Cyberman

Creation

The name "Cyberman" comes from cybernetics, a term used in Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948). Wiener used the term in reference to the control of complex systems, particularly self-regulating control systems, in the animal world and in mechanical networks. By 1960, doctors were researching surgical or mechanical augmentation of humans and animals to operate machinery in space, leading to the portmanteau "cyborg", for "cybernetic organism".

In the 1960s, "spare-part" surgery began with the development of gigantic heart-lung machines. Public discussion included the possibility of wiring amputees' nerve endings directly into machines. In 1963, Kit Pedler discussed with his wife (who was also a doctor) what would happen if a person had so many prostheses that they could no longer distinguish themselves between man and machine. He got the opportunity to develop this idea when, in 1966, after an appearance on the BBC science programmes Tomorrow's World and Horizon, the BBC hired him to consult on the Doctor Who serial The War Machines (1966). That eventually led to him writing, with Gerry Davis, The Tenth Planet (1966) for Doctor Who.

Pedler, influenced by the logic-driven Treens from the Dan Dare comic strip, originally envisaged the Cybermen as "space monks", but was persuaded by Davis to concentrate on his fears about the direction of spare-part surgery. The Cybermen were originally imagined as human but with plastic and metal prostheses. The Cybermen of The Tenth Planet still have human hands, and their facial structures are visible beneath the masks they wear, but over time they evolved into metallic, more fully mechanized designs.

A variety of specialized forms of Cybermen have been shown, in particular Cyber Leaders and Cyber Controllers, with power to command other Cybermen.

Appearances

Television

The Cybermen first appear in the serial The Tenth Planet in 1966, set in 1986. This story explains how, millions of years ago, Earth had a twin planet known as Mondas that was knocked out of solar orbit and drifted into deep space. The Mondasians, already far in advance of Earth's technology and fearful for their race's survival, replaced most of their bodies with cybernetic parts. Having eventually removed all emotion from their brains (to maintain their sanity), the natives installed a drive propulsion system to pilot the planet itself through space. As the original race was limited in numbers and were continually being depleted, the Mondasians – now Cybermen – became a race of conquerors who reproduced by forcibly changing other organic beings into Cybermen. The First Doctor (William Hartnell) opposes these Cybermen when they attempt to drain the Earth's energy to make way for Mondas' return to the Solar System; in this encounter, Mondas absorbs too much energy from Earth, destroying it and all Cybermen on Earth. The adventure takes its physical toll on the Doctor, forcing him to regenerate for the first time, becoming the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton).

The Cybermen next appeared later in the same television season in The Moonbase (1967) opposite the Second Doctor. In 2070, the Cybermen attempt to remotely destroy the Earth by affecting its weather patterns with a device called the Gravitron. However, the Gravitron is used against them, hurling them into space. In the following season, The Tomb of the Cybermen saw a 25th Century human expedition discover sarcophagi containing hibernating Cybermen on the planet Telos, where the creatures arise and attack. This episode introduced the cybermats, small mechanical scouts used by the Cybermen, as well as the Cyber Controller. In The Wheel in Space (1968), the Doctor and his crew face off against the Cybermen on a marooned Earth space station in the 21st century. This episode introduces the Cyber-Planner, an immobile unit which directs the Cybermen. The Cybermen plan to take over the space station, after which their fleet will invade Earth. The Doctor uses an x-ray laser to destroy the Cybermen. In the next season, The Invasion has the Doctor and his companions visit late 20th century England, where he discovers an army of Cybermen are hidden on Earth and working with magnate Tobias Vaughn (Kevin Stoney) to invade Earth. Their invasion is defeated by the Doctor and the military support of the newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.

The Cybermen did not face the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) during his era, but one is shown as part of an exhibit in Carnival of Monsters (1973). The Third Doctor would however face Cybermen in the 20th anniversary special "The Five Doctors" (1983).

Spin-offs

The Cybermen have appeared in various spin-off media.

The Cybermen were also featured in the novel Iceberg by actor David Banks, who played the Cyber Leader in the television series from Earthshock to Silver Nemesis. Banks had previously written, in 1988, Cybermen, a fictional history of the Cybermen which included a "future" design for them. The Missing Adventure Novel Killing Ground also features Cybermen of the type seen in Revenge of the Cybermen. During this novel, the Sixth Doctor's new companion Grant Markham returns to his home planet and learns that a group of Cybermen have hidden on it for centuries, with his robophobia being based around the repressed memory of witnessing a Cyberman kill his mother before he escaped.

