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Sunday 12 May 2013

There mite be giants

You know what's great about Doctor Who? The word TransMat. Every other piece of sci-fi has followed Star Trek's lead and called it a teleporter but no, a Matter Transporter got christened a TransMat in the Doctor Who universe in the 1960s and that's what it's still called today.

"Nightmare in Silver" by Neil Gaiman, directed by Stephen Woolfenden. Spoilers after the cut.

You know what else is great? The cybermites. Yep, they were very cool. OK, I'm running out of positive stuff to say about this episode. I mean there's a lot about it that should work but it's all a bit... boring, really. It kind of feels like it was written to showcase Matt Smith's acting, which it does, but he's still left giving a multi-layered performance in the middle of nothing much exciting. Maybe it's the director - Stephen Woolfenden hasn't done any Who before and he just can't seem to bring this to life at all. It's a shame, after so much expectation Neil Gaiman's first episode was a triumph, and then this second one's just... meh.

Also, what would it take to impress those bloody kids? "Oh, we're not at a theme park, I think we're on the Moon. Whaddaloadabollox." Yeah, because if it had been the Moon that would have been a totally unexceptional day out, wouldn't it?

Why did that planet get designated a no-go area, anyway? If children were disapparing from the amusement park, couldn't the Empire have, I dunno, investigated before evacuating an entire planet? Seems a bit harsh - or maybe not harsh enough, if they suspected Cyberman activity there surely they'd have blown it up if they had no qualms about eliminating entire galaxies. Nah, let's just leave it there with a platoon who are being punished. Most of them for being generally a bit inept, and Tamzin Outhwaite for the misapplication of lipstick.

Still, good to find out what that poster image was supposed to be - I thought it was a Cyberman ice-skating. Which would, in the end, have been better. Cybermen on Ice! And it must have been nice for Warwick Davis to do a genre show without being under an inch of prosthetics, probably for the first time since Willow. Next week: "The Name of the Doctor." Spoiler: It's Keith.

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