Fate of the Cybermen: The Cybermen of NuWho

Written 1/10/15.

This is Cyberman Month, where we've been looking at the original five black and white stories featuring Mankind's cyborg nemesis. I've also covered the five other Cyberman stories from the Classic Series, under Phillip Hinchcliffe in 1975 and later John Nathan Turner through the 80s. But what of the Cybermen now in the revival of the show? I've certainly covered all of the episodes, but it's often harder without hindsight to pinpoint the design and story changes which have brought the Cybermen from the swinging 60s into modern living rooms. So, in this article, I will be examining the history of the Cybermen in NuWho, and wondering where they might go from here.

This was in fact the first publicity image
of the Cybusmen. I love the head tilt.

The Cybusmen - 2006-9
Seen in: Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Cyberwoman, The Next Doctor

Russell T Davies waited until the second series of the revived show to bring back the Cybermen, spending his first season giving a similar treatment to the Daleks. While they were made shiny gold and layered in a number of different political metaphors, the Cybermen were given an entirely new origin story. Instead of originating on Earth's twin planet Mondas, the Cybermen of an alternate universe originated on Earth itself, created by a disabled human scientist, John Lumic, who wished not only to end human pain and suffering, but also to prolong his own life and unite the world under the brand of his company, Cybus Industries.
     These Cybermen are strong, and sturdy, their design featuring a more angular face and a headplate which from behind recalls a roman helmet. Much was made of the Cybermen's reduction to "stampy metal robots," in the fan consciousness at the time, but this is somewhat unfair - if anything, these Cybermen harken back to the "boiler-suit" design from the middle three Sixties stories, except this time with a budget to fully execute the idea. While their voice was fairly memorable and well done (ta to Nicholas Briggs), they were imbued with a few new catch-phrases indicative of the change in their overall philosophy - "Delete", "Upgrade" and similar phrases likening their thoughts to computer software.
     That change in philosophy is a distinctly modern one. The original Cybermen were a reactionary fear to the use of cybernetics in medicine - artificial hearts, artificial limbs. They were the whole concept of prosthesis medicine taken to a logical extreme, in which a person's entire body is replaced and thus, in the eyes of Kitt Pedler and Gerry Davis, so is the soul. RTD's Cybermen - or the "Cybusmen" as fans call them - are an attempt to apply the same method to capitalism, more specifically to companies like Apple. Rise of the Cybermen sees everyone on the Alternate Earth owning a Cybus Industries "earpod" which downloads information directly into people's brains, and from this we can see the Cybusmen as a particularly heavy-handed message to not let corporations tell you what to think and what to feel.

Of course Chris Chibnall would give a Cyberman a metal bra
and heels. Talk about fetishes.

     But allegory aside, one area where I think that the Cybusmen excel over their previous incarnations is the fear and paranoia that they produce. Conversion between human and Cyberman was only actually seen in a single story of the Classic Series - the often derided Attack of the Cybermen. With the Cybusmen, we see the population of London marching into factories, waiting outside little cubicles, and then wandering in as their brain is surgically extracted from their body and placed into a Cybus Industries shell. It's obviously not as gory as I'm making it sound, but the whole idea of extracting and reprogramming the brain rather than slowly switching body parts means that becoming a Cyberman is an act of complete and utter dehumanisation. Some of my favourite moments from the Rise/Age two-parter came when the Cybermen ended up for one reason or another referring to their former selves, especially the Parallel Jackie Tyler, which just hits you as a gut-punch that this person, while not dead, is irreversible changed. It's fantastic.
     The Cybusmen within Series Two were at their most effective. I was glad that the show used them sparingly, and used them to influence a large part of the show's ongoing mythos. While Cyberwoman was quite, quite ridiculous, it had all of the body horror, all of the adult fears about losing the ones you love, and it also presented the whole idea of a single Cyber-conversion unit as a terrifying thing. While their execution in The Next Doctor was a little more experimental and weird, I think it was still an interesting use of the concept, and I can't really think of anything more awesome to do with your cybernetic guys than to stick them in Victorian England and make them create a slave-driven steampunk mecha. Oh. Yeah.

Hold on... that's a Preacher gun. From the Parallel Universe.
The Cybusmen never even wielded those, this is ridiculous.

