This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

The problem with Neil Gaiman striving to prove that The Doctor’s Wife wasn’t a one-off piece of Who brilliance is that, inadvertently, he might have ended up proving that The Doctor’s Wife was a one-off piece of Who brilliance. Although Nightmare in Silver doesn’t quite make that case, nor does it fully live up to Gaiman’s previous episode.

Things get off to a bumpy start with a moonscape which is far too obviously a stagey set. Its rampant artifice undercuts young Artie’s assertion that they must be on the moon, making him look a bit daft, and it also devalues the initial appearance of Jason Watkins’ Webley. One imagines that, in the screenplay, this moon was perhaps meant to look just like the moon, with the result that a door suddenly springing opening within its dusty terrain would prove genuinely surprising and strange. But here, Webley’s arrival fits right in with a set seemingly designed to look like, well, a tatty old set. As well as upsetting any notion that Nightmare in Silver is going to examine themes of simulation and reality, the Spacey Zoomer ride also upsets fan expectations. It’s presented as an anti-gravity theme park experience, immediately suggesting that the Cybermen will be defeated via a reference back to the Gravitron from The Moonbase. But this “Chekhov’s gun” is very much left unfired, remaining in place as a moment of pure wonder for Artie and Angie rather than becoming a clanking great plot device. If the Spacey Zoomer ride isn’t activated for its story potential, then the Doctor’s golden ticket most certainly is, as Gaiman gleefully toys with fan knowledge. Indeed, this story’s opening gambit seems to be just as loosely based on Marc Platt’s Big Finish audio The Silver Turk as Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel were on Spare Parts, though there’s no end credit for Platt this time round. Perhaps the concept of a Cyber-chessplaying marvel simply occurred independently to both Gaiman and Platt.

Angie and Artie are given a particular narrative rationale – the Cybermen need children as part of their scheming – but this is so rapidly superseded by the Doctor’s utility that the topic of childhood creativity versus mechanical or literal thought is rather blunted. As a result, it becomes hard to see what the child characters bring to events, and why they’re called for here. Gaiman’s story keeps on promising thematic weight, as if rifling through his very own authorial “world of wonders”, only for various themes to be over-run by the requirements of a mass invasion plot and an internalized, schizoid threat. Appearance vs. reality, or child-like imagination vs. machinic predictability, are both subordinated to an action-adventure plotline.

As things turned out, the UK broadcast of Nightmare in Silver was forced to compete with football silverware over on ITV, so maybe the emphasis on brash, colourful action was a canny move. But I wonder whether earlier drafts of Gaiman’s screenplay might have focused more significantly on the theme park setting and on Cyber plans in relation to childhood sensations of awe, wonder and playfulness (something which would have made greater sense of the Spacey Zoomer ride scene too).

Ahead of transmission, much publicity was wrung from the notion that Nightmare in Silver would make the Cybermen scary again. They are certainly given some shiny gimmicks, including head reversal, detachable bits, and the brilliantly realised -mites rather than -matts, along with speediness that stirs up a veritable Cyber-wind. But are they genuinely creepy, unsettling and uncanny? Russell T. Davies decreed that his Cybusmen were steel entities rather than silver monsters – hence The Age of Steel – in an attempt to make them seem more plausible, real-seeming and industrial. In the setting of Hedgewick’s World, battling in Natty Longshoe’s Castle, massed ranks of silver Cybermen somehow feel less real, and more of a fairytale threat, despite talk of Cyber Wars and needing to detonate a planet to destroy just one of their kind. It’s as if the lurid blasts of coloured light (meant to cost-effectively transform real-world locations into Disney-esque simulations of a castle) capture these Cybermen in a glare of unreality. Even when we’re confronted by what should be a jagged, ugly absence in the sky – destruction on an epic scale which supposedly destroyed the galactic Cyber-threat – we’re instead given a visual that looks both flatly stylized and beautifully astral at the same time. An air of artifice floats dangerously around these Cybermen, making their gimmicks seem too much akin to showman’s tricks – “roll up, roll up, see what new things they can do!” The ragged world of Nightmare in Silver also runs the risk of looking as if production values have malfunctioned: ‘Webley’s World of Wonders’ seems a lot like cobbled-together Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures’ gubbins, and the Emperor’s craft also feels very familiar in the visual grammar of BBC Wales’ Doctor Who.

Setting budgeting issues to one side, there is an effective guest-star turn from Warwick Davis as Porridge while Jenna-Louise Coleman continues to convince as the highly competent Clara. But discussing this tale without reflecting on Matt Smith’s work would be impossible. Smith gets the opportunity to play both hero and villain, and this duality (sometimes represented very clumsily on-screen) is the real heart of Gaiman’s work. Such character splitting is a well-worn trope of fantasy, but astonishingly it’s not something that’s ever been this fully explored in a battle between the Doctor and the Cybermen, and its inclusion here notably elevates the story’s intrigue. But any mythology-expanding potential is crowded out by too much other business, whether it's massed ranks of Cybermen, explosions, firefights, or a character who might remind some viewers of the ninth Doctor’s survivor guilt. If only this episode had been more prepared to explore a claustrophobic, internal struggle for control of the Doctor’s mind, as well as more extensively exploiting anxiety over whether and when the Doctor is really himself, then Nightmare in Silver could have attained a purity of purpose and a truly terrifying tone. But larded with action-adventure planet-busters, Emperor issues (how many disguised identity subplots and ‘big reveals’ do we need?) and kids to be saved, this all becomes rather overloaded. Or perhaps it’s a case of story as theme park, with lots of different entertainments being toured around without ever cohering into one structure.

