Doctor Who - Nightmare In Silver

High Cyber Diet

Doctor Who - Nightmare In Silver
Airdate: 11th May 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: Yeah... minor spoilers, I guess.

You know, I really used to like the cybermen as a nipper, growing up with Jon Pertwee as The Doctor. That’s possibly because they were never on TV at that point, of course. Jon Pertwee didn’t met up with them until he officially came back to the role one last time in the anniversary story The Five Doctors. But I knew about them, of course. Because quite apart from Pertwee standing against one of them on the wraparound cover shoot for the Doctor Who tenth anniversary magazine (which I still have) all the kids my age, or any who were of any interest at any rate, would read the Target novelisations of the older stories and, as you may or may not know, the cybermen were pretty much running rampant through Patrick Troughton’s rein on the show, hot on the heels of the really sinister looking versions used in their first outing, the final William Hartnell story The Tenth Planet. So we all knew who they were and we all wanted to see them in action.

So it was pretty cool, actually, when Tom Baker’s incarnation of The Doctor met them in Revenge Of The Cybermen... and then they didn’t come back again for a while. Tom Baker never met them again but when Peter Davison came on board they returned in a big way in the story Earthshock, which truly brought the scariness of the cybermen back in a marching legion of terror... very sinister first episode if I recall and, pre-internet, nobody really had a clue they would be back until the big reveal at the end of the first episode. Not only that, but they killed off The Doctor’s companion Adric, who sacrificed himself to save the planet Earth (and who destroyed all the dinosaurs in the process if I remember correctly). This was a big event and I remember the end credits of that episode being silent (do I remember correctly?) and focussing on the decimated remains of Adric’s gold rimmed badge for mathematical excellence, which he’d used to take out one of the cybermen with... being that they could be killed by the introduction of gold into their system.

But after that, things started to get a bit silly.

The BBC, in much the same way as they have been behaving over the last 6 or 7 years with the show, didn’t really want to waste those new costumes... so the cybermen started coming back again just a little more frequently until, by the time we got up to Sylvester McCoy’s stint on the show, they really were nothing more special than “monster of the week” and were, for all intents and purposes... really boring.

When the show came back under the Russel T. Davies era, the programme had been off the airwaves long enough to once more generate big interest at the return of the cybermen and, although the new design was somewhat juvenile (with a big C across the front) there was enough drama in the story to make their welcome return a success. When they went up against the daleks at the end of David Tennant’s first season, all the fans were into it because, well, ever since the early days of their first appearances on the show in the 60s, people had been wondering who would win a fight between a dalek and a cyberman.

But then the rot set in again. Not only did the cybermen keep coming back repeatedly to the show, but they were still cursed with that blasted C on the front of their armour. Honestly, I’ll never know why the BBC don’t learn about why it’s not a good idea to keep recycling the same costumes in close proximity. The Doctor travels in time as well as space... it’s completely impractical he’d keep meeting the same model of cybermen in different times just because the BBC don’t want to pay out for a new costume design, or rebuild any of the, much cooler, older ones for that matter.

But never mind all that. Neil Gaiman, one of modern fantasy’s great writers (his spin off from his own The Sandman comics, Death: The High Cost Of Living is one of the greats in modern comic book fiction) and who had a very successful episode of the show last series with The Doctor’s Wife (reviewed here) was promising to make the cybermen scary again and, to boot, the BBC were upgrading the design a little. So there was maybe a glimmer of hope there after all.

So was this episode of the show really a Nightmare In Silver or was it more of a bad dream in platinum?

Well I’m sorry to have to report, since I do admire this writer greatly, that for me it really wasn’t a show which was in any way scary or made me feel threatened by the menace that the cybermen should be seen as. It was definitely one of the less interesting stories of the second half of “series seven” although, that being said, it was still a damn sight better than the majority of episodes in the first half.

But, it certainly wasn’t a tragedy either. It was still entertaining and there were definitely some nice things going on in there. When the cybermen started moving very fast, almost like they were teleporting, that was a good sign and I was hoping for more in that vein but, alas, this advantage wasn’t pressed against the army defending the planet and ultimately, uneasy moments were few and far between.

