The Tomb of the Cybermen

No.  I have a better idea.  I'll leave you to the Cybermen.  I'm sure they'll have a use for you.  Or parts of you.--Klieg

Jamie and the Doctor watch as Toberman sneaks up on a Cyberman

Episode 1, 2 September 1967
Episode 2, 9 September 1967
Episode 3, 16 September 1967
Episode 4, 23 September 1967

Written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Victor Pemberton
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon (earliest extant appearance)
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (earlier extant appearance)

The TARDIS has just acquired a new crew member: nineteenth-century gentleman's daughter Victoria Waterfield, whose father was murdered by the Daleks at the end of the last (lost) story, "The Evil of the Daleks". For Victoria's first trip, the TARDIS lands on a rocky, desolate landscape. Soon after arrival, our heroes make contact with an archaeological expedition from Earth, from whom they learn that they are on the planet Telos, home world of the Cybermen.

It has been five hundred years since the Cybermen vanished from history, and the expedition are here in search of the legendary Tombs of the Cybermen, the hidden catacombs where stories say that the last of the Cybermen sleep in waiting. (The Doctor is genre savvy enough to realise what a bad idea this is.) The expedition can be divided into three groups: there are the archaeologists themselves, British and with a healthy respect for how archaeology is supposed to be done. There's the crew of the expedition's rocket ship, American, brash and brusque, but not very bright. And then there are Mr. Klieg and his associates. Klieg is funding the expedition, and he's brought along with him a woman, Kaftan, and her servant, the lumbering, silent hulk, Toberman. (Toberman has quite rightly been criticised over the years for being a rather racist depiction; it's unfortunate he's Doctor Who's first major black character.)

Klieg and Kaftan are indeterminately foreign, probably Arabic. Kaftan's relationship to Klieg is unclear, but while she doesn't have any clear authority over him, she's definitely able to manipulate him fairly easily. And she, Klieg and Toberman clearly have another, more sinister agenda that they're keeping secret for a moment.

When the Doctor and team arrive, the expedition have just found the entrance to the Tomb of the Cybermen--and they've just lost their first life, a crew member from the rocket who was electrocuted when he grasped hold of the doors of the tomb in order to open them. The Doctor works out that the door will now have been drained of the electricity with which it was charged, and the doors are safe to open.

Inside they find a labyrinth of corridors and control rooms. They're deserted, but the computer terminals are still in working order--if only someone can figure out their operating system, which appears to be based on a symbolic logic puzzle. It's not entirely free of menace, though--Victoria gets briefly trapped inside a "revitalising chamber" for the Cybermen when its door closes on top of her (no one realises it was Kaftan who sealed her inside, flipping its closing mechanism in order to see what effect the chamber would have on a human being), and one of the archaeologists is killed when he and Jamie accidentally trigger a Cyber gun in a weapons testing room.

And there's a massive steel hatchway, leading down into the belly of the facility, where Klieg is certain the Cybermen's actual tombs lie, but at first, no one can figure out how to open the hatch.

And there's something sinister afoot, too--someone has sabotaged the expedition's rocket. (Toberman, acting on Kaftan's orders.) It's going to take at least three days to fix, and during the repairs, the ship's captain, Hopper, is unwilling to allow any of the expedition aboard, because he doesn't know who it was that sabotaged the ship. That means they'll have to spend their nights (when the temperature on the surface drops dangerously) inside the ominous warren of the tombs.

Klieg manages to decipher the controls that open the big hatchway. There's an amusing sequence where the Doctor follows behind him as he flips switches, surreptitiously flipping them back again in an attempt to stop the hatchway from opening--only it turns out that the Doctor's subterfuge puts the switches in exactly the pattern that they really need to be in to open the hatch.

The expedition descends to the lower level of the tombs, leaving behind only Kaftan and Victoria. Victoria initially balks at staying behind just because she's a woman, until the Doctor explains that really, he wants her to stay behind to keep an eye on Kaftan. As soon as they're alone, however, Kaftan drugs Victoria by slipping a mickey into her coffee, and once Victoria has fallen asleep, she closes the hatch again, declaring that she'll only open it upon receiving a prearranged signal from Klieg.

