I still think this is a better "first half of a finale" than Army of Ghosts; it has a more interesting setup scenario - whether or not you think the 'Irish' stuff is remotely coherent, it has a different feel to everything else we've had up to that point - and it uses the Cybermen (and the "humans fighting them") more interestingly.
I still don't think it's particularly good though, for all that. I think I actually prefer Battle as a finale because it (like the rest of that season) felt more experimental. This second season feels too much like Chibnall letting his fannish side get the better of him - and when you compare it with, say, "No Future", you can see how inadequate it is.
One vaguely clever thing about the twee Oirish stuff is its gentle bucolic pastoral nature is exactly the sort of thing the BBC tends to put out on a Sunday evening (hello Countryfile). So if you want you can read it as that world getting invaded / distorted by the logic of a gritty Sawardian Cyber space opera. The cutting between wildly different, seemingly completely unrelated plot lines that seem to be from different genres does feel like a Moffat thing (he’ll also try it in Flux), but I think Steven would’ve resolved that narrative tension within the same episode (“aha this is how these two things click together!”) instead of what we get here which is … um… not bringing them together in the first part and very offhandedly fusing them with a hand wave line in the second part that makes no logical sense (the Doctor is seeing the same Oireland scenes we’re seeing, apparently, despite nothing whatsoever suggesting that this is the case).
I still think this is a better "first half of a finale" than Army of Ghosts; it has a more interesting setup scenario - whether or not you think the 'Irish' stuff is remotely coherent, it has a different feel to everything else we've had up to that point - and it uses the Cybermen (and the "humans fighting them") more interestingly.
I still don't think it's particularly good though, for all that. I think I actually prefer Battle as a finale because it (like the rest of that season) felt more experimental. This second season feels too much like Chibnall letting his fannish side get the better of him - and when you compare it with, say, "No Future", you can see how inadequate it is.
One vaguely clever thing about the twee Oirish stuff is its gentle bucolic pastoral nature is exactly the sort of thing the BBC tends to put out on a Sunday evening (hello Countryfile). So if you want you can read it as that world getting invaded / distorted by the logic of a gritty Sawardian Cyber space opera. The cutting between wildly different, seemingly completely unrelated plot lines that seem to be from different genres does feel like a Moffat thing (he’ll also try it in Flux), but I think Steven would’ve resolved that narrative tension within the same episode (“aha this is how these two things click together!”) instead of what we get here which is … um… not bringing them together in the first part and very offhandedly fusing them with a hand wave line in the second part that makes no logical sense (the Doctor is seeing the same Oireland scenes we’re seeing, apparently, despite nothing whatsoever suggesting that this is the case).
Unfortunately, in execution these scenes are SO “look at our little Irish stereotypes” that they’re kinda hard to sit through. The Irish Times even ran a piece about how patronising & cliched it all was - https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/doctor-who-landed-in-1950s-rural-ireland-last-night-the-fiddles-never-stopped-1.4183190