Reactions: Rise of the Cybermen and Age of Steel
I'll start off this particular recap/review by saying I was slightly disappointed that there weren't any scenes directly between John Lumic and the Doctor, given that in a prior life they were Barty Crouch and Barty Crouch, Jr.
And a quick query to confirm my assumption: am I correct in guessing/assuming that Lumic probably suffered from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease)?
Many thanks to obsessive_caps for the piccies, and thanks to the assist from various members of the comm and f-list on solutions for picture-heavy posts done on the fly. From now on I'll be using Photobucket and Deepest Sender for doing these. Scrapbook fails at bulk picture posting big time, and the less said about the Rich Text Editor the better.
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I have to say, first of all, for this having continued on from The Girl in the Fireplace, that I feel bad for the writer Tom MacRae, because I'm fairly confident had there been any communication at all regarding what was going on in that story, he would have given us some sort of connective tissue at the start of this episode to explain why everything is back to normal, despite what Ten just put Mickey and Rose through.
And now, the purty pictures.
You have to love David and Billie here - as in New Earth, they are unafraid to embrace their inner dorks. I'd commented before on the Doctor and Rose acting like the cool kids at the cafeteria table here, but this is the first time I'd noticed that Rose seemed to be making at least a minimal effort to include Mickey. Ten? Not so much.
Poor Micks. He wants to be part of the fun - that's the whole reason he decided to come along in the first place - but this is strictly a two-person clubhouse, kiddo.
And of course, demonstrating Rose's later point about the two of them taking Mickey for granted, he's completely forgotten that he asked Mickey to help reset/calibrate/whatever Gizmo X. Mickey, trying to be helpful as always and assuming he's being taken with at least a modicum of seriousness, has done exactly as the Doctor's asked. If the button really had needed to be held down that long, couldn't they have just duct-taped it in place and set a timer? Maybe that's just me.
He's pretty, even when he's being a smug little git.
Mickey certainly deserves to be in a strop here, although one could say he could have well seen this coming, given the Doctor said he could do with a laugh as his reason for inviting him along. Pop quiz: given an identical chain of events, who do you think would actually take Mickey more seriously... Nine or Ten?
I suppose it would be shallow of me to point out that they were already on the floor when the console blew.
Poor woobie Doctor. Yeah, he was being an ass, but he didn't deserve this. Neither did the TARDIS, for that matter. I thought it was a little odd that they kind of implied that Mickey having pressed that button for a half-hour was the cause of the crash and then just let it go unaddressed; we know now (and the writer possibly knew at the time) that they probably just fell through some sort of space/time eddy created by the Daleks' journey into the Void.
Given Rose's normal absorption and retention of details, I did find it a bit odd that she doesn't realize the TARDIS is, at least in some sense, a living creature. Between having looked into its heart, and hearing the Doctor refer to the TARDIS as dead and therefore her entire species/what have you as extinct, you'd think Rose would have known better than to ask in TIP if the Doctor couldn't just build another one.
And Mickey gets his own back, having one up on the Doctor. Hee!
So, do y'all think the Doctor could sense that this was another universe, or that he was just assuming? I mean, isn't it possible that someone could've mucked around in N-Space's history to cause something like this to happen to 'our' London?
And if they'd landed anywhere else, somewhere where her first real sight wasn't that of her father's counterpart, how would things have gone down?
The Doctor's thinking 'Do not go there again. Remember last time? Big church? Reapers? Me, dead?'
Although the thought has crossed my mind that maybe the Doctor at some point hit one or more alternate universes perhaps looking for an analog to his people, maybe during the War, and knows from hard-earned experience that these counterparts will not give a rat's arse about you?
Rose just set the Doctor to /ignore. Next thing, she's going to ban him from commenting in her journal.
And now, introducing alt!Jackie and her breasts. One would think that with all that money, her dye job would be better than Jackie's. I dunno, maybe visible roots are fashionable in Pete's World? (Seriously, they couldn't have slapped a wig on her or something?)
