Review: Doctor Who: Genesis of the Cybermen
- cepmurphywrites
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
From their first appearance in 1966’s The Tenth Planet, the Cybermen have ranked high among Doctor Who’s most iconic foes. Unlike the Daleks, who have been largely unchanged since their debut, they’ve been the subject of numerous cosmetic upgrades over nearly six decades. Nor, unlike the Daleks, did they have a set origin story on-screen during its original 20th century run. Indeed, the closest fans have perhaps gotten has been the 2002 Big Finish audio drama Spare Parts, which has rightfully earned a place among fans of the series expanded media to the point its influenced not one but two multi-part Modern Who stories.
But in a different world, 1982 might have seen their origin presented on-screen. More than forty years on, Big Finish have made it possible to imagine what that serial could have been via a full-cast audio drama.
Like the Daleks before them, their origin looked set to come from their original creator. Or, in the Cybermen’s case, co-creator. Gerry Davis had been the series script editor in 1966 when, alongside Dr. Kit Pedler, the pair wrote The Tenth Planet. Davis would be co-author (un-credited in one case) of two additional serials featuring the silver terrors before departing the series. In 1974, during the planning of what would become Tom Baker’s first season as the Doctor, Davis was invited to write for the Cybermen again. His scripted Return of the Cybermen would be heavily rewritten by then script editor Robert Holmes at the insistence of producer Philip Hinchcliffe, becoming Revenge of the Cybermen and not ultimately something that Davis was happy with upon broadcast.
Despite that experience and a move to North America, where he worked on feature films such as The Final Countdown and television series such as The Bionic Woman, Davis found an itch to write for Doctor Who once more. In early 1981, he submitted an unsolicited storyline to the series production office. Arriving on the desk of producer John Nathan-Turner was Genesis of the Cybermen.
Reading the storyline, eventually published in 1988 as part of Doctor Who: Cybermen by 1980s Cybermen actor David Banks, it is a curious beast. For starters, Davis, evidently out of touch with the series revolving cast of companions during the later Baker era, opted to feature a placeholder in the form of “pretty, blond Felicity”. With an arrival by chance upon (the as yet unrecognized) Earth’s twin planet Mondas, the Doctor begins making repairs to the TARDIS while Felicity meets the “handsome and carefree” Prince Sylvan, the charming son of the dying King who is devoted to the arts and the brother to the aloof but scientifically inclined Dega. When Sylvan causes the TARDIS to be thrown into the planet’s future, they arrive on a world transformed by Dega who, “lacking the skills of artistry and the emotion of a poet,” has created a technocratic hell of which he is absolute ruler. One enforced by a now familiar foe and bent on the conquest of Mondas’s twin world...
In reading the storyline, even presented as it was in the Banks book alongside an impressive illustration by artist Keith Watson, it’s perhaps easy to understand why neither Nathan-Turner nor either interim script editor Antony Root nor eventual script editor Eric Saward proceeded to develop it further. As had been the case with his previous script offering, the tone even at the pitch stage owes more to the era that Davis worked on rather than the later Tom Baker era or the incoming Peter Davison’s. Something which is especially clear in both the set-up with Mondas as an almost fairy tale kingdom (complete with Princess and late queen Meta) and the explanation Davis provides in the climax for how Mondas would eventually become a rogue planet, leaving Earth’s solar system only to eventually return. It’s all to easy to understand why Saward, interviewed years later in regards to another 1980s Cybermen serial, described Davis’ Genesis of the Cybermen as “more old school Cybermen [with] lots of standing around with mouths opening,” and as a story that he ultimately “wasn’t really convinced by.” (Though in a move that was both looking to the past but foreshadowing the series mid-1980s obsession with its own history, Davis did include a named Cyberman character from The Tenth Planet as a supporting character.)
Those issues that damned it on television made it ripe for rediscovery and audio dramatization. In 2008, Big Finish Productions began a new range of releases under the banner of Doctor Who – The Lost Stories. Initially focusing on unmade stories from the era of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, the company’s attention soon turned to the unproduced scripts from other Doctors through 2013. The range became recurring in 2019, with March 2025 seeing Genesis of the Cybermen being given its chance to shine, though not without some skepticism and controversy given the existence of Spare Parts. Was there room for two different Cybermen origins on audio?
