Headscratchers / Doctor Who S33 E12 "Nightmare in Silver"

• When the Doctor sent the kids to bed, why didn't he leave them in the TARDIS?!
  • According to Neil Gaiman on twitter, there was a scene explaining why in the script - but, surprise surprise, it got cut.
  • He probably didn't want funny insect hitch-hikers in there either.
  • Not to mention, the TARDIS is a huge, sentient construct. She's been known to act up toward unwanted visitors on her own, which is bad enough. But do you really want one of the children getting up for a glass of water and stumbling into the swimming pool, the backup control rooms, or something actually dangerous?
• Something I'm not quite clear on, why were the children needed to wake up the Cybermen? Why were they all waiting around for a child's mind to wake them up when they all seemed to be in perfect working order after awakening?
  • They were intact, not functional. The kids were necessary because their minds had the computing power necessary for boot-up and central control. The Doctor provided an alternative when they got him.
• Why does the Doctor claim he and the Cyberplanner are in a state of stalemate? If the Doctor regenerates, he destroys the cybermites in his brain with no real damage to himself, it's not like he hasn't regenerated in order to save lives before. A stalemate implies that if the Doctor regenerates, the cyberplanner can do an equal and opposite reaction... but he can't. Thus, surely the Doctor has the upper hand throughout the episode? If so, why does he not use it? (beyond the real life reason that they can't just regenerate Matt Smith willy-nilly, but since that's the case, why mention onscreen that regenerating would defeat the Cyberplanner?)
  • He's on his thirteenth regeneration. He still has some regeneration energy left, as seen in The Angels Take Manhattan, but it's not enough for a full regeneration. If he triggers a regeneration, it will kill him along with the Cyberplanner.
  • He outright said that he doesn't want to regenerate if he can help it because he doesn't know what his next incarnation would be like. Additionally, if regenerations are finite, using one up when an alternative is available would be unwise. He was holding it in reserve as his "big gun", as it were, just in case the Cyberplanner managed to win.
  • Adding to that the fact that the Doctor post-regeneration is erratic at best, and would still be in the middle of a Cybermen-infested planet, with very little to prevent them to try infecting him again.
  • The Doctor revealed that if he regenerate not only will the Cyberplanner be destroyed but EVERY SINGLE cybermen will be destroyed as the Cybermen are Hive Mind via Electronic Telepathy and the Doctor said it would fried them. The Cyberplanner doesn't know if this would work-but considering that the Doctor is their first Time Lord in captured(and thus wouldn't know a single thing how regeneration work) they probably don't want to risk it.
  • See Fridge Brilliance: The Eleventh Doctor isn't really the Eleventh incarnation, and can't regenerate. He's bluffing.
    • Notice how when they show his previous incarnations, it doesn't show the War Doctor or the Meta-Crisis Doctor..which means that The Doctor actually manage to keep some information away from him.
• Why don't the Cybermen use their Bullet Time ability in the siege?
  • For all we know, the super-fast Cyberman could have been a specialised Cyberman.
    • I actually saw it as the idea that they only sent one because it requires a lot of processing power, the Cybermen slowed down and just stopped at one point, I can't remember for what reason but I know their computer core had been off.
    • The Cybermen slow down because the Doctor challenged the Cyberplanner (aka Mr. Clever) to the chess game, and the 'Planner took the other Cybermen's processing power for himself so that he could beat the Doctor.
• Why wasn't there more investigation of millions of disappearances?
  • Perhaps the Cybermen were growing more bodies.
• How can the Cyberman reboot in the river and become immune to the electric shock?
  • The electric shock wasn't severe enough to completely destroy it.
  • How can the Cyberman become immune to electric shock through software updates?
  • Who says they were software only? The Cybermites have the ability to build Cybermen from scratch using any electronics they can get (hence the radio being empty), so it's probable that they were inside the Cybermen making repairs and hardware improvements as they cropped up.
• Why do the Cybermen never use their superspeed again?
  • Perhaps as the Cyberman that did use it was in stronger condition. The others had only just been activated so were less powerful. Or this Cyberman was a better design.
• Why is Mr Clever showing such emotional extremes?
  • The Doctor's extreme personality isn't something Cybermen will be used to, so it has emotion.
  • The big thing this episode was Cybermen adapting to their weaknesses. Presumably, with Mr. Clever being the Cyberman strategist, he'd be trying to understand and neutralise these things you call "emotion" that defeat them every other week.
• How can Angie survive being picked up at such high speed?
  • Most likely the Cyberman had some form of Inertial Dampening technology incorporated into it.
• After The Doctor disables Mr. Clever with the golden ticket, why doesn't he remove Mr. Clever entirely? He's got time enough to talk to Clara; now would be a great time to say "Hey, do you have any anti-cybermen weapons?". Then they could zap him with the hand-thing (which is what he eventually does anyway), and he'd be fine. There's really no reason to continue the chess game.
  • Probably the Cybermen would've simply blown the building to atoms if he did that. So long as he still has Mr. Clever hijacking part of his brain, they'll remain determined to take the Doctor alive; if he shuts down the connection fully, they'll write him off as too much trouble to convert and proceed to kill everyone, especially the Time Lord who just got to snoop at their cyberneural network.
• They have a chance to leave before anything nasty happens, but The Doctor says they can't leave yet because he wants to investigate the "funny insects". Ok...but why don't you drop the children off at home first? Then you can return with Clara and investigate all you like without endangering the children.
  • Because he's the Doctor. He's hardly Mr. Responsible; being easily distracted and leaping into something without considering the potential consequences is kind of a fundamental part of his character.
  • By observing the "funny insects" they've become parts of the event, which is the excuse they always use for questions like this. They can't just get in the TARDIS and leave a situation, they have to follow it through (although what constitutes the end of a chain of events has always been a bit fuzzy).