The Fake Cybusmen - 2010-11
Seen in: The Pandorica Opens, A Good Man Goes To War, Closing Time, Nightmare In Silver (briefly).

Moffat's first move upon taking the show was to hoist a major redesign onto the Daleks, who had to be included at least once per year in order to fulfil the BBC's contract. However wise that decision was given that as of writing we just had a massive Dalek episode and not a single "New Paradigm" Dalek actually appeared, it led to the apparent explanation that the Cybermen couldn't be redesigned, because the budget had gone towards the new Daleks and the new Silurians. Why bother to bring them back, then, if it's going to be a continuity nightmare? Ha. Moffat doesn't care about keeping continuity within the show as he runs it, only in making references to Classic Who in some bizarre effort to please the fanbase.
     In this period of the Cybermen's history, there was a motion to distance the show from their alternate-universe origin, with the idea being that the Cybermen we were seeing were the originals from our Universe. However, the only concessions made to this were the removal of the "C" plate in the centre of their chests, and the fact that they now apparently have vast fleets of interstellar spacecraft that The Doctor can blow up as and when he pleases. Their catchphrases have changed as well, with at least one Cyberman screaming the Borg cry of "Assimilate" and for some ungodly reason having tentacles in its head. At least one fan theory espouses the idea that some of the Cybusmen remained in our universe at the end of Doomsday and found some of our Universe's guys, who decided to copy the design in the name of style.

Skulls are more funny than scary, particularly when they start
chattering at you. What's it going to do, bite you to death?

     The show attempted to make these Cybermen better in Closing Time, an episode which somehow managed to be the most disappointing thing in Series Six - no mean feat, I'll tell you. They had them skulking under a department store, kidnapping people, converting them and making the use of Cybermats for the first time since 1975. But, of course, they had to spoil it by having the Cybermen's weakness to emotion (admittedly weaponised by both The Invasion and The Age of Steel) become so absurd that the sound of a child crying for his father became enough to melt solid steel.
     It says a lot about the Moffat era that they simply didn't care enough to try and work out what these Cybermen were all about. There's no ideology behind them, no basis in any form of metaphor or idea, they are just cut-and-paste villains who borrow a lot of their catch-phrases from The Borg. Which, when you mention it, goes to describe our next lot...

Some Cybermen face designs look happy, others sad. These
are in a state of constant dumb surprise.

The Iron-Man-Borg-Lovechild - 2013-Present
Seen in: Nightmare In Silver, Time of the Doctor, Dark Water/Death In Heaven

The excitement when I saw the publicity photos for Nightmare In Silver was just ridiculously high. I love the Cybermen, and I love Cybermen stories, at least in principle. Every time there's a new Cybermen story or redesign I tell myself that this time, it's going to be good. It's going to work, there's going to be a point to them again. The Cybermen are best when they are both A.) working off of your fears about being robbed of your humantiy and B.) working as a metaphor for some aspect of ourselves that is leading us down a bad path. The best Cyberman stories have these elements, be it the original fear of medical technology in The Tenth Planet, of unguarded militarism in The Invasion, or of dehumanising Capitalism in Rise/Age. The most recent incarnation of the Cybermen? They are completely gone. Any hint of being about something is gone, and the Cybermen are now mostly just empty villains.
      Their initial appearance in the romance-novel-sounding Nightmare In Silver brings with it a lot of promise. Their design is given a technical upgrade when a "Cyber-mite" (evidently an evolved version of the Cybermats) absorbs and reverse engineers a newer piece of technology. The Cybermen which result from this have super-speed (an ability seen in a single sequence in their very first appearance and then never again) as well as the ability to both adapt to energy weapons as they're being fired upon and to assimilate people using tiny organisms. In other words, the Borg. I make this comparison a lot on this blog, and that's because it's perfectly warranted, especially after that episode., While the idea of a plague which could rob you of your humanity is still pretty scary in principle, it lacks the body-horror and deeply personal elements which make the Cybermen effective.

Death In Heaven returned some body horror to the Cybermen,
even if it went about it in a weird way.

