Silver Nemesis Part One

The one where a comet containing a living statue crashes to Earth...

Silver Nemesis was Doctor Who's 150th story, as well as its 25th anniversary serial. It was a chance to celebrate the series' monumental achievement in reaching half a century. It was lucky to have reached this birthday, as there had been a handful of times along the way when Doctor Who could have been axed. The BBC could quite easily have scrapped it when William Hartnell left in 1966; the series was almost cancelled in 1969 when ratings had tumbled to a numbing 3.5m; and then there was the infamous 1985 hiatus, when the BBC really wanted to ditch the Doctor, but didn't have the guts. So to get to Season 25 was a real achievement, and this was the story to mark the moment.

But Silver Nemesis isn't a straightforward anniversary tale. For its 10th and 20th anniversaries, Doctor Who had brought back old Doctors and old enemies, celebrating the show's past and present. Lesser anniversaries tended not to be purposefully marked (The Invasion for the fifth, The Key to Time for the fifteenth), and although Silver Nemesis was marketed and intended as an anniversary tale, there were no returning Doctors, no litany of old monsters and enemies, and (thankfully) no Time Lords. It's just the current Doctor and the current companion in an action-packed time travel adventure. 

The episode opens with a scene set in South America on November 22nd, 1988 (the day before this episode was broadcast) where a white-haired German is trying to shoot a parrot with a bow and arrow. He's thankfully prevented from doing so by a message of "vunderful news" from his aide Karl, and once inside his villa, we see that Herr De Flores (played by the intensely typecast Anton Diffring) is actually a modern-day fascist, a "neo-Nazi". The fact he's living in South America is a hint that he escaped Nazi Germany in 1945 ("I give you the Fourth Reich!").

Meanwhile, in Windsor, England, 1638, Lady Peinforte and her aide Richard are using a bow and arrow to shoot (and miss) pigeons. Inside her home, an ageing mathematician is busy working on some calculations about a comet he expects to land in the meadow outside. There's a serendipity to the casting of Peinforte and her scholar, as Fiona Walker appeared as a baddie in Doctor Who's very first season (1964's The Keys of Marinus) and Leslie French was considered for the part of the Doctor before Hartnell got it. Another very low-key link between these three actors is that French was awarded the freedom of Cape Town in South Africa in 1963 (of all years!) after helping establish a series of Shakespearean seasons at the city's Maynardville Open-Air Theatre - Maynarde being Richard's surname!

Apart from the ornithophobic similarities between De Flores and Peinforte, there's also the bows and arrows. The 20th century Nazi has a silver bow, while the 17th century lady has a silver arrow. There must be a connection, hinted at by the scholar's calculation that something called the Nemesis comet will return to Earth by landing in Windsor - "on the twenty-third day of November in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-eight..."

Director Chris Clough then switches to a camera shot rising out of the bell of a saxophone, as if everything we've seen happening in South America and Windsor took place inside Courtney Pine's instrument! It's taken over five minutes to catch up with the Doctor and Ace, who we find chilling out at an open air jazz concert on a beautiful summer's day (for summer, read autumn). I'd never noticed on previous viewings that the two headphone-wearing assassins who shoot at our heroes a bit later are sitting enjoying a couple of pints of beer in the background!

It's great to see Doctor Who existing in the "real world" again, in contemporary England surrounded by normal, contemporary people doing normal, contemporary things. Doctor Who has often felt slightly removed from the trappings of everyday life for its viewers, only rarely dipping its toe into "our" reality in stories such as The War Machines, The Faceless Ones, Time-Flight and, of course, significant chunks of the Pertwee era. In recent seasons, Doctor Who has felt even more removed from reality, preferring to spend its time on alien planets or somewhere else in time, so it's refreshing to see the Doctor and Ace mingling with the muggles in 1988.

The bliss of straight-blown jazz doesn't last long, however, as the Doctor's pocketwatch alarm goes off to remind him of something he's forgotten. Heading back to the TARDIS, the duo are shot at by the boozy headphone twins, and rather unexpectedly tumble into the fast-flowing river ("Hope my tape's all right!"). Rather than a boring old TARDIS scene, the Doctor and Ace settle down on the riverbank to dry off and work out what the alarm meant. The Doctor ascertains that "some planet somewhere faces imminent destruction", which means he actually goes to the trouble of setting himself alarms to remind him to save planets! That's a very Doctory thing to do! The trouble is, the planet in question is Earth.

