Wednesday 31 January 2018

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - Torchwood 2.1


In which the Torchwood team pursue an alien Blowfish through the streets of Cardiff. The creature has stolen a sports car, and is high on alcohol and drugs. It abandons the vehicle and runs into a house, taking one of the family there hostage. As the team attempt to negotiate, it becomes clear that the alien will not co-operate. A shot rings out and it falls to the floor dead - a bullet through its brain. Everyone turns to see Jack, his gun raised. He asks if they have missed him...
Back at the Hub, Jack finds that his return has not been universally welcomed. His colleagues are angry that he disappeared without any explanation. In his absence, Gwen has become the de facto team leader - and she is now engaged to Rhys. An alarm sounds, indicating Rift activity in the area. On the upper level of a multi-storey car park a uniformed figure emerges from the Rift. A mugger is robbing someone close by. The man intervenes, and the mugger is thrown to his death. Torchwood trace the man to a nearby bar, where he has forced everyone to flee. Jack orders his colleagues to stand back. He and the man embrace passionately, then start a fist fight, before having a drink together. Jack introduces everyone to his old Time Agency colleague Captain John Hart.


Back at the Hub, John manages to offend everyone before revealing why he has come here. He claims that a number of powerful bombs have been scattered around Cardiff, which must be found in the next few hours before they detonate. The team agree to split up to search for the devices. Owen will accompany Tosh to a large warehouse, Jack and Ianto will go to an office block, and John will go with Gwen to the container terminal at the docks. The device at the docks is located hidden in one of the containers. However, John uses a toxic paralysing drug on Gwen, and leaves her locked in the container, throwing away her phone. He goes to the warehouse, where he shoots and wounds Owen before removing the second device. At the office block, he locates Jack on the roof - and throws him off. Owen's wounds are not serious, and he and Tosh locate Ianto. They go to the docks and manage to find Gwen in time to stop the toxin.


John now has all three of the devices, and he returns with them to the Hub. However, the team are all waiting for him. John is shocked to see that Jack is still alive. He is forced to give the real explanation of what the devices are. It transpires that they are the components to a machine that will tell him where a fabulous treasure is located. He and a partner had been searching for this, but she is now dead. The machine is assembled, and a hologram appears - a message from the dead partner. She explains that she knew that John would betray her, so she left a trap. Instead of giving the treasure's location, the device attaches itself to John's chest, homing in on his DNA. It is a bomb, which will explode in a few minutes. John handcuffs himself to Gwen. If the team don't save him, she will die as well. They return to the roof of the car park where John first arrived. If the worst comes to the worst, he will be thrown back into the Rift to save the city. Owen has collected blood samples from the whole team, and he mixes them together and injects them into John. This confuses the bomb, as his DNA has altered, and the device falls off. It is thrown into the Rift and explodes, resetting time to the moment when John first arrived. He is allowed to depart back through the Rift. However, he leaves a message for Jack - telling him that he has found someone called Gray, which shocks Jack...


Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was written by Chris Chibnall, and was first broadcast on 16th January 2008. Following the success of the first series, Torchwood would now be broadcast on BBC 2 instead of the more niche BBC 3. The episode shows Jack's return to his team after his sojourn with the Doctor and Martha in the concluding three episodes of Doctor Who's third season. Their lack of involvement in the events of The Sound of Drums had been explained in that episode, when the Master told Jack that he had sent his friends off on a wild goose chase to the Himalayas.
Some time must have passed since End of Days, as Gwen has now become engaged to boyfriend Rhys.
We begin to learn a little more about Jack's background, as we are introduced to a fellow Time Agent - another Captain called John Hart (Buffy's James Marsters). He is a sort of anti-Jack - funny, sexy but totally untrustworthy. He is heavily armed, and wears an odd mix of military uniform elements. Marsters had contacted the production team as he wanted to appear in the programme - and it was well known that Buffy was one of the shows Russell T Davies wanted to model his new version of Doctor Who on. There is also mention of Gray - whose identity and fate will be revealed mid-season, before he makes a devastating appearance in the series finale.
Torchwood have never made their presence in Cardiff very secret, driving around the city in a big black SUV with the word "Torchwood" stamped on it. During the opening car chase, a woman crossing the road after encountering the Blowfish mutters "Bloody Torchwood...".


The Blowfish is one of those aliens common to RTD stories, where a new creature is simply a humanoid with an animal's head - in this case a lion fish, inspired by the film Finding Nemo. All we know of them is that they are irresponsible thrill-seekers. We will see one more of their kind - which meets the same fate as this one - later in the series, before they finally turn up as part of the Pandorica Alliance, rather bizarrely.
The story title derives from James Bond - in particular the movie Thunderball. That film's title song was originally going to be called "Mr Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang".


Overall, it is a promising start to the new series - funny and fast. Someone like Captain John is just the sort of character who was missing from the first season.
Things you might like to know:

  • A little more on the Bond connection. Thunderball features a nightclub called Club Kiss Kiss. An Italian journalist had described the cinema Bond as "Mr Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang". The film had this as its title song, as we've said - sung initially by Cardiff's own Shirley Bassey. This version was deemed not quite right, so it was re-recorded by Dionne Warwick, with a longer instrumental part. The producers were still not happy, so a new song was composed, called "Thunderball" and sung by that other great Welsh export Tom Jones. 
  • It was originally intended that Captain John would first appear from the Rift riding a pan-dimensional surf-board - as had first featured in Boom Town. It was decided that it would be cooler if he just simply strode out onto the car park roof.
  • Barrowman and Marsters did almost all of their own stunts in the bar-room sequence, which took a whole day to shoot. Marsters had learned a lot of martial arts for his role as Spike in Buffy and Angel.
  • John lets Torchwood know where he is by sending a hologram message to Jack's Vortex Manipulator - thus facilitating a Star Wars reference as he says "Help me, Obi-Wan...".
  • John is somewhat disappointed with the name "Torchwood" and suggests some alternative titles. One of these is "Excalibur" - which is what Torchwood was originally going to be called.
  • Russell T Davies was going to write this episode and got as far as the opening Blowfish in a sports car pre-titles sequence before he handed it over to Chibnall.

