After the swooning romance of The Girl in the Fireplace, Series 2 slams the tone into reverse and gives us cold steel, corporate dread, and one of the most famous monsters in the show’s history clanking back into view. “Rise of the Cybermen” is a slow-burn setup episode, and it uses that time well, building a whole parallel world, twisting the knife in Rose, and giving Mickey the spotlight he’s been quietly craving. It ends on a cliffhanger that had me shouting at the screen, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
A world that’s almost right
The TARDIS tumbles out of reality itself, falling through the Void between universes, and dies. Properly dies, with a dark console and no power and the Doctor genuinely frightened for a moment before he coaxes a single surviving power cell back to a faint glow. They’ve landed on Earth, but not their Earth. Zeppelins hang in the London sky. Everyone wears EarPods, sleek little ear devices that feed information straight into their heads, all manufactured by the omnipresent Cybus Industries. It’s a fantastic bit of world-building, familiar enough to unsettle and wrong in all the small ways that matter. The Doctor and Rose spend a while just gawping at it, and the show is happy to let them: a fleet of zeppelins crossing the evening sky, strangers stopping dead in the street to receive a daily download through their EarPods, jokes and headlines and lottery numbers piped straight into a nation’s skulls twice a day. It’s meant to look convenient. It looks like a leash. And when Pete Tyler’s beaming face turns up on a giant advertising screen, the trap the episode is quietly building around Rose clicks into place.
And then the knife. On this world, Pete Tyler is alive. Rose’s father, the man she watched die and risked everything to save back in Father’s Day, is here, breathing, thriving, a self-made millionaire flogging a health drink with the slogan “Trust me on this.” He doesn’t know Rose. In this world he and Jackie never had a daughter; they have a little dog named Rose instead, which is the kind of detail that’s funny until it isn’t. The Doctor warns her, gently and firmly, that this is not your father. But of course she can’t leave it alone, and Billie Piper plays Rose’s helpless pull toward this stranger with Pete’s face beautifully. Everything the show built in Father’s Day comes flooding back.
The ultimate upgrade
The architect of all this is John Lumic, head of Cybus Industries, a brilliant dying man kept alive by a wheelchair full of life support and utterly consumed by his terror of death. Roger Lloyd-Pack plays him as a proper mad-scientist grotesque, and his solution to mortality is the stuff of nightmares: if the body fails, replace it. Cut out the human brain, drop it into an indestructible steel shell, wire in an emotional inhibitor so the poor thing doesn’t go mad from what’s been done to it, and call the result an upgrade. Human point two. The next stage of evolution, whether humanity consents or not. The EarPods are the tell. They aren’t just a gadget, they’re a leash Lumic already holds, and the episode’s most chilling beat is a demonstration of exactly that, when he freezes an entire street of pedestrians mid-step, hundreds of people locked rigid while the city carries on around them, purely to prove he can. When he takes his ultimate upgrade to the President of Great Britain and is flatly refused, told to his face that it’s an abomination, Lumic doesn’t bother to argue. He simply decides that consent was never really on the table.
The show is smart about how it doles out the horror. We see the homeless herded off the streets, because they won’t be missed, into converter factories, and we hear the machinery, and we’re spared just enough that our imagination does the rest. When the Cybermen finally march out in formation, gleaming and identical and utterly without pity, they land as genuinely disturbing rather than campy. The AV Club made the point that this is the version of the Cybermen the revived show needed, and it’s the body horror dressed up as progress that does it, a company turning people into product. Everyone plugged into the same corporate feed, nodding along in unison, and Lumic didn’t have to force the EarPods on anyone. They queued up.
Mickey, Ricky, and the spare part
If Rose’s story here is about a father, Mickey’s is about himself, and it’s the most rewarding thread in the episode. Stranded in this world, he runs into his own parallel double: Ricky, a resistance fighter with the Preachers, a scrappy cell trying to bring Cybus down. Ricky is everything Mickey has always suspected he isn’t, decisive and respected and the leader, and it forces a reckoning Mickey’s been circling since he clocked himself as the tin dog back in School Reunion. He’s spent so long as the one who waits by the phone, the spare part, the third wheel to the Doctor and Rose, that meeting a version of himself who matters lands like a challenge. There’s a real ache to it. In the space of a single conversation he realises that the parallel version of him is out here grieving people and leading a resistance, while the real Mickey has spent two years being told to wait in the car. Noel Clarke plays the wound without ever wallowing in it, and you can watch him deciding, more or less on the spot, that he’s finished being anyone’s punchline.
It helps that the Preachers give the parallel world some texture and stakes beyond Lumic’s boardroom. Ricky, the loyal Jake, and the wonderfully down-to-earth Mrs Moore are people already living under the boot of a company that owns their government and their heads, and they know exactly how bad things are about to get. The Doctor, meanwhile, is unusually powerless, and the episode is smart to keep him that way. No working TARDIS, no reputation on this world, no backup and no easy technobabble hatch to escape through, just a man improvising on hostile ground while the net draws tighter. It makes Lumic’s slow, patient advance feel genuinely dangerous, because for once you’re not certain the Doctor has an answer already up his sleeve.
What it leaves behind is the Cybermen back and properly horrible, not the clanking retro villains of old but something colder, humanity converted into obedient hardware with the emotions switched off by design. It leaves Pete Tyler alive and out of reach, with the episode weaponising everything Father’s Day made us feel by dangling Rose’s dad in front of her as a man who doesn’t know she exists. It leaves Mickey finding his spine, the spare-part arc that’s been simmering since School Reunion coming to the boil with a parallel double showing him the man he could be. It leaves a corporate dystopia with a modern sting, EarPods and a company that owns everyone’s attention and upgrades nobody asked for, which is 2006 science fiction that gets sharper every year. And it leaves a dead TARDIS and a stranded Doctor, with no easy exit, the box a husk and the way home anything but certain.
Rating: 3.5/5. A deliberate, atmospheric setup that occasionally drags while it arranges its pieces, but the world-building is superb and the Cybermen reveal genuinely lands. Very much the wind-up before the punch. And what a place to leave us: the Cybermen crashing Jackie’s birthday party, steel closing in from every side, the Doctor out of options and out of power, and that flat metal voice promising to delete everyone in the room. Part one done, and I have no idea how anybody’s getting out of this. Roll on next week.