skeleton crew from which the signal was either relayed or transmitted.

Frankly, this part of the story wasn't particularly great. The crew had gone missing and the freighter was held for 7 hours at a waystation before being allowed to enter the vicinity of Earth because of a Red Alert because of the conference. Yet Beryl and her crew are more concerned about getting their bonuses than the fact that three of them have disappeared! I mean, how big is the freighter and in what way would you not think "Oh shit!" when three of your apparently-not-huge crew just disappear? Beryl's two subordinates seem overly-relaxed and overly-stressed respectively about this, so I guess that sort of goes to explain things - greed and laxity are a thing and I suppose you can pass it off as the crew being incredibly shit at their jobs, but still, it feels a bit convenient.

On the plus side, Adric and the Doctor have made up and they're both exploring the freighter - the cliffhanger saw them found by over-zealous/stressed Security Chief Ringway (clearly shit at his job) who threatened to execute them for the murder of the two crewmen they found. That was a bit weird, too. The crewmen - Vance and Supporting Character - saw a figure running between silos which indicated there may be androids on the freighter, too, but if so why hide it? There was only a glimpse of a running figure which didn't look like the Doctor or Adric, nor a Cyberman (who don't run anyway), so who was it?

This was very much an intermediary episode which raised as many questions as it answered. I'm enjoying this story, but it doesn't feel quite as well plotted as previous serials this season (Black Orchid not included). Hopefully next week things will be a bit clearer.

 EARTHSHOCK (Part Three) 15/03/2022 

That was pretty good, despite one or two flaws. The Cybermen have an invasion force aboard the freighter and, now the Doctor has deactivated their bomb, the Cyberleader has woken them up.

The Doctor and Adric were apprehended/caught by Ringway and taken to the bridge where there was a lot of arguing and distrust until the Cybermen attacked - a small guard unit killed off the remaining skeleton crew so only Ringway, Berger and Beryl remained, and Ringway was working for the Cybermen (which seemed a little odd given he was desperate last week to report the disappearance of three of the crew who no doubt were offed by the Cybermen) but he's dead now because the Cybermen thought he'd betrayed them. The Cybermen took the bridge and set about waking the rest of the army - 15,000 of them, it seems, since that's how many silos the freighter is carrying and that's what they're breaking out of.

Captain Scott and his three remaining soldiers finally went out to help the Doctor after Nyssa delayed them because of a mysterious electro-magnetic field. Tegan went with them (in Professor Kyle's overalls because she wasn't "even dressed for it", which is stupid - she wasn't dressed for carrying the Zero Cabinet through a forest or scaling a massive cliff-face, but she still did it! Seems like it was just an excuse to get Janet dressed like Ripley from Alien! Fortunately, Kyle seems to have 'one size fits all' overalls because they fit them both despite the women being notably different sizes.

Scott and his soldiers killed some Cybermen, alerting the Cyber Lieutenant to there being more than just ten crew on board (hence Ringway's assumed betrayal), then Tegan got separated as the Cybermen all woke up and burst out the silos.

Why are they all wrapped in cellophane???

There was a nice, if silly, bit where they tried to melt a door to the bridge but the Doctor rigged it so that the Cyberman walking through got trapped in it (looking like a freeze-dried Han Solo). It all seems to be building nicely, but it isn't as well written as Saward's other script with some awkward phrasing, arch dialogue, and fairly emotional Cybermen. The lead cast aren't as well used, either, Nyssa remaining with Kyle in the TARDIS to make sage observations, and Tegan only getting something decent to do 3/4 of the way through the episode (when she shot a Cyberman with its own gun).

It's nice to have the Doctor and Adric working together, though. Adric's finally been given something cool and productive to do. Some of the Direction was a bit off - zooms in on Beryl which required Matthew to run up to her to deliver his line, a rather stagey death for Ringway, and surely something could have been done in rehearsals about some of the nonsensical dialogue - apparently, the Cyberleader intends to 'destruction' the Earth. As Nyssa said last week, "Oh dear, it's all getting rather silly, isn't it?". Nevertheless, not a bad episode. Just a draft away from being a transmittable script. And I'm really not sure about Beryl being cast as the leather-clad Captain!

