Here we are at the Fifth and Final Chapter of The History of the Cybermen. We'll start by discussing the last few Cybermen stories from the Classic Series and then figure out how the remaining New Who stuff fits in...
PART 5: THE REALLY DISTANT FUTURE
Once more, the Cybermen seem to be in a crisis. They have taken a heavy beating at the hands of a special Alliance created by the humans of Earth. The First Great Cyber War stretches through the better part of the 26th Century. Near its end, the Neomorphs' vulnerability to gold is discovered and utilized to its greatest potential. Thanks to the planet Voga, the Cyber Race is utterly defeated.
The Alliance, however, did overlook those Cyber Scavengers lurking in the deep fringes of the galaxy. One group of scavengers does attempt a comeback - but fails. I would guess their gambit to destroy the remains of Voga took place sometime around the 29th Century.
With their attempt at revenge quelled, the Cybermen seem to be truly extinct. Conveniently enough, the Daleks during this period also seem to have disappeared (this is a cross-reference to my Dalek History posts I did a while back - you'll see more of these in this entry. Here's a link to the chapter I'm referencing: http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/07/chronologies-and-timelines-episode.html).
All seems quiet. The Universe can rest easy for a while.
But only for a while...
RETURN TO THE FUTURE
The Cyber Scavengers were not the only important point that the Alliance missed. During the late stages of the Great Awakening on Telos, the Cybermen were able to capture a time vessel. They, immediately, used it to try to alter the course of history. The Time Lords sent the Doctor in to stop them but the time ship remained in the Cybermen's possession after the incident.
Now that they had the technology, the Cybermen wanted to become masters at time travel. At best, they were only able to scrape a bit of the surface technology off their time machine during this period. The Alliance against them banded together quite quickly and they needed to focus everything on the war effort. Research into time travel was put on the back burner. The time vessel, itself, was rarely used during the First Great Cyber War.
However, when it looked like the Main Fleet was doomed to lose, a group of Neomorphs boarded the time ship and simply took off into the future. They set a course for two centuries ahead in time.
The Alliance had only ever heard rumors of their enemies having the ability to travel through time. They figured that if such technology did actually exist, then it was destroyed when they took out the fleet.
Sometime in the late 29th Century, the time vessel re-materializes. The crew immediately assess their situation. As anticipated, there is no longer a Main Fleet. They learn of the one group of Scavengers that tried destroy to Voga (they even recover footage of the event from the security cameras of Nerva Beacon). Since Revenge of the Cybermen, Voga has re-emerged into the public light and involved itself with the galactic economy. They've emptied their mines and sold their gold to the rich of the Universe. Which means, of course, that Voga is no longer the threat it once was. The Alliance will have a much harder time arming their glitter guns now that ammunition can no longer be acquired from a centralized source. Plans of conquest can begin anew.
FIRST LAST DITCH EFFORT FROM THE NEOMORPHS
These Cybermen who have slipped into the future immediately embark upon two vital missions. The first is to re-build the fleet. One group of scavengers were destroyed in the Voga Mission but there are still several more out there. They are called in with whatever supplies they've gathered. Once more, the Scavengers acquired enormous resources that will create a new army. Once they've delivered their cargo, they are sent back out. The Scavengers are an excellent ace-in-the-hole that have saved the Cyber Race several times, now. As long as they can remain hidden from the eyes of the Major Civilizations of the Universe, they will continue to be effective.
The second mission the re-emerging Neomorphs undertake is to better understand the time ship they've stolen. After much research and development, the Cybermen are able to make time travel capabilities an integral aspect of all their navigational equipment. The huge fleet that they have re-built can, now, time-jump whenever it wants to. A very handy feature to have should they find themselves' close to defeat like they did during the First Great Cyber War. Some might even say the fleet is now unbeatable.
With their new abilities, the Cybermen decide to try to meddle with history again. The Fleet (or, at least, part of it) travels back to 2526 to prevent the Alliance that defeated them in the Cyber War from ever forming. Earth is on High Alert and will be near-impossible to take out in a direct assault. So the Cybermen take advantage of the various merchant vessels that are still making regular deliveries to the planet. They arrange the smuggling of two androids and a massive bomb to be delivered to Earth. The androids set up the bomb in a hidden cave and protect it until it is time for it to be detonated. The Cybermen are waiting for a major conference that they know will be taking place shortly. The bomb will destroy the better part of the Earth and kill all the delegates assembled, there. Which will, in turn, destroy the unity the Alliance was meant to inspire. The 26th Century Cyber Fleet will be able to thrive, after all.
Just to ensure that their plans are successful, a small army is hidden in the cargo bay of a second merchant vessel. They will commandeer the ship once the bomb is set off and mop up anyone who survived the bomb's explosion. Earth will definitely be destroyed and the history of the Cybermen can move in an entirely new direction.
The plan fails, of course. Thanks to the intervention of the Fifth Doctor and Lieutenant Scott's taskforce. Earthshock happens here.
SPECIAL NOTE: Making the Cybermen time travelers in Earthshock gets a few of its continuity problems to work better. Firstly, the flashback to Revenge of the Cybermen now makes sense. If these were Cybermen from the Year 2526 - how would they have footage from an event that clearly takes place after the Cyber War? Since they are from the future, they can do this now.
Also, the freighter suddenly being able to time-jump at the end can have a sort of logic to it. Adric accidentally unlocked the time travel capabilities found in all navigational equipment that the Cybermen use.
SECOND LAST-DITCH ATTEMPT OF THE NEOMORPHS
News of another Cyber Fleet soon reaches the ears of the humans. Without any intergalactic tyrants to fight, the Earth has become an empire, itself. Like most empires, a greater concentration has been put on military funding. This time, the humans don't need an alliance to defeat the Cybermen. They have a big enough army, already. They aren't aware, however, of the fact that these Cybermen can escape through time if their opponents are overcoming them.
The ever-scheming Seventh Doctor takes care of this tactical advantage. He intentionally leaks some information to the Neomorphs about a Gallifreyan super-weapon that he has sent into orbit around the Earth in the late 20th Century. The Cybermen cannot resist the lure of such an opportunity
The Human Empire start engaging the Cyber Fleet. They're showing enormous success in the limited skirmishes they've had. The Cybermen can see that they will not defeat this enemy so they all slip back into the past and shroud themselves' as they orbit the Earth in 1988. A small command force descends to the planet to retrieve the Nemesis statue once it crashes, there. Again, they intend to pervert history. With the Nemesis Statue, they will have the might to convert the Earth into a New Mondas.
They were lured into a trap, of course. The Seventh Doctor defeats them in the story Silver Nemesis. With the destruction of this particular fleet, the Cybermen's knowledge of temporal physics is also lost. While there are still scavengers in the 29th Century, time travel technology was not passed on to them.
THE SECOND GREAT CYBER WAR
No one from the 29th Century actually knows what happened to the Cyber Fleet. They guessed that they time traveled in some way - but the fleet never seems to return. They appear to have completely disappeared from the Universe.
A century or so passes where, again, we don't hear from the Cybermen. The Scavengers are still out in the outer fringes, though. This time, they decide to just come together on their own and share their resources. A new army is built.
Deciding the Neomorph model isn't all it was cracked up to be - they go Cybus-Style, this time. Cybus-Style Cybermen prove to be highly adaptable. If the enemy starts exploiting a certain weakness, this model can perform internal upgrades that will neutralize the vulnerability.
On top of that, the Earth Empire is now in a state of decline. They don't have the same military might that they had back in the 29th Century (we're probably somewhere in the 31st Century, at this point). Nonetheless, they have to engage the enemy. The Cybermen are attacking the humans in full force. A Second Great Cyber War commences. Like the first one, it rages on for the better part of a century.
Humanity has to take more drastic measures in this war if they are expected to survive. A special protocol is introduced to the armies of the Empire. Each platoon is issued a powerful bomb that has the ability to blow up an entire planet. If even a single Cyberman is found on a world - the bomb is detonated.
Using this plan of attack, the Empire eventually defeats their enemy. They also end up destroying the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy. It is now just an empty space in the cosmos. No planets. No stars. Nothing.
The Cybermen made one fatal mistake during this war. So confident were they in victory, that they did not bother to send their Scavengers back out to the remote corners of the Universe. There was no way to re-marshal their resources in a century or two like they had been after their last few defeats. This time, the Cybermen really do seem to be wiped out.
MORE CROSS-REFERENCING
In Part Five of my Dalek History post (http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/07/chronologies-and-timelines-episode-5-of.html), I try to postulate what period of time the Daleks return to after the Time Wars. Some dates are given in certain early stories like Dalek, Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways and the whole arc involving The Cult of Skaro. But there also seems to be a large army that takes up occupancy in the far-flung future. Full Dalek stories such as Into The Dalek, Magician's Apprentice/Witch's Familiar and cameos like Wedding of River Song and The Pilot all seem to support this idea (as do several more stories, really, but listing them all gets a bit tedious). No specific dates, however, are appointed to any of these tales. I suggest that the Daleks pick up where they left off from in Dalek Masterplan (the latest point in their pre-Time War timeline) and are back in the 42nd Century - but I don't fully commit to the idea. It's entirely possible they're at some other point in the future.
Now that we are reaching some stories where the timelines of Daleks and Cybermen are intersecting again, I'm going to set some proper dates in stone. The time for wishy-washiness is over.
So, as the Time Wars end, a group of Daleks return to the early 42nd Century. Using a Progenitor, they re-design themselves' and begin building their numbers back up. As they are re-establishing their reign, they learn of an impending disaster that will be caused by their greatest enemy. The Doctor's TARDIS will explode and destroy the Universe. In order to truly ensure that they can capture the Doctor and stop this cataclysm, they create an alliance with other races who have clashed against him. Using their time travel technology, they transport all of the members of the Alliance back to Stone Henge on Second Century Earth where they have set a massive trap for him.
The Daleks decide that the Cybermen could have a lot to offer to such an Alliance. But they can't find any of them. Their light seems to have been extinguished from the Galaxy. Remembering that there are still some of them stranded in the Void - they extract a small force and bring them back to our reality to assist in the operation. This is why we see Cybus Cybermen in The Pandorica Opens and not Cybermen from our universe.
What becomes of this particular group of Cybus Cybermen is unknown. Perhaps they're still out there, up to no good. Or perhaps they were defeated in an offscreen adventure.
MORE SILVER
While the original Earth Empire did collapse sometime around the 32nd Century, the Royal Family that reigned during that period survive. A thousand or so years later, they manage to rise back into power. The Second Human Empire, however, is fairly short-lived. Emperor Ludens Nimrod Kendric, called Longstaff the Forty First is reluctant to assume leadership and runs away from his responsibility. His escape lands him on the now-derelict Hedgewick's World. An amusement park planet that ended up going into bankruptcy and being abandoned.
Hedwick's World falls into ruin because a Cyber Army has been ever-so-gradually building itself up underneath the surface of the planet. Stealing the occasional child in the park and converting them.
Some major refinements get made as a new model of Cybermen is developed. The Cyber Controller is long dead - probably destroyed near the end of the First Great Cyber War. Cyber Leaders and Lieutenants have been running things most of the time but a new centralized intelligence has been created. Christened a Cyber Planner, it is very different from the ones that were used back in the day. There seems to be no physical form for this Planner. It operates within the Cyberiad - a highly organized neural network that can instantly access and control any Cyberman in the Universe. This is the most sophisticated of all the hive minds the Cyber Race has ever produced.
Another huge boon for the Cyber Race is the creation of the cybermite. A smaller version of the cybermat, it is used for a quicker more effective conversion rather than being a weapon. Even contact with just a few cybermites causes any organic creature to fall under Cyber control. The greater the number of cybermites, the more complete the conversion.
These two key elements and a few modifications to the basic model make these Nightmare Style Cybermen some of the most deadly and dangerous we've ever seen. They are ready to rise back up from the catacombs they've built into Hedgewick's World and re-conquer the galaxy. They just need an effective housing for the Cyber Planner. When the Doctor makes an ill-timed visit to the amusement park, their plans can begin.
Nightmare In Silver ensues.
SURVIVING THE SECOND CYBER WAR
When Hedgewick's World is destroyed at the end of Nightmare In Silver, we see that a single cybermite has survived the explosion and is floating in space. It's a moment that's vaguely reminiscent of the scene with the surviving cybermat in Tomb of the Cybermen. We know that the Cybermen will be back for more.
My guess is that this was not the only cybermite that made it through. During the Second Cyber War, cybermites had not yet been invented. So the Empire's scorched earth policy was effective. But such a tactic no longer works. Cybermites were made to withstand the destruction of a planet so that the Cybermen can still proliferate after such an attack is used against them.
The surviving Cybermites make their way to a nearby world and begin, anew, the evolution of the Cyber Race. We get the impression that they are cutting a few corners as they re-build things. Any other time that we've seen Nightmare-Style Cybermen, they don't seem to show a lot of the capabilities that we saw displayed in Nightmare In Silver.
As the Cybermen assert themselves' into the Fourth Millennium, they experience a similar problem that the Daleks did. During earlier times, the Cybermen were more technologically-advanced than most of their opponents.Which gave them all sorts of advantages. But these other races have now caught up to them and can contain them better. The Cybermen do end up conquering and controlling their own quadrant of the galaxy, but they're only allowed to spread so far. The same proves true with several other aggressive alien species that litter the universe. Their enemies accept that they can't truly wipe them out - but they are now powerful enough to, at least, hold them at arm's length.
