Tony’s getting the upgrade.
When Doctor Who came back in 2005, it was keen to redevelop what had long been the show’s #1 monster in the public imagination – the Dalek – and make it a genuinely scary threat for the 21st century.
When the show got its second series confirmed, and with a brand new Doctor in David Tennant, it couldn’t really avoid bringing back the Cybermen (often thought of as the show’s #2 monster), and re-imagining them for the 21st century too.
But there was a line to be walked. With the Daleks, they were so very vivid in the general public consciousness that what you needed to do was address their perceived weaknesses – the inability to deal with stairs, their sink-plunger arm, etc – and turn them into strengths, to make the Skarosian tank-mutants into unstoppable killing machines again, and elevate them to such a position that they and the Time Lords had essentially wiped each other out, leaving only the Doctor in the universe who could stand up to them when they returned.
With the Cybermen, there was a different problem. It wasn’t that the public was mostly aware of their weaknesses, but that they weren’t particularly aware of what made the Cybermen tick, where they were from, what made them want to convert or conquer the universe.
So what you needed for the first Cyber-story of the 21st century, was essentially an origin story that people could get hold of.
Hardcore fans of course, knew the origin story. The people of Mondas, Earth’s original twin planet, had perfected cyber-surgery, replacing the organic parts of themselves over time, and eventually removing their capacity for emotions, leaving them entirely logical and bent on spreading the gift of Cyberization to the rest of the universe.
That’s where the second balancing act came in. Without essentially re-telling The Tenth Planet with the Tenth Doctor, how did you give the Cybermen a backstory that new viewers could connect to, without ruining the ‘canon’ for the established fans by essentially retconning The Tenth Planet?
The solution from writer Tom MacRae was more than a touch ingenious. In ‘our’ universe, Mondas was a twin planet of Earth. But perhaps in a parallel universe, it was right here on Earth that the Cybermen developed. A twin dimension, rather than a twin planet. And Rise of the Cybermen and The Age Of Steel was off to the races.
There’s always talk of the similarities between Rise of the Cybermen and Spare Parts, the Big Finish story by Marc Platt which takes the Fifth Doctor to Mondas as the Cybermen are actually beginning to emerge as an entity, rather than a collection of upgrades. But MacRae rightly draws lines of separation between Platt’s masterpiece (Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, go now and listen, it’s absurdly good) and his own. Yes, technically, they document the same point in the evolution of the Cybermen – but that’s about all they have in common.
For a large part of Rise of the Cybermen, in fact, we’re distracted by the potential of a parallel universe when the Doctor, Rose and Mickey more or less fall into one. While the only energy source that can recharge the Tardis is growing and getting power, the potential of that other universe is too strong for the two companions – Mickey goes to see if his nan, who raised him, is still alive there, given she had died in ‘our’ world, and Rose is brought up short by a billboard that shows her dad, dead in our universe, is not only alive in the parallel, but successful.
In the parallel world, Jackie and Pete Tyler are still married, but they never had Rose. And Pete is connected to the activities of a mega-businessman called John Lumic.
Lumic, we learn early, is dependent on a wheelchair and life-support systems, making him very much a re-envisaging of Davros, creator of the Daleks. But the interesting thing is that it technically makes more sense in Lumic’s case that a man who feels himself to be an almighty brain and will, almost mocked by a body decaying with age and atrophy, would focus on creating something like the Cybermen. While he wants to wait until the last possible moment, the Cybermen for him are a kind of fantasy wish-fulfilment, an immortal, undecaying body to carry around the human brain. The Cybermen have always been the ultimate fantasy of the old and the fearful – they’re a protection both from the physical decay of ageing and death, and from the mental pain of living a life with a brain that still thinks organic thoughts in a body no longer able to experience mortal pleasures in any meaningful way.
The Cybermen have always represented this fear, but it has never been centred in a single individual’s drive to survive until the world met John Lumic (Roger Lloyd-Pack) in Rise of the Cybermen.
At first experimenting with society’s unwanted, the homeless and hungry (literally the spare parts of the social pecking order), the Cybermen grow in number – though it’s worth pointing out that this gradual rise is somewhat counterintuitive at the end of the story, when it turns out Lumic has had hives of Cybermen stashed away for quite some time). Weirdly though, it’s almost coincidence that brings Rose and the Doctor to Pete and Jackie’s house the night they’re hosting the President of the UK. With whom, Lumic’s toy soldiers want a word.
Graeme Harper was the only Classic Who director to get to direct in the New Who era too at the time, and what he gave us in The Rise of the Cybermen was a masterclass in angles and the delivery of menace through the choice of shots. He made the return of the Cybermen into something that had both power and a sense of size that was frightening as they crashed Jackie Tyler’s birthday party with mayhem on their minds.
