'Doctor Who' Season 12 Episode 9 Review: Part 1 of finale fails to impress thanks to a far too chaotic plot
Spoiler alert for 'Doctor Who' Season 12 Episode 9 'Ascension of the Cybermen'
The first part of 'Doctor Who' Season 12 finale is here and it's... well there's no easy way to say this but it sucks. After 'The Haunting of Villa Diodati', we were extremely excited and hoping to get an amazing season finale but 'Ascension of the Cybermen' was an absolute let down.
With a laundry list of logical inconsistencies and a complete lack of any interesting character arcs, Episode 9 gives us more questions than answers. Honestly, at the end of the episode, we are left more clueless than we were at the start and while that can be a good thing sometimes, this was certainly not one of those times.
For starters, there is a whole plotline running through the episode about a man named Brendan (Evan McCabe) who appears to be immortal. How does this subplot tie into the main story? We have no idea and while some mystery is always appreciated, there is so much mystery here that we were almost led to suspect they might have accidentally spliced in some scenes from a different show.
There is plenty of weirdness surrounding Brendan besides the obvious fact that he doesn't die. For one thing, it appears his father and his boss at the local police station don't age even though he does and while we are hoping this has something to do with the Cybermen, we really have no way of knowing, especially because of how random the metal monstrosities are in the episode.
We have been waiting a long time for a proper Cybermen episode and while Ashad the half-finished Cyberman is creepy (Patrick O'Kane), he doesn't quite make up for the terrible writing. The Cybermen are supposed to be driven by pure logic and nothing else but in this episode, they seem to just do whatever takes their fancy.
The first (of many) inconsistencies in the episode comes right at the beginning when we see Cyberdrones shooting down humans. The Cybermen have always preferred converting captured humans into Cybermen over just killing them and the fact that they are willing to waste perfectly good candidates for conversion, especially at a time when the Cybermen are practically extinct, makes absolutely no sense.
There are some parts of the episode where we see some interesting parallels between Cybermen and the Nazis but even that doesn't get much focus, and ultimately, the comparison isn't explicitly pursued at all. In the end, it almost feels as if Chris Chibnall only brought the Cybermen in so he wouldn't have to use the Daleks in the finale because honestly, this story would have made so much more sense with the little salt shaker dictators.
Oh, and by the way, the TARDIS is never shown in the episode and the only explanation we get from the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) is that it's too far away. We've seen in the past that the Doctor can summon the TARDIS to their location if need be, so unless she forgot she can do that, that's another plot hole to add to this episode that's already so full of holes it's practically porous.
The only interesting thing in the entire episode was the last scene where the Master (Sacha Dhawan) finally makes his grand entrance. Sure, we don't get an explanation for his escape from the Kasavin but that's excusable in an episode that didn't explain anything at all anyway and with less than a minute on screen, the Master completely stole the show. Whether that's a testament to Dhawan's acting skills, a consequence of the terrible writing, or both, we leave for you to decide.
The final episode of 'Doctor Who' Season 12 will air on March 1 on BBC America.