An Evening with Neil Gaiman: Memory, Magic and Survival

The magnificent Neil Gaiman has been doing that thing again recently where he flies all around the world in a remarkably short space of time, like a novelist Father Christmas, visiting all the good bookshops and literary societies to give them the gift of his latest book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

I was fortunate enough to catch Gaiman on his whistle-stop tour of the UK for a Q&A at the Royal Society of Literature (and a couple of nights previously in the Apple store on Regent Street), where he discussed his first adult novel in over eight years and how it came to be. Chairing the Q&A was the Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armistead.

Tell us about The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel I've ever written completely, one-hundred percent entirely accidentally. Any other time I've written a novel, I've known I was going to be writing a novel, I knew what kind of a novel it was going to be, I knew the shape of the book, and then I went off and wrote it. I knew that Stardust was going to be a thin book that would feel like a fairy tale; I knew that American Gods was going to be something the size and shape of a brick, and that it would be a big, rambling thing; I knew that Anansi Boys was going to be a funny book about the length of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, because that was the kind of thing I wanted to make.

But The Ocean at the End of the Lane... It was last year and my wife, the inestimable Amanda Palmer [there's a whistle from the audience] – thank you, she is very whistle-worthy – she had gone off to Melbourne, Australia. She had gone to Melbourne to make an album, which eventually she finished, it's called Theatre is Evil, and I didn't expect really to have a problem with this. I thought, 'I'll go off and write.' And then I discovered that when your wife goes off to make an album, she winds up in another relationship with the album that she's making, that kind of excludes you. I actually understood this, because I'm pretty much like that when I'm writing a novel; I batten down the hatches and everybody else in my life just shrugs and waits for me to come back out again. But in this case I was really missing Amanda, and she was gone, she was sending me happy texts, telling me how her album was going, and that was about it... And I thought, 'I miss her. I'll write her a short story, that's what I'll do...'

Some years ago, about 2003, I bought a mini. And I really liked the mini; I loved things about it, like the fact that I was in proportion to the new minis out there, roughly the same size that I as a small boy had been to our little mini. There was a very nice consistency to that. I remember just talking with my dad – he'd come out to America – we were talking about minis. And I said: “You know, you used to have that lovely, little white mini. I loved that car. Why did you get rid of it?”
He went, “Ah. I've never told you that story, have I?”
And I said, “No. You have never told me that story.”
“Well, we had a lodger. He was South African. He'd come over from South Africa, and he'd smuggled out lots of money with him from his friends that he'd promise he'd bank for them. He had lots of money with him. He came to England, and he discovered the casino in Brighton. Initially, he lost all his money, and he only planned to dip into his friends money until he'd made all of his money back, but then he didn't have anything. He came home, stole our car, drove it down the lane and he killed himself in it.”
And I said, “What?!”
“Yep. I sold the car that afternoon. I knew your mum would never get back in it, ever again, and that was the end of that car.”

My reaction to this anecdote was not sorrow for somebody who had died, it was instead this weird seven-year-old resentment that something interesting had happened that I hadn't known about! I was the kind of kid who thought interesting things happened in books, but never happened in real life, and something had happened and I hadn't known... So that sort of sat there at the back of my head, and I kept thinking 'wouldn't it be interesting if I had known' or 'if that were a story, where would that story have gone?'

Then Amanda goes away, and I missed her, and I thought, 'you know, do a story. I'll do Amanda a story.' She doesn't really like fantasy very much, but she likes me, and I tried taking her to places I had lived before, just to show her what they look like. I kept having to go, “but this isn't actually what it was like when I lived here, because now they've built houses all over it.” So I thought, 'I'll take – not the family, but the landscape – of the world I grew up in and I will have a character who is a lot like a seven-year-old me, who lives in books a lot, and I'll set it in that landscape, and it will be a short story. Then I'll send it to Amanda, and then she'll be happy that I've done this thing for her. Then I'll get on with the real work that I'm meant to be doing while here in Florida, like writing an episode of Doctor Who that makes the Cybermen scary, and the other stuff that I'm meant to be doing.'