Matt Smith’s bravura acting shines through despite the faintly pantomimic visuals of left-side and right-side 'selves'. And the Cyberplanner is all the more chilling for being portrayed through Smith’s performance, even if his renderings of Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant are oddly caricatured. I wish that visual effects could have included strongly CGI-augmented shots of Cyber-components growing and developing into the Doctor’s body, however: the winking lights and facial prosthetic that we’re shown are fairly cartoonish. The outcome is a nightmare that isn’t allowed to be very nightmarish in terms of body-horror or corrupted, violated identity.

As Neil Gaiman’s sophomore story after The Doctor’s Wife, this episode – which could almost be dubbed ‘The Doctor’s Mind’ – is ultimately too much of a mixed bag to hit home. And to depict theme park fantasy and artificiality really convincingly perhaps takes a greater sense of realism than this episode’s production values can always muster.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode.

In 1974, my great-grandmother died in the hospital where Mark Gatiss’s parents worked. This is not an accusation or a desperately morbid claim to association, but a partial explanation of why The Crimson Horror appealed greatly to my imagination. Mark has memorialised themes from the industrial history of northern England by fashioning them into a Doctor Who episode, and in a way which seeks to entertain wider audiences as well as exiles from the northern counties used to suspicious southrons stricken with alarm at their origins and wondering how an apparently civilised person can come from a place thought impossible to survive in without scissor grenades, limbo vapours triple-blast brain-splitters.

Twenty-first century Doctor Who has been so fixated with London that it’s taken it a long time to visit northern England. While Gatiss is from County Durham, like my family, the north which Vastra, Jenny and Strax set out to explore is an industrial landscape identified by caption as Yorkshire. The setting plays with stereotypes; this ‘northern’ town draws inspiration from originals outside northern England as well as from experiences specific to its apparent setting in the south Pennines. The name ‘Sweetville’ suggests – it turns out misleadingly – Bournville, the model village built by the Cadbury family roughly contemporaneously with this story, to house the workers in the chocolate factory at the heart of the development. The architecture of Sweetville belongs to an earlier period, being recorded in the 1830s model village of Bute Town in Caerphilly. Its nearest point of comparison in Yorkshire is probably Saltaire, begun in the 1850s by the cloth manufacturer Titus Salt. There, Salt sought to manage the lives of his employees more closely than would have been possible had they been living among workers for other employers and trades in Bradford where the Salt firm had been based. Their housing was supplied with gas for cooking and fresh running water and was more spacious and more hygienic than in the overcrowded Bradford where life expectancy was a little over twenty years. Salt prescribed sport and fruit and vegetable growing for his workforce and encouraged religiosity, both his own Congregationalism and Wesleyan Methodism being represented with churches in Saltaire. For Salt and his admirers, Saltaire was a patch of heaven on earth, but to critics such as the commentator on society and art John Ruskin, Saltaire reduced Salt’s workers to slavery. It’s presumably this of which Gatiss was thinking when he remarked to Doctor Who Magazine of "those sort of Victorian philanthropists, who made all these beautiful workers’ cottages and then ran them like dictators."

Poisoning was an occupational hazard of the nineteenth-century industrial worker. Sweetville, Mrs Gillyflower tells us offhandedly, is a match factory, even if it’s generally referred to in dialogue as a ‘mill’, a term usually reserved for flour grinding or cloth working establishments. Death from the Crimson Horror was at least a quicker fate than the slow death from skeletal deterioration and organ failure real match workers suffered from in the period; this was ‘phossy jaw’, the result of white phosphorus inhaled during the manufacturing process building up in the skeleton. The affected bone, when exposed, glowed green, just as alarming as a waxy, red-skinned corpse or the shuffling, stiffened, inarticulate Doctor would be if they were encountered in everyday life. The debt the realisation of the process owes to the petrification technique of Carry On Screaming accentuates the macabre quality of the allusion because the dismissive attitude of Mrs Gillyflower to her rejects is barely removed from the lack of responsibility several nineteenth-century employers felt towards those employees injured or killed in the course of their work.

Mark Gatiss has called Mrs Gillyflower “a proto-fascist”, but this simplifies the historical influences which have shaped her character. The industrial towns and colliery villages of the north of England were full of the churches, chapels and meeting-houses of religious denominations and sects. Religion did not just comfort the oppressed worker but offered the possibility of a transformed state on this earth in a way which struck fear into the establishment. It was not for nothing that some County Durham clergymen of the state Church of England had battlements on their vicarages and made sure their servants were armed. Waves of mass religious conversion and pledges to find a New Jerusalem on Earth occurred throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but it was unusual (though not unheard of) for them to be led by women. Those women religious leaders there were tended also to come from impoverished backgrounds, like the workers they led, and new societies were more likely to be founded through emigration to North America than by mass murder. Mrs Gillyflower’s emphasis on physical perfection, however, recalls nineteenth-century anxieties about the physical enfeeblement of the industrial population, which paternalist entrepeneurs like Titus Salt sought to cure through sport and diet, but which by the end of the century Francis Galton argued could only be corrected through selective breeding of fitter human specimens. Mrs Gillyflower is an avowed eugenicist, seeking to preserve those subjects whose bodies can produce an antitoxin; her rocketry anticipates the Second World War associated in the western historical memory with eugenics’ short-term ascendancy over Europe.

