Well, no, that's not fair. Part two isn't particularly good, and the problems start early, but it's not a train wreck -- certainly nowhere near how The Twin Dilemma turned out. The main concern with Attack of the Cybermen essentially boils down to two points: 1) is this a story that requires people to know about twenty-year-old Cyberman stories that no one's seen since their initial broadcast, or are those just added details? and 2) does it matter that nothing we see physically resembles those early stories? (There's also the related point of, "Should we care that part one appears to have had little bearing on anything we see in part two beyond moving characters into the right places?", but this ultimately has less of a bearing on the story's success than you might think.)
That first point is probably the main sticking one. Attack of the Cybermen is explicitly a sequel to both The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Tenth Planet, but the more you think about it the less important it is that you have a detailed knowledge of those stories -- all the important points are covered in the (admittedly excruciating) info-dump speech in the TARDIS, as Lytton watches the Doctor explain those stories to Peri and Griffiths (the Brian Glover henchman) -- Russell (the Terry Molloy one) having apparently actually been killed by a Cyber-blow to the shoulder at the end of part one (um...), and thus not around to be explained at. And really, other than establishing that Telos has tombs left over from The Tomb of the Cybermen, all you really need to know is that Mondas swanned in to Earth's neighborhood and got itself destroyed for its troubles in 1986 (so next year, since this is 1985), and that the Cybermen want their newly-acquired time ship to change history by sending Halley's Comet into Earth before Mondas gets there. (Er, which denies Mondas a place to get the energy it desperately needs in the first place... if you do remember The Tenth Planet, you'll note that Mondas blew up because it really needed energy but ended up absorbing too much from Earth, not because of anything Earth did.) So even if you do recall those stories (either because you saw them the first time around or maybe you read the Target novelizations), that doesn't give you an advantage over anyone else.
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| The Doctor and Flast are locked in a storeroom. (Attack of the Cybermen Part Two) ©BBC |
But this is all essentially fan complaining, rather than addressing the central point: is the story itself any good? The answer is somewhat mixed. The worst problem with this story is that it seems very generic; there's no real reason for this to have been set up as a sequel in the first place, and the potentially interesting plotline of diverting Halley's Comet into Earth is brought up briefly and then discarded in favor of watching Cybermen and Cryons run around the tombs -- we certainly don't see any evidence of the Cybermen putting this plan into motion. There's also the wasted inclusion of Bates and Stratton, a storyline which looks like it might be going somewhere (for most of this tale, in fact) but then patently doesn't, leaving the audience wondering what the point was. The Cryons are probably the best part, and while it was a good move to cast women in all the roles, they don't end up being the most dynamic of characters. The Lytton subplot about how he was really working for them also feels tacked on, and while seeing Lytton half-cybernized is a very good move, ultimately little is done with this, other than to make the Doctor feel bad about things. ("Didn't go very well, did it?" he notes at the end).
Let's be fair; trying to make a sequel to an old story isn't the worst of sins, and you can see, sort of, why the author(s?)137 thought it was worth doing. However, they've tried to also come up with a more general action story that more casual viewers can enjoy, and the result falls between two stools; too many things changed to please the old-school fans, too generic to interest the new ones. It doesn't help that Attack of the Cybermen too often feels like it's just spinning its wheels. If they'd maintained the atmosphere of part one they might have gotten away with it, but while it's not the disaster you may have heard, there's not ultimately any real reason to care about anything that happens here.
137 The authorship of Attack of the Cybermen is the most contested credit of any Doctor Who story -- to the point where I'm not sure anyone genuinely knows for sure who did what. What seems to be clear is that while Eric Saward was originally going to write this story, John Nathan-Turner told him he couldn't write this as well as Revelation of the Daleks (as that would be a third of the entire season -- something the BBC frowned upon script editors doing at that time), so Saward got an old former girlfriend, Paula Woolsey, to do it up for him (under the pen name Paula Moore). This is where things get confused, however; Saward suggests that Woolsey did a decent amount, rewritten by him as script editor, while then-continuity advisor Ian Levine says that he and Saward wrote it up and that Woolsey didn't contribute anything more than her name. (What is known is that Woolsey subsequently submitted two more story lines to the production office, so it seems unlikely that her name was her only contribution.) The truth is likely somewhere in between, but it seems we'll never know for certain.