(WARNING: Spoilers Ahead)

The very best Doctor Who stories say something to me in a way that other shows just… don’t. This story? It speaks volumes! Sometimes, we come across a story that is so quintessentially “Doctor Who” that it’s breathtaking. Monsters in Metropolis is absolutely one of those stories.

The Existential Horror of the Cybermen

Despite earning silver place on the roster of beloved Doctor Who monsters, there are relatively few stories that really showcase the true existential horror of the Cybermen. Whilst capable of killing you, the real horror of the Cybermen isn’t their destructive power so much as their ability to completely remove our humanity. Moreover, and possibly even more horrific, there have been very clear suggestions that being a Cyberman hurts.

Back in 2006:

DOCTOR: That's a living brain jammed inside a cybernetic body, with a heart of steel. All emotions removed.

ROSE: Why no emotions?

DOCTOR: Because it hurts.

And in 2017:

SURGEON: This won't stop you feeling pain, but it will stop you caring about it. It fits over your head.

It is to Moffat’s 2017 interpretation that Dorney pays closest homage in Monsters in Metropolis, with his lone Cyberman clearly in suffering and even repeating the line “Pain”, just as we saw in World Enough and Time. What makes this different, however, is the time and effort put in to building sympathy for this lost Cybermen, marooned in the Berlin of 1925, a deadly tool in the hands of the bitter Dieter Jovanovic yet also a real person, rediscovering what it means to be human once more. This is horrific. The Cybermen, as portrayed, are victims as much as antagonists (and, in this case, moreso the victim). The body horror is largely unspoken but deeply felt (that makes it feel even more acute) and the psychological horror cuts deep. Indeed, the coda at the end between the Ninth Doctor and the Cyberman is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Never have the Cybermen felt more horrific. Never have I felt quite such sympathy for an individual Cyberman (Bill excepted, though that’s different as we already knew her as a character). I think that’s part of what makes this such a great story for me. We begin, as does the Doctor, by seeing the Cyberman first but then we gradually see the inhumanity stripped away to reveal the truth of the person (and thus the horror of conversion) underneath. It’s a total inversion. In fact, if I had any real criticism of this story it would be that we don’t really get to learn much about Fritz Lang as a man but that’s specifically because Dorney goes to such lengths to humanise the Cyberman… and, by heck, it works!

History and the Rise of the Nazi Threat: A Disturbing Misappropriation

There is something deeply unsettling and profoundly ironic about the Cybermen being wielded as tools by the proto-Nazi, Dieter Jovanovic. In 1925, the Nazi Party was still on the fringes, but this story masterfully captures the disillusionment and social unrest that would fuel their calamitous rise. Setting this story in such a volatile moment is deliberate and thematically deeply significant. The making of Lang’s science fiction masterpiece provides the perfect backdrop and only adds to the impact of the Cyberman.

What makes this choice truly thematically brilliant is the stark ideological dissonance between the lone Cyberman and the fascist ideology of the man it serves. The Daleks have long symbolized fascism — brutal, supremacist, violently hierarchical — whereas the Cybermen represent a terrifying vision of the opposite: a dystopian collectivism where individuality is erased, emotions are suppressed, and all human qualities are sacrificed on the altar of cold technological "progress." Their society is classless in a mechanistic, authoritarian way that echoes the most extreme interpretations of Marxist dialectical materialism and enforced collectivism, not the fascist doctrine of racial purity and violent nationalism.

In other words, the Cybermen embody the erasure of humanity through enforced conformity and mechanization, a nightmare of dehumanizing industrial and ideological control. To have a proto-Nazi character, whose very ideology thrives on hatred, hierarchy, and racial identity, harness a member of the ultimate classless collective to his ends is a deeply ironic perversion: it is a twisted ideological clash and a grotesque hybridization of two fundamentally opposed totalitarian nightmares.

This contradiction, using the cybernetic “antithesis” of fascism as an instrument of proto-Nazi terror, adds a rich layer of thematic complexity and horror to the story. It suggests the frightening reality that the forces of oppression can co-opt even those elements that are, in essence, their enemies or opposites, twisting them for their own ends. Extremism of any flavour is destructive. To my mind, this also deepens the psychological and existential horror of the lone Cyberman: not only is it a victim of horrific forced transformation, but it is further victimized by becoming an unwilling pawn in a violent political ideology that contradicts its very nature.

This layering of ideological conflict makes Monsters in Metropolis both a compelling period piece and a profound meditation on the dangers of dehumanization, technological abuse, intolerance and political extremism in all its forms. It is a potent reminder that the threats to humanity can come from both the right and the left — and that the most terrifying monsters of all might be those who misappropriate others as pawns to further their own cruel agenda (oh, I might just have to write an essay about that some time! 😝).

In Summary

Monsters in Metropolis succeeds on multiple levels: as a tense, atmospheric historical drama, as an exploration of the personal tragedy behind the Cyberman mask, and as a chilling meditation on the political dangers lurking beneath societal unrest. By humanizing the Cyberman and placing him amidst the fragile political landscape of 1920s Berlin, the story amplifies the tragic cost of dehumanization — both personal and political.

The story’s thematic core is a haunting warning about how totalitarian ideologies, no matter how opposed in theory, share a brutal tendency to crush individuality and exploit technology and people alike for control. This makes Monsters in Metropolis a standout entry in the Ninth Doctor Adventures that reminds us why Doctor Who’s best tales remain relevant and powerful: they hold a mirror to our darkest histories and fears while daring us to hope for humanity behind the monsters.

Final Verdict (tl;dr)

Monsters in Metropolis is a hauntingly humanizing, ideologically rich Cyberman story that brilliantly captures the horror of lost humanity amidst the political shadows of history.