A very miserable, dark, dank, scary, terrifying episode of Nu-Who. But why give it a high rating? because its bloody brilliant!

Parallel universes are fun - you get to see characters act different and the play on words and names is a treat to watch and hear. This world, London filled with Blimps and Ear-pieces is a strange, brave new world that you know is bad.

However behind the fun of the new world (and the drama of Rose's dad being alive) there is the darkness. My favourite villain of Doctor Who is back and better than ever - The Cybermen!

And what better way to recreate them than use people? Chop off body parts and strap on the metal. grind them through gears and saws and create the most menacing creature in the Who Universe. This is a great episode and possibly the best Doctor Who Cliffhanger - well, until The Stolen Earth.

This episode shines from various points – In this alternate world, Mickey (or rather Ricky) is a vast improvements on Mickey's usual useless self and is determined, focused and even heroic. One of the many moments which impress is when Mickey and Rose start in different directions and when the Doctor is torn which to go with, Mickey – in an unusual display of seriousness – tells the Doctor to go with Rose, after all, there is no real choice here, is there? There are several strong scenes with Mickey, including the touching reunion with his grandmother. This is the only episode where Mickey actually has a purpose and actual character growth. If I was the actor, I'd be actually insulted by the way they've written Mickey. This episode proves this character has such potential, if the writers would just spend a little time on him, instead of using him as a comedy piece in the background.

As always, a strong part of Rose's character comes from her relationship with her parents and here she has the opportunity to spend time with her dead father, only in this universe she was never born… they have a dog named Rose instead! Very funny moment when they find that out and the Doctor burst out laughing! Finding that her father happens to be where they need to go, Rose not only gets to see him but the Doctor does his job at the same time. This leads to a charming scene with Rose's dad and an equally unpleasant scene with her mother.

It always confuses me how the writers do such a good job with the Doctor and Rose, then make such a mess of Mickey – but this episode is the exception to that, thankfully. There are several great moments and I have to say that one of David's best in this episode actually comes from their attempt to surrender to the cybermen. For some reason, his performance right then really impressed me.

I was never impressed by season 1 but I have to say season 2 has been very good, David Tennant is absolutely perfectly cast and continually impresses. He effortlessly handles everything from comedy to action. Add that to the lovely chemistry with Billie and we've got a strong combination. Season 2 has been a pleasure to watch.

A very strong episode, some great character scenes and very enjoyable.

Not great but not abysmal. There was too much talking and no enough action. Even when the cybermen entered the house it was too talkative.

We needed to see more of the relationship between Pete and Rose and the Doctor, Pete and Rose. The Age of Steel didn't do this either but this didn't do it the worst.

If the cybermen were to return I would have wanted it to become more amazing and spectacular. This did not happen and I was disappointed. This episode is in my bottom 1/4 of episodes which is not very good.

Fairly, fairly average...for Dr Who standards.

I think we all knew they were coming back long before the story broke in the press, but how would they return? What would they look like? What would the story be all about? In "Rise of the Cybermen," Tom MacRae tells not one, not two, but three 'parallel' stories, each and every one of them bound together wonderfully. With twice the time Rob Shearman had to re-invent the Dalek, the writer is able to slowly crank up the tension on all fronts before ending his first episode on an outstanding cliffhanger! Those who tuned into "Rise of the Cybermen" expecting a massive gratuitous Cyberfest may have been disappointed (and I'm sure they'll be appeased next week), but I can honestly say that I was thrilled with it. Barring the obvious transformation of the inhabitants of this parallel Earth into Cybermen, there was not one aspect of this episode that failed to surprise me…

To begin with, I had it in my head for some reason that this was going to be an episode built almost exclusively around Rose and her father Pete, who is not only alive in this alternate reality, but is actually a successful businessman; a millionaire no less. Whilst much of the episode does focus on the temptations surrounding Rose, "Rise of the Cybermen" is at heart a Mickey Smith story. In fact, it is the Mickey Smith story. With all the hype about the return of Shaun Dingwall as Pete, I really didn't see the unravelling of Mickey's back story coming. Like the Doctor, I'd taken him for granted. He was a young man living on his own in a flat and I'd never thought to ask why. Giving Mickey a tragic past – a past the Doctor never knew about because he never asked and never cared – really helps to round off Mickey's character and helps us to understand him that bit better. Abandoned by his parents, Mickey's blind grandmother raised him until she died five (relative) years ago, tripping and falling down the stairs. I love the scene where the Doctor stands in between his two companions, Rose rushing off in one direction to look for her living Dad, Mickey rushing off in the other to go who knows where. Mickey shouts "Go on then, no choice is there, you can only chase after one of us. It's never gonna be me is it?", and he's right. As much as he doesn't want it to be right, and even as much as we, the audience, don't want it to be right because he's grown on us so much recently, the bottom line is the Doctor loves Rose and Mickey is just a gooseberry; a spare part. MacRae should have called this episode "Spare Parts," that would have raised a few eyebrows amongst fans… and possibly a lawsuit… I digress. Of course, the Doctor runs after Rose and Mickey is left to fend for himself in the "gingerbread house"…

Russell T. Davies and co. swear that Mickey's story arc wasn't planned, and if the whole Mickey / Ricky angle wasn't masterminded last year than it is one of the best cases of serendipity that I have ever come across. It fits like a glove. In our universe, Mickey Smith starts off as, well, a bit of an idiot, frankly. An idiot that lacks any real backbone. In this universe Mickey's counterpart, ironically named Ricky Smith (the name the ninth Doctor would always call Mickey when he pretended to get his name wrong), seems to be his complete opposite. He's a hero. A freedom fighter. A "Preacher of Gospel Truth… London's Most Wanted!" Two Mickeys? Something's gotta give! MacRae is clearly building towards something here, and I can only hope it isn't the demise of my new favourite companion…

"You could pop between realities and be home in time for tea. Then the Time Lords died. Everything became that bit less kind."

