Sunday 22 November 2020

Doctor Who Night 2020: The Phantom Pipers

This year I have been mostly in lockdown because the mannys are worried about the coronavirus. Fortunately there is no coronavirus on the internets, so we held our annual Doctor Who Night there.

The Moonbase sees the Doctor, Jamie, Sailor Ben and Polly team up with the employees of Moonbase PLC to fight the Cybermannys. You can tell the mannys W-word for a private corporation because of the way the base is run with a minimal number of staff, even though the gravitron is capable of devastating the Earth when it (inevitably) goes wrong. And Benoit is obviously their IT manny, since he is the one who suggests they try turning the gravitron off and on again to fix it.

The Doctor, Sailor Ben and Polly have all met the Cybermannys before in The Tenth Planet, but they are new to Jamie, and some komedy arises when he first sees a Cybermanny and mistaiks it for "the Phantom Piper" lol.


Maybe when he says "the Phantom Piper" he really means Pipes? Now that would be scary.

By the time of Tomb of the Cybermannys, Sailor Ben and Polly have left and Jamie has become the veteran of Cybermanny stories. There the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria "Vic" Waterfield (the nickname never caught on, despite the supposed-to-be-Americans' best efforts) meet the Shapmeister himself, here playing Viner, who really gives away what sort of story they are in when he says
"These controls are of their earlier dynasty."
(Well, that and all the references to archaeology and archaeologists.)

Viner is easily the most genre-savvy of the guest characters, and as the atmosphere of the tomb gets to him he has further lines such as
"He's dead. Don't you see, he's dead? It's this damn building. It's alive. It's watching us! It'll get us all! We've got to leave!"
and carries on like that right up to the point where Klieg shoots him.

Aside from having the Doctor, Jamie and, of course, the Cybermannys in common, these two stories also both feature the iconic 1960s Cybermanny music, which does a lot of the heavy lifting in creating the menacing atmosphere as they make their slow advance across the Moon's surface or emerge slowly from their tombs.

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