In two Virgin Missing Adventures novels by Craig Hinton, the Cybermen become Cyberlords at some point in their history. They are mentioned in passing in Hinton's The Crystal Bucephalus, where the Cyberlord Hegemony is a peaceful future version of the Cybermen who have an empire in the Milky Way; their description was modelled after Banks's designs. In The Quantum Archangel, there are numerous unexplained references to the Cyberlords as an extremely advanced race. At one point, they are referred to as the Time Lords' greatest ally in the Millennium War, though because that war was supposed to have taken place a very long time before the modern era, it is unclear how this bit of Cyberhistory fits in or whether or not they have achieved advanced time travel capabilities. While not explicitly mentioned, Hinton may have adopted this idea from the aborted script for the Five Doctors by Robert Holmes (scriptwriter), which would have had the Cybermen adopting Time Lord DNA to achieve their higher state of being.

The Past Doctor Adventures novel Illegal Alien featured Cybermen and Cybermats in London during the Blitz. Cyber-technology left over from that adventure was subsequently misused in Loving the Alien, written by the same authors. The Fifth Doctor story Warmonger by Terrance Dicks has the Cybermen join the Doctor's alliance against Morbius. The First Doctor story The Time Travellers by Simon Guerrier, set in an alternate reality, has the Cybermen (who are never named) living at the South Pole and trading advanced technology to South Africa. The Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Hope by Mark Clapham features the Silverati, a group of cybernetically enhanced humans heavily reminiscent of the Cybermen, in existence in the very far future as the universe approaches its end, with some evidence suggesting that the Silverati were adapted from remnants of the Cybermen of the present.

Physical characteristics

While the Doctor's archenemy, the Daleks, were on the whole unchanged during the original series's 26-season run, the Cybermen were seen to change with almost every encounter. The Cybermen are humanoid, but have been altered until they have few remaining organic parts. They retain living human brains. In their first appearance in the series, the only parts of their bodies that still seemed human were their hands; by their next appearance in The Moonbase (1967), their bodies were entirely covered in their metallic suits, with their hands replaced by three finger claws, but they changed back to regular five-fingered hands in The Invasion (1968). As they are relatively few, the Cybermen tend towards covert activity, scheming from hiding and using human pawns or robots to act in their place until they need to appear. They also seek to increase their numbers by converting others into Cybermen (a process known as "cyber-conversion" or "Cybernisation" in the older episodes and "upgrading" in the newer episodes), an often painful process as body parts are removed and replaced with cybernetic replacements.

It is implied that there are still organic components beneath their suits, meaning they are cyborgs, not robots: in The Tenth Planet, a Cyberman tells a group of humans that "our brains are just like yours", although by the time of Attack of the Cybermen (1985), their brains seem to have been replaced with electronics. Also in this story, two human slave-prisoners of the Cybermen on the planet Telos, named Bates and Stratton, reveal that their organic arms and legs have been removed by the Cybermen and replaced by cyber-substitutes. In Earthshock (1982), the actors' chins were vaguely visible through a clear perspex area on the helmet to suggest some kind of organic matter. In The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), veins and brains were visible through the domed head of the Cyber-Controller, and similarly, in Attack of the Cybermen (1985) and "The Age of Steel" (2006), the Cyber-Controller's brain is visible through the dome. The first is a Mondas Cyber Controller, and the second involves alternative Earth's John Lumic. However, in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975), the Doctor says they are "total machine creatures".

The audio play Real Time implies that the converted victim's face remains beneath the Cyberman faceplate, although the audio plays, like all non-televised spin-off media, are of uncertain canonicity with regard to the television series. In the 2014's "Death in Heaven", Danny Pink removes the faceplate showing his face underneath. The Virgin New Adventures novel Iceberg by David Banks states that some Cybermen experience rare flashes of emotional memory from the time before they were converted; these flashes are then usually suppressed. The Cybermen in the revived series are usually constructed from human brains bonded to a Cyberman exoskeletal shell with an artificially-grown nervous system threaded throughout ("The Age of Steel"), although direct grafting of cyber-components is another method of conversion ("Cyberwoman"). In "The Pandorica Opens", a Cyberman head is shown to open up, revealing an entire human skull, not just the brain.

