Of all the shocking twists and revelations made in the last season finale, the penultimate Moffat ep, none have hit quite as hard as the devastating declaration that
The Worldshapers is now canonical.
It might seem a trivial thing, given NuWho was acknowledging
DWM comic strip as early as
The Long Game (with kronkburgers from
The Iron Legion sold on Satellite 5) and incredibly-blatantly in
Time Heist (where Abslom Daak and Harma the Ice Warrior appear in Psi's records of criminal masterminds). Yeah, the whole
New Adventure bit is as much a grey area as ever, but every strip prior to Benny with the exception of
Train-Flight (which directly contradicts School Reunion by having Sarah get all that closure twenty years early) easily slide into continuity. Sharon from Blackcastle? Any evidence she
didn't travel with the Fourth Doctor and K9 while Romana was down the shops? Colin Baker certainly considers Frobisher his companion and he's appeared in BF along with Shayde, Izzy and Murial Frost.
So, yeah, it was pretty much unspoken that the Sixth Doctor comic strips happened. Some time after Nekros but before Thoros Beta, the Doctor dumped Peri's ass in New York and teamed up with a whifferdill, came back for her and they had lots of wacky adventures (and makeovers) before the TV show came back. Frobisher was left literally out in the snow - suddenly he was the solo-sidekick to Sylvester McCoy, and the Seventh Doctor was more capable than the mad clown the whifferdill worked best with.
No problem. It fits. (Well, not
The Age of Chaos, anyway, but that's not technically a
DWM comic strip.)
But
The Worldshapers?
OK. Let's look at this with an academic perspective.
1. Origins
The Worldshapers was the last regular comic strip appearance for the Sixth Doctor in
DWM. Written by Grant Morrisson and John Ridgeway, the three-part adventure was printed in issues 127 to 129 from July to September 1987. The final installment came out as Season 24 began and the next issue saw
DWM modified with logos, typefaces and comic strip embracing the Seventh Doctor in the tradition that the magazine focusing on the present rather than the past. However much he had been loved and cherished, the Sixth Doctor and his era which had been living on borrowed time for the last six months.
Due to the notorious behind-the-scenes chaos of Season 23,
DWM had been unable to maintain its usual relationship with the production team in regards to the comic strip. Ideally they would have started using Bonnie Langford's Mel in the comics to accompany the on-screen adventures, but with no guarantee there would be a Season 24 or that Mel would return, the strip continued to use Peri and Frobisher in their "hiatus" format - albeit often keeping them away from the Doctor and tucked away in separate subplots while he carried on either alone (
The Gift) or with a one-off surrogate companion (
Profits of Doom).
There's some evidence that the magazine was intending to sort that out: the script for
A Cold Day in Hell, the story scheduled for the traditional slot of accompanying the new season, was set after
Trial of a Time Lord and thus had written out Peri, and dealt with Frobisher as well before introducing a new companion called Olla. Ultimately, the Doctor would be changed to the Seventh but the dialogue was unchanged. With six month's warning of a new incarnation, it was clear the story between
The Gift and
A Cold Day in Hell would be the last where Colin Baker's Doctor was still the current version.
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| The original introduction to the Sixth Doctor's final adventure. |
It seems likely therefore that
The Worldshapers was from an early stage meant as the Sixth Doctor's finale. The magazine chose Grant Morrison based on the fact his strip
Changes the previous year had proved both memorable and popular. The story also echoes
The Two Doctors in that it is a three-part epic where the Sixth Doctor and Peri team up with Jamie and, sharing the Time Lords' concern about unauthorized time experiments investigate an attempt to force-evolve a lower species into a more sophisticated one that involves a fan-favorite monster as an extended cameo. It also recalls
Slipback, where again a eugenics-obsessed enemy eager to rewrite history and evolution seemingly outwits the Doctor and succeeds in their plans, with the Time Lords allowing this with a view to the big picture. The last installment, with a monster-patrolled quarry and the Doctor penetrating a secret underground vault containing a vast domed object that will rewrite evolution and known history unless a heroic sacrifice destroys it would also echo into
Time And The Rani showing it was certainly part of the zeitgeist.
