Nelvana's Doctor Who

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This is for all you Doctor Who nerds on this board, of which I am one.

Back in the 1980's, the Canadian animation company, Nelvana Productions, based out of Toronto, was briefly involved in trying to do a Doctor Who animated series.

Nothing came out of it, but some extremely intriguing concept art with remarkable new visions for Cybermen, Daleks, a teenage black Companion, a 'morphing' K9 and a couple of unique versions of the Doctor. It's beautiful, it's intriguing and it's mysterious, because after a couple of days of web browsing, those concept drawings are pretty much all we know about it.

You can find the concept drawings, by the way, on the net. Just google 'Nelvana' and Doctor Who. I'm assuming that if you're a hard core Whodunnit, then you've seen them.

So.... in terms of context, here's what I can tell you.

Nelvana Productions was started in the 1970's by a couple of indy film makers and an animator, doing interesting little shorts and specials. They seemed to have done okay.

Their big ambitious breakthrough project - Rock and Ruin, a sort of funny animal rock opera with lovecraftian subtexts stapled onto romeo and Juliet, cost about 8 million but failed. I remember seeing it, it's genuinely ambitious and quirky.

Their other early mark was the animated section of the Star Wars holiday special that featured Boba Fett's first screen appearance. I don't really care that much - Boba Fett's always been my poster boy for 'Why wearing a jet pack is such a bad idea.' But it's a historical thing.

They had their ups and downs in the eighties.

Between 1985 and 1987, they did two Star Wars franchise animated series - Droids and Ewoks. Droids seems at least somewhat sophisticated in concept and execution, lasted 13 episodes. Ewoks made it to a second season, but that season dumbed down fast.

Then they had their big score with the Care Bears movie. A lot of their business model as animators seemed to be licensed toy and media products, although they would dip into various experiments.

From what I can sort out, the Doctor Who project seems to have floated around in mid-eighties, roughly between 1985 to 1987. I can't pin it down more tightly than that. Some sources have it in the 90's, but those seem unlikely.

As far as I can tell, Nelvana's commercial and production interests were geared towards American sales and American markets. So Doctor Who was an interesting choice, given that it's largely unknown to the mainstream. I think that their interest was probably piqued by PBS running and capitalizing heavily on the series in the 80's, and the cult status it had acquired there.

It's ironic because around the time that Nelvana was sniffing around, the series was in trouble in England. This would be the broad time frame of the budget freeze or cutbacks, Michael Grade, Colin Baker's troubles, the hiatus, etc.

Still, I think that they'd have been taking a rather big risk, given that they weren't being backed by a toy company or tapping into a mainstream market franchise.

On the other hand, they were still young enough, they might have had a reputation for and interest in quirky satisfying projects. And Doctor Who might have given them a degree of freedom that they didn't get from working in the Lucas garden. (I'm not suggesting that the Lucas connection get butterflied - that's pre-established).

Mid eighties animation, including Saturday afternoon animation was in a sort of golden age. It was still marketed and aimed at the children's and early teen demographic, but you had genuine characterization, credible animation, continuing stories.

So while I shudder at the thought of a 'Carebears' level Doctor Who, it's more likely from the drawings and from what we know that they could have done something quite fun.

And that's all I've got so far.

So my first question is - does anyone have any more knowledge of the Nelvana project? Specific time periods? How it originated? Who was involved? Was there any kind of bible or write up beyond the concept drawings - there must have been? Why it got turned down? POD's that might have made a difference? Anyone out there with expertise in 80's era animation industry?

So, I'm throwing it open to the collective intelligence, if there is such a thing. How about it people. Thoughts - ideas - notions - contributions?
 
