A bread-and-butter DW story. This is only Charley’s second adventure, so giving her a “preview” of how things usually go with the Doctor makes sense. I only realised now how clever of BF it was to make Charley an early 1900’s girl: she gets to say “this is some sort of *insert simple mechanism here*!” and demand some explanations for hightech space gizmos quite naturally, which helps us to understand what they’re all seeing and dealing with. I thought this episode was a lot more natural in inserting the cues and descriptions for things than “Storm Warning”, which was more on the nose with its ‘say what you see’ lines.

Man, there were just too many people on that ship. Did this story really need 6 (or was it 7??) crewmembers? I literally finished listening to it less than 1 hour ago and cannot remember their characters. Deeva, the ‘Captain’/spy, is the standout, of course. The android twist came a bit too late to really be a twist, sadly. This was a pretty standard Cybermen story as well, I don’t have much to comment about it. 

The Doctor and Charley are a good team, and bounce off of each other nicely with their little quips. As always, Paul and India’s performances are great. There’s not a great deal of characterization going on, but Charley learns that humanity’s future is not all bright, and people can be racist even in space. Overall she deals with being in space and meeting aliens and all very well! The bit where the alien shopkeep Grabbed her was super unnecessary. I guess the writer’s idea was to show Charley takes no shit can defend herself, but it’s a very outdated and lazy way of showing that. Yeah, yeah, this came out in the 2000’s, but still.

The mystery of Ramsey’s size was answered for me when Charley said he was too big to move. That guy on the R101 that wanted to take him home as a pet really was a loony.

Now, I do know the Cybermen came before Star Trek TNG introduced the Borg, but everytime they said “Resistance is… useless” I snorted a little bit.