This post is going to be spoiler heavy. I usually try to write these so that we don’t ruin things for people that haven’t watched/read/played whatever is being covered, but I am physically incapable of writing about Cybermen without getting a bit heated and talking about Bill and Torchwood. And I’m not particularly sorry. So basically, if you haven’t watched the last season of Doctor Who or Torchwood and you plan to watch them, this post has spoilers. I will put a big red spoilers sign above them to warn you.

Before I release my barely controlled Cyberman-based-emotional-goulash upon an unsuspecting properly warned world, I wanted to take a minute to talk about this year’s square selection process. We went back and forth on a lot of things about this square. Doctor Who has been in the top five of the Fight For Your Fandom thread pretty much since we opened the floor for votes this year, and I’ve gotten a few questions about it. The Fight For Your Fandom thread on the Ravelry Geek-A-Long Group is open for voting and nominations ALL YEAR. You can nominate a new fandom any time you want. You can/should go through every once in a while to vote for things you want to see on the blanket since new nominations are added regularly. The ONLY way to vote is by selecting “Agree” on the nomination post. “Love” is not counted as a vote. Similarly “Disagree” does not subtract a vote. Is there stuff I would down vote if this were Reddit? Sure. But we’re trying to keep everything civilized, so really, there’s no reason to click “disagree,” because it’s only value is to make the original poster feel bad about their nomination. You’ve got basically the entire rest of the internet for that, Reddit is designed just for it, so lets just all agree to not disagree on our Ravelry forum.

Anyhow, at the beginning of the week Jac counts all the votes and then we discuss the top nominations. There are reasons to choose or not choose a square theme on our ends. For example, maybe it’s got a movie coming out this year and it makes sense to hold it, even if it’s in a top slot, for it’s release date. We’ve already picked next year’s theme, so we are avoiding squares that are definitely on the 2019 blanket. And sometimes, we think we’ve already done the best square. So it’s tough as designers to do the second best square, so we sit on it until we think of something that’s as good as the original. Princess Bride is a nice example. I LOVE the 2014 square. I think it’s better than the 2018 square, which is still pretty good. The hardest ones to design this year are the ones that are revisiting a square we especially liked to begin with, since there is a sort of pressure to top them.

2014 Princess Bride

2018 Princess Bride

Long story short, we’ve been avoiding Doctor Who a bit this year. We’ve technically done four Whovian squares already: TARDIS, Van Gogh TARDIS, River Song, and Torchwood. So, despite being one of the greatest things ever, we had to ask ourselves, is there another great Doctor Who square yet to be made? Yes, obviously, but we needed a few extra weeks to think on it. Which brings me to the Cybermen. If you want to skip the spoilers, this is your cue to just close your eyes and scroll on down to the bottom and grab your pattern.

The Cybermen are horrifying. It’s easy to draw a parallel between them and the Borg. They both want to turn you into one of them, but at least the Borg want to make you part of them. They want to assimilate you, turn your knowledge into their knowledge, and be a speck closer to perfection for it. Your consciousness amounts to something if you’re assimilated. You join the hive mind. You probably get to keep some of your nicer organic parts too. I’m not advocating for the Borg or anything, but at least they look at the collective as having been improved by the addition of you.

Cybermen think you have no inherent value. It’s not that they want to include your knowledge and skills in their greater consciousness. It’s just that your humanity disgusts them. After the conversion, there won’t be any of you left. Though they change up their look on occasion, they leave almost nothing of the original body. The process is intentionally torturous, and what little is left of their minds afterwards is broken and angry. The Cybermen 100% scare the shit out of me. The fourth episode of Torchwood, Cyberwoman, is some of the scariest TV I’ve ever seen. Ianto has been keeping a partially converted Cyberwoman in the lab because she was his one true love before the Cybermen got her. He had interrupted her conversion, and now she lives strapped to a table, in constant pain, and of course she gets free and goes full Cyber. Captain Jack attacks her with a Pterodactyl. Cybermen are so dangerous that you need dinosaurs to take them out. And in that fight, the dinosaur didn’t even win. Just soak that in. The Cyberman robot may not look classically scary, but it can beat a dinosaur in a fight.

