34. Spare Parts.

4 episodes. Approx. 120 minutes. Written by: Marc Platt. Directed by: Gary Russell. Produced by: Gary Russell, Jason Haigh-Ellery. 


THE PLOT

The TARDIS materializes on the planet Mondas - the homeworld of the Cybermen. Though the Cybermen have not yet replaced the human race, Mondasian humanity is in its dying days. The surface of the rogue planet has frozen over, driving the survivors underground. Only one human city still stands, its population afflicted with illness. Crews are selected from the sickest of the residents. They are processed, "augmented" with cybernetic technology in order to work on the otherwise uninhabitable surface, building a planetary propulsion system to return them to their home sun.

Once the Doctor realizes where they are, he insists that they cannot interfere and should leave immediately. But Nyssa has already befriended the Hartley family, recognizing them as good people undeserving of the fate that awaits them. She pushes the Doctor to at least intervene a little... and that little is enough to mark them as outsiders, with the Cyber-augmented "planning committee" ordering them arrested and brought in for interrogation!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Recognizes very quickly that this is Mondas before the Cybermen, something he tries to conceal from Nyssa. When she confronts him at the end of Part One, he insists that neither of them can change this world's fate. Even so, he can't stop himself from making multiple attempts to wake the people of Mondas up to what is happening around them. The future may be inevitable, but when the horror is right in front of his face, he will make an attempt to shift its course. Peter Davison has rarely been better, compassion, sarcasm, and an angry ferocity he was too often denied by his television scripts all perfectly balanced.

Nyssa: While the Doctor makes an inevitably doomed attempt to alter the future on a large scale, Nyssa helps on a smaller one: Helping to fix Mr. Hartley (Paul Copley)'s mechanical heart, for instance, or bringing food to the Hartley family to repay what she has eaten. She continues to feel pain at Adric's death, and seeing the birth of the Cybermen makes that all the stronger. When the Doctor urges that they should leave at the end of Part One, she wields Adric's fate like a weapon against his arguments. 

Cybermen: Several of this serial's Cybermen are first seen as human characters. One is plucky and likable, another officious and humorless, yet another rather shady and potentially dangerous. All are fully human creations, which makes it that much more effective to see them reduced to machines by the story's end. Nicholas Briggs voices most of the Cybermen, and offers a different sound for each stage. The recognizably human police are presented as semi-Cybermen, with a light electronic treatment given to a voice recognizably Briggs' own. The full Cybermen, little heard in the story's first half, have the full Tenth Planet voices. The lead Cyberman, Commander Zheng, also has that voice but with a deeper tone. This makes it easy for the listener to differentiate one "class" of Cyberman from another, aiding visualization while showing each successive generation moving further away from human and toward machine.


THOUGHTS

Spare Parts is Doctor Who's best Cyberman story. I make this statement without any equivocation. It is not merely the best Cyberman story on audio. It is the best Cyber-story across all media and all incarnations of the Doctor Who franchise.

I did enjoy the new series' Rise of the Cybermen, which recycled a handful of the ideas from this audio into an effective television action story. But this is a much more meaningful piece, with far greater emotional impact. Writer Marc Platt hasn't turned out an action story, though there's certainly action in it. As he explains in his author's notes, he rejected the idea of having a "Cyber-Davros" (something this story's television counterpart did indulge in), and instead crafted a human tragedy.

The most memorable scene comes in Episode Three. A power outage has interrupted a Cyber processing line, and one of the half-processed Cybermen has enough of its human memory to find its way home, to a reunion with its family. The reunion scene is genuinely devastating, one of the most vivid single moments in all of Doctor Who.

Russell Stone contributes another terrific score, starting with a jaunty patriotic tune accompanying a newsreel, then distorting that same tune into something discordant and mournful. The score gradually moves toward the mechanized as the Cybermen move from the periphery of the narrative to the center of it, until we get a full Cyber-score backing the action of the final episode. 

Guest performances are mostly excellent, in well-realized roles. Special mentions go to Sally Knyvette's Doctorman Allen, taking refuge in heavy drink and cynicism as she sees her good intentions transforming into something monstrous; Paul Copley's warm but defiant Mr. Hartley; Darren Nesbitt's grasping, deceitful Dodd; and of course, Nicholas Briggs' Cybermen. The only weak link in the cast is Jim Hartley as young Frank Hartley, who starts out sullen and resentful before emerging as an ally. Hartley's wooden line readings contrast sharply with the outstanding performances surrounding him. Fortunately, it's a decidedly supporting role and his relative weakness does little damage to the piece.

Released in 2002, Spare Parts remains not only a highlight of the Big Finish audio range but one of the entire Who franchise. It is fortunate that when the new series produced Rise of the Cybermen, the decision was made to set it in a parallel reality so as not to conflict with this story. If the two Cyber-origin stories had conflicted, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would have chosen this one over its television counterpart.


Overall Rating: 10/10.

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