Doctor Who - Documentary s05e03 Episode Script

DOCTOR: There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things.
Things which act against everything that we believe in.
They must be fought.
- Cybermen.
- Cybermen.
- Cybermen.
- Cybermen.
We are the Cybermen.
Most classic Doctor Who monsters freak us out because they're not like us.
They're alien.
They have great cascades of wet tentacles where their mouths should be.
They have great cascades of wet tentacles everywhere.
But the Cybermen are different because beneath that suit of armour, beneath that blank steel mask, there's nothing wiggly at all.
Not a patch of green skin.
Instead, there's something very like you or me, a human being, or the remains of one, at least.
Doctor Who has shown us two versions of the birth of the Cybermen, one that happened in our universe and one that happened in a universe very much like ours, but with more Zeppelins.
But this is the version of cyber history that I grew up with.
In the days before DVD box sets, there were these.
Books.
Novelisations.
Doctor Who scripts turned into prose.
They were the nearest thing you could get to re-watching an old episode or catching up with one that had been broadcast before you were born.
And at the front of every adaptation of a Cyberman story, there was a chapter telling you how they came into being.
It didn't really match with what you saw on the telly but I didn't know that in those days and I didn't really care.
"Centuries ago by our earth time, "a race of men on the planet Telos sought immortality.
"They perfected the art of cybernetics, "the reproduction of machine functions in human beings.
"As bodies became old and diseased, "they were replaced, limb by limb, with plastic, steel.
"Finally, even the human circulation and nervous system were recreated "and brains replaced by computers.
"The first Cybermen were born.
"Their main impediment was one "that only a flesh and blood man would have recognised.
"They had no heart or emotions, no feelings.
"Love, hate, anger, even fear were eliminated from their lives "when the last flesh was replaced by plastic.
"They achieved their immortality at a terrible price.
" Now, for me, it's the slowness of that process that makes it so alarming.
It's like they didn't mean to do it, not at first, anyway.
Like they just had a few creaky joints and went down to the hospital a few times and suddenly found themselves on the slippery slope to throwing all their organic bits and pieces into the scrag bin.
In the 40-something years that the Cybermen have been clomping over our TVscreens, we've been given hints about what might lurk beneath their plastic skin.
In the parallel universe where the Cybus Corporation controlled the world's technology, we saw a kind of Cyberman that put its human ancestry on display with a great, veiny brain showing through a glass skull.
This was a new kind of Cyberman, not one that gave up its humanity bit by bit, but one that surrendered everything but the brain in one gigantic surgical makeover.
Jackie Tyler, Rose's mum, was one of the humans who ended up tinned inside a cyber body.
You're not her.
You're not my Jackie! She couldn't remember who she was, but she didn't care.
But it doesn't work like that with everybody.
That's Yvonne Hartman, head of the Canary Wharf branch of Torchwood.
And something very horrible is about to happen to her.
Oh, God! I did my duty! But what happens next is even worse.
Even though Yvonne's brain has been decanted into a cyber body, she still seems to know who she is.
I did my duty for Queen and country.
I did my duty for Queen and country.
I did my duty for Queen and country.
SWEET: In earlier episodes, we were given other hints about the flesh that might still remain inside the metal.
My body may be cybernetic but my mind stays human.
This is what the Cybermen do to you.
SWEET: These Cybermen have Perspex jaws, behind which you can see some human movement.
CYBERMAN: Destroy them at once! Whatever's coming out of these Cybermen looks organic to me.
And these Cybermen are the most human of all.
There's clearly a human face with a fleshy mouth and nose.
These are the originals and they come from a world called Mondas, Earth's long-lost twin planet, where even the continents look more or less like ours.
These were people who were like us once, until they went under the knife and gained a kind of immortality, and a kind of death, too.
The Cybermen have a catchphrase that helps explain what we have in common with them.
You shall be like us.
SWEET: It's what they say when they're getting ready to do unspeakable things to us with knives and circular swords, to fillet us and repackage us in silver suits with dirty great ear muffs and set us marching with the rest of them.
But that's not the only reason why it's scary.
It's scary because they might be right.
The Cybermen were people who wanted to improve their bodies, people who didn't want to grow old, to get fat and wrinkly and tired.
