Nightmare in Silver

Chapter the 295th, where Gaiman's in again, and seems game, but perhaps without as good an aim, man.

Plot:
The Doctor takes Clara and the two children she nannies (the Maitland kids) to a theme park planet in the future, a thousand years after a war with the Cybermen. The park is all but abandoned, with only a squad of soldiers on the planet plus the last of the original carnival folk Webley remaining, waiting for someone to give him a lift out of there. He shows the TARDIS travellers his main exhibit, a chess playing Cyberman. It's just an empty shell, though, with his assistant Porridge inside controlling things. Or is it? There are small Cyber-creatures scuttling about, and they reanimate Webley's Cyberman, as well as having built up an army of thousands of other new design Cybermen hidden on the planet. Webley and the two children are brought under cyber-control, as is the Doctor. The Time Lord fights the efforts to turn him into the Cyber Planner, mentally visualising this as two versions of himself battling for control. Meanwhile, Clara and the troops attempt a rearguard action, holding off the masses of Cybermen. This is difficult as the Cybermen have new powers to move very fast and silently (luckily only one of them uses these powers). The Doctor manages to free the kids from Cyber control; then, just when all hope is thought lost, he briefly halts the Cyber advance and the remaining soldiers and Clara are not killed. Porridge - who turns out to be the runaway Emperor of many galaxies - transmats everyone and the TARDIS onto his ship and they nuke the entire site from orbit.

Context:

I watched this from the BBC iPlayer over two nights in March 2024, on my own. The reason I split it in half was because of writer's cramp. I watch stories taking notes longhand in a pad, but the initial action of Nightmare in Silver is so busy that I could barely keep up, and had to have a break. After the first fifteen minutes or so it settles down a bit, but it never settles down completely - there's a lot of stuff crammed in there. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can work for a Doctor Who story to pack in a lot of different elements and concepts at a fast pace in a limited time, particularly in the more modern era of post 2005 Who; but, it's always a bit of a risk...

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 23rd season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

A clear memory about this story is from long before it was shown, November 2012, when I saw a news article that confirmed its working title The Last Cyberman. Eve de Leon Allen, the young actor playing Angie Maitland - who must have been mortified, poor thing - left her copy of the script in the back of a Cardiff taxi. A student found it and handed it back to the BBC without leaking any details (see here for the full story). It ramped up the excitement a good six months or more before the broadcast to know that Neil Gaiman was writing a Cyberman story. I didn't watch it go out live, as I was in Hamburg because of a big project for the day job. It was such a big project that they'd had a rehearsal of the launch over a weekend a couple of months before (coming home from which I endured a difficult journey in the snow, as retold in the First Time Round section of this blog post). The real thing was over the weekend of the 11th and 12th May 2013. I did at least get to watch some new (to me) Who that weekend, as there had been a leak of a recently recovered episode of The Underwater Menace, and it was available to watch online for a while. I celebrated the day job project's success by watching a Troughton episode on my phone in a hotel with the worst wi-fi in the universe (as retold in the First Time Round section of this blog post). I got home late on the Tuesday, and watched the recorded Nightmare of Silver on the Wednesday. I found it crushingly disappointing on that first watch, alas. Watching episode two of The Underwater Menace episode was more enjoyable; heck, struggling to get home in a blizzard was probably more enjoyable, or at least I thought so at the time. Would I change my opinion after this latest watch?

Reaction:

When I covered the writer of Nightmare of Silver Neil Gaiman's previous story for the show The Doctor's Wife, I wrote some things that are worth repeating here, as they are even more relevant when discussing Nightmare in Silver. I wrote that Gaiman has "always been a fan writer in the best sense of the term" and that consistently in his work "he revels in upending the toy-box of myths and legends, both ancient and pop, and playing with them in new ways". In the first of his two Doctor Who stories he polished up a cornerstone of Doctor Who mythology, the TARDIS; but, there is so much else in the show's long history. The chance to write about the Cybermen, who have built up a mythology of their own in all their appearances since first appearing in 1966, must have been enticing. Despite appearing in almost every story, the TARDIS had accumulated very little information to be assimilated into a 45-minute narrative: it's a constant companion of the Doctor, a bit telepathic, it rarely arrived where intended - that's about it. The Cybermen though come with a lot of backstory, mostly fragmentary, often contradictory: they're from Mondas, they're from Telos, they're from a parallel Earth, they died out years ago, they're still going strong, they were involved in an interplanetary war with humans, people on Earth have never heard of them, they're allergic to gold, they're not allergic to gold. Trying to put even a fraction of all that together in one screenplay is likely to produce something, well, fragmentary and contradictory. Gaiman's script appears to be attempting to include everything (even down to specific in-jokey references such as a weightless moonwalk sequence harking back to 1960s Cybermen story The Moonbase), and the result is predictably a mess.

