I had been looking forward to this episode ever since I heard about it. Neil Gaiman returning to the show, and writing the Cybermen (a race I know he has great love for). What could go wrong?
Well, a lot, apparently. Despite some good ideas, there was a lot of really dumb stuff in this episode. Especially the Doctor/Cyber Planner scenes of him talking to himself, which just came across as silly. I also didn't like how they just blew the planet up at the end? Okay, the Doctor did technically blow a planet up before, but in that case he was really just giving Davros enough rope to hang himself with. It felt very wrong to me to have the Doctor and Clara spend the whole episode reacting with horror to the idea of the planet being blown up as a possibility, and then turning around and doing it.
There was no good way out of that situation, but the obvious solution would be to not have an army of three million Cybermen to begin with. I think the episode was more interesting when you had a handful of Cybermen clinging to survival (which is really where the Cybermen shine), and once you have a massive army, it ceases to be interesting. In many ways, this episode feels like the history of the Cybermen in miniature. They start out interesting, you have some space zombies clinging to survival, lurking in the shadows, and some interesting implications as far as the human characters go and the technological implications of the Cybermen, and by the end of the episode they've become a mindless army of boring. Also, like many other Cybermen stories, far too many characters, including the Cybermen themselves, are acting illogically.
On top of that, I feel like there was really too much going on. There were too many characters and too many different plot elements for 45 minutes. While some episodes from this run have felt stretched out (last week's episode and Hide both being chief offenders), this episode felt too crammed together with different characters and story hooks that didn't really amount to much of anything.
I also didn't exactly love the 'Emperor of a thousand galaxies' being played for a bit of comic relief, an implication of feeling more sorry for whoever authorizes the use of weapons of mass destruction rather than their victims, and ending the episode with the whole 'oh, the Emperor jokes around about how he can execute people for any reason, isn't that hilarious' hijinks, but that's neither here nor there.
All of that said, I did enjoy several parts of this episode, although I feel like in typing out this stream of consciousness reaction I've convinced myself that I liked it less than I did while initially watching it. I think the script definitely needed at least one further draft to cut down on some of the fat and focus the ideas more (and maybe a better director could have helped realize the ambition more).
The idea of playing chess against a Cyberman was cool, and the image of the partially converted Doctor was great, but there was just too much surrounding material that wasn't particularly engaging. The idea of bringing the kids along was neat, but the story didn't really do much with them. The theme park planet was an interesting idea, but it's pretty marginalized in the end. This story feels like Daleks in Manhattan in a way to me, in that it's a story that really should have been great, but it just feels undercooked. I still like Gaiman as a writer, and I hope he does write for the show again, but I also hope he doesn't do something like this again.