So that was my plan. It was a really good plan. After several weeks, I looked around and thought, 'you know, this isn't a short story. It's a novelette. They're about 10,000 words, it'll be one of those.' And somewhere in the middle of the following week I thought, 'well, it's obviously a novella.' Then I kept writing it. A few weeks later, I sent an email to my lovely editor Jane Morpeth over here, and my editor Jennifer Brehl in America saying, “I just need to warn you: I appear to be writing a novella. I have no idea what we'll do with it once it's done, but just so you know there's this thing that I'm working on.”

And then I kept writing it... Amanda finished her album... She came to Dallas to mix her album, and I flew in and spent the first couple of days sitting in coffee shops just finishing the book, and then I started typing it. Every night, I would read her what I'd written before bed, and then she'd fall asleep. I have told people that story and they go, “weren't you upset?!” I say “No!” I loved it. She'd wake up the next morning, and I'd ask her where she'd remember up to, she'd tell me and I'd start from there.

When I'd finished the end of that week, I'd finished typing my second draft, and I did a word count. I sent a very surprised email to Jane and Jennifer saying, “I appear to have accidentally written a novel.”

So that was the book. Not necessarily what was going on inside my head as things were being written, but those were the circumstances in which the book was written. It was, from my perspective, a very small, personal book, and I wasn't expecting the reactions I started to get.

I did a signing the other day in Bath, that started about nine-thirty (pm) and finished at one (am), and there were actually people coming up on stage at one o'clock in the morning saying “it's really good.”

[He reads an excerpt of the book – I won't transcribe it, you'll just have to read the book, which you should anyway, it's really bloody good.]

It's interesting that these monstrous creatures make their entry by giving away money. Is this a sort of anti-capitalist statement?!

Not really. It's much more to do with how peculiarly important money can be when you're a kid, because you don't actually have an income source. I, as a kid, was fascinated with money, because I couldn't really understand it; you got it from your parents. Sometimes you'd be really lucky and somebody would come to stay, a friend of your dad's, and they'd actually give you half a crown. Power! I could go into a sweet shop and buy everything I wanted! I could go into a bookshop and buy two books!

So I loved the idea, because we have the suicide and the suicide is driven by money, and I liked the idea of a creature who was by its own rights not evil, trying to do good by people – trying to give people what they wanted at least – giving people money in ways that possibly were not entirely the best form. So that was really where that began, and then of course as the story carried on I had to find out what it was that was giving them money, and once I had created a big – I don't want to give away too much, you've got to read the book – but you encounter relatively soon Ursula Monkton. Ursula Monkton was enormously fun to write. And she always comes with both names; occasionally she's referred to as the thing that calls itself Ursula Monkton, but I liked the idea that she was like Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins from Hell.

Absolutely! But Mary Poppins is always Mary Poppins. She's never Miss Poppins or Mary, she's Mary Poppins. I thought, let's do one of those, but much darker. Mary Poppins is basically a sort of beneficent God that comes into the Banks children's lives. And I thought, 'what happens if the thing that comes into their life is nowhere near as beneficent?' That was the starting point for Ursula Monkton, who is a monster.

Can you tell us something about the different ways you start work on stories for children and stories for adults, and if there's ever a fork in the road where you have to decide which of the two to follow?

What a great question, and it's absolutely relevant to this one... When I started it, I had no idea. I wasn't actually categorising it as children's fiction or adult fiction, I just went “I'm writing a book, this is fun.” Actually, I didn't, I went “I'm writing a short story, this is fun.” I didn't have to worry.

As it went on, I started to have to actually think about things I'd never thought of before in terms of what makes adult fiction and what makes children's fiction. Occasionally in the margins of the notebook I was writing in, I'd leave little notes to myself. I remember writing... I don't actually remember writing it, but I do remember noticing in my handwriting the words “in adult fiction, you're allowed to leave in the boring bits.”

I think one of the things that decided me on the idea that this was adult fiction that I was writing, even more than the material because you are seeing everything from a child's eyes anyway, was the idea that in children's fiction I am perfectly happy to make villains as dark as I like, to make things as dark as I like, but I always feel that a book needs to be about hope. It has to be about ways you can cope with the darkness, ways you can deal with it. The quote from G. K. Chesterton that I made up that begins Coraline, where I say that “fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” That is the important thing about Coraline.

