Amazon.com
In the early 1970s, the BBC shamefully erased most of their master tapes of black-and-white Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s, with only a few random episodes here and there surviving the purge. Hence the appearance of this compilation tape of two Patrick Troughton stories featuring the Cybermen--sort of low-tech versions of Star Trek's Borg--where fewer than half the episodes still exist. Hosted by the sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, and interspersed with interviews with series contributors at the time, there are two episodes (out of four) from "The Moonbase" from 1967, and two episodes (out of six) from 1968's "The Wheel in Space." The final episode of "The Wheel in Space" is an archivist's delight, perhaps the cleanest copy of a '60s episode that still exists (the rest rely on sometimes murky kinescopes). Short excerpts are also included from "The Tenth Planet" (featuring the Cybermen's first-ever appearance), "Tomb of the Cybermen," and "The Invasion." What remains of the stories is still effective because it exploits the bleak black-and-white photography of the time, and the Cybermen's penchant for taking on isolated near-defenseless humans on futuristic outposts. It was a simpler time when monsters could still threaten without irony, "Resistance is useless" and "You will be destroyed!" But it has to be said that these partial representations are probably for die-hard completists only; casual fans would be better served by the excellent novelizations of the missing stories, or the few remaining (near) complete Cybermen stories like "Tomb of the Cybermen" and "The Invasion" also available on home video. --Ryan K. Johnson
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