Doctor Who: Ascension of the Cybermen Review

SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE WHOLE EPISODE. Insofar as there is anything to be spoiled.

Ascension of the Cybermen is the kind of episode you only review if you’re paid to (So what am I doing here? Never mind). It may not be a clunker that physically upheaves you from the sofa out of bafflement, but this isn’t an episode to be watched as much as it is to be waited through. Billed as an epic space opera as well as the first of two episodes that threaten to rewrite the deepest foundation of Doctor Who’s history, Ascension instead redefines what it means to be a story of setup: 50 minutes of running away from Cybermen that reveals very little. It is mechanical, it is cold and if I didn’t love talking about this show so much, I would have already forgotten I had watched it.

On the face of it, that sounds very obviously wrong and grouchy. Clearly things happen in Ascension: the gang is split into two during a siege scenario, the Doctor discovers a portal to Gallifrey, the Master is back and Yaz & Graham…well, they get to run around a spaceship. Chibnall even makes a genuinely interesting addition to the Cybermen mythos: in adopting Moffat’s approach to the villains as an ideology rather than a species, Chibnall then goes one step further by painting the episode’s Cyberleader as a religious zealot who is driven by an almost biblical sense of purpose.

The difficulty is that each of the above developments are empty – setups for a story that is actually going to arrive next week. Chibnall makes the decision to delay his huge narrative cards in favour of a tense buildup to the main event - a decision that's not inherently inexplicable. On paper, this means that two series of character investment should be about to pay off in spades, as Chibnall takes a gun and points it at each member of the cast. No-one is more miffed than I am that I shrugged my way through every second of it.

It doesn’t help that after last week’s terrific and electric 'The Haunting of Villa Diodati', the main characters are returned to their usual, stoic, functional roles (quote a single line spoken by any of them, I dare you). There’s precious little insight into anyone’s state of being: more time is spent on Yaz and Graham than almost ever before and yet we learn less about them in 50 minutes of screentime than a weaker episode of Avatar can impart about its characters in 20. Even the religious Cyber Zealot is a pretense – a new motivation for the same old plan, rather than a new storyline that actively capitalises on it.

This taps into a part of television and film I’ve become more obsessed with lately, wherein the appeal of drama is not in the ‘what’ but the ‘how’. How effectively a scenario is dramatized can make all the difference – it’s the main reason that the recent His Dark Materials drove me up the wall and why I think it mostly fell flat for general audiences. For most people I talk to, the subject of one Steven Moffat is usually met with hostility, but a thing that many stopped giving him credit for over time was how fucking great he often was at dramatizing his stories. His episodes are breathless and stacked with ideas that constantly twist the characters and the narrative out of shape. Even his sloppier episodes like Let’s Kill Hitler are written with a verve that is by and large missing from the current era.

Back during the Series 11 finale I twisted myself into a humph by arguing that Chibnall’s big issue isn’t in failing to create drama, but in being uninterested in creating it. Just before this Series aired, he even gave the following insight to the AV Club:

“I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’ll be clashes or risks between the companions. There are different approaches in different stories. But what I come back to is, this is an incredibly strong friendship group that they can have differences of opinion, but it’s not like there’s going to be some spectacular fallings out among this group.”

God knows I’m not about to extrapolate anything concrete about Chibnall or his approach from a single interview quote. It is incredibly likely that he is niceness incarnate (the devotion of his production crew backs this up tenfold) and I am incredibly jealous and respectful of the amount of work he has put in to climb to the top of one of the most prolific shows on television. I do find his quote telling, though. Because it would be one thing for Chibnall to point a gun at a group of characters we don’t care about, but in this case the gun isn’t even loaded.

For an example of this in miniature: just before the midpoint of Ascension of the Cybermen, Yaz and Graham decide that the only way to propel their shuttle across space into a carrier ship is to reroute all power into the engines. That’s it. There’s no caveat, no real risk – just five minutes of everyone bracing for a jolt. No-one even worries about the oxygen and all of them end up surviving the trip.

As with many moments in the current run, I’m often reminded of better scenes from previous series. In this case, I keep going back to the Matt Smith episode ‘Flesh and Stone’. In it, there’s a scene where the Doctor, Amy, River Song and a group of soldiers/clerics (bear with) are trapped in a corridor; Weeping Angels on one side and a locked door on the other. The Doctor realises that he can bypass all power into the door to kickstart it, but in doing so he will have to turn off the lights, meaning the Angels will be able to close in. All this whilst River Song’s trust is under question and Amy has begun counting down from ten as a Weeping Angel starts shutting off her brain. The Doctor and everyone weigh up the danger of the situation, get into position, take a deep breath and turn off the lights. Cue total darkness, with only the flare of the soldier’s gunfire lighting up the advancing Angels and the gradually opening door.

The two scenes share a lot of things in common and both of them end with little to no casualties. But only one of them is exciting.

I haven’t even mentioned the tertiary subplot involving an Irish lad who is found in the road as a baby and then grows up to be a police officer who can be shot off a cliff without any sign of injury. It’s a shame because, on a purely economical level, it’s maybe the best piece of writing Chibnall has done for Doctor Who. It’s also chopped into pieces and inserted seemingly at random throughout the episode. The ending – where the man is taken to a room by his ageless father and electrocuted – isn’t revelatory so much as it is confusing. A pure tease for next week that’s wrapped up just in time for the Master to jump out of a portal with the words ‘To Be Continued’ tattooed on his forehead. The whole hour is it's own trailer for next week’s episode, wherein Chibnall may or may not drop a live grenade down the pants of Doctor Who’s fandom. Most fans are tying themselves in knots waiting for the incoming continuity explosion, but at this point it feels tiring trying to muster the enthusiasm. Will any of it genuinely matter? Have any of the last 20 episodes suggested that might be the case? And who cares how exciting a revelation it is if the people it's happening to aren't as exciting in and of themselves?

“Everything is about to change,” the Master gleefully intones.

…

...

Okay.

#DoctorWho #chrischibnall