I suppose that in a show that runs that long, you can find examples of every possible cheesy monster plot.

Also, the only Doctor Who monsters ever to frighten me in childhood were the Autons. I was flipping channels idly, and came to a second-string PBS affiliate on which some strange mannequin-like person had a hand that popped open to reveal a gun that shot people, and I was sufficiently creeped out to look up the name of the show and decide not to watch this Doctor Who thing again.

I guess it was either “Spearhead from Space” or “Terror of the Autons”. If it was the former, that makes a particularly good story, since I think “Spearhead from Space” (Jon Pertwee’s debut, and the first serial in color) was the first Doctor Who serial ever to run on many American PBS stations. So that would mean I was freaked out at pretty much the earliest possible opportunity.

The two-parter that established the new series’ alternate origin for the Cybermen even had them being created by a mad genius in a wheelchair and attacking people while muttering “delete delete”, both of which are really much more Dalekian touches, and weren’t in the old show.

In the original series they were somewhat more different variations on the theme of mad cyborgs. The key difference is that Cybermen are supposed to have no emotions (with all the usual contradictions that come up when you try to tell stories about emotionless characters); whereas Daleks have exactly ONE emotion. Cybermen just wanted to survive and propagate their race, and had no moral quibbles about how to do it; Daleks actually wanted to kill everybody.

(And my wife points out that the Daleks’ backstory mutated repeatedly even in the old series; Davros wasn’t introduced until the Tom Baker era, though Terry Nation had thought up a sort of proto-Davros in Dalek comic strips he wrote earlier.)

While the show was off the air (and after), a company called Big Finish produced Doctor Who audio dramas distributed on CD with some of the original actors. One of them was a very different Cyberman origin story written by Mark Platt called “Spare Parts”, which convinced me that, properly handled, the Cybermen can be really interesting. He had to work with a lot of loopy continuity—on the old show, there was a bunch of Velikovskian nonsense about how the Cybermen came from a twin Earth named Mondas that got knocked out of our solar system—but what he came up with was remarkably poignant and atmospheric; there’s a tragic sense that the people of Mondas don’t want to become Cybermen but don’t see any workable alternative.

Btw, did anyone notice that the actress who played the Torchwood boss (who was eventually Cybered, but turned renegade, and cried blood) was called Tracey-Anne OBERMAN. The potential for another spin-off, about a posse of Jewish Cyberman, is immense.

The Cybermen are more of the vampire and zombie threat: monsters who will make you into one of them. The old story of the Fate Worse Than Death. The concept of the Cybermen was cleverly stolen and perfected by Paramount Pictures in Star Trek: the Next Generation with the Borg (though they were eventually watered down).

But the Zygons – hoo boy, the Zygons. Behind the sofa was no good for those bastards, the first time I saw one on screen I bolted clean out of the house and down the street.

ps. we also watch “young sherlock holmes” 50,ooo times, but that was as much me as it was him.

I started watching late in the Patrick Troughton incarnation and the Cybermen always had the edge over the Daleks in the fear department.

That said, it was the Ice Warrior that really scared the crap out of me and there was no hiding behind the sofa because there was a wall there.

Doctor Who was never completely devoid of social commentary. The old show took time to mock Thatcher surrogates and media excess inbetween blowing up robot monsters. There’s nothing wrong with pure escapism, but the best stories work on more than one level.

Both Daleks and Cybermen are potentially interesting, however. The Daleks could easily be retooled into a broader metaphor for fascism instead of a narrower one for state-sponsored genocide, which works particularly well with the old shtick of Daleks being monsters made from human beings (that is, you can have some planet which is turning its soldiers into Daleks to win a war or root out terrorists or whatever, and then you get the incredible creep factor of young volunteers willingly turning themselves into Daleks for God and Country). With the Cybermen, I’m less interested in their weird Mondas/gold mythology than I am with the fact that they’re not really evil, they’re just incapable of emotion, which means they’re only driven by self-interest. A planet of Cybermen should be like a planet full of robot libertarians.