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| "What if you could wvorp between a thousand different worlds?" |
...oh.
Ohhhhh...
A man in a wheelchair, John Lumic, overlooks his newest creation alongside a doctor in his employ. In a scene out of Frankenstein, the creation is indeed alive. The doctor warns to Lumic that he'll have to report this new development to Geneva. Lumic coolly asks him how exactly he plans to do that from beyond the grave, upon which he is electrocuted by the not fully seen creation. Lumic gives the order to set sail for Great Britain.
In the TARDIS, we are back with the Doctor, Mickey, and Rose in their travels around the universe. Mickey is being criminally underutilized...both by the story and by the Doctor and Rose, who are being insufferable. As he rightly calls the Doctor out for forgetting him and the Doctor puts up a terrible defense...the TARDIS explodes.
The TARDIS goes dark and the Doctor, after they recover, theorizes that they've fallen in the Void between realities. Mickey opens the doors and finds they're in London, though clearly not the London of their Earth as evidenced by the zeppelins overhead. He is excited at the prospect of going to a parallel universe, discussing all the changes that could be different from their own universe. Rose, in particular, has found one via an advertisement - her father, Pete (aka, the only good part of the absolute war crime on sanity that I hate with the fiber of the collective of humanity's being, Father's Day) is alive! Not only that, but he's very successful whereas in the main universe he was an absolute failure.
The Doctor manages to find a part of the TARDIS still working and charges it up with 10 years of his life (which he describes as "worth every second"). The energy he gave will let the TARDIS regenerate, but it will take about twenty-four hours to do it. As such, he tries to convince Rose to not go looking for her parents in this universe...which she does little to assuage his fears of.
Rose Tyler is Awful Count: 5,055,636,224
And then they both wander off with only the Doctor, not Rose at any point, making a half-hearted attempt at trying to apologize for going off after her...
Rose Tyler is Awful Count: 5,055,636,225
Then we get a little more detail on John Lumic, namely that he's a very prominent businessman in world industry and politics, running Cybus Industries. He is also confined to a wheelchair and forced to use a breathing mask with [insert disease here] that is slowly killing him. He plans out getting some homeless people off the street for "upgrading" (putting that off on his toadie, Mr. Crane) and has a meeting ahead of him with the President of Great Britain, who has raised some objections to Lumic's experiments. He also has some connections with the Pete Tyler of this Earth, having bought out his company. With a gift he sent to this universe's Jackie Tyler, EarPods.
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| "I'm definitely not a villain..." |
Using them, Jackie gets her mind rooted through for security codes and guard placements for Jackie's upcoming birthday part. When Lumic hacks into her, Jackie's EarPods make a metal arch over her head that look suspiciously like a Classic Series monster...hmmm...clearly, it's the Ogrons coming back.
While that's going on, the Doctor and Rose have a short exchange about Mickey's backstory that will never be brought up again after this episode except for a single line of dialogue in Journey's End, and which seemingly does next to nothing to change how the Doctor and Rose treat him, so...
Rose Tyler is Awful Count: 5,055,636,226
And they are witness to a "download" from the EarPods that stops everyone on the streets in their tracks. This raises a few questions for me. Do people who are driving also get downloads at the same time? I have to imagine the accidents are both common and incredibly extreme. Of course, we don't get to see that because this might ruin the light and happy tone of a story about a race of cyborgs who tear the humanity out of your flesh.
This convinces the Doctor to look into Cybus and thus he and Rose are going to the Tylers despite his earlier objections.
This is all interposed with Mickey getting into the community where his grandmother lives, finding her as she lived in his universe. Blind as a bat, snarky as Hell, unwilling to take Mickey's crap (even slapping him for "Ricky" abandoning her), and with a break in her rug on the stairs that she tripped and broke her neck on in his universe. The last of which very clearly distresses Mickey. She invites him in for a cup of tea, but Mickey soon finds himself being snatched up and thrown into a van. These are Jake and Mrs. Moore, Jake who we did actually see earlier trying to convince people to not go into one of the obviously evil Cybus Industries trucks.
Meanwhile, Lumic meets with the President of Great Britain, who rightly points out his plan as absolutely nuts and reminds him that he is not God. He does not give his approval. Needless to say, this will not go well for him.
