Doctor Who: "Earthshock"

'''"Earthshock." Doctor Who'''. Peter Grimwade, dir. UK: BBC Colour, 1981. Peter Davison, star. Matthew Waterhouse, Janet Fielding, and Sarah Sutton, featured. (David Banks, Cyber Leader; Mark Hardy, Cyber Lieutenant).

Doctor Who and the TARDIS land on a 25th-c. Earth threatened by Cybermen, initially aided by smooth-looking robots called "androids." Many scenes shot the from point of view of the Cyber Leader (David Banks), including flashbacks of earlier encounters with the Doctor. Other scenes on a Terran spacefreighter. Note (1) inexorable movement of Cybermen: quite robotic (though the Doctor thinks them worse than robots) and militaristic; (2) the Cyber Leader's line, "Your technology is primitive compared to ours; mistakes will not be made"; (3) references to "the Cyber race" (the parallels with the Nazis are explicit); (4) the conflict between the Doctor and the Cyber Leader over the value of emotion; (5) a Cyberman rather admirable in his persistence ensuring that the freighter will crash into Earth of 65 million BCE, thus killing the Doctor's companion Adric, but also assuring the evolution of the human species.

(RDE, 08/08/93) RDE, Title, 21Aug19