Nightmare in Silver
May. 18th, 2013 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatNightmare 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.
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.