The strength of The Crimson Horror isn’t found in how it flaunts its research, but how it deploys the elements it selects. It presents the viewer with a ‘Yorkshire 1893’ which is re-engineered to present what might be termed a ‘hyper-historical’ setting, where the manipulation of detail and the observation of period forms is more important than the strict accuracy of that detail and form in representing of how things actually were. One example is the scene in the interview queue where Jenny tries to persuade Abigail to distract the others while she disappears behind a locked door. Abigail eventually succumbs to bribery. Jenny offers her a guinea, represented by a dull coin. The guinea was a gold coin and had not been in circulation since 1816; though still used colloquially, the sum of money the term represented – twenty-one shillings – would most likely have been handed over in a purse. This would probably have seemed to the audience a disjuncture of word and image, so ‘guinea’ becomes a historically-coded term for a large sum of money. Perhaps the coin we see is a downpayment. The line also demonstrates that although Mrs Gillyflower’s revivalist rhetoric appeals to her recruits’ spiritual welfare, their concerns are inevitably material.

The use of place and date captions to establish the setting of a Doctor Who story might be a regrettably pedestrian convention, though here the caption helps fix the blend of source material from different time periods at the end of the nineteenth century, contemporaneous with The Snowmen. Successfully, the design of this caption draws on the place of the late nineteenth century in the popular memory, a time which has just slipped out of reach in terms of living recollection, but which haunts the present in faded advertisements painted on gable ends. This association helps disguise what looks like a modern garage. The choice of font – Copperplate Gothic Bold, or something close to it – is reminiscent of a typeface used on railway tickets of the period, as if the act of watching television is analogous to a train journey in the heyday of steam. Another striking piece of design is the jar under which the favoured preserved are kept in their houses; with bellows pumping away in the background the debt to Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment with a Bird in the Air Pump is evident.

Within the narrative, it appears that the Paternoster gang travel from London to Sweetville by coach, presumably for reasons of privacy. The only failure of any substance is the running gag concerning Mr Thursday and his fainting at the sight successively of Vastra’s face, Strax’s appearance and the dematerialisation of the TARDIS. Given that Vastra’s veil doesn’t hide her Silurian features, the reaction is unconvincing. Strax, too, has previously been rationalised as ‘Turkish’ (neatly echoing Bloodaxe’s mishearing of ‘Sontaran’ as ‘Saracen’ in The Time Warrior) by Vastra’s Scotland Yard contact in a prelude to The Snowmen. The presence of Vastra and Strax in Victorian England requires not so much suspension of disbelief, as audience complicity with the conceit; Thursday’s repeated collapses are meant to show that this ploddingly unimaginative character can’t comprehend the situation, but instead make this heightened reality, which has already made clear that it is aware of its own absurdity, seem a little too self-satisfied.

Like the way it assembles a setting from a largely pre-Victorian model village location and allusions to historical events and people from over a century of the steam-powered industrial age, much of the imagery of The Crimson Horror is determinedly Neo-Victorian, putting nineteenth- or early-twentieth century technology or its trappings to anachronistic use. Jenny’s encounter with the giant gramophone horns, relaying the sounds of horrors elsewhere like electronic speakers, is one example. Another is Mrs Gillyflower’s rocket, its design somewhat in advance of late-nineteenth century technology, and hidden in plain sight within a chimney which in an age of smoking stacks, doesn’t emit any smoke. Vastra’s dismissal of optograms as scientifically impossible is the importation of a modern certainty; optography was the subject of serious research in the late nineteenth century and the possibility that one part of the spectrum at least could be retained on the retina, if only for a short period, fascinated several scientists and science fiction writers including Jules Verne, as this article shows. Less successful, perhaps, is the appearance of Thomas Thomas, whose formulaic directions may indeed send him far. The circular scars left on rejects of the process, together with the ambition of creating a superior caste, are perhaps nods to the process of Gordon Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.

Mark Gatiss’s Doctor Who episodes have sometimes strained at the 45-minute format. The Idiot’s Lantern cut off a number of plot and character threads perfunctorily in order to hurry to a resolution. Victory of the Daleks felt as if it was apologising for not being able to build up the mystery of the Ironside Daleks more thoroughly, or to develop the threat of the new paradigm. With The Crimson Horror the problem is acknowledged and incorporated into the structure. The discovery of the crimson-dyed Doctor and his recovery allows the episode to present the highlights of ‘part one’ nested within the ‘part two’ which forms the bulk of the broadcast episode. The use of sepia tones and artificial film scratches in the memory sequence are another historical allusion, as in the 1890s Yorkshire was the base of several pioneers of filmmaking in Britain, but this flashback also hints at a CGIed world derived from old photographs of which Doctor Who, even with modern technology and budgets, can still only afford little.

This episode heavily trailed as a vehicle for Diana Rigg and Rachael Stirling to work alongside each other, and their performances don’t disappoint. Despite a script which Mark Gatiss has claimed as his campest work, Rigg avoids overplaying an already inflated character, the sort of villain who knows theirs are “the wrong hands”, is entertained by the gap between their own moral certainties and those of the surrounding world, but doesn’t enjoy their own performance to the extent that they cease to be a credible threat. From a period when women were struggling for equality, Winifred Gillyflower at first appears to be an example of female advance, a prizewinning chemist who has stormed male bastions in science, industry and religion and who has also survived the brutality of a violent marriage. Instead, she is in thrall to a phallic leech, a reject from the Star Trek symbiont factory with the face of a Raxacoricofallipatorian, and wants to recreate the world in his image rather than her own.

