Doctor Who Villains, A History: Mondasian Cybermen
By James Aggas
With their imminent return in the finale to series ten, we take a look back at the origins of the earliest Cybermen from Mondas.
The Mondasian Cybermen made their first (and, until now at least, only ) appearance in the First Doctor’s final story, The Tenth Planet. They were very different, not just to current Cybermen, but even to models from their later adopted homeworld of Telos.
They originally came from Earth’s twin planet Mondas. At some point, the planet had drifted off into space, which lead to conditions that, unsurprisingly, made it difficult to survive. With the Mondasians’ lives becoming shorter, they needed to adapt to survive. So they started creating “spare parts” for their bodies that would allow them to live longer and survive.
As you can see so far, their origins are already very different to those of the parallel universe. While the Cybus conversion involved removing the brain and putting it into a mostly cybernetic body, the Mondasians simply replaced their body parts piece by piece. This has never been clearer than with the original design. All too human hands were still clearly visible, and their faces were covered by a cloth than a face-plate.
If I’m honest, to me, this is still the creepiest design for the Cybermen. Yes, it looked much less robotic, but that’s what I liked about it. You could still see the human body parts. It was the faces that creeped me out the most. How they would clearly open their mouths, but the voices that came out did not match up to their lip movements. And those black holes in the mask gave the impression that while some of the human face would be beneath it, the eyes wouldn’t be.
The End of Mondas
In The Tenth Planet, Mondas returned to Earth because it was dying. The Cybermen needed to absorb energy to save their world, and their twin planet seemed to be the best place to get it. They were willing to sacrifice the Earth to ensure that Mondas would survive.
However, it completely backfired. The energy absorbed by Mondas was so great that it simply absorbed too much. The planet exploded as a result, and the Cybermen seemed to die with it. Even Cybermen that had landed on Earth died when their planet was no more.
Of course, the Cybermen had survived, in some form. It was later revealed in the Second Doctor’s era that many had not only left Mondas to find a new world, but they had over time evolved, becoming more outwardly robotic. However, the original design still has its own strengths, and is, along with the design they had in Troughton story The Invasion, one of my favourites.
Spare Parts
I also need to mention the Fifth Doctor audio story Spare Parts. This is a highly regarded story, and for very good reason. I’ll be reviewing it soon. For now, I’ll simply say it fleshes out the Cybermen’s original history on Mondas considerably.
We see them when a great deal of the population was still human, and how the Cybermen simply started as a logical way to survive. It’s a beautifully tragic story of a doomed race. No, more than that: of ordinary humans, exactly like us, making terrible choices to survive, and unintentionally creating a monster.
The upcoming final episodes of series ten, World Enough and Time and The Doctor Falls, seem to be looking at the Cybermen’s origins. I genuinely hope it doesn’t ignore or replace Spare Parts. Even when the audio story served as inspiration for the series 2 episodes, Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel, they ended up being so completely different that they can easily exist in the same canon. Spare Parts is so perfect that you really don’t want Moffat presenting his own version of the Cybermen’s origins that overwrites that. We’ll see what happens on Saturday, anyway.
Next: Review: The Eaters of Light overall good, but hit clunky notes