sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 03:35 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 03:35 pm
Entry tags:
Condition of Release: Author's Notes
While posting Condition Of Release, I had some requests to discuss the Classic Who canon that I drew on in this story. I also wanted to talk a little bit about the mytharc of the Cybermen, so if you'd like the full impact of my nattering you can read on, but if you scroll to the bottom you can find a plain set of links to articles about the canonical sources I used.
The Cybermen, after forty-seven years of Doctor Who canon, have a complex and convoluted history which it's really probably best not to think about too carefully. Probably the wisest course is to consider "Cyberman" a recurring theme rather than an actual alien race you can write a history on. There are many distinct types of Cyberman from a variety of origins; the Pete's World Cybermen from New Who, for example, are an acknowledged metaphysical echo of the Classic Who Cybermen rather than their direct descendants. The Cyberwoman featured in Torchwood is unique as a partially-converted human, though the idea has roots in "Tomb Of The Cybermen", where a character named Toberman is partially-converted with a single implant in order to bring him under Cyberman control.
Toberman and "Tomb Of The Cybermen" lay the conceptual foundation for Condition Of Release.
That's Toberman being brainwhammied by the big head honcho Cyberpopecontroller. Because the idea first occurred to me while watching "Tomb of the Cyberman", I opened in chapter one with Jack interviewing Victoria Waterfield, a Companion of the Second Doctor and a witness to the events in that story.
The Doctor picked her up in the 19th century, whilst already travelling with 17th century highland soldier-boy Jamie McCrimmon, but eventually left Victoria with a 20th-century family after she had a crisis of identity. She was initially a strong character, though as her arc progressed she grew steadily weaker, devolving into the Screaming Female -- literally, in her last serial, her screams are what defeat the Big Bad. I've tried to play with those conceptions of her a bit, showing her through the Brigadier's eyes ("rather useless") and Jack's ("the strength she could use to defy him").
The idea of Cyberman mind control is cemented in two Second Doctor serials, "The Wheel In Space" and "The Invasion", where it's basically accepted that Cybermen can telepathically control humans, except those humans protected by a metal "patch" at the back of the neck that blocks Cyberman transmissions (hilariously, this is essentially tape and tinfoil). "The Wheel In Space" is something I would have liked to have referenced, but all the direct witnesses come from the (presumably very late) 21st century and could not have encountered Jack prior to Ianto's tenure at Torchwood. The two people who could have told him about it, the Doctor's Companions at the time, were never separated from him long enough and at the right time for Jack to legitimately find them. They were eventually returned to their own times (Zoe to the 21st, Jamie to the 17th) with their memories almost fully wiped.
Jamie and Zoe look badass in spacesuits.
In Chapter Two, because I was dealing with the very beginnings of Ianto's attempts to break conditioning, I wanted to retell the story of Lieutenant Carstairs, who met the Second Doctor on a battlefield in "The War Games". Carstairs believed that they were on Earth in 1917, engaged in World War I; in actuality, he and thousands of other soldiers from a dozen historical wars had been transplanted to another planet. Here, they were divided into "zones" and conditioned to believe they were on Earth, so they continued to fight. This was done by an alien race known as the War Lords in order to find the strongest possible soldiers to train as a galactic invasion force. Carstairs is one of the few soldiers who, with the Doctor's help, actively broke his implanted conditioning (as opposed to simply being immune to it as a few others were).
Anyway, in order to fully overthrow the War Lords, the Doctor had to summon the Time Lords, who stepped in, cleaned up, and sent the soldiers back to their Earthly battlefields. This seems like kind of a douchebag thing to do, but it is also a great commentary on how easily we accept brutality if we're inflicting it on each other, where we wouldn't if someone else was making us do it.
"The War Games" is a really excellent serial, though it does suffer some common maladies of early Who -- awkward racial and gender stereotypes, now-and-then line flubs, and occasional hilariously bad special effects. It's not a good place to start watching Classic Who, but with a little grounding it's an excellent serial to really dig into, both for the wartime metaphors and for the great story. Carstairs is a marvelous character, and frankly I would have killed to see him as a Companion. He's a handsome bloke, who reminds us of another handsome bloke...
