ELIMINATE ALL WEAKNESS
Award-winning writer Neil Gaiman talks candidly about his ambition to upgrade the Cybermen in his 2013 story Nightmare in Silver.
[Published in The Essential Doctor Who #1 Cybermen (Panini UK, March 2014), pp.104-7. Posted here by kind persmission of Doctor Who Magazine editor Tom Spilsbury.]
In
June 2013 the current affairs programme Newsnight spoke to Neil Gaiman about his new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and his two episodes of Doctor Who.
“I was incredibly happy,” he said of his first one, The
Doctor's Wife. “I got 95, 96,
97 per cent of what I wanted. The new one...” But before he gave
his verdict on Nightmare in Silver,
the interviewer changed the subject.
Gaiman
laughs at that now. “Yes, they missed a scoop,” he says. What
score would he give his second episode? “I
don't think I'm going to answer. Truthfully,
a lot of the things I wanted didn't really happen, just because of
the way things were shot, or because of time and the nature of the
beast.”
His brief from showrunner Steven Moffat
was to make the Cybermen scary. Where did he begin? “I made a
mental list of things that troubled me watching The Moonbase
[1967] as a kid. The fact that they were kind of stealthy. I wanted
the new Cybermen to be really silent, to lose the whole
clompy-clompy thing.”
Did he
not like the previous version of the Cybermen, introduced in the 2006
story Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel?
“I enormously enjoyed the kind
of steampunk design thing, and that you could hear them coming from a
long way away. But there's something really nice about Cybermen just
flitting in and being deadly.”
Another
idea was to make the Cybermen more ant-like in their behaviour,
acting as a group instead of as individuals. “For
example,” says Gaiman, “when they cross the electrified moat, I
originally had them dying, more coming and dying, and then more
coming, marching over the bodies. The moat has 1,000 dead Cybermen in
it, and 100,000 marching over them.”
Other
ideas were thrown into the mix. “Steven Moffat's thing was having
Cybermen that could upgrade on the fly: you throw things at them,
they think about it and upgrade. I
wanted them silent and I wanted their faces to look more human –
two dots and a line, like the original ones.”
The
script for Nightmare in Silver
included a description of the Cybermen that was open to
interpretation:
The new model CYBERMAN is standing in an open doorway. Gleaming. Silver. Absolutely immobile.
How
involved was Gaiman in the new design? “Oh, quite a lot. Me
and [Moffat's co-executive producer] Caroline Skinner got to work on the
faces. They sent us some designs and we didn't like them. Long emails
were written explaining what made the old Cybermen scary.”
In those emails, Gaiman cited The
Uncanny Valley – a 1970 article written by Japanese roboticist
Masahiro Mori. The idea is that the more a robot looks or acts like a
real human, the more disturbing we find it. “And
that's what I got,” says Gaiman. “The body wasn't quite what I
expected – it was more Iron Man – but
I was very pleased with the face.”
Today, The Uncanny
Valley is a benchmark for those working in fields such as robotics,
3D animation and reconstructive surgery. When the Cybermen were first
created in 1966, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis were also inspired by
developments in medical science.
“Heart
transplants were just about to start,” says Gaiman. “People thought it
was threatening and weird that you could have pacemakers or
artificial limbs. When you've replaced all the bits, what are you
left with? That was a real, good 1960s problem to use in a story.”
Don't
we still find it problematic today? “Yeah – and I used it in The
Doctor's Wife.
But last year I met a really nice model whose legs had been
amputated. She'd become an athlete. She had carbon-fibre sprung legs
designed to run with. She doesn't wear high heels if she wants to
look taller, she wears different legs. It's not that we lose our
humanity, it's more, 'We're human, we can do this...'”
Gaiman was keen to use the latest technological advances in his
story. “I looked at what's worrying and weird in contemporary
computers. A lot of it is the web: all these devices talk to each
other. My phone is a little computer that talks to every other
computer out there. The 1960s Cybermen were about replacing human
beings part by part until you get things that aren't quite human any
more. But the scariest thing now is that they're all in touch.