Monday 29 January 2018

D is for... Dalek Drones


Dalek nanotechnology allowed human beings to become their slaves. Their personalities were overwritten, and they were given built-in Dalek technology in the shape of an eye-stalk which could emerge from the forehead, and an energy weapon that could emerge from their hand. One of these drones was the woman who used to be Darla von Karlsen. She was sent to trap the Doctor, luring him to Skaro. She claimed to have escaped from a Dalek prison camp and wanted the Doctor to rescue her daughter. Other drones were sent to capture companions Amy and Rory. She was taken by her make-up assistant, Cassandra, and he by a converted bus driver. Their capture was required as the Daleks needed the Doctor to infiltrate the planet which they used as their asylum, housing all of their war-damaged kin.
The planet's atmosphere was full of the nanogenes which converted people into drones, unless protected by a special wrist-mounted control.


The Doctor and Amy met a young man named Harvey who claimed to be a survivor of a crashed Earth vessel. However, he had memories of dying in the crash. He and his skeletal colleagues were reanimated by the nanotechnology. One of them stole Amy's wrist control. She and Rory argued over which of them should get his control before she could become converted, until they discovered that the Doctor had secretly given his unit to her.


During the final stages of the war for Trenzalore, the Daleks defeated the Church of the Papal Mainframe and converted all of its personnel into drones. This included Silents as well as humans. The leader of the Church, Tasha Lem, was able to fight against the mental conditioning and attack the Daleks, allowing the Doctor to escape down to the planet. She later took the TARDIS to Earth to fetch Clara and bring her to the Doctor when he was dying of old age.


When Davros sent his servant Colony Sarff in search of the Doctor, finally locating him hiding out in Medieval England, the Daleks converted his friend Bors into a drone in order that he might locate the TARDIS for them.

Played by: Anamaria Marinca (Darla von Karlsen), Naomi Ryan (Cassandra), David Gyasi (Harvey), Orla Brady (Tasha Lem), Daniel Hoffmann-Hill (Bors).
Appearances: Asylum of the Daleks (2012), The Time of the Doctor (2013), The Magician's Apprentice (2015).

D is for... Dalek Caan


One of the members of the Cult of Skaro, a quartet of Daleks who were assigned to devise new strategies to help win the Time War against the Time Lords and their allies. Allowed names, they had complete freedom to think up ways of winning the conflict, answerable only to themselves. Sensing that they were on the brink of defeat, the Cult removed themselves from the War by hiding in a Void Ship, taking with them a captured Time Lord prison capsule. They dubbed this the Genesis Ark, as once opened it would unleash a whole new army of Daleks. The ship was captured by the Torchwood Institute in London after it emerged from a breach between two parallel universes. The Cult emerged just as the Earth was being invaded by an army of Cybermen who had crossed the Void in the ship's wake. Caan and his colleagues used an emergency temporal shift to escape being pulled into the Void along with their army and the Cybermen.
They arrived in New York in the early 20th Century. Hiding in the city's sewers, they infiltrated the construction of the Empire State Building, intending to use it to capture a massive gamma radiation flare that was due to strike the planet. This energy would be used to fuse Dalek and human DNA to create an army of human-Dalek hybrids. The Cult's leader, Sec, experimented on himself to create a full Dalek-Human hybrid. Caan and his colleagues Jast and Thay were appalled by this development, feeling that Sec was no longer pure Dalek and therefore unfit to lead them. They rebelled against him. Caan remained behind at their base, linked to their battle computers, whilst Jast and Thay took Sec to confront the Doctor at a nearby theatre. The Doctor's DNA had become mixed with the Dalek and human DNA, so that the army no longer blindly followed Dalek commands. They turned on Jast and Thay after Sec had sacrificed himself to save the Doctor. Both Daleks were destroyed, but Caan self-destructed the army. Now the last survivor of the Dalek race, the Doctor confronted him, hoping that it would allow him to take it away from Earth. Instead, Caan activated a further temporal shift and fled.


This second shift took him back into the heart of the Time War. He was able to rescue Davros from his command ship just before it was destroyed. The effort smashed open Caan's casing, and left him mentally unsound. He began to have visions and to speak in prophesies. Davros created a new Dalek army from his own cells, led by a new Dalek Supreme. The Supreme regarded Caan as an abomination, but chose to keep him alive in a vault alongside their creator. Caan appeared to be predicting Dalek victory and the defeat of the Doctor, but what he had really seen was the evil of his own race and their inevitable destruction. He was secretly engineering the defeat of his own kind.
One of Caan's prophesies had revolved around Donna Noble - that she would bring about the Daleks' destruction, but at the cost of her own life. Caan was destroyed when the Dalek Crucible was blown up by Donna and the half-human Doctor. Donna did indeed die as a result, in that the Doctor had to wipe her memories and restore the personality she had before she met him.

Appearances: The Army of Ghosts / Doomsday (2006), Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks (2007), The Stolen Earth / Journey's End (2008).

D is for... Dahh-Ren


A bald, blue-skinned humanoid who was one of the crew members of Chasm Forge, a deep space mining station. This was run by Ganymede Systems, and they had decided that the operations were not cost effective. As such, they had programmed the crew's spacesuits to conserve oxygen by killing their occupants with an electric shock. He survived as his suit had been off-line when they were programmed to kill. No stranger to racism herself, Bill Potts was inadvertently offensive towards him because of his blue skin. He did not like being called "Darren" either. Dahh-Ren was killed when his suit electrocuted him.

Played by: Peter Caulfield. Appearances: Oxygen (2017).

  • Dahh-Ren appears to belong to the same race as the janitor Jorj who we met on the Mondasian colony ship in The World Enough and Time. Other notable blue-skinned aliens include Dorium Maldovar, though he does not seem to be of the same species as he does not have the same yellow eyes. A closer match are the peoples of Crespallion, as seen in The End of the World, though they tended to decorate their skin with tattoos.

D is for... D84


D84 appeared to be a black Dum-Class robot based on Storm Mine 4. This vast mobile mineral refinery was crossing an inhospitable alien desert, seeking valuable ores. Both the Doctor and Leela became suspicious of D84 as he did not act like other robots. When confronted, he revealed that he was really a government agent, working in partnership with a human operative named Poul. Both had been placed on the Mine in order to try to identify a criminal named Taren Capel, a scientific genius who was attempting to foment a robot revolution. Unfortunately Poul suffered a mental breakdown when confronted by evidence that robots could be made to kill. The softly spoken D84 then allied himself with the Doctor to continue the investigations. As a robot, he tended to take everything that the Doctor said quite literally. The Doctor devised a scheme to disable all the robots, and made it clear to D84 that it would destroy him as well if he were present when it was activated. The robot SV7 attacked D84 with a Laserson Probe. Badly damaged, D84 was able to activate the Doctor's device, sacrificing himself to destroy all the robots which Capel had converted.