When the resistance group - the Preachers - arrive at their base of operations, however, they find...Mickey. Or, rather, Ricky. Mickey's double on this Earth. Sadly, Ricky doesn't have an evil goatee, but some sweet five o'clock shadow has to suffice. They immediately question Mickey, who is forthcoming about who he is. Before they can get too far into it, though, their contact informs them that Cybus is on the move and they take Mickey off with them to pursue.
The Doctor and Rose infiltrate the Tyler residence as serving staff. Rose laments this, whining about them not coming in as Sir Doctor and Dame Rose, because she's being incredibly bratty, spoiled, and entitled...so...
Rose Tyler is Awful Count: 5,055,636,227
Here we see that Pete and Jackie's marriage isn't going well. Rose is shocked, seeing something worse than the pair's argumentative nature in Father's Day and far from the storybook picture of her father she had from her mother's tales before that event. Rose has a conversation with Jackie that seems to be going well up until Jackie berates her for commenting on her marriage, leaving Rose in tears.
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| Rose managed to find a bigger ass than her. |
While Jackie doesn't seem to recognize Rose at all (for obvious reasons of Rose being a dog in this universe - ha! Comedy!), Pete seems to think there's something...familiar about her.
The Doctor, meanwhile, has broken into Pete's office to get on with the plot. Finding Lumic's PowerPoint presentation and has put two and two together. In a rather neat shot that is plenty chilling, we hear loud, clanking footsteps and see indistinct parts of...the metal men, just as the Doctor works out what is going on. He reunites with Rose just in time for the party to be officially be crashed. Just before they break in, the Doctor names them to Rose: Cybermen.
Lumic taunts the President and, when he refuses the Upgrade, he is executed.
For a brief moment here, I like the redesign of the Cybermen. It's clear the "future is chrome" early 2000s look is the main influence here and they have a far more sleek design than the Cybermen of the Class Series. Personally, my favorite design for the Cybermen is how they looked in their initial appearance in The Tenth Planet, followed by their 80s look. This makes a close third and it's the look we're going to have for them up until Nightmare in Silver in a few Series' time.
Back to the plot, however, the Cybermen start wreaking havoc. The Doctor, Rose, and Pete end up running into Mickey and the Preachers. The Preachers decide to take a page from the UNIT school of dealing with alien menaces - that is shooting it with five rounds rapid. Sadly, since none of them are named Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, it does nothing. The group gets surrounded and the Doctor declares their surrender. However, the Cybermen aren't having it.
They are rogue elements.
They will be...deleted...
Rise of the Cybermen isn't too bad for the first outing of the Revived Series into alternate universes. It's also, unfortunately, far from perfect. This largely comes down to the fact that it was completely unnecessary to have this story set in an alternate universe. The audio that inspired this story Spare Parts (and who's author, Marc Platt, gets a credit for this episode and its second part Age of Steel) is set in the main universe where the Fifth Doctor and his companion Nyssa discover the origins of the Cybermen. That worked well enough and didn't need an alternate universe.
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| Run like fangirls are chasing you. - #justdoctorthings |
The alternate universe tropes being played with à la Sliders - Pete still being alive and successful, Mickey being Ricky, Rose being the Tyler's dog instead of their daughter - are done fairly well for what its worth. Russell T. Davies has tried to justify the parallel universe by thinking the Cybermen's original origin - motivated by things like organ transplants and the like - didn't really make much sense anymore and that a better focus would be on upgrades to technology and how our culture advances its technology.
This is either really, really brilliant or really, really stupid depending on how you look at it.
As I said before, I do like the design of the Cybermen in this story. But the 80's Cybermen were my first and the The Tenth Planet Cybermen trump even them as far as cool designs go. As the Cybermen got more robotic, up to this point, they somehow managed to get less imposing than a man covered in metal bits and bandages.
Next time, we enter into Lumic's masterplan - The Age of Steel. We'll see a The Five Doctors reference, we'll see that Cybermen can apparently turn off their loud footstep sound, and we'll lose a companion.
...no, it's not Rose. I know you're wishing for it, too.
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