11.43: Nightmare in Silver

In which I do not understand the fan consensus.

Broadcast: May 2013

Watched: January 2022

“Get me to a table, and somebody tie me up!”

A lot of fandom hate this one – I mean, *really* hate it; “I couldn’t finish” hate it – and I honestly can’t work out why.

It feels extremely compressed – I’ve seen rumours it was originally a two-parter? – and the Cybermen, Webley, the slightly rubbish platoon of soldiers, are all introduced before the credits roll. But it feels movie-sized, with the action sequences and music to match; it’s one of the few episodes this season that actually lives up to that “Every episode should be like a movie” thing that Moffat used in the publicity. 

It is a bit weird to randomly have some mildly annoying kids along for the ride, and even weirder that next season gives us a totally different annoying kid with a connection to Clara. Angie a right pain; Artie is quite sweet (“Clara, I think outer space is actually very interesting”). I really hope the next generation of fandom has furious arguments about whether they count as companions. 

But the kids don’t really matter, they’re basically just plot tokens. The thing that works about this is it actually makes the cybermen scary – cybermites you barely notice, Star Trek: First Contact-esque instant conversions, monsters which move so fast you can’t see them, and which can trick you by taking off their hands or head or turning it round to see who’s behind them. This is great for a one off, but you can sort of see why they didn’t stick with it: a monster so unbeatable the only solution is to blow up a planet probably doesn’t generate that many stories.

It’s also frankly a bit weird that, when both Jason Watkins’ Webley and the Doctor speak the cybermen’s words, they still seem to be emotional in both content and delivery. This is more fun to watch, but no one bothers to explain it. Oh well.

I love the Porridge/emperor twist and Davis plays it well. But it does feel like maybe if he’d done that at the start of the episode there’d be a lot fewer people dead – like his pride matters more than their lives? Which to be fair he does admit quite early in the episode, and which does fit with being the emperor, but the show doesn’t seem to have realised this is maybe not a great quality.

This and Name... feel like an experiment in splitting the action bit of the finale and the emotional bit into two different stories. I’m not sure you’d want to do it every year, but as a one off it works quite well. 

So why does everyone hate it?

Other thoughts:

• The soldiers have names of a style nicked from the lost boys in Peter Pan (Haha, Brains, etc). One of them is called Missy.

• Love that the psychic paper makes the Doctor a pro-consul. Very late Roman.

• I think Smith is rather good at talking to himself. Other opinions are available. Also, “I could call myself... Mr Clever” is pretty hateful, and the bit where he randomly does a Yorkshire accent just weird.

• “Now, if you don’t mind, I have a chess game to finish, and you have to die, pointlessly and very far from home” feels as neat a one-line summation of Doctor Who as any. I also really like the search for a defensive position in a theme park (“Real castle? Drawbridge, moat?” “Yes, but comical”).

• The parade of Doctors don’t include the War Doctor, obviously, but showing all the past Doctors at all at this point seems to be a deliberate attempt to make sure the audience remembers who all of them were, so they can be surprised by a new one next week.

• Some references: the Cybermen wake from tombs. Cool. And, as seen in Curse of Fenric, the Doctor cheats at chess to beat an unbeatable villain. (Also, the Time Lords invented chess – is that new?)

• Clara is so good at taking charge of a war that it prepares her nicely for a new career teaching in the East End. Has anyone counted all the marriage proposals Doctor Who companions get? I feel like it happens quite a lot.

We see a single cybermite has escaped the blast. Which makes me wonder if this is the cyberwar from Ascension.