Played by: Gregory de Polnay. Appearances: The Robots of Death (1977).

C is for... Cyber Shades


When a group of Cybermen escaped from the Void between universes to Victorian London, they had little resources with which to work. They had to make do with the technology available to them, and created Cyber Shades by converting animals. These creatures were shrouded in black robes, with crude face masks made from beaten copper. The Cyber Shades were used as guards in the construction of the Cyber King, keeping the young slave labour force in check, and they were also employed to spy on the local area. They were used to attack and capture some of the mourners at a funeral, as the Cybermen wanted the heads of the local workhouses under their control in order to increase their labour force. Having been converted from animals, they had remarkable agility, capable to clambering up the sides of buildings at great speed. They were all destroyed when Miss Hartigan self-destructed, wrecking the Cyber King.

Appearances: The Next Doctor (2008).

C is for... Cyber Planner


During the Cybermen's attempt to take over the W3 space station, they made use of a Cyber Planner. This was a communications device linked to their command network, which enabled the Cybermen on the station to update and adjust their plans. One of the human captives who had been mentally conditioned by the Cybermen was ordered to picture in his mind all of the people on the Wheel, and these images were scanned by the Cyber Planner in order to identify the person who seemed to be anticipating their plans and preventing their success. This, of course, proved to be the Doctor. As with all Cyber technology, the Planner appeared to have organic components.


When the Cyberman invasion of Earth was being organised with the co-operation of industrialist Tobias Vaughn, he was given instructions on how to build a Planner, to be housed in a secret compartment at his London HQ. This was dubbed the Cyber Director, but fulfilled the same functions as the Planner. Again, it had organic material in its construction. When forced to destroy it after the Cybermen threatened to destroy the planet, Vaughn commented that it felt like he had killed a living creature.


The Cybermen attempted to create a new Cyber Planner on the planet where Hedgewick's World of Wonders had been established. At first they were going to harness the imagination and creativity of children - Clara's wards Artie and Angie - but they then decided to use the Doctor instead. Previously, Time Lord biology had been incompatible for conversion, but this had changed. Using the Doctor also meant that the Cybermen could gain the knowledge of the Time Lords to add to their own Cyberiad network. The Doctor had to fight a mental duel with that part of his mind that had been taken over by the Cyber Planner, whom he dubbed Mr Clever. The two played a game of chess to see who would win outright control. Gold could disable the Cyber components grafted onto the Doctor. In order to solve the chess problem, the Planner had to make use of the processing power of the entire Cyberman army, giving Clara and the others enough time to defeat them. A powerful electrical shock burnt out the Cyber components and rid the Doctor of Mr Clever.

Appearances: The Wheel In Space (1968), The Invasion (1968), Nightmare in Silver (2013).

Thursday 25 January 2018

Inspirations - The Web of Fear


The inspiration for this story is pretty straightforward, as it's a sequel. Sequels in the classic run of Doctor Who were, however, a very rare event. Some monsters and characters make return appearances - the Daleks, Cybermen and the Meddling Monk for instance - but only the latter of these was in any way a sequel, in that the Monk was specifically out to get revenge for what the Doctor did to him in his previous story. A sequel has to be a continuation of a storyline, or have a plot which directly shows the consequences of events and outcomes which occurred in the previous episodes.
Before we take a closer look at the story itself, a quick word about changes going on behind the scenes, for there are several things happening here.
Innes Lloyd has now stepped down as producer, and Peter Bryant has taken over that role full time, after getting a shot at it with Tomb of the Cybermen. Replacing Bryant as script editor is Derrick Sherwin, who will be with the programme in one capacity or another up until the advent of the Jon Pertwee era. Sherwin brings an assistant along. You won't see his name on the closing credits, but this is the first story to have input from Terrance Dicks. Victor Pemberton, who had also been trialed on Tomb, was offered the chance to become full time script editor, but declined. He'll write the next story, however.


The Web of Fear is written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, and was commissioned on the strength of their earlier contribution The Abominable Snowmen. In fact, it was commissioned before that story had even been broadcast, such was the enthusiasm of Lloyd and Bryant. The writers were asked to come up with a rematch featuring the Yeti and the Great Intelligence, and a reunion for the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria with Prof Edward Travers.
Another adventure in the mountains of Tibet was ruled out, as that scenario had been thoroughly mined, so the writers chose to set it in contemporary London. The UNIT dating controversy really kicks into gear here, as the earlier story was said to have taken place in 1935, and Travers claims that was 40 years ago - making this circa 1975. Were we to take this as gospel, then every Brigadier-UNIT story takes place in a 12 - 18 month window. If you like to think that all the novels and short story anthologies are canon then beware, because they say this story takes place in 1966, 1968, 1969 or 1975.
The truth is on screen the whole time, as we see movie posters for films that were in the cinema in the winter of 1967/8, and there is also the small matter of the Underground map, showing the network as it was then, and not as it was in the mid 1970's. I'll also draw your attention to the tin with the Tube map on the lid which the Doctor brandishes in The Snowmen.


Episode One sees one of the Tibetan Yetis ensconced in the private museum of Julius Silverstein (who is painted in very broad stereotyped hues). Initial drafts were going to have these scenes take place in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. No explanation is given on screen for its transformation into a slimline "Mark II" version, even when the difference in remarked upon. From a production point of view, the change was because director Douglas Camfield wanted to make them less cuddly and more scary. They now have glowing eyes, as they are going to be doing a lot of lurching in the darkened Underground tunnels, and he also wants them to roar. They were silent in their last outing. This is how we know that Terrance Dicks has come on board, as one of his oft-repeated anecdotes on many of the DVD extras is how they used the sound of a flushing lavatory to help get the roar. Camfield gets referenced in the 2013 telesnap reconstruction for the still AWOL Episode Three. The chocolate bar which Driver Evans takes from a vending machine is labeled Camfield's Dairy Milk Chocolate - a play on Cadbury's famous brand, The BBC's ban on product placement extends to a poster for the film In The Heat of the Night, which they have re-titled "Block-Buster". Another production in-house reference to look out for is the name of the commanding officer of the Fortress who has been killed off screen before the action starts - Colonel Pemberton.