But, like I said, there were some nice things. The Doctor’s ongoing battle of wits with the cyber version of himself in his head was kinda cool and it was a way in to show us that there was a memory block in his head when it comes to new companion Clara. There was also a reference, with Cyber Planner version of himself calling himself Mr. Clever, to the phrase that Clara’s various “apparitions” keep repeating... Run You Clever Boy And Remember... the initials of which make up the word CYBARR... except I don’t believe that "almost had me conclusion" for a minute. Moffat knew we’d all figure that out last year so I’m just assuming the lameness of that particular anagram is dead wrong. I hope.

There were some particularly nice scenes with Clara’s personality really coming to the fore (I think she may be River or The Doctor or possibly Rani or The Master, by the way) and it was really good to see the chemistry between her and Matt Smith working quite well. Also, there was a blink and you’ll miss it alignment of hordes of cybermen who make up the shape of an inverted question mark, just like the inverted question mark that hangs around Clara’s neck... so that was kinda cool. As was the introduction of the new upgrade of the old cybermats... namely the cybermites.

Add to this a very nice turn by Warwick Davis as someone who turns out to be a quite important character and some excellent scoring by Murray Gold, once again using variations of the cyberman theme he composed for their first appearance against David Tennant, plus a few nice appearances of the Eleventh Doctor sub theme, and it made for an okay, entertaining, close but no cigar episode of the show, which is fine. That’s my opinion anyway and it’s hugely disappointing that I didn’t like an episode penned by Neil Gaiman all that much.

And, of course, next week we have the final episode of the current series, which everyone is hoping will be the big reveal. Not of The Doctor’s name, of course. Nobody wants to know that and, frankly, I really hope they don’t reveal it. But hopefully something will come to some kind of conclusion with the current show's dangling story threads. This might, as it happens, even be the last time we see either of Alex Kingston or Jenna Louise Coleman in the programme. I hope not but there’s always that chance. I know lots of people, myself included, are hoping that the return of The Great Intelligence will somehow bring The Doctor’s old foe The Yeti out of hybernation... but something tells me that may not happen, I’m afraid.

Oh well. I’ll be trying to make it through to next weeks episode then... keeping myself alive for the sake of a TV show is as good a way of carrying on as any other I would guess. Hopefully I’ll see some of you here after for a major autopsy... if all things go well.

Doctor Who - The Crimson Horror

Value Added Strax

Doctor Who - The Crimson Horror
Airdate: 4th May 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: Crimson spoilers waiting 
to slowly seep through you below...

Well that was all rather a lot of fun for the hundredth episode since the new era of stories started, counting from when Russel T. Davies ressurected of the show.

The Crimson Horror is the third, so far, Doctor Who story to feature one of my favourite triumvirates of regular characters... the Silurian Madame Vastra, her human lover Jenny and their Sontaran assistant Strax. The story is, like their previous outing in The Snowmen, set firmly in Victorian times but shifted away from their regular “beat” in London, instead moving to the Yorkshire town of Bournv... err... Sweetville. It’s possibly not as great an episode as either The Snowmen or A Good Man Goes To War, but it’ certainly not far from the standard set in those and Mark Gattis, a man I trust for writing homages to the pulps of this particular period, shows he’s more than up for the job.

The story starts off with the old chestnut of the last thing a person seeing before death being retained by the eyes and the opening hook, after a man has been struck down by the delightfully lurid pulp terror known as The Crimson Horror, is that his last image was of The Doctor. Then, post credits, we follow an investigation by our three Victorian heroes which eventually, after some time, leads us to The Doctor, who has turned crimson himself and is held prisoner and paralysed almost... until he can reverse the process in a convenient cabinet which I guess one has to write in for these kinds of stories.

Then, rescued by Jenny, he relates to her and the audience the story which has led up to his near terminal crimson complexion and this is done in a beautifully treated flashback which looks like old grainly filmstock and photographs. Now, I could be picky (and I might as well be, for when am I not?) and mention that the style of moving image used in this sequence or the sounds used to trigger to a modern audience the capturing of still images, are not actually as old as the period on which they are being used... of course, I’m no expert on that so please comment below if I am wrong, but the fact that they made an effort to give these flashback moments a sense of the past which could artistically be linked to that kind of period was both admirable, with a slight dash of genius... so I’m quite happy to forgive them any amount of what I would call deliberate, controlled anachronism within the delivery of the story.