There are also plenty of moments evoking other Sixth Doctor tales. Apart from the oft-motif of the Doctor visiting a world he has been to before (like Joconda, Telos, Karfel) or deliberately seeking out an old friend (such as Azmael, Dastari, Stengos, Travers), we have a Time Lord perishing after their thirteenth incarnation, Cybermen attempting to master time technology, non-human aliens obsessed with profit over morality, breaking into another TARDIS, visits to historical Scotland, people being aged to death by accelerated time, a booby-trapped inner sanctum and a popular companion senselessly destroyed thanks to the aloofness of the Time Lords. The comic strip themselves are referenced with the Cybermen being transformed into halfway state by higher powers (
Revelation), Maxilla's race resemble the Akkers (
Polly the Glot), Frobisher being effected by time distortion (
Funhouse), the Doctor inviting a bearded tramp-like character aboard the TARDIS who turns out to be good with a claymore (
Kane's Story), the return of a one-off TV monster (like the Draconians in
War Game) and the Doctor caught up in a calamity that creates his own history (
Time Bomb). As such, this
The Worldshapers is appropriately-enough focused on the past.
2. Plot
Like the majority of DWM comic strips since 1985, each episode is a reasonably self-contained mini-stories following one long narrative.
The story begins on Marinus "the water world" which has been fitted with a worldshaper machine to terraform it to order. Although worldshapers are only to be used on uninhabited planets, the Voord have captured this unit and are attempting to use its time-acceleration properties to evolve themselves into more powerful life-forms. However, these experiments are read as malfunctions by the company providing the worldshapers and also drawn the attention of the Time Lords.
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| Events on Marinus draw the interest of the Time Lords. |
The High Council send their agent to investigate and he arrives on one of the waterways to be immediately ambushed by the Voord who use time-acceleration to age the Time Lord to death throughout his regeneration cycle and he collapses before he can retreat to his TARDIS. Said TARDIS sends out an SOS which the Doctor picks up in his own ship and immediately goes to investigate.
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| The last words of a Time Lord prove unhelpfully cryptic. |
No sooner has he realized where they are and who is calling for help, the Doctor finds the dying Time Lord who manages to gasp out the words "Planet 14" before expiring. The accelerated time dissolves the Time Lord's corpse and causes Peri's hair and nails to start growing faster. Having learned of the Time Lord's mission to Marinus, the Doctor sends the dead man's TARDIS back to Gallifrey and gets his friends to the safety of their own ship. The Doctor remembers something about "Planet 14" from his second incarnation, which means he was almost certainly with Jamie at the time. Thus, they set course for Scotland 1746 to find his friend to ask him what he knows (as Jamie was able to resist the Time Lords' mind-wipe.)
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| The Doctor's reunion with his friend does not go according to plan. |
No sooner have the TARDISes left the waterways then the worldshaper maintenance team of Maxilla and Deedrun who are here, they believe, to fix a malfunctioning machine. They instead encounter the Voord and discover their plan. However, the worldshaper - not programmed to be used as a selective weapon - overloads in a time explosion. Maxilla, partially-protected by his time shield belt, is horribly aged but nonetheless survives the shockwave which turns Marinus into a dry, barren rocky world. The Voord meanwhile have undergone thousands of years of accelerated evolution and are now deformed cyborgs of various stages, becoming proto-Cybermen. Maxilla flees across the wastelands and spends the next week trying to escape the roaming Cyber-Voord.
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| Maxilla reveals the fate of Marinus and its inhabitants. |
Meanwhile, the TARDIS arrives in Scotland in 1786 - forty years too late. Left on his own in one time and place with no one believing his fanciful tales, "Mad" Jamie is now a heartbroken hermit who shuns all contact. Even so, he remembers the Sixth Doctor and Peri from Seville and eagerly wants to help and resume his travels in the TARDIS. When questioned about "Planet 14", Jamie only remembers hearing of it once during the battle between UNIT and the Cybermen when the Cyber Controller recognized the Second Doctor and Jamie, claiming it had met them before on said planet.
