Last of the Cybermen

Main Range #199

Released: 20 May 2015

Listened: 7/30/20

This is the second portion of the “Locum Doctors” trilogy, in which the Sixth Doctor changes places with the Second. He has it a little easier than the Fifth Doctor did, because Jamie and Zoe know about regeneration (Polly told Jamie, who told Zoe), so they get past the identity crisis portion pretty easily. (Jamie doesn’t know this Doctor yet, as “The Two Doctors” is still in his future.) They also have the advantage that the baddie is the Cybermen, who they’re all familiar with. There’s a lot of callbacks to “Tomb of the Cybermen,” and frankly lots of callbacks to various Second Doctor stories. Jamie and Zoe each get a large chunk of an episode to interact with the Sixth Doctor one-on-one. Jamie’s interactions are more distinctive, because Jamie’s a larger personality, and keeps rubbing the Sixth Doctor the wrong way, but it doesn’t go on so long it becomes annoying. As the story goes on, there’s a lot of timey-wimey, where causality gets knotted up, making some of the earlier parts seem stilted in retrospect. There’s more of that than would have happened in the Second Doctor’s era, and unlike “The Secret History,” it doesn’t seem as much like an authentic 60s episode. It is a lot of fun, though, and the actors are clearly having a good time.