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i afraid that Nelvana would had screw up Dr Who badly

i saw what Nelvana made of "Blake and Mortimer" there animation had little to do with original comic.
or what that Elfquest animation attempt, were Wendy and Richard Pini withdrawn from the deal, after they saw how Nelvana "Rape" there work.
they had almost made same disaster to The Adventures of Tintin.
lucky Hergé Foundation had army of lawyers to make sure that Nelvana not to sheer off into extreme or come up with something complete different.

irony in end of 1990s Nelvana president and vice president were replaced and then they start to respect customer requirements...
 
i afraid that Nelvana would had screw up Dr Who badly

i saw what Nelvana made of "Blake and Mortimer" there animation had little to do with original comic.
or what that Elfquest animation attempt, were Wendy and Richard Pini withdrawn from the deal, after they saw how Nelvana "Rape" there work.
they had almost made same disaster to The Adventures of Tintin.
lucky Hergé Foundation had army of lawyers to make sure that Nelvana not to sheer off into extreme or come up with something complete different.

irony in end of 1990s Nelvana president and vice president were replaced and then they start to respect customer requirements...
Basically this. Please don't have them adaptationally rape Doctor Who! :(
 
So animated Doctor Who is an actual (sort of) thing? I've seen those pictures floating around the internet, but I always though they were by an unknown Deviantartist. They're very cool. I could totally see Doctor Who as an animated series.
 
i afraid that Nelvana would had screw up Dr Who badly

i saw what Nelvana made of "Blake and Mortimer" there animation had little to do with original comic.
or what that Elfquest animation attempt, were Wendy and Richard Pini withdrawn from the deal, after they saw how Nelvana "Rape" there work.
they had almost made same disaster to The Adventures of Tintin.
lucky Hergé Foundation had army of lawyers to make sure that Nelvana not to sheer off into extreme or come up with something complete different.

irony in end of 1990s Nelvana president and vice president were replaced and then they start to respect customer requirements...

Any adaptation involves changes, compromises and interpretations. Very few creative people are satisfied merely to photocopy. Absolute fidelity is neither possible nor even desirable.

The reality of producing commercial animation means that you do have to respect certain limitations. Your audience is / are children and early teens, filtered through the censorship and mores of commercial television stations, and station regulatory practices. They're not interested in being cutting edge, adult or controversial and they're not terribly concerned with creator issues. You can still tell good stories, and even stories that adults would enjoy. But your storytelling will be circumscribed. While there are major visual opportunities in storytelling, allowing for backgrounds, vistas, and shots that and effects that might cost millions to achieve, there's also a complex production chain that requires you to simplify, and the physical limitation that every single frame has to be hand drawn and coloured. So your drawings don't get too complicated. In the 21st century, computers have revolutionized production process. But in the 80's, it was still very much traditional technique, amplified by the exploitation of Asian manpower.

For any number of reasons, any adaptation or envisioning will depart from the source material, but that's a thing to celebrate. Honestly, the original Doctor was a frail old man of dubious morality who sabotaged the Tardis for petty reasons in one adventure, tried to throw his companions into space in another adventure and almost brained someone with a rock - he got nicer, but the actors physical health meant that other characters often did most of the work. Consider that in contrast to either Pertwee or Baker and the complete reimagining of the character.
 
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So animated Doctor Who is an actual (sort of) thing? I've seen those pictures floating around the internet, but I always though they were by an unknown Deviantartist. They're very cool. I could totally see Doctor Who as an animated series.

Most of 'those' pictures are by Steve Bastien, and relate to the Nelvana project. There's several different versions of the Doctor, ranging from aged to young.

It appears that there may have been an abortive effort at a Doctor Who cartoon in the 90's, but we know even less about that.
 
Within the more modern context, Big Finish engaged in a pseudo-Animation, basically - panning and scanning hand drawn and painted pictures accompanying the an audio track three times.

* Death Comes to Time, starring Sylvester McCoy.

* Shada (II), starring Paul McGann and Lalla Ward.

* Real Time, starring Colin Baker.

