Articles by:
The pre-publicity for ‘Nightmare in Silver’ indicated that this episode was going to do for the Cybermen what 2005’s ‘Dalek’ had done for their metallic rivals: restore them to scary eminence after a period when they had lost their robo mojo.
Lawks a mercy! That was a camp confection and no mistake!
As a writer, Mark Gatiss doesn’t so much wear his influences on his sleeve as parade them like a popinjay. So it should come as no surprise that he is singularly suited to assembling such a preposterous patchwork of period pastiche.
Ever since its title was first announced, this has been one of the most eagerly anticipated episodes of this run of Doctor Who.
‘This isn’t a ghost story,’ says the Doctor with one of those humany-wumany grins on his face. ‘It’s a love story.’ And he’s not wrong.
After a run of Doctor Who episodes which have made a play of character riddles and tricksy story twists, ‘Cold War’ represents something of a thaw in proceedings.
There are no paradoxes here to send you hurrying to the internet to speculate about what you have seen and why. There’s probably less subtext than in last week’s, altogether more awkward, instalment.
You know that feeling you got as a child when you had to sing a song in front of the whole school? Well, they’ve gone and made a Doctor Who episode about it.
It’s a truism that Doctor Who inspires playground re-enactment; but rarely has an episode so obviously been designed with Monday morning playtime in mind. So much of the story is imitable: from the alien who barks like a dog to the fact that the monster is defeated with an autumn leaf. A psychically-charged, totemic sort of leaf, but a leaf nonetheless.
For an episode which did so much to ring in the new, there was an awful lot that was familiar about ‘The Bells of Saint John’.
As an exercise in managing and confounding expectations, this episode is skilfully done.
Being Human‘s final series concludes next weekend and the supernatural trinity has been broken.
Is it wrong to say that next Sunday both can’t come soon enough and, we wish, wouldn’t come at all?