Patrick O'Kane - Zone Six

For about forty minutes this is the bleakest and most effective thing the era attempted. The Cyber-Wars have been fought and humanity lost. There are seven human beings left in the universe, hiding in a camp on a dead world, and the Doctor arrives with a plan and a handful of improvised defences and watches all of it fail inside five minutes. That is a genuinely bold opening for a penultimate episode, and the first two thirds of “Ascension of the Cybermen” are as tense as this show gets. Running underneath it, in black and white, is a story about an Irish policeman that has nothing to do with anything, and what that story turns out to mean is the reason I cannot rate this higher.

Losing, properly

The strongest thing here is that the Doctor is beaten from the first scene and stays beaten.

Her defences are swept aside immediately. The survivors are scattered across two ships with no way to contact each other. Graham and Yaz end up aboard a Cyber-carrier full of dormant warriors, hiding in a rack of empty suits while Cybermen power up around them, and it is the most sustained tension the era generated. Bradley Walsh and Mandip Gill play the whole sequence in near silence and it works far better than any amount of running.

The design work has stepped up too. The new Cyber-warriors have battle damage, cracked faceplates, human skulls visible through broken helmets, and the show finally gets that a Cyberman is more disturbing the more you can see what it used to be. The flying Cyber-heads are a genuinely nasty idea, small and fast and worse for being incomplete.

Patrick O’Kane remains superb. Ashad is now a zealot rather than a wounded man, preaching to a fleet that has not woken yet, and his contempt for the “half-forms” who did the conversion badly gives the character an edge nobody else in the era has. He is a Cyberman who believes, which is a contradiction the show has never really used before.

Ko Sharmus, the guardian of the boundary, is well played by Ian McElhinney and gives the survivors somewhere to run towards. The bleakness is maintained: people die, the plan does not work, and the episode is content to let the Doctor be out of ideas for most of its runtime. After Praxeus and its tidy antidote, watching this show fail at something for a full hour is welcome.

The Irish policeman

And then every ten minutes we cut to Brendan.

A baby found on a roadside in rural Ireland, adopted, grown, joining the Garda. Shot off a cliff by a robber and getting up unharmed. Serving out a long career and then, at his retirement, being strapped into a chair by his father and his old sergeant, neither of whom have aged a day, and having his memory wiped by a machine.

Taken on its own this is well made. It is shot like a different programme, warm and grainy where the main story is cold, and the retirement scene is properly unsettling. The trouble is that it has no visible connection to anything. For most of the episode you are watching two unrelated stories and waiting for the join, and the join does not arrive within this hour at all. As a piece of construction that is a gamble, and it only pays off if the eventual answer is worth the wait.

It is not. What Brendan turns out to be is the first move in the Timeless Child business, and I have already made my feelings about that plain going back to The Ghost Monument. Watching these sequences now, knowing they exist to set up a rewrite of the Doctor’s origin that I think the programme should never have attempted, drains them of whatever intrigue they had first time. They stop being a mystery and start being a delivery mechanism.

Ascension of the Cybermen: Seven Humans Left and a Man Called Brendan - Doctor Who episode still

It is worth noting how much better the Cybermen work here than they have in years, because it is not an accident. The show has stopped treating them as an army and started treating them as a weapon that has already been used. The war is over. These are the survivors of the thing that won, and most of them are asleep, which means the episode can put its characters inside a room full of them and generate dread without a single one moving. Fear of a dormant enemy is a far better use of a Cyberman than another squad marching down a corridor announcing deletion.

The survivors are thinly drawn, and that is the one place the writing lets the premise down. When there are seven human beings left alive in the universe, each of them ought to feel irreplaceable, and instead they are largely interchangeable and die in an order determined by the plot rather than by anything they do. Ethan and Ravio get a little colour. The rest are there to be lost. An episode this bleak needed us to know exactly who was being spent.

