It's A Type Of Goth, Isn't It?

To say that Nightmare In Silver was the episode I've anticipating most would be, in all honesty, a lie. That was Cold War. But to say that it's an episode I've been anticipating with a strange mix of keen interest and vague dread would be fairly spot on.

See, the problem with the Cybermen in the new series is, as I'm fairly sure I've mentioned at least once, that there simply hasn't actually been a really good Cyberman story. There have been a couple of decent stories with Cybermen in, but that's not really the same thing. Indeed, it's quite telling that the best use of them has been as incidental bit parts in episodes like The Pandorica Opens or A Good man Goes To War.

Not to mention the fact that everything's better with Rory.

So it was that I'd been steadily hoping for a really decent Cyberman story for a long, long time. That Neil Gaiman was to be writing this episode was a good sign. That it was going to shoehorn in a pair of irritating child characters was.... less so. It's not so much that I'm against the inclusion of child characters in stories at all. It's more that we already did a pair of siblings who couldn't act for toffee if their lives depended on it back in The Twin Dilemma. And look how well that turned out.

Some days death by embolism really does seem like the best option.

And so it comes as not only a pleasure but a positive relief to report that Nightmare In Silver is actually pretty damn good. 

It's not exactly what you'd call the perfect Cyberman story, mainly because there's no such thing as a perfect story. But it get's a hell of a lot really RIGHT. Whilst the big stompy armies are fun and all, the real threat and menace of the Cyberman comes from the conversion process. Indeed, one of the ways the new series really undercut the Cybermen in their prior stories was by making Cyber conversion a near instantaneous procedure, just scooping out the brain, dumping it in a robot body and reducing the Cybermen to low rent Daleks with legs. Here though, conversion takes a central role in the story, thus playing up what makes the Cybermen unique.

The first and most obvious way is in the attempts to convert the Doctor himself into a Cyber-Planner.

So, basically this, only wearing a bow tie?

This is, most interestingly, not actually something that anyone had ever tried before. It's odd to think that in all these years there hasn't actually been a televised story in which the Cybermen actually have a proper go at converting the Doctor himself, generally preferring to coerce him by threatening to not kill Adric or something similar. Of course, it's possible that they did in fact no what they were doing as it has to be said that the Cyber-Planner personality does get a little bit more emotive than your average Cyberman would consider normal or healthy. But I guess them's the breaks when you're trying to assimilate a Time Lords brain. Besides which it's not like machine intelligences' get to taste much, not having tongues or anything. So it's quiet understandable that they'd give the scenery a bit of a nibble given the chance.

Then of course we have the sub plot of how exactly the Cyber Wars were won. Taking the policy of scorched earth to it's illogical conclusion is actually a disturbingly sound strategy when facing an enemy that, as the episode so artfully puts it, "uses your armies as spare parts". 

Finally there's the perhaps the only slight disappointment in this theme in the shape of the partially converted Mr Webley.

The disappointment here though is simply that that there's not more of him. Once the Doctor is infected by the Cyber-Planner he becomes fairly redundant as a mouthpiece for the Cybermen and is basically left to hang around in the background. A shame, because he's really rather creepy. Not to mention that it's these not quiet right partial conversions that give us a real window into the sort of horror the Cybermen represent. Body horror in both word and deed you might say. Not to mention an awesome bit of design.

Then we have the actual Cybermen themselves. The new design is pretty cool being sleeker and more manoeuvrable, which I'm sure is a great relief to the valiant souls inside the suits. It also seems to be taking more than a few visual cues from the movie version of Iron Man, wish I'm sure will keep the mash-up T-Shirt trade fat and happy for a good long while yet. Beyond the merely physical they're also utilised in some effective new ways. Whilst I personally think the detachable head part is perhaps a bit to close to the whole brain in a suit motif that I disliked about their previous version I can't deny that it wasn't kinda fun. As was the fact that they came out and said what we've all known for long time, that the Cybermen are constantly improving and redesigning themselves. I suppose some people might say that the mid combat upgrades are making the Cybermen a little too much like the Borg from Star Trek. But we all know what to say to people like that.