These 'animations' were fairly crappy. They make 1960's 'Mighty Marvel Action Heroes' look polished and innovative. But they were designed to be aired through the internet, downloaded on computer screens and through the available bandwidth. They did get better and better at it. These can all be found on youtube.

Big Finish efforts here were aborted when BBCi decided to do its own in-house Doctor Who series, starting with Scream of the Shalka', with a new Doctor played by Richard E. Grant.

The 'Shalka' Doctor and BBCi series were interrupted by the re-launch of the new television series. As a result, only one serial was actually shot, although a second 'Blood of Robots' had been commissioned. And a short story featuring the Shalka Doctor was also published online by BBCi. The 'Scream', that story, and the unmade script is the entire oevre of the Shalka Doctor who found himself decanonized by the TV series.

The Shalka Doctor story was released online through BBCI in fifteen minute installments, using flash animation. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of flash animation, but apparently, if you have to have flash this was upper end - they won an award. It was released to DVD and you can also find it on youtube.

The live action series did inspire it's own animated serials. These were released in five or ten minute segments through a British children's series. The first one was 'Infinite Quest' which seems to be traditional line animation, or perhaps very sophisticated flash. The second one was CGI, Dreamland. Both starred David Tenant. Both are available on DVD.

That's the entire rest of the history of animated Who to the best of my knowledge.

Does anyone have any information or insights into the Nelvana proposal?
 
There is also the Doctor Who anime.

Youtube

This is however only a fan project draw by one man.


Yeah, I love that one. There's just enough of it at 12 minutes to make me completely crazy. I mean, wow - the Daleks and Cybermen throwing down in Tokyo, the Delgado and Ainsley Masters working together, the Pertwee Doctor returned.... I think someone should give this guy a grant and have him do a full 90 minute production. If I ever win the lottery....

There are actually some quite interesting fan animations of Doctor Who on youtube. But this is by far the best.
 
They did a tiny bit of coverage of it (and the first time I heard of it) on the CBC's online documentary, "Planet of the Doctor".
 
Okay, I'm just going to free associate this one, and call it how I see it. It's possible that I'll get things completely wrong and some helpful soul will come along and explain what it was all really about. I'm fine with that, so long as you're not a dick about it.

Here goes...

If you go looking up 80's cartoons... there's a shitload of them. The sheer volume of Saturday cartoons is astonishing. Not just Saturday morning, but Saturday afternoons. There's a wild diversity ranging from the infantile to the sophisticated. The 80's was an era of cartoon explosion on television.

To understand what happened here, what drove it, and what was produced out of it, we have to take a step further back.

First thing - Animation is hard. Really, I know animators. Basically, it's hand drawing each animation cell - which involves sketching, pencilling, inking, colouring. Then doing it again and again, twenty-four drawings per second, 1440 drawings per minute, 20,000 drawings for a fifteen minute short. That's time consuming and expensive, and it calls for huge organizational requirements. The indy animators I knew were one man operations. But more commercial animation often uses several people or dozens or hundreds of people working in a studio, and coordinating those efforts, making sure that the transitions from one person or one group to another requires astonishing work.

Back in the thirties and forties labour was fairly cheap and organizational resources cascaded up. There was a market in the movie houses for comedic shorts, along with newsreels, serials, A and B movies. Basically, a movie experience back then could run five or six hours. So animated shorts found a home - this was the golden era of mickey mouse, bugs bunny and their respective pantheons.

That golden age slowly came to an end in the postwar era. Television came in, and the format of the movie studios changed. The newsreels went, as did the serials, the focus shifted to movies - for a while comic or animated shorts hung on as a sort of warm up act to the movie. But a lot of the market dried up for animation.

Instead, the animation market moved to television - with mixed results. If you were around for the animation of the 50's and 60's into the 70's, I think you'd be struck by what a mixed bag it was. At the high end, Disney and Warner Brothers had found a new life for its shorts on television. For the rest of it... it was pretty harsh stuff.