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| The results of a malfunctioning worldshaper on an ocean planet. |
Taking Jamie with them, they return to Marinus and find it ruined by the time explosion. They save Maxilla from the Cyber-Voord and learn what is happening. Not prepared to leave the Cyber-Voord with the worldshaper as a weapon, the Doctor decides to sneak into the base and sabotage it with Maxilla's help. He takes Jamie with him, knowing this encounter will be why the Cybermen recognize them in the future.
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| The Doctor, Jamie and Maxilla have an appointment with destiny. |
However, the worldshaper is both protected by a force-field and armed guard. Maxilla is gunned down and the leader of the Cyber-Voord orders the remaining "fleshmen" to be executed. The Doctor and Jamie overpower the guards and then Jamie charges the force-field. He manages to break through despite it nearly killing him, and then stabs the worldshaper with his claymore to destroy it. Though Jamie succeeds in that, it also triggers a final time explosion. The Doctor flees back to the safety of the TARDIS as Marinus is transformed into a completely unrecognizable planet and Jamie and any Voord in the vicinity are aged to death.
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| Jamie destroys the worldshaper and himself - and in doing so creates the Cybermen. |
The TARDIS now sits in a valley with other TARDISes and Time Lords present. The surviving Voord are now fully-evolved into Cybermen and the Time Lords have the chance to wipe them out in their cradle, but they refuse and order the Doctor and his friends to leave. The Time Lords in fact are on Marinus - or Mondas as it has become - to ensure the Cybermen have been created because, although they will cause chaos and destruction for millions of years, they will ultimately evolve to become a benevolent race of pure intelligence and bring a new era of peace to the universe.
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| The Time Lords arrive to supervise the dawn of the Cybermen. |
3. Response
The Worldshapers was well-received at the time. Although most correspondence was understandably about the introduction of Sylvester McCoy and the merits of his first season, every letter mentioning the story praised it. Future-fan-alumni Nick Walters, Lawrence Conquest and Mark Thompson considering it one of the best and adoring both the nostalgic and new material, as well as detractors of Frobisher glad the penguin was sidelined. It won the title for best comic strip in the following year's poll with 35% of the vote (the combined score for
The Gift and
Profits of Doom was 8% and the remaining went to
A Cold Day in Hell).
It was summarized in the June 1988 poll by David Wills as "the best strip to date" and true to spirit of the TV show with "really excellent drama, pathos, irony, comedy and the reintroduction of two old favorites in a stunningly original way". It was held up as a rare example of a comic strip that worked and for the 25th Anniversary comic
Planet of the Dead, Jamie, Peri and Frobisher returned as companions that had respectively been killed, maybe-killed and recently departed.
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| The Seventh Doctor is tormented by those he's lost - including Jamie, Peri and Frobisher. |
However, the story was eventually reappraised and found rather wanting. In 2002, the Stripping Down website declared "a fanboy-type affair which needlessly kills off one of the Doctors best ever companions and does weird things to the Cybermen and established history that should never have been done". In 2003's
The Complete Sixth Doctor Special, current comic
supremo Scott Grey deemed it "sadly lumbered with an overly-complicated,
continuity-laden storyline" which "proudly [exposes Grant Morrison's]
anorak" in "a story hopelessly tangled in the TV series' history". The same year Richard Radcliffe conceded it was "not quite the epic it tries to be", while the next saw Finn Clark taking the view that the story whatever its merits was "unreadable for fanwank-sensitised modern readers" yet "the doom-laden capstone to the Colin Baker era that
Trial of a Time Lord wasn't."
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| The second volume of Sixth Doctor DWM comic strips. |
Doctor Who Magazine itself stood in judgement of the reprinted story in 2008's issue 398 where reviewer Gary Gillat bluntly stated: "
The World Shapers was much admired back in the day, but only because it's a comic strip for people who don't like comic strips. Wit and invention are shouldered aside to make room for 24 pages of arseing-about with
Doctor Who continuity. There are flashbacks to
The Keys of Marinus and
The Invasion. Jamie McCrimmon appears an old man and dies saving the Doctor. The Voord turn out to be ancestors of the Cybermen... Now, if you feel a little aroused at the thought of all that, then it's time to take a cold bath followed by a long, hard look at your life. Oh, and please stop writing letters to the BBC demanding that Paul McGann and Kamelion be brought back to fight the Time War."