If Winifred’s name alludes to Victorian nostalgia for the remote past, commemorating a seventh-century saint, Ada’s name is probably most widely associated with Ada, countess of Lovelace, mid-nineteenth century pioneer of computing, whose mother’s County Durham origins may also be relevant to this episode. If one is still looking for emotional cores to Doctor Who episodes, then one is to be found here in Ada’s transition to autonomy and escape from the persona created for her by her mother. Room isn’t made for a description of what the preservation process does to memory and identity, but as the active ‘preserved’ are compliant automatons, one might infer that Ada was left sightless and scarred and with gaps in her self-knowledge which she has relied on her mother to fill. Ada assumes maternal love exists, but Mrs Gillyflower only views her as a failed test subject; fanaticism and addiction to Mr Sweet’s “nectar” can’t absolve this temperance advocate from personal responsibility.

Ada’s violent reaction to learning of her mother’s betrayals is refreshing. Too often a tormented character will be placated with therapeutic words from the Doctor. Ada’s beating of her mother, coldness on knowing her fate, and spearing of the crawling worm making as fast an escape as it can from the scene, is dramatically credible and leaves the Doctor a temporarily ineffectual bystander. His plan to ‘return’ Mr Sweet to the Jurassic is meaningless given that Mr Sweet is a native of 1893. The despatch of Mrs Gillyflower and that of Mr Sweet offer potential difficulties to an early evening time slot, as both are on the borders of fantasy violence and realism. The coding of Strax as a comedic character prevented him from causing Mrs Gillyflower more direct damage than throwing her off balance. Though undoubtedly revenge helps the process of healing Ada’s psychological wounds, the camera is careful to show that no pleasure is taken in the brutality beyond the satisfaction that those who caused harm can no longer do so.

Fan audiences were primed for the mention of a “gobby Australian” whom the Doctor spent ages trying to return to Heathrow. If there is a nod to the themes of the fifth Doctor’s era, it is to family: one can lose one’s birth family, as Ada does and Tegan did, but one can become a self-reliant member of a new family. While the TARDIS family of the fifth Doctor’s era were probably stronger in the imagination of fan writers than they were on the screen (Russell T Davies’s critique of the failure of Time-Flight to build on the end of Earthshock, as expressed in Richard Marson’s JN-T, was certainly shared by others) something of what was hoped for can be seen in the Doctor’s present friendship network.

The Doctor’s awkward expressions of physical affection have become more accentuated in recent weeks and his slap from Jenny was a necessary corrective. The relationship between the Doctor and Clara is tending towards being framed in romantic terms, at least from Clara’s point of view – she doesn’t deny that he is her boyfriend – and Nightmare in Silver promises to put the Doctor and Clara in a quasi-parental role to Angie and Artie Maitland. There is dramatic potential here, but also a danger of going over ground which Doctor Who has already explored.

The Crimson Horror was a richly textured confection, but while full of performances which were at their worst solid, which is more than can be said for some of the current run, some of the icing should have been withheld to better serve the episode’s strengths. At times it was just a little too pleased with its own cleverness and didn’t know how to convey its pleasure with itself on these occasions to the audience. For all they dominate this review, allusions and references to other sources do not by themselves good Doctor Who make. The density of its references – and I’m sure I’ve not spotted or mentioned them all – could have happily filled a Doctor Who Confidential, a programme especially missed on these occasions. While I enjoyed it greatly I do wonder whether, like so many episodes this year, it needed more room to breathe and explain itself and develop the nature of the central threat. Brendan Patricks, doing his best with a double role held in uncertain regard by the script, turned up at the end to faint once more, perhaps not at the dematerialisation of the TARDIS but exhausted by his escape from wherever the resolution of the main plot had needed to park him. Nevertheless, The Crimson Horror was a largely successful satire on Victorian industry and philanthropy, even if the adventure elements of the episode were comparatively undernourished.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

This is a bottle episode of sorts, but it’s set inside a very unusual bottle – one that’s really more of a box, infinite indoors, and capable of architectural reconfiguration as well as generating multiple “echoes” of any particular room. Whether this sort of impossible space could ever actually possess a “centre” may be a tough philosophical nut to crack, but it’s a classic episode title nonetheless. And just in case we’re not aware of the rich promise conveyed by ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’, the Doctor informs the Van Baalen gang that he’s confident he can deliver on “the salvage of a lifetime” (echoing the tagline which accompanied Doctor Who’s 2005 return, although back then it was a trip being promised rather than spectacular flotsam and jetsam).

Making the TARDIS the story’s main environment also makes it highly likely, or at least thematically relevant, that time-travel shenanigans will be involved. And sure enough we get a time rift, Time Zombies, frozen time, and a 'History of the Time War'. All set against a ticking clock. Rarely has Doctor Who been this fixated on temporality. I kept waiting for a sequence where assorted clock faces would mysteriously melt, in homage to the very first ‘trapped in the TARDIS’ story from 1964, but plenty of other fan service aimed to press fans’ buttons – including ninth Doctor dialogue from ‘Rose’ and other audio treats, along with glimpses of TARDIS rooms such as the swimming pool and, rather oddly, what appeared to be the telescope from ‘Tooth and Claw’. Does the TARDIS incorporate copies of the Doctor’s previous destinations so he can re-enact adventures at his leisure, in his very own private version of the Doctor Who Experience? It’s one way to break up all the repetitive corridors, I guess.