Put like that, doesn't sound too bad, does it? In the parallel universe with the Zeppelins, this man created the Cybermen, John Lumic.
Looks a bit like that bloke from Only Fools and Horses, doesn't he? Anyway, it can't be him, because this man is a scientific genius, the sort of scientific genius who scoots about in a wooden wheelchair.
He's not a well man, which I think you can tell from the way he talks to his staff.
Kill him.
But don't let me do the pitch for his good intentions, he can do that himself.
LUMIC: The most precious thing on this earth is the human brain, and yet we allow it to die.
But now, Cybus Industries has perfected a way of sustaining the brain indefinitely within a cradle of copyrighted chemicals.
This is the ultimate upgrade, our greatest step into cyberspace.
SWEET: The Cyberman from our universe, those cloth-headed gentlemen with the dead eyes, they did it for the same reasons.
We were exactly like you once, but our cybernetic scientists realised that our race was getting weak.
Weak, how? Our lifespan was getting shorter, so our scientists and doctors devised spare parts for our bodies until we could be almost completely replaced.
You're robots! Our brains are just like yours, except that certain weaknesses have been removed.
Weaknesses, what weaknesses? SWEET: "Their metal limbs gave them the strength of 10 men, "and their inbuilt respiratory system "allowed them to live in the airless vacuum in space.
"They were immune to cold and heat, "were immensely intelligent, resourceful.
" It's like some totally macabre version of those ads that you see in the backs of magazines.
Take these pills, join this gym, attach these electrodes to your torso and you can get the high-performance body that you want.
I don't recall LA Fitness ever claiming that they could help you survive in the airless vacuum of space, but you know what I mean.
If the Cybermen were summoned into existence because of their desire to transcend the frail human body, then they'd hardly be the first to feel that desire.
They were weak and they wanted to be strong, and they wanted to show it.
Mainly by smashing things.
(SCREAMING) So, the process of becoming a Cyberman is only a nastier and a less reversible version of other transformations that we seem happy to undergo.
It's a bit like one of those reality TV shows, where they send an unhappy, middle-aged person down a shopping mall, where people make unflattering guesses about their age.
And then they go to the plastic surgeon, who draws lines on their body like a butcher, separating the sirloin from the brisket.
And then all the lard is hoovered out of them and they're sent back down to the same shopping mall, and people tell them that they look 20 again.
Many of the people who have become Cybermen have clearly become them willingly.
And it's also clear that the Cybermen themselves believe that if they fillet us and put our brains inside a metal skull, that they're doing us a big favour.
The Cybermen who come from Mondas to the South Pole sound like they just want us to move in with them.
CYBERMAN: You must come and live with us.
SWEET: We had to wait a long time before we actually saw the process of cyber conversion.
We saw those who were on their way, like Toberman, but it wasn't until 1985 that this story showed us in explicit detail.
This is "Attack of the Cybermen".
And this chap being put through the blender is Lytton, a space mercenary who also has the Daleks on his CV.
Of course, not everybody comes willingly.
In the parallel universe, Mr Crane of International Electromatics, goes cruising around Battersea in his monster truck, hoping to entice likely lads.
They think they're getting kebabs, instead they get implants.
But out there in the rest of society, everybody else had them done years ago.
The Tylers and their staff, the president and all these people walking down the street, with their bleeping blue ear pods.
(WHIRRING) If you do a deal with the Cybermen, it's a good idea to read the small print.
If some silver gentlemen knock on your door offering you a tasty proposition like asking you to betray the population of Earth, it's probably best to pass.
We agreed that I should remain in control of Earth.
In return, I supply the minerals you require.
You will honour that bargain, otherwise there will be no invasion.
SWEET: It's easy to mock the foolishness of any earthling who thinks that the Cybermen will play by the rules.
But maybe it's the metal people in this relationship who should be complaining about breach of contract.
Because most of the humans who have acted as agents of the Cybermen have done so in order to do them over.
serve him.
Aid you in your cause.
SWEET: Lytton is in the pay of the Cybermen.
Turns out, though, that he's really working for the Cryons for nothing.
Obviously, he has a thing about ladies with long fingernails and bubble-wrap catsuits.
then we'll discuss it.
