Nightmare in Silver: Mr Clever Plays Chess

Nightmare in Silver wants one thing above all, which is to make the Cybermen scary again, and on that narrow measure I think it succeeds completely. They’re the best version of them the revived show has come up with, fast and adaptive and properly alarming, and Matt Smith gives one of the best performances he’s managed in the part. Everything around those two things is a bit of a shambles though. I spent the back half of the episode wishing it had trusted its best idea and just stayed inside the Doctor’s head, because that’s where the good stuff lives, and the rest of it is a theme park.

Fixing the Cybermen

The redesign is the headline and it’s the right one. These Cybermen move at speed, with a head-snap turn that’s properly unnerving and a sprint that arrives before you’ve finished taking it in. Their limbs detach and work independently, so a severed hand crawls after you and a head keeps issuing orders, which is gruesome in exactly the way a family show can get away with. And they upgrade in real time: shoot one, and every Cyberman in the galaxy is instantly immune to that weapon, so you only ever get to hurt them once. That’s the fix. The Cybermen have spent the modern era being knocked over by whatever was lying around, and a mechanic that punishes repetition turns them from a wave of targets into a strategic problem. Add the Cybermites, a swarm that replaces the old Cybermats and converts you by infestation rather than surgery, and it’s the most thought anyone has given this species since Rise of the Cybermen, and a lot more than the wasted outing in Closing Time.

What I like most is that the conversion happens to somebody you know. In earlier Cyberman stories it’s something that happens to a stranger in another room, a horror you watch from a safe distance, whereas here the Doctor gets partly converted and we get to watch him lose the argument with his own head in real time. That’s what makes the Cybermen frightening again for me, much more than the speed or the gadgets, and it’s what sets up the good half of the episode. I’d have happily taken a full forty-five minutes of just that, and if the rest of the script had been built to serve it I think this would be one of my favourites of the run.

Mr Clever

The Doctor’s partly converted, and his mind becomes contested ground: half of him, half of a Cyber-Planner that calls itself Mr Clever, sharing a body and playing chess for control of it. Matt Smith is superb. He switches between the two mid-sentence and mid-gesture, and the difference is all in the eyes and the tempo, the Doctor scattered and urgent, Mr Clever unhurried and delighted with himself. The pair of them bicker and insult each other and negotiate, and watching him play both sides of that table he gives them completely different rhythms without any of the tricks a lesser actor would grab for. Mr Clever gets the best material too. He wants the Doctor’s mind because a Time Lord’s processing capacity would let the Cybermen finally win, and he keeps stopping mid-threat to admire the inside of the head he’s living in. There’s a lovely nasty bit where he flicks through the Doctor’s memories, every previous face in order, and calls the whole collection marvellous. It’s a two-hander for one actor and it’s the reason to watch this.

The chess idea is the smartest thing in the script. The Doctor and Mr Clever play for control of the body, and the Doctor, with nothing else to bet, puts his companions on the table, which is properly uncomfortable. Is that the Cyber-Planner’s ruthlessness leaking across, or just the Doctor, who’s always been willing to gamble other people’s lives on being the cleverest man in the room? The episode raises the question and, typically, doesn’t stay to answer it, and I’d have liked it to hang around a bit longer. Clara comes off well in the middle stretch too. Handed command of the platoon and a planet-killing bomb she’s decisive and unsentimental, better at the job than the soldiers around her, and she holds off on using it purely because the Doctor asked her not to, which is a nicely stubborn bit of loyalty rather than a plot convenience.

The theme park problem

Now the rest. Hedgewick’s World of Wonders is a derelict amusement park on a planet due to be destroyed, garrisoned by a punishment platoon of soldiers who are written as one trait each and killed off in roughly that order. There’s a mechanical chess-playing cabinet, a comedy sergeant, and a lot of running between shuttered attractions. The place never actually becomes a place, just corridors with fairground bunting, and I kept thinking of the submarine in Cold War, which felt like somewhere you could genuinely get lost in. The children are the real problem. Angie and Artie, the kids Clara nannies, get dragged along and spend the episode being sullen, being captured and complaining, and Angie in particular is relentlessly obnoxious in a way that seems meant as realism and plays as an obstacle. Every minute they’re on screen is a minute not spent on Mr Clever, and by the time the Cybermen switch the pair of them off I was honestly a bit relieved.

Underneath the casting problems there’s a tonal one, and it’s the thing that really sinks it for me. This is a horror story about your own mind being colonised, and a jolly runaround with a comedy platoon, and a fairy tale about a hidden emperor, and a family adventure with squabbling kids, and it switches between them at speed without committing to any of them. The Doctor’s Wife was one idea chased with total conviction for forty-five minutes, and this is five ideas in a bag. The individual pieces are frequently excellent and nothing holds them together. There’s even a cracking gag buried in the premise that barely gets used, the Cybermen reduced to a fairground waxwork that children pay to be mildly frightened by, and waking up the real thing inside its own museum exhibit deserved a story built around it rather than a location to run through.

Porridge and the emperor

Warwick Davis does his best as Porridge, and the reveal that he’s actually the Emperor of the galaxy, hiding from a job he can’t bear, is a decent idea delivered far too casually. He proposes to Clara in the last two minutes having barely spoken to her, she turns him down, and it’s meant to land as poignant and instead plays like a scene from a different draft. His dilemma is the one guest idea that nearly works though. He’s the man who gave the order that destroyed whole worlds to end the last Cyber-war, because it was the only thing that worked, and he ran away rather than live as the person who signed that off. He’s been sweeping up a derelict fairground ever since, which is strong stuff, exactly on point for an episode about control and what you’ll do to win, and the script mentions it about twice before going back to the children complaining about the wi-fi.

The ending just stops, too. The planet’s destroyed, the Cybermen go with it, and the threat is resolved by pressing a button on a bomb that was available from the start. After an episode about an enemy that adapts to every solution, they get beaten by explosives, and I didn’t buy it for a second, because the whole point of these Cybermen is that they’d have upgraded past it. If Mr Clever had lost the chess game on the strength of something the Doctor had set up earlier, I’d have cheered. Instead the episode quietly drops its own best rule, pushes the button, and gets everybody out in time for a proposal nobody asked for. And it frustrates me because the pieces for a better finish are all sitting right there: a Doctor who knows exactly how Mr Clever thinks, a Cyber-Planner that can’t help showing off, and a hundred small hints that the chess game was never going to be won by force. I wanted the last ten minutes to be clever in the way the first twenty were, and instead it was loud.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok, half of it I’d rewatch tomorrow and half I’d skip, and I keep thinking about that severed hand coming after me at a sprint.

Would you have kept the chess match and thrown out the platoon, or do you think the Emperor’s secret deserved the whole episode to itself? Tell me in the comments.