So here's a nice scene; rolling countryside, green grass, nice trees, dead cybermen crucified. Wait, what?
If anyone haboured any suspicions that this is a show for children, then dispel them now (then kindly do away with the expectation that plots can be shit because it's for kids). We're obviously on the ship still, because the number of the floor is still up there. A cute little pastoral family, with far too many kids in tow, are shacked up in an old time homestead. But the partially converted cybermen are out for them, but they have...laser guns...so that's okay then. Later on, a small spaceship slams through the floor and a Mondasian Cyberman walks out, holding a prone Doctor.
Sighhhhhhhhhhhh. It's Bill, I knew it was Bill from the first. Yet another Cyberman whose brain has been upgraded with tech, has overcome the neural net control by the power of love. Boring. Sorry but that's not interesting or cool,
it's just boring. But we flash right back to what happened to the Doctor right after he met roboBill. He got slapped about a bit by the Masters, and he wakes up tied to a wheelchair on the roof of the hospital while the Masters dance. Nardole ran away to do offscreen things to advance the plot.
Then comes what I like to term "extricating Ep 2 from Ep 1". In nearly every two part episode now, we have to have some reason why the story can't just logically continue from the first one and has to move location and change plot entirely. It's why a lot of these stories fall flat, and it would be excusable if these ones had a different writer,
but they don't, and I don't see why we couldn't see more of the decrepit world that's creating the Cybermen.
The Doctor points out, to an accompanying orchestral swell as though it's the end of the episode, that he changed the Cyberman protocols (in a split fucking second while he was concussed by a strike from Missy) to include Time Lords. So the Cybermen are now all after them too. Excellent. Hope that protocol never gets out or the Doctor just brought the wrath of all Cybermen down on Gallifrey. But nobody cares about Gallifrey. We're also introduced again to Billbot, purely to distress the Doctor.
The Cybermen begin attacking the Masters and they realise that they're probably fucked without the Doctor.
They let him out, but yay Billbot comes to the rescue. Of course she does. Nardole flies in on a hitherto unseen spaceship (why do they need to upgrade if they can make spaceships to protect themselves?) and the Doctor gets zapped by an errant Cyberman. Why they do this is unknown when they could just grab him and carry him away.
Whatever, tension. The Masters leave him for dead and try to get Nardole to leave without him, but Billbot grabs hold of the rope ladder and apparently this is enough of a tether to stop a presumably interplanetary spaceship from moving.
The previous landing scene is then implied, and we wake up to... what. No. NO.
Bill is all better again and in a barn. They're keeping her there because they think she's dangerous, and because the Doctor is injured. Uh. What the fuck, what happened to Bill's massive chest hole? What happened to her upgrades?
Pearl Mackie is acting like everything is normal for her, so I'm not sure. She's emoting like a human so I assumed she was human. But really what they're doing is keeping the actor in the show by having her stand in for her Cyberman self in order to illustrate how she doesn't see herself as a Cyberman. This becomes apparent when she discusses the situation with the Doctor.
Now, on the whole I'm okay with the whole "Bill thinks she's human so sees herself as human" thing. It on occasion allowed us insight into things she was doing in a way that was shown and not told, but it also raises hella questions.
The main one for me was how the hell was she emoting in the way that she was when everything the Cybermen have always been about is removing emotion? Okay this one is a prototype, but they specifically stated in the last episode that the head dongle thing is the thing that makes her have no emotions. But all she does is fucking emote all the damn time. The Doctor struggles to tell her she's a Cyberman, and I have to question why he even bothered,
when he tells her that her denial is all that's keeping her, her. Surely it would be better and safer for her to remain convinced of her humanity so she could remain loyal to him, the implicit assumption is that she would lose her identity to the Cybermen if she were aware of it and came to terms with it. I also wonder why she fires off her weapon when she gets angry, as aside from the fact that Cybermen shouldn't get angry, this is the exact same way that Daleks use their weaponry (cf.
The Witch's Apprentice). Does every Who villain have to have weaponry literally powered by hate?
Either way, her blasting the door down allows her to see what's happening. The townsfolk, basically led by Nardole while the Doctor sleeps (and apparently with no interference from the Masters, even though John Simm's one has thus far been as cruel and spiteful as ever) have been fortifying the town with sandbags they pulled from their assholes filled with sand that they made at the Trek replicator they have in their house because there ain't no fucking crops in this land.
John Simm walks up and insults Bill a lot. She says she doesn't mind but on the inside she's totally sads. Cry-Ber-Man.
He also says that they found the entrance to the lifts, which is handy and would have probably helped in the last trip they took. Whatever. While they're walking there Billbot Baggins of the Shire confronts the Doctor about his claim to fix her. He admits it can't be done, but he points out that she cried and this is important because "where there's
bullshit tears there's hope". So he lied to her again then, HERO.
Missy immediately calls up one of the lifts and the Doctor tells her she done fucked up because the lift was in the bottom floor. Lolsostupid. A normal Cyberman prop that's cheaper to use pops out and they all shoot the shit out of it with various gadgets. The Doctor exposits that they have had a ton of years to upgrade and send out military models to attack them (not that that stops them also sending shitty Mondasian models as well).
Then the Reapers attack. BWAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
No wait, that's the Cyberman BWAH. I can tell because the BWAH is a little less BWAH and a little more BHAUH.
I think. Anyway, we'll bang okay.
Speaking of that. The Masters are talking again. See, John Simm has a TARDIS, but broke it. Apparently due to timey wimeyness, Missy remembers herself as John Simm being told by Michelle Gomez to have the spare part she needs, as so Missy just happens to have one. Convenient. Also they have Missy push the Master up against a post to tell him this important technical information, and he gets a bit of a chub on. Well done Doctor Who, our children need some confusing questions about whether it's okay for two people who are the same person to fuck.
