First published 19 February 1976*, between The Seeds of Doom Parts Three and Four

 *http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Tenth_Planet_(novelisation) 

"She shrank back, and screamed slightly, as his helmet almost brushed her face"

This one doesn’t come together as well as Doctor Who and the Cybermen. There’s a hint that Davis might have now watched the series since he left, with attempts at Hinchcliffe-style Who coming in the shape of ‘stronger’ language (as http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Tenth_Planet_(novelisation) puts it), most notably the remarkably unnecessarily gruesome death of a soldier: ‘His sightless eyes gazed up; his head—the neck completely shattered—lolled at a grotesque angle’. Unfortunately, these moments are more jarring than atmospheric as Davis demonstrates little sense of being in control of his prose.

Chief among the problems is the way in which he’ll never let his vision of the ruthless, emotion-purged horror of the Cybermen get in the way of using the first adjective that comes into his head, whether that be the way ‘The first of the Cybermen stepped gingerly down into the Polar snows’ (an adjective so at the front of his mind he uses it four other times) or the way that, faced with Cybergun-wielding soldiers, they ‘turned and ran wildly through the snow back towards their waiting spacecraft’ (six more uses, one of those being another insight into Cyberstrategy).

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Even aside from the colourful language, Davis’s Cybermen are more batshit crazy than last time. There’s the way they’re so devoted to entering the base in disguise that they don not just the parkas but the ‘thick leggings’ of the men they kill; the way in which they seemingly can’t tell the difference between conquering the Earth and conquering an office block in Geneva; and the way in which their first reaction to learning from Polly that she’ll die in the cold is to knock her out, despite the fact she’s securely tied and not trying to escape, and then wonder what temperature is necessary to keep her alive.

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Even one of the best scenes to feature them, when Ben disarms one and then is compelled to kill it, is undermined by the way Davis can’t quite decide what being emotionless means. What’s nice about the scene is the way Ben is forced to confront the fact that taking the gun means he has to be willing to use it. He starts off almost chummily assuming the gun gives him control of the situation, calling the Cyberman ‘mate’ and informing it he’s ‘giving the orders now’; once the Cyberman ignores the change in circumstances, Ben’s reduced to almost begging it to stop, screaming a ‘warning’ and insisting ‘I’ll fire!’; as the Cyberman still keeps coming, it’s Ben who is ‘trapped’ with ‘no alternative’ but to fire, unable to look as he does it and ‘horrified’ afterwards.

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What’s less clear is exactly what the Cybermotive for ‘inexorably’ advancing on Ben is. Presumably, it’s meant to mirror the scene when the Cybermen first arrive at the base (reproduced on the back cover) where they ignore the Sergeant’s warning that he’ll ‘open fire’ and continue ‘inexorably’ towards the soldiers. The point there, though, was that conventional weapons have no effect on the Cybermen; this Cyberman must know he’s vulnerable to his own Cybergun.

It all boils down to what’s going on in the 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 the Cyberadvance is a calculated gamble that either Ben will choose not to shoot or that the Cyberman can deliver its’ death blow’ before the shot comes. However, such a gamble contradicts the later statement that the Cybermen ‘only interested in survival’ – it’s difficult to square such a blatant disregard for self-preservation with a race who value survival above all else.

The alternative reading is that the moment’s pause is a reflection of the Cyberman’s inability to process the situation – its lack of emotions means it cannot be threatened, either because the only reason it can deduce for Ben not having already shot is that he can’t operate the weapon or because its lack of fear makes it unresponsive to Ben’s warnings. I’d argue the latter is still countered by the Cybermen’s self-preservation instincts, which leaves just the idea that Cybermen cannot understand human actions, backed up by their inability to ‘under-stand… feelings’.

However, this is also unconvincing, partly because they seem to immediately understand when offered the list ‘Love, pride, hate... fear’, words which should presumably be equally meaningless to them, and partly because they attempt to employ psychology against the people of the base at least twice. Towards the end, they ‘take a hostage’ in order to ensure the base does as they demand, 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. Clearly, it thinks humans ‘learn’ best from visual stimulae.