A good way to see something has gone badly wrong is to look at Jason Watkins' character Webley. Watkins is a good actor, and a guest appearance by him is something of a boon. The character is introduced early on, an impecunious showman with a faded grandeur: it seems that he will be a significant presence in the narrative. A few minutes in, though, he's grabbed by a Cyberman long thought inactive (a nice jump scare, to be fair), is converted to cyber-control, and after that he just stands around. For nearly forty minutes, he just stands around, very occasionally spouting some exposition. Does he live or die by the end? Did that ever even get confirmed on screen? If so, I've already forgotten. The two Maitland children too spend a lot of the running time doing nothing of any consequence. In the wider season outside of this story, there have been a few clunky story beats required to engineer their presence in this story. In an easy to miss snatch of dialogue it's mentioned that the Cybermen needed children to create their Cyber Planner, but the Doctor's brain is even more suitable. So, the Doctor could have incited all the subsequent incident just by landing there, as he always does every week without two children in tow - they aren't needed at all. A big question that was in my mind most of the way through the story was 'Why now?' and I'm not convinced that snatch of dialogue adequately explained it: the Cybermen have built up a ridiculously large army, vastly outnumbering any resistance forces. Did they really need to wait for a Cyber Planner before they took action? Don't they have some standing order inbuilt along the lines of 'kill the rag-tag band of misfit soldiers and take over the planet'? It wouldn't take a whole lot of planning. And if they haven't had a Cyber Planner up to now, who planned the rebuilding of their forces?

Once the Cyber Planner is established, there are still logical flaws in the Cyber activity presented. In a bravura sequence, a redesigned (and it's a good re-design) Cyberman is shown in new speedy, silent mode zipping around lethally. So, why would any of them move any other way? Why does the army revert to stomping around later? Why is there even an army? One stealth mode Cyberman could wipe out every human on the planet in the blink of an eye. It's a long-standing flaw of the steel giants that they are presented as invulnerable, so any script has to give them a new vulnerability each time as otherwise they'd easily win, which would get boring quickly. These vulnerabilities are often not very convincing, but in Nightmare in Silver there isn't anything offered at all. In fact, it's shown - Borg-style - that the Cybs can adjust and upgrade to any weapon used against them. There's certainly no reason given why they can't all be in the stealth / zip / bullet-time mode all the time. This links in to a difficulty the script has in choosing between the two different styles of Cyberman story historically: creeping horror where there may be one or a few Cybs infiltrating a human base, hiding around corners, or quickfire action where they attack in large numbers. In a longer story, it has been possible to do both as different phases, but this story's too short for that; the setting of an eerie abandoned space funfair seems to have been picked (and perhaps the children included) for scenes of the first type, but then there aren't any, and the story lurches into the action sequences (which could have been set anywhere). This is possibly down to the director not accentuating the horror enough in the early scenes, but the script is not helping by trying to do too much.

There isn't very much for the Doctor to do in the action either. Gaiman shunts him off to one side, tied up (sometimes literally) in a mental battle with the psychic force of the Cybermen. This is personified by Smith playing the darker side in a battle against himself: Doctor and Cyber-Doctor. The trouble is that the Doctor isn't shown as that heroic before or after this battle is joined, so the two sides are not in sharp enough relief; he deliberately sticks around investigating instead of getting two children to safety, making comments to suggest he knows full well that he's putting them in danger. Later, he makes comments objectifying Clara (including an unforgivable line about her wearing a skirt that's too tight, which I suspect came from showrunner Steven Moffat). This is all when he's not under the influence. Gaiman has gone on record as saying he wanted to show people that Matt Smith could act, but it only shows me that he can overact. The material is too static and Smith perhaps thought he needed to go a bit wild to give it some oomph, or maybe the director didn't know exactly what tone for which he should aim. The Doctor's not the only character that doesn't contribute much to events; Tamzin Outhwaite is wasted in this as much as Jason Watkins; Warwick Davis has a bit more to do, but his character on the page is inconsistent - it might have been better to have his runaway Emperor backstory outlined a bit more rather than just be hinted, but maybe there wasn't time with everything else going on. The story's not 100% bad, but when judged in terms of the ratio of potential to result, it's one of the worst misfires of Doctor Who's history.

