Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel
(Series 2, Dr 10 and Rose, 13-20/5/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Tom MacRae, director: Graeme Harper)
'Today's sentence has been re-written twenty times because every time I come up with something pithy to say I hear those clonking knees walk up behind me and a robotic voice say 'delete'.
Ranking: 213
WWho’s that taking over the Earth by stealth, despite making so much noise you can hear them from miles away? Yes, it’s the clunky Cybermen from the 21st century, arriving to the series just in time to have some 40th birthday cake (from when they were first seen on television in ‘The tenth Planet’) or 20th birthday cake (from when ‘The Tenth Planet’ was set), depending how you look at it. Like many monsters heading into middle age they’ve had a colossal makeover to make them look younger and more contemporary. Only, despite the pricey midlife crisis and fashion change, they’re are the one revived race of monsters that aren’t a patch on any of the 20th century models. This is their first appearance in the new look series and that’s a surprise actually: unlike the huge battle to get hold of The Daleks getting The Cybermen was easy peasy, with Russell sharing an agent with co-creator Gerry Davis’ estate (that’s why one appears in ‘Dalek’). Unlike The Daleks too (who got left alone, at least at first because Terry nation’s estate would have had kittens) they’re…different. If you’ve come to this review from ‘The Tenth Planet’ and its many sequels then you’ll know that the original version we got on screen were always a bit of a fight. The brainchild of scientist Kit Pedler, they were his worry about the future, in the early days of implants (still often being rejected by the body for being ‘alien’ back then) and the way medication had side-effects that turned people into numb emotionless zombies and where that might all lead in the future, when people remove all emotions. To his co-writer Gerry Davis, though, they were more of a physical threat, a monster that was unstoppable and as close to an emotionless robot as you could get without actually being one and their behaviour changes depending on which writer is in the driving seat. Which version were we going to get we wondered?
We don’t get either. After handing The Daleks to someone who knows them backwards in Robert Shearman, Russell T Davies took another tack and decided to re-invent the Cybermen by giving them to a new author who didn’t know much about them (beyond catching ‘Silver Nemesis’ on the telly when he was six). Or indeed Dr Who. Or indeed much telly. Tom MacCrae is the only instance of Russell helping out an old friend rather than someone who either knew television or Who well and he was all of twenty-give at the time he got this commission. The two had become friends after a DVD signing Russell had done earlier for his ‘Queer As Folk’ series where the young writer had mentioned being a writer and asked for tips before handing over samples of his work. He’d then become a friend to Russell, who’d helped him get his first job writing a series for sky and he’d been a sounding board for a lot of series one. So it made sense that he’d get his own episode somewhere. Rather than ask someone with no scifi experience to come up with their own worlds and aliens, though, Russell handed him the second biggest monster in the Whoniverse and asked Tom to start again from scratch and give them a makeover. By 2006 transplants had a 97% success rate and if the Dr Who forums are anything to go by humanity was only getting more emotional every year, so MacCrae didn’t see the Cybermen the way Pedler did and robots didn’t really look the way Cybermen did in 1966, all tall and made out of home-made appliances. However MacCrae, who armed himself with just enough DVDs of past stories to learn the basics, saw something in the Cybermen that their two creators would never ever have seen. He saw them as walking phones, as if people had stepped into their mobiles and chosen to upgrade themselves (without reading the true cost of the contract). He also saw them as a unique mix of vampires that stole your soul and zombies who were left to wander about in a daze, which is a neat analogy but one that doesn’t really come over on screen. By now all vestiges of humanity (well, Mondasity) from the originals have gone and the Cybermen have upgraded themselves completely. To the Cybermen they’re offering an upgrade: why would you turn down the hance to be free of such pesky things as emotions? Why wouldn’t you want to be indestructible? The future’s bright, the future’s…metallic?
How you feel about the
‘Rise Of The Cybermen’ two-parter rather depends on how you feel about what
they’ve done to the Cybermen. To some fans it updates a bunch of monsters who
never did anything but leer and turn them into an actual believable threat they
can get behind, a symbol of all the ways capitalism is killing us in its drive
to make us better, faster, stronger in ways beyond our appliances. To other
fans they’re a travesty, a betrayal of everything the Cybermen once stood for.
