Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis

Part One



“…And I have found his secret out.”

Ooh, captions! Stock footage of the Amazon rainforest! A parrot! Nazis! Ride of the Valkyries! A lot of things are being thrown at us thick and fast. And then we switch to 1638 and Lady Peinforte. Both groups of people in both time zones include someone carrying a bow and arrow.

Eventually things slow down a bit and we’re allowed a bit of exposition. Apparently Nemesis is a comet which, in spite of the fact that its orbit is decreasing, continues to orbit the Earth every 25 years exactly. Er, what?

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ace are outside watching Courtney Pine. The Doctor’s alarm goes off, but he’s forgotten what it means. Er, what? They return to the TARDIS to find out, and are shot at by some half-Cybernised blokes, to the accompaniment of incidental music which is quite the worst to have been heard on the show so far.

So, the Doctor has made Ace a new tape deck using fantastically advanced technology, which seems an absurd thing to do twenty years later. What next? A digital abacus?

We flit quickly from scene to scene, making the narrative very disjointed. It’s not that this makes the story hard to follow (it’s not really that complicated) or that the plot as a whole doesn’t really make sense (it does, more or less, although lots of little things don’t). It’s the characters’ motivations that don’t make any sense- Lady Peinforte and the Nazis are just behaving as the plot requires them to because that’s their role, with no thought given to motivation or characterisation beyond that. And it’s noticeable that the writer can’t seem to manage much beyond plot mechanics; there’s no successful humour in this story, or development of themes, or meaningful character moments.

Peinforte knows the Doctor, and his “secret”, because the statue told her in 1638, and she also knows how to use a “potion” to travel forwards in time. Both Peinforte and the Nazis are converging on the statue, which has now fallen to Earth just outside Windsor.

The Doctor and Ace are caught trespassing in Windsor Castle- and I can clearly recall that when originally broadcast there was absolutely no explanation of how they escaped before next being seen by the statue. For the video release which I watched these “deleted scenes” have been slipped back in. But the fact that this story was originally edited so as to make the basic plot impossible to follow is simply appalling, and arguably render the episode as originally broadcast unsuitable for transmission.

And then the Cybermen arrive…



Part Two



“The bear will not pursue us. Such things happen only in the theatre.”

Peinforte kills a Cybermen with a gold-tipped arrow. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing. Meanwhile people shoot at each other for what seems like an awfully long time. It’s also suddenly noticeable that De Flores seems to be driving a Ford Granada just like the one in Ashes to Ashes. If only it were brown…

The Doctor and Ace pop back to 1638 for no particular reason, something they’ll keep on doing throughout the story. The Doctor plays a bit of chess. You know, I reckon there might be some kind of very, very subtle metaphor going on here.

The scenes with the skinheads are appalling, and are the prime example of the awkwardness of the dialogue in this story. But I like the scene where Richard sees his own grave, although it would have been nice to have dwelt on the timey-wimey paradox-y side of this a bit more.

Although this story often seems to get criticised for its treatment of the Cybermen, it actually gets a lot of things right, with its stress on Cybernisation and cold logic. Unfortunately, though, their vulnerability to gold simply becomes absurd here, utterly diluting any sense of threat.

Unfortunately the Doctor’s silly speech about historical events which happen as the comet passes by every 25 years is impossible to take seriously. And De Flores constant banging on about Wagner is starting to get on my wick too.

I like that shot of the lizard in the tree just before the cliffhanger. It would be nice to think it was filmed on the day rather than being a bit of boring old stock footage.



Part Three



All things will soon be mine.”

Ace refuses to go back to the TARDIS, in spite of the fact she’s “really, really scared”, basically out of bravado. This could have been a good character moment but somehow fails to quite get there in spite of some superlative acting from both regulars. That sums up this script in a nutshell.

Sylvester and Sophie are also fantastic in the scene where they dodge several Cybermen to manoeuvre the bow into the statue’s hands, although the whole thing doesn’t quite come off as plausible.

Unfortunately we get a couple of arse-clenchingly awful things in this episode; the stereotypical American tourist character seems to be written without any hint of self-awareness. And while there’s a certain coolness to the Dirty Harry moment, Ace’s firing gold at Cybermen with her catapults pretty much causes them to leap headlong over a certain predatory fish of the genus Carcharhinus. No wonder we’ll never see the Cybermen of “our” universe ever again.

It’s a shame that the generally laudable attempt to reintroduce mystery to the Doctor should focus so heavily on this story rather than on one where it would have been better handled. As far as the general direction of the show is concerned, though, it’s an exciting move, although of course a lot depends on where this is going. But it’s exciting to hear of the “Old Time” and the “Time of Chaos”.



