Silver Nemesis Part Two

The one where Lady Peinforte visits her own tomb...

The Cybermen disembark from their shuttle, only to be set upon by a trigger-happy neo-Nazi - and so begins the Battle of Windsor! These scenes were actually filmed in Greenwich, not Windsor, and the old warehouse has long been demolished, with the area redeveloped to give way to the Millennium Dome and its car parking facilities. It's thought that the comet's crash site later became the David Beckham Football Academy (until it closed in 2009).

"Eradicate them!" orders the Cyber Leader. Cue lots of explosions, machine gun fire, and impressive stunts as the Mondasian marauders battle it out with the Nazi numbskulls, but it must be noted how pathetic the Cybermen's weapons are. They don't shoot lasers, they just fizzle and spark like damp fuses, and let down the physical might and presence of so many silver giants.

Chris Clough directs with pace and an eye for getting the most out of the pyrotechnics, although there are moments where you wish he'd had a quiet word with his cast on a few points. What's with the soldier who dies so pathetically that he collapses saying the word "aaaahh", and why do the Cybermen hit by Peinforte's arrows die so vocally, screaming out as if they feel physical pain? As cybernetic beings, surely the first thing they'd dispose of would be pain?

As the battle rages, the Doctor sneakily pinches the silver bow, and is spied by Peinforte. "Oh glorious evil!" she exclaims. "It is he!" Oblivious to all of this is De Flores (that's Spanish for "flowery", you know), who doesn't see the Doctor steal the bow, and asks Karl to risk his life to grab the bow case, which the Doctor cleverly closed so it wouldn't be obvious it was empty. What is most unconvincing about this is that at no point does De Flores think to open the case to check the bow is there, until he's told to at the end of the episode. From this moment on, De Flores and his neo-Nazis are completely superfluous to the story. The Doctor has the bow, Peinforte has the arrow, and the Cybermen have the statue.

The Cybermen take the comet into the warehouse where they cut the statue free, but what makes less sense is that they then transport the statue all the way to a tomb in Windsor Safari Park. It transpires that the tomb is Lady Peinforte's, which she designed before her death, and that the Safari Park used to be her estate in the 17th century (I'm not sure how right this can be, as Windsor Great Park was property of the Crown until the 18th century). Why do the Cybermen go to all the trouble of flying their shuttle across town - in full view of what I presume would be a high security area - to put the statue in Peinforte's tomb? It's suggested that the Cyber Leader expects Peinforte to be driven insane by "the fact of her death", but wouldn't it be easier to wait in the warehouse for the arrow to lure her to them?

The Cybermen do look stunning in the crypt though, their silvery armour glinting in the candlelight, turning them a misleading burnished gold. All credit to Chris Clough who directs the Cybermen really well, often from below making them tower on the screen, or in impressive numbers.

They're still being very stupid though. Why do they abandon the statue in the crypt to allow Peinforte to acquire it? Why not just wait inside the crypt for the arrow to lure her to them? There's no logic to their actions. They go outside the crypt, allowing Peinforte and Richard to pick them off with gold-tipped arrows, which they know they have!

I do appreciate the rather fretful Cyber Lieutenant though, who keeps picking at the Leader's decision to call in reinforcements before they have all three units of validium. "You are outside your function!" reprimands the Cyber Leader!

The episode is full of nonsense like this. Why does De Flores assume the arrows he sees kill the Cybermen are effective because of their gold tips, rather than a) because they're arrows, or b) because they're poisoned? He assumes it's because they're made of gold, but cannot possibly know. Next thing we see he has a pouch full of gold dust (where did he get that from?) and stages a rendezvous in the woods with the Cybermen to forge an alliance.

I get the strong impression writer Kevin Clarke is struggling to keep De Flores and the Nazis relevant, and is forcing them into the story when they no longer fit. De Flores persuades the Cybermen to let him retake the statue, because "whatever your unfortunate vulnerability, it does not affect us". He's talking bunkum! He's right that gold in and of itself cannot harm him, but when you're talking about a gold-tipped arrow laced with deadly poison, yes it would harm you. Harm you very much! I'm glad the Cyber Leader plans to have De Flores killed once he's secured the statue and the arrow, because the guy's just annoying.

