The Silver Turk

Main Range #153

Released: 15 October 2011

Listened: 7/13/21

The Doctor thinks he’ll take Mary for an easy first trip, and hops over to Vienna without changing the time coordinates, ostensibly to pick up Samson and Gemma. However, that doesn’t go to plan, and they end up in the 1870s, where the local fair has another “mechanical Turk” exhibit going. Except of course this Turk is actually a badly damaged Cyberman, which you can see coming. What you can probably also see coming is that a damaged, suffering mechanical man is going to elicit the sympathies of the author of Frankenstein. The Doctor really doesn’t see that coming, because he has a really bad reaction to the presence of Cybermen; maybe not quite as bad as his Dalek reaction, but he’s clearly upset. There are, of course, a variety of humans looking to use the Cybermen for their own ends, and you know how that’s going to go. These particular Cybermen seem a bit different than usual: they’ve got personal names, and apparently the power to hypnotize, which I didn’t remember as being part of their abilities. Things get a little murky around who, exactly, the main antagonist is, but that’s necessary if you’re going to make the Cybermen sympathetic. Although the difference of opinion on the Cybermen could strain the relationship between Mary and the Doctor, they seem to get over it fairly quickly. This story is pretty much a requirement if you’re going to have Mary Shelly as a protagonist, and they pull it off well.