This is no madness. ‘Tis England.
For all of producer John Nathan-Turner’s efforts to continually reinvent Doctor Who, he always understands the value of returning to what works, as evidenced by Kevin Clarke’s “Silver Nemesis” (Story Production Code 7K). To paraphrase the old saying about IBM, “No show ever got cancelled by bringing back the Cybermen,” and on the strength of this admittedly derivative three-episode story, the advice stands. Absent from the screen since 1985’s “Attack of the Cybermen,” roughly four years and sixteen stories prior, the menace from Mondas proves fresh enough to distract viewers from the undeniable similarity of “Silver Nemesis” to “Remembrance of the Daleks” just two stories earlier. Not that Clarke’s tale tries to hide the parallels, making the linkage explicit at one point: the Seventh Doctor is settling scores with his enemies, wrapping up “[u]nfinished business,” as he calls it, as though aware his time—or at least that of the series—draws to a close.
Veteran Doctor Who director Chris Clough takes the helm for the second story running, following on from his turn on “The Happiness Patrol” (though that story will be shot after this one), and where the latter (next?) story involves moody studio shooting, “Silver Nemesis” takes full advantage of being set in jolly old England, with bright, beautifully shot location footage of various locales, including a vibrant high street and a not-quite Windsor Castle (Arundel Castle in West Sussex standing in for the exteriors). The sense of lived space, with natural light and wide vistas, helps ground unlikely time travellers from the seventeenth century, wanna-be modern-day Nazis from South America with dodgy accents, and, yes, Cybermen in a contemporary setting, the story taking place mostly on November 23rd, 1988, neatly the same day as the first episode airs—also, not coincidentally, twenty-five years after the initial airing of Doctor Who‘s first episode, a “silver” anniversary present of sorts.
Much like “Remembrance of the Daleks,” the initial episode sets up the various factions at play in the story. De Flores (Anton Diffring), a Nazi holdover hiding in South America, prepares a strike force of Aryan-esque mercenaries committed to bringing about a Fourth Reich. They plan to reach Windsor on November 23rd, and bring with them a small silver bow. Some three hundred and fifty years earlier, Lady Peinforte (Fiona Walker) reinforces the archery theme, shooting an arrow that lands harmlessly next to a pair of unimpressed pigeons in either the most deadpan, or most unintentionally funny, scene ever shot on Doctor Who. She wields a silver arrow, once, along with De Flores’ bow, part of a silver statue she had commissioned of herself from a mysterious ore that fell from the sky.
Said sculpture, the Nemesis statue, flies through the heavens as Comet Nemesis, launched there, as it transpires, by the Doctor. Lady Peinforte’s astronomer (Leslie French) calculates that it will return to Earth exactly three hundred and fifty years after being sent on its long, looping journey; and using a bit of black magic, the blood of the unfortunate mathematician, and a vague bit of knowledge about time travel acquired from who (?) knows where, she and her retainer Richard (Gerard Murphy) travel to present-day Windsor, where her home has been turned into a restaurant. The Doctor and Ace, meanwhile, are also in the vicinity at the time, enjoying a jazz brunch which is rudely interrupted by two headphone-wearing assassins who are, thankfully, not very good at their jobs, allowing our heroes to escape to the TARDIS. The Doctor checks his watch and sees that an alarm he set for this very day, some three hundred and fifty years in the past, requires his attention: Earth is in danger once more.
When the comet lands with a prodigious explosion next to a delightfully telegenic warehouse, it attracts the frenetic fascists, our haphazard guests from the past, the Doctor and Ace, and, inevitably, David Banks…
The Cybermen, led by the Cyber Leader (with David Banks reprising his role from both “Earthshock” and “Attack of the Cybermen,” the character, or at least the actor, having survived both stories somehow) pour out of their spaceship at the crash site and engage in battle with De Flores’ out-gunned commandos. But somehow, Lady Peinforte knows of their sole weakness: gold. She wields a quiver full of poisoned gold-tipped arrows, and they find their target somewhat more surely than her earlier efforts at making pigeon stew. The effects team goes all out for a full five minutes to open the second episode, with explosions aplenty and more than a few knock-off Nazis flying through the air; an equal number of Cybermen keel over with arrows in their chests, and the constant action papers over the ludicrous notion that a major battle involving interstellar forces can take place within shouting distance of Windsor Castle, where the Doctor and Ace have already had a near run-in with Queen Elizabeth and her corgis, without attracting immediate attention.
