John Lumic

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.

The Age of Steel closes out the two-part Cybermen story that began the previous week, following the Doctor, Rose, and the Preachers as they storm John Lumic’s Battersea factory to stop a city-wide forced upgrade. The episode turns on the discovery that the Cybermen are converted humans kept docile by an “emotional inhibitor,” and that switching it off would let them feel, and be destroyed by, what has been done to them.

The review credits the episode’s horror to that single idea and singles out Mickey Smith’s arc as its emotional core, tracking his shift from comic relief to the person who saves London and then chooses to stay behind in the parallel world. It closes with a rating of 4 out of 5, calling the episode a strong, emotionally intelligent resolution to the two-parter.

Picking up right where “Rise of the Cybermen” left off feels almost unfair. The Doctor’s cornered, the whole party’s surrounded, and that flat steel voice is promising to delete everyone in the room. After the quieter, romantic detour of The Girl in the Fireplace, this two-parter throws me straight back into it, and “The Age of Steel” has a lot to deliver after a first half that spent most of its runtime setting pieces on the board rather than knocking them over. I’m happy to say it delivers. This is the half where everything that spent last week clicking into place finally goes off, and while there’s plenty of running, shooting, and factory-storming, what actually sticks with me is a genuinely upsetting idea at its centre, plus the payoff of an arc I’ve been watching build for half a season. This is the episode where Mickey Smith stops being the tin dog for good.

Escaping the Trap

The escape itself is a nice bit of business. The Doctor pulls out the TARDIS’s last power cell and blasts the Cybermen with raw energy, and the survivors scatter into the night. From there it’s a race to Lumic’s Battersea factory, with the Doctor, Rose, Pete, Mickey, and the Preachers converging on the place where the “upgrades” are happening from every angle. Lumic himself gets a nasty comeuppance dressed up as a promotion. His failing body finally gives out, and his own Cybermen forcibly convert him into the Cyber-Controller, the exact fate he designed for everyone else. The man who wanted to escape death by becoming steel gets exactly what he asked for, and he hates it.

Then Lumic springs his masterstroke. Every EarPod in the city switches on at once, and all across London ordinary people go blank-eyed and start walking: a silent, orderly procession of the controlled, filing toward the conversion factories by the thousand. It’s a genuinely chilling image, and it pays off every ominous thing the first episode planted about a population that handed over its attention without a fight. Rose’s mother is out there in that crowd. So is everyone else’s.

What follows is a proper assault, and the episode splits its heroes up smartly so everyone has something to do. The Doctor and Mrs Moore go in low through the freezing access tunnels beneath the plant. Rose and Pete bluff their way in from above wearing deactivated EarPods. Mickey and Jake take to the air in a stolen zeppelin. It gives “The Age of Steel” real forward momentum after the deliberate slow build of part one, and because the team’s scattered, when things start going wrong (and they go wrong for very nearly everyone), the losses land on people I’ve spent two episodes coming to care about.

The Horror in the Steel

Here’s where “The Age of Steel” earns its keep. For all the metal-monster spectacle, the episode’s real weapon is one simple, awful idea: the Cybermen are people. Every one of those steel shells has a human brain trapped inside it, and the only thing stopping each of them from screaming is an “emotional inhibitor,” a chip that switches off the horror of what’s been done to them. Sit with that for a second. They aren’t robots. They’re victims, anaesthetised against their own existence.

A dormant Cyberman reactivates as its emotional inhibitor is switched off, revealing the human consciousness trapped within the steel shell.

The show drives it home in the episode’s best and bleakest scene. The Doctor and the brilliant, brave Mrs Moore corner a dormant Cyberman and switch off its inhibitor, and it turns out to be a woman named Sally, converted the night before her wedding, still asking about her fiance, still cold because she’s “getting married in the morning.” She realises, in real time, what’s been done to her, and the grief of it kills her. It’s horrifying in a way the show rarely attempts, and it hands the Doctor his solution at a terrible price: Mrs Moore is murdered by a Cyberman moments later, one more good person lost to Lumic’s machine.