The Doctor goes outside and see the Masters wandering off. They're running for that busted TARDIS and he's pissed off at them. He kills delivering a really hammy speech about doing the eminently stupid thing he's doing because it's kind, and John Simm literally laughs in his face and leaves. Missy hesitates, and he makes an appeal directly to her saying her standing with him is all he ever wanted. I don't really buy that for a second, really all he wants is to know that he can make someone as mad as the Master stop being so mad, because then he can fix people and make them not be awful any more. Missy confusingly tells him that she wants that too, but then leaves anyway. I...don't get it.
They seem to have set this up to have the old Master in the person of John Simm run away and leave him to die,
while Missy has changed and become a good person. But then she just fucks off anyway and I'm left wondering what all that setup was in the first place.
Where were we? Yes the Cybermen are on the way. The first line of defence against them is...a child with an apple.
I'm convinced they had her use an apple purely because they wanted Nardole to have that crack about an Apple upgrade. It's dumb. Nevertheless the apple explodes like a fucking nuclear bomb. Apparently below all this grass is fuel lines and pipework that can be exploded in controlled fashion in a way eminently suitable for combat. How this floor hasn't turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I don't know.
The Doctor tells us that the Cybermen have retreated thinking they have powerful weapons. Now they're not trying to convert them, they're trying to kill them all. Good job. But apparently not the kids because they're not military targets. Despite them using a kid to deliver a military attack sufficient to convince them that they were legit threats. Sound logic bro. But nevertheless, evacuating the kids is priority, and the Doctor orders Nardole to do this. They have a little bitch fight about it, because Nardole apparently hates humans so much that he would rather die that care for them. The Doctor calls him out by asking who of them is stronger, and he just mutters "damn" under his breath and does whatever the plot decides. Farewell Nardole, you were the only funny and interesting character.
The Masters have reached the lift and are attempting to open it. They succeed and John Simm runs to it. Missy stays behind. He enquires as to what she's doing and she weirdly plants her umbrella in the ground and tells him to "come here". Oh shit is this really going to happen? Who gets to play the sub? This ham fisted come on works, because the Master is apparently really interested in finding out what fucking himself feels like, and they embrace. Without really showing it, she's killed him with a hidden blade from Assassin's Creed. Well done with the plagiarism there.
They're clearly setting him up to regenerate into Missy, which is fine. But then after a little conversation where she tells him that it's time they stood with the Doctor he shoots her in the back and she dies and can't regenerate.
What. No seriously. What?
I'm not going to really dwell too much on the merits of her not regenerating. It's not like that didn't get completely overturned in the Russell Davies era when they wanted to bring the Master back. But the whole plot arc of Missy ends like
this? She just gets shot in the back by herself and laughs until she dies? She never actually does anything material to help the Doctor, just craps out in the forest and leaves him to die there? Does she not REMEMBER this part of events given she was John Simm when he did it? There's too much about this that confuses me and makes everything a
time paradox.
Meanwhile Billbot of Bag End has a final chat with Il Dottore. They can't come up with anything meaningful to say like "I'm sorry I once sold the Earth to zombies to get back your eyesight", or "I'm sorry you lost your eyesight getting me out of a scrape", or "Thanks for stopping that crazy bug man from killing me". He can't come up with anything because she hasn't done anything important. So they settle for Bill, as a robot, reminding the Doctor for absolutely no reason, that she's gay, then skipping off like she's not one ton of stamping metal abomination. Ladies and gentlemen, the final episode of Bill's Opinions.
While Nardole runs the kids and the thirstiest homesteader lady to the lift to run five floors up, the Doctor and Bill run interference. This works for longer than you might expect, but ends as you would expect. Kaboom. Strangely,
despite every single other Cyberman being destroyed, Billbot is unharmed and she can still agonise over the Doctor's strangely unburned corpse like she's a normal human.
BWAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Oh that one wasn't the Cybermen, this one is the bullshit alert. Everything after this is pure unadulterated bullshit.
Our plot now runs thus. Bill is miraculously and fully revived by the sentient starship fuel from the first episode.
They rescue the Doctor and dump him on the TARDIS and wander off to live an amazing life of being starship fuel.
The girl can fly the TARDIS just because she's the Pilot. Apparently. Nardole goes to live a life fending off Cybermen on that spaceship because they're totally going to upgrade for a thousand years and come kill them all. Nobody cares though because on that day they're okay. The ship itself is not rescued, nobody bothers to get it away from the black hole. The people on floor 900 just all die or get converted. Nobody saved Blue Man Group.
The Doctor is abandoned in the TARDIS, trying to regenerate. But he said NOE. He's like the Ian Paisley of Time Lords. He dun wanna regen and unlike Tennant he's mad, not sad. We revisit the scene from the start of the first part where he's yelling about regenerating, and he just shoves his hands in show and doesn't. I think he's going to become a lady. I just have that feeling. But in the meantime we're confronted with...the first incarnation of the Doctor, played by that guy who played the actor in the Adventure in Space and Time series about the making of Who. Wooo. That sounds...boring.
So overall this episode was basically Moffat 101. Tons of buildup, some genuinely engaging situations brought up,
but it lacked any sort of quality payoff. Everyone gets a happily ever after and nothing of import happens. The only one who didn't was Missy, who turned good long enough to be murdered for it. But we can safely consider her a villain. The Cyberman went from a scary threat to just another stomping army to evade or defeat. Every other thread is left hanging. I'm forced to conclude that Moffat genuinely doesn't know how to tie up plots. Overall this one was disappointing.
I will be attempting a full series roundup in hindsight soon.