'I could feel your hard - on' : Cyberwoman (S01E04)

Ianto Jones

Wahayyyyyy! I have been looking forward to this. Cyberwoman is an infamous story, which for years was considered the worst Torchwood had to offer. Having re-watched it I can say it's not as bad as people would have you believe. That said some interesting choices were made behind the scenes which impacted what ended up on screen Examining this episode honestly has me feeling like Gwen as he is lying on-top of Owen in the mortuary drawer. I am staring at Cyberwoman right in the eye while stating "why yes, "I could feel your hard-on"

Evolution of the Cybermen

Cybermen are a classic Doctor Who monster who debuted way back in a 1966 story called: The Tenth Planet. Basically, Earth has a sister planet called Mondas which drifted off into Space somehow and the humanoid inhabitants: augmented themselves with machinery to survive the resultant apocalyptic conditions. 

Over the years the Cybermen have undergone several re-designs. At the time of Cyberwoman's debut the Cybermen had been reintroduced to new audiences watching the 2005 revival of Doctor Who.  Now comes the terrifying backstory start the so hold onto your boots

Doctor Who put on hiatus in 1989 by the British Broadcasting Company. When it was revised in 2005 the production slowly reintroduced new audiences to the premise and monsters of show, in a fun nerdy way the production team used an in-story explanation for what the Doctor was doing for the 16 years he was off television, he was off helping his people The Time Lords fight something called the Time War against the Daleks, The Doctor ended up killing everyone except for a group of clever Daleks who hid in the void between dimensions in a special ship before re-emerging over London and creating a space anomaly which Torchwood One (remember them?) sough to exploit to achieve British energy independence. 
 
Meanwhile, The Doctor and his companions felt through another space anomaly to a parallel universe where a mad CEO is trying to turn humanity into Cyber-Guys and Dolls, the Doctor and Co, make new friends and stop the plot to turn the population of the UK into Cyber-people but leave their new friends to fight a war against the Cyber-folk, desperate to avoid losing, the Cyber-individuals detect the space anomaly created by the Dalek ship and invade The Doctor's version of Earth through Torchwood One, just the Daleks emerge from their ship, a three sided conflict takes place in Torchwood One between the Doctor/ Friends, the Daleks and the Cyber-citizens during which Torchwood One is destroyed and most of its staff turned into Cyber subjects,  but an Torchwood One employee named Ianto Jones was able to escape the battle physically unharmed while dragging his girlfriend Lisa Halett out of a Cyber-Conversion Unit......  And we're done. Well done RTD, the Merry Men and Maids Marion in trying to get rid of all the bullshit associated with the Cybermen from the original Doctor Who, you instead created more complicated bullshit.

Cyberwoman

At it's heart Cyberwoman is a Gothic Horror about grief. Gothic is a term that is bandied about so much that its almost meaningless, but I will use this definition for Gothic as a genre going forward: "a transgression of aesthetic proprietary or social respectability, an overpowering of emotion, an obsession with madness, the unconscious and extreme psychological states" (Jones). 

I do not think that anyone in their right-mind could disagree that the character of Ianto is experiencing bereaved passion to the point of extreme torment which in turn motivates an erotic desire "without any moral framework or theological boundaries to it" (Bragg, Wuthering Heights).

I have to tip my hat to Gareth David-Lloyd (the actor playing Ianto) for giving one hundred percent to what the story is asking of him. Unfortunately, this was his first acting job and the script would be challenging for even an experienced actor. Due to his psychological state Ianto is responsible for the following:

1. Hiding his girlfriends corpse in the basement of the hub 

2. To my mind at least displaying borderline necrophilic tendencies  

3.The deaths of two civilians at the hands of Lisa

4. Attempting to dispose of the body of one of her victims

5. Repeatedly impleading his coworker's attempts to stop Lisa

6. Threatening Jack with torturous death

7. Refusing to take responsibility for his choices regarding Lisa

8. Being unable to kill Lisa himself requiring his Co-Workers to shoot her.

Now, to put it mildly that is quite a list of transgressions and implies quite a fascinating cocktail of psychological issues. It won't surprise anyone that Ianto is winning this weeks H.E.R. award. However I am going to present three defenses for the characterisation of Ianto in this story.

