Ascension of the Cybermen - Review

A very good episode. I do believe this is the first time I've ever described a Chibnall era episode as such. I'll state my usual caveat that this is the first half of a two part story, so we can't really judge it properly until we've seen the conclusion. A lot of promising first episodes have been followed by poor second ones. From the 'Next Time' teaser we can see that there will be a shift in emphasis to the Doctor, the Master and Gallifrey, though there will be more Ashad and new Cybermen as well. There's something rather epic about a Cyberman saying "Set course for Gallifrey".
One thing we really want to see explained is the whole rural Ireland thing, which the episode kept gong back to. A baby gets left on a country road in early 20th Century Ireland, and is adopted by the man who finds it. We see him grow up and join the Garda, and at one point he gets shot and falls off a cliff. A few minutes later he gets up, as though nothing had happened. We then see him grow to old age and retire, yet his father and his superior officer look exactly the same as when he was a baby, and they take him into a back room and zap him with electricity to wipe his memories - the electrodes attached to the sides of his head reminiscent of Cyberman earmuffs.
The actor playing Ashad is Irish, so does this have something to do with him? Or is this another unknown Doctor - the retirement clock being part of a Chameleon Arch? I think the gift of a clock is significant. Or is this something to do with the old monk-like man, Ko Sharmus, who appears towards the end of the main narrative, and who is also played by an Irish actor - Ian McElhinney? The whole speeded-up life was reminiscent of something not really happening in real time at all, like it was some kind of artificial construct - like Donna Noble's life inside the Library in Forest of the Dead.
It will be interesting to see what this whole Irish flashback sequence was all about. I note that there was no sign of this sub-plot in the teaser trailer, though.
As for that main narrative, which follows on from the events at the Villa Diodati, Ashad worked a lot better this time. He felt a bit shoehorned into last week's episode, and I still think I would rather that the Byron / Shelley episode had been a stand-alone one. More was made of the fact that he is an incomplete Cyberman, who retains his human emotions. He sees himself as some sort of messiah who will bring about the Cyberman Second Coming. I wasn't entirely sure what he did to the first couple of Cybermen he brought out of hibernation - I'm going to assume that he was disabling their emotional inhibitors - but that then begs the question of why he didn't do it to all of them? Why just a couple of them? The new design - referred to as a Warrior Class - looked very impressive, though I don't know why Cybermen would need a Warrior Class.
As far as Cyber-history goes, this obviously has nothing to do with the Cyber-War mentioned in Revenge of the Cybermen. This story seemed to be set much further into the future, with only a handful of humans and Cybermen left (which contradicts a lot of earlier stories which dealt with the far future of the human race, unless these events are confined to just one galaxy). One big question I have to ask is: if the Cybermen are wiping out all the humans, who are they going to convert into new Cybermen? I'm in two minds about the Cyber-Drones - basically flying heads. They looked slightly stupid.
I don't think it takes a genius to work out where Chibnall might be going with the "Boundary" through which many other humans have escaped, leading to Gallifrey. Is it that the fleeing humans arrived in the planet's pre-history, and eventually became the Time Lords? Depends when they arrived. From a couple of photos already released from The Timeless Children, the action next week moves to the Gallifrey that has already been destroyed by the Master. Is Brendan the Timeless Child, and not the little girl we keep glimpsing? Did the early, human, Gallifreyan settlers make use of his immortality to regenerate themselves?
So many questions, and the problem is that we aren't going to get them all answered this series. Chibnall has pretty much said so. There will be some answers in the final episode, but not all.
I've said before that I prefer this Doctor when she is on the back foot, when things aren't going to plan and there is a real sense of danger to herself and her companions. We got that again here. Yaz was once again well served, but Ryan needn't have bothered turning up for this episode. I'm afraid Graham has become a bit of a walking Cockney cliche, which is annoying. He was one of the best things in Series 11, but he's been neglected this year. By far the standout performance of the episode is Patrick O'Kane's Ashad, though I suspect that Sacha Dhawan will give him a run for his money next week.