Theirs is a poignant story of ‘there but for the grace of God and reliable
orbits go I’, with Mondas Earth’s twin planet sent on a crash course to
disaster, looking over their shoulders jealousy at our stable planet and
feeling jealous. The difference between the two is that now Cybermen upgrade
because they want to – back then they upgraded because they felt they had no
choice. They’ve gone from unstoppable ‘silver giants’ to ‘steel robots’ and
that’s a downgrade however you look at it. As for me I can see the value in
both sides. Of all the ‘classic’ Dr Who monsters to be upgraded the Cybermen
make the most sense: they already changed a great deal between appearances and
they would indeed be the sort of race that would always be changing and never
satisfied. Having them become like phones in this story, with downloads beamed
into every Human brain complete with ‘joke’ where everyone laughs as one like
robots, makes them relevant to a whole new audience in ways that just bringing
the old ones back wouldn’t have done. But they lose something too, that sense
of tragedy and desperation. You should feel sad when the Cybermen are defeated
because in a way they were as powerless as the people they were taking over and
turning them into unfeeling robots just makes them another generic Doctor who
monster. Plus having them made of steel might be more practical but it’s far
less aesthetically pleasing and besides is just silly: the noise they make when
they walk with that heavy stomp means even I would be about to run away from
them without much danger. The designs went through lots of changes, with lots
of different people working on them, but they went with the wrong designs for
me: The Cybermen need to be tall and slim and with a trace of the individual
people they used to be and working stealthily, like spies, infiltrating bases
so you never knew who had been taken over; they were never meant to be an army
working as one the way The Daleks were. You only have to look at ‘World Enough and Time’ to see how scary
the original Cybermen, still with traces of personality in them, can be. Most
children I knew were decidedly underwhelmed by them, despite being a big deal
on Blue Peter (presenter Gethin Jones plays one of the cyber army and had a
long ‘behind the scenes’ feature on working on set ‘Confidential/Unleashed’
style that seems to be better remembered by a generation than this actual
episode is).
Oh and it’s a parallel
world, Jo. With cold feet over how the new designs might go down, Russell also
comes up with the idea of this being a ‘sideways’ story (so this is the path
the Mondasians might have chosen in a different scenario where they became
‘robots’ quicker). The classic series did a few of these (let’s face it the
‘Whoniverse’ has become an increasingly parallel world to ours anyway now there
have been so many alien invasions, which, erm, I don’t think happened in ours –
or at any rate they never made the news) but they were, by and large, a rarity
on telly back in the days when ‘classic’ Dr Who was on the air (though they’d
been around as a concept in scifi books since the 1940s, when lots of writers
were spooked about how close Hitler came to winning WWII). They were
rediscovered in the 1990s to an extent though, a time when moving forwards and
backwards in time was old hat but moving sideways in time to see all the
different worlds you might have been brought up on was both exciting and
budget-conscious (the series ‘Sliders’, featuring a teenage genius, his
girlfriend, his professor and a random soul singer who was passing when a
parallel machine was turned on – no, seriously – is basically forty separate ‘Inferno’s. Though ‘Timeslip’ got
there first and broke so much new ground, with two juvenile leads it never got
the serious respect and reputation it deserved). Once again the success of
‘Rise’ depends on what you think of parallel world stories: are they an
exciting bit of drama that leads the characters to re-think all the life
choices they made and see paths untaken? Or a bit of cheap telly where they
only have to build sets and costumes like ‘our world’ but don’t have to do any
actual homework and where the lead actors get to have fun playing different
versions of themselves? Once again I’m somewhere in the middle: when done well
(as in ‘Inferno’) they can be chilling, all those people you know so well
pushed past their limits to become someone else entirely, a world screaming in
terror and no easy way to get home. When done badly though (as in ‘The Android Invasion’) it can make
for some of the most boring and pointless telly you’ve ever sat through.
‘Rise’ is somewhere in
the middle, with bits that work really well and other bits that don’t at all.
