Doctor Who: Nightmare in Silver Review – Pondering 8 Moves Neil Gaiman Made
WARNING! SPOILER UPGRADE IN PROGRESS: All units are required to prepare for assimilation of spoilers and speculation for Doctor Who Series 7a and 7b, especially episode 13: Nightmare in Silver. Once properly converted, units may submit progress reports in the comments below. The first game I remember playing is Candy Land. It consisted of a simple track of colored squares. Players advanced by choosing a card and moving to the space that matched the color of the card. The objective was to reach the end of the track first. Even for a child of 3 or 4 this got boring amazingly fast. Luckily, the board was printed with bright candy-based graphics and you could simply move your piece off the track and spend hours making up stories about the people who lived in the molasses swamp. It struck me, as I watched the chess match between the Doctor and the cyber-Doctor, that the aim of most games is quite similar. There may be more strategy involved, but the objective is simply to reach the end to win. Thats a fixed point. So the only way to truly defeat the game, to end its control over your actions, is to change the parameters to walk off the track. Writer Neil Gaimans Nightmare in Silver is a cheat in the most creative sense of the word. The game has been changed Cybermen are now endlessly adaptable and after his conversion the Doctor is not safe within his own head. It is perhaps the closest weve come to exploring the idea of the dark Doctor an all powerful being without a conscience a sociopath unable to access his emotions. The eleventh Doctor has made some exceeding dark choices this series, including the one he makes in this episode to investigate the amusement park without first returning the children to a safer place. Was he intentionally using them as bait? If so, perhaps the Doctor and his cyber-alter ego were not so far removed from each other after all. Rules are made up. They only exist if all players adhere to them. The second someone tests the boundaries everything shifts. Lets explore some of the ways Neil Gaiman changed the game.