After the last two episodes, I'm in no hurry.

Here be spoilers.

Nightmare in Silver was a great showcase of Matt Smith's ability to play the duality of both someone in the process manipulation as well as that of manipulator.
I suspect this episode will be, on the whole, either loved or hated.
It's going to be an interesting confrontation if the Cybermen ever encounter the Daleks again.
And that, I think, is what the main problem with this episode was.
It was all about bringing the Cybermen back in a much more relevant way than they have been seen before, and while I know and understand that the show is still very much a show for younger viewers, the child actors in this episode were woefully underused.
So an episode primarily focussed on bringing back a foe with pretty much all other major characters ignored except two (Warwick Davis was excellent) that likely failed to fully engage with either adult or child audience was never really going to be a satisfying experience.

We did find out a few interesting little things though : The Doctor needs to go back and mend the holes he's been leaving behind, The Doctor seemingly doesn't have full control of his own brain, the ease with which The Doctor went along with the plan to destroy the whole planet was very telling and something I hope will be expanded upon in later seasons (especially with his previous comments about destroying all the Daleks).

Not a very satisfying episode really, but it did have a few little nuggets in there to redeem it.
Not a patch on Neil Gaimans previous episode.

Mark

I found it quite engaging. Many spoilers ahead:

For one thing, there was no airy-fairy "love will mend everything" type ending. There were bad guys. There were good guys. Phasers were set to "kill". The good guys won by using a good old fashioned explosion, and our heroes escaped by the skin of their teeth. The red-shirts sacrifice themselves honourably, redeeming their former crimes.

The Cybermen were interestingly evolved with some new back story. The story behind the void in space was well delivered, giving a real sense of the magnitude of the war. Children vanishing at an amusement park which is then closed gives a ghostly sense of creepiness, nicely enhanced by the shadowy figures when the boy is trying to sleep. The Emperor reminded me of The Turk and The Mule, and was a very agreeable character.

My only really gripe was that I'm sure they said the bomb would cause an implosion, which is not what they delivered at the end. The planet should first have shrunk dramatically before the remnants rebounded out and scattered.

I wasn't playing close attention to the "present" (gift, not time and space) from the Tardis. Was it the phone that was earlier full of Cyber bugs? Did anyone clean it?

Then that last camera shot of the bug drifting into space... presumably containing full knowledge of the recent "upgrades".

I forget when this was set, but I guess we'll be seeing them again in "the future". It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, The Doctor does about the gaps in history.

Looking forward to next week. They've been hyping this moment for a while.

Was it me, or did that void look like an eye? And was there a mote in it?

Sorry but I expect more of Doctor Who than a re-imagining of the Cybermen as The Borg...

The episode was enjoyable, but I wasn't keen on the infinitely upgradeable/adaptable Cybermen either. If they are all linked, doesn't that mean the next lot will have developed an immunity to a planet blowing up in their faces?

Agreed and adapting that rapidly to physical attacks like the ray gun.


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That particular upgrade was a bit suspect, since they should have been exposed to it many times before. Rather a coincidence that they just figured out some firmware update that made them immune just as we were watching.

However, the Cybermen have been upgrading humans (assimilating) and evolving since well before The Borg. The concept of distributed processing might be new, but they've certainly been networked in the past.

The only part you could really say was Borg inspired was the face decoration. I can't recall exactly how earlier upgrades went, but that was very reminiscent of Locutus. However, if there were no Borg it may well have looked the same.

I agree on all of that. Though how on earth could they through software overcome a fatal reaction to gold? Also they do not even have force fields and thousands of cyber men were no match for 4 Daleks in a previous episode with Rose, so how were they the all conquering machines now?


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That was hundreds or thousands of years past. They've evolved.

I suspect they're still no match for a healthy Dalek, they'd just not been around for a while.

There were some quite gruesome Cybermen episodes in the "classic" series. We did have some people halfway through conversion, and it wasn't nice. We also had a Cyberman causing a bloody injury in one episode. The idea that a conversion is painless, bloodless and clean was laid to rest.

I found the Borg-like conversion a better route than those spinning blades and knives in their first outing in the new series. I found that rather childish.

Read this: it's Neil Gaiman interviewed about this episode. http://io9.com/how-neil-gaiman-did-away ... -496671542

The Rose episode was set only a few years ago. Loads of upgrades in a few years.


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This episode was set far in the future... loads of upgrades in thousands of years.

Which means that, logically, if we have the Cybermen in a more contemporary setting, they should be of an older design.

I expect that Cybermite will have some inkling about Time Travel now.

Anyho, I look forward to the day when the Cybermen try to convert a Dalek.

Just a thought out of the blue so somewhat unformed but...

The Daleks exterminate their enemies, unlike the Cybermen who assimilate / upgrade them, except the Daleks assimilated Clara. Does this mean there is going to be a CyberDalek somewhere down the road?