Doctor Who Rewind #3: "Earthshock"

The Rewind is back with a Classic era...classic.

The Review

Even though I consider myself a die-hard Whovian, I've actually only seen a small handful of stories from the original series in their entirety. It's not that I'm not interested or don't find the classic Doctors any good. There's just too many episodes and too little time. When I do decide to sit down and watch one, I tend to look for the ones that I've heard are the best of the crop (ie. Tomb of the Cybermen, Genesis of the Daleks, City of Death, Remembrance of the Daleks, etc.) Earthshock sticks out as my favourite. So far, anyway.

The story sees Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, along with companions Tegan, Nyssa and Adric, encountering a platoon of soldiers combing a mysterious cavern for several missing scientists. The Doctor and company end up uncovering a plot by the Cybermen to wipe out Earth's population by crashing a freighter ship full of powerful explosives into the planet.  

I think I enjoy Earthshock as much as I do because it's quite cinematic. Visually? Not so much. Remember, this is 80's Doctor Who we're talking about. I mean story-wise, it's cinematic. The plot is something out of a sci-fi action adventure film, but it still has the Doctor Who charm. The story is paced reasonably and doesn't drag towards the middle, which is a problem I've had with a few of the classic stories I've seen. This all results in a tale that's actually quite exciting.

The more I see the classic-era Cybermen, the more I prefer them over the modern-era ones. The modern ones are fine, but they're too...robotic, I guess. It sounds dumb, since they're made of metal and called Cybermen, but I think the robot-ness makes us forget that these guys are/were human, and thus we forget what makes them so terrifying. The classic Cybermen, especially in Earthshock, are a lot more threatening. The robot/human hybrid voices and the mouths seen just under their...faces? Helmets? Ah, doesn't matter, Anyways, they make the villains that bit more scarier. Like, that could be you or someone you know under there. Plus, they way they speak, and they way they still emphasize certain words despite being emotionless, give me the impression that these are villains you will never be able to reason or bargain with. It's like trying to argue with a really stubborn guy. You can't win, no matter how right you believe you are. That's something I feel doesn't come across that well with the modern Cybermen.

All in all, Earthshock is a great Doctor Who yarn. It's thrilling, it's got heart, and it has a historic, yet tragic, ending.

The Trivia:

ContinWHOity

• Earthshock was the first appearance of the Cybermen since the Tom Baker story Revenge of the Cybermen. The gap between the two was 7 years.

• The Cybermen's weakness to gold, which was first introduced in Revenge of the Cybermen, is mentioned and exploited. The weakness is later fixed in the Matt Smith episode Nightmare in Silver.

• The Cybermen view footage from their previous encounters with the Doctor. The pieces of footage are from The Tenth Planet (with William Hartnell's First Doctor), The Wheel in Space (with Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor) and Revenge of the Cybermen. 

• Adric attempts to convince the Doctor to return him to E-Space, which the Fourth Doctor travelled to and met Adric in the story Full Circle.

• Adric mentions that Romana, a Time Lady companion of the Fourth Doctor, is still in E-Space,which is where she and the Doctor parted ways in Warrior's Gate.

• At the time, Adric was the third companion to die on the show after Katarina and Sara Kingdom, two companions of the First Doctor.

Other Facts and Tidbits

• Producer John-Nathan Turner went to great lengths to keep the Cybermen's return and Adric's death a secret. He refused to allow the Radio Times, a British TV guide, feature the Cybermen on the cover to promote the story, and gave Adric actor Matthew Waterhouse a credit for the following story, Time-Flight, as a red herring.

• Sentinel was the story's working title.

• Earthshock's fourth episode is the first and only episode of Doctor Who not to have the theme music playing over the credits. Instead, the credits roll in silence over an image of Adric's broken gold star.

• The costume for the Raston Warrior Robot that appears in The Five Doctors is a repainted one that was used for one of the androids seen at the beginning of Earthshock. 

So this is the last Rewind for the summer, but I'd like to churn out one every once in a while while I'm in school, so it's certainly no the very last one. I like the idea of alternating between the classic and modern stories, so the next one will be a modern one, I guess. How about...The Eleventh Hour?

Noah