In the same chapter, Jack also references Torchwood's research materials on a variety of subjects. Some names will be familiar to New Who viewers: The Hartigan Excavation is a theoretical excavation that Torchwood London could have carried out, studying the damage done to London by the giant steampunk Cyberman controlled by Miss Hartigan in the Tenth Doctor special "The Next Doctor". The Van Statten authentication is meant to be a document concerning the Cyberman helmet seen by the Ninth Doctor in Henry Van Statten's museum in "Dalek".
The Snowcap Base black box recordings that Jack has on file would have been relatively recent acquisitions of his; they refer to "The Tenth Planet", a First Doctor episode set in 1986. "The Tenth Planet" was the first serial to feature the Cybermen, where they invaded an astronomy station in Antarctica and were consequently routed by the First Doctor, with Companions Ben Jackson and Polly Wright. It's not a great serial in and of itself, but the Tenth Planet Cybermen are about a million times scarier than any other Cybermen I've encountered so far.
That Cyberman doesn't look too frightening, but have a good look at the blacked-out eyes, the human hands, and the open mouth. Now picture that mouth not moving as words come out. Yeah. (That's Polly there on the right.)
Ben and Polly likely flew under Jack's radar for a long time, given that they left the TARDIS after their travels slightly before the date they entered it. By the time Jack acquired the recordings, locating two random Londoners named Ben and Polly would have been quite difficult. Incidentally, Ben Jackson bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Owen Harper. I'm pretty sure there's some timey-wimey baby-daddying going on there.
The other two files Jack references, "The autopsy file on Vaughn" and "The Invasion Debriefing", both relate to "The Invasion", a Second Doctor serial set in London. This ties into chapter four's interview with the Brigadier, which also concerns "The Invasion".
The ostensible human villain of the serial is Tobias Vaugh, a wealthy microchip manufacturer and pawn of the Cybermen. Hello,Steve Jobs Bill Gates Tobias Vaughn!
The Cybermen use Vaughn's ubiquitous technology (which is actually rather prophetic of our current state of affairs) to knock out anyone within listening distance of any machine that had a Vaughn microchip in it. This accomplished, they intended to invade by rising out of the sewers where they'd been hiding and by attacking from a spaceship orbiting Earth. They were then pwned hard by the Second Doctor, the Brigadier, some Russians, and a turncoat Vaughn, which just goes to show.
This story is recounted to Jack unofficially by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, one of the leaders if not the ultimate authority at UNIT in the early seventies (or eighties, depending on how you date the UNIT era, but that's a complex research thesis and we won't get into it). At the point Jack interviews him, we are firmly in the late sixties; the Brigadier has met the Second Doctor twice, once battling robot Yetis in "The Web Of Fear" and once battling the Cybermen in "The Invasion". He will encounter the Third Doctor soon enough, and become a series regular while the Third Doctor is stranded on Earth and employed by UNIT.
It should be noted that the Brig has had encounters and adventures with every iteration of the Doctor except the Ninth; even if you only count TV canon, he's still met the first seven. He is one of the longest-running characters on television, recently appearing on the Sarah Jane Adventures, and Nicholas Courtney has played the Brigadier longer than nine actors combined have played the Doctor. Both Courtney and the Brig are made of awesome.
Lookin' fine, Brigadier.
Unlike the first four chapters, chapter five has no "direct witness" statement, but Jack does remark at one point that their research on the Cybermen goes back to the 1940s. This references a tie-in novel, "Illegal Alien", in which the Seventh Doctor and Ace encounter the Cybermen during WWII. This is the first record I could find of the Cybermen after 1851, but I've not read it.