SWEET: Ferrety Mr Kellman from "Revenge of the Cybermen" is pulling a similar fast one.
He's the exographer on board the Nerva Beacon, and he's cheerfully killing his fellow crew members, which allows him to send deadly cybermats scuttling around the space station, and to keep that hair of his so wonderfully smooth and straight.
Despite all this murder, he's not really the villain he appears.
He's working for these people, the Vogans, who have lovely, glossy fair hair just like him.
The bomb head is being fitted now.
The fortress of the Time Lords is at your mercy.
SWEET: This is the worst managerial decision that the Cybermen ever make, forming an alliance with the Master.
They think they're going to discover the secrets of the Time Lords, but in fact, they're being led to the dance floor of destruction.
You will show me the safe route or I shall destroy you.
SWEET: Would their original organic selves, I wonder, have known that it's usually a bad idea to do a deal with a man who dresses entirely in black, wears a pointy black beard and who cackles to himself between sentences? (GROANING) SWEET: Throughout the 1960s, when the Cybermen were at their most ubiquitous in Doctor Who, their emotionless nature was a key to their power.
You could read it in their great, goggling, blank eyes and letterbox mouths.
In this story, "The Invasion", the Doctor defeats them by giving them their emotions back.
He does it with the aid of a lash-up called the Cerebreton Mentor.
And then, if I put my hands on my hips and started shouting, I think I'd probably be expressing some kind of emotion.
Annoyance maybe, petulance.
CYBERMAN: Cybermen can survive more efficiently than animal organisms.
SWEET: And the title of the story? I know that revenge is a dish best served cold, but to want to serve it at all, you have to be very, very cross about something beforehand.
No Cyberman ever again flounced around, tubing akimbo.
But in subsequent stories, the human-like voices were retained and some rather excitable language.
CYBERMAN: This is excellent news, Doctor.
SWEET: And these two are clearly telling each other a joke.
In the parallel universe, the question of emotion is much more clear-cut.
Cybermen do not strut, they're not promiscuous with their expressions of satisfaction.
They march, they kill, they conquer, they convert.
But more horribly than ever, their emotions have not been surgically stripped from their brains, simply switched off with an inhibitor built into their armour.
And if that gets damaged CYBERMAN: I am quite cold.
Oh my God, it's alive.
- It can feel.
- I broke the inhibitor, I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Why so cold? Can you remember your name? CYBERMAN: Sally.
Sally Phelan.
SWEET: With all those messy emotions squeegeed away, the Cybermen operate by pure, cold logic alone.
That's the idea, anyway.
It's certainly very hard to argue with one.
CYBERMAN: I see that Time Lords have emotional feelings.
- Of sorts.
- Surely a great weakness - in one so powerful? - Emotions have their uses.
To restrict and curtail the intellect and logic of the mind.
They also enhance life.
When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset? Eating a well-prepared meal? These things are irrelevant.
For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about.
You know, I don't think the cyber leader would have accepted that argument, even if the Doctor had taken him out for dinner on the bay at Acapulco and cooked the shrimps himself.
Logic, it seems, doesn't have tastebuds.
But those humans who think themselves most logical are the Cybermen's biggest fans.
I am Klieg, Eric Klieg.
I have brought you back to life.
We of the Logicians have planned this.
You're alive because of us.
Now you will help us.
You know what, though? if I wanted advice on, say, how to get from Paddington to Swindon on an Easter Bank Holiday, I wouldn't ask anybody from the planet Mondas.
Because their advice would probably involve crashing Halley's Comet into the 747 to Bristol Parkway.
And then infiltrating the buffet car with Cybermats, trained to consume all the hot and cold snacks.
I mean, it would probably get me there, but then so would buying a ticket.
Let me explain.
It's 2526, a conference is about to take place on Earth that will forge a powerful military and diplomatic alliance against the Cybermen.
The Cybermen decide to blow it up, so what do they do? Do they launch a warhead at the conference building that will blast it to smithereens? Well, no, they find some caves in the middle of nowhere and set up a bomb that's protected by a pair of androids dressed in some rather lovely Lycra.
Androids with guns that can reduce the human body to a puddle of bubbling gunge.