I covet Pete's tie and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Why he changed into that other one is beyond me - unless Jackie screamed at him that he wasn't going to wear the same thing to her party that he'd worn to work, so he said 'FINE!' and changed his tie. Or pointed out that since he didn't live there anymore, he hardly had a change of clothes handy, and she chucked a tie at him.
alt!Rose is a Cairn terrier. Well, at least she's brown-eyed and feisty!
And without the TARDIS, the Doctor realizes he and Mickey may not be on that different a footing after all. Either that or he's just so heartsick he doesn't really care about proving anything to anyone at the moment. Rose isn't there to show off for anyhoo.
I love Mickey's mirroring posture here. He's just as ready as Rose to soak it all in and be a contributor.
*I can't believe I'm here in a dead TARDIS talking comic books with Mickey and making fourth-wall pushing comments about the 'real world.'*
Nice wristbones, by the way. Dear god, he really is about 2 inches across, isn't he?
GLEE for the second time in two episodes: if we take it from this that his super-glee only comes on when he's been thinking he's up the creek and finds out otherwise, that puts a whole different spin on that moment from the post-VotD trailer.
So there's now a physical piece of the TARDIS herself invested with the Doctor's life energy? Do you think they'll ever do anything with that little factlet?
*Rose, I love you. Please don't start this sh*t again, really.*
And now he's just annoyed. Even in some completely alt!episode where no Cyberstuff was going on, this was not going to end happily.
Just a very pretty shot of Rose.
Mickey's annoyed, but to be honest I've always thought of the Doctor's decision to chase after Rose as a sign of faith in Mickey's common sense. He trusts him not to get himself in really big trouble.
This was, of course, before he knew about Mickey's retconned family history. Maybe the events of Father's Day did change the future after all?
Num, num, tortoiseshell hornrims. And the wheat-colored shirt. I actually liked that combination, though we've not seen it much.
This world is only parallel, eh? So is there a different terminology for vastly disparate universes, then?
Yes, you're pudding-whipped. Just admit it now, it'll make things easier in the long run.
She knows. That's really the only important part here.
Whipped, whipped, whipped, whipped, whipped. And you love it. Especially when it involves her in that little corset thing with the ribbons up the back.
I wonder if the reason the Doctor and Rose were able to get this close to the house so easily was because Lumic had sabotaged the security surrounding the mansion.
I don't know that I would actually recommend trying to impersonate theoretically important people in a universe you know almost nothing about. The Doctor's way...
...besides being funnier, is probably far safer. Well, in the general sense. Certainly not in the Rose's Sh*t List sense.
Rose is jealous and the Doctor just doesn't get it. It's not that she considers Lucy a threat, in my opinion, but rather that she knows (even if the Doctor doesn't seem to) that he is piping hot and therefore subject to pouncing by random women. She just doesn't like him being macked on. Or maybe she's worried her wrapping-around-little-finger ways have rubbed off on him, and she's now unleashed a flirting force into the universe whose likes have never been seen before.
Completely tangential nitpick: caterers do not send waitstaff out with more than a single type of hors d'oeuvres on their tray. Okay, good caterers don't. If anyone cares why, I can get into it in the comments. Related beef: those don't look like the type of nibbles that would be served at a heavy hors d'oeuvres party... or even a party being thrown by people with that much money to blow. Maybe the booze is really, really expensive here (or there's a Prohibition or something).
Yay Don Warrington, yay for a black President. I wonder if failing to give his character a name was a decision made so that no particular ethnic background was being singled out for having received that honor.
Not that Rose mightn't have a point - after all, we've all known people daft enough not to know the form of government of their own country, but still. I'm surprised those lasers in her eyes haven't bored a hole in the side of his cheek by now.
