Doctor Who (2005) 2-06: The Age of Steel (Quick Review)

Episode:

716

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Serial:

172

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Writer:

Tom MacRae

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Director:

Graeme Harper

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Air Date:

20-May-2006

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the second part of Doctor Who's Rise of the Cybermen two-parter, The Age of Steel. So they're continuing series 1's approach of giving each part its own title.

The episode was written by Tom MacRae and directed by Graeme Harper, just like the previous one. Some series, like Star Trek, tend to get a different writer and director for every chapter, but Doctor Who treats its two-parters like they're a single story.

I hope you've seen this one already, as there will be SPOILERS below. For this and also the Third Doctor serial Inferno. Though I won't say a thing to ruin anything from the next 20 years of episodes.

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RECAP

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The TARDIS fell into a parallel universe, giving Rose a chance to see her dad again, now wealthy enough for the President of Great Britain himself to visit his wife's birthday parties. Unfortunately Cybus Industries Cybermen turned up too and killed a bunch of people. Meanwhile Mickey met his doppelganger Ricky and his team of anti-Cybus rebels, and they came to investigate, getting surrounded with everyone else. To be continued...

The Doctor just zaps the Cybermen with the power cell he's charging up for the TARDIS, problem solved. Unfortunately they're all over the streets, leading mind-controlled Londoners to be turned into cyborgs, and Ricky is killed in their escape. The heroes go to the factory to save Jackie, while Mickey shuts down the signal luring people to the slaughter. The plan goes wrong and the Doctor is brought to Cybus' CEO John Lumic, now upgraded to a metal body. But Mickey's listening in and the word 'idiot' makes him realise the Doctor's giving him instructions. He texts him the code to shut down the Cybermen's emotional inhibitors, causing them all to die from the shock.

Afterwards Mickey decides to stay in the parallel universe with his parallel gran, even though there's no way the TARDIS can ever return to bring him back.


REVIEW

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The teaser for this one is just a recap of part one, reminding viewers that the heroes had been left surrounded by Cybermen with no chance of talking their way out of their imminent deaths. But then the moment the opening credits are over the Doctor just zaps them with the power cell!

I'll give the writer credit for setting up this Chekhov's gun in part one, except he forgot to tell us it was a gun. In fact it's a really good gun that kills all your opponents simultaneously! There's no danger of this making a '10 most satisfying Doctor Who cliffhanger resolutions' list, though I do like all the Cybermen actors performing the same motions in unison, they nailed that bit. Plus there's even a good reason why the Doctor doesn't just solve all his cliffhangers this way, as he doesn't carry guns! (He doesn't have to when Mrs Moore has a backpack full of her own gadgets).

But oh no, they've used up the TARDIS's power and now they can never get home!

Actually it's fine, there's a throwaway line about how it's on a revitalising loop and it'll be ready again in four hours. Doesn't make much sense, but whatever. 

The important thing is that the Doctor being in this universe just saved Pete and Ricky's team from what would've been their deaths. Also it turns out that the two had been working together, as Pete is their informant Gemini. Good name, considering he's a twin of our Pete. Somehow neither Pete or Ricky knew who they were communicating with, which doesn't make much sense, but whatever.

Pete's not impressed with their operation, saying they're like Scooby Doo and his gang. Does that mean that Mickey is Scrappy Doo? I suppose if you squint he is a little bit of a "Poochie", in how he was added to the established TARDIS team mid-season 2, messing up the formula a bit. Also he's always worried about being the tin dog.

It's kind of weird that Ricky admits here that he's London's most wanted... for parking tickets, seeing as he's been running around firing machine guns. I know it's a parallel Britain and gun laws might be different here, but I've played enough games to know that's going to raise the wanted level in any dimension.

And then the heroes are out of the van and in the street for some reason. I assumed I missed a line so I checked the script and there's nothing there. I like that this looks like a proper night shoot though, with no obvious day for night post processing. And they got a bit ambitious with the compositing here as Ricky's overlapping Mickey's shadow.

Actually hang on, this isn't a VFX shot, I think that's just some other dude playing Mickey! I was wondering why he was a couple of inches taller than his identical double. Though I suppose it worked well enough to fool me.

I'm going to give this bit of the episode bonus points because Rose remembers that she's already seen a Cyberman in Van Statten's museum back in Dalek. She doesn't get much of a chance to shine in this story so it's nice that she gets to show that she's putting pieces together.

And then I'm going to take the bonus points away for having Mickey and Ricky splitting off from the group to distract the Cybermen stomping around the streets, just so Ricky can get killed. The episode's in so much of a rush to get to each plot point here that it's barely bothering to set any of them up. 

Part one did a better job with that, taking enough time to establish Lumic's henchman Mr Crane and make him someone I wanted to see more of in part two.

