YMMV / Doctor Who S22 E1 "Attack of the Cybermen"

• Continuity Lockout: This serial is a Sequel Episode to "The Tenth Planet", "The Tomb of the Cybermen" and "Resurrection of the Daleks". If you have not watched these serials, you will be totally lost. Worse, the first two serials were lost at the time, and hadn't been broadcast in over fifteen years! To compound matters, this story was originally broadcast at a time where the home video market was only just starting to take off and a VCR was seen as a luxury. To the vast majority of people who saw the original broadcast, much of this story would have been totally meaningless, and the serial still maintains a reputation as a perfect microcosm of all of 80's Who's worst traits partly because of this.
• Fight Scene Failure: The climactic fight in Cyber-Control gives the previous season's fight between Solow and the Myrka a run for its money. It starts out well enough, with Lytton stabbing the Cyber-Controller in the arm (albeit it causes the Controller to bleed what looks like Mountain Dew). Then it swiftly goes downhill as the Controller kills Lytton by slapping him on the shoulder a few times, then the Doctor shoots the Cyber-Leader, which in turn somehow causes the lieutenant to shoot itself dead, before the Controller chases the Doctor around the room, flailing like a drunken monkey before the Doctor shoots it dead too — and for good measure, the Controller turns into a clearly empty (and much smaller) Cyberman costume before exploding.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When told that shooting a police officer carries a twenty year prison sentence, the Sixth Doctor confidently boasts that it's a "handful of heartbeats to a Time Lord". Flashforward to the revived series where the Twelfth Doctor (technically) spends billions of years isolated in a prison^note It was closer to a day from his perspective, but it kept happening in loops and he was given at least some memories of previous loops and the Thirteenth Doctor spends at least nineteen years moping about in a space jail^note And her downbeat attitude during that time implies Six's boasting was a bluff, but she was also going through a lot beyond that.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A Cyberman fluffs his lines and says, "It is a fat controller." In the revival, they would have a fat controller...sort of. Not long before this story was broadcast, there was the TV debut of a different Fat Controller. Even more hilariously, the line actually does fit the description of the Cyber-Controller in this story, due to his weight and the shape of his headpiece.
• Informed Wrongness: The Doctor's berating himself for misjudging Lytton, considering that there's precious little to suggest that Lytton's working with the Cryons was motivated by anything other than money. And that's before you take into account his working with the Daleks, unleashing a flesh-eating gas on the crew of a prison station, shooting one of his own mercenaries dead in order to make his escape from the Daleks' employ, and clearly treating his criminal cohorts in London as expendable. Granted, it's unclear how much of this the Doctor knows, but from the audience's standpoint it's difficult to see Lytton as anything other than a cold-hearted mercenary at best.
• Les Yay: The Cryons, all of whom have a general female appearance, are very touchy-feely with Peri, far more so than Flast is with the Doctor.
• Memetic Mutation: "There is logic in what he says."^ExplanationA clip of the Cyber Leader which caught the attention of Linkara, who started using it in Atop the Fourth Wall to convey sarcastic appreciation towards incomprehensible dialogue choices. The clip consequently spread around among both his fans and Doctor Who fans as a reaction video for similar purposes.
• Narm:
  • Things which really stand out are the escaping prisoners (one of which is perpetually angry) and the noticeably overweight Cybercontroller, of course. The fact he is twice as fat as any other Cyberman makes it nearly impossible to take anything he says seriously, given how much it jars with the idea of Cybermen being ultra-conformist to the point of looking identical to one another. A special mention to the Cyberman who seems to have a German accent too.
  • Not to be outdone are the Cryons who, despite some prosthetic design (although the less said about their costumes the better), talk in strange fey voices and flutter their absurdly long-nailed hands around like they're attempting to communicate through interpretive dance, which makes it difficult for the weight of their words and actions to sink in much of the time.
• Questionable Casting: Bringing back Michael Kilgarriff as the Cyber-Controller, considering that he hadn't played the role in 18 years, was noticeably out of shape, and didn't even provide the Controller's voice in his debut story (Peter Hawkins did). There's some disagreement as to exactly how this casting decision got made, with director Matthew Robinson claiming that he was pressured into giving the role to Kilgarriff by producer John Nathan-Turner and Ian Levine, but Levine in turn claiming that he only suggested that they give some role (likely thinking of one of Lytton's gangsters) to Kilgarriff as a Casting Gag, not that he be brought back as the Controller. Seeing how Nathan-Turner died without ever making any public statement on the matter, odds are we'll never know the truth of this one.
• Villain Decay: Immune to small arms fire from UNIT soldiers in "The Invasion", a Cyberman is visibly damaged by a gang member's gun here.
• Watch It for the Meme: Ever wonder where Linkara's running gag about having the Cyber-Leader say, "There is logic in what he says", with obvious sarcasm whenever a comic book character says something utterly ridiculous came from? This is where it comes from.

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