When that bomb is diffused by the Doctor and Adric, the Cybermen resort to plan B.
For something that's just a sort of backup, it's quite elaborate.
They sneak by the thousand into the cargo hold of a space freighter heading for Earth.
They persuade one of the ship's officers to turn traitor.
Then they attach their own computers to the flight controls and set the freighter on a collision course for Earth.
What could be more simple? Apart from, of course, firing off one of their own giant missiles.
But it seems that in matters like this, Cybermen favour style over simplicity.
And it wasn't the most baroque plan that they ever made.
It's the early 21 st century and the Cybermen want to invade us.
To do this they need to put a beacon into Earth's orbit, to guide their battle fleet towards the planet.
So what do they do? Nothing so simple as just launching a beacon into the orbit of the Earth.
First, they attack a cargo spaceship called the Silver Carrier.
They refuel it, fill it with a bunch of little egg-like objects and punt it in the direction of this, the Wheel in Space.
The little eggs drift over to the Wheel and out of them pop these little creatures, cybermats.
Cute, aren't they? And they have an incredible appetite for a metal called bernalium.
Which just happens to be an essential ingredient in the Wheel's defence system.
So, the Cybermen ionise a nearby star.
Are you still with me? No! No! No! Oh, well.
Anyway, it causes a great meteorite shower.
The Wheel is in the line of fire and the crew soon discover they're fresh out of bernalium and if they don't find some quick, then the Wheel is going to lose a few spokes.
So, they send a party over to the Silver Carrier to get some, just as the Cybermen have predicted.
But it's just not the bernalium that's on board the Silver Carrier.
These guys have hatched out of some giant wobbly spheres.
They hypnotise the crew members who come over from the Wheel and climb inside the crates of bernalium.
Once their human dupes have helped to transport them across and unpack, the Cybermen intend to switch off the air supply and asphyxiate the humans, allowing them to convert the wheel into a beacon for their fleet.
Now imagine that you're at the Cybermen's "Invasion of Earth"planning meeting.
Do you think this one would really have got past the brainstorming stage? And yet, when the Cybermen are at their sneakiest, they're often at their most effective.
(SCREAMING) They don't often go for the full-scale, up-front invasion.
Before computer-generated effects were invented, not many Doctor Who aliens did.
When does this great operation begin, this conquest of the world? Phase one is already complete.
And what are you going to do with it when you've got it? Isn't it a bit large for just about six of you? SWEET: In "The Invasion", they're the secret backers of an electronics company selling cheap radios to the British public, who don't realise that in each one there's a little device that will help them deafen the population into submission.
In "The Moonbase", they've cut a hole in the wall of the storage room, and have poisoned the sugar.
If anyone takes it in their coffee, they develop varicose veins, and everyone seems to drink coffee on the Moonbase, no matter what the state of siege, which ensures the crew members are carted off one by one to the sick bay, where a Cyberman sneaks in at night to carry them off for conversion.
(MAN YELLING) This is such a fantastically cunning way to behave, and I love the fact that sugar is the medium for the poison.
A liking for a hot, sweet latte being a weakness of the flesh that the Cybermen have outgrown.
It's the sugar! Don't you see? That's why the disease doesn't affect everyone.
It's the sugar, not everyone takes it! SWEET: But this sort of strategy suits the Cybermen.
Unlike the Daleks, you rarely encounter them at the height of empire.
For most of their career on the screen they've been on the defensive, on the back foot.
They've been reeling ever since the destruction of their home world, Mondas.
They're desperate and they take what they can.
You've no home planet, no influence, nothing.
You're just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.
SWEET: By the year 2070, they had become known and feared in the galaxies as the Viking raiders of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries.
If your enemy was more powerful than you, you went away.
If he could be defeated, you killed, imprisoned or enslaved.
You were unswayed by pity or mercy.
And it's when they're most passive that they're most dangerous.
This is "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
It's one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever.
And it's about how the Cybermen set one of their most deadly traps.
After the destruction of Mondas, they came to this world, Telos.
Nothing much to look at on the surface, in fact, it's no more attractive than, say, a quarry near Gerrards Cross.
Beneath the surface, however, things were a lot more interesting.
The ice tombs of the Cybermen.
