Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: Rise of the Cybermen

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I have new armchairs: they’re 1940s’ club-style, and I’m finding myself a little constricted by the arms—I keep mistyping things.

Actually, I don’t think I can live-blog in this chair. I can’t move my arms sufficiently.

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I’ve been sensible and moved to the Tibetan coffee table, my usual live-blogging position, and can now move my arms again.

Whoops, it started while I wasn’t looking.

Now, apparently, the “prototype” is “working”—but a man I’m going to call Owen until I get another name says “prototype” is the wrong word, as it implies a machine. The scientist, Dr Kendrick, apologises: “I should have said: it’s alive!”

And the Frankenstein analogy starts already.

Now Owen, now known as John Lumic, has his new creature—strangely Cyberman shaped—kill Dr Kendricks, who wants the creature ratified by the Geneva convention—Geneva convention? That doesn’t sound right—as a new form of life, and sets sail for Great Britain.

Credits.

Now the Doctor and Rose are roaring over shared experiences, and Mickey feels terribly left out, especially since the Doctor seems to be subjecting him to some kind of hazing—or forgetting him, Mickey says.

The Doctor says, no: “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

And, of course, the TARDIS console room blows up at that point. And oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, as the Doctor says the TARDIS is dead.

The TARDIS can’t be dead!

Nick says this is the first episode directed by Graeme Harper since “Revelation of the Daleks” in 1985.

The Doctor is ranting about how they fell out of the Vortex into some kind of “no-time,” but Mickey points out that they’re in London.

It’s not our London, despite the similarity of the dates. There are zeppelins. So they’re in a Jasper Fforde novel?

And Rose’s dad is alive. She sees him on a talking billboard, and Rose is, unsurprisingly, freaked out by this, but the Doctor says she can never see him, that he’s not her dad, he might have his own Rose and Jackie.

He certainly has much money, judging from the house and car. And he does have his own Jackie, though she’s much more of a shrew than the original Jackie—this one is annoyed that Pete has arranged her 40th birthday, when she’s “officially” thirty-nine. She’s also incredibly materialistic.

She draws attention to the fact that everyone is wearing earbuds: hers were a gift from John Lumic, which can’t be a good thing.

Meanwhile, Jackie has been calling “Rose! Rose!”—but Rose is in fact a Yorkshire terrier. I am partial to Yorkies, I admit.

Lumic is clearly not a well man, but that doesn’t justify his over-riding of Jackie’s earbuds, which causes a strangely Cybermannish arrangement to come out of her head, allowing him to download the security arrangements for Jackie’s party.

Lumic needs “extra staff”—and he appeals to a member of his staff who I’m fairly sure is called “Mr Crane,” who says he’s going on a “recruitment drive.”

Meanwhile, Rose has wandered off, and the Doctor is more than a little annoyed by this. Sitting on a bench by the Thames, Rose discovers that she has access to a mobile-phone network.

Torchwood reference! Drink!

The Doctor is trying to explain to Mickey why, comic books notwithstanding, you can no longer flip blithely between universes: once you could, but the Time Lords took that knowledge with them when they died.

Call back to “The Invasion,” one of the last Cyberman stories of the Patrick Troughton era, with the International Electromatics truck that Mr Crane uses to abduct a group of homeless men, except for one canny man who appears to be Brummie. He has an ugly accent, anyway.

Meanwhile, the Doctor finds one insignificant power cell that is clinging to life—he can’t charge it up, because he needs energy from his own universe: he breathes on it, and manically explains that “I just gave away ten years of my life! Worth every second!”

They’ll be able to return home in twenty-four hours.

The Doctor and Mickey find Rose, who is freaking out about the fact that her dad still married her mother, but she was never born. She wants to see them, and the Doctor is objecting—he appeals to Mickey to help him, but Mickey has his own things to take care of. The Doctor is trapped between his two companions, but Mickey tells him to go: “You can only chase after one of us. It’s never going to be me.”

Sure enough, the Doctor runs after Rose, and tells Mickey to be back in twenty-four hours.

MICKEY: Sure thing. If I haven’t found anything better.

Meanwhile, Pete and the British Prime Minister [President] are waiting for John Lumic at the airport, chatting about the state of the world. Lumic clearly has more influence than we’ve been given to understand.

Mickey, heading off somewhere, sees a soldier, who tells him he’s safe to pass: “The curfew doesn’t start ‘til ten”—and asks Mickey whether he’s been living up with the toffs in the zeppelins.

Somewhere else, Rose is telling the Doctor that Mickey’s mother couldn’t cope, his father only stuck around for a short while, and he was raised by his grandmother—ROSE: “She was such a great woman. She used to slap him . . .”—until she died in a fall down the stairs.