Perhaps so. Working from the early 1980s Davis storyline, writer David K Barnes faced the same task that Davis himself would have done in developing the script. Among the challenges was crafting the script for the crowded TARDIS of the 1982 season consisting of Peter Davison’s Doctor, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, Matthew Waterhouse as Adric, and Janet Fielding as Tegan. Another was developing some of the ideas Davis put forward, including building a better reason for the arrival of the TARDIS on pre-Cybermen Mondas, strengthening Dega’s motivations for creating them, and lessening how far forward in time the TARDIS crew and Sylvan would be brought. All while keeping the core of what Davis pitched in 1981, which Barnes described on the Big Finish site “as a wonderful fusion of futurism and fairy tale, all kings and castles and rival princes, with the Cybermen representing the perils of science without culture.” Barnes also chose, as John Dorney had with Return of the Cybermen and Jonathan Morris with The Ark, to create an essentially Unbound Lost Stories tale that would exist outside the series canon to avoid having to reconcile it with the 1982 Cybermen serial Earthshock that had featured the same TARDIS crew.
Taking that approach allowed Barnes to craft perhaps the best possible version of Genesis of the Cybermen. Despite having the number of leads doubled, Barnes found plenty for the foursome to contribute to the plot. He also further brought the rift between the brothers, one a man of the arts while the other is devoted to science, into sharper focus and sets up the ultimate tragedy of the turn of events. Perhaps no other character benefits from Barnes work more than that of Meta, whose character arc takes her from the young artistic love of one brother to the embittered queen of the other who seeks a way out of the madness engulfing her life. Barnes plays up the drama and the tragedy in a way that Davis, as a writer of admittedly solid science fiction adventure serials for Doctor Who, likely wouldn’t have been able to accomplish. Though, in keeping with the original storyline, the climax relies on a piece of what Barnes generously terms in the interview extras as “fantasy science” that perhaps undermines it from a 2020s perspective.
All of this brings out solid work from the cast. The 1982 TARDIS crew have been undergoing something of a renaissance at Big Finish in recent years and Genesis of the Cybermen is no exception with Barnes finding plenty for each of the four performers. There’s a particularly strong role here for Sutton’s Nyssa, whose scientific expertise plays a central role in events, while also bringing Waterhouse’s Adric closer to the character’s roots. Something which, coupled with Davison’s Doctor and the ever mouthy Tegan brought to life by Fielding, arguably makes better use of them as a team than many of their TV serials despite Waterhouse in particular sounding far older than the teen he once played.
They are also ably backed by a solid supporting cast including Nuhazet Diaz Cano as Sylvan, who wonderfully captures not only the idealism of an artist but also someone brought forward in time to a changed world; Colin Tierney as the older Dega whose struggles to save his people are damned by his own lack of humanity; and Kelly Price as the older Meta who gets to embody all of the contradictions of the character in a fine performance. Nicholas Briggs once more brings the Cybermen to life, though substituting the sing-song voices of the cloth faced Cybermen of The Tenth Planet for something closer to the more familiar voices he’s used for them in recent years, a move likely to be controversial with purists but perhaps not terribly far off what a 1980s production team might have done even with an origin story (as evidenced by the decision to upgrade the 1960s Tomb of the Cybermen Cyber-Controller in keeping with the 1980s Cybermen designs for Attack of the Cybermen). That voice also makes them both easier to understand but also allows Briggs to bring forth an unlikely trait for Cybermen: humanity, at least in a number of scenes where these early incarnations haven’t yet become tyrants of logic. Coupled with an evocatively harsh but fitting synthesizer score from David Roocroft, the effect is like stepping into an alternate timeline.
An alternate timeline where the Cybermen’s origins were presented in a mix of a fantasy past and high technology, set on a world slowly undergoing decline where a man’s efforts to craft a better future as he sees it are damned by his own lack of human understanding and over-reliability on technology. Something which, of course, doesn’t make it feel relevant at all to a 2025 audience. What is presented via Big Finish is undoubtedly a solid version of the concept Davis pitched more than four decades ago, one that doesn’t reach the dark depths of Spare Parts but would have fit quite in with early to mid 1980s Doctor Who, even while retaining (for better and worse) aspects of the series earlier tendencies.
Though that would also be a timeline which, of course, would have meant we lost out on that 2002 audio and one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever told in any medium. Perish the thought! But it doesn’t make Genesis off the Cybermen any less solid as a production or worth a listen as a Cybermen origin that might once have been.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.
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