Spare Parts by Marc Platt (2002)

(DWM – Spare Parts Preview Image 2002)

‘Good evening, Mr Crewman. I’m speaking to you, on behalf of the central committee, in what must be the strangest telephone call ever. In moments you will step out of your capsule, the first man to set foot on the surface since our tiny world began. Strengthened by the finest technology the science factories can muster. You carry our future in your hands – our light in the endless dark. Good luck, Crewman.

Scream!’

The last tram has finished for the night, the Lyons Cornerhouse is boarded up, the picturehouse has shown its last film. The family are all home, eating their tea or at least what they can get on the ration and preparing for Christmas. All three of them – Dad, Yvonne and young Frank. The paddles in Dad’s chest unit keeping his blood circulating, Vonnie taking her pills for consumption. Only one person is missing – Mum. In her final days, Dad sold her for spare body parts to Thomas Dodd – a backstreet ‘private medical practitioner’ specializing in spare body parts of the organic rather than chrome-plated sort. The proceeds are keeping the family going (‘Your Mabel was quality and that’s a fact. She did very well for me.’). In the corner of the room, a caged bird sings – it is a Trillerby, an upmarket model – half real bird. It is the evening curfew. Outside the bobby is on his beat, on his armoured, half-converted horse, his face contorted with grafts, whip in hand. A truck is taking away the bones of the dead from the churchyard for use as raw materials in the conversion processing of the surface ‘work crews’. The streets of the city are deserted.

These are the final days of the last remaining city on Mondas, a few thousand people clinging on to life, surviving through mechanical implants and body parts salvaged from the dead. It isn’t really night – the lights have just been turned off to conserve energy and the cavern roof of the sealed biosphere is just about visible. The planet is drifting towards the Cherrybowl nebula, towards its destruction and a tragedy is unfolding that will lead to the creation of the Cybermen. Mondas is running out of time.

Rationing, trams, body parts and beetroot – the world of ‘Spare Parts’

In my review of ‘Ghost Light’, I talked about the ability that Marc Platt has to build a detailed picture of a world, which no matter how the logic of the world might be off-kilter, has a verisimilitude. Rather like Robert Holmes in that respect and the small details and the coherence of the world depicted are very important to stories like these. Here, Mondas is presented as post-war, austerity Britain – with a hint of Stalinist Soviet Union thrown in. A time between VE day and ‘The Beatles’ – dark and more than a bit grim, in stark contrast with the standard US depiction of the 50’s of a time of plenty, sunshine, colour, diners, big cars, rock and roll, TV and shiny new household appliances. Here, we have the trams and picture houses, rationing, a diet that largely seems to consists of beetroot, a Pathe news style newsreader telling stories of Ruby Craddock (‘This year’s Miss Beetroot factory!’) giving the work crews a send-off, the boarded-up churches, the central committee running things – central planning of every aspect of life, the state police on the street. But all wrapped up in the normality of putting the kettle on and preparing for Christmas or at least a very similar holiday. As a coherent world, it works so well and fits perfectly with the creation of the original Cybermen – not all sleek chrome and steel and plastic, more bakelite and home-made. Not so much silver-giants as something cobbled together by people just desperate to survive.

And Marc is in a way writing about a world he knows about, not Mondas obviously, but rather the Britain he grew up in. He is old enough to have seen the first episode of ‘Doctor Who’, he was born in 1953 and so grew up in 50’s and early 60’s Britain and he drew on that world to represent Mondas. Talking to my own family – that austerity lasted well into the 1960’s, even though rationing ended in 1954. The post-war world in Britain was in some ways worse than war-time, the rationing actually more stringent in the immediate aftermath of the war, with Europe to feed as well. My own parents grew up with very little, everything brown, bomb damaged, blackened with industrial pollution and regular smogs. Take that world and just push it further into the darkness and you have Mondas and the birth of the Cybermen. This is one of the most impressive pieces of world building that we’ve had in ‘Doctor Who’ and is every bit as coherent as the war-torn Skaro of ‘Genesis’, more so for me.

