The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa find themselves on a doomed world not unlike Earth and realise they are there to witness the birth of the Cybermen.
The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa find themselves on a doomed world not unlike Earth and realise they are there to witness the birth of the Cybermen.
SPARE PARTS
There are stories which fans have waited ages to hear, and rarely do they live up to the hype. It seems like every range has a sixth-Doctor-meets-the-Brigadier story, the books have taken several shots at Liz’s departure, and the Daleks even invaded Gallifrey in The Apocalypse Element. An origin story for the Cybermen, however, had never been touched — and giving the writing job for this epic task to Marc Platt might have been the best decision Big Finish ever made.
Part of what made Genesis of the Daleks so successful was the relationship between Davros and his creations. A scientist, hell-bent upon creating an emotionless super race, is eventually overthrown and killed by his own creations who do not understand his cries for pity. However, the horror of the Cybermen lies not with the fact that they are emotionless or implacable but rather with the fact that they were once, essentially, human like us. As such, to create a Davros for the Cybermen would have been a terrible mistake. What Platt realizes in the script is simple: Cybermen were not created, per se — they evolved. The concept of the population of Mondas slowly replacing their body parts as the environment grows more unforgiving is terrifying — we, as listeners, know what’s coming and, rather than waiting for the Cyberman to leap from the shadows, watch as the people slowly turn themselves into the enemy.
It helps that Mondas has been established as Earth’s twin planet, because this allows Platt to ground the script in very human feelings. Some have condemned the script for having an indistinct time period represented on the surface, while others have condemned the portrayal of Mondas for being too human — but this misses the forest for the trees. Mondas *has* to be a human society or else the terror will be partially lost on the audience. Russell T. Davies has said of the new series that it revolves mostly around Earth because people don’t care as much about the political strife of the planet Zargax, and he’s absolutely correct: had Platt taken the time to flesh out an alien society, Spare Parts would simply not have been as effective.
Peter Davison’s performance in Spare Parts is absolutely astonishing, and it ranks as the best, to my ears, of any of the Doctors in the initial thirty-four releases. Platt understands the character better than most, and here we see the Doctor, still damaged by the loss of Adric, surrounded by the evolution of the very beings he has grown to hate. As such he’s much more desperate than usual, and his relationship with his companion is stretched almost to the breaking point. The use of the Doctor as model for the Cybermen could have been nothing more than a tired fannish indulgence, but the closeness of the event to Adric’s death makes it heartbreakingly poignant. This is a Doctor who is also very well characterized in relationship to his chronological portrayal on television — rather than the fatalist of season 21, this fifth Doctor is still willing to take up the mantle and fight against insurmountable odds, even when he knows from the beginning that he’s going to lose.
Balancing the Doctor is Nyssa, who manages to keep a level head even as the Doctor flies off the handle. Nyssa has always been one of my favorite companions simply because she’s intelligent and practical — to my mind, she got the short end of the stick on television because she had so many other companions to contend with. Spare Parts betters any portrayal of Nyssa on television — here she’s the ultimate altruist, immediately willing to sacrifice herself to help the people of Mondas and, though she and the Doctor fundamentally disagree, she still serves as his moral compass throughout much of the play. Sarah Sutton’s performance is incredibly nuanced — the character’s diction has always been somewhat flat but here it’s invested with a great deal of emotion, especially regarding the issue of Adric.
It’s impossible to discuss the supporting cast without first dealing with the Hartley family, whose tribulations encapsulate the entire play. Paul Copley, Kathryn Guck, and Jim Hartley are superb: Platt writes a deliberately cliched working-class family, with loving father, rebellious son, and idealistic daughter, and destroys their world — and the actors shift from their initial cliches to heartwrenching performances as they crumble along with Mondas. It’s appropriate, meanwhile, that Doctorman Allan is the moral high point of the higher-ups on Mondas, as she’s a pessimistic alcoholic — Sally Knyvette nails the role, and she and Davison work quite well together. With Pamela Binns surprisingly sympathetic as Sisterman Constant, and Derren Nesbitt creepy as Thomas Dodd, it’s hard to imagine the supporting cast could be any better. Nicholas Briggs provides the voices of Zheng and the other Cybermen, but his work as the Cyber-converted Yvonne might be the best of the play — it’s a beautiful performance that’s absolutely shattering.
The sound design provided by Gareth Jenkins is, as we’ve come to expect, exceptional — he expertly recaptures the voices of the original Cybermen and, combined with Russell Stone’s score, gives the play a very quiet sense of impending doom. Stone should be commended as well, though I’ve never heard anything approaching a bad score from the man. It should come as no surprise that Gary Russell directed this play, as he holds everything together exceptionally well — all involved should be proud. And the cover’s amazing.
Many times, ideas like “Genesis of the Cybermen” are dismissed as fannish indulgence before they even get off the ground. Oftentimes this is the appropriate reaction, but every so often a long-awaited concept lives up to the hype and even surpasses it. Such is the nature of Spare Parts, one of the best productions BF has ever released and essential listening for every Doctor Who fan.
Exceptional.
10/10
“Poor Adric. We never really stopped to mourn him did we?”
