Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel

The return of the Cybermen and these episodes really rattled along.

The trouble isВ…Cybermen shouldnВ’t rattle!

IВ’m sad to say I found the whole thing to be an exercise in superficiality. Glossy looking but a complete lack of investment in the characters or the storyline. Fast food Sci-Fi which is definitely not what I was expecting from Who.

Perhaps, like Aliens of London / WW3 it was geared for 5-12 year olds with its pace and thin veneer plotlines. They go for that, seven year olds...bombs over banter, speed over script. You can certainly guarantee that school playgrounds across the country will be heaving with marching children this week all trying to В‘DELETEВ’ their class mates.

But the real crime here is that this two parter was not allowed to reach its potential. This COULD have been great. Hell, it could have been bloody fantastic. There were elements of production; the cyber design, the lighting, the camera angles, the special effects etc. which were some of the best weВ’ve seen. There were also some wonderfully inventive ideas and concepts within the story, but they somehow lacked the cohesion necessary to make it work. The result is a really messy story line, some mismatched acting and a shallow selection of easy fix plotlines that wouldnВ’t be out of keeping in the В‘straight to videoВ’ shelf of my local rental store.

There were brief moments that workedВ…when they were being chased I felt a slight inkling of tension, the underground chamber scene was spooky and the brilliant nod to В‘The Five DoctorsВ’ with the line В“WeВ’ll attack on three fronts, above, between and belowВ” were all well done but otherwise things were distinctly flat.

IВ’m still struggling to put my finger on what it was. I was strongly reminded in both look and feel of the Paul Mcgann Movie. You can see where the money has been spent. It LOOKED greatВ…and yet, I just wasnВ’t emotionally involved at any level. Being cinematic isnВ’t enough, there still needs to be some originality.

A huge problem for me were all those В‘convenientВ’ moments. The death of the Tardis...surely the Doctor would have been utterly broken...they are almost the same being. All we got was a look of disappointment and a bit of nostalgia about it being the last of it's kind. And yes...didn't it sort its self out rather quickly. What's the point in having a catastrophic event if it isn't actually catastrophic? It would have been much better to think they were genuinely trapped on this Earth...far more powerful considering we knew what they are going to be trapped with. Alfred Hitchcock once said..."Show an audience a bomb hidden in a desk two seconds before it goes off and you get two seconds of suspense. But show them the bomb two hours before and you get two hours of suspense." All I'm saying is...we KNEW the Cybermen were coming from the start, wouldn't it also have been better if we thought there was no possibility of escape. And then thereВ’s the moment when the Doctor just happens to be able to use the Tardis energy cell as a weapon ( not really a cliff hanger then !!!) and just happens to know somehow that Mickey is in the control room listening in so he can relay instructions, and Mickey just happens to be able to crack the computer and find the volume and locate the rope ladder and on and on and on В…pleaseВ…this is just lazy writing. And the whole creeping up on the guards on the roof was the biggest pile of unbelievable nonsense IВ’ve seen since the final season of Buck Rodgers in the 21st Century. В‘Excuse me, you may be highly trained guards, but if you could just look straight ahead while we run right up to you in plain sight from 500 yards making a huge amount of noise and stick a small bottle of slow acting chloroform up your nose. Will you let us do that?В… you will !. Thank you so much , thatВ’s so helpful.

These are the sort of QUICK FIXES you expect from a single 45 minute episode where I accept you might have to sacrifice a little reality for the sake of the plot running to timeВ…but thereВ’s just no excuse in a two parter.

And the Cyber controllerВ…what a triumph of design. It looked brilliant, the brain, the chair, the potential to scare the pants off a whole new generation В…he appeared in a cloud of smoke and I shouted, yes, at last, a real villainВ…so why oh why was he only on for the last ten minutes and why did he just sit there doing nothing. He had the brain of an evil genius, the power of a super machine, the potential to plug in to every mind in the world...and what do they actual do with him...they drop him out of a blimp above an exploding building in an effects shot so over used by Hollywood it's a clichГ©. The Cybermen themselves also looked amazing. They really did look like they could knock a house down with one arm and would pull your head off as soon as look at you. Did they scare me...no. They seemed unable to convey any sense of real menace beyond sheer brute force. And of all the things to test their might on, crashing a dinner party wasn't really what I'd have gone for as an impressive show of force. I suddenly realisedВ…these arenВ’t Cybermen at all, theyВ’re just tin men, robots, automatons. They didnВ’t have the history, mentality or resilience of real Cybermen. They were just a tin pot armyВ…and therefore, I didnВ’t care and I wasnВ’t scared. OK, you could argue that on this parallel earth this was their first outing, their birthВ…and yet, this was definitely no where near being a В‘Genesis of the CybermenВ’.

The worst failing of both Rise and Age of Steel was that I just didn’t care about the characters. This wasn’t Roses dad…it was just a bloke who looked like him. Her alternate reality mum was a shallow bigot so who cares if she’s been upgraded or not. Lumic’s side kick does a sudden turn around, Mickey and Ricky are suddenly wearing the same clothes, except Noel Clarke doesn’t portray a significant difference between the two characters…so you don’t know which is which or care about either of them. In fact, the only character we got any background on at all was Mrs Moore the Preacher Techi…and just as we were starting to get interested in her and her Cyber killing gadgets…she gets killed. Even the attempt at giving the Cyber victim pathos fell flat. OK…so she was cold and missing her fiancé…but she still said it in an emotionless monotone, even though the emotion inhibitor was switched off. And I know it wasn’t her voice box, , but I would gladly have traded technical correctness for the empathy instilled in a human voice. To have heard a terrified human female voice emanating from within that metal casing would have been far more powerful at portraying the idea of a ‘TRAPPED SOUL’. Perhaps even a partial obscured view of part of a face inside the cracked helmet. The fact that the rest of the body was mechanical would have made that quite chilling.

Well lit, well shot, well designed and produced.

Badly written, badly directed ( yes I dared to say it and sorry to all those Androzani fans ) and badly acted at times.

I have to say bad direction because although it was well shot and paced etc, ultimately it is the director ( and the editor ) who determines the real impact of the shot in terms of timing and emotion. I donВ’t think Rose ( episode one, season one) worked as well for the same reasons. Its saving grace was some decent monologues which these episodes sadly lacked. In fact, there was nothing clever about the speech at all. Some of the lines were so banal it was the sort of thing you expect from the A-teamВ…В”Yeah, come on manВ”, В“LetВ’s do it!В” В…and that all importantВ… В“Run !В”

I feel like IВ’m being overly harsh, after all, many shows would probably have taken the single premise of this two parter and run it for the entire season, which would no doubt have given ample opportunity to flesh out both characterisation and storyline. But isnВ’t that the point? IsnВ’t that the failure of the writing? If you only have two episodes В…you write to make it work for those two episodes.

Tooth and Claw, Unquiet Dead, Fathers DayВ…beautiful compact self contained little gems which still contain emotional drive throughout the storyline.

This didnВ’t.

My finger hovers tentatively over the video recorder. DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!