The Doctor’s excited to visit the filming of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – but the machine man isn’t what he’s expecting.

John Dorney’s concluding tale for this Lost Warriors set sees Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor encounter a lone Cyberman – not just a head in a display cabinet, as we saw in Dalek, but a deadly example of the cybernetic race. Not everything is quite as it seems, though, and Dorney provides plenty of twists and turns as the Doctor tries to save everyone if possible, with sterling – if initially reluctant – help from Helen Goldwyn’s Anna Dreyfus (and I was pleased to hear the coda between their two characters, something that would have felt wrong not to be addressed). There are some other resemblances to Robert Shearman’s series 1 tale, but they feel like appropriate echoes, and a subtle hint of the PTSD that still is at the heart of this incarnation.

Director Barnaby Edwards and sound designer Iain Meadows give an appropriately Gothic air to proceedings, with one of the tenser audio deaths of recent times, and Nick Wilton’s Fritz Lang is a more three-dimensional figure than legend would have the director.

Verdict: A clever slant on a classic tale. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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