Weaknesses

The Cybermen have had a number of weaknesses since their introduction. The most notable weakness of the original Cybermen is the element gold. Their aversion to gold was not mentioned until they try to destroy the planetoid Voga (the so-called "Planet of Gold") in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975). Initially, it was explained that, due to its non-corrodible nature, gold essentially chokes their respiratory systems. For example, the glittergun, a weapon used during the Cyber-Wars in the future, fired gold dust at its targets. However, in later serials, gold appeared to affect them rather as silver affects werewolves, with gold coins or gold-tipped bullets fired at them having the same effect. The revived series's Cybermen have no such weakness, though the tie-in website for the episode mentions it. Cybermen are also efficiently killed when shot with their own guns, or by a Dalek. Other weaknesses from early stories include solvents, gravity based technology, and excessive levels of radiation. In "The Age of Steel", an EMP grenade is shown to disable a Cyberman and shut down its emotional inhibitor. The vulnerability to gold is clearly not present in some early Cyberman types, for example the type seen in the 1968 serial The Invasion were unlikely to possess it, or perhaps more likely the weakness is not known, otherwise the Doctor/UNIT would simply have used it and not needed the elaborate plan involving the assistance of a Russian missile base and the Cybermen's puppet ally, Tobias Vaughn. In "Nightmare in Silver", the Doctor uses gold to slow down though not destroy some circuitry of technologically advanced Cybermen in the distant future. It is unclear precisely how many of the different types, and which types, of Cyberman are vulnerable to gold.

Their armour is often depicted as flexible and resistant to bullets, but can be penetrated by gold arrows and projectiles made of gold. The Cybus Cybermen are bullet-proof and are very resilient, but are not indestructible – they are vulnerable to high explosives, electromagnetic pulses, specialised weaponry and Dalek energy weapons.

In "The Power of the Doctor" (2022), Tegan Jovanka and Ace fire gold bullets at a group of Cybermen only to be told that they have evolved beyond weakness to gold.

Costumes

For The Tenth Planet, the original Cyberman costumes, including the "handle" shapes on their heads, were designed by Sandra Reid. The masks and one-piece bodystockings were made from jersey fabric, with holes trimmed with vinyl where the Cybermen "eyes" and "mouths" were; the actors' features were darkened to hide their faces. The fabric of the costumes were coloured a faint blue so they could show up on black and white television cameras. Over the top of the stockings, the Cybermen wore polythene suits ribbed with metal wings, along with epaulettes made of metal, and plastic piping. Their boots were short Wellington boots, painted silver. In a 2016 interview, Reid, by then going by the name Alexandra Tynan, described the motivation behind her designs was "I had a planning meeting that I had to be at, and I had to have a design drawing with me. My motivation was the clock on the wall!" Although the script specified the Cybermen should keep their human hands, Reid wanted them to wear gloves. However, Reid mistakenly forgot she said she would make special gloves for the Cybermen until the first day in the studio. Instead, make-up designer Gillian James hastily added silver paint to the actors' human hands. The chest units and "handles" were built by Shawcraft of Uxbridge. The handles were adapted from lorry headlamps, while the chest units used a lot of clear plastic and had battery-powered flashing mechanisms. The handles were intended as the housing for wires that lit up the lamps, but in a test shot the bulb exploded and the idea was dropped. Tynan explained in 2016, "I indicated that there was going to be a chest unit there, but I didn't do any designs for them, because I knew that the units were going to be a props thing."

Producer Innes Lloyd's production team wished to update the Cybermen for The Moonbase and make them look more sophisticated and robotic. Sandra Reid designed new costumes for this serial. These were based on a one-piece silver jumpsuit made from vinyl fabric, and the Cybermen were given gloves with three-fingered hands. Their boots were lace-up army boots painted silver. Fibreglass helmets and chest units made from aluminium were built by freelance prop makers Jack and John Lovell. Silver tape was added around the eye and mouth area for emphasis, and on Reid's instruction, the Lovells attached "hydraulic joints" consisting of tubing from a vacuum cleaner manufacturer and plastic practice golf balls. Costume designer Daphne Dare, consulting with Reid over the phone, took over midway through production of The Moonbase while Reid was recovering from surgery. Eight of these costumes were reused, with slight repainting and additions, for The Tomb of the Cybermen, Reid's final Doctor Who serial, and a new costume was built for the Cyber Controller, with a red-domed cranium built that was intended to light up, but the lighting mechanism failed.