It is within this geo-political landscape that Gallifrey starts transmitting its distress beacon from Trenzalore. Along with several other power-hungry military forces, the Cybermen arrive to investigate things. Eventually, the Doctor even comes to check out the situation. When he does, the events of Time of the Doctor occur.
ONE LAST CAMEO
I estimate that Time of the Doctor probably takes place sometime around the 44th Century. Nightmare In Silver was probably in the 42nd or 43rd Century so I thought I would give those cybermites a good hundred years to get a formidable army in place by the time Trenzalore starts calling out to the Universe.
So the big question is: do the Cybermen survive much longer than this? Our last cameo that needs to be chronicled indicates there were still be Cybermen nearly a thousand years past Time of the Doctor.
No specific date is given to any of the events that take place in the future time period that A Good Man Goes to War transpires in. We do get certain dates subtitled as the Doctor amasses his army. But we don't know, for sure, when the battle of Demon's Run specifically happens. Through various bits of dialogue, we can ascertain that the attack on the Twelfth Cyber Legion and Kavorian's confrontation with Dorium also happen in the same time period as the Fall of Demon's Run. But, again, no specific date is given during these scenes.
However, if we take the time and trouble to go back to Pandorica Opens, we see River Song visiting Dorium at the Maldovarium to acquire time travel technology. In this instance, the date 5145 flashed up in the subtitles. In Good Man Goes to War Dorium appears to be closing down shop. So we have to assume his transaction with River Song took place before this event. That means the various events that take place in other locations in this time period are occurring sometime after 5145. So it looks like the Cybermen have, at least, made it to the 52nd Century.
By this time, the Cybermen are not just using Nightmare Style models, they have brought back older versions, too. We have never seen legions of Cybermen before this, so I'm guessing that each legion might actually be a different type of Cybermen (it was awesome to see a New Who update of the Mondasian Cybermen - how great would it be to see other Classic Who models brought into the New Series?!). The Twelfth Legion was a group of Cybus Style Cybermen. The bulk of their fleet, however, gets destroyed when Rory and the Doctor visit them for information concerning the location of Amy.
So it would appear that the Cybermen go on for over three thousand years after their first attempt to invade us in the late 20th Century. Like the Daleks, there are spells where they are nearly defeated and seem to disappear from the Universe for a bit. But they go on.
More than likely, they will be around for a long time to come.
And so, at last, we reach the end of this long and winding tale. I seem to have found times for all the stories and cameos to take place in. As complicated of a task as this was - I do find that a good consistent history was easier to build for the Cybermen than it was for the Daleks.
Yet one more reason why I think I might like the Cybermen better....
Other Parts of the Saga:
(referring to my own work as a "Saga" - how pretentious is that?! Thank God this is Pretentious Doctor Who Essays!)
Part 1:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
Part 2:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_9.html
Part 3:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_13.html
Part 4:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_18.html
Tuesday 27 February 2018
Sunday 18 February 2018
CHRONOLOGIES AND TIMELINES: HISTORY OF THE CYBERMEN - PART 4
Well, we got through a whole slew of late 20th/early 21st Century stories. Now we're off to the far-flung future. We'll go to Telos and deal with the first Great Cyber War.
PART 4: THE DISTANT FUTURE
The Cyber Race is in trouble. They were quite the formidable galactic conquerors with their Main Fleet and Mondas - but both were lost during attempts to take over the Earth. Subsidiary Fleets tried to exact a revenge of some sort, but they took damage too. The Cyber Armies are strong and still have power and influence in other parts of the Universe but it is getting harder for them to maintain their grip. They are running low on energy.
THE GREAT RETREAT
After some calculation, the Cybermen decide they must rest for a time. They will disappear from the cosmos in hopes that the Universe will be changed enough to suit them when they re-emerge. They even devise a sort of trap that will indicate to them when the humans of the galaxy are more suitable for conversion.
Of course, the biggest problem is to find a place where they can hide while they rest. After some searching, they discover a world that will suit their needs. The Cryons of Telos have become masters at mass refrigeration. Their planet went through a huge climate change and is no longer hospitable for them so they fashioned gigantic survival chambers that maintained a low temperature for them to thrive in. Uniting all the subsidiary fleets, the Cybermen invade those chambers and more-or-less wipe out the Cryons. They then retro-fit the whole place into a cryogenic suspension system. Or the tombs of the Cybermen - as they came to be known.
Before going into hibernation, the Cybermen wanted to make sure they could acclimatize properly to the ways of the Galaxy when they awoke. They took a massive sweep through all the greatest warehouses of knowledge that were available in the Universe at the time (they couldn't hack the Matrix - they didn't even know Time Lords existed, yet). They would take a second sweep when they arose once more so that they could see just how much things had changed during their slumber. As they gathered all their information, they learnt more about the Doctor. They didn't know how, but he was a man of many faces. As they probed Earth records, they learnt that - with another face - the Doctor was responsible for the destruction of Mondas.
The Cybermen felt they needed an appropriate repository for all the knowledge they had gathered. Up until this point, they had been reliant on Cyber Planners. They wanted something less cumbersome and more mobile. The Cyber Controller was created.
This was their last act before sealing themselves' into a huge underground hibernation chamber. This all occurred just as the 21st Century was ending...
THE GREAT RE-AWAKENING
There was but one more logistical problem to deal with before the Cybermen went into their Long Sleep. While all the subsidiary fleets had been gathered, those Deep Space Scoutships were taking too long to return. So the Cyber Controller ordered them to remain where they were but to change their mission parameters. No longer would they search for new worlds to conquer. Instead, they would commit acts of piracy on any space vessels or small colonies that they had the strength to beat. They would plunder them and amass as much resources as possible for the sleeping Cyber Force to use when they returned to consciousness. Essentially, the scouts became scavengers.
It's difficult to say just how long the Cybermen truly slept for. In Tomb of the Cybermen, the claim of five hundred years gets used several times. This is probably a rounding up of the number for dramatic effect. It's probably more like four hunrded and a bit of change.
Convinced that humans will, someday, evolve into more logical beings that will crave conversion - the Cyber Controller sets up his own hibernation chamber near the surface of the planet. He also leaves several logic puzzles that will need to be solved in order to gain access to him. He is convinced that this will be a kind of screening system that will mean that anyone who does seek him out will be suitable to turn into soldiers in his Army.
Things don't quite go according to the Cyber-Controller's plan. He is, eventually, dug up by a small archaeological team during the early 26th Century who realize they've opened a Pandora's Box. With the help of the Second Doctor (who the Cyber Controller recognizes and attributes the destruction of Mondas to), the tombs are re-sealed.
These are, of course, the events of Tomb of the Cybermen.
One cybermat manages to escape before the main doors of the tomb are closed. Cannibalizing circuitry from the artificial arm of Toberman's fallen body, the cybermat sets up a transmitter that summons a crew of Cybermen that had been successfully scavenging during the centuries that the Main Army slept. They respond to the signal and reach Telos a short while later. The Cyber Controller is repaired and the tombs are properly re-opened. With all the resources the scavengers have amassed, the campaigns of the Cybermen can begin, anew.
THE NEED FOR UNIFORMITY
Once restored, the Cyber Controller sees there must be some serious revision to the Cyber Race. He has only revived a small force but there is a need for greater delegation of orders. Cyber Leaders are created to help with the decision-making process. They confer and decide that the scavengers who came to save them should be sent back out into deep space. Attributing a Cyber Leader to the scavengers, they are sent off to commit more acts of piracy.
Other scavengers are contacted and they bring in their hauls, too. They are sent back out once their cargo is delivered. The Cyber Controller sees he can do a lot with the resources the scavengers provided. But he needs an even larger governing force so he also creates Cyber Lieutenants to help with the issuing of his orders.
A second sweep of all the great data bases of the Universe is done. More is learnt about the Doctor and his many faces. Some visual records are even obtained. In the process of acquiring more knowledge of their greatest foe, the Cybermen also discover the existence of Time Lords.
After creating new ranks in his forces, the next big decision the Cyber Controller makes is to take all the different models of Cybermen that are sleeping in their tombs and assimilate them into one form. This conversion occurs while many of them are still asleep. The latest model is meant to be the most streamlined and efficient of all the Cybermen. Easy to build so that the army can grow as quickly as possible as they go back out into the cosmos and begin, anew, their plans of conquest. This particular branch of Cybermen came to be known as the Neomoprh.
Full Disclosure: I am, technically, breaking my own rules with the naming of this model. I had said in my first entry that I would only use information from transmitted episodes. The term "Neomorph" is never said onscreen. It's something that's really only used in David Banks' book on Cybermen (a great read with very pretty pictures!). I've decided to employ this title when I discuss this particular model because it sounds better than the more commonly used: "80's style Cybermen".
While the Neomorph Cybermen do have their advantages, there are some shortcomings, too. The earliest models seem to be some of the most vulnerable. They aren't even immune to bullets. Also, because the conversion was done on so many hibernating Cybermen, it's created complications in the revivification process. Many Cybermen are waking up and acting in an irrationally violent manner. They are dubbed Rogue Cybermen. The Cybermen working under the Cyber Controller's authority study the problem but can find no way to repair it. Rogue Cybermen are simply eliminated any time they awaken.
TIME TRAVEL
At this point in time, the Cybermen have one of the greatest strokes of luck. They just happen to capture a time vessel and the fundamentals of time travel are opened up to them. Ruthless, logical creatures that they are, they try to exploit their new-found technology to its fullest potential.
Deciding that it all went downhill for them after they lost Mondas, the Cybermen of Telos undertake a mission to alter the course of history. They will go back to 1985 and take advantage of the fact that Halley's Comet will be passing by the Earth. They will divert its course and cause it to collide with the planet. The devastation it will cause will weaken the Earth enough so that when Mondas arrives in 1986 they will absorb the planet effortlessly.
Just to better understand the effects of such devastation, the Cybermen start lacing the surface of Telos with explosives. The Time Lords get wind of what they're up to and dispatch the Doctor to stop them. The events of Attack of the Cybermen take place, here.
ANOTHER SOMEWHAT IRRELEVANT SIDENOTE: Some might think that Attack of the Cybermen takes place entirely in 1985 since Lytton sends out a distress beacon that year that gets received by the Cryons. How can he send out a transmission that finds its way into the future? I say that Lytton's previous experience with the Daleks and their time corridor in Resurrection of the Daleks gives him that ability. He managed to glean a bit of temporal physics off of the Daleks and built a transmitter that could emit into the future. He wanted to return to his own time (somewhere around the 27th Century) but could only get the transmitter to project so far. The transmissions made it to the 26th Century - which was good enough. He could probably work out a way to jump ahead one more century once he got there.
Cyber Control does get destroyed at the end of Attack but it was largely abandoned by that point. When the Cybermen came to Telos in the late 21st Century to go into hibernation, they landed their armada on Telos and hid it in an underground complex. Their ships were waiting for them five centuries later when they emerged from their tomb. Since Telos was scheduled for demolition, they evacuated the planet.
Once more, the Cyber Fleet was haunting the heavens.
THE FIRST CYBER WAR
The Earth soon learnt about that Cyber Fleet and grew concerned. They had suffered enough at the hands of the Cybermen back in the day. They decided that, rather than wait for an attack that they knew would come, they would take the fight to them.
But they also knew they couldn't do it alone. While the Cyber Fleet wasn't as large as it once was, it was still formidable. Earth's military forces were not sufficient to win in a war against the Cybermen. Fortunately, other worlds remembered the threat they once posed to the galaxy. Various interstellar governments began to confer with Earth. An alliance was forming..
Our Neomorphs do make an attempt to stop the alliance by trying to blow up the Earth during a vital conference that would have banded the different governments together once and for all. Again, some time travel shenanigans are going on, here. As we reach the appropriate moment in the Cybermen's timescale, we'll discuss it in further detail.
The second attempt by the Cybermen to pervert history fails. A short while later, the First Great Cyber War erupts.
The war was long and bloody. Even with so many forces combined against them, the Cybermen were still showing signs of a possible victory. The Neomorphs had managed to overcome those early design flaws and were, now, impervious to most forms of weaponry. However, in achieving their near-invulnerability, they develop a single great weakness: they are allergic to gold. If it gets into their chestplates, it clogs up the breathing apparatus and suffocates a Cyberman. The Alliance Against the Cybermen, eventually, learn of this Archilles' Tendon and use it to their advantage. Voga, the planet of gold, is approached by the Alliance and their assistance is requested. Military scientists invent the glitter gun. A weapon that can coat a Cyberman with gold (or, at least, a part of the Cyberman - you probably have to aim for the chestplate) and kill him.
This represents a huge turn in the tide of the First Great Cyber War. The Cyber Forces are driven back in a vicious onslaught by the Alliance. There is a Final Great Skirmish where, to all intents and purposes, the Cybermen appear to get wiped out. However, in that final battle, the planet Voga also appears to be destroyed.
The Cybermen do still appear to have their time vessel throughout the Cyber War. As it looks like they are doomed, a crew embarks upon the ship and disappears into the future.
We'll hear more about them later....
REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED LOGICAL
Once more, the Cybermen seem to disappear from the Universe. Many believe they could be gone forever.
However, the Alliance has overlooked one or two important matters. Firstly, they did not realize there were still Cybermen working in the remote parts of space. They had originally been scouts and were now scavengers. They were staying hidden from the eyes of the Alliance while they were re-building supplies and hatching a scheme to create a new Cyber Fleet.