MacCrae had been particularly keen on ‘Father’s
Day’ from the ‘comeback’ series and liked the added emotion of Rose meeting
with her not-quite-family again. In this world her dad Pete is still alive and
living with her mum and even though they’re not quite the same (Pete’s actually
rich in this world, which has brought out the worst spoiled side of mum Jackie
and means they never got around to having Rose, except in dog form) they’re
close enough for her to legitimately get the sniffles. This is the life Rose
has always wanted, to grow up with her family together – but far from being a
happy ever after you also see all the ways that Rose has been fooling herself
about the ‘perfect’ life they’d have had together (something we saw in
‘Father’s Day’ too but is understandably taking a while to kick in after 15 odd
years of family stories of how great she thought he was). You seriously have to
ask what it is about Pete and Jackie that they see in each other to be a couple
in two separate parallel worlds as they don’t seem to have much in common but
even that sort of works. We see how small changes can make differences to
people’s lives, which ends up making us sympathise with the Cybermen, who were
victims of the Mondasian catastrophe as much as the Humans in this story are
victims of their actions. This also works well with the cyber-conversion
threat: we get to see people we know and love in ‘our’ universe die horrible
deaths and the fact that they aren’t quite ‘our’ heroes doesn’t take away from
the shudder that we’ve just seen someone we care for die. It’s a good episode
for Rose though, who’s been a bit ignored across series two – most of the best
scenes in this story are her trying to get to grips with a world that’s so like
hers yet isn’t, without giving away who she really is or how badly she wants
her parents to kiss and make up.
It’s an even better
episode for Mickey. Indeed, the reinvention of Mickey from coward and ‘idiot’
to a lead player whose brave but in a much more cautious way than Rose is the
real gift of the second series, his characterisation having been singled out by
Russell as one thing he never quite got right in the first series. I mean, Rose
is easy to write for in a way – she’s as desperate to explore space and time as
most of us fans are – but Mickey is the not-we whisked up into a world he never
knew existed and which scares him as well as fascinated him; his re-actions
were always going to be harder to convey on screen. Here he comes of age, not
as the ‘tin dog’ used to get the Doctor and Rose out of trouble but a lead
character righting wrongs and saving strangers because being round the Doctor
and Rose has taught him to see the bigger picture. Russell wrote him in as a
supporting role across series one, in the background as something ‘normal’ for
Rose to run from when she takes up with The Doctor (and as someone who reacts
to space and time in a completely different way to her), but the showrunner
promised Noel Clarke that if there was a second series he would do more to
explore his character and, more than any other story this year, this is it.
Mickey meets his parallel world self (who of course is called ‘Ricky’, the name
the Doctor keeps calling him by accident/on purpose) and sees all the lives he
could have been: his life could have turned him tough, nasty, macho, instead of
the slight wimp we know him as (though Ricky, too, just acts tough the way
Mickey sometimes but all the time: the best line of the two episodes is when he
turns out he’s ‘Britain’s most wanted…for parking tickets’). Mickey came on
board the Tardis this year partly, you suspect, to grow closer to Rose but he
feels more left out than ever seeing the way she embraces these new worlds and
all the in-jokes she now has with The Doctor. He has been, to an extent, the
‘new’ Rose, seeing these worlds through fresh amazed newbie eyes now that she’s
become a seasoned traveller who’s been everywhere and bought the punky fish
t-shirt to show for it. But while Rose is happy enough with the ‘real’ world
(making the season finale all the sadder) Mickey belongs in this more broken
world. His beloved Gran is still alive (we learn Mickey has carried around the
guilt of her tripping down the stair carpet which he kept meaning to fix in an
accident that’s more or less what happened to poor Michael ‘Ben’ Craze in real
life). This is a world of more advanced electronics and Mickey’s rather good
with computers, especially taking control back from megalomaniacs. He falls in
with a gang of reprobate ‘saviours’ (who at first assume he’s Ricky) and feels
as if he matters to these people in a way he never does at home.
So Mickey finds his place
in the universe at last after a lifetime of searching it and watching the only
good thing that happened to him (Rose) run off, becoming the ‘hero’ in a way
that Rose (too busy caring for her family) never gets to be and which The
Doctor (who’s plan of basically making the Cyber-converts so miserable and in
pain they commit suicide by their own hand) seems to have forgotten how to be.