‘It’s all spare parts. All implants. Nothing human left..’

Winding back a bit. We live in a time when more than 5 million viewers in a primetime BBC1 Saturday night timeslot have watched the twelfth Doctor fall at the hands of cloth-faced, Mondas Cybermen as originally depicted in ‘The Tenth Planet’ (coming up next). And most people seem to agree that this original version, with connotations of surgery and bandaged burns victims, with surgical gloves and their synthesized sing-song voices, are terrifying or at least very creepy. But it wasn’t always like this. Before ‘Spare Parts’ they were widely regarded in fandom as a joke – cloth masks, eyes still showing through the mask, ‘handles’ held together by sellotape, real hands, names (Krang, Krail, Talon, Shav or Gern) and those funny sing-song voices. ‘Spare Parts’ changes all of that completely and to my mind without ‘Spare Parts’ we simply do not get ‘World enough and Time’. As much as I love that story (coming up soon) and I really do, ‘Spare Parts’ is far more than just an influence on two TV counterparts – ‘Rise of the Cybermen’/’Age of Steel’ also borrow elements from ‘Spare Part’s and were originally conceived to be much closer than the end product. It is very much its own thing and to my mind one of the finest ‘Doctor Who’ stories in any format. I would urge anyone coming to the story for the first time after already viewing ‘World enough and Time’ to view it in that way. It would make my top 10 of stories across any medium, to my mind it is that good. The equal of ‘World Enough and Time’, which has to be said borrows an awful lot from this story (without crediting it) and considerably better than the RTD era story.

A very personal ‘Genesis of the Cybermen’

To my mind, the most important aspect of this story is that it is a tragedy and more than that a personal one, played out not just in the palace of the central committee or the dark streets or the hospital wards where the recruits are augmented/converted, but in the home of the Hartley family – a very domestic horror. The piece hurtles towards an almost inevitable dreadful conclusion, but entirely by accident. No one is to blame, there is no evil genius at the birth of the Cybermen, just a Doctor trying to do her best – Doctorman Christine Allan (Sally Knyvette). Someone well-meaning, but flawed. No John Lumic or Davros-esque evil super villain, just someone under such strain that her only escape is in cynicism and the bottle. The few remaining people in this city just want to survive and live their lives, to do that, in their name, the Central Committee (more later) need ‘work crews‘ to break through to the surface of the planet and work there to fit a propulsion device to move Mondas away from the Cherrybowl nebula. To avoid going completely insane, the work crews require ‘full augmentation’ – the Cybermen are born purely out of a practical imperative – the survival of the last people on Mondas. Even the proto Cyber-commander Zheng isn’t always the villain of the piece, at times he sides with the interests of the people against the committee, but in the end for the people of Mondas to survive they need the Cybermen. Without the work crews, the planet is doomed, but the Cybermen won’t stop there – ultimately the only hope that they offer is through complete conversion of the whole population – of Doctorman Allen and Sisterman Constant, the Hartley family and Thomas Dodd. Into this world come the Doctor and Nyssa.

A good man…

The story is just made for the Fifth Doctor. A key lesson from the success of ‘Caves of Androzani’ is that this Doctor works very well when placed in situations where he can’t win, where things are just terrible and are spiralling out of control and all he can do is his best. He works so well as a ‘good man’, a beacon of decency when everything is bleak. Likewise, the as ever well-intentioned Nyssa – offering empathy and help to the Hartley family. They are the perfect pairing for this story. This is also personal. The story is placed between seasons 19 and 20, when the Doctor is travelling alone with Nyssa and the death of Adric is still very raw for both of them and at one point even the normally controlled Nyssa lets loose at the Doctor and he is audibly hurt.

