What was the Lone Cyberman doing to the Cyber Warriors in the latest episode of Doctor Who? Doctor Who season 12 is coming to a close, and the plot has seen the Doctor dragged into the final Cyber War. The unceasing war between the Cybermen and humanity has brought both races to the brink of extension, but the Doctor has unwittingly given the Cybermen a new lease of life. Now, she’s fighting to protect the last handful of humans.
At the center of the story is the Lone Cyberman. Originally a human named Ashad, the Lone Cyberman was a zealot whose conversion process was interrupted. Where most Cybermen are cold and emotionless, slave to logic, Ashad is motivated by a passionate self-hatred. His goal is to destroy the entire human race, and restore the glory of the Cyber Empire. To this end, he forced the Doctor to give him the Cyberium, a vast repository of data contained in some form of nanotechnology; according to the Doctor, the Cyberium contained “the knowledge and future history of all Cybermen.” The penultimate episode of Doctor Who season 12, “Ascension of the Cybermen,” saw the Lone Cyberman take control of a vast army of Warrior Class Cybermen.
And yet, one key scene in “Ascension of the Cybermen” has generated a great deal of debate online. When the Lone Cyberman discovers the army of Cyber Warriors, he initially chooses a couple and performs what appears to be some form of torture. The Doctor’s friends are listening in on the spaceship’s security system, and they’re horrified to realize they’re “carrying a Cyberman that makes other Cybermen scream.” It’s an odd scene, made all the stranger because the Lone Cyberman subsequently awakens the entire army - and they pledge allegiance to him with the traditional Cyberman chest-thump.
Although “Ascension of the Cybermen” never pauses to explain this, the most likely scenario is that the Lone Cyberman is reprogramming these two Warrior Class Cybermen, introducing a sort of virus that forces them to obey his will. The Lone Cyberman, after all, is an unlikely commander of a Cyber Legion; he’s only partially converted, and the Cybermen never even got around to inhibiting his emotions. What’s more, there’s no evidence the Lone Cyberman believes he needs the process to be completed. For all he glorifies the Cybermen, in “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” he told the Doctor he does not need to be “stabilized.” There’s no way the traditional Cybermen would ever swear allegiance to a half-formed creature like Ashad, so it’s reasonable to assume he has used the knowledge of the Cyberium to reprogram the Cyber Warriors.
The Matt Smith episode “Nightmare in Silver” revealed the Cybermen possess a sort of hive mind, called the Cyberiad. When one Cyberman experiences an upgrade, it then uploads this into the Cyberiad, triggering a similar upgrade in all other Cybermen connected to the hive mind. It seems Ashad has essentially hacked into the Cyberiad, introducing subservience to him like a virus, and then triggering the upgrade process to bind the entire Cyber Legion to his service. Thus that apparent act of torture was actually how he bound the Cyber Warriors to his will; two suffered, that the rest may be enslaved by the Lone Cyberman.
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