Talk of commanding officers brings us neatly to the first appearance in the programme of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, who turns up in Episode Three. He is only a Colonel when he gets introduced here, belonging to a Scottish regiment, and his full name won't be heard for a year or two yet. Nicholas Courtney was part of Camfield's regular pool of actors. He had been in reserve to play King Richard in The Crusade had Julian Glover turned the part down, and Camfield later gave him the role of Bret Vyon in The Daleks' Master Plan. For The Web of Fear, Camfield had cast him as the doomed Captain Knight, with the role of Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart going to David Langton. Langton had to withdraw, so Courtney was quite literally promoted - and the rest is Doctor Who history.
The Colonel was inspired by Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell - known as "Mad Mitch" - who in July 1967 had led the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in action in Aden, going into battle accompanied by 15 pipers. Photos show him wearing the same sort of tartan-trimmed Glengarry hat which Lethbridge-Stewart sports, so viewers at the time would have known exactly where the inspiration came from.


Another character whom the viewers might have recognised is journalist Harold Chorley. He is a smarmy and unctuous individual, and people might have been put in mind of David Frost. He had come to prominence during the satire boom of the early 1960's, presenting That Was The Week That Was, having previously been a member of the Cambridge Footlights group which spawned many a British comic genius. Peter Cook thought that Frost tended to steal others' ideas - dubbing him "the bubonic plagiarist". Visually, Chorley has the look of Robin Day about him. Day was for many years the BBC's political Grand Inquisitor. He sported thick rimmed spectacles and a bow tie (when they weren't at all cool).
 Much of the action centres of the Goodge Street Fortress. The most famous of the World War II bunkers in London is Churchill's Cabinet War Rooms built beneath Whitehall, which are open to the public and run by the Imperial War Museum. Churchill had another, rarely used, bunker built away from the city centre, up in Dollis Hill. The Admiralty had their "Citadel" which you can see beside Horseguards Parade just off The Mall. A number of tunnels linked these bunkers to the Underground network. There really was a bunker at Goodge Street. It is now The Eisenhower Centre, entrance on Chenies Street, and houses a D-Day museum. Eisenhower was never actually based there, it being used as an Allied communications hub.


The idea of London being shrouded by a mysterious and deadly fog would appeal to overseas viewers, as they were always being led to believe that London looked like this all the time. We have the Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper films, plus a number of Gothic pot-boilers (usually starring Stewart Grainger) to thank for this notion. In the USA TV viewers were still being presented with this image of London in the 1980's. I refer you to an episode of Murder She Wrote, where Angela Lansbury plays Jessica Fletcher's look-a-like English cousin, as just one example. Up until we introduced smoke-free coal varieties we did have what was known as the "London Particular" - a sulfurous smog which killed thousands every winter. Also known as a "pea-souper" these annual fogs hit crisis point in 1952 with the Great Smog, in which some 12,000 people are thought to have died in only a few days.
Lastly, it may just be a coincidence, but two of the Fortress personnel are named Arnold and Lane.
Pink Floyd's song "Arnold Layne" had been a hit for them in March 1967, so might still have been ear-worming the writers of The Web of Fear. It's a song about a man who steals women's underwear, and was supposed to be based on a real person. It has nothing to do with robot Yeti, as far as I know.
Next time: Victoria screams her way out of the show after an encounter with not so deadly seaweed, as Victor Pemberton raids a BBC radio drama for inspiration. It's okay though, as it is his own BBC radio drama...

Tuesday 23 January 2018

Invasion of the Bane - Sarah Jane Adventures: Pilot


In which schoolgirl Maria Jackson and her father move into a new home on Bannerman Road in Ealing, West London. They have moved house as Maria's parents - Alan and Chrissie - have recently divorced. She notices a large house opposite. When the owner emerges she is very abrupt with them, not wishing to get into conversation. She does introduce herself, however - journalist Sarah Jane Smith. That night, Maria sees strange lights coming from Sarah's garden and she sneaks across the road to see what is happening. She spies Sarah with an alien creature, which hands her something before flying off into space. Maria goes home, intending to keep what she has seen a secret from her dad. The next day a girl named Kelsey turns up at the house to say hello. She insists that Maria accompany her to the Bubble Shock! factory. This new soft drink has taken the nation by storm, but Maria does not like it. Regular bus tours go to the factory, where visitors can look round and get free samples. At the factory, everyone is ordered to turn off their mobile phones by a young man named Davey. Maria does not like the way he continually tries to push the drink onto people. She spots Sarah, and wanders away from the tour group.


Sarah has come to interview the manager - Miss Wormwood. She tells her that she has tried to analyse the drink, but found that it contains ingredients which can't be recognised. She comments on Miss Wormwood's name - in the Bible it refers to a star that will fall to Earth and fill the world with bitterness. She knows that Miss Wormwood is an alien - and Miss Wormwood knows that she knows. After she has left, scans reveal that Sarah has residual traces of Artron Energy - meaning that she has travelled through time and space. Miss Wormwood orders that she be prevented from leaving the factory. Maria meanwhile has found a boy in a medical bay in a secure part of the building. Kelsey uses her phone, which triggers an alarm. The boy wakes up and Maria decides to take him to safety - and encounters Sarah. Sarah uses her sonic lipstick to get them out of the factory. Kelsey finds herself in Miss Wormwood's office, where she reveals her true form - that of a huge squid-like creature. She is an alien Bane. She scans Kelsey's mind and learns the location of Sarah's home. Davey is sent to kill Sarah, and to retrieve the boy.
At Sarah's house, the boy proves to be only a few hours old, yet looks like he is almost a teenager. He also lacks a navel. He can learn rapidly. Sarah is forced to tell Maria that she investigates aliens, and tells her of her time with UNIT and with the Doctor. In her attic is her study, and behind one of the walls is a supercomputer which she calls Mr Smith. A safe contains a portal to a black hole which is being held in check by K9. When Kelsey turns up - her memories of what happened in Miss Wormwood's office wiped - they realise that the Bane know where to find them, as Davey had given her a lift. He arrives and reverts to his natural tentacled form. Sarah uses an alien gas to chase him away.


