The Tomb Of The Cybermen: Ranking - 45

 

The Tomb Of The Cybermen

(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 2-23/9/1967, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Victor Pemberton, writers: Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, director: Morris Barry)

Rank: 45

   'Cybermum's gone to Iceland, on Telos - she'll be back soon, just as soon as humanity's recklessly opened up her tomb and let her out! Now eat your cyber fish fingers and cyber custard'

 

  There they lurked, entombed, in the dark, waiting for the archaeologists who were fated to awaken them and bring them out into the open, restoring them from a legendary folk memory to their proper title as their era’s most ruthless killers. The historians gaped in awe as they gazed upon their icy catacombs, sealed for decades and brought them out into the blinking light. And then one of them opened the film canisters and aid ‘gosh, I wonder how this got here? I suppose we’d better send this back to the BBC right away’. Fandom spent the longest time assuming that this highly popular and much loved story from the moment it was first broadcast was one that we would never get to see again. It was, following the cataloguing that went on in the late 1970s and the return of a few stray lone episodes, the first big cache of returned missing episodes we’d ever had and certainly that fans could actually own (more or less) straight away thanks to the wonders of home video – one that was the best-selling in the DW range for quite a few years afterwards (and remains one of the highest selling BBC home videos of all time). For anyone who wasn’t a fan or wasn’t born in 1992 when this story was returned it was like the recovery of ‘Web Of Fear’ and ‘Enemy Of the World’ in 2013, but more so because it had never happened before in such a big way, like all your birthdays and Christmasses at once sprinkled with a dose of fairy magic, a moment in time when all things seemed possible (after all, if this story could turn up out of the blue then what could happen tomorrow?) Only of course it is no longer magic, but a real tangible object made on a low budget in a cramped TV studio by people who have the audacity not to realise they’re making a bit of history that those who saw it the first time round would talk about in hushed tones and the feelings of fans nowadays who can measure this story up against other Troughton episodes is usually ‘is that it?’ What they see are the wonky special effects (even by 1967 standards), the drab talky scenes of unrehearsed actors crashing their lines, the rather odd pacing that speeds up and slows down and a story that’s great in parts rather than gripping all the way through. But some of that magic still remains: its easy to see why viewers from a quarter century earlier still remembered so much of it, particularly the iconic moment of a whole army of cybermen being defrosted in slow motion at the end of episode two (another of those candidates for the greatest DW cliffhanger of them all) while the central idea, a riff on all those mummy curse films, only in the future and in an ice tomb not a baking hot Egyptian desert, is still a moment of pure inspirational genius, one of the best plots the show ever had. As for me, I’m in a peculiar halfway house – I’m not old enough to have seen this story the first time around but I had already fallen in love with the script book published two years before the re-discovery which I loved from the first before finding out how revered and loved this story was and that’s still one of my most treasured DW possessions even now I can see the thing and don’t need to read it, so having this story returned in 1992 after it existed only on the page and in my imagination was quite an experience. Other stories from the Troughton era look a lot better than this one (not least other Cybermen stories that make them even more of a threat like ‘The Moonbase’ and ‘The Invasion’) and yet I read the novelisations of both those books early on and they never quite gripped me quite the same way: for all its faults this story is special because the ideas are so good. 

Cyber creators Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler have clearly been thinking what to do with their Mondasian meanies next and hit on the idea that being not-strictly-human Cybermen would be quite likely to have a sort of ‘cryogenic chamber’ and so stick them in a giant freezer on an ice planet– a mainstay of scifi in the last half century but still unusual in 1967. So far in their chronology the Cybermen have come to us, overpowering human bases at the South Pole and on The Moon, but its here, in their third story, that we seem them on their world – or one of them anyway, the Cybermen having frozen themselves on Telos following the destruction of home planet Mondas. They know, though, that one day someone will find them when the time is right to be conquered again and so set a trap for those who come after in much the same way the legends of Pharoah curses work (which, in reality, are more a warning saying ‘grave robbers hands off or you’ll get a smack in the afterlife’ but make for a good story), only this time its not a curse but pure mathematics, a series of logic problems that mean only the very intelligent get through to be taken over. The Tardis lands as an archaeological team from Earth intend to do just that and what happens next is interesting in the light of this story following straight on from ‘Evil Of The Daleks’. As if anyone’s a ‘baddy’ in this story its the Dr, leading the team on to their doom despite knowing what’s going to happen – it looks as if he’s making sure these tombs are opened while he’s here so he can make sure they’re sealed forever, but he’s still partly responsible for all the things that happen as a result of his actions, even slipping the humans the logic code to open the tomb when they get it wrong. These aren’t your oven-ready Cybermen either, despite being defrosted so thoroughly – they feel fresh in new ways they weren’t even in their last two excellent (even better?) adventures, more of a threat now we meet them on their world and get to hear them talk at length in those chilling electronically-treated voices (an actual gadget used to help people who’d lost their larynxes through illness, usually smoking to speak, with a metal gadget placed against the throat: a lot of Cyber voice artists went dizzy by the end of filming). The Cybermen never looked better or acted more emotionless than they do here, utterly ruthless and close to unstoppable (as with the two previous Cybermen stories this story is more horror than scifi, with the incidental cast being picked off one by one just as you get to know them well). 