They're plugged into the web and we're not. That
was something I tried to do with the Cyberplanner,” he continues.
“I loved the idea of Cybermen using the Doctor's brain – all the
things they could find there and drain from it – to communicate.”
That meant Matt Smith playing two roles – the Doctor,
and a partially cybernetic version of the Doctor. “Some people have
said, 'But the Cyber Doctor
is so emotional'”, says Gaiman. “They wanted Matt to have played
the Cyberplanner much more like Spock from
Star Trek. But
no, it's like riding round in a borrowed car – the Cyberplanner is
in there digging about, seeing what works. I liked the idea of
bringing up a bit of Doctors Nine and Ten as part of that. It's a
mechanical consciousness using what's in the Doctor's head to
communicate with the Doctor.” And trying to rile him so that he
makes mistakes? “Absolutely. It uses what it finds against him.”
There are similarities between
Nightmare in Silver and The
Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Both are about revisiting something strange and scary seen in
childhood – the old Cybermen in the episode, a man's suicide in the
novel – and exploring them from an adult perspective
Gaiman agrees. “They were being written at the same time and I had
the same stuff going through my head. I started the Victorian version
of Nightmare in
Silver,
then wrote The
Ocean at the End of the Lane,
then went back to the next draft of the script.”
The
Victorian version of Nightmare
in Silver...?
“Oh yeah,” he nods. “Originally, the companion in that script
was Beryl, a Victorian governess in charge of two Victorian kids.
Beryl was a Mary Poppins figure, so the idea was to have a kind of
Mary Poppins adventure. When Steven changed that plan and Beryl
became Clara, I said, 'Hang on, I've started writing the Victorian
one.' He was like, 'It's fine, she looks after two kids anyway.'”
How
did that change affect Angie and Artie's roles in the final draft?
“They definitely had less import and impact than in the original
script. I would have loved to keep the early scenes, with the Doctor
explaining that rule number one is no kids, and Clara still getting
her way. Lots
of people have said, 'Why would he take kids in the TARDIS?' The answer was in the script, but got cut.
Or they say, 'Why do they bed down in Webley's rooms and not in the
TARDIS?' But that was in the script, too.”
It's
not just Artie and Angie. “A Cyberman passes Missy [a member of the punishment platoon], then drops its arm which doubles back and kills her. There
were reasons for that in an earlier draft:
an arm getting thrown over an electrified fence and one going through
a narrow space that a full Cyberman couldn't. It got cut.
"It's
what happens," he says, laughing. "There's lots I'm happy
with. We now have quieter, slicker Cybermen. And Steven had a wooden
Cyberman in The Time of
the Doctor
– that's awesome!”
Would
he like to write for the Cybermen again? “Next time, I'd love to
create a new monster, and do what they did with the Autons in [the 1970
story] Spearhead
from Space. I
don't think I've ever passed a shop window with plastic dummies in it
without wondering just a little if the hands were going to come down
and start shooting. That's part of the fun of Doctor
Who
– creating situations that make people see something they've always
known with new eyes. And then write upset letters to the Radio
Times.
Yeah, next time I'll write a really
scary one...”
DELETE, DELETE
“My
favourite little scene didn't get shot," says Gaiman, referring
to the web-connected nature of the new Cybermen. "Right at the
end, a little Cybermite has survived, its light flashing as it beams
information. There was a draft where we follow the beam to Cyberman
headquarters, somewhere far off in space, where all sorts of
different models of Cybermen essentially sit round a table, going,
'Okay, now we know what the Doctor is.' The one at the head of the
table would have been a Tenth
Planet,
cloth-faced Cyberman.”
The
script also asked for a 1960s Cyberman to be included in Webley's
display of Cyber relics at the start. “I figured that would be
relatively easy to do,” says Gaiman. “I thought they'd get one
from a Doctor Who
exhibition. As it was, we just did a couple of the more recent ones.”
Comments
Post a Comment