Day 5060: DOCTOR WHO: Remembrance (Day) of the Cybermen*

Saturday:


There’s one central idea here done superbly well: the Master is just doing all this to get her friend back.

Alex once wrote a piece – one I fully endorse – titled “The Time Lords are Gits and Always Have Been”, chronicling their use and abuse of arbitrary power from “The War Games” on.

And suddenly, watching this, I realised that it’s the Doctor who is the fallen Time Lord, not the Master. The Master, Missy, just wants him to see that they are supposed to be ruling the cosmos and then he’ll come back and play with her the way they used to.

Michelle Gomez is really good at this. Properly bananas as her character says. Even in handcuffs. (Eat that, River Song!) The horrible brutality of killing Osgood the cos-play fangirl – for no reason – is exactly the sort of thing that the Master needed, to underline that she is not just some suave giggling loon, but really properly evil. And grounded in a solid motivation (and decades of “shipping”), the character is a better, more worthy adversary than she has been in years.

It’s not a novel observation to say that “Dark Water”/“Death in Heaven” is Moffat doing “Army of Ghosts”/“Doomsday” his way. Ghosts or skeletons that are revealed as Cybermen; a global invasion; a twist halfway to introduce another old enemy (the Daleks even get a cheeky name-check); even the hand-brake turn last-minute twist to stop the heartbreak ending being too much.

Nor is it a secret that Moffat is not very fond of two-parters: he hasn’t done one since “The Rebel Flesh”/“The Almost People”; hasn’t written one himself since “The Pandorica Opens”/“The Big Bang”; and even when he has, it’s usually to perform a big scene shift to a second part that is often hugely different in location or scope or tone.

But Russell clearly got something right when he minted the new series with a spectacular two- or even three-part finale at the end of every year.

The success of the individual stories is less of the issue here, than how they round out the seasons. For the record, we love the Mister Master in his “Last of the Time Lords” trilogy, and of Russell’s five finales, only “Journey’s End” and “The End of Time” bellyflop into disappointing us, but your mileage may vary. What I’m saying is that the Moffat era could be characterised by series – six, seven a and seven b – that come to an end without coming to a climax.

So it’s some sort of irony that Moffat’s here using the form to write what is ultimately a pretty good story that is also a seriously good capstone to the series arcs, for a series where those arcs have been based in character rather than plot. It seems that Steven is just better at re-writing Russell “but better” than he is at his own stuff.

The other fantastically good scene here is, of course, also a collage of Russell moments, which is Clara’s farewell (even though it isn’t… what is it with Moffat-era companions not being able to say goodbye?).

The way that it’s prefaced with Danny’s inevitable self-sacrifice (a voice from the other side, riffing on Rose’s summons to Bad Wolf Bay in “Doomsday”) and intercut with the raw emotion of the Doctor assaulting the TARDIS in grief that the Master lied and Gallifrey is still gone beautifully composits the information that the audience needs to understand what is happening.

Coleman and Capaldi have been brilliant all year, but never better than in this goodbye that caps off the emotional arc of (this year’s version of) Clara Oswald where all her lies have finally come back to bite her on the bottom, only for her to finish by telling the biggest white lie of all to spare the Doctor just as he does the same for her.

If only all the moments could be as good. Or at least not so cripplingly disappointing.

When I said last time that I thought I’d been spoiled, it wasn’t about the slow, careful, clever build up to the revelation of the Cybermen in “Dark Water” being blown in the teaser at the end of “In the Forest of the Night”. Although it was.

(Of course knowing there would be Cybermen, it was obvious that they were Cybermen, to the extent I didn’t even realise it was meant to be a surprise and so the slowly draining tanks reveal seemed a bit pointless. But I didn’t spot that the 3W logo was a Cyber teardrop until the doors closed to reveal them as a pair; I’d been thinking of it as a “map” of the Nethersphere touching the larger sphere of the real universe as it were as the City of the Saved.)

But I had a much bigger problem with “Clara Oswald has never existed”, because to me that suggested a retrospective redemption of the whole Impossible Girl arc and too-good-to-be-true Clara of season seven.

With Missy, as everyone guessed, turning out to be the Master and also, as everyone guessed, the “woman on the phone” who gave Clara the TARDIS telephone number, along with the drop-in scenes suggesting that Missy “chose” Clara for the Doctor… the expectation rose that Clara was either a construct of the Master’s, like Seb, or maybe the Master’s TARDIS (remember how Clara and the TARDIS did not get on in series seven?), or even the next regeneration of the Master herself (Missy = Miss C Oswald… apparently, nahh). (Or was Oswald the Penguin!)

Having Moffat’s companion be the most specialist ever, who jumps into the Doctor’s timestream to save him and so meets him (and beats him!) everywhere smacks just a teensy bit of “Mary Sue”. But having the Master wrap him/herself around every point in the Doctor’s timestream because… “a Universe without the Doctor scarcely seems worth imagining”, now that would be properly epic. In fact, it would be an almost perfect reversal of the “they turn out to be the same person” ending that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had in mind for their “Final Problem”, and incorporate elements of the Reichenbach Fall ending that Saward and Holmes planned for “Trial of a Time Lord”. It would even be satisfyingly timey-wimey for a Moffat story.

Really, the only other way to go would be for Clara to turn out to have been the Doctor all along.

Oh.

The twist with Clara turns sour because it is so obviously a fake-out, and such a waste of a terrific idea.

It would be such a great story to do, too: the end of season switcheroo reveal that Doctor and companion were actually the other way around. But having done it for false now, how can someone do it for real?

But you couldn’t have done it at the end of this season eight. You couldn’t have done it after seeing Matt Smith turn into Peter Capaldi, or after the scene in “Deep Breath” where Capaldi’s Doctor remembers the phone call made by Smith’s. You couldn’t do it after a season that included “Listen” that expressly takes the present Doctor back to his childhood on Gallifrey. You couldn’t do it after a season that included “Flatline”, a story about Clara trying to be the Doctor. (Though wouldn’t that have worked differently in retrospect if she’d turned out to be the Master!)

What you needed was to end “The Time of the Doctor” with Clara (or “Clara”) returning to the TARDIS and meeting Capaldi, and he knows nothing about who he is so she tells him that he’s this man called “The Doctor” and then season eight is about her setting out to teach him how to be this Time Lord, this hero.

(And – suggests Alex – we could have cast that jobbing actor, even though he’d been in it before, who’s been in tons of things and was very respected but really became well-known when he got a bit older and got all crabby and sweary and was in a sit-com. He meant “A Very Peculiar Practice” and “Waiting For God” of course…)

In order to work, it needs some things to be more ambiguous. The fake Doctor can’t fly the TARDIS alone, for example, so can’t keep materialising at Clara’s home to collect her. And he can’t rely on pulling knowledge or Gallifreyan superpowers out of his hat (though you could slyly imply that Clara does – perhaps having her seem to appear somewhere out of nowhere, the way Missy appears to shift at super-speed when she makes her move and grabs Osgood).

There was a chance there to have done something jaw-dropping. But instead, Moffat burned that idea. Tossed it away for a gag. It brings to mind his engineering the Doctor’s regenerations so that he could be the one to confront the “thirteen regenerations limit”, only to blow it off with “and the Time Lords gave him some more lives”.

Burning up ideas like TARDIS keys, Moffat is closing the box on other people using these ideas to tell much better stories, and I think that’s a real shame. Russell used to throw out ideas for people to tie up in better stories – the Fall of Arcadia, the Moment – so it’s a good job no-one’s used those up in half-baked fan-fic…Hang on…



The Cybermen were, obviously, totally wasted. Where exactly did all those metal suits come from, I ask? Gallifreyan technology, says Alex and fair play to him I’ll give him that. And I suppose you could say that just for once in her lives, the Master teams up with a monster menace only to betray them before they betray her!

But really, do we have to believe that every single human was willing to delete their emotions and turn bad, unless they were so specially-wecially as to be in love with Clara Oswald (or the Doctor… see below). Seb tells us the Nethersphere is emptying and we see the lights going out. And yet only two Cybermen out of all of humanity resist the conversion.

Again, it’s the better story not told. The Cybermen are never (apart possibly from “The Tenth Planet”) treated as individuals. They all just become an army of grunts. (Ironically, when the season’s been trying so hard to tell us that soldiers have personalities too.)

Whatever Danny might say about the Doctor being an officer and a general, he’s lying to himself if he thinks he’s not doing exactly the thing he condemns when he orders the Cyber-army to their deaths without compunction. Though to be fair, he’s probably had Clara delete his compunction.

