So I watched Doctor Who: "Nightmare in Silver"

My partner and I have been watching through Doctor Who together during dinner. And I didn’t know what I was going to write about for the inaugural Nightly Buzz, so I figured this is as good a topic as any. I told you it wouldn’t all be AMS stuff :D. This episode was from the 7th season of Doctor Who, one of the Smith!Doctor and Clara seasons.

Episode Summary

We’ll do this real quickly. Last episode, some kids discover Clara is doing a time travel and they want to go. So the Doctor takes them to an amusement park planet (but like… after it’s old and dilapidated). A bunch of soldiers are on the island, but the Doctor quickly talks his way into them leaving. Then Doctor et al find two random people: a collector and Porridge. The collector shows off his cool collection of Cybermen (evil murder robots built on human bodies), one of whom plays chess! Fun!

The kids get to do their gravity jump ride and are ready to go home, but the Doctor wants to investigate weird robot bugs. So he has them not stay safely in the Tardis (his magic blue box of ultimate safety and time travel) but instead has them sleep alone in the dark room where the Cybermen were. But don’t worry, he tells them not to wander off.

The collector guy gets got by the Cybermen (surprise), and one of the kids wanders off. She goes to where all the soldiers with guns are and says “I’m bored.” Which is how kids talk. Then a Cyberman comes and uses powers of super duper speed to grab her from the midst of the soldiers (this is the only time the Cybermen in this episode use super duper speed). The other one of the kids also gets got.

The Doctor is like “oh I’m gonna save these kids” so he scampers off to do that. In the meantime, the soldiers really want to blow up the entire planet to eliminate all the Cybermen, but Clara tells them not to do that. Because it would also blow everyone up. Porridge is there when this happens. When the Doctor finds the kids, the Cyberman is like “we wanted kids, but now we want you” and throw some cybermites onto him to attach a prosthetic with LEDs on it to the side of his face. Now, there’s The Doctor and Mr. Clever inhabiting one body. They’re fighting over the Doctor’s brain, but they’re perfectly evenly matched :0. The Doctor inexplicably decides they should play chess over the last bit of his brain.

Meanwhile, the soldiers have taken up a defensive position at a castle. They talk some more about blowing everything up, and the captain of the platoon decides to blow everyone up, but gets sniped through the castle’s window (the only time someone gets shot through a window in the whole episode). But don’t worry, Clara has a remote detonator, which is the only other way to activate this bomb (it’s specifically keyed to voice signatures). The remaining platoon prepares to fight.

The Doctor is playing the chess match and talking to himself, like you do. And then he’s like “oh, you still run old code, Cyberman. You’re weak to gold!” and then he slaps a piece of gold foil on the side of his face to disable the Cyberprosthetic. He uses this critical time to… move his chess game to the castle and get himself tied up. The chess game continues.

There’s some fighting, interspersed with some chess, interspersed with two Matt Smiths talking to themself in Green Screen Land. The remaining highlights are as follows:

• Mr Clever is talking to Clara. The Doctor writes “hit me” and she does, but gives the Doctor control of his body back

• Mr Clever pretends to be the Doctor and tells Clara she’s super funny and hot. Clara realizes the deception but can’t prevent Mr Clever from smashing the remote detonator for the blow everyone up bomb. Now there’s no way to blow everyone up.

• Mr Clever tells the Doctor that if he sacrifices his queen he’ll let the two children from before go (they’re in a cyberstasis right now)

• Porridge runs into the room and gets yeeted by a Cyberman to the Doctor’s feet, unconscious

• 3 million cyber men start to attack the castle

• The cyber men break into the castle and are inches away from killing Clara et al

• The Doctor says “I can win in 3 moves”. Mr Clever reallocates the processing power from 3 million Cybermen to forecast a chess game 3 moves in advance. Which apparently will take 3 million+ super computers from the future multiple minutes

• All the Cybermen shut down since their processing power is going to forecast 3 moves of a chess game

• Mr Clever says “that’s not possible”. The doctor grabs a zappy device from Porridge. The 3 moves are (1) turn on sonic screwdriver, (2) activate zappy thing, and (3) amplify zappy thing. Then there’s a bonus step of slam zappy thing into face to destroy the cyberprosthetic.

• Clara et al return to the room. They all panic because even though the Doctor is free, there are still 3 million Cybermen and there’s no way out

• Porridge goes “actually, there’s still a way to activate the bomb. Because I’m the emperor with an incredibly long name and as soon as I say ‘activate the bomb’ it’ll start an 80 second count down. Which will be more than enough time for my imperial retinue to track down my location, power up their transporters, and beam all of us up into my imperial flagship safely in low orbit

• IT HAPPENS. JUST LIKE THAT.

• Porridge (the emperor) asks Clara to marry him. She says no.

• The Doctor drops everyone off back home. Then to himself he talks about how Clara’s skirt is a little too tight.

My Thoughts

First of all, I should have just done bullet points for that whole summary. But this is a presidential email, baby! I’m not going back and making things easier to read. First draft is final draft as they say. I’ll bullet point my thoughts here, how’s that?

• Random shit just happens. Like… why did the Cyberman get super speed and a cool slow mo sequence as it walked past all the soldiers to kidnap a kid? Who knows. It didn’t ever happen again and nothing related to it ever happened.

• Absolute deus ex machina. Porridge was really just like I’m the emperor so everything is fine. Simply could have done exactly that before a bunch of people died for… reasons?

• Reading the script. It feels as though every character read the script because it didn’t feel like people were acting… at all like people? It felt like someone was like “it would be cool if the Doctor played chess against himself” but didn’t want to put in the legwork to make everything else make sense.

• Have you met a kid? The kids talk like caricatures of a child. Here’s an exceprt of some of Angie’s dialog (one of the kids). It’s very bad.

• I don’t like how Smith’s Doctor has a thing for all the women he travels with. I just think it’s kinda cringe and gross and I don’t think it’s necessary for him to talk about the fit of Clara’s skirt in a clearly sexualized way.

• I didn’t realize Neil Gaiman was this shit at writing TV

• I think Smith did well portraying the Doctor and Mr Clever fighting over his body

• Cinematography + Lighting was also pretty effective at distinguishing the two, so that was kinda cool

• The CGI… looked like they did it within their means. They didn’t try to do anything crazy, so it looked fine. The Green Screen Land powerpoint was very funny, at least to me.

That’s all, probably… a 1/5 or 2/5 episode for me. It was mostly just the cool concept of “Doctor plays chess with himself”, but little else there. The story and characters were contorted to ensure that scene could happen. And the resolution was…. bad. If your climax is resolved by someone going “I could have saved us this entire time, I just had to give a 10 second speech to this box” like… you built the tension then flopped on the resolution.

That’s it!

That’s all for this edition of The Nightly Buzz. I’m aware that this was all very stream of consciousness and ineloquently written, but hey, I’ve got to adhere to the 10:30 pm email genre. The first presidential debate is tomorrow at 4pm in the Michael Kingsmill Forum (Floor 4 of the Nest). I’m sure that’ll be a very fun time. But yeah. That’s the first email. Hopefully I disappointed you. Same bad time tomorrow o7.