Doctor Who/Recap/S12/E05 Revenge of the Cybermen



""You've no home planet, no influence, nothing. You're nothing but a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.""

- Now begone, Cybermen, before The Doctor taunts you a second time

The Time Ring gets the Doctor and companions back to Nerva Beacon all right - but at the wrong time (typical shoddy Time Lord tech), instead putting them many millennia earlier than their previous visit. The station is an active radio beacon controlling space traffic around Earth, particularly with reference to a new asteroid in orbit around Jupiter - a "planet of gold" called Voga. However, all is not going well - a space plague is rife on the station and has killed all but a few of the crew, and the Doctor and friends are of course immediately suspected.

The space plague turns out to be poison, spread by a traitorous scientist, Dr. Kellman on behalf of the Cybermen, who wish to gain access to, and destroy, Voga because of their weakness to gold. Sarah Jane is infected with the plague but is cured by Harry through the use of a transmat system. When the Cybermen arrive, the Doctor and the others are forced to carry cobalt bombs into the heart of Voga, but the Doctor exploits the Cybermen's radar system and rids himself of his bomb to make contact with the Vogans. (No, not those Vogons.) It seems that Kellman is in fact working for them, luring the Cybermen onto Nerva Beacon, which the Vogans will then destroy with their Skystriker rocket. The Doctor returns to the beacon and informs the humans, but the Cybermen hear of the plan and evacuate. The Skystriker is launched (crashingly obvious Saturn V library footage), but the Doctor manages to divert it to hit the Cybermen's ship using the beacon's radio signals.

The TARDIS appears back on the station, having been sent to catch up with them by the Time Lords, and on boarding the ship, the Doctor receives a message from The Brigadier, requesting assistance back on Earth...

Tropes

 * Butt Monkey: "HARRY SULLIVAN IS AN IMBECILE!"
 * Double Reverse Quadruple Agent
 * Divided We Fall
 * Ghost Ship
 * Heroic Sacrifice
 * Kill'Em All
 * Mexican Standoff
 * Planet of Gold: Voga
 * Stock Footage Failure: The painfully obvious Saturn V rocket, right down to the BIG HONKING "UNITED STATES" ON THE SIDE being palmed off as a Vogan anti-Cyberman rocket.
 * Stock Poses: The Doctor, Lester and Stephenson pull off The Three Monkeys pose while prisoners of the Cybermen.
 * Tainted Veins: A symptom of the "space plague"—which the Doctor finds suspiciously similar to a "space plague" he's seen before.
 * Too Dumb to Live: The Vogans. They know the Cybermen have a weakness to gold, which exists in ample quantities on Voga, but they never get the idea to exploit it, even when several of them are getting slaughtered by two Cybermen.
 * Unusual Weapon Mounting: The Cybermen head guns.
 * Weaksauce Weakness: The Cybermen's "allergy" to gold is first introduced in this story. Apparently, it "suffocates" them. Yeah.
 * Worthless Yellow Rocks
 * The X of Y