Day 223: The Invasion Episode 4

This story is eight parts long, which is a bit cumbersome when you expect audiences to keep attention for eight solid weeks without getting bored. Nevertheless, writers have come up with ways in which to make the longer serials work. We'll be dealing with one such scenario later on in this series, but let's focus instead on what we've got here. The basic plot so far is that a mysterious man has taken the world by storm with his electronics company. There's some nice James Bond action as we see a daring escape in a helicopter, and there's hints of an alien intervention, but beyond that, this serial should be quite a basic four part serial, with the end of this only having a few loose ends to tie up. But the genius of this serial is to hide a key element from the plot and bring it out when things threaten to get stale, thus giving the plot a constant movement. It's akin to a magic trick, where a magician will draw back some curtains that you didn't know were there in the first place (and is that an actual magic trick? It sounds like quite a dull one in my opinion. File that one away in reasons why this blog author should not do magic). So what have the curtains revealed? What has been so immense as to change the course of the story completely? Well, it can only really be the revelation of a returning monster, which we have in this instance as we discover the Cybermen returning to our screens, after a painstakingly long 14 episode absence.