     Ignoring the ridiculous wooden Cybermen of Time of the Doctor (fuck that episode, seriously), their next appearance was in last series' finale, Dark Water/Death In Heaven, where they have become tools of The Master. This two-parter did good and bad things with the concept. On the one hand, the whole idea of downloading the minds of the human race and resurrecting them in robotic shells is key to what made the Cybusmen work, and so that was really effective. What wasn't effective was this whole business of these new Cybermen apparently having an entire human corpse inside them, which seems to go against the entire idea of having them now so easily transferred via a "Cyber-virus". Why attempt to forcibly combine the two ideas, when the whole "downloading people" thing is scary enough? Having people actually rise from their graves as Cybermen with their original bodies and suggesting that one of them is The Brigadier is effing ridiculous. It made the episode funny rather then terrifying, which as is the case with Capaldi's stuff so far, it was a hair's breadth from being.

The Future

There were accusations flying around during the Wilderness years that any interesting things that could be done with the Cybermen had already been done, and not just in the show, but in the extensive material from the Expanded Universe. Then, Rise/Age appeared, an adaptation of the audio Spare Parts, which was an origin story for the Cybermen of our Universe, similar in style to the way that Genesis of the Daleks had breathed new life into the metal pepper pots by revealing their history and ideological purpose. Whether or not you believe that everything good from Rise/Age came from Marc Platt and Spare Parts, I don't think that there is a Cyberman story which better combines a really good origin for the Cybermen, a set of body-horror moments which scare and unsettle, with what is a fairly decent adventure story.

The one on the right has discovered that her husband Gerald
is having an affair with the pool boy, and the one on the left
was the one trying to cover it up.

     There are so many possible stories that you could develop using the Cybermen from either Universe which would be fulfilling to a purpose of some sort, and genuinely fun at the same time. We don't need a full history lesson a la Attack to explain where they've come from - if necessary, just stick in some minor background dialogue, because the people who notice that stuff will love it and people who don't will love the story for being a good story. The Cybermen have always been for me the dark mirror of humanity, always a vision of what we may become, either literally or in metaphor. It's what makes them so powerful to me, and why after all these years, they're the ones I remember the most. I bought Earthshock, I bought Attack, because the most exciting thing for me about rewatching The Five Doctors over and over again was watching the many different ways the Doctor defeated the Cybermen. One can only hope that there will come a story good enough to inspire that same devotion and love in future generations.

Thanks.

Overview: Doctor Who: Series Two

Written between 26th January and 9th February 2013.

Series One of the revived series is one that I consider to be pretty much flawless, owing to a combination of factors that complement the superb acting of its lead and the writing that enables it. The second series, something of a "difficult second album," had the job of both introducing a brand new Doctor to the public, but also of living up to the insane standards of the previous year. And, probably to the annoyance of many of you, I don't think that it quite succeeded. I will attempt here and now to explain why, without being too pretentious or insulting. (Two counts on which I will probably fail.)
     Firstly, the good bits. Conceptually, a lot of the stories of the season were actually pretty strong. You had the great Impossible Planet two-parter, as well as the well-executed Parallel Earth story earlier on in the series, as well as several strong offerings from others like Moffat and Toby Whithouse. That's gonna sound like I'm only praising the writers from the current series, and that's completely co-incidental. It is a shame that this is where I think that RTD began to slide in my expectations, not due to any abject change in talent but rather because he became too enamoured with his own characters.
     Rose is the centre of this season's problems for me. I'll just spit it out, I'm going to piss off her fans anyway. I don't hate Rose as a character - I think that it was a good idea to bring the show back with a clear audience recognition figure, and Rose provided that in spades as the charming working-class shopgirl who was carried away by the Doctor's adventures at the same time we were. But after the first series, this role seemed to diminish, and either the guest writers didn't know what to do with her or you had the main writers just trying to get her to fit in. Just take a look at the first four episodes to get what I mean: Two RTD episodes, New Earth and Tooth and Claw, in which the Doctor and Rose are all lovey and smug, and then two current writers tell other stories of the Doctor's escapades and Rose fades into the background. Her story had been told, there was nothing else to do with the character, she'd already done the journey from nobody to God and after that there's nothing much you can do.

