Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel - Ranking: 213

 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

Whose 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 21^st century, who despite the pricey makeover are the one revived race of monsters that aren’t a patch on any of the 20^th century models. The attempt to give them a Davros-type boss in a wheelchair for their long awaited comeback is also a strange move. I mean, two psychopaths with disabilities teaming up with the two meanest monsters in the universe, what are the odds? We also get the first, but not the last, of New Who’s parallel worlds and unlike ‘Inferno’ there’s nobody wearing any eye-patches or pushing their characters to such extremes we learn more about them than we do in the ‘real’ world. The only ‘real’ difference in this world are some zeppelins in the sky, an old standard for parallel worlds (I still say we should have stick with airships, they’re so much safer than planes – but then I have just seen ‘Timeflight’). Once revival DW had been confirmed for a second series after the inventive first this was exactly the sort of thing we feared might happen: an extended story that relies on tricks from the past in a new setting without really offering anything new or even coherent, a story that knows it’s safe and doesn’t have to take any risks, just formulas that worked in the past. Something happens to make this two-parter work though, despite all the things stacked against it. 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 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 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 see life through Rose’s eyes at the shock first that her dad is still alive and then the realisation that her mum really wasn’t devoted to her dad at all (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). 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 as we learn of his guilt that the Gran who looked after him tripped down the stairs he always meant to go back and mend one day. 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 RTD 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. 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…which is a bit worrying now it seems from actresses who have come forward with tales of bad behaviour Ricky is closer to the real him after all), 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. David Tennant is on top screwdriver-twiddly form as well, solving problems without breaking sweat for the most part though even he looks concerned in the epic cliffhanger when Don Warrington’s president gets shot, even if it’s impossible watching this today without expecting the ‘Death In Paradise’ team to get involved (New Who might not get many cliffhangers per season anymore, but they use them well when they have the chance and this is another good ‘un). Like so many DW 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 without saying anything really new and an extended action finale that seems to go on forever. Still, part one is good enough to keep up the goodwill and the end result is a solid episode, one that occasionally flickers between greatness and ghastliness but mostly comes out on the side of good.

+ Battersea Power Station is an excellent location and one its surprising DW hadn’t used before. 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. It makes perfect sense a mad genius intent on taking over the world and who sees it in such a bleak way would build a base there. It made even more sense when, just a few years later, 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.  

    
-          The world is ending. Everything is in chaos. It looks like the Cybermen have won. Rose knows that her parallel world dad needs to have a clear head to survive. So what does she do? Finally tell him that she’s his daughter from a parallel dimension. One of DW’s most overly soap opera-y moments; you have expect the ‘Eastenders’ cliffhanger-signalling drums to kick in just then.