One group of scavengers does make a play at re-asserting themselves' into a more central part of the Universe. They are, quite possibly, the same group that received the transmission from the cybermat on Telos and re-awakened the main forces. They have amassed all that they need for a new army - they just want to make one important strategic move. Voga, it seems, was not entirely destroyed in the Cyber War. A chunk of it is still floating about near Jupiter with an actual population staying hidden beneath its surface. The Cybermen know they will be defeated, once more, if they try to conquer the galaxy before Voga is destroyed.
They attempt to blow up Voga during Revenge of the Cybermen. The campaign fails.
It should be noted that the Revenge-style Cybermen are one of the few models in existence at the time that weren't Neomoprhs. Not all the scavengers underwent Neomorphic conversion during the Great Re-Awakening. While the Cyber Wars were waging, however, they were still receiving minor upgrades from the dominant model. One of those upgrades causes the Cyberleader to take on very aggressive characteristics so that he's more intimidating to humans. They also sought that high level of invulnerability that the Neomorphs had. Which meant that, at the same time, they inherited the weakness to gold. However, the allergy wasn't quite as acute. The gold really needed to get into their system to cause harm. Which may explain why the guns the Vogans were using against them didn't seem to have any effect (one would presume the bullets in their rifles were made of gold - since just-about everything else on Voga is golden). But, when the Doctor loads a cybermat with gold-dust, the attack works. The sting of the cybermat injects the gold deeply into a Cyberman's body. Whereas the bullets can't quite penetrate their armor.
With the attack on what remains of Voga repelled, the Cybermen do seem to be well-and-truly extinct. But we all know that can't truly be the case.
They will be back.
And we end the entry, here. I thought I could do this whole saga in four installments but the tale is proving longer to tell than expected. So we'll return again, soon, with the Second Great Cyber War and a series of cameos that seem to indicate that the Cybermen will keep surviving for thousands of years to come....
Part 1:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
Part 2:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_9.html
Part 3:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_13.html
PART 4: THE DISTANT FUTURE
The Cyber Race is in trouble. They were quite the formidable galactic conquerors with their Main Fleet and Mondas - but both were lost during attempts to take over the Earth. Subsidiary Fleets tried to exact a revenge of some sort, but they took damage too. The Cyber Armies are strong and still have power and influence in other parts of the Universe but it is getting harder for them to maintain their grip. They are running low on energy.
THE GREAT RETREAT
After some calculation, the Cybermen decide they must rest for a time. They will disappear from the cosmos in hopes that the Universe will be changed enough to suit them when they re-emerge. They even devise a sort of trap that will indicate to them when the humans of the galaxy are more suitable for conversion.
Of course, the biggest problem is to find a place where they can hide while they rest. After some searching, they discover a world that will suit their needs. The Cryons of Telos have become masters at mass refrigeration. Their planet went through a huge climate change and is no longer hospitable for them so they fashioned gigantic survival chambers that maintained a low temperature for them to thrive in. Uniting all the subsidiary fleets, the Cybermen invade those chambers and more-or-less wipe out the Cryons. They then retro-fit the whole place into a cryogenic suspension system. Or the tombs of the Cybermen - as they came to be known.
Before going into hibernation, the Cybermen wanted to make sure they could acclimatize properly to the ways of the Galaxy when they awoke. They took a massive sweep through all the greatest warehouses of knowledge that were available in the Universe at the time (they couldn't hack the Matrix - they didn't even know Time Lords existed, yet). They would take a second sweep when they arose once more so that they could see just how much things had changed during their slumber. As they gathered all their information, they learnt more about the Doctor. They didn't know how, but he was a man of many faces. As they probed Earth records, they learnt that - with another face - the Doctor was responsible for the destruction of Mondas.
The Cybermen felt they needed an appropriate repository for all the knowledge they had gathered. Up until this point, they had been reliant on Cyber Planners. They wanted something less cumbersome and more mobile. The Cyber Controller was created.
This was their last act before sealing themselves' into a huge underground hibernation chamber. This all occurred just as the 21st Century was ending...
THE GREAT RE-AWAKENING
There was but one more logistical problem to deal with before the Cybermen went into their Long Sleep. While all the subsidiary fleets had been gathered, those Deep Space Scoutships were taking too long to return. So the Cyber Controller ordered them to remain where they were but to change their mission parameters. No longer would they search for new worlds to conquer. Instead, they would commit acts of piracy on any space vessels or small colonies that they had the strength to beat. They would plunder them and amass as much resources as possible for the sleeping Cyber Force to use when they returned to consciousness. Essentially, the scouts became scavengers.
It's difficult to say just how long the Cybermen truly slept for. In Tomb of the Cybermen, the claim of five hundred years gets used several times. This is probably a rounding up of the number for dramatic effect. It's probably more like four hunrded and a bit of change.
Convinced that humans will, someday, evolve into more logical beings that will crave conversion - the Cyber Controller sets up his own hibernation chamber near the surface of the planet. He also leaves several logic puzzles that will need to be solved in order to gain access to him. He is convinced that this will be a kind of screening system that will mean that anyone who does seek him out will be suitable to turn into soldiers in his Army.
Things don't quite go according to the Cyber-Controller's plan. He is, eventually, dug up by a small archaeological team during the early 26th Century who realize they've opened a Pandora's Box. With the help of the Second Doctor (who the Cyber Controller recognizes and attributes the destruction of Mondas to), the tombs are re-sealed.
These are, of course, the events of Tomb of the Cybermen.
One cybermat manages to escape before the main doors of the tomb are closed. Cannibalizing circuitry from the artificial arm of Toberman's fallen body, the cybermat sets up a transmitter that summons a crew of Cybermen that had been successfully scavenging during the centuries that the Main Army slept. They respond to the signal and reach Telos a short while later. The Cyber Controller is repaired and the tombs are properly re-opened. With all the resources the scavengers have amassed, the campaigns of the Cybermen can begin, anew.
THE NEED FOR UNIFORMITY
Once restored, the Cyber Controller sees there must be some serious revision to the Cyber Race. He has only revived a small force but there is a need for greater delegation of orders. Cyber Leaders are created to help with the decision-making process. They confer and decide that the scavengers who came to save them should be sent back out into deep space. Attributing a Cyber Leader to the scavengers, they are sent off to commit more acts of piracy.
Other scavengers are contacted and they bring in their hauls, too. They are sent back out once their cargo is delivered. The Cyber Controller sees he can do a lot with the resources the scavengers provided. But he needs an even larger governing force so he also creates Cyber Lieutenants to help with the issuing of his orders.
A second sweep of all the great data bases of the Universe is done. More is learnt about the Doctor and his many faces. Some visual records are even obtained. In the process of acquiring more knowledge of their greatest foe, the Cybermen also discover the existence of Time Lords.
After creating new ranks in his forces, the next big decision the Cyber Controller makes is to take all the different models of Cybermen that are sleeping in their tombs and assimilate them into one form. This conversion occurs while many of them are still asleep. The latest model is meant to be the most streamlined and efficient of all the Cybermen. Easy to build so that the army can grow as quickly as possible as they go back out into the cosmos and begin, anew, their plans of conquest. This particular branch of Cybermen came to be known as the Neomoprh.
Full Disclosure: I am, technically, breaking my own rules with the naming of this model. I had said in my first entry that I would only use information from transmitted episodes. The term "Neomorph" is never said onscreen. It's something that's really only used in David Banks' book on Cybermen (a great read with very pretty pictures!). I've decided to employ this title when I discuss this particular model because it sounds better than the more commonly used: "80's style Cybermen".
While the Neomorph Cybermen do have their advantages, there are some shortcomings, too. The earliest models seem to be some of the most vulnerable. They aren't even immune to bullets. Also, because the conversion was done on so many hibernating Cybermen, it's created complications in the revivification process. Many Cybermen are waking up and acting in an irrationally violent manner. They are dubbed Rogue Cybermen. The Cybermen working under the Cyber Controller's authority study the problem but can find no way to repair it. Rogue Cybermen are simply eliminated any time they awaken.
TIME TRAVEL
At this point in time, the Cybermen have one of the greatest strokes of luck. They just happen to capture a time vessel and the fundamentals of time travel are opened up to them. Ruthless, logical creatures that they are, they try to exploit their new-found technology to its fullest potential.
Deciding that it all went downhill for them after they lost Mondas, the Cybermen of Telos undertake a mission to alter the course of history. They will go back to 1985 and take advantage of the fact that Halley's Comet will be passing by the Earth. They will divert its course and cause it to collide with the planet. The devastation it will cause will weaken the Earth enough so that when Mondas arrives in 1986 they will absorb the planet effortlessly.
Just to better understand the effects of such devastation, the Cybermen start lacing the surface of Telos with explosives. The Time Lords get wind of what they're up to and dispatch the Doctor to stop them. The events of Attack of the Cybermen take place, here.
ANOTHER SOMEWHAT IRRELEVANT SIDENOTE: Some might think that Attack of the Cybermen takes place entirely in 1985 since Lytton sends out a distress beacon that year that gets received by the Cryons. How can he send out a transmission that finds its way into the future? I say that Lytton's previous experience with the Daleks and their time corridor in Resurrection of the Daleks gives him that ability. He managed to glean a bit of temporal physics off of the Daleks and built a transmitter that could emit into the future. He wanted to return to his own time (somewhere around the 27th Century) but could only get the transmitter to project so far. The transmissions made it to the 26th Century - which was good enough. He could probably work out a way to jump ahead one more century once he got there.
Cyber Control does get destroyed at the end of Attack but it was largely abandoned by that point. When the Cybermen came to Telos in the late 21st Century to go into hibernation, they landed their armada on Telos and hid it in an underground complex. Their ships were waiting for them five centuries later when they emerged from their tomb. Since Telos was scheduled for demolition, they evacuated the planet.
Once more, the Cyber Fleet was haunting the heavens.
THE FIRST CYBER WAR
The Earth soon learnt about that Cyber Fleet and grew concerned. They had suffered enough at the hands of the Cybermen back in the day. They decided that, rather than wait for an attack that they knew would come, they would take the fight to them.
But they also knew they couldn't do it alone. While the Cyber Fleet wasn't as large as it once was, it was still formidable. Earth's military forces were not sufficient to win in a war against the Cybermen. Fortunately, other worlds remembered the threat they once posed to the galaxy. Various interstellar governments began to confer with Earth. An alliance was forming..
Our Neomorphs do make an attempt to stop the alliance by trying to blow up the Earth during a vital conference that would have banded the different governments together once and for all. Again, some time travel shenanigans are going on, here. As we reach the appropriate moment in the Cybermen's timescale, we'll discuss it in further detail.
The second attempt by the Cybermen to pervert history fails. A short while later, the First Great Cyber War erupts.
The war was long and bloody. Even with so many forces combined against them, the Cybermen were still showing signs of a possible victory. The Neomorphs had managed to overcome those early design flaws and were, now, impervious to most forms of weaponry. However, in achieving their near-invulnerability, they develop a single great weakness: they are allergic to gold. If it gets into their chestplates, it clogs up the breathing apparatus and suffocates a Cyberman. The Alliance Against the Cybermen, eventually, learn of this Archilles' Tendon and use it to their advantage. Voga, the planet of gold, is approached by the Alliance and their assistance is requested. Military scientists invent the glitter gun. A weapon that can coat a Cyberman with gold (or, at least, a part of the Cyberman - you probably have to aim for the chestplate) and kill him.
This represents a huge turn in the tide of the First Great Cyber War. The Cyber Forces are driven back in a vicious onslaught by the Alliance. There is a Final Great Skirmish where, to all intents and purposes, the Cybermen appear to get wiped out. However, in that final battle, the planet Voga also appears to be destroyed.
The Cybermen do still appear to have their time vessel throughout the Cyber War. As it looks like they are doomed, a crew embarks upon the ship and disappears into the future.
We'll hear more about them later....
REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED LOGICAL
Once more, the Cybermen seem to disappear from the Universe. Many believe they could be gone forever.
However, the Alliance has overlooked one or two important matters. Firstly, they did not realize there were still Cybermen working in the remote parts of space. They had originally been scouts and were now scavengers. They were staying hidden from the eyes of the Alliance while they were re-building supplies and hatching a scheme to create a new Cyber Fleet.
One group of scavengers does make a play at re-asserting themselves' into a more central part of the Universe. They are, quite possibly, the same group that received the transmission from the cybermat on Telos and re-awakened the main forces. They have amassed all that they need for a new army - they just want to make one important strategic move. Voga, it seems, was not entirely destroyed in the Cyber War. A chunk of it is still floating about near Jupiter with an actual population staying hidden beneath its surface. The Cybermen know they will be defeated, once more, if they try to conquer the galaxy before Voga is destroyed.
They attempt to blow up Voga during Revenge of the Cybermen. The campaign fails.
It should be noted that the Revenge-style Cybermen are one of the few models in existence at the time that weren't Neomoprhs. Not all the scavengers underwent Neomorphic conversion during the Great Re-Awakening. While the Cyber Wars were waging, however, they were still receiving minor upgrades from the dominant model. One of those upgrades causes the Cyberleader to take on very aggressive characteristics so that he's more intimidating to humans. They also sought that high level of invulnerability that the Neomorphs had. Which meant that, at the same time, they inherited the weakness to gold. However, the allergy wasn't quite as acute. The gold really needed to get into their system to cause harm. Which may explain why the guns the Vogans were using against them didn't seem to have any effect (one would presume the bullets in their rifles were made of gold - since just-about everything else on Voga is golden). But, when the Doctor loads a cybermat with gold-dust, the attack works. The sting of the cybermat injects the gold deeply into a Cyberman's body. Whereas the bullets can't quite penetrate their armor.