The anthology led blogger Kippy Woo to describe the story's plot as "fairly simple in structure [but] there's a dense script to wade through, one that sags under the weight of its often-mistaken continuity" and "very much style over substance. It ultimately demands perhaps a bit too much goodwill and suspension of disbelief to be truly satisfying." David E Ford also was unimpressed by the contrived nature of the narrative: "The 'important' bits are handled with a
peremptoriness that borders on the comical. When the Doctor and Jamie
finally confront the highly evolved Voord assassins, the "battle" is dispensed with in a mere
anticlimactic panel."
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| The Cyber-Voord fail to live up to the reputation of either race. |
The CultBox website marvelled at "such lack of respect" to the Cybermen and Jamie, adding "we can safely assume that nobody considers this to be canonical". The last comment on it was in 2015 when Noah Blatt who found that, apart from the improved persona of the Sixth Doctor (hardly unique to that particular story), it was as dire as his TV era and full of material that would put off most audiences. Yet at the same time it pressed buttons no honest fan could deny.
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| IDW's colourized reprint of The Worldshapers |
Certainly the idea that the Voord and the Cybermen were one and the same did not gain
any recognition in organized fandom. Some ten years later the events of
The Worldshapers (or
The World Shapers as it was now known) was held as one of the more ridiculous twists of canon which fandom casually ignored and never mentioned. 1996's 30th Cyberman anniversary DWM special did not mention the Voord connection once, nor did their 35th anniversary special. The special end-page comic strip
The Cybermen ignored the connection with the Voord entirely. The archive for
The Keys of Marinus in issue 310 merited the strip worthy of a single sentence in a box-out referring to other appearances by the Voord, as noteworthy as the story's novelization or tie-in sweet cigarettes story.
When Big Finish commissioned the origin story
Spare Parts from Marc Platt, he was more worried about fitting with Kit Peddler's
Genesis of the Cybermen pitch than an actual published comic strip and nor did anyone complain about it. Similarly
Domain of the Voord deliberately ignored the comic strip and the author Andrew Smith mocked the idea in the extras, but not quite so viciously as Lawrence Miles'
Interference which parodied the idea claiming that the Voord must have evolved into his own enemy the Remote on the spurious reason they wore antennae on their heads. Furthermore it was established that Jamie McCrimmon lived a happy, amnesiac life in
The Companion Chronicles and his death in
The Worldshapers was outright ignored - especially when the Sixth Doctor seeks him out once more in the 2010 trilogy facing Cybermen.
Doctor Who and Philosophy by
Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka do mention the story, but are less interested in the Cybermen once being Voord but more the idea they will ultimately become peaceful and friendly - with their "mission of mercy" finally being recognized as such by the rest of the universe.
Until its repeated references in
The Doctor Falls - a moment of fan-baiting only-slightly-less obvious than the repeated "Dr. Who" jokes in the previous episode -
The Worldshapers was either forgotten or overlooked. Leaving aside the continuity issues, it is undoubtedly has merit - despite Tim Perkin's ugly inking, John Ridgeway relishes in the freedom Morrison gives him to depict landscapes and aliens as well as visual set pieces such as the Voord stalking the TARDIS crew or the Time Lords walking off into the sunset, and the splash-page of the TARDIS landing on a dried-out storm-wracked Marinus is rightly impressive. The Cyber-Vood, each one at a different state of metamorphosis, are as eerie and impressive as the "pretentious" modern TARDISes seemingly built of crystal. The final climax as Marinus is transformed forever around the TARDIS is a marvel of visual storytelling.
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| Frobisher and Peri enjoy one last adventure together. |
As in
Changes, Morrison gives some impressive characterization to the regulars. The Sixth Doctor is brusque and rude in an emergency, but takes time to show compassion and forgiveness to those in need, before shutting off his anger following Jamie's death. Peri is nicely-credible, shaken at seeing her friend old and emotionally-destroyed while Frobisher's uncharacteristic rage at the news of the worldshapers helps sell the incredible danger this technology poses. As with
The Neutron Knights and
The Moderator, the last DWM story of a given Doctor shows them out of their depth and carried away by outside forces, with the Doctor fleeing an unwinnable battle (and a massive explosion) in the TARDIS to contemplate the loss of a good man's life and with an uncertain future. Finally, the title is a clever pun as it refers to the Time Lords rather than the worldshaper machine or the Cyber-Voord.