Although TARDIS-centric storytelling licenses all the chronic time malarkey, this episode’s resolution still comes across as immensely convenient. Yes, it draws attention to the fact that everything can be made better via a “big friendly [reset] button”. And yes, Edward Russell will probably be pleased that this is the first ever Doctor Who story where branding officially saves the day (oops, no, sorry; it’s the wrong sort of brand awareness). More than that, though, you can almost picture Steven Moffat and Steve Thompson chortling over the fact that they’ve come up with the ultimate “handy” solution to a Who story. I say Moffat and Thompson because for me this episode has the exact same problem as ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’. Where that felt too strongly like Thompson imitating Moffat’s preferred tropes (technology gone awry), this was the same hired hand again borrowing showrunner tricks – a rift or crack in time, paradoxes, memory loss, a ‘reveal’ of unexpected identity, and yet another 'reveal' hidden in plain sight (thanks to the torn photograph which we assume is merely set dressing and character background when we first see Gregor). Instead of "Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the TARDIS", a little too much of this resembled Moffat-era storylining on auto-pilot. It reminded me of series five and its epic rewind through previous stories, but crammed into the space and time of a single tale. I can understand contributing writers wanting to please the big boss, but all this faux-Moffat pastiche arguably produces story predictability rather than elegant brand consistency.

On the plus side, director Mat King made some good choices: the opening ‘walk and talk’ between the Doctor and Clara had them circling the TARDIS console at pace, giving some basic dialogue a whirling dynamism, and nicely prefiguring the characters’ later TARDIS disorientation. And in terms of visual style, King used an unusually large amount of out-of-focus or blurred material for HD, effectively heightening the menace of the Time Zombies. The exploded engine room was also a definite high point, resembling something you’d expect to see in promotional footage for 3D television, whilst its stark white backdrop was brilliantly combined with an absence of incidental music, at least up until the turning point of the Doctor taking Clara’s hand. If these directorial decisions all smartly served the story, then by contrast the end of the pre-credits sequence felt poorly edited and lacking in rhythm – it crashed rather haphazardly into the titles rather than building up to a dramatic punctuation, almost as if King didn’t quite have all the coverage he would’ve wanted.

Greater ethnic diversity is surely something modern Who should be striving for, but casting three black actors to play the shifty Van Baalen team – salvage being represented as boring manual labour lacking in creativity and job satisfaction – struck a debatable note. Another odd moment arrived in the form of Clara’s self-referential “good guys do not have zombie creatures. Rule one, basic storytelling!” Seemingly approaching her travels with the Doctor as if she’s wandered into a “story”, I only hope that the eventual explanation of Clara’s multiple deaths doesn’t involve her being unveiled as some kind of fiction or fabrication. Yet her sudden 'meta' invocation of “basic storytelling” was so ham-fisted it’s tempting to wonder whether this'll carry any further significance in the scheme of things.

There’s also some set-up for ‘The Name of the Doctor’ – presumably material requested by Moffat, just as he’s previously instructed the likes of Matthew Graham and Neil Gaiman on arc duties. It’s a pity, though, that Clara’s reading of 'The History of the Time War' is immediately erased from Doctor Who: ongoing storylines would surely have been more interesting given her unfolding awareness of “the Doctor”. Yet neutralising Clara’s character development is what really makes this a bottle episode, essentially disconnected from what surrounds it. In the end, it’s the guest characters who seem to retain after-images and echoes of what they’ve learnt, with Gregor discovering “a scrap of decency”, whereas over-arching mysteries are safely put back in their box... for the time being.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

The thing about ghost stories is they’re full of rules: mysterious noises, flashes of lightning, cold spots, psychics, detecting equipment replete with oscilloscopes and toggles (noun), plus photographs revealing the impossible. And there are contemporary film conventions too: a burst of light illuminating something right next to our protagonists; a dark, menacing shape flitting across camera (a trick used back in ‘The Eleventh Hour’). ‘Hide’ throws itself into this maelstrom of whirling tropes with gusto and sincerity. And being set in the seventies, it almost feels like a classic BBC TV ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ reanimated at the wrong time via anachronistic technology: it’s as if the theatrical-yet-brilliant Stone Tape has been worked over for high-def, high-style TV.

Despite the opening “ghostbusters” reference, we’re treated to a greatest hits’ collection of spooky goings-on that are played pleasingly straight. Jessica Raine is outstanding as the emotionally suppressed and confused empath Emma Grayling, radiating fragile luminosity and stern verity as she warns Clara off the Doctor, instantly reading him as a “liar”. Professor Alec Palmer is also well realized, with Dougray Scott putting in a strong performance as the guilt-ridden researcher unable to shake off  revenants of his past.

You can see why Neil Cross was asked back to contribute ‘The Rings of Akhaten’. This is a fantastic script; a blend of believable, character-led emotional moments (rather in the vein of Russell T. Davies’s writing on the series) and Moffat-style inversion and tricksiness as we get around to the final genre-shifting kicker. There’s also a clever, parable-like challenge to our interpretation of monstrosity:
what we’ve assumed to be grotesque and terrifying (the half-glimpsed, gnarled stuff of nightmare) is simply a form of life and love we’ve been unable to recognize. Cross handles it all with skill, making me suspect possible problems with ‘Akhaten’ may have been far more to do with budgeting and production issues.

Although the sequence where the Doctor disappears off to monitor Earth's planetary life-cycle seems to puncture the episode’s rhythm and atmosphere, it rapidly gives rise to two great pay-offs – not just the Sapphire and Steel-type explanation of what’s going on, but more importantly Clara’s realisation that “we’re all ghosts to you”. Time travel will do that, jumping from birth to death, hurtling from joyous presence to jaded memory. And of course the Clara-Doctor exchange isn’t just a mirror of its surrounding ghost tale, but also neatly harks back to ‘The Snowmen’ and the Doctor’s graveside visit there.

Cross’s paralleling of the Doctor and Clara with the Professor and his “companion” also draws attention to the different genres that the two couples occupy – while Alec and Emma are part of a love story, the Doctor and Clara are instead tied together by a “mystery” that needs solving. For all their banter, and the Doctor’s exaggerated discomfort with talk of love, this Doctor-companion pairing is perhaps overly dominated by ongoing arc stuff, not quite giving Clara the space to really come alive as a three-dimensional, flesh and blood character. Her ghostliness is partly a product of the need to keep the ‘Oswin’ Oswald puzzle flickering away in the background.