Firstly, the story is making an existentialist commentary on authenticity and the nature of choice. Ianto is being criticized by the narrative: he has not told his co-workers about his past with Torchwood One nor the existence of Lisa. Ianto is also monomaniacally fixed on the past as regret (Lisa)  to the detriment of his present and future (his relationships with his coworkers) (Flynn).

One of Soren Kierkegaard's characters in  Either/Or the Judge Williams summarises Iantos position excellently: 

"Do you not know that comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true natures could not reveal itself. Or any you think of anything more frightful that it might end eth your nature being resolved into a multiplicity?  That you really might become many? Become like those unhappy demoniacs? A Legion? And you this would have lost that inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality. Such a one may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend so far beyond himself that he also cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love. And he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all" (Flynn) 

Stick a pin in that idea of hiding oneself and lying its going to become a massive theme throughout Torchwood.

Secondly, Cyberwoman is tackling a problematic plot element in fiction; the association of Madness with violence or evil. Ianto is really acting like the villain of the story. All of his decisions put people in mortal danger and actually get two people killed. However rather than going the route of treating Ianto's actions as a evidence of a "existential category of radical otherness" thereby, forcing the other characters to either imprison or kill Ianto before he kills them, the story opts to redeem Ianto (Jones). 

At the end of the episode Ianto is allowed back onto the team to build the relationships he needs to heal. That is a honestly a lovely and brave decision. I just wish that it worked. The reason I struggle with the decision is quite simple. The consequences of Ianto's choices are extremely severe, two people have been killed and he was willing to cover up one of those deaths. In order for the audience to buy into Ianto's redemption the series needs a clear idea of where his character is going and have solid pieces of character writing to guide Ianto through the transition. 

Torchwood does none of these things, there are maybe three brief scenes after this episode which touch on Ianto's mental state and then by Episode Eight he is fine. Ianto cured himself of all those issues off screen apparently. The writers did not put the leg work therefore I am unconvinced.

Finally, Cyberwoman is a Gothic horror and Ianto is being written in the mold of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights or Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre. Hand on my heart I have not read Jane Eyre but I trust the analysis I am going to use.

Both Heathcliff and Rochester are written as characters capable of violent passions and obsessions (Bragg, Wuthering Heights) (Bragg, Jane Eyre). Both men are capable of horrible acts; Heathcliff is sadistically abusive and infatuate with his love Cathy to the  point of necrophilia, attempting to dig up her grave after her death to look upon her face, Rochester has imprisoned his first wife Bertha in the attic of his stately home after marrying her for her money (Bragg, Wuthering Heights) (Bragg, Jane Eyre).

Which brings me to Lisa. In contrast to all the messy psychological stuff going on with Ianto, Lisa is a sexy lamp. I honestly cannot tell you anything about Lisa or her personality, other than the fact that she worked at Torchwood One and is Ianto's girlfriend. As I hinted at above with the necrophiliac comments, to my mind Lisa is dead and all we see is a corpse being puppeteered by Cyberman technology.  

This is because Lisa is the Mad Woman in the Attic of Cyberwoman. The Mad Woman in the Attic is an idea from Jane Eyre. Basically the first wife of Mr. Rochester Bertha Mason has been locked away and kept secret in the family home due to madness. Bertha is an incredibly uncomfortable character for the following reasons: 

a. Bertha is a "wholly demonised figure in the novel a figure of Gothic monstrosity" (Bragg, Jane Eyre)

b. Bertha is "given a biography but she's not really given a psychology that we can enter into because it's organised around a set of contradictions" (Bragg, Jane Eyre).

c. Bertha is everything that Jane is not" i.e. Jane as a character  is associated with the "healthy heart of England with English Values and English Geographies" whereas Bertha is a black woman of mixed heritage from the Caribbean and in a "very 19th century way of thinking contaminated by contact with the colonies"  (Bragg, Jane Eyre).

Unfortunately, all of those descriptions can also be applied to Lisa: her biography is bare-bones, I have no insight into her psychology because she is dead, the other four T3 members demonise her due her status as a Cyberman, and she has been contaminated by exposure to the weird alien bollocks of the Doctor Who universe (I will have a whole rant about this idea in another blog post.) 