Am I the only one who assumes the Royals are no longer even titular heads of state here? I mean, wouldn't a man of Lumic's accomplishments have been knighted by this point (whether he deserves it or not being another question entirely)?
Were we meant to get the impression that alt!Jackie just dresses provocatively, or were they trying to imply she'd had work done?
See, different tie. Still pretty, but no longer a variant on Ten's tie from last episode.
And now, another completely irrelevant pondering: how the hell do people keep from getting impacted wax in their ears if they have these damn things on all the time? I mean, if the cyber takeover kicked in all around the world, and people took them out when they're sleeping, shouldn't that mean that the other parts of the world where people weren't awake (or too poor to afford pods) would have remained relatively unaffected?
I dunno, maybe Lumic invented a cure for ear wax. Or there's a huge market in earpod cleaning solutions and stuff, like we have for contacts.
Poor Ten. This is such a Mickey-during-the-previous-two-episodes moment. He tried to warn her, and now the universe is thumbing its nose at her in the form of a dog.
*No, you're right, it's not funny. And I value the continued existence of my family jewels. Even if I don't use them as such.*
Let us take a moment to admire the quality of the Mill's greenscreen work.
A completely gratuitous shot of Mrs. Moore. Because she is awesome. I kinda wish, to be honest, that they'd had the professor from LotTL be her instead of some random woman we don't care about.
*Look, I'm James Bond and Q all wrapped up in one! Go me!*
At least she gets a reasonably warm reception from Pete at the start - without the icky pseudo-flirting from FD. Query: do y'all think Rose really didn't remember the exact jingle, or was she using her failure to get it completely right as a handle for the conversation?
And then there's the encounter with alt!Jackie, wherein Rose finds out she's a mean, useless bint.
Twin horror:
His first, and likely only thought, is *Roseroseroseroserose, where's Rose, where's Rose, where's Rose*.
Screw the spaceship, every thing about this is not good.
I wonder what security devices exist in the PW that would've made Lumic need to disable them for the Cybermen to gain access to the Tyler estate?
Even all frozen, windblown and terrified, he still manages to look tasty. Even in a cheap polyester service tux.
Poor Ten. He tried the classic Doctor technique of deliberately letting himself be captured by the bad guys. *It used to work on our Cybermen.*
PART DEUX
In case you'd forgotten how screwed everyone was last week...
The Doctor casts his Chain Lightning spell...
...and rolls a 20. 'Cos that's how he rolls.
*I am menacing. Rrrrr.*
No 'thank you,' no 'oh, cool, where'd you get that,' just 'Well I guess we don't have a weapon anymore. Neh neh neh neh neh.'
Pissing the Doctor off should never be high on one's list of priorities. Although better S2 than S3, that's for sure.
Parking tickets. Hee. Rickey, you're so cute.
And now, with the status quo of Mickey/Rickey being a (semi)sweet doofus having been reestablished, the Doctor feels much better.
*Must not laugh. They still have guns.*
I may have mentioned previously that I love Mrs. Moore. If they ever decide to have an older companion again, I hope they use her as the model. Or maybe the Angela Pryce of N-Space doesn't have a family and would therefore be free for adventuring. (Or maybe that's why they didn't use her in S3.)
Such an iconic shot. And I mean that in both the general Who and specifically LJ sense.
I know we're meant to feel sympathy for Mr. Crane here, but this really is too little, too late. He hasn't had a problem with this until it was his turn for the chop.
I wasn't aware you had a methodology, sir. Oops, sorry, wrong show.
The New Who's Doctor is such a point man. He's not marching around telling everyone to back off and let him do all the saving - he's enabling other people to be better.
The traditional Tyler stubborn chin. She's gonna do whatever the hell she feels like. One suspects this trend may continue as we move forward.
So, since we get about zero background on Jake: was he in the Preachers, and then when he and Rickey met within the Preachers they paired up, or were they together first and then joined the Preachers together?