The thing with television, as Harlan Ellison said, is that it doesn't suck, it 'sucks' - it is the great devouring maw of talent. Borscht Belt comedians might spend years on the club circuit refining their gags, and one visit to the Ed Sullivan show.... all their material is gone, broadcast on national TV, they've used it up and now they have to come up with a new routine because everyone's seen their old one.

You have a cartoon in the can and want a Saturday morning cartoon half hour? Terrific. What about next week? And the week after? And the week after that? Twenty to forty thousand new drawings each weak, plus sound synch, dialogue, music, the whole nine yards. Impossible.

Unless you started looking for shortcuts, lots and lots of shortcuts. Did we need full motion on everything? Backgrounds and foregrounds became separate things, and a good set of backgrounds could be done simply and re-used again and again and again. The entire person didn't have to be animated, just the part that apparently moved - when Fred Flintstone or Yogi Bear runs, their bodies are absolutely stiff, just those two little legs at the bottom pumping away. And certain motions, like running, once you had those you could save them and bring them out whenever you liked. Cartoons were often about saving drawing time every which way. Simply running stationary drawings accompanied by narration or dialogue was done in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Pan and scan offered opportunities, or zooming in to different parts of the frame to give the illusion of movement - Marvel's Marching Heroes did that. There was even one effort which pasted a live actor's moving mouth and lips to a cartoon characters's drawing to give the impression of animated life - a technique now employed with Annoying Orange. This all drove a mostly stylized, hyper stylized form of animation, with characters stiffly posed and moving like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

This animation, wretched as it was, gave us Scooby Doo. It also gave us Fred Flintstone, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss and the rest of the Hanna Barbra pantheon. I remember that Hanna Barbra used to be quite dominant - Fred Flintstone got his own movies. But for whatever it was worth, their animation went to hang with the dinosaurs. We don't see Fred and co around much any more. Scooby Doo is really Hanna Barbra's only great survivor.

But then, and I put this around the 80's, animation changed dramatically. Suddenly, you had the Ghostbusters, He-Man, GI Joe, Strawberry Shortcake, Thundercats, Transformers, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Popeye, Felix the Cat, Muppet Babies, Bravestar, Beetle Juice, Jem, Gummi Bears, Carebears, Smurfs, Hulk Hogan-Rocking Wrestling, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, Heathcliff, Happy Days.... this is the tip of the iceberg.

There were something like three hundred or more of them, and while most were crude by today's standards, almost all of them were far more polished with higher levels of animation than the Hanna Barbra stuff of the 60's and 70's. Their target audiences ranged from pre-school toddlers, to as high as twelve to fourteen.

So what happened?
 
F*ck*d if I know.

But I'm prepared to make some guesses, and it involves the intersections of commerce, technology and culture.

I think that one - but only one - of the key changes might have been the discovery, or exploitation, or just the development of effective communication protocols with the giant animation factories of Asia.

The great bottleneck for animation was always labour, human labour - every cell having to be hand drawn and photographed. That labour was skilled, specialized, and in North America, it hadn't been cheap for decades. So throwing in that big pool of cheap Asian drawing labour was probably revolutionary, at least in terms of the capacity of the industry.

This probably wasn't as easy as it sounds. You had to translate your scripts and directions into an alien language, an alien culture, directions and ongoing changes and adjustments had to surmount huge barriers in terms of distance, time zones, language and culture. Actually achieving a trans-pacific production process is a huge accomplishment in its own right. And not something you wave a magic wand to just appear for.

In the seventies, some Japanese animation had appeared on North American shores - Macross, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, showing up in syndication. They're commonly understood as the fore-runners of the later wave of Japanese animation, or Anime that would take North America by storm in the 90's and 21st century. But I think that they should also be regarded as the interface point or introduction of western animators to the Asian production capacity. People had to first learn what was out there, and what it could do at home on its own, and what it could potentially end up doing for them.