It also unfortunate, because Lisa's actress  Caroline Chikezie is British but of Nigerian heritage. Her parents are members of the Igbo ethnic group. Ooops. I don't think there was malice behind casting Caroline in this role, it just was not considered. This is the first black character in Torchwood in the next three series there will black supporting characters and leads so its a little unfortunate that she falls victim to a Victorian story telling trope. 

Further compounding these issues is a recurrent horror element in Cybermen stories: Body Horror. In 1966 an anthropologist named Mary Douglas wrote a book called Purity and Danger in which she explains: "The Body is a model which can stand for any bounded system, it's boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or are precarious" (Jones).

This is a fancy way of saying that  human bodies are fragile and are often used as metaphors for the frailness of politics, society life etc. Fear of that fragility either motivates people to man literal or figurative barricades to defend against the outside coming in and contaminating that which we hold dear. 

Furthermore, these same anxieties about our vulnerability in a hostile world leads people to create categorisations to make sense of the chaos around us. his is echoed by an argument that Mary Douglas advances in which she asserts that social and metal organisation required "order, a clear classification and categorisation in events and objects" (Jones). Boxes allow us to label what is and is not safe and provides a sense of security, therefore when individuals or communities occupy two boxes simultaneously or move from one box to another people get uneasy.

Cybermen by definition occupy multiple boxes and this is part of where the horror of them as a concept comes from. As noted by Jones in another section of his book; "In it's incorporation of flesh and machine the Cyborg is a characteristically techno-phobic figure for the contemporary world. The Cyborg is another of horror's liminal boundary transgressors; Flesh/Machine, human/inhuman, living/inorganic, sentient/algorithmic, familiar/strange" (Jones). 

Cybermen do not play by the rules of what Douglas argued is essential for a human sense of security; simply by existing they expose how fragile humans are. Again it is a little head-tilting that all those traits are given to black character with no personality, who is then presented by the narrative as a source of contagion. 

“Lone Cyberman Looks Left.

Before, we conclude I must discuss the important issue of Lisa's costume design. Apparently, the production team were trying to tap into "a very long history of sexy, pneumatic, hydraulic women, strangely, in science-fiction" in order to produce a Cyberman character who is threatening, powerful and "as sexy as possible" (Walker, 3983 & 3994). 

Therein, lies in the problem Cyberwoman is a dark story both literally and emotionally. The T3 team are trapped in a darkened locked-down Hub terrified and trying to avoid Lisa who is stomping around looking to kill them. Sexy has no place in a story like this. Whenever Lisa showed up in her metallic bra and high kneeled boots she completely destroyed the tone. Whenever, I saw her all I could think was "she looks like a Power Rangers villain".

That is not a jab at Power Rangers by the way, its more a comment that Lisa's design is at home in a campy fun action-adventure series aimed at little boys than a tense horror story.  There are only two instances where the costume works. The first is when we see Lisa strapped to the life support machine, as we can clearly see she is a person. The scene also allows the costume to used for discomfort as Dr. Tanizaki a cybernetics specialist Ianto has brought in to try and cure Lisa, starts excitedly pawing at the machinery on her breasts and thighs and discussing how beautiful the conversion process was. 

After that though, the costume should have been retired. Lisa is very intimidating when she is silhouetted. There are a few scenes in the episode in which you just see the Cyberman head handles and general outline shadowed against red light and its very effective. Whenever, she is up close to the camera through the fear vanishes almost immediately. 

How would I repair this issue if I had my script doctor glasses on? Well a couple of suggestions: Have the costume do its thing in Lisa's first scene, but afterwards have her encase herself fully in the Cybermen suit, maybe leave her face exposed to manipulate Ianto OR  Keep the costume but clearly show that Lisa has been mutilated in someway; perhaps have visible scarring or burns on her body to demonstrate that the conversion process is a violation. Alternatively, we can employ an idea that the writer of the episode uses later: with Ashad the Last Cyberman in the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who. Ashad is fully armoured but his face plate is cracked so you can see half his face and its very striking visually, so we could have had Lisa fully encased in a Cyberman suit but have the armour clearly damaged in some way so we can see her features.

I meant what I said when  I claimed that Cyberwoman is better than people gave it credit for. The story is thematically dense, I would not have written as much as I have if the script had been less ambitious. Tragically, that ambition is perhaps why the episode does not work but I would rather something ambitious and messy, than boring and mindless. 

Bibliography

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