Connectivity:

Both Nightmare in Silver and The Sensorites feature a four-person TARDIS crew being transported between a planet and a spaceship without using the TARDIS. Both planets contain many members of a race of creatures that can communicate telepathically (well, sort of in the Cybermen's case - they are all linked by the Cyberiad). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Never go back? In an acceptance speech on his being given a Hugo award for The Doctor's Wife, its author Neil Gaiman joked that "only a fool or a madman would try again – so I'm on my third draft now", confirming that he was working on another script for Doctor Who and giving away that at some level he knew it was a risk. His first story for the series had been pretty much universally loved. Could lightning strike twice? Early on in his tenure, Steven Moffat, lead writer and exec producer (and the person who commissioned Gaiman), occasionally tempted writers who were names, but not necessarily for stuff like Doctor Who, to contribute a script for the series. Simon Nye and Richard Curtis, each known more for comedies, both wrote for Moffat's first season in charge; Gaiman's first script was made in Moffat's second year, and Nightmare in Silver for the third. Nye and Curtis's efforts (Amy's Choice and Vincent and the Doctor respectively) were both well thought of, but perhaps not to the stratospheric heights of The Doctor's Wife, but neither writer was tempted back. Gaiman's history as a writer up to this point was more aligned with Who in terms of genre, though he was at the pure fantasy end of the spectrum, but he wasn't by that point known for television. He'd written screenplays periodically in the past, some for TV, but it was by no means his full-time job - he was much more used to writing comics or bestselling novels. He didn't need the money, and could presumably have found more lucrative ways to spend his time. As noted in the Reaction section above, he was doing this for love of the programme, and he had at least enough love for two stories, not just one.

Looking back, the throwaway joke of the acceptance speech proved hauntingly prophetic. Nightmare in Silver was greeted with a reaction that was pretty much the polar opposite of that received by The Doctor's Wife, and in the years since it has not had any critical re-evaluation. It's generally seen as a misfire. Gaiman went on record a few years after Nightmare in Silver's broadcast that the treatment of his second story left "a bad taste in [his] mouth" saying - perhaps a bit generously - that the story was "widely regarded as having some good bits in it – but being rather a curate's egg". He also said at the same time of both his two stories that as far as he was concerned "both of the scripts were of equal quality". This goes beyond generosity for me, and I struggle to believe it, at least of the shooting script. I cannot think that all the issues in the final product came in between the page and the screen: as set out in the Reaction section above, there's just too many elements, many of which are not used well or barely at all. No director or production designer or even showrunner added all of those. I can only think that Gaiman is talking about the scripts he produced in toto, including the changes of multiple redrafts. The vision in his head may have been as good as The Doctor's Wife, but the process of making that into an episode of Doctor Who, with the compromises inherent in that process, mangled it. So, what went wrong? There's nothing on record to definitely confirm it, but there are strong indications that it was something to do with work between the writer and the showrunner, Gaiman and Moffat.

A caveat is warranted here: we're entering the theatre of rumour now. I've seen some wild theories out there, and I won't give them an airing. Moffat's job was to help Gaiman to tailor his vision to best fit the show's format. They'd worked together to this end successfully on The Doctor's Wife, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't happen that way again. Moffat didn't want a bad story in his season - who would? - and had indeed laid down the challenge to Gaiman in the first place with the commission to make the Cybermen "scary again". Gaiman generated a lot of ideas, but this was reportedly what he did for The Doctor's Wife also (there's no definitive source for this, by the way, but it chimes with Gaiman's work elsewhere which is always chock-full of different elements, some that might challenge even the biggest of budgets). Some have speculated that Moffat just wasn't as available as he had been first time round; but, based on everything Doctor Who fans have learnt about the showrunner's job over the years, there's never a moment of peace, it's always busy. Moffat would have had no less but probably no more distractions from focus on Gaiman's Nightmare in Silver script. He might have had less time in a different way, though. It may have been forgotten in all this discourse that The Doctor's Wife was originally scheduled for the series before the one in which it eventually aired. It was deferred because of worries about the overall season budget, but this presumably allowed a longer gestation period. It's easy to say with hindsight, but perhaps the same should have happened with Nightmare in Silver: leave it a year, work on honing things down to a central idea and visual, and produce something wonderful for Capaldi's first season. Some things are worth waiting for.

History, alas, went a different way; but, there is a happy ending of sorts. Gaiman has said that he was "really glad" in one way that his second Doctor Who episode didn't work out as he intended, as it inspired him to take more control of his future projects, becoming showrunner for the TV adaptation of the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett Good Omens. "I can't just write the scripts, hand them over to somebody and hope that I get something fantastic back. I may or I may not. If this is going to be f**ked up, it's going to be f**ked up by me personally, with love and dedication. And I will hope that it isn't, but it needs to be done properly, and I need to care."

In Summary:

A mess, which is a shame.