Thank god this wasn’t chosen over the daleks

A disappointment. It starts out interesting enough, with the establishment of a dead world that feels weirdly alive, and the first episode portrays that well, but after that, it takes a bit of a nosedive. This is, partly, because we live in a post-cyberman world. We’ve seen the struggle between human and machine in a thousand different ways. So the question becomes, what does this script bring to the table?

The answer is, sadly, not much. It touches on concepts, like generations, religions, the meaning of life, but it also feels the need to pad itself out and add a lot of superficial elements on top of it, so these topics don’t get the room they should’ve had. Maybe that’s the consequences of an old script, but well, the story was adapted in 2012, so more could’ve been done.

But it is not without good sides. William Russell’s first Doctor is great. When he gave the speech about the death of his Tardis, I felt that to my core. And the runaround and interactions with Ian and Susan at the beginning are great as well. After that, it sadly just becomes standard fare with a lot of padding. A shame.