Doctor Who A-Z #37: The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967)

There’s a very slight oddity in The Tomb of the Cybermen which is all but ignored now, and which is hard to appreciate unless you’re watching these stories in order. It has to do with the Cybermats, the weird robot rat-bugs the Cybermen use as henchmen. This is their first appearance, but they turn up in later stories like The Wheel in Space, Revenge of the Cybermen and Closing Time, all of which give you a certain set of expectations. From those stories, I expected them to be running around zapping people with their laser eyes and injecting poison into people. It was only after the story finished when I realised that, for all the screaming and shooting the Cybermats provoke in the humans here, and for all their horrible googly eyes and wobbling tentacles, there is no actual illustration of what they do. What threat do they pose?

The answer is simple, and reveals a lot about what kind of a story The Tomb of the Cybermen is. We are meant to be frightened and fascinated by the Cybermats because they’re creepy-crawlies, and this is the most full-on horror story the show has risked to date. The Cybermen were created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, the first of whom was supposed to strengthen the show’s scientific plausibility. Two stories on, they’ve gone so far in the opposite direction as to end up writing what is effectively a mummy’s-curse story.

There are other influences in the mix. Part of the appeal of Doctor Who, as I’ve noted before, is that it invades other genres and bends them out of shape. The Tomb of the Cybermen is a perfect case study. After a brief TARDIS introduction, we’re led into a stirring, muscular adventure about mostly American archaeologists trying to open the Cybermen’s tomb. It has something of the flavour of the serials Irwin Allen was producing around at the same time, like Land of the Giants and Lost in Space, shows which I enjoyed watching as a kid but couldn’t help wishing had a hero as magnetic and chaotic as the Doctor. The Tomb of the Cybermen shows you what that would be like.

The pleasure is increased by it being Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, second only to Sylvester McCoy as the one who takes the most glee in subverting these macho potboilers. Famously, The Tomb of the Cybermen was rediscovered after years of being missing from the archives; after the initial celebrations subsided it was reconsidered and questioned for its lack of internal logic and consistent characterisation. The strange thing is, we should have known this before the episodes were rediscovered. All of these problems are more prominent in Pedler and Davis’s script than they are in the finished piece. On paper, there is no sensible reason for the Doctor to actually assist the archaeologists in digging up the tomb of incredibly evil beings who are almost certainly not dead. Watching Troughton play this, though, reminds you that the Second Doctor is a trickster. It makes sense that his plan for dealing with the Cybermen involves escalating the situation until a confrontation is forced; what else are tricksters meant to do?

This isn’t to say the Doctor is irresponsible or callous here. The morality of Troughton’s Doctor comes from his skin in the game: he will always put himself at greater risk than anyone else, and uniquely among Doctors he always seems to be genuinely terrified of the monsters. Much as Hartnell’s Doctor became more heroic when faced with the Daleks, the Cybermen flick a certain switch in this Doctor. In The Moonbase they made him deliver his moral credo, and here he takes time out to comfort debutant companion Victoria on the stresses of being far from home and in grave danger. Placed daringly right in the middle of the story’s final escalation, it must have been an influence on Jon Pertwee’s later “moments of charm”. Those, though, were often moral lessons. This is two fighters on the eve of battle taking time to expose a little of their character. It’s a Howard Hawks scene in a Doctor Who episode, and to be honest that’s enough to hail the story as a classic on its own.

It might just be Troughton’s greatest performance as the Doctor, and it might well be the Cybermen’s best appearance as well. The Cybermen have many facets but Pedler and Davis are relentlessly focused on the most terrifying one: that, as the Cyberleader puts it, you will become like us. The pure horror of the conversion process is front and centre, and if the show can’t actually depict that viscerally it can show you slime oozing out of a shattered Cyberman’s torso so graphically that even the Doctor turns away from it. 

That battering is dished out by Toberman, a nearly-silent Black man employed as a heavy by one of the expedition’s funders Kaftan. The depiction of Toberman is the serial’s biggest problem, as nobody – not even the Doctor – seems to realise it’s a problem. As the Cyberman try to convert him, the Doctor warns him the robots will make him a slave, without acknowledging that the humans have already done that. Other cultural depictions have dated more gracefully. Kaftan and Klieg’s plan, for instance, is often criticised for making less sense than their membership of the Brotherhood of Logicians would seem to promise. Yet I put it to you that if you met someone today who claimed to be part of an organisation called the Brotherhood of Logicians, they would be the sort of person who practically lives in Elon Musk’s mentions. Their belief that the Cybermen can be defeated by a Cyberman’s gun, as if the Cybermen could never possess a weapon that could counter it, is actually significantly less imbecilic than anything their modern-day peers have come up with.

Next: The Abominable Snowmen (1967).

Graham’s Archive – The Tomb of The Cybermen

Full Doctor Who Archive Here