Back at the factory, Davey is killed for his failure. Miss Wormwood decides to advance her plans. Bubble Shock! contains extract of Bane and is deliberately addictive. When a signal is transmitted from the factory, those who drink it will fall under the mental control of the Bane. The boy was genetically created from the DNA and memories of all the visitors to the factory in order to develop the drink's addictive properties. The signal is sent, and everyone is zombified - lurching through the streets forcing the drink onto those unaffected. Sarah decides that they must go to the factory to stop the Bane. They break in and discover that hidden within the compound is the Bane Mother - a huge specimen of the race. It is susceptible to mobile phone signals. Sarah has with her the object which had been given to her by the alien in the garden. This was a star poet, and the object is a communications device. The boy uses this to boost the signal from Maria's mobile phone, and this destroys the Bane Mother. They flee the factory before it explodes, but Miss Wormwood is able to make her escape before the blast. Those affected by the drink wake up, unaware of what has just happened.
Back at Bannerman Road, Sarah has Mr Smith plant a false story in the news to cover up the incident. She decides to adopt the boy as her son, and he takes the name Luke. Maria is now part of her secret world, investigating aliens and helping to defend the Earth. As much as she enjoyed travelling with the Doctor, Sarah knows that the Earth can be just as interesting and exciting, having come to terms with her life back home after meeting the Doctor again the year before.


Invasion of the Bane was co-written by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts, and was first broadcast on New Years Day 2007. The Sarah Jane Adventures were created by Davies as the second spin-off from Doctor Who after Torchwood. Whilst Torchwood had been targeted at more adult viewers, The SJA were aimed squarely at the younger ones.
The inspiration had come from Elisabeth Sladen's highly successful return as Sarah Jane Smith in Series 2's School Reunion. Sarah would now fight aliens on the streets of London, carrying on the work of the Doctor. She is joined only briefly by K9. He is stuck in a safe monitoring a black hole which threatens the Earth - caused by a scientific experiment going wrong. This is merely a cameo appearance, as K9 was about to get his own independent spin-off series developed by co-creator Bob Baker, to be filmed in Australia. In his place we are introduced to the supercomputer Mr Smith, voiced by Alexander Armstrong. Sarah has been very much a loner, who never settled down with a partner. She suddenly finds herself a mother to Luke, and a surrogate one to Maria, whose own mother has gone off with her dance instructor and split up the family. Sarah has her own Doctor-ish gadgets, including a sonic device, in the shape of her sonic lipstick. She has a scanner built into her wristwatch as well.


Her attic study is full of references back to Doctor Who - with pictures of the TARDIS and photos of the Brigadier and Harry Sullivan (whom she fondly recalls, in a manner which suggests that he is no longer with us). For some reason she has a blueprint for a Jagaroth spaceship as well. In trying to come up with a name for the boy, she briefly considers Alistair and Harry.
The character of Kelsey (Porsha Lawrence-Mavour) would not survive to the full series (mercifully, as she is totally annoying). The regulars who do get to stay on are Yasmin Paige (Maria), Tommy Knight (Luke), and Maria's parents - Joseph Millson (Alan) and Juliet Cowan (Chrissie).
The guest star is former Miss Moneypenny Samantha Bond as Miss Wormwood, with Jamie Davis playing Davey.


Overall, it is a cracking start to what will prove to be a wonderful series, at times much more like the original run of Doctor Who than the newer episodes. Its target audience is clear from the beginning, but it never talks down to them.
Things you might like to know:

  • The black hole K9 is monitoring is said to have originated in Switzerland. This is a reference to the CERN project, which some people feared might cause such a thing to happen. It has featured in a Torchwood radio serial, broadcast to coincide with its inauguration, as well as making an appearance in Extremis, though this was in the artificial construct created by the Monks.
  • The Star Poet is a reused CGI creation from the Torchwood episode Greeks Bearing Gifts.
  • The Bane Mother was originally created as an audition piece by effects company The Mill, in order to get the CGI contract for Doctor Who. It was based on the Nestene creature as it appeared on the cover of the Terror of the Autons Target novelisation.
  • People affected by Bubble Shock! have an orange glow round their heads - the same effect as used for those mentally enslaved by the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion where it was blue.
  • We see the presenters of Blue Peter endorsing the drink on screen. Blue Peter had previously featured in Aliens of London, where the presenters were inspired to make a spaceship cake. This scene was designed to show just how much impact Bubble Shock! was having on the country, as the BBC are not allowed to endorse any products other than their own, especially in children's TV.
  • It was originally intended that the series would be set in Croydon, South London, as this was where Sarah had said she lived back in The Hand of Fear. However, the 1981 K9 and Company special had established that this house had been sold.
  • Instead of Davey attacking Sarah and her friends at her home, it was originally intended that another species of alien would be sent, hidden in a parcel. This idea was later used in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith.
  • Gareth Roberts had previously created a drink called Bubbleshake for one of his Virgin New Adventures novels - "The Highest Science".
  • Before Davies settled on the continuing adventures of Sarah Jane Smith, he had been asked to develop a series about the teenage Doctor for CBBC.

Monday 22 January 2018

C is for... Cybermen (Telosian)


At some point prior to the destruction of Mondas in 1986, the Cybermen sent parties out into space to establish  colonies. These Cybermen were explorers and warriors, and so were redesigned for this purpose. They had to survive without recourse to a power supply on their home planet, and their bodies were sleeker and streamlined, with a more armoured appearance. They had a more compact chest unit and the head was now encased in a solid helmet, with the lamp-fitting now built in. Cybermen from different colony worlds evolved their design separately, leading to the diversity in looks encountered by the Doctor over the years. The planet which became the new home for the Cybermen after the fall of Mondas was Telos, and this is where their Controller based himself. Other colonies were established on Planet 14 and on Marinus.


In the year 2070, the Cybermen launched an attack on the Earth. They used a weather control base on the Moon as their bridgehead. This housed a gravity-influencing machine called the Gravitron, which moved air pressure zones around the Earth's surface to control the weather. The Cybermen landed a saucer-shaped spacecraft in a nearby crater and broke into the base, introducing a neurotropic virus into the sugar supply. Victims of the virus collapsed into a coma, with black lines visible on the skin following the nerves beneath. The affected men were then abducted from the sickbay and taken to the saucer to be mentally conditioned to obey Cyber control impulses. The Cybermen were unable to withstand the gravitational forces generated by the Gravitron, and needed these mental slaves to operate the device for them. The Doctor and his companions Ben, Polly and Jamie arrived on the Moon at this time. Despite the change in design, Polly recognised the Cyberman which came into the sickbay to kidnap one of the patients.