With the attack on what remains of Voga repelled, the Cybermen do seem to be well-and-truly extinct. But we all know that can't truly be the case.
They will be back.
And we end the entry, here. I thought I could do this whole saga in four installments but the tale is proving longer to tell than expected. So we'll return again, soon, with the Second Great Cyber War and a series of cameos that seem to indicate that the Cybermen will keep surviving for thousands of years to come....
Part 1:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
Part 2:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_9.html
Part 3:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_13.html
Tuesday 13 February 2018
CHRONOLOGIES AND TIMELINES: HISTORY OF THE CYBERMEN - PART 3
With the Genesis of the Cybermen established, we can start moving on to their expansion campaign and the huge difference Earth has made in stopping them from taking over the cosmos.....
CHAPTER THREE: FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH EARTH
DEEP SPACE EXPLORATION
Mondas and the Main Cyberfleet are now working together in perfect conjunction. They begin moving out and invading the many planets around them. Worlds with humans on them face mass conversion before they are stripped and then absorbed by Mondas. Other planets with lifeforms that aren't suitable for conversion are simply conquered, devastated and drained by the Cyber Homeworld. As mentioned in the last entry, there are also subsidiary fleets attacking minor colonies.
With their cold logic, the Cybermen are not even concerned about the names of the planets they are taking over. They are simply numbered. The major planets are, at least. Those smaller settlements the subsidiary fleets are taking care of receive a different designation. But the larger civilizations that suffer from the hands of the Main Fleet and then Mondas are referred to numerically. So the first planet they conquered gets called Planet 1. The next one they invade: Planet 2. And so on...
We also mentioned in the last entry that long range scout ships are going out into deep space to discover new worlds to invade. One of these ships was manned by a team of Cybus Style Cybermen. They travel far out into the galaxy to find distant potentials. Unfortunately for them, they travel too far and then run into some technical problems with their ship. They lose contact with the fleets and Mondas and are forced to crash on a planet of humans that they were about to investigate. The planet they land on is Earth. The ship embeds itself in the Earth's crust. The Cybermen probably emerged briefly to find the planet was at too primitive of a stage to provide them with a decent energy source. So they shut down for a few centuries as they wait for the civilization of humans to evolve and be more useful. The ship is set on automatic to detect when a form of energy has finally developed for them to exploit.
SIDENOTE: While I have already documented this in Part 1, I will include Cybus Cybermen incursions into our reality just to help us with understanding their timescale. So, some time after the scout ship has crashed and gone into sleep mode, a small band of Cybus Cybermen emerge into our reality. This takes place around 1851. The buried Cyber scoutship fails to detect them. The scanning system is quite weak from the damage it received from the crash. A strong energy source has to be practically on top of them before they can pick it up.
Lumic's Cybermen attempt to build a Cyber Dreadnought but the whole campaign fails quite quickly. This is, technically, their second incursion into our reality but our first experience with them in Earth's timescale. We forget the experience we had with them, though. It's postulated that the Cracks in Time the TARDIS' destruction created somehow absorbed our memories of the event.
PLANET 14
While Earth gets its first few tastes of Cybermen, the Main Fleet and Mondas continue their campaign over in their end of the universe. More and more planets receive that numerical designation as they are gutted. The Cybermen face resistance from the populations of each world, of course. But nothing manages to stop them.
Until, at last, they reach Planet 14.
Somehow, the Doctor in his second incarnation stops them from conquering that world. We don't know how, exactly. But we do know that the Cybermen get visual records of him and label him as a major threat. His success in thwarting the Planet 14 campaign is well-documented. The Cybermen face failure for the first time and this means a lot to them. The Doctor, in this particular form, is never truly forgotten.
Fortunately for the Cybermen, another nearby world is not defended by this mysterious Doctor character. The Main Fleet and Mondas have just enough power to get to it. Planet 15 is extinguished and the Cyber Race moves on.
When, exactly, the events of Planet 14 happen in the Second Doctor's personal timeline is somewhat unclear. He never seems to show much knowledge of the experience during televised episodes. Nor does Jamie - who was travelling with the Second Doctor for almost his entire era. So I'm guessing Planet 14 happened for him during Season 6b. It may have even been a specific mission he undertook on the Time Lords' behalf. They would know the importance it represents to the Cybermen and, specifically, send the Doctor there to ensure events happened the way they were meant to.
PRIMARY CAMPAIGNS TO CONQUER EARTH
Over the next few years, the campaigns of the Main Fleet and Mondas continue. More planets get those dreaded numbers assigned to them. The Cyber Race grows. Strategies are becoming more and more complicated though and Cyber Planners are developed to help handle this. They are used by the Space-Faring Cybermen, only.
Another long-range scout ship makes its way to Earth and quickly sends messages back to Main Fleet to inform them of their discovery. Earth is, easily, one of the most abundant worlds they have ever found. Both in terms of human population and overall resources.
The Cybermen back on Mondas research the Earth a bit. Other races who have made the journey between Earth and Mondas have noticed the similarities between the two worlds. Theories are postulated that they might be sister planets of some sort. The Cybermen, being so literal-minded, fail to understand that these are just theories or legends and accept this as truth.
Earth, with its dense population and primitive-but-strong defenses, looks like it might be a difficult planet to invade. The Cybermen that arrive in this latest scout ship construct a Cyber Planner to assist them with the problem. Mondas and the Main Fleet begin their long journey to join them.
The Cyber Planner directs its minions to form an alliance with a suitably greedy human. They select Tobias Vaughn for their campaign. Over the next five years, Vaughn conquers the Earth economically so that he can make way for the ensuing invasion force.
The events of The Invasion take place. Assigning a definite date to this adventure becomes quite tricky. It takes place sometime during the 60s or 70s. We can't say for sure. Someday, I might dare to tackle UNIT dating protocol. But I don't have enough courage to do that right now!
Whatever date it is, the events of Planet 14 are still fairly recent (perhaps only a few decades previously). Memory of the Second Doctor's image is still fairly fresh and the Cyber Planner recognizes him immediately.
At the end of The Invasion, the Main Fleet is wiped out. This represents a huge problem for Mondas. The fleet was meant to make Earth weak enough for them to absorb at safe levels. But the campaign failed. Mondas is too far into Deep Space to try to turn back. There are no other suitable planets for them to conquer in the part of the universe they are travelling through. They have to continue to Earth.
Unbeknownst to the Mondasian Cybermen, Neomorphic Cybermen with time travel capabilities make an attempt from their future to save them. They go back to 1985 and use the sewers of London, once more, as a small base of operations. They also have a ship hiding from Earth detection on the dark side of the moon. Their attempt to crash Halley's Comet into the Earth would've weakened the planet suitably so that, when Mondas does arrive, it could have harmlessly soaked up what energy remained. The plan, however, was thwarted by the Sixth Doctor and Lytton. We'll learn more about these matters when we reach the appropriate point in the Cybermen timescale.
Mondas arrives at Earth in 1986 with a simple enough plan in mind. Earth has developed the Z-bomb: a weapon of mass-destruction. Mondas plans to explode the Z-bombs on the Earth's surface once they have soaked up an appropriate amount of energy. The events of The Tenth Planet ensue.
This campaign also fails. This time, at the hands of the about-to-regenerate First Doctor. The Cybermen fail to recognize him in this form, of course. Nor does any visual record of him in this incarnation survive beyond the destruction of Mondas. At this point, the Doctor is still only known to the Cybermen in his second body.
SOME MINOR EARTH ADVENTURES
The Cyber-Race has received a crippling blow. Both its Main Fleet and Home Planet have been destroyed in the course of a few short years. Subsidiary Fleets are still active in the neck of the cosmos that Mondas amd the Main Fleet came from. They are attempting to grow in power and size but are only experiencing limited success.. Scout ships are also out in the furthest reaches of space looking for more worlds to invade.
The Cybermen must work on a smaller scale for a time.
Enough information gets sent back to these lesser forces to ascertain two important things:
1) Earth represents too great of a threat and must, logically, be invaded or destroyed. Which course of action they choose will depend on the strength of the attacking fleet.
2) This mysterious Doctor who thwarted the conquest of Planet 14 was, at least, partially responsible for the failure of the Primary Earth Campaigns. He must be remembered and defeated.
While the subsidiary fleets and scout ships go about their business, there is still some activity that takes place on Earth that involves the Cybermen.
In November of 1988, a fleet piloted by Neomorphic Cybermen gathered in Earth's orbit. A small attack force descended to the surface and attempted to take control of a validium statue known as Nemesis. Their plans were thwarted by the Doctor and Lady Peinforte. Like the events of Attack of the Cybermen and the various Cybus Cybermen incursions, these things are happening in a bit of a timey whimey fashion. These are Neomorphs - so they have time travel capabilities. Like the Cybermen from Attack, they hail from the far future and have journeyed into the past. Like Attack of the Cybermen, we'll elaborate further on the events of Silver Nemesis when we reach the proper point in the Cybermen's timescale.
Speaking of Cybus Cybermen, a few decades after Silver Nemesis, they attempt their first incursion into our reality (although it is the second one by our own timescale). The events of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday probably take place sometime around 2007.
In 2011, humans lay power lines close enough to the first Cyber scout ship that crashed on Earth a few centuries previously. The ship, at last, awakens. The Cybus Style Cybermen onboard see just how much the humans on Earth have grown and advanced. They decide to be more tactical and stealthy. They even do some research before acting.
With their advanced technology, the deepest darkest places on the internet are no match for their prying eyes. While much has been kept secret from the public through cover stories and subterfuge, the Cybermen in the scout ship learn of the failures of the Main Fleet and Mondas. They even discover information about the battle at Canary Wharf. Most importantly, however, they dig up extensive files on the Doctor. Turns out Mickey never properly used the virus the Doctor gave him at the end of World War III so there was plenty the scout ship Cybermen could learn about the Time Lord. They were, in fact, the first ones to learn that the Doctor came in many forms. So when they did run into him during Closing Time, they were able to guess who he was.
Interestingly enough, these are the first Cybermen of our reality to attempt to build a Cyber Controller. We can't say, exactly, where the idea came from. Perhaps they actually downloaded some secret files from the Cybus Cybermen at Canary Wharf and saw that they, very briefly, used a Cyber Controller in their past.
Sometime around 2014, Missy attempts a mass conversion of humans with the army she's put together throughout the span of Series Eight. The adventure in Dark Water/Death In Heaven takes place. This, of course, is another tale involving a lesser race of Cybermen. It's entirely possible that the Mondasian Cybermen never even hear of this.
We should note, however, that there have now been too many experiences with Cybermen during the late 20th/early 21st Century to keep them concealed from public knowledge. A newscast heard in the background of one scene in Death In Heaven mentions knowledge of a previous attack from the Cybermen. Which one it was, exactly, we can't be sure. There are so many to choose from in this era!
SECONDARY CAMPAIGNS TO CONQUER EARTH
Things seem to settle down with Earth and the Cybermen for a bit. But, after nearly a century of operating in their own end of the universe, the Cybermen return their attention to Earth.
A subsidiary fleet makes the journey to Earth in the Year 2070. They have recognized a tactical weakness in the way Earth controls its weather via a station on the moon. These Cybermen have calculated that they still lack the might to overcome Earth's opposition so they opt to just wipe out the population through weather catastrophes that they could generate from the moonbase. Earth cannot be allowed to prosper any further or they may, eventually, represent a legitimate threat to what remains of the Cyber Race.
The Moonbase takes place, here. Visual records of the Second Doctor still remain in the memory banks of the Cybermen. He is still designated as a dangerous enemy so the Cybermen recognize him. They may not mention Planet 14 in this instance because the passing of time may have corrupted files a bit. Or they just didn't see it necessary to bring up the subject.
Knowledge of the Cybermen attacks during the late 20th/early 21st Century have probably become very public by this point. The crew of Weather Control talk quite openly about the Cybermen. But they also mention how no one's heard from them in forever. So Missy's Army might be the last time we had any experience with them until the events of The Moonbase. It's my guess, however, that information regarding The Invasion, The Tenth Planet, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and Dark Water/Death In Heaven are well-known by everyone. Some of the other stories that take place during that time might not have gotten any attention at all. Attack of the Cybermen, Silver Nemesis and Closing Time all happened on a pretty covert scale.
A few of the Cybermen's saucers do appear to get repelled and, quite possibly, destroyed at the end of The Moonbase. Was this all that existed of this particular fleet? We can't say for sure...
A second subsidiary fleet, eventually, makes an attempt on Earth in the story The Wheel In Space. Dating Wheel is a tricky matter. No clear date is given in the actual transmitted story. Because we see Zoe joining the TARDIS crew at the end of Wheel, mention is made of her background in other stories she stars in. This can help us determine when Wheel happened.
The best we get is that Zoe is from the 21st Century. The Mind Robber seems to insinuate she's from the early 21st Century but I'm more inclined to think she's into vintage telepress comics and hails from a much later era. I'd like to think she's from the tail end of the 21st Century. Maybe even as late as the 2090s. If I could, I'd like to put her at an even later date but she does admit during her interrogation in The War Games that she's from the 21st Century so we have to commit to that.
It would appear, though, that attacks from the Cybermen and, probably, other aggressive alien species have prompted the humans of late 21st Century Earth to set up a long-range defense system with their "space wheel" stations. The Cybermen actually see the program as another tactical weakness. If they can take over just one space wheel - that can clear the way for an attack armada.