The Doctor feels quite guilty, until he’s distracted by everyone falling silent to listen simultaneously to “the daily download, published by Cybus Industries.” The bit where everyone laughs simultaneously at a joke we don’t hear is incredibly creepy.

When the Doctor realises that Cybus Industries owns Pete Tyler’s company, he agrees to go and see Rose’s alterna-parents.

Mickey, meanwhile, has reconnected with his grandmother, who is surprised to see her grandson, Rickey. She’s been worried that something terrible has happened to him. And the scene where he sees that the stair carpet is still rucked up at one corner, so his grandmother could trip on it, is devastating.

While they’re chatting, Mickey is grabbed off the street by people who are clearly friends of Rickey’s—Rickey, apparently, is “London’s most wanted.”

Meanwhile, Lumic’s voice over a recording—while Lumic himself is breathing through a respirator—is explaining to the Prime Minister [President] and Pete about the fact that he is saving the human brain, by preserving it in “a cradle of copyrighted chemicals.” Lumic needs permission to carry out his research, but the Prime Minister says it is not only unethical, it is obscene. He doesn’t even listen to the entire presentation before leaving.

Lumic doesn’t seem too fazed, though: he talks to Mr Crane, and Mr Crane shows how he has grafted earbuds onto the homeless men whom he earlier tricked into his van with the offer of free food.

Mr Crane finds it “irresistible” to use the earbudded men as toys, making them turn left, turn right, etc. But Lumic wants the men “upgraded”—Mr Crane sends them into a factory and when the sounds of screams filter out, asks a lackey to “cover up that noise.” “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” starts up.

Mickey and his new friends arrive at one of their hideouts, but Rickey is already there.

Meanwhile, Rose and the Doctor are crashing Jackie’s birthday party as waiters. Rose is not impressed, since she though the psychic paper could have done better, but the Doctor thinks there in a better position to hear gossip.

Rose is incredibly jealous of someone she’s never met called Lucy. I’m sorry, Drew, but that was clearly jealousy.

Damn, now I have to go and replace the words “Prime Minister” with the word “President.” I thought they’d said “President,” but I was distracted. Oh, well—maybe I’ll get around to that later.

Rose is not impressed to hear that she is now a Yorkie, but I can’t blame her for that. The Doctor, on the other hand, finds it hilarious.

Mr Crane is “mobile,” while Lumic is “arriving.” Is that deliberately obscure?

Mickey has been stripped to his knickers, but they’re confused by the fact that he’s human—and identical to Rickey.

RICKEY OFFSIDER: Well, it could be that Cybus Industries has perfected human cloning. Or, perhaps your dad had a bike?

Rickey points out that they aren’t wearing earbuds: they’re independent of Lumic’s network.

They know Lumic is on the move, and they’re following him. They’re armed, too—so they have some suspicion of what’s going on.

The Doctor, passing a partly open door, sees a computer, and can’t help his sticky-beaking. Rose is gobsmacked at seeing her mum again, while Pete is remembering Jackie’s twenty-first birthday: “A pint of cider down the George the Fourth.”

There was a pub in Picton called the George the Fourth—used to brew its own German beer. Not such a god pub now, though I feel guilty saying so.

Rose is chatting to Pete, who says he moved out last month. She doesn’t want her parents to split, but Pete suddenly realises he doesn’t know why he’s saying these things to a waitress.

And that’s the first sight of the Cybermen. Spoiler! Feet stomping down a gangplank.

Meanwhile, Rose is chatting to her mother outside.

Bugger, my Internet connection has gone flaky. I’ll finish this in one hit, then try and upload the rest.

Rose tries to chat to her mother about the dissolution of her marriage, but Jackie is—and I’m rather with her on this, though she is grotesquely classist in her expression—entirely unimpressed.

The Cybermen burst into the Tylers’ party, and Lumic tells the President that these are his children. Both the Doctor and the President know that these were once real people, and both are horrified.

The Cybermen claim to be “Human.2,” which sounds better than it types.

The Cybermen claim that every human will receive a free, compulsory upgrade, and if you refuse, you are deemed “incompatible” and promptly deleted. The President is deleted, but the Cybermen seem to be deleting everyone who runs away from them, which is bound to have a negative effect on their eventual numbers.

Pete, Rose, and the Doctor get out of the house, but Jackie is hiding in the basement, and a Cyberman is coming down the steps.

Rickey and the Brummie come running up, firing—but the five of them are surrounded by Cybermen now. The Doctor surrenders, thinking that this will stop the Cybermen from deleting them. The Cybermen says no: they are a rogue element, inferior, and they will perish under maximum deletion.

Cliffhanger!