If necessity is the mother of invention, then what about re-invention? Following the corollary then the Cybermen would be the weird Uncles of the Doctor Who family. There’s scarcely two stories in a row where their appearance, even during their halcyon days of the Troughton era. This changed finally from Earthshock onwards when JN-T not only brought them back but made sure they were relatively consistent from that point forwards.
The stories which brought them into nu-Who were Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel, for which we have a new set of caps of each new deployed within the Tour.
Once again, though understandably, the Cybermen got a refit, complete with a new, and parallel befitting the plot, backstory. The parallel Earth idea, of course, had been done before, in Inferno, but the similarities end there. Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel are their own beasts, and the ways in which those parallel lines sometimes met showed a lot of confidence by the production team only in Series 2.
Steven Moffat put his own spin, and another, sleeker design for the Cybermen in Nightmare in Silver. Doubtless if Chris Chibnall wants to bring them back in 2018 they’ll probably sport a different look yet again, no doubt staying fashionable for the mid-21st century.