In a very contrived manner, they attempt to infiltrate space station W3. Once more, their old enemy is there to stop them. The Second Doctor doesn't seem to get recognized until the Cyber Planner sees an image of him - but they still remember.
Space Station W3 definitely does some real damage to the Cyber fleet. Most likely, the Cybermen are facing other defeats in other invasion attempts, too. Their forces are dwindling. They're running low on resources and energy. They must rest.
They will find a place to slumber on the planet Telos.
.... And we'll stop Chapter Three here. In our next installment we'll look at the intergalactic wars that finally erupt between Earth and the Cyber Race. And, of course, we'll be looking at Telos.
Part 1 of Cyber History:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
Part 2 of Cyber History:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_9.html
CHAPTER THREE: FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH EARTH
DEEP SPACE EXPLORATION
Mondas and the Main Cyberfleet are now working together in perfect conjunction. They begin moving out and invading the many planets around them. Worlds with humans on them face mass conversion before they are stripped and then absorbed by Mondas. Other planets with lifeforms that aren't suitable for conversion are simply conquered, devastated and drained by the Cyber Homeworld. As mentioned in the last entry, there are also subsidiary fleets attacking minor colonies.
With their cold logic, the Cybermen are not even concerned about the names of the planets they are taking over. They are simply numbered. The major planets are, at least. Those smaller settlements the subsidiary fleets are taking care of receive a different designation. But the larger civilizations that suffer from the hands of the Main Fleet and then Mondas are referred to numerically. So the first planet they conquered gets called Planet 1. The next one they invade: Planet 2. And so on...
We also mentioned in the last entry that long range scout ships are going out into deep space to discover new worlds to invade. One of these ships was manned by a team of Cybus Style Cybermen. They travel far out into the galaxy to find distant potentials. Unfortunately for them, they travel too far and then run into some technical problems with their ship. They lose contact with the fleets and Mondas and are forced to crash on a planet of humans that they were about to investigate. The planet they land on is Earth. The ship embeds itself in the Earth's crust. The Cybermen probably emerged briefly to find the planet was at too primitive of a stage to provide them with a decent energy source. So they shut down for a few centuries as they wait for the civilization of humans to evolve and be more useful. The ship is set on automatic to detect when a form of energy has finally developed for them to exploit.
SIDENOTE: While I have already documented this in Part 1, I will include Cybus Cybermen incursions into our reality just to help us with understanding their timescale. So, some time after the scout ship has crashed and gone into sleep mode, a small band of Cybus Cybermen emerge into our reality. This takes place around 1851. The buried Cyber scoutship fails to detect them. The scanning system is quite weak from the damage it received from the crash. A strong energy source has to be practically on top of them before they can pick it up.
Lumic's Cybermen attempt to build a Cyber Dreadnought but the whole campaign fails quite quickly. This is, technically, their second incursion into our reality but our first experience with them in Earth's timescale. We forget the experience we had with them, though. It's postulated that the Cracks in Time the TARDIS' destruction created somehow absorbed our memories of the event.
PLANET 14
While Earth gets its first few tastes of Cybermen, the Main Fleet and Mondas continue their campaign over in their end of the universe. More and more planets receive that numerical designation as they are gutted. The Cybermen face resistance from the populations of each world, of course. But nothing manages to stop them.
Until, at last, they reach Planet 14.
Somehow, the Doctor in his second incarnation stops them from conquering that world. We don't know how, exactly. But we do know that the Cybermen get visual records of him and label him as a major threat. His success in thwarting the Planet 14 campaign is well-documented. The Cybermen face failure for the first time and this means a lot to them. The Doctor, in this particular form, is never truly forgotten.
Fortunately for the Cybermen, another nearby world is not defended by this mysterious Doctor character. The Main Fleet and Mondas have just enough power to get to it. Planet 15 is extinguished and the Cyber Race moves on.
When, exactly, the events of Planet 14 happen in the Second Doctor's personal timeline is somewhat unclear. He never seems to show much knowledge of the experience during televised episodes. Nor does Jamie - who was travelling with the Second Doctor for almost his entire era. So I'm guessing Planet 14 happened for him during Season 6b. It may have even been a specific mission he undertook on the Time Lords' behalf. They would know the importance it represents to the Cybermen and, specifically, send the Doctor there to ensure events happened the way they were meant to.
PRIMARY CAMPAIGNS TO CONQUER EARTH
Over the next few years, the campaigns of the Main Fleet and Mondas continue. More planets get those dreaded numbers assigned to them. The Cyber Race grows. Strategies are becoming more and more complicated though and Cyber Planners are developed to help handle this. They are used by the Space-Faring Cybermen, only.
Another long-range scout ship makes its way to Earth and quickly sends messages back to Main Fleet to inform them of their discovery. Earth is, easily, one of the most abundant worlds they have ever found. Both in terms of human population and overall resources.
The Cybermen back on Mondas research the Earth a bit. Other races who have made the journey between Earth and Mondas have noticed the similarities between the two worlds. Theories are postulated that they might be sister planets of some sort. The Cybermen, being so literal-minded, fail to understand that these are just theories or legends and accept this as truth.
Earth, with its dense population and primitive-but-strong defenses, looks like it might be a difficult planet to invade. The Cybermen that arrive in this latest scout ship construct a Cyber Planner to assist them with the problem. Mondas and the Main Fleet begin their long journey to join them.
The Cyber Planner directs its minions to form an alliance with a suitably greedy human. They select Tobias Vaughn for their campaign. Over the next five years, Vaughn conquers the Earth economically so that he can make way for the ensuing invasion force.
The events of The Invasion take place. Assigning a definite date to this adventure becomes quite tricky. It takes place sometime during the 60s or 70s. We can't say for sure. Someday, I might dare to tackle UNIT dating protocol. But I don't have enough courage to do that right now!
Whatever date it is, the events of Planet 14 are still fairly recent (perhaps only a few decades previously). Memory of the Second Doctor's image is still fairly fresh and the Cyber Planner recognizes him immediately.
At the end of The Invasion, the Main Fleet is wiped out. This represents a huge problem for Mondas. The fleet was meant to make Earth weak enough for them to absorb at safe levels. But the campaign failed. Mondas is too far into Deep Space to try to turn back. There are no other suitable planets for them to conquer in the part of the universe they are travelling through. They have to continue to Earth.
Unbeknownst to the Mondasian Cybermen, Neomorphic Cybermen with time travel capabilities make an attempt from their future to save them. They go back to 1985 and use the sewers of London, once more, as a small base of operations. They also have a ship hiding from Earth detection on the dark side of the moon. Their attempt to crash Halley's Comet into the Earth would've weakened the planet suitably so that, when Mondas does arrive, it could have harmlessly soaked up what energy remained. The plan, however, was thwarted by the Sixth Doctor and Lytton. We'll learn more about these matters when we reach the appropriate point in the Cybermen timescale.
Mondas arrives at Earth in 1986 with a simple enough plan in mind. Earth has developed the Z-bomb: a weapon of mass-destruction. Mondas plans to explode the Z-bombs on the Earth's surface once they have soaked up an appropriate amount of energy. The events of The Tenth Planet ensue.
This campaign also fails. This time, at the hands of the about-to-regenerate First Doctor. The Cybermen fail to recognize him in this form, of course. Nor does any visual record of him in this incarnation survive beyond the destruction of Mondas. At this point, the Doctor is still only known to the Cybermen in his second body.
SOME MINOR EARTH ADVENTURES
The Cyber-Race has received a crippling blow. Both its Main Fleet and Home Planet have been destroyed in the course of a few short years. Subsidiary Fleets are still active in the neck of the cosmos that Mondas amd the Main Fleet came from. They are attempting to grow in power and size but are only experiencing limited success.. Scout ships are also out in the furthest reaches of space looking for more worlds to invade.
The Cybermen must work on a smaller scale for a time.
Enough information gets sent back to these lesser forces to ascertain two important things:
1) Earth represents too great of a threat and must, logically, be invaded or destroyed. Which course of action they choose will depend on the strength of the attacking fleet.
2) This mysterious Doctor who thwarted the conquest of Planet 14 was, at least, partially responsible for the failure of the Primary Earth Campaigns. He must be remembered and defeated.
While the subsidiary fleets and scout ships go about their business, there is still some activity that takes place on Earth that involves the Cybermen.
In November of 1988, a fleet piloted by Neomorphic Cybermen gathered in Earth's orbit. A small attack force descended to the surface and attempted to take control of a validium statue known as Nemesis. Their plans were thwarted by the Doctor and Lady Peinforte. Like the events of Attack of the Cybermen and the various Cybus Cybermen incursions, these things are happening in a bit of a timey whimey fashion. These are Neomorphs - so they have time travel capabilities. Like the Cybermen from Attack, they hail from the far future and have journeyed into the past. Like Attack of the Cybermen, we'll elaborate further on the events of Silver Nemesis when we reach the proper point in the Cybermen's timescale.
Speaking of Cybus Cybermen, a few decades after Silver Nemesis, they attempt their first incursion into our reality (although it is the second one by our own timescale). The events of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday probably take place sometime around 2007.
In 2011, humans lay power lines close enough to the first Cyber scout ship that crashed on Earth a few centuries previously. The ship, at last, awakens. The Cybus Style Cybermen onboard see just how much the humans on Earth have grown and advanced. They decide to be more tactical and stealthy. They even do some research before acting.
With their advanced technology, the deepest darkest places on the internet are no match for their prying eyes. While much has been kept secret from the public through cover stories and subterfuge, the Cybermen in the scout ship learn of the failures of the Main Fleet and Mondas. They even discover information about the battle at Canary Wharf. Most importantly, however, they dig up extensive files on the Doctor. Turns out Mickey never properly used the virus the Doctor gave him at the end of World War III so there was plenty the scout ship Cybermen could learn about the Time Lord. They were, in fact, the first ones to learn that the Doctor came in many forms. So when they did run into him during Closing Time, they were able to guess who he was.
Interestingly enough, these are the first Cybermen of our reality to attempt to build a Cyber Controller. We can't say, exactly, where the idea came from. Perhaps they actually downloaded some secret files from the Cybus Cybermen at Canary Wharf and saw that they, very briefly, used a Cyber Controller in their past.
Sometime around 2014, Missy attempts a mass conversion of humans with the army she's put together throughout the span of Series Eight. The adventure in Dark Water/Death In Heaven takes place. This, of course, is another tale involving a lesser race of Cybermen. It's entirely possible that the Mondasian Cybermen never even hear of this.
We should note, however, that there have now been too many experiences with Cybermen during the late 20th/early 21st Century to keep them concealed from public knowledge. A newscast heard in the background of one scene in Death In Heaven mentions knowledge of a previous attack from the Cybermen. Which one it was, exactly, we can't be sure. There are so many to choose from in this era!
SECONDARY CAMPAIGNS TO CONQUER EARTH
Things seem to settle down with Earth and the Cybermen for a bit. But, after nearly a century of operating in their own end of the universe, the Cybermen return their attention to Earth.
A subsidiary fleet makes the journey to Earth in the Year 2070. They have recognized a tactical weakness in the way Earth controls its weather via a station on the moon. These Cybermen have calculated that they still lack the might to overcome Earth's opposition so they opt to just wipe out the population through weather catastrophes that they could generate from the moonbase. Earth cannot be allowed to prosper any further or they may, eventually, represent a legitimate threat to what remains of the Cyber Race.
The Moonbase takes place, here. Visual records of the Second Doctor still remain in the memory banks of the Cybermen. He is still designated as a dangerous enemy so the Cybermen recognize him. They may not mention Planet 14 in this instance because the passing of time may have corrupted files a bit. Or they just didn't see it necessary to bring up the subject.
Knowledge of the Cybermen attacks during the late 20th/early 21st Century have probably become very public by this point. The crew of Weather Control talk quite openly about the Cybermen. But they also mention how no one's heard from them in forever. So Missy's Army might be the last time we had any experience with them until the events of The Moonbase. It's my guess, however, that information regarding The Invasion, The Tenth Planet, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday and Dark Water/Death In Heaven are well-known by everyone. Some of the other stories that take place during that time might not have gotten any attention at all. Attack of the Cybermen, Silver Nemesis and Closing Time all happened on a pretty covert scale.
A few of the Cybermen's saucers do appear to get repelled and, quite possibly, destroyed at the end of The Moonbase. Was this all that existed of this particular fleet? We can't say for sure...
A second subsidiary fleet, eventually, makes an attempt on Earth in the story The Wheel In Space. Dating Wheel is a tricky matter. No clear date is given in the actual transmitted story. Because we see Zoe joining the TARDIS crew at the end of Wheel, mention is made of her background in other stories she stars in. This can help us determine when Wheel happened.
The best we get is that Zoe is from the 21st Century. The Mind Robber seems to insinuate she's from the early 21st Century but I'm more inclined to think she's into vintage telepress comics and hails from a much later era. I'd like to think she's from the tail end of the 21st Century. Maybe even as late as the 2090s. If I could, I'd like to put her at an even later date but she does admit during her interrogation in The War Games that she's from the 21st Century so we have to commit to that.
It would appear, though, that attacks from the Cybermen and, probably, other aggressive alien species have prompted the humans of late 21st Century Earth to set up a long-range defense system with their "space wheel" stations. The Cybermen actually see the program as another tactical weakness. If they can take over just one space wheel - that can clear the way for an attack armada.
In a very contrived manner, they attempt to infiltrate space station W3. Once more, their old enemy is there to stop them. The Second Doctor doesn't seem to get recognized until the Cyber Planner sees an image of him - but they still remember.
