L is for... Lone Cyberman

When the Doctor's companions - Graham, Ryan and Yaz - encountered Captain Jack Harkness on an alien spaceship, he told them to warn the Doctor about the "Lone Cyberman".

Sometime later they arrived in the Swiss lake regions and the Villa Diodati, which had been rented for the summer by the poet Lord Byron. With him were his physician John Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft and Miss Clare Clairmont. The villa appeared to be haunted, but it transpired that a substance called the Cyberium was located here, housed in the body of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was making the house appear haunted as part of a defence mechanism. A shining man had been glimpsed on the lake nearby, and this turned out to be Ashad - a Cyberman who was only partly converted. He had all the ruthlessness of the Cybermen, conjoined with human cunning. The Doctor realised that this was the "Lone Cyberman" whom Jack had warned her about. Ashad wanted the Cyberium - a living metal with artificial intelligence, which would allow him to rule the whole Cyber-race. In the far future the Cybermen were winning the Cyberwar, and the human race was being pushed to the brink of extinction. Ashad revealed that he had killed his own sons when they fought against the Cybermen. He saved the son of Mary and Percy - but only because he expected him to be converted at a later date. Unwilling to allow Shelley to die, and deprive future generations of his work, the Doctor elected to hand the Cyberium over to Ashad, who returned with it to the future.

Feeling responsible for future events the Doctor took her companions to the far future, where they met one of the last refugee groups. They were seeking something called Ko Sharmus, which provided a gateway to a safe zone free of Cybermen. Ashad was here, and he had a scheme to have the Cybermen become creatures totally free of organic components - a purely robotic race. Beyond this he would then wipe out all organic life - leaving only the Cybermen. Whilst pursuing the Doctor, he came across a Cyber-troop carrier, filled with thousands of Cyber-Warriors which he was going to forcibly convert. Ko Sharmus proved to be a person - a general in the human resistance forces and the person who had sent the Cyberium back through time to prevent Ashad obtaining it. He oversaw an energy barrier which led to supposedly safe worlds - one of which turned out to the Gallifrey destroyed by the Master. He was present in the Capitol, and he entered into a deal with Ashad to help him. He would create Cyberman-Time Lord hybrids capable of regeneration. Within Ashad's body was a powerful energy form known as the "Death Particle" which was capable of disintegrating organic matter. The Master used his Tissue Compression Eliminator to kill Ashad, without disturbing the Particle. He also took the Cyberium from Ashad into his own body.

Before fleeing Gallifrey with some Cyber-Masters, the Master had taken Ashad's remains and he later cloned them. He sent this shrunken form to Tegan Jovanka, pretending it was from the Doctor - knowing she would carry it past security into UNIT's new HQ. Ashad had been converted into a Passenger form, containing an army of Cyber-Warriors. Ashad then began converting the UNIT personnel. Tegan and Kate Stewart sabotaged his systems, causing a  feedback which killed the Ashad clone and the Warriors. It also destroyed UNIT HQ.

Played by: Patrick O'Kane. Appearances: The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Ascension of the Cybermen, The Timeless Children (2020), The Power of the Doctor (2022).

• One of the drawbacks of presenting a comprehensive A-Z in sequence for an on-going show, there will always be occasions when I have moved on from a letter before a new character is introduced - which is why Ashad appears here under "L" rather than "A".
• O'Kane featured in Game of Thrones as one of the 'disguises' adopted by the assassin Jaqen.
• He was a First Order commander in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.