Collateral to that, of course were probably advances in telecommunications - it got easier and easier to travel back and forth, to quickly, reliably and safely ship things back and forth, to make phone calls, send faxes, to integrate communication and business protocols - remarkable when you think of it - possibly not even paper sizes were initially compatible.


The second great change was probably commercial. Bear with me, because I've got absolutely nothing but my own seat of the pants here. Reagan came in, in 1980 on a wave of deregulation, including in telecommunication.

I think that one of the effects of that is that it created children as a viable target audience in a way that they hadn't been in the 70's or perhaps even the 60's. Basically, children were the new untapped market for advertising and advertisers. Buying for children - toys, toy systems, accessories ranging from blankets and bedspreads to lunch boxes.... I suppose this had always been there, but now somehow, suddenly, it kicked into overdrive, suddenly you could market hard and heavy directly to children and everyone was going crazy for a chunk of that child viewing demographic.

And when I say everyone.... Did you know that Laverne and Shirley had a cartoon show? Happy Days? Mister T? ALF? ALF, a sitcom about a alien played by a puppet was practically a cartoon anyway, but it had its own spin off cartoon. Successful television series were hiving off their animated versions, sometimes taking huge liberties. Any kind of cultural production, such as a successful movie or television series could spin a cartoon. Godzilla had a cartoon show, so did the Ghostbusters, and Rambo. The Harlem Globetrotter had a cartoon series. Ghostbusters and Rambo were by no means children's movies, but as action/adventure, there seemed to be enough lead into young adult that they could be used to exploit that demographic.

Of course, every segment of the children's demographic was being targeted with the intensity of napalm. However it worked, wherever the incentive came from, it seemed that anything that posed even tangential interest to kids would inspire a show.

Under the circumstances, it's amazing that there was no Doctor Who animated series....
 
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The third factor - well, the rabid hounds of commerce had been unleashed on our nation's innocent children, to pillage and devour until their guts burst.

Someone had to have let those dogs out.

I blame Star Wars.

See, here's the thing. Star Wars was basically a gigantic and overwhelmingly successful fantasy adventure. It redefined everything in so many ways. But one of those key ways was that it was as much a teen or children's adventure as anything else. It was family friendly.

He-Man, Thundercats, Bravestar, Thundarr, Transformers, Ghostbusters, they all explicitly absorbed the Star Wars lesson. The genre had been re-defined and remade.

And there were some good reasons for this - theatrically, Star Wars had been followed by Star Trek the motion picture, a bloated special effects bomb, Battlestar Galactica, on star wars level and incredibly expensive, Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars a production so ambitious and expensive he spent 30 years recycling the effects footage, an the Italian Starcrash - an object lesson in what it was like when you didn't have the budget and technological sophistication.

There was a smattering of Star Wars inspired B-movies - Corman's Space Raiders, some Italian trash, efforts here and there. Charles Band's 'Metalstorm.' But the truth was that for live action films, Star Wars was almost impossible to replicate as a B-movie with any credibility. It required a high level of technological and organizational skill and quite a lot of money. If you didn't have that, you ended up with Space Mutiny or some other trash.

It was the same thing with other iconic films - the steps from Conan, to Beastmaster, to Barbarian and the Sorceress..... well, that first step was often right off a cliff.

It's why Alien proved to be such a successful model - it could be done cheaply. The result was endless cheap Alien clones - Forbidden World, Biohazard, Scared to Death, Alien Contamination, Alien Predator and many many more.

The thing was that elements of Star Wars, the ships, the equipment, the settings in outer space or alien landscapes, the monsters and aliens, even the derring do battles.... if they were incredibly expensive to produce on live action.... they were cheap as line drawing. If you wanted to riff on star wars, animation was the way to go.

And overnight, Huckleberry Finn and Alice in Wonderland and all those others are out the window. Children's and Teen stories are redefined almost completely as Fantasy/Sci Fi Adventure.

