WhiteCrowUK: American and British takes on Sci-Fi

This weekend saw the concluding part of the Doctor Who two parter Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel which has seen the return of Doctor Who villains the Cybermen.

Part of the update of the Cybermen has been the coverage for the first time that there are no separate CyberWOmen – with both men and women being turned into the same machine end product.

This was an interesting idea (commented on in the story) that the Cybermen removed differences of race, gender, disability and sexuality between people which have caused so much violence and bloodshed over our history. But it imposed this equality by a violation of the individual, an equality gained by stripping down a human being to just their brain, and then inhibiting even that.

This violation of the individual was reinforced by the discovery that one of the Cybermen the Doctor encountered was a girl called Sally who was due to be married that same day (some have picked up there might be a social comment with Sally as she is obviously a woman trapped within a masculine machine body). And also there was the shock as Rose discovered that her mother Jackie had been processed into a Cyberman in this alternate world.

Sally the "Cyberwoman"

But the Cybermen aren’t the only cyborgs to be covered in popular science fiction. So how does Sally-the-Cyberman from BBC Wales compare with the cyborgs of Hollywood?