A cliffhanger that promises the wrong thing

The last five minutes are enormous and I remember being genuinely excited by them.

The survivors reach the boundary. The Master steps through it. Gallifrey is in ruins behind him, and he tells the Doctor that everything is about to change, and the episode ends. Sacha Dhawan is electric in the thirty seconds he gets, and as a hook it is one of the best the show has done in years. The Cybermen are ascending, the Master is loose, and the answer to the season’s mystery is one week away.

That is the difficulty with writing about this episode honestly. As broadcast, week to week, it worked. It is well made, it is bleak in a way this show is usually too polite to attempt, and it sets up its finale with real momentum. The BBC’s own programme page still lists it among the era’s highlights and I can see why. But a penultimate episode is a promise, and this one is promising something I would rather it had not delivered.

Watched purely as an hour of television, with no knowledge of what follows, this would sit close to the top of the era. That is an uncomfortable thing to admit about an episode I have just spent several paragraphs criticising, but it is true, and it says something about how much a finale can retroactively cost the episode that set it up. The craft here is genuinely good. The problem arrives seven days later.

What it leaves behind is a universe where humanity has already lost and seven people are all that remain, which is as dark a premise as the show has used. It leaves Graham and Yaz hidden in a rack of empty Cyber-suits, the tensest sequence of the era. It leaves Ashad as a believer rather than a victim, and Patrick O’Kane making a zealot out of a machine. It leaves Brendan, well acted and well shot and entirely disconnected, waiting to explain himself. And it leaves the Master stepping out of a ruined Gallifrey to tell the Doctor that everything she knows is wrong.

Rating: 3/5. Bleak, confident and genuinely tense for two thirds of its length, with the best Cybermen the show has fielded in decades and a Doctor who spends the hour losing. The Brendan material is a real gamble that the following week does not justify, and knowing where it leads takes the edge off a story that otherwise had me. Very nearly the era’s second-best hour.

Put the Doctor in a haunted house on the night that Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein, and then walk a half-converted Cyberman through the front door. It should be too much. Maxine Alderton’s script makes it look easy, and “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” is the most confident, best-directed and most genuinely frightening hour the Whittaker era produced. It is also the one episode of this run that does what I keep asking the era to do: it builds a monster first, and lets the meaning come out of what the monster does.

A proper ghost story

The first half is played completely straight as gothic horror and it works.

Lake Geneva, 1816, the year without a summer. Byron is preening, Percy Shelley is missing, Polidori is sleepwalking, and the house will not let anybody leave. Corridors loop back on themselves. A door leads to the room you just left. The fam keep walking down the same passage and arriving where they started, and Emma Sullivan directs the whole thing with a patience the era has rarely shown, holding shots long enough for the geometry to feel wrong rather than cutting away to reassure you.

The period detail is good and the casting is better. Jacob Collins-Levy plays Byron as a vain, faintly ridiculous man who is nonetheless dangerous to be near, and his attempts to flirt with the Doctor are both funny and slightly appalling. Lili Miller’s Mary is watchful and unimpressed and clearly the cleverest person in the building, which is exactly right for someone about to write the book that invents modern science fiction.

There are a dozen small horrors before anything alien turns up. The skeletal hand that scuttles across the floor and goes for a throat. The portrait that follows people. Polidori fighting a duel in his sleep. Graham looking for a lavatory and finding the same corridor four times, which is played for comedy and then quietly stops being funny. The show has not committed to atmosphere like this since Blink, and it holds for a full twenty-five minutes before the plot arrives.

Ashad is the best Cyberman in fifty years

And then the lone Cyberman that Captain Jack warned about in Fugitive of the Judoon comes through the wall, and the episode gets even better.

Ashad is a broken conversion. Half his face is still human, the metal has failed across his chest, and he is in constant pain from a process that did not take. Which means he has feelings, and hates having them, and cannot stop. Patrick O’Kane gives the finest guest performance of the era, all shaking rage and disgust, a creature who despises what he is and cannot go back to what he was. He talks about his own children, whom he had converted, and the memory clearly still costs him something.

