Mondas (Doctor Who)

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Mondas is a fictional planet from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was the homeworld of the Cybermen, a race of cyborgs which are one of the most famous adversaries of the Doctor.

Mondas was Earth's twin planet, identical down to even the size and shapes of its continents. Millions of years ago, it was the tenth planet of the Solar System, until somehow it drifted out of its orbit and journeyed into deep space. In Mondas's first appearance in the 1966 serial The Tenth Planet, it was stated that "Mondas" is another name for Earth in one of the ancient languages.

What exactly moved Mondas out of its orbit is not known. According to the book Cybermen by David Banks it was the arrival of the Moon in orbit around Earth, but the canonicity of this is uncertain. According to the Cybermen themselves, the Mondasians were once exactly like human beings, but to remove various weaknesses such as a decreasing lifespan, their scientists designed cybernetic spare parts to replace the organs of the human body. They also considered emotions a weakness, and removed those from their brains as well, becoming extremely powerful and long-lived while at the cost of becoming cold, logical and machine-like in their ruthlessness. It is unclear if this conversion process arose because of environmental necessity after Mondas left its orbit or for other reasons.

The Cybermen began to send spaceships to conquer and colonise other planets, including Telos, where they pushed the native Cryons aside (Attack of the Cybermen) and established the "tombs" of the Cybermen, vast vaults where they could take refuge in suspended animation if needed (The Tomb of the Cybermen).

Eventually, the Cybermen fitted a propulsion system to Mondas itself. This allowed them to pilot the planet through space, returning it to the solar system in 1986 (The Tenth Planet). The Cybermen invaded Earth while Mondas drew closer, draining Earth's energy to replace and supplement its own. However, the energy absorbed was too much, and Mondas disintegrated along with the Cyber forces on Earth.

The 2006 episodes Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel introduced Cybermen who originated on a parallel version of Earth, rather than on Mondas. In The Age of Steel, the Tenth Doctor explains that the Cybermen of his own universe started from a planet "just like" the parallel Earth, an apparent reference to Mondas, although the planet is not mentioned by name.

[edit] Other appearances

The comic strip The World Shapers, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by John Ridgway and Tim Perkins, (Doctor Who Magazine #127-#129) shows the Voord of the planet Marinus using stolen time technology to "quick-evolve" themselves into the earliest Cybermen, which would make Marinus an earlier version of Mondas, before a change of name.

Incompatible with this explanation, the Virgin Missing Adventures novel State of Change by Christopher Bulis includes a throwaway scene of the creation of a duplicate Earth with the inference that we would later know as Mondas.

The monthly series of comic strips written by Alan Barnes and drawn by Adrian Salmon, The Cybermen (DWM #215-#238) ignored this and took place on an unspoiled version of Mondas. It is not an origin story per se, but a sequence of events taking place in a larger history beginning with the story The Dead Heart, taking place some time after Mondas has begun its journey. It showed Cybermen similar to those shown in "The Tenth Planet" discovering and warring with Silurians and Sea Devils.

The last story of the cycle, The Ugly Underneath, depicts the original Cybermen having died out, by which time an Earth-like, technologically modern civilisation has arisen to replace them. The comic strip ended with the implication that revived Cybermen will, one day, still take over the planet. The Sea Devils and Silurians do not appear in this story.

In the Big Finish Productions audio play Spare Parts, the Fifth Doctor and his companion Nyssa arrived on Mondas prior to the rise of the Cybermen, while it was still drifting through space. There, they discovered the Mondasians living underground in a culture virtually identical to that of England in the 1950s, although with more advanced technology. The play relates the slow slide of the Mondasians towards cyber-conversion, conceived by the cybernetic gestalt intelligence controlling Mondas (an early version of the Cyber Planner seen in The Wheel in Space and The Invasion) as a solution to the planet's increasingly desperate situation.

It should be noted that, like the other spin-off media, the canonicity of these and other non-televised accounts is uncertain.