And while I know the Doctor has to get used to new teeth with each incarnation, “Metebelis” seems to be pronounced strangely. Surely a DVD of ‘Planet of the Spiders’ could have been sent to Matt Smith or director Jamie Payne as additional homework? Otherwise, though, Payne plays an absolute blinder: the scary, mist-wreathed forest visuals are especially gorgeous, reminding me of Adam Smith’s work on series five. Echoing laughter and sweeping, dream-like camera work also somehow put me in mind of ‘The Deadly Assassin’, placing this episode’s flashes of surrealism in very good company indeed. As for the stillness and silence immediately following in the wake of Emma’s furious bid to retrieve the Doctor, this was an inspired, chilling instant. I’d expected “boo!” moments from ‘Hide’, a perfectly unimaginative expectation which sure enough the pre-credits sequence promptly answered, but I hadn’t expected such a startling soundtrack punctuation. Not since Graeme Harper’s outer space silence in ‘42’ have separation and absence been so well calibrated. In short, more Payne, please: this was smartly directed, making impeccable use of guest actors and capturing a visceral sense of the Doctor’s fear.

‘Hide’ sells itself as one kind of story, turning all its ghostly paraphernalia up to eleven before sharply sidestepping into a whole different pocket genre where the rules are different. Crammed with quotable dialogue (the “I’m not holding your hand” business even felt like Moffat pastiche, unless it was an uncredited showrunner contribution), its ending – “jump!” – had the sort of vitality and irreverence that perhaps only a newcomer to the fold would attempt. Hiding its twist in plain sight, ‘Hide’ nevertheless represents the most audacious and spirited genre switch in Who’s recent memory as it toggles (verb) between love and monsters.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

In the promotional build-up to this episode it seemingly became compulsory to make jokessssssss about the Ice Warrior’s sibilant speech patternssssssssss. So, now that’s out of the way, how successfully did this week's Who reimagine the Martian race? Mark Gatiss’s script was determined to depict them as a terrifying and plausible threat. As Clara says at one point, “it’s all got very... real”, and that could almost have been the mission statement of 'Cold War', where monstrous realism was the order of the day.

Instead of clunky design, the Ice Warrior’s “shellsuit” is shown to be body armour with an extremely useful line in sonic remote control. And we get the same Alien-style trick used all the way back in 'Resurrection of the Daleks' – the not-quite-seen entity out of its housing and busy stalking its prey. It’s unsurprising that ‘Dalek’ has instantly become a reference point for this adventure – the lone, reimagined creature in a lock-down situation makes comparisons too tempting to resist. But however many similarities can be drawn between ‘Dalek’ and this ‘sub-under-siege’ scenario, there is one vital difference: Rob Shearman’s much-redrafted magnum opus never punctures its sense of reality.

By contrast, ‘Cold War’ unwittingly stresses its artificiality right from the outset. The decision to depict a Russian submarine’s crew speaking English from the word go emphasizes a profound tension between narrative reality and production anxiety – clearly it was felt that Russian voices and subtitles would frighten off the early Saturday evening audience. We get a production decision which assumes the worst of its audience, rather than crediting them with curiosity and intelligence, because the English-speaking opening sadly can’t be rationalized through any TARDIS intervention. It’s a production choice, pure and simple, indicative of how weirdly mixed-up and inconsistent this episode becomes. Text is given in Russian-style lettering in the submarine, as if to remind audiences of the setting (in case they’d forgotten), yet this doesn’t clearly correspond with previously established TARDIS continuity either. It’s all a bit of a linguistic tangle, where playing-it-safe production decisions are constantly screamed out, puncturing the sense of immersive reality that a base-under-siege story absolutely calls for. Given how brilliantly TARDIS translation was handled in, say, ‘The Christmas Invasion’, where a sudden shift into English corresponds with a punch-the-air moment and a vital plot point, this episode sadly missed its chance to show us the TARDIS translation matrix kicking in, in what could have been a truly startling, stunning instance of the Doctor’s Time Lord powers. Imagine if suddenly, just as the order to launch a nuclear missile was given, we’d shifted from subtitles into spoken English. What could have been a stone-cold classic Who moment, transforming Russian characters from exotic, stereotyped others into our trustworthy protagonists, remains something that can only be imagined on Saturday night telly.

For me, the 1980’s music references were also clumsier than a 1960’s Ice Warrior costume. Despite David Warner’s strong performance, and he even made the query about Ultravox’s break-up work brilliantly, his character was lumbered with a habit designed to reinforce the eighties’ setting. I think this patronized the audience yet again – can’t we recall that it’s the eighties from an on-screen caption, talk of nukes, M.A.D. and mention of shoulder pads? Do we really need ‘relatable’ pop references to ram the time-frame home? Professor Grisenko was certainly an eccentric, but he felt too much like a designed creation rather than a flesh-and-blood character: blatantly there so that the “song” theme could get its pay-off via Clara’s Duran Duran rendition. Pop music was crow-barred into Chris Chibnall’s ‘42’ (hardly a fan favourite), but its inclusion here is no more convincing, I’d wager. Again, the reality effect worked so strongly around Skaldak is undermined by some of these surrounding decisions.

