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2nd Season Dr. Who - Rise of the Cybermen - 5 star poll - SPOILERS AHOY !
27 Oct 2006 18:28:30 -0700
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georgeavalos0...
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"Rise of the Cybermen"
10-27-06 Dr. Who
pv+usenet...
5 stars (Bill, Steve, Woz)
0-1 stars (Poulsen, Mitnick, Levin)
Lizard...
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3.75
The sure sign you're in an alternate world -- Zeppelins.
More angst for Rose. I'm sorry, but the point of Doctor Who is wonder
and strangeness, not character development. I don't mind it when it
happens in the background, but the new Doctor Who is developing Rose
more than the Doctor. Companions are there to scream to let the Doctor
pbowles...
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I think this is unavoidable. The Doctor has too much baggage, in the
sense that we've got this character stretching back 26 years about whom
we've traditionally learned very little - any effort to develop him now
is going to step on the toes of a lot of fans with their own cherished
ideas or who simply feel the 'mystery' of the character is fundamental
to the show (and heaven forbid that they try something like giving him
a name). Moreover, within the story context it's actually plausible -
this character who's been roaming time and space for 900 years isn't
going to have his perceptions or attitudes affected as profoundly by
his adventures as a girl from a London council estate. I don't mind
Rose's character development, but I do mind that it was handled rather
badly and inconsistently this season (especially in the next
two-parter, when the character's portrayal, while good in both
episodes, is inconsistent between them - in one she's more 'Season 1
Rose' and in the other 'Developed Season 2 Rose').
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BTR1701...
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I don't mind her character being developed, I'm just incredibly bored
with all her constant daddy issues. Okay, you miss having a dad growing
up. I get it. We don't need episode after episode about it.
Lizard...
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More importantly, to my mind, it was dealt with very well in Father's
Day. She got to meet her father, learn what sort of man he was, and be
with him when he died. That was very nicely done. This just seems like
overkill.
pbowles...
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It becomes relevant later in the season, but I wasn't happy with the
way they did that.
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Next week: Rose's father turns out to be the Emperor Dalek!
pbowles...
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Close. Her grandfather's a Cyberman.
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The week after that: Astoundingly, Rose goes back in time to a few
years before her birth and helps her father and mother meet!
pbowles...
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Yes, the episode is called "Back to the Past"...
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Season finale; Rose learns her father, in addition to being the
Emperor Dalek, is actually the Other -- and thus, probably Doctor Who!
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know there's a monster coming. :) Or, sometimes, to pack high
explosives.
The other issue I had is that if you know any Doctor Who history, you
know it's cybermen being built, so keeping them in the dark for most
of the episode doesn't build drama. (Nor does titling it 'rise of the
Cybermen') OTOH, if you don't know Doctor Who history, you don't know
pbowles...
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But was that really the point? Sometimes a delayed revelation spoils a
cliffhanger (as in the season finale to my mind), but we *do* know it's
the Cybermen coming here. What we don't know is how or when the
revelation will come (well, how at any rate. Of course we know the
"when" is likely to be the end of the episode). As I watched the
episode, the cliffhanger I was waiting for wasn't finding out who the
monsters are (the silhouette in the pre-title sequence is sufficiently
clearly handlebar-headed to reveal that), but more what their new
incarnation looks like and, more than that, what the Doctor's reaction
to finding Cybermen there would be.
OTOH, if you don't know Doctor Who history, you don't know
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why seeing cybermen again is so cool.
pbowles...
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No, but if you're a six or twelve year old watching, you know that
seeing big menacing robots that smash things is cool. Of course the
Cybermen aren't actually robots, but to all external appearances they
are (why, both here and in the finale, newscasters insist on referring
to them as 'metal men' rather than the better-known if inaccurate
concept 'robots' I'll never know).
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Nice to see Mickey/Rickey getting to do things. And his line "You can
only chase after one of us, and we both know it's going to be her" was
excellent. It's nice when the second banana KNOWS it, and reacts with
appropriate hurt and anger.
pbowles...
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Mickey gets a good part in this story, but it strikes me as just being
too obviously set up to produce the resolution it does. The Doctor's
disregard for Mickey in the story, quite apart from raising the
question "Why did he bring him along anyway?", is jarring after the
character's development in earlier episodes, and seems put in to fuel
Mickey's dissatisfaction rather than because it's plausible or natural
for the Doctor to treat him that way - especially after the Doctor's
and Rose's conversation about taking Mickey for granted in this very
episode.
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David B...
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4.25. I haven't seen the Cybermen for ages. Nice to see them again.
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Alane...
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It's always hard for me to judge the first of a two-parter because
it's setting up things for part 2.
Anyhow, I'll give it a 3.8.
One thing I'm wondering. Isn't the concept between the Daleks at
the end of series 1 and these parallel universe Cybermen the same?
That is, humans are being used for horrible experiments -- except
in the case of the Daleks, they end up very short.
pbowles...
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There is some similarity - in both the season 1 finale and this story,
the Daleks/'Cybermen are portrayed as having a religious mission (John
Lumic instructs his Cybermen to carry out "the good work"), and both
use humans in one way or another, but that's about it for similarity
(well, aside from the Cybermen now shouting "Delete! Delete!" and both
Cybers and Daleks portrayed as lacking emotion). The Daleks used humans
to propagate the Daleks for the sake of having more Daleks, and the
suggestion was that the Daleks were a meld of human and Dalek genetic
material rather than just former humans in battle armour - think of it
being a bit like cloning an extinct species by injecting its genetic
material into a living one. Humans provided the tissue, but the genetic
material was Dalek. The Cybermen are portrayed as upgrading humans for
the humans' sake (as they see it) rather than the Cybermen's.
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Michael Bowker...
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What happened to the gold weakness and no cybermats? I liked the
pbowles...
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It's intended to be the way the Cybermen develop in the parallel
universe - they start on Earth rather than Mondas and get going a few
years later, but they're different Cybermen. There's a small comment
near the start of the next episode alluding to that.
The
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pbowles...
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He expects the humans to act like the humans he knows too, even though
they're in a different universe. A Cyberman is a Cyberman just as a
human is a human.
Also, I thought we knew a little about the origin of
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pbowles...
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That's the bit I find puzzling, I admit. The Doctor seems to know
instantly that they're brains-in-boxes, as does a character in the
finale after learning that they're Cybermen.
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pbowles...
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Third? Aren't you talking about Baker's adventures in N-space, or
wherever it was? It's possible to rationalise that by suggesting that
you could cross between parallel but similar dimensions reasonably
easily, but dimensions portrayed as fundamentally different spatial
dimensions are a different story - then again, was N-space actually a
separate dimension or a strange phenomenon within ours?
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pbowles...
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Maybe they just had rituals to follow which kept things working even
though they'd forgotten the original point behind the rituals.
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Michael Bowker...
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Yep I agree with your questions. Weren't the Cybermen developed to
fight a war with the planet of gold people (who kept hiding their planet
from them?)
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Michael Bowker...
zeppelins, not that fond of this.
pv+usenet...
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These aren't our cybermen! *
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I'll give it a 1.5
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Jaime M. de Castellvi...
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Not London *again* (even with a chokeful of zeppelins)! Oy!
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