Doctor Who (1963) 25-10: Silver Nemesis, Part Three

Episode:

677

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Serial:

150

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Writer:

Kevin Clarke

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Director:

Chris Clough

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Air Date:

07-Dec-1988

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the final part of the infamous Silver Nemesis. It's only a three-parter this one. You can click these links to go to PART ONE or PART TWO.

There had been other three-parter episodes earlier in the show's run, even a couple of two-parters, and a one-parter, but the Seventh Doctor era was when they really became a regular thing. It's a little surprising to me that it took them so long, as splitting up a story into a beginning, a middle, and an end seems very natural, and people love their trilogies. Three-parters also have the advantage, theoretically, of not being padded out with irrelevant scenes and dragging on too long. I'll let you know how well that worked out in this case.

This is going to be full of SPOILERS, at least up to this point in the series.

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Previously on Doctor Who:

A comet has crashed to Earth containing a Gallifreyan weapon made of living metal called Nemesis, though it's not the first time this has happened. It came down in Lady Peinforte's backyard 350 years ago and she was able to reforge it into a statue, a bow and an arrow before the Doctor intervened and launched the statue part back into space. She successfully used the silver arrow to bring herself and her loyal sidekick Richard to the year 1988 in time to reclaim Nemesis, but things went badly after that. They lost the silver arrow and they're all out of Cyberman-slaying gold arrows, which is a problem now that the Cybermen have the statue. De Flores's squad of Nazis had tried to claim it first, but you need all three pieces to activate Nemesis and the Doctor had secretly swiped the bow from them in episode one.

It's all very straightforward and simple.

And now, the conclusion:

The episode begins as the last episode ended, with the Doctor discovering that there are thousands of Cyberwarships lurking nearby in space (actual space, not cyberspace).

The silver arrow is already with Nemesis so all they need to do now is put the silver bow into the statue's hands and then it'll activate. The Doctor figures that the quickest way to do that is to just stroll in through the front door with the object the Cybermen would be happy to kill them for. Because walking up to their enemies unarmed worked so well when they tried it with the Nazis in episode one.

Lady Peinforte and Richard emerge from her crypt's secret passage momentarily defeated, but undeterred. They're out of gold arrows but she still has one weapon they can use: her knowledge.

Though Peinforte's a little confused about why Richard saved her back in the crypt, considering that she's been nothing but mean to him. She concludes that he must be a good man... and she is evil. That's a rare level of self-awareness for a villain.

The Doctor and Ace have a bit of a hike ahead of them and as they're walking Ace suddenly admits that she's a bit scared of walking into a tiny crypt filled with Nazis and Cybermen who both want to kill them. She points out that this is a bit out of character for her, and a bit out of nowhere, but she's really nervous right now. The Doctor is immediately sympathetic and tells her that she can go to the TARDIS where she'll be safe.

I like this scene, as it shows that Ace isn't fearless and the Doctor isn't pushing her into danger. Sure they're heading into danger, but if she wants out then that's fine. He's not going to pressure her, manipulate her, make her feel guilty, or anything like that. She turns the offer down though. She's sticking with him.

Back at Lady Peinforte's crypt, the Cybermen are still baffled by the jazz that's blocking their signal to the fleet. The noises are meaningless! Honestly, I'm not a fan either. I imagine the Cybermen are more into techno.

Oh look, they've given De Flores some Cybermen headphones, like their assassins were wearing earlier. I guess he's on Team Cybermen now.

De Flores has only met the Doctor once, when he stole their bow in the chaos of a battle and then ran away, so his knowledge of him should be limited. But he starts acting like he's the expert, warning the Cyber Leader that he's no ordinary opponent and he's certainly won't be walking through the door with the bow in his hand.

So yeah, the Doctor walks through the door with the bow in his hand.

But then he starts doing a ridiculous routine with Ace, passing the bow to her, grabbing it back with his umbrella, and twirling around while saying chess moves. I get that the Seventh Doctor is spec'd as a chessmaster/jester multiclass build, so clowning on them like this is entirely in character, but the execution here is terrible. The Cybermen just look like idiots for not being able to grab them, it's a horrible scene.

