Forum:The Unspecified Cyberman Debate

I was recently reading through The Brilliant Book 2012 and noticed that it states that the "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Closing Time" Cybermen (although it says nothing about "Blood of the Cybermen") are infact 'Mondasian' (for want of a better term) and not 'Pete's World' ones. I suppose the debate now is: Do we consider The Brilliant Book/s to be canon? I can see why some people wouldn't (a lot of it is written out-of-universe), but I also understand that the views on continuity expressed inside the book are also those expressed by the production team. So should we go ahead and merge the information into Cyberman (Mondas), or are there some people who object or something? The preceding comment was made by Bigredrabbit (talk to me) 23:26, October 29, 2011 (UTC)

If the fact that the more recent Cybermen are actually the main universe Cybermen actually does come from the production team or from Moffat, then I would say that we should consider that canon. I would think that writer's intent is really what is important in this case. Still, I'm sure that their are plenty of people who would disagree.Icecreamdif talk to me 20:19, October 30, 2011 (UTC)

I think there's a debate as to whether reference material works as a source. I'm sure I read somewhere that it's preferred to be placed in the "behind the scenes" section. Am I wrong on this? That said, if it's absolutely said with the production team's blessing, rather than just whoever wrote it... -- Tybort (talk page) 20:55, October 30, 2011 (UTC)

There's s0me debate as to whether reference books are 'canon'. This wouldn't be the first article that demonstrated information from REF prefixes as 'canon'. Even the CyberMondasian, CyberNeomorph, CyberFaction, etc. stuff is mainly based on REF: Cybermen. So I really think we ought to consider The Brilliant Book 'canon'. 220.244.162.100 10:02, November 1, 2011 (UTC)


 * The issues are seperate in that particular case. The CyberMondasian / CyberNeomorph / etc. info comes from the book Doctor Who: Cybermen which is a very unique case, as it contains both in-universe narrative and out-of-universe reference material.  The in-universe reference stuff is presented in the form of a reference work by in-universe characters.  So the in-universe stuff from Doctor Who: Cybermen is okay to cite in-universe regardless of how we feel about out-of-universe reference works like The Brilliant Book, and we can't base our policy on out-of-universe reference material on how we feel about CyberNeomorphs. &mdash; Rob T Firefly - &#916;&#8711; - 21:37, November 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * The Brilliant Book cannot be used to assert in-universe information. Our canon policy is immensely clear. Narratives are primary information.  Secondary sources — that is, reference works — cannot be used to source of in-universe information.  Secondary sources may be used to add notes to "behind the scenes" sections but that's about it.


 * Although I've got a lot to say on this subject, it's actually really simple. In-universe sections have to come from in-universe sources.  Behind the scenes sections contain real world information.  Ne'er the twain shall meet.  And since the in-universe portion of articles is mandatory, if you don't have a narrative reference for a topic, you can't even start the article at all.


 * Here's a practical example. Let's say there was a book called Uncle Terrance's Guide to the Whoniverse.  And imagine that Terrance Dicks, feeling a bit impish, put in an entry about a place called "Devon Motorworks", which he asserted was the company that built Bessie. You can't then create an article which says:
 * Devon Motorworks was the automobile factory that created Bessie. (REF: Uncle Terrance's Guide to the Whoniverse)


 * It doesn't matter that it's written by Terrance Dicks, key production team member during the years that Bessie was in use. The problem is that you're using an out-of-universe source to cite something which is in-universe.


 * I know it's tempting to use information said to be straight from the word processor of Steven Moffat, but we just can't do it. It's the "thin end of the wedge", as Humphrey Appleby liked to say.  We'd then have to let in a lot of material:
 * Offhand comments made on DVD commentaries. (And then we'd have to settle the question of who's right.  For instance, Julie Gardner firmly asserts The Woman was the Doctor's mother, but RTD is more coy about it in PCOM: The End of Time part 2.)
 * Stuff in the production notes section of DWM, or notes from the producers at the front of annuals. Was series 5 actually Season Fnarg?  It is if you take Steven Moffat literally in the pages of DWM.
 * A literal ton of material from old Doctor Who and Dalek annuals that we don't even want to think about, such as text which introduces activity pages, which is sometimes done non-narratively, but in-character. This sort of creep is already happening on the wiki, largely from the DWBIT range of magazines.  Some editors are quoting from non-narrative "factoids" that appear in BIT and it simply can't be allowed to continue, much less expand to other publications.
 * God does not know how much we'd have to include from The Writer's Tale, The Nth Doctor and other books which contain information about narrative avenues not actually taken. We're already on shaky enough ground sometimes using the credits and the script (hello Zaggit Zagoo bar, I'm lookin' at you) to name things which the finished episode does not.  We don't want to open ourselves to the mentality that "anything which comes from the mouth or pen of The Creator deserves an article/is canon here".  Sometimes great artists just doodle.  We don't want to be in the position of creating an article for all the things that almost were.


