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Spare Parts
(Marc Platt) |
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 Name: Doctorman Christine Allan
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Mondas, the distant
past (How far back is unknown, but she lived at the ‘half-way
mark’ of Mondas’s journey, Mondas beginning its return
journey to Earth during her lifetime).
Appearances: "Spare
Parts"
Doctors: Fifth
Doctor
Companions: Nyssa
History: Although
Doctorman Christine Allan began with the best of intentions, her
later actions cemented her place as one of The Doctor’s adversaries,
as it was a result of her experiments that the Cybermen were
originally created, although their design was only perfected after
Allan met
the Fifth
Doctor.
Doctorman Allan’s life began on Earth’s
long-lost twin planet of Mondas, which had drifted out of Earth’s
solar system centuries in the past due to the instability caused by the
Moon’s arrival in Earth’s solar system disrupting the balance
between the two worlds. As a result of Mondas’s long trip through
space, the population were forced to retreat underground in order to
survive as the surface cooled and the atmosphere froze. Trapped underground
in a vast cavern, with oxygen and food supplied by the hydroponics gardens,
the people became increasingly desperate, eventually reaching a point
where they - under unrevealed circumstances - rose up against their current
decadent government, ending their rule and replacing them with the ‘Committee’,
a bionic gestalt composed of twenty of the greatest Mondasian minds (The
Doctor described them as possessing enlarged heads and malnourished bodies
linked together in a hydra-like pattern, but his own distaste for the
concept of the Committee combined with the stress of the situation could
have coloured his description).
Although
the people of Mondas managed to survive using straightforward transplants
to cope with the poor health conditions of their environment at first,
as time went on it became increasingly obvious that their continued
random drifting through space would only lead to disaster in the
long term. To this end, work was begun on an elaborate propulsion
system that would allow the ever-dwindling population to reverse
Mondas’s direction and take it back to its original solar system,
but this only presented further problems; having spent so long living
underground, the people of Mondas were driven virtually insane from
terror at seeing open space for the first time. Coupled with the
rough conditions currently present on the surface - made even worse
as Mondas approached a spatial anomaly known as the Cherrybowl Nebula,
a crucible of unstable energy that all space-farers avoided like
the plague -, maintenance crews had to be fully augmented in order
to survive, becoming Cybermen in all but name, and even then the
conversion process still ended up killing all but nineteen percent
of the work crews.
This continued until the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa landed
on Mondas, Nyssa encouraging The Doctor to stay despite his own desire
to leave before he was tempted to interfere in Mondas’s development
after she befriended the Hartley family. As The Doctor learned more
about Mondas’s current social situation - including the existence
of the ‘Committee’ and its peoples’ increased reliance
on cybernetic implants -, Mondas reached the Cherrybowl Nebula, the
unstable space opening a hole in the cavern roof and damaging the
power generators. Forced to work with Allan and Cyber-Commander Zheng
to restore power, The Doctor took what should have been a fatal electric
shock while repairing the generators, unintentionally attracting
Allan’s attention due to him surviving the shock with only
a few burns, prompting her to run a full body scan of him. As a result,
she learned that all The Doctor’s body functions were controlled
by a tertiary lobe at the back of his brain while the rest focused
on intellectual functions; by duplicating that extra lobe, Allan
could perfect the Cyber-conversion process and eliminate the organ
failure issues… which meant that every single Cyberman The
Doctor had ever met in his past and her future would be based on
him.
Refusing to allow a race created in his image to continue
as it was, The Doctor resolved to stop the Committee as they prepared
to initiate large-scale conversion of the city, having concluded
that this option was more practical than trying to start the planetary
propulsion system, The Doctor’s own words inspiring them to
shed individuality and become the first Cyber-Planner when he confronted
them with their lack of unity. Traumatised by the knowledge that
she’d condemned her people to become a race of machines when
she’d only ever sought to augment selected workers to save
her planet, Allan sought refuge in the bottles of wine still stored
in the cellars of the Committee palace, inspiring The Doctor and
Nyssa to use the wine to contaminate the Committee’s nutrient
feed. With the aid of the Hartley family - the father being a ‘mat-catcher’ who
caught wild Cybermats -,
The Doctor was able to program the city generators to attract the
Cybermats, drawing power from the already-weakened
Committee long enough for The Doctor to convince Zheng to activate
the propulsion system, reasoning that both humans and Cybermen would
otherwise die while the Committee was now only interesting in its
own survival. Although The Doctor left Allan with some notes about
how to reserve the conversion process, the appearance of Zheng after
his departure implied that processing would still continue.
Although Doctorman Allan has never been referenced again
in the series, the Tenth
Doctor briefly visited a parallel Earth
("Rise
of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel") where he encountered
a man who could be regarded as Allan’s ‘counterpart’;
John Lumic, a crippled, dying genius who created the Cybermen as
a means of saving his own life when he began dying of an unspecified
illness. Although he attempted to initiate mass conversion in the
belief that it would make life ‘better’ for humanity,
unconcerned with accusations that he was eliminating the very creativity
that inspired him to make the Cybermen in the first place, he was
defeated when The Doctor and his allies destroyed his main conversion
factory, Lumic - now converted into the Cyber-Controller - dying
in the subsequent explosion.
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