And if the Ice Warrior out of its shell is a scarifying highlight of the story, helping to ramp up the tension by playing to Gatiss’s formidable strengths as a writer, whilst also benefiting from sympathetic direction and lighting, then the choice to reveal Skaldak’s face feels a little misguided. It slavishly emulates a horror genre template: the big reveal of the bravura monster effect, after a lot of tantalizing and audience anticipation. But in this case, the effect wasn’t spectacular enough to warrant the reveal, and I think the mystique of the Ice Warriors, as well as Skaldak’s presence, would have been better served by refusing to give the audience this visual FX reverse shot. If we’d only seen the Doctor through the Martian’s eyes, without ever glimpsing what turned out to be Skaldak’s rather generic appearance, then that very absence would have been infinitely more thrilling and unsettling. By following the established plot beats of a literal face-off (even seeming to playfully reference Moffat’s “don’t blink” via a contest of wills) Skaldak and the Ice Warriors were diminished a little, when previous events had industriously set out to achieve the exact opposite.

There’s much fan-friendly stuff to welcome here: impeccable model FX work on the sub; HADS gets a mention (though wouldn’t that have been better explained earlier in the story rather than at the very end?); and (this) Clara treats her first historical outing as a test of her own performance, in a rather touching and well-played device where she constantly seeks reassurance. ‘Cold War’ has atmosphere in abundance, and is consistently well acted by all of its cast, with Liam Cunningham deserving just as many plaudits as David Warner. It also has a cleverly integrated bit of business about Skaldak’s singing – paralleled with Ice Warrior sonic technology – and his own family relationships. He has a daughter, so in the sentimental codings of family entertainment, we know right away he can’t be an irredeemable monster. And given that Skaldak doesn’t definitively leave until immediately after Clara’s singing, I interpreted her effort as reminding him of his daughter’s songs (indeed, Clara had already emphasized the link to “daughters” in dialogue). The new romantics save “Planet Earth” (why couldn’t that have been Grisenko’s favourite? “looking at planet earth… this is planet earth”). Clara’s emotional intelligence and resourcefulness are neatly reinforced here.

But the Doctor appears to rather strangely teach Skaldak, and by implication us, that nuclear deterrence is basically A Good Thing, and that mutually assured destruction handily works to keep the peace. I can’t help but feel that these aren’t unquestionably Doctorish ideologies, and I wonder if this section of the script underwent many revisions or generated much in the way of contention across the production process. It wouldn’t have been like this in the days of the Virgin New Adventures, I suspect. Further back in time, in 1984, Doctor Who mounted a version of this story as science fiction allegory (‘Warriors of the Deep’). The intervening years mean that ‘classic’ allegory can now be safely tackled as ‘new’ popular memory, swapping one kind of distancing shell for another.

‘Cold War’ is an incessant conflict between two power blocs where neither can entirely triumph. Intended realism fights against (unintended) displays of production artifice, and what is very nearly a chilling classic finds itself marred, though not sunk, by specific production decisions. The Ice Warriors are now a more complex and convincing on-screen race than ever before, but this particular Ice Warrior hero finds himself encased by narrative techniques (especially the language issue and the pop song gimmick) that threaten to jolt audiences out of Gatiss’s finest sub-under-siege storytelling, despite all its dripping, dripping water and its damp, desperate physicality.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

Doctor Who isn’t specially made for those of us who go online and watch multiple trailers multiple times or devour previews, but it is concerned with those who catch trailers between other programmes or might occasionally view online previews. The audience for The Rings of Akhaten was carefully primed to expect a story set in space with multiple alien species and a child-threatening monster. This is of course what they received, but to get there they took the public footpath rather than the motorway. There the themes of the season were restated and the moral of the episode prepared for, and the background of our new heroine explored further.

The Rings of Akhaten unexpectedly proved to be the first of this series’ visits to the recent past, with the central narrative being framed by the Doctor’s research expedition to establish Clara’s personal history. That history so far appears unencumbered by otherworldly or extradimensional intervention beyond the Doctor’s periodic sampling of her life, but the episode does raise the puzzle of the TARDIS’s unwillingness to open its doors to her, and provoke expectations surrounding the early death of Clara’s mother. On the one hand the loss of Ellie and the refusal of the TARDIS doors to open are both perfectly regular occurrences. People die, sometimes early; and Clara does not have the TARDIS key. Still, the idea that the TARDIS doesn’t like Clara is expressed in the shadow of the personalisation of the ship in The Doctor’s Wife and the affinity it displays with Melody/River in Let’s Kill Hitler. We are given many reasons to admire Clara in this episode, but there are unsettling notes in the background.

Those unsettling notes are not provided by Murray Gold, whose music moves back into being part of the narrative rather than a commentary upon it. His soundtrack to this story recalls his earlier choral works, especially those in Journey’s End and The End of Time, both in implying doomsday and in offering salvation from it. There were moments where one felt one was listening to a bland contribution to a fashionable modern hymnal, but there had to be contrast with the ritual hymn and subtlety of mood is difficult when a composer has so few minutes to work within, and so many other elements within the episode to underwrite. Overall, Gold continues to recognise and project the tone of the series: peril is interpreted in a less self-indulgently sinister manner than Dudley Simpson might have managed in the mid-1970s, but Gold’s scoring is intelligent and poignant, working with the emotions of the characters rather than trying to impose a mood on the viewer.

Doctor Who makes selective use of popular music, but a willingness to use it at all was one of the refreshing points of the revived series in 2005. ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials is used to signify 1981, juxtaposed with the Doctor reading The Beano Summer Special of that year, but the use of the song has further implications. It plays over the first meeting of Ellie and Dave, Clara’s parents; does this somehow prefigure apocalypse? More specifically for the episode’s plot, ‘Ghost Town’ concerns collective memory and experience. In terms of The Rings of Akhaten this is the history taught in song to Merry so she can feed her people’s god, and also Clara’s remembrance of her dead mother and the stories she passed on to her. ‘Ghost Town’ also echoes the Doctor’s long life and the memories which he rarely discusses but which he is willing to offer to the god to be devoured. If these ghosts are reflections of the past they can be confronted and digested. It’s the reflections on what might have been which can’t be faced, because they were never realised in the first place. As such, their form is unfixed and insubstantial and it’s appropriate that they give the Old God of Akhaten indigestion.

