Kroton (Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman)

Kroton was a Cyberman who uncharacteristically retained his emotional capacity. He discovered this on the planet Mondaran, where turned against his superiors and saved a group of the local Mondarians. Escaping the planet, Kroton spent many years traveling alone, saving planets, and helping those he came across. All the while he had little memories of his life before becoming a Cyberman, often having brief flashes of memories of a lost life come into his mind. After helping the Eighth Doctor and Izzy on the Qutrusian Cargo Freighter X-703, Kroton was taken on-board The TARDIS, where he travelled with the pair for a time. After a battle with and Sato Katsura, Kroton became the new centre of the Omniversal Spectrum.

Biography
Little was known about Kroton's original life. He had a family and a wife named Shallia, who was also his childhood friend, before he was taken from them by the Cybermen and converted. He himself forgot all of his past. (COMIC: Unnatural Born Killers, The Glorious Dead)

Following his conversion, Kroton became a Junior Cyber-Leader, and was sent from Telos to assist in the invasion and management of the planet Mondaran.

On Mondaran, Kroton began to question his superiors and fight back as he discovered his emotions. He helped a group of Mondarains to escape their planet and Cyberman rule. The ship they used to escape was low on fuel. Rather than maroon himself to die on a jungle planet, he set off into space to drift alone and deactivated himself. (COMIC: Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman)

A cruise spaceship, the Flying Dutchman II, which was stuck in a lateral stasis field, found Kroton's ship and the human passengers reactivated him. He helped remove the ship from the stasis loop, but discovered it had been trapped for six hundred and twenty-eight years. The mortal passengers all rapidly aged and died, leaving Kroton on his own again, with only the ship's robot pilot for company. (COMIC: Ship of Fools)

After that Kroton travelled through space. Along his journeys, he helped a group of Technosmiths on Baroq VII, (COMIC: The Company of Thieves) possibly appeared on the planet Paradise, (COMIC: Star Tigers) and prevented an act of genocide by the Sontarans. (COMIC: Unnatural Born Killers) Iris Wildthyme, who had a history of claiming that the Doctor's adventures were her own, mentioned that Kroton travelled with her for a time. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress)

Kroton encountered the the Eighth Doctor and his companion Izzy on the Qutrusian Cargo Freighter X-703. After assisting them, he joined them in the TARDIS. (COMIC: The Company of Thieves)

Kroton left the Doctor after a battle with during the Master's pursuit to become the centre of the omniversal spectrum. He reached Pandarost, the planet where the Master had prepared his trap for the Doctor and Izzy. Both were caught in the Church of the Glorious Dead's assault and barely survived, living a hard existence for nearly a month, fending off attacks by cultists and their monstrous Ash Wraith forms.

Kroton finally did battle with Sato Katsura, lasting against him much longer than any other foe due to his enhanced physiology. Sato was sent reeling from the fight when Izzy forced upon him a mnemonic crystal and fed him back all the pain she had suffered at the hands of the Church. She gave the same crystal to Kroton, who used it, though he had rejected it before. It awoke memories from before his Cyber-conversion. He remembered all the happiness and sorrow he had ever felt as a human being. He accepted them and chose joy over misery. He was chosen as the new centre of the Omniversal Spectrum, banishing the Master and restoring the history he had warped, granting Sato his ultimate wish for honourable death as he left for the heavens. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

Personality
Kroton appreciated beauty. This made the Doctor realise Kroton was no ordinary Cyberman. He also withstood the impression of the interior of the TARDIS; when the Doctor asked him if it struck him as "illogical", Kroton happily cast away the word, stating, "To hell with logic!". (COMIC: The Company of Thieves)

He had a balanced sense of right and wrong, becoming utterly infuriated at the possibility of a Sontaran plan for genocide of innocent natives and the Church of the Glorious Dead's atrocities against the alien ambassadors on the planet Paradost. (COMIC: Unnatural Born Killers, The Glorious Dead) Before he touched the mnemonic crystal offered to him by Izzy Sinclair, he suffered from flashbacks of his former life. These saddened him as he could not access all his memories and he felt the pain those memories would bring would be greater than the joy, making him reject the crystal initially. However, upon embracing those memories and his humanity, he became a complete person again and left to have his own adventures soon after. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

Early on in his life he showed a child-like innocence to everything around him. He was often bothered and horrified by death or tragedy that surrounded him. (COMIC: Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman, Ship of Fools) In his later life, however, he grew more cocky and confident.

Kroton originally had a Cyberman gun, which he used on the Flying Dutchman II to break open the cockpit door. (COMIC: Ship of Fools)

Due to helping out a group of Technosmiths on Baroq VII during his journeys, they thanked him by making some "special adaptions" to his armour — which allowed Kroton to withstand blaster fire from various guns, including Sontaran lasers, as well as withstanding a powerful electric charge after the Eighth Doctor mistook him for a normal Cyberman and shoved a high-voltage cable into his chest unit — which merely disabled him temporarily. He even stated to the Doctor when revealing the adjustments that "when half the galaxy keeps trying to shoot you on sight, you learn how to protect yourself!" (COMIC: Unnatural Born Killers, The Company of Thieves)

He had a metal staff that he could use during combat as well as magnetise it to his back. Kroton was seen using it to great effect during his battle with the Sontarans and the Space Pirates before finally using it during his battle with Sato. (COMIC: Unnatural Born Killers, The Company of Thieves, The Glorious Dead)

Behind the Scenes
Created in 1979 during the early issues of Doctor Who Magazine, Kroton's story was initially meant to be a one-off, but his story saw brief continuations over the years. This eventually ended with him becoming a brief companion of the Eighth Doctor, more than twenty years after his creation. The character's creator, Steve Moore, had said that he was not aware of the characters use outside of Ship of Fools in real time, and that he thought of that later stories to be too far a removal of the initial concept.

"I probably wouldn’t have approved. From what little I’ve seen of this stuff, it looks to be a complete transformation of the original character… he’s now less a ‘Cyberman with a soul’, more just a human being in a funny suit. It’s far too far a move away from the original. If I’d done anything else with him, it would have been to continue with the character pretty much as he was… only a little different from a normal Cyberman, and still very much the “innocent abroad” that he was in Ship of Fools. The later characterisation just seems far too knowing to me. But I don’t know if I ever would have done anything else with Kroton… I never really thought that far ahead at the time."

- Steve Moore