Proud of Mickey at last. I know some people bang on about how the Doctor was ostensibly a father figure to Rose, but I'd say that better describes the Mickey-Doctor dynamic. Or at least an older brother-younger brother relationship.
Why couldn't they have given us a smooch here? I mean really.
Mickey knows. He can't block it out anymore after that.
And The Dork Patrol part II. Too bad there weren't any Scooby Snacks on that van. XD
Mrs. Moore is just... Ace plus 30-40 years. Seriously.
If she'd lived and didn't have a family to go home to, I swear he'd have asked her along. Especially after this:
With all the cool sh*t the Doctor's seen over the centuries, and he can still be this impressed with someone. These devices are especially handy given this version of the Cybermen don't have the traditional gold allergy anymore.
And is it just me, or does he bear a bit of a resemblance to Milo Ventimiglia (Peter from Heroes) in these particular shots? Don't know why that just strikes me, but it does.
In light of S3, I'm not sure whether this was a rhetorical question on Ten's part (remember, the Doctor refused to end the Daleks before they began back in the day because he didn't think he had the right), or whether he was borrowing Mrs. Moore's moral viewpoint since Rose wasn't there. He knew what he was doing was potentially monstrous...
And so did she, but sometimes you don't get that luxury.
Allons-y, Angela! See, it could've worked.
And he's right, they didn't need to kill her. They wanted to, for all they claim to be without feelings of any kind.
His perfect Rose.
So they've upgraded Lumic, and put him above all the other Cybermen. Was that respect for Lumic programmed into them? Did they believe him to be a potential threat were he to change his mind about what he'd done?
I will not make any Beatles jokes. I will not make any Beatles jokes.
Cue the BS machine.
I don't care what other people say, I think the click-wink is very cute when used in moderate intervals.
Deep Thought might be able to persuade...
...a legless Arcturan Mega-Donkey to go for a walk...
...but only the Doctor...
...could sell it a treadmill and a lifetime supply of thrombosis tights.
I think Pete is finally grokking his Tarzan-speak.
*cough*Binary9*cough*
Rose looks justifiably horrified. She's such the moral compass for the Doctor.
*You know I didn't want to do this. You know that, right?*
It's not often he's got to face the consequences of the things he's had to do so up close and personal. I'm sure he still beats himself up over not being able to come up with a solution that didn't involve killing all those people by driving them mad.
And now the moment the Doctor's really been dreading...
...watching Rose get her heart broken.
They took the trouble to go back to the mansion to round up the Doctor's clothes? I'm surprised they hadn't ended up in the mitts of the security services. They must've been swarming all over that place once they'd gotten their feet back. Note that they don't have Rose's. I wonder where those ended up?
*You're what?!?!*
He can really make something of himself here. And look after Rickey's gran the way Rickey would've wanted - and the way he couldn't for his own.
The Doctor understands. If he had the ability to save some other stripe of Time Lords from their Time War, do you think he'd take that opportunity?
Poor Rose. She only realizes now, of course, how terribly she really has taken Mickey for granted. Not the Doctor. Her.
But ultimately she's proud of him too.
Given all the weird crap Jake's been seeing lately, you'd think he wouldn't be quite so gobsmacked.
Jackie doesn't even mind him parking right in the middle of her flat these days. She's clearly reached the son-in-law level of acceptance at this point.
How long did it take Jackie to get out of him and Rose at least most of what happened?
He knows that this is really the only thing he can do for her at this point. I say he brought her straight here, but maybe didn't even tell her first. Just set the coordinates while she was changing or whatever and just didn't give her the option of trying to bury it.
*is still annoyed they cut the boyfriend line*
This was definitely a turning point in the Doctor/Rose relationship. There's no buffer between the two of them after this, and no pretending that their actions don't have consequences.
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Tom MacRae had done a script for this upcoming series, but apparently it got squelched for being too alike in tone to another script. Whether RTD popped out another one or they had Tom do a complete rewrite I do not know. So long as they didn't turn it over to Helen Raynor. Note to Helen: THIS IS HOW YOU DO TWO-PARTERS.