As with “Remembrance of the Daleks,” the Doctor slowly unveils his culpability in events. Validium, the ore from which Lady Peinforte had the statue created, comes from Gallifrey, the creation of Omega and Rassilon (whose involvement script editor Andrew Cartmel would never dream of omitting) as a form of living metal, “the ultimate defense” which inevitably escaped its original purpose (possibly with a nudge from a certain Time Lord). Without a sufficient, critical mass of Validium, however, the statue’s potential for taking over the universe and/or conquering seventeenth century England and/or creating the Fourth Reich cannot be attained. After the fracas at the crash site, the Cybermen hold the statue, Lady Peinforte the arrow, and the Doctor the bow, purloined during the fight; all, plus De Flores, who has accumulated a pile of gold dust (and a seemingly limitless supply of flunkies), converge on the Lady’s tomb, where the Mondassians have taken Nemesis.
Motivations remain thin on the ground beyond a desire to harness the power of the Nemesis statue, and perhaps none, truly, are needed. “Silver Nemesis” is Doctor Who as spectacle, drawing on its history with the Cybermen and also its unique ability to bring together so many disparate elements, so many genres, all at once: historic, futuristic, and contemporary; melodrama, farce, and adventure, rolled into one. That said, the script takes several bewildering detours, with the Doctor trying to get an audience with the Queen rather than just ringing UNIT; skinheads mistaking Lady Peinforte for a social worker (and getting hogtied and hung upside down from a tree in their skivvies for their troubles); and a rich American woman (Dolores Grey) giving the visitors from the seventeenth century a lift to Windsor Castle. Many, but not all, of these scenes have segments cut from the final version as aired, the elisions making what’s included of the extraneous material even more disorienting. Though perhaps the asides provide some levity, needing filler in a three episode story with three sets of antagonists and the Doctor speaks to significant script issues.
Poison coated gold-tipped arrows being in short supply, Lady Peinforte loses the silver arrow to the Cybermen, whose thousand-strong invasion fleet the Doctor discovers hidden in space around Earth. He has a plan, though, and manages to get the silver bow close enough to the statue—right under the noses of the hapless Mondassians—activating the living metal. Nemesis (played doubly by Fiona Walker) homes in on the bow, which the Doctor returns to the “rocket sled” that he used to launch it into the heavens in 1638. More explosions ensue, with Ace leading the Cybermen through a cavernous warehouse, pelting them with gold coins, while the Doctor programs the statue to destroy the Cyberfleet. De Flores and his chief henchman Karl (Metin Yenal) show up just as all the Cybermen are (apparently) eliminated, but the Cyber Leader doesn’t go down so easily, and he kills the would-be Reich revivers. Not to be outdone, Lady Peinforte and Richard arrive on cue, and she brings proceedings to a screeching halt:
Lady Peinforte: Doctor who? Have you never wondered where he came from, who he is?
Ace: Nobody knows who the Doctor is.
Lady Peinforte: Except me.
Clarke (and, perhaps more pointedly, Nathan-Turner and Cartmel) attempt to inject a sense of mystery into the Doctor’s origins here, one quite lost from the series in recent years, by having this figure from the seventeenth century hint at some terrible secret in the Time Lord’s past, one told to her, or so she claims, by the statue itself. Sylvester McCoy sells the moment exceptionally well, the Seventh Doctor seething as she threatens to reveal his sordid history should he fail to give her the silver bow. And indeed, after he instead hands the final piece of the Nemesis puzzle to the Cybermen, she hints at her big reveal: Gallifrey’s “old time, the time of chaos,” the implication being that prior to the Time Lords current “civilized” demeanor, they once wreaked a terrible shadow across the universe (or something to that effect). But after Season Twenty-three, where it is revealed that the Time Lords countenance a cataclysm on Earth to hide their misdeeds, vague rumors of Omega (already revealed to be a villain of sorts) and Rassilon misbehaving don’t land with quite the intended heft.