He puts the bow on Nemesis for a moment, activating the statue, then picks it up and runs away in the chaos. Again.

The jazz is definitely over now and the stage looks set for some gothic metal. Nemesis is able to move while incomplete and it's going to go straight for the bow.

Oh damn, they built a model of Lady Peinforte's tomb just to blow it up? I'd be impressed, except I'm not sure the effect works like they meant it to. This is presumably supposed to be Nemesis making its getaway, but all we see is a bit of a fireball coming from a window.

Meanwhile the Doctor and Ace have managed to escape without being shot in the back. Once again being the cheekiest bastard in the galaxy has paid off.

De Flores has taken his headphones off, so I guess he knows it's time for the Cybermen turn on them. He's made preparations however and tosses some gold dust at the Cyber Leader's chest plate.

In the script, this scene orginally came before Nemesis was activated, and the Cyber Leader had different lines. De Flores' second in command pretended to betray him and asked to be turned into a Cyberman, which is how he ended up with the headphones on in the other scene. In the final episode however, De Flores' escape attempt works and they just leave.

Meanwhile, in 1938, the Doctor and Ace have returned to Lady Peinforte's house with the bow. This must have really confused poor Nemesis, which must be flying in circles right now.

It seems like he's come to collect the mathematician's calculations for the Nazis to steal later. He also has Ace grab the bag of gold coins, while he plays a bit of chess. I suppose they have all the time in the world here, while everyone else is rushing around in 1988.

Richard's gotten some new confidence after saving Lady Peinforte at the crypt and he works out that they can flag down a carriage after watching a hitchhiker do it. It's Lady Peinforte who actually succeeds at stopping a vehicle with his method however, and she hit the jackpoint as it's a limo!

The TARDIS returns to the hangar next to Lady Peinforte's former house (now tearoom), and Nemesis isn't far behind. It's a shame the effect couldn't have looked better, but they did what they could.

I remember the last time I watched this I didn't get why he chose to bring the statue back to where it started from. It seemed like a really contrived way to reuse the same location. This time around though I picked up on the fact that the rocket sled is here, which is what the Doctor needs to get it back into space.

The subtle clue I'd missed was when it cut to the Cyber Leader saying "The Doctor must not lead the statue back to the rocket sleds."

It turns out that the two time travellers have been picked up by American tourist who doesn't seem all that thrown off by the way that Richard doesn't quite get what she's talking about. She explains that her family came from around here and she's been checking out her roots, which Richard takes to mean 'crops'. Peinforte goes on a bit of a villian rant about how all things will soon be hers, but the tourist isn't all that bothered by that either.

This is actually a surprise cameo by actress and singer Delores Gray, who had the lead role in several Broadway musicals, starting in the 1940s. All the American musical theatre history fans in the audience were probably going wild at this point... which probably would've spoiled the mood a bit for them. Still, it made producer John Nathan-Turner happy, even though his first choice for the role was apparently the considerably more recognisable Larry Hagman, from I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas.

The Doctor gives Nemesis the bow and Ace comes over to have a chat. She's maybe a little surprised that Nemesis can talk, though she understands that it's living metal.

It reveals that in its current form it is retribution and Ace replies with "Catch you later!" She's got to run as it's her job to hold off the Cybermen while the Doctor finishes his preparations and calculations (and hopefully gets the numbers right this time).

There are no painted-on laser blasts but there's a lot of sparks going off as Ace sprints around the warehouse to draw the Cybermen's fire. She's not completely helpless however, as she's got a slingshot and that bag of gold coins she picked up from the past.

In the Fourth Doctor story Revenge of the Cybermen, it was explained that the Cybermen are vulnerable to gold dust because it chokes their respiratory systems, so she has to find a way to get the gold into their systems.

Or she could just fire a coin at their chest plate. That seems to do the job.

