Hurrah! It’s the return of ‘the blundering Cybermen’ (3).

    Gerry Davis is still banging that drum about the Cybermen being the Doctor’s ‘most dreaded adversaries’ (4) – we all know they’re not – whilst simultaneously making them utterly ridiculous. Their plan doesn’t even make internal sense. Apparently ‘they only want superior intellects’ (5) and yet, in what is at the very earliest the late-21st century (6), their fiendish plan to get them exclusively entails 20th-century knowledge (7). They’re actively courting simpletons. Worse, it turns out that you don’t even have to solve the century-old mathematic riddles – it’s enough to just take everything apart and follow the wiring (8).

    It’s difficult not to think Davis intends the Cybermen as some sort of satire on computer intelligence. Though the Cybermen think of themselves as a triumph of logic (9), they consistently demonstrate faulty reasoning, as when the Cybercontroller declares ‘Everything we decide is carried out’ (10) mere moments after detailing how their previous plans have all been foiled (11). The novelisation even hints that their computerised minds are prone to misreading situations; a fight with Toberman sees a Cyberman’s ‘computer-sensory messages’ judge him as ‘equal in strength’ just before ‘the superior cybernetic power of the Cyberman's arms’ overpower him (12).

    Klieg and the little club of logicians he represents see themselves as the beacon of intelligence (13) and the Cybermen as simply exemplars of strength and power (14), and that seems a fairer appraisal of where the Cybermen’s abilities lie. True, this could equally be intended as a sign of Klieg’s wonky thinking (15), but it’s the Cybermen, not Klieg, who, when cybernising Toberman, decide to focus first on improving his muscles rather than doing anything about his ‘injured powers of concentration’ (16). No wonder it’s the Cybercontroller’s ‘gigantic metal limbs’ that mark him out as ‘the greatest of the Cybermen’ (17) and not anything more cerebral.

    If you accept that everyone in the story, bar the insane fanatic, is wrong and the Cybermen are actually about being blank monoliths of power who, however stupid, will eventually triumph through hydraulically assisted might and sheer attrition, they do have some nice moments: when awakened, they’re so ‘impassive’ they’re likened to ‘a group of space-age statues’ (18); they march about in ‘heavy unison’ (19); the Cybercontroller, when confirming the Doctor’s suspicions about the tombs being a trap, is described as ‘like a god who chooses for the moment to be benign’ (20). Especially evocative, and it’s telling this is from well before any Cybermen actually turn up, is the way the tomb’s upper levels are covered in the Cyberequivalent of cave paintings, portraying events such as Mondas’s doomed clash with Earth (21) and, most intriguingly, ‘an early Cyberman’ (22), ‘encased in metal and plastic’ but with a still visible ‘face behind the helmet, although a blank face’ (23). It’s lovely to hear people talking about ‘Level Nine’ Cybermen (24) and arguing over how early they developed ‘ancillary breathing apparatus’ (25).

    However, for every moment of blank-faced elegance, like, say, their stirring like ‘a slow-motion shadow ballet’ (26), there’s another to dissipate the splendour, like, say, their refreezing ‘like run-down clockwork dolls’ (27). And, just in case that simile actually worked for you, there’s quickly another, such as them waking once more, ‘stiffly, one small jerk at a time, like a chick emerging from an egg’ (28), and another: ‘the last Cybermen clambered down to join the thirty-strong group’ (29). Basically, however well the Cybermen are portrayed at any one moment, there’s bound to come another when Davis’s prose choice jars and the whole mirage is revealed as quite mundane. If it doesn’t happen for you during all their repeated ‘uncurling and stretching’ (30), then it might come when the Cybermats are described as the Cybermen’s ‘pet’ (31), or when the Cybercontroller is likened to a ‘queen bee’ (32), or when smoke makes the Cybermen all ‘confused’ (33), or when, despite being able ‘to communicate together without spoken words’ (34), they turn on their voice boxes to talk ‘together quietly’ (35), or, simply, when one is described as ‘fumbling’ (36). At one point, it weirdly turns out the one trait Davis really thinks sums up the great horror of the computerised future the Cybermen represent is their ‘casualness’ (37).

    If none of the above has you scratching your head, then you’ve also got to make sense of stuff like their command structure, where ‘five head Cybermen’ are required to manage a group of thirty (38), a detail which suggests they’re either very unruly or suffer from a piss-poor individual work ethic. You’ve also got to unravel why the Cybercontroller is so vague about the Cybermen’s retreat to the Telos tombs – he attributes it to their ‘machinery’ stopping and their ‘replacements’ drying up (39) – in a way that doesn’t simply deduce they haven’t a clue what’s going on. You’ve got to remain undistracted by the sudden revelation that they apparently have antennae (40), and that their being ‘hypersensitive’ suggests they unhelpfully detect every passing insect or rustle of leaves. You’ve got to not notice that the manner in which the Controller signals the Doctor to speak, ‘inclining his helmet’ a wonderfully precise and inhuman ‘millimetre’ (41), is actually a really stupid way to grant permission to someone who might not unambiguously be able to register such a slight movement.