I do admit, after loading you up with all this information, that my accounting of the Cybermen is incomplete. I've only seen the first three Doctors and the latest three; there's a gap in my knowledge that spans from Four to Eight. I was pretty pleased with what I had, though, and how I've worked it in; I like that the story had a faintly noir-ish air to it, since I wanted to recall the earliest Classic Who episodes that inspired it. Some of my description, especially of the old film and audio reels, draws directly from the quality of the episodes I watched. I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
For more information on the episodes directly influencing Condition of Release:
Jack and Victoria's interview: "Tomb Of The Cybermen"
Jack and Carstairs's interview: "The War Games"
Jack and the Brigadier's interview: "The Invasion"
The Hartigan Excavation: "The Next Doctor"
The Van Statten Authentication: "Dalek"
The Vaughn autopsy and the Invasion Debriefing: "The Invasion"
The Snowcap Base black box recording: "The Tenth Planet"
The Cybermen, after forty-seven years of Doctor Who canon, have a complex and convoluted history which it's really probably best not to think about too carefully. Probably the wisest course is to consider "Cyberman" a recurring theme rather than an actual alien race you can write a history on. There are many distinct types of Cyberman from a variety of origins; the Pete's World Cybermen from New Who, for example, are an acknowledged metaphysical echo of the Classic Who Cybermen rather than their direct descendants. The Cyberwoman featured in Torchwood is unique as a partially-converted human, though the idea has roots in "Tomb Of The Cybermen", where a character named Toberman is partially-converted with a single implant in order to bring him under Cyberman control.
Toberman and "Tomb Of The Cybermen" lay the conceptual foundation for Condition Of Release.
That's Toberman being brainwhammied by the big head honcho Cyber
The Doctor picked her up in the 19th century, whilst already travelling with 17th century highland soldier-boy Jamie McCrimmon, but eventually left Victoria with a 20th-century family after she had a crisis of identity. She was initially a strong character, though as her arc progressed she grew steadily weaker, devolving into the Screaming Female -- literally, in her last serial, her screams are what defeat the Big Bad. I've tried to play with those conceptions of her a bit, showing her through the Brigadier's eyes ("rather useless") and Jack's ("the strength she could use to defy him").
The idea of Cyberman mind control is cemented in two Second Doctor serials, "The Wheel In Space" and "The Invasion", where it's basically accepted that Cybermen can telepathically control humans, except those humans protected by a metal "patch" at the back of the neck that blocks Cyberman transmissions (hilariously, this is essentially tape and tinfoil). "The Wheel In Space" is something I would have liked to have referenced, but all the direct witnesses come from the (presumably very late) 21st century and could not have encountered Jack prior to Ianto's tenure at Torchwood. The two people who could have told him about it, the Doctor's Companions at the time, were never separated from him long enough and at the right time for Jack to legitimately find them. They were eventually returned to their own times (Zoe to the 21st, Jamie to the 17th) with their memories almost fully wiped.
Jamie and Zoe look badass in spacesuits.
In Chapter Two, because I was dealing with the very beginnings of Ianto's attempts to break conditioning, I wanted to retell the story of Lieutenant Carstairs, who met the Second Doctor on a battlefield in "The War Games". Carstairs believed that they were on Earth in 1917, engaged in World War I; in actuality, he and thousands of other soldiers from a dozen historical wars had been transplanted to another planet. Here, they were divided into "zones" and conditioned to believe they were on Earth, so they continued to fight. This was done by an alien race known as the War Lords in order to find the strongest possible soldiers to train as a galactic invasion force. Carstairs is one of the few soldiers who, with the Doctor's help, actively broke his implanted conditioning (as opposed to simply being immune to it as a few others were).
Anyway, in order to fully overthrow the War Lords, the Doctor had to summon the Time Lords, who stepped in, cleaned up, and sent the soldiers back to their Earthly battlefields. This seems like kind of a douchebag thing to do, but it is also a great commentary on how easily we accept brutality if we're inflicting it on each other, where we wouldn't if someone else was making us do it.
"The War Games" is a really excellent serial, though it does suffer some common maladies of early Who -- awkward racial and gender stereotypes, now-and-then line flubs, and occasional hilariously bad special effects. It's not a good place to start watching Classic Who, but with a little grounding it's an excellent serial to really dig into, both for the wartime metaphors and for the great story. Carstairs is a marvelous character, and frankly I would have killed to see him as a Companion. He's a handsome bloke, who reminds us of another handsome bloke...