 * Another thing I'm seeing as dangerous is the suggestion upthread that some reference works are better than others. This would be a very difficult arrangement to administrate.  A reference work is a reference work is a reference work.  One written by RTD may be more valuable to your own personal sense of canon, but it'd be hard to let some in but exclude others. Other people, who generally disapprove of RTD, would be quick to say that they don't particularly care what his opinion is in a specific book.  Thus, the disqualifying factor here is not the writer, it's the perspective from which the work is written.


 * See, this is a wiki about a fictional universe. The DWU is created by and indivisible from narrative.  This isn't like the Star Wars universe, where Lucasfilm has a canon policy. It's okay for w:c:starwars to use the Star Wars Encyclopedia because that's explicitly canon to Lucasfilm.


 * We don't have the organisational luxury of a BBC-provided list of allowed works. So we have to set some sort of boundaries.  If we didn't, we'd soon be including fan works or things that have no actual bearing on the DWU.


 * Now, we have a pretty broad church here, but it's not infinitely expandable.


 * If you look at DWU reference works, as a general group, they're not the most accurate things in the world. JNT wrote The Companions and erroneously asserted that Sara Kingdom was a companion — something Jean Marsh has strongly denied ever since.  JNT later asserted in another book that he had absolutely no problems with Tom Baker, something we know isn't true from the preponderance of other evidence.  He's a big part of the production team, though.  Should we take him more seriously than Jean-Marc Lofficier, who once notoriously asserted that Polly Wright's last name was "Wright"?  I don't see why we should.  Philip Hinchcliffe is well known as a non-expert on the narrative history of DW.  I wouldn't trust him if he set out to make a DW encyclopedia, nor would I expect Verity Lambert to have been terribly accurate on the details of her tenure in the years before her death.  I mean, this is surely the lesson of DVD commentaries.  They're not that accurate, even though they may include people who we'd otherwise deem to be authoritative.  We'd expect Tom Baker to remember things about The Ribos Operation.  After all, he was there!  But his memory is often spotty.


 * The point is, as a class of works, it is simply better for the quality of our information to stay on point. Our subject is the DWU, not other people's impressions of the DWU.


 * Such a stance forces us, as editors, to actually watch the episodes, or read the books, or listen to the audios. Everything in the DWU begins and ends with the narrative. "Reference" works are — by definition — someone else's distillation of the stories of the DWU.  Now, of course, it's relevant to note what various people important to the production of the DWU think about it.  But these notes must be in their proper place — the behind the scenes sections of articles.


 * Now, allllll that said, I happen to believe that you don't need The Brilliant Book to tell you that the S6 Cybermen are Mondasian. This is readily apparent in their design, in their ability to travel into deep space, and in the design of the shapes of their spacecraft — which clearly match those seen in The Invasion.  The visual evidence is that they are "proper" Cybermen, and I've long held that we've put the burden of proof the wrong way around.  The question is not, "prove they're Mondasian".  Rather, it's, "using only the evidence at hand, prove that they're Pete's World."


 * We're being far too literal, expecting a bit of dialogue or a screen to tell us that they're definitely this universe's Cybermen. Such dialogue is incredibly unlikely.  We can positively assert they're Mondasian, because they're obviously NOT Pete's World, and we've been given no reasonable expectation that there's a "third option" out there.


 * It's better to say that it's unclear how or why the Mondasian Cybermen came to have a somewhat similar appearance to the Pete's World Cybermen than for us to assert that the s6 Cyberment are a "third, unknown type" of Cybermen. We're just making that up.  The visual evidence points to the fact that they are Mondasian, and that we're simply missing the bit of their history that connects, I guess, Silver Nemesis with A Good Man Goes to War.