It’s possible to argue though that the new Cybermen lost some of their Classic era menace specifically in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age Of Steel, by virtue of having no weapon except a kind of electro-touch. They also gained an unfortunately undramatic catchphrase to mimic the Daleks – intoning “Delete, delete, delete” like walking incarnations of Grammarly. And for any long-term Cyber-fan, the question of how they would sound was a vexed one – the Cybermen have had a range of vocal tones throughout their on-screen lives, but for many people the best (if least logical) was that of the Eighties Cybermen voiced (and played) by David Banks and Mark Hardy, which had a deep electronic burr to it. Nick Briggs is a master in almost all things, but the monotone he gave the new Cyber-voices, while logically in keeping with the like of Troughton-era Cybermen, felt a bit flat on screen.
But for most viewers, that didn’t matter. Either the Cybermen were back, and looking bigger and stronger then ever if you were a hardcore Who-fan, or there was a new cool monster in Doctor Who if you weren’t.
One of the neatest elements about the Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel is how plausible the creep of Cyber-technology is in it – people at first getting ‘earpods’ which feed chosen content directly into their ear canals and brains, and from there, the information-flow going both ways, facilitating mind-reading and mind-control as and when necessary. The Doctor’s lecture about the human race always needing the next upgrade was well observed based on a society in which technology is outdated within two years of its launch. And the universality of Lumic’s ‘earpod’ technology gets lots of people walking into Battersea Power Station early in The Age Of Steel, because if the Cybermen have always been about the fear of ageing and death, they’ve also always been about the body horror or a human brain in a metal body, the flesh having been cut away and discarded.
The second episode of the Cyber-return to Doctor Who riffed heavily on this body horror and the emotional response to it. Where in Classic Who it was rarely made explicit how the emotions were removed, in The Age Of Steel it was given a conveniently vulnerable explanation. There was no Frankensteinian lobotomy action involved in creating a Cyberman, there was simply an emotional inhibitor, which, if you knew how, could be switched off. That would mean lots of Cybermen suddenly becoming self-aware inside their metal bodies and going stark, raving bonkers.
The Doctor only discovers this through Mickey and his connection to a gang of anti-Lumic activists, the Preachers, who in this universe have a Ricky Smith among their number. Ricky is sadly killed along the way, giving Mickey an example to look up to (as well as a potential boyfriend in fellow Preacher, Jake). When Mrs Moore, a techie in the gang, teams up with the Doctor, there’s a touching scene where a dying Cyberman regains its humanity, and tells them it was getting married the next day. And while Mrs Moore too immediately pays the price, and the parallel Jackie Tyler is among the first batch of humans to be Cyber-converted at Battersea, the Doctor learns the way to defeat the Cybermen – find the code that controls the emotional inhibitor and broadcast it to all the Cybermen.
This is both in the long tradition of Cyberman stories and yet somehow disappointing at the same time. While the Daleks have had issues that make them weak – stairs, plungers, etc – the list of things that, for no good reason whatsoever, allow you to destroy a lot of Cybermen in one go had grown ludicrous in Classic Who – from radiation to gravity to nail varnish remover to gold coins lodged in their chest. They have always had to be artificially limited in their power, and the emotional inhibitor, while it was a slightly more technical version of the trope, was the first 21st century way to kill a lot of Cybermen in a hurry and so resolve a story. It was a trend which would probably reach its nadir in the Eleventh Doctor story Closing Time, when for all intents and purposes, ‘blowing them up with love’ became a thing you could do to Cybermen.
While the ending is too easy, it leaves a lot of changes in the world of the Tardis crew. Rose reveals her identity to Pete Tyler, and he can’t especially handle it – especially not after losing his wife in the Cyber-factories.
Mickey, meanwhile, decides to stay behind in the parallel universe and root out all the hives of hidden Cybermen, while also having some extra time with his nan. As he rightly says, in a world with Rose Tyler and the Doctor in it, “It’s never gonna be me, is it?”, so he decides to find his own destiny, free from the endless, hopeless hope of getting back a relationship with Rose.
Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel together are a fantastic spectacle of Cyber-reinvention, and they repay re-watching even today. The way the Cybermen are defeated may be little more than the 21st century of the Classic show’s easy solutions to Cybermen, downgrading them as a threat, but the two-part reintroduction of Doctor Who’s silver medal monsters has a high bodycount, Cybermen marching en masse, a joyfully explicit explanation of how they came about (in at least one reality), and plenty of personal, emotional impact, both for the Tardis team and for us as viewers. This is an achievement underlined by quite how difficult it has proved to deliver an effective Cyber-story in the years that have followed. Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel – check them out again.
They’re probably better than you
remember.
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