     The Tenth Doctor is a bit odd in his first season, in that he seems composed primarily of his initial weirdness and doesn't really get a chance for much seriousness of thought. His characterisation seems to change depending on the writer, ranging from a power-mad weirdo in RTD's episodes to a serious, considerate diplomat in the series' two-parters. I think his popularity stems from the overall sense of "awesomeness" that just emanates from the character, which obviously in many cases is subjective. There's just something about the Tenth Doctor that manages to balance attractive youth and incredible experience, to the extent that, for now, his presence is enough to make you more confident about a situation.
     And that's all I can build up the will to say about this season. It's one that will continue to divide fan opinion, but it's almost universally loved by the public, so I don't really feel at liberty to spread more dirt about it. Suffice to say that I don't think it's as perfect as so many of its fangirls would have the world, believe, and while a lot of it is harmless, there are a few episodes that really just abuse the effort that went into getting the show back on the air. Anything I saw about it will probably be uncontrollable rubbish by this point, so feel free to ignore this article and everything I've said. Onto the next series!

Thanks.

P.S. A very Happy Birthday to my friend Joel, who makes cool music here.

Review: Doctor Who 2.12/13: Army of Ghosts and Doomsday

Torchwood makes its first appearance. And it's cool.

Doctor Who - Season 28, Episode 12/13 - Army of Ghosts and Doomsday
Written 25/1/13

I could get in a lot of trouble here. Fear Her, the Idiot's Lantern - no-one cares what I say about those episodes. They're old news, they're unimportant. But this finale, and Doomsday in particular, is considered by some in the NuWho section of the Doctor Who fandom to be one of the most heart-wrenchingly potent moments in modern television. One's position in said fandom, and the divides within, goes pretty much hand in hand with your particular opinion on this episode, and on how sad you are at the loss (for now) of Rose Marion Tyler. As you may have been able to tell, while I'm getting to like Ten a bit more overall, Rose is still not exactly a character that I am enamoured with.
     I am not someone, however, who particularly cares about having unpopular opinions any more. As long as I'm not talking complete mouth-farts, I think that I can keep some dignity and say that while the structure of the two-parter is well-done, the execution of the epic concept at its heart is less than satisfying. And, behind the buzzwords, what I basically mean is that you're either here for Rose's exit or the monsters. And I was most definitely here for the Monsters. This is the first (and so far only) time that the Daleks and Cybermen have identified with and fought each other in the entire 50 year history of the show. If you're centring an episode around that, I expect it to be a little more than a one-sided cop-out. After the fans put the new Cybermen down in their opening story, it really didn't do them any favours to appear in massive numbers as nothing more than ray-gun fodder.
     Perhaps that's more childish than I realise. There's so much more to this two-parter than monsters shooting at each other, and a lot of it is relevant to the overall plot of the season. Like the previous series, Season 28 had an arc, although one that was much less obscure. The launch of Rusty's new Torchwood spin-off (which I'll be finishing off in April) was punctuated by a series of references in Doctor Who that led up to this story, which takes place mainly in the headquarters of Torchwood's London branch. They're led by the wonderfully characterised Yvonne Hartman, played by a Tracy-Ann Oberman who is enjoying herself immensely. It was very interesting to see that concept explored in the first half, even if it got shoved to the side for our emotional finale. (Which I'll get to at the end, I promise, this is gonna be like the End of Time review but slightly less foamy at the mouth.)

The Daleks are in this. Spoilers, I guess.

     For what its worth, the sheer unexpectedness of the main elements of the story as they're introduced in Army of Ghosts makes the story quite interesting for the first half. The idea of ghosts leaking through into our world through a hole in spacetime, following a mysterious golden sphere, had us all on our toes. While the reveal of the Cybermen wasn't too surprisingly, their subsequent invasion of the Earth and the final, shattering reveal of four Daleks gives the story one of the best cliffhangers in NuWho. (One which caused my mother, in fact, to emit a high-pitched scream that still haunts me to this day.) It felt like the perfect build up to a perfect finale to what was a less than perfect season.
     As I have likely discussed elsewhere (and likely discuss far too often), the main problem that occurs quite often in Rusty's writing is the extraordinarily good build-up that then gets a shitty pay-off. He's always been better at extracting every last ounce of emotion from the viewer, even if that means distorting the characters and plot to suit. An example would be Rose's change from independant and feisty 19-year-old woman to love-sick teenager who makes inappropriate jokes every few minutes, in order to make her loss in this episode more powerful. I'm skirting on the edge of that subject again, so I'll get this paragraph back on track - Army of Ghosts was building up for a really, really powerful story and then we sorta threw too many things into the pot at once and Davies wrote himself into an impossible situation. We have six billion Cybermen roaming the world's streets, with even more Daleks flying above them, killing us and each other. Davies' solution of a magical interdimensional hoover is as laughable as it is implausable, especially considering the fact that the TARDIS and a few Classic companions have crossed dimensions and we don't see them being sucked in too. And we'll not even talk about Pete Tyler's amazing omniscience.
     Right, onto Rose. I'm pretty much sick and tired of talking, rather inexpertly, about the reasons why I found her character a bit saddening by this point in her history. She had once been a symbol of such confidence during NuWho's beginnings, but her character really just got mangled for some reason into a caricature of her former self. Don't get me wrong - Billie Piper is a wonderful actress that I really quite respect, and it's the writing that forms the crux of my problem with Rose in her second series. Your opinion on Doomsday is very much gonna depend upon whether you like Rose or not, because if you do then it's the most heart-breaking thing in the world, and if you don't then it's a rather underwhelming send-off to a character you didn't much care for in the first place. Seeing as I'm in the latter camp, all I can give you is my perspective.

