There’s a hint that Davis might now have watched the series since he left, with attempts at Hinchcliffe-style Who coming in the shape of, as the Tardis Data Core puts it, ‘stronger’ language (3), most notably the remarkably unnecessarily gruesome death of a soldier (4).

    His Cybermen, however, are still batshit crazy: so devoted to entering the base in disguise, they don not just the parkas but the ‘thick leggings’ of the men they kill (5); incapable of telling the difference between conquering Earth and conquering an office block in Geneva (6); and responding to Polly’s plea that she’ll die of cold in their Cybership by knocking her out, even though she’s already securely tied and not trying to escape, and then wondering what temperature is necessary to keep her alive (7). She’s lucky it doesn’t boil her.

    Their pretence of cold, ruthless logic is also not helped by Davis’s habit of always plumping for the first adjective that comes into his head, so that the first Cyberman to land in the Antarctic steps ‘gingerly’ onto the polar ice (8) and the first  Cyberattack force to encounter Cybergun-wielding humans turn and run ‘wildly’ away (9). It’s not just that the adjectives don’t quite fit their image, it’s also that ‘gingerly’ gets used four more times, all describing humans, and ‘wildly’ six more, five of those describing humans – it’s hard to think of Cybermen as calculating, emotion-purged horrors when they seeming behave in exactly the same way as all the people.

    Even the best Cyberscene, when Ben disarms one and then is compelled to kill it, is undermined by the way Davis can’t quite decide what being emotionless entails. What’s nice about the scene is the way Ben is forced to confront the fact that taking the gun means he has to use it. He starts off almost chummily assuming the gun gives him control of the situation (10); is reduced to almost begging the Cyberman to stop (11); realises he’s actually got ‘no alternative’ but to shoot (13); and is still unable to look as he does it (12). What’s less clear is exactly what the motive for the Cyberman ‘inexorably’ advancing on Ben is. Presumably, it’s meant to mirror the first Cyberarrival, when they ignored the Sergeant’s warning that he’d ‘open fire’ and continued ‘inexorably’ towards the soldiers (14), but the point in that scene was that conventional weapons have no effect on the Cybermen. In this case, the Cyberman must know he’s vulnerable to his own Cybergun.

    It all boils down to what’s going on in that moment when ‘The Cyberman paused for a moment, looked at the weapon held in Ben's hand, then started to move towards him’. It’s possible that its advance is a calculated gamble that Ben will choose not to shoot or maybe that it can deliver its ‘death blow’ before Ben can shoot. If that’s the case, it feels an odd fit with the later declaration that the Cybermen ‘are only interested in survival’ (15), rather cavalier for a member of a race who value self-preservation above all else. Alternatively, its advance could be due to its lack of emotions, incapable of responding to a threat because of its lack of fear. Even without fear, though, if a Cyberman always prioritises survival, it should be able to process a threat. However, a lack of emotions could also mean it’s unable to read Ben’s reluctance to shoot as anything but an inability to operate the Cybergun. If, as the Cyberleader states, Cybermen do not ‘understand… feelings’ (16), then it might not understand why Ben would hesitate before killing it.

    Thing is, the Cybermen keep trying to employ psychology in their assault on the base, so they must have some concept of human emotions. Towards the end, they ‘take a hostage’ in order to ensure the base does as they demand (17), a pretty clear indication they understand how humans care for each other; a more complex attempt to get inside the minds of the crew comes early on when, instead of just letting Ben keep and use a weapon that is useless against them, the Cybermen make a show of ‘bending’ the gun out of shape to reinforce the humans’ helplessness (18). Clearly, they think humans ‘learn’ best from visual stimulae.

    It’s not only Cyberbehaviour that makes no sense, the Cyberplanet doesn’t either. It’s implied that the Cybermen are somehow connected with their planet, both ‘melting and cracking as they die (19), but no explanation is ever forthcoming as to how or why that might be so. Mind you, Davis also thinks that Mondas’s absorption of Earth’s energy will leave our planet ‘completely exhausted’ so that ‘nothing will work—light, power, engines, planes, ships!’ (20), so maybe he’s trying to suggest some sort of connection between all forms of mechanical and electrical power that for some reason excludes life, which would serve to highlight how the Cybermen are more machine than living being.