The Doctor was able to trace the virus but the Cybermen took over the base, using the enslaved personnel to wreak havoc on the planet with the Gravitron. The Doctor deduced their reason for employing the men. In the sickbay, Polly worked out that the Cybermen had plastic components in their chest units, and these would be susceptible to a solvent such as she used to remove her nail varnish. A cocktail of chemicals was poured into some fire extinguishers, and these were used to destroy the Cybermen in the base. The Cybermen then launched an all-out attack across the lunar surface, employing a huge laser cannon to breach the Moonbase dome. The Doctor used the Gravitron to deflect further attacks, and the machine was then brought to bear on the Cybermen and their spacecraft - sending them hurtling into space. In this instance, the Cybermen had not intended to invade the planet to live there. They merely wanted to mine it for its mineral wealth in order to survive.


Some 500 years later, the TARDIS materialised on the planet Telos, and the Doctor encountered an archaeological expedition from Earth which had come to excavate the tombs of the Cybermen, as the creatures had vanished from the galaxy. Financing the party was Eric Klieg and his partner Kaftan. Klieg was a member of the Brotherhood of Logicians, and he secretly wanted to revive the Cybermen in order to enter into a pact with them - forcing the Earth to submit to their philosophy. The Cybermen were not dead. They had committed themselves to frozen hibernation as their resources were spent. Their tombs were laid with traps which the party had to negotiate - the Cybermen wanting suitable persons to convert. The Doctor met their Controller, and encountered Cybermats, which were small metallic lifeforms which the Cybermen employed as weapons. These Cybermen had to recharge themselves with electrical power, using a large sarcophagus-shaped recharge unit. The Cybermen were forced back into their tombs, and the Doctor had the complex re-sealed. The Controller appeared to have been killed as the main doors were re-electrified, though one of the Cybermats was still active. These Cybermen were of a similar design to the ones which had attacked the Moonbase five centuries earlier, with only a different boot design and a different arrangement of cabling around their bodies.


At some point in the mid 21st Century, the Cybermen attempted another assault on the Earth, this time using a space station - the Wheel - as their bridgehead. A supply rocket named the Silver Carrier was captured by the Cybermen and its servo-robot was programmed to pilot it into close proximity to the Wheel, with a pair of Cybermen hidden on board. Cybermats were then sent across to the station to infiltrate it and destroy its supply of bernalium fuel rods. These were vital for the station's defences, as they powered its X-ray laser weapon. A shower of meteoroids were then deflected onto a collision course with the Wheel. The station crew were forced to send a couple of crew members across to the rocket to fetch its bernalium stocks. These men were placed under the mental control of the Cybermen, and were used to smuggle them onto the Wheel. The Cybermen planned to poison the station's air supply with ozone, killing the crew and then using the station to provide a homing signal for their invasion ship, but they had not reckoned on the presence of the Doctor. These Cybermen could be killed by firing quick-setting plastic into their chest units, or by means of a powerful electrical charge. Station medic Gemma Corwin sacrificed herself to alert the Doctor to the ozone poisoning plan, and he was able to have the air supply switched over to a source which the Cybermen could not access. With their scouts destroyed, the Cybermen attempted to space walk to the Wheel, but the crew were able to repel them into space, and the Doctor had the time-vector generator from the TARDIS linked to the X-ray laser to boost its power - destroying the approaching Cybership.
These Cybermen resembled the ones previously encountered by the Doctor and Jamie, but they had much more streamlined bodies, and the eyes and mouth pieces on their helmets now had a teardrop-like duct.


Some years before Mondas returned to the solar system, another group of Cybermen launched an invasion of the Earth after forming an alliance with the industrialist Tobias Vaughn. He allowed them to give him a cybernetic body, then permitted his factory compound in the English countryside to be used to stockpile a massive army of dormant Cybermen. These were then transferred to the sewer system beneath Vaughn's London HQ where they were reanimated to await the beginning of the invasion. The Cybermen established a base on the dark side of the Moon. Vaughn wanted to take control of the operation, and developed a machine called the Cerebretron Mentor which generated emotional impulses. It had been invented by Professor Watkins as a teaching machine, and Vaughn had the scientist abducted to work for him. The newly formed UNIT - United Nations Intelligence Taskforce - were investigating Vaughn and his company, International Electromatics. The Doctor became involved when he tried to visit his old friend Prof Edward Travers - only to find he had left the country and was renting his home to Watkins. Watkins' niece Isobel alerted the Doctor to his disappearance, and he and Jamie were reunited with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart on leaving Vaughn's HQ building - having first met him as a Colonel with the army during the second Yeti invasion attempt.


These Cybermen, who knew of the Doctor from Plant 14, were of a similar design to the ones who had attempted to take over the Wheel, except that they now had a different helmet design, with earmuff like panels on the side. The invasion plan depended on special micro-monolithic circuits which Vaughn's company had placed in all their electronic devices. A signal would be beamed from a Cybership in space which would activate these circuits, which would in turn cause the world's population to fall into a comatose state, removing any resistance. The Doctor knew how to combat this effect after his experience of the creatures on the Wheel, and so was able to protect the Brigadier's men and his companions. The army were able to shoot down the invading Cyberships with missiles. The Cybermen decided instead to wipe out all life on the planet by dropping a massive bomb. Vaughn was forced to co-operate with the Doctor to destroy their homing beacon, and the bomb and the spaceship which delivered it were blown up.


One of the Planet 14 Cybermen could be seen as an exhibit in the Miniscope belonging to the Lurman showman Vorg, and it was this version which the Doctor showed to the Time Lords at his trial, to illustrate the evils in the universe which he had battled against.
A great war was fought between Earth forces and the Cybermen around the 27th Century. The Cybermen were defeated when the humans discovered that they were vulnerable to gold. This non-corrosive metal plated their breathing systems and suffocated them. A weapon known as the glitter-gun was developed, using gold obtained from the planet Voga, which had rich deposits of the metal. The last of the Cybermen attacked and blew up Voga before disappearing from the galaxy to regroup. Voga was not entirely destroyed however. The core of the planet survived, containing the deep shelters which harboured the Vogan peoples. Voga drifted into the solar system, becoming a satellite of Jupiter.


