Neil Gaiman's second Doctor Who script sees the Cybermen get a brand new design! Warning - the following review contains spoilers, don't read if you haven't seen the episode!

Two years ago, way back in 2011, Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife won over the hearts of millions of Doctor Who fans worldwide. Gaiman's magnificently crafted episode revolutionised the Doctor-TARDIS relationship, featured the first new series TARDIS that wasn't the Doctor's, and was almost universally acclaimed, winning many awards. Naturally, Whovians were extremely excited to hear that Gaiman would be returning this year to update the Cybermen. So, does Nightmare in Silver successfully update one of Doctor Who's oldest enemy?

Yes. It. Does. It is official: the Cybermen are awesome once again!

Nightmare in Silver sees the Doctor (Matt Smith), Clara (Jenna-Louise Coleman) and the Maitland children, Angie (Eve de Leon Allen) and Artie (Kassius Carey Johnson) land on Hedgewick's World of Wonders: the largest amusement park in the universe, a quarter of a million years in the future. Unfortunately, it's been desolate ever since the conclusion of the second Cyber Wars, one thousand years previously. When the Doctor gets suspicious of tiny insects, the excursion to the theme park is over. For the Doctor's old enemies, the Cybermen, have survived and are about to upgrade to their best and most terrifying model yet...

In my trawls through the web in the aftermath of the transmission of this episode, I've found that, like The Rings of Akhaten, this episode has really split the fanbase; people either love it or hate it. I think the reason for the latter is that viewers were expecting another Doctor's Wife. This is the wrong mentality, as Nightmare in Silver is a vastly different beast from Gaiman's previous script, but is by no means bad. In fact, it's fantastic.

First things first: the Cybermen. As stated above, they are awesome. Really awesome. Long gone are the loud, stomping robots from Parallel Earth and their lookalikes from Mondas/Telos, these Cybermen are smooth, slick and only emit a soft pneumatic hiss when they walk. Their voices are no longer robotic, instead we've got a deep, slightly mechanised, toneless sound that is a lot scary than the previous computer-synthesised voice. (Thank goodness the rubbish 'Delete' phrase is gone!) The design is a lot better too, the face harks back to the Cybermen from the 60s, and there is undoubtedly a bit an Iron Man influence as well (the glowing light in the chest in particular). In short: a success.

In interviews, Gaiman has revealed that he envisioned the Cybermen in this episode to be a combined form of the Cybus and Mondas/Telos versions, that is, at some point prior to the episode (and presumably the second Cyber War), they merged their technology and became one.  The end result is a mixture of the two respective technologies; Mondas/Telosian Cybermen's Cybermats have been miniturised and upgraded into Cybermites, the Cybusmen's human upgrade limitation has been removed by the Telosmen's superior conversion technology, and body parts can now be removed and controlled independently. But by far the best improvement to the silver warriors is the ability to upgrade themselves to eventually become immune to almost every form of attack, a process which also seems to affect every other Cybermen, as demonstrated when the lone Cybermen attempts to cross the moat, only to be briefly deactived before upgrading; the whole army subsequently moves across unhindered. Based on some dialogue in the episode, I suggest that this is because the Cyber operating system (computer code) devlops a patch that cancels out any adverse affects, then transmits the improved code across the Cyberiad to every other Cyber unit.

The episode also does a great job of showing the upgrade ability. For example, two Cybermen are destroyed by the cyber-gun, then the next two only have their heads blown off. Finally, they are immune to it, and shrug the gun blast off before moving on. In short, Gaiman has masterfully reworked the Cybermen into the best and most credible threat in the Whoniverse. Neil Gaiman, I salute you.

I could literally write an entire review on why these Cybermen are so astoundingly amazing, but there are other aspects to the episode. Firstly, guest star Warwick Davis, gave what was arguably the best guest star performance this series. His beautifully understated performance as Porridge was both welcome and realistic. Tazmin Outhwaite as the Captain didn't really make much of an impact due to her limited screen time, but she performed well in the scenes she featured in. The rest of the punishment squad left no lasting impression either, mainly due to the fact that they were simply uncharacterised cannon-fodder only present to showcase the Cybermens' new abilities.

Nightmare in Silver demanded a lot of Matt Smith, he not only had to play the Doctor, but also Mr Clever/the Cyberplanner as well. Mr Clever gave Smith the opportunity to demonstrate his considerable acting skills, and he absolutely shines as both the Doctor and Mr Clever. Jenna-Louise Coleman does a good job of showing a more military side to Clara, and pulls it off in a realistic way, since its assumed that her character has had no previous combat experience. I've heard some critisim of the amount and thoroughness of the strategic thinking Clara does in this episode, but I think that the amount is reasonable, plus the fact that none of the decisions Clara makes are outside the range of a normal person - finding a defensible location, for example. As for the children, well, the less said about them the better. While Artie wasn't too bad, I'm still trying to decide if Angie was characterised the way she was, or if the actress was just bad at acting. I'm inclined to believe that it is the former, as it seems that Gaiman recognises this and immediately shuts the children out of the action for most of the episode - an extremely wise decision in my opinion. Hopefully we won't see much of them again.

Continuity references were also about in Nightmare. Gold has always been the Cyber weakness that everyone remembers, even though it was only introduced in 1975's Revenge of the Cybermen. Likewise, Cleaning fluid also gets a mention as being an old weakness -the Second Doctor's companion, Polly, once got rid of a few Cybermen in The Moonbase (1967) by whipping up a cocktail of various cleaning fluids and chemicals, and throwing into the Cybermen's chest units, suffocating them.

We also see images of all eleven Doctors, and well as the regeneration from the Tenth into the Eleventh. Mr Clever imitates the catchphrases of the Ninth Doctor ('fantastic') and the Tenth Doctor (Allons-y). Also, some of the set design looks very reminicent of the Cyber Tombs from Tomb of the Cybermen (1967).

The episode wasn't without its faults. As mentioned above, the children, Angie in particular, were annoying. They didn't really contribute anything to the episode, and could have been removed altogther, though I suspect the production team prevented this. Also, I found Porridge's proposal to Clara at the end to be extremely contrived and out of the blue, it wasn't necessary at all (except to give Angie a line showing how arrogant she is). Likewise, the revelation about Porridge being the Emperor, while nice, wasn't particularly justified, considering that the waxwork's face looked nothing like the real thing. This isn't Gaiman's fault, rather, the design team should have looked at Warwick Davis' face more closely. Also, I felt that Mr Clever gave off too much emotion for something that's emotionless. I feel that Matt could have toned his amazing performanced down with respect to facial expression and voice range.

Finally, to end on a good note:

a) A clear indication that the Cybermen weren't completely destroyed. Thank goodness, if only RTD had done this with the daleks...

b) The dialogue, was amazing as well, particularly Porridge's line about feeling sorry for the guy who had to press the button to blow up the Tiberon Galaxy.

Overall, Nightmare in Silver is an astoundingly good episode. The Cybermen are better than ever, the dialogue's great, the acting's great, the continuity references are great...there's barely anything wrong here at all. If only the children hadn't been in the episode, and if Matt had toned his performance down just a tad, this would have been the best episode of the series.

9/10

PS: For those who are interested, in the Classic Series, the Cyber Wars occured in around the 26th Century. Seeing as Nightmare is set in circa 252, 013 AD, I interpret the Cyber Wars as referred to in this episode as being the second such conflict.