Season 22, Episode 1 | 2 parts | First broadcast: 5–12 January 1985 | Writer: Paula Moore | Director: Matthew Robinson
Cast
- Colin Baker as the Doctor
- Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown
- Maurice Colbourne as Lytton
- David Banks as Cyber Leader
- Michael Kilgarriff as Cyber Controller
Summary
Tracking a distress signal to a scrapyard in 1980s London, the Doctor and Peri find the ruthless mercenary Lytton secretly working with a squad of Cybermen intent on averting the destruction of their home world Telos by traveling back through time to alter history. Following the Cybermen through a damaged time corridor to their ice-tomb base, the Doctor confronts the Cyber Controller in a desperate bid to stop their plan before it unravels the timeline itself.
Interesting Facts
- The story deliberately revisits continuity from earlier Cybermen serials, including The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Tenth Planet, as part of producer John Nathan-Turner’s fondness for continuity-heavy plots.
- Maurice Colbourne reprises Lytton from Resurrection of the Daleks, recontextualizing the mercenary as a more sympathetic figure working against the Cybermen from within.
- It marked the first time the Doctor Who era used two full-length 45-minute episodes rather than the traditional four 25-minute installments.
- Michael Kilgarriff returned to play the Cyber Controller, a role he had originated back in 1967’s The Tomb of the Cybermen.
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