Nightmare in Silver

[purplecat]

Nightmare in Silver appears to have been received with considerable enthusiasm but, it must be said, I found it a bit of a mixed bag.

In its favour, Nightmare in Silver had a comparatively strong role for Clara to play; a plot that was pretty coherent; and emphasised one of the main scary selling points of they Cybermen, namely their desire to convert you into them.

I felt it was let down, to be honest, by the performances from Matt Smith and Warwick Davis. I'll start with Matt Smith. I've been very fond of his performance as the Doctor but my big problem with him here was that his Cyberplanner performance was not clearly differentiated enough. Obviously, at certain moments, we were meant to be uncertain about who was in control but, for instance, in those first few minutes when the planner had accessed his brain I was genuinely unsure who was talking. This was, of course, because I was expecting a Cyber-controlled Doctor to be emotionless (this being a major part of Cyberman behaviour) where mostly he seemed anything but. Even where the characters could be told apart, I don't think Smith really sold the horror of the situation. Two extremely clever beings attempting to outwit each other isn't as gripping as a man desperately fighting for his own mind, and the safety of his friends and I felt we got too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

My issue with Warwick Davis' performance was slightly different. Where I think Matt Smith's was a technical shortcoming, I felt Davis was basically playing against the role and I'm not sure if the misunderstanding here was weak-scripting, direction or acting. In harsh terms the script, as I saw it, presented us with an emperor who was on the run from responsibility, who when presented with a very clear and immediate need to destroy a planet (and, it turns out, an almost instantaneous escape route for himself and the handful of people on the planet should he do so), opted instead to leave the decisions to the Doctor and Clara and who, at the end, attempted to once again abdicate responsibility by getting Clara (as his wife) to take it on for him. In short, the script is giving us, if not a coward, at least a man not only avoiding his duty but any difficult decision, a classic case of the "poor little rich boy" if nothing else. He was played as noble which mostly worked right up until the very end when his speech about the terrible responsibility of the throne came across as smugly trite where, I think it would have worked better as the Emperor having a final whinge about his responsibilities. The proposal to Clara also makes much more sense if viewed as a desperate man clutching at straws than as a weird throwback to the 1970s trope where miscellaneous well-meaning princelings would propose to companions on a regular basis.

The kids, meh, were OK. In the end there was relatively little for them to do, but that is probably just as well since the performances were a little stilted. I think it was an interesting idea for a Tardis team dynamic, that would emphasise Moffat's interest in families of companions, but definitely ran the risk of becoming a bit too Sarah Jane Adventures for the format.

I was initially doubtful about the Cybermen's new abilities to move really fast and to learn instantly how to counteract any new attack. However, unlike the Ice Warrior updating we saw in Cold War, I came round to these. Partly because the idea of some sort of networked highly adaptable intelligence works well with the way the new series has tried to reposition the Cybermen thematically and partly because it amuses me to imagine that the Raston Warrior Robot from The Five Doctors was actually a highly advanced Cyberman.

As I said above, I was pleased that the episode gave Clara a strong role to play where she has been in tag-along mode for an awful lot of this season. It was a bit of a shame that the plot required the Cyber-planner to get the self-destruct from her, even though the script worked hard to avoid making her appear too stupid when it happened. Jenna-Louise Coleman was making the most of the opportunity to do a little more and injected more personality into Clara than we've seen previously, emphasising her trust in the Doctor even while she is aware of his flaws.

While Nightmare in Silver did have a lot going for it, it was neither as breathlessly imaginative as The Crimson Horror nor as tight and thoughtful as Hide. At the end of the day, I think it spent too long focusing on Matt Smith's half-controlled Doctor and, sadly, Smith wasn't delivering the performance that was required to sustain that.

Comments

[gabcd86.livejournal.com]

I liked it a lot less than you (and apparently everyone on the internet) but I think your reason is pretty spot-on. Lots of the people who loved it seem to have really liked Matt Smith's performance, and as you say, that was big chunk of the episode, so maybe that's the determining factor.