This is what the Cybermen should always have been. The horror of the concept was never the marching or the shouting, it was the person still trapped somewhere inside. Ever since 2006 the show has mostly been using them as generic robots with a good silhouette, and I have been complaining about it since Closing Time. Here, finally, is a Cyberman who is frightening because of what was done to him rather than because he is large.

The scene where he demands the Cyberium, and the Doctor realises Percy Shelley has absorbed it, gives Whittaker her best material of the run. She is genuinely out of options. She can hand over a weapon that will doom billions, or refuse and let Shelley die, which erases Frankenstein and most of the literature that followed. Her fury at the fam when they push her towards the easy answer, that sometimes even she has to choose, is the closest this Doctor gets to the steel the part usually carries. The Guardian picked this one out as the point the season found itself, and that is about right.

The house itself deserves credit as a piece of design. Villa Diodati is all candlelight and heavy furniture and doorways that lead somewhere they should not, and the production resists the urge to over-light it. You spend a lot of the episode not quite able to see the corners of rooms, which is exactly right for a ghost story and almost unheard of in modern television, where everything tends to be lit for clarity. When Ashad finally appears he does so out of that same darkness, and the two halves of the episode share a visual language even when they do not share a plot.

The fam are also used better here than anywhere else in the run. Splitting them across the household gives each of them somebody to play against: Yaz with Mary, Ryan with Percy, Graham lost and looking for a toilet. It is the difference between three companions and a crowd, and it makes you wonder why the era so rarely bothered. Mandip Gill in particular benefits from being paired with someone who takes her seriously, and her scenes with Lili Miller have an easy warmth that Yaz has almost never been allowed.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati: The Night Frankenstein Got Written - Doctor Who episode still

What makes it work when the rest doesn’t

I keep saying the era delivers its ideas in speeches instead of dramatising them. This episode is the proof that the team could do otherwise whenever they chose.

There is an idea here about creation and monstrosity, about a woman inventing Frankenstein on the same night she watches a man made of stitched-together parts beg for something, and nobody ever says it. No character explains the parallel. No caption appears. Mary Shelley simply watches Ashad, and you can see her filing it away, and the episode trusts you entirely. That is the difference between this and Rosa, which had a better subject and a worse method.

The Doctor loses, too, which matters. She hands over the Cyberium to save one life and one book, and she knows exactly what it will cost, and the episode ends with her walking towards a war she has just armed. After a season and a half of problems being solved by a clever technical trick in the last four minutes, an ending where the right choice is also the catastrophic one is bracing.

If the era has a single episode I would point to as evidence that the criticism was never about the cast or the production, it is this one. Same Doctor, same companions, same budget, same year. The difference is a script that builds a situation and lets the people in it react, rather than deciding on a message and constructing a delivery route. Everything I have complained about across two seasons is absent here, which tells you it was always a choice.

What it leaves behind is Ashad, a conversion that failed halfway, in agony and ashamed of it, the best Cyberman the show has built since the 1960s. It leaves a house that will not let anyone leave, and twenty-five minutes of gothic horror played entirely straight. It leaves Mary Shelley, watching a stitched-together man plead, and saying nothing at all about what she is about to write. It leaves the Doctor choosing wrong on purpose, with her eyes open, because the alternative was worse. And it leaves a Cyberium loose in the hands of something that hates itself.

Rating: 4/5. Atmospheric, superbly cast and genuinely frightening, with a monster that finally understands what Cybermen are for and a Doctor who is given a real choice and gets it wrong. It falls just short of the top only because the ghost-story half and the Cyberman half never quite fuse. Everything else here is the era at its absolute best.

Patrick O’Kane

Ascension of the Cybermen: Seven Humans Left and a Man Called Brendan