Nightmare In Silver: Ranking - 242

  Nightmare In Silver

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 11/5/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Neil Gaiman, director: Stephen Woolfenden) 

Rank: 242

'Well, Peri, I would have taken you to Blackpool but the queues were too long and The Celestial Toymaker was running amok with an arcade machine, so I thought I'd take you here instead to Hedgewick's World to err, watch some chess. Fancy a cy-burger with fries after?'

When the series seven preview came out, with the titles and the brief synopsis, this was the story I so badly wanted to see (and typical they stuck it right near the end!) It sounded, and indeed still sounds, like the most amazing story ever: The Cybermen picking off a human base under siege like the days but this time its…on a theme park! That covers a whole planet!!! I mean, that’s just such a perfect idea: quite aside from wanting to see a Cybermen filled rollercoaster it’s a plot that has so much to say about human culture and our desire for entertainment, while seen through the lens of a Cyber-race who’ve struggled so much for mere survival and don’t understand it at all. In my head I could see it all and it looked wonderful: oh the clash of metal as Cyber giants strutted past metal struts chanting delete! Oh the symbolism as the relentless monotone Cybermen walk past the ultimate example of human life with all its ups and downs. The joy of seeing a Cyber-head used in a coconut shy! And oh the humanity, as a group of people expecting a happy day out full of laughs and hoping to feel ‘alive’ by putting themselves in harm’s way safely end up questioning their mortality while chased by a race who don’t know the meaning of laughs – or indeed being alive. Maybe there’ll be a Cyber hall of mirrors, with logical Cybermen blowing their circuits on finding there are multiple distorted versions of themselves staring back at them. Maybe there’ll be a big chase sequence on the dodgems, with Cybermen scratching their metal heads (oh those sparks) as they try to work out why humans would design any transportation that goes round and round in a circle and is impossible to drive without bumping into something (maybe there’ll be a special souped-up cyber dodgem car?) There’s bound to be fun with a ‘test your strength’ machine, while the ‘guess your weight’ machine would surely crumble. Maybe one would sell its spare body parts on a bric-a-brac stall? Goodness only knows what the ‘freakshow’ was going to look like, but that was sure to offer more contrasts against the monotone Cybermen who all looked the same. And there just had to be a showdown in the ‘tunnel of love’ as The Cybermen are vanquished, as they so usually are, by the emotion they least understand and most resent in human nature. Most of all, though, it felt like a comment on where we were headed as a society, at a time when a recession the credit crunch was biting and The Conservatives were pushing austerity while charging the taxpayers for breakfasts each that cost more than you could earn on benefits for a month and there was a growing divide between the families who could afford to splash out on entertainment and those who, like The Cybermen, could barely survive and looked on enviously. I mean, sign me up for that story right away!!! 

Needless to say we don’t get any of that. Instead of being purely symbolic the credit crunch instead became the baddy in a purely production sense which meant that every short circuit eas taken instead. That theme park planet? We literally see one moon-like crater and an underground bunker. Those rides? A game of chess. The people under siege? A couple of weirdoes we never really get to know and those two super annoying kids from Coal Hill School again who have been taken in the Tardis for a school trip and are never seen again after this story. Every time this story should be thinking big it goes small. Every time we should get lots of violence and action we get yet another chess game. Ever cyber attack is replaced by that cheapest of baddies, the possessed Doctor who basically just talks to himself. Even The Cybermen have been given an upgrade that’s actually made them worse, the Cyber equivalent of the brightly coloured monsters of ‘Victory Of The Daleks’, that rebuilds them out of iron and makes them look anaemic (the biggest thing going for the upgraded 20^th century Cybermen seen so far was their imposing bulk but this lot look like the kid who couldn’t even last the journey on the coach without getting sick before they even got to rides – and I should know given that, more often than not, that kid was me). Even their new pat familiars, the cybermites, looked thin and weedy compared to the might of the cybermats, closer to silverfish than rats (and whose scared of silverfish?) It all looks cheap and tatty and not in a good metaphorical way (a decaying theme park, from a planet that’s seen better days, is exactly the aesthetic this episode needs) but in an ‘oops we ran out of budget’ way. Instead of my ream episode we ended up with a nightmare, a ‘Nightmare In Silver’ indeed (what does that title, chosen at the last moment, even mean?!)

