You will be Assimilated!

Sorry, wrong franchise! 🙂

Let it be known as a statement of fact, The Cybermen were created in 1966, decades before the Borg. 🙂

While not the first cyborgs, they are very scary to me.

More scary than a Dalek.

The Cybermen add that element of Body Horror.

The Dalek wants to just kill you.

The Cyberman wants you to be THEM.

That’s much scarier in my opinion.

And especially, The Neil Gaiman Cybermen with their Cyber mites and the fact that people have to blow up whole star systems to get rid of them.

That’s bad ass.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Dalek story too, but Cybermen are just far creepier to me.

The Cybermen were created by Dr. Kit Pedler, a surgeon, who was concerned with the then new sciences of organ replacement and if it went to far what would happen. In 1963, Kit Pedler had a conversation with his wife (who was also a doctor) about what would happen if a person had so many prostheses that they could no longer distinguish themselves between man and machine.

Eventual Doctor Who Script Editor Gerry Davis was the TV writer of the pair.

To have your entire being subsumed by a Cyberman suit to lose the very essence of you, but still be alive and a killer who just wants to convert anyone else around you (or kill just them).

Makes my skin crawl.

 

And with advances that we are making, will we someday face this very dilemma?

 

Quite Possibly. And that I think that is the scariest thing of all.

 

TV Appearances:First Doctor

The Tenth Planet

Second Doctor

The Moonbase
The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Wheel in Space
The Invasion

Fourth Doctor

Revenge of the Cybermen

Fifth Doctor

Earthshock
The Five Doctors

Sixth Doctor

Attack of the Cybermen

Seventh Doctor

Silver Nemesis

Tenth Doctor

“Rise of the Cybermen” / “The Age of Steel”
“Army of Ghosts” / “Doomsday”
“The Next Doctor”

Eleventh Doctor

“The Pandorica Opens”
“Closing Time”
“Nightmare in Silver”

Torchwood

“Cyberwoman”

Minor appearances

The War Games
The Mind of Evil
Carnival of Monsters
Logopolis
Mawdryn Undead
“Dalek”
“Human Nature”
“The Eleventh Hour”
“The Lodger”
“A Good Man Goes to War”

Also Big Finish audio and the Doctor Who Books.

I also highly recommend the Big Finish Audio: “Spare Parts” that offers one authors take on the origins of the Cybermen.

Related articles

• “The Tenth Planet” Original Script Found Among Papers of Kit Pedler (lezgetreal.com)