Cybermen, Even! (Silver Nemesis)
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But… Bella! We sparkle way more than Edward! |
It’s November 23rd, 1988. Robin Beck remains at number one with “First Time,” a situation resolved two weeks later when Cliff Richard unseats her with “Mistletoe and Wine.” Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Rick Astley, and Salt-N-Pepa also chart.
In real news, Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan. The number of HIV positive people in the UK is pegged by a government report at 50,000, and it’s estimated that by 1992 as many as 17,000 people may die of the disease. Health Minister Edwina Currie causes a massive crash in egg sales through a carelessly worded claim about salmonella. The last shipbuilding facilities around Sunderland close. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuts.
While on television, Doctor Who attempts to provide MST3K with material. Silver Nemesis is the weakest of the eleven Cartmel-shaped stories: a messy and smoldering wreck of ill-defined ideas and unconfident execution. But this fact is in and of itself interesting and worth expanding on, simply because it is in many ways the only artifact of its kind: a really bad McCoy story that has no excuses based on the idea that the era was still coming together and figuring out what it was doing. This was made in between The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Happiness Patrol. It has no excuses. And so it’s the one point where we can meaningfully ask: what does bad Sylvester McCoy mean?
It’s easy to mistake the Cartmel era as being good because of its ideas. This is because the Cartmel era does, in fact, have some really good ideas. In this regard Silver Nemesis is in grand company. At the heart of the story is the Nemesis statue. Although it more colloquially refers to a general case of an archenemy, in mythological terms Nemesis is a primal force of retribution – the thing that balances the scales in reaction to one’s hubris. Astronomically, it refers to the idea that the sun has a twin star that has collapsed into a dwarf star, lurking unseen in the Oort cloud and causing mass extinctions according to a pre-ordained twenty-six million year cycle.
The statue Nemesis, on the other hand, travels in a quarter-century cycle in its disasters, bringing instead of extinctions various historical calamities. As About Time points out, this is hopeless – there’s no twenty-five year cycle of historical tragedies to build out from here. But the nature of this cyclic disaster is tied here to the history of the program, both extending out of its imagined past (more ancient Time Lords secrets) and tied to its debut. (This is perhaps tempting fate – changing a twenty-six million year cycle to a twenty-five year cycle is almost too apt given what happens for the program’s twenty-sixth anniversary.)
Nemesis, in other words, stalks the program as its dark other. And hey, look who’s back to accompany her: the program’s dark mirror images of humanity. For all that the story gets flak for the supposed reasoning here (“It’s the silver anniversary of Doctor Who and the Cybermen are silver, so why not add them?”)…