As for his big soldier speech to the Cybermen – was anyone else just hoping they’d reply to “love is a promise” with “we don’t care; we’re Cybermen, you moron!”?

Still it could have been worse. Oh wait. It was.

I’d really expected that the Doctor would use the TARDIS to save Kate from falling out of that airplane – as he’s done to save River Song at least twice. It’s not like he was going to be late for getting to Clara in the graveyard in his time machine. And at least it would have spared us the Cyber-Brig. Oh for shame, they even painted his handles black to make him a Cyber-leader.

The Brigadier’s passing in “The Wedding of River Song”, the Doctor missing it, and learning a lesson about mortality, was understated, tasteful and a last nod to a beloved old friend. So why the need to bring him back? And as a Cyberman?! What is it with Moffat-era companions not being able to say goodbye?

(And while we’re at it, “permission to squee” is up there with burping bins and farting Slitheen as… something I will have to get used to.) I’m glad to say that Alex enjoyed it, though. Mainly because the Master immediately shot him.

If there’s one tiny sliver of redemption for the whole wretched idea it’s this:

“Who will save your soul, Doctor?” Well who is it who is always there to shoot the monsters so that the Doctor doesn’t have to?

But, having got all that out of my system, let me return to the story that was actually there, rather than the stories I thought might be there or hoped might be there, because the one that Steven does tell is still a good story.

The genius of it is this: all season we have seen Clara trying to be the Doctor, trying to keep up with his breakneck lifestyle, trying to match his moral ambiguities. And all season the Doctor has been asking the question that Clara should have been asking herself, practically shouting it in her face: am I a good man?

How often do we stop to interrogate our own actions? Or do we, like Clara, keep on doing what we’re doing – telling the little lies to cover the bigger ones – because it’s simpler to keep following the path rather than stopping to think, really think if it’s the right path.

We all like to think we are “good men/women/choose your own label or none”. We are all the heroes of our own story, as the saying goes; and as Moffat has said, Clara thinks the show is called “Clara”. But the Doctor’s answer is a good one: it’s too hard to be a “good man”; it’s okay to recognise yourself as a silly one, one just muddling through with a box and a screwdriver, trying to help. That’s actually quite liberating – the freedom from the obligation to “do good”; and the avoidance of the total harm that “do-gooding” can do (take heed, politicians of all stripes).

The Master thinks only in absolutes. She takes the logic of being good to the max: obviously you want an army raised from the dead and slaved to your will because if you are going to be “good” you need to do all the good, stop all the evil, destroy all the monsters.

And that’s bananas.

We, as a society, seem to have gotten ourselves stuck in a place where we are all expected to work harder, increase the productivity, deliver more. We are trapped in a World of “The Apprentice” where we have to give it 110%. And that’s the same logic that the Master uses. It’s not okay to be just okay.

I like that our hero, the fallen Time Lord, wins with the simple, welcome realisation that it’s okay to fall short.

So forgive me for demanding better stories. It was wrong, when the lesson of this one is so good.

Also, somewhere, presumably, Rory has just come back from the dead again as a Cyberman.

Next Time: Santa Claus? Santa Claus! Dammit we’re British! He’s Father bloody Christmas!

Start the Wham! It’s “Last Christmas”.


*May not contain actual Cybermen.

Day 5053: DOCTOR WHO: Damp Water

Saturday:


That which is dead cannot die…

(Yes, we were in New England for the first broadcast of “Dark Water”.)

Re-watching the two-part season finale has helped me to appreciate it. My first viewing, I realised, had been overshadowed by expectations and inferences drawn from the previous week’s teaser. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I was, for the first time, spoiled by a “next time” trail. Not “spoilers” in the River Song sense, but spoiled in that the trailer constructed a story in my head that was better than the one we ended up with.

(I fear it’s not the first time – or the last – that I’ve thought of a better story– I remember doing it for a ‘Mr the Supreme Dalek’ back in Russell’s day, but I think it’s the first time I’ve done in in advance!)

Just to warn you, I’m going to range freely over plot points from both episodes, though I’ll generally focus on the Cybermen for this review and more on the Master in what I write about “Death in Heaven”. But maybe not in my titles!

I would have liked to say that “Dark Water”/“Army of Ghosts” (whatever) is the very definition of a Curate’s Egg, except that I recently learned, via comments on Mr Hickey, that this would actually mean it’s properly rotten but I’m finding good things to say in order to crawl to Steven Moffat.

So instead I’ll stick to saying that it’s “good in parts”, and mean it.

And I’ll start with the good parts, because that’s pretty much what “Dark Water” does. Because clearly, the best of the episode is the first ten minutes, up to Clara’s desperate face-off with the Doctor on the Star Wars volcano planet. That turns out to be a dream. Or (in context of this series’ themes) a lie that the Doctor is telling her.

And everyone knows the best line of the whole year was: “Do you think I care so little for you that betraying me would make a difference?” Probably best we didn’t use that in our wedding, though.

After that it descends into more ordinary larks with Cybermen. But larks that are very much informed by where we’ve just come from.

“Dark Water”, you see, is going quite a long way towards exploring just why people might turn themselves into Cybermen: it touches on Clara’s grief and anger and denial; it explores Danny’s guilt and regret; it glances at the possibility of life continuing after death and the fear of what that means for bodily decay and violation.

The death of Danny Pink, in an ordinary, boring car accident, is an incredibly powerful and brave way to open this story.

Whatever you think of Danny’s complex character, whether you think he was the abusive controller or the abused victim of Clara’s lies, he was a real, complicated, normal person trying to do what he thought was right. And the awful suddenness of his death is both terrible and true. He’s there and he’s gone. There’s more of a lesson about death in that silence at the end of the phone than any number of disintegrations or Daleks can teach.

Funnily enough, I’d been saying just that day that no one had really done a Cybermen story properly.

The Cybermen are the fear of death. They are people so afraid of dying that they replaced everything that makes life worth living just to carry on existing and then buried themselves in Tombs so that they would not pass on. It’s a well-established horror trope that the modern zombie is a death-metaphor: gruesome, shambling and inescapable. And, particularly in Steven Moffat’s interpretations – from “The Pandorica Opens”, but re-stated with a vengeance here – that is exactly what the Cybermen are: corpses in shiny armour; hi-tech zombies.

The first Cyberman story, “The Tenth Planet”, hints at this through techno-mummies wrapped in plastic bandages, but is tied up in fears of the machine, the intrusive penetrating replacement-part surgery taking away that which makes us human. After that they are quickly relegated to robo-commies – the faceless army of infiltrators who want to take away our freedoms and take over – as substitutes for the tin-pot fascists the Daleks for face offs against the second Doctor’s “destroy all monsters” crusade. Later Eric Saward will fetishize them as machismo incarnate, all “Man” and no “Cyber”. And Russell Davies’s scoop-and-serve brain-in-a-can versions seem to recognise the iconography without getting the idea behind it. To be fair to Moffat, at least he seems to “get it”.

And yet “Dark Water” still doesn’t tell that story. For some unknowable reason, it just skips the punchline, straight past it (well, straight-ish now she’s genderqueer, I suppose) to hilarious shenanigans with the Master…

(Not that they aren’t really good shenanigans – that reading the scrolling text is an hilarious reference to the opening of “The Deadly Assassin”; Missy pretending to be a robot is surely an insane in-joke about the robot Master played by Derick Jacobi in “Scream of the Shalka” – but even so…)

We almost have to infer that that story, that better story takes place. Sure, the Doctor gabbles something during “Death in Heaven” about the Master preying on the fears of the rich to set up the 3W tombs, but we’ve just missed all of that story entirely.

And that’s a shame because surely that was the whole point. If the Cybermen taking us unwilling from the grave is the zombie form of the Undead, surely the flip side is the vampire making the devil’s bargain: foreswear love (emotions) for eternal life. That is the deal that Danny is offered but it feels… unconnected to the 3W plot even though it’s central to their operating procedures.

It’s typical of why I feel I am ambivalent about these episodes. While they are pretty good, occasionally brilliant, they leave me with the nagging feeling they could, indeed should have been better.

And, of course, it’s typical of Moffat’s writing, to expect the viewer to fill in the blanks for him, whether that’s a sign of how much confidence he has in his audience or just an example of his flighty jumping from idea to idea without ever developing them to their potential. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The entire plot seems to hang on a kind of “voodoo”. (Maybe it’s Faction Paradox technology.)

Why bother with all the bones and the graves at all if you can just put any mind in any tin can? It’s clear that the minds of the dead have some genuine connection to their mortal remains through which they are able to animate their cyber-converted body.

Which means that Missy really has harvested the minds of millions of dead people.

