MR 034: Spare Parts

Yes, it's good, despite the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa. It's amazing to me that Marc Platt did the incompressible Ghost Light and then did the incredibly boring Loups Garoux and then somehow pulled this out of his hat. It's pretty wild. I don't know how he did it.

The Doctor ends up on Mondas in its ancient history where Nyssa makes friends with a local family. Modas is Earth's twin, the long lost planet from Earth's solar system. It was knocked out of orbit and set adrift into space when a moon formed between them. The Earth thrived while Mondas died. All the people live underground. Their society faintly resembles Earth except it's more desperate, more based around survival. There's a market for artificial body parts: organs, limbs, anything as people get sick and injuried regularly. Doctors go around harvesting "spare parts" from people to sell as replacements. It's a dark and twisted reflection of humanity and it's good stuff.

It's this world that produces the Cybermen. Some time ago in Mondas's history they executed the royals, French Revolution style. This desperate set of circumstances lays the blatant evil of capitalism and wealth inequality bare when people don't know if they're going to survive from one day to the next. However, the "central committee" that they established is actually 20 people's brains pushed together as a think tank, like Shada. The brains inside their corpses kept alive to make decisions for the planet.

They've established a propulsion system on the surface of the planet to try to control the direction of Mondas's drift through space. But now Mondas is drifting towards a dangerous nebula that threatens to doom its civilization. The surface of the planet is too dangerous for anyone to go out unless they are FULLY converted and processed into the cybermen that we know. And even then they don't live very long. So working on the propulsion system is practically impossible.

The conversion process and the propulsion system are sucking up all the power from the city, especially in the dangerous nebula. People are starting to die. The government is using corpses from the graveyard in its conversions. And there's a lottery for who gets picked to go up to the surface. They don't know that they're going to be converted though. Of course not.

The nebula starts to destroy the cave system. People WILL start dying unless they can fix it. But the Committee decide to convert EVERYONE in order to save everyone. To survive, they become Cybermen.

There's something about the Doctor being the template for the Cybermen, which was odd. Not sure why that was a thing. The Doctor also manages to get Mondas's propulsion system to push it away from the nebule where it begins its journey back to the solar system where it will be destroyed in The Tenth Planet. The Doctor tries to get them to stop converting people, but they do it all the same.

There's a lot of really good stories here. The lottery is not exactly random. There's a job called the "sisterman" who goes around seeing who would be best suited for conversion. It's a pretty f**ked up job for evil people. The sisterman in the story KNOWS what she's doing, but she doesn't care. And in the end she gets converted herself.

As does the doctor who goes around harvesting organs to sell. He bemoans the government selling artificial parts and driving his organic parts out of business. Which is suitably f**ked.

We get to see a lot of the events through the family that Nyssa befriends. The dad is a cybermat catcher, because the cybermats were used as pets but have apparently become pests. The son wants to go to the surface because he thinks it's his patriotic duty, but the sisterman chooses his sister instead. And we get to see the horror in the conversion through her, especially when she comes home and how horrible it is for the family to see her like that. Also, it definitely really threw me off to have a character named Yvonne who isn't, you know, THAT Yvonne.

The cops are also the first to be mostly converted. The cops and their horses. The description is horrible. They're still recognizably human, but only just, cybernetic implants on everything. Of course the police are the first to be mostly converted.

There's some good stuff for the Doctor and Nyssa as well. The Doctor does his usual bullshit of saying that changing history is bad in and of itself, that preventing the rise of the cybermen would be bad for some reason. And Nyssa gets to call him out on it. There's some pathos for me, as the world's only Adric fan, to hear her calling the Doctor out on his not saving Adric when he totally could have.

I'm pretty happy with Nyssa's character development in these audios so far. She's surprised me. She's becoming more of a character who can call the Doctor out on his bs, which is the type of companion I like. For the most part, though, the Doctor and Nyssa are just observers in this story even though he restores power to the city. Which fits this Doctor. They're just struggling to survive like the people on the planet.

Definitely very good. Rare Fifth Doctor w. And rare Marc Platt w, I still don't get how he did it. We're coming out swinging, apparently, after the second Eighth Doctor season that concluded in Neverland. We shall see if we can keep the good stories coming.