And inside these cells, sleeping Cybermen are just waiting to be defrosted.
Just at the moment when some fresh new flesh turns up on their doorstep for conversion.
Because here's something else important about the Cybermen.
They are relentless, they just keep on marching.
I doesn't matter whether it's past the landmarks of London or across the surface of the moon, they never tire.
There's no use firing guns at them, it doesn't work.
Cybermen! Take them out! To your positions.
Take your marks! Fire! That gun will not harm me.
Eradicate them.
You are not compatible.
You will be deleted.
We must destroy life on Earth completely.
Every living being.
(SCREAMING) (GROANING) (GROANING) Bullets can't stop them but fortunately, quite a few other things can.
Otherwise the human race wouldn't have stood a chance.
Bear with me, though, because this is quite a long list.
Cybermen have as many Achilles heels as your average centipede.
Radiation, bright lights, nail varnish remover, artificial gravity, neutron force fields, spray-on plastic, the fearsome power of the Cerebreton Mentor, giant explosions, a quick prod from a sonic lance.
Gold.
Want to give Cybermen an everlasting cold? Grate some bling into his chest unit.
These Cybermen are on Voga, the planet of gold, an asteroid entirely composed of the yellow stuff.
They have an old score to settle here.
This place is what lost them the war with humanity.
And it's what loses them this punch-up in the Tardis, too.
(CYBERMAN GROANING) By this story, "Silver Nemesis", they only have to look at the stuff to start coughing and expiring and exploding.
The Doctor's companion Ace manages to dispatch a cohort of the creatures with a catapult and a bag of loose change.
(GROANS) It's the fact that the Cybermen are human and not quite human, that you can't reform or rehabilitate them, that has allowed the Doctor and his friends to treat them much more roughly than some other aliens.
No other race has caused the Doctor just to pick up a gun and blam away.
CYBERMAN: Where's Gareth? Who's Gareth? SWEET: In "The Age of Steel", shortly after he's had the horrible experience of watching a woman wake up inside her suit and ask about her fiancée, the Doctor decides quickly to dispatch the rest of the Cybermen with a mobile phone signal that will switch off their emotional inhibitors and drive them a painful and fatal form of doolally.
And once it's been accepted that you can't make a Cyberman well again, there's only a short step from that idea to celebrating their destruction.
Yes! (SCREAMING) (CHEERING) Well, that's taken care of the Cybermen.
SWEET: Well, they look so happy, don't they? But that little human party won't last long.
Once the cheering has stopped, the Cybermen will simply have a bit of a refit and a Turtle Wax and go marching on again.
They were repelled from the South Pole and they came back.
They were entombed in the catacombs of Telos, Telos means "ending"in Greek.
The Cybermen paid no heed to that.
They were kebabbed by the Raston Robot on Gallifrey, in a place that was actually called the Death Zone.
But death had no dominion over them.
They were assaulted by the Vogans on the planet of gold.
But even that didn't seem to bother them that much.
Their plans to blow up the world in the 26th century were foiled by a snub-nosed boy with a little blue badge.
They didn't let it get them down.
They came back to chase the Doctor through the sewers of London and through Windsor Safari Park.
For a moment, it looked as if the time warp had condemned them to the archive.
But were they downhearted? No, they just learnt to stamp in formation, and rose again in the universe next door.
They jumped all over Victorian London, attempted to have their own alternative Industrial Revolution.
And sure, that Time Lord mucked it all up for them again, in a hot air balloon.
But you can't keep a good Cyberman down, not even when he's been smashed to pieces and left for dead under Stonehenge.
This one can still go like the clappers.
So will they, no matter how many times they get knocked over or apart.
The Cybermen have evolved as our technology and culture has evolved.
The "Tenth Planet"kind looked like the fruits of 1960s transplant surgery.
The "Earthshock" variety were a little bit disco with their silver moonboots and their Walkman headphones.
The Cybermen of the new series have a retro look, big and chunky and sleek.
And their hardware flashes with that shade of blue light that's the hallmark of most consumer technology of the first decade of the 21 st century.
When they return, they may be different again, but if we want to know how, we should look to ourselves and to the world that we're making.
CYBERMAN: We will survive.