For the rest of the episode the TARDIS zooms from place to place, century to century as the Doctor tries to catch the situation up. First they visit the vault beneath Windsor Castle looking for a silver bow presented to the Crown but which was mysteriously stolen in 1788 (by who?). There's some nice banter between Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred (who both rather presciently wear a fez!), before they zoom off to Windsor in 1638, only to find Lady Peinforte's home empty.

We saw her travel 350 years into her future by using apparent black magic in a memorable scene where the Stuart coupling "ride the back of time" to arrive in the same building in 1988, which has now been converted into tearooms! That in itself is amusing, but it's handled poorly by Clough, who fails to have the seated customers react properly to the sudden manifestation of two ghostly figures in their midst. It needed a confused waitress or angry restauranteur to come over and ask who they were to make the scene better.

In 1638, the Doctor tells Ace that Peinforte fashioned a statue in her own image from a lump of living metal called validium which fell into the meadow outside. He doesn't expand on where validium came from, but does say that it's sole purpose is destruction. These scenes set in the 17th century are truly gorgeous, lit by flickering candles and the glow of a roaring fire (congrats to lighting designer Ian Dow), and dressed beautifully with various scrolls, black magic paraphernalia, and sextants, astrolabes and chess sets ("This game's going rather badly"). Kudos to set designer John Asbridge. I love how you hear the TARDIS coming before you see it materialise, with possibly the first ever example of the time machine's arrival in a breeze, which snuffs out the candles. It all looks gorgeous.

It's clear the Doctor knows what's going on, mainly because he launched the Nemesis comet - containing the living metal statue - into the heavens in the first place. He launched it in 1638 (so has met Peinforte before) but with an ageing trajectory that circles the Earth once every 25 years, finally crashing back down in 1988.

A race is on to get to the statue in 1988. Peinforte uses her silver arrow and a "rudimentary knowledge of time travel (black magic mostly)" to travel forward in time, while De Flores catches a plane from South America to England with his gang of combat-ready mercenaries, bringing the silver bow with him. After a pointless jaunt to try and see Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor ("Act as if you own the place, it always works!"), the Doctor and Ace also arrive at the site of the fallen comet, which has instigated its own defence mechanism by gassing the local policemen with talcum powder.

Lady Peinforte and Richard decide to hang back, and I'm enjoying Richard's struggles to comprehend the 20th century, puzzling over the police car "carriages", the noise, the foul air, and how the policeman "speaks into his hand"! Clarke gives Peinforte and Richard some wonderful dialogue - "I am in a nightmare, or mad!" - making them an amusing duo, and Gerard Murphy's Richard is rather sweet, even if he is a convicted criminal!

It's interesting to hear Peinforte talk of "that predictable little man", who she expects to see in 1988. She also hints at a reason why Silver Nemesis is an anniversary tale: "This time there'll be a reckoning with the nameless Doctor whose power is so secret, for I have found his secret out. In good time, I shall speak it. I shall be his downfall!" Oo-er! Is this going to be the story where the Doctor's pre-An Unearthly Child origins and true identity will be revealed? I sincerely hope not. This is Doctor Who, after all...

The Doctor explains to Ace that to become active and reach critical mass, the statue needs to be whole, which it will be when the bow and arrow are placed into its hands. "I have the bow," points out De Flores, but where is the arrow? The viewer knows that Lady Peinforte has it, and the Doctor knows that Lady Peinforte is about somewhere, so all he has to do is stop the Tudor tigress and the Nazi ne'er-do-well getting their hands on the devastating power the statue wields. That can't be too hard, can it...?

... And then the Cybermen land a spaceship next door and the entire game is changed, stepping up several notches and raising the risks considerably. The Cybermen are extremely silvery - this is the silver anniversary after all - and their sudden, unexpected, unheralded appearance makes for a memorable cliffhanger.

This episode is incredibly choppy, even for a McCoy story, both in the way it's edited and how writer Kevin Clarke's narrative zips from place to place, time to time, never in one place long enough to lick a stamp. It's flashy and colourful, intriguing and exciting, but doesn't allow the viewer to settle long enough to invest in what's happening. A South American villa! Nazis! A Stuart noblewoman! A comet in space! Courtney Pine! The Queen! Cybermen! It's all so frenetic and disparate, like a classic Who version of Flux. It's not unenjoyable, just difficult to get invested in. It'll be interesting to see where it goes now there's a classic monster in the mix!

First broadcast: November 23rd, 1988

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The scenes set in 1638 look gorgeous.
The Bad: It's all over the place, making it difficult to keep up amid the frenzy of people, places and times.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

Ace says "Professor": 37

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

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