"My name's Rose Tyler, and this is my overly
dramatic voiceover."

     I might talk about this more when I get to the reviews for Series Four, but it deserves to be said here. NuWho during Rusty's era began to use Rose as a crutch, and a lot of the souring of her reputation from certain parts of the fanbase has come from the fact that once she left, we never really got rid of her. The character was mentioned quite frequently in the next series, with brave new companion choice Martha getting sidelined as "not-Rose". Then in Series Four, she's back again and guiding the series towards its messy conclusion. I'm not blaming the character of Rose for all of my problems with RTD's Who, but I am saying that her almost constant background presence made it almost impossible for our main characters to develop a lot of emotional grounding.
     Ok, so those two paragraphs were a bit of a tangent. Never mind me. Rose Tyler's time on the show has come to an end, for now, and while I wasn't particularly moved by her admittedly poignant exit, I was excited by the first half and Rusty's general ability to create a decent build-up around a set of great concepts. I enjoyed the Dalek v Cybermen action, because that's fanboy gold, and I enjoyed some of the more intimate moments with Rose's family reuniting in the parallel world. Army of Ghosts/Doomsday is not a bad story by any means, and is one of the most impressive of this season. But it doesn't tug on my heartstrings as much as it does for other people, and that's something that a lot of you probably won't forgive me for.

Thanks.

P.S. As to why I can write a long article like this in one night while a Lost review takes a couple of days... make of that what you will.

NEXT TIME: I take a week break from Doctor Who for my half-term break, returning with Smith and Jones in the new half-term.

Review: Doctor Who 2.11: Fear Her

Much like Queen Bess, this blog has two birthdays - December 7th, which denotes my first published review, and today, which denotes the actual creation of what was then Audenshaw Reviews. I usually put less pathos on the second for various stupid reasons, but this year it's happened to fall on one hell of an episode. So, as we celebrate my three-year-long hobby, we also take a look at one of the most universally hated stories in NuWho this side of Love and Monsters. (Which I reviewed last Summer, so no complaining.)

The real ceremony somehow managed to be cooler
than this.

Doctor Who - Season 28, Episode Eleven - Fear Her

Written between 13th and 18th of January 2013

It's hard to put a finger on what exactly went wrong with Fear Her. The concepts, at least at the beginning, are fundamentally sound, but they tap into several things which are quite risky - mainly making reference to future cultural events and by having a large part of the episode revolve around a child actress. Fear Her's irreverent jabs at the 2012 London Olympics, and Matthew Graham's "Power of Love" solution, push a story that was already pretty lightweight into the dark, demonic depths of mediocrity. And that's pretty much the worst crime you can come up with for a show like this.

     Because really, there's nothing that's too bad about this episode. Ten and Rose are still a little smug here or there, but they're generally tolerable for the most part, especially with some small moments between them discussing The Doctor's past. The main beef of the episode comes from Abisola Agbaje, who plays Chloe Webber. While I'm sure that she's a lovely girl in reality, her acting is piss-poor and it's no surprise that Fear Her was the only thing she ever did. Her line reads are unconvincing and she turns what could be the rather scary prospect of an alien-possessed little girl into something innately laughable. It's probably a fault of the direction and just the general environment, but this story hinged around having a competent child actor and unfortunately that just wasn't the case.