It’s an odd one, this. The plot actually works well enough, and the similarities to Remembrance of the Daleks are general enough to not be a problem. But plot’s all there is- there’s no real sense of characterisation, humour or mood. 2/5.

Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen

Part One

“I suddenly feel conspicuous.”

So, now we’re beginning a new 45 minute format, eh? It’ll never catch on. We’re also getting a new writer, apparently, in the shape of Paula Moore.

We begin with the new Doctor being very different from his predecessor- after procrastinating about it ever since Logopolis he’s finally getting around to repairing the Chameleon Circuit. Apparently he’s still a little unstable, which is worrying. This regeneration has been drawn out far too much.

Lytton’s back, still stuck on Earth, planning a heist alongside characters played by Brian Glover and an unmasked Terry Molloy. But mostly we’re just watching the Doctor and Peri hanging about in the TARDIS for ages before they land. They seem to bicker a lot, too. Still, they eventually land, in 76 Totter’s Lane. In spite of the Doctor’s claim that “This looks familiar”, it bears absolutely no relation to the junkyard seen in An Unearthly Child. It hasn’t got a roof for one thing. 

The Doctor and Peri are trying to trace a distress call from an alien being broadcast from Totter’s Lane in 1985, observed by those two policemen from Resurrection of the Daleks. Oh, and the TARDIS is changing it shape in scenes which I think we’re meant to find amusing. But it’s not just Totter’s Lane; this scene alone features a bewildering and self-indulgent excess of fanwank; not only does Peri recite the name of several past companions for no particular reason, but we’re told that the Terrible Zodin was “a woman of rare guile and devilish cunning.” And that’s only the beginning.

You can probably see already that I’m not hugely enamoured with this story, but I’ll defend it for one thing; for all the bickering between the Doctor and Peri it’s obvious that neither of them really means it and they actually come across as quite affectionate with each other, especially through body language. It helps that Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant have good chemistry.

A Cyberman shockingly appears in the sewers- and is immediately shot dead, oozing green, er, ooze. This is a highly appropriate intro for the Cybermen in a story which shows them to be disturbingly easy to kill. We discover that Lytton made contact with their ship behind the dark side of the moon- all very The Invasion. 

It’s nice that cybernisation gets a mention, but then the fanwank continues; the Cyber Controller and Telos are mentioned, and suddenly we switch to an escape attempt on the part of a couple of slaves on Telos- and to be fair the location is a fair match for the Telos we saw in Tomb of the Cybermen. Our two escapers, Stratton and Bates, are very hard-boiled style characters, almost to the point of being characters in a script by Eric Saward. But of course that cannot be, as this story was written by Paula Moore. Definitely.

The Doctor and Peri find Russell, and there follows an amusing scene in which the Doctor and Peri get the gun off him, and the Doctor seems to tell Peri to shoot him. Oddly enough, I don’t have a problem with this in spite of my increasing unease with the tone of the programme. The Doctor’s clearly bluffing and the thing’s carried off with charm and humour- it’s the absence of these things, after all, that have been my main concern with recent scripts.

Russell, it seems, is an undercover copper, and so he joins the Doctor and Peri in venturing into the sewers.

Meanwhile, on Telos, Stratton and Bates seem to be killing Cybermen with the greatest of ease whenever they stop bickering for long enough to do so, while the Cyber Controller directs things. For some reason the rather rotund Michael Kilgariff has been pointlessly recast in the role, in spite of the fact that both here and in Tomb his entire body in covered, and in the earlier story he didn’t even provide the voice. The result of this is, of course, that a certain softly pronounced “c” in the line “It is a fact, Controller” becomes a moment of comedy gold.

The Doctor kills a Cyberman with a sonic lance (guns and the Doctor again!), unfortunately attracting their attention. As the Doctor and Peri return to the TARDIS, accompanied by Russell, who shows the customary lack of surprise at its dimensions for this era, they are attacked by Cybermen…

Part Two

“I can understand why they call them tombs.”

The Doctor queries the Cyber Controller’s survival and is told that he was “merely destroyed.” Er, yes. This begins a running theme of this episode; ridiculous plot points and fanwank references revealed to us by dull and often long-winded exposition. We get detailed references to The Tenth Planet and Tomb early in the episode which must have been utterly alienating to the casual viewer.

The Doctor, Peri and Lytton are stranded and, separately, all make contact with the planet’s indigenous Cryons, played by the likes of Sarah Green, Faith Brown and Esther Freud, all unrecognisable. The Cryons actually look great and, with their groovy hand movements, dignity and wit, are the best thing about this story.