And a quick query to confirm my assumption: am I correct in guessing/assuming that Lumic probably suffered from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease)?
Many thanks to obsessive_caps for the piccies, and thanks to the assist from various members of the comm and f-list on solutions for picture-heavy posts done on the fly. From now on I'll be using Photobucket and Deepest Sender for doing these. Scrapbook fails at bulk picture posting big time, and the less said about the Rich Text Editor the better.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have to say, first of all, for this having continued on from The Girl in the Fireplace, that I feel bad for the writer Tom MacRae, because I'm fairly confident had there been any communication at all regarding what was going on in that story, he would have given us some sort of connective tissue at the start of this episode to explain why everything is back to normal, despite what Ten just put Mickey and Rose through.
And now, the purty pictures.
You have to love David and Billie here - as in New Earth, they are unafraid to embrace their inner dorks. I'd commented before on the Doctor and Rose acting like the cool kids at the cafeteria table here, but this is the first time I'd noticed that Rose seemed to be making at least a minimal effort to include Mickey. Ten? Not so much.
Poor Micks. He wants to be part of the fun - that's the whole reason he decided to come along in the first place - but this is strictly a two-person clubhouse, kiddo.
And of course, demonstrating Rose's later point about the two of them taking Mickey for granted, he's completely forgotten that he asked Mickey to help reset/calibrate/whatever Gizmo X. Mickey, trying to be helpful as always and assuming he's being taken with at least a modicum of seriousness, has done exactly as the Doctor's asked. If the button really had needed to be held down that long, couldn't they have just duct-taped it in place and set a timer? Maybe that's just me.
He's pretty, even when he's being a smug little git.
Mickey certainly deserves to be in a strop here, although one could say he could have well seen this coming, given the Doctor said he could do with a laugh as his reason for inviting him along. Pop quiz: given an identical chain of events, who do you think would actually take Mickey more seriously... Nine or Ten?
I suppose it would be shallow of me to point out that they were already on the floor when the console blew.
Poor woobie Doctor. Yeah, he was being an ass, but he didn't deserve this. Neither did the TARDIS, for that matter. I thought it was a little odd that they kind of implied that Mickey having pressed that button for a half-hour was the cause of the crash and then just let it go unaddressed; we know now (and the writer possibly knew at the time) that they probably just fell through some sort of space/time eddy created by the Daleks' journey into the Void.
Given Rose's normal absorption and retention of details, I did find it a bit odd that she doesn't realize the TARDIS is, at least in some sense, a living creature. Between having looked into its heart, and hearing the Doctor refer to the TARDIS as dead and therefore her entire species/what have you as extinct, you'd think Rose would have known better than to ask in TIP if the Doctor couldn't just build another one.
And Mickey gets his own back, having one up on the Doctor. Hee!
So, do y'all think the Doctor could sense that this was another universe, or that he was just assuming? I mean, isn't it possible that someone could've mucked around in N-Space's history to cause something like this to happen to 'our' London?
And if they'd landed anywhere else, somewhere where her first real sight wasn't that of her father's counterpart, how would things have gone down?
The Doctor's thinking 'Do not go there again. Remember last time? Big church? Reapers? Me, dead?'
Although the thought has crossed my mind that maybe the Doctor at some point hit one or more alternate universes perhaps looking for an analog to his people, maybe during the War, and knows from hard-earned experience that these counterparts will not give a rat's arse about you?
Rose just set the Doctor to /ignore. Next thing, she's going to ban him from commenting in her journal.
And now, introducing alt!Jackie and her breasts. One would think that with all that money, her dye job would be better than Jackie's. I dunno, maybe visible roots are fashionable in Pete's World? (Seriously, they couldn't have slapped a wig on her or something?)
