Classic Who on BBC America

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Turbo wrote:

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I would be shocked if it wasn't The Tomb of the Cybermen. One of Matt Smith's favorite stories, a four-parter, pretty good quality even without the DVD restorations? It certainly beats The Krotons.

Works for me!

[Anachronus]

The BBC America site is showing Tomb of the Cybermen (shock) on 2/24/13 with the usual lead in documentary.

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^

Excellent! In many ways, I'm looking forward to this even more than the Hartnell special last month. It'll be great to see classic Cybermen once again.

[Mr. Adventure]

It may be predictable but it's a solid choice.

[tomalak301]

Anachronus wrote:

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The BBC America site is showing Tomb of the Cybermen (shock) on 2/24/13 with the usual lead in documentary.

Pity it's not this weekend so they don't co-inside with the Academy Awards

[Klaus]

They're re-running last month's first ["The Aztecs" justed started]... I'm looking forward to the new one.

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Mr. Adventure wrote:

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It may be predictable but it's a solid choice.

I keep looking for a pun in that statement, but it seems to elude me.

[Mr. Adventure]

Procutus wrote:

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I keep looking for a pun in that statement, but it seems to elude me.

Heh, nope, no pun for once.

[sidious618]

Tomb of the Cybermen is one of those serials that is never as good as it sounds but it's not like there are many Troughton episodes to choose from. I'd probably enjoy The Mind Robber more but that seems like an episode that takes a particular taste while Tomb is a bit broader.

[Christopher]

On the other hand, "The Mind Robber" has sparkly catsuit Zoe, which is one of the greatest things ever. They just showed a clip of her outfighting the Karkus, which I'd forgotten about.

[Christopher]

Semi-live-blogging the episode:

Oh, this is ghastly. The edition of "Tomb of the Cybermen" they're showing has been altered to fit a widescreen format. The middle of the image is normal, but it gets stretched out toward the edges. And in some shots there's some kind of digital processing error that's making things flicker and change shape. I think it's making me nauseous.

I'd forgotten how confident, brave, and resourceful Victoria was in this one. That sure changed over the course of the season.

If the Eleventh Doctor were Cyber-converted, would he become a CyberMatt?

I've checked the credits online and there's no composer credit for this serial. Which is odd, since it has some rather distinctive music. It has kind of a Dudley Simpson sound to it, but I'm not sure. ...Wait a minute, on second thought, I think it's tracked music from "The Moonbase." But that doesn't have a composer credit either.

Oh, thank you, Kleig, for killing Viner. His constant panic was really getting on my nerves.

The Doctor really played with fire here. He manipulated events and allowed Kleig to get to where he could awaken the Cybermen, despite all his insistence that that shouldn't be allowed to happen... just because he wanted to see what Klieg's plan was? I think he let his curiosity get the best of him there.

Oh, and brilliant suggestion, Doctor -- lock up the crazy power-mad logicians in the room full of prototype weapons! How could that possibly go wrong? Is it me, or is the Doctor basically just making everything worse?

The Cyberman voice treatment here is interesting; I'd assume it's the sort of thing where they put a speaker emitting a buzzing noise against the actor's throat, so the sound resonates in his vocal tract, and he then mouths the dialogue to modulate the sound with lips and tongue. The problem is that many of the consonants don't come through very well, so it's hard to understand the dialogue. I'm watching it with the closed captioning on for clarity.

I really like the scene of the Doctor and Victoria talking about the loss of her father and the Doctor's memories of his own family. It's an unusual degree of character insight for the original series.

And I like the Doctor's gun handling technique right after. He takes the gun to stand watch, but just holds it loosely and absently as if he's just holding onto it for somebody else -- and the moment danger materializes in the form of Cybermats, the first thing he does is to put the gun down on the table and forget about it completely!

The actress playing Kaftan needed some work on her death-scene skills. As she fell "dead," you could see her shifting around to get comfy on the floor.

The portrayal of Toberman is quite an unfortunate racial stereotype, a product of the period. Yet nonetheless he's allowed to be somewhat heroic toward the end, which redeems it somewhat.

But the Doctor choosing to re-electrify the doors seems uncharacteristically vicious for him. Killing Cybermen is one thing, but he set it up to kill any hapless archaeologists who might come across the tomb again -- and he does get Toberman killed as a result. Again, practically everything bad here is the Doctor's fault. Why not just have the expedition use more of the blasting equipment they used at the beginning and re-bury the tomb?

[Redfern]

Since I already have the story on DVD, I didn't bother watching the "main feature", just the "development discussion". However, before I switched off the TV, I too noticed the entire 47 inches of the screen were filled. I knew that couldn't be right, but I assumed they were possibly cropping the top and bottom of the image to fit modern widescreens. I'm not sure which would be worse.

I won't debate your assessments, Christopher. You do bring up some very interesting points. Some fans use this story to draw comparisons with McCoy's "grand manipulator" persona during the last two series of the "classic" era.

Just curious; was this your first viewing of the serial? The way you phrased some of your observations implied genuine surprise.

Sincerely,

Bill

[CmdrAJD]

I'm really wondering how they're going to fill out an entire half hour special on the Eighth Doctor. Sure they could get into the audios, but that's not exactly visual. And do we have any confirmation yet that BBCA will be showing the TVM to go with his special? I assume they will, but I have no idea if there are any issues with the rights.

[Christopher]

Redfern wrote:

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Just curious; was this your first viewing of the serial? The way you phrased some of your observations implied genuine surprise.

I saw it when it was first released in US syndication after its recovery in '91, and a couple of times thereafter as my local PBS station cycled through the whole available series over and over. But this is the first time I've seen it in nearly two decades.

[OmahaStar]

CmdrAJD wrote:

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I'm really wondering how they're going to fill out an entire half hour special on the Eighth Doctor. Sure they could get into the audios, but that's not exactly visual. And do we have any confirmation yet that BBCA will be showing the TVM to go with his special? I assume they will, but I have no idea if there are any issues with the rights.

I'm fairly sure that any rights issues would have been sorted before they announced they would be doing one of these nights for each Doctor.