DOCTOR WHO – Not Quite Mr. Harvey's Nightmare

Season 7, Episode 12 “Nightmare in Silver”

When the Doctor takes Clara and her young charges to the greatest amusement park in the universe, they discover two things: That it’s closed and falling apart, and deep beneath it, an old enemy begins to awake from a centuries long sleep…

SPOILERS for “Nightmare in Silver” follow, but seriously, haven’t you watched it by now? We’re days out from the season finale!

Ok, let’s get this out of the way.

This is NOT “The Doctor’s Wife”.

Neil Gaiman’s first foray into writing for Who was, in my opinion, one of the absolute finest episodes of the New Series, giving us a voice for what is arguably the second main character of the show: The TARDIS. From showing that She stole the Doctor as much as he stole Her, to explaining the TARDIS’ steering problems as being the Ship knowing where the Doctor needs to go and taking him there, to giving us the “Hello” we never knew we needed to hear, it’s pure Doctor Who and pure Neil Gaiman, and one hell of a love letter to the show and its fans.

“Nightmare in Silver” is not anywhere near as good. Oh, it’s not bad, and there is much to enjoy here, but if you’re looking for a story on the same level, with the same power, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s unfortunate in a way that we have “The Doctor’s Wife” to compare it to, as without it, this would have a respectable, if not stellar, piece of writing from Gaiman, and some of this episode’s faults lie out of his control, and yes, we’ll talk about those, too. But as much as I tried not to, I had very high expectations for this one, and they just weren’t met.

Some of that lies in reading what Gaiman and Moffat have said about this episode, and knowing what their goals were, such as making the Cybermen scary again. It’s a great goal. The Cybermen were originally from the planet Mondas, and because it had been knocked from its orbit, forced to become more and more cybernetic to survive. Eventually they turned to conquest, in part to take a new home, but also because they still had organic parts, and needed a new supply.

They’ve been part of Doctor Who since 1966 and the final 1st Doctor story, “The Tenth Planet”, and have been one of the few Who “monsters” to change with almost every appearance. They returned with the New Series in “Rise of the Cybermen”, but in a new form entirely, not just a physical revamp. Now they were created by a human on an alternate Earth, then crossed over into our universe, before…er… something, something. It gets a little vague there, and during Moffat’s run, it hasn’t been clear at all if we’re dealing with the Cybus Cybermen or the Mondas Cyberman. Personally, I’ve been thinking the “The Pandorica Opens” and “A Good Man Goes to War” appearances were version Mondas, since they were space faring and lacked the Cybus symbol, but here Gaiman seems to have meant to combine the two variants in an alliance that fought the last great Cyber War, and led to the creation of the new version. Not that you’ll hear that in the episode… it comes from one of his interviews on the subject, so if you’re looking for an onscreen answer, no luck there. But here’s the question… are they scary?

Well, no. At least not to me. I of course am remembering that technically Doctor Who is considered children’s programming, and yes, yes, I know that seems odd considering the themes and content, but British programming is curious that way. The whole “hiding behind the sofa” thing comes from the fact that Who is supposedly aimed at a younger audience, and yes, we all know that’s not accurate at all, except when it is.  I don’t find any of our monsters frightening all that much, even the ones I really like. The idea of the Cybermen, now that is disturbing, when you consider that they used to be human and now have become emotionless cyborgs with a mandate to increase their numbers by force, but as far as they themselves being scary… well. But that was the stated goal, and that begs the question: Did it work?

Well, the redesign is fine by me for starters, although if you’re looking for scary-looking versions of the Cybermen, these aren’t it. These pull bits and pieces from earlier versions, and are sleeker and smaller than the steam-punkish ones we’ve seen in the New Series. They are also faster and quieter, although apparently Gaiman wanted them to be silent and the version we see do make mechanical noises. The Cybermites are certainly more disturbing than the Cybermats were, and what this episode does, more than anything, is set up a potentially more frightening version of the Cybermen, especially if they retain what information the Cyber Planner was able to take from the Doctor’s mind. That has potential, but if the goal was to make them more scary this time out, I don’t think they pulled it off. To me, and feel free to disagree, the true horror of the Cybermen is that there is still something organic trapped inside that robotic shell, something and someone that didn’t want to be in there, and this story — and most of the other Cybermen stories for that matter — just don’t play with that enough. We do get the threat of conversion though, and the unfortunate fate of Webley, so there’s that.

And of course, one has to discuss the Borg similarities, doesn’t one? Considering Star Trek basically took the Cybermen and flat-out copied them in everything but appearance, that’s a pretty unavoidable one, but any comparisons of the Cyber Planner to the Borg Queen need also to be flipped around, as the Planner made its first appearance in 1968. Of course we seem to have a lot more hive-mind action going on here, which is more like the Borg than before, and the Cybermites are a lot like the Borg’s nanobot-based conversion, but really, when you’re playing with alien cyborgs that are wanting to covert you into them, there are bound to be similarities. Ultimately, as a fan from way before The Next Generation aired, I’m not bothered by the comparisons as some younger fans may be.