Down below, the expedition come upon the actual Tombs of the Cybermen, a massive steel honeycomb crusted over with frost. Great, manlike shapes are visible through the tombs' doorways: Cybermen, dormant and sleeping. There's a control panel next to the tombs, and Klieg immediately sets about trying to decipher it, declaring that it must be an opening mechanism for the hatch that has closed above them. (The expedition realise the door has closed over them, but they don't know it was because of Kaftan's treachery.) Of course, both he and the Doctor realise what the control panel is really for--awakening the Cybermen in their tombs.

And this Klieg soon manages to do, and an army of Cybermen emerge from their dormancy and advance on the expedition. It's at this point that Klieg reveals his true plan: he is a representative of the Brotherhood of Logicians, an association of Earthmen dedicated to the supreme power of rationality and the intellect. The Logicians wish to make contact with the Cybermen--who are also, of course, dedicated to logic--and ally with them, using Cyber might to help them take over the Earth.

Of course, the Cybermen are having none of this. Now that they're awake again, they see no reason why they'd need the help from any human group to conquer humanity. The Cyber Leader makes clear with its first words what their plans are: "You belong to us. You will be like us."--In other words, the humans are going to be converted into Cybermen.
Back up at the tomb's entrance, Victoria has woken from her drug to find the hatch closed and Kaftan holding a gun on her. But the day is saved when Kaftan is attached by a Cybermat--basically, the Cyberman version of a mouse; like the Cybermen themselves, lethal and made of steel (though Kaftan survives this particular attack). This allows Victoria to open the hatch, and just in time, too. A struggle has broken out down below between the expedition and the Cybermen, and the hatch opens just in time for the expedition to escape--though the Doctor is almost dragged back down into the tombs when a Cyberman grasps him by the ankle as he climbs out. Only Toberman doesn't make it; he's been captured by the Cybermen.

Safe upstairs, the expedition are able to seal the Cybermen down below by closing the hatchway again. But they still can't escape--Captain Hopper hasn't finished his repairs on the rocket yet, and he still refuses to let anyone else aboard. The expedition imprison Kaftan and Klieg in the weapons testing room, because it has only one exit, but--rather unsurprisingly, considering the room's name--once they're in there, Klieg is able to find a Cyber gun, capable of killing both humans and (unlike the handguns a few of the humans are carrying) Cybermen.

Klieg and Kaftan therefore emerge from the weapons testing room and take the other expedition members captive at gunpoint. Klieg is still intent on forging an alliance with the Cybermen, and he thinks that possession of a Cybergun will give him the leverage to do that, so he opens the hatch.

Down in the tombs, the Cybermen have been on the verge of collapse from a lack of energy; the Cyber Leader has therefore ordered them back into stasis to conserve energy. It is therefore only the Leader who emerges from the hatchway, accompanied by Toberman. The Leader now agrees to Klieg's proposal in exchange for being allowed access to the revitalising chamber (where Victoria was trapped back in episode one), to restore his dangerously low levels of energy. The Doctor helps the Cyber Leader into the revitalising chamber in hopes of trapping it there, but once revitalised, the Leader is too strong for the ropes Jamie ties over the door and easily breaks free.

Another fight breaks out, between the Cyber Leader and the humans, and at this point Klieg and Kaftan discovers Toberman is now under Cyberman control--he has been partially Cyberised, with his right arm replaced with a steel limb. He knocks Klieg unconscious, and the Cyber Leader picks up Klieg's Cybergun and shoots and kills Kaftan.

The Doctor is able to use Kaftan's death to get through to Toberman, exhorting him to break free of Cyber control. Toberman turns on the Cyber Leader, picking it up bodily and smashing it into the floor. It appears the expedition have won. The Doctor, Toberman and Jamie descend back into the tombs so that the Doctor can seal the Cybermen inside permanently--but they find Klieg, recovered from Toberman's blow, already there, waking the Cybermen up again. He's still fixated on his plan of an alliance.

But he's killed by the first of the Cybermen to revive, who then turns round to the controls so that it can wake up the rest of its brethren. Toberman sneaks up on it from behind and destroys it, and the Doctor ensures that the controls have been set to return the Cybermen to complete dormancy.

Back upstairs at the main entrance to the catacombs, the Doctor electrifies the doors, just as they were when they killed one of the rocket's crew when the expedition first arrived, so that no one else can ever release the Cybermen. But before he can then close the doors again, the Cyber Leader revives and starts to shuffle toward the humans. The Doctor can't close the doors, as they've been electrified. Toberman steps forward and slams the doors shut on the Cyber Leader (who is thereby electrocuted as well), sacrificing himself to save the others.

