Neil Gaiman’s brief, by his own account, was to make the Cybermen scary again, and on that narrow measure he succeeds completely. The Cybermen in this episode are the best version of them the revived show has produced, fast and adaptive and genuinely alarming, and there is a central performance from Matt Smith that is among his finest work in the part. Everything around those two things is a bit of a shambles.
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 operate independently, so a severed hand crawls after you and a head keeps issuing orders. And crucially, they upgrade in real time: shoot one, and every Cyberman in the galaxy instantly becomes immune to that weapon. Hurt them once and the trick never works twice. That last one is the fix. The Cybermen have spent the modern era being knocked over by whatever was to hand, and giving them a mechanic that punishes repetition makes them a strategic problem rather than a wave of targets. Combined with the Cybermites, a swarm replacing the old Cybermats that converts by infestation rather than surgery, it’s the most thought anyone has given this species since Rise of the Cybermen, and considerably more than the wasted outing in Closing Time. Gaiman also restores the horror of conversion as something that happens to you rather than to a stranger in another room, which is what sets up the good half of the episode.
Mr Clever
The Doctor is partially 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 distinction is entirely in the eyes and the tempo, the Doctor scattered and urgent, Mr Clever unhurried and delighted with himself. The two of them bicker, insult each other, and negotiate, and Smith gives them genuinely different rhythms without any of the tricks a lesser performer would reach for. The writing gives Mr Clever the best material too: he wants the Doctor’s mind specifically 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 occupying. There’s a lovely nasty moment where he flicks through the Doctor’s memories, every previous face in sequence, and pronounces the whole collection marvellous. It’s a two-hander between one actor, and it’s the reason to watch this. The new Cybermen work as a threat because they let Smith play hero and villain at the same time.
The chess framing is the smartest idea in the script. The Doctor and Mr Clever play for control of the body, and the Doctor, with nothing else to wager, puts his companions on the table. It’s a genuinely uncomfortable moment, and the fact that he does it while half-converted lets the episode have it both ways. Is that the Cyber-Planner’s ruthlessness leaking across, or is it simply the Doctor, who has always been willing to gamble other people’s lives on being the cleverest man in the room? The episode raises the question and, characteristically, doesn’t stay to answer it. Clara comes off well in the middle stretch. Handed command of the platoon and a planet-killing bomb, she’s decisive, unsentimental, and better at the job than the soldiers around her, and the episode lets her refuse to detonate purely on the grounds that the Doctor told her not to, which is a nicely stubborn piece 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 a collection of single traits and killed off in roughly that order. There’s a mechanical chess-playing cabinet, a comedy sergeant, and a great deal of running between shuttered attractions. The location never quite becomes a place, just a set of corridors with fairground bunting. Warwick Davis does his best as Porridge, and the reveal that he’s the missing 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, and she declines, and it’s meant to land as poignant and instead lands as a scene from a different draft. The children are the real problem. Angie and Artie, the kids Clara nannies, are brought along on the trip and spend the episode being sullen, being captured, and complaining. Angie in particular is written as relentlessly obnoxious in a way that seems intended as realism and plays as an obstacle. Every minute they occupy is a minute not spent on Mr Clever, and there are a lot of them.
Porridge’s dilemma is the one guest idea that nearly works. He’s the Emperor of a galaxy that, on his orders, destroyed an entire star system to stop the last Cyber-war, a million planets gone because it was the only thing that worked. He ran away rather than live as the man who signed that off, and he’s been sweeping up a derelict fairground ever since. That’s a genuinely strong piece of characterisation, exactly on point for an episode about conversion and control, and the script mentions it roughly twice before returning to the children complaining about the wi-fi. Underneath all the casting problems is a tonal one: this episode cannot decide what it is. It’s 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 children, and it switches between them at speed without ever committing. Gaiman’s previous script for the show, The Doctor’s Wife, was one idea pursued with total conviction for forty-five minutes. This is five ideas in a bag. The individual pieces are frequently excellent; nothing holds them.
The ending simply stops, too. The planet is destroyed, the Cybermen with it, the threat resolved by pressing a button on a bomb that was always available. After an episode about an enemy that adapts to every solution, they’re beaten by explosives. There’s also a decent gag buried in the premise that never quite gets cashed: the Cybermen have been reduced, in this galaxy’s memory, to a fairground attraction, a waxwork in a derelict amusement park, something children pay to be mildly frightened by. Waking up the real thing inside its own museum exhibit is a good idea, and it deserved a story built around it rather than a location to run through.
Rating: 3/5. Worth watching for the Cyberman redesign and for Matt Smith, both of which are genuinely excellent, and frustrating in almost every other respect. The children are a drag, the setting never materialises, the guest cast are disposable, and the resolution ignores the very thing that made the threat interesting. Great ideas, no architecture. Every weapon works exactly once, a severed hand comes after you at a sprint, and somewhere behind the Doctor’s eyes something is playing chess and enjoying itself enormously.