 EARTHSHOCK (Part Four) 16/03/2022 

Oh my god! They killed Adric! You bastards!!!

That was actually quite dramatic, but again immensely flawed. Tegan was caught and taken to the bridge where there was a lot of arguing again. The Cybermen want to destruction Earth because the conference being held there will result in a treaty between a number of planets against the Cybermen - a collective which would be too strong for the Cybermen to overcome. So they've attached a piece of their own technology to the freighter to fix it's course. The freighter engine is powered by anti-matter so if it collides with Earth...

Scott and his soldiers returned to the TARDIS but the female soldier was grabbed by a Cyberman. But not in the interior TARDIS sequences where it was one of the two men who was missing. Then, when they left (after a Cyberman had killed Professor Kyle) she was gone again. The straight-haired male soldier would do something similar toward the end, disappearing before Scott et al. entered the escape pod. It seems Peter Grimwade is pretty rubbish at keeping a check on his extras. It was really, really obvious and, frankly, pretty shit.

I noticed for the first time this episode that the Cybermen's chins are clear plastic and show silver, humanoid chins moving beneath, which is a nice touch. I do like the new design, despite the Moonboots, but slightly miss the old, emotionless voices of the 60s, even if they were often hard to understand.

The Cyberleader took the Doctor and Tegan back to the TARDIS to leave and view the freighter collision from a distance. Beryl, Berger and Adric were left on the bridge. Scott and the curly-haired soldier killed the two Cybermen guarding them allowing Adric to try and solve the logic codes controlling the freighter's journey. Solving the first made the freighter spiral backwards in time, which is what happens when you have a piece of alien technology overriding your computer... apparently. Solving the second code stopped the time travel (obviously) and took them out of Warp Drive (of course!) - 65,000,000 years in the past (so that's what all that chat about Dinosaurs in Part One was all about!).

Apparently, Cybertechnology is pretty rubbish all round. Not only does it accidentally cause time travel when added to Earth technology, but it's a bit dodgy at waking up its armies. Some stray Cybermen slowly made their way to the bridge (why not an airlock?) and, when Scott, Beryl, Berger and Curly left in the escape pod (which Adric jumped out of at the last minute when he realised what he needed to do to crack the final code) the last Cyberman shot the controls preventing Adric from completing the sequence.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor realised the Earth was no longer in danger, that the freighter was responsible for the mass extinction of the Dinosaurs, and he used Adric's gold badge for Mathematical excellence to kill the Cyberleader. Nyssa gunned down the other Cyberman, but the console was damaged and the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan watched as the freighter entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded.

It was quite a shocking way for a companion to leave; only Katarina has previously died while travelling with the Doctor and she wasn't around for a fraction of the time Adric was! It's a memorable way to go, but also pretty stupid. Adric wasn't to know how far back in time they'd travelled, but since the freighter was always part of historical events, it does make his death seem a bit meaningless. Of course, the episode ended directly after the explosion with a stunned reaction from the TARDIS crew, so who knows - maybe they'll manage to save him next week!

The lack of the theme music over the closing titles was an interesting touch, albeit very cheesy. Actually, that says to me that they've actually killed him off. Poor Adric!

One other thing that occurred to me about the plot was that, if the freighter was travelling back in time, how could there be any guarantee that it would still be locked onto the Earth when it stopped time travelling? The Earth moves. The freighter would have to have stopped travelling in time when the Earth was in exactly the same location (or close enough) as when it started time travelling for it to hit the planet - ie - if events took place in October 2526, it would have to be October 65 million years ago when it stopped. If it were April (for example) then the Earth would be on the other side of the sun and perfectly safe!

But I digress. This whole story was immensely flawed, featured some dodgy dialogue and direction, but it was SO good to see the Cybermen back, and what's a Cyberman story if it isn't riddled with plot holes? It looked great, and the dramatic tension was dialled right up to 11. This hasn't been my favourite story this season, but it certainly continues the variety and experimentalism we've had so far, once more pushing the boundaries (is this the first 'Action Movie' serial we've ever had? I think it may be!), and travelling with the Doctor has suddenly become much less safe and comfortable. On the whole, yet another successful story.