INTERFERENCE

Attack of the Cybermen v. Survivors of the Flux

It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I’ve only just been able to finish writing up this post on the next couple of stories, 1985’s Sixth Doctor adventure Attack of the Cybermen (on which Eric Saward, Paul Woolsey and Ian Levine all seem to have contributed to the writing process to greater or lesser extents), and 2021’s Survivors of the Flux by Chris Chibnall, the fourth instalment of the Thirteenth Doctor’s ‘Flux’ season.

Attack of the Cybermen

I wrote in my last post about the moment in Doctor Who history – Deep Breath, opening the Twelfth Doctor’s era – at which I felt my children had reached ages where the programme held less appeal for them. Attack of the Cybermen, opening the Sixth Doctor’s first full season, could have been an equivalent moment for my own younger self. It was broadcast in January 1985, when I was fourteen years old, the sort of age that a lot of people talk of having drifted away from DW fandom, having ‘discovered girls’ or some such euphemism for just not wanting to be associated with something that was becoming increasingly uncool, or just for kids. On the Saturday of episode one of AOTC, one of the cooler kids from my class at school was visiting my house to play a fixture in our Subbuteo league. I think we had a good day, played the flick-to-kick game then probably kicked a real ball around in the garden, like normal lads. But I recall becoming quite agitated when my dad drove him home at tea-time, as I had to go with them which meant missing a big chunk of the start of programme. This kid, James, was a nice enough guy but I remember him looking at me very oddly, bemused as to why this should annoy me so much. It’s a clear memory of when I first started to realise that being a Doctor Who fan carried with it a degree of embarrassment, because it was something that I should have grown out of. This coincides with a period in which the show became louder, brasher, more sparkly and pantomimish – silly and childish in some instances – which didn’t help. There was a lot about it that I’d started not to like, if I’m honest with myself. But I stuck with it; in fact, if anything I immersed myself deeper into my Doctor Who fixation, collecting books and fanzines and drawing and painting characters and ideas from the show, but it was all within myself, not shared with anyone as healthier fandoms often are.

Why did I stick with it? Some might regard that as an odd thing to do, if the quality of the programme had deteriorated to a level that I could recognise as poor, and association with it among my peers was likely to bring ridicule. I didn’t know anybody who was into Doctor Who in the same way as I was, so I had no obligation to anyone other than myself to carry on watching; in fact, I did have friends who were into other things – football and music, mainly. This would have been as good a time as any to put away this childish thing and close the door. But that wasn’t something that occurred to me to do.

I can’t think of a defining reason right now, but it’s something to explore as other stories from these latter years of the Classic Series come up in my rewatch. All that I can say right now is that Doctor Who was incredibly important to me. It was my thing, my comfort, my obsession, because … because over the years I had made it so. It’s not something I had any intention of casting aside. (There was one point in my life that I did nearly abandon the show – between the penultimate and the last seasons of the Classic Series – but the reasons for that, and the reason I came back to it, will need to wait until the Randomiser brings me a story from that period.)

Having written all that, I’m now feeling quite defiant about those ‘embarrassing eighties’ aspects of the era, so I’ll try to disregard them (the garish clothes and the spangly monsters) for the sake of this review. When you reduce it down, I think there’s quite a good story in here about anger, noble intentions, and the Cybermen’s attempts to retcon history, but it’s cluttered up with a lot of unnecessary stuff such as the Doctor mucking around with the TARDIS’ chameleon circuit, and ambitious attempts to rationalise various inconsistencies in Cybermen continuity, referencing at least three stories from the 1960s that surely can’t have made sense to more than a handful of Doctor Who fans in 1985, let alone the more casual viewer. It worked for me this time round because I only watched 1968’s The Invasion a couple of weeks ago, and – assuming this is the same bunch of Cybermen, crawling around the sewers of London while communicating with a command ship hidden on the dark side of the moon – AOTC answers the question I had then about how they had managed to travel back in time from their previous encounters with the Doctor.