This is not a book necessarily about defeating dragons. Definitely not a book about telling kids they can be powerful. It's actually a book for adults who have forgotten about the powerlessness of childhood. You have your own wonderful things you can do, but you're also living in a world inhabited by giants. You've turned up in this place where you didn't even speak the language; you were definitely not issued an instruction manual or anything when you turned up. You're just here, and there's this occupying power, and they're enormous. You can't even argue with them, because they can always pick you up and move you. So I wanted to try and put that into my story as well.

One of the things that people keep saying to me about The Ocean at the End of the Lane when they've read it, is they tell me about things that they had forgotten about being a child. That made me ridiculously happy. The stuff that you forget just because you don't go there, and then you can read a book where you are taken there, and suddenly bits of your childhood that you'd completely forgotten can come back.

Let's talk a little about the farm and Lettie's family, the Hempstocks. You get an idea from that extract that she's older than she might be for an eleven year old. Where did they come from? Are they witches?

The Hempstocks began for me when I was about 8 or 9, when somebody – probably my mum – told me that there was a farm down our lane that was mentioned in the Domesday Book. So it was almost a thousand years old. As a kid it didn't occur to me that a thousand years ago the farm would have looked very different, I just assumed that this nice red-brick farm had been standing there for about a thousand years. And then I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if the people who lived there had lived there for a thousand years. And that thought never quite went away.

They were called the Hempstock family, and they had lived on the farm down the lane for about a thousand years, and they were sort of very old, very magical, and nobody ever noticed them. I liked that. As I became an adult, I kept expecting to write a story about them, but a story never turned up with them in. So every now and again, when I was writing something else, I would put one of the Hempstocks in: Daisy Hempstock turns up in Stardust; and then when I was writing The Graveyard Book, I put Lisa Hempstock – who's witchy – I thought, 'good, she's witchy, she'll be in there.'

I think, looking back on it, what I failed to notice about the Hempstocks and the reason I never wrote a story with them in, is I had never written a story set in my lane before. So suddenly, I had this idea: I'll do a story set in my lane, and my father's mini – obviously, there will be bad stuff.

What are they, are they witches? No, they're not witches. Somebody asked me last night - the screenwriter of the film of this, or the person who will be writing the script, I won't say who it is because I don't think it's been announced yet – but his first question was, “is there anything that I should be researching to understand the Hempstock family? Is there any myth you can point me to?” and I said “no.”
“Are they Pagan? Are they magical, Pagan...?”
“No. They pre-date all that. That's new-fangled stuff to them.”

I like the idea that, Old Mrs Hempstock – the oldest of them – remembers the Big Bang. Lettie claims that her duck pond is the ocean, and she says they came across it when they came from the old country, and her mother says that Lettie can't really remember properly because the really old country sank beneath the waves. And Old Mrs Hempstock says that the really old country blew up. So I loved the idea that they were just very earthy, very practical ladies, who dragged their farm half-way across the Universe from the dawn of time, ripping weird stuff up and bringing it with them, and plonked it down at the end of the lane. That's what the Hempstocks are. And they're looking after things. Quite how much they're looking after you never really know...

Certainly keeping bad things out.

Definitely keeping bad things out. They obviously have a job, and part of their job involves just making sure that bad things that come in get dealt with.

Leading on from that... In much of your work, the mythical and the modern merge and conflict. Do you feel that myths are still important in modern culture, and why? Are you creating them, are you tapping into something, or...?

I love myths. I'm a huge myth-junkie. I've loved myths since I was six years old, I may have loved them before. I remember being given a copy of Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Norsemen and just going “This... is brilliant. This is so much cooler than anything else.” Then I got to the story where Loki and Thor and a kid named Thialfi take refuge for the night in a very peculiar house: it's got five branching passages and a big branching passage, they can't really make sense of the geography of it, and it turns out it's a giant's glove.

I saved up my own money, and bought a copy of Roger Lancelyn Green's Myths and Tales of Ancient Egypt...

Which appears in the book.

