Doctor Who: Last of the Cybermen

The second in the “Locum Doctors” trilogy, this sees Jamie and Zoe paired up with the Sixth Doctor on a distant planetoid a few decades in Zoe's future. As in the first of the trilogy, there's an attempt to make this feel like a Second Doctor story into which Six merely happens to be intruding. This, however, is less successful this time around.

That may partly be because there's less of an obvious template to follow for the Second Doctor's stories than the Third's, at least if, as in this case, you want to avoid straightforward base-under-siege narratives. Instead, we have the '60s theme music, rather than the '80s version, and a story that, to begin with, is loosely modelled on Tomb of the Cybermen, but that breaks away from that mould for something slightly more space opera in the second half. Perhaps aware of this, Barnes includes a lot of references to the Second Doctor's run in the dialogue, and there's fun to be had spotting them all.

Another feature of the era was that a number of stories, especially including those featuring Cybermen, were, by the standards of Doctor Who, quite hard science fiction. This story, too, tries to get the science right, but, unfortunately, doesn't really succeed. In particular, the Kuiper Belt gets referenced a lot, but I'm not at all convinced that Barnes actually knows what it is.

Fortunately, for me, a couple of points raise this story above the average, even if they aren't anything typical of this era of the show's history. First, there's a nice focus on Zoe, making good use of her backstory in ways that are directly relevant to how the plot plays out. The second plus is the complexity of the story, which relies heavily on time travel, and at times is non-sequential, with effects playing out before their causes. For many people, this “timey-wimey” approach is a negative, and it's certainly true that the story isn't one to listen to casually if you want to understand what's going on. But it works for me.

But does the pairing of characters from disparate eras work? I felt that it did, and there's less of the prolonged suspicion from the companion(s) that we had in the first part of the trilogy - Zoe, in particular, works out what's going on almost immediately, and has no trouble accepting it. It helps that Hines and Padbury's voices have changed less than those of some other actors from the era, keeping things sounding authentic. The differences between Six and Two are played up, of course, but the interactions with the companions are convincing, and there's a good line up of guest characters.

Including a Cyberman with a Lancashire accent. Can't beat that.