It seems that Lytton was in fact working for the Cryons all along, which of course means he is an entirely a good guy and the fact that hitherto he’s behaved like a total arse in no way diminishes his unambiguously heroic status.

Anyway, the Cybermen want to prevent Mondas from being destroyed, so they’ve travelled back in time to 1985 so that they can use Halley’s Comet to destroy Earth, thereby saving Mondas. This is utter fanwank; the series is now becoming sufficiently self-referential that it’s eating its own tail. What on earth would the casual viewer have made of this?

Still, at least it fundamentally makes sense. Aside, that is, from a couple of tiny little flaws, such as the reason for Mondas’s arrival back in 1986 was that they needed Earth for its energy, and the question of whether the Cybermens’ survival is really served by changing history for the benefit of a completely different bunch of Cybermen and wiping out centuries of their own history.

There’s a nice scene where the Doctor wonders why the Time Lords haven’t sent an agent to help after he warned them earlier, only to realise that he is the Time Lord agent. Sadly, this is soon followed by a discussion of why the Cryons are helping him. As even the script points out, they stand to benefit from the Cybermen changing history as their planet would never have been invaded. The explanation that “The Cryons have accepted their fate” doesn’t really cut it. As for all that frozen explodey stuff that’s being kept in the cell- aaargh!

Things get even worse. I don’t mind violence as long as it’s not done in the service of an overly grim tone, but the scene where Lytton’s hands are crushed is utterly repellent. How was that allowed to get through? Also poor is the Doctor’s statement that the Cybermen “have only one weakness- they respond to the distress of their own kind”. I think, given the number of Cybermen we see being killed in this story, that his mathematical prowess may have deteriorated somewhat since Castrovalva.

More bad stuff rounds out the story; Bates, Stratton and Griffin almost reach the Cybermen’s control centre only to be killed at the last moment- very cynical. The TARDIS is suddenly stuck as a police box again with no explanation whatsoever. And the scene with Lytton begging the Doctor to kill him is just wrong.

Terrible, just terrible. The plot makes no sense, it’s unremittingly grim, the tone is all wrong and it’s all substandard fanwank anyway. 1/5. The nicest thing I can find to say about it is that at least it’s better than Underworld.

Doctor Who: Earthshock

Part One

“Too many people have died for you to play the fool.”

We open with some unusually hardboiled potholers wearing skiing goggles round their necks, soon revealed to be military types investigating the disappearance of some other, presumably less hardboiled, potholer types. It’s all very hardboiled. Did I mention this story starts off very hardboiled? Because we’ll be seeing an awful lot of hardboiledness.

The now obligatory early TARDIS scene gets the now obligatory token reference to the previous story out of the way, and gets on with a bit of conflict between Adric and the Doctor, whose relationship has been interestingly dysfunctional since the Doctor’s regeneration. It’s as if Adric now no longer sees the much younger-looking Doctor as a father figure but as a rival for the position of alpha male. This may seem absurd if you’re not Adric, of course, as he’s just an awkward teenager with increasing tendencies towards acting like an arse, but it might explain his behaviour. It’s either that or a lax grip on the regulars’ characterisation by the script editor.

Oh, and all this happens in Adric’s room. Are we going to see the full set by the end of the season?

Adric wants to go back to E-Space and, for some reason, Terradon, although it was explained in Full Circle that it’s got nothing to do with him. Suddenly the Doctor’s casual dismissal of Romana’s ethical queries about taking Adric away from his own universe in Warrior’s Gate is coming home to roost. Perhaps that’s why he throws such a strop, leaving Tegan and Nyssa to play the role of grown-ups this week.

Anyway, the TARDIS lands, it’s 2526, they’re underground and they see some dinosaur fossils. Lovely. Foreshadowing, anyone? We get nasty black robots, killing, and general hardboiledness. It’s all rather effectively done, with the device of having Walters above ground with the scanner working well to increase the tension. It’s all very Alien and very generic early 80s action movie, but this is a very well constructed opener. It’s all a bit hardboiled, though.

We end, in what is possibly the most spoiled cliffhanger of all time, with some Cybermen. They’re back!

Part Two

“You know, I find this situation so bizarre. There’s no purpose for it.”