Which appears in the book! And I have that book still. I just loved that, I loved these animal-headed Gods, loved those stories. So I have always been fascinated by myths; I've always loved letting them drip and trickle into my fiction. There's a moment in The Ocean at the End of the Lane where our narrator is reading some myths, and he says what he likes best about myths is that they aren't for adults, and they aren't for children, they just are. That is still how I feel about them. I can go back and read old myths, I can go back to – these days I don't go back to the Roger Lancelyn Green ones, I go back to the Prose Edda or the Poetic Edda – but I can still get the same joy and thrill as I did as a kid.

There's a thing that comes out very strongly in the way that you talk about children's books in this, that they have huge, violent back-stories. The character says that he loves books about Egypt, because it's about animal-headed Gods that cut each other up and then restored each other to life.

Definitely part of the fun of myths is that nobody is particularly sugar-coating anything for anyone, and kids love terrible things happening. There's that terrifying satisfaction on the face of a kid when something really awful happens to a bad person, it's like “yes,” and you'll read like Grimm's Fairy Tales: “And the Queen was forced to wear iron shoes, and they heated until they were red hot, and they clamped them on her foot and then they made her dance until she died.” It's only when you become an adult that you start going, “oooh, that's not really very nice.”

I love that children's books run all the way through this book, and my publishers actually got in touch with me at one point because they wanted to make sure that any permissions had been gotten for the quotes from classic children's books that I had in the book, and I had to admit that I made them up.

When I was a kid, I read everything; absolutely anything I could find lying around, I would read it. But we had all of my mother's books, that my mother and my aunt read. We had books about girls who could not leave their ponies when the Nazis came. I got to make up some of those in this book, when he goes off to read them, so that was enormously fun. There's a point when you get Sandie, who has been sent off by an administrative error because she's Sandie -ie rather than Sandy with a Y, and has gone off to the wrong school, but it's all worked out very well because she's discovered that her geography teacher is a Bolshevik spy.

But there's a difference between your main character in this and those main characters, in that your main character is powerless. He doesn't fight the good fight and win, whereas the classic trope thing is that they do.

Absolutely. I'm very proud of my main character. It's true, though. He screws up a lot. Several of the things he does actually cause more bad things to happen. At one point he gets himself into deeper trouble – he does escape, a brief escape – he climbs down a drainpipe. He's learnt to climb down drainpipes because kids in books climb down drainpipes, and he feels he has an obligation.

And you've made that point, that it's not a plastic drainpipe like we have today, it's a good old solid drainpipe. There's another point you make, like you say, it's the oddest thing that we used to have gas fires in rooms. It's much odder than a witch or a ghost turning up in your room.

I think it's because I was writing the book, sitting there writing it, and I'm going “well, okay, if this thing had happened to him he would now be drying off... He'd be in the bedroom...” I kept the geography, very much, of the house and the grounds – I played with it a little bit, it's fiction, I moved things around – but basically it's pretty factual. I got to thinking that he would have done what I would have done. I would have gone into the bedroom, I would have lit a match, lit that gas fire and dried off in front of that– you know, that's really weird, the idea that you'd have a five year old and a seven year old with their own gas fire. That's kind of dangerous. In fact, looking back on it, I had a pair of red pyjamas that had a huge hole in the sleeve, and somehow managed not to drip burning plastic from nylon pyjamas that caught fire from that fireplace onto anything, except me...

And I thought, that actually seems more unlikely than anything else that I have written so far, and there's some really weird stuff in this book. So I put that in. It's just something you wouldn't do today. Wouldn't happen. I'm sure Health and Safety people would turn up at your house... With clipboards.

So you can write about horrific things as long as they're in the realm of the imagination, but as soon as it involves reality...

It was fine. I do not want anyone to think that my parents were in any way not looking after us, because this was just how it was! It was just a house that had a gas fire in the children's bedroom... So yes, I'm very good at fiction, but when it's real then that's very weird...

---

It was an absolute pleasure to listen to the writer whose work I have admired for some time discuss his latest book at length, and I found myself feeling considerably more inspired with my own writing afterwards. Gaiman's fantastic new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is now available from all good bookshops and online, and is absolutely well worth reading. My review of the book can be read here.