 * 01:37: Wed 02 Nov 2011


 * Their ability to travel into deep space is not much of an argument for them being Mondasian, as the Cybermen with the Cybus logo in The Pandorica Opens also have this ability. And the third option is not them being a completely separate type, but a result of an alliance/merger between the Mondasian Cybermen and the remnants of the Pete's World Cybermen. As for visual evidence, while their ships etc. look Mondasian, I don't think we can just dismiss the fact that they themselves look more like Pete's World Cybermen. Ausir(talk) 11:37, November 3, 2011 (UTC)

Well, as long as this is turning into a debate about what type of Cybermen they are, let's just go with Occam's Razer. An alliance/merger betweeen the different types of Cybermen is wild speculation. No possible justification for it at all exxcept that it would be cool. The Mondasian Cybermen aren't like the Daleks who have been completely destroyed (over and over), we just haven't heard from them. The Cybus-Cybermen, on the other hand, come from a parallel universe that has been completely cut off from the main one. Every episode that they have been in has given some sort of explanation for how they crossed through the void. Even in The Pandorica Opens, we can probably assume that they came through the cracks. The Cybermen of the new series look exactly like you would expect the classic Cybermen to look if they had a higher budget and modern special effects. Unless we have a real reason to believe that they found another way to brak down the walls of the universe and cross over from Pete's World, we should assume that they are the Mondasian Cybermen unless told otherwise.Icecreamdif talk to me 20:04, November 3, 2011 (UTC)


 * It seems to me that we don't have enough info to assume a single thing about where those C-less Cybus-looking Cybermen came from. What we do know is that the modern version of the DWU contains our familiar classic-era Mondasian Cybermen, because of the head in Henry van Statten's vault, so we can't assume an original Star Trek Klingon style of "oh, they were supposed to look like that back then too" just because that would be cool.  We should really be calling Rory's Cybermen "Cybermen," without indicating anything to suggest they came from Mondas or Pete's World or France or any other damn thing; it would all be just speculation on our part.  We're here on this particular wiki to catalog what we see, not to imagine what would fill in the gaps we don't see. &mdash; Rob T Firefly - &#916;&#8711; - 02:59, November 5, 2011 (UTC)

It's not really relevant, but the Klingons' appearance actually changed due to Klingon genetic engineering experiments using human augment embryos. There was an Enterprise 2-parter that explained it. The case with the cyberheadd is more like the DS9 episode where they travel back in time to The Trouble with Tribbles and ask Worf why the Klingons all look like humans. Anyway, back to the point. I wasn't saying that we should assume that the Cybermen always looked the way that they do now. I meant that if they had originally brought back the Mondasian Cybermen in the new series instead of parallel universe Cybermen, they probably would have made them look similar to how they look now. Even if you just look at the black & white era of the show, the Cybermen in The Invasion are radically different from the Cybermen in The Tenth Planet. It isn't really a stretch to assume that they would continue to look more advanced. By your logic, we also shouldn't assume that the Cybermen in Silver Nemesis or The Five Doctors, or most other cyberepisodes. After all, they rarely specify where they came from and for all we know the Pete's World Cybermen could have travelled to our world, gone back in time, gotten rid of their Cybus logos, and faced earlier versions of the Doctor in different episodes. We shouldn't require evidence that the Cybermen are from our universe-if there is no proof that they aren't from our universe then they are from ours.Icecreamdif talk to me 06:03, November 5, 2011 (UTC)

i think the best way to compare the cybermen types is to look at how they become cybermen. mondasian cybermen are made from human parts being replaced with cybernetic parts while the cybus cybermen are created when the brain is transplanted into the cybersuit. from this information, i conclude that the cybermen in series 5/6 are mondasian not cybus (skull in helmet in DW:pandorica opens, craigs transformation in DW:closing time), although i do think a cybersuit redesign would have helped clear matters. an alliance is still a valid point though. this debate seems more like the kind of conversation that would happen on the howling instead of in the panopticon. Imamadmad talk to me 08:28, December 20, 2011 (UTC)

Well, at least when it started out, this was about trying to figure out what to do with the Cyber-articles. Anyway, the method of conversion can't really be used as evidence, thanks to Cyberwomen and Lisa Hallett. There is probably more than enough evidence, regardless, to assume that the Cybermen that we've been seeing recently are real-universe Cybermen, but just putting the ambiguous Cybermen on the Cyberman page is probably as fair a compromise as any, and the fact that we are having this discussion proves that the evidence that we are now seeing real Cybermen wasn't quite clear enough for some people. Hopefully we'll get some kind of redesign before long that will finally convince people that we are seeing real Cybermen.Icecreamdif talk to me 09:17, December 20, 2011 (UTC)