Voice

Early Cybermen had an unsettling, sing-song voice, provided by Roy Skelton, constructed by placing the inflections of words on the wrong syllables. In their first appearance, the effect of this was augmented by having a Cyberman abruptly open his mouth wide and keep it open, without moving his tongue or lips, while the separately recorded voice would be playing, and then shut it quickly when the line was finished. Although the cloth-like masks of the first Cybermen were soon replaced by a full helmet, a similar physical effect involving the mouth "hatch" opening and then shutting when the line was finished was used until The Wheel in Space (1968).

Later, the production team used special effects from its Radiophonic Workshop by adding first a mechanical larynx used by Peter Hawkins, then a vocoder, to modify speech to make it sound more artificial. In later stories of the original series and in the audio plays, two copies of the voice track were sampled and pitch-shifted downwards by differing amounts and layered to produce the effect, sometimes with the addition of a small amount of flanging. From Revenge of the Cybermen to Silver Nemesis (1988) the actors provided the voices themselves, using microphones and transmitters in the chest units.

The voices for the 2006 return of the Cybermen are similar to the buzzing electronic monotone voices of the Cybermen used in The Invasion. They were provided by Nicholas Briggs. As shown in the second series of Doctor Who Confidential, the timbre was created by processing Briggs' voice through a Moog moogerfooger ring modulator. Unusually, in "The Age of Steel", the Cyber-Controller (John Lumic, played by Roger Lloyd-Pack) retains his voice after being upgraded, but it is still electronic. In "Doomsday", a Cyberman which contains the brain of Torchwood Institute director Yvonne Hartman retains a female-sounding though still electronic voice, as does the partially converted Lisa Hallett in "Cyberwoman" when her Cyberman personality is dominant. In an effect reminiscent of the earliest Cybermen's mouths snapping open while speaking, the new Cybermen have a blue light in their "mouths" (or "teeth") which illuminates in synchronisation with their speech.

Since "The Next Doctor" in 2008, the Cybermen have had nasally-sounding electronic voices; this continued all the way until "Closing Time" in 2011. Between the 2013 episode "Nightmare in Silver" and 2017 episode "The Doctor Falls", the Cybermen (continuing to be voiced by Briggs) now have deep, almost growl-like voices. Their mouths retain a blue light-up effect but flicker luminously instead of staying lit as opposed to the 2006 design.

Variants

Some Cybermen are given titles, being credited as "Cyber Leader" (or variants thereof), "Cyber Lieutenant", "Cyber Scout" or the "Cyber Controller". The Cyber Leader is usually depicted as a Cyberman with black handles.

An immobile computer, referred to as the "Cyber Planner", appears in The Wheel in Space and The Invasion. A Cyber Planner also takes over the Eleventh Doctor's body in "Nightmare in Silver".

The original Controller is seen (and destroyed) in two serials, The Tomb of the Cybermen and Attack of the Cybermen, and in each may or may not be the same consciousness in different bodies; it appears to recognise and remember the Doctor from previous encounters. In the Virgin New Adventures novel Iceberg, the first Cyber Controller is created by implanting a Cyber Director, or Cyber Planner, into the skull of a recently converted Cyberman.

The parallel universe Cyber Controller in "The Age of Steel" uses the brain of John Lumic, the creator of the Cybermen in that parallel reality.

In "Doomsday", a Cyber Leader appears, and when he is destroyed, mention is made of downloading his data files into another Cyberman unit, which is then upgraded to Cyber Leader.

The 2008 Christmas special, "The Next Doctor", featured a new, more agile variant called a Cybershade. The Doctor theorises that it is a more primitive version of a Cyberman, using the brain of a cat, and they physically resemble animals as they cannot speak and walk on all fours. In the same story a "Cyber-King" appears; according to the Doctor, it is a "Dreadnought-class" ship for use in invasions resembling a Cyberman hundreds of feet tall, and contains a Cyber-factory in its chest. It is controlled from within its mouth. Its right arm can be converted into a cannon, and its left into a laser.