Still, it proves a bracing moment, one that reminds viewers that the Doctor remains, at his core, unknowable, alien, a cipher. The pseudo-revelation provides enough of a jolt that viewers do not have time to dwell on the far more disconcerting interaction the Doctor has with Nemesis, in which he reveals that he is essentially enslaving a living creature to bring about his revenge, a thinking being he declines to free from eons-long servitude after this latest eradication. Thinking that silver statue will allow them to turn Earth into a new Mondas (having lost the original way back when), the Cyber Leader stands by approvingly as the Doctor launches it into the heart of the Cyberfleet, where it promptly kills what remains, theoretically, of the Mondassian diaspora.
To save any awkward questions, Clarke has Lady Peinforte hurl herself on the statue just before it rockets to its destructive date in the stars, and Richard impales the Cyber Leader with a gold-tipped arrow fortuitously stuck in the TARDIS from the original three-way fight between the factions. The Doctor and Ace whisk the grateful highwayman back to 1638, where an impromptu lute and flute serenade prevents Ace from getting an answer to her question: “Professor? Doctor? Who are you?”
Though three factions dominate “Silver Nemesis,” Fiona Walker and Gerard Murphy as Lady Peinforte and Richard steal the spotlight when they are on screen. The oddly affecting dynamic between them helps paper over the lack of background given the enigmatic noble—and a strong case can be made that a deeper exploration of her time with both the Doctor and Nemesis in the past would have enriched the story far more than the time wasted on the pseudo-Nazi paramilitary group. Murphy’s responses to Richard being very much out of his time, both on the high street and on encountering fearsome, um, llamas, adds texture without veering too far into camp, and Walker’s steely determination (albeit for a cause we know nothing of) drives the character of Lady Peinforte forward, so sure of herself that nothing, not even an pedigreed Virginian lush in a limo, can scare her off.
Sophie Aldred’s willingness to perform her own stunts, particularly with loads of pyrotechnics flashing off, adds greatly to the sense of Ace as brave while still being scared. Her slight flinches as the effects fire, that a hardened stunt performer might shrug off, amplify Ace’s determination to face her fear. Aldred holds several minutes of the story by herself, clambering up and down stairs wielding a slingshot, holding a horde of Cybermen at bay, and it’s all quite believable, as is Ace’s dismay when she realizes that she doesn’t, quite, know who the Doctor really is.
Sylvester McCoy doesn’t let any doubt cloud his presentation of the Seventh Doctor. Far more than in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” he wears the harder edge of this Doctor on the prowl with conviction—even as the audience, perhaps, remains less convinced at this darker turn of events. McCoy’s jauntiness peeks out wherever possible, and his gift for physical comedy, for timing, helps soften these edges that the production team keeps trying to chisel into the Time Lord. But he can only go where the scripts take him, and though the Doctor should always have a serious side, McCoy seems to be happier when the peripatetic time traveller is saving rather than condemning.
That question, of “who” the Doctor really is, and by extension who the Time Lords are, remains utterly compelling, and the invocation of that uncertainty rescues “Silver Nemesis” from being a simple rehash of “Remembrance of the Daleks,” what with its repetition of a very long ruse by the Doctor (ostensibly the sole doing of the Seventh, but never clarified) to wipe out yet another of his traditional adversaries. For the series to continue, perhaps the question of identity, of origins, should never be answered in full. But Nathan-Turner and Cartmel refuse to grapple with the ethical dimensions of the Doctor’s frankly bloodthirsty behavior here and in “Remembrance of the Daleks.”
Coy winks and nods are one thing after the Doctor reveals some hidden facet of his past, like having been in the vaults under Windsor Castle before; but simply skipping over any sense of moral weight in the Doctor’s decision leads one to wonder: who, indeed, is the Doctor that he can eliminate a people, no matter how bent on evil they might be, then groove to some Renaissance tunes like nothing happened? This unease pervades the Sixth Doctor’s run, and its shadow sits heavily on the Seventh Doctor’s time as well, despite Sylvester McCoy’s best efforts to return some sense of affability to our favorite Gallifreyan. As a celebration of twenty-five years of Doctor Who, “Silver Nemesis” reminds us of the wonder the series can evoke, and also highlights the missteps that have brought the show to the brink.
(Previous Story: The Happiness Patrol)
Post 160 of the Doctor Who Project