4. Plot-holes
The Worldshapers buckles under Morrison's apparent goals - to do a sequel to
The Keys of Marinus, a prequel to
The Invasion (in particular Planet 14), a Genesis of the Cyberman plot, a post-script to Jamie's adventures, as well as an epic finale to the Six/Peri/Frobisher lineup. Any one would have been enough to fill the three-part adventure, but doing all of them leads to a spectacular failure to each one seemingly down to Grant Morrison's ignorance of the continuity he was to explore.
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| The Voord-occupied water planet of Kandalinga. |
Firstly, Morrison doesn't appear to have seen or researched
The Keys to Marinus in any detail. Everything seen in
The Worldshapers comes not from the fifth television serial but the Annual story
The Fishmen of Kandalinga, itself a sequel to
Marinus. The depiction of an ocean planet crisscrossed with concrete roads and patrolled by Voord fits Kandalinga rather than Marinus, as do the idea of the Voord hiding in the shadows working on magical technology to make themselves the supreme fighting force. Also is the idea that the Voord are cyborgs. Alas,
Fishmen was not set on Marinus but featured the Voord retreating to another planet, only to be thrown out yet again. The Marinus of
The Worldshapers is inexplicably deserted, lacking any of the acid seas, living jungles or freezing tundra one might expect. In short, anyone who might have been in a position to appreciate a Marinus sequel would have been the most likely to be annoyed by the inaccuracies - especially when DWM did a detailed archive of the story two years later.
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| The Voord-occupied water planet of Marinus. |
Secondly, there is the desire to resolve the mystery of Planet 14 which had been mentioned enough times in the magazine's Matrix Data Bank for even a casual fan to notice: in
The Invasion, the Cybermen recognize the Second Doctor and Jamie from Planet 14 in an adventure not shown on TV. Morrison has chosen to show that adventure, but has made no attempt to understand the context. He seems instead to have confused that moment with one in
The Tomb of the Cybermen (or more likely, its novelization) where the Cyber Controller confronts the Doctor and states it recognizes him from a previous encounter (and, in the book, includes Jamie as well). The end result is trying to explain a completely fictitious continuity reference that, again, would have been corrected with basic research.
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| When The Invasion was released on BBC video, this scene wasn't included... |
No such scene occurs in
The Invasion. The Doctor and Jamie are never in the sewers together, the Brigadier never goes down them, and there is no moment when a Cyberman recognizes them. Indeed, the Cyber Controller doesn't appear in the story at all. In actual fact, Tobias Vaughn shows black and white photos of the Doctor and Jamie to the Cyber-Planner who identifies them from an encounter on Planet 14 but this information never reaches the Doctor and Jamie themselves. It's certainly not the nagging mystery that has apparently been plaguing them both ever since. Again, the story struggles to fix continuity issues that never actually happened and, like Marinus, taps into stories that most of the audience wouldn't have seen but only vaguely read about. It's unsurprising nowadays when both
Marinus and
The Invasion are easily viewable online or wikipedia, such pointless fanwank is unwelcome.
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| This version of events was not endorsed by David Banks. |
The idea of a Genesis of the Cybermen story is, of course, as popular now as ever. Indeed,
The Worldshapers came out only two years after Gerry Davis himself had submitted such a plot to JNT for television. It's interesting to note that, bar their first scene in
The Tenth Planet, the television series had made no attempt to explain just how or why the Cybermen had been created - only the mandatory
Creation of the Cybermen prologue in Target novels gave any rationale, that they were the end result of experiments to achieve immortality. So while Morrison can be forgiven for not looking to the Cybermen's origins as a quest for survival or medical horror, we don't actually get any origin for them. Here, the Voord are transformed from black rubber cyborgs into silver metal cyborgs with apparently no alteration to their mindset, culture or aims. The changes appear to be entirely cosmetic; there is no explanation for why the Voord were the way they were originally and ultimately nothing more than a rebranding and costume change occur - unlike
The Heroes' Story which saw a much more obvious forebear in the Skeletoids, cyborg warriors who recruited prisoners to expand their numbers. Had the Skeletoids been the proto-Cybermen it would have made total sense. Here, there seems to be some kind of agenda to make sure the Cybermen make an appearance in
Doctor Who's first season in a story still in the archives - and meaning that Terry Nation created both the show's signature monsters.