A small party of Cybermen led by a Cyber Leader were alerted to its survival, and decided to complete its destruction. They employed a human agent - an exographer named Kellman who was stationed on a navigation beacon in orbit around Voga - to spread a virus using a Cybermat. Three crewmen were to be left alive, as they would be used to carry powerful bombs to the heart of Voga. Kellman was a double agent, however, in the pay of the Vogan militia leader Vorus to lure the Cybermen onto the beacon - to be destroyed by a missile which Vorus had built. The Cybermen took over the beacon, and the Doctor was forced to travel down to the planet's interior with crewmen Stevenson and Lester to plant the bombs. The Cybermen could not do this themselves due to the heavy concentration of gold. This distorted the Cybermen's tracking systems, allowing the Doctor and Lester to double back and use the bombs to destroy their Cyberman guards. With the bomb ploy ruined, the Cyber Leader decided instead to load the beacon with more of the weapons and send it on a collision course with Voga. The Doctor was able to put the beacon back into its orbit, and the Vogan missile was redirected to destroy the departing Cybership.
These Cybermen had been of similar appearance to the Planet 14 troops, but with corrugated ridges to the helmet handlebars and to the knee and elbow joints, and with thicker hydraulic cabling to the limbs. The Cyber Leader was distinguished by black markings to the helmet, and they had a new type of Cybermat, with an elongated serpentine body.


When the Doctor next encountered the Cybermen it was a point just before the Cyberwar. In 2526, the Earth forces had organised a conference to forge an alliance against them, and the Cybermen decided to prevent this. A powerful bomb was placed close to the conference site, hidden deep in a cave system and guarded by a pair of android sentinels. These androids destroyed a paleontological expedition, attracting the attention of Earth security forces. The TARDIS materialised in the same cave system close to where the bomb was located. The Doctor helped the security forces deal with the androids, then he set about disarming the device. The Cybermen were based on a space freighter which was approaching the planet, its hold containing thousands of dormant Cybermen who would be reactivated and sent down to attack the planet once the bomb had been detonated. The Cyber Leader attempted to override the Doctor's tamperings, but failed, and the bomb was defused. Unaware of who was behind the bomb attack, the Doctor took the TARDIS to the freighter. The Cybermen knew he was coming, having recognised the TARDIS, and they were able to access information about their previous encounters with him.


Now that the bomb had been disabled, the Cyber Leader decided to crash the freighter into the planet instead. Its navigational systems were hijacked, and the Leader forced the Doctor to take him in the TARDIS to view the collision. The Doctor's young companion Adric was left aboard the spaceship and he attempted to override the Cyberman control systems. This caused the ship to travel back in time, stabilising some 65 million years in the past. The Doctor informed the Cyber Leader that instead of destroying the humans, he had helped give rise to them, as it was this event which would wipe out the dinosaurs. Adric died in the crash, and the Doctor used his gold-rimmed star badge to kill the Cyber Leader.
These Cybermen were of a new design, with a more compact chest unit. Traces of their organic origins could be seen behind a transparent jaw piece. Though never made explicit, these Cybermen could also travel through time, as they were able to view data about the Doctor's encounter with them on Voga, though this was many years in their future.


A number of these same Cybermen were encountered by the Doctor on his home planet of Gallifrey. Cybermen had always been banned from the war games staged by the Time Lords of the age of Rassilon, but President Borusa used a time scoop to bring them to the Death Zone. The Master allied himself with one group - leading them into a lethal trap in Rassilon's tomb. Another party pursued the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith and stumbled into the path of a Raston Warrior Robot, which wiped them out. A third group attempted to destroy the TARDIS using a massive bomb.


The Cyber Controller on Telos later devised an audacious scheme to prevent the destruction of Mondas and change history, using a captured time ship. In 1985, the Cybermen set up a base in London's sewers as they had once before. Their initial plan was to divert the course of Halley's Comet to impact the planet, so that the Earth would be defenceless when Mondas arrived the following year. They captured the mercenary Lytton as well as the Doctor, who had come to Earth after tracking Lytton's mayday signals. This gave the Cybermen access to the TARDIS as well. The Controller planned to destroy Telos' surface using the mineral vastial, which became highly volatile at temperatures above freezing. The Doctor and companion Peri met the planet's indigenous life-form - the Cryons - who were fighting a guerrilla campaign against the Cybermen, sabotaging their tombs.
The Cryons had secretly employed Lytton to steal the time ship with the help of two of its crew, who had been turned into partly converted slave workers. The Doctor destroyed the Controller and a stockpile of vastial was rigged with his sonic lance to explode - blowing up Cyber Control as well as the time ship.


These Cybermen looked like the ones seen during the attack on Earth in 2526 and on Gallifrey, but when one of them had its face plate removed there was no sign of organic material within. The Doctor took off the plate in order to trigger an alarm, to lure other Cybermen into a trap.
The Cybermen then decided to seize control over the Nemesis statue - formed of a living metal which the Doctor had removed from Gallifrey. In 1638 the sorceress Lady Peinforte had moulded this into a statue of herself in the pose of Nemesis, goddess of retribution. The Doctor had sent it into an orbit around the Earth, but it was due to return after 350 years. The Cybermen arrived just after it had landed - first recruiting a pair of humans whom they placed under their mental control. Lady Peinforte travelled forward in time to meet the statue, and it was also sought by a group of mercenaries led by a Nazi war criminal named De Flores, who dreamt of establishing a Fourth Reich.


The Cybermen had a vast fleet in a hidden orbit above the Earth, intending to make the planet the new Mondas once they had obtained the statue. Most of the Cybermen were destroyed by gold - either the gold-tipped arrows of Lady Peinforte and her manservant Richard, or gold coins fired by the Doctor's companion Ace using a catapult. The Cyber Leader was given the statue by the Doctor. He ordered it to rendezvous with the fleet, but the Doctor had earlier programmed it to destroy the armada. Richard then despatched the Cyber Leader with the last of his mistress' arrows.
These Cybermen had a less complex body design but retained the same helmets as the ones recently encountered by the Doctor, although these were now chrome-plated.


