I must admit I expected something more from this, but sadly this was a bit underwhelming.

Don't get me wrong, it has some GREAT Things, the whole Interactions with the Brig and 9 are great, Culshaw and Eccelston give it their all and have some lovely Moments with one another. When they meet, it's so good hearing those two meet.

When we get the Ending with the Mondasian Cybermen, I started to properly get intrigued with the Story but the Moment this happened, was also the Moment where this First Part out of Two ended.

Honestly besides those two really great Things, I don't rate it highly at all. It's okay at best. Hopefully the second Part will work much better for me.

The Ninth Doctor #16

'Old Friends: Way of the Burryman' (2022) from The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Series 1.

As a bit of an informal introduction to the Brigadier for me, minus one little First Doctor short story, I suppose a lot of his connection with Nine and their references to their past is a bit lost on me, but I still enjoyed their conversations together. The setting of Scotland with the Burryman and the Forth Bridge is an interesting piece of history with all of the related accidents, and I suppose turning those lost people into Cybermen would be sort of fun maybe if there wasn't a Cyberman story literally two stories ago in these box sets. But the presence of Kreel is quite well done here, even if Nicholas Briggs' performance kind of makes him sound like General Grevious, and as a cliffhanger the reveal is cool. This is generally a pretty solid first-part in a two-parter that doesn't overall work for me unfortunately.

Lots of planets have a Scotland…tricky part is keeping hold of it.

It’s nice to see the Brig and Nine meet up, plus Jon Culshaw does an uncanny impression of Nicholas Courtney…but this episode is so all over the place and weirdly paced, that I found it a little difficult to follow.

Not a bad story, but definitely a messy one.

(Review for this and the next story.)

Two-parter with Cybermen and the Brigadier! ...Unfortunately I don't know the Brigadier well enough yet for this to be particularly nostalgic, and it wasn't much interesting otherwise.

C.