Back in 2006 this story seemed like the perfect end to Mickey’s character arc and proof that even
the supporting characters were being thought about more carefully than some
whole companions from the olden days. Noel Clarke acts his socks off and gives
the performance of his life too, making Ricky feel like an entirely different
person at first (though it’s just a tougher outer shell from being brought up
in a harsher world the more we get to know him). I never was terribly fun of
the ‘Ricky’ sub-plot (we know ‘our’ Mickey is brave when he’s pushed to it, so
spending two long episodes turning him into a mean street fighter is only good
for giving Noel Clarke the chance to prove Mickey is an act and not really him –
the hint in the draft script that Jake is gay and the parallel world Rickey is
too got cut in editing after it was decided it didn’t quite work and might
confuse people), but even that kind of works in the sense of giving one of the
series regulars ‘closure’ away from the main story of what happens to Dr 10 and
Rose later in the series. Of course watching this back in 2024 this story hits
rather differently. I shall be careful what I say here given how litigious the
actor has been in clearing his name but lots of women have come forward to say
that he’s much closer to ‘Ricky’ in real life than ‘Mickey’ and that he doesn’t
understand the idea of consent or the word ‘no’. Noel denies it, but like with
so many of these cases there are now so many people who have come forward that
they can’t all be making things up (while if people were after money they’d go
after a bigger household name like, say, David Tennant, of whom I’ve never
heard anybody say a bad word ever. Well, only Michael Sheen on screen as part
of ‘Staged’ anyway, a comedy that only works if you know what best friends they
really are in real life). At first
people’s reaction was ‘but Mickey’s so sweet, Noel would never…’ but those of
us who know this episode can see what an acting part Mickey is. The court case
runs on and I shall leave the damnation to people who know the actual events
more than me, but if the people behind the Baftas saw enough evidence to strip
the actor of his award then things start to look bad.
One thing this story gets
badly wrong, though, is the Cyber-plan. One of the downsides of giving stories
like this one to writers who don’t know their Who is that they accidentally
re-invent the wheel, not once but twice. Apparently MacCrae’s research
consisted of ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and he never got round to watching ‘The Invasion’. If he had done then
he’d know that we’d already had a human genius in league with the Cybermen
who’d planned to take over the Earth one electrical gadget at a time. Russell,
who knows his Who backwards, went with it but wrote in that the billionaire
Lumic was the boss of International Electromatics in the parallel world, just
like Tobias Vaughan had been in ‘ours’. The script turns out in much the same
way as ‘The Invasion’ with the Doctor fiddling with equipment, just minus the
hiding about in sewers, but without the same tension or threat or scale at the
end with a rocket launch for the finale. Despite the difference in years and
how much slower television used to be you have to say the two parts of this
story drag way more than the eight (half) parts of ‘The Invasion’, without
enough here to sustain anything. MacCrae, who had never seen ‘Genesis of Daleks’, also comes up with
another natural enough idea that rather ruins this story for some. He decides
that Lumic would make a good contrast with the Cybermen if he, too, was being
kept alive through electrical gadgets and had set his plan in motion so that he
could have a sort of immortality without pain. All very natural and clever, but
we’ve already had one wheelchair-bound eccentric genius scientist and Lumic is
no Davros. I mean, two psychopaths with disabilities teaming up with the two
meanest monsters in the universe, what are the odds? Roger Lloyd-Pack, who did
know enough Dr Who to know Davros well, elects to play him differently: he
doesn’t whisper or rant so much as bark orders throughout, but he can never
quite make Lumic different enough (of course nowadays a mad billionaire
meddling with electronics they don’t understand and trying to make themselves
‘special’ even though they’re clearly more in the ‘special needs’ bracket would
immediately make you think of Elon Musk. But he was just the weird hubby of
that nice Talulah Riley, ‘Miss Evangelista’ from ‘Silence
In The Library’ to most Whovians at the time, not a symbol of everything
wrong with contemporary life). At least
the wheelchair came in handy after Roger broke his ankle and feared he would
have to pull out (though, contrary to some reports at the time, it was a lucky
coincidence he was sitting down throughout and the wheelchair was in the first
draft before anyone was cast in the role). He finally got to act with David
Tennant too, after playing his dad in the ‘Harry Potter’ film franchise though
they were never in any scenes together (they don’t look much alike do they?)
