So, my first exposure to the Cybermen in Doctor Who was the David Tennant 2 part episode Age of Steel/Rise of the Cybermen, so all I knew about them was that they came from an alternate dimension where Barty Crouch Sr. began to change the population against their will because....evil.
That episode along with Dalek during Christopher Eccleston's run hinted that there were previous Cybermen in the regular Who-niverse, so after I watched it, I did a little Wikipedia research, found out that the Cybers were a legacy monster that like the Daleks first appeared during William Hartnell's tenure as the First Doctor...in fact the events of their first appearance led to the death of the First Doctor, and introduced Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor, which therefore also introduced the concept of Regeneration, which allowed the series to last nearly 50 years now. So one could argue that the Cybermen are indirectly responsible for the continued existence of the series until now.
Anyway, on to the subject of today's post, and yeah, it's another Audio play, but hear me out. I, Davros was a sort of special event made by Big Finish Productions that really doesn't have any effect on the show's continuity in any far reaching way. Spare Parts was one of the Big Finish line's regular monthly releases...and was used as the basis for the aforementioned two-parter. Now, if you've seen the two-part episode, it does depart pretty severely from the subject matter, because Spare Parts is set in the main Who-niverse, and is goddamned terrifying.
Seriously, I'm 31 and this audio play, while awesome, gives me nightmares. It's that terrifying, and it's that good.
Spare Parts could be re-titled "Genesis of the Cybermen". However, while the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks still look like the Daleks from the current run of Who, the first Cybermen bear only a slight resemblance to the Cybers of now. Here's a comparison shot which for some reason has the Cybus Cybermen of now on the left, working back to the original Mondas Cybermen on the far right:
Pretty much the only thing they all have in common is that weird handlebar thing on their heads. But what really sets the original Cybermen apart from the current run are the voices. The current Cybermen have a heavily modulated, mechanical voice which is very reminiscent of the Borg Collective I think. The original Cybers still have modulated voices...but...well, um, take a listen. It's creepy as hell and it's all you hear of the Cybermen over the course of the audio.
The plot is as follows: The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his current travelling companion Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) accidentally land the TARDIS on the planet Mondas just as Cyber-Conversion is beginning to really take off among the population as a way to explore the uninhabitable surface of the planet. At the same time, Mondas is about to enter an area of space called the Cherrybowl Nebula which would kill all the inhabitants, so that creates a moral conundrum for the Doctor: Save the planet and unleash one of the most terrible menaces in history, or let them all die, which would have massive repercussions in his own timeline, including completely changing his regeneration cycle. The First Doctor wouldn't regenerate because of this, but at the same time his past companion Adric wouldn't have died either (although depending on who you ask among classic Who fans, some think that he didn't die soon enough).
The title mainly refers to the idea that human body parts have become a black market item for those not wanting to undergo conversion of any sort. As such, it creates something of a "body horror" story, with some citizens worrying about being snatched and turned into the titular Spare Parts, or a lifetime of having new parts added into you while your humanity is slowly ripped away from you.
The audio is tense as hell, menace coming from every side of the story...there's tragedy when one of the main characters undergoes Cyber Conversion...you like Doctor Who, you need to listen to this. I'd almost call it the Resident Evil of Doctor Who stories...and unlike the insanely vague motives of Age of Steel/Rise of the Cybermen, everything is laid out quite clearly as to why things are degenerating on Mondas. I can't stress enough that this is a must-listen.
Buy it here!
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