What’s more compelling is that this means that the story has actually started mid-way through, Now I’m guessing it was probably scripted like this but it could also have been an editing decision, since a lengthier selection of footage from the flashback starting off the story would have done the same thing in a more linear fashion and placed The Doctor and Clara front and centre, right from the outset. However, a smart decision harkening back to the days of early Marvel comics and before, in terms of a useful narrative structure to lead you to the hook of the story in a more timely and dramatic fashion, has been made and since this method is not all that often used in Doctor Who (although taken to the Nth degree, as you can get away with in science fiction, then show runner Steven Moffat’s original Weeping Angels story Blink could also be considered an extreme version of the same technique, if you chose to decode it that way), I was very happy to see the episode structured in this manner and it certainly made sense to do this in a story that was so aptly grounded in late nineteenth century pulp fiction.

The action and detective work never really flagged and it had some very nice moments in it which I am very grateful to Gattis for. The fan-pleasing reference to Fourth and Fifth Doctor companion Tegan Jovanka was very much “on the money” for instance, and a scene which was built around a terrible joke, with Strax making use of Thomas Thomas, who is the living Victorian embodiment of the modern Tom Tom satellite navigation systems in cars is one of the reasons I’ll continue to watch the show even though it does seem to be going a bit pear shaped as of late. The relationship between the characters played by Diana Rigg and her real life daughter as villainess and blind daughter was all very nice and there were some truly cool musical moments to support scenes such as the brilliant bit where Jenny strips down to black leather fighting gear to knock a few heads. All good stuff and I think the show needs more of these characters and more scenes like these, please!

My only real disappointment with this episode was the baggage I brought with me. I assumed that since Vastra, Jenny and Strax do not know about the living version of companion Clara, that we were going to get some kind of big revelation this week when they think that their version has returned from the dead. All we got, alas, in return for those kinds of questions throughout the episode was, unfortunately, answers along the lines of “It’s complicated.” They’re playing their cards very close to their chest again on this one but I’m assuming we’ll find out whether Clara is either friend (a regenerated time lord such as Romana, or The Doctor’s Daughter or even The Doctor himself) or foe (The Rani, The Master, a construct of the Great Intelligence or the Daleks) or something I haven’t quite worked out yet in two weeks time... when River Song returns to our screens.

But, ultimately, my own expectations of the story did not stop the episode from being, mostly, a brilliant addition to the show and, if not a rival to the likes of shows like the Victorian set story The Talons Of Weng Chiang, certainly a good stab at being a worthy successor. Not sure if I’m looking forward to Neil Gaiman’s take on the Cybermen next week but we shall see what we shall see, I guess.

Doctor Who - Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS

Fiddling While TARDIS Vernes

Doctor Who - Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS
Airdate: 27th April 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: New spoilers waiting to be discovered as you journey to the centre of this article.

For a long time now, Doctor Who fans around the world have been given occasional little audio and visual glimpses of other parts of The Doctor’s famous time and space travelling machine, TARDIS, besides the main console room which features in a lot, although not nearly all, of the stories. But rarely are we given a real chance to see what the rest of the TARDIS is properly like and even just the sound of the cloister bell, a famous chime in the Doctor Who universe, is enough to light up fans' eyes en masse (first used in Tom Baker’s last story Logopolis and still used in the Matt Smith series more than it ever was in the past, strangely enough).

So it was with much trepidation that I embarked on this episode with the Jules Verne inspired title of Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS... after 50 years of not having enough budget to show us much else of The Doctor’s good vessel (in spite of at least one Hartnell story taking place in its entirety on board this ship). I was really not wanting to see much else of it in all honesty.

Moffat does like to change things and tinker with the established myth of Doctor Who more than The Meddling Monk and sometimes that can get quite interesting (when confined to certain acceptable parameters) and other times that can just seem quite arrogant, unnecessary and, frankly, leaving a downright tragic aftertaste in the mouth. I’m dreading what is going to be revealed in four weeks time at the end of the current series, for example... he’s already made some horrible references to The Doctor’s name in some scenes that really didn’t work in the last series and onward and... well... let’s all wait and see.