DOCTOR: The infinity of Time and Space is all laid out like a huge game of consequences. Sometimes you play, sometimes you sit on the sideline, sometimes you run on afterwards with a stretcher…
NYSSA: A pity that you didn’t think of that when it came to sacrificing Adric.
DOCTOR: Ah… yes… Adric. So much that never gets said…

The Doctor even finds time, rather wonderfully to reassure a partially converted cyber-police horse:

‘What’s the matter? Bridle too tight? All of those implants biting into your head and limbs? You have a hard life… The whips are cruel, the feed is old and stale. The stable floor is hard under foot. But if we can get that bridle off you can sleep properly. And dream. Dream like a real horse … wild, galloping where the ground’s soft between the open sky and the sweet blowing grass…’

All that the Cybermen have lost summed up in a conversation with a horse, the equivalent of his ‘well prepared meal’ speech of ‘Earthshock’!

You need beacons of hope and decency in a story as dark as this – and that is the Doctor and Nyssa. She has a very strong moral compass and a sense decency and duty and wants to help the Hartley’s, pre-figuring her eventually leaving to help those afflicted with Lazar’s Disease in ‘Terminus’. He is reluctant at first to be drawn in, he has his suspicions from the start that they are on Mondas, but knowing the history, he knows that he can’t interfere too much, at least not directly. It is a less overt version of ‘Waters of Mars’ or even the moral dilemma faced by the fourth Doctor on Skaro. The ending of this story, more of which later, contains a horrible irony for the Doctor, one that justifies his reluctance to be involved in the story, it is a nasty twist given ‘Earthshock’, but also a terrific central idea, but his time here on Mondas has consequences.

Here, as in ‘Caves of Androzani’, the Doctor spends most of his time paired with someone of very dubious morals. Instead of Stotz or Jek, we have Thomas Dodds, Derren Nesbitt in a role that in every other story would be that of a villain. A seedy figure almost equivalent to a back-street abortionist in British films of the 50’s. He deals in spare part surgery – the backroom of his shop has a butcher’s freezer section full of body parts and organs – including presumably those of Ma Hartley. The queues outside of his shop mirroring those outside of butcher’s shops during rationing. In the world of Mondas, he is old-school, being put slowly out of business by the cybernetic body parts offered by the Central Committee. Splitting up the Doctor and Nyssa for the story works very well and allows us to see the Hartley family framed through Nyssa’s eyes, whilst the Doctor and Dodds confront Doctorman Allan and the committee.

A very domestic tragedy

The heart of the story though, is the Hartley family. Through them, Marc Platt makes ‘Spare Parts’ a very personal story. Mum might have been sold for spare parts and young Frank might be a hopelessly stroppy teenager, but they are played as lovely, Northern (Yorkshire) family, decent, well brought up and just trying to do their best in a world gone wrong. Mr Hartley, played beautifully by the terrific Paul Copley is the core of the family – a Mat catcher by trade – the Cybermats roam the streets, feral in packs feeding on electrical supplies. Yyvone is the emotional heart of the piece, a kind-hearted young woman working in the hydroponics centre. We later learn she only has a few months to live, suffering from the last stages of consumption, her ‘call up papers’ really her only option for survival. She forms a really strong bond with Nyssa, Nyssa helps her rescue her father and helps get his heart paddles working properly. In turn the family offer Nyssa shelter during the curfew and protection from the police and Sisterman Constant.

At times there are overtones of similar families in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia, keeping their heads down and doors locked during the curfew as their neighbours are taken away or as the young people are selected for the work crews by the very creepy Sisterman Constant and her ‘nurses’ (again a character that is echoed in ‘World Enough and Time‘ in the nurse) who assess and recruits those destined for conversion. Frank is the source of conflict – he just wants to join the work crews – there are echoes of the 30’s and 40’s as Frank informs on Nyssa, but he later realizes as Yyvonne gets her call up papers that the truth behind the heroic images of the ‘work crews’ lies in the horror of cyber-conversion and eventually helps Nyssa. For all of this though, in all of the madness of this world, the Hartley’s are played as any normal family, provide the story its heart and ground it in the domestic, in a way that no other Cyberman story has. It is a clever move by Marc Platt and makes the conversion of Vonnie so very personal and all the more heart-breaking.