It's Going to be a Sad Christmas... Matt Smith to Leave the TARDIS at the End of the Year

This article can also be found on Media Gateway.

The BBC has announced that Matt Smith will be hanging up his bow-tie and leaving Doctor Who during the 2013 Christmas Special, in which the Doctor will regenerate into Smith’s as-yet-unnamed successor. The news comes after months of rumour and speculation surrounding Smith’s tenure in the TARDIS. In a statement about his departure, Smith said:

"Doctor Who has been the most brilliant experience for me as an actor and a bloke, and that largely is down to the cast, crew and fans of the show.

"I'm incredibly grateful to all the cast and crew who work tirelessly every day to realise all the elements of the show and deliver Doctor Who to the audience. Many of them have become good friends and I'm incredibly proud of what we have achieved over the last four years.

"Having Steven Moffat as show runner write such varied, funny, mind bending and brilliant scripts has been one of the greatest and most rewarding challenges of my career. It's been a privilege and a treat to work with Steven - he's a good friend and will continue to shape a brilliant world for the Doctor.

“The fans of Doctor Who around the world are unlike any other; they dress up, shout louder, know more about the history of the show (and speculate more about the future of the show) in a way that I've never seen before.

"Your dedication is truly remarkable. Thank you so very much for supporting my incarnation of the Time Lord, number 11, who I might add is not done yet - I'm back for the 50th anniversary and the Christmas special.

"It's been an honour to play this part, to follow the legacy of brilliant actors, and helm the Tardis for a spell with 'the ginger, the nose and the impossible one'. But when ya gotta go, ya gotta go and Trenzalore calls. Thank you guys. Matt."

I am sure I am not alone when I say I that Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor will be greatly missed. Following on from David Tennant’s much-loved iteration of the character, Smith rose to the role brilliantly with an equally beloved portrayal of the eponymous Time Lord. Throughout his four years working on the show, Smith has displayed a phenomenal range of emotion and talent, providing consistently superb performances throughout the series. He has been a constant joy to watch, and is the very embodiment of the Doctor.

It will be a sad Christmas to see Smith’s departure, but he’ll be going out on a high note. I hope he'll be given the send off he deserves.

Thank you, Matt, for four fantastic years of time travelling shenanigans; it’s been absolutely brilliant. I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavours.

Doctor Who - The Name of the Doctor Review

This review can also be found on Media Gateway.

On the channel of BBC One at the hour of Seven, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked. A question that must never, ever be answered... In Steven Moffat’s phenomenal finale, The Name of the Doctor, the enigmatic Time Lord is forced to travel to the one place that he must never go, and his greatest secret is revealed...

Ever since The Wedding of River Song back in 2011, we’ve known that the Doctor’s path will eventually lead him to Trenzalore, where he will be asked his name at the ambiguous yet foreboding Fall of the Eleventh. It’s been the topic of intrigue for some time, but now here we are, the Doctor inextricably summoned to Trenzalore at the behest of the Great Intelligence in order to save the lives of those he cares about. However, in doing so the Doctor not only puts himself in jeopardy, but his actions could have major implications for the rest of the Universe and time itself...

The Name of the Doctor has to be, in my opinion, the finest series finale we’ve had in a very long time! From start to finish, this episode delivered on all fronts, providing us with a superb story and answers to some of this series’ lingering questions, as well as an homage to the past with a look to the future. The whole thing really was bloody brilliant!

The revelation of Clara takes place early in the episode, revealing that she was born to save the Doctor (although quite why or how is not explained until much later) through a montage of Jenna-Louise Coleman being inserted into old footage of almost every pre-2005 generation of Doctor Who, seeing Clara as a constant throughout the Doctor’s life, even being the one who helped Hartnell’s Doctor choose the right TARDIS (although I was under the impression that it was the TARDIS who chose him). Not unlike my crack in the mirror theory (detailed in my review of Hide), Clara is fractured into a million pieces, a million echoes of herself spread across time, living and dying over and over to save the Doctor. We now know the mystery of the Impossible Girl, and it’s actually quite a satisfying answer to the question, neatly wrapping up the enigma and tying it up with a bow.

