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Trivia / Doctor Who S33 E12 "Nightmare in Silver"

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  • Acting for Two: Matt Smith plays both the Doctor and Mr Clever in a delicious Gollum/Sméagol kind of performance, as well as a face-to-face encounter inside the Doctor's head.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: Warwick Davis thought it was a "thrill" to be on Doctor Who, especially in an episode involving the Cybermen and Neil Gaiman.
  • Completely Different Title: The French title is "Le Cyberplanificateur" (The Cyber-Planner).
  • Creator Backlash: Both Neil Gaiman and Matt Smith have expressed their disappointment and frustration with this story. Smith found the double acting role to be a hard job and received little support from the crew, whom Smith constantly voiced his frustrations at. Gaiman meanwhile enjoys the script as he wrote it but found that the finished product was misinterpreted by the director, leaving a lot of his intentions unclear. Gaiman revealed in 2018 that he felt like the product was being taken out of his control and being weakened without his consent, leaving him with a bitter experience. Whilst this hasn't altered his love of the show or his desire to return, it did lead him to demand full creative control over future projects based on his scripts.
  • Inspiration for the Work: In his portrayal of the Cybermen, Neil Gaiman was inspired by the legend of the Turk, a man-shaped automaton that could play chess. Despite its prowess, the Turk was a hoax. Its cabinet and mechanical man hid a person underneath it which when viewed seemingly only contained the Turk's machinery.
  • Prop Recycling: The soldiers are seen using the communicators from "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone".
  • Recycled Set: The theatre-repurposed-as-military-barracks is the same theatre-repurposed-as-military-barracks from "The Doctor's Daughter".
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Gaiman first wrote the story when the Doctor’s companion was going to be Beryl (back when her and Clara Oswald were separate entities). He saw her as “a Mary Poppins figure, so the idea was to have a kind of Mary Poppins adventure.” The characters of Artie and Angie (then called Godfrey and Charlotte), as well as the alien amusement park were created for her. When Steven Moffat changed plans and made Clara the new companion, Artie and Angie were transported to a 21st century setting.
    • Neil mentions in this article that he wanted to set it on a seaside fair and beach, with Cybermen rising up from the water. It had to be scrapped due to budget concerns. Gaiman’s ambitious idea of a Cybermen army was just too much. The beach gets mentioned as one of two possible defensible positions as a Development Gag.
    • The episode was supposed to have the Cyberiad with a group of Cybermen from all over the show’s history (including the ones from "The Tenth Planet") that seemed to be plotting against the Doctor. This element would eventually be dropped, while Gaiman also struggled to find a way to better involve the Doctor in the action. He finally came up with the idea of engaging the Doctor and the Cyber-Planner in a duel set inside the Time Lord's mind, affording Matt Smith the opportunity to give a very different onscreen performance.
    • Hedgewick's World was called Lampwick's World, before they found out that was also the name of a light fixture store.
    • Gaiman originally wanted the Cybermen to be silent, as he found the 1960s Cybermen much scarier than the Daleks "because they were quiet, and they slipped in and out of rooms".
  • Working Title: The Last Cyberman, Silver Ghosts, A Nightmare in Silver and The Last of the Cybermen.


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