The BBC were – for very good reasons – quick to come out and say that it was all a big fib by the Master, that this really isn’t what happens to people after they die…

…except, that’s really not what the episode is saying at all. We are presented by the Doctor with the possibility that the Danny that Clara is talking to is a fake, a projection from her own mind psychically scanned by 3W… but to the audience, Danny is clearly real: he’s been having an independent story of his own. Likewise, the boy who Danny is revealed to have killed while soldiering could similarly be a fake from reading Danny’s mind. But why bother when it seems that the dead can be found in the Nethersphere for real. And really, if you need a load of minds for your Cyber-army, what would be the point of faking them?

It seems very clear that whether there is a real afterlife or not, Missy has interposed her Matrix data slice between this life and the whatever or nothing that comes hereafter. And is torturing everyone she brings there with real or simulated post-death agonies to get them to agree to deleting their emotions.

Which brings us back to Danny.

Of course death is not the end. Not in a Moffat story, anyway. Thought if death was the end, there wouldn’t be a story. And while it may turn into yet another lurve-conquers-all schmaltz in “Death in Heaven”, at least the ending of “Dark Water” suggests a more interesting ambiguity that Danny’s guilt over the boy he killed is simultaneously pushing him towards deleting those emotions and keeping him from doing it, because to do so would be a betrayal of the very feelings that are driving him.

A better story – and I’ll look more at the better stories not told next time – a better story would have explored that ambiguity more. Because that’s the line that separated human from Cyberman.

When the White Guardian (aka God) threatened the Doctor with existing without changing I said that that was death: the icy, frozen death of cold logical perfection. And put like that, it’s obvious that that is what the Cybermen are. They bury their emotions and carry their own tombs with them in the form of that armour.

Of course, the Cybermen get thrown under the bus yet again, as they are turned into an army of boring robots once Missy comes out in all her bananas glory.

Next Time: “Death in Paradise” starring Ben Miller. No hang on, wasn’t he in a different one?

Day 4714: Millennium’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Top Trunks #44: POLLY

Wednesday:

Age: Swinging Sixties
Stories: 21
Awesomeness: Can kill a Cyberman with her nail varnish
Cuddles: Able Seaman Ben Jackson. Jamie doesn’t get a look in.
AKA: Lady Pollard; Miss Pussy Kat (The Avengers, Dressed to Kill); the impossible girl, Miss Anneke Wills

Day 4698: Millennium’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Top Trunks #18: THE CYBER-CONTROLLER

Monday:

Age: On Ice
Stories: 3
Awesomeness: Steel Giant; Visible Brain
Cuddles: Embraced Cypber-technology. Afterwards, rather cold.
AKA: The Giant Robot, mighty Michael Kilgarriff

Day 4641: A Doctor Woo Metaphor for Conference

Sunday:

If the Conservatories are the dastardly DALEKS… and Hard Labour are the soulless CYBERMEN… are the Liberal Democrats:

a) The SILURIANS – green-tinged former rulers of Earth; now caught in a suspended animation time-warp…

b) The SONTARANS – bit shouty; always keen for a fight; treated as a bit of a joke by everyone else…

or

c) The WEEPING ANGELS – kill you with kindness; change position suddenly when you’re not looking; can’t even look at each other…

Day 4514: DOCTOR WHO: Nightmare in Silver

Saturday:

Neil Gaiman's second episode for Doctor Who, in spite of doing everything humanly possible to touch the fans' buttons and warm the cockles of their cold hearts, seems to have produced something of a backlash, at least among those fans whose opinions I've been reading. Despite polling in the same mostly-about-8-out-of-10 range on the forums as the last few episodes, people voicing their thoughts have been a touch, er, negative about it.

Well, as this week's guest star Warwick Davis might put it, life's too short for the haters, so here are ten reasons I thought this was brilliant:

1. A properly constructed story with beginning middle and end. I know that that really only counts as "competence" but after several stories this year that have overdone, mistimed or generally cocked up one part or the other, this shows how decent it can be when you actually getting the mechanics right.
To take you quickly through it, in the traditional four parts of a Doctor Who story we are:

part one – introduced to the planet-sized fun-park of Hedgewick's world, reintroduced to the Cybermen and told that they're all dead, have it heavily flagged for us that Warwick Davis' character "Porridge" is – spoilers – emperor of the universe, and muse a little on the price paid for defeating the Cybermen a thousand years ago...

part two – guess what, the Cybermen aren't dead after all and we do some cool new stuff with Cybermites (a logical and yet ingenious and very creepy evolution of the Cybermats) and introduce the main threat – which evolves nicely from those musings in part one – that the humans will react to the presence of Cybermen by destroying the planet as very nearly a first resort. Unfortunately, the platoon of troops we thought would be useful turn out to be rubbish and the two children in Clara's charge have been possessed by the Cybermen...

part three – to make matters worse, so has the Doctor, and we get a face-off between the Time Lord and the invading Cyber-Planner inside his mind, while Clara and the punishment platoon try to secure Sleeping Beauty's castle...

part four – the full Cyber-army emerges from their tombs and march on the castle but the Doctor reveals that he's way ahead of the Cyber-Planner after all and springs his trap, allows the Emperor to set off the bomb and saves the day.

2. Robert Holmes used to construct stories "in the shadow of great events", so – for example – "The Ribos Operation" sees the Graff Vynda-K after he's lost his empire or "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" sees Magnus Greel's last stand after fleeing from a World War in the year Five Thousand. Obviously the model here is "Revenge of the Cybermen", script-edited and largely re-written by Holmes, where the base under siege events on the Nerva Beacon and Voga are a sequel to the unseen story of the Cyberwars.

Gaiman does much the same here, sketching in for us a Universe-spanning human Imperium which defeated the wonderfully-named Cyberiad of the Cybermen in a terrible war and at a terrible price: the destruction of the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy. Simon, incidentally, reads this as the destruction of the Cybermen's home galaxy, but I rather thought that the implication was that the Cyber-army was lured into a trap in a human-occupied galaxy which was then destroyed to wipe out the Cybermen en masse.

(Or, if you prefer, after the Cybermen where annihilated from our galaxy, a surviving ship managed to escape to intergalactic space. They are, after all, always establishing "new" homeworlds.)

"Tiberian" suggests the river Tiber, on which of course Imperial Rome was founded, and into which Roman traitors were thrown after execution, particularly by the Emperor Tiberius – though for Alex it suggests not the Cybermen's home but the Empire's, with the Emperor sacrificing his own people and home to destroy the enemy before running away because he can't deal with guilt of double-genocide. It makes Porridge an explicit mirror of the Doctor (and tragically suggests not just a mirror of Season 2005 but a prefiguring of next week: Porridge / Emperor has been running but must in the end return to face up to his responsibilities, just as the Doctor / [insert name here; no, don't do that] must go to Trenzalore…?), just as 'Nightmare in Silver' suggests a "dark dream mirror" all over, and the Doctor mirrors himself as the Cyber-Planner, and indeed the Cyber-Planner Doctor starts mirroring earlier Doctors. Badly.

Are the chess game and wonder-world for children from "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Clara Found There"? If the Cybermen are dark mirrors of ourselves, we see through the looking-glass darkly a lot.

And Jason Watkins' look manages to suggest a dishevelled, disreputable version of the Doctor, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter and (sigh) the Great Intelligence, all at the same time, which is quite impressive multiple mirroring.

It also suggests James Tiberius Kirk, and having a galaxy named after him would fit.

What this cleverly hinted-at backstory enables Gaiman to do, though, is to establish that the human empire is huge and powerful and so take the threat from the Cybermen to the next level.

3. Making the Cybermen actually dangerous in a way that they have only really ever been in "Earthshock".

Ever since their first home planet of Mondas blew itself to bits in "The Tenth Planet", the Cyber-race has been on the verge of extinction and basically a bit rubbish. Their ranking as Number Two monster in the Whoniverse (see "Doomsday" for who is definitely Number One) has always been a bit of a mystery, compared to galaxy-crushing foes like the Sontarans, the Rutans or, er, the Dominators and their fearsome Quarks (look, BAFTA thought so!). Skulking in the shadows became their modus operandi for the rest of the Sixties, as they tried various hare-brained schemes to survive by taking over the Earth before they finally buried themselves on Telos. "Revenge of the Cybermen" explicitly describes the few we see as the last survivors – and the Doctor goes out of his way to tell them how rubbish they are. "Attack of the Cybermen" sees them desperate at the end of the Cyberwars, stealing time technology and blowing up Telos. The Cybermen in "Silver Nemesis" are a bit of an anomaly: everything about them suggests the very last survivors of Telos, escaped in the stolen timeship (which Ace blows up), until they pull a cloaked Cyberfleet out of their handles. Post-facto justification, if not logic, suggests that these must be ships from "The Invasion" rather than a whole new foe from the future.