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| Kane's Story - a better genesis of the Cybermen than The Worldshapers? |
Finally there is the revision of Jamie's fate. While the idea of Jamie losing his memories and being reduced to the violent, ignorant Scot of his first appearance is upsetting, Morrison's revision don't improve his lot: having his memories destroys Jamie's life and leaves him bitter, lonely and ultimately suicidal. It's not exactly giving the character a happy ending, and even his sacrifice is shown to be stupid and self-defeating. He merely completes the Cybermen's evolution, condemning the universe to five million years of bloodshed and nearly killing his friends in the process. He thus dies an ignorant savage making things worse after an unpleasant life. The contrivance of accidentally skipping forty years of Jamie's life makes little difference to the plot; had Jamie been aged by the world-shaper on Marinus, it would have explained his desire to die (not having a future to enjoy) and been more visible evidence of time acceleration than the wrinkled Maxilla. One might think aging Jamie was an excuse not to have to get Frazer Hines' likeness, but the artwork is shockingly poor as it is that readers thought Peri looked more like Mel.
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| That's just tempting fate, that is. |
Even on its own terms,
The Worldshapers is full of inconsistencies. Why are the Time Lords ignorant of the fact a world-shaper machine is causing the problems on Marinus when there are dozens of the things in this part of history, fifteen of which are known to be malfunctioning? Why send a Time Lord on his last life with no protection to face time acceleration? Why are people safe from the world-shaper inside the Doctor's old TARDIS but not the newer model, even when its doors are closed? Why does the dying Time Lord gasp out the words "Planet 14" - how can that information help anyone?
Why is Marinus referred to as Planet 14 anyway? It's simply where the fourteenth world-shaper Maxilla and Deedrun have fixed - had they gone in the other direction, would it be Planet 2? It makes no sense for this arbitrary term to be used by the Time Lord or the Cybermen, who would surely call the planet by its name - and why would Marinus be renamed Mondas?
True Jamie might have problems adjusting to life in Scotland after the TARDIS but why did he expect anyone to believe his stories of being a time space traveler when as far as everyone knew, he hadn't been gone an afternoon? Wouldn't all this blabbery of future events risk altering history? At the very least, folk in that village would have known Mad Jamie to have uncanny foresight of future events? Wouldn't Kursty and the Laird, et all, have at least confirmed his story about a man called the Doctor helping them?
The world shaper is never really explained - it's supposed to terraform planets but all it does is fast-forward through time, so why does aging the planet a million years cause the oceans to vanish? Why do the Voord evolve into Cybermen but anyone else just age to death? Shouldn't Maxilla be a different species after his exposure? Just what exactly causes Maxilla to die - is he shot in the back or does he hit the force field? How does Jamie get through the force field? Why doesn't the Doctor stop him? Why do the Time Lords arrive in force on Mondas when they don't actually want to do anything?
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| The more you think about it, the worse it gets. |
5. Continuity
Reconciling
The Worldshapers with the rest of
Doctor Who is immensely difficult if we take everything at face value. It would be easy to just ignore the story until the following exchange was made on TV:
MISSY: Exciting, isn't it? Watching the Cybermen getting
started.
DOCTOR: They always get started. They happen anywhere there's people. Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus...
If the Doctor is not referring to the events of this story, then Moffat certainly is. However, he notes Mondas as separate to Planet 14 and Marinus, which contradicts the Doctor's speech at the end of the story:
DOCTOR: Marinus, Planet 14, has become Mondas, the home of the Cybermen.
However, it's worth noting that this declaration is made after the Doctor has just seen one of his best friends die pointlessly in agony. He's emotional, angry and could be speaking in terms of metaphors - ie, by becoming a planet full of Cybermen, Marinus has lost any of its original identity and become a Cyber-home world. It might as well be Mondas, even though it's not Earth's long-lost twin. Also, the Time Lord neither confirm or deny the world they are standing on is called Mondas.