The setting of an abandoned amusement park is effective, in both terms of allowing varied locations, industrial decay, and reusing props and costumes all over the place as a bit of extra set dressing. If the Doctor Who Experience ever get's around to updating itself then I think that this episode provides the ideal backdrop to base it on.

Then let's talk about the frankly ridiculous amount of old school references that the episode throws at us. Some sort of nod to previous Cyberman tales might be expected, but we get something for pretty much every single one. Yes, even Attack Of The Cybermen. The one good thing you can say about that story was it gave us our first proper partial conversions. We get nods to old weaknesses from stories like The Moonbase and Revenge Of The Cybermen. We have a CybePlanner, not heard from since The Invasion. We even get a montage of old Doctors like in Earthshock! Of course what you might not have been expecting is another callback to Curse Of Fenric in the shape of high stakes chess game, or that final brief nod to, of all things, Evil Of The Daleks. After all, the finality of any end is always in inverse proportion to it's popularity.

Of course, there's one other callback to previous episode. Just like in Rise Of The Cybermen a female character arrives in the TARDIS, opens her mouth, and we immediately want to smack her in the face with a shovel. Whilst neither of the child performances are what you'd call exactly stunning, the little brother character at least has the advantage of being polite and at least somewhat endearing. The flat performance of the sister however only exacerbates an already irritating character. I guess they were going for some sort of teenage petulance vibe. But what we get is a ghastly self centred ingrate that you frankly have to wonder why anyone would bother trying rescue. By all means, let the Cybermen use her to create a new Cyber-Planner. They're not going to conquer much of the galaxy whilst they're sat in their room whinging about unfair it is that the Daleks are the most popular monster. Seriously dear, you are in a TEME PARK IN SPACE. Quit acting like bitch and get some fucking perspective. Also, a quick tip: The military are not day care and owe you nothing. Stop bugging them unless you want to get yourself shot.

It's funny really, because as much as I worried about the kids spoiling things they didn't really have much chance to. They turn up, act up just long enough for you to wish you put them in coma or something, and then episode itself PUT'S THEM IN A COMA. Bam, problem solved. It does make you wonder why it was they were put in at all, considering how tortuously they were forced into the TARDIS in the first place. Were the production team going for cheap scary points by having the monsters threaten children? Or are they just trolling us? Really, there isn't much reason they couldn't have been replaced with a generic friendly NPC who was old enough to actually pull of the whole acting thing, so really it's just confusing at this stage. The only other option is that they're being seeded in for some larger role to be played in the finale, but that's just to horrible to contemplate.

One other surprise that the episode has in store for us is in the shape of Clara. In that she actually has something to DO for once. It's been a running theme so far that she's just kinda hanging out somewhere in the background, not really contributing and thusly we're not really getting any feel for the character. Only here, FINALLY, she's actually doing something useful for a change and getting to demonstrate a little of what made her so promising her previous incarnations. And whilst it's nice I honestly can't help but wonder if it's too little too late. This is the sort of thing she should have been getting up to three episodes at least. And then building on. As it is we're only just getting a glimpse of the character and next time it's meant to be the big reveal of the mystery that's been ignored since bloody christmas. Still, even if this is the penultimate episode it's nice that we've finally gotten at least a start on this incarnation of the character actually developing a character.

So, we have a strong return for a classic foe, a whole bunch of old school fan service, and a pretty decent story to boot. There are, in all honesty few criticisms I can honestly make for this episode, certainly nothing that isn't endemic to the current series, format.or production. Indeed, strangely although there's an awful lot of enjoyable elements packed in, this is one of the few stories this season that I haven't immediately thought would have benefited from an extended run time. I think it's paced out pretty damn finely already. still, it's something to think about. 

You want to shake thing up with the format? How about making a series of ten 1 hour episodes, rather than thirteen 45 minute ones?  About the same amount of total screen time, but giving each story a little more room to breathe. It's an idea. Still, now there remains nothing else to do but wait until Saturday and find out the answer to the age old question:

Steven Moffat isn't REALLY dumb enough to go there is he?