FEATURE: The Cybermen - Unlimited Power or Unfulfilled Potential?

 

2nd only to Skaro's finest in the pantheon of Doctor Who's monster races, the Cybermen have had viewers diving behind the sofa since seeing off the Doctor's first incarnation in 1966.

The Cybermen are us. Or used to be...

They are the living dead, walking cadavers, synthetic mummies.  A concept that chills to the bone when we stop to think that these people used to be just like us, but just went too far and forgot what made them human.

The imperative to survive at all costs meant they became willing to pay any price, including sacrificing their hearts and souls. It's horrific because they did it to themselves, and worse - now they want to do it to us.

The creeping fear is that they will take away what makes you you, and you will be like them. And you won't care, you'll have no feelings about the matter at all. Your body, what's left of it, will perambulate around with metal and plastic, wires and circuits, all welded to it, and it will do whatever it takes to live forever and to make everyone else in the universe exactly like it.

This is what we're primed to expect. Body horror. The uncanny. The psychologically upsetting simulacra.

And on paper, what a great... foil, ahem, for the Doctor.  The Time-Lord with two hearts who cares so much, who is brave and enjoys the wonder of life in all its' forms, and would  (and does) fight to the death to save the lives of people he's never met. 

But that's on paper. On screen...

When they first appeared in The Tenth Planet, we could still see the Cybermen's very human origins, with their bare hands and mummified cloth faces, but as time went on, their design was constantly refined, as they became sleeker, more powerful, more technological.  

It makes perfect sense of course that they would carry on adding more and more technology to their bodies, increasingly losing sight of what they once were, their human origins a smaller and smaller dot on the horizon. And that's fine, in terms of their design, and perhaps even of some of their behaviour, yet the more robotic they become, the more - it seems - they're used as generic robots... 

In their second outing, the survivors of Mondas have upgraded themselves but are low on materials and power, and so stage a last ditch attempt to gain control of the Earth's resources via The Moonbase.

Their humans hands are no longer visible, and gone are their sing-song voices, replaced by a more clinical buzzing voice. The shape of their faces is no longer visible through a surgical cloth masking, but instead their heads are encased in tightly fitted metal helmets.

It's this version of the Cybermen that reinforces their mummy-like qualities as they waken from their tomb (pyramid) on Telos and stalk the members of an archaeological team in The Tomb of the Cybermen, and who replace the arms of the giant Toberman. It's here we first meet their Controller, too.

They've had a redesign by The Wheel in Space, but here they really could be any of season 5's long list of 'monsters wot lay siege to a base'. Seriously, replace them with Yeti or Ice Warriors and is this story really any different? The pen of the usually superb David Whittaker (which at that time had only recently given us some of the most devious, chilling and conniving Dalek characterisation) seems to suffer a major wobble, even writing from an idea by the creatures' co-creator Kit Pedler. We know your ways, alright, but where are they? 

When they return in The Invasion (sorry, that's a full 4 episodes into The Invasion), whilst displaying a much more bulked up powerful look, they're really just generic robots again, and really only stormtroopers to the real villain of the piece, Tobias Vaughan (a star turn from the inestimable Kevin Stoney). 

This tale is much better regarded than its' predecessor, thanks in no small part to Stoney, but also due to memorable trips to London Landmarks and the presence of the fledgling UNIT, with Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart having gone up in the world. It's well-loved, but there are no conversions (other than the revelation that Vaughan has allowed his own body to be augmented on condition that his mind remains his own), and other than 'trying to take over the planet', yet again the Cybermen are really just generic robots.

After a long absence they returned to face Tom Baker's 4th Doctor, but as in The Moonbase, Revenge of the Cybermen's protagonists are a "pathetic bunch of tin soldiers roaming the galaxy".

Curiously, though, they're also rather more emotional ("Revenge"?), with rather more human sounding voices too. 

It's the 1st appearance of a black-handled "Cyber-leader" who appears to have rather more personality than we're used to in our Cybermen. It's also this story, and this once-again updated version of the Cybermen, that introduces us to their weakness - Gold.

It doesn't make a great deal of sense, and diminishes their credibility further, though at least here it's vaguely plausible that gold dust clogs their chest units, suffocating them (confirmation at least that they still need to breathe to some extent, though they didn't whilst walking on the lunar surface towards the Moonbase nor when walking through space towards the Wheel). In later stories we'll see the merest contact with gold cause them to give up the ghost.

By the 80s, the look of the Cybermen had evolved, but in a way that remembered their human origins, to the extent that we could see their humanoid chins as they spoke.

These Cybermen were led by a new iteration of the black-handled leader that seemed rather more influenced by the then contemporary Darth Vader. Again the leader seemed somewhat more bombastic than the more generic robots of the later Troughton stories. But is that really so "excellent"?

Aren't they meant to be emotionless? Don't they want their leaders dispassionate and logical, ruthless tacticians who will deliver victory and the furtherance of their goal to survive at all costs? 

It's an interesting touch that the Cyberleader claims to be meeting the Doctor "again", which some have suggested means that the Cyberleader "personality" is a software program. Previously just a fan theory, this does seem to be pretty effectively confirmed in Doomsday when a Cyberleader is destroyed and a lieutenant upgrades. Perhaps this more domineering "personality" type serves an intimidatory purpose, employing psychological manipulation in the field. In fact, we very rarely see a Cyberleader even ever wheeled out except when they come up against the Doctor, so is the software even tailored to him...?