A short review is that this is a Season 20 story except with sayable dialogue. It’s clear why this story was picked for adaptation in the New Series. In many ways, to be a fan of this story means to be part of the self-proclaimed fan elite. It means being able to enjoy the continuity and fanwank of this story whilst feeling more socially adept and able to appreciate its poignancy and emotional content. That way such ‘sensitive’ fans can feel like a cut above the usual ‘sad’ continuity-loving anoraks that they sneer at.
Like a Paul Cornell story, it can’t help but feel manipulative and of dubious sincerity for those reasons. But also like a Paul Cornell story, dubious sincerity isn’t the same thing as being insincere and it takes an act of will not to be taken in by its magic.
As fans we were certainly inclined to be fond of it because it was written by Marc Platt, who had also given us Ghostlight- one of several stories that just in Doctor Who’s final days, finally justified and rewarded our long term perseverance and loyalty throughout a long depressing string of nadirs that had been accumulating into a corrosive critical mass. And listening to this audio will certainly make most fans wish he’d been allowed to write for the show more often back then.
As with the best Big Finish stories, Marc Platt is clearly someone who loved the era at hand. Since this is the Peter Davison era, that’s a relief because it means the story is written by someone who ironically cares more about Doctor Who than anyone who was actually producing the show at the time. Marc Platt is clearly someone who really saw Peter Davison’s vulnerable and fallible qualities as something beautiful and human, whilst Eric Saward just saw it as an opportunity to push the Doctor out of the way in favour of his favourite mercenary characters and killing sprees, and of course to keep weak plots going without a competent decisive hero to efficiently resolve them. Spare Parts also rather homages State of Decay’s sense of curfew atmosphere, which is close to the era. More importantly it treats Adric’s tragic death with the respect it always deserved but never got.
The impact of Adric’s death and indeed the impact of Earthshock as a story overall was huge. Unfortunately it was followed up by the almighty shark-jumper Time-Flight. It was a shark jumper for many reasons – its failure at telling a coherent story, that it was so stale and joyless that even the outtakes were deathly dull, and given that Earthshock was one of the few 80’s stories to achieve the same kind of impact as the best Tom Baker stories, then quite frankly any story that followed Earthshock and inherited its buzz and audience boost simply couldn’t afford to be as awful as Time-Flight was. Sadly I think millions of viewers tuned into that story and assumed the whole series was as cheap and embarrassing as that, and could never take the show seriously again.
But the main reason Time-Flight represents the rot setting in for me is the fact that in the beginning of the story, the Doctor, Tegan and Adric have an obligatory grieving scene over Adric’s death, being hysterical and dramatic about it which lasts about a minute, before they immediately change the subject and started acting bored again. It’s one of the most crass, offensively false scenes in Doctor Who and a sign that something nasty, soulless, cheapening and insincere had creeped into the show. The very insincerity and cheapening of life that paved the way towards Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks with their contrived pointless massacres followed up at the end by some hypocritical moralising speech from the Doctor, and of course the coup de disgrace of The Twin Dilemma’s unrelenting character assassination of the Doctor for the sake of cheap shock tactics.
But the mouthy, domineering Tegan is absent here, which gives Nyssa a chance to step forward and be a felt presence. The beauty of which is that Nyssa was always a quiet and meek contrast to loud, brash Tegan, but in Spare Parts we see that Nyssa too needs to scream about Adric’s death in order to grieve properly. So we have two completely different women reacting to grief in the same way. And for that moment, the vile insincerity of that token grieving scene in Time-Flight is wiped from memory, and in his absence Adric is almost remembered as a real person rather than the unpleasant cipher he was in the show. And of course that love begats more love as a good script compels the actors involved to give it their all. Sarah Sutton and Peter Davison are at their best here, really showing what a waste their potential dynamic was. Peter is especially giving his most energetic, passionate performance as the Doctor and for once he really sounds like he’s never been away from the role.
It’s clear that the Doctor Who fan writers have taken to the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh as an inspiration as something that could fit comfortably in Doctor Who. After all the TV series was apparently going the way of social realism dramas in its last story Survival (which was written by Rona Munro who went on to write the superb screenplay for Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird). When Doctor Who came back in 2005, the depiction of the Doctor bore an uncanny resemblance to the volatile antihero of Mike Leigh’s warped existentialist masterpiece Naked. Indeed there are moments in Naked where the lead character’s monologues seem almost like a continuation of some of Sylvester McCoy’s tirades against the Gods of Ragnarok, and he’s even given his own Master to play against. Furthermore it’s impossible to get any more Mike Leigh than Father’s Day and Parting of the Ways.
It should be said that the reckless, youthful Fifth Doctor was perhaps accidentally a very current approach back in the 80’s, and in synch with Brookside. The switch towards the elder brother type character becoming the role model, rather than the father figure. The 80’s was a time when heroes were getting younger which suited a time when fathers were being made redundant and youth culture was freed up to place its stamp on the media. In that regard the Fifth Doctor really can feel at home in the kitchen sink drama, even though the TV series never placed him there.
