26th Oct 2008
The Tomb of the Cybermen
We watched “The Tomb of the Cybermen” last night. This was one of the few extant Doctor Who stories that I had simply never seen before. It was missing when I was a kid, and I hadn’t watched the show enough since this serial was rediscovered to have caught it on television. I was excited about seeing it, since it is one of the very small number of complete stories featuring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. (In fact, it is the only complete story from Troughton’s entire first two seasons on the show!) It’s the earliest complete story with cybermen, and it introduces their athropoid minions the cybermats My Doctor Who Techical Manual has some beautful production photographs of entombed cybermen, so I was expecting a graphical treat with this serial.
The plot sounds more complicted than it actually is. The Cybermen begin the story entombed in a frozen honeycomb of cells beneath the remains of one of their outposts on the planet Telos. A group of explorers from Earth have just uncovered the entrance when the TARDIS arrives. The explorers attempt to force open the titanic double doors (flanked by nine-foot reliefs of cybermen), only to lose of their number to the first of numerous booby traps. The Doctor helps the archeologists get past the trap and into the base’s control room. He figures out that in order to work the controls, they must solve several abstract logical puzzles. Against the Doctor’s urging, Dr. Eric Kleig, one of the archeologists (who is in open conflict with the man who is supposed to be the leader of the expedition), opens the shaft down into the tomb antechamber. The Doctor, his male companion Jamie, and most of the team descend into the frigid chambers below, and Kleig’s female accomplice promptly seals them inside (after drugging Victoria, the Doctor’s second companion, who is brand new and extremely ineffectual). Kleig reveals that his plan is to wake the cybermen (which he does) and make a deal with them. However, the cybermen (predictably enough) are not interested, and they reveal that the reason they had protected their tomb with logic puzzles was to ensure that only the most intelligent interlopers would make it inside. The interlopers are then to have their brains operated on to remove fear and robotic enhancements added to their bodies; they are to become the next race of cybermen. However, the present group of intruders does manage to escape and to reseal the cybermen underground, although they leave behind Toberman, the strongest member of the team, who promptly gets partially fitted with cybernetic enhancements and some kind of mind control device. Unfortunately, Kleig is unwilling to give up his treachery and lets the Cyber Controller, leader of the Telos cybermen, out. The man-mountain Toberman accompanies the cybernetic warlord, but it seems that Toberman is not yet completely in the thrall of the cybermen. With his innate strength and new robotic arm, he overpowers Cyber Controller in several one-on-one engagements, giving the Doctor and his allies time to seal the complex up again, so the cybermen might never escape.
Of course, they did eventually escape. This was the second Doctor’s second cyberman story already, and he had two more coming. Counting “The Tenth Planet,” William Hartnell’s final appearance, there were five stories with cybermen in seasons four through six! They were obviously pretty popular.
To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with this story. When I was a kid, “Tomb of the Cybermen” was one of the most famous missing classics. It was recovered in 1992, when a TV station in Hong Kong discovered a copy they had rented from the BBC in the early 1970s, and was released on DVD with great fanfare. I’m not sure what was supposed to be so special about this episode. The tomb itself, five stories high, filled with living cybermen in suspended animation, who wake and shear through the protective bubbles that have contained them, is as impressive as my Techincal Manual made it look. But the rest of the visual design is pretty uninspired. The regular cybermen appear threatening, but Controller’s costume can only be desribed as ridiculous. He has a pointed dome atop his metal helmet, which was supposed to look like it contained a glowing brain. When Cyber Controller returned in “Attack of the Cybermen” (played by the same actor, Michael Kilgarrf), the costumers dispensed with the brain look and simply gave the controller an extra-large pointed helmet. However, when the new race of cybermen in “The Age of Steel” created their new Controller, they went back to the retro exposed cerebrum.
Moreover, most of the action takes place in a very small number of rooms, in what really ought to be a much larger complex. I realize the budget was small, but in some episodes, the production team was able to create a much greater impression of space. And after halfway through the first episode, there aren’t even any more outside shots of Telos (until “Attack of the Cybermen,” which did its shooting in the same quarry).
Finally, Patrick Troughton was the first Doctor that I ever met, and he was an amazing character in person. He took off his pants on stage! (It turned out he had “accidentally” worn his Doctor Who costume pants underneath them, but he really made people in the audience think that he was about to strip down to his underdrawers.) There are very few Troughton episodes extent, but in those that I’ve seen (such as “The Mind Robber“), the second Doctor possesses a crazy energy; and in “The Three Doctors,” the first Doctor characterizes his immediate replacement as a “clown.” Yet there was very little of that in this story. There are occasionally flashes of the the second Doctor’s distinctive persona, but the only real moment when the Doctor’s character really seemed to be interesting comes near the end. The Doctor takes a moment to indulge Klieg’s megalomaniacal fantasies, sending the villain into an ecstatic fit, before the Doctor pronounces that he’s now eliminated any lingering doubts that Klieg is an utter madman.
As I’ve said, this episode was rather a disappointment. The cybermen were not very threatening, and were overpowered by nothing more than main force. They weren’t even the most important villains; that was Kleig and his faction. There were certainly moments; I watched the scene of the tomb unfreezing and the cybermen stirring in their cells over and over. Some of the special effects were quite innovative. They used static electric discharges, overlain on film of action scenes, to portray the cybermen’s energy weapons. Even better, I thought, was the similar use of oscilloscope traces to represent mind control waves. Yet this is never going to be among my favorite Doctor Who stories, and I’d like to think it wasn’t the second Doctor’s best work either.
[...] being thoroughly disappointed with “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” I thought I’d go back and watch another Doctor Who story featuring the cybernetic [...]