‘All laid out in the parlour’

In ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ we are asked to feel sorry for the bride to be, Sally Phelan, cyber converted, but with a broken emotional inhibitor, always cold – ‘He can’t see me. It’s unlucky the night before’ and it is a very effective scene. However, it is someone we haven’t spent any time with – later in the story the not particularly nice alternative universe Jackie and then in the season finale Yvonne Hartman (sound at all similar to Yvonne Hartley?) are converted. Again, we struggle to feel too much empathy as we don’t actually like them all that much. In ‘World Enough and Time’ we lose Bill to conversion and it is much more effective because we know and like her. Well, ‘Spare Parts’ does that just as effectively as the Capaldi story. We are told that Vonnie is dying of consumption by Sisterman Constant and without a cure, she only has months to live. So, this is a very personal representation of the ‘choice’ faced by the inhabitants of Mondas – to die as humans or live as Cybermen. I say ‘choice’, because I don’t think Vonnie knows she is dying and she also isn’t given the choice – her ‘call up papers’ arrive (another 50’s/60’s reference to conscription) and she is sent off for conversion. However, her ‘batch’ of Cybermen are in the middle of the mental conditioning part of the conversion process when the City’s power fails. They are left in a child-like state asking for their orders. Vonnie wanders back home, determined to show her family her new ‘uniform’. It is utterly heartbreaking, one of the most moving scenes that I have experienced in ‘Doctor Who’ in any of its media.

It’s all spare parts. All implants, nothing human left…

We realise that the lost, newly converted Cyberman that the Doctor and Dodds encounter (‘Disgusting, stank of antiseptic’, They’ve always done that’) is Yvonne as she leaves the scene … ‘Father must see my new uniform’. It is a shock, but the real realization comes in the scenes when the converted Vonnie arrives home:

NYSSA: It’s a Cyberman
DAD: Sounds distressed to me
NYSSA: It can’t be. They have no feelings
DAD: Let’s take a look
FRANK: Careful Dad
NYSSA: Keep back

DAD: (gently) Now then in there, what’s all the fuss?
CYBER: (Trying to articulate) Da.. D…D..a..
DAD: What’s that?
CYBER: D..D..(long drawn out) Daaaaad
DAD: Yvonne? Is that you? What have they made of you? What have they done to you? I can’t see your face. And they’ve made you so tall. Oh my little Vonnie .. Let’s get this horrid mask off…

Later:

NYSSA: The lights on the tree. She’s fascinated by them.
FRANK: That’s my sister. What have they done to her?
DAD: (very gentle). Come on, love. Let’s have a look at the tree. That’s right. Ooh your hands are frozen.
FRANK: It’s horrible. Is that really her?
DAD: Now remember what all this means, eh? Our dear old, scraggy old tree stands for the forests that once covered the surface of the world. The lights are the stars above the stone sky. And the baubles are the worlds we pass, winding our long journey through them lie the tinsel.
CYBER: Ss..ss..star.
DAD: And the star on top. That’s the old sun we left behind and one day we’ll get back to it.

DAD” No, don’t cry love. Don’t cry. We’re all back together now. Like a proper family…

There are some deleted scenes from ‘Spare Parts’, one of which I really wish had stood. One of these is an especially affecting scene where with great dignity, Dad invites his neighbours in to take part in the funeral of his daughter:

It is with deepest regrets that I have to announce that my daughter Yvonne has passed away. As you know she had only just been called up to the service of our central committee. She was a good girl and went to do her duty without any questioning. And now she has returned to us. Well you’d best come and see for yourselves. She’s all laid out in the parlour. So if you want to come and pay your respects… Is that kettle boiling yet, Frank? Best china now mind.’

Mondas doesn’t have a future

DOCTOR: Cybermen so bloated with mechanical parts, only cold logic stifles their natural urge to scream in agony. How can you do that to your people?
ALLAN: Because we’re dying! That’s why we are screaming! We’ve been trapped down here so long, we daren’t even step out on our own planet’s surface. Just the thought of the vast, empty sky drives us insane. Only the Cybermen can go there and save us.
DOCTOR: Save you? That means nothing to them. You’ve no idea what you are creating.
ALLAN: No Cybermen, no life. Unless you have a better solution?

