This Saturday, acclaimed author Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Coraline) will return to Doctor Who with Nightmare in Silver, an episode he was commissioned to write by Steven Moffat with the request that he “make the Cybermen scary again”. This is Gaiman’s second offering to the Doctor Who universe, the first being The Doctor’s Wife, which subsequently went on to win the 2011 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. And Gaiman, a lifelong fan of the franchise, was the perfect choice to give these classic monsters the treatment, and the “upgrade”, they so richly deserved. (Note: the full interview will be published, with all the details, following the airing of Nightmare in Silver on Saturday)
DarkMedia had the privilege to sit down with Neil during a press call earlier today, as he talked about his history with Doctor Who, a dangerous game of chess, the revelation of the TARDIS as her own character, and the brilliance of Matt Smith.
On how he came to do his second Doctor Who episode, and what he thinks of the Cybermen: “The entire episode began with an email from Steven Moffat, which was a sequence of emails. The first one saying would I like to write a Doctor Who episode, going on from The Doctor’s Wife, and me writing back and saying I really didn’t have time, and life was completely mental, and I was sorry. And then him writing back and saying if I could find time, somehow, he’d really like it if I made the Cybermen scary again. And that one got to me. Because when I was a kid, I was a huge Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) fan; Patrick Troughton was my Doctor. And I remember (The) Moonbase, the second outing, I think it was, of the Cybermen. And I was terrified of them; I was much more scared of them in a way than I was the Daleks. They were sort of quiet, and they slipped in and out of rooms, and it was very off-putting. So, I started thinking, ‘I like the design of the clanky-clanky Steampunk Cybermen, but I know that their time is coming up, and wouldn’t it be fun to see if I could make them more scary?’ After that, I think I originally proposed actually doing it in a fairground, like something in the 1950s. And I just got the idea of doing it on an English beach, with Cybermen coming up out of the sea, millions of them, and crunching over the pebbles, and being told that that was kind of not really going to work, budget-wise, anyway.”
On the evolution of the Cybermen: “I just figured, my phone doesn’t look anything like it did five years ago, and that didn’t look anything like it did ten years ago. My computer looks nothing like it looked like fifteen years ago. And I felt, well, Cybermen talk about upgrading, let’s watch them upgrade. And what would an upgraded Cyberman do?
On the Cybermen versus the Borg (Star Trek: The Next Generation): “I would love to reclaim the cybernetic menace crown (from the Borg).”
On his role in the personification of the TARDIS (in The Doctor’s Wife): “You know, I really don’t think I did very much. I grew up definitely considering the TARDIS a character in Doctor Who, and the only really constant, not just Companion, but character. In some ways more consistently there than even the Doctor, because the TARDIS didn’t really change the way that it looked. It was still this wonderful blue box. It was bigger on the inside, even if that inside changed a little. And from a very early episode that was called (The) Edge of Destruction, it was obvious the TARDIS was sentient. I used to love the way that the Doctor would talk to the TARDIS, call her ‘Old Girl’ and things like that. Mostly what I did was remind people that the TARDIS is also a living entity. I love the idea of a TARDIS who doesn’t particularly like a companion, just in the same way there were companions, Leela springs to mind, the old Tom Baker Companion (after whom the character on Futurama was named), who the TARDIS really likes. It was part of the script, for reasons never adaquetely explained. The TARDIS ‘liked Leela a lot’. So, if she doesn’t like Clara, that’s something that may or may ever not be explained. They may get deeper with it or not. But I like that. I like that the TARDIS is a character.”
On humanity becoming more electronic/cybertronic: “How many pieces can you replace in a person and still have them be a person? I was talking to a friend yesterday who had mentioned that she had knee surgery; they basically replaced her entire knee with something artificial. And I can absolutely imagine myself with a huge number of artificial bits. As long as I felt like ‘me’, I don’t think I’d mind. I’m ridiculously open-minded about this. I quite like the idea of downloading my entire consciousness into a computer, and then invading every network in the world and slowly taking…oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that, should I? Scrap that. Pretend I never said anything. Definitely nothing about taking over the world by downloading my consciousness into a every computer in the world.”
On which part of the Doctor Who mythos he’d like to work on in the future: “I’d love to create a monster. I’d really like to create a monster, and have it be one that’s interesting enough, or fun enough, to come back written by somebody else, or turn up completely reinvented, or whatever. I’d love to do that. Feeling like you’ve actually left something behind. You know I love that Terry (Nation) left us the Daleks. And I love that Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis left us the Cybermen. I love that the great intelligence has come back, but I miss the Yeti. I would love huge, shambling, robotic Yeti, because I loved them as a kid. So, yeah, I’d love to do that. That would be wonderful. The trouble with everything these days, for me, is time. There’s only one me, and there are a ridiculous number of demands on my time with so many things I’m trying to do, and it’s so much more when I’m going to get time to do this, if I get time. I think they’ll have me back. They seem to like me, and I know I definitely like them.”
On how the mythos of Doctor Who has impacted his own life: “In terms of how Doctor Who, and the mythos of Doctor Who, has influenced my life. I think it’s impossible for me to say, because I have no idea. There’s no control, out there. I can’t actually ever get to meet a Neil Gaiman who, at the age of three, wasn’t watching Doctor Who. Who, at the age of four, wasn’t imagining how things can be bigger on the inside. At the age of five, wasn’t buying a copy (or persuading his father to buy a copy) of The Dalek World annual on (London) Victoria Station, and taking it home, and studying it, and learning all about Daleks. And discovering Daleks couldn’t see the color red, and then worrying about the Red Daleks; whether they were invisible to their friends. And discovering that measles was a Dalek disease, which not a lot of people know, but I learned because I read it in The Dalek World Anthology. Doctor Who was so primary. It was the first mythology I ever learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies, I knew the TARDIS stood for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’. And I knew that the TARDIS had a food machine that made things that looked like Mars bars, but tasted like bacon and eggs. This is all such a part of what I knew as a kid; I still have the battered copy of David Whitaker’s Doctor Who and the Daleks. So, I don’t know. I know it’s been unusually influential on the shape of my head, and how I see things. And I know that I feel ridiculously comfortable in that universe, and I will keep going back for as long as they’ll have me, and as long as I can find the time.”
Nightmare in Silver airs this Saturday on BBC America a 8/9 c. And please stay tuned for our weekly coverage of Doctor Who, and all the latest Who news, right here on DarkMedia.com.
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