I think this is where we get our first “Brave heart, Tegan”. But mostly, it’s where we get our first glimpse of the Cybermen as redesigned for the 80s, with David Banks, “excellent”, fist shaking and non-monotonous voices. They’re somehow less symbolic of the body horror intrinsic to the Cybermen then the 60s models were, in spite of the nice touch of the visible organic chins behind the glass jaws, but to balance this they’re chunkier and more physically threatening. The visible chins are simultaneously a problem though, because as soon as the Cybermens’ already worrying increased vulnerability to gold becomes apparent, the glass jaws lend themselves rather too easily to crap and obvious metaphors like what I’m using now.

Oh, and we get our first “I know that object.” Brilliant!”

It’s been a while since we had a parade of clips from earlier stories so the fanwank here is excellent, although the Cybermen seem to have junked their copy of Tomb of the Cybermen. There’s a problem here though- Revenge of the Cybermen was quite unequivocally set on a beacon built in the “late 29^th, early 30^th” century, and this is equivocally 2526. Now, lack of obsessive detail to continuity among the production team would of course be unthinkable, so we must seek an alternative explanation. Have these Cybermen travelled from the future?

The story ends with some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the Doctor and Adric have made up (er, yay!) and the bad news is the appearance of the horribly miscast Beryl Reid. No disrespect to her, but this is the first time the alleged JN-T syndrome of horribly miscast guest “stars” seems to rear its head. Till, I’ll keep an open mind as the era continues.

Part Three

“I’m just a mouth on legs!”

The Cyberleader declares that the Doctor “must suffer for our past defeats”. Good to know they’re as emotionless as ever. And the bit with the Cybermen sealed inside plastic bags actually shocked me almost as much as it amused me with its blatant disregard for good health and safety procedure. Did no one think of the kids watching? Could that even be screened today?

Amusingly, the freighter’s crew are all a bunch of cynical jobsworths, which in no way dissuades me from my view that Eric Saward may possibly have seen Alien at some point. Oh, and the fact that Ringway turns out to be a traitor leads me to believe he may well have seen some previous Cybermen stories. There’s a lot that’s traditional about this story now that I stop to think of it, with the Cybermens’ appearances being rationed until they appear in force halfway through the story. And we also have a first wave, admittedly just of black robots, who are defeated early on only for a much bigger wave to turn up later on. It’d all be very '60s, if not for the fact that it’s very '80s.

Part Four

“Now I’ll never know if I was right.”

The Cybermens’ dastardly scene is revealed; they plan to put a bomb on the freighter and ram it into Earth, thus disrupting a galactic conference at which their enemies are plotting against them. The fiends! The episode’s very exciting, with lots of tension right up to the end, although we get to pause slightly for the Doctor’s rather good speech on emotions. This almost makes up for the fact that most of the human characters have been referring to the Cybermen as robots, which shouldn’t have happened; the Cybermen haven’t been seen for ages, so the script should be making it very clear to the casual viewer that this is exactly what they’re not.

Oh, and the boy Adric snuffs it. The script has quite a lot of fun with the old dramatic irony beforehand, though; Adric shakes the Doctor’s hand as he leaves and says goodbye, while assuring Tegan that he’ll see her soon. He’s starting to remind me of the character Dead Meat from that excellent film Hot Shots.

The freighter goes back in time 65 million years to the time of the K/T boundary, where it’s neatly revealed that the freighter crashing into Earth will become part of the existing historical pattern, in scenes a little too similar to Saward’s own The Visitation. And then it all starts happening thick and fast. There are Cybermen in the TARDIS. The Doctor shoots one repeatedly with a gun- he’s always doing that sort of thing. And Adric’s use of the gold in his badge to kill a Cyberman is simultaneously great for adding to the heroism of his final sacrifice and awful for the credibility of the Cybermen. But that’s for the future.

Adric’s death manages to actually be quite affecting and not at all bathetic, which I wasn’t expecting. And the silent credits are a nice touch.

Part Five (DVD only)

Indisputably the finest episode of Doctor Who, nay, television drama, ever to exist. Utterly sublime in its superiority. But sadly I’m not going to count it towards the story’s overall score as such things are Just Simply Not Done. It’s definitely canon, mind. So there.

This is very fast-paced, very well-structured, and with a sense for the natural beats of the storytelling that so elude Christopher H. Bidmead and that RTD does so well- it’s generally very well-written. But at the same time, it’s also very, very hard-boiled- did I mention that? Because the guest characters are all required to act in this hard-boiled manner, there’s no real depth to them. It’s all dated since the 80s in the same way the work of Frank Miller has- it’s still enjoyable, but no longer seems as big or clever as it did, and it often makes me laugh at inappropriate moments because of its unintentional boys’ own silliness. Still, a good ‘un. 4/5.