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13TH MAY 2006
(50-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 1 OF
2)
In the wake of the successful comeback made by the Doctor’s oldest and
dead-
liest foes, the
Daleks, it was to be expected that this second series would feature his
big ‘number two’ enemy, the Cybermen. But how would they return? What
would they look like? And what would the story be all about?
In Rise
of the Cybermen, Tom MacRae tells not one, not two, but three
‘parallel’ stories, all of which are bound together masterfully. With
twice the time that Rob Shearman had to re-invent the Dalek, MacRae is
able to slowly crank up the tension on all fronts before ending his first
episode on a stupendous cliffhanger. Those who tuned into Rise
of the Cybermen expecting a colossal Cyberfest might have been a
little disappointed (though I’m sure that they’ll be appeased next week), but I
was thoroughly thrilled with the episode. Save for the
inexorable transformation of the inhabitants of the parallel Earth into
Cybermen, there was not a single aspect of this story that failed to
surprise me…
To begin with,
given all the hype about the return of
Shaun Dingwall as Pete Tyler, I was
expecting this
story to be built almost exclusively around Rose and
her
father, who is not only alive in the story’s ‘alternate
reality’ setting,
but is actually a successful business-
man; a millionaire, no less. However,
whilst much of
the episode does focus on the temptations surrounding
Rose,
Rise of the Cybermen is at heart a Mickey
Smith story. In fact, it
is the Mickey Smith story. Here
MacRae gives
Mickey a tragic past – a past that the
Doctor never
knew about because he never asked
and never cared.
Abandoned by his parents, Mickey’s
blind
grandmother raised him until she died, tripping
on some upturned
carpet and falling down the stairs.
I love the scene
where the Doctor stands in between
his two companions, Rose rushing off in
one direction
to look for her father, Mickey rushing off in the other to
go who knows where. Mickey shouts “go on then, no
choice is there,
you can only chase after one of us. It’s never gonna be me is it?”, and he’s
right. And as much as he doesn’t want it to be right, and
even as much as we, the audience, don’t want it to be right, the bottom
line is that the Doctor loves Rose and Mickey is just a gooseberry; a
spare part. Indeed, MacRae could have plausibly called this episode
Spare Parts, although that might have raised a few eyebrows, not to
mention increase Marc Platt's fee!
Russell T Davies
swears that Mickey’s story arc was not planned, and if indeed
the whole Mickey / Ricky angle was not masterminded last year, then it is
truly one of the best cases
of serendipity that I’ve ever come across;
it fits like a glove. In our universe, Mickey starts
off as a spineless
idiot. In this universe though, Mickey’s counterpart, the ironically named
Ricky (the name that the ninth Doctor would derisively call Mickey), seems
to be his polar opposite. He’s a hero. A freedom fighter. A “Preacher
of Gospel Truth… London’s Most Wanted!” MacRae is clearly building towards
something here, and I can only hope it’s not
the demise of my
new favourite companion.
I also enjoyed
the explosive opening to the episode. Half-expecting another “oh look,
we’ve landed on a parallel Earth” type-of-story, I was thrilled to see
that the writer had made this a definite one-off trip – something far
outside the TARDIS’ capabilities, at least, outside the TARDIS’
capabilities now that the Time Lords have gone from the universe. In fairness, I’ve
always really enjoyed this type of story, but in making this crossover a fluke MacRae could really
push the envelope in terms of drama in a way that previous stories
never could. Rose can’t just pop in any time she wants to see her Dad, and
Mickey can’t just pop in any time
he wants to see his Gran. “Twenty-four
hours on a parallel world” is all that they get – and what a parallel
world! Zeppelins in the air; Cybus technology everywhere… This episode’s
designers have certainly succeeded in making a place as familiar as
contemporary London feel both eerie and alien. Undoubtedly beautiful, but
irrefutably unsettling.
“You could pop between realities and be home in time for tea.
Then the
Time Lords died. Everything became that bit less kind.”
Furthermore, I
think I’m right in saying that Rise of the Cybermen is the longest
episode of the new series (bar the Christmas special) by a good few
minutes – it actually over ran and
I missed the opening seconds of
Doctor Who Confidential which I was less than pleased about! – yet it
still has the same frenetic pace as preceding episodes. It’s remarkable
just how much they have managed to cram in to it – one of Mickey’s
earliest lines about every-thing being “the same, but different” sums up
what would surely have eaten up at least an episode in the classic series.
Even the story of the genesis of the Cybermen (okay, not the
Cybermen, but Cybermen nonetheless) is told in around five scenes,
without, I should add, the viewer feeling like anything has been left out
or glossed over.