The arrow leads Peinforte to the statue in her tomb, but along the way they encounter a couple of unconvincing "skinheads" who stop them on Windsor High Street demanding money. "What are you, social workers?" says one, in a line of dialogue that was lifeless the moment Clarke's ink was dry. The skinheads end up being strung by their feet from a tree, stripped to their lipstick-kissed boxer shorts while their stonewashed jeans and polo shirts smoulder on a camp fire. It's meant to be amusing, but instead it's just embarrassing, especially when the Doctor has the indignity of discovering these poor souls. "Who did this to you?" he asks. "Social workers!" they reply. Oh dear...

Lady Peinforte and Richard also happen across a couple of llamas, as well as a gravestone in sight of Peinforte's tomb. It turns out to be Richard's own resting place, the inscription telling him that he died/ dies on November 2nd, 1757, aged 51. "If the dogs would not eat thee, I ordered you put out here to attend me in the next world as in this," says the rather heartless noblewoman. The last of the inscription reads: "He saw worlds end and begin." It's a nice little moment in what is otherwise a rather frothy mess of a story, the sort of thing that probably makes Steven Moffat's heart skip a beat.

Attacked in the tomb by De Flores, Richard rather foolishly (and needlessly) hands the arrow to the stirring Nemesis statue, and he and his mistress escape along a convenient secret tunnel that she had designed into the structure all those years ago ("Death is but a door. I always knew I'd cheat it!"). At which point the dense De Flores believes he possesses the statue, the arrow and the bow. If he'd bothered to look inside the case, he'd realise he doesn't.

While all this is going on, the Doctor and Ace spend their time wandering around Windsor Great Park, listening to jazz and whistling their merry way toward the tomb. They're in absolutely no hurry at all, which is surprising seeing as a squad of Cybermen, a band of murderous neo-Nazis, and a malicious 17th century witch are at large. Along the way, the Doctor asks Ace to use the nitro-9 that she's not carrying to blow up the Cyber shuttle, which she does spectacularly. But my 'nonsense alarm' is ringing again, and I'm wondering why the Cybermen left two inept cyber-humans to guard their ship (two cyber-humans who've been drinking, remember) instead of one of their own number? When the Cyber Leader has the twins killed for their supposed "betrayal", it doesn't make sense. They didn't betray their masters, they simply failed at their job.

Ace's reaction to the Cybermen killing the men in cold blood is nicely placed, with the Doctor reassuring her they were already dead. "The Cybermen had transformed them," he says. "They were no longer human beings." They were still human enough to get served at the pub and imbibe a couple of pints though. Clough's idea of what Cyber-conversion looks like is two blokes wearing silver headphones, a far cry from the cadaverous form of Lytton in Attack of the Cybermen, or the stronger depictions in stories like Dark Water, World Enough and Time and The Haunting of Villa Diodati.

By the end of the episode the Doctor and Ace have completely stalled, sitting on a felled tree looking bored. They're jamming the Cybermen's signal for reinforcements - what do they need reinforcements for? All they've got to do is kill a couple of humans - by playing Courtney Pine's jazz tape*, but other than that they're busy doing nothing. The Doctor spots a lizard emerge from under a leaf, which makes him realise there's an entire fleet of Cyber warships already in orbit around Earth. "Thousands of them. They were invisible!" he tells Ace.

After a frenetic but intriguing first episode, part 2 stumbles as people's motivations and actions make less and less sense. De Flores should have been killed off in the Battle of Windsor - he's pointless, and Anton Diffring doesn't give a hoot about giving a good performance. There are some nice moments, but as a whole it's a flimsy mess. I hope Clarke can pull it together in part 3.

* I wonder if they're playing Pine's 1986 album Journey to the Urge Within, featuring a track presciently called Dolores (as in Gray?), and another ironically called Peace, composed by Horace Silver!

First broadcast: November 30th, 1988

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Battle of Windsor (except for that bloke who dies saying "aaaahhh").
The Bad: The skinheads.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

Ace says "Professor": 37 - no "Professors" uttered here.

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Silver Nemesis is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Revenge-Cybermen-Nemesis/dp/B003QP2TPA