I mean, a decaying theme park was the single most obvious route to go and an idea a lot of other people jumped on. Theme parks were closing constantly in this period (and still are), as families just didn’t have enough spare money to spend anymore and there are lots of them up and down Britain slowly decaying, with the papers often sending photographers round on slow news days to capture the funny sights of trees growing out the head of Mr Blobby statues or something similar. We’re a bit early for the much-derided Willy Wonka Experience of 2023 (the lowest budgeted events day ever, with a warehouse filled with a few tatty bits of tinsel, a thimble of rationed Lemonade, a bunch of tired Oompa Loompas given an AI script that made no sense and no chocolate whatsoever) although that would have been the perfect image, what with The Doctor starting the episode by producing a ‘golden ticket’ and all. We’re a bit early for ‘Dismaland’ too, the 2015 Banksy-inspired anti-theme park where everything was deliberately run down and old and fading, as a comment on what austerity was doing to Britain – I’m willing to bet someone, somewhere, saw this story and saw how it should have been. There’s even a touch of ‘Farmageddon’, the rural theme park that meets once a year for Halloween near me and which is deliberately meant to look like its seen better days. Putting the Cybermen in a setting like this really should have been a slam dunk. Instead all we get is a bunker.

It’s not just the scenery though – everything about this story feels tired, as if everyone is going through the motions. We are, by now, right at the end of the series seven filming block, a long one that’s pushed everyone to the limit. The budget is running out. The actors are tired. Even Matt Smith has lost his bounce after nearly three years of boundless energy. The filming on Dr Who’s 49^th, November 23^rd 2012, was a particular low point: newcomer director Stephen Woolfendon figured everyone knew their parts by now so he could leave them well alone just when they needed help. Matt especially had a quadzillion lines to learn as he swapped between The Doctor and the Cyber consciousness controlling him and just couldn’t get it right. Usually he felt protected and helped by the production team but they just kept snapping at him to do it better, and quicker, while he kept asking for direction. It is, indeed, his single worst bit of acting in Dr Who (heck in anything I’ve seen him in) and if the person whose usually your reliable go-to person to get you out of trouble is struggling you know your production is a hot mess. But nobody knew how to make the scenes better. Nobody knew how to get out of this mess. Watching this story now just shows a bunch of cast and crew who are tired and fed up and muddy and want to go home. And while admittedly that’s how I feel roughly halfway into every trip to a theme park I’ve ever been on it seems weird for Dr Who, a series where practically everyone looks as if they’re having the time of their lives practically all the time.