Thanks to the invention of CGI, the new series has seen the Cybermen adopt the Dalek tactics of creating a huge army out of nowhere only for them all to get killed again. (Perhaps a strategy bought in from Skaro along with using imaginative, creative children for their battle computers.)

"The Age of Steel" saw the Doctor end the Cyber-threat to a parallel Earth almost before it began by making their heads go pop, and then, when they tried to invade our Universe, he vacuumed them into the void not once but twice, and their bonkers Cyberking with them. This, however, did not stop them attending the Party at the Pandorica or crash-landing a Cybership under Colchester (can we appeal to "The Invasion" again?). And they crashed another ship into the actually-not-bad "Blood of the Cybermen" downloadable game.

But if a man is judged by the quality of his enemies, then a Cyberman is even more so. Having set up the great and bloody powerful human empire, if this universe-sized empire is so threatened by the Cybermen that they resort to blowing up planets the minute they know the Cyber-threat has arrived, then you know that the Cybermen are now quite hard bastards.

The far-future setting allows for some hefty evolution of the Cyber-species along the way, and giving them some seriously dangerous new powers such as the ability to adapt and survive very quickly and to begin conversion of downed enemies via Cybermite at a touch. The fact that if you don't kill them fast enough they will, first, become immune to your weaponry and, second, then come and turn you into one of them finally gives them the tools to become a universal threat.

And anyone complaining that this also makes them too like the Borg should remember the recent Star Trek/Doctor Who comic crossover from IDW which saw the Borg allied to (and then, obviously, betrayed by) the Cybermen. Stealing Borg technology from an alternative universe is a very Cyberman thing to do.

The new Cyber-suits were sleeker and more menacing than their Cybusman predecessors, and I liked some of the movement, particularly the attack where one snatched a mace out of Clara's hands. And the baby-faced look was, I thought, a sign of them upgrading to psychological warfare too, since humans are known to have difficulty killing anything that looks like a baby.

As the Cybermen might say: clever, clever, clever.

Their plot: to bury a new Cyber-tomb underneath a pleasure planet and pick off the – as the Doctor says – "Spare Parts" that they need from the visitors is reminiscent of Paul Cornell's "Love and War", which sees similar abuse of the dead of two empires on the idyllic memorial world of "Heaven". And the irony that the Doctor himself triggers the reawakening by bringing children to the planet is recognised as the second time – after Marc Platt's near-perfect Cyber-genesis story "Spare Parts" – that the Doctor has been hailed as saviour of the Cyber-race.

(May 13th is, as it happens, the anniversary of "Rise of the Cybermen" which, as it happens, is not very based on Marc's "Spare Parts" but does at least give him a credit in the titles.)

So much for the opposition; how about the heroes.

4. A strong guest cast included, in particular, Jason Watkins as the seedy but sympathetic Mr Webley and also as the sinister Cyber-Webley when he falls victim to his own Cyberman exhibit. It's one of the better uses of the "horror of conversion" themes that underlies the Cybermen since the shock Jackie Tyler conversion in "The Age of Steel", and it takes an actor of Jason Watkins' calibre to make you warm to Webley in the small amount of screen time before he gets "turned", and so regret his subsumption into the Cyber-collective.

In fact this "horror of conversion", while allegedly central to the Cybermen's character, is rarely touched upon by the TV series, and notably when it does – "Attack of the Cybermen" – it's accused of going too far. Russell's "scoop and serve" version, that sees the Cybermen reduced to tin suits with a human brain stuck in, is visceral and yet oddly clinical. Big Finish audio have played it up more, perhaps because you can go further on audio, in particular in Gary Russell's "Real Time", but the real go-to book on conversion is Steve Lyons Virgin "Missing Adventure" "Killing Ground", where we get the full convertee's eye view of the process. Eew!

The members of the punishment platoon don't get a lot of screen time to make their presence felt, and consequently some seem to have found them disposable, but I like them. And Tamzin Outhwaite as their Captain manages to squeeze quite a few moments out of what she's given. It's pretty clear that she's worked out who Porridge is, and what it probably means. And it's nice too that she's a do-the-right-thing soldier rather than just following orders, so she tries to give the Doctor and Clara time to save the kids but when it comes down to it, she's going to set off that bomb anyway.

The real kudos, though, has to go to an outstanding performance from Warwick Davis as the world-weary Emperor who has just run away in search of a quiet life, who also has the cheek to (King Peladon-like) ask for Clara's hand in marriage once it's clear he has an empire and a Temple of Peace -shaped flagship to offer her.

Porridge's sadness for the poor bloke who had to push the button is clearly self-pity, by the way, but also forms a bond between himself and the Doctor.

The story is a little bit fast and loose about how long ago the Cyberwar was; Webley suggests a thousand years, but the ongoing paranoia suggests either a more recent conflict or that Cybermen have continued to pop up in the centuries since "the big one". It's therefore not completely certain that Porridge isn't hinting that he himself was the one to push the button, or whether it was an ancestor of his, but that he empathises as the responsibility should it happen again will fall to him. As indeed it does, and he isn't found wanting.

Mind you, that far into the future humans living for a thousand years might be commonplace.

And yet, in the light of all that, Matt still manages to top that by giving us...

5. Two Matt Smiths for the price of one. The Cybermen have clearly bitten off more than they can swallow when they try to turn him into their new Cyber-Planner. And Matt shines as he turns in a Superman III -esque contest of Doctor versus evil-Doctor.

The view from inside the Doctor's head, reminiscent of Tegan's trippy trip into the Wherever where the Mara dwell, is done beautifully, with the left side (the left brain?) all golden regeneration-energy fairy-dust in Time Lordy swirls and circular writing, while the right side is all cold steel-blue dots joined up into an electric network. It's a perfect representation of the conflict between the Doctor's creative energy and the Cyber-hive mind. It also suggests that Time Lords are the highest culture and the Cybermen are still at the level of dot-to-dot in comparison.

Back in the real world, the fact that the Cyber-Planner seems positively berserk – Matt turning it up to, er, eleven – is a nice recognition of the way that the Cybermen have no experience of and no preparation for dealing with emotions. The fact that this drives them nuts goes all the way back to "The Invasion" and it's nice to see it referenced here.

Matt as the Cyber-Planner is quite deliciously evil, revelling in cruel deceits and taunting Clara, and by proxy the Doctor. And also dropping hints about this year's "big story arc", which sits rather nicely with him being an out-of-control version of the Doctor's personality, wanting to tell Clara and at the same time thinking "secrets keep us safe". And it tricks her into bringing the detonator for the bomb within its reach. Destroying the detonator is, of course, part of escalating the peril. It's a "rule of three" - we know the Cybermen will be killed by the planet bomb, but first the unfortunate Tamzin is shot, so she cannot detonate it; then Clara looses the detonator here... but we've already been shown how (third times the charm), there's still a way to win.

Alex though, asks if destroying the remote activator is about saying 'This stick-shaped-tech-thing you're carrying as a magic wand to solve the plot? Not so much.' Which is a criticism / more mirroring from Neil that he quite likes.

If there is a weakness to the episode, it's that the Cyber-Planner, as performed by Matt, has the same effect on the Cybermen that Davros has on the Daleks, namely he is so interesting and so charismatic that it reduces the titular villains to extras in their own show, and makes them seem more like dumb robots. They aren't, but the bias of the short screen time robs them of some of the necessary balance and layers to show that properly. What we were missing, I think, was a Cyberleader to interact with Clara and give some (entirely logical, of course) personality to the serried ranks of troops.

Of course, the Cyber-Planner may like playing the Doctor – nice that Clara sees through it; nice the way the Doctor later passes her test for being himself again – but it isn't as in control as it thinks it is, as evidenced by the way the Doctor plays...

6. The Curse of Fenric gambit of "I bet you can't work out how I'm about to beat you at chess". And, as in "The Curse of Fenric" the Doctor's winning move is to, er, alter the rules.

The chess motif suggests that the anniversary celebrations that have so far seen a first Doctor type story in "The Rings of Akhaten", a second Doctor monster-era one from "Cold War", a third Doctor Quatermass crossover in "Hide" and then allusions in dialogue to fourth and fifth Doctor's eras (while arguably getting the actual stories the wrong way around) in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" and "The Crimson Horror" have – alas poor Colin – skipped ahead to a story for the devious seventh Doctor.

(Or is the Sixth Doctor hiding in plain sight, another Valeyard?)

