Doctor Who Social Club

Rose is a dinner lady again for the 2nd time this series. :)

I like a good steampunk airship alternate reality. I quite like a lot of what's hinted at in this alt universe, though it doesn't all come together perfectly. I enjoyed the UK having a president, one that is no-nonsense and willing to stand for what is right, Don Warrington did a good job. We get basically no explanation for how we ended up in the alternate universe, but I can let that slide.

I was aware of cybermen as a general villain prior to watching this, but this reboot showing them having an origin in a billionaire's immortality fantasy is pretty horrifying, and sets them up as a more horrifying monster than I remember from the original series. I enjoyed Roger Lloyd Pack as Lumic. As villains go he is kind of pedestrian evil, but I think that works for this story. He has no moral compass or drive beyond saving himself, and thinks he knows what is best for everyone else. As the Doctor mentions, this universe is very close in many respects to our current reality. I'd argue 20 years later things are even worse. We don't get a daily download, many of us are permanently doomscrolling, and we have far too many tech billionaires being sycophantic about machine intelligence and human connected systems. I could easily see engineers working 24/7 at the office putting on pop music to mask out the horrible stuff they have to do.

As much as I'm not a huge body horror fan, I like that this episode (and the following, as I recall) pulls no punches about how awful everything is. As a kid watching this it was pretty scary, and it set a tone for how I'd think about technology the rest of my life. At the end of the episode we get an pretty good cliffhanger ending.

Praise aside, there's a lot of stuff in this plot that doesn't really go anywhere - A throwaway mention of a curfew, class-divided militarized slums, but also there's people even lower down who're actually being taken away, Jealous rose is back going at a nobody background character, cybus seems to own and control everything but also needs to get government approval.

• The big attention grabbing line during the cold open "Set sail for great Britain" is nationalistic and pandering and doesn't make any sense in the context.
• Rose smirking at the doctor when she realises he's hooked on a mystery is cute and delightful, but it completely undermines the whole overprotective "thou shalt not interfere" he was going on about for the first half of the episode.
• Mickey going off on his own to find his gran is nice, but he had so little time with her it doesn't feel like it really added anything beyond the Rickey setup.
• The earpod hack could be more subtle. Sure, let's make a giant antenna pop out of it, never mind who might be nearby to see it happen. It doesn't work as a foreshadowing device because we already know this is a cyberman story.
• Production-wise You can see "Cybus Welcome.jpg" scrolling on roses phone, I'm guessing it was just a fully green jpeg they uploaded onto it, then edited in everything afterwards.
• Also during the download scene the frozen crowd has far too few people, after a crowd of about 15 folk the rest of the street is empty behind them.
• Torchwood is repeatedly mentioned in this episode, which doesn't make sense. Torchwood only came about because the doctor existed in the main universe.
• One of the rebels says "Protocol Search" - why, just call it a search, it's fine. Not everything needs to be jazzed up with technobabble.
• In that same scene "Your father had a bike" - I'm trying to figure out what that phrase means but I have no idea.

Finally, I hate the "delete" catchphrase. The cybermen could have just killed the guests. As maniacal as Lumic is, the one thing he isn't is funny, so there's no reason to program the cybermen to use a catchphrase, as I could imagine a Musk or Altman type villain doing.