With villains as old as the Cybermen and the Daleks, it can be difficult to come up with new stories for them after fifty-seven years. The Doctor has beaten them so many times and in so many different contexts that it can be hard to come up with new ways to make them a threat. During the classic series this problem led to a few extended hiatuses for these enemies. The Daleks, after having emphatically been wiped out forever in “The Evil of the Daleks” in 1967 didn’t show up again until “Day of the Daleks” in 1972; and the Cybermen, after their grandest appearance during the early years of Doctor Who in 1968’s “The Invasion” weren’t brought back until 1975’s “Revenge of the Cybermen” without making a single appearance during the entirety of the Third Doctors’ run.
Of course now these villains are too much a staple of the show that the BBC will never allow them to disappear for more than a couple years, and yet there has to be some way to keep them an engaging and intimidating terror. Fortunately for “Ascension of the Cybermen”, while the Daleks struggle to maintain that, the Cybermen don’t so much. The Cybermen are humanoid and work for that same reason the Borg do in Star Trek, by embodying the fear of losing our humanity and becoming mindless drones to a machine of evil domination. And yet while Doctor Who has repeatedly played out the narrative of the Daleks exterminating the universe and being the great evil of an epic galactic war, the Cybermen have never really gotten that treatment -their target more often than not has just been Earth or some other singular planet or vessel.
“Ascension of the Cybermen” takes them to that end, foreshadowed by Captain Jack back in “Fugitive of the Judoon”: the great adversaries of a generations-spanning galactic war in which they’ve suppressed and destroyed most of the human race. The Cybermen themselves suffered immense losses, and at the point we enter it, seem to be in little better a position than the humans. But Ashad “the Lone Cyberman” in possession of that Cyberium from last episode has plans to rejuvenate the Cybermen and finish the war. It’s an incredibly compelling situation to put the Doctor and her companions down in the midst of, forced to confront the remnants of a war and the near impossible odds of righting it.
So naturally the episode begins in a small Irish village sometime in the early twentieth century. Doctor Who is no stranger to this kind of storytelling, supplementing a larger narrative with a smaller, seemingly inconsequential one at the head of the episode. And we’re trained to expect the general direction it’s going in to be some greater insight into a significant character, most likely the villain. But this episode makes the unconventional and sometimes detrimental choice to follow this subplot of an abandoned child adopted by a rural couple who grows up to join the Garda all through the show. The episodes’ editing already has some weaknesses: shots that seem to serve no purpose left in, short cuts and variant angles that result in unclear actions and spatial geography during intense sequences; but the transitioning between the high stakes and desperate attempts at survival of the main story with a scene of the young Brendan (Evan McCabe) going in for a job interview or sat down to dinner with his parents is some tonal whiplash that doesn’t fit with such urgent pacing.
It’s not until midway through the episode that this storyline takes an interesting turn when Brendan during a scuffle with a thief is shot off a cliff, only to come back to life in much the same way that we’ve seen countless times with Captain Jack. We see both his chief and his father respond to this miracle with some suspicion and it definitely seems to be leading to a major reveal or plot development that would connect it to the future events. Is Brendan Ashad? Is his father? Do either of them have something to do with the beginnings of this war or the Cybermen themselves (it wouldn’t surprise me given how often the Cybermen origin story has been rewritten)? Instead we check in on them one more time after an even more significant time jump to Brendans’ retirement party where he meets both his father and the chief but as their younger selves, who take him away to have his memory wiped. The process is torturous and involves electrodes to the head in the only obvious connection between Brendan and the Cybermen that this episode makes. It’s a thread that has to be picked up next week, but one that still feels wholly unconnected to the bigger story. There’s no indication drawn in the Doctors’ adventure either, leaving it as a “Mission to the Unknown” style narrative within this episode: an interesting standalone story, but completely irrelevant to “Ascension of the Cybermen.”
Not that I object to its content though. I think it’s definitely fascinating and in fact could use a little more fleshing out. There’s drama and intrigue to this life story and I want to know what Brendan made of his brush with death in the years before his brainwash. If it does tie in in some important way to Ashad’s story or that of his Cybermen, it might have been better served in full at the beginning of the next episode -which might leave less time for the more important plot and necessitate some structural reorganization (perhaps this part didn’t need to end with the Masters’ dramatic comeback, which we knew would happen at the end of the series anyway), but Doctor Who has pushed its run-time before, I see no reason it couldn’t for the twelfth series finale, given everything it has to resolve.
Some of this resolution could have been reserved for “Ascension of the Cybermen”, but like “Spyfall” it’s more content to be forty-nine minutes of set-up; though it moves with much more purpose and excitement than that earlier episode. In its’ first act, concerned with a decimated camp on a barren world and a handful of human survivors, it heavily recalls “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos”, but soon proves to be a better illustration of the cost of war in the utter hopelessness of their situation and a mere desperation to survive another attack. And they aren’t soldiers even, one of them confessing to the Doctor he was a schoolteacher. You feel the weight of this war on them, how they’ve had to live their whole lives in this kind of existence, Ethan (Matt Carver) having been trained by his father to hack into Cyber technology from as young as four, and Yedlarmi (Alex Austin) being so accustomed to an atmosphere of fear he’s essentially driven by it. And all of them are willing to leave behind their friends if their chances are so weak. The Doctor confirms early on that they are the last humans in this part of the galaxy as well, making it all the more impactful when one of them dies.