[purplecat]

Yeah, I've seen posts suggesting he be nominated for various awards and I'm not seeing it - I think if the script had, perhaps, suggested that the Cyber-planner was gaining slow control and so sort of influencing the Doctor rather than switching between two personalities I'd have been more enamoured of it, but it felt like Matt Smith as playing the Doctor and... the Doctor with a slightly less friendly expression.

It's the kind of role, requiring a good deal of technique, that people expect to be a tour-de-force performance and maybe that's skewing the perceptions somehow into thinking it was stronger than it was - either that or I'm missing the subtley in it...

[reggietate.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed it. I could have done without the kids, but I didn't think they were too bad, considering, and I thought Warrick Davis was great, and Matt Smith was brilliant. Again, if felt to me much more like an old-style Who adventure (excepting the short length).

[purplecat]

I thought Warwick Davis was great, I just didn't think his performance made much sense of the character, if you see what I mean. Less sure about Smith, although I know daniel_saunders thinks the fault was more in the writing than in the acting.

There were bits of this I loved and I would have liked to enjoy it more.

It's give you a wonderful icon though!!

[reggietate.livejournal.com]

I think a lot could be improved with a little more time to let the stories develop in a more natural fashion. 45 minutes isn't always enough, as I believe I've said before :-)

Have you seen the finale yet? I won't spoil, but I thought it was excellent, with some stunning visuals and Matt was bloody good. Some people seem to have hated it, though :-( I confess, I get a bit tired of Moffat-hate. He has his faults, but he's hardly the worst showrunner there's ever been! I await your verdict with interest.

Glad you like the icon. I thought it was about time I had a more up-to-date Doctor icon, so I nabbed a pic of the Digital Spy site and made it quite quickly.

[purplecat]

The Moffat hate gets me too. I prefer his version of Doctor Who to Russell Davies' though I can understand why there are people who don't. I've not seen the finale yet, hopefully tonight.

[reggietate.livejournal.com]

There are elements in both their tenures that I dislike, they both have failings and strengths. Since Primeval came along, I haven't been as emotionally invested in Who as I used to be, so perhaps I'm less critical than I might otherwise have been. I do find the cries of misogyny! to be somewhat overblown.

[purplecat]

I'm not as invested in Who these days as I was in my teens, but I'll definitely be more sorry if it's cancelled now than if it had been at the end of Davies' tenure. I suspect it's current flaws are one I'm more willing to over-look and its strengths are ones that appeal to me. I can see where people are coming from with the misogyny thing, but Davies is hardly exempt from the same charge, and the portrayal of women in the show is hardly out of line with popular culture as a whole, especially if you take into account that the central character is male with god-like powers (shouldn't be god-like, but often are if the script so demands).

It does concern me a bit that so few of the writers are female...

[reggietate.livejournal.com]

That there's sexism I can buy; misogyny, not so much. More women writers would certainly be good for the show, though. A female showrunner would be great, too (though I'm not someone who wants a female Doctor). I can't see it happening without more women writing for the show first, but you never know, the time may come.

I most definitely don't want to see it cancelled. To be honest, thought it costs a lot to make, I doubt we'll be losing it any time soon. It's a flagship show for the Beeb, and seems to be doing pretty well overseas.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

The writers thing is not just concerning, but weird, because there have been female directors, producers and script editors in new Who, but only one female writer. Very strange.

the central character is male with god-like powers

I have a theory (which I suspect would make me very unpopular in fandom) that this why sexualizing the Doctor was a bad idea. Although the Doctor was always played by a male actor, until 1989 he was not played as a stereotypically male character, especially once Susan left. Regardless of whether you think the Doctor is asexual or celibate or omnisexual off-screen or whatever, from The Rescue to Survival he is largely played as a sort of blank slate, expressing no sexual interest and not acting 'male'; I think somewhere Tat Wood describes the Doctor as "a male impersonator" which has some validity. For all that many fans assume a romantic/sexual relationship between the fourth Doctor and Sarah and/or Romana, Tom Baker quite deliberately plays the Doctor in a way to remove any sexual tension. Even the sixth Doctor patronising Peri all the time is written as the Doctor patronising a human, not a woman (he makes remarks about human intelligence, not female intelligence), even if other aspects of those scripts were deeply disturbing from a gender relations viewpoint.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that the Doctor (until 1989) did hero things and intellectual things, but as a sort of abstract, alien force who can be interpreted in a variety of ways, not in a 'men are the heroes, men are the intellectuals' way. Although I have no evidence, even anecdotal, I would not be surprised if large numbers of young girls were pretending to be the Doctor in the seventies; I would be more surprised by that now, because he is more clearly coded as 'male' - he is involved in romantic relationships including a heterosexual marriage (or two, if you count the TARDIS, which is at least a 'boys and their toys' thing), River and some of his companions treat him (at times dismissively) as a stereotypical man and so on.

