Doctor Who - Audio Details

"I'm not even sure they are people by the end.  They're just so many tinned left-overs..."

On a dark frozen planet where no planet should be, in a doomed city with a sky of stone, the last denizens of Earth's long-lost twin will pay any price to survive, even if the laser scalpels cost them their love and hate and humanity.

And in the mat-infested streets, round about tea-time, the Doctor and Nyssa unearth a black market in second-hand body parts and run the gauntlet of the augmented police and their augmented horses.

And just between the tramstop and the picturehouse, their worst suspicions are confirmed: the Cybermen have only just begun, and the Doctor will be , just as he always has been, their saviour…

WHEN GARY RUSSELL FIRST asked me about an origin story for the Cybermen, the first thing we agreed was that the story was a tragedy.  With definitely no CyberDavros.  Just lots of good intentions paving a long road to Hell.  So I started thinking about how Earth's twin planet Mondas and it's people could possibly survive when it's drifted away from its sun.  It wouldn't have gone far before its atmosphere froze, so the survivors must be underground somewhere.  But what circumstances would force its human race to abandon their humanity?  Dwindling population, dwindling resources, dwindling hope.  It's almost traditional for the Doctor  to regale the Cybermen with a catalogue of the senses and emotions they have lost after purging their minds with cold clinical logic, but we've barely seen it from the point of view of their progenitors - the man with his family on the Mondas equivalent of Clapham omnibus.  And then there's all that continuity to juggle.  So the main theme of the story is the cruelty of loss, and the similarities between Mondas and Earth that bring the threat of the Cybermen and who they once were, closer than is comfortable.

Marc Platt, March 2002