There’s a big hole at the
heart of this story where a bit more plot might have gone, which is a
particular shame given that it was there in the first draft. Russell’s original
idea for this two-parter was just to use a Big Finish story and adapt it to TV
with his characters, in much the same way that ‘Dalek’ started life as Robert
Shearman’s story ‘Jubilee’ (and most fans agreed that that story was either the
standout highlight of the first year or one of many). The reason Marc ‘Ghostlight’
Platt gets a ‘special thanks’ in the credits is because Russell originally sounded
him out for permission to re-use his storyline from ‘Spare Parts’, arguably the
single greatest Dr Who story Big Finish ever made. It’s fabulous, set back in
the early days of Mondas when things
start going wrong (and reviewed in this book under ‘World Enough and Time’,
with which it shares quite a few plot details) and following the horror of one
girl in particular, Jennifer, as she realises what’s being done to her brain
but is unable to stop it. Russell really liked her character especially and the
new level of emotion/detachment it brought out in the 5th Doctor (Nyssa
for one is appalled at how blasé he is about an event he knows is a fixed point
in time). There was originally much more of that in the script including the
idea of ‘body shops’ with parts that people could buy like phone upgrades
(which Russell cut because he couldn’t see people swapping limbs willingly) and
in the end very little of ‘Spare Parts’ made it to the finished product, it
just ended up a launching pad for MacCrae’s other ideas. That’s a bit of a
shame as ‘Rise’ needs something like that: the closest we get to the horrors of
what’s going on is when a bunch of homeless Londoners are converted (and their
screams covered by the weird choice of Tight Fit’s ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ is
no substitute for emotion). If you were new to the Cybermen you don’t really
see what’s so bad about becoming a cyber-convert. After all, it’s just like
upgrading a phone isn’t it?
The general feeling is
that this is a story that isn’t bad by any means but just misses somehow, on
the slow side despite having Graeme Harper on board, famous for his requests
for ‘energy’ and ‘pace’ (still the only returning director from the ‘classic’
years who’s directed more episodes than anyone now). ‘Rise ‘n’ Age’ tries hard
to yank your emotional chain artificially a lot of times over the course of
this story, as so many of the modern episodes do, but it feels a bit forced and hollow this
fortnight. The only time the story really gets you is when Mrs Moore dies after
doing all the things ‘right’ that companions generally do (The Doctor is about
give minutes away from asking her to travel onboard with him in the Tardis and
gives her looks he long ago stopped giving Rose). It’s also just that little
bit too ‘safe’: we have zeppelins in the sky, because we always do in parallel
worlds (early airships were so much safer than early planes, but the R101
killed so many people in one go that news coverage rather overshadowed all the
ones and twos who dies in planes in the same period. (I still say we should
have stick with airships, they’re so much safer than planes – but then I have
just seen ‘Timeflight’ which
is enough to but you off airplanes for life; there’s a McGann Big Finish story
about why this is the point where so many parallel worlds spring from, another
better than average story ‘Storm Warning’) but little else to show why this
world is different. Not even any eye-patches, sadly! The cliffhanger (only the
third in modern Who) is a great one, with the Doctor and Rose undercover at a
party thrown by the ‘president’ we wish we had (the great Don Warrington, who’s
reinvented himself more times than Dr who by now but best known either as the
student of ‘Rising Damp’ or the police commissioner who is easily ‘Death In
Paradise’s longest running character depending on your age: he’d have made a
far better Lumic) and invaded by Cybermen. But the resolution (a van interrupts
the party with ‘the slowest getaway ever’) is disappointingly easy after having
to wait a week for it and just shows how slow and ineffective the Cybermen are
that they aren’t quick enough to stand in the way or zap the tyres or
something. Like so many Who two-parters though things run out of steam when the
plot has to start making sense and resolve itself and the bag of unexpected
tricks comes to an end, with a speech about emotions that tries hard to be like
the ones in stories of old (ripped directly from ‘Earthshock’ indeed) without saying
anything really new and an extended action finale that seems to go on forever. Overall
the most obvious thing to say it’s the sort of thing we were afraid of when Dr
Who was re-commissioned for not just one more series but lots all in one go: it’s
got lazy, being an extended story that relies on tricks from the past in a new
setting without really offering anything new or even coherent, the sort of
things series do when they get tired and in a rut. None of the things it
borrows from the olden days are done any better: The Cybermen don’t measure up
to what they used to be, Lumic doesn’t measure up to Tobias Vaughan, the
parallel world is a poor man’s ‘Inferno’ and the Cyber plan makes even less
sense than the 1960s plots (which is really saying something). All these
elements are things that had been tried and tested already though that everyone
knew worked already. While there are far worse stories than this one in Who’s
first couple of years they tend to get it wrong bravely, by trying the sorts of
things that were never going to work (‘Love
and Monsters’ or ‘Fear Her’). Sometimes
‘upgrades’ are nothing of the sort and give you stuff you don’t need, like wheelchair
lunatics and rather gruesome scenes of killing the homeless as if they don’t ‘matter’
(an oddly tone deaf scene for Russell, just as the credit crunch is about to
hit, who’s usually much better at that sort of thing). I think I’d rather stick
with my original plan and not convert at all, thanks.