However, it’s the truth of Trenzalore that provides the most intrigue in this episode; it’s the site of the Doctor’s final battle, and his final resting place. Here, on the Fields of Trenzalore, is the Doctor’s tomb, and quite a familiar old thing it is too. Trenzalore is as much a graveyard for the TARDIS as it is for the Doctor; a fitting end for them both, intrinsically linked even in death. And at the heart of the dying TARDIS, a tear in time; scar tissue from the Doctor’s journeys throughout time and space. This tear represents the Doctor, his own personal timeline, things that have been and things that will be - something no time traveller should ever come across. There’s something remarkably mystifying about this idea and it’s used to great effect in this story, especially towards the end.

It was a welcome return for Richard E Grant as the Great Intelligence, with a cohort of the fantastically creepy, Slenderman-esque Whispermen, as the villain of the piece. Gaining access to the Doctor’s tomb, the Great Intelligence’s master plan was to intercept the Time Lord’s timeline, destroying himself in order to turn all of the Doctor’s victories in to defeats, essentially rewriting the past, present and future. Despite his menacing presence, and the build up he received in The Snowmen and The Bells of Saint John, it’s surprising to see the Great Intelligence just go like that. Admittedly, it’s a fine act of villainous vengeance, but for something so steeped in Who lore and portrayed by the eminent Richard E Grant, Mr G. Intelligence felt sorely underused and had the potential to be a superb recurring foe for the Doctor. That being so, it’s entirely possible that as he was disseminated throughout the Doctor’s timeline he could pop up again sometime in the future (although that may just be wishful thinking on my behalf).

In addition, The Name of the Doctor sees the return of the Paternoster Gang (Vastra, Jenny and Strax), and the Doctor’s non-TARDIS wife, River Song. Although it felt as if River’s storyline had come to an end in The Angels Take Manhattan, Alex Kingston reprises the role in this episode to provide something she never truly got; a wonderfully understated and tender farewell. It’s difficult to give a natural end to a character whose story has essentially been upside-down and backwards since inception (a veritable Schrödinger’s Cat, both dead and alive depending on which way you look at the timeline), and although I wasn’t sure whether she needed to reappear, I’m incredibly pleased she did. It’s a genuinely touching moment between herself and the Doctor, and something that both Kingston and Matt Smith portrayed superbly.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Neve McIntosh, Catrin Stewart and Dan Starkey as Vastra, Jenny and Strax (a trio I am still trying to conjure up a fitting alliterative title for) as they continue to prove that a Victorian era crime drama spin-off series featuring these three would be bloody fantastic! Jenny's death during their 'conference call' (a sort of psychic Skype, which personally I reckon would be infinitely better than actual Skype) was a fantastically sinister moment with Catrin Stewart's chilling line, “I'm so sorry Ma'am, so sorry, so sorry, I think I've been murdered.” Thankfully, she was bought back to life later on; the loss of Jenny would be a terrible thing to happen to the trio. These are three great characters, brilliantly brought to life by three fantastic actors, and I certainly hope to see more of them in the coming series (maybe even an appearance in the 50th Anniversary?!).

Naturally, the absolute stand-out performance was that of Matt Smith. He never ceases to portray a consistently outstanding Doctor, and this episode was certainly no exception. There are times that a truly great actor can project an emotion and make it genuinely palpable, and that’s something Smith achieved at multiple points throughout this episode (and many, many other episodes!), not least during his deep concern and sorrow upon hearing the name Trenzalore. And of course, the man who doesn’t like goodbyes having to let go of the one he loves and finally bid her farewell was a truly tangible scene.

However, regardless of how outstanding this entire episode proved to be, there is one singular moment that steals the show and overshadows everything else in a revelation . The Name of the Doctor is an apt title, but not for the reasons many were anticipating, and not for the first time is a cunning turn of phrase to intentionally mislead. In the recesses of the Doctor’s timeline lies a truth that the he has tried to bury... One of his incarnations, but one he does not call the Doctor. “The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose, it's like a promise you make,” the Doctor explains of this mystery figure, “he's the one who broke the promise.”