When the Doctor and Rose visited the museum belonging to billionaire Henry Van Statten, built deep beneath the Utah desert, they found a Cyberman head among the exhibits. The information plaque claimed that it had been found in the sewers of London, but it was of a different design to the helmets of the Planet 14 Cybermen who had allied themselves with Tobias Vaughn, and did not match the ones who had set up their base in the sewers at the time of the plan to change history and save Mondas. It actually matched the ones belonging to the group which had launched the attack on the remnants of Voga, so how it came to be found in London prior to 2011 is a mystery.


At some point prior to the 52nd Century, the Cybermen encountered their cousins from the parallel universe where a whole new race of Cybermen had been created by John Lumic. The two groups merged, so that the Cybermen of this era looked just like the Cybus versions. The Doctor and Rory Williams infiltrated the 12th Cyber Legion in order to discover the whereabouts of Rory's kidnapped wife, Amy Pond. The Doctor blew up their fleet to force them to pass on what information they knew, as they were monitoring this region of space.


The Doctor later went to visit his old friend Craig Owens at his home in the Essex town of Colchester. Here he noted strange power losses, and there were reports of missing people centred around one of the big department stores. A silver rat had been seen in the shop, so the Doctor took on a job there to investigate. One of the lifts proved to contain a teleport leading to a damaged Cybership. The Doctor believed this to be in orbit above the town, but it turned out that it was actually buried deep beneath the store. The Cyberman occupants were badly damaged and crudely repaired, and were using a Cybermat to harness electrical energy for their systems. They were kidnapping people for conversion. They claimed that they could not convert the Doctor as, not being human, he was incompatible. They wanted to use Craig as their new Controller, but his love for his baby son overrode the conversion process and this strong emotion fed back to destroy the Cybermen and their ship.


When the Doctor and Clara took her young charges Artie and Angie to visit the theme-park planet Hedgewick's World, they found it dilapidated and abandoned. A war between the humans and the Cybermen had been fought near here, won only when the humans had blown up an entire solar system. Mr Webley's waxworks contained a number of empty Cyberman shells, one of which had been adapted to play chess, with the diminutive Porridge hidden within. Before the planet had closed for business, there had been a spate of disappearances. It transpired that the Cybermen survivors of the war had set up a repair and conversion factory on the planet, and a new breed of Cybermen had been created.


These new Cybermen were of an advanced design, with much sleeker armoured bodies. They could travel at great speed, and individual components such as the head or hands could be removed to act independently. They also had the ability to upgrade whenever they encountered a setback. The Cybermen planned to use Artie and Angie as their new Cyber Planner, but settled on the Doctor instead - as they could now convert Time Lords. These Cybermen were linked to a shared command and data network called the Cyberiad. A huge army was activated, and only the destruction of the entire planet could stop them. However, a Cybermite survived. These tiny insect-like creatures were an evolved form of Cybermat, and were capable of converting people from within. The Cybermen no longer had to transplant brains or graft on cybernetic limbs and organs.


At some point the Doctor obtained the head of one of these new Cybermen. He nicknamed it "Handles" and used it as a form of personal computer. He had it with him on the TARDIS when he went to investigate a mysterious signal emanating from an obscure planet, which was being heard throughout the cosmos. This attracted many alien races, including the Cybermen. Handles failed to identify their new Cyberships. The planet turned out to be Trenzalore, and the Doctor found himself trapped there for centuries - defending its people from the assembled aliens. Handles had translated the signal and identified it as coming from the Time Lords. Cut off from Clara, Handles became a friend to the Doctor as much as a tool. It eventually wore out and broke down.


The Church of the Papal Mainframe had stopped any advanced technology from being beamed down to the planet, so the Cybermen countered this by sending down a scout made of wood, armed with a flame thrower instead of an energy weapon. The Doctor tricked it into reversing its weapon to shoot and destroy itself. Later, once the technology embargo had been overcome, the Cybermen attempted to attack in force, but the Doctor had joined forces with the Silents to repel all invaders.


Clara got herself a job teaching at Coal Hill School, and fell in love with fellow teacher Danny Pink. When he was killed in a road accident. Clara forced the Doctor to help find a way to get him back. Linking herself to the ship's telepathic circuits brought the TARDIS to the 3W Foundation, which appeared to be a form of advanced funeral complex. Many hundreds of skeletal bodies could be seen seated in water-filled tanks. One of the employees demonstrated that this "dark water" made man-made materials invisible. In charge of the place was Missy - the female incarnation of the Master. She had a Matrix Data Slice, taken from Gallifrey, and explained that everyone who had died on the planet had their consciousness stored into it at the point of death. These would then be downloaded into Cyberman bodies. Within each of the water-filled tanks was a Cyberman, its armour hidden by the dark water.


It transpired that the 3W Foundation was concealed within St Paul's Cathedral in London. The Cybermen emerged onto the streets of the city but were confronted by UNIT troops under the command of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. To show that her forces could defeat the Cybermen, she had a broken helmet retrieved from their failed invasion of 40 years before - the Planet 14 design. These Cybermen had a new feature, however - the power of flight. They took off and a number of them self -destructed over major world capital cities, spreading Cyber-conversion nanotechnology which caused the planet's dead to be reanimated as Cybermen, their consciousnesses having been downloaded from the Data Slice. Airborne Cybermen attacked and brought down the plane carrying the Doctor and Kate. Clara was saved by a Cyberman, who proved to be Danny. He was fighting against full conversion, and asked her to switch on his emotional inhibitor. This was because he was going to take command of the army. Missy had intended to give the Cybermen to the Doctor as a present - an army to use in his crusade against evil. Danny had the army destroy itself instead, wiping out the clouds full of conversion technology before more Cybermen could be created.


Only one Cyberman was left, and it had saved Kate from plunging to her death when the aircraft had been destroyed. The Doctor realised that this had been her father, the Brigadier. Other deceased friends of the Doctor would also have been converted - including Amy and Rory.
When the Mondasian crew of a colony ship transformed themselves into Cybermen, they evolved over time to adopt the same designs as the Telosian Cybermen, suggesting that, even in isolation, Cybermen follow a logical technological progression.

Appearances: The Moonbase (1967), Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), The Wheel In Space (1968), The Invasion (1968), Revenge of the Cybermen (1975), Earthshock (1982), The Five Doctors (1983), Attack of the Cybermen (1985), Silver Nemesis (1988), A Good Man Goes to War (2011), Closing Time (2011), Nightmare in Silver (2013), Dark Water / Death In Heaven (2014).
Cameo appearances: The War Games (1969), Carnival of Monsters (1973), Dalek (2005).