     The story follows The Doctor and Rose as they land in 2012 London, on a small cul-de-sac in which children have been disappearing. It's the run-up to the Olympics, which will be passing the street in a few days. They find in one of the houses a small girl named Chloe Webber, with the power to absorb people into drawings. She's been possessed by an isolus, a space-dwelling plant that has been seperated from its mother and its four billion brothers and sisters, and so is using its amazing reality-bending powers of loneliness to get new friends. Just when they think everything's sorted, a series of stupid mistakes gives Chloe the chance to draw The Doctor, leaving Rose to have to stop her from drawing the entire world. Eventually, Rose is able to use the passion and spirit of Olympic fever to restart the Isolus' pod, and the creature returns home.
      The idea at the core of the story is one that I'm not very happy with, if only, ironically, for its lack of imagination. We're supposed to accept that these tiny little wisp-like creatures have the power to morph reality in quite a profound way, and yet can't even get a tiny spaceship off the ground. I suppose the idea of it all is that this is an alien race powered by love, which is a nice thought but doesn't exactly help me to maintain my suspension of disbelief. It's a bad idea, badly executed, and next to the sub-par acting it causes the story to spiral into the mess that it becomes.

Klow-ee Webbah

     Three years ago I started this blog because I wanted to have a place to write about things without feeling like I was being one of those annoying Facebook people. Now, I’m still here, still writing, perhaps not what I thought I’d be writing about, but regardless at the end of a mountain of work which is longer than most short books. (And, in hindsight, I wish I’d used the time to do that instead.) When I look back, I wonder whether it’s all bee worth it. Nobody has really ever read any of my reviews except out of a strange feeling of pity, and the only commenters here are few and far between. It is simply, in the end, a question of whether I should continue writing even when I know that nobody is ever going to injest it. And the answer, resoundingly, is yes. Because it lets me contribute something, no matter how small. And for me, at least, that's important. Fear Her wasn't the worst story in Who history, but it had such flaws on every level that at the end of the day, it might as well be.

Thanks.

This review is dedicated to my friend Asher, who passed away on the 17th January. She was someone whose extraordinary kindness and good humour made me the man I am today, and my sympathies are still with her family and closest friends. May she rest in peace.

Review: Doctor Who 2.8-9: The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit

Toby is possessed by The Beast.

Doctor Who - Season 28, Episodes Eight and Nine - The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Written between 9th and 11th of January 2013

Religion. Religiony widgiony. It's a topic that I've talked about to various degrees of controversy on this blog, mainly because I don't like it when writers shove religious themes into the finales of otherwise secular stories. Doctor Who itself hasn't shyed away from examining the subject, and while this week's story has certainly been done before by Who, it's not exactly what I'd call deriviative. The Impossible Planet two-parter is distinct in its sheer ability to summon the deepest and darkest of scenarios from what it a basic base-under-siege plot, invoking not just crazy new aliens but the bloody Devil himself.

     The episode comes from writer Matt Jones, who is a big fan of evil devil-like figures (especially if you look at his next story for this universe, Dead Man Walking.) The setting is one immediately different in new Who - an entirely new planet, orbitting around a black hole. The Doctor and Rose land on Sanctuary Base Six, a base positioned on the planet to discover whatever's keeping the planet steady, as well as the source of a gravity funnel into space. They have the telepathic, Zoidberg-esque Ood as willing slaves, and for a while have been finding out that the planet's former civilisation is ridiculously old. When the TARDIS falls into the centre of the planet, The Doctor is forced to stick around and help them, descending their mineshaft into the planet's heart. As he decends, an entity known as The Beast possesses archeologist Toby Zed, who kills one crew member before spreading his possession to the Ood's hive-mind. As The Doctor discovers the ruins of the old civilisation, Rose and the remaining crew battle to stay alive. The Doc finds that the creature controlling the Ood, and sitting at the centre of the planet, is a giant demon who was locked away at the Dawn of Time but who has since subliminally inspired the rest of the Universe's devil stories.
     This isn't the first time that Doctor Who has done The Devil; Season Eight story The Daemons had a slightly similar character in the demon Azal, but this takes a much bleaker and certainly more tense position. Despite obviously having a maximum of what looks like three or four sets, the base feels surprisingly large and the atmosphere is well-crafted. There's the right mix of desolation and loneliness, with the crew members of the base remaining proffessional while at the same time in a state of permenant awe at their current situation. It felt so serious and dark that Series Two's odd habit of having Rose make inappropriate jokes throughout the exposition just felt off. She had recovered by the cliffhanger, however, and managed to maintain a rather odd scenario in which she drove the majority of the action while The Doc drove the exposition.