"What I did I did without choice. In the name of peace and sanity," the figure intones enigmatically. "But not in the name of the Doctor," spits Smith’s Doctor, and the figure turns around to reveal (as if one couldn’t have guessed by the voice) John Hurt, accompanied by the terribly fourth-wall break ‘introducing JOHN HURT as THE DOCTOR.’ And thus, the episode ends.

This is the kind of phenomenal finale we have lacked for quite some time, it’s something that genuinely blows you away, and provides us with possibly one of the greatest cliffhangers in Who history, leading into the 50th Anniversary on 23rd November. And I am excited! Not least because I love John Hurt, he’s a magnificent gentleman and consummate actor, but also because it opens up so much speculation and anticipating for the anniversary special.

So, without further ado, let the theorising commence! My initial thought was that Hurt could be the Valeyard, an amalgamation of the darker sides of the Doctor’s nature from between his twelfth and final incarnations, but that doesn’t seem to fit with what little has been revealed... The Eleventh Doctor - that is to say, Smith’s Doctor - seems to possess knowledge of this other man, “he’s the one who broke the promise.” This also implies that this incarnation was not true to the Doctor’s name. A doctor heals people, and Hurt’s Doctor did something that goes against that name. He did not heal; he killed. Hurt hurt people, if you will.

He did what he did without choice, in the name of peace and sanity... We’ve always assumed that Smith is the Eleventh, because McGann was the Eighth in the 1996 film, and Eccleston came next when the show was revived in 2005 (so it was assumed Tennant was Tenth). What if there was a forgotten incarnation, between McGann and Eccleston, the true ninth incarnation of the man we know as the Doctor? This would be the incarnation who fought in the Time War, sealing his own people - the Time Lords - and the Daleks in a time-lock, and in doing so brought the war to an end. The Doctor would look back on this time with nothing but sorrow and regret, and see the man who had to commit these acts as someone other than himself, a man who did not act in the name of the Doctor. “I said he was me, I never said he was the Doctor.”

It’s going to be a long wait for the 50th Anniversary, but I have a feeling it’s going to be worth it!

I bloody love John Hurt.

If you missed The Name of the Doctor because the Great Intelligence interrupted your timeline (almost did mine, neighbours came and knocked on my door half-way through the episode), you can watch it again on iPlayer here.

Doctor Who - Nightmare in Silver Review

This review can also be found on Media Gateway.

The Doctor takes Clara and the two children in her care to the future for a visit to Hedgewick’s World of Wonders, only to discover that the place has long been abandoned aside from a small military squad. However, in this seemingly dead amusement park, an old enemy is lurking in the shadows and sees the Doctor and his two child companions as the final hope for survival...

The Cybermen are back! In his second story penned for Doctor Who, Neil Gaiman has given the Cybermen an upgrade and made them more formidable than ever before, but will this prove to be a new lease of life for the Doctor’s oldest foes?

As some readers may have picked up on in my reviews for this series, I am hugely enamoured with Gaiman’s first episode of Doctor Who, The Doctor’s Wife. It’s somewhat of a modern classic, and I'm sure it will long remain at the top of my list of favourite episodes. As such, I was greatly anticipating Nightmare in Silver, especially with the promise that the Cybermen would be scary again.

For such an iconic enemy, the Cybermen have felt a little lackluster in recent years (especially in A Good Man Goes To War, wherein the duty of the Cybermen is to show up for a minute and promptly explode), and they haven’t been truly menacing since their reintroduction in Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel in 2006. This is something that Gaiman remedies, introducing a new form of Cyberman with a shiny new design and the ability to charge forward at alarming speeds, they're a vast improvement on previous models. With their capacity to upgrade as they go, adapting to new situations and new challenges, and their methods for assimilating people for cyber-conversion, it’s like this particular variety of Cyberman has been taking lessons from the Borg! Ultimately, Gaiman’s reinvention of the Cybermen does feel like a rebirth for them, and succeeds in portraying them as a far more formidable and unbeatable enemy.

