Day 173: The Tomb of the Cybermen Episode 4

One of the vaguely unsettling subtexts in this episode is not the conversion of people into metal creatures, but instead the way that others will appear to be treated in the future, and by others, I mean one person in particular. His name is Toberman, and he is the strongman for the archaeological expedition that is being undertaken. His role would seem to be being bossed about by his superiors and to carry things. He doesn't really have a character beyond that, the most interesting thing that happens to him is that he is converted by the Cybermen and then later overthrows them completely, only to be killed at the story's conclusion. And that's a nice little idea, that uses the idea of someone being converted fighting back against their original programming, and it will occasionally be used again in later stories (cf Doomsday, Closing Time). But here's the annoying thing: Toberman is a person of colour. And that means that the story has an uncomfortable slavery subtext beneath it. For all that it portrays itself as a futuristic version of a mummy movie, occasionally it too strays into uncomfortable stereotypes, showing us a white crew where a black man is told to do things for them as a slave. Does this mean that the writers (Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis) were racist? In my opinion, no, because it is less individuals that are racist and more the time that the story is made in. When people will search for characters, often they will do so with a certain stereotype in mind, and it just so happened that Toberman was the stereotype associated with strongmen, generally being from outside of Britain, from far off regions such as Africa or Europe. But all of this means that when we come back to the story, we can see all of the cracks that are associated with it, be it in the writing or how some of the effects come across, or in how the characters are portrayed. This story is undeniably a product of its time, the only problem is seeing whether it is still relevant today, or whether things have just become too uncomfortable.