Oddly the 2^nd Dr never really is this manipulative again(apart from a brief dabble at the end of his 7^th incarnation), perhaps because this story feels like one of his closest battles – after three and a half episodes of all hell breaking loose its one of this story’s negative points that it basically ends with everyone legging it outside and the Dr electrocuting the doors shut again, as the only way he can defeat the undefeatable. In between, though, you get the feeling that this is a story where anything can happen, because it quite often does, with a new twist and turn to keep your interest throughout, each revelation topping the last. Behind the scenes Peter Bryant had just taken over as DW’s fourth producer in three years and was determined to show off what he could do, making this story a sort of soft ‘re-launch’ of the show at the start of season 5, pulling out all the stops and budget (which might explain why the stories at the end of the run look a bit ropier – particularly this story’s close cyber-cousin ‘Wheel In Space’), so that this story looks – sometimes anyway, not all the way through – hugely impressive compared to the stories around it. The tomb particularly is a thing of beauty, one of the best sets DW ever had, though really they’re two meant to represent the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ rather than the usual side by side (no running down corridors in this story, just legging it up and down a surprisingly flimsy hatch). What’s really clever is how the jeopardy is increased little by little bit as they invert the usual formula of a ‘base under siege’ by having the humans uncover things it by bit and get nearer to the Cybermen. The baddies don’t fully make an appearance until the cliffhanger at the end of episode two, but writers Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler keep up the suspense in a number of ingenious ways, such as showing us where the Cybermen train (in a very surprising and sudden first cliffhanger that makes even a ‘dummy’ Cybermen look threatening, killing off the person in the supporting cast we know best), where the cyber-stores are (poor Victoria ends up trapped in an airless sarcophagus that makes this seem even more like a curse of the mummy epic) and we’re introduced to the Cybermats, small deadly rodent-like electronic beings that can crawl along the floor, the ‘scarab beetle’ of the tombs. If you happened to miss the earlier two cyber-stories then this one cleverly sells the threat to you with all those incidents before we even see them cut their through their ice tombs, in a combination of set and model work that looks astonishing now and must have looked other-wordly in 1967. 

In a way this is shot like a nature documentary for a vicious predator, only revealing a part at a time: ‘Here is the corner where the Cybermen stalk their prey… and here is where they practice for later kills...’ Of all the DW worlds Telos feels ‘real’ even though we never see it past a bit of ground surrounding the tomb - each roll of the dice, each logic puzzle solved, each reveal by the baddies who’ve financed this dig for their own ends, ups the stakes until by part four, when most of our heroes are trapped down the tombs with the hatch shut fast behind them and tall silver giant beings looming over them, all seems lost – few DW stories can match this one for threat. There are better cyber-stories both before and after this one, full of better motives greater characters and even more impressive individual scenes, but there’s something about seeing the Cybermen on their home soil, where everything is built for them and not for humans, that makes this one special. It’s a great one for the regulars too who shine even compared to usual. The 2^nd Dr-Jamie pairing seem to have put their arguments in the previous story to bed now and Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines add lots of little comedy moments that might seem out of place in other stories but here adds to the tension: we know the 2^nd Dr is at his most scared when he’s alternating between cracking jokes and being moody and highlander Jamie’s straightforward loyalty is a stark contrast to ou future human selves, the scared historians on one side and the scheming financiers on the other. Victoria gets lots of sweet moments early on as the Victorian lady fits this story more than the others somehow – strictly speaking Tutankhamen's tomb was re-discovered and re- opened in Georgian times, but it’s close enough for someone so clearly part of the stiff-upper-lip British Empire for her to feel as if she belongs in this world more than she usually does (plus Egyptian archaeologists often seemed to bring their teenage daughters along on digs for some reason). Generally speaking once a new companion arrives we never have any real feeling that they’re ‘new’ to this world again, but there’s a lovely moment in episode one when the Dr thinks to comfort Victoria and the death of her father she’s just witnessed at the end of previous story ‘Evil Of The Daleks’, talking about how he misses his own family (notably he never does this to, say, Zoe or Tegan later who both lose people close to them in their debut story; interesting given that for the audience at home there’s a gap of ten weeks between the two stories). The problems come with the other characters, of whom the most interesting is Haydon, sacrificed in that part one cliffhanger; otherwise they’re a series of ciphers an caricatures: the boss out of his depth, his timid second in command afraid of his own shadow, the gruff practical American pilot (whose straight out of Gerry Anderson puppet shows), the unlikeable conspirators, assistant Toberman (whose basically Marina from ‘Stingray’, but big and black and without the tail...Or Kemel from ‘Evil’ again, though he makes more sense in thus story than in a Dalek-filled Victorian house It’s a neat touch giving him a cybertronic hearing aid too, a reminder of the cybernetics that inspired this story in the first place and the author’s fears that the inventions of the 1960s would lead to the cybermen of tomorrow)...If you’ve seen any war film, or even any ensemble film from the 1940s and 1950s, then you know what’s coming: the plucky Americans do all the shouting, those with English accents are all terribly nice and polite and the other Europeans are incredibly shifty. It all feels wrong for a forward-thinking, everyone has value series like DW (and especially so soon after ‘The Moonbase’ where everyone worked together ‘star Trek’ style, against their common Cybermen foe). Ironically, given that all Cybermen stories are really about the threat not just to mankind (like other monsters) but our humanity, the Cybermen are better drawn than any of the Humans and you can tell the writers much prefer writing for them. 