Still, against all odds,
something happens to make this two-parter just about work, despite all the
things stacked against it. Weak as the Doctor’s plan is to stop everything (he
basically flicks a switch and causes the Cyber army to realise what they’ve
become) at least using their own technology against them is better and more
satisfying than the old days of killing Cybermen with Gold, radiation, gravity
and jazz (no, seriously). For the first few minutes the Cybermen are laughable,
particularly if you don’t know their back story as people who used to be Human
and see them just as more silly robots, but scene by scene they turn into a
really viable dangerous threat. Lumic starts off as a pantomime villain you’d
boo-hiss off the stage, but as we head into the second episode he becomes a real
person, a damaged soul who yearns to be whole and sees the Cybermen as a way of
becoming ‘complete’ for the first time in his life. By the end he’s been
transformed and very different to the racist megalomania of Davros, he’s just a
scared man whose always lived with the shadow of death and wants to live
forever. The second episode brings most of the plot threads together with a
three-way attack on the Cyber plan that adds some urgency at last, with an ‘above,
below and through’ reference from ‘The Five
Doctors’ (another story MacCrae hadn’t seen and almost certainly a
Russellism). The lives of the people we know and care about might only be
subtly different in this parallel world, but the writing is so clever and these
characters are so well-drawn that we really feel the repercussions of these small
changes. We’ve already dealt with Rose, but you also get to see how their parents
react to finding out who she is. We see Pete, someone who’s always gone his own
way, learn to care for someone else and feel protective. We see parallel Rose’s
mum Jackie come to terms with the fact that she always wanted to be a mum and
the closest she came was a dog she named for the child she didn’t even know she
wanted. Best of all we see Mickey and learn more about his difficult home-life,
seeing past his gruff and defensive exterior to the vulnerable child who’s always
overlooked by someone braver, smarter and more important than he is. Without
those details this story would be awful, but there’s just enough going on to
keep your interest even when the main plot is a washout and just enough ‘excellent’
ideas thrown at the upgraded Cybermen to make them more then the disappointment
they seem when they walk out on screen. You don’t quite get the sense of why
The Cybermen are so special, but at least it doesn’t insult them the way ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ or ‘Silver Nemesis’ did. Other Cybermen episodes will treat them better
in the future (unlike the Daleks, who still have never matched up to how the
modern series treated them first time out in 2005) but then again others will
treat them far worse. A curious mixture of greatness and ghastliness that just
about comes out on the side of good.