    • I think that's looking at it a bit too deeply. Simply observing the insects doesn't prevent them from leaving; they can leave any time they want. When they say they're "part of events," they are referring to the reason why they cannot simply go back and change the past using the knowledge that they've already acquired, such as when Rose suggests that they go back and warn the people of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire about the oncoming Dalek invasion, or when she suggests that they take the TARDIS to Reinette's time in "The Girl in the Fireplace" in order to circumvent the closed time window. That's not the case here. I think the Doctor really was just being too curious for his own good.
    • Remember the one lie too big for the psychic paper to tell? "I am widely recognized as a mature and responsible adult."
  • "Funny insects" can also have a nasty habit of hitching a ride back to Earth (or anywhere at any time for that matter) if they open up the TARDIS again. That's probably why the Doctor didn't even want them going back to the TARDIS at least.
• So...did I miss something? Porridge reveals that he's the emperor, and that he can active the planet-busting bomb, and furthermore that his ship will teleport everyone to safety before the planet blows up. Is there some reason he didn't do all that at the beginning, as soon as the cybermen showed up? I get that he doesn't want to be emperor, but...people are gonna die!
  • At that point The Doctor has Mr. Clever in his mind, the collected conscious of the Cybermen and they have the kids under their control. If they were to escape then Mr. Clever would still exist and so would the cybermen. He met the Doctor and the kids so he probably didn't want to cause them harm and only activated it once they were safe.
  • Plus the whole point of Porridge abandoning his role as the Emperor in the first place was due to his tremendous guilt after blowing up an entire galaxy. That suggests the kind of trauma that would at very least make him hesitate before doing the exact same thing all over again, even if on a smaller scale.
    • Minor point: the war happened centuries ago. Porridge personally didn't blow up the galaxy, unless he's Really 700 Years Old.
    • Considering Liz Ten back in "The Beast Below" has been alive for at least three hundred years, this is hardly an impossibility.
    • Just to reinforce your point, Liz Ten is 2550 by the time of her appearance in "The Pandorica Opens".
• Mr. Clever and the Doctor play a chess game. Why? The Doctor clearly states that Mr. Clever can't be trusted to keep his promises. Presumably the Doctor can't be trusted either, in this case. (Would he seriously turn over all his memories and abilities to the Cybermen? Heck, no! That would doom the universe!) So, no matter who wins the game, nothing will change. If the Doctor loses, he won't actually surrender his mind. And if Mr. Clever loses, he won't actually leave the Doctor alone. Surely they both understand this. So why bother playing the game?
  • Perhaps they are simply using this to give themselves more planning time. Also Mr Clever's personality means it wants to prove its intelligence.
  • It is almost certainly a way of trying to outthink the other.
  • It's not really a practical necessity, but this being a Gaiman scripts it works very well as a visual metaphor for the battle of wits between the characters.
  • Mr Clever and the Doctor were at a stalemate and the most expedient way to resolve it was to agree to a chess match. As far as Mr Clever was concerned the Doctor was only delaying the inevitable, and he's enough of an asshole to allow the Doctor one last bit of hope before snuffing it out. The Doctor meanwhile, realizes that's what Mr Clever is doing and sticks with the chess thing to keep him distracted long enough to come up with a real plan.
• In the backstory, they won the war against the Cybermen by blowing up a bunch of galaxies. So...did they trick all the Cybermen in the universe into gathering into one spot like that, so they could blow them up?
  • Well it's a pretty big "spot". And presumably they didn't kill all the Cybermen with that blast; they just killed most of them, and turned the tide of the war.
• Is there some reason why they couldn't use the anti-Cybermen gloves to fix the kids? I mean, it worked on Mr. Clever...
  • Yes, but Mr Clever was only using half of the Doctor's brain while he kept the other half. The Anti-Cyber Glove took Mr Clever out of commission by deactivating the half of the brain he was controlling. As the kids' mind had been completely overridden, turning off the Cyberintelligence controlling them would have meant turning off their brains altogether. Which is not good.
  • The Doctor had to turn the power up on it and he might have been afraid it might hurt the kids.
• So you've got Cybermen attacking, and a planet-busting bomb. You don't want to use the bomb because it would kill everyone on the planet. But wait...there's only a couple dozen people on this planet, and they're all nearby. So here's an idea: Tell everyone to get in the TARDIS. Then, arm the bomb and leave it outside. Use the TARDIS to warp away from the planet before it explodes. Then the cybermen all die, the people all live, and the only thing you've lost is an abandoned amusement park. Why didn't they do this?
  • Well, once they realized the Cybermen were attacking, the kids had already been hooked up with mind-control things.
    • But surely the Doctor could find a way to disable those eventually. (And see previous bit about using the anti-cybermen gloves.)
    • Breaking the link could have given the kids brain-damage. Also the Doctor may have worried about letting Mr Clever inside the TARDIS.
• Hmmm, there's something strange going on here. Should I take, literally, one second to pop Clara's stepchildren back home safe while I investigate? No, I'll just leave them on the couch, I'm sure that'll be fine. Really, Doctor? Really???
  • This was discussed above; basically, seeing as it's been established over fifty years now that the Doctor isn't exactly the most responsible person in the universe, this shouldn't really be that much of a headscratcher.
  • As was also explained above; the Cybermites could have very easily gotten into the TARDIS if the Doctor even so much as allowed the kids to stay in there for their own (already doomed) safety. Think of it like the Doctor's own version of airport customs on a whim.
  • Some Fridge Horror: The TARDIS is a living thing, and might possibly be more susceptible to Cyber-infection, since she's kind of techno-organic. Now imagine if the Cyberiad had gotten their hooks into the TARDIS.

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