Wednesday 18 January 2023

Countdown to 60: Cybermen In The Snow


Number 9 - the first appearance in the programme of the Cybermen. They're called "Cybermen", and explain why, but they bear very little resemblance to what we think of as Cybermen. This lot are the originals - the inhabitants of Earth's long lost twin world of Mondas. They look unique - with cloth-like skin and cumbersome attachments on the chest and on top of the head. We see that they have human hands at the end of their mechanical arms. 
There's nothing sleek and slim-lined about them. They look like they have been crudely put together, perhaps due to time and resource pressures. The voice is a weird sing-song sound - suggestive of a tape-loop running on a low battery, or a race who have picked up only snatches of English and spliced them together.
Mondas has returned to near Earth orbit, and though a later story will suggest this was intentional, here it is implied that the Cybermen have no control over the planet. They certainly can't stop it draining energy from its twin. They and all their equipment is bound to the planet - so when Mondas perishes, they collapse and die. Interestingly, despite being the most organic of all the Cybermen, it is only their metal and plastic bodies which remain. The organic material seems to have dissolved.
All other Cybermen will be far more robotic, and will hail from their second home planet Telos, or claim to have left Mondas before its destruction. As such this type of early Cyberman was never seen again - until Steven Moffat brought them back as a gift to the departing Peter Capaldi, who was a big fan. This was in a new origins story, and so their presence was explained away by them being the earliest form of the Cyberman, which would evolve eventually into the more robotic variations.
The Tenth Planet may have featured creatures called Cybermen - but it wasn't until The Moonbase that the Cybermen as we know them really arrived...

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