Haven't had one for a while, but it's another of those occasions when the Time Lords send the Doctor on a vital mission, but don't tell him he's on one until he works it out for himself, and they don't provide him with any information that might prove useful - like where he's going and what he has to do when he gets there.
That mission is to prevent the Cybermen messing about with future history by preventing the destruction of Mondas in December 1986, as seen in The Tenth Planet. (That's not the last old Cybermen story I'll mention, as this one is stuffed with references - many would argue to its detriment).
In order to do this, they've obviously travelled back in time to the year before this disaster.
Except...
They haven't mastered time travel yet, and have only just stolen a time-ship which has crash-landed on Telos. How can they have a base on the dark side of the Moon, and one in the London sewers (as seen in The Invasion) in 1985, but be in contact with the Controller on Telos in 2500 or thereabouts if they don't already have significant time travel capability?
It is never quite clear if the plans of either Lytton and / or the Cybermen depend on the Doctor turning up or not. Sometimes that is suggested, and other times they simply seem to exploit his presence. But if Lytton kept his distress beacon going even after he made contact with the Cryons, who else was it intended for?
If he did know that the Doctor was sure to turn up, why put himself in danger by deliberately making contact with the Cybermen? The Doctor could have simply been made to take him to Telos in the TARDIS.
What, precisely, were the Cybermen going to do if the Doctor hadn't turned up when he did?
Why have the Cybermen chosen to change things by going to Earth anyway? Wouldn't it be simpler going to Mondas itself and warning their ancestors directly?
In The Tenth Planet, Mondas was actually destroyed by its own greed. The Cybermen claimed that they couldn't control its energy consumption, so even if the Earth was devastated by Halley's Comet, Mondas would still absorb too much energy and perish.
In this story it is stated that the planet was deliberately steered back to Earth by the Cybermen, but The Tenth Planet implied that the Cybermen didn't have much control over it, and it had simply followed a natural trajectory which had brought it back towards Earth again. The Cybermen made to attempt to move it out of danger, did they?
Here, the Controller is happy to allow a couple desperate and potentially dangerous prisoners to escape, killing several of his Cybermen, all just so he can run a psychological experiment. Wouldn't it have been better to delay this until after the saving of Mondas and foiling the Cryon plan?
The Controller also wants to destroy the surface of Telos, just to see what it looks like. Again, wouldn't it be best to make sure Mondas is safe first and not leave yourselves homeless again? But, of course, if they do save Mondas then they would never have come to Telos in the first place, so the whole experiment is pointless whichever way you look at it.
And Cybermen are supposed to be creatures reliant on logic...
The time-ship requires three to operate, yet Stratton and Bates never explain how they are going to get the third person. They don't know about Lytton and Griffiths until they come across them.
You have to wonder how Stratton and Bates could ever have been placed in control of a valuable time-ship in the first place. No wonder it crashed.
You also have to question Lytton's credentials as a criminal mastermind, if the best he can come up with include Griffiths and a police insider.
Another temporal anomaly is how the Cryons were able to establish communication with Lytton when he's in 1985 and they're also in the 26th Century. Even if they had the technology, how could they possibly know that there's a bloke in 20th Century London who is the best person to help them now, in the 26th Century?
If the technology isn't theirs but Lytton's, then where did he get it, as last time we saw him he was wandering off in a police uniform with no visible stash of electronic components. I doubt very much he'd find anything on Tottenham Cross Road that could be adapted to communicate with an alien planet 500 years into the future.
The Doctor and Lytton seem to know an awful lot about each other, considering they only glimpsed each other once across a darkened warehouse during a battle with Daleks and didn't say a single word to each other. There's nothing on screen to even hint at an unseen adventure. Indeed, the Doctor even refers to Lytton as last being in the Daleks' employ.
The Doctor also suddenly comes up with the bizarre fact that Cybermen will always respond to the distress of one of their number. Where did that come from?
If you're going to lock up a dangerous prisoner, best not to put them in a room full of highly volatile explosive material - especially if you're not going to bother searching them for any devices capable of igniting highly volatile explosive material...
Production wise, they go to all that bother to return to the ice tombs of Telos (as seen in Tomb of the Cybermen), but come up with sets that look nothing like them. They also bring back the Controller, who also looks nothing like the original - though it would be fair to say that both Controllers look like altered versions of their current subordinates, and Cybermen certainly do evolve over time.
Needing a tall actor to play the Controller, they do the fan-pleasing thing of bringing back the original actor, Michael Kilgarriff. But he doesn't look the same, and he doesn't sound the same, and he's obviously filled out a bit in the last 18 years... That there was a character in Thomas The Tank Engine called "The Fat Controller" didn't help fans take this seriously.
In fact fans didn't like this story at all - mainly for some of the very things put in to please them. It's one thing to honour the show's history, but you have to do it in a respectful manner (no turning Sutekh into a big CGI dog, or Omega into a big CGI zombie, for instance). Above all, don't muck about with continuity, even if the series has a very poor grasp of this at the best of times. What little there is needs to be honoured.
Certainly don't go overboard on it. One of the things people really hated about the Star Wars spin-off Solo was that they felt the compulsion to stick in an explanation / reference for every single Han Solo line in the original trilogy.
Attack of the Cybermen felt at times like a shopping list of elements from past Cyberman stories, as well as Resurrection of the Daleks obviously.
And let's not forget An Unearthly Child, because the TARDIS just happens to revisit I.M. Foreman's yard in Totters Lane. Except this looks nothing like the one we saw earlier - or the one we'll see later.
This is a scrap yard, not a junkyard. There is a difference.
Lastly, we must mention the level of violence in this story, as it will be used as an excuse to force the series into its first hiatus (I think Doctor Who fans are more familiar with this word than the general population).
There's a high body count, and we also have the nasty moment when Lytton gets his hands crushed by the Cybermen. The violence of this and other stories in Season 22 was used to justify suspending the series (though we actually know it had nothing to do with it) but a lot of fans at the time agreed that the violence was going too far.
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