I love so many Cyberman stories and I hate so many Cyberman stories. Because so often they're meaningless and hollow. They recur because they recur. But once in a while they really hit on something, so let's celebrate that today.
Conventional wisdom says the Cybermen should reflect contemporary anxieties about technology and how it augments people. That's what Kit Pedler did with Gerry Davis for The Tenth Planet (1966), famously in the shadow of the first artificial heart transplant. They were patchwork men, a horror angle on the Tin Man of Oz, asking how much meat can you lose before your humanity goes with. But The Invasion (and The Age of Steel 40 years later) move toward anxieties about consumer gadgets doing our thinking for us; basically "kids on the damned phones" before the invention of the damned phones.
But the angle that always works is their tenacity. Their first catchphrase was "we must survive", sold by a very creepy voice modulation. Doctor Who is a Romantic show, if there's one thing held in common among the 17 or so TV shows under that name it's Romanticism. One must live for the sake of art, and creation, and exploration, and love, and family, and experience, and nature's splendor, and all the lovely things in the world. Cybermen reject that. They don't live, they survive. They have no reason to survive, they MUST survive. There is no need to justify the means because there is no end. There can be be no end. They must survive.
Spare Parts is an audio drama written by Marc Platt and published by Big Finish in 2002. It may be the best Cyberman story ever. It's almost certainly the best one that doesn't feature Kevin Stoney. The Cybermen could be tragic, or misguided, or redeemable, but they are not. Those chances were burned away because they must survive. I would love to see that explored and interrogated in the tv series. I would love The Doctor to respond "But what for?" and have to contend with where that places them in the broader question.
I want to put the Cybermen in conversation with Tony Kushner's Angels in America, just to see how it shakes out, Perestroika (Act 5, scene 5):
PRIOR: Bless me anyway.
I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. [...]
I don't know if it's not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but... Bless me anyway. I want more life.
All that potential just waiting, so often squandered in favor of metal marching men that viewers already recognize. And that's what the first Monday after Thanksgiving means to me.