So, did the episode which was advertised to be an exploration of some of the parts of the TARDIS we’ve never seen before prove to be an interesting and respectful look at the space/time vehicle of this beloved show’s history or... did it fall flat? My expectations were not really going too much in either direction, well... with the exception of aforementioned trepidation, that is... and I can say now that this episode proved to be...

Okayish.

There was, as I’m sure a lot of us were all expecting, a lot of running down corridors and some of the rooms (and you really didn’t get to see much more than the corridors for most of the running time) looked like cheap CGI backgrounds as opposed to actual sets... but the episode certainly wasn’t anywhere disrespectful to the shows of the past and, considering it was presumably the “bottle neck”* episode of the current series, it was mostly quite entertaining too (Bottle neck episode is a term for an episode of a TV show which is deliberately “written cheap” to allow money allocated to be used for other episodes when unexpected costs happen. These episodes frequently feature few sets and often a lot of flashbacks to previous episodes, to the extent that many people also refer to them as “flashback episodes”. Many shows have them and they’re often not very hard to spot.).

This episode offered a few tantalising glimpses of things every fan would want to explore further, such as a Gallifreyan library with a certain book charting The History Of The Time War which gave Clara a mini moment of epiphany in regards to The Doctor’s name and his place in the universe, so to speak. Unfortunately, the episode also managed to cop out on all these little things because the way our heroes got out of this week's story was, frankly, a big time and space reset button which erased the versions of our characters out of history after they’d saved themselves from earlier folly, thus rendering the majority of the characters (at least the important ones) without a memory of the episode. So that was a bit pointless.

And, yes... we got to hear the cloister bell again. Briefly.

Nevertheless, although there was some hellish imagery used in the story, there were also some wonderful, visual delights, with a very diverse set of colour palettes used from scene to scene... especially the moment when The Doctor and Clara went from running through orange and green lit corridors to the side of a “snarling” plateau which used colouring more reminiscent of the Pertwee era. Pertwee, in fact, was also heard in this episode... as were a few Doctors and companions, since the removal of a panel on the TARDIS console triggered a series of sound bytes from the shows past, starting with a sample of The Doctor’s grandchild Susan Foreman (as played by Carole Ann Ford) explaining the TARDIS acronym from the very first episode of the very first story, An Unearthly Child. 

And talking of children, and possible grandchildren, it was also nice to have a glimpse, once again, of Melody Pond’s (aka River Song’s) cot from the A Good Man Goes To War episode too. Nice touch and one is still wondering, or at least I am, if Clara will eventually be revealed as the daughter of River and The Doctor at some point... or is she a future incarnation of The Doctor’s Daughter perhaps, ripped from David Tennant’s DNA in his third series as The Doctor. That’s another of my many theories this week... I’m hoping Moffat’s got something a little more clever planned for his big reveal though.

It wasn’t a fantastic story, it has to be said, but it certainly wasn’t a big letdown like the five episodes which comprised the first part of “Series Seven” were either, so that’s okay. It kept me interested and it really feels like the producers of the show are working up to something big. Now I’ve been twice bitten by that already with this series over the last couple of years so I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet... especially with Moffat now threatening that this year will somehow change the show.

What I will do, though, is look forward to next weeks Victorian London shenanigans with the return of my favourite lesbian Silurian, my favourite Sontaran and Bond/Avengers gal Diana Rigg in it. Wish I could leap seven days into the future and check it out now.

Doctor Who - The Bells Of St. John

Run For Your WiFi

Doctor Who - The Bells Of St. John

Airdate: 30th March 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: Some spoilers here, methinks

And here we are again... a mid season start up, well, continuation of the new series of Doctor Who which is, I believe, the only modern incarnation of the show to have a season split by a Christmas special (reviewed by me previously here). Once again, Moffat’s set up for a new companion is off to a flying start... well partial set up, really, being as he kind of already set the companion up twice already.