Turning to the
men of steel themselves, when the Cybermen first hit television screens
forty years ago in The Tenth Planet, they played upon viewers’ fears of new technology. For the benefit of the uninformed, Doctor Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis’ “silver giants” originally hailed from Mondas,
Earth’s twin planet, and were a non-too subtle metaphor for what many
feared could happen to humanity itself. But rather than muck about with
decades of messy cyber continuity, the production team quite wisely
opted to invent some new Cybermen – human ones!
Of course, this
allowed them to completely redesign the Cybermen and rewrite their
evol-ution, effectively putting their own stamp on what has, over the
years, become quite a fluid concept. Best of all though, thanks to this
re-imagining, the audience now knows that locked inside that monstrous
metal casing is a human being, which I think has much more dramatic punch
than knowing that it is a faceless Mondasian inside. And along with the
new design; the new catchphrase (“you will be deleted!”); and even the new
voices (better than the 1980s voices, but worse than the originals) MacRae
has also updated the technology that we are
to fear - the Cybermen of the noughties
use earpieces to download information directly into the human
brains, which if you think about it, is only a step or two down the road
from Blue-tooth.
That said, one
integral facet of the Cybermen concept has remained the same and that is
the sheer horror of cyber conversion. I was particularly interested to see
how the production team would portray this here, given the broadcast slot.
A few messy shots of Lytton in Attack of the Cybermen is about as
gruesome as it ever got on television before the revival, but in the
expanded universe of novels and audios – particularly in stuff like
Killing Ground and Real Time – the gore is really quite
outrageous. Personally, I feel that the writer and director did everything
right here – a few screams, a brief flash of some menacing machinery, and
then everything drowned out by The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Sublime.
“Skin of metal and a body that never ages. I ENVY IT!”
And then we come
to John Lumic – the man who is to the new Cybermen what Davros is to the
Daleks. Roger Lloyd Pack is unbelievably intense; having only seen him in
comic roles prior to this (I’m an Only Fools and Horses nut) I was completely
taken aback by his grave presence. His chair; his
respirator; and those wide-open, completely insane eyes conjured up images
of Davros, Darth Vader, and even the Master’s calcified incarnation. On
paper, I suppose he’s a fairly run of the mill Doctor Who
villain, but when you see him on screen he’s just so imposing. He has a
very definite menacing charisma that just holds you; no small feat
considering that his character is almost devoid of humour.
And in the
President of Great Britain, Lumic
has a superb foil. Don Warrington is
certainly
not new to playing powerful figureheads in
Doctor Who,
having appeared as Time Lord
founding father
Rassilon in several Big Finish
audio
productions, and in this episode his gutsy
President does
not disappoint – it’s just a shame that his role has been limited to just
this episode thanks to the electric shock of a Cyberman!
“You’re a fine businessman John, but you’re not God.”
Throughout the
episode, everything builds towards Jackie Tyler’s “thirty-ninth” birthday
party, and despite the fact that it is obvious to anyone with half a brain
cell what is going happen, you could still cut the tension with a knife.
Rose’s thread of the story is handled well, even though the Pete stuff
does feel a little anti-climatic after Father’s Day. I actually
found the alternate Jackie more fascinating than her husband – whilst she
may share certain traits
with our universe’s loveable Jackie, this
woman is more belligerent (which really says a lot) and comes
across as being arrogant and spoilt, whereas Pete is portrayed more or
less as he was in Father’s Day, only older and perhaps a little
more seasoned.
What made the
party scenes so enjoyable for me though were those lovely little Doctor
Who touches that just seem to flow throughout this series. Moments
like where the Doctor laughs out loud when he discovers that this
universe’s Rose Tyler is a Yorkshire Terrier, or where Rose’s blatant
jealousy comes to the fore when the lady-killing tenth Doctor gets
friendly with the fellow kitchen staff (“According to Lucy…”).
The episode’s
climax is nothing short of spectacular, but despite all the cinematic
splendour of these beautiful new art-deco Cybermen iconically bursting
through the glass windows, for me it was a line of dialogue that lingered
longest. Someone asks the Doctor why the Cyber-men don’t have emotions, and
he simply replies “because it hurts”. That’s what is at the core of the
techno fear that surrounds the Cybermen, but no-one has ever framed
it so succinctly before. We are scared of Cybermen, but we are more scared
of becoming Cybermen. That is why they worked in 1966, and that is
why they work today. The rest is just dressing. The Age of Steel
has begun.
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