Doctor Who: Every Tom Baker/Hinchcliffe Era Story Ranked From Worst To Best

14. Revenge Of The Cybermen

There are people who disregard anything people say about Doctor Who not making sense. But even these people join the hordes when the plot of this story is read out to them. Even Paul Cornell, fanboy writer of books and episodes of the show (Father's Day/Human Nature) said in a podcast that he thought the episode was founded upon a giant, glaring stupidity. The Cybermen thinking they can invade the planet of gold. As Cornell puts it perfectly, this is like vampires going down to the planet of garlic. But somehow it happens anyway. There€™s a scene in which two of them have gone down to the planet and it's shocking that the Cybermen initially harboured the strategy of sending soldiers down to be killed until the planet ran out of gold... or something like that, anyway. This story is just about carried by the leads who always manage to be entertaining. Even though Harry comes off horribly here as he assumes Looney Tunes levels of daftness as a foil for the Doctor, this is just about permissible for the Doctor€™s shout of "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!", a moment every montage of the Fourth Doctor is incomplete without. It says something about the demise of the perception of this story that, while fans voted for it to be the first to be released on VHS in 1983, it wasn€™t released on DVD for years. Even then it was bunched in with Silver Nemesis. Quite the fall from grace to be slipped in under that story. Actually, that€™s more like a plummet.