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Article Excerpt
Re-designed for a new millennium, they stomped out
of the fog and into your nightmares. --David Tennant, "Music and Monsters"
In the 2005 to 2006 series of the BBC television program Doctor Who, starring David Tennant as the Doctor, the cyborg villains known as the Cybermen reappear in a double episode whose two parts are entitled "Rise of the Cybermen" and "Age of Steel." The Cybermen are old foes of the Doctor; they had appeared in ten previous episodes of Doctor Who that together featured six different incarnations of the Doctor. (1) The Cybers (as this Doctor sometimes calls them) nearly always appear in silver suits, with costumes fashioned in the past from components such as a rubber diving suit and cricketers' gloves. Not only do they now have a new costume, a more streamlined, dynamic version of the old Tin-Man suit, they also stomp, which is to say, they tread very heavily and in unison. The Cybers' loss of humanity has always been signified by features such as synchronized group action and jerky, angular movements; however, this is the first time their tread has been so loud. This sonic signifier is so marked that it begs an analysis of what it is meant to convey to the viewer and how it contributes to the story and its narrative.
This essay considers some sonic features of this double episode of Doctor Who in order to locate the meanings of its narrative and the assumptions and values that motivate it. In doing so, the essay also reveals the crucial role played by the sound elements in creating this story about the relationship between humans and technology. The analysis necessarily includes the relationship between these sonic features and other meaning-making practices in the text, including visuals and words, and touches on the intertextual history of each sonic feature, particularly as it has functioned within this and related media. Further, an examination of the sound elements, like that of the words or image choices, may also reveal specific aspects of the politics of the text. Accordingly, the analysis also explores the particular approach to technology that structures this narrative, and the view it assumes of human subjectivity.
In this double episode, the Doctor and his companions Rose and Mickey arrive in a parallel Earth almost indistinguishable from Rose and Mickey's home, London, except that the skies are full of airships and the advertising is slightly more technologically advanced and intrusive. However, they soon discover that this is a world in which information technology has taken control of people's lives, a fact indicated by the universal wearing of bluetooth devices. In one scene, everyone in a crowded street except the Doctor and Rose (Mickey is elsewhere) suddenly stops, and Rose realizes, by looking at her mobile (total convergence is also a feature of the technology), that they are all being sent the latest news. Effectively, it is being downloaded into them. Thus begins the human-computer exploration that structures the episode. Eerily, all of this society's citizens laugh at the same time. As Rose demonstrates when she indicates the item "Joke" on her screen, it seems the technology is programming the humans, not vice-versa. It is worth noting that humanness is signified in this episode by reference to the experience of emotion (here, the appreciation of humour).
In "Cybermen," the Doctor Who Confidential episode screened on BBC Three after "Rise of the Cybermen," the principal actor, David Tennant, and the producer and writer, Russell T. Davies, discuss the episode's concern with modern technology, particularly information technology. (2) Tennant describes the episode as "using things that are happening in the modern world, and maybe that we have a slight paranoid fear about as well--this whole idea that we get information downloaded. We download it into our computer, we download it into our phones. It's just a short hop to downloading it straight into your head." Davies notes that people are excited by the possibilities of contemporary technology, but that those possibilities also lead to "modern paranoias and modern obsessions," including a relentless drive to upgrade technology. Tennant refers particularly to the fear generated by our lack of understanding concerning many of the technologies we use: "That's where all the Cybermen come from anyway, this whole idea that the modern technology will slowly replace us, and that modern technology is out to get us. [...] That's what we see throughout that episode, just this whole idea that it will slowly creep up on us and we won't quite notice it happening, which just makes it that worrying bit closer" ("Cybermen"). In these Cybermen episodes, all technology is in the control of one corporation, Cybus, and of one man, John Lumic. Lumic has a debilitating illness, which necessitates his use of a wheelchair, and he is using technology to try to prevent his own approaching death. His solution is to fashion himself a body of steel within which his brain can survive; this is the contemporary genesis of the Cybers.
Lumic is not satisfied with "cyborging" himself, however, and is planning to create a generation of Cybers, though this is illegal under government regulations. Lumic demonstrates his ruthlessness by having his first active Cyber kill the research scientist who threatens to report his experiments to the government. When the President of Great Britain (this title of President is questioned by Rose and confirmed by the Doctor) objects, at a party given by Rose's parallel-world parents, he too is killed. To ensure the Cybers' compliance with his scheme, Lumic has introduced an emotion-inhibitor into their programming. Once operating in purely rational mode, the Cybers decide that all of humanity, eventually including Lumic himself, must be transformed.
The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey battle the Cybers and save the day using a combination of the Doctor's advanced knowledge, Rose's ingenuity, and Mickey's bravery and computing skills. Significantly, the way in which the Cybers are defeated is not through superior armaments. In the second part of the episode, we learn that the Cybers' emotion-inhibiting programming prevents them from not only empathizing with their human "others" but also acknowledging their own (non-)humanity. The Doctor, Mickey, and Rose work together to plant a virus in the Cybers' communication system that releases the inhibitor. The humans inside the Cyber-suits must then face what has been done to them and the monsters they have become. The...
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