I know that the serial has a bit of a low-tech vs. high-tech theme going on, but I don't buy for a moment that flicking a coin at a Cyberman is going to make them explode. Just regular gold coins, not enhanced by the Hand of Omega or anything like that. All the Cybermen have to do is cover their weak point with a bit of sponge and they're safe!

On the other hand, I'm not going complain too much about an action scene which has Ace evading shots and racing through sparks until she finds another opportunity to send another deadly coin their way. So far their accuracy is about 0%, while she's gotten around 100% of shots on target.

Hey, where's my damn action scene gone? Who thought it'd be a good idea to keep cutting back to the comedy routine in the limo?

It turns out that Mrs Remington here is a descendant of people that Lady Peinforte once knew. In fact she even murdered one of them, apparently in retribution for bribing her cook to come work for her instead. Remington is astounded that she's picked up someone who's been researching her family tree, completely missing Peinforte's sinister line delivery. Along with the fact that she said "my cook" not "a cook who worked for Lady Peinforte".

It's a very weird scene.

Back at the warehouse, the action is going all Steadycam as Ace continues to re-enact Rambo: First Blood, Part II. It's all going great until she drops the bag of coins and can't go near it without being shot at.

The sparks look amazing though with the camera they were using. Look at those trails! It's also doing that thing where bright lights have a dark halo. I love a good practical weapon impact effect.

Anyway, I hope she's making a mental note of where she dropped her ammo, as you'll go further in life with a slingshot and a bag full of 350-year-old gold coins than you will with just a slingshot.

Ace eventually runs out of floors and finds herself up on the gantry surrounded by three Cybermen, who are surprisingly reluctant to shoot her dead. I don't know who was braver during this scene, Sophie Aldred, who was terrified of being up this high on an old narrow walkway, the actors in the Cybermen costumes, who could probably barely see, or the person up here behind the camera filming it.

She's only got the one coin left, so she has to decide which one to hit. She decides to shoot at the one in front of her and ducks, letting the other two kill each other with their own crossfire. It's a strategy that works more often than you'd expect!

And the Cyberman that fell over the railing rains down in a shower of sparks and metal. The frame I picked makes it look like they were filming with modeld, but I'm pretty sure they just dropped a suit full of explosives next to the full-sized TARDIS prop in the warehouse for real.

I think that may actually be the last of the Cybermen now. Ace used her own plan, her own weapon, her own skills and her own quick thinking to take out a whole squad without any help from the Doctor. I wouldn't want ever companion to be able to do this, but every now and again it's nice to have one who can.

With Ace doing such a great job of keeping the Cybermen's undivided attention, the Doctor has been able to finish his work in peace.

He sets the rockets on course for the Cyberfleet and orders Nemesis to destroy them, every ship. The dude is just sick of Cybermen I guess. But then he tells it to reform afterwards, so he can use it again. No freedom for poor Nemesis. I just hope he managed to get the orbit right this time so it doesn't (potentially, theoretically) cause any more world wars.

Then he takes the bow away for some reason.

Oh no, two Cybermen slipped into the hangar completely unseen, probably because they're being very quiet and not shooting anyone. Ace was being less quiet unfortunately, and they both turn around when they hear her running in like an idiot. C'mon Ace, they were standing there in plain sight! I know your eyes take time to adjust when you come indoors, but they're very very shiny.

The Doctor yells at them, and I mean really yells at them. He makes it very clear that if they harm her he'll destroy the bow. They don't belive he even can destroy it, so he gives them a demonstration of how it would work.

He'd put it next to the rocket sled's rockets, which have been pre-programmed to test fire at a certain time. He asks Ace what time it is now and when she lifts her arm up to check, he hooks her watch with his umbrella and yanks her away!

The Cybemen react immediately and march towards them... closer to the engines.

And they both get roasted alive in a scene too gruesome to actually show in an episode of Doctor Who. Well, too gruesome to show in this episode anyway; you can always go back and watch The Five Doctors if you want to see Cybermen melting.

But oh no, the Cyber Leader wakes up on the gantry, as he survived being hit by Ace's final coin! No explanation why.

