minervr asked:
Mr. Gaiman sir!
Okay, that's enough formality. I have a question.
So recently, I discovered that nightmare in silver is a disliked episode of Doctor Who (I loved it, the dynamic of the doctor and cyberplanner? Love it).
Well, I have to ask, how much of it was changed without your saying if at all? And, do you ever feel regret for how the Cybermen became more robotic than cyborg?
Regardless, I absolutely adore the two episodes you've written for the show (the doctors wife is without flaw and no one can tell me otherwise)
I’m still fond of the original script for Nightmare in Silver.
The Cybermen I wanted to write would have been much more like the ones in Wheel in Space, which were the Cybermen that scared me, but what the show wanted were higher tech, upgradable Cybermen.
It was originally written for Beryl Montague, when she was going to be that season’s companion… (She became the short-lived Victorian governess who became Clara.)
and it ended differently too…
Spoilers for the first few minutes…
RT met Neil Gaiman, the writer of Nightmare in Silver, back in March at the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in London. Here’s an extract of that interview…
Neil, could you give us a non-spoilery encapsulation of the story?
Easily! It just stops at about minute three. The Doctor has been talked by Clara into taking the two kids she looks after, Artie and Angie, for an excursion, a day out, and he decides to take them to Hedgewick’s World, the biggest, best and most wonderful amusement park in the galaxy, a quarter of a million years in the future, because he has a golden ticket and it gets four people in for free, gets you free ice creams and it gets you to the front of any line, which is great because the lines for the Spacey Zoomer can go on for weeks. And that’s where it starts.
Unfortunately, it also starts with them discovering that Hedgewick’s World has been closed for several years and there’s almost nobody on it now except for a small army troop on manoeuvres and a mad old showman named Mr Webley who landed his spaceship there after it closed and is now there with a Cyberman that plays chess. That’s where it begins. This is also 1,000 years after the end of the big human/Cyberman war – where we won.
There are some well-known actors in the episode. Can you tell us about the characters they’re playing?
Jason Watkins plays Mr Webley, this wonderful, slightly alcoholic old showman touring the universe with a waxworks and a chess-playing Cyberman. Warwick Davis is his henchman, who is called Porridge. He’s affable, sweet and helps Webley and cannot wait to get off this planet.
Tamzin Outhwaite is a captain named Alice Ferren who’s in charge of the platoon doing troop exercises on an abandoned amusement park planet and as we discover, as the story goes on, it’s actually a punishment platoon. They’re all people who’ve got into trouble. She was sent there for disobeying orders. They’re not the kind of crack troop you’d want if it so happened that a Cyberman moves in – a new model Cyberman that we haven’t seen, who is absolutely lethal and hyper-intelligent…