It’s not just the filming either though, it’s the script. Neil Gaiman was the highest profile name we ever had writing for the series outside Richard Curtis and while I was more than a little sceptical about whether he’ d get’ Dr Who (he’s one of those writers whose only good if you don’t recognise the source material he’s ‘borrowing’ from, usually Joan Aiken who they really should have asked to write a Dr Who story before she died, or from Terry Pratchett or C S Lewis). ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ had seemed to prove me wrong. This story was far less ‘fun’ to write though, not helped by the fact that Gaiman lost his entire first draft very nearly the end when he took his laptop on a plane trip and left it behind, delaying writing again until he absolutely had to, by which time it was a rush job (seriously, did he not keep a backup at home or, even though this was a while ago the early ones were around, a cloud? I mean that alone could have been in the second draft, The Cybermen missing out on an upgrade after their consciousness gets left behind). It’s funny though: the more you learn about the making of these two stories the more it becomes clear that ‘Wife’ ended up with Steven Moffat’s fingerprints all over it as the showrunner took a great idea and tweaked it, turning it into as work of art, while for ‘Nightmare’ Gaiman was mostly left alone while Moffat fell behind badly on his own scripts (‘The Snowman’ especially). You can kind of tell: The Doctor never feels quite right somehow veering between big kid and scary adult, which sounds as if it should be exactly who the 11^th Doctor is but he’s too alien where you just know he would be comforting the people around him normally and too Human and scared at times when you know he would normally be running into danger not away from it. Clara, too, is all over the shop: sometimes she’s the authoritarian teacher who lays down the law, while at other times she’s so lax she doesn’t seem to give a monkeys about the children under her care. Even The Cybermen are no longer people who are scary precisely because they used to be people and have had all emotions like mercy cut out of them but a Cyborg race controlled by a single entity that is driven by an overwhelming emotion of revenge. Goodness we’ve had stories where The Cybermen have acted out of character before (‘Revenge Of the Cybermen’ and ‘Closing Time’ spring to mind) but it really does feel as if Gaiman researched this story by watching the ‘wrong’ programme and tuned in to the Cyborg from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ instead (a race that owes a lot to The Cybermen after all). Given that we’re at the end of the universe, in some specified time millions of years away, I could have forgiven that (after all, if any monster is still likely to be going when everyone else has died out it’s the unstoppable Cybermen and they would only keep upgrading themselves so it could happen – and amazingly this is the first time The Cybermen have ever upgraded the Doctor!) but the story never makes good use of that ‘all plugged into the same being’ mentality and just makes them into mindless robots. In Star Trek the horror comes from watching Picard, our flawed hero who wouldn’t hurt a fly (but would still fight the Klingons in armed combat if he had to) staring blankly, unflinching as he unleashes destruction and devastation on the people he loves. The best episodes in Next Gen aren’t even from Picard being a Cyborg but how it scars him mentality afterwards, as a person who only wanted to bring good to the universe is scarred by memories of the cruelty and destruction he caused. ‘Nightmare In Silver’? Matt Smith grows a funny blue bit out of the top of his head and talks a bit funny  literally turning into…’Cyber Matt’ (I still can’t tell if that jokes was deliberate on the part of the production team or not). There’s no sense that The Doctor is scared, no sense that he’s been turned into a ruthless killing machine, no sense that he’s still inside trying to fight everything he hates most within himself. It’s a wasted opportunity to do something really dark and threatening. The irony, though, is that Gaiman admitted it was botched and demanded more creative control on his next project, (‘Good Omens’ starring David Tennant) – even while this story proved how badly he needed an editor sitting over his shoulder taking his quite brilliant idea and going ‘no, not that – write that instead’.  

After all, there are children on board The Tardis. The plot starts off, until the halfway point, being about how these newly upgraded Cybermen need children’s brains to convert: they’re smaller yet also more alive, more full of the creative unruly juices the Cybermen need to survive. Of all the Doctors this is the one who most has a rapport with children, especially after the first person he met was the young Amy. Some Doctors just see Human children as younger versions of their parents but this one firmly believes that children are the future and the way humans should be, curious, open-hearted, enthusiastic, carefree. Forget all those stories where The Doctor’s the oncoming storm and fighting monsters the moment he threatens a child while possessed ought to be the single most awful thing this Doctor ever does. Instead they’re so annoying you’re willing him on. I’ve said this before, particularly in the 12^th Doctor era when Clara is teaching at Coal Hill School, but the Moffat production team seem to really hate generation Z. Angie and Artie, the children Clara nannies for in this era, are some of the most offensive stereotypes the series ever had. They’re bored even in space, ridiculously hard to please, would rather stare at their phones than the alien world around them and keep breaking rules then having a strop about them to Clara, ‘the worst teacher ever’. Once again, you have to ask if anyone working for Dr Who has met anyone under thirty lately: sure you get badly behaved children everywhere but not like this, not in this way. Most Gen Z children are worryingly well behaved: they’ve grown up in a society that, again, has been hit by the credit crunch. They know that there are too many of them for too few jobs. They know that to stand out against the competition they need to do so many extra-curricular activities it would make a boomer’s head swim. They can’t afford to be rude, or at any rate not to a teacher whose usually pretty popular and given them a fun day out. If they really were this badly behaved all the time there’s no way Clara would let them out the house without supervision, never mind take them to an alien planet. They’re not characters but walking talking clichés, there to get into trouble through their own foolishness and end the story having learned absolutely nothing. You only have to compare these two to the three-dimensional children over in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’, who are no angels either but all have motivations to act out and feel like real people; Angie is meant to be Clyde when we first meet him but even in his first appearance when he’s at his most smug and annoying Clyde is a far far more interesting character. Angie and Artie surely rank amongst the most annoying characters in Dr Who of all time, especially Angie. There’s a reason why Big Finish, who do spin-off box sets for everything these days, have never done a spin-off Angie and Artie series: most fans can’t remember them at all and the ones that do merely shudder at the mention of their name. Oh and that plot point, the one that’s driving the first half of the story and which makes good use of the contrast between children and adults and how Cybermen are the logical rule-abiding grown-ups that children are frightened of, with children instinctively everything Cybermen hate (rebellious creative individuals who love mess) gets dropped like a hot Sontaron-shaped potato once they meet The Doctor and decide his brain is more suitable for their needs.  