The Cybermen aren’t the only thing that’s nuts – their planet is too. No explanation is ever forthcoming as to why its demise leads to the deaths of its inhabitants. It’s implied that the Cybermen are somehow connected with their planet as their deaths precisely mimic each other’s, both ‘melting’ and suffering ‘cracks’ across their surface, but not how. Mind you, maybe Davis doesn’t think any explanation’s necessary because it looks like that’s how he thinks Earth works too, Mondas’s absorption of its energy projected to leave it ‘completely exhausted’ so that ‘nothing will work—light, power, engines, planes, ships!’. Does he think energy is a mystical lifeforce imbued by planets? I suppose that might make Mondas and the Cybermen some sort of mythical parodic horror where machinery has perverted a fundamental force of the universe.

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I’d have more faith in that if everything else weren’t equally wonky. The Z-bomb, to be fair, is as ludicrous in the broadcast episodes as it is in the novelisation – though I’m not sure they ever say on TV that its destructive power relies on its launch being ‘rightly timed’, they do express the remarkable fear that it might turn Mondas ‘into a sun’. But Davis manages to go a step further by stating that, on its destruction, Mondas is ‘turned into a super-nova’ anyway – presumably because he thinks that’s what happens when a planet dies (so the Z-bomb actually had nothing do with that – it does just ‘split’ planets open). What he thinks a supernova is, meanwhile, is the conversion of rock into ‘A huge shifting amoeba-like corona of gas’ which disperses in ‘half an hour’ to ‘the far corners of the universe’, whilst also glowing and spinning and whizzing away.

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Okay, maybe that was a less implausible vision of planet deaths and a less baffling misunderstanding of the term supernova in 1976? Maybe the concepts weren’t quite general knowledge 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. And they’re doing it because the best way they have to establish their position is to locate Mars (even though they’re in orbit and so travelling very fast and not in a straight line and could just look out of the window at Earth). In 1976. That’s four years after the last Apollo mission.

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To be fair to Davis for a bit, he does a nice line in how the Cybermen’s dedication to logic means their intentions are utterly transparent and predictable. Twice in quick succession, the Doctor is able to evaluate the situation from Cyberactions, deducing that ‘Mondas itself is in far greater danger’ from the Cyberpresence on Earth and that they plan ‘the destruction of Earth’ from their plans to evacuate.

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He’s also very good at showing what a dangerous git 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’, for example, and his tirade that Barclay is ‘the enemy’, which shows how far his concerns have diverged from the rest of the planet – but Davis adds a little insight just before the final showdown when Cutler is still just able to keep a grasp on ‘reality’ before the loss of contact with his son’s ship leads him to ‘lose control’.

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Where he really improves the character, though, is in laying the seeds for his psychological collapse. His delusions of grandeur are copied straight across from TV, with Cutler seeing himself as a man to make ‘History’, but there are also several subtler suggestions that the general’s a cock. He likes to be fawned over, pleased when ‘his little jokes [are] appreciated’, and taunts his scientists for thinking rather than acting with blind machismo: ‘What's the matter, Dyson— chicken?’. 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 all despite the ‘many […] courses’ he seems to get sent on. More, he clearly looks down on ‘scientific egg-heads’, valuing ‘decisions’ over 'understanding’.

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And that’s the attitude that forms the only threat to the Earth that happens 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 from the start through their misjudging 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’. 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. It even turns out that the one thing Cutler cared about, saving his son, is achieved by precisely the action he scorned, waiting, and the Z-Bomb would have unnecessarily endangered him as well as half the planet.