Some of the Cybermen are granted a bit more personality than we’ve seen in previous stories. Michael Kilgarriff’s portly Cyber-Controller has a hubristic authority, David Banks’ Cyber-Leader has a cruelness about him, and the Cyber-Lieutenant played by Brian Orrell seems to be a slightly bitchy favour-currier. Perhaps ‘character types’ is a better description than ‘personalities’. Is it right for the Cybermen – famously emotionless – to have these shades of character? I suppose the absence of emotion doesn’t necessarily mean that one can’t have a unique character, if one doesn’t categorise bossiness, cruelty or obsequity as emotions. We learn in other stories that Cybermen’s emotions are inhibited rather than removed completely, so perhaps these slightly more interesting examples have just had their inhibitors turned down a notch or two.

I also noticed that these Cybermen’s downturned helmet mouths make some of them look a bit like Beaker from The Muppets.

AOTC seems to have been constructed with a number of two-hander scenes: the Doctor and Peri, Cyber-Leader and Cyber-Lieutenant, Lytton and Griffiths, Stratton and Bates, the Doctor and Flast. It’s quite Robert Holmesian in that sense, although I wouldn’t say any of these pairings are as captivating as some of Holmes’ classic partnerships. Stratton and Bates make for an interesting couple as Cyber-‘rejects’, but I think Lytton and Griffiths are the most endearing. Brian Glover’s Griffiths is the most enjoyable to watch – a tough Yorkshire heavy suddenly transported, Dorothy-like, in a pipe organ to a world of diamonds and ice fairies.

The Doctor in this story is exhibiting similar symptoms of post-regeneration trauma to those we saw from the Twelfth Doctor in Deep Breath, the most pronounced being anger and memory loss (including misnaming (and misgendering) Peri as Tegan, Zoe, Susan and Jamie, just as Twelve got Clara confused with Strax). But this is the story in which we start to see Six become a little less abrasive, showing compassion and self-recrimination for the sacrifices made by Flast and Lytton.

Survivors of the Flux

Having watched the complicated middle sections of the Flux season out of order in recent weeks – episode four, followed by three, and now five – things are starting to make a bit more sense. Survivors of the Flux gives us some answers, sort of.

The Doctor meets Awsok again, and learns that she is an incarnation of Tecteun, the Gallifreyan who discovered her and raised her as ‘the Timeless Child’. Tecteun asks the Doctor whether she recognises her eyes, which made me wonder whether the mysterious character played by Claire Bloom in The End of Time, who seemed to communicate a message to the Doctor with a meaningful look, might have been another incarnation of Tecteun, although the Doctor would only have known her as ‘mother’ at that stage. Anyway, in SOTF, Tecteun explains that Division is a sort of celestial intervention agency that exists in the division between our (dying) universe and the next universe, into which they plan to move. Division created the Flux to destroy our universe because it’s been buggered up by the Doctor’s meddling.

Doctor Who, as its title suggests, has always questioned who the Doctor really is, and rather than answer that question SOTF further deepens the mystery. Now it’s not just the audience that doesn’t know who the Doctor is – they don’t know themselves. ‘Everything that you think you know … is a lie,’ as the Master crowed. Not just a lie, though; it’s possible that the Doctor has not lived the life that she was supposed to – her future stolen from her and from another universe or dimension by Tecteun and the Time Lords, a cultural theft nicely paralleled in this episode by Yaz’s unease over stealing the prophetic pot from a Mexican tomb.

‘Morality was always your flaw,’ Tecteun tells the Doctor. ‘Morality is a strength,’ counters the Doctor. This seems to be speaking directly into our current ideological debate, the ‘culture wars’ raging across mainstream and social media. Has the Doctor been too much of a do-gooder for Tecteun and the Time Lords’ liking? A Gallifreyan snowflake? There’s nothing wrong with snowflakes – intricate, beautiful, unique. Like the Woman That Fell to Earth, they fall from the sky bringing whiteness, purity, to the ground. The media, corporate, political and ruling classes don’t like those who act with morality, who show them up and meddle with their plans. They demonise and seek to destroy. This week it might be Greta Thunberg or Prince Harry; last week it may have been Gary Lineker or Jeremy Corbyn; next week, who knows? It’s a story as old as the gospels, and probably older. ‘You inspire, make people question and rise up,’ Tecteun lectures the Doctor. ‘You give them hope. That can be problematic.’