Which, yet again, is a real shame because of what I think this story was originally meant to be. The first draft called the theme park ‘Lampwick’s World’, before a hasty last minute re-write when it was discovered that was the name of a candle shop and they might have grounds for sue if their ‘customers’ were seen on TV getting Cyber-massacred.  If that sounds familiar that’s because it’s the theme park in ‘Pinocchio’, where children are hoodwinked by promises of all the ‘wrong’ things they could  be doing with the freedom of being treated as adults: playing pool, drinking, smoking. Only of course it’s all a ruse to turn them into donkeys and make them work hard for a living, to be the opposite of the carefree little boys they were (there’s no girls in the original; I’ve never seen anyone else say it but that surely is one of the most damning comments on capitalism until ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ came along).  Pinocchio has to learn that becoming a ’real boy’ (although its really a coming-of-age tale about ‘becoming an adult’) is about learning responsibility, of putting other people’s needs above your own for the greater good and seeing through people who offer you something that’s too good to be true and make some out of it at your expense. Angie and Artie have never had to worry in their lives before because there’s always been someone (usually Clara) to keep them safe. But in this story both she and The Doctor are out for the count for different reasons. It feels as if this story, perhaps in the first draft that got ‘lost’, was meant to be about this, that the real ‘gift’ of The Doctor’s fun day out was learning that they can be independent and that they can save even the biggest badass in the universe (and her friend The Doctor). There are moments when it feels as if the script is going there, converting people into Cybermen rather than donkeys and putting them to work, only both children get possessed for disobeying the rules early on and aren’t put ‘right’ until the end (the closest they come to seeing the errors of their earlier ways is when Angie tells The Doctor his box wasn’t that bad, really).

That sense of responsibility is still in the script though in Porridge, the one supporting character here that we get to know. Warwick Davies, star of everything from ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Willow’ but most memorably to Whovians the owl opposite Tom Baker’s Marshwiggle in the BBC adaptation of the Narnia book ‘The Silver Chair’, is the one person in the room enjoying himself. A lifelong Whovian, he ‘gets’ what the character of Porridge was meant to be and fills in the gaps that just aren’t there in the script. Basically he’s The Doctor, a freewheeling adventurer who hates to be tied down in one place but also someone whose learned, by degrees, that the universe is bigger than he is and that it’s a good thing to offer a helping hand. The plot revolves around his decision, as an Emperor who turned his back on responsibility, whether he should allow the bodies to pile up or whether he should swallow his pride and send out an alert, something that almost certainly means he’ll end up going back to his people and a job he hates. It’s a decision that’s mirrored entirely by the one the 2^nd Doctor makes in ‘The War Games’, that the way to grow up and not become a Cyber-donkey is to take the more difficult road when it means confronting something you don’t want to face.  The moments when Porridge makes his mind up is genuinely sad, even his proposal to Clara is daft and utterly out of nowhere (I mean, she has a bigger wanderlust habit than he does); I can’t help but wonder if the part of Angie was written to be older so she was meant to become ‘Queen’ instead, before the production team got cold feet about a schoolchild running off with a strange man to an alien planet. It kind of works even so, though, given that Warwick’s height mean that he is someone who is at least treated as a child, even when he’s a great and benevolent ruler: this is his coming of age tale, despite being forty-three when this story went out and he gives easily the best performance of the episode.