    Sadly, it’s more likely Davis just doesn’t understand planets. To be fair, the scripts probably didn’t help, what with all the talk of how the Z-bomb may turn Mondas ‘into a sun’ (21) coming straight from the broadcast episodes, but Davis manages to go a step further, stating that, on its destruction, Mondas is turns ‘into a super-nova’ anyway (22), no Z-bomb involved. Presumably he just thinks that’s what happens when a planet dies. What he thinks a supernova is, meanwhile, is the conversion of rock into ‘A huge shifting amoeba-like corona of gas’ (23) which disperses in ‘half an hour’ to ‘the far corners of the universe’, whilst also glowing and spinning and whizzing away (24).

    Okay, maybe that was all less implausible and baffling in 1976. Maybe there were still competing explanations for supernovae 40 years ago. Fine. But then he devotes lots of attention to two men in an orbiter using a telescope, a small chart and verniers to navigate (25). And they’re doing it because the best way they have to establish their position while whizzing around the Earth is to locate Mars (26). In 1976. That’s four years after the last Apollo mission.

    So, what does Davis do well? He’s also very good at showing how dangerous General Cutler is. A lot of the material towards the end when Cutler’s obviously unhinged remains the same (the contrast between Cutler’s readiness to sacrifice ‘all life on the part of the Earth facing’ Mondas and his eagerness to ensure his son’s one-man capsule is on ‘the far side’ (27), for example, and his tirade that Barclay is ‘the enemy’ (28), which shows how far his concerns have diverged from the rest of the planet), but Davis adds a nice little detail, showing Cutler still just about able to keep a grasp on ‘reality’ (29) before the final showdown, adding emphasis to how the seeming loss of his son leads him to ‘lose control’ (30).

    Where he really improves the character, though, is in laying the seeds for that psychological collapse. His delusions of grandeur are copied straight across from TV, Cutler seeing himself as a man to make ‘History’ (31), but there are also several subtler suggestions that he’s a massive cock who’ll just need the slightest nudge to boil over. He likes to be fawned over, pleased when ‘his little jokes [are] appreciated’ (32), and taunts his scientists for thinking rather than acting with blind machismo: ‘What's the matter, Dyson— chicken?’ (33). Most tellingly, Cutler isn’t even very good at his job, excusing his ignorance of the nuclear technology of which he’s in charge as if he’s not actually expected to understand it despite the ‘many […] courses’ he seems to have got sent on (34). Furthermore, he clearly looks down on ‘scientific egg-heads’, valuing ‘decisions’ over understanding’.

    And that’s the attitude that forms the one and only actual threat to the Earth in the story. The arrival of Mondas is set up as a historic fact, and presumably a more-or-less benign one considering the Doctor’s relaxed attitude to its appearance, and the Cybermen are doomed to fail from the start, having misjudged the effect Earth’s energy will have on their planet. Cutler is the only one who ever really endangers the Earth thanks to his eagerness to use the Z-Bomb, a weapon so destructive ‘Nobody […] had thought that this terrible weapon […] would ever be used’ (35). The immediate reaction of ‘scientists, soldiers and […] civil servants’ in Geneva is that it should not be used and Wigner hints that they’re not even sure what it does (36). It even turns out that the one thing Cutler cared about, saving his son, is achieved by precisely the action he scorned, waiting.

    Which brings us on to Hartnell. The first regeneration was always an odd one. For a start, it’s difficult to know what causes it. Early scenes suggest it might simply be his time, it being noted before the adventure even begins how he ‘seemed to be ageing rapidly’, ‘beginning to stoop’, confusing Ben and Polly with ‘his first two fellow space-travellers’ (37) and growing increasingly ‘irritable and dictatorial’ (38). Later scenes, though, suggest ‘An outside force of some kind’ (39) – presumably Mondas’s energy drain – is responsible. Certainly, it’s only after the planet draws near that the Doctor falls ill and Ben observes his hair has ‘gone a shade whiter and finer during the last few hours’ and his skin has turned ‘as transparent as old parchment’ (40), and there’s a definite parallel between how the Cybership suffers ‘several years of slow corrosion […] telescoped into as many minutes’ (41) and how the Doctor puts ‘on a score of years during [a] few hours’ (42). There’s even a late suggestion in the novelisation that it may simply be a heart attack brought on by Ben messing about: ‘The sudden shock seemed to prove too much for the Doctor. His head slumped forward, eyes glazed, just as Ben stepped into the room’ (43).