I also enjoyed the explosive opening to the episode. Half-expecting another "oh look, we've landed on a parallel Earth" type-of-story, I was thrilled to see that the writer had made this a one-off trip – something far outside the TARDIS's capabilities, at least, outside the TARDIS's capabilities now that the Time Lords have gone. To be fair, I've always enjoyed this type of story; classic serials like "Inferno" and novels like "Blood Heat" never failed to entertain me, but in making this crossover a fluke MacRae could really push the envelope in terms of drama in a way that those classic stories never could. Rose can't just pop in any time she wants to see her Dad. Mickey can't just pop in any time he wants to see his Gran. "24 hours on a parallel world" is all that they get – and what a parallel world! Zeppelins in the air, Cybus technology everywhere… this episode's designer have certainly succeeded in making a place as familiar as London seem creepy and alien. Undoubtedly beautiful, but definitely unsettling.

I think I'm right in saying that "Rise of the Cybermen" is the longest episode of the new series (obviously bar the Christmas special) by a good few minutes – it actually over ran and I missed the opening seconds of Confidential which I was less than pleased about! – yet it still had the same frenetic pace as the other episodes. It's remarkable how much they have crammed into forty-six minutes – one of Mickey's earliest lines about everything being "the same, but different" sums up what would have eaten up a couple of episodes in the classic series. Moreover, what is for all intents and purposes the story of the genesis of the Cybermen (okay, not the Cybermen, but Cybermen nonetheless) is told in about five scenes, without, I should add, the viewer feeling like anything has been left out or glossed over.

When the Cybermen first hit the TV screens in "The Tenth Planet" they played on the viewers fears of new technology. For the benefit of the uninformed, Dr. Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis's silver giants originally hailed from Mondas, Earth's twin planet, and were a non-too subtle metaphor for what many feared could happen to humanity itself. Rather than muck about with decades of very messy Cyber history, the production team quite wisely opted to invent some new Cybermen – human ones! This allowed them to completely redesign them, rewrite their evolution… basically do what the hell they wanted with them and best of all, the audience knows that locked inside that monstrous metal casing is a human being. It has much more dramatic punch than knowing that it is a Mondasian inside that casing. Along with the new design, the new catchphrase ("You will be deleted!") and the new voices (better than the 1980's voices but worse than the originals I reckon) MacRae has also updated the technology that we are to fear. Almost forty years on from their first appearance, the Cybermen of the noughties use earpieces to download information directly into humans' brains… if you think about it, it's only a step or two down the road from bluetooth!

That said, one integral facet has remained the same and that is the sheer horror of cyber conversion. I was particularly interested as to how they would portray this. A few messy shots of Lytton in "Attack of the Cybermen" is about as gruesome as it got on TV, but in the books and audios – particularly in stuff like "Killing Ground" and "Real Time" – the gore is really quite shocking. Personally, I feel that the writer and director did everything right here – a few screams, a brief flash of some menacing machinery and then everything is drowned out by "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Sublime!

"Skin of metal and a body that never ages. I ENVY IT!"

And then we come to Lumic – the man who is to the new Cybermen what Davros is to the Daleks. Roger Lloyd Pack is unbelievably intense; having only seen him in comic roles (I'm an Only Fools and Horses nut!) I was completely taken aback by his character's massive presence. His chair, his respirator and those wide-open, completely insane eyes conjured up images of Davros, Darth Vader and the calcified incarnation of the Master – in that order! On paper, he's a fairly run of the mill Doctor Who villain but when you see him on screen he's just so… impressive. He has a certain menacing charisma that just holds you… a mean feat considering that his character is almost devoid of humour.

"You're a fine businessman John, but you're not God."

In the President of the Great Britain, Lumic has a superb foil. The geek in me almost leapt out of my seat and my fiancée must have thought I was mad when I kept inexplicably shouting "Rassilon! It's Rassilon!" Suffice it to say that Don Warrington isn't new to playing powerful figureheads in Doctor Who, and in this episode his gutsy President does not disappoint – it is just a shame that he was killed off after just one episode, the first victim of a Cyberman!

Throughout the episode, everything builds towards Jackie Tyler's 40th… ahem… 39th birthday party, and despite the fact that it is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell what is going happen you could still cut the tension with a knife. Rose's part of the story is handled well, though in fairness all the Pete stuff seems very anti-climatic after "Father's Day" and what I thought would be the major hook of the story takes a back seat to Mickey's much more interesting misadventures. I even found the alternate Jackie more interesting than her husband – while she may share certain traits with our universe's loveable Jackie Tyler, this woman is much more aggressive (which really says a lot) and comes off as arrogant and spoilt, whilst Pete is portrayed more or less as he was in "Father's Day", only older and perhaps a little more seasoned. What made the party scenes so enjoyable for me were those lovely little Doctor Who touches that just seem to flow throughout the new series… stuff like the Doctor laughing out loud when he discovers that this universe's Rose Tyler is a Yorkshire Terrier, and Rose's blatant jealousy when the lady-killing tenth Doctor gets friendly with the fellow kitchen staff. "According to Lucy…"

The finale is nothing short of spectacular, and despite all the cinematic splendour of these beautiful, new, art-deco Cybermen iconically bursting through the glass windows it was one line that really swung it for me. Someone asks the Doctor why the Cybermen don't have emotion, and he simply replies "because it hurts." That is what is at the core of the techno fear that surrounds the Cybermen, but no one has ever really put it so succinctly before. We are scared of Cybermen. We are scared of becoming Cybermen. That's why they worked in 1966. That's why they work in 2006. The rest is just dressing. The Age of Steel has begun.