The Doctor takes Clara and the two children in her care to the future for a visit to Hedgewick’s World of Wonders, only to discover that the place has long been abandoned aside from a small military squad. However, in this seemingly dead amusement park, an old enemy is lurking in the shadows and sees the Doctor and his two child companions as the final hope for survival...
The Cybermen are back! In his second story penned for Doctor Who, Neil Gaiman has given the Cybermen an upgrade and made them more formidable than ever before, but will this prove to be a new lease of life for the Doctor’s oldest foes?
As some readers may have picked up on in my reviews for this series, I am hugely enamoured with Gaiman’s first episode of Doctor Who, The Doctor’s Wife. It’s somewhat of a modern classic, and I'm sure it will long remain at the top of my list of favourite episodes. As such, I was greatly anticipating Nightmare in Silver, especially with the promise that the Cybermen would be scary again.
For such an iconic enemy, the Cybermen have felt a little lackluster in recent years (especially in A Good Man Goes To War, wherein the duty of the Cybermen is to show up for a minute and promptly explode), and they haven’t been truly menacing since their reintroduction in Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel in 2006. This is something that Gaiman remedies, introducing a new form of Cyberman with a shiny new design and the ability to charge forward at alarming speeds, they're a vast improvement on previous models. With their capacity to upgrade as they go, adapting to new situations and new challenges, and their methods for assimilating people for cyber-conversion, it’s like this particular variety of Cyberman has been taking lessons from the Borg! Ultimately, Gaiman’s reinvention of the Cybermen does feel like a rebirth for them, and succeeds in portraying them as a far more formidable and unbeatable enemy.
However, the more threatening aspect of the episode isn’t so much the Cybermen themselves, but the conflict between the Doctor and the Cyber Planner. Attacked by a group of Cybermites (a more compact and likely more efficient kind of Cybermat), the Doctor starts to undergo the cyber-conversion process and begins to look a little bit like a male version of 7 of 9 from Star Trek: Voyager. Star Trek references aside, this is the highlight of the episode, as Matt Smith fantastically portrays this inner conflict, flitting between the Doctor and the Cyber Planner as they vie for control of his body and mind, engaged in a battle of wits and a game of chess. When done properly, the Doctor being incapacitated or compromised can be a powerfully threatening thing, and that is something that Nightmare in Silver did exceptionally well.
It’s up to Clara to lead a rag-tag band of incompetent soldiers in defence of Natty Longshoe's Comical Castle against the hordes of unbeatable cybernetic warriors, whilst the Doctor continues to fight for his mind and to free the two children. Clara continues to prove herself as the Doctor’s most startlingly competent companion to date (something that no doubt is connected to her impossible nature), but ultimately she’s fighting a losing battle. It’s Warwick Davis’s Porridge (the character, not his breakfast) who holds the key to defeating the Cybermen. Davis does a wonderfully understated job of portraying a man burdened by the necessities of war, something best conveyed when discussing the Cyber-Wars (“Used to be the Tiberion Spiral Galaxy. A million star systems. A hundred million worlds, a billion trillion people. It’s not there any more. No more Tiberion galaxy. No more Cybermen. It was effective. … I just feel sorry for the poor blighter who had to press the button and blow it all up.”). It’s not long until Porridge has to make a similar choice, and resorts to blowing up the planet in order to defeat the Cybermen...
It’s a drastic move, having to destroy an entire planet, but as Porridge said, “it was effective.” Maybe a little too effective for my taste, as although there was a hint that maybe the Cybermen are not all dead and gone by the end of the episode, I would have liked to see the Doctor et al have to run from their unbeatable foe and flee to the TARDIS. Escaping the army of Cybermen, those who made it out alive would consider themselves lucky, but be left with that looming sense of dread knowing that those Cybermen are still out there... Nevertheless, the ending certainly hints that this won’t be the last we’ll see of these relentless automatons, which I’m rather content with!
My only major issue with the episode would be the children... Their admission to join the Doctor on a trip in the TARDIS was largely unexplained, aside from them being particularly brat-like with their attempts at blackmail at the end of last week’s episode, but that still doesn’t quite explain why the Doctor would be so willing to bring them along... He’s turned better people away from the TARDIS in the past. Presumably the children were introduced to bring a sense of danger to the episode when they’re both taken to be upgraded, but I just felt it was a relief that they were side-lined so early on, and left in a cyber-conversion induced walking coma until towards the final five minutes. The danger element had already been achieved with the Doctor undergoing his own conversion, which was pretty much the driving force for the episode, so the children ultimately just felt superfluous.
That being so, Nightmare in Silver was still an all-round enjoyable episode. Matt Smith’s performance of the inner conflict between Doctor and Cyber Planner was the absolute highlight for me, alongside the now more effective Cybermen. As long as a planet doesn’t get blown up every time one of them shows up, there’s every chance these Cybermen could rise to become quite a prominent threat to the Universe once again!
And now, everything has been leading up to this moment... Next week, in The Name of the Doctor, all of our questions will (hopefully) be answered. Who is Clara? The impossible girl, a mystery wrapped in an enigma squeezed into a skirt that's just a little bit too tight... And on the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature could speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked. A question which must never ever be answered... Doctor Who?
If you press the red button, you can watch the prequel for next week's episode. The red button on your television remote, that is. Not just any red button. There's no telling what might happen. Actually, click here and watch it on YouTube. Probably safer than pressing a load of red buttons.
If you missed Nightmare in Silver, you are inferior. You will be assimilated. Man will be reborn as Cyberman. Upgrading is compulsory. Watch the episode whilst the upgrade is in progress. If you do not comply, you will be deleted.
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