The other impact of Star Wars was on the minds of the wolves of commerce - all that money Lucas made from merchandising, the insane levels of money - you could get a piece of that. Toy manufacturers saw all sorts of wonderful synergies in hitching Rainbow Brite or He-Man to a cartoon, a walking advertisement, a play structure, a continuing vehicle to promote and push every kind of merchandise they could come up with. Wow. Hell, in many cases, the toys drove the cartoons - He Man was created by Mattel.

You just didn't get that with Popeye.
 
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Nelvana's Doctor Who, the pilot episode
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Aired May 5, 1986. Opening scene of a regular urban street. An armoured car pulls up to a bank. Vagrants in hoodies and overcoats converge on the armoured car. Throwing off their over coats, they are revealed to be essentially metal skeletons, with glowing red eyes and handle bars. They tear overturn the armored car, breaking open its doors. As police cars arrive, one of them bends metal light poles over to create a barrier. Two others enter the bank, tearing a bank vault off its hinges. They ignore a hail of bullets, working calmly and methodically, and then vanishing.

In the next scene, the street is a wreck with smashed cars, broken light poles. An overweight police detective is on the screen taking witness statements. A tall man with dark spikey hair and a flowing overcoat comes up to him. The overcoat has a question mark on its tail. He’s accompanied by a young black girl.

The man introduces himself as the Doctor, and says he’s been called in. He asks what the Detective can tell him. The Detective says "Doctor Who?" It’s a question which will appear in every single episode. The man replies, ‘Just the Doctor’ introduces his companion, Casey Jones, and asks what has happened. The Detective tells the story of robots trashing the place. The Doctor corrects him - ‘Cybermen.’ Robots? Cybermen? What’s the difference? ‘Cybermen used to be men, before they gave up flesh for metal bodies.’ After determining that the Cybermen only stole money, the Doctor expresses puzzlement and departs.

Cut to - the time vortex, a swirl of strange colours and shapes. Occasionally a spaceship or a dinosaur or a skyscraper drifts past in the void. The camera focuses on a strange blue box, with the words ‘police’ written on it.
Inside, the Doctor and Casey muse over the puzzling development, while what appears to be a floating breakfast tray with a stylized dogs head tries to get them to take some tea. What could Cybermen possibly want with money? They don’t need to eat or breath, their power source provides them with energy, and there’s nothing that Earth people could sell them. Casey asks if the Cybermen are from space. The Doctor explains that they are indeed. They used to be just like Earth humans, before they traded their bodies for metal, now they want to convert everyone and everything into beings like him. They’re one of the greatest threats in the Universe. Casey points out that they didn’t try to convert anyone. The Doctor agrees. There is a mystery afoot.

There is a beep at the console. The Doctor looks at it and says that there’s been a development next Thursday. They will go there right away. Casey says it’s pretty handy to have a time machine.

On the side of a Road, the Blue box materializes. The fat detective is surprised to see the Doctor again and asks where he came from. The Doctor indicates the Police Box. He asks for an update. The Detective tells him that the money stolen by the Cybermen has been found abandoned by the side of the Road. It’s as if they didn’t even want it. There’s no trace of the cybermen.

Over the next few weeks, however, there are more robberies - of banks, of jewelry stores, of gold bullion from Fort Knox. In each case, the cybermen are orderly and methodical, exhibiting superhuman strength and oblivious to hails of bullets. In each case, the Cybermen later abandon their stolen goods once they have escaped.

Each time, Casey Jones complains that they have a time machine, but they always arrive late. The Doctor explains that time travel is not easy. Time is always moving forward. It’s hard to get to exactly the right moment. You arrive mostly after. Sometimes before.... This inspires the Doctor. He pilots his time machine to the beginning of the original robbery, before it takes place.

On the street, he goes up introduces himself and asks a Cyberman what the plan is? Why are the Cybermen robbing an armored car when they’re just going to throw the money away? The Cyberman asks if he intends to stop them. The Doctor replies that he is a time traveller, to him, this has already happened, and the time laws forbid changing the past.