Rule One is that the Doctor lies, and it's a bit of a screaming clue when the Doctor says that the Time Lord and the Cyber-Planner allegedly control exactly the same share of his brain when he makes his chess-based challenge. The Cyber-Planner may not smell a rat (Cybermen have no noses) but I do.

Obviously he's got another motive, and like Sylvester McCoy's grandmaster on a thousand boards, he's thinking many moves ahead. He knows that the humans are going to blow up the planet as soon as they realise that the Cybermen are in charge. Plus he's recognised the Emperor. (It's not just a case of if Angie can do it, so can he; he drops hints repeatedly to Porridge that he knows the true situation.) So he can safely deduce that the Cybermen are not his real problem; Porridge will destroy the planet and because he's Emperor all human survivors will be transmatted to safety.

No, the Doctor's problem is that the two children he's brought with him, Angie and Artie who Clara is helping to look after, are currently under cyber control and will be left behind by the Imperial flagship.

Of course, he's made a monumental error of judgement by leaving them in Webley's Emporium rather than sending them back to the TARDIS, because tucking them up among the scary exhibits is really such a good idea – and it is a shame that Gaiman had to delete the scene where the Doctor explains that he's paranoid about letting children into his ship because they "push buttons".

So the whole business with the chess match, indeed quite likely the only reason he allows himself to be infected by Cypermites in the first place, is in order to fool the Cyber-Planner into releasing Angie and Artie.

And as soon as it's let the kids go, the Doctor "Fenrics" it out of his cranium with extreme prejudice.

Think about it: is it remotely logical for the Planner to make the offer to release the kids?

I realise that the Planner isn't being logical, but even in its warped, sadistic way it has nothing to gain from this. So why do it? Unless it's not the Planner's idea at all, but one that the Doctor has cunningly slipped into its mind, and it's so dizzy with the pleasures of emotions that it doesn't realise that it doesn't really make sense.

7. Gold of course has never really made sense as the Cybermen's Achilles' Heel – except that, alchemically, it feels right, in the "gold beats silver" sense.

In fact, the New Adventure "Iceberg", written by David "the Cyberleader" Banks, has it that this is a vulnerability that the Doctor himself added to the Cybermen when they were seeking to, well, upgrade themselves following their defeats in "The Invasion" and "The Tenth Planet", and this would certainly help to explain why it's their software that reacts badly to interaction with gold (something that makes more sense than it plating their respirators, especially when in "Earthshock" they seem quite happy to survive in the vacuum of space but retain they old gold weakness.)

Here the Doctor gets a wonderful moment of ingenuity, turning the Willy Wonka reference that he's been waving under our noses since the start of the story into an instant patch to disable the Cyber-Planner.

8. Clara gets to go totally baddass, leading the troops of the punishment platoon like a pro, improvising defences and seeing through the deceptions of the devious Cyber-Planner, even if it still manages to get the trigger for the bomb off her.

It's actually quite a dramatic shift in her character – I mean it's really good to see her in full-on Sigourney Weaver from "Aliens" mode, and it's definitely Sigourney Weaver from "Aliens" not Sigourney Weaver from "Alien", and Jenna-Louise Coleman rises to the challenge of making her strong and just a very little bit cold – but you have to admit that it's not quite where she's been at so far. It's almost as though she's adapting to be exactly the companion that the Doctor needs.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but what with the Cybermen upgrading all over the place, it did strike me as a subtle in a blatant-if-you-think-about-it way of Clara the perfect companion "upgrading" to be perfect here too.

9. References to classic series Cyber-stories that I spotted include: regeneration ("The Tenth Planet"); bouncing on the surface of the moon, and explicit mention of a moon base ("The Moonbase"); the tombs of the Cybermen ("guess", but the design incorporates some nice touches to allude to the design work of the Sixties classic; mind you, it also resembled the galleries of "Attack of..."), also a single Cybermite / Cybermat left at the end; the destruction of an entire galaxy ("The Wheel in Space"); the Cyber-Planner doing all the talking the Cyber-arm largely silent, and the reaction to emotion ("The Invasion"); the last of the Cybermen, gold (see above), and bombs that fragmatise – is that even a word? – a whole planet ("Revenge of the Cybermen"); bombs that destroy a whole planet (again), and "My army awakes", with three columns of Cybermen advancing on the camera ("Earthshock"); the Cybermen get their own "Raston Warrior Robot" moment, moving faster than can be seen ("The Five Doctors"), which makes sense as they'd upgrade to defeat an future Raston warriors they encounter (lord knows how they'd deal with Raston Lap Dancers ("Alien Bodies")); partial Cyber-conversions, in particular the way half Webley's face gets covered ("Attack of the Cybermen"); the secrets of the Time Lords, chess (see above) and silver in the title ("Silver Nemesis").

You can work out for yourselves if there are nods to new series stories "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel", "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday", "The Next Doctor" or "Closing Time", but...

10. "The Silver Turk" by Marc Platt was the opening story for Big Finish's 2011 series of adventures for Paul McGann's Doctor with Mary Shelley. Yes, that Mary Shelley. (And we've already had a "Witch from the Well" reference in "Hide", which leads us to wonder if the "Army of Death" might have something to do with Trenzalore next week.) Apparently no one knows how the historic Silver Turk automaton really worked, although a dwarf concealed under the table is one of the more popular theories.

And, as a bonus, Marc's "Spare Parts" gets a name-check slipped into dialogue.

Alas, no place to slip in a mention of the excellent (sorry) sort-of-trilogy "The Reaping", "The Gathering" and "The Harvest". And couldn't Briggsy have persuaded the Emperor Porridge to name his flagship the "Sword of Orion"?


So, I've now written three-and-a-half thousand words of good things about this episode and only skimmed the surface, and the fact that there is so much to write about surely, surely is the real sign of just how great, how packed with ideas and whimsies and things to make you think this was.

I think the 2012 half of series seven was, in spite of a couple of episodes not quite ending well, a marked improvement on the convoluted disappointments of series six, and the 2013 half, in spite of a couple of episodes not quite ending well, an improvement on 2012, and – a wobble for "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" aside – getting better week on week ,with these last two episodes real triumphs.

What could possibly go wrong now?

Next Time... As Alex and I keep singing when we watch the Prequel "She Said He Said", didn't we have a loverly time the day we went to Trenzalore... Much is promised. Will it be delivered? Or will it be "A Good Man Goes to the Wedding of River Song" all over again? If his name turns out to be "St John" I will scream. Time for the answers? And everything that's been done in "The Name of the Doctor".

PS:

There has been what can only be described as a bit of a FLUFF up, and the BBC's American distributor has sent out copies of Series Seven Part 2, including the series finale, a week early. Fans are being advised to spend a week in a medically induced coma to avoid spoilers.

So I doubt anyone is reading!

Day 2992: Mysteries of Doctor Who #18: Do the Cybermen have invisible planets?

Wednesday:


Because on the face of it, they certainly seem to.

Planet #1: Mondas, aka Blowy-uppy-world.

Mondas, I don't like Mondas, I'm going to burn the whole planet down. Though, ironically, that's what they try to do to Telos, and only blow up Mondas by mistake.

In "The Tenth Planet", astronomers from Earth SUDDENLY spot a ruddy great planet barrelling down on us. Now, even though this was set in the DISTANT FUTURE of, er, 1986, and therefore before Mr Lembit had got all shouty about asteroids, a planet the size of Earth (which, by definition, Earth's TWIN planet would be) ought to be visible for millions of kilometres. You know, like Mars and Venus are. And yet this comes as a total surprise to people who are running a SPACE PROGRAMME and therefore jolly well ought to know. Flying a rocket isn't just Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, you know.

And yet somehow, Mondas just "appears" from nowhere.

Planet #2: Telos, aka Freezer Empire (catchy advert: "Mum's Gone to Telos")

Although Dr Who returns there in the DISTANT, er, PRESENT DAY of 1985 for the "Attack of the Cybermen", the Cybermen's home from home – or rather tomb from tomb – is first visited in "The Mummy". Er, what? No, you see, "The Tomb of the Cybermen" is basically a retelling of the Mummy legend, with Telos as the Egyptian desert and Cyber-control as the lost pyramid. The hieroglyphs, sorry "logic-symbols", are the big give away. Oh, and the lumbering Undead rising from the tomb to exact their curse on whomsoever should disturb their eternal slumber. Anyway, this, in and of itself, relies on Telos being a "lost planet", somehow difficult to find. Invisible even.

