"Handles" was the name given by the Eleventh Doctor to a Cyberman head that he had obtained from the Maldovarium Market, and subsequently repaired. All of its organic components and Cyberman protocols had been cleaned out, leaving it a plain, docile robot that interpreted commands literally whether or not they were meant to be taken as rhetorical statements. It went on many adventures with him as he searched the mysterious Trenzalore. When the Doctor went aboard ships orbiting Trenzalore before he gained access, Handles was accidentally brought aboard a Cyber-Ship which led the Cybermen to attack the Doctor.
Outliving the residents he had chosen to protect, Handles was the Doctor's only companion during his first three hundred years in Christmas. As the years passed, Handles began to corrode with rust and slowly lost his functionality. The Doctor kept repairing Handles as best he could, but he lacked enough spare parts and it eventually broke down. Before shutting down, Handles finally fulfilled an order the Doctor had given it prior to landing on Trenzalore: reminding the Doctor to patch the TARDIS phone back to the console. Handles' death reduced the Doctor to tears. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
Behind the scenes
- Handles is the fourth known robotic companion to appear in a televised story, following the first two iterations of K-9 and Kamelion.
- Handles is strikingly similar in concept to the beach ball named Wilson in the 2000 film Castaway. In that film, Tom Hanks' character adopts the inanimate object as a friend and talks to it, and the loss of the object reduces Hanks to tears. A major difference, of course, is that Handles is able to interact verbally with the Doctor, whereas Wilson remains a silent friend.
- Coincidentally, a similar Cyberman head is prominently displayed in UNIT's Black Archive during The Day of the Doctor, the preceding story.
- Handles is technically one of the longest companions the Doctor has had, as he was with him for the first 300 years he was on Trenzalore.
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