Cybermen

"Cybermen will remove fear. Cybermen will remove sex and class and color and creed. You will become identical, you will become like us."

- One of the Cybermen.

The Cybermen are a race of cyborgs from Doctor Who that are one of the series' most recurring and dangerous antagonists (rivaling the Daleks in that regard - in fact the current human-derived Cybermen are in a state of war with said Daleks ever since the Daleks denied them an alliance during an attack on Torchwood).

Personality
All Cybermen are essentially living brains inside a robot body that robs them of emotion and free will. They are programmed to see themselves as a perfect life-form and work to "upgrade" others into more Cybermen, by force if needed. Any life-forms that resist or are incompatible with Cyber technology are to be 'deleted'.

Cybermen from Mondas
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.

Having installed a drive propulsion system so they could pilot the planet itself, the Cybermen began conquering planets to convert the native life forms into more Cybermen to increase their numbers. The Cybermen first confronted the Second Doctor in the distant future when he came to one of their tombs five centuries after Mondas's destruction in 1986.

The Cybermens' chronological first meeting with the Doctor was in 1970 when a group of Cybermen from "Planet 14" use industrialist Tobias Vaughn to paving the way for a ground invasion. However, the Cybermen are forced to retreat due to interfere from Doctor with the aid of the newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. An advance force of Cybermen set up base in an Antarctic space tracking station in the year 1986 to summon Mondas. However, Mondas's overloaded from draining Earth's energy for the Cybermen's use and ceased to be along with many of the Cybermen. But the Cybermen lingered on as species and confronted the Doctor in several time periods, with him thwarting them.

When Borusa had trapped the five incarnations of the Doctor in the Games of Rassilon, some Cybermen appeared as enemies in the deadly games. They allied the Master, who wanted to lead them to the Dark Tower, but he betrayed them and they were destroyed in one of the tower's traps. Another squad went after the Third Doctor but were all destroyed by a Raston Warrior Robot.

A Cyberman was once among the many creatures that Vorg had in his miniscope.

After the Cybermen were already defeated a long time ago, the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler found a head of a dead Cyberman in Henry Van Statten's museum along with the arm of a Slitheen and other alien artifacts.

Later they allied with the Master once again, who developed a way to convert the deceased into Cybermen. They also gained the ability to fly via rockets built into them. Once a large enough army was raised they invaded London once again. However when the Twelve Doctor took the control bracelet from the Master (which controlled all the Cybermen) and gave it to a converted Danny Pink he lead all the Cybermen up into the sky where they all simultaneously self destructed.

The Cyber-Wars


In the year 2526, a force of Cybermen attempted to destroy Earth, first with a Cyber-bomb and then by crashing a human freighter into the Earth, to prevent the alliance who planned to fight them from forming. Both of these attempts were stopped by the Fifth Doctor.

After the war several Cybermen and a few Cybermats survived and tried to destroy the gold planet of Voga to avenge their fallen empire but are stopped by Fourth Doctor.

Thought to have been extinct for centuries, using advanced minuscule Cybermats known as Cybermites to spy and gather parts for them, Cybermen underwent massive upgrades to make them invincible to the point that only a planetary destruction device can be used against a single Cyberman if not dealt with quickly. These enhancements include Cyber-conversion by Cybermites, detaching their limbs, super fast speed, and the ability to convert non humanoid life forms as the Eleventh Doctor found out. However the Doctor temporarily immobilizes them which gives enough time for him, Clara, and other human troops to evacuate and destroy the planet they are on.

This model was also present in the siege of Trenzalore, devising one with a wooden exoskeleton  armed with a flame thrower to avoid detection. The Eleventh Doctor is able to trick and destroy it by using it's own weapon against it.

Human 2.0
Ending up in a parallel universe with his companion Rose Tyler and her boyfriend Mickey Smith, the Tenth Doctor finds the parallel Earth to be the genesis of that reality's Cybermen. The product of a dying transhumanist named John Lumic, founder and owner of the multinational company Cybus Industries, these Cybermen were created from the homeless and acted on his will to convert every human into a Cyberman. However, the Doctor and his friends stop the Cybermen by deactivating the emotional inhibitors that keep the Cybermen from going insane. Afterwards, a resistance group, the Preachers, set about to clean up the remainder of Lumic's factories around the world.

However, thanks to the Cult of Skaro, the Cybermen exploit a breach between universes found by Yvonne Hartman to invade London under command of their Cyberleaders. Though the Doctor manages to send the parallel Cybermen into the void, traces of their actions in Canary Wharf remain such as a partially converted Torchwood employee named Lisa Hallett who was killed moths later by her follow Torchwood operatives.

However, due to the actions of the New Dalek Empire, the parallel Cybermen escaped the void and ended up in London 1851, where they enlisted the aid of a human named Mercy Hartigan before they are destroyed for good by the Doctor by sending their giant robot, the "Cyber-King" into the time vortex.

Cybermen of Unknown Origin
At Stonehenge the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond encountered Cybermen whose exact origin was never explained, although resembling John Lumic's Cybermen. They had teamed up with others of the Doctors enemies like the Daleks, the Judoon and the Sontarans to save the universe by trapping the Doctor in the Pandorica. However, they vanished from existance when the TARDIS exploded.

Others of these Cybermen, called the Twelfth Cyber Legion, were visited by the Eleventh Doctor and Rory Williams, when they were searching for Amy Pond, who was imprisoned by Madame Kovarian. Their Cyberleader told Rory her location after the Doctor destroyed some of their spaceships.

After one of their ships later crashed on Earth in Colchester, they fought the Doctor one more time, when he visited Craig Owens. Like the Cybermen from Mondas, they used Cybermats. They tried to convert Craig into their new Cyber-Controller, but his feelings for his infant son were so strong, that he was able to override to process and blow up their ship.

The Eleventh Doctor and his companion Clara Oswald encountered Cybermen who could upgrade themselves by will but retained the Mondasian Cybermen's weakness to gold. The Doctor got briefly possessed by their Cyber Planner who called itself Mr. Clever.

On the planet Trenzalore, the Doctor encountered a wooden Cyberman that could blast fire and tricked it into destroying itself.

Trivia
Cybermeni