How Ood?

     I know I've spoken bad of Tennant's Doctor in certain places, but his performance here is just unbelievably good in its sincerity. Jones shows us another side of The Doctor's faith, seeing how he puts his trust in science in all cases except the grand myths from his home period. Despite the way that the episode sets up The Doctor as the saviour of the Universe chosen by the elders to defeat Satan, it's rather odd how humble he comes out of the whole deal, especially as RTD's team would continue to up the "Lonely God" crap as he went through the series.
     Like most of this season, there were a few nitpicks here or there. But the overarching mythology and the well-crafted tone of the story overrode that immediately. The Impossible Planet two-parter is by far the best story of Season 28, and that's not just because it has The Devil in it or the funny Ood guys, but also because it takes a hell of a lot of old ideas and manages to fit them into a story that is not only interesting, but that also maintains a brilliant sense of tension. It was one that managed not just to make our leads come into their own in a way they haven't for a while, but that also managed to introduce a whole host of minor characters and have us feel for their stories.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who 2.7: The Idiot's Lantern

Jamie Foreman has "angry cockney" down pat.

Doctor Who - Season 28, Episode Seven - The Idiot's Lantern
Written 4/1/13

From the pen of the great Gattiss himself, this mid-season story is strangely disliked by the fandom. In my experience it's always been one of those ones that are not as bad as everyone thinks they are, mainly due to its outstanding sense of tone. Gattiss has always had a grasp for getting the feel of the past right even when the script itself isn't top notch - his most out-of-touch and weird script was the one he tried to set in the present, Night Terrors. The Idiot's Lantern is otherwise rather mediocre, but don't let that fool you - there's some good potatoes here.
     Aiming for the height of New York Americana, the Doctor and Rose instead land in 1950s London, where they find a mysterious conspiracy by which people are being abducted from their homes by the police. The disappearances seem to be coinciding with the sales of local Magpie Electronics, who is selling cheap televisions in the run-up to the Coronation of Elizabeth II, the most watched television event in history. As Rose investigates Magpie's, The Doctor discovers that the police are in fact hiding people whose faces have been absorbed, leaving them mindless husks. Rose discovers that Magpie is being controlled by an entity who communicates via a face in a television screen known as the Wire, who steals her face. When The Doctor discovers this, he goes after the Wire and manages to stop her from transmitting herself across the country by recording her onto a betamax tape.
     I love Gattiss' appeal to the domestic, which arrives in the form of the Connolly family. Their brash father figure Eddie Connolly is played by character actor Jamie Foreman (known to modern viewers as Derek Branning) who is channelling his role from the previous year, Bill Sykes, to create a loathsome secondary villain. In an odd way, Eddie Connolly feels more villainous than The Wire herself - the latter just attempting to survive while Connolly sells out his neighbours and abuses his family. That was one of the episode's biggest disconnects, because you've got this magnificent human figure and then a main villain that's basically a ranty TV screen.

Face-off!

     That's probably my only beef with it, really. The tone is absolutely spot on, and the extension of the metaphor of the "TV that sucks your brains out" is rather cleverly executed. I could have done without Maureen Lipman screaming "FEEEED ME!" and I suppose the Doctor's weird rants are a bit off, but everything's here that should be here for a really good story. Any problems regarding people's appreciation of that comes soley down to the way it was executed, which wasn't necessarily wrong - rather more with the wrong focus. Gattiss took it back to the family in Night Terrors and for all of its faults that worked a lot better than this for what it was trying to do.
     The Idiot's Lantern works as a period piece, an examination of the stereotypical family dynamic and the attitude towards a fast-evolving media presence. It takes fears and urban legends of the time and puts them into a monster which is actually quite scary - people being turned into empty shells. It fails in one simple regard - as an adventure, it's 90% buildup. There's no real flow of narrative, it's exposition until a rush at the end. But, despite it's flaws, it's still an entertaining hour and it contains some of my favourite guest characters in this season.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who 2.5-6: Rise Of The Cybermen/The Age Of Steel

