Doctor Who: 11 New Who Moments That Never Made It To Screen
5. Submersible Cybermen Nightmare In Silver
As far as expensive scenes go, Neil Gaiman really outdid himself this time by planning to set Nightmare In Silver on a beach and include a scene of the Cybermen rising from the ocean. A concept that, coincidentally, Tom Baker and Ian Marter threw around in the 1970s for their planned but never made film Doctor Who Meets Scratchman. As you can imagine, realising a scene like this would be insanely expensive and the BBC were already putting a lot into Nightmare In Silver with a complete redesign of the Cybermen so the idea was dropped. The corresponding scenes in Gaimans final draft and the televised episode were a homage to both Tomb Of The Cybermen and Earthshock; Cybermen emerging from preservation in a network of tombs, and a shot of Cybermen walking out of a corridor copied three times and composited into one shot. Not as visually striking but rather more fitting for a story that fully reintroduced the Mondasian Cybermen for the first time. Another moment that never made it to the final draft of Nightmare In Silver is that the Doctors game of chess against the Cyberplanner was originally played against a very talkative Cyberman. Gaiman later decided that Matt Smith was talented enough to play both characters and rewrote the episode accordingly. While the resulting performance is incredible, Gaiman notes that Smith was less than pleased about having to learn so much extra dialogue.
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