Of course, I could be completely wrong, as I have no grounding in feminist theory and I have my own personal reasons for wanting the Doctor asexual or celibate (or I certainly did as a child, and perhaps still do), but this is how it seems to me.

[purplecat]

My memory is that, even before the new series, or the TV movie, the fact that the Doctor, as a man, necessarily dominated most stories was a concern to writers who wanted to put better female roles into the stories.

It may be that he was deliberately asexual, but I suspect that the fact that our culture defaults to `male' means that in most people's minds he was clearly male.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Agree about the Doctor, less about Smith; I think he did all he could to differentiate the parts, the problem was that Gaiman wrote them too similar. Especially as one was supposed to be an emotionless techno-zombie and the other... isn't.

Hadn't thought of Porridge or Davis like that; I'll have to bear that in mind when I re-watch the series (which probably won't be for a long time).

I like the Raston Warrior Robot idea! The Cyber-massacre it perpetuates can now be seen as an internal schism!

[purplecat]

You could be correct that the fault is more in the writing than in the performance. I'm not sufficiently knowledgable about the nitty gritty of acting to really decide. I think my problem is that I think the Cyber-planner should have been an emotionless techno-zombie but I'm not sure anyone involved in the actual production thought hat.

It took me a long time to figure out what my problem with Davis was, because I was enjoying the performance right up until the final scene where I thought his speech was terrible. It was only when I tried to make sense of the character as a whole, I thought that might explain why the last speech didn't work.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I think the Cyber-planner should have been an emotionless techno-zombie

I totally agree. I did have a discussion with parrot_knight about this on his LJ or mine. He presented a rationale for an emotional Cyber-planner; I felt that while his reasoning was good, we needed to be told about it, not left to work it out for ourselves. There's a difference between not spoon-feeding your audience and just being lazy...

[purplecat]

I can see a couple of arguments about why the Cyber-planner shouldn't be emotionless but I don't like either of them much and I agree there should have been a line to make it clear, if so. The thoughts I had were:

a) Emotion is needed for "planning". I recall, at one point, that was a favourite of the pro-Dalek "side" in discussions of "who would win Daleks or Cybermen?". It's also fairly current thinking in neuroscience - or at least in neuroscience as it gets reported to computer scientists. I think it's a rotten argument within `Who itself largely because it suggests even the Cybermen are aware that removing all emotion is essentially a flawed idea.

b) The Cyber-planner was taking over the Doctor's own brain topology and that, at least initially, contained emotions and "bleed-over" of the Doctor's own personality. This makes more sense, in general, of Smith's performance but would have been more convincing (for me anyway) if it had been presented in terms of one or other personality having more influence over the body's actions rather than the idea, as presented, of each waging war for total control of specific parts of the brain.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I think a) was parrot_knight's argument; certainly that's the one I would use. But as well as the reason you suggest against it, to me the idea, "What if the Cybermen had emotions?" is a rather pointless question to ask, from an aesthetic point of view. As Cybermen are purely fictional creations, and as their main defining point within the fiction is a lack of emotion, why not write a story without the Cybermen instead?

And either way, I'd like to be told about a revision this drastic to established continuity!

[purplecat]

Oh, and I forgot to add, the Cyber-planner was (somewhat gleefully) mocking the Doctor's emotions at the end. So I'd be very surprised if part of the idea was that the Cyber-planner was supposed to be showing emotion.