Honestly, the use of Cybermen in the new Doctor Who series has been remarkably unterrifying, with the villains being sort of cheesy and harmless throughout most of the series.
I've said before that, of the classic Cybermen eps I've watched, I haven't seen what the big goddamn deal was. Tomb of the Cybermen, which is generally regarded as the best original series Cybermen ep and one of the best original series eps period, just seemed thoroughly bland to me (though I can see the draw of the Lovecraftian "man opens tomb of things he never should have meddled with" angle, and the shot where they come out of their cocoons IS classic). Likewise, the Davison-era Earthshock was a largely underwhelming exercise until its last episode or so. (Let's give RTD props for one thing: psychic paper. A way for avoiding the "Doctor is blamed for something he didn't do and thrown in jail" plot was long, LONG overdue.)
There was an awesome damn Cybermen story recently reprinted in Grant Morrison's Doctor Who, but...that was Grant Morrison. He could make, I don't know, the Slitheen awesome.
I still think the new Cybermen redesign is really well done, especially the emphasis on weight and power. Makes them seem a lot more of a legitimate threat when it looks a sounds like they could crush a man's skull in their cold, metal mitts.
SHIT yes. The knew Cybermen designs are one of the great visual decisions of the new series IMO. They're distinctly recognizable as Cybermen, without being, well, fucking ridiculous-looking.
And again, the Iron Giant Cyberking in the Christmas special was
.
Of course it bears mentioning that style and presentation ARE vital to Doctor Who, that distinctive designs of alien peoples and settings ARE integral to what makes it Doctor Who. Nobody'd accuse Moffat of prizing style over substance, but for all the complexity and cleverness of his plots, his episodes all feature some fucking stunning imagery. And his monsters are the scariest.
That tangent aside, there IS a sense that the Cybermen are on the series simply because it's Doctor Who and they're obligatory. (There's a quoted interview earlier in the thread where Moffat says, essentially, that things like Daleks and Cybermen were necessary in the first couple of seasons to reassure old fans, but now that the show's caught on they're not necessary anymore and he's not going to use them unless there's a good plot reason for it and would much rather create the new monsters that today's viewers tell THEIR kids about twenty years down the line.) I haven't seen season 2 in awhile, but my recollection was that the first appearance of the Cybermen had a good premise but was ultimately a victim of RTD's over-the-top style. My recollection of the season finale was that it worked pretty well, and of course I particularly liked the heckling between the Cybermen and the Daleks. The ending was over-the-top but really the most logical and coherent of any of RTD's finales, and I commented the first time that I saw it that the episode would have been pretty much perfect if they'd hacked off the ten-minute goodbye scene at the end.
All that to say...I like the IDEA of the Cybermen. And I think most of the eps, old series and new, that I've seen them in have had pretty good premises but gotten lost somewhere along the way. Maybe we'll see them again in the next few years and maybe we won't. I kinda hope they get a rest for a bit, but there's potential there too.
I'd rather see them again than the Daleks, at any rate.
...speaking of. How big a reset switch do you guys figure RTD's going to pull at the end here? You think he'll go so far as to undo the entire Time War and bring back Gallifrey and the Time Lords?
