10 Doctor Who Plot Holes You Didn't Realise Were Actually Solved

When Doctor Who returned in 2005 its writers were faced with the unenviable task of reintroducing the series’ various monsters and aliens to a new generation who were largely unfamiliar with them. This happened slowly over the course of multiple years, with each villain usually arriving with a vague pre-existing relationship to the Doctor.

The exception to this was the Cybermen. Instead of bringing back the Doctor’s second-most iconic alien foes as they were in the classic series, the show gave us a whole new origin story for them, sending the TARDIS team to a parallel universe where they witness the completely different genesis of a completely different race of Cybermen.

And yet despite having a unique origin to our universe’s Cybermen, the Cybus Industries Cybermen from Pete’s World are conveniently, incredibly similar to their Mondasian counterparts. This issue gets further muddled as the series goes on and the Cybus branding is phased out of the Cyberman design, as it becomes increasingly unclear which universe’s Cybermen are appearing.

This was all eventually cleared up in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, where we get to witness a third Cyberman origin on board a Mondasian colony ship. Here, the Doctor proposes the theory of “parallel evolution”, positing that Cybermen are, in a sense, a form of evolutionary inevitability (try saying that ten times fast), with multiple species across space and time all turning themselves into somewhat similar versions of the iconic man-machine hybrids.