The Doctor works out that the inhibitor is the whole game. Shut it off everywhere at once, and every Cyberman in the city wakes to the full horror of its own body and is destroyed by it. It’s a solution that doubles as a mass mercy killing, and the episode doesn’t pretend otherwise. The Doctor frees these people the only way he’s got left, and it’s the saddest kind of victory. Tennant plays it with no trace of triumph, just a man doing the necessary, terrible thing because no one else will, knowing exactly what it costs. It’s the same cold resolve I saw beneath the charm when he faced down the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, turned here toward an act of grim mercy.

Mickey Smith, Hero

And the person who makes it happen is Mickey. The arc that’s been simmering since he named himself the tin dog in School Reunion pays off completely here. He watches his own parallel double, Ricky, die at the hands of the Cybermen. It’s a gut-punch that could have broken him, and instead of folding, he steps into the gap. He takes the wheel, hacks into Lumic’s systems, pilots a zeppelin, and cracks the code that broadcasts the cancel signal to every inhibitor in London. The spare part saves the world. The man who was always told to wait in the car turns out to be, when it counts, the cleverest and bravest person in the building.

What lands even harder is what he does next. With the Cybermen beaten and Lumic fallen from his burning factory, Mickey chooses to stay. There’s a version of his beloved gran alive on this world, a fight still to finish alongside Jake, and, crucially, a place where he’s needed and seen rather than trailing after the Doctor and Rose as an afterthought. His goodbye is understated and quietly heartbreaking. He isn’t being left behind this time. He’s choosing to stay, on his own terms, as his own man. The friendship he strikes up with Jake, spiky at first and then real once shared grief over Ricky welds them together, gives Mickey something the Doctor and Rose never quite managed: a partner who genuinely needs him. By the time he waves the TARDIS off, I completely believe he’s found where he’s meant to be. After a season of watching him ache to matter, it’s an enormously satisfying send-off.

Rose’s farewell is rougher. Pete Tyler, this world’s Pete, who never had a daughter, can’t cope with what she represents and simply walks away from her, and there’s nothing she can do but let him. It’s a cold little echo of everything Father’s Day put her through: a second version of her dad slipping through her fingers.

Where The Age of Steel Leaves Me

I came out of this two-parter thinking about how much it manages to reframe. The Cybermen aren’t killer robots to me anymore. They’re converted people, screaming behind steel until a chip silences them, and that one idea does more work than any amount of factory-storming could. The Doctor’s win is to let thousands of trapped minds finally feel what happened to them: a rescue that’s also a mass death. I respect that the episode has the nerve to sit in that discomfort instead of glossing past it. Lumic gets exactly what he wanted, too. The prophet of the upgrade is upgraded against his will, which is about as tidy and grim a piece of poetic justice as this show has ever managed.

But the thing I’ll remember most is Mickey. The tin dog becomes the hero and then walks his own road, choosing to stay behind out of purpose rather than defeat, and I think it’s one of the best companion arcs the show has told, something other Doctor Who fans have picked up on too. Rose loses her father all over again in the same hour, and this time there’s no saving him. Just the quiet cruelty of being unrecognised by someone who should have been family. That’s a lot for one episode to carry, and it mostly carries it.

Rating: 4/5. A strong, emotionally intelligent resolution that mostly justifies the slow build of part one, anchored by the horror of the inhibitor scene and a career-best turn for Mickey. A little of the factory-storming plays as standard-issue, but the heart of it is anything but.

The Doctor and Rose step back into their own world one companion lighter, with a hard conversation waiting for them at home. Mickey Smith stayed behind, a hero. I honestly didn’t see that coming back when he was just the bloke minding the phone.

Rise of the Cybermen: A Parallel World Turns Cold