Double oh no, De Flores and his second in command have arrived! No other Nazis, just them. I guess the others stopped for a McDonalds or got massacred by the Cybermen or something.

De Flores takes the extremely intact bow from the ground, but he doesn't have the Doctor and Ace shot. I guess winning is less fun when no one's around to witness it. Fortunately there's another witness he didn't spot, as the Cyber Leader guns him down! RIP De Flores, you were technically in the episode.

Triple oh no, Lady Peinforte and Richard have arrived! I guess it was that obvious to everyone that the Doctor was taking Nemesis right back to the rocket sled.

She reveals that the statue has told her the truth about who the Doctor really is and unless he wants those secrets shared he'd better hand her the bow. She even says "Doctor, who?" so you know it's serious. The episode milks this tension for a bit, keeping us wondering if his secrets are that important to him. It kind of gets away with it as well, as this has never come up before. The series has never tested how much the Doctor will sacrifice to keep his secret.

The Doctor is like 'oh no, I've been outplayed, I'm going to have to give up the bow'...

...and then he hands it to the Cyber Leader!

Lady, he's not going to let the planet get destroyed/enslaved etc. just to protect his damn secret from a Cyberman and his own companion. Especially as the Cyberman admits he doesn't actually care!

Though the Doctor does thank Lady Peinforte, for bringing the arrow to 1988 and for helping out along the way. She's been very useful to him. Then he tells her she can go now.

This is the last straw for poor Lady Peinforte's sanity, and she runs over to leap onto the statue, getting absorbed by it. Which is kind of weird, but okay.

The Cyber Leader tells the Doctor to disarm Nemesis so he can send it up to his fleet, then gives him the bow back. I'm getting the impression that he doesn't quite get how this works. The Doctor asks Nemesis if it understands the Cyber Leader's instructions and when it says yes he sends it on its way.

This effect doesn't look amazing, but a bit of practical smoke helps to sell it.

The Cyber Leader takes joy in explaining to them that imagination, thought, freedom and pleasure will soon end. In fact, he's only leaving them alive long enough to watch the fleet arrive so that they may transform this world into a new Mondas!

But of course Nemesis was going to ignore the Cyber Leader's instructions, as they were irrelevant. He was asking the Doctor to take action, not Nemesis, and the Doctor merely asked if it understood those instructions. So the bomb that everyone's been fighting for this whole serial finally goes off.

It's kind of a terrible looking explosion, but it gets the job done. A thousand cyberships are gone.

Unfortunately this doesn't do anything to save them from the one Cyberman left on the planet.

I guess this is where the Doctor's schemes end. He's saved the world, but he doesn't have a plan to save his own life from the final Cyberman afterwards. That's fine though, as Richard rushes in to save the day! He grabs Chekhov's arrow from the TARDIS's door and jams it into the Cyber Leader's chest!

Richard's spent the whole story being bewildered and terrified by everything, but he's been slowly getting more comfortable and assertive. He dragged Lady Peinforte away into the secret passage, he figured out how to hitchhike and now he's just saved the good guy from the evil robot man. Not bad for a guy who started off claiming to be a thief and a scoundrel.

It's unclear if he knew at the time that the Doctor could give him a ride home to 1638, but his hitchhiking skills have paid off yet again! So I guess he'll be making use of that grave in 19 years after all. First though, he's going to play the two heroes a gig to properly bookend the story.

I like that every now and then we get to see what happens when a henchman stops being part of the problem and does something helpful instead. The Doctor will wipe out a thousand ships if he has to, but he was going to let Lady Peinforte go without any punishment and he actually has let Richard go. In fact, they're in Peinforte's garden right now so he may have even inherited her house!

Ace lampshades the fact that the Doctor took out the Cybermen the same way he took out the Daleks a couple of stories ago. In fact, he deliberately used Nemesis to draw them out and put their fleet where he could hit it. But there's one thing she still wants to know. "Professor... Doctor, who are you?" He just raises a finger to his lips.