In the same chapter, Jack also references Torchwood's research materials on a variety of subjects. Some names will be familiar to New Who viewers: The Hartigan Excavation is a theoretical excavation that Torchwood London could have carried out, studying the damage done to London by the giant steampunk Cyberman controlled by Miss Hartigan in the Tenth Doctor special "The Next Doctor". The Van Statten authentication is meant to be a document concerning the Cyberman helmet seen by the Ninth Doctor in Henry Van Statten's museum in "Dalek".
The Snowcap Base black box recordings that Jack has on file would have been relatively recent acquisitions of his; they refer to "The Tenth Planet", a First Doctor episode set in 1986. "The Tenth Planet" was the first serial to feature the Cybermen, where they invaded an astronomy station in Antarctica and were consequently routed by the First Doctor, with Companions Ben Jackson and Polly Wright. It's not a great serial in and of itself, but the Tenth Planet Cybermen are about a million times scarier than any other Cybermen I've encountered so far.
That Cyberman doesn't look too frightening, but have a good look at the blacked-out eyes, the human hands, and the open mouth. Now picture that mouth not moving as words come out. Yeah. (That's Polly there on the right.)
Ben and Polly likely flew under Jack's radar for a long time, given that they left the TARDIS after their travels slightly before the date they entered it. By the time Jack acquired the recordings, locating two random Londoners named Ben and Polly would have been quite difficult. Incidentally, Ben Jackson bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Owen Harper. I'm pretty sure there's some timey-wimey baby-daddying going on there.
The other two files Jack references, "The autopsy file on Vaughn" and "The Invasion Debriefing", both relate to "The Invasion", a Second Doctor serial set in London. This ties into chapter four's interview with the Brigadier, which also concerns "The Invasion".
The ostensible human villain of the serial is Tobias Vaugh, a wealthy microchip manufacturer and pawn of the Cybermen. Hello,
The Cybermen use Vaughn's ubiquitous technology (which is actually rather prophetic of our current state of affairs) to knock out anyone within listening distance of any machine that had a Vaughn microchip in it. This accomplished, they intended to invade by rising out of the sewers where they'd been hiding and by attacking from a spaceship orbiting Earth. They were then pwned hard by the Second Doctor, the Brigadier, some Russians, and a turncoat Vaughn, which just goes to show.
This story is recounted to Jack unofficially by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, one of the leaders if not the ultimate authority at UNIT in the early seventies (or eighties, depending on how you date the UNIT era, but that's a complex research thesis and we won't get into it). At the point Jack interviews him, we are firmly in the late sixties; the Brigadier has met the Second Doctor twice, once battling robot Yetis in "The Web Of Fear" and once battling the Cybermen in "The Invasion". He will encounter the Third Doctor soon enough, and become a series regular while the Third Doctor is stranded on Earth and employed by UNIT.
It should be noted that the Brig has had encounters and adventures with every iteration of the Doctor except the Ninth; even if you only count TV canon, he's still met the first seven. He is one of the longest-running characters on television, recently appearing on the Sarah Jane Adventures, and Nicholas Courtney has played the Brigadier longer than nine actors combined have played the Doctor. Both Courtney and the Brig are made of awesome.
Lookin' fine, Brigadier.
Unlike the first four chapters, chapter five has no "direct witness" statement, but Jack does remark at one point that their research on the Cybermen goes back to the 1940s. This references a tie-in novel, "Illegal Alien", in which the Seventh Doctor and Ace encounter the Cybermen during WWII. This is the first record I could find of the Cybermen after 1851, but I've not read it.
I do admit, after loading you up with all this information, that my accounting of the Cybermen is incomplete. I've only seen the first three Doctors and the latest three; there's a gap in my knowledge that spans from Four to Eight. I was pretty pleased with what I had, though, and how I've worked it in; I like that the story had a faintly noir-ish air to it, since I wanted to recall the earliest Classic Who episodes that inspired it. Some of my description, especially of the old film and audio reels, draws directly from the quality of the episodes I watched. I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
For more information on the episodes directly influencing Condition of Release:
Jack and Victoria's interview: "Tomb Of The Cybermen"
Jack and Carstairs's interview: "The War Games"
Jack and the Brigadier's interview: "The Invasion"
The Hartigan Excavation: "The Next Doctor"
The Van Statten Authentication: "Dalek"
The Vaughn autopsy and the Invasion Debriefing: "The Invasion"
The Snowcap Base black box recording: "The Tenth Planet"
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Mage Mallard, Sam, among other things, famously kept people's souls from being stolen by giving them pebbles to wear--because if you believe it can't be stolen, no one will be able to steal it.