Through these losses and usually being the cause of them, Ashad remains a really good, visually striking, and subtly complex villain, still toeing that line of humanity and demonstrating its worst facets. The malicious glee in his voice when he considers sparing Ethan only to spread a message of his power or when he tells the Doctor via hologram that he’s going to kill them all rather than transform them is so much worse than it would be coming from any other Cyberman, and his human characteristics both physical and mental still stand out frighteningly. Patrick O’Kane is brilliant, playing this fanatic with a horrifying zealousness and complete lack of empathy, yet a hideously warped emotionality. His opening monologue is great (also providing a creative transition into the Doctor Who titles), and what more we learn of his story, that he voluntarily gave himself to the Cybermen before being rejected, yet has come to believe himself the Cyberman Messiah is chilling. He’s given a new name this episode: “the Cyberman who Makes Other Cybermen Scream”, when our characters witness him sadistically drilling into stasis Cyber warriors to upgrade them, eliciting cries of pain from even these emotionless husks. He brings menace to the Cybermen again, something they haven’t had on this level since perhaps the days of the Second Doctor. That being said, while some of the Cybermen technology introduced in this episode, such as their adrift ship, is terrifically ominously realized, it isn’t entirely without the usual camp. The cyber drones for instance, just flying decapitated Cybermen heads, do not convey the genuine distress they’re supposed to and are largely silly. If that must be the route, I’d have preferred flying Cybermats, thank you very much.
Of our mainstays, Graham and Yaz spend more time in immediate danger of such things as occupants of the human ship that escapes the forsaken planet, ultimately emerging in a battlefield of dead Cybermen and debris. It’s one of the richer space environments that I’ve seen on Doctor Who recently, haunting and desolate and with VFX on par with anything in a mainstream sci-fi movie (which is to say, decent). The two companions try as much as they can to lift spirits, being more optimistic and earnest than the other survivors and ultimately convincing acting captain Ravio (Julie Graham) against giving up -although in a funny scene, when asked for poignant final speeches, Graham and Yaz are the only ones to start. They board an abandoned Cyber ship with the power to get them to Ko Sharmus and the safe passage to the other side of the universe. Only once on board do they realize it’s carrying a vast Cyber army in stasis, and that’s just about the time that Ashad catches up to fulfil his purpose. Now stuck on a ship with no way of escape and thousands of swiftly awakening Cybermen (designed to their 70s look), the claustrophobic intensity is especially thrilling. The episode leaves Graham, Yaz, and these guest characters in the most imminent danger, with merely one door separating them from death. And just before the end, we see it burst through.
The Doctor, having escaped with a separated Ryan and Ethan aboard Ashad’s own cyber ship (which is a very Doctor thing to do) has no further encounters with Ashad himself this episode, despite his telling her that he was tracking her. Thanks to Ethan, they reach Ko Sharmus first, who is actually an old man on a temperate planet who stayed behind as a sort of ferryman as his fellow escaped prisoners and refugees crossed over the boundary into a new part of the galaxy. Game of Thrones’ excellent tertiary player Ian McElhinney lends considerable gravitas to this part, as he expounds on his history fighting in the great war and escaping a human processing camp with a handful of others to arrive at this prophetic place. Still, the boundary remains elusive, and you question his motives as urges the Doctor to move closer to sea for it to become apparent. A portal does open with no end in sight, Ko Sharmus having told them that nobody knows what’s beyond, only the certainty that it can’t be worse than the alternative, further exemplifying an unaccustomed degree of affecting pessimism. But then something happens that surprises even him, when the portal reveals the burning Gallifrey. The Doctor had just heard from Yaz the dire situation aboard the warship, and now things are complicated further, for her personally.
So of course now is the perfect time for the Master to show up unwelcome from the other side of the portal (in an outfit that looks swiped from the TARDIS wardrobe), with the foreboding message that everything is about to change forever. But then, the Doctor’s been told that before.
“Ascension of the Cybermen” thus leaves us in a bit of a precarious place for the series finale. There’s going to be a lot on its plate between delivering on this war story and the conclusion of the Ashad arc, whether or not the twentieth century Brendan storyline factors into that, and resolving the lingering tension between the Doctor and the Master, likely incorporating the true story of what happened to Gallifrey and the great secret that led the Master to destroy it. The episode is called “The Timeless Children” after all, which makes me concerned the Cybermen story is going to be condensed or simplified, or worse made merely a B-plot next to the Doctors’ greater personal reckoning. Oh, and also the companions need to have something to do, and a return of Jack is probably going to have to be squeezed in there somewhere to follow up on “Fugitive of the Judoon”… . It’s entirely possible that both stories can be interconnected organically, but that looks like a hard enterprise and possible signs of the show biting off more than it can chew. Each of these grand events for the franchise seem too important to share screen time with one another, and there’s nothing wrong with holding off on this big secret for another series or two, letting it hang over the Doctor and creating more interesting drama for her. I will wait with bated breath to see if Chris Chibnall can pull this off. At the very least he’s set up the pieces terrifically.
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