Silver Nemesis

In the year 1988, a comet called Nemesis draws ever closer to the Earth in a decaying orbit. The Doctor knows all about it; he originally launched it into space from Earth in the year 1638 to keep it safe from the power-mad Lady Peinforte; for inside is a statue made of a living silver metal fashioned in her image. Using black magic, Lady Peinforte travels forward in time to 1988 to reclaim the statue, but its legend has attracted a group of neo-Nazis and an advance party of Cybermen; all three determined to have the power of the Nemeis for themselves, and to destroy the Doctor and Ace.

It sounds better than it actually turned out.

The approach of the comet makes from page news of a tabloid that Ace is seen reading in a garden, but when the comet actually makes planetfall there's no-one there to see it; the police arrive after the fact, the area isn't cordoned off, there's no media, and if as the script claims the crash site is outside Lady Peinforte's country home and just a few yards from Windsor Castle, why was no-one evacuated? There's tourists and everyone wandering about as if everything is fine, and the Doctor and Ace even have a chance encounter with the Queen so lax is the security there.

Speaking of tourists, why the Cybermen? They contribute absolutely nothing to the story, except to fall victim to one of the Doctor's little games to draw them out so he could wipe them out with some old Gallifreyan technology... exactly how he "nailed the Daleks" as Ace puts it. Sure they have a fantastically loud gun battle with the neo-Nazis which manages to fail to attract the attention of the military with its supposed proximity to Windsor Castle, but come on surely the Cybermen deserve a little better than this. And lo their whole vulnerability to gold is back, like an old cliche, and now just touching it kills them (Lady Peinforte shoots arrows at them with gold heads) whereas before the fifth Doctor had to absolutely grind gold into the Cyberleader in Earthshock and the results were not as immediate. The Cybermen we're seeing in the late days of the classic series are nowhere near the quality of the ones we saw in the 60's, but thankfully when they returned in 2006 all was not lost.

The clever bit I do like, though, is the whole idea of the statue itself. It is fashiond out of a living metal, as I already said, called Valedium, which was supposed to be the ultimate defence for Gallifrey. None of it should ever have left the planet, according to the Doctor, but I think we can all guess who was responsible for that. My continuity-obsessed mind wonders if maybe we're going to hear about this stuff again when the new series mentions the Time War again.

Jay and I watched this together, but it was a "special" version released on VHS with previously cut material restored to the edit, but in a pretty sloppy way without the music being redone to cover the edits. And Jay pinged this little gaffe right away: in the early moments of episode one a neo-Nazi somewhere in South America manages to plot the landing point of the comet, but the actual co-ordinates are way off given that Windsor is close to the Greenwich meridian. Boo, I say. And for the sake of nostalgia, since this is the 25th anniversary story, the comet's landing date is 23 November 1988. November in England looks fantastic; everything green and verdant almost as if it was the height of summer. I realize even an effects powerhouse like the BBC can't change the weather, so why even bother with the whole 23 November thing?

Included with the "special" version of the story is a behind the scenes special made for PBS about the making of the serial, full of all sorts of technical wonder and humourous moments with the cast and crew. We're wondering if this little gem will make it to the DVD release whenever that happens, or if they'll just go ahead and shoot an all new feature. The special has a lot of moments where we can get comment from then-producer, the late John Nathan-Turner, the man everyone wants to blame for the decline in the quality of the series. It's easy to blame the dead, but when JN-T is there on camera saying that the ultimate responsibility for everything the show ends with him, then I think it's warranted. Silver Nemesis is complete and utter crap; it's not well thought out, it's boring and thankfully it's only three episodes long. Even the cover of the VHS is terrible, totally out of whack with the the rest of the series, which is why I used the cover from the Target novelization.

I'm done.

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