Silver Nemesis: Ranking - 168

  Silver Nemesis

(Season 25, Dr 7 with Ace, 23/11/1988-7/12/1988, producer: John  Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Kevin Clarke, director: Chris Clough) 

Rank: 168

'Hey man, dig these crazy beats! We've just been hired as the new companions so we can play our trumpets at any aliens we meet because the whole universe needs jazz. Why only today we conquered the Krotons with Coltrane, Jelly Roll Mortoned the Abzorbaloff, Benny Goodmanned the Cyberman into submission and then after we hung out with some cool cats at New New New New York. There was a worrying moment when The Meddling Monk turned out to be disguised as Thelonious Monk, but we defeated him too by taking away his piano-shaped Tardis and turning it into a xylophone. Now the universe is all grooved out and our work here is done' - Miles T Davis and Chet 'Tom Or Is It Colin?' Baker

 

 Doctor Who’s 25^th anniversary was an oddly muted affair compared to the big guns that were pulled out for the 10^th and 20^th anniversaries. Writer Kevin Clarke was a newcomer who didn’t even know DW was still on the air when his agent suggested writing a script  (not the best of signs for how important everyone was treating such a big anniversary episode) and he originally wrote it all for the Daleks, until a clash in the schedules with ‘Remembrance’ meant that they were quickly replaced with the Cybermen instead (more suitable for a ‘silver’ anniversary too, hoho!) A lot of people call it ‘Remembrance mark II’ only not as good, but for me its ‘Battlefield Mark I’, a similar story full of past history I the present day, multiple plot strands that don’t quite come together, lots of unnecessary silly moments and a lot of heart and soul that nearly pulls the whole thing off despite the many things working against it. Let’s start with the good points: after 25 years of using other monsters as metaphors for them DW finally puts the Nazis in the show (well, ‘paramilitaries from the 1940s with German accents’ as a nervous producer hastily renames them just in case anyone’s upset, but we all know what they are – they even get Anton Diffring to play the head one who was always playing Nazis in films; notoriously he hated the script and did it because it gave him enough time off in England to go to Wimbledon when the tennis was on. In any other period this would have been a stupid move and I can already hear the letters of protest at Tom Baker making jokes and offering Nazis jelly babies or Colin Baker pontificating morals at them. But this is the 7^th Dr and, despite a comedy beginning, Sylvester McCoy is going for mean, moody and sinister, a Doctor whose seen the darker forces of nature and isn’t afraid of unleashing them straight back to those who deserrve it. His Doctor is often pushed to extremes and he’s near his best here, a worthy opponent clever enough to stay moves ahead of everyone else but unlike them fragile enough to make mistakes. Better yet the Nazis are shown to be weak simple morally corrupt wannabe cry-babies against the might of the Cybermen, the ‘super men’ they worship but who have no more use for kow-towing obsequious right wingers than they do all other weedy and puny Humans. Cybermen don’t do politics but, like many a monster, the right automatically think they must be one of ‘them’ because they’re ruthless, opportunistic and heartless, heavy on the trigger finger. What they miss is that Cybermen turned out that way to survive annihilation not through ideology and are quite happy to annihilate back without caring if others agree with them or not. Better yet, the Doctor’s discovered the perfect antidote to the rigid conformity of cybermen and nazis: jazz. Seeing as they’d done rock and roll already (in ‘Delta and the Bannerman’) I can’t think of a better way of demonstrating the unbroken unity of humanity responding to the randomness of life. I still can’t quite believe they got Courtney Pine to do a cameo; the only shame is that he isn’t in the show more but they genuinely didn’t seem to think he’d show up – actually Courtney was as big a DW fan as any guest whose been on the show and more than happy to play. If I had to name my favourite plot conclusion to any DW story then it might well be the idea of random jazz signals in space so confusing to cyber warships that they crash and burn. I mean, what other show would think of that? Throw in the 7^th Dr and Ace at their telepathic best and there’s much to cherish here. It’s just that, even with missing scenes added to the video (frustratingly they’re absent from the DVD) the plot still doesn’t make much sense. Like ‘Battlefield’ there’s an ancient artefact that everyone’s trying to get hold of that apparently the Doctor buried in Britain’s ancient past, but this time there isn’t even the hook of the Doctor being ‘Merlin’ to hang this on and the comedy medieval pair, Lady Peinforte and her man servant Richard, are poorly developed and really have no need to be there, one enemy too many for a humble three-parter (that really needs to be at least four). Not least because in the end the cybermen get barely any screen time and are defeated by Ace and a slingshot pretty easily for the supposed second-biggest race of baddies in the universe.‘Silver Nemesis’ must also have the least funny comedy scenes of all of DW too, weird additions from the usually steady hand of script writer Andrew Cartmel (they sound like JNT ideas to me, but why stuff them both in this show, which was already over-running so badly large chunks of necessary dialogue were being cut?) In the end ‘Silver Nemesis’ is a collection of really great ideas (and one or two disastrous ones) rather than a really good story but, again like ‘Battlefield’, it’s a near miss so close to its target that you can feel what the production team were trying to do and willing them to get a bullseye right up until the end. You can tell that its being made by the right people who care about this stuff who’ve messed up a bit, rather than the dark days of the mid-80s when so much seemed to go wrong most of the time and no one was quite sure what they were doing. Its an oddly nervy story for a series that’s been running 25 whole years but these were nervy times and, for the longest time, it looked as if we wouldn’t get past a 26^th.

+ Even at its worst and most incomprehensible, seasons 25 and 26 glow because of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred. Their Dr-companion relationship is truly one of the best and they seemingly improvise their way round every script, making it feel natural and warm. You can tell these two are having a whale of a time together as actors and characters (they bonded quickly after finding they shared a birthday of August 20^th – it’s mighty tight which Doctors are which astrological signs by the way if you’re interested in such things with 3 Earth signs (1,4 and 7) 4 Fire signs (all aries; 2 5 10/14 and 12), 3 water signs (3,8, and 11) and 5 air signs (6,9,war and 13 plus 15 to come); the Doctor himself says he’s a Sagittarius ‘probably’ - the sign of the carefree traveller – an in-joke as the series itself has a birthday on November 23rd.  Of all Tardis teams, this is the one that seems the most fun. At least util the 7^th Dr goes all gloomy and dark again.

- Oh God, those ‘comedy’ bits! There’s an American millionaire who wonders into the plot and out again, thinking that Lady Peinforte and Richard are a couple of eccentric Brits rather than a couple of time travellers from the Middle Ages. This scene is there, apparently, because producer John Nathan-Turner met Dolores Grey at a convention and thought she was funny even though few Americans knew her at the time and no Brits did. The Nazis, in turn, assume that Lady Peinforte and Richard are social workers, though I don’t think many social workers wander around in Medieval garb (why not assume they’re going to a fancy dress party?) Then, good grief, there’s the near miss with the ‘Queen’, a look alike so bad I genuinely didn’t know who she was meant to be until I bought my first DW guide book, in a scene filmed in the grounds of Arundel Castle which looks nothing like Windsor Castle. This part is in the plot because JNT thought it was funny. Its isn’t. The Queen was a genuine DW fan though (she requested the Christopher Eccleston series DVD for Christmas in 2005, no less) and the production team sort-of came close to getting her involvement, but the closest they ever came to royalty was Prince Edward, who was due to cameo until the last minute. Good job it wasn’t Prince Andrew is all I’m saying. Though Ace would have soon put him straight with some Nitro 9 if he’d tried anything on her...