So this is very much a Ken Loach film with Cybermen, and there’s little wrong with that, after all Dalek Empire is basically Tenko with Daleks. The story mainly focuses on a northern typical nuclear family representing a proud, nostalgic, salt of the Earth vision of the working classes. It’s a particularly cosy vision of that family unit, far closer to Vera Drake than to Meantime. As with Kes, the destiny that awaits the young ones is already mapped out for them. Getting called up to work is a euphemism for Cyber-conversion, which isn’t out of synch with what the Cybermen are. They are an automated workforce, a socialist Communist ideal turned nightmare.
Of course it’s been argued with a certain justification that the domestic focus of this story rather constrains the potential scope of this all. But the point is that it instantly conjures a sense of old fashioned utilitarianism, which was the basic ethos of Doctor Who until the 80’s battered it to the ground. You may see plenty of deaths in any era of Doctor Who, but it’s only in the 80’s where characters are no longer dying for something. Doctor Who of the 60’s and 70’s may seem less emotionally resonant now because it was pitched to a generation that was assumed to already feel a personal stake in their fellow man and the greater society, without needing emotional prompting. New Who on the other hand is pitched at a more individualist age which needs an immediate, intimate emotional connection with the lead characters.
Anyhow, Spare Parts manages to tap into that forgotten ethos and as such, it effectively conjures and raleighs support in the Doctor’s actions to liberate the people even though we know the Doctor is doomed to fail. In a manner that goes in the opposite direction to the TV series, Adric’s death becomes a reason to keep fighting the good fight, rather than a reason to give up, lose all faculties and only look after number one from now on. It’s the Doctor’s pro-activeness, determination and conviction to make a difference that prevents this story from being defeatist in the way most of the mid-80’s stories were, and as such the Doctor maintains our faith and the bleak fate of Mondas becomes a tragedy rather than a requirement.
Compared to the rather overblown New Who remake, this is far superior. Mainly by virtue of not featuring the unsavoury macho trash that Age of Steel did. Likewise the scene that is lifted from here, featuring a defective Cyberman remembering its emotions and its past life is far more effective here by concerning a character we got to know beforehand, and it’s far more brutally done. Looked at in a particularly cynical light, this seemed a perfect choice for the New Who model because it suits the New Series’ insular conception that in order for the audience to care for an alien world, it must be rendered identical to our own, or at least feature humans that are just like us. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Part of what made Genesis of the Daleks work in its depiction of the planet Skaro was how it’s blatant allegories to the Third Reich and the First World War trenches made its world resemble the ultimate vision of hell and therefore perfect ground for spawning the ultimate evil, where we see all the worst periods of human history anachronistically brought together in one place. The rules here were different and thus this was a world where the Doctor could lose.
As with Genesis, the Doctor’s failure here is suited to the kitchen sink drama where the inevitability of defeat is always hanging there. Come the final reel, the hero must eventually realise that he can’t change the world and he must accept his lot and count his blessings. The Doctor has to leave Mondas taking what little victory he can from delaying the inevitable, allowing the people to be happy and human for that bit longer.
Likewise this is a world that exists in our own collective memory lane of the good old days, but relocated to an alien world. The winter of discontent becomes represented by the cracking of the planet opening up a frost fountain and the very people becoming cold, metaphorically. The moment that really achieves the magic is the scene where the father of the household invites us to look at what previously seemed like a Christmas tree, only to reveal that the baubles actually represent planets, making up a cosmic map of where Mondas is in the universe. This is the ordinary and familiar poetically subverted and turned otherworldly, like a child’s imagination playing let’s pretend with everyday props.
Of course the most obvious point is that the human element is essential when it comes to the Daleks and Cybermen. The Daleks are an extrapolation of the worst aspects of our own psyche, and the tragedy of the Cybermen is that they may be unrecogniseable and inhuman but they were once like us. This is a story that works on character contrasts, most notably the Holmesian double act between the anal, prissy Sisterman Constant and her alcoholic, cynical aide Doctorman Allan. The latter woman becomes a particular staple of the ‘dying world’ audio stories, such as Creatures of Beauty and Flip-Flop. A well-meaning character at core, who’s world weary humour and sarkiness adds such poignancy to the pessimism, someone who laughs at the hopelessness of the situation because otherwise they’d have to cry. Of course there are moments where the script is too quick to overstate and jump the gun, and to presume its own success and tell us how clever, poignant and sentimental it thinks it is being. But overall the pacing and the ticking clock to Mondas’ spiralling and inevitable demise keeps it from lagging and leaves us little time to notice its portentousness, and by the end, the story has earned its final analysis as no less than a success. The best TV story to have really conveyed this sense of pathos about the Cybermen, by contrasting them to the warm, emotional aspects of the humans is Tomb of the Cybermen. But this goes one further and really shows us this tragedy of the Cybermen first hand, reminding us that they are as much victims as monsters. As such, amidst the fannish derivativeness of the 80’s, this kind of revisitation feels like it’s been an obvious missed opportunity for too long. Seven years on and so far it still stands as Big Finish’ best Cybermen story and seems in no danger of being knocked off the top spot anytime soon.