Show get s a great little “plead for help” pre-credits sequence with a montage depicting the dangers of wi-fi signal in modern London and, after the new credits sequence which started up the last episode, we get straight into the silly but brilliant pun of the title, which leads one to expect the TARDIS cloister bell but which, actually, is the externally accessible telephone on the police box... ringing in a call across the centuries from the very person that The Doctor has been searching for throughout time and space since the Christmas special - Clara “Oswald” Oswin... who doesn’t know him at all, by the way because... well, because she’s already died twice, right? Why would she? 

So anyway, couple of details so far after we’re ten or fifteen minutes in which may be two things which come back to bite everyone in the backside (in a good way) later in the show or, maybe possibly, just one thing to haunt us with the other being just... a nice detail. 

Detail number one, which may or may not be important, is the fact that the childhood book that Clara has leant the child she is minding is written by Amelia Williams. Well then... that’d be by Amy Pond writing the old book from the time in which she got stranded and finally taken on the surname of her husband Rory Williams then. It may or may not give credence to @sdunlop’s theory that the new companion is in some way related to the Ponds. Personally, I suspect it’s just a nice little detail to give the series some continuity but... well with Moffat you never know, do you?

Detail number two which obviously is something which will need to come back and be answered is... who the hell gave Clara the Doctor’s phone number so she was able to call him for help from the 21st century while he was having a rest in the 13th century. Now the two main contenders on this are either, I would think, River Song or, possibly, Rose Tyler. However, I suspect Jackie Tyler might also be an option but... well, I’m not going to play these guessing games anymore... we shall see when we shall see.

Okay so... we get to meet the spoonheads in this one and... they’re kinda okay as new monsters go. I’m a bit alarmed that they can double for practically anybody because, well... that means the previous two Clara’s could have been either a spoonhead (Victorian times) or a download (Dalek)... so it’s kinda boring if these threats have been written in to provide the main protagonists with a convenient get out later on down the line... and, yes, I’m thinking very specifically about the fake Doctor’s death at the start/end of the last series. That was all a bit of a cheat if you ask me.

Now then, you may find some similarities, again, with the opening set up to the cyberman/dalek crossover from the Tennant days... and, truth be told, you’d be right. However, the premise just about veers off into its own thing at just the right time to make this a fairly enjoyable, perhaps even touching adventure in which to let The Doctor and the new incarnation of his companion meet properly. Although I have to say... it does look like Clara Oswald has been programmed with key phrases that come out in each version of her The Doctor meets.

Nice enough story though. The Doctor drives his bike up the side of The Shard in much the way a car is driven up the side of a large building in the movie version of Daywatch and that makes for a neatish little piece of frippery we’ve not seen in the show before. The performances were all fine too and we even had the return of Richard E. Grant as the modern day version of The Great Intelligence... turning up a fair few episodes earlier than I thought actually but it all serves as a reminder that he’s coming back I suspect... hopefully with the Yeti not far behind him, one would hope (well, this one would hope so anyway). 

Nice bit of scoring, too, with some fast action cue’s building on a variation of the Eleventh Doctor sub theme... hopefully some of those will make it on to the album when Silva Screen get around to releasing it. 

All in all then... a fun, if lightweight, adventure which is probably the third best of the season so far (lagging slightly behind the previous two Oswin episodes is my estimation). Should be a crowd/fan pleaser and Moffat even gets a chance to make fun of Twitter... but in such a way that he uses it to push a story point. So clever him and lets hope the series continues in this vein after what I saw as a mostly disastrous first half. The trailer for next week's one looks like a bit of tosh but, you know, trailers are not always good advertisements for the main product. Again... we shall see what she will see.

So all that’s left for me to do now is to put my feet up and start speculating in the way that Moffat likes us to... so he can see if he can outwit us before revealing his real end game. So maybe my speculation will go something like this (and I quote my own twitter feed from this morning here)...

“Anyone else here thing Oswald Oswin is going to be the Doctor's 12th incarnation? Been thinking about it... when you put her initials...”

“...together you get the sign for "infinity". They need to get the old 12 lives rule out of the way now. What better way than to merge...”

“... with a human host for your next generation and go on forever... to oo or ∞ (infinity) and beyond! Or am I just being fanciful?”

I think the real question here is, though, why do I care? Que sera sera.