YMMV / Doctor Who S12 E5 "Revenge of the Cybermen"

• Draco in Leather Pants: Vorus gets this treatment from some fans, who praise him for trying to at least do something about the Vogans' plight, while also ridding the galaxy of what threat remains from the Cybermen. This overlooks the fact that part of his plan involved murdering almost the entire crew of Nerva and then destroying the beacon with a missile once the Cybermen had been lured on-board — and to be fair, the story doesn't make it clear whether wiping out Nerva's crew was his idea, Kellman's, or the Cyber-Leader's, but there's almost no way he could have been ignorant about that part of the plan. Indeed, he is immediately suspicious of Sarah and Harry because there was only supposed to be three humans left alive on Nerva (going so far as to say "That was the plan") and has one of his own men killed for trying to warn the humans of the danger. He also pulls a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on Kellman, not being bothered whether he gets off Nerva before it's destroyed or not.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Cybermen's next appearance also involves crashing a space vehicle into a planet, only the Doctor doesn't prevent it.
• Memetic Mutation: HARRY SULLIVAN IS AN IMBECILE!!
• Narm:
  • Tom Baker's exceptionally abysmal getting-shot acting in Episode 2. He dives forward onto his forearms, gets tangled in his scarf while writhing around dramatically with his mouth open, and surreptitiously-but-obviously arranges his hair so it'll look good for the closeup at the end of the shot. Not one of his best moments as a performer.
  • The Cybermen voices, which are just the actors' normal voices with a very mild reverb effect added. The story might have been able to get away with that in isolation, but when combined with Christopher Robbie's Large Ham performance as the Cyber-Leader, it ends up rendering them impossible to take seriously.
  • While the Cybermen's head-mounted guns may have sounded like a good idea on paper, in practice it results in the Cybermen standing there with their hands on their hips, while firecrackers occasionally go off in their heads, and cause their victims to drop dead (or be knocked out) in a comically unconvincing fashion. There's a reason why the Daleks' in-built guns were put in the same approximate position where humans would generally hold a gun.
  • In many of his scenes, the Cyber-Leader is doing the Superman pose with his fists firmly planted on his hips. It thoroughly undermines any kind of menace he might've possessed.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The Cybermats in this story are inserted with Colour Separation Overlay. While this technique might have worked well for the giant maggots in "The Green Death", the shiny bodies of the Cybermats end up reflecting the CSO screen, causing them to turn transparent.
  • When the Vogans see on their screen that Nerva has been set on a collision course, it's depicted by a zoom-in on a still image of the beacon, which ends up making it look like Voga's heading towards Nerva instead of the other way around. Weirder still, later on there's an actual model shot of Nerva heading towards Voga, which looks incredibly cheap but at least gets across the desired effect.
  • During Nerva's near-miss of Voga, they attempt to depict the planet's surface with what looks like some mud slapped onto a wood lathe. On top of that, the camera is tilted at the wrong angle during the sequence, making it look like the Doctor's deliberately trying to crash the station into Voga instead of steering it away.
  • The dead bodies on the Nova Beacon are quite obviously dummies.
• Stock Footage Failure: The launch of a missile on an alien planet is represented by stock footage of a NASA rocket launch, with the rocket's official markings in English clearly visible. This case became far more amusing a decade later, in that it's the same stock footage that early MTV used in its hourly station idents, which video-loving American viewers of a certain age have seen hundreds if not thousands of times.

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