Doctor Who - Season 28, Episodes Five and Six - Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel
Written 15/12/12

I love the Cybermen, at least as a concept. For me as a kid, the idea of a race of people driven by adversity to their complete loss of humanity was incredibly fascinating, and a somewhat viable exploration of the mankind's future. In the 60s, this idea was mainly inspired by the fear around artificial organs - if we can make a man's heart out of metal, what else will we find to replace? The Classic Series' continuity regarding the Cybermen got a convoluted with JNT's tenure, and thus to avoid any of that, Rusty chose to completely reinvent them. The result is a two-parter that, while flawed, is still one I rather enjoy.

Alright, dave?

     The Doctor, Rose and Mickey accidentally fall through a gap in the Universe and end up in a Parallel World, in which Rose's father Pete (Shaun Dingwall) is still alive and working for the ridiculously powerful Cybus Industries, headed up by Davros-expy John Lumic (Roger Lloyd-Pack). While they wait for the TARDIS to recover after her stressful trip, they find themselves forced to investigate Cybus Industries' activities. Mickey gets abducted by a terrorist group known as the Preachers, led by his parallel counterpart Rickey, who are investigating Cybus' Cybernetics programs. When The Doctor and Rose investigate her parents' houseparty, they find that Lumic has created a terrestrial version of the Cybermen with which he plans to take over the world. The Doctor, Rose, Pete and the Preachers meet up and head to the central Cybus factory where the brainwashed peoples of the UK are being converted. The Doctor confronts Lumic and, using Mickey's help, manages to destroy the factory and all of the UK's Cybermen. With Rickey dead, Mickey and the last of the Preachers go off to fight the Cybermen elsewhere as The Doctor and Rose return home.
      I'm actually quite glad that Rusty allowed this two parts, because what we get for that time is a quite thorough exploration of the Cyberman concept as applied to the Modern Era. These Cybermen aren't about the primal thirst for survival, they're something much more modern - a commercial idea, a brand, the latest accessory for your existence. Lumic's primary motivations are to remove sickness and difference from the world, but there's that undercurrent of power-madness the allows us to see why the mechanism for such a change comes in the form of telecommunications and the media. We also see a lot of the humanity behind the converted faces; an especially effective moment is when we see the Parallel Jackie Tyler in Cyber-form, and hear an emotified-Cyberman talk about her wedding day. It's all nice seasoning.
     As for the Cybermen themselves... I don't know. In this story, at least, their incredibly robotic and militaristic design seems to work rather well for them, and they fit right in with the corporate image of Cybus Industries. It's a bit unfortunate that this is seemingly the only place where this is true, as elsewhere these particular Cybermen seem a bit too stiff, a bit too robotic. Simply not Human enough. The JNT Cybermen may have looked like people in costumes, but the simple little things like a visible chin made you believe that this could have been a person converted into one of them. Here, the idea is simple brain transfer, and so it's much more of a consciousness thing. How much can we say that a Cyberman is a "person" if all that's happened is that your brain's been put in one? I don't know, I'm not a philosopher.

The Cybusmen make their first appearance.

     Tom MacCrae, the writer, gives us quite a few secondary characters, and they're all actually quite well-written. The Preachers are an interestingly silly group, wanted for petty crimes and all bitter against Cybus Industries for one reason or another. Angela Price (whose nickname, Mrs. Moore, is likely a cheeky reference to the "writer" of Attack of the Cybermen), played by Helen Griffin, is given a surprisingly long period to exposit, and when she dies a few minutes later we actually feel something. CBBC presenter Andrew Hadyn-Smith (another doppelganger of mine) has a weird turn with Jake Simmonds, a character supposed to gay in the script but who subsequently had all of these references written out. Weird, considering the show-runner's openness for such things.
     It's the little touches here or there that make the Rise two-parter so successful. As an execution of concept, it works to its full potential and is an incredibly thorough application of the Cybermen to Noughties Britain. But it's more than that. Its minor characters, and its little explorations of the concept where you wouldn't expect them, they give this two-parter a real soul that's quite inescapable.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We watch an episode of a long-running television program that makes jokes about the dangers of watching too much television.