Before we get to the good stuff, we do need to talk about the absolute worst part of the episode, and that is the children. Oh god, the children. The children, quite simply, are horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Doctor Who actually has a pretty good track record with child actors, so I’m willing to believe that the script and the editing let down Eve de Leon Allen and Kassius Carey Johnson’s Angie and Artie, well, for the most part anyway. But honestly, who acts like this? “Oh, time machine/spaceship? Boring. Alien world? Boring. Robotic monsters attacking me? Boring.” Gah. It’s just embarrassingly bad, and my desire to see the Doctor just tell the Cybermen to take the blasted kids was pretty strong throughout the episode, tempered only by the fact that the Doctor let the dumb kids wander around the alien planet unsupervised in the first place.

Thankfully they spend the back half of the story in a cyber-coma, so we’re spared Angie’s whining. Gaiman has written better kids many times, so one wonders how much he was required to put them in the story, or if he just was off his game here with them, but it wouldn’t bother me one bit if this was the last we saw of the Maitland kids.

The other major problem is one that has plagued this entire season, and it covers the rest of the sins of “Nightmare in Silver”: The damned “No Two-Parter Rule”. This, like “The Rings of Akhetan”, is an episode that screams out for more time, because everything suffers for being crammed into 42 minutes. Tamzin Outhwaite, whom I really liked in Paradox (although apparently I was one of like 5 people who watched the show), is pretty much wasted here, appearing in maybe 5-6 minutes of the episode, and even Warwick Davis, who is one of the best parts of the story, gets less screen time than he should.

In Outhwaite’s case though it’s really jarring, especially when you consider that even in the credits she doesn’t have any depth, listed only as “Captain”. Here we could have had an episode setting up the resurrection of the Cybermen, with the final moments being the big reveal of the Tombs opening, and the second episode being the assault and the mental fight between the Doctor and Mr. Clever, and actually got some character development and some real tension, but alas, instead it just felt rushed. It also cost us any time with the soldiers, leaving us with no reason to care if they died, and too little time with Jason Watkin’s Webley, who shone in the few scenes he was in.

On the plus side, well, there was a lot on the plus side actually. Watkins and Warwick Davis were excellent, especially the latter. More Warwick, people! From the not so subtle hints as to his real identity to his matter of fact rescue of the survivors, Davis was just great to watch. I’ve heard from some that the whole “Marry Me, Clara” bit was hard to swallow, but I read it as him just being lonely and seeing someone he liked and who liked him for him, who he could tell wasn’t after power. I would think he would have been a little disappointed if she had actually said yes, honestly. In any event, I thought Davis’ performance was one of the real strengths of the episode.

Clara got more of a mixed bag here, but that just continues the trend of the last few episodes, doesn’t it? She did get to take charge and show some solid strategic planning and even a bit of the action hero with her mace, but there was one moment that was really jarring. When one of the soldiers tells her that they lost communications with another one, she just responds that the Cybermen are obviously coming, which is just cold. It really seemed out of character for the lady we have gotten to know, however slightly, these past few weeks, but otherwise, aside from also showing that her nanny skills were much better in the 19th Century, Jenna-Louise Coleman again gave us a brave and funny Clara, who I just wish they had taken more time to develop.

The lion’s share of praise goes to Matt Smith, who gets to play both the Doctor and the mind-invading Cyber Planner, who takes the name Mr. Clever. Personally I liked the crazed villain, almost drunk on the power of a Time Lord mind, stealing a cracked mirror of the Doctor’s personality to express itself. It hammered home, in case you’ve missed it, the darkness that sleeps just under the surface of the Doctor, and it was quite effective showing that The Doctor as villain is an awful lot like the Doctor as hero: It’s all about his choice to be a force for good. One wonders when the Cybermen reappear, if there will be traces of Mr. Clever hanging about, because an army of cybernetic monsters with a twisted version of the Doctor’s personality? Now that would be creepy. And it could have been quite silly, Smith’s back and forth between the two personalities, but it’s a credit to his talent that he made it work, giving us a set of performances that played off each other in both funny and disturbing ways. If it hadn’t worked, the core of the story simply wouldn’t have either, and thankfully it does.

Production design was excellent too, with the creepy tackiness of the park spot on, and the tattered splendor of Webley’s museum suitably charming and eerie, especially in the dark. The darker shots were actually the most effective ones for the Cybermen, giving them a shiny menace that the daylight ones lacked. It makes me think that we need more of the Cybermen as stealthy killers, instead of the sheer weight of numbers tendency they often show, but then, again, I obviously like the more body-horror side to them.

So overall? Decent if not great. Smith and Davis both were excellent and carried the episode, and we got a new version of an old enemy with new potential for their next appearance. If you’re not holding it up against “The Doctor’s Wife” it looks better, and it would have greatly benefited from being a two-part story, and it falls… in the better part of this really uneven season. The rumor mill seems to grind fine that the season finale “The Name of the Doctor” will redeem the season, and I hope that’s the case, because while I give the production team credit for trying new things, this season really has been wildly uneven, lacking the focus and drive of Smith’s previous two as the Doctor. Doctor Who has a long history of unconnected episodes making up a season, but here, with the departure of the Ponds and the mystery of Clara, it’s made the season feel fractured and unfocused, and that’s a shame. But if we can go out strong and have a stellar 50th Anniversary Special, well, I’ll be quite pleased.