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| “ | Cybermen will remove fear. Cybermen will remove sex and class and color and creed. You will become identical, you will become like us. | „ |
| ~ CyberLeader One's broadcast. |
Cybermen are the secondary antagonists of the Doctor Who franchise. They are a race of cyborgs, who wish to convert or destroy all other life
History[]
Being the product of parallel evolution, the Cybermen were "inevitable", "always get[ting] started" wherever there was people.
The first Cybermen were originally the people of the planet Mondas, the Tenth Planet of Earth's solar system, who converted themselves to survive when their world was knocked out of solar orbit and drifted into the deep space.
Prior to coming to Earth, as revealed in The Isos Network, a faction of Cybermen from Planet 14 had invaded the planet Isos II and converted its humanoid population. By repurposing Isos II's monorail system, a dimensional warp was created which led to Earth. A large invasion fleet of Cybermen waited on Isos II while a smaller amount of Cybermen and a Cyber-Planner went through the warp to establish themselves on Earth and put the planet into a weakened state. As seen in The Invasion, This group of Cybermen established a base on the dark side of the Moon, and worked with industrialist Tobias Vaughn, adding mind control circuits to his company's appliances. However the Second Doctor, and the newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, interfered with their plans. Despite successfully using the monolithic circuits to pacify the population, and summoning the fleet, their ground invasion was thwarted, and the fleet was destroyed by a chain reaction of missiles.Some Cybermen survived the destruction, and fled back to Isos II. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe followed them, and liberated the planet.
In 2526, as seen in Earthshock a group of races united in a peace conference to oppose the Cybermen. A force of 15,000 Cybermen tried to devastate Earth with a Cyberbomb and convert the survivors. After the Fifth Doctor disarmed the bomb, they hoped to crash the freighter into Earth and cause an ecological disaster. The effort was thwarted by Adric, and the freighter was catapulted back in time to become the "meteor" that wiped out the dinosaurs.
After a timeship landed on Telos, in Attack of the Cybermen the Cybermen captured it and devised a plot to save Mondas by diverting Halley's Comet to Earth to destroy it in 1985. A party of Cybermen travelled back in time and established a command centre hidden in the London sewers from which they could affect the comet.
When the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown visited London in 1985, the Cybermen captured the Doctor's TARDIS and forced him to take them back to Telos. Bringing the Doctor and Peri to Telos led to several losses for the Cybermen, including the death of the Cyber-Controller and the Cryons gaining help in their revolution against the Cybermen.
In the comic The Flood, Cybermen from far future used time travel to go to the 2000s to convert Earth. They used rain that caused extreme emotions (sadness, fear, anger) to convince the humans that emotions were bad and to accept conversion willingly. The reason they needed humans from a past era was that the human genetic template had been corrupted by their interactions with many alien races. Since the Cyber-conversion protocols were keyed to human or Mondasian biology, the number of viable converts had dropped by then. The Eighth Doctor offered to regenerate for them so they could use it to upgrade their conversion protocols to include other races, in exchange for leaving Earth alone. The Cybermen agreed, but betrayed him at the last moment (as he expected). Using the fragment of the Time Vortex the Cybership used as a power source, the Doctor destroyed the Cyberfleet and dissolved them into rain.
A thousand years after the end of the Cyber-Wars, in Nightmare in Silver the Cybermen were thought to be extinct. However surviving Cybermen lay beneath Hedgewick's World of Wonders. The Cybermen began using Cybermites to kidnap people as "spare parts". Angie and Artie Maitland arrived on Hedgewick's World with the Eleventh Doctor and Clara, and were taken by the Cybermen. With enough components to reawaken them, the Cybermen awoke from their tombs. The Cybermen began attacking the Castle to convert the humans there, but the Doctor, in a battle for his mind with the Cyber-Planner, "Mr Clever", had them stop in place to "bring in the local resources" to win the chess game. The Doctor used a hand pulse to redistribute Clever among the rest of the Cybermen. Angie and Artie were also released. The Emperor gave the command to start the countdown of a planet-imploding bomb. This drew the attention of his ship, which transmatted the Doctor and the humans on the planet while the Cybermen were left to be destroyed.
After being summoned to Trenzalore by the Question, in Time of the Doctor the Cybermen attempted to pass through the anti technology force field. During the Seige, the Cybermen sent in a Wooden Cyberman as it was low-tech and would not trigger any alarm system but the Eleventh Doctor tricked the Cyberman into destroying itself. After the Daleks broke the force field, the Cybermen followed them and fought the Doctor and the Silents until all the Cybermen, like many other species involved in the battle, were either killed retreated.
In the UNIT audio drama Cyber Reality, a group of Cybermen from a alternative universe invaded reality and battled UNIT in the 2010s. These Cybermen had utilised virtual reality technology to conquer parallel universes in a bid to upgrade the entire multiverse. They were unfamiliar with the Time Lords, which proved their undoing when the Master visited a parallel world they had occupied. Returning to his Earth, the Master joined forces with UNIT against the Cybermen, who attempted to convert him, only to be destroyed when he overloaded their systems with power from infinite dimensions.
Following this encounter, in the two parter Dark Water and Death in Heaven, Missy engineered a new breed of Cybermen. She created the 3W Institute, based on the idea the deceased remain conscious after death, to preserve the bodies of the rich. Its main base of operations was in St Paul's Cathedral, hidden by use of dimensional engineering. A dying person's mind would be uploaded to a matrix data slice called the Nethersphere where their emotions would be removed while their bodies would be upgraded into Cybermen. The people that paid the organization to preserve their bodies, would be placed inside tanks filled with a substance called dark water to hide their nature as Cybermen, while their minds were uploaded.
3W was discovered by Clara Oswald and the Twelfth Doctor, who were trying to find Danny Pink, who was also uploaded to the Nethersphere upon death. Missy activated the tanks, and drained away the dark water, revealing the Cybermen. They were then released, flying into the sky and exploding over major populated areas, creating clouds to produce cyber-pollen for converting normal dead bodies. Missy also planned for a next wave of pollen to kill and convert every human on Earth. Her plans were foiled by the Doctor, Clara, and a cyber-converted Danny Pink, by flying the Cybermen into the clouds and making them self-destruct, destroying both them and the clouds.
On a Mondasian colony ship that got caught by a black hole, and thus suffered the effects of time distortion, the bottom floor of the ship, floor 1056, experienced thousands of years in the space of a few minutes for floor 0. The society formed by the engineers stranded eventually started to decay. The Master crashed on floor 1056, and took it over until his overthrowal and hid as Razor in the hospital, aiding Operation Exodus. This would entail that the population would be coverted into cyborgs to lead an expedition to the upper decks. The cyborgs would go and lead people to the hospital to be converted. They also went to the upper decks to collect people to also be converted.
The Twelfth Doctor, trying to rehabilitate Missy, responded to the ship's distress call, and the cyborgs detected Bill's life signs. After Bill,was shot, the cyborgs took her to the hospital, where she was fitted with a chest unit. There, she befriended Razor, and stayed there for decade before he tricked her into going to the conversion theatre, where she was converted into the first fully functional Cyberman. The Doctor eventually arrived and found Bill, and fled to Floor 0507 while the Cybermen continued to evolve and take over the floors. Eventually, they were defeated by the Doctor, who blew up the fuel lines below, incinerating them, while the residents of the floor escaped to Floor 0502.
Quotes[]
| “ | Excellent! | „ |
| ~ Cyber Leader, Earthshock |
| “ | There is nothing to fear. | „ |
| ~ The Reaping |
| “ | Delete! | „ |
| ~ Rise of the Cybermen |
Gallery[]