And so to the finale. There is revolution in the air as the inhabitants of the city discover what their fate is to be – heading to storm the committee palace lead by the Hartley’s. In a deleted scene they strap the Christmas tree from the square to an abandoned tram and attempt to ram the palace gates! And all the while, Mondas skirts closer to disaster – the proximity to the cherrybowl nebula. The closed biosphere is punctured and snow falls as the city freezes and an icefall from the roof pours down onto the hydroponics plant, destroying the city’s main source of food. As with something like ‘Waters of Mars’ there is a real sense that everything is falling apart very quickly and we are heading to inevitable disaster.

The committee is revealed to be a monstrous hydra of the 20 best minds on Mondas, connected together, shrivelled bodies and swollen heads. The committee and Zheng and his work crews have a decision to make – to concentrate efforts on getting the propulsion units working, to save the city and its inhabitants or to instead convert the rest of the population. In the hospital wards, Sisterman Constant is next to go for conversion along with her nursing staff. The horrible human machine hydra of the committee becomes the Cyber-planner – all internal dissent crushed and slaved to logic. Allan has hit the bottle, but she has a very nasty plan for the Doctor after he survives a massive electrical shock whilst restoring power to the city. She and Zheng scan the Doctor’s body print and she realises that the 3rd brain lobe of the Doctor’s Time Lord anatomy is just what she needs to stabilize the Cyber-conversion process and halt the tissue/organ rejection the converted suffer. She and Zheng complete the scan and Allan updates the Cyber-conversion process with the new plan. For a while it almost seems that Doctor has been converted, but as a new Cyberman enters – it becomes clear that it is Thomas Dodds instead. The committee orders conversion for the whole population.

The twist that the Doctor’s own biology has a hand in the creation of the Cybermen would be horrific enough, but when you realise that it is this Doctor – the one that lost Adric, it is even more horrific and cruel. The ending though manages to almost be uplifting – the committee is defeated by pouring Allen’s wine from the cellars of the old palace into its nutrient feed (a suitably darkly humorous fate which reminds of something Robert Holmes would write), whilst Zheng appears to perish as the work crews get the propulsion units working. Mondas is steered on its long way back towards Earth and away from the destructive Cherrybowl nebula. Allan is set to work reversing some of the processing and the inhabitants of the city try to get things working again. As ever though, it isn’t as clear cut as that and the Cybermen always survive, once the Doctor and Nyssa have departed, leaving the people of Mondas to rebuild their city, a badly damaged Zheng re-appears and tells Doctorman Allan ‘we begin again’. It is a punchline we all know is coming, there is no respite for Mondas – we’ve already seen it’s future.

So ‘Spare Parts’ is a fantastic Cyberman story, it builds a world that I instinctively know and understand, populates it with characters that behave in believable and often not unreasonable ways in a situation that is spiralling out of control. It is dark and sometimes unpleasant and macabre, dealing in body horror and the pain and loss of self of cybernetic surgery and the conversion process, but also beautifully balanced by the leads and the Hartley family, a tragedy involving a whole world but grounded in the domestic, where the morality of creating the Cybermen is balanced against that of letting the people of Mondas slowly die. It eschews super-villains and mad scientists and instead grounds the creation myth of the Cybermen in a tragedy that is more blundered into by accident than design. It beautifully ties up some of the loose ends from ‘Earthshock’, references ‘Tenth Planet’ in some very clever ways (one of the work crew recruits for example is Eric Krailford – ‘Krail’) and does more interesting things with the Cybermen than the TV series (old and new) has mostly managed in 53 years. I’ve known and loved this story for 17 years now and I’ve enjoyed writing about that love and sharing it with the good people of this section of the forum immensely. It’s up to you whether you want to try it for yourself, you may love it as much as I do, you might not. It will always be one of my favourite stories.