Nightmare in Silver reaction post
I remember liking The Doctor’s Wife, but I only ever saw it once, and you know… I can’t remember a thing about it, not really?
I probably should have taken that into account before I watched Nightmare in Silver.
Kali quite astutely pointed out that the episode lost her when Angie got kidnapped and Clara just kind of… stood there? And wasn’t fussed? And yeah, that was terrible, but it was worse because it clearly wasn’t meant to happen. She was reaching out. Everyone else was leaning in and pitching forward, trying to get to the Cyberman and stop it, but not Clara. Clara went left, because that’s where Angie was, and she had to get to her kid. She reached without thinking, because that’s what my Clara does. She follows after little girls who look upset, just because she wants to help; she bargains for the fate of the planet by reminding a warlord what it meant to spend time with his daughter; she throws herself at a locked door to save an abused woman from her psychotic mother. There’s a reason babysitters are called caretakers. They fucking care. Clara cares.
And yet, even though she reached out, even though she started to give chase, the second the Doctor said “I’ll get Angie back” she stopped. Like she forgot. Which, like…
I should have known that when Moffat said in that one interview “Neil’s gotten so much better at this whole script writing thing” that he actually meant the opposite because that’s what Moffat always means. Because it’s a book mistake. It’s an error of omission that can be explained by limited perspective, but cameras see everywhere, and you can’t HAVE limited perspective.
Imagine it in a novel, and it makes sense: Clara throws herself after Angie, Angie disappears, the Doctor says “I’ll get her back” and then goes to talk to the very important military person because that’s what will make the plot go. We can assume Clara’s fucking wigging in the background, but the dialogue is elsewhere so it doesn’t get addressed. You can get away with that in text.
You can’t get away with it on a TV show. And I don’t know if I should blame Neil Gaiman for writing it (because he wrote lovely stuff too, what with her calling them “my kids” to that one soldier and being, in dialogue at least, perpetually more concerned for their safety than her own), or the editor for not cutting away to a piece of coverage that didn’t have Clara in the shot, or the director (a bloke named Stephen Woolfenden, who has never directed an episode of DW before and unfortunately did not love to his tantalizingly-reminiscent-of-that-one-beach-in-Norway-surname) for not being like “yo Jenna could you like look upset or something?” or Jenna-Louise herself for not, like. Looking upset. Or something. (And I don’t want to blame JLC because she is so VERY pretty, and does that make me shallow?)
But despite all that, that’s not where this episode lost me.
It lost me when it started on that stupid moonscape instead of in the Maitland’s freaking kitchen like it should have.
Last week, I was so excited. I was literally squealing at the end of The Crimson Horror, because the kids knew and this was our gateway. “Shit is about to get so domestic,” I said, because this is the stuff I live on. You want to know about Rose? Take a look at Mickey and Jackie. Can’t figure out why Martha feels responsible for everything? Why Donna thinks she’ll never be good enough? Look at their mums. Angie and Artie were supposed to be our gateway into Clara, and it couldn’t have been more perfect because this was the Neil Gaiman episode. Neil Gaiman of Coraline fame. The man knows how to write about kids in fantastical settings, and how the adventure in unreality is what makes them learn to appreciate home and normal life.
But instead they spent three quarters of the episode in a waking coma, utterly cut off. We never got to see them convince Clara to take them, we never saw them meet the Doctor. All those connections we were meant to see made, lost.
And then there’s the Cybermen.
The thing about the Cybermen is that they take away your ability to feel. They see emotions as a weakness. The whole point of Age of Steel was that this is an abomination; the second the Cybermen see themselves for what they are, they go mad. They can’t bear to look at themselves. Because if they saw, it would hurt too much. What makes a Cyberman a Cyberman has nothing to do with technology.
Neil Gaiman seems to have missed that memo.
The whole conceit of this episode, apparently, is that humankind went to war with the Cybermen-the 616 Cybermen, it seems, though they didn’t mention Mondas in particular-and won. And they won by committing massive, heinous genocide on an entire GALAXY, literally wiping it out of the sky. A spot with no stars, where stars used to be. Just black.
We’re meant to think of Nine, I think, because of this. Porridge’s line about feeling sadder for the guy who pushed the button than all those people who perished. But this would have made Nine vomit. Like, without end. That platoon, god, they were stuck on that theme park for showing mercy. For failing to blow a planet just to eradicate a single Cyberman. Nine would have loved Captain Whatserface (I deleted the episode from my DVR and sidereel keeps freezing and neither wiki nor IMDB list her name I AM SORRY CAPTAIN), and he would have been horrified to see her die believing she should have pressed the button. And the fact that that’s the lesson at the end of the episode-press the button, end them, do it for your country-sickens me, as a fan of this show. Rule one is disobey. Fight back. Never give up, and don’t use the enemy’s tactics against them. (And Clara saying “doing what the Doctor says is what keeps me alive” is a whole other long rant, but we’ll shelf that, for now.)
Which is to say: in the war between the humans and the Cybermen, the Cybermen won. Because it was never about “upgrading.” Technology was never what made the Cybermen scary. The loss of compassion and emotion was, and the humans were the monsters in this story. And no one seemed to see it but me. If this is an Empire, it’s the Fourth Great and Bountiful-run by a Jagrafess, and everything is wrong.
And then there’s the Doctor.
I thought that Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS would be my least favorite episode this season, because of the shoddy characterization of the salvage brothers and the closed time loop ending. I really did.
But in Nightmare in Silver, we knew the Doctor was himself because he called a Cybermite beautiful (remember that?), and Clara ugly. That was the setup, and that was the test.
At least in JTTCOFT he knew that Clara’s human fragility was what made her lovely.
You have failed me, Neil Gaiman. Neil Cross has defeated you utterly in the Battle of the Neils. I’m gonna go watch Rings of Akhaten again or something.
BUT, because I like to end on a positive note, here’s a list of things what I liked:
- Murray Gold. Even when I was utterly discontented with this episode, when he brought back that Cyberman theme from series two, my heart just did this THING. every time.
- What little of Angie and Artie we saw, because their characterizations totally fall in line with my headcanon/what I’ve already written in a WIP and I’m selfish enough to have worried about such things
- The fact that, in many ways, this felt like an episode of Classic in a way that very few these days do. The whole thing with Eleven’s headspace and the weird camera angles and ~spacey light things in the background~ was so very low tech and retro. I feel like Four totally had scenes like that, you know?
- Porridge asking Clara to marry him, if only because it adds another bullet point in my Clara vs Astrid gif set, what with them both getting proposed to by an alien fellow of diminutive stature. (Of interest: Astrid, of course, is an anagram for TARDIS. Do you know what Clara Oswin Oswald is a perfect anagram for? “A sardonic swallow.” I’m choosing to think of that less as Moffat Girls Are Sassy and more in terms of Krop Tor. A bitter pill. An episode where the other side of grace means beliving in her. Rings of Akhaten had Satan Pit envy; can we get that back for the finale please?)
- The design of the new Cybermen. Streamlined!
- Warwick Davis existing in general on my tv screen
- jlc is so fucking attractive she really really is
- shit I wish I had more to add to this list???