The Doctor, Peri and Frobisher follow a distress signal to a watery planet that the Doctor recognises as Marinus, where they discover a dying Time Lord who mutters "Planet 14..." before expiring. The dead Gallifreyan's TARDIS reveals they were there to investigate a time anomaly. Spurred on by the familiarity of "Planet 14", the Doctor decided to visit his old friend Jamie. Meanwhile, Deedrun and Maxilla, Worldshaper repairers, arrive on Marinus. And the Voord are lurking nearby...
Arriving in Scotland forty years later than he intended, the Doctor finds an elderly Jamie an outcast from the village, regarded as a madman for his stories of travelling to other worlds. Naturally the Doctor bundles his old friend into the TARDIS and heads back to Marinus. There they find the Voord have seized control of the Worldshaper and used it to artificially evolve themselves into... the Cybermen!
The Doctor resolves to destroy the Worldshaper, but it's surrounded by a time field that will age the person who tries to deactivate it to death. Jamie sacrifices his life to destroy it with his sword, and the planet is changed into one the Doctor recognises as Mondas. Two Time Lords show up and tell the Doctor to move along, even as he argues they could wipe out the Cybermen here, at their origin point. After he leaves, the two Time Lords reflect that a few million years of suffering caused by the Cybermen will be well worth it when they one day ascend to peaceful, benevolent beings of pure thought.
Tropes:
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: According to the Time Lords, the Cybermen will one day ascend to beings of pure thought.
- Back for the Dead: Jamie returns for one final adventure with the Doctor.
- Continuity Nod:
- Jamie and Peri remember each other from "The Two Doctors".
- Possibly one of the most obscure in Doctor Who - there is a reference to the Fishmen of Kandalinga from the 1966 Annual, a story that also featured the Voord. One wonders if a young Grant read it at some point...
- Continuity Snarl:
- No other story would run with this one's idea that Mondas, Marinus and Planet 14 are all the same world. When it got a Continuity Nod on TV in "World Enough And Time", Marinus was notably listed as a parallel evolution of the Cybermen, and certainly not Mondas itself. And its place as the definitive Cyberman origin story would be superseded by "Spare Parts".
- Some small details are wrong (understandably, since Morrison was probably working off the novelisation and possibly childhood memory - "The Invasion" wouldn't come out on video till 1993). A major one is that Jamie never heard the Cyber-Planner reference Planet 14 onscreen in "The Invasion" - that actually happened in a scene with only Vaughn and the Cyber-Planner present. They also never faced the Cybermen in the sewers with the Brigadier as depicted in the flashback.
- Heroic Sacrifice: An elderly Jamie sacrifices his life to shut down the Worldshaper.
