13.20: Ascension of the Cybermen

In which Chris Chibnall gets the thesaurus out and finds another word for “rise”.

Broadcast: February 2020

Watched: July 2022

I watched this in mid July 2022. That I didn’t turn my scrappy notes into a post until mid-September is a mark of my enthusiasm. Anyway, it was roughly then I decided I needed to pick up the pace, because I realised I wanted to finish before the centenary and it was only a few weeks away.

“We’re carrying the cyberman that makes every cybermen scream.” Great line to sum up Chibnall: sounds terrifying, but if you think about it for half a second he’s... sort of just casually broken the cybermen the show has carefully set up since 2005, there?

Anyway. As a part one, this is quite good in a big dumb action sequence way! We start with a pre-credits monologue from Ashad, setting up the cybermen as a literal empire – this is bit less subtle than Moffat’s “eternal menace” thing. Weirdly, the show then seems to suggest that these seven people are the only surviving humans, which

    a) doesn’t fit with anything else the show says ever, and

    b) suggests the human race is dying out, even before half of these guys die. It also feels very Chibnall to wipe out the human race by accident because he wanted a dramatic sounding scenario and didn’t think about what would happen next. Oh well, race banks or semi-human races or something, I suppose.

The action bit is good – the flying cyberheads (“Cyberdrones!”) silly but sort of scary. There’s other good stuff, too: the escape sequence, the debris field of dead cybermen in space, the sense of being under siege and desperately trying for survival against the odds. LOL that everyone acts surprised when the ship they try to nick from the middle of the cyberwars has some cybermen on it.

The other half of the plot is the confusing Irish dream sequence about a baby being found and becoming a cop then getting his mind wiped. This doesn’t quite fit the timeless child story we get told in part two, though we don’t know it yet (regeneration/becoming a cop are the wrong way round). It’s also extremely weird, though appropriately dreamlike, that Brendan’s father and old boss are the same age as they were 50 years ago when they randomly kidnap him at the end. Brendan’s screaming seems to match the cyberman’s screaming, again without purpose.

As to the Irishness – it’s not just a casual feature, the entire physical and musical landscape of that bit of the story is very, very Irish – is it about making the Doctor other in some way?

It’s not bad. As the first half of a finale it beats the first half hour of Battle..., some of this is genuinely intriguing. But... what’s it about? How does Ashad’s choice to join the cybermen fit with the final destruction of humanity stuff? Why is he leading the cybermen despite being only semi-converted? (Is it because of the cyberium or is it just incoherent?) How does that map onto the Doctor/Brendan story? What’s Chibnall trying to say about Doctor Who or anything else? 

It’s all quite fun, but... you can pick any RTD/Moffat finale and say “this is the story of the Doctor losing Rose” or “facing insurmountable odds and fighting on to the death all the same” or whatever. This one... it’s not a failure in the way Battle was. But... what’s it for?

Oh, and at the very end, the Master’s appearance (“WOW! That’s a good entrance, right?”) is pretty cool... but “Be afraid Doctor, because everything is about to change” is a problem because, no, it isn’t.

Other things:

• What is the ascension, exactly? Is this just because RTD already did “rise”?

• The Doctor is still freaking out about the idea of the cybermen converting her companions, to such an extent that I wonder if the season 10 finale is one of the few bits of Who Whitaker actually watched.

• Why do cybermen want to wipe out humans anyway? Shouldn’t they be farming them or something?

• Oh right obviously the mute baby brother is the first to die, yeah. It’s also not massively obvious that the human leader is killed, he just disappears from the narrative.

• Grandpa Joe with a big stick. He’s fucking brilliant in an extremely silly role obviously, so cool.

• The design of the cyber war carrier, with lots of buttons and lights that look like bits of cybermen, is great.

• Cybermen are the end bosses in seasons 2, 8, 10 and 12; Daleks are the end bosses in 1 and 4; 3 is the Master; 5 is everyone; 6 & 7 are Moffat mythology stuff, 9 is sort of “Gallifrey”, 11 is Tim Shaw (fuck’s sake), 13 sort of doesn’t work like that but also Sontarans. Anyway. the show seems to have fallen into “You want a generic army? Use cybermen.” I’m just wondering why.

• “How is that possible?” I just wish the Doctor was the person who’d explain *why* things were possible, rather than just going around looking baffled.

• Yaz being able to message the Doctor just as they’re about to die (yeah right) is another example of characters just popping up where you need to or being able to talk to anyone.