Neil Gaimon makes his return to writing for Doctor Who after his very popular episode, The Doctor's Wife. This time he is writing for the Cybermen which he says is a monster that always terrified him as a child. I'd have to agree with him. I think the Cybermen are so much more scary than the Daleks as they have that thing about them where they sort of look human but not quite and it's that unnaturalness about them that makes them creepy.
As is tradition for the series, the Cybermen have gone through another redesign! I suppose that for a race that is continually trying to better itself than it's not beyond the realms of reason to suppose that they can look different each time we see them. Now they look more sleek and are far more agile, they can bend down and even run! There is no more of that slow march towards you that you could easily outrun! Also I'd say that in the region of the face they resemble more the Patrick Troughton era Cybermen which I thoroughly approve of.
Warwick Davis stars in this episode (also in Harry Potter so chalk another one up for me there for those of you playing along at home. In fact I think he has played a couple of characters in Harry Potter so I could get triple points for that. And he was in Star Wars... I wonder if anyone else has been in both Doctor Who and Star Wars?...hmmm.....yes! The original Boba Fett was in The Space Museum and The Time Warrior! God! I'm good!)
So yes I was taking about Warwick Davis, he plays a character called Porrage (don't think the name ever really gets explained) who SPOILER ALERT turns out to be the Emporer of ...I'm not sure.. But he's an Emporer anyway.
This episode is set several thousand years into the future and the Cybermen have seriously improved since they were destroyed by "love" at the end of Closing Time. In this episode it is revealed that the Emporer allowed the destruction of an entire galaxy in order to wipe out the Cyber threat! Yep, they really have made some serious improvements over the millennium then.
Matt Smith gives a great performance as the Doctor is slowly taken over by the Cyber Controller. There are many scenes of him arguing with himself effectively as he and the Cyber Controller who is in charge of half of the Doctor's brain do battle with each other over a game of chess. I always think that must be really tough for an actor, to keep switching between two characters like that. The Doctor does get a slight respite from the Cyber Controller when he slaps a gold ticket to the implants on his face. For the first time in the new series we see that the Cybermen still have a problem with gold. You can tell Neil Gaimon is a proper fan the way he slips in these references to the past.
Overall I really like the new Cybermen who have some cool tricks up their sleeves too such as allowing their hands to detach to sneak up on people etc. Whilst I enjoyed the episode I do not think it compares very well to Gaimons previous episode, The Doctor's Wife, but then that was just so making that maybe it's unfair to compare the two.
No comments:
Post a Comment