When you think about it, being super-talented has got to be pretty super-frustrating.
Take Neil Gaiman, for example. As one of his generation's brightest, smartest, wittiest and most creative writers, his attachment to a project is always going to herald with it a whole heap of ejaculatory geek buzz.
And given that he wrote arguably last season's best episode in 'The Doctor's Wife', the expectation's increase exponentially when it comes to the good Doctor and his travelling TARDIS.
So we'll get this out the way right now. 'Nightmare in Silver' is no 'The Doctor's Wife'. It's so far removed tonally and conceptually that a direct comparison is unfair, though that makes it no less hard to dismiss.
Once/if you're able to disregard the disappointment of an episode that's far from groundbreaking, 'Nightmare in Silver' still stands up as a solid if underwhelming return for one of Who's most iconic and timeless of villains.
Ricocheting pretty swiftly on from the weirdly tacked on end to last week's 'The Crimson Horror', 'Nightmare in Silver' properly introduced us to Clara's actorly-challenged brood of mardy, ridiculously deductive wards (we're not sure what's worse - their initial and immediately casual assumption that Clara's a time-traveller, or Clara's complete lack of bluff-titude in riposte).
Faced with blackmail, Clara and the Doctor decided there's no other way of keeping them schtum than by pandering to their foot-stompy demands and taking them on an interstellar adventure.
Chance of capture, death and imminent 'Worst Nanny of the Year' award? Exceedingly high.
Unfortunately their futuristic jaunt to a dilapidated galactic theme park (think Jurassic Park meets Apollo 13) was scuppered somewhat by a surprisingly militarised security patrol, and the unexpected arrival of an army of new and improved Cybermen.
And when the Doctor himself was infiltrated by the Cybermen's deadly new upgrade, he was forced to wage a very personal, internal war while Clara battled the oncoming Cyber-horde.
Intriguing villainous upgrades and nerdy nostalgic throwbacks aside, 'Nightmare in Silver' was a relatively straight-forward Who sci-fi action adventure. It's hard to ignore the fanboy-pleasing evolution of the Cybermen, but similarly, for a tale that had 'Nightmare' in the title, it's also hard to feel as though Gaiman missed an opportunity to reinstate the psychotic cyborgs as one of the Doctor's most underwear-soilingly terrifying enemies.
Alas, the story was further let down by two of the most annoying, talentless and punchable Who kids in recent times. Now, I'm not exactly what you'd call a fan of infanticide, but if the Cybermen had ripped Angie clean in half mid-way through her 'comical' rant about the lack of 3G on a futuristic far-flung planet, I think we all would've coped.
It was a tonal shift that immediately brought to mind a comparison to a far more annoying episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures - not a bad thing in itself, but a comparison that feels out of place in Who's modern attempts to balance adult with family entertainment.
Thankfully, it was far from a total performance blow-out. Not only were the kids sidetracked pretty quickly, but Warwick Davis brought a solid mix of understated drama and humour to Porridge, while Matt Smith was given one of his weightiest, most complex scripts to date.
As soon as he'd been Borg-arized, he was forced to play two polar-opposite sides of the same Timelord coin, and he delivered with a captivating back-and-forth that never slipped into machiavellian campery.
While it was a done-in-one episode distinct enough to function in and of itself, Gaiman's script also sowed the seeds for a few tantalising plot threads, including the wider universe's collective acknowledgement that there's a distinctly Doctor-sized hole in the history of everything, and the evolution of a nemesis that could play serious havoc for both short and long-term storylines (nanotechish villainy FTW!).
And so we come back to the troublesome nature of the curse of the super-talented.
Judged in normal terms, this was far from a terrible episode. But judged in Gaiman-terms, it can't help but feel like a bit of a let-down.
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