Space Station W3 definitely does some real damage to the Cyber fleet. Most likely, the Cybermen are facing other defeats in other invasion attempts, too. Their forces are dwindling. They're running low on resources and energy. They must rest.
They will find a place to slumber on the planet Telos.
.... And we'll stop Chapter Three here. In our next installment we'll look at the intergalactic wars that finally erupt between Earth and the Cyber Race. And, of course, we'll be looking at Telos.
Part 1 of Cyber History:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
Part 2 of Cyber History:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of_9.html
Friday 9 February 2018
CHRONOLOGIES AND TIMELINES: HISTORY OF THE CYBERMEN - PART 2
With the Lesser Races examined, we can get to the meat of things. Let's look at the strain that star in most of the Cybermen stories we've seen.
PART 2: GENESIS
LEGENDS OF MONDAS
An old galactic legend would have us believe that Earth once had a sister planet known as Mondas. Through some strange twist of cosmic circumstance, Mondas was knocked out of its orbit in our solar system and sent to a distant point on the other end of the galaxy. There, it settled into a new orbit. The truth of this legend is subjective, at best. But Mondas certainly looks very similar to our own world. No one can properly account for the resemblance.
Like Earth, a race of humans evolved on Mondas. They seemed to advance quite quickly. Interstellar travel was developed and contact established with other space-faring worlds that were nearby. Mondas, however, was a dying world (perhaps a long-term effect from its massive trip across the galaxy - if such a thing happened). They lacked the proper resources to build a substantial fleet of ships to take them offworld but they were able to strike some sort of deal with a neighboring world to build them a colony ship.
The colony ship was massive. Most habitable planets in that part of the galaxy were already densely populated.. The Mondasians knew they had a long trip ahead of them before they could reach a place to live. During the extensive journey, their population would grow so they would need the space.
COLONY SHIP PROBLEMS
As the colony ship was travelling to Mondas, an unfortunate accident occurred. A glitch in the navigation computers caused it to ignore a black hole and the vessel started getting drawn into it. The skeleton crew onboard noticed the imminent disaster in time and switched to manual. They threw the engines into reverse as they were nearing the black hole's threshold. This saved them from plunging in but now they had to get out of it. Part of the crew traveled down to the thrusters and made the necessary modifications that would enable them to actually pull out of the black hole's influence and resume their journey to Mondas.
No one thought to compensate for the time dilation that would happen under such circumstances. At the thrusters, time flowed more quickly. Minutes would pass at the front of the ship and years would fly by at the rear. The crew that had gone down needed to stay there to maintain the modifications they made. With time moving so fast in that section of the ship, they were living out their full lives while little time was passing on the bridge.
The crew at the back of the ship procreated and grew into a legitimate colony. All the time, staying near those thrusters to keep them firing at full force in reverse. This caused some major health issues as various toxins from the engines began to affect them. On top of that, the Master arrived and took over the colony for a while. Eventually, the evil renegade Time Lord was usurped. But he disguised himself and manipulated the colony from behind the scenes. A medical program was developed to strengthen the ill colonists. Project Exodus came into play as the population began to experience varying levels of cybernetic conversions. A race of Cybermen was born. Some might even call it the race of Cybermen.
Around this time, the Doctor arrived with the Master's next incarnation. The events of World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls transpired.
CYBUS DEBATE
Since the New Series introduced Cybermen from a parallel reality, there has been much speculation regarding which Cybermen we've been seeing in certain stories. We know that Cybus Cybermen have broken into our universe. So we're wondering if any appearance that we've seen of this particular model is a Cybermen that hails from this parallel reality. Or have Cybermen from our plain of existence also developed a model like this?
The answer comes, at last, in The Doctor Falls. Once the colony ship crew had perfected a basic model of Cybermen, they began to work on upgrades. At first, they found a way to give themselves' flight. Then they actually started working on more advanced models.
One of those models looks exactly like the Cybus Cybermen created in another reality by John Lumic (with the exception of the bold "C" on the chestplate, of course). It's entirely possible that the models could resemble each other so much since we are dealing with parallel evolution. So now we know that local Cybermen also have models in the same style as the ones that come from the version of Earth that has the Cybus Corporation.
For the sake of distinction, we will refer to Cybermen from our reality that look like Lumic's Cybermen as Cybus Style Cybermen. Cybermen that actually come from the parallel universe will be called Cybus Cybermen (as they have, already, been named in the first part of this essay).
The Doctor seems to put a big dent in the stock of Cybus Style Cybermen that were built on the colony ship when he blows up the solar farm on Floor 507. Some were still probably kicking around, afterwards, though. But more advanced models were too big of a strain on resources so the colony ship crew went back to the more basic version that they first developed. For similar reasons, they also stopped building them with boot thrusters.
SIDENOTE: We'd like to think that Nardole found a way to get the solar farm colonists off the ship before another invasion force could ascend to their level and upgrade them. More than likely, there was more than one shuttle in that hangar he found his way to. Perhaps the colonists snuck through more of the infrastructure to get to some transport. They used a fleet of shuttles to get off the colony ship and built their own home on a nearby planet.
"But how would the shuttles get off the ship without getting sucked into the black hole, Rob?!" some of you may be asking. There are a few possibilities. Either the escape occurs after the colony ship breaks free of the black hole or clever 'ole Nardole makes some sort of modification that enables the shuttles to achieve the appropriate velocity that could resist such intense gravity.
ARRIVAL ON MONDAS
It's entirely possible that what happens on the colony ship meant for Mondas is its own self-contained story. That it never escapes the black hole and that parallel evolution happens, once more, on Mondas. This would account for some fairly radical differences in design between the Colony Ship Cybermen and the Proper Mondasian Cybermen.
It's more likely, however, that the colony ship did pull free of the black hole's gravity and arrive at its intended destination. Those poor Mondasians, eager to escape their dying world, get quite the surprise. Cybermen from the colony ship descend upon them and induce a mass conversion of the population. The Cyber-race grows. The Cybermen that we see in The Tenth Planet look as different as they do because the story takes place quite a few years later. Upgrades were performed over the years that caused these changes in appearance.
It wasn't just the people of Mondas that were altered - the planet, itself, also went through some radical changes. Recognizing that there was little life left in their world, the Cybermen found a solution to the problem. The colony ship was no longer large enough to support the entire population of Mondas and the civilization that had developed on it while it was stuck at the black hole so they canabilised it. They turned Mondas into a planet that they could actually pilot and created technology that could absorb massive amounts of energy from other worlds.
These alterations, however, dramatically weakened the crust of the planet. The Cybermen needed to be careful about the energy levels of the planets they were attacking. If they overloaded on power, their entire homeworld would collapse in upon itself.
They came up with a clever strategy to avoid this.
THE CYBER FLEET
Once more, the Cybermen started working on different models. Their main focus would still be the style of Cybermen we saw in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, but modifications would be made. As mentioned before, some of the changes were aesthetic - others were far more significant. The biggest was the way the Cybermen became linked to their own world. As Mondas gathered energy from other planets, that power would transfer directly into its denizens. In many ways, it was a very efficient way to do things. But it did present one major weakness: if Mondas fell, all of the Cybermen would die with it.
The logical way to work around this weakness was to create versions of Cybermen that would draw energy from sources that were independent of Mondas. Several different models of this nature were made. We would see them in stories like The Invasion, The Moonbase and Wheel In Space. There were even some Cybus-Style Cybermen lurking about. They may have been left over from the colony ship or the Mondasian Cybermen may have decided to re-explore the model.
These Cybermen that existed independently from their homeworld became focused on interstellar travel. Mondas, even in a depleted state, had built a handful of spaceships (they may have also used some spare parts from the colony ship to build more). These models were sent into the solar system to attack other worlds ahead of Mondas. At first, they attacked poorly defended planets that were populated by humans. They converted the population into Cybermen and then stripped the world of the bulk of its resources. Once the conquered planet was at a low enough energy level, Mondas could move in and safely absorb what was left. This became the established attack protocol as the Cybermen expanded into the universe.
These models that were not directly connected to Mondas became known as the Space-Faring Cybermen. As their numbers grew, they developed a main fleet that attacked larger planets with better defenses. But there were also subsidiary fleets that were invading easier targets. These might be minor colonies that were not even worth the attention of Mondas but still had resources that could benefit the Cyber-Race. There were also a handful of smaller ships that were used as long-range scouts. They went to the deeper reaches of space to find new worlds for the fleet to move in on.
And so, the Cybermen began to spread out into the Universe like a plague. Space-Faring models would invade first and do the bulk of the damage. Then Mondas would come in and clean up what was left.
This method worked very well for them for quite some time. But all of that changed as they eventually found their way to Earth.....
We've, now, laid down the foundations of the society for the largest breed of Cybermen in our universe . Technically, we only really discussed two episodes in this chapter. But we've created the circumstances that will breed a whole cluster of stories that will get examined in the next post.
Missed Part One? Here's the link:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
PART 2: GENESIS
LEGENDS OF MONDAS
An old galactic legend would have us believe that Earth once had a sister planet known as Mondas. Through some strange twist of cosmic circumstance, Mondas was knocked out of its orbit in our solar system and sent to a distant point on the other end of the galaxy. There, it settled into a new orbit. The truth of this legend is subjective, at best. But Mondas certainly looks very similar to our own world. No one can properly account for the resemblance.
Like Earth, a race of humans evolved on Mondas. They seemed to advance quite quickly. Interstellar travel was developed and contact established with other space-faring worlds that were nearby. Mondas, however, was a dying world (perhaps a long-term effect from its massive trip across the galaxy - if such a thing happened). They lacked the proper resources to build a substantial fleet of ships to take them offworld but they were able to strike some sort of deal with a neighboring world to build them a colony ship.
The colony ship was massive. Most habitable planets in that part of the galaxy were already densely populated.. The Mondasians knew they had a long trip ahead of them before they could reach a place to live. During the extensive journey, their population would grow so they would need the space.
COLONY SHIP PROBLEMS
As the colony ship was travelling to Mondas, an unfortunate accident occurred. A glitch in the navigation computers caused it to ignore a black hole and the vessel started getting drawn into it. The skeleton crew onboard noticed the imminent disaster in time and switched to manual. They threw the engines into reverse as they were nearing the black hole's threshold. This saved them from plunging in but now they had to get out of it. Part of the crew traveled down to the thrusters and made the necessary modifications that would enable them to actually pull out of the black hole's influence and resume their journey to Mondas.
No one thought to compensate for the time dilation that would happen under such circumstances. At the thrusters, time flowed more quickly. Minutes would pass at the front of the ship and years would fly by at the rear. The crew that had gone down needed to stay there to maintain the modifications they made. With time moving so fast in that section of the ship, they were living out their full lives while little time was passing on the bridge.
The crew at the back of the ship procreated and grew into a legitimate colony. All the time, staying near those thrusters to keep them firing at full force in reverse. This caused some major health issues as various toxins from the engines began to affect them. On top of that, the Master arrived and took over the colony for a while. Eventually, the evil renegade Time Lord was usurped. But he disguised himself and manipulated the colony from behind the scenes. A medical program was developed to strengthen the ill colonists. Project Exodus came into play as the population began to experience varying levels of cybernetic conversions. A race of Cybermen was born. Some might even call it the race of Cybermen.
Around this time, the Doctor arrived with the Master's next incarnation. The events of World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls transpired.
CYBUS DEBATE
Since the New Series introduced Cybermen from a parallel reality, there has been much speculation regarding which Cybermen we've been seeing in certain stories. We know that Cybus Cybermen have broken into our universe. So we're wondering if any appearance that we've seen of this particular model is a Cybermen that hails from this parallel reality. Or have Cybermen from our plain of existence also developed a model like this?
The answer comes, at last, in The Doctor Falls. Once the colony ship crew had perfected a basic model of Cybermen, they began to work on upgrades. At first, they found a way to give themselves' flight. Then they actually started working on more advanced models.
One of those models looks exactly like the Cybus Cybermen created in another reality by John Lumic (with the exception of the bold "C" on the chestplate, of course). It's entirely possible that the models could resemble each other so much since we are dealing with parallel evolution. So now we know that local Cybermen also have models in the same style as the ones that come from the version of Earth that has the Cybus Corporation.
For the sake of distinction, we will refer to Cybermen from our reality that look like Lumic's Cybermen as Cybus Style Cybermen. Cybermen that actually come from the parallel universe will be called Cybus Cybermen (as they have, already, been named in the first part of this essay).
The Doctor seems to put a big dent in the stock of Cybus Style Cybermen that were built on the colony ship when he blows up the solar farm on Floor 507. Some were still probably kicking around, afterwards, though. But more advanced models were too big of a strain on resources so the colony ship crew went back to the more basic version that they first developed. For similar reasons, they also stopped building them with boot thrusters.
SIDENOTE: We'd like to think that Nardole found a way to get the solar farm colonists off the ship before another invasion force could ascend to their level and upgrade them. More than likely, there was more than one shuttle in that hangar he found his way to. Perhaps the colonists snuck through more of the infrastructure to get to some transport. They used a fleet of shuttles to get off the colony ship and built their own home on a nearby planet.
"But how would the shuttles get off the ship without getting sucked into the black hole, Rob?!" some of you may be asking. There are a few possibilities. Either the escape occurs after the colony ship breaks free of the black hole or clever 'ole Nardole makes some sort of modification that enables the shuttles to achieve the appropriate velocity that could resist such intense gravity.
