Legend of the Cybermen

 

Legend of the Cybermen by Mike Maddox

The Mind Robber is one of the best classic Who stories ever, and quite frankly, it's pretty much entirely due to it's unadulterated madness. It's the kind of story that takes into account the fact that Frazier Hines wants a week off on Holiday and turns Jamie into a cardboard cutout without a face that the Doctor has to repair the face on but he does it wrong and then Jamie's a different actor for an episode until he's inexplicably normal. It's the kind of story where robots try and crush Jamie and Zoe to death with a giant book - it's utterly brilliant. And to be honest, if you had told me a sequel existed, I'd say that that's a horrible idea. And if you told me it was a brilliant sequel that was on par, if not surpassing the original in quality, I would have laughed in your face. But no, Legend of the Cybermen takes everything The Mind Robber does well and does more of it, while progressing these ideas in a natural direction until, in a result that's quite apropos, you have a story that is creativity distilled. I like the Mind Robber for it's willingness to do what "shouldn't" be done in Doctor Who, it goes off the rails and is allowed to do so, and Legend has a similar result, and is magnificently surreal in all the right ways. It has a scene where Jamie hallucinates he's in a recording booth because of the Cybermen altering reality and Nick Briggs says "Frazier, could you do that take again?" To take something like that, and push the Fourth Wall so far that it completely shatters but without ruining the immersion of the story is something I before now thought was impossible. The story is filled with stuff like that that's just like the original Mind Robber, and the story is filled to the brim with loads of fanservice, but it doesn't feel mindless, it feels like a natural progression of what has happened so far. The 6/Jamie trilogy had so far felt incredibly lacking to me, but one of my friends said that it's a trilogy that is more than the sum of it's parts, and I have to agree with that now that it's done. It's not a good trilogy at all, actually, as far as I'm concerned, but this final part of it ties it off so eloquently I can't help but feel more favorable towards the previous parts, for allowing this story to ultimately exist. Everything in the story is treated with such pathos and earnest from the stellar cast - Wendy Padbury does the ONLY audio performance I've ever heard where she has a conversation with herself and doesn't make it incredibly confusing, and even side characters like goddamn Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Count fricking Dracula are well characterized and believable in this carefully controlled madness. You can't do a story like this in most situations, but really, Legend of the Cybermen allows you to go all in on the surreal and mad while not sacrificing dramatic integrity, and that's something I haven't seen before or since that's not written by ROBERT SHEARMAN. To quote a certain Cyberman... Please, Sir. I want some More. 9/10