The recent finale of Doctor Who saw the Cybermen given their best material since their reintroduction in 2006. As a race the Cybermen hold a lot of promise - there are so many directions they can be taken in but most of their stories in the new run of Doctor Who have been rather lacklustre. Constantly the Cybermen are marginalised or out-shadowed by a larger threat or something with more prominence. The majority of their recent appearances have been wasted; they were likely only included to save money on creating a new monster, but such ideas come across as lazy. Several of their stories during the original run are rightly deemed as classics - The Tenth Planet and The Invasion amongst them. Admittedly some of these original episodes are poor too, but in comparison to their most recent appearances they don't appear all that bad. So why have the Cybermen came across as poor of late? Their 2006 reintroduction saw a parallel version of the silver menaces many had known for years - this alternate version allowed for a new continuity to begin afresh for a new viewership, but once that parallel world - or Petes World, as the Doctor dubbed it - became shut off forever (or so it seemed) it became harder to make the Cybermens appearances plausible. These Cybus-Cybermen exhausted all possibilities in the second series. Once they were all sucked back into the void they shouldn't have been able to return. Alas they did. What followed was several poor attempts at giving them some form of credence and, like the Daleks before them, they became a bit of a laughingstock. To celebrate their return to form (well, almost) here is a definitive ranking of their new series appearances. Click next to find out which came in last.
