One of my biggest complaints about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, besides the annoyingly regular deus ex machina episode endings, was that Davies ruined some of the classic Who villains. Sure, the Cybermen weren’t too badly done by but the Daleks were killed and resurrected so many times that I stopped caring about them.

And so it fell to British sci-fi writer Neil Gaiman to write the latest Cybermen episode. When handed the assignment, showrunner Steven Moffat had one simple instruction for Gaiman. His job was to make the Cybermen scary again. After watching, I’m not sure that it was mission accomplished.

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