If we look back at
The Two Doctors, there is a sequence worth noting as the Sixth Doctor - hearing that his second incarnation has perished, comes to the conclusion that the universe is about to be destroyed in a temporal paradox and goes on about it at length. Except that never happened, and there was no reason other than the Doctor's paranoia to suggest it at all. Could this be the same thing?
Given Marinus is only called Planet 14 by Maxilla, and there's no reason for anyone else to use that term, it could just be a coincidence. In short, the planet where the Cybermen met the Second Doctor and Jamie was Planet 14 but has nothing to do with Marinus. The dying Time Lord's mention of it could be "What is happening here is what happened on Planet 14, parallel evolution of the Cybermen."
However, the Doctor only hears "Planet 14" and jumps to the wrong conclusion. Jamie, having gone through two mindwipes and now in his seventies, gives a very distorted account of a Cyber Controller mentioning them and again the Doctor assumes this is all significant and not actually a total red herring. In short, everything the Doctor tells us about this being the reason the Cybermen in The Invasion remember them from Planet 14 is entirely wrong. His discussion of this is even mocked by the Cyber-Voord themselves.
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| The Cybermen of Marinus have nothing to do with Tobias Vaughn. |
Another thing to bear in mind is that if this was the proper original genesis of the Cybermen it would have to have happened thousands of years before the twentieth century - yet Frobisher, a native of the 82nd Century, knows all about the worldshapers. Either they take a long time to come back into fashion after this, or the sequences on Marinus occur in the far future.
In
The Doctor Falls, the Doctor describes Marinus as one of the origins of the Cybermen. So if we chalk the Doctor's Planet 14 theory to a mistake, and his later speech as over-emotion, we have Marinus in the 82nd Century transformed into a New Mondas and a brand new species of Cybermen created from the Voord. Hence they don't evolve into the bandage-and-calliper type seen in
The Tenth Planet, but appear more like the ones in
Nightmare in Silver. It also explains the Doctor's desire to wipe them out, as he is not changing the past but altering the future. Given in 1987 the Cybermen were considered to have met their final end in
Attack of the Cybermen, the Time Lords would be eager for this new strain to exist to ensure the future they have seen.
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| These Time Lords were likely the first against the wall when the revolution came. |
So that only leaves poor Jamie's fate. Big Finish's
The Glorious Revolution contradicts
The Worldshapers quite clearly: Jamie is alive and well and living as a farmer in Scotland, totally amnesiac of his adventures aboard the TARDIS. Yet The Glorious Revolution is in the same range as Peri and the Piscon Paradox, which reveals that after Peri was killed on Thoros Beta the Time Lords altered history to save her life and - eventually - erased her memories and returned her to Earth to live out her life. This was due to various factions of Time Lords and their powerplays each making sure they weren't the ones that would gain the Doctor's ire for killing his companion. Add to whatever timey-wimey weirdness ensues when you're at ground zero of an exploding time wave and it's not hard to imagine Jamie surviving somehow. After observing his fate on Marinus, the Time Lords would have good reason to wipe his memory properly this time and allow him to live a happy life on Earth...
...which is exactly his fate, as
The Glorious Revolution shows.
So, there we are. The Cyber-Voord of Marinus are resolved, Jamie's horrible fate is undone.
The Worldshapers ends with the Doctor at loggerheads with the Time Lords, angry and depressed. It's established in
A Cold Day in Hell that shortly after this story, Frobisher went off on his own for a while and the Doctor and Peri meanwhile got caught up with events on Thoros Beta. The Doctor's determination to stop an advanced culture manipulating the destinies of a lesser species seems like a reference to this very encounter. Of course, the Doctor seems very cheerful in
MindWarp (assuming that we can trust it) but perhaps we can think the Doctor and Peri returned to Jamie's village with the intent to telling them Mad Jamie had died only to discover Sane Jamie alive and happy and with no clue who they were.
It'd be enough to put a spring in the Doctor's step, and make him even more determined to stop Sil - plus he'd be totally confident that he wouldn't get his companion killed in a Time Lord trap this time...
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| Frobisher is the only regular character left following the reformat in DWM # 130 |