I covet Pete's tie and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Why he changed into that other one is beyond me - unless Jackie screamed at him that he wasn't going to wear the same thing to her party that he'd worn to work, so he said 'FINE!' and changed his tie. Or pointed out that since he didn't live there anymore, he hardly had a change of clothes handy, and she chucked a tie at him.
alt!Rose is a Cairn terrier. Well, at least she's brown-eyed and feisty!
And without the TARDIS, the Doctor realizes he and Mickey may not be on that different a footing after all. Either that or he's just so heartsick he doesn't really care about proving anything to anyone at the moment. Rose isn't there to show off for anyhoo.
I love Mickey's mirroring posture here. He's just as ready as Rose to soak it all in and be a contributor.
*I can't believe I'm here in a dead TARDIS talking comic books with Mickey and making fourth-wall pushing comments about the 'real world.'*
Nice wristbones, by the way. Dear god, he really is about 2 inches across, isn't he?
GLEE for the second time in two episodes: if we take it from this that his super-glee only comes on when he's been thinking he's up the creek and finds out otherwise, that puts a whole different spin on that moment from the post-VotD trailer.
So there's now a physical piece of the TARDIS herself invested with the Doctor's life energy? Do you think they'll ever do anything with that little factlet?
*Rose, I love you. Please don't start this sh*t again, really.*
And now he's just annoyed. Even in some completely alt!episode where no Cyberstuff was going on, this was not going to end happily.
Just a very pretty shot of Rose.
Mickey's annoyed, but to be honest I've always thought of the Doctor's decision to chase after Rose as a sign of faith in Mickey's common sense. He trusts him not to get himself in really big trouble.
This was, of course, before he knew about Mickey's retconned family history. Maybe the events of Father's Day did change the future after all?
Num, num, tortoiseshell hornrims. And the wheat-colored shirt. I actually liked that combination, though we've not seen it much.
This world is only parallel, eh? So is there a different terminology for vastly disparate universes, then?
Yes, you're pudding-whipped. Just admit it now, it'll make things easier in the long run.
She knows. That's really the only important part here.
Whipped, whipped, whipped, whipped, whipped. And you love it. Especially when it involves her in that little corset thing with the ribbons up the back.
I wonder if the reason the Doctor and Rose were able to get this close to the house so easily was because Lumic had sabotaged the security surrounding the mansion.
I don't know that I would actually recommend trying to impersonate theoretically important people in a universe you know almost nothing about. The Doctor's way...
...besides being funnier, is probably far safer. Well, in the general sense. Certainly not in the Rose's Sh*t List sense.
Rose is jealous and the Doctor just doesn't get it. It's not that she considers Lucy a threat, in my opinion, but rather that she knows (even if the Doctor doesn't seem to) that he is piping hot and therefore subject to pouncing by random women. She just doesn't like him being macked on. Or maybe she's worried her wrapping-around-little-finger ways have rubbed off on him, and she's now unleashed a flirting force into the universe whose likes have never been seen before.
Completely tangential nitpick: caterers do not send waitstaff out with more than a single type of hors d'oeuvres on their tray. Okay, good caterers don't. If anyone cares why, I can get into it in the comments. Related beef: those don't look like the type of nibbles that would be served at a heavy hors d'oeuvres party... or even a party being thrown by people with that much money to blow. Maybe the booze is really, really expensive here (or there's a Prohibition or something).
Yay Don Warrington, yay for a black President. I wonder if failing to give his character a name was a decision made so that no particular ethnic background was being singled out for having received that honor.
Not that Rose mightn't have a point - after all, we've all known people daft enough not to know the form of government of their own country, but still. I'm surprised those lasers in her eyes haven't bored a hole in the side of his cheek by now.
Am I the only one who assumes the Royals are no longer even titular heads of state here? I mean, wouldn't a man of Lumic's accomplishments have been knighted by this point (whether he deserves it or not being another question entirely)?
