Audio Club has reached Spare Parts, the famed ‘genesis of the Cybermen’ story.
What are your favourite ‘Genesis of a Monster’ stories?
Genesis of the Daleks?
Spare Parts?
Lords of the Red Planet?
The First Sontarans?
The Dark Path?
And actually - should this be a trope @shauny? There are quite a few examples of ‘origin’ stories within the Whoniverse.
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel is technically a Cyberman origin story although I’ve always been slightly perturbed by the acknowledgement of the story being based on Spare Parts, with Marc Platt getting a credit. It really is the loosest of adaptations with only the barest minimum of linkage.
Do Fragments and Tooth and Claw count for Torchwood? Or Timeless Children for Gallifrey? : P
In all seriousness, Genesis is a classic for a reason so credit there were it’s due, I really need to listen to spare parts again, and I really like the alternate take of the Cybermen origin with Rise/Age. (Plus love that with the cybermen’s concept you can just keep doing origins for them because they’re inevitable)
Now I’m thinking about other monsters that should get this treatment. Autons?
Didn’t we sort of get an Auton origin in Forty 2?
Wayyyy ahead of you, although might not have them all:
Also, the best “Genesis of the Cybermen” story is World Enough and Time!
Would The Doctor Falls count as a kind of origin story? We get a good look at how the Cybermen came about in that one.
I haven’t seen many of them. I liked Rise of the Cybermen as a very light episode, I thought it was cute and the bits where people got turned into cybermen were legitimately squeamish, but honestly I feel like there should be more squeamishness, given that both Dalek and Cybermen are tinned humanoids.
(and if you wait for me to actually get to the editing phase, i explore this in something i’m working on…)
I thought World Enough and Time’s scenes inside the hospital were brilliant. The old cybermen design I legitimately prefer. There’s something really unsettling about the bags over heads, and the crude machinery. I buy it more that there’s meat in there.
I don’t know, for a genesis story of manmade life forms like dalek or cybermen, I’d like more scenes inside the cannery. It really isn’t hard to make them scary.
Well now, that wasn’t there when I looked at those stories earlier today 
The trope existed, and was on all of the stories except a couple you mentioned (because I didn’t know about those, thanks!)
That’s the second part of World Enough and Time. I’ve added it too, as the Genesis of the Cybermen is touched on in both stories 
Out of interest, are the two Dark Eyes stories there because they detail the origins of the Eminence?
And I’ve just thought of another - Primeval shows the Doctor becoming the first Keeper of the Source of Traken.
Also– according to Lance Parkin in The Inside Story– Kwundaar summoning his people at the end of Primeval foreshadows the Eternals and Guardians in season 20! Not so much an origin, more an addendum to canon, but a fun moment I missed when listening.
Yes!
Should we add Primeval then? Not sure if that counts…
Well, Spare Parts is a masterpiece and the original Cyberman origin - the later stories s are just watered-down versions. Although World Enough and Time and The Doctor Falls are great episodes in their own right.
Genesis of the Daleks is great but not superb.
I haven’t experienced the other stories suggested above.
Also, adding to this: could Lungbarrow be considered an origin story? I haven’t read it, but I’m familiar with some of the stuff in it. Also, every Doctor’s first story is technically that incarnation’s origin story.
River Song’s origin? The Big Bang!
The Master’s origin? The End of Time, a pivotal story 
Oh! And Destination: Skaro is an alternative Genesis of the Daleks!
I see I successfully baited @BillFiler 
Thinking after I posted its not a monster origin story. I’ll shut up.
First of all this is “monster origin” not Doctor origin 
But I’m limiting it to a very specific trope where they take an existing monster, something that has been in stories before, and then go back and reveal how it began. So for example this doesn’t count every first story featuring a monster eg Aliens of London for the Slitheen or Partners in Crime for the Adipose.
So the Eminence is on murky grounds because it’s the box set that it was introduced in, but the story does very specifically go back in time and show how it began so 
Oh and yes very clever
Technically Master is also one of these stories, although not necessarily the best example.
And of course as we all know Finetime is Skaro
It is?! 