    What’s clearer is that the regeneration is some sort of comment on Hartnell’s Doctor – he’s inadequate to the threat here and that’s why it’s ‘time for a change’. That threat, as said above, has nothing to do with Mondas or the Cybermen, it’s his inability to get Cutler in hand that does for him – in other words, his failure to take charge of a base-under-siege story (44). On TV, where Hartnell’s illness led to a last-minute rewrite of Part Three, this could be seen as an accident, but the book follows a similar course without any such practical explanation, the Doctor collapsing and essentially sitting out Chapter 10 having wilted before Cutler’s intransigence (45).  Later, when it looks like the Doctor is about to step forward in Cutler’s absence and get one last moment to shine, ‘his authority […] pre-eminent’, the room hanging ‘on his every word’, taking on the mantle of ‘spokesman’ for Earth (46), the Cybermen declare he’s surplus to requirements and banish him to their ship, effectively removing him from the story’s climax. The same happens in the broadcast Part Four, but here Davis changes the Doctor’s final warning (47) into a desperate, impotent plea not to be discarded (48).

    Oddly then, especially considering that three of Hartnell’s successors are by now well-known and there’s no need to worry how Target readers might react to what’s their second regeneration story, Davis doesn’t embrace Troughton with any greater clarity than the TV episodes. He’s described as ‘elusive [and] slightly mocking’ (49) and announces himself, rather shiftily, as ‘the new Doctor!’ (50), as if he’s a new man usurping the previous occupant of a role. Davis further encourages the sense of uncertainty by having the regeneration occur unobserved, Ben and Polly last seeing the first Doctor ‘trudging […] to the door of the TARDIS’ (51) before later hearing ‘a long wailing cry’ in someone else’s voice (52) and finally encountering someone they’ve never seen before (53) wearing the Doctor’s ‘familiar cloak and body’ (54).

   But Davis’s biggest change is to introduce the sleeping compressor, something never mentioned in the show, and hint it’s somehow important to the Doctor’s transformation. It might simply be that the Doctor felt a bit tired after all the exertion at the Pole and the regeneration just happened to kick in while he was sleeping, or that it speeds up any process, not just sleep, and so allows Hartnell to skip the aeons of decay that Pertwee suffered before his change, but it is reminiscent of the 1966 BBC memo, written while Davis was on the production team, which compared regeneration with the effects of taking LSD (55), with a dream-state standing in for an actual trip. It even states the process ‘takes place over 500 or so years’ (though I suspect it means every rather than ‘over’), which would explain why you’d want to compress it.

    None of this quite explains why Davis rewrites the regeneration scene quite so thoroughly, but it does hint at something else that’s been bugging me. Though the back cover does mention that this is ‘the last adventure […] of the first DOCTOR WHO’ (56), much less is made of the fact than was in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders’s blurb. There, the extract was the moment of change, the declaration that it was Pertwee’s final story got a one-line paragraph of its own and the transformation into Tom Baker was pictured on the front cover; here, the fact of Hartnell’s demise is swallowed up in a paragraph that focuses more strongly on the Cybermen, the extract was of the Cybermen’s initial arrival and the front cover, which is plastered with Cybermen, declares ‘THE FIRST CYBERMAN ADVENTURE !’ (57).

    Now, the Cybermen were popular recurring monsters, fair enough, but they hadn’t been on TV for nearly a year and had been absent before that for nearly seven years. It might be that Target still felt they were a big deal for their market, especially if Doctor Who and the Cybermen sold particularly well, and it’s unlikely Gerry Davis had much to do with the front and back covers, but, at this point in time, the only Cyberstory not to feature Davis, co-creator of the Cybermen, in the credits was ‘The Wheel in Space’. It’s easy to think he might have rather oversold them to Target.

    And the connection with the 1966 memo might hint at his great hopes for his creation. The Doctor is very familiar with the Cybermen and Cyberhistory in a way he’s not shown with any other first-time adversary, he’s unusually keen to let events run their course in a way he’s never insisted on outside historicals and he seems very susceptible to whatever the Cybermen are up to in a way none of the humans are – was Davis hoping to insert the Cybermen as the antagonist in the ‘galactic war’ that had been so significant in the Doctor’s life? They are the enemy he devotes so much of his second life to fighting and the monster he insists must be confronted in Doctor Who and the Cybermen. That would explain why the first Cyberman adventure was a bigger hook than the first regeneration. At some point in the unspecified future, when they finally start unpeeling the events of the Doctor’s past, these villains are going to be a big deal!