ARRIVAL ON MONDAS
It's entirely possible that what happens on the colony ship meant for Mondas is its own self-contained story. That it never escapes the black hole and that parallel evolution happens, once more, on Mondas. This would account for some fairly radical differences in design between the Colony Ship Cybermen and the Proper Mondasian Cybermen.
It's more likely, however, that the colony ship did pull free of the black hole's gravity and arrive at its intended destination. Those poor Mondasians, eager to escape their dying world, get quite the surprise. Cybermen from the colony ship descend upon them and induce a mass conversion of the population. The Cyber-race grows. The Cybermen that we see in The Tenth Planet look as different as they do because the story takes place quite a few years later. Upgrades were performed over the years that caused these changes in appearance.
It wasn't just the people of Mondas that were altered - the planet, itself, also went through some radical changes. Recognizing that there was little life left in their world, the Cybermen found a solution to the problem. The colony ship was no longer large enough to support the entire population of Mondas and the civilization that had developed on it while it was stuck at the black hole so they canabilised it. They turned Mondas into a planet that they could actually pilot and created technology that could absorb massive amounts of energy from other worlds.
These alterations, however, dramatically weakened the crust of the planet. The Cybermen needed to be careful about the energy levels of the planets they were attacking. If they overloaded on power, their entire homeworld would collapse in upon itself.
They came up with a clever strategy to avoid this.
THE CYBER FLEET
Once more, the Cybermen started working on different models. Their main focus would still be the style of Cybermen we saw in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, but modifications would be made. As mentioned before, some of the changes were aesthetic - others were far more significant. The biggest was the way the Cybermen became linked to their own world. As Mondas gathered energy from other planets, that power would transfer directly into its denizens. In many ways, it was a very efficient way to do things. But it did present one major weakness: if Mondas fell, all of the Cybermen would die with it.
The logical way to work around this weakness was to create versions of Cybermen that would draw energy from sources that were independent of Mondas. Several different models of this nature were made. We would see them in stories like The Invasion, The Moonbase and Wheel In Space. There were even some Cybus-Style Cybermen lurking about. They may have been left over from the colony ship or the Mondasian Cybermen may have decided to re-explore the model.
These Cybermen that existed independently from their homeworld became focused on interstellar travel. Mondas, even in a depleted state, had built a handful of spaceships (they may have also used some spare parts from the colony ship to build more). These models were sent into the solar system to attack other worlds ahead of Mondas. At first, they attacked poorly defended planets that were populated by humans. They converted the population into Cybermen and then stripped the world of the bulk of its resources. Once the conquered planet was at a low enough energy level, Mondas could move in and safely absorb what was left. This became the established attack protocol as the Cybermen expanded into the universe.
These models that were not directly connected to Mondas became known as the Space-Faring Cybermen. As their numbers grew, they developed a main fleet that attacked larger planets with better defenses. But there were also subsidiary fleets that were invading easier targets. These might be minor colonies that were not even worth the attention of Mondas but still had resources that could benefit the Cyber-Race. There were also a handful of smaller ships that were used as long-range scouts. They went to the deeper reaches of space to find new worlds for the fleet to move in on.
And so, the Cybermen began to spread out into the Universe like a plague. Space-Faring models would invade first and do the bulk of the damage. Then Mondas would come in and clean up what was left.
This method worked very well for them for quite some time. But all of that changed as they eventually found their way to Earth.....
We've, now, laid down the foundations of the society for the largest breed of Cybermen in our universe . Technically, we only really discussed two episodes in this chapter. But we've created the circumstances that will breed a whole cluster of stories that will get examined in the next post.
Missed Part One? Here's the link:
https://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2018/02/chronologies-and-timelines-history-of.html
Saturday 3 February 2018
CHRONOLOGIES AND TIMELINES: HISTORY OF THE CYBERMEN
I've been wanting to tackle this one for a while, now. Particularly since World Enough and Time and The Doctor Falls aired. Seeing such a substantial contribution to the Cybermen's origins had me, practically, foaming at the mouth to explore their background more thoroughly in this blog. But I wasn't sure if Twice Upon A Time might offer further details on Cyber-History since the First Doctor was being extracted from his adventures in The Tenth Planet. So I chose to wait until after the episode was shown.
As fate would have it, I didn't really need to hold out. The events of The Tenth Planet are only touched upon (and lovingly re-created) quite briefly. I wanted to tie up a few loose ends in January with entries that I had been meaning to write for a while and just haven't gotten around to. With that done, I can finally embrace this particular topic with vim and vigor. It's probably going to take a few entries to cover everything. It's also going to get pretty convoluted, in places. So strap yourselves' in!
It's almost sad that the Cybermen are eternally ranked as second fiddle to the Daleks. In many ways, they are the superior monster. Their origins are far more interesting. They represent a greater threat (Daleks tend to just kill or enslave you, Cybermen turn you into one of them - that's far scarier, in my book!). They're even able to negotiate stairs in a far more practical fashion! But, for some reason, those Skarosian Meanies always seem to outdo our Mondasian/Telosian/Possibly-A-Few-Other-Planets-Of--Origin Conquerors. Even on the one occasion where we actually saw them do battle - the Daleks seemed to be coming out ahead.
As we explore a possibly coherent timeline that gets all the different stories about them to make some sort of sense, I hope we're all able to step back a bit and take a better look at how great the Cybermen truly are. They will probably never quite grab the same ratings that the Daleks do whenever they make an appearance - but I think they're a far more interesting and even terrifying alien.
PART 1: THE LESSER RACES
During the first few minutes of The Doctor Falls, our favorite Time Lord makes a very important point about the evolution of these mechanical zombies. He explains that all humanoid races, at some point, explore the idea of full cybernization and mass conversion. Put in simpler terms, the Cybermen actually originate from several different planets and cultures. In that same speech, he very quickly names just a few places where Cybermen come from.
This infers, of course, that there are several different "races" of Cybemen lurking about in the Universe. One could even pre-suppose that every time we see a different model of Cybermen in the show - it hails from a different background. The Cybermen we see in The Tenth Planet, for instance, obviously come from Mondas. But the Cybermen we see in The Moonbase do not resemble them at all. Could it be that they actually hail from an entirely different world? Perhaps the planet Selius B had a race of humans that evolved on it and decided to become fully cybernetic. It's this version that we see attacking the weather control station on the moon.
Fast forward a few more seasons and we see that the Cybermen in The Invasion look radically different from Mondasian Cybermen or Cybermen from Selious B. Could they come from the Planet Roota-Booga-Nubius?
I'm making up silly names for planets because the idea, itself, is fairly silly. But it's still something to consider...
For the sake of this essay, however, I'm going to say that the bulk of the stories we see involving Cybermen are about the race that originated on Mondas. There's a fair amount of evidence to substantiate this. Flashback sequences in Earthshock or the development of different models on the Mondasian colony ship are just a few of the stronger examples that support this notion. But there are references all over the place that show us that about 75% of the Cybermen stories that we see involve this specific species.
However, there are a few stories and references that designate that there are, at least, three other species of Cybermen out there in the Universe (or in a universe nearby). I like to see these as The Lesser Races of Cybermen. They've had some success at conquering the galaxy but not nearly as much as our Mondasians.
We'll discuss the timelines of the lesser races first.
LIFE ON MARINUS
To me, it's almost not worth mentioning these guys. But I know some of the hardcores would object if I don't cover them, at least, a little bit.
Marinus is one of the planets mentioned in The Doctor Falls as being a place that has produced Cybermen. To fans less sad and pathetic than I am, it's just the name of a fictional planet. Some of you that have gone back and enjoyed the Classic Series know that there is a world called Marinus in a story called The Keys of Marinus. But if you've really frittered your life away on this show, you know of the notorious comic strip tale entitled The World Shapers that claims that Marinus was an earlier name for Mondas and that the people of that world eventually become Cybermen.
This namecheck implies that the events of The World Shapers is, in some way, canon. Should we accept that the plot happened exactly the way it did in the comic strip, however, it would make the sorting out of this timeline even more convoluted and confusing.
I would suggest, instead, that there was a race of Cybermen that did evolve on Marinus but not in the way that the comic strip presents things. It may even be as simple as a few scientists on that particular world built a handful of Cybermen, at one point, in a highly controlled experiment. When they saw the results of their work they were mortified and, immediately, destroyed them. On the end of the spectrum, things may have gone as far as a full conversion of the planet's population and a successful galactic campaign. Whatever happened, Marinus was never re-named Mondas. It's just a world that bred its own branch of Cybernmen that we've never actually seen in action on the show. They're just mentioned by the Doctor in that one brief scene.
The fact that the Doctor even discusses Marinus would seem to indicate this. Otherwise, why wouldn't he just say Mondas? That's what Marinus will, eventually, become according to The World Shapers - so why bother to make the distinction? It seems clear that a race of Cybermen was created there but not according to the events described in the comic strip.
UNRELATED SIDENOTE: I have a similar theory about the companions the Eighth Doctor namechecks in Night of the Doctor. He has adventures with these characters but probably not quite in the way that Big Finish tells them. Otherwise, the Ninth Doctor would have noticed how much the events in Dalek resemble a previous experience he had when he was in his eighth incarnation (the Big Finish story Jubilee was re-written to become Dalek). In both these instances, time flows in a pattern similar to some spin-off fiction - but not exactly the same.
Just to really document all this properly, we should try to pinpoint exactly when The Keys of Marinus takes place in relationship to the development of the Marinusian Cybermen. If the Cybermen were more of a limited experiment that was abandoned, it could be that Keys takes place after Cybermen walked the surface of Marinus. I'm more inclined to believe, however, that a formidable Cyber-Army was constructed on the planet and even went out to conquer some corner of the Universe. So I think this Season One tale took place before Cybermen were invented on this world. Otherwise, we would have seen some hint of them somewhere during the TARDIS crew's quest for the keys. The fact that the people of Marinus are quite comfortable with the idea of having their minds controlled by a giant computer would lead us to believe that becoming Cybermen is something they may find appealing.
Finding any kind of specific date for when the Marinusian Cybermen existed is still an impossibility, at this point. The Keys of Marinus and the Doctor mentioning them in The Doctor Falls provide no proper points of reference on the matter.
Okay, that's sorted out. You're welcome, hardcores!
MISSY'S ARMY
Our next race of Cybermen isn't just a reference made in some throwaway dialogue, it has some actual screentime. But the reign of this particular breed is pretty short-lived.
Having just regenerated - the Master re-christens himself Missy, installs a new dematerialisation circuit and flees the Mondasian colony ship. Disappointed in herself for failing to re-direct the fate of those Mondasian Cybermen, Missy decides to create a Cyber-army of her own.
Secretly following the Doctor in his travels, she begins downloading the minds of the people who get killed in the cross-fire of his battles into a Matrix Data Slice (a sort of Gallifreyan hard drive). At the same time, she is creating one of the most efficient conversion processes a Cyber-race has ever developed. The whole thing seems to happen on an atomic level. Atoms from existing Cybermen can be used to convert the atoms of deceased organic tissue into cybernetic beings.
Once she has harvested enough human souls, Missy releases the small armies she has built in various strategic global locations to spread their seed. She was able to set up these caches of Cybermen through a dummy corporation she created known as 3M. Although she has been travelling throughout time and space to harvest souls, the proper establishing of her army happens on Earth - sometime around 2014.
This particular breed of Cybermen were also capable of flight. Which was a necessary skill to have for her plan to be properly executed. Her Cybermen would fly into Earth's atmosphere and willingly explode. Their atoms would then seek out nearby graveyards to infect the dead buried there and convert them into Cyber-bodies. Those minds she was storing in her data cloud would then be downloaded into the waiting metal exoskeletons.
Ultimately, the process would renew itself over and over. Cybermen could, now, invade the Earth, kill its population and convert their corpses into an even bigger army. This particular breed, even in its most early stages, seemed quite unbeatable.
Had it not been for Missy's insane decision to hand this army over to the Doctor, the Earth would have been surely doomed. With the help of Danny Pink, the Doctor is able to dismantle this particular branch of Cybermen before they can do too much damage.
Missy's Army, for all its deadliness and raw power, dies before it can even fully flourish.
THE LEGACY OF JOHN LUMIC
At last, we reach the lesser race with the most screentime. Six whole episodes, in fact.
In a parallel universe where Britain seems a bit more Right Wing, a wheelchair-bound genius is attempting to perpetuate himself into a race of cyborgs (sound familiar?!). John Lumic heads up the Cybus Corporation - one of the most powerful companies in the world. Lumic, however, is dying. He develops a way of artificially extending his life by using his wealth and resources to build a special exoskeleton that can house a human consciousness. He has also installed a special emotion inhibitor so that the mind housed inside the metallic body can function more efficiently. The first Cyberman is born.
The Tenth Doctor, Micky and Rose accidentally drop into this reality just as Lumic's plans in London are reaching fruition. With the help of Pete Tyler and a group of rebels who call themselves' The Preachers, they stop the army Lumic was attempting to build out of the population of Britain's capitol. Lumic, himself, is converted into a Cyber-Controller before facing his demise.
It is made abundantly clear, however, that there are other armies hidden away in the various major cities of the world. As the Doctor and Rose return back to their own universe, Micky chooses to stay behind and help with the disbanding of the other Cyber-armies. These are, in a nutshell, the events that transpire during Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel.
At the end of Age of Steel, the situation seems under control. But, as we would later learn, destroying the rest of the Cyber-armies was more complicated than anticipated. An ethics debate ensued among the humans in this reality. The Cybermen were a proper lifeform onto themselves - did they have the right to kill them?