The last season of Who was one of the best on the show. I couldn’t stand Clara, so it had been a struggle for me for a while there. I liked the Impossible Girl story line well enough, but I found her so annoying that it was hard to get past it. And then the Impossible Girl came to a conclusion, but she didn’t. I liked her better with Capaldi than Smith, but I won’t pretend I wasn’t glad to see her finally go. And then the Great Moffat gave me Bill. I can die happy after a season of Bill. She was one of my absolute favorites. Really, I think she’s my second favorite companion ever after Amy, knocking Donna down to third. She was so fun! She was smart, and gave the Doctor shit when he needed to be knocked down a peg. She had a compelling backstory.

And after one season, the Cybermen ripped her from me and I am NOT over it. Bill is the companion we all deserve, and the Master converted her into a Cyberman. She waited a decade for the Doctor to save her, and he was too late. The hospital is filled with the Master’s earlier experiments crying out in pain, and we can all imagine what Bill went through. She didn’t accept the change. She managed to hold onto her mind, even though her body was gone. In the end, her mind was freed and she was able to travel the universe with Heather, who she had been crushing on at the start of the season. So it had a happy ending in a I-have-to-let-Bill-go kind of a way, but I still get upset every time I think about the Cybermen getting Bill.

Firefly15309 nominated Doctor Who to the 2018 blanket, with a 9 point summary of its may qualifications:

1. First time the Doctor will be a WOMAN!
2. Proven franchise for over 50 years now
3. The woosh sound the Tardis makes makes all fans look for a blue phone box
4. So many great actors as not only the Doctor but great Companions and everybody has a favorite Doctor and Companion
5. How many times did Rory die?
6. Spoilers!
7. Great villians the Master/Mistress to Weeping Angels, Cybermen, to humans in general sometimes
8. POND
9. Bigger on the inside or as Clara said smaller on the outside

“So many choices and options to choose from! Wanted to have a square for the newest Doctor.“

~ Firefly15309 

We didn’t end up putting Jodi Whittacker, the newest Doctor, on the square since we haven’t seen her in action yet, but her time will come. Our first thought was actually Weeping Angels for the square, but Jac and I couldn’t agree on the right look for them. Then, we talked Daleks for a minute, but that felt really over-done. We landed on Cybermen. I put off knitting the square until the last minute, we were still arguing about colors. I got my way, and we used “Pumpkin Spice Everything” and “TARDIS“. I know, TARDIS is a little on the nose, but I think the Doctor would approve. With the orange speckles, I was going for a “watch the world burn” vibe, and I think I captured it.

GET THE PATTERN

Whether you’re knitting, crocheting, or cross stitching this square, you can view Cybermen pattern by clicking this link or the download it by clicking the button below. Instructions and charts for both knit and crochet are listed in the pattern. When you’re finished making it, don’t forget to Instagram your squares at us @lattesandllamasyarn with the hashtag #geekalong!

Want to hang out with other people making the blanket? You can find moral support in the Geek-A-Long group on Ravelry here. If you’re having trouble with double-sided knitting, we have a how-to video here. If this is your first time encountering the Geek-A-Long, you can learn more about it, the history behind it, how to participate, and why we do it for Child’s Play Charity on this page.

EDITED TO ADD: This post was edited on May 2, 2021 to update links and upload a revamped pattern format, which includes more information. You can read our post about the revamp here, which also includes three other Doctor Who inspired Geek-A-Long squares.

~ Megan-Anne

“Okay, so my first day here, in the canteen, I was on chips. There was this girl. Student. Beautiful. Like a model, only with talking and thinking. She looked at you and you perved. Every time, automatic, like physics. Eye contact, perversion. So I gave her extra chips. Every time, extra chips. Like a reward for all the perversion. Every day, got myself on chips, rewarded her. Then finally, finally, she looked at me, like she’d noticed, actually noticed, all the extra chips. Do you know what I realised? She was fat. I’d fatted her. But that’s life, innit? Beauty or chips. I like chips. So did she. So that’s okay.”-Bill Potts

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