"The Time of the Doctor" introduced a unique prototype Cyberman that was made of wood to avoid detection by the Church of the Papal Mainframe and equipped with blowtorches.

Technology

Cybermen technology is almost completely oriented towards weaponry, apart from their own bodies. When originally seen in The Tenth Planet, they had large energy weapons that attached to their chests. In The Moonbase, the Cybermen had two types of weaponry: an electrical discharge from their hands, which stunned the target, and a type of gun. They also made use of a large laser cannon with which they attempted to attack the base itself.

The hand discharge was also present in The Tomb of the Cybermen, which featured a smaller, hand-held Cyber-weapon shaped like a pistol that was described as an X-ray laser. In The Wheel in Space, the Cybermen could use the discharge to also operate machinery, and had death rays built into their chest units. They displayed the same units in The Invasion as well as carrying large rifles for medium distance combat. In Revenge of the Cybermen and the audio play Real Time, their weapons were built into their helmets. Killing Ground indicates that this type of Cybermen also have more powerful hand weapons. Subsequent appearances have shown them armed almost exclusively with hand-held gun-style weapons.

The Cybermen have access to weapons of mass destruction known as cobalt bombs, also sometimes as Cyber-bombs, which were banned by the galactic Armageddon Convention (Revenge of the Cybermen). A "Cyber-megatron bomb" was mentioned in The Invasion, supposedly powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth. In Earthshock, the Cybermen also used android drones as part of their plans to invade Earth.

The revived programme Cybermen electrocute their victims by touching them and at first carried no other weaponry. In "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday", the Cybermen are equipped with retractable energy weapons housed within their forearms (these were actually first shown in "The Age of Steel", but only very briefly and were not used during that episode), but also use advanced human weapons to battle the Daleks. The arm mounted guns prove effective against humans but are unable to penetrate Dalek shields. Two Cybermen sent to parley with Dalek Thay at the Battle of Canary Wharf shot the Dalek but were promptly exterminated. In the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman", the partially converted Lisa Hallett used her electrical touch against the Torchwood team, as well as an energy beam fired from her arm which could only stun the part of the body at which it was aimed. In "The Pandorica Opens", the Cybermen again have the wrist-blaster, but also regain the modified human weapons. In "Nightmare in Silver", the Cybermen have the ability to move at a warp-like speed. At this speed they appear as blurry after images. Cyberman had also overcome the weakness of solely being able to convert human-like species; the Doctor had been safe from being in danger of conversion until this point.

Cybermat

The Cybermen also use smaller, cybernetic creatures called "cybermats" as weapons of attack. In their first appearance in The Tomb of the Cybermen, they resembled oversized metallic silverfish and had segmented bodies with hair-like tactile sensor probes along the base of their heads, which were topped with crystalline eyes. The Second Doctor described them as a "form of metallic life," implying that they may be semi-organic like the Cybermen, and that they too attack by feeding off brain waves. They were defeated using electricity.

The second model of Cybermat seen in The Wheel in Space was used for sabotage, able to tune in on human brainwaves. They were carried to the "Wheel" in small but high-density sacs that sank through the hull of the space station, causing drops in air pressure. These Cybermats had solid photoreceptors for eyes instead of crystals. The Second Doctor used an audio frequency to jam them, causing them to spin, crash and disintegrate.

The third model, seen in Revenge of the Cybermen, was a much larger, snake-like cybermat that could be remotely controlled and could inject poison into its victims. It had no visible eyes or other features, and was as vulnerable to gold dust as the Cybermen were.

The original model was later mentioned in a conversation between the Doctor and his double during The Rebel Flesh, reaffirming that that model of Cybermat killed by feeding on brainwaves.

The fourth model of cybermat appears for the first time in the revived series in the 2011 episode "Closing Time", where it is shown to have an organic mouth full of sharp teeth, and transmits power to a crashed cyber-ship.

In the audio play Spare Parts, "mats" are cybernetically augmented creatures, sometimes kept as pets. Cybermats of a different design are used for surveillance by Mondas' Central Committee. The creatures occasionally go wild, chewing on power sources, and must be rounded up by a "mat-catcher." In the Past Doctor Adventures novel Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, set in the 1940s, the Cybermen create cybermats by cyber-converting local animals like cats or birds, possibly because of lack of technological resources.