Were we meant to get the impression that alt!Jackie just dresses provocatively, or were they trying to imply she'd had work done?
See, different tie. Still pretty, but no longer a variant on Ten's tie from last episode.
And now, another completely irrelevant pondering: how the hell do people keep from getting impacted wax in their ears if they have these damn things on all the time? I mean, if the cyber takeover kicked in all around the world, and people took them out when they're sleeping, shouldn't that mean that the other parts of the world where people weren't awake (or too poor to afford pods) would have remained relatively unaffected?
I dunno, maybe Lumic invented a cure for ear wax. Or there's a huge market in earpod cleaning solutions and stuff, like we have for contacts.
Poor Ten. This is such a Mickey-during-the-previous-two-episodes moment. He tried to warn her, and now the universe is thumbing its nose at her in the form of a dog.
*No, you're right, it's not funny. And I value the continued existence of my family jewels. Even if I don't use them as such.*
Let us take a moment to admire the quality of the Mill's greenscreen work.
A completely gratuitous shot of Mrs. Moore. Because she is awesome. I kinda wish, to be honest, that they'd had the professor from LotTL be her instead of some random woman we don't care about.
*Look, I'm James Bond and Q all wrapped up in one! Go me!*
At least she gets a reasonably warm reception from Pete at the start - without the icky pseudo-flirting from FD. Query: do y'all think Rose really didn't remember the exact jingle, or was she using her failure to get it completely right as a handle for the conversation?
And then there's the encounter with alt!Jackie, wherein Rose finds out she's a mean, useless bint.
Twin horror:
His first, and likely only thought, is *Roseroseroseroserose, where's Rose, where's Rose, where's Rose*.
Screw the spaceship, every thing about this is not good.
I wonder what security devices exist in the PW that would've made Lumic need to disable them for the Cybermen to gain access to the Tyler estate?
Even all frozen, windblown and terrified, he still manages to look tasty. Even in a cheap polyester service tux.
Poor Ten. He tried the classic Doctor technique of deliberately letting himself be captured by the bad guys. *It used to work on our Cybermen.*
PART DEUX
In case you'd forgotten how screwed everyone was last week...
The Doctor casts his Chain Lightning spell...
...and rolls a 20. 'Cos that's how he rolls.
*I am menacing. Rrrrr.*
No 'thank you,' no 'oh, cool, where'd you get that,' just 'Well I guess we don't have a weapon anymore. Neh neh neh neh neh.'
Pissing the Doctor off should never be high on one's list of priorities. Although better S2 than S3, that's for sure.
Parking tickets. Hee. Rickey, you're so cute.
And now, with the status quo of Mickey/Rickey being a (semi)sweet doofus having been reestablished, the Doctor feels much better.
*Must not laugh. They still have guns.*
I may have mentioned previously that I love Mrs. Moore. If they ever decide to have an older companion again, I hope they use her as the model. Or maybe the Angela Pryce of N-Space doesn't have a family and would therefore be free for adventuring. (Or maybe that's why they didn't use her in S3.)
Such an iconic shot. And I mean that in both the general Who and specifically LJ sense.
I know we're meant to feel sympathy for Mr. Crane here, but this really is too little, too late. He hasn't had a problem with this until it was his turn for the chop.
I wasn't aware you had a methodology, sir. Oops, sorry, wrong show.
The New Who's Doctor is such a point man. He's not marching around telling everyone to back off and let him do all the saving - he's enabling other people to be better.
The traditional Tyler stubborn chin. She's gonna do whatever the hell she feels like. One suspects this trend may continue as we move forward.
So, since we get about zero background on Jake: was he in the Preachers, and then when he and Rickey met within the Preachers they paired up, or were they together first and then joined the Preachers together?
Proud of Mickey at last. I know some people bang on about how the Doctor was ostensibly a father figure to Rose, but I'd say that better describes the Mickey-Doctor dynamic. Or at least an older brother-younger brother relationship.
