Earthshock (unproduced TV story)
- You may be looking for the Fifth Doctor story.
Earthshock was a story concept in John Leekley's series bible for Amblin Entertainment's proposed 1990s Doctor Who television show. It was based on the Fifth Doctor story Earthshock and notably reinterpreted the Cybermen as piratical plastic "Cybs".[1]
Synopsis
The Doctor arrives in Wyoming in 1994. In an underground cave of dinosaur fossils, a number of paleontologists were murdered by a raiding party of Cybs, galactic slash-and-burn marauders who converted themselves into beautiful cybotic organisms of vat-grown plastic after ruining the environment of their home planet, Mondas. They are protecting a bomb capsule capable of destroying Earth.
Although the Doctor dismantles the bomb, the Cybs capture him and force their way onto the Tardis where a deadly fight takes place. The Doctor weaponises the Cybs' vanity against them, as well as their breathing apparatuses' vulnerability to gold dust.[2]
Notes
- In an earlier draft of the Earthshock summary, written 21 March 1994, the Doctor is not captured after dismantling the bomb but instead follows its radio signal to a space freighter that the raiders have locked on a collision course with Earth. The Doctor destroys the Cyb leader and saves Earth by sending the ship into a time spiral.[2]
- The Nth Doctor notes that, while the visual reinterpretation of Cybermen as "deadly cyborg version[s] of a Native American-style warrior" would have been controversial among fans, the depiction of the Cybs as space scavengers is faithful to their introduction in The Tenth Planet (rather than, as the authors note, "some silver-suited alternative to the Daleks").
