We’re hurtling towards Doctor Who’s two-part finale and the truth behind Missy, with Steven Moffat promising to make returning villains the Cybermen scary again.
In many ways, the silver giants are perfect Moffat era monsters – he’s fascinated by things that look, but are not, human (the Spoonheads, the Dalek drones from ‘Asylum…’, the Flesh, the Teselecta and many others), and there’s every chance that if he pulls this off, ‘Dark Water’/‘Death in Heaven’ could be a highpoint of the Grand Moff’s tenure on the show. But what does it have to compare with?
We look at some of the best Cybermen stories of the past…
‘Army of Ghosts’ / ‘Doomsday’ (2006)
The Cybermen are actually a very difficult threat to write for: they really only work if they are completely and entirely unstoppable, and obviously, narrative demands dictate that that can never happen.
In his second finale for the rebooted series, far from trying to ignore the Cybermen’s status as the ‘other’ Doctor Who monster, Russell T Davies positively revels in it: the metal monsters are positioned first as a major threat, and then revealed to be entirely irrelevant – even the fanboy fantasy of Daleks Vs Cybermen isn’t nearly as interesting as the smaller, more individual stories.
As well as a great scene when the Daleks and Cybermen trade bitchy barbs (“You are superior in only one respect – you are better at dying”), RTD realises that the best way to present an emotionless monster is to turn up the volume on the emotion everywhere else: the Cybermen are presented first as the ghosts of loved ones, and the most important aspects of this story are the Tyler family being reunited, even as The Doctor and Rose are ripped apart.
It’s actually pretty difficult to come up with a new way of doing Cybermen: even if you do them ‘properly’ – implacable, emotionless, and not that great at conversation – there’s too much of a risk that you’ll end up doing something boring.
The solution? Do what Russell T Davies is best at. Go bombastic. Go ridiculous. Big broad strokes, with a strong emotional core at the centre. All the best Cybermen stories of recent years have scored highly by shifting the focus from the Cybermen themselves to the supporting cast. So here we have a grieving father and a disillusioned woman – Mercy Hartigan – attempting to create a new world order while surrounded by unsympathetic men.
Yes, it’s gossamer-light, and, as a Christmas special, largely unconnected with the episodes that surround it, but it’s well-paced fun, provides an interesting new variant of the cyborg (the shades), and, of course, has a gigantic steam-punk CyberKing, which is as every bit stupid as you’ve heard, and a hell of a lot better than you may have feared.
Pertwee’s Doctor never faced off against the Cybermen during his own era, and nor should he have done: his approach of karate chops and “I say, old chap” would have seen him shot down in the first four minutes.
The sequence in which a squad of Cybermen get demolished by a dancer in a silver Morphsuit has dated slightly, but frankly only slightly. This is deep in the era of 80’s Who, when the Cybermen don’t get to do a great deal apart from booming ‘excellent’, fist-bumping, and panicking about where their anti-gold inhaler has disappeared to.
The only way to convince us that they’re a truly terrifying force is not (as will happen later in this same story) getting them to play and fail at hopscotch, but – ironically enough – have them completely slaughtered by the Raston Warrior Robot, once you’ve introduced it as the ‘most perfect killing machine ever devised’.
Yes, seriously. We’re sticking our neck out on this one, since ‘The World Shapers’ – a comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine – never actually appeared as part of the TV series, and takes some serious liberties with continuity (we can safely assume that nobody considers this to be canonical).
As well as that, Jamie gets killed off, and the Cybermen are reverse-engineered into fetish-gimp aliens, the Voord.
Ironically enough, such apparent lack of respect for Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler’s creation means that the Cybermen suddenly become interesting again, and a final coda from the Time Lords suggests an entirely believable conclusion to the ultimate upgrade.
More on Page 2…