Turns out he's in this episode for about 60 seconds, including the 7 second shot of him realising that Lumic's trying to mind-control him too and deciding in that moment to turn on his boss and kill him. 
I liked their brief confrontation though, with Crane feigning loyalty just long enough to pull the plug on Lumic's life support, and getting killed for it. It's a bit like an '80s Doctor Who story in how the henchman has his own subplot and dies before ever meeting the heroes, except you could blink and miss the whole thing.

It's interesting that Lumic always intended everyone to be upgraded, even if it means no one will buy his phones any more, though I'm not sure the episode fully explains why. I do like that it turns out he's just as reluctant to go through the process as anyone, even though it's his own desperate plan for personal survival.

But that's it for Lumic as well, so the episode's already lost both of its villains! Sure he's still around as the Cyber Controller, but it's not really the same.

Rose's side of the episode is still all about her and her parallel parents. I don't know if she had a fantasy of somehow staying here with Pete and Jackie when she tried to get them back together, but she was definitely attached to them. So it's a bit traumatic for her when she learns that Jackie got her brain cut out and put inside a robot body.

It probably came as a bit of a surprise to viewers as well, as the episode gives you every reason to think that she'll be saved somehow. Personally I already knew it was coming, but I didn't know exactly how it was going to play out and damn it was dark.

They can't even find Cyber-Jackie again when she disappears back into the crowd of Cybermen as they're all identical. No gender, no skin tones, no differences at all. They even have the same voice, sounding a lot like Nick Briggs. Which is funny, because the Daleks were also performed by Nick Briggs, and they also hate differences.

The main difference between the two is that the Daleks want to kill everyone that isn't like them, while the Cybermen want to make everyone like them. Also the Daleks spend their whole life sitting on a chair, while the Cybermen are more stompy.

Though there is one time where the Cybermen do look different, and that's when the episode switches to extremely obvious CGI. They've got a nice detailed 3D model, but the lighting doesn't match the live action shots. Also what happened to all the people? The whole point of this scene is that they've got everyone in London mind-controlled and walking over (like in The Christmas Invasion), and they're going to process them to remove the excess meat and bones.

I suppose we're just meant to assume that Lumic had 8 million Cybermen shells in storage ready to go. In each and every city he's operating in.

Anyway plan A: report Lumic to the authorities, clearly isn't going to work any more, so the team switches to plan B: do what they did in Rose - find the big transmitter next to a London landmark and shut it down. In this case it's built into a Zeppelin docked to Battersea Power Station, so that's pretty cool. 

It's funny how dressing like the catering staff left Rose looking like a maid and the Doctor looking like James Bond. I suppose Lumic is a bit of a Bond villain.

The team splits into three, to maximise the chance that one of them ends up dying again, and the Doctor ends up with Mrs Moore as his very capable and extremely temporary companion.

I liked this bit, with the Doctor and Mrs Moore having a chat while squeezing past the inactive Cybermen lining the hallway like evil mannequins. It's a bit weird that she tells him her real name when she went to the trouble of faking her own death to protect her family. I mean why risk one of the Cybermen overhearing? Why risk the Doctor hearing, she doesn't know him! At least the Doctor has the sense to not tell her his own real name, though it seems like something that should've come up in the conversation.

Just in case the scene with Jackie didn't make it clear how much this whole situation sucks, Mrs Moore takes down a Cybermen and they discover that it used to be a woman called Sally Phelan. And she was about to get married!

Unfortunately they're so distracted by the Cyberman on the floor they don't notice the one creeping up to kill Mrs Moore with a single touch. I guess the loud stomping footsteps are optional?

It's funny, the Cybermen captured the whole group earlier and refused to upgrade any of them, they were absolutely determined to kill them all. But when they find them in their factory they send most of the group straight to Cyber Control. Their reason for taking the Doctor this time is curiosity over his two hearts, but for Pete they were going to 'reward him by force'. That sounds a lot like cyber-conversion, but they were found at the conversion machines and taken away from them, so I don't even know.

We at least get the Doctor's sarcastic line "I've been captured, but don't worry, Rose and Pete are still out there. They can rescue me. Oh well, never mind." It's funny but also tactically brilliant, as it makes it seem like Lumic's caught the whole group.

We get to see that Lumic has escaped his old chair and has been upgraded... to a fancier chair. There has never been a need for any throne to have so many pipes, so I think Lumic was just indulging his creativity when he designed it (along with his fancy cyber body with its glowing eyes and brain window). There'll be no need for imagination after this point though.

There's a classic "I'm the Doctor", "A redundant title. Doctors need not exist" exchange here, as the Doctor makes the case that Lumic only achieved so much because he was fighting his own illness. Without problems to solve, they'll never advance. So add that to the list of messages, along with people relying too much on phones.