Captain Hopper and the expedition's only other survivor, Professor Parry, head back to the rocket, while the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria leave for the TARDIS. The story ends with the camera drawing in on a single Cybermat, which, unnoticed by the humans, has escaped from the tombs and is trundling off into the desert.

What Lisa thought
This was actually the very first Doctor Who Lisa saw, when I first started buying Doctor Who DVDs. She hadn't been interested in watching with me, but she was sitting next to me on the couch cross-stitching while I watched, and by midway through episode one, she was asking me to go back to the beginning so she could sit and watch it properly. So it's one she likes. Particularly, she likes Klieg, who she thinks is wonderfully portrayed by George Pastell.

She does complain about the Cyberman voices, and she's right to. They're lost in an electronic drone that makes them almost indecipherable--definitely the worst Cyberman voices, and possibly the worst alien voices full stop, in the history of the programme. Which is a shame, because besides that, the Cybermen are actually very well realised. They've evolved significantly since their first appearance, which came, let's remember, less than a year before this, and it's the Cybermen of "Tomb" who really serve as the template for all Cybermen that have followed--for those who would show up again in the 1960s and in 1975, for the ones that would return in the 1980s, and for the ones that would return in 2006.

No longer is there any visible flesh and blood to their appearance (which is a shame, because that was pretty neat in "The Tenth Planet"). They're now entirely steel men. Instead of the actor holding his mouth open while his lines are piped out, the Cyber Leader has been given a steel facemask, with a slot that slides open to serve as the mouth piece. When Toberman kills the Cyberman who has just murdered Klieg, he rips its chest piece off, and white foam Cyberman "blood" comes bubbling up out of its corpse in copious amounts. It's really cool. (Lisa said, "Ewww.") There's even some rudimentary visual effects--we see mental waves passing between the Cyber Leader and Toberman as it silently transmits instructions to him, and electric bolts shoot from the Cybermen's hands to kill the humans--an idea that would be subsequently abandoned before returning when the Cybermen made their first New Who appearance in 2006.

For a long time, "Tomb" was amongst the missing Doctor Who stories (meaning that Victoria was the only companion for whom not one full story existed), until a complete copy was unexpectedly discovered in Hong Kong in 1992. We did have the story's soundtrack during that period (as we having the soundtracks of all the missing episodes), and from that audio track "Tomb" developed a reputation as a missing masterpiece, a gem of tension and atmosphere.

One of the Doctor Who DVDs--it's probably Lost in Time, the DVD release of all the orphan episodes--has a documentary about missing episodes, in which Mark Gatiss talks about the disappointment everyone felt upon actually seeing the real product in 1992.

I think that's crap. It's true that I never listened to the "Tomb" audio track, so I never had the opportunity to build it up into The Perfect Who in my head (though anyone who does that should be intelligent enough to realise that the TV show we construct in our head is always going to be superior to the actual TV show that shows up on the screen). But speaking as someone who has only ever seen "Tomb" as an extant story (it was one of the first Who VHSes I bought, back in the mid-90s), it's an absolutely cracker--for my money, the best extant Patrick Troughton story.

It's a brilliant, claustrophobic science fiction horror story, in the tradition of Who Goes There? (the great John W. Campbell novella upon which the film The Thing is based) or Alien. Its first two episodes are, indeed, palpably tense and atmospheric, as the expedition explore the catacombs and we wonder just what Klieg and Kaftan's design is. The latter two episodes suffer a bit from the loss of that tension, but they're nevertheless good action storytelling, with the ever-dwindling human band trapped in the tombs with the Cyber menace.

Narratively, the real genius of "Tomb" lies with Kaftan, Klieg and Toberman. A small band of humans in a remote, inaccessible location is the basic template for five of the first six Cyberman stories (besides "Tomb", there's Polar Base in "The Tenth Planet" (1966), the Moonbase in "The Moonbase" (1966), the Wheel in "The Wheel in Space" (1968), Nerva Station in "Revenge of the Cybermen" (1975) and the cargo freighter in "Earthshock" (1982)), but it's the addition of the Brotherhood of Logicians that gives that premise a fresh spin. Instead of humans vs Cybermen, we now have three factions, making shifting allegiances with each other, and it means the story never lulls.

The next story after this is "The Abominable Snowmen", in which the Doctor fights the Yeti for the first time, in 1930s Tibet, but it no longer exists, so the next story on our rewatch will be "The Ice Warriors".

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