Why couldn't they have given us a smooch here? I mean really.
Mickey knows. He can't block it out anymore after that.
And The Dork Patrol part II. Too bad there weren't any Scooby Snacks on that van. XD
Mrs. Moore is just... Ace plus 30-40 years. Seriously.
If she'd lived and didn't have a family to go home to, I swear he'd have asked her along. Especially after this:
With all the cool sh*t the Doctor's seen over the centuries, and he can still be this impressed with someone. These devices are especially handy given this version of the Cybermen don't have the traditional gold allergy anymore.
And is it just me, or does he bear a bit of a resemblance to Milo Ventimiglia (Peter from Heroes) in these particular shots? Don't know why that just strikes me, but it does.
In light of S3, I'm not sure whether this was a rhetorical question on Ten's part (remember, the Doctor refused to end the Daleks before they began back in the day because he didn't think he had the right), or whether he was borrowing Mrs. Moore's moral viewpoint since Rose wasn't there. He knew what he was doing was potentially monstrous...
And so did she, but sometimes you don't get that luxury.
Allons-y, Angela! See, it could've worked.
And he's right, they didn't need to kill her. They wanted to, for all they claim to be without feelings of any kind.
His perfect Rose.
So they've upgraded Lumic, and put him above all the other Cybermen. Was that respect for Lumic programmed into them? Did they believe him to be a potential threat were he to change his mind about what he'd done?
I will not make any Beatles jokes. I will not make any Beatles jokes.
Cue the BS machine.
I don't care what other people say, I think the click-wink is very cute when used in moderate intervals.
Deep Thought might be able to persuade...
...a legless Arcturan Mega-Donkey to go for a walk...
...but only the Doctor...
...could sell it a treadmill and a lifetime supply of thrombosis tights.
I think Pete is finally grokking his Tarzan-speak.
*cough*Binary9*cough*
Rose looks justifiably horrified. She's such the moral compass for the Doctor.
*You know I didn't want to do this. You know that, right?*
It's not often he's got to face the consequences of the things he's had to do so up close and personal. I'm sure he still beats himself up over not being able to come up with a solution that didn't involve killing all those people by driving them mad.
And now the moment the Doctor's really been dreading...
...watching Rose get her heart broken.
They took the trouble to go back to the mansion to round up the Doctor's clothes? I'm surprised they hadn't ended up in the mitts of the security services. They must've been swarming all over that place once they'd gotten their feet back. Note that they don't have Rose's. I wonder where those ended up?
*You're what?!?!*
He can really make something of himself here. And look after Rickey's gran the way Rickey would've wanted - and the way he couldn't for his own.
The Doctor understands. If he had the ability to save some other stripe of Time Lords from their Time War, do you think he'd take that opportunity?
Poor Rose. She only realizes now, of course, how terribly she really has taken Mickey for granted. Not the Doctor. Her.
But ultimately she's proud of him too.
Given all the weird crap Jake's been seeing lately, you'd think he wouldn't be quite so gobsmacked.
Jackie doesn't even mind him parking right in the middle of her flat these days. She's clearly reached the son-in-law level of acceptance at this point.
How long did it take Jackie to get out of him and Rose at least most of what happened?
He knows that this is really the only thing he can do for her at this point. I say he brought her straight here, but maybe didn't even tell her first. Just set the coordinates while she was changing or whatever and just didn't give her the option of trying to bury it.
*is still annoyed they cut the boyfriend line*
This was definitely a turning point in the Doctor/Rose relationship. There's no buffer between the two of them after this, and no pretending that their actions don't have consequences.
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Tom MacRae had done a script for this upcoming series, but apparently it got squelched for being too alike in tone to another script. Whether RTD popped out another one or they had Tom do a complete rewrite I do not know. So long as they didn't turn it over to Helen Raynor. Note to Helen: THIS IS HOW YOU DO TWO-PARTERS.