It's not really the episode you want if you're looking for messages about transhumanism though. We get a bit of a proper speech here about why being turned into an emotionless RoboCop who just stomps around and turns other people into RoboCops is a bad thing, but I feel like we already know that.

Of course Spock would disagree about emotions being a good thing, but the Cybermen also seem to be missing free will and everything else that makes people people. It's all been inhibited by the suit. Robo-Lumic asks if the Doctor's known grief, and rage, and pain. This is the story right after The Girl in the Fireplace, so we know the answer to that one. But like Sarah Jane said a couple of episodes back, "Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love."

Speaking of advancing technology, video cameras have come a long way since classic Doctor Who... but blue LED lighting really seems to mess with their camera sensor. This image is a mess.

If you split it into channels, the blue channel looks like what you'd expect, the green channel looks like the blue lights weren't even there, and the red channel looks like a horror movie. This isn't always a sign that something's messed up, but here it really is.

It seems that something in the camera or software prioritised keeping the colours looking right over keeping the brightness accurate, so adding extra blue light has actually subtracted red.

Mickey being determined to join in and do something could've gone in a number of directions, like a heroic death.

Fortunately Mickey survives, though he is pretty damn heroic here. He doesn't finally summon his courage and do one useful thing right at the end, the guy is actually taking charge and coming up with plans every step of the way.

But the highlight of the episode for me is when the Doctor calls him an idiot. It's the perfect payoff to their whole relationship, as like in World War Three he's stuck in a room again, relying on him to do the computer hacking to save the day. This time however 'idiot' isn't an insult, it's a sign that he knows he's there and is trusting him to get the job done. And he does not let him down.

This isn't the first Doctor Who revival story to feature strange robot creatures invading the streets of London, a plan to stop the transmitter, a character finding their own self worth and stepping up to save the day, and the villainous controller dying in an exploding factory at the end, but any similarities to the episode Rose actually strengthen it I reckon.

The two episodes are the start and finish of Mickey's character arc, with him going from being a useless coward to stepping up and being assertive. He was the real hero of this story, while Rose... had her own personal story going on.

The episode also has a proper action movie ending, with Cyber-Lumic trying to climb the Zeppelin rope ladder. It's not the first time the Doctor and Rose have been chased up a ladder this series. And once again Pete gets to be the one to save everyone at the end. Sorry, I'll stop comparing this to other episodes now.

Unfortunately for Rose, Pete's not interested in adopting a daughter and he runs off. Things don't seem to have worked out as horribly as the Doctor thought they might, Mickey seems pretty happy, but Rose went into the gingerbread house of temptation and she got burned.

Meanwhile Mickey gets a proper companion exit. This is his Parting of the Ways, where he realises he's got nothing left back home and he's found a better way to live. Also he wants to be here with his doppelganger gran... who actually didn't appear again. It's fine, we only really needed the one scene with her last episode to understand why Mickey feels he has to stay here. Hopefully he got the carpet fixed before going to Paris to fight the Cybermen.

It's funny how the Poochie of the show has to go because his planet needs him, but Mickey was actually a pretty good character. And it's a proper classic companion exit, as companions either find that they've landed in the correct time and leave, fall in love and decide to stay with someone, or they have to stay to be a hero and leader. It's just a shame he's like the third guy in the revival series to have two stories in the TARDIS and then leave.

Also it's weird that the traffic in the background seems to be back to normal. Plus this music seems to be looping too much and it's starting to get annoying.

Anyway, Mickey goes to save the world in a van again, while Rose returns to our universe's Jackie to give her a hug and make sure everyone in the audience gets that it was a different Jackie who got killed, and our one's still fine.

RATING

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Alright now I have to decide, is The Age of Steel better or worse than Man of Steel? Or Age of Ultron?

Actually I have a better idea, I'll compare it to the first part. It's got considerably less Lumic and Mr Crane, it really rushes the death of Ricky so it can get to the Cybus factory, and it's got that dumb parking tickets joke, so I'd probably rank it a little lower. The bit with Mickey saving the day is so good that I want to give it a better score, but it's hard not to see all the flaws. Like that music going on and on at the end.

Though as a mid-season two-parter this was so much better than Aliens of London, partly because it's got a better premise. The parallel universe idea let them bring Pete back, go a bit Black Mirror with the themes, give the Cybermen a new origin story, and get rid of Mickey forever while giving him a satisfying conclusion. The episode's still got its moments of light comedy, but it's several levels above 'farting aliens', and it gives enough focus to the character drama as Rose loses Mickey after he finds himself.

  7/10

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NEXT EPISODE

Next time on Sci-Fi Adventures, the Doctor Who continues with its first post-Mickey episode, The Idiot's Lantern.

But if you've still got The Age of Steel on your mind then you're welcome to leave a comment below.