POSITIVES + Battersea
Power Station is an excellent location and one its surprising Dr Who hadn’t
used before being so near to TV centre. I mean, Pink Floyd chose it for the
cover of their ‘Animals’ album for a reason; it smacks of industrial capitalist
decadence and decay, all the ugliness of the functionality of modern living
with none of the aesthetics, a building designed to make money and nothing more
(the scene also resembles the song ‘Sheep’ from that album, about brainwashed
Humans marching to the orders of their leader. The Cyber march was based on the
relentless ‘Nazi hammers’ sequence from Gerald Scarfe’s animation from the film
adaptation of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’. We know they’re fully paid up Whovians who
would be tickled by this by the way: their song ‘One Of These Days I’m Going To
Cut You Into Little Pieces’, sadly not on either album but ‘Meddle’ from 1972,
has a burst of the ‘Dr Who’ theme.). It makes perfect sense a mad genius intent
on taking over the world and who sees life in such a bleak way would build a
base there. It made even more sense when, just a few years after this story was
broadcast, another mad tyrant with ideas above his station intent on turning
the world into zombie cyborgs robbed of their humanity named David Cameron
chose it for a Conservative press conference where he announced his austerity
cuts. How we laughed. Briefly. Before we cried. Battersea was a late minute
replacement for Uskmouth Power Station who had to cancel the planned film dates
when a cold snap meant they had to turn up to (read this bit out in a Servalan
voice) ‘maximum power’. The cold snap caused havoc with the location filming
too: those outside scenes at the party were delayed after a huge snowstorm and
there’s still quite a bit on the ground in the background of some shots.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Being
a two-parter from series two means that we get two Tardisodes to tell you
about, the minute long mood-setting prequels that were available on the Dr Who
website and downloadable to your mobile phone with then-new fangled technology
that seemed very Cybermanish. ‘Tardisode #5’ is a brief news clip about some
guy named John Lumic whose company has gone stratospheric – why he’s almost
made as much money as that nice Tobias Vaughan of cyber industries. Wonder what
happened to him? Other news: a whole load of people around the world have
suddenly gone missing (that’s typical news priorities that: I’d have put those
bulletins the other way round in order of importance me). Oh and there’s a new
programme sponsored by Lumic to offer free upgrades. How kind! The camera pulls
back to show that Mickey clearly doesn’t agree and he drives off in a van
looking sullen. ‘Tardisode #6’ is an update: now most of the world is ready to
be upgraded and Lumic is calling on his employees to start it now. There’s a
nice illustration of a human brain being transplanted and put inside a
Cyberman. Only something’s gone wrong and they’ve found an ‘incompatible
version’ with a rally cry of ‘delete!’ Like the other Tardisodes these are both
weirdly unavailable on anything official since but it’s one of those things
that springs up on Youtube all the time
(and if you don’t use Youtube you’re not missing all that much in this case).
‘Made
Of Steel’ is one of the best-selling Who books around, if only because it was
in the ‘Quick Reads’ programme in 2007, the year when libraries went out of
their way to encourage children to take up reading as part of a national
program (and Dr Who was an obvious choice to get young Whovians hooked. Well it
worked for most of us down the years!) It’s a welcome chance to see how old
hand Terrance Dicks handles the new-look Cyberman, although sadly his usual
gifts for description desert him: the Cybermen are just ‘metallic, flat,
inhuman’ and the 10th Doctor is only ever described as ‘skinny’!
He’s typically good at characterisation though, with both 10 and Martha ringing
true, even though due to a quirk of the publishing schedules it features The
Doctor travelling with the ‘other’ Doctor as a full-time companion even though
she wouldn’t appear on TV at all for another month yet! As for the plot it’s a
bit odd: Terrance has clearly been giving some thought as to how the new age
Cyberman might be different to the old ones and made them interested not in
bodies but electronics, having them in charge of a multimedia business that’s
suddenly everywhere and even has them raid an army base for their supplies at
one point (not UNIT sadly); only this time there’s no Lumic or Tobias Vaughan
as the Human collaborator, it’s all Cybermen standing around going ‘delete’!
The more interesting parts of the plot come early on, when The Doctor has taken
Martha back to prehistoric Earth and they treat it like a petting zoo (‘this is
an Apatasaurus. It’s strictly vegetarian. Or was it that it only eats
vegetarians? I forget!’) – all very different to ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’!
Even allowing for the fact that I wasn’t the target audience anymore, given I
was in my mid twenties when this book first came out, I’m not sure it would
have got me reading at a young age (not the way some of the Target
novelisations did for me) – there are better examples in the range. A lot of
people the right age look back on this book very fondly though.
Previous ‘The
Girl In The Fireplace’
next ‘The
Idiot’s Lantern’
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