“There’s one question you haven’t answered, Professor— Doctor. Who are you?” —Ace
Story
The Doctor and Ace are listening to an outdoor jazz concert in November 1988 when his pocket watch beeps an alarm, reminding him that some planet is in danger of destruction on that day and he ought to do something about it, though he’s forgotten the details. Checking the TARDIS records through a remote link in a new boombox he made for Ace, he discovers it’s Earth.
In 1638, a meteor of the alien metal “validium” crashed to Earth in Windsor, on land belonging to the villainous Lady Peinforte, who had the meteor carved into a statue of herself before discovering it to be a dangerous “living metal” capable of wreaking terrible destruction. In an adventure we viewers didn’t see, the Doctor intervened and launched the meteor back into space. But he “got his sums wrong”— every 25 years the statue’s orbit has taken it near to Earth, causing disaster on each near pass. In the 20th century it passed near Earth in 1913, setting in motion the events leading to the first world war, then again in 1938, triggering World War II, then in 1963, provoking the Kennedy assassination. The Doctor knew it would finally land on Earth on November 23, 1988— and thus, the reminder on his pocket watch.
Validium requires a critical mass to be fully active and the Doctor separated two small pieces from the statue when he originally launched it: a bow and an arrow, originally held in the statue’s hands. Three different factions are trying to get their hands on the two pieces and reunite them, in order to gain control over the statue and use its power: Lady Peinforte, who has used the power in the arrow to time-travel to the time when the statue would return, an escaped Nazi war criminal who has the bow and hopes to use the statue to launch the Fourth Reich, and the Doctor’s old enemies the Cybermen, who’ve sent a small squad to Earth to get the statue for themselves.
Review
Didn’t we just see this story a couple of weeks ago, when it was called Remembrance of the Daleks? Neo-Nazis, plus one of the Doctor’s oldest enemies, a destructive ancient artifact the enemies want, the Doctor apparently losing but he’s actually already programmed the artifact to destroy the bad guys when they try to use it… yep, it’s pretty much the same story, although Silver Nemesis takes it through some different specific twists and turns. Ace even points out the similarity at the end, “It’s just like what you did to the Daleks!” The odd thing is, the similarities appear to be largely coincidence. The writer, Kevin Clarke, was new to Who and admitted he hadn’t even watched very much of it, and appears to have come up with the story pretty much independently, although Ace’s line shows that someone noticed the resemblance before it went out over the air.
Remembrance of the Daleks has a lot more references and tributes to Dr Who’s past than this, the “official” 25th anniversary episode. Silver Nemesis only notes the anniversary in having a plot that revolves around something that happens every 25 years, and the fact (without drawing attention to it) that the specific day of the adventure is the 25th anniversary of the show’s premiere.
It’s a much better story than last week’s Happiness Patrol but shares one flaw with it: it seems overcrowded. Lady Peinforte, the Nazi group, the Cybermen, and the Doctor and Ace together make up one side too many in the conflict, and they don’t really come together very well. If the serial was four episodes instead of three, perhaps there’d be room for them all, but I don’t know: the second major flaw is that despite the overcrowding there’s not quite enough story to fill the 3 episode running length. Each of the four sides spend too much time just wandering around (occasionally following each other) as they all try to get control of all 3 pieces needed to bring the statue to life. That said, at least it’s possible to follow what’s going on this time around.
Silver Nemesis also represents a low point in the tale of the Cybermen’s vulnerability to gold. If you’ll recall, this vulnerability was introduced in Revenge of the Cybermen, where it was said that gold poisons them by coating their breathing apparatus— but lots of things poison humans and it’s reasonably they’d have some defenses. In that story, characters even rub gold dust directly into their chest units without harming them, and the Doctor has to do something clever in order to exploit the weakness. Later, in Earthshock, rubbing gold on their chest plates does work but it still takes a bit of effort. In Silver Nemesis, when Ace flings some gold coins in their direction, they explode. I suppose they come off better than in The Five Doctors, when even without any mention of the gold weakness, they act as cannon fodder for just about everyone in the story, but that’s not saying much.
The Doctor’s mystery gets more play in this story, as per the “Cartmel Master Plan,” although it seems to have come out of writer Kevin Clarke’s ideas without any prompting from Cartmel himself. Near the end of the episode, Lady Peinforte tries to blackmail the Doctor into surrendering by telling him that the statue told her the truth about the Doctor’s identity, and if he doesn’t stand down she’ll spill the beans to Ace and the nearby Cybermen. It’s very clear that whatever she learned, she’s sure her threat is a serious one. Ace replies “The Doctor’s a Time Lord, I know that already.” But Lady Peinforte laughs and says there’s much more than that— and the Doctor seems to regard her threat as serious, although he refuses to be blackmailed and tells her to go ahead and reveal the secret (she ends up getting interrupted before she has the chance, leading to Ace’s question in the very last line of the story, quoted above).
Although it fit in with Cartmel’s plans to restore a sense of mystery to the Doctor, the exchange really comes out of the idea that writer Kevin Clarke pitched to JNT and Cartmel. They were having trouble finding the right story to fill the 25th anniversary slot— JN-T had two requirements: it must have silver in the title, and feature the Cybermen, both because it was the silver anniversary. Clarke promised Cartmel that he had the perfect idea for the story, although as he later admitted he was just bluffing. After getting an appointment to pitch his (nonexistent) idea to them, Clarke stammered his way through suggesting that since the Doctor’s true identity had never been revealed, the story could center around revealing it. Clarke, off the top of his head, proposed that the Doctor was actually God, and had been traveling to put right things that had gone wrong in creation, and that the real villain behind the events of the episode would be revealed to be the Devil. JN-T’s response was “Okay, you can do that, but you can’t say it.”
Very few traces of this idea remain (even unstated) in the final story, but a throwaway line at one point has the Doctor say that the way Lady Peinforte time traveled in search of the statue was “using the power of the Arrow… and black magic.” My guess is the line is a vestige of an earlier stage in the planning when that reveal about the Devil would have come through Lady Peinforte, and that the Doctor is God was the secret she threatened to reveal. In any case, the whole idea remained, as JN-T wisely insisted, offstage and non-canonical.
Meanwhile, the radical move of introducing magic into the Dr Who universe will get far greater play in an upcoming story: more on that when we get to it.
Next Week:
“The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” 4 episodes, the season 25 finale.
