Hogan Reviews

It’s time for the “post new TV series Big Finish audio catch up” once again, starting with the return of one of my favourite ranges, the “Lost Stories”. Admittedly “Genesis of the Cybermen” is another one of the Lost Stories that can’t really be slotted into regular continuity thanks to a lack of knowledge as to what Cybermen were by The Doctor’s companions in Adric’s final story “Earthshock”, not to mention having to get rid of the superior audio Cybermen origin story “Spare Parts”. Still though, in a “imagine if instead of Earthshock we got this” way it works well, and seeing original Cyberman creator Gerry Davis’ take the origin was historically interesting, even if it wasn’t, um… that great. Let’s take a look!

The Doctor (Peter Davison), Tegan (Janet Fielding), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) all arrive on a planet where they meet an entertainer/Prince called Sylvan (Nuhazet Diaz Cano) and his wife-to-be Meta (Kelly Price), the former convincing them to take their magically appearing box trick and perform it on stage with him, mainly because as he’s approaching his 30s he’s starting to run out of breath easily. While The Doctor and Adric head off with Sylvan Nyssa and Tegan are taken to Sylvan’s brother Dega (Colin Tierney) as Nyssa might be able to help him save their father, the King, who is succumbing to the same illness that seemingly the rest of the people of the planet are. Nyssa helps Dega with some cybernetics, something she is well versed in but something Dega hadn’t really heard of, and then soon the rest of the cast meet up, where Sylvan has found out about some of the “magic” that The Doctor’s box can do so soon forces his way on board with causes the “magic box” to fly forward in time. Sylvan pops out expecting a shocked and delighted audience but instead finds a barren and colourless landscape.

It’s around this point where we meet an early Cyberman example who comes to arrest them. The Doctor is naturally horrified that he’s on Mondas and tells everyone they need to leave but of course they end up being pulled this way and that way and separated so the story can actually happen. Sylvan finds out that Dega is now King and has settled down with Meta and has partially converted them both using Nyssa’s cybertechnology and his own skills, allowing him and Meta to stay alive and, um, relatively healthy for longer, though Dega has gone much further than his wife. He has also began to convert other “volunteers” into Cybermen to be his guard and secret police, all of which horrifies Nyssa as she had no idea her knowledge would be used in such an unethical practice, even if the population’s life expectancy was shrinking every generation thanks to Mondas’ gravity increasing as it got closer to the sun, made worse by Dega trying to use a massive rocket to blast it clear. On that note I will say that a lot of the science of how Mondas as a planet operates is very 60s (even though this would’ve aired in the 80s, showing how Mr. Davis hadn’t moved with the times which is one of the reasons this script was changed into Earthshock to begin with…) to the point where Nyssa flat out says that it doesn’t make any sense leading to The Doctor saying that the planet must have odd properties or some such. Made me laugh, anyway…

Speaking of The Doctor and the rest of the cast, they don’t get up to much. The Doctor helps Sylvan stage an uprising comprised of the non-converted against Dega and the Cybermen, and Adric at least has some good scenes with a man called Raith (Michael Abubakar), who finds his partially converted mother and manages to escape thanks to it not being able to kill him, showing the emotional inhibitors hadn’t properly kicked in yet. Later Adric finds Raith fully converted anyway mind you, much to his distress. He’s also key in the final few sequences which I’ll get to in the spoilers so actually he did quite a bit in the end, more than Tegan who beyond a quick womanly chat with Meta literally doesn’t do anything! Ah well. There are some fun moments and some good drama with the concept of some willingly undergoing the process of conversion because living otherwise was just too hard, something you rarely see actually, it’s normally people running from the idea, naturally. I will say though that I can understand why it was pulled, Dega is a cartoon villain once we jump into the future, and a lot of the plot and dialogue does feel like a Troughton story, which makes sense given the writer but I can see why they just took the returning Cybermen concept and made a more modern story instead…

The Continuity:

A striking cover, and happy the artist didn’t feel like he had to put all the companions on it!

This, by my count, is the fourth origin story of the Cybermen after the Fifth Doctor audio “Spare Parts”, the Sixth Doctor comic book “The World Shapers” and the Twelfth Doctor two-parter “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls”, though funnily enough the latter was written in such a way that all three of those can co-exist, but this on the other hand as mentioned doesn’t work at all still…

Also given its place as the original origin story is also connects back round to the First Doctor finale “The Tenth Planet”, the debut of the Cybermen. I’ll also mention again that this scrapped story was replaced with the Fifth Doctor TV story “Earthshock” instead, which without it Doctor Who would certainly be a lot lesser, especially the Fifth Doctor’s era…

Overall Thoughts:

“Genesis of the Cybermen” is another Lost Story that was fun to listen to as a “What if?” and was written, acted and scored really well to give it a proper early 80s Who vibe, but at the end of the day it’s just not as good as Earthshock that replaced it so it’s not “This should’ve been made!” like some Lost Stories, and it’s not as good as Spare Parts so we’ve already had a better Fifth Doctor Cyberman origin audio drama several decades ago, so it leaves this story with a “hard to recommend” feeling. It wasn’t bad, and I’m glad I’ve now experience Gerry Davis’ original ideas, but I won’t be in a hurry to listen to it again…

Meta eventually leaves Dega in hopes of going back to Sylvan but her blatant ego and lack of care as to what happens to the general populace put an end to that idea, meanwhile losing Meta leads the King to undergo full conversion, becoming the first Cyberleader and beginning to convert people fully whether they want to or not. A captured Adric also gives him the space coordinates and calculations for his ships to successfully launch from the planet but Sylvan and his rebels soon board the last working one and thanks to Meta sacrificing herself to slow down an advancing Cyber-army (which felt extremely un-earned as she was still a stuck-up bitch who died complimenting her own bravery, but I guess that was the point, that for once it wasn’t a change of heart and instead she was just not a nice person…)

In the end the ship with Sylvan and co. leave the planet (and The Doctor implies that they’ll end up on Earth and become Tegan’s early ancestors as its still prehistoric times, which um… no, that’s not the case at all, but again, the story is already very much non-canon, so sure…) while Mondas is knocked out of its orbit thanks to the launch and will eventually spin back round and approach Earth as seen in “The Tenth Planet”.