Secured in their factories - the Cybus Cybermen looked for a means of escape. Eventually, they discovered the Daleks' Void Ship. They used it as a means to pull themselves' into our reality and invade us. Army of Ghosts/Doomsday happens at this point.
For the first and only time, we get to see a battle erupt between Daleks and Cybermen. The Daleks seem to be the clear victors. However, in defense of the Cybermen, the Cybus version is pretty primitive. More advanced Cybermen from our universe would have put up a better fight.
Dating these four episodes can be a tricky task. They are contemporary to when they were transmitted - but only so much. Firstly, we have the complication that a year has passed between Rose and Aliens of London. So, although Army of Ghosts/Doomsday was shown in 2006, it's more likely to be taking place in 2007. On top of that, Pete Tyler reveals in Doomsday that the events of Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel occurred - roughly - three years previously. So it's most likely that those two episodes happened sometime around 2004. Unless time in the parallel reality runs at a different speed from ours.
The Cybus Cybermen do manage another breach into our reality. At the end of Doomsday, they are sucked back into the Void along with the Daleks. The fight they began at Canary Wharf continues within the Void. During that battle, the Cybermen are able to steal some Dalek technology that brings them back onto our plain of existence. However, it also sends them into the past. Their entry point is London in 1851. Even with these primitive conditions, however, they are still able to build a Cybermen Dreadnought and another attempt is made to invade our version of Earth. These are, of course, the events of The Next Doctor. With the help of Jackson Lake and Rosita, the Doctor is able to thwart their plans.
It may be possible that other Cybus Cybermen have found breaches into our reality. It does look like Lumic's Cybermen make one more appearance in The Pandorica Opens. How this version got through - we can't say, for sure. But, after that appearance, there is a conspicuous absence of Cybus logos on the chest plates of this type of Cybermen. Which indicates to me that, any other time we see this model, they're local. I'll explain how Cybermen from our reality can still look like Cybus Cybermen in my next installment...
That's all for Part One. The Lesser Races have been covered. As we move on to Part Two, we'll be looking at the breed that populate most of the Cybermen stories. We'll be examining their early days...
As fate would have it, I didn't really need to hold out. The events of The Tenth Planet are only touched upon (and lovingly re-created) quite briefly. I wanted to tie up a few loose ends in January with entries that I had been meaning to write for a while and just haven't gotten around to. With that done, I can finally embrace this particular topic with vim and vigor. It's probably going to take a few entries to cover everything. It's also going to get pretty convoluted, in places. So strap yourselves' in!
It's almost sad that the Cybermen are eternally ranked as second fiddle to the Daleks. In many ways, they are the superior monster. Their origins are far more interesting. They represent a greater threat (Daleks tend to just kill or enslave you, Cybermen turn you into one of them - that's far scarier, in my book!). They're even able to negotiate stairs in a far more practical fashion! But, for some reason, those Skarosian Meanies always seem to outdo our Mondasian/Telosian/Possibly-A-Few-Other-Planets-Of--Origin Conquerors. Even on the one occasion where we actually saw them do battle - the Daleks seemed to be coming out ahead.
As we explore a possibly coherent timeline that gets all the different stories about them to make some sort of sense, I hope we're all able to step back a bit and take a better look at how great the Cybermen truly are. They will probably never quite grab the same ratings that the Daleks do whenever they make an appearance - but I think they're a far more interesting and even terrifying alien.
PART 1: THE LESSER RACES
During the first few minutes of The Doctor Falls, our favorite Time Lord makes a very important point about the evolution of these mechanical zombies. He explains that all humanoid races, at some point, explore the idea of full cybernization and mass conversion. Put in simpler terms, the Cybermen actually originate from several different planets and cultures. In that same speech, he very quickly names just a few places where Cybermen come from.
This infers, of course, that there are several different "races" of Cybemen lurking about in the Universe. One could even pre-suppose that every time we see a different model of Cybermen in the show - it hails from a different background. The Cybermen we see in The Tenth Planet, for instance, obviously come from Mondas. But the Cybermen we see in The Moonbase do not resemble them at all. Could it be that they actually hail from an entirely different world? Perhaps the planet Selius B had a race of humans that evolved on it and decided to become fully cybernetic. It's this version that we see attacking the weather control station on the moon.
Fast forward a few more seasons and we see that the Cybermen in The Invasion look radically different from Mondasian Cybermen or Cybermen from Selious B. Could they come from the Planet Roota-Booga-Nubius?
I'm making up silly names for planets because the idea, itself, is fairly silly. But it's still something to consider...
For the sake of this essay, however, I'm going to say that the bulk of the stories we see involving Cybermen are about the race that originated on Mondas. There's a fair amount of evidence to substantiate this. Flashback sequences in Earthshock or the development of different models on the Mondasian colony ship are just a few of the stronger examples that support this notion. But there are references all over the place that show us that about 75% of the Cybermen stories that we see involve this specific species.
However, there are a few stories and references that designate that there are, at least, three other species of Cybermen out there in the Universe (or in a universe nearby). I like to see these as The Lesser Races of Cybermen. They've had some success at conquering the galaxy but not nearly as much as our Mondasians.
We'll discuss the timelines of the lesser races first.
LIFE ON MARINUS
To me, it's almost not worth mentioning these guys. But I know some of the hardcores would object if I don't cover them, at least, a little bit.
Marinus is one of the planets mentioned in The Doctor Falls as being a place that has produced Cybermen. To fans less sad and pathetic than I am, it's just the name of a fictional planet. Some of you that have gone back and enjoyed the Classic Series know that there is a world called Marinus in a story called The Keys of Marinus. But if you've really frittered your life away on this show, you know of the notorious comic strip tale entitled The World Shapers that claims that Marinus was an earlier name for Mondas and that the people of that world eventually become Cybermen.
This namecheck implies that the events of The World Shapers is, in some way, canon. Should we accept that the plot happened exactly the way it did in the comic strip, however, it would make the sorting out of this timeline even more convoluted and confusing.
I would suggest, instead, that there was a race of Cybermen that did evolve on Marinus but not in the way that the comic strip presents things. It may even be as simple as a few scientists on that particular world built a handful of Cybermen, at one point, in a highly controlled experiment. When they saw the results of their work they were mortified and, immediately, destroyed them. On the end of the spectrum, things may have gone as far as a full conversion of the planet's population and a successful galactic campaign. Whatever happened, Marinus was never re-named Mondas. It's just a world that bred its own branch of Cybernmen that we've never actually seen in action on the show. They're just mentioned by the Doctor in that one brief scene.
The fact that the Doctor even discusses Marinus would seem to indicate this. Otherwise, why wouldn't he just say Mondas? That's what Marinus will, eventually, become according to The World Shapers - so why bother to make the distinction? It seems clear that a race of Cybermen was created there but not according to the events described in the comic strip.
UNRELATED SIDENOTE: I have a similar theory about the companions the Eighth Doctor namechecks in Night of the Doctor. He has adventures with these characters but probably not quite in the way that Big Finish tells them. Otherwise, the Ninth Doctor would have noticed how much the events in Dalek resemble a previous experience he had when he was in his eighth incarnation (the Big Finish story Jubilee was re-written to become Dalek). In both these instances, time flows in a pattern similar to some spin-off fiction - but not exactly the same.
Just to really document all this properly, we should try to pinpoint exactly when The Keys of Marinus takes place in relationship to the development of the Marinusian Cybermen. If the Cybermen were more of a limited experiment that was abandoned, it could be that Keys takes place after Cybermen walked the surface of Marinus. I'm more inclined to believe, however, that a formidable Cyber-Army was constructed on the planet and even went out to conquer some corner of the Universe. So I think this Season One tale took place before Cybermen were invented on this world. Otherwise, we would have seen some hint of them somewhere during the TARDIS crew's quest for the keys. The fact that the people of Marinus are quite comfortable with the idea of having their minds controlled by a giant computer would lead us to believe that becoming Cybermen is something they may find appealing.
Finding any kind of specific date for when the Marinusian Cybermen existed is still an impossibility, at this point. The Keys of Marinus and the Doctor mentioning them in The Doctor Falls provide no proper points of reference on the matter.
Okay, that's sorted out. You're welcome, hardcores!
MISSY'S ARMY
Our next race of Cybermen isn't just a reference made in some throwaway dialogue, it has some actual screentime. But the reign of this particular breed is pretty short-lived.
Having just regenerated - the Master re-christens himself Missy, installs a new dematerialisation circuit and flees the Mondasian colony ship. Disappointed in herself for failing to re-direct the fate of those Mondasian Cybermen, Missy decides to create a Cyber-army of her own.
Secretly following the Doctor in his travels, she begins downloading the minds of the people who get killed in the cross-fire of his battles into a Matrix Data Slice (a sort of Gallifreyan hard drive). At the same time, she is creating one of the most efficient conversion processes a Cyber-race has ever developed. The whole thing seems to happen on an atomic level. Atoms from existing Cybermen can be used to convert the atoms of deceased organic tissue into cybernetic beings.
Once she has harvested enough human souls, Missy releases the small armies she has built in various strategic global locations to spread their seed. She was able to set up these caches of Cybermen through a dummy corporation she created known as 3M. Although she has been travelling throughout time and space to harvest souls, the proper establishing of her army happens on Earth - sometime around 2014.
This particular breed of Cybermen were also capable of flight. Which was a necessary skill to have for her plan to be properly executed. Her Cybermen would fly into Earth's atmosphere and willingly explode. Their atoms would then seek out nearby graveyards to infect the dead buried there and convert them into Cyber-bodies. Those minds she was storing in her data cloud would then be downloaded into the waiting metal exoskeletons.
Ultimately, the process would renew itself over and over. Cybermen could, now, invade the Earth, kill its population and convert their corpses into an even bigger army. This particular breed, even in its most early stages, seemed quite unbeatable.
Had it not been for Missy's insane decision to hand this army over to the Doctor, the Earth would have been surely doomed. With the help of Danny Pink, the Doctor is able to dismantle this particular branch of Cybermen before they can do too much damage.
Missy's Army, for all its deadliness and raw power, dies before it can even fully flourish.
THE LEGACY OF JOHN LUMIC
At last, we reach the lesser race with the most screentime. Six whole episodes, in fact.
In a parallel universe where Britain seems a bit more Right Wing, a wheelchair-bound genius is attempting to perpetuate himself into a race of cyborgs (sound familiar?!). John Lumic heads up the Cybus Corporation - one of the most powerful companies in the world. Lumic, however, is dying. He develops a way of artificially extending his life by using his wealth and resources to build a special exoskeleton that can house a human consciousness. He has also installed a special emotion inhibitor so that the mind housed inside the metallic body can function more efficiently. The first Cyberman is born.
The Tenth Doctor, Micky and Rose accidentally drop into this reality just as Lumic's plans in London are reaching fruition. With the help of Pete Tyler and a group of rebels who call themselves' The Preachers, they stop the army Lumic was attempting to build out of the population of Britain's capitol. Lumic, himself, is converted into a Cyber-Controller before facing his demise.
It is made abundantly clear, however, that there are other armies hidden away in the various major cities of the world. As the Doctor and Rose return back to their own universe, Micky chooses to stay behind and help with the disbanding of the other Cyber-armies. These are, in a nutshell, the events that transpire during Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel.
At the end of Age of Steel, the situation seems under control. But, as we would later learn, destroying the rest of the Cyber-armies was more complicated than anticipated. An ethics debate ensued among the humans in this reality. The Cybermen were a proper lifeform onto themselves - did they have the right to kill them?
Secured in their factories - the Cybus Cybermen looked for a means of escape. Eventually, they discovered the Daleks' Void Ship. They used it as a means to pull themselves' into our reality and invade us. Army of Ghosts/Doomsday happens at this point.
For the first and only time, we get to see a battle erupt between Daleks and Cybermen. The Daleks seem to be the clear victors. However, in defense of the Cybermen, the Cybus version is pretty primitive. More advanced Cybermen from our universe would have put up a better fight.
Dating these four episodes can be a tricky task. They are contemporary to when they were transmitted - but only so much. Firstly, we have the complication that a year has passed between Rose and Aliens of London. So, although Army of Ghosts/Doomsday was shown in 2006, it's more likely to be taking place in 2007. On top of that, Pete Tyler reveals in Doomsday that the events of Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel occurred - roughly - three years previously. So it's most likely that those two episodes happened sometime around 2004. Unless time in the parallel reality runs at a different speed from ours.
The Cybus Cybermen do manage another breach into our reality. At the end of Doomsday, they are sucked back into the Void along with the Daleks. The fight they began at Canary Wharf continues within the Void. During that battle, the Cybermen are able to steal some Dalek technology that brings them back onto our plain of existence. However, it also sends them into the past. Their entry point is London in 1851. Even with these primitive conditions, however, they are still able to build a Cybermen Dreadnought and another attempt is made to invade our version of Earth. These are, of course, the events of The Next Doctor. With the help of Jackson Lake and Rosita, the Doctor is able to thwart their plans.
It may be possible that other Cybus Cybermen have found breaches into our reality. It does look like Lumic's Cybermen make one more appearance in The Pandorica Opens. How this version got through - we can't say, for sure. But, after that appearance, there is a conspicuous absence of Cybus logos on the chest plates of this type of Cybermen. Which indicates to me that, any other time we see this model, they're local. I'll explain how Cybermen from our reality can still look like Cybus Cybermen in my next installment...
That's all for Part One. The Lesser Races have been covered. As we move on to Part Two, we'll be looking at the breed that populate most of the Cybermen stories. We'll be examining their early days...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)