One other idea that comes off is the idea of Cybermen playing chess as an exhibit, the 699^th wonder of the universe (a neat tip of the hat to the fact that the 700^th, the Exxilon city, was blown up at the end of ‘Death To The Daleks’!) We first meet Porridge inside the body of a Cyberman, part of the theme park, in an idea based on the Victorian stories of ‘Silver Turks’, giant automatons who toured Europe playing chess like experts (probably because there were actual chess experts hiding inside them so they think nowadays). It’s an idea that’s very Dr Whoish and had indeed been touched on in the series before (in Moffat’s ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’) but makes even more sense as a Cyber-design: after all, what are Cybermen if not logical machines with human beings hidden deep inside? Chess has been a recurring motif on Dr Who too, especially in the 7^th Doctor era, and it somehow makes perfect sense to learn in this story that Gallifreyans invented the game (our historians say it came from Ancient China, but nobody knows the actual person who created it – who’s to say it wasn’t, say, The Meddling Monk on holiday who left a spare set behind? I’m picking him because The Rani seems unlikely to care for games and The Master would lose a game where he has to think so far ahead – explosion tiddlywinks or Hangmen, with real nooses, are more his thing). Chess works particularly well in the context of a Cybermen story though: all that merciless logic and sacrificing pieces for the bigger picture while The Doctor is desperately trying to save every pawn. On paper it’s a great way of showing the differences between them and The Doctor even if, on screen it mostly means Matt Smith playing chess with himself while the camera veers wildly from left to right, which is nobody’s idea of interesting telly. Still, it’s a clever idea and one I wish they’d made more of.

That’s the frustration with ‘Nightmare In Silver’; there are other stories at the bottom of my pile that feel empty, as if they were written to collect a pay cheque and nothing more than that, but there are a lot of great ideas in this story that just never made it to screen. What should be an epic battle for control between a relentless logical Cyber race and a quirky quizzical Doctor, against the backdrop of a theme park that’s been turned into a Cyber afterlife (‘Their Valkyrie’ the script puts it, veering dangerously close to ‘Silver Nemesis’ Nazi ways of thinking, even though we already have one lot of Nazis stalking about the universe and the Daleks suit the idea so much better) ends up so poorly executed that most of the plot gets garbled and it soon ends up being another one of those cheap filler episodes where the baddy is one of the regulars. Some of these scenes are some of the most atrocious and inept things seen since Mark Gatiss became an insect; the shots of a possessed Doctor are really shockingly poor (there's not even an effect on Matt's voice to make it clear which is which at any one time; yeah sure Clara’s meant to be confused which is which, but hearing ‘our’ Doctor emotional with a cyber effect would have been so much more frightening). There’s a weird scene borrowed from ‘The Matrix’ (and it didn’t work there either) of The Cybermen moving at lightning speed to grab Angie, everyone else in slow mo and powerless to stop it, that just looks stupid (if you want a monster that moves fast make it the Raston warrior Robot not a Cybermen – and besides, the simple graphics in 1983 showed speed so much better – this just looks like a sports action replay gone wonky). This scene just makes the Cybermen look like so many Tom Cruises pretending to run fast in 'Top Gun' et sequence. But a lot taller obviously. A lot, lot taller. The cybermites are up there in the collection of ‘stupidest unnecessary ideas in Dr Who’ alongside the sonic glasses, the timeless children arc and casting Kylie Minogue (why do they help the Cybermen in any way? And why would a race, with such meagre resources, spend them making insects?!) The story utterly wastes Jason Watkins, one of the creepiest actors around who steals every scene he’s in as the chief great vampire in Being Human but who here is just feeble as theme park owner Webley. There are other supporting characters too but I can’t remember a thing about them. And the episode only finished playing five minutes ago! This is a story that demands to be bright and colourful and gaudy and false, like ‘The Happiness Patrol’, but seems to have been shot in the mud in the dark. More than any one thing it gets wrong, though, ‘Nightmare’ feels as if it’s a story that nobody really understands: not the director, not the guest cats. Not the regulars, not the set dresser, not even the writer. I hate this vision of the future, it’s stupid, as Angie would say.