I've read that the point of this ending wasn't to set up a mystery to be resolved in a later story. It wasn't leading to anything in fact; the goal was just to make the Doctor appear mysterious. Giving the answers away would've spoiled that. In fact, it's very possible that dropping huge revelations about the Doctor's origins and true identity this late in the game would've actually made fans pretty angry. So it's a good thing they never did that.


CONCLUSION

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Silver Nemesis is a chaotic mix of ideas, some of them fascinating, some of them irrelevant, and some of them missing. Like, where's all the anniversary stuff? The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors celebrated the show's history by bringing back characters and villains, this celebrates the silver anniversary by painting the Cybermen silver and having them hunt down silver artefacts. I feel like they could've done a bit more there.

In fact, the serial falls short of its potential in almost every department. The production was too rushed for proper rehearsals and retakes. The visual effects can't match a BBC sitcom. The soundtrack sounds like it got lost on the way to a cheesy '80s anime. But to be fair, the story had a lot of potential, so only getting half way there still gets it pretty far.

The narrative is a confusing mess that follows four separate groups and takes so many detours that it's hard to even tell what's padding and what's foreshadowing... but it moves at a decent pace so I was happy to just go along for the ride. There was always something new to be confused about just around the corner. Plus this time around I found that a lot of it does make sense as long as you don't blink and miss the explanation, and I was able to enjoy piecing the story together.

• Why did the Doctor bring Nemesis to the warehouse? Because that's where the rocket sled was.
• How did the Nazis learn about Nemesis? It seems like a certain Time Lord arranged it.
• Why did firing gold coins from slingshot kill the Cybermen? Because... uh...
  

Okay, I'm not even sure what I think about Ace dodging Cybermen bullets and killing them all with one coin each. It was absurd, but it also gave me what I want, which is Ace running around and being an action hero. Some companions are just built for this kind of stuff, like Leela and the Brig, and I was waiting three episodes for her to get her chance to shine. Meanwhile, Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor you want when scenes are low in dialogue and high in opportunities for physical comedy, so the moments of the Doctor and Ace just hanging out were never unwelcome... well, except for when they went to Windsor Castle for no reason in episode 1. Then episode 2 got distracted with Lady Peinforte and Richard confronting skinheads, and episode 3 wasted way too much time on the two of them in a limo with the guest star. It's like the writer assumed that every scene with the two of them would be fun regardless of what they were doing. To be fair, there is evidence to support that theory.

Some people say that Silver Nemesis is a redundant remake of Remembrance of the Daleks because it's about an ancient Gallifreyan weapon made by Rassilon and Omega that the Doctor hid around Earth in an earlier incarnation and he uses it to blow up a fleet at the end. And, I mean, fair. But you can say the same thing about every serial in the Key to Time season, because they all end with the Doctor finding a piece of the Key to Time. Some other people say that the stories work as a pair of bookends, with Remembrance set just as the series first aired in 1963 and Silver Nemesis taking place on the exact day people were watching it in 1988, and I like that thought better.

Either way, it's still my #2 Seventh Doctor story.


Anniversary story ranking so far:

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1. The Three Doctors (6)
   
2. The Five Doctors (6)
   
3. Silver Nemesis (6)
   

Honestly, I could put these in any order. Silver Nemesis loses points for being a bit of a mess and not actually doing much to celebrate the anniversary, then it gains some back for having entertaining characters. But The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors have good characters too! None of them have great music, all of them have great explosions. It's tricky to choose between them.

But the real question is, which is better, this or Star Trek's 25th anniversary story, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country? Well, it's Star Trek obviously, it's not even a contest. Though maybe Doctor Who will put up more of a fight when it comes time for the 50th anniversary special.

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COMING SOON

Next on Super Adventures, it's another anniversary special! They just keep coming, it's weird.

I had to make a choice here and for a while I was leaning towards writing about The Star Beast next, seeing as it just aired. But you've waited long enough for me to cover a certain minisode special (plus it's only five minutes long and writing about it is way less work). So next time it's The Night of the Doctor!