But then to compound that, there's the evidence that Telos is actually IN our own Solar System. To reprise the whole Planet 14 debate: all of the mighty Trout, Mr Dr Pat's, adventures with the Cybermen are set in the Solar System and in the 21st Century (or late 20th), and all of them make it pretty clear that the Cybermen do NOT have interstellar technology and desperately need to conquer the Earth as their only hope of survival. Well, they all do so long as you accept the allowances you have to make if you're to make ANY sense of that one written by Mr David "I wouldn't know the difference between a Galaxy and a Finger of Fudge" Whitaker. Given that going cryo is their very-last-throw-of-the-dice option, that would suggest that the oh-so-difficult-to-find Telos is right here in the Solar System. Which would have to make it even more difficult to detect.

So ARE they invisible?

Well, there IS another possible explanation, although it's a bit "Star Trek".

The alternative is that there is some kind of WORMHOLE near to where the Earth orbits the Sun. And Mondas fell through it.

This isn't QUITE as unlikely as it sounds, at least not in the Doctor Woo universe. There's at least one occasion when a pretty ordinary Earth spaceship (i.e. one of the ones that THAT stock-footage from NASA can double for) manages to accidentally get lost in another star system. Admittedly that's "The Android Invasion" aka "The One with the Spoiler in the Title" (or more precisely "The One with the Spoiler in the Title that doesn't have Daleks in it"). Nor is it unknown for planets to apparently wander in and out of the Solar System – Voga in "Revenge of the Cybermen", Vulcan in "Power of the Daleks", arguably the Moon in "…and the Silurians" – so there's a least a chance that trans-galactic billiards is on the cards.

And of course, the whole of Torchwood is based on the idea that there is this space-time rift to anywhere that just happens to have a back door in Cardiff.

Actually, the Torchwood Rift (or GIANT ANTI-PLOTHOLE as it is called) ought to be a tiny wee crack in the Universe (what with the Gelth specifically NOT able to come through in numbers) rather than the bleedin' enormous demon-disgorging dimensional doorway that it is used as whenever the plot calls for it to be the Hellmouth this week, but N E Waaaaaay.

It's been put forwards by others that the REASON the Earth keeps getting invaded in the 1970s and/or 1980s (your UNIT-dating mileage may vary) is because there is some STRATEGIC value to the planet beyond the prettiness of its oceans and the nice view towards Alpha Centauri. A convenient hyper-space by-pass to the Oseidon system (or wherever) would certainly be that.

Mondas popping back thorough the rift would satisfy the "suddenly appearing from nowhere" criterion that "The Tenth Planet" sets up; and if Telos is at the other end of the rift, especially if the other end isn't fixed (yes, just like that one with the Ferengi) then that would make it the "lost city/planet/tomb" for which Professor Parry's team had to scour the universe. (Even though they seem ill-equipped to scour a BATHTUB!)

But that's not really "drifting to the edge of space" is it. It's rather more "blimey, where did the sun go?" and "where's parallel Professor Richard to tell us that WE'VE moved and not all these new planets" to be honest.

No, the wormhole explanation won't do.

Instead, let's pretend that the Cybermen behave logically like they claim they do (but DON'T!) and look at this that way.

This whole problem starts with Mondas becoming increasingly uninhabitable as it drifts away from the Sun. The Mondassians have got time and technology on their side, but otherwise they're more STUFFED than I am.

We know that their EVENTUAL solution was to turn themselves into friends of Dorothy. (OK, so the straw cybermen and the cowardly cat-monster Mondassians were even less successful…) But what else might they have considered?

Well, large scale INSULATION of the planet might be a good idea. Your main needs are to keep the atmosphere in and to keep it warm: what you want is some sort of dome over much if not all of the planet, an artificial sky that is reflective on the inside to retain as much heat as possible and is totally black on the outside to absorb any warming sunlight that manages to fall upon it.

Entirely as a BY-PRODUCT of that technology, you've built a great big NINJA COSTUME for your planet, rendering it difficult if not impossible to see.

Of course, returning to the environs of the Earth, such a shroud would result in the REVERSE problem, runaway global warming. And we already know that Mondas suffers from overheating. The Cybermen would need to pretty quickly disassemble their planetary blanket… hence apparently materialising out of nowhere!

That's Mondas explained… what about Telos?

Well, ask yourself about the native Telosians, the Cryons who we meet in "Attack of the Cybermen", a species so evolved for sub-zero conditions that they VAPORISE at room temperature. And yet, humans appear able to wander about on the surface of their home planet without instantly turning to popsicles. So, what, the Cryons invented the freezer BEFORE they evolved? It seems a little unlikely. Obviously, something has happened to CHANGE their planet – and what more obvious a change than the invasion of the Cybermen.

Actually, even this doesn't really make total sense. We're supposed to believe that the Cybermen invaded Telos to take advantage of the Tombs… so the giant fridges must have been there before them… so they can't have been built BECAUSE of the Cybermen. But let's take a little CREATIVE licence. Say the Cybermen invade Telos just because. After all, it's a planet and their own world, Mondas, is currently on an apparently one-way trip to deep space doom. But the Telosian weather is routinely what we call "a bit nippy" or even "quite brisk". And yet fortunately the Cybermen just HAPPEN to HAVE the technology to hand for exactly these circumstances: they adapt same techniques they used on Mondas and set about adjusting the Telosian climate to be a bit more to their liking. And, as the temperature rises, the Cryons are forced to build refrigerated cities just to survive the Global Warming.

In this sense, Telos is twin-of-terraformed into a planet with Earth-like surface conditions (and quarries) encased in a black light-absorbing suit making it vanish. The only way to detect it would be by calculating the effect that its gravity has on the surrounding system… enter the Brotherhood of Logicians with their "mass intelligence" able to put in the thousands of man hours of calculations needed to locate the lost planet.

On the other fluffy foot, ASTROLOGY rather than astronomy would be more in keeping with the whole "ancient curse" vibes. And the Cybermen ARE the astrologers of the Doctor Who Universe.

After all, their plans begin with the movement of the planets ("The Tenth Planet"), before progressing to the Moon ("The Moonbase"), a nova in another galaxy(!)… oh all right, meteorites ("The Wheel in Space"), a planet of gold ("Revenge of the Cybermen") and finally turning into a falling star themselves ("Earthshock"), even if they wind up chasing a "magic comet" ("Silly Nemesis").

Of course an INVISIBLE planet would turn an astrological chart to gibberish… if it wasn't gibberish ALREADY! Maybe that is why all of the Cybermen's schemes go wrong.

"Your Stars for Today. Telos: a tall/short dark/fair young/old stranger will be important to your plans. Maybe don't bother going out."



.

Day 1968: Rational : INTEGRAL : Sterile : Eternal

Wednesday:


"If you've done nothing wrong / You've got nothing to fear
"If you've something to hide / You shouldn't even be here"

That is the opening of the song INTEGRAL from the PET SHOP BOYS fabshious new album FUNDAMENTAL and Daddy Richard has had it on continuous loop since he first heard it.

Who would have thought that those icons of emotional minimalism and wry detachment would have had such a capacity for INCANDESCENT RAGE?! This is the blistering attack of a betrayed lover and you don't have to look very far to find the deserving object of the Boys' scorn.

The Project.

Conformity, uniformity, technology,
for your protection, for your own good,
like a self-programmed machine the New Labour Project is on a mission, almost a holy cause,
to improve you, to upgrade you,
for you own good,
whether you want it or not, whether you voted for it or not,
and they won't stop, they won't listen to you, they already know what is good for you,
and if you resist then you are a threat, a concern,
they are relentless, implacable, superior, empty,
they are CYBERMEN.

I can already see the video in my fluffy head – an endless stream of numbered plastic cards falls past the camera, each and every photograph the dead metal face of a Cyberman.

The only security that the Cybermen have to offer is the security of the dead, to be a corpse in a walking coffin with a cold metal heart.

Is this an exaggeration? Is this the extreme end point? Does anyone think that if Tony Blair took it into his head to upgrade the lot of us that isn't exactly what he would go and do?

Cybermen don't commit crime (unless you count genocide, of course) so that's the Home Office finally sorted.

Cybermen don't get sick, that's the NHS fixed.

Cybermen don't get old or die, pensions crisis avoided.

And Cybermen all do what the Cyber Controller tells them, well that's the end of back bench rebellions and embarrassing protests in parliament square.

No crime, no sickness, no death, no protests. You would have to be out of your mind not to want that.

Only Humans 2.0 deserve Human Rights.

Crikey, now I'm REALLY worried!



Go and BUY this song.

Find a place to stand one kilometre from PARLIAMENT.

Turn up the volume to VERY LOUD.

And press PLAY!

