Starting with a brief of ,"Make the Cybermen scary again" how the hell did undoubtedly talented Neil Gaiman get to the truly awful Nightmare In Silver?
His previous effort The Doctor's Wife, though highly derivative of the Seventh Doctor comic story Nineveh, was none the less a good watch and one of the best episodes of nuWho.
This week everything fell flat.
The new Cybermen have all the flaws of the Cybusmen but now have Flash like superspeed and walk in bullet-time (yawn).
Their new voices are just as dull as their previous voices.
The occasional quirky character is interesting but why did every character have to be so?
It debases the currency of quirkiness and defuses any possible tension when you have a small army of oddballs facing 6 Million Cybermen doing impersonations of the Raston warrior robot. Even the Cybermen themselves seemed to be quirky in their running through the greatest moments of Cyberhistory.
The disassembled parts doing their own thing was much more menacing in The Pandorica Opens, the rows of three marching towards the screen was more more impactful in Earthshock (even though the false perspective effect was screwed up). Even the elements new to the television show were done better in other media like the Big Finish audios The Silver Turk or The Blue Tooth.
The child actors were awful as were their surplus to requirements characters.
Once again the brevity of these stories and the weird pacing is an issue. If this was a two parter maybe there would have been more breathing room between the scenes and it would at least be on the same level as the equally quirky but better written and sometimes disturbing Revelation Of The Daleks.
I think it's time that Moffat went back into the background and the series went back to telling proper stories instead of billing each episode as a event that is bound to disappoint. I loved most of series five and six but there have only been a few watchable stories since Asylum Of The Daleks and the this year they really should have made more of an effort.