Satisfied, the Cyberman explains: They don’t care about the money. They care about demonstrating their strength and power. When the armies of the world see what metal bodies can do, they will all want to convert to steel, and the Cybermen will do it for them. The Doctor asks what if they refuse? The Cyberman says it doesn’t matter. Earth is full of armies, some of them will. Even if none of them do, then criminals will want to convert, and police will have to convert to keep up with criminals. One way or the other, it will spread, and eventually, the Cybermen will convert the entire planet.

The Doctor congratulates them on their ingenious plan and departs. He cannot be in two places at once, and he needs to leave before he arrives. Casey asks if the plan can possibly succeed. The Doctor says that there’s one way to find out - check the future. The Police Box vanishes in a swirl of coloured lights, travelling into the future.

Stepping out, the streets are filled with marching Cybermen. One of them spots the Doctor and Casey and announces that they have not yet been upgraded - they must stand by for conversion. The Doctor and Casey flee. The Doctor explains that alll Cybermen worlds are like this - no war or hunger or disease, but no love, no friendship, no beauty, just another world of machines.

Casey asks what we can do. The Doctor says he cannot change the past. But he can still change the future. They go to Generals and politicians to try to get them not to agree to converting, but none of them agree. Casey complains that the Cybermen are too strong, and that we need a weapon to weaken them. The Doctor says that weakening them is the key!

All Cybermen draw from a central power source, the Doctor explains. That is their ship. All they have to do is find their ship and destroy the energy source, and the Cybermen will be almost powerless.

The Doctor and Casey travel into space in the past. In orbit, they watch the Cybermen ship come to Earth. They can see that it is damaged and that there is a forced crash landing. Casey asks if they can stop it, but the Doctor says it has already happened. They watch it land.

Then the Doctor materializes his Tardis inside the ship. He and Casey, and the robot dog K9 sneak out, but are immediately caught. The Cybermen announce that the Doctor will be taken for immediate processing into a Cyberman. But they don’t know what to do with Casey since she is too small. K9 announces that he is a cyber-dog, and that he will take her to processing for children and pets, the Cybermen agree. As he is lead away, the Doctor tells Casey it is all up to her.

In the processing chamber, the Doctor stalls for time and tells the Cybermen that he can help them fix their ship and be on their way to wherever they were going. They don’t have to bother with Earth. They can go and fight whatever they were fighting, Daleks or whoever. The Cybermen tell them that their mission is to convert all human life to Cybermen, and that they can do that hear as easily as anywhere else.

Meanwhile, Casey and K9 make it to the glowing power core of the ship. Casey takes an explosive from inside K9 and attaches it to the power core, then they flee. Behind them there is a mighty explosion. All the lights go red. In the processing chamber, the Doctor excuses himself, unstraps from the processing rig, brushes politely past the ineffectual cybermen and wanders back to the Tardis.

Cut to street scene of another Cyberman robbery - after ripping the doors off of cars and overturning vehicles, they lose all strength. Suddenly, they are barely able to lift small objects. They fall over. Police arrest them almost without resistance. A little old lady pushes a cyber-warrior around, while another struggles futilely to steal a rattle from a baby.
Cut to the Doctor and Casey looking at a viewscreen. On it, Cybermen sit neatly in prison cells, while one uses a walker to get around. One of them seems to look directly into the viewscreen.

The image blurs and waves, and then there is an old man in robes in the viewscreen, who congratulates the Doctor for stopping the Cyberman and tells him that his sentence will soon be over and that he can return. The Doctor says he has no wishes to return. The screen goes blank.

Casey asks about the reference to the sentence, does that mean that the Doctor is a prisoner? But how can he be a prisoner if he can travel anywhere in space and time. The Doctor says that his sentence is to guard the earth.
 
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