Day 1964: Doctor Who: THE AGE OF STEEL

Saturday:


I do NOT want handles sticking in my big, fluffy ears, so I will NOT be wearing earpods, thank you VERY much.

Here is what Daddy Richard has to say about "The Age of Steel":

Let's Let's get the badness over right away: that was a dreadfully lame way to resolve the stunning cliffhanger from last week. Suddenly, the Doctor is able to shoot golden fire from his fist! (Please, nobody think of the Peter Davison Easter Egg incident!) Worse than that it's all over in a blink-and-you-miss-it instant, surely anyone not following the Internet speculation would be left with a huge sense of "what the…?" And then there is no price to pay for this handy get out of mortal peril free.

How would I have done it?

Well firstly, just a moment for the Doctor to switch from panic to fury, maybe a chance to say "well I tried!" or even just "Sorry!" or to see him hit the thing in his hand (which turns out to be the TARDIS power cell) so that is discharges. Anything at all, really, to cue up that something was coming to make the transition just a bit less jarring.

And secondly, that should have discharged the power cell completely. The price for saving their lives should have been high, too high to let the Doctor do it again lightly – otherwise, why not carry it round all the time in case you need to disintegrate a marauding Dalek or rampaging Yeti?

So I would suggest that the scene in the aftermath in the Preachers' van should have gone:

RICKY: What was that thing?

THE DOCTOR: That was our trip home. The very last bit of the TARDIS. Useless now, all gone. Here you go, Mickey, souvenir for you. [Tosses dead power cell to Mickey]

RICKY: So now we're without a weapon…
[Continue as before]

Yes, that leaves them stranded in the alternative universe – that's kind of my point: the Doctor gives up the chance to get home tomorrow for the chance to keep fighting today – but I can still get them out of there. Roll forward to the moment where the Cybermen catch up with Ricky and kill him. Change that to them both being caught and electrocuted and falling to the ground.

Cut away to some other scenes with the Doctor and then when we cut back, Ricky and Mickey are sprawled on the ground side-by-side, but Mickey groans and sits up. He turns to Ricky to try and rouse him, only to roll him over and discover that he is indeed dead.

Then the later scene overlooking Battersea becomes…

JAKE: So how did YOU survive?

MICKEY: I dunno… but it might have had something to with this. [Takes out TARDIS power cell, now glowing faintly again]

ROSE: What, so the Cybermen recharged it?

THE DOCTOR: No, no not possible… I think… I think that's your life energy, Mickey.

Obviously, that needs a bit of polish but it would, I hope, have added a bit more point to the cliffhanger and the escape and the death of Ricky and even a little touch of poignancy to Mickey staying as he's giving a little of his life to save the Doctor and Rose. Plus the TARDIS seeming to have the power of death and life ties in a little with "The Parting of the Ways" and even the 1996 TV Movie.

Anyway, once you get past that first moment of "gnnng" – and one other little niggle, to which I’ll get back – this is generally pretty brilliant.

It goes like a rocket – I was astonished at how it seemed to blur past, and I wonder what it will be like to watch this and "Rise of the Cybermen" back to back.

Some very strong moments of psychological terror: Cyber-Jackie – it sounds like a camp joke, written down like that, but in the (absence of) flesh it was horrible, tuning the vibrant, charming, caustic, love-her-or-hate-her ALIVE Jackie Tyler into just another Cyberman. Yoicks! And then Sally the Cyberman, when the full horror of what has been done to these people is really brought home to you, so cruel and tragic and irreversible.

Still, if the mind shocks weren't enough for you, there was the screaming-abdab inducing view from the inside of the Cyber conversion, with the mask coming down on the camera at the end! And also the traditional horror movie moments of the dark tunnel full of Cybermen (a nod to "The Invasion" which was famous for "the Cybermen in the sewers".) And you just know that that army of Cybermen will be waking up sometime before the Doctor and Mrs Moore can reach the other end!

Mrs Moore – "ooh," says I the next day, "like, Mrs Moore is a pseudonym does that remind you of anything? "Attack of the Cybermen" perhaps?"

[MM: I have to say, Daddy Alex spotted this twelve hours earlier, like while the show was ON AIR. You will have to forgive Daddy Richard. He can be a bit SLOW.]

"My army awakes!" says the Cyber Leader in "Earthshock" – "Awaken the army" says the Cyber Leader in "The Age of Steel".

Lawrence Miles plays a game in his debut novel "Christmas on a Rational Planet" of referencing (allegedly) every single televised Doctor Who story. Rather less elegantly, John Peel does a similar trick for all the televised Dalek stories in BBC Eighth Doctor adventure "Retcon of the Daleks". I wonder if Tom MacRae has tried a similar trick with the Cybermen here.

Alex and I think we can find links – okay, some of them pretty tenuous ones – to all of them. How about you?

I worried a little bit about the continuity last time so I'll mention it again this. I was surprised at how far they went with the continuity references: mentioning the Cyberman head in Van Statten's museum ("Dalek") seemed a bit obscure to me. But the Doctor makes it clear that these Cybermen are completely separate from the original Cybermen in our universe, so there's no need to worry about any contradictions in origin story. Perhaps a little sadly, he also seems to rule out the possibility that I mentioned last week: that Lumic obtained his Cybertechnology from this universe’s "Invasion".

I mentioned another niggle, and I’m sorry but I’ve slightly got to go all accountant on you but if Lumic’s plan is to "upgrade" the entire population of London to Cybermen using his, er, "scoop and slam" technique, then how exactly does he come to have six million cybernetic bodies to hand? (Or indeed many more as he claims to have similar factories in many other cities.) That’s an awful lot of stock to be laying up. That’s a lot of steel to have bought, a lot of computers to assemble. I don’t think that there’s a company on Earth today that could afford to build, say, six million cars without selling a single one.

It’s very similar to the problem I have with the dramatic twist in "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" – it’s a huge deal how hard it is to obtain this enormous army, and yet out of nowhere they suddenly have gunships and AT-PE walkers and Star Destroyers, for heavens sake! Seriously, soldiers are the easiest thing in the world to obtain – it’s the hardware that goes with them that is hard, and writers seem to forget or ignore that.

Alex had the same thought that about the Dalek fleet last year. All that fuss about making the Daleks out of recycled dead humans when apparently humanity was also throwing away a lot of tin cans. All in colour co-ordinated brass.

Anyway, accountant hat off again.

The conclusion at the end of the episode was much better handled than the resolution of the cliffhanger at the start. The Doctor uses his brains to work out how to destroy the Cybermen – and it's a very similar solution to "The Invasion" again, where emotion also destroys Cybermen, and of course this is where the similarities to "Spare Parts" comes in strongly, with the reason for the emotional inhibitor: people cannot survive the emotional trauma of being turned into a machine. Well, except for heartless Mr Lumic apparently.

Marvellously, Lumic manages to get his comeuppance not once but twice: first forcibly converted by his creations after Mr Crane the henchman turned to the good; and then dropped of a dirigible. "Bye bye" waved the kids of the BBC's Fear Forecast family, while we were reminded of the conclusion of Sir Ian McKellan's "Richard III". But will the Cyber Controller be back for a third time?

Of course, if you recorded the BBC's three minute season preview from the red button service, you can now play the game of spot-which-scenes-come-from-"Army of Ghosts".


And then, when you think it's all over, it suddenly turns into Mickey's leaving story. We can hope that whilst he was off recovering the Doctor's suit from the Tyler residence, Mickey took the time to drop in on his gran and make sure she hadn't (a) tripped on the stair carpet or (b) taken a one way walk to Battersea, before he drove off to Paris with his new boyfriend.

Ah, so were Jake and Ricky an item? It's hinted at rather than stated – Rickey's reaction to a hug from Rose, not so very positive, and Jake's mourning when it's Mickey who comes back alive – and both actors have said that it was played that way. So you can read it in if you want, ignore it if you don't. (But do try not to react with horror at the very idea as some online fans have done. Sad.) Personally, I rather like the idea, and I'm happier that Rose's alternative in this universe is a plucky freedom fighter and not a toy dog after all.

So, one duff note aside, Graham Harper really delivered the big-movie-adventure business. The script may not have topped "Dalek" or "The Empty Child" but no one's likely to overlook this one for its sheer visual impact.

And this year, the Doctor got to join in with Rose hanging off the bottom of a great big balloon over London!

Next time: The Doctor gets an 'ology.

Day 1957: Doctor Who: RISE OF THE CYBERMEN

Saturday:


This week Doctor Who was back to being frightening. Which is a GOOD thing, because I get MORE CUDDLES and not soggy from Daddy sobbing into my back!

