john_amend_all

And it was all going so well.

I liked the first forty-five or so minutes of "The Next Doctor" — the mystery of who the other Doctor was, his very successful attempts to be the Doctor without any of the magical props the real Doctor has, the revelation of his true identity, and the way he pulled himself back together and saved the real Doctor's life. I was looking forward to the finale, with the Doctor and Jackson Lake standing shoulder to shoulder against the foe...

And then, what I can only describe as a Ludicrous Mecha rose out of the Thames, and my suspension of disbelief went away to hide somewhere. The phrase "terrible miscalculation of scale" popped into my head, and never went away. Mr. Lake, the representative of humanity at its best, was reduced to a fanboy gushing over the Doctor. Cybermen at St. Paul's? Very allusive, I don't think. The Doctor's confrontation with Miss Hartigan gained nothing from the fact that one of them was in an oddly stationary balloon and the other in the mouth of a giant robot. And how was this menace ultimately resolved? Why, the Doctor, so famously anti-gun, shot it. Twice, with different weapons, just to make sure.

Overall, the Ludicrous Mecha spoilt it for me. The Doctor seems sufficiently familiar with the thing to claim that it's a standard Cyberman tactic, not even a one-off product of a disordered brain. What? Why on Earth, or Mondas, or Telos, or wherever, would Cybermen want to build a battleship in the shape of a giant robot? With all the mechanism on the outside? That's just asking for trouble. It was frightfully convenient to the plot, of course, making a big basket that the Cybermen could put all their eggs in. I could see the Toclafane building something like that and using it to cause random destruction -- there's a deadly exuberance about it that fits them quite well. But why would Cybermen care that the idea of a giant, city-stomping robot is fun?

Rosita (the Rose-eater?) was perfectly good, if a bit generic, for the parts she was in. Pity that, like Jackson's, her story ran out a quarter of an hour before the programme ended. The scene where she decks Miss Hartigan was, I think, intended to show that Miss Hartigan, for all her vague hints about being oppressed, certainly didn't want to improve the lot of anyone other than herself. Exactly what she did hope to gain by working with the Cybermen, I am not entirely clear — she ended up in charge of them, but that obviously wasn't what she was expecting.

The "stolen from the Daleks" explanation for the Cybermen's new knowledge and tech sounds most implausible to me, given the demonstrated capabilities of the Daleks and the Cybermen the last time we saw them together.

When, at the end, Lake commented that history was being made, I hope the Doctor's puzzled reaction is foreshadowing. It seems to me that a timeline in which a Ludicrous Mecha was wandering about in 1851, cannot be a timeline in which the Torchwood Institute wasn't set up until 1879. Though if there are bits and pieces of Dalek-based tech knocking about, it might explain how Maxtible and Waterfield managed to build a time cabinet in 1866.

Liked the Doctor noting that companions, plural, had forgotten him.

Oh, and can anyone think of a good Watsonian reason why this story is called "The Next Doctor"?