Usually DW stories with great plots but poor characterisations aren’t my cup of tea, but yet this story just works somehow as an example of everything that makes DW great, from the badness of the baddies to the goodness of the goodies and the Egyptian tomb slant makes this story stand out from similar stories that try similar things. It isn’t DW’s deepest or most intelligent story, it doesn’t work on multiple levels the way a lot of my top 100 stories do and there are a few effects that let the side down, even by other Troughton story standards (no other story has an effect quite as comical as Toberman flying through the air on hugely visible wires for instance, while the ‘dummy’ Cybermen isn’t anything close to threatening as it was in my imagination or, indeed, the script). You also have to question the wisdom of an archaeological team so thick that they’re shocked to find a tomb filled with deadly Cybermen who were thought to be a ‘myth’...despite coming across dead bodies beneath a wall with a whacking great big cyber-logo on it (bit of a clue there, boys. And forget the logic problems testing intelligence: if anyone is stupid enough to open a tomb with this many clues around the outside they deserve to be cyber-converted). However there’s also no denying the TV archaeologists struck gold when they discovered this story sitting unloved in a Hong Kong TV vault – not that the Cybermen would have appreciated that analogy of course (one of the reasons they’re such a threat in this story is that they’re unstoppable– I never understood why their allergy to gold got added in later anyway, it’s not as if they’re vampires). This is still a brilliant story, even if its one of those brilliant stories that’s brilliant despite its flaws. For DW fans this discovery of a story so many people remembered and loved was on a par with Tutankhamen’s tomb (and not every discovery in that tomb was a ‘treasure’ either), a moment when everyone remembered where they were when they heard the news, a bit of magic from that day still lingering every time we look at our DVD shelves and collectively go ‘wow – that really happened, this story really does exist’. Is it as great as we hoped? No. Do we love it anyway? Of course we do.

+ The Cybermen logo appears on everything: every wall, every ice-tomb. You suspect that in the Cyber-bathroom off-shot its on the cyber-toothpaste and cyber-toilet rolls too. What should be silly (I mean, what dying race takes precious time inventing a stencil and adding it to all the walls – especially if they’re trying to keep what’s inside the tombs a secret to lure people in?) is one of this story’s strengths simply because it looks so good, the silhouette logo of a cyber head one of the best and most striking images in the whole of the series. It makes sense too, fitting the hieroglyphic-logo fitting the ‘vibe’ of the story and being very cyber-friendly, providing information descriptively without the emotion or depth of words. There was a time, following 1992, when it was on everything connected with DW - and rightly so. I’m amazed new-Who hasn’t brought it back so far, especially with an ‘updated’ version of how the Cybermen look now.

- The racism. Of course the baddy is a shifty looking foreigner somewhere on the borders of Germany and Turkey (borders seem to be different in the DW universe. I mean Salamander in ‘Enemy Of The World’ seems to be from Australia via Mexico with a hint of Ireland in there too). George Pravda plays Klieg the same way he played every shifty foreigner in war films, while Shirley Cooklin as Kaftan (producer Peter Bryant’s wife) adds a fittingly Egyptian flair, while her mute manservant Toberman is a muscly African. Needless to say the other archaeologists are all male, pale and, well, stale, British Empire types to the last. Watch out for Clive Merrison making his first TV appearance (very briefly) thirty years before becoming the single best Sherlock Holmes there ever was (seriously: anyone who still thinks its Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett or Benedict Cumberbatch have just never heard the superlative radio 4 adaptations).