The Tomb of the Cybermen

Dear Gary—

Hurray! Finally a real episode that I can sit back and watch. Finally a reprieve from the reconstructions. The Tomb of the Cybermen was actually a lost episode until it was found in 1991. Hurray!

This story has more going for it than just the fact that it is not reconstructed. We get some revelations about the Doctor, a well written and acted script, humor, great character chemistry, and the Cybermen.  Plus it has a small role for Clive Merrison who will go on to play one of my all time favorite Doctor Who characters—the Deputy Chief Caretaker in Paradise Towers.

A win-win throughout.

First we have some revealing and touching scenes with Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. In welcoming Victoria on board, the Doctor tells her, “It’s the TARDIS; it’s my home. At least it has been for a considerable number of years.” His affection for the TARDIS perhaps explains his continual defense of it, as he does again in this story: “A smooth take-off—what nerve,” he huffs indignantly when Jamie questions his ability.

And then for the first time he reveals his age—450 years (in Earth terms). This leads to a sweet exchange a little later in our story with the newly orphaned Victoria when the Doctor tries to comfort her for the loss of her father. Victoria asks the Doctor if he doesn’t remember his own family and he responds, “Oh, yes I can; when I want to. And that’s the point, really. I have to really want to to to bring them back in front of my eye. The rest of the time they sleep in my mind and I forget.”

Already he is a lonely Doctor. Exiled from his home planet; his granddaughter left behind on Earth to start her own life; the TARDIS the only home he has known for a ‘considerable number of years;’ his family forgotten, sleeping in his mind, only thought of when he wants to bring them forth.

Speaking of homes, Gary, we have a little confusion about the Cybermen’s true home. Back in the Tenth Planet where they were first introduced, Mondas was identified as their home planet. Now we hear that Telos is their home. However, what I gather from this is that Mondas was their original planet but since it was destroyed they turned to Telos and made it their new home.

We also learn at the start of The Tomb of the Cybermen that they have been dead for 500 years. Of course, in The Moonbase we also heard that the Cybermen had died out years ago, so this should be taken with a grain of salt.

Our action starts with a group of archeologists intent on uncovering the site where these supposedly dead Cybermen have been entombed. And just to illustrate how good a script we have in the Tomb of the Cybermen, we get this wonderfully humorous little exchange in a set-up scene with supporting cast as they explode the area in which they believe the tomb to be buried:

“Well, there you go—you blast yourself one layer of rock and all you’ve got’s another,” one says in defeat as the apparently futile explosion of rock settles.

“Man, you just blew yourself a pair of doors,” another exclaims, as indeed a pair of doors unexpectedly emerges at the last minute.

The Tomb of the Cybermen is full of great lines, great exchanges, great interchanges between characters, and these are liberally scattered to all the actors and not just to the main core. I especially enjoy when the American Captain Hopper enters the picture. He is a no-nonsense, direct, to the point, take no guff type of a guy, yet with a subtle humor that hints of an off duty persona I truly would like to know. Too bad his character is in a story so soon in Victoria’s Doctor Who experience; he would have made an ideal mate for her. I don’t know, Gary, how Victoria (or ‘Vic’ as Hopper calls her) does eventually leave the Doctor, but I hope that in her Doctorless future she somehow hooks up with him.

Captain Hopper doesn’t get much screen time; he has a sabotaged rocket ship to repair, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t need members of the expedition under foot, or as he shakes off a particularly annoying  scientist, “especially with you insisting all over the place.”

The archeologists and the Doctor are left to explore the mysteries of the uncovered tomb. There is a hatch that needs opening, a sarcophagus that swallows Victoria, and a Cyberman weapons testing room where one of the party gets himself blasted when he stands in the way of the dummy target practice. And of course, what is any good Doctor Who story without secret plots and a madman who believes he can control the Cybermen (or whatever enemy is on hand) to his own advantage.

“Some things are better left undone.” In this case, that something is the opening of the hatch leading down to where the frozen Cybermen await an awakening. But the expedition diligently works out the symbolic logic puzzle of levers to figure out the correct sequence. “Everything yields to logic.” “I think perhaps your logic is wearing a little thin,” the Doctor replies when the sequence doesn’t work. However the hatch finally does open and a party descends.

Curiously the Doctor only half heartedly tries to dissuade the resurrection of the Cybermen, responding to a chastising Jamie that he wanted to see what Klieg (the madman of our story) was up to. Meantime Klieg’s associate Kaftan, left behind with Victoria, closes the hatch thus trapping the Doctor and party below with the newly defrosted Cybermen.

I have to say that Victoria is not totally useless, despite the fact that she is so often left behind and does her share of screaming (“You scream real good, Vic”). For being a young innocent girl straight out of 1866, she is quick witted, sharp tongued, determined, and even defiant, all in a refined, soft spoken way.

She reluctantly obeys the Doctor when he orders her to stay above in safety, settling for the role of watchdog over Kaftan. Victoria is wonderfully stern and stubborn with the devious Kaftan. Then when Kaftan seals the hatch a determined Victoria, not knowing how to open the hatch back up, runs for Captain Hopper and Jim (AKA the Deputy Chief Caretaker). “Now hold on; I’m not pulling any levers until I know what this is all about.” But Victoria will not be dissuaded.

"Who’d be a woman?” she says in dejected disgust when rebuffed yet again from descending down into the open hatchway. “How would you know?” Captain Hopper shoots back off handedly as he disappears below. A woman born and bred in the 1800’s, but a woman getting a taste of adventure and beginning to question her designated role. I hope, Gary, that the show continues to explore this aspect of Victoria's character.

And I hope to see more of the great camaraderie developing between the Doctor and Jamie. They are turning into quite a team, at times a comic duo. After defeating an advancing army of cybermats by confusing “their tiny metal minds” with an electrical field, the Doctor turns to Jamie with “you might almost say they had a complete metal breakdown,” as Jamie groans.

Cybermats are not Cybermen, however, and the Doctor still needs to face the Cyber Controller. However these freshly unfrozen Cybermen are running sluggish and it is rather easily done. “The best thing about a machine that makes sense—you can very easily make it turn out nonsense.” But it is the human drama and comedy going on around the Cyber menace that is central to The Tomb of the Cybermen.

Kleig has gone completely off the deep end as the Doctor goads him into revealing his mad plan to gain ultimate power. “Well now I know you’re mad; I just wanted to make sure.” The Cybermen he was relying on, however, inevitably turn on Kleig and all that is left is for the Doctor to return the Cybermen to their deep freeze and seal up the tomb for good.

“That really is the end of the Cybermen, isn’t it?” asks Jamie. “Yes, Jamie,” the Doctor replies, “on the other hand, I never like to make predictions.” Good thing, because we know the Cybermen’s history.

I guess I’ve run on a bit, Gary, but it is just so refreshing to have such a great story in its entirety for a change.

I leave with just a few last observances from the Doctor. “Our lives are different to anybody else’s,” he tells Victoria. “That’s the exciting thing. Nobody in the universe can do what we’re doing.”

No, nobody can do what the Doctor does, nor can they do it in the style of the Doctor. As he eloquently says of his home the TARDIS, it “enables me to travel through the universe of time.”

I leave on that note, Gary, traveling through the universe of time with the Doctor.