Agreed. Perhaps they're mellowing as they begin to decline in numbers.

The Angels are never going to have the impact again that they had in 'Blink', simply because they were so original and so different then. That kind of thing is a one off deal - it's the magician's reveal. Once you've used the trick, people won't applaud if you do it again. However I hated the treatment of the Angels in their previous appearance the two parter with the upside down crashed spaceship. They turned them from a baddie with a twist that almost automatically brought a level of decent storytelling along with it, to a generic 'jump out of a dark cupboard' monster and almost willfully seemed to discard their USP - the fact they can't move when you see them. In theory, the fact they can move when you look at them should make them even more scary (because it makes them less vulnerable) but in fact all it did was make them feel more generic and less unique.

This story took them to some degree back to their original form and again used their particular raison d'etre as a hook for an intelligent story. But the bare fact is they are never going to be the creature from Blink again. That creature was new and different and strange and rare. By using them in a semi-frequent basis - and thus essentially saying there are lots of them, not just a few - their feeling of being exotic and unusual has been lost, even if their unusual nature is retained.

As to why they look the way they do? Well, you could come up with a PSB explanation about the fact their visual appearance is formed partly from our subconscious and we associate predators with fangs but at the end of the day it's just because they are meant to look scary.

Jon

I thought it went some way to restore their previous notoriety/fear factor/whatever, and I heard the Doctor mention the whole time-displacement thing as their third form of attack - not something I had noted before, and perhaps an attempt to legitimise (and acknowledge) their poor previous outing.

I've said it before but the whole flickering/failing lights angel advance really does freak me out - It just works at a very fundamental level. I love it.

It could get old very quickly, if they get too much air time; so I hope they remain an infrequent threat, and special treat.

I can't wait to get home and check out page 11 of this thread - according to my work laptop, the content is offensive and inappropriate; so I'm not allowed to see it!

The Cybermen are to return.
I hope he can do something special with them, because so far I've been distinctly unimpressed with them.

Mark

I thought the Lumic story quite chilling in its premise. We certainly haven't had a creation story about them, even if it was in an alternate universe.

However, there has yet to be a story in the new series that has the same impact as some of the Dalek stories.

For me, the Cybermen are tantalisingly close to, yet just the wrong side of, the line that either makes me care about them or not.
I think there's a great swell of possibilities behind them, they just haven't had that certain something that pushes them across that line.
I thought the Cyberwoman episode of Torchwood was the best treatment of this race, and I think that this is the most obvious avenue for the Cybermen to take.
Infiltrating the human race by cybernetically enhancing us to the point of being less human and more cyberman is the way to go, in my opinion.

Mark

In the "classic" series, some of the most complained about stories were Cyberman ones. There was a story where a Cyberman broke off the hand of a prisoner, and there was blood gushing around. There was also an episode where people had escaped a cyber transformation and had artificial limbs and evidence of surgery. Again, I believe there were complaints.

Cyberman are quite nasty in concept, and this was best explored more recently by Star Trek where the Borg are the best analogue of Cybermen from across the pond. However, unlike the Borg, Cybermen appear to be canabalistic. There is little assimilation of other species in evidence.

Cybermen have great potential for the kind of medical shock horror that wold creep me out, but I suspect that it would not make for great family viewing. Touchwood touched on this, but didn't go as far as they could have.

Redesigned Cybermen

Mark

They had given themselves a problem with the space left by the big letter C.

Has the helmet design taken a step back towards the earlier designs?

Mark

The heads/helmets seem more rounded than they used to be, to me anyway. They used to be very much more 'square chinned', like they'd based the design on David Coulthard. Also the whole suit has a bit of an 'art deco' feel to it, although I couldn't tell you exactly why.

Jon

My attention has been drawn to the large cross on their chests. Why is it there? It looks like it was copied from a picture of a mexican bandit with two belts of ammo, across the chest.

We now have a minisode that kinda-sorta bridges the gap between losing the Ponds and the Christmas Special, and the official Christmas Special trailer.
Spoiler sensitive people probably won't want to view either of those links.

Mark

Just caught the christams special on iplayer.

I don't know if it was because we've been starved of Doctor Who for a while, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can see the the new companion fitting in very well.