Morphic resonance on Doctor Who

The first episode of the new series of Doctor Who was screened in Australia last night, and the preview of coming episode showed our old friends the Cybermen. As my son observed, they’re the least satisfactory of the Doctor’s enemies because they are just second-rate Daleks.

Oh, did you just pick the wrong day to post that comment. You see, the last episode of the new series of Doctor Who was screened in Britain last night, in which the Daleks themselves made the very same remark.

…and then proceeded to PWN the silvery goons. That was the most satisfying aspect of the whole giant fan-wank-fest.

The Cyberman are actually much better than the Daleks from an industrial design point of view. Obviously the writers spend a lot of time with the Daleks in coming up with rationalisations for their main drawback (the stairs thing), but the Daleks have a number of other flaws when considered as fighting machines:

1. The eye stalk. Monocular vision is bad enough in itself, but such a vital system ought to be kept in the body of the machine and properly shielded, not held out two feet in front of the Dalek where it is so vulnerable that a Dalek can be effectively blinded by hanging a hat off the eyestalk.

2. The plunger. This is crazy; enough work has gone into the rest of the Dalek that it makes no sense to have its only manipulation tool be so utterly crude. The Daleks never really managed to overcome this problem, and were always dependent on unreliable slave races to operate their spaceships and mining machinery.

3. The modular design. The Dalek is meant to be a fighting vehicle equivalent to a tank! And yet the shell can be dissassembled with a sonic screwdriver in only a few minutes, giving access to the more or less helpless green blob within.

4. Even the “exterminator”, an otherwise excellent weapon, is severely limited in its field of fire because of a bad choice in locating it on the front of the Dalek rather than a more logical turret positioning.

Face it, evil genius or not, as an industrial designer, Davros was dreadful. The Cybermen on the other hand are pretty well designed with few genuine weaknesses; it is always a difficult task to shield an air intake so I am not going to score too many points off the designer for that one.

“2. The plunger. This is crazy; enough work has gone into the rest of the Dalek that it makes no sense to have its only manipulation tool be so utterly crude. The Daleks never really managed to overcome this problem, and were always dependent on unreliable slave races to operate their spaceships and mining machinery.”

Reminds me of a Charles Barsotti cartoon in The New Yorker in which a dog dressed in a suit is berating a human employer with:

“Remember, you weren’t hired to think — you were hired because you have opposable thumbs.”

“the “exterminator” … is severely limited in its field of fire because of a bad choice in locating it on the front of the Dalek rather than a more logical turret positioning.” – fixed, I believe, in the current incarnation, as it can now do the full 360.

I can’t help but disagree on this one. The Cybermen have a terrific history.

Right from when the First/Second doctor entombs their race on Talos and through the fourth doc intervening in their rivalry with the Vogans whose planet is made entirely of the only substance the robot dudes are vulnerable to (gold) right until Earthshock where (spoilers) Adric martyrs himself and his crashlanding of the neutron-bomb rigged spaceship kills off all the dinosaurs and the Cybermen unwittingly cause the rise of homo sapiens.

They got a bit sucky after that, but I blame the writers for that one.

Let’s face it: as they are, the Daleks and the Cybermen are both pretty barren concepts. The Daleks have never grown beyond a stale metaphor for Nazi Germany – and do we really need Doctor Who to tell us that Hitler was bad? – and while Cybermen have always looked terrific, they’ve always been treated as glorified robots. To the extent that science fiction has any resonance beyond that of particularly gaudy action films, it’s that it tries to say something about the world we live in. If it’s saying little more than “watch out for crazy robots!”, I’m not all that interested.

Both Daleks and Cybermen are potentially interesting, however. The Daleks could easily be retooled into a broader metaphor for fascism instead of a narrower one for state-sponsored genocide, which works particularly well with the old shtick of Daleks being monsters made from human beings (that is, you can have some planet which is turning its soldiers into Daleks to win a war or root out terrorists or whatever, and then you get the incredible creep factor of young volunteers willingly turning themselves into Daleks for God and Country). With the Cybermen, I’m less interested in their weird Mondas/gold mythology than I am with the fact that they’re not really evil, they’re just incapable of emotion, which means they’re only driven by self-interest. A planet of Cybermen should be like a planet full of robot libertarians.

I was really scared of the daleks when I was a kid, but I never had to go behind the sofa. probably the copious amounts of second-hand pot smoke just immobilized me.

Christmas: And let’s throw some stuff about stem cells and cancer into the mix while we’re at it — maybe The Doctor can travel to the Republican alternate universe and, I don’t know, do something there. What I mean is, wasn’t Doctor Who was supposed to be about mindless fun all along?

Damn! Daniel beat me to it with the “stairs thing” :-)

I started watching late in the Patrick Troughton incarnation and the Cybermen always had the edge over the Daleks in the fear department.

That said, it was the Ice Warrior that really scared the crap out of me and there was no hiding behind the sofa because there was a wall there.

The Daleks never really scared me that much, although the story of their creation from human stock had its creepy side when I got old enough to understand it, as did Davros’ brilliant megalomaniac speech in answer to the Doctor’s “vial of virus” hypothetical. The Cybermen were cool in a Terminatoresque “wade into the enemy gunfire” way, but not scary (although the Cybermats gave me one or two nasty turns).

But the Zygons – hoo boy, the Zygons. Behind the sofa was no good for those bastards, the first time I saw one on screen I bolted clean out of the house and down the street.

The Daleks and the Cybermen were two different types of stories: the Daleks are the threat of extinction, of pure hatred. They don’t want to subjugate, they want to exterminate. Slave races are also doomed, once their usefulness ends. They are the archetypical Armegeddon Foe.

The Cybermen are more of the vampire and zombie threat: monsters who will make you into one of them. The old story of the Fate Worse Than Death. The concept of the Cybermen was cleverly stolen and perfected by Paramount Pictures in Star Trek: the Next Generation with the Borg (though they were eventually watered down).

The new series played up the similarities between Cybermen and Daleks, apparently so that it could all lead to that Cyberman/Dalek trash-talking smackdown in the second-season finale.

The two-parter that established the new series’ alternate origin for the Cybermen even had them being created by a mad genius in a wheelchair and attacking people while muttering “delete delete”, both of which are really much more Dalekian touches, and weren’t in the old show.

In the original series they were somewhat more different variations on the theme of mad cyborgs. The key difference is that Cybermen are supposed to have no emotions (with all the usual contradictions that come up when you try to tell stories about emotionless characters); whereas Daleks have exactly ONE emotion. Cybermen just wanted to survive and propagate their race, and had no moral quibbles about how to do it; Daleks actually wanted to kill everybody.

(And my wife points out that the Daleks’ backstory mutated repeatedly even in the old series; Davros wasn’t introduced until the Tom Baker era, though Terry Nation had thought up a sort of proto-Davros in Dalek comic strips he wrote earlier.)

While the show was off the air (and after), a company called Big Finish produced Doctor Who audio dramas distributed on CD with some of the original actors. One of them was a very different Cyberman origin story written by Mark Platt called “Spare Parts”, which convinced me that, properly handled, the Cybermen can be really interesting. He had to work with a lot of loopy continuity–on the old show, there was a bunch of Velikovskian nonsense about how the Cybermen came from a twin Earth named Mondas that got knocked out of our solar system–but what he came up with was remarkably poignant and atmospheric; there’s a tragic sense that the people of Mondas don’t want to become Cybermen but don’t see any workable alternative.