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Spare Parts

july 2002

(4 EPISODES)

I loved “Spare Parts”. It is well written, well acted and superbly produced; all the elements

just seem to fuse exquisitely to make for one of the most compelling Doctor Who stories ever told in any medium.

Shifting his attentions away from ancient Gallifrey and Time Lord lore, Marc Platt is tasked with giving us an insight into the rise of the Cybermen, a task he clearly approached with relish.  The Cybermen back-story has been an integral part of Doctor Who history ever since their first appearance in “The Tenth Planet”, yet until the release of this audio we had never seen the original people of Mondas, and although we knew of their grisly fate we were always comfortably detached from it. In “Spare Parts” though, Platt throws us straight into the heart of the matter, telling a great deal of his story from the perspective of a native family, the Hartleys. The Hartleys are all portrayed with northern accents really enabling the listener to empathise with them more fully, but the similarities to Earth do not end there. There are picture houses and they have ‘Christmas’… do not ask me how, but Mondas truly is Earth’s sister planet, a fact that makes the play more and more disturbing as it progresses, its inhabitants slowly being processed into Cybermen.

Yvonne Hartley being turned into a Cyberman and returning home is unquestionably the

most moving scene in the play. She calls out to her brother and father in her clipped, Cybernetic voice (the same Cyberman voice heard in “The Tenth Planet” and throughout most of the Troughton era) as she dies, a monstrous cybernetic parody of the girl that she once was. In this sense, Platt clearly distinguishes his story from “Genesis of the Daleks.” The Kaleds were a warlike and unsympathetic alien race, many of their number made up of racists, bigots and war criminals. The people of Mondas were just like you and I – human beings just trying to live their lives, trying to survive. Even Doctorman Alan, for all intents and purposes the creator of the Cybermen, is neither a megalomaniac or hungry for dominion – she is merely an alcoholic scientist, doing her best to ensure that her people live on.

Moreover, unlike his fateful mission to Skaro at the behest of the CIA, in this story the Time Lord has no agenda. In fact, at first he is reluctant to try and change the history of Mondas. However, spurred on by the thought of his own physiology unwittingly being used as the template for their “…monstrous parodies of mankind…”, as well as arguments from Nyssa - who is at her absolute best in this story, incidentally - the Doctor decides to use his Time Lord powers to try to interfere, to try to change what he knows is established history. Platt cleverly uses Adric’s death at the hands of the Cybermen to spur both the Doctor and Nyssa on, leading to a very exciting finale as the Doctor and Nyssa try to change history for the better, and at the very end of the play appear to have succeeded – they give the humans on Mondas another way out, a chance to change what they will become for the better.

Moreover, they also exorcise the pain of Adric’s death whomadmittedly neither of them

had stopped to grieve for. After the TARDIS departs, however, back on Mondas Cyber Commander Jeng and Sisterman Constant re-emerge to take control once again and start processing the entire population into Cybermen. It seems that even the Doctor could not make such a drastic change to history.

Most importantly of all though, the Cybermen - introduced as ‘Police’ on their augmented horses early in the story - are not evil, or greedy or immoral in any way. They are cold and logical. They were designed that way to survive – a point not often illustrated since the Troughton era. Mondas is frozen, its people forced to live underground. They have no Sun. The only way they can eat is to grind up the bones of the dead. What would you do to survive…?

All things considered, “Spare Parts” is a moving yet very traditional Doctor Who story that Big Finish may never better.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2006

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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