    The shame in all this is that, until the

Cybermen do turn up for the second half,

it’s the little lovely touches that dominate

this novelisation. Victoria is introduced

bemoaning 20th-century fashion as ‘children’s

clothes’ and worrying that she now looks like

‘Alice in Wonderland’ (42), which, whilst a

terrible description of what she actually

wears onscreen, or indeed of 60s clothes in

general, is a great nod to when Victoria’s

from (43) and hints at the excitement the

Tardis has in store for her, at least once this

book’s out of the way. The name-dropping

of Faraday is a nice touch too, alongside his

dislike of carrots (44), which sets Victoria up

as rather more involved in her father’s

enthusiasms than ever came across on TV,

possessing a ‘scientific curiosity’ (45) that

explains her putting a Cybermat in her

handbag – she intends to examine it later.

She even gets a lovely extra bit of reflection

on the loss of her father and her separation

from home, on top of her scene with the

Doctor about family, clinging on to her bag

because it ‘contained her whole world right now’ and reminds her of home (46). Jamie, although less well-served, gets some nice moments too, explicitly explaining his tendency to say ‘Oh, aye, that’ (47), reflecting on his fear of the dark (48) and trying to escape what he sees as needlessly dangerous situations (49). He also gets a touch of depth with his realisation that he’s, however inadvertently, responsible for Haydon’s death (50).

    Beyond the regulars, it’s slimmer pickings. Toberman, for example, is no better than on TV, though he is oddly dubbed ‘the great human’ (51) and there is at least a hint that he chooses to keep his own counsel rather than simply being mute (52). Kaftan, however, does better. Through Victoria’s eyes, she’s described as a woman of clear ‘calibre’ (53), ‘pleasant and poised’ (54), ‘lovely […] warm, friendly and even motherly’ (55) with ‘great beauty and self-assurance’ (56). Of course it’s all an act. She is also clearly the brains behind the logicians’ operation, Klieg at one point admitting to himself that his ‘wild chase for power’ is entirely at her instigation (57). This makes her strikingly similar to the Doctor, whose true intentions are well-hidden throughout behind an unthreatening façade – they even share a tactic, the Doctor inquiring if Jamie’s afraid to ensure he does as he’s asked (58) just as Kaftan does with Klieg later when insisting he must confront the Cybermen a second time (59).

    The parallel between Kaftan and the Doctor is interesting. Toby Hadoke, in Running through Corridors, views the manner in which he needlessly facilitates the archaeologists’ access to the tombs as a result of his reckless spirit of adventure (60), but I’ve always thought it felt a bit more like the ‘dark, manipulative Doctor’ (61) Hadoke acknowledges but doesn’t quite embrace. The novelisation seems to lean towards the more sinister reading. This Doctor’s a secretive figure even his friends know little about (62); he clearly knows more than he lets on, not just about the tombs (63) but also about the damage to the orbiter (64), information he never shares even with others so that they might understand the risks they’re facing; there’s even a hint that he’s getting inside other people’s minds (65). Though outwardly affectionate (66), just as Kaftan was friendly and motherly, he seems to have no problem putting others in danger to achieve his ends. When Victoria is trapped in the Cybersarcophagus and Viner races for the Doctor’s help, the Doctor reacts ‘as if he had expected something to happen’ (67) – he’d been using Victoria to test whether Kaftan was the villain he suspected. It turns out Victoria is very lucky to have survived, saved by her small stature, rubber soles and a lot of luck (68).

    This is different to what Dicks has been doing with the character. Thrown in with a bunch of archaeologists straight out of 1922, Dicks’s Doctor, or more specifically his Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee, would have fit right in and taken charge. Troughton never fits in. He’s mysterious rather than unsympathetic – even when his actions are questionable, it invites speculation about his motives rather than just coming across as arrogant or overbearing. To be fair to Dicks, this is an aspect of the character that largely disappears between Troughton and McCoy, so its absence isn’t entirely due to him.

    It’s also worth considering what Dicks gains through his approach. Davis forcefully dissociates the Doctor from his environment, stating, for example, that he ‘came from a time when no one believed women incapable of doing even the toughest and most hazardous jobs’ (69) – the exact opposite of the way Dicks had the Doctor easily adopt Victorian mores in Talons. However, that allowed Talons, to an extent, to offer a critique of those mores. Nothing in Tomb ever confronts the sexism Victoria identifies. Nothing in Tomb, even though it’s published 11 years later than the TV episodes, really confronts the racism that runs through the story either. Everything is skirted around or ignored in favour of focusing on the Cybermen and their dastardly plan, and both are rubbish. Better to drag the Doctor through the dirt than pretend the dirt’s not there at all.