Here is what he thought of it then:

This was Doctor Who of the 'Old School', but the 'old school' that was "The Caves of Androzani" not "Timelash"!

For a change, this week I read the opinions on the Outpost Gallifrey forums before writing my own review but, in spite of one or two nice observations from the keen eyed – see Pete Tyler's hair loss – opinion there does not seem to have been very inspired: dividing into the love it/hate it camps without much by way of critical analysis unfortunately.

A lot of the critics felt that it was slow; I felt that there was a terrific sense of gathering pace to it, an increasing tempo that marked the approaching march of the Cybermen and keeping time with the repeated glimpses of their new metal forms until the symbolic crash of their entrance.

Most weeks the complaint is that the story is too rushed, taking no time to develop the latest world in which the Doctor finds himself. This story took that time, and it was well used. It was about time that Mickey had more to his backstory than "boyfriend of Rose", and I put my hands up – like the Doctor it hadn't occurred to me to ask before.

And it was a useful way to illustrate some of the shortcomings of this alternative England: not just zeppelins, but curfew and soldiers on the street and homeless starving in the industrial wastelands as though Thatcherism never ended.

I like too that although the audience obviously know that they are in for a Cyberman story, for most of the episode David Tennant plays the Doctor as thinking that he's in an "alternative universe" story, leading to a terrific sense of the Doctor's horror at the climax that he's made all the wrong assumptions about this world.

It is true that the scene with the President meeting Lumic for the first time is not completely necessary from a plot point of view, but it does the Chekhov's gun set up for the "Cybus sales pitch" which the Doctor discovers later on Pete's laptop and hence discovers the real monsters of this piece. And it does establish the President, world weary and with a sad wisdom, played by the ever wonderful Don Warrington. Of course, there's more to this President than his superficial "good" character suggests: after all, his government presides over those curfews and homeless that we saw earlier. (Unless he's an honorary President, and there is a Prime Minister too – though that is not the inference I draw from him forbidding Lumic's experiment on the government's behalf.)

I'm clearly out-of-step with the pack because I also really enjoyed Roger Lloyd-Pack's meaty turn as villainous loon John Lumic head of Cybus Industries. "Skin of metal," he says with such perverse relish, "and a body that will never age…" he's clearly in love with his creations and not just in a platonic way(!) Also, it's clear that he brings Lumic a sense of humour – there's a great moment when he's speaking to the President: "I suppose a remark about crashing the party would be appropriate" and then he laughs but it seems more that he's laughing at his own remark rather than because of it: laughing at the preposterousness of being the stereotypical villain even as he relishes the role.

Two particularly noteworthy moments of direction: the deeply traumatic Cyber-conversion not quite muffled by the upbeat tones of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"; and, though the commentary says it was just a stroke of fortune from the weather, the scenes in the dark and mist with apparently limitless (though in fact ten very well directed) Cybermen looming out of the night on all sides were exceptionally fine.

I'll just pause to give due credit to the Cyber-choreographer. Just as last week with the clockwork robots, the body language of Doctor Who monsters is a crucial, and often overlooked, element in selling their "reality". As Doctor Who Confidential made clear, the current production team are well aware of this and have been willing to go that extra mile to make use that these Cybermen look and more importantly march as though they mean it.

To touch briefly on the deadly question of continuity: the story is generally pitched as an "origin of the Cybermen" story and you can read it as Lumic inventing them. There is enough wiggle room for the dedicated fanboy to infer that Lumic acquired the remains of the Cybermen from Pat Troughton adventure "The Invasion" (by buying up International Electromatics, the Cybermen's front company in that story, seen again here) and has spent the intervening decades reverse engineering the technology. It would be nice to have a causal line to that effect in next weeks "The Age of Steel" but I expect that the producers will leave it ambiguous.

Weaknesses: well, the obvious one to me is that if you weld some homeless people's brains into Cyber-bodies but have to put in an "override" so that they obey your commands… wouldn't it just be easier to build some robots?

I liked the visual style of the ear-pods (and loved the ear-pods not "eye"-pods gag) but I think I would have liked it more if there had been people with different stages of upgrade: those with just the ear-pods; some with ear-pods and "handles" for an always-on connection; some with maybe a metal wrap-around covering the ears and the back of the head (plus handles) with extra memory capacity; and so on, to indicate that there is upgrading going on by choice and to show progression towards the horrific conclusion. What we get instead is a rather big jump from ear-pod to full body and I'm not certain that people would wear it (if you'll forgive the pun).

For me, a large part of the Cybermen's tragedy is that they did this awful thing to themselves. Now, I like the way that the 2006 team have updated the spare-part surgery nightmare of the 1960s into the must-have latest upgrade fetish of the 2000's, so wouldn't it have been better to have had Mr Crane (Colin Spaul – is he only the second person to have appeared in Doctor Who both pre-1989 and post-2005?), rather than kidnapping the homeless, park his van in Piccadilly Circus and offer the very latest free upgrade to the first dozen oh-so-keen teens to take up this never to be repeated offer? Polish up that exchange between the President and Mr Lumic nicely:

THE PRESIDENT: "Who were these people?"

LUMIC: "Teenagers, Mr President. Wasteful, idle, vain. The least useful members of our society. Before I improved them. Think of the contribution they can make now!"

THE PRESIDENT: "I'm so sorry that this was done to you."

LUMIC: "Oh, don't be sorry, Mr President. That's the beauty of my work: they were all volunteers, they got exactly what they deserved." (Bwah ha ha ha haaaa etc.)


James Graham raises a good question about alternative universes and just why everyone we know is so important.

With my post-factor-justification hat on, I might suggest the following. The Doctor initially does not expect them to have arrived in an alternative universe, but instead thinks they will be marooned in the "silent realm" outside time and space. But in the Doctor Who universe there is a place outside of time and space where fiction and dreams come true.

Could it be that they have landed in this alternative universe guided there by the (subconscious?) desires of Rose and Mickey – she wants her mother and father alive and together and rich; he wants his Gran alive and himself to be respected and important. And behold, they get their wishes.

[Alex suggests: "and the Doctor wants a monster to fight!"]

Mickey raised the question of how the TARDIS managed to get there and the Doctor skated over an answer: "I dunno. By accident?" which suggests, or at least leaves open, the possibility that more may be made of this later – perhaps someone is trying to open holes in the universe.

Or it may all be a coincidence.



The end titles give a credit to Marc Platt, and clearly there is a nod towards his Cybermen origins story "Spare Parts": a Big Finish audio where the fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrive at the beginning of the tragedy on frozen Mondas as it drifts into the depths of space. Highly recommended.

However, I found that "Rise of the Cybermen" had rather more in common with Mike Tucker's BBC Past Doctor novel "Loving the Alien".

In an alternative England, frail genius George Limb discovers the remains of some Cybermen during the Second World War and uses the technology to improve British soldiers so that Britain wins the war without American intervention. Limb continues to lead the Empire as Prime Minister, an Orwellian Big Brother figure, while overseeing the Cyber-augmentation of the population.

Personally, I think that this is one of the worst of the BBC books range, not just because it is a ghastly train-wreck of colliding plots and timelines but also because of its treatment of the Doctor's companion Ace.

Essentially, after her TV story appearances, the character of Ace had continued in 32 of the Virgin New Adventures, eventually leaving in "Set Piece" to become an adventurer in her own right (although she returned for guest appearances in "Head Games", "Happy Endings" and "Lungbarrow"). When the BBC ended Virgin's licence in 1997, Tucker and co-author Robert Perry began a new series of adventures with Ace following on from the TV stories but contradicting minor continuity points from the New Adventures, such as changing her surname from "McShane" to the so-much-more-tedious "Gale".

This all culminates in "Loving the Alien" with the original Ace from the television episodes being killed, and an Ace from an alternative timeline joining the Doctor as his companion, obviously the "New Adventures" Ace. (You can take this as them generously allowing for both continuities or they were being petty and saying "ha ha, we were right and you New Adventures writers were just using a copy".) My main problem then and now was the reaction of the Doctor: it seems not to matter to him at all that a real person called Ace has died because he still has a companion called Ace, the copy from another universe.

I dredge all of this up because it struck me as clashing markedly with the Doctor's very strong insistence to Rose that the Pete from this universe was not her father.

Finally, thanks to overrunning of the episode and (hopefully) the wisdom of Steven Mophat from last year's "The Empty Child" finally sticking with the production team we didn't get a "Next time…" spoiler to ruin the cliff-hanger. (Mark of a good cliff-hanger, by the way: how much it gets you wondering "how will they get out of that?") Hoorah!

And so:

Next time: to be continued…