An exception to this is Attack of the Cybermen, wherein the Cyberleader is already on Earth when the Doctor arrives. In this story we return to the ice tombs of Telos and the Cybermen return to their old converting ways. It's here that we get one of those rare glimpses into the so-called body-horror of the Cybermen with partly-converted humans being used to swell their ranks, and the doomed Lytton partly converted before his death.

As their story progresses it becomes clear that, if only via their experience of the Doctor, they gain knowledge of the Time-Lords and time travel, to the extent that they attempt to capture the Time-Lord weapon of validium, which the Doctor has fashioned into the Nemesis statue. It's in Silver Nemesis that they are at their most stupidly susceptible to gold.

Maybe their goal, as in Attack of the Cybermen, is still, and always has been, simply to take over the Earth and turn it into the new Mondas, or to rescue their own doomed planet via time travel... but it's just not always very clear, is it?

Since Doctor Who's 21st century rebirth, the Cybermen returned, but this time originating on Earth, in a parallel universe.  These "Cybus-men" are a slightly distinct prospect. This is not a race striving for survival through spare part surgery, but a race consumed by vanity, obssessed with upgrading. Unfortunately, as horrific as the brain-meat as SIM-card concept of the Cybus-men is, it doesn't really strike terror into the deep subconscious in the same way that the more mummy, or zombie, -like originals can continue to do.

Neil Gaiman's messy and confused Nightmare in Silver treated us to the return of "our" Cybermen, but at least in appearance they were still seem akin to the RTD-era versions, if also seeming to include elements of the 2nd & 3rd iterations. 

Despite some impressive new adaptations such as super-speed and detachable hands, we saw too little of the Cybermen themselves in a story that really focused on the Cyber-planner's attempts to infiltrate the Doctor's brain and take over his Time-Lord body.

Their appearance in Peter Capaldi's debut season went some way to restoring the body horror aspect, with another undeniably logical progression, this time from the pen of showrunner Steven Moffat, that saw the Cybermen harvest the dead as raw material for their army. 

Disappointingly, though, it's not a plan of their own making; once again they're simply an army playing second fiddle, this time to the latest incarnation of the Master: the Mistress. 

There's perhaps an implication that the 'animate-the-dead' plan has links to the Mistress' sock-puppet GUS, and the technology gleaned from the Foretold on the Orient Express, meaning that the destiny of the Cybermen has been led astray. If so, it's pleasing to see them linked back to the mummies of old, but disappointing to hear that the link may in fact have been lost on Steven Moffat, who apparently mocks Capaldi's favoured Cybermen of the 10th Planet as having "jumpers pulled over their heads." 

More upgrades and adaptations are on show in the 2014 finale, including the even more Iron Man-like ability to fly, and they exploit the eponymous "Dark Water" to hide in plain sight in tombs that show that, perhaps after a time, their only organic components are the skeletons of the dead. 

Now what is intrinsically "Cyberman" is in the machinery, the software, and the human meat is needed to keep those components going and not the other way around. 

The horror of the uncanny is on show in the failures of conversion: the emotionally uninhibited reanimated corpse of Danny Pink providing a sucker punch to both Clara Oswald and the 12th Doctor... 

...and the Good Soldier, the man too loyal to turn, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, whose reanimation as a Kroton-like Cyberman with a soul leads to unquestionably mixed feelings; at once horrifying that this much-loved character would be defiled by the Cybermen in this way, and touched that what made us love that character cannot, in fact, be dimmed, and he is able to enslave the Cyberman curse to his own will in order to provide those he loved in life with eternal protection. 

So overall, do the Cybermen do their 'job' as monsters? Do they scare us? Perhaps even as generic robots their iconic yet ever evolving design gives them enough of an identity to scare just in the role of relentless stormtroopers.

But it's rarely that that truly satisfies. It's surely undeniable that they're at their peak when the glimpses of their long-buried humanity show through, when we see the dead men stare at us.

It's perhaps no co-incidence that some of the most compelling examinations of the Cybermen in recent times have come through spin-off media, including the highly acclaimed Spare Parts from Big Finish arguably botched by Rise of the Cybermen, the late Steve Moore's compelling Kroton, the Cyberman with a soul, making it from a back-up comic strip to the main strip itself as a companion to Paul McGann's 8th Doctor, and the almost wraith-like future Cybermen of the epic final 8th Doctor comic strip (the regeneration story that never was) The Flood. 

Special mention of course has to go to Alan Barnes & Adrain Salmon's "The Cybermen" - the mid nineties one-page strip that ran for 24 parts of epic silver giant mysticism and malevolence. 

So what of the future? Can the Cybermen play to their strengths and remember that we need to feel the hole in their souls to shudder at the abyss? Only time will tell.

What are your thoughts? And which is your favourite design? Leave your comments below or tweet me at @tygerwhocame2T!

TTFN! K.
Coming Soon... "What If..." Season 12 starred Jon Pertwee?, The Arc of Fenric, Doctor Who Movie Do's and Don'ts!