The Age of Steel

First of all, I was slightly disappointed by the cliffhanger resolution, and the progress of our heroes through the streets of Card- London, avoiding Cybermen and the controlled humans awaiting upgrade was strangely uninvolving. I did appreciate the ease with which information was imparted in the blue van scene, though, tweaking the viewer's assumptions from 'Rise of the Cybermen' about the characters. Ricky turns out to have more similarities to Mickey than his physical appearance; and Pete turns out to have compromised himself - and fatally, Jackie and all his party guests - for the purpose of opposing Lumic, although his deeper motivation for opposing Lumic is not explored, which is a pity. Was he hoping to pick up a large slice of Cybus Industries after Lumic was exposed, or (more likely in the context of the episode) was he a quiet crusader for private enterprise against monolithic corporatism?

This year's Doctor Who is more conscious of the need to protect the backstory; hence Rose recognises the Cybermen from the helmet in Van Statten's museum in 'Dalek', and the Doctor acknowledges that there are Cybermen in 'our' universe too, except that they are from another 'ordinary world'; thus there is a possibility that in a future season we will meet Cybermen from Mondas as well as (I presume) these parallel world Cybermen later in this series in 'Army of Ghosts' and 'Doomsday'.

The Doctor declares that he wants a hot dog at one stage, and Mrs Moore refers to it as 'mechanically recovered meat'. These episodes have in some respects been mechanically recovered fragments of the 'classic series' strung together into something appetizing. There have been homages to the 1968 Cyber-tale 'The Invasion' all the way through; John Lumic owes something to that story's Tobias Vaughan, and one of his companies, International Electromatics, was Vaughan's in that story. There is even an infamous rope ladder scene, though 'The Age of Steel''s equivalent took the rescue-of-attractive-woman model and turned it into a redemptive confrontation. The stark sihouette of Battersea Power Station recalls, marginally, 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth'. Lumic seems like an attempt to give the Cybermen their Davros figure but the fact that he isn't as impressive is to my mind dramatically effective. As the Cyber-controller, he is the creation of his own 'children' - after he rejects them and declares that he will only upgrade with his last breath, the Cybermen rebel and decide that he should 'breathe no more' and be reborn as their platonic ideal of a parent, forever monitoring their activities and approving their every mood. Growing up, as emphasised on 'Doctor Who Confidential', is a theme of this story, but it applies to the Cybermen as much as to Mickey. Like their counterparts on 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', the vampires, they have been denied the possibility of self-realisation.

The Doctor's easy bonding with Mrs Moore reminds the viewer of the gift he has for finding companions. With Mickey gone we return to the Doctor and Rose, but I can't believe that we will see the smugness of the first two episodes of the season back again. Rose's faith in the Doctor as a sort of exclusive comfort blanket has been shaken several times in the last few weeks, and I hope that she is depicted as more independent in the remaining episodes. Her farewell conversation with Mickey suggests that she is becoming more self-aware, particularly of her own selfishness. With Billie Piper now committed to recording 'The Shadow in the North', the second of Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart series, in the summer, the removal of Rose from the series is advancing upon us (which 'School Reunion' began actively to set up) and it's going to be intriguing to see where her character develops over the remaining episodes this season.

I thought that the emotional exploration of the converted humans within the Cybermen was successful; the scene where the Jackie-Cyberman recognised Pete was competently done, and was one of many scenes where the audience is left to ponder how uniform and how unemotional the Cybermen actually are. The Jackie-Cyberman is aware of itself as an individual 'unit' in the greater whole and 'cares' - if that is the right word - about the destiny of the Cyber-species. A pity that there wasn't a more explicable reason for it to defer the processing of Pete and Rose - a line about the need to interrogate them before they were condemned for incineration as 'rogue units' would have been appreciated. I was affected when Sally the Cyberman became self-aware, too; I can't believe so many people on the Outpost Gallifrey forums said that they laughed. Appropriate, too, that the 'emotional inhibiter' was connected to the Cyberman's steel heart; the science of Doctor Who has probably always owed more to traditional poetic metaphors than to realistic or pseudo-realistic technology.