SOTF also tells us a bit about the founding of UNIT on Earth, with various references to past stories involving the paranormal paramilitaries, and attempts to solve some of the UNIT dating problems. UNIT dating seems to be something that interests and irritates a lot of fans, but it’s never really bothered me that much, perhaps because UNIT has never really beeped my beret. All the soldier boy chat and military honour stuff leaves me a bit cold, but this re-casting of it as an organisation infiltrated and manipulated from the first day by the sinister Grand Serpent was an interesting angle, if a little hard to follow on first viewing.

If there’s a problem with this new mythology for the Doctor – Division and the Timeless Child – it’s been in the telling. The details have been drip-fed to us over three seasons, which stretches one’s patience, and it’s only in SOTF that any of it starts to make sense. Even here, the delivery is in that slightly breathless, overcomplicated manner characteristic of Chris Chibnall’s Thirteenth Doctor era, so – for me, anyway – it takes a second or third viewing to really get my head around it all. Once I’ve done that, however, I really like it, and I disagree with those who seem to think this whole Timeless Child narrative should be ignored by fans and future showrunners alike. It’s a great idea, entirely in keeping with Doctor Who’s sixty-year propensity for redefining itself and unfolding new boundaries.

Connections

Both AOTC and SOTF feature a tomb (Mexico, 1904, and Telos, somewhere in the 25th or 26th centuries) and some underground tunnels (London, 1985, and Liverpool, 1904 but also running between other times and places).

The Cybermen in AOTF claim that emotion is a weakness, to which the Doctor counters by demonstrating that righteous anger (his, and Lytton’s) is a strength. Tecteun in SOTF claims that morality is a weakness, to which the Doctor counters that it is a strength.

Both stories go out of their way to rationalise canonical inconsistencies in Doctor Who’s extensive narrative history. AOTC deals with the difficulty of the Cybermen having had two planets of origin in the programme’s past – The Tenth Planet named their homeworld as Mondas, while The Tomb of the Cybermen presented it as Telos. SOTF attaches some hard and fast dates to the development of UNIT – that it was formed in 1958, and that Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart was working there as a young colonel in 1967. These UNIT dates don’t really resolve anything, rather they just come down on a particular side of a self-erected fence, contradicting some of what has gone before in some of the other stories. But I don’t really mind about any of this. Contradictory canon has never really been a problem for me; real life is so full of mystery and contradiction that this sort of thing almost makes Doctor Who seem more real to me.

In any case, it seems from both stories that fixed points in time are subject to change. In AOTC, the Cybermen have diverted the course of Halley’s Comet to crash into the Earth, so that the destruction of Mondas as seen in The Tenth Planet will never happen. In SOTC, Yaz, Dan and Jericho have also learned (in 1904) from an ancient prophecy that the Earth is to be destroyed in the future (they have a date, 5 December, but not a year; coincidentally (or not) Mondas was destroyed in December of the Earth year 1986). ‘You can’t change the future,’ they are warned by an agent of the Grand Serpent, and the Sixth Doctor in AOTC protest that the Cybermen cannot change the laws of time. But it appears that the threat is sufficiently real in both stories for our heroes to have to try and stop it.

Which brings us to the theme of celestial interference. In AOTC the Doctor realises that the Time Lords have manipulated him against his will to stop the Cybermen’s plans. In SOTF, it is revealed that Division constantly send out agents (including the Doctor in the distant past, and various Weeping Angels) to ‘guide and shape events’ across space and time. It’s acknowledged in both stories that the Doctor is also a meddler, but they seem to prefer to act independently rather than as a hand of either the Time Lords or Division.