All of which just leave the lowest-key aspect of this novelisation to consider – the Doctor’s first regeneration. It doesn’t get as much attention as I’d have expected, what with the changing face of Doctor Who having become such a feature of the show since this first bit of recasting, but Davis does pepper the early scenes some foreshadowing, commenting on how ‘the Doctor seemed to be ageing rapidly’, ‘beginning to stoop’, confusing Ben and Polly with ‘his first two fellow space-travellers’ and growing increasingly ‘irritable and dictatorial’. The intermittent attention to the upcoming end of the first Doctor may partly result from the confusion over what triggers the change, however, with the Doctor’s old body simply making him vulnerable to ‘An outside force of some kind’ – presumably Mondas’s energy drain – though he seems more ready than on TV, offering the extra information that ‘It's nearly time for a change’. Certainly, its 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’ and there is a definite parallel drawn between how the Cybership suffers ‘several years of slow corrosion […] telescoped into as many minutes’ with how the Doctor puts ‘on a score of years during [a] few hours’.

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More surprising is the way that Hartnell’s Doctor’s final stand remains undercut as it was on television despite there no longer being any need to fear how the audience might react to the change – indeed, the Doctor even seems to get a little moment to comment on the future longevity of the show, staring ‘as though […] seeing ahead a great way into time’ and declaring ‘It’s not over by a long way’. Just as on TV, 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’, at last adopting the role of ‘spokesman’ of Earth. And then the Cybermen decide he’s surplus to requirements and banish him to confinement on their ship. The crumbling of his momentary stature is made all the worse as Davis transforms the Doctor’s final warning (‘You will regret this’) into a desperate, impotent plea (‘I must stay here. You need me’). This is regeneration story as failure – Hartnell is inadequate to the threat here and that’s why it’s ‘time for a change’.

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And then Troughton emerges, with his ‘elusive, slightly mocking’ eyes and his ‘swarthy, almost gypsy appearance’, and announces himself ‘the new Doctor!’. Davis niftily sidesteps the danger of making this most disconcerting of regenerations pedestrian through description by having it occur entirely unobserved. However, this does raise the odd prospect that the second Doctor could be an actual replacement rather than a rejuvenation of the old body – the ‘new Doctor’ sounds uncannily like he’s just taken up a freshly vacated role. On top of this, the last Ben and Polly see of the first Doctor is his ‘trudging […] to the door of the TARDIS’, then they hear ‘a long wailing cry’ not in the Doctor’s voice and finally they find a different man in ‘the Doctor’s familiar cloak’ in the sleep-compression cupboard. Accepting that the reader is aware enough of Doctor Who to not question the identity of the Doctor, Davis does make the events as open to doubt as possible.

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Even if you don’t buy that Davis is hinting at each Doctor usurping the last, he’s still making odd decisions that suggest he wants to rewrite the nature of regeneration. Why does the Doctor head straight for a sleep compressor, something never mentioned in the show, when he knows his time is up? The manner in which the compressor also works as a cocoon could make the first Doctor like a larval stage with the dormant stage compressed and the second Doctor emerging as the glorious butterfly. That would make Troughton the endpoint though. So it could be making sleep analogous to death, with the compressor ensuring Hartnell doesn’t have to spend aeons in his final throes like what Pertwee did. This would tie in with the BBC internal memo that suggested regeneration ‘takes place over 500 or so years’, though I suspect it meant to say ‘every’ rather than ‘over’. All that said, the sleep compressor is probably just inspired by the memo’s vision of regeneration being ‘is as if he has had the L.S.D. drug’, with a dream-state standing in for an actual trip.

But the memo raises one other interesting prospect. 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 Cyberabsorption in a way none of the humans are – was Davis hoping to insert the Cybermen as the antagonist in the ‘galactic war’ that has been so significant to the Doctor’s ‘long life’? They are the enemy he devotes so much of his second life fighting and the monster he insists must be confronted in Doctor Who and the Cybermen. That would explain why ‘THE FIRST CYBERMEN ADVENTURE’ was seen as a bigger hook that the first regeneration. These villains are going to be big!