Which is annoying because while I’m quite happy to say there are stories I don’t ‘get’ when the people making it clearly do (‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ ‘It Takes You Away’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’) I do feel as if I understand this story. It’s about how the hard things in life don’t take a holiday even if you are. How bad things can happen even in places designed to be fun. About how doing the hardest and logical thing is often the hardest choice on an emotional level. It’s about the dangers of being so caught up in logic that it takes you over and stops you having fun. It’s a storyabout doing the right thing, even when its hard – especially when it’s hard – without the dangers of numbing yourself to the pain. It’s about how things are more than what they seem on the surface, that there is a person hiding behind every leader taking hard tough logical decisions that kill that cries out ‘what are you doing? Think of the children!’ (and in this era in this country that person was mostly David Cameron. Even though I normally tend to think of him as a Slitheen or an Abzorbaloff crossed with Davros). It should have been a rollercoaster of emotions that instead has Angie saying near the end, quite honestly, that she’s bored – and when you’re bored in a story that involves the Cybermen at a theme park you know something has gone very wrong indeed. The result is like being given a golden ticket to the greatest most death-defying rollercoaster in town - and then finding out that you only ever got as far as the interminable queue and you never really got to see anything happen. It’s an oh so promising idea turned into a mess not by one lot of people getting it wrong (as per usual on Who) but everyone being stuck on automatic pilot together, so that writer showrunner and actors were all caught napping. After all it’s not like this is a story that should never have been tried or was un-rescuable and other much worse stories have been saved by the people working on it putting in over time to make it soar; it’s just that nobody knows quite how to convert it and make it work. Despite this being a story that, above all other things, is about converting and upgrading. At the time of writing Neil Gaiman is under investigation for sexual assault and all sorts of unsavoury things; he’s not had much of a chance to say his piece yet and who knows what the truth is except for the people there. However I will say that if they end up having to remove ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ from i-player due to the allegations, so soon after ‘Fear Her’, there will be a horrified passionate outpouring of frustrations from fans. Few, if any, will complain if this one goes missing. It seemed better in our heads in the days before we saw it on screen anyway.

POSITIVES + There's an awful moment when it looks as if we're going to get another of those interminable 'Doctor flirting with companion' scenes. We know the Doctor has been getting steadily closer to Clara and that he's really missing Amy, so we think we know what's going to happen when Clara asks him to tell her something only the Doctor would know to prove he's not possessed. When he chats her up it looks for one awful moment as if Dr Who is going down that same tired route again, but no - this isn't Dr 10 anymore and it isn't Rose or Martha or Amy. Instead Clara sees through this as a complete and utter cyber-lie because their relationship isn't like that and even if he felt that way (which he doesn’t) he would never tell her. Go Clara! Go writers! Of course its then spilt by one of the most (rightly) criticised and attacked Dr Who scenes of them all, in which The Doctor drops Clara off and wonders again about who she is, deciding she’s ‘an impossible girl, a mystery wrapped in an enigma squeezed into a skirt that’s just a little bit too tight’. Whoa, a lustful misogynistic Doctor. Sometimes JNT was right about ‘no hanky panky in the Tardis’.  That line felt really out of place on first broadcast and actually quite icky now we’ve had the Neil Gaiman allegations. You wonder if the 13^th Doctor ever woke up in the middle of the night remembering when she said this and hating herself for it when she became a woman.

NEGATIVES - The Cybermen really do look awful. Ever had a bad hair day? Well, this is a bad head day. All that sense of menace and humanity is long gone. For my money the modern production team have never got the 21st century Cybermen quite right but at least the ‘Rise’ ones looked like a proper scary army. This lot just look frail. If this was your first Cyber story you’d be going ‘what a pathetic monster’ – and if you know your Cyber history you’re going ‘what a pathetic version of a great monster’. Even accepting that they're monsters with the desire to keep upgrading themselves and not every upgrade is going to work...Why did they have to look like that? Especially when they start walking fast in the battle scenes and every Human starts walking s l o w l y  to cover up the fact that they still walk too slowly despite the sudden bursts of speed. This story only exists because Moffat handed Gaiman the idea of making the Cybermen ultra scary again. They’ve never seemed more of a pushover, without a scary scene anywhere. In the olden days a silhouette was enough to have you running under the bed. It’s by far the weakest Cyber episode even with some absolute horrors in the catalogue. Delete, delete delete!!!

BEST QUOTE: Webley: ‘As the battle raged between humanity and the Cyberaid the Cyberplanners built a Valkyrie to save critically damaged units and bring them here, and one by one repair them’

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