The Rings of Akhaten has been promoted as another instalment of cinematic Doctor Who, but it seems more at home within the confines of the small screen than many of its predecessors. The bazaar set is crowded and claustrophobic, and while this was set up in Roath Lock, one can imagine something similar being realised in Television Centre or with ingenuity and still narrower camera angles in Lime Grove or Riverside. The CGI is limited and relatively static compared with recent episodes and there is one space exterior very visibly realised using that age-old standby, the black cloth with lights shining through it. The great exception is the sense of distance suggested by the cuts between the Mummy’s temple and the open theatre where Merry sings her lullaby before her audience. Nevertheless, the concentration on a series of undynamic images mostly works to the episode’s advantage. The episode is substantially the story of Clara and Merry and the sets and effects function largely as background to a series of portrait shots rather than as features in their own right. They do register as a series of references to a cinematic heritage. The Rings of Akhaten suggests Ancient Egypt in its title (though misleading some fans, and journalists, to expect a connection to the natives of Phaester Osiris and Pyramids of Mars). The design of the sets is placed in the broad western tradition of Orientalism (and ‘Ghost Town’ too contains musical references to middle-eastern music or at least a twentieth-century Euramerican theatrical idea of what middle-eastern music was). Set designs which recall depictions of Egypt, Arabia or India in film are joined with a script inspired by Chinese or Japanese orthography. The plot, too, has echoes of various generations of The Mummy, and the Indiana Jones series. The episode could be construed as cinematic in its referencing rather than in its execution; though it’s also been seen as a literary episode, one more familiar with literary SF than me having noted links with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books. It’s the influence of cinema, and the depiction of Islamic, south and east Asian societies in adventure films, which lingers the most; perhaps it is appropriate then that the Old God is depicted both as Ancient Egyptian sun god and American Halloween pumpkin.

In performance, the episode demands most of Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman, with special mentions for Michael Dixon and Nicola Sian as Clara’s parents, who had to carry much of the pre-credits sequence, and for Emilia Jones as Merry. The latter’s role at first seems to have clear analogies with a schoolchild wanting to avoid embarrassment before peers and parents when faced with a solo song or reading. Emilia Jones conveys Merry’s predicament as the Queen of Years as if it is nothing extraordinary, the better for Jenna-Louise Coleman to reinforce Clara’s affinity with children, and later displays a fierce determination to fulfil her destiny. In contrast to the Clara of The Snowmen, this Clara seems more like the folk image of a Blue Peter presenter than Mary Poppins; she is compassionate, brave, willing to take risks as extreme as driving a space vehicle she’s only known briefly as a passenger, and able to think laterally at times of crisis. Matt Smith’s Doctor continues to evolve, becoming yet more attached to Amy’s glasses (does looking through them, perhaps, remind him of the human perspective?) and in doing so coming more to resemble Harold Lloyd than Norman Wisdom or Michael Crawford-as-Frank Spencer; this comparison seems also fitting for his Doctor’s greater physical self-control and proactivity.

The Rings of Akhaten furthers Doctor Who’s attitude to religion. The Doctor won’t disassociate himself from the beliefs of the inhabitants of the Akhaten system completely. His description of their faith as a ‘story’ is not a dismissal in a series so self-aware of its own storytelling. He gives a rationalist, empirical, cosmologist’s account of the making of the universe and what individuals are made of in order to convince Merry of her worth in her own right, not as the Queen of Years. Souls, the Doctor says, are stories; the roots and merits of this idea in the context of various religions should be left to those with more skill in comparative theology, but it’s an appropriate foundation for a belief system in Doctor Who. More frivolously, red is still the colour for religious orders in Doctor Who, five years from The Fires of Pompeii, but just over three from The End of Time.

Though the Old God is defeated and extinguished at the end of the episode, the return of the ring which Clara gave to Dor’een indicates that the best of the faith, a respect for lived experience and giving of oneself, survives. The Doctor gives that ring to Clara in a gesture which recalls the way in which he gave her Victorian counterpart the TARDIS key. For Clara this restores what she surrendered to the Old God with the leaf from 101 Places to See and confirms her integrity, which the Doctor’s mention of “someone who died” then seems to undermine. A viewer remembering The Snowmen might see the ring as a provisional commitment, short of the TARDIS key which marks the Doctor’s whole trust and performs a quasi-sacramental role within what The Myth Makers would remind us is the Doctor’s own ‘temple’. The Doctor is still no closer to finding out who or what Clara is at the end of the story; together with his mistaken identification of the Mummy as the Old God, this episode places unusual emphasis on his fallibility.

The Rings of Akhaten is a change in setting and tone from the expansive ebullience of The Bells of Saint John. The jumps in character progression which enable the telling of this story in forty-four minutes place a little strain on credibility but they are sustained by convincing performance and assertive editing. It’s an intimate story which could do with a little more breathing space in order to develop its themes of learning to explore and appreciate lives lived as a basis for future actions and discoveries. The fact that Clara has lived the life which enables her to understand and deploy her own story and the stories of others which influenced her against the Old God becomes not just a character strength and crisis resolution, but for Doctor and viewer, a frustrating and engaging narrative problem.