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Ben Jackson bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Owen Harper. I'm pretty sure there's some timey-wimey baby-daddying going on there.
You know this could explain why Owen's mother hated him so much. If his father left her pregnant (came and went in Torchwood terms?) and he resembled him so much...I think you have a plausible theory there.
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hump your theorypoint out that this would not be entirely incompatible with the timeline that would be involved in Ben Jackson being Owen's grandfather... Oh, god, somebody hand me the plotbunny-killing shotgun...no subject
popecontrollerWas that a reference to Clifford D. Simak's Project Pope?
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You know, I've only seen, like, five seconds worth of that serial, and that was enough to make me go, "OH GOD I GET IT NOW." Shudder.
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The Cybermen get crap in the 80s, be warned. There's some good moments, but mostly...no. Basically the best thing they do is kill Adric/the dinosaurs.
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I'm working my way straight through the classic canon, start to end, and was under the impression that really nearly everything gets crap in the eighties :D
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Steve JobsBill GatesTobias Vaughn!Hmm. This makes me wonder, with the release of the iPad, and the iPhone's latest operating system, and the prevalence of iPods......
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...Excuse me, I must now go AFFIX MY MUSE TO THE WALL WITH DUCT TAPE. {shakes plotbunny out of trouser-leg into the bin}
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I am kind of fascinated with the idea of children of time-travelers -- I played around with it in the TW/DW USA fic I did, where the Brigadier has sex in the 1980's and three months later meets his full-grown son in the early 2000s. I think there must be something a bit special about them. The summary of The Fanfic I Didn't Write is:
When the Doctor stops by Torchwood for a chat and a cup of coffee after saving the world, he finds Dr. Owen Harper strangely familiar. He discovers that Harper's mother had a brief liaison with a sailor -- a sailor named Ben Jackson, who said he was "just stopping off" and then turned out to be seeing some bird named Polly Wright and left Ms. Harper alone and pregnant. Intrigued, the Doctor lures Owen into joining him as a Companion. But children born to time travelers have a few quirks the Doctor didn't count on...
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...or at least give Dove some more hints so she can write it. Or something. *is not above bribery*
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Nine's not a bad Doctor to have your fun with, I like him a lot. If you like Nine, I suspect you'd quite like the First Doctor as well.
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I think we're supposed to feel ambiguous. I personally think that Lisa was gone, no more Lisa, but I also think we're supposed to be uncertain as to whether this is the case.
Torchwood is not...king of logical plotlines, really. :D
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I have a Doctor Who book which goes up to the Christopher Eccleston episodes of Doctor Who. It details every episode and goes through a lot of information of what we learnt in each episode. To be fair I'm not sure very Doctor met up with the Cybermen in tv canon from like 4 onwards.
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Sam Starbuck, bending canon to his will FTW!
Really, this explains a lot of very odd behaviour by all of the team members in the wake of Cyberwoman. Thank you for making Torchwood make sense.
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Excellent story line, excellent pace and in-depth research! Sam, you are made of awesome :D
Though I'm not really a DW fan (excepto Nine), I really liked the bits and pieces of research.
Loved that Jack used to spend so much time in the archives and leaves this sort of impression behind - his apparently intact and unassailable mental state is most annoying in canon.
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a mild suggestion that I might just take up myself - an interleaved list of episodes and your stories so they are read at the "right" time. this coming as someone just catching up wit the NewWho (now if that doesn't sound a little Suessian ...)
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I have a couple of different sources for the episodes I download -- there is a torrent site (membership-only) that I sometimes use, and another source I'm not allowed to talk about.
Man, that sounds like I'm taunting :D Sorry! They're just secrets I'm not allowed to divulge.
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Hi
I like your fics very much and I like your permission to have them in a Word document to reread them sometimes, if you don't want to I can erase them :P
I will wait for your answer
Thank you
:)
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