Doctor Who: EVERY Version Of The Cybermen Explained

5. Handles (First Appearance: 2013)

Though most of the Cybermen encountered by the Doctor have been working against him, there was one exception.

Towards the end of his life, the Eleventh Doctor bought a patched-up Weapons-Grade Cyberman head at the Maldovar Market, adopting him as his companion.

Stripped of his organic components, but still containing a full set of data banks, Handles, as the Doctor nicknamed him, was completely harmless and had more personality than the rest of his kind.

As a creature of logic, he was somewhat temperamental, tending to take the Doctor’s instructions literally. But he could assist with simple tasks, such as operating the TARDIS’ teleport, sending reminders and decoding messages.

After accidentally incurring the wrath of the Cybermen by taking his new friend onto a Cyber-ship, the Doctor used Handles to determine the origin, and meaning, of the message being sent through the crack on time on Trenzalore.

Handles then kept the Doctor company during the first few centuries of his exile on the planet, before finally giving up the ghost. In the process, he had, by some margin, become the Doctor’s longest-serving companion.

His final action? To remind the Doctor to patch the TARDIS telephone back through the ship’s console (a reminder the Doctor had set three hundred years earlier).