However, the more threatening aspect of the episode isn’t so much the Cybermen themselves, but the conflict between the Doctor and the Cyber Planner. Attacked by a group of Cybermites (a more compact and likely more efficient kind of Cybermat), the Doctor starts to undergo the cyber-conversion process and begins to look a little bit like a male version of 7 of 9 from Star Trek: Voyager. Star Trek references aside, this is the highlight of the episode, as Matt Smith fantastically portrays this inner conflict, flitting between the Doctor and the Cyber Planner as they vie for control of his body and mind, engaged in a battle of wits and a game of chess. When done properly, the Doctor being incapacitated or compromised can be a powerfully threatening thing, and that is something that Nightmare in Silver did exceptionally well.

It’s up to Clara to lead a rag-tag band of incompetent soldiers in defence of Natty Longshoe's Comical Castle against the hordes of unbeatable cybernetic warriors, whilst the Doctor continues to fight for his mind and to free the two children. Clara continues to prove herself as the Doctor’s most startlingly competent companion to date (something that no doubt is connected to her impossible nature), but ultimately she’s fighting a losing battle. It’s Warwick Davis’s Porridge (the character, not his breakfast) who holds the key to defeating the Cybermen. Davis does a wonderfully understated job of portraying a man burdened by the necessities of war, something best conveyed when discussing the Cyber-Wars (“Used to be the Tiberion Spiral Galaxy. A million star systems. A hundred million worlds, a billion trillion people. It’s not there any more. No more Tiberion galaxy. No more Cybermen. It was effective. … I just feel sorry for the poor blighter who had to press the button and blow it all up.”). It’s not long until Porridge has to make a similar choice, and resorts to blowing up the planet in order to defeat the Cybermen...

It’s a drastic move, having to destroy an entire planet, but as Porridge said, “it was effective.” Maybe a little too effective for my taste, as although there was a hint that maybe the Cybermen are not all dead and gone by the end of the episode, I would have liked to see the Doctor et al have to run from their unbeatable foe and flee to the TARDIS. Escaping the army of Cybermen, those who made it out alive would consider themselves lucky, but be left with that looming sense of dread knowing that those Cybermen are still out there... Nevertheless, the ending certainly hints that this won’t be the last we’ll see of these relentless automatons, which I’m rather content with!

My only major issue with the episode would be the children... Their admission to join the Doctor on a trip in the TARDIS was largely unexplained, aside from them being particularly brat-like with their attempts at blackmail at the end of last week’s episode, but that still doesn’t quite explain why the Doctor would be so willing to bring them along... He’s turned better people away from the TARDIS in the past. Presumably the children were introduced to bring a sense of danger to the episode when they’re both taken to be upgraded, but I just felt it was a relief that they were side-lined so early on, and left in a cyber-conversion induced walking coma until towards the final five minutes. The danger element had already been achieved with the Doctor undergoing his own conversion, which was pretty much the driving force for the episode, so the children ultimately just felt superfluous.

That being so, Nightmare in Silver was still an all-round enjoyable episode. Matt Smith’s performance of the inner conflict between Doctor and Cyber Planner was the absolute highlight for me, alongside the now more effective Cybermen. As long as a planet doesn’t get blown up every time one of them shows up, there’s every chance these Cybermen could rise to become quite a prominent threat to the Universe once again!

And now, everything has been leading up to this moment... Next week, in The Name of the Doctor, all of our questions will (hopefully) be answered. Who is Clara? The impossible girl, a mystery wrapped in an enigma squeezed into a skirt that's just a little bit too tight... And on the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature could speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked. A question which must never ever be answered... Doctor Who?

If you press the red button, you can watch the prequel for next week's episode. The red button on your television remote, that is. Not just any red button. There's no telling what might happen. Actually, click here and watch it on YouTube. Probably safer than pressing a load of red buttons.

If you missed Nightmare in Silver, you are inferior. You will be assimilated. Man will be reborn as Cyberman. Upgrading is compulsory. Watch the episode whilst the upgrade is in progress. If you do not comply, you will be deleted.

Doctor Who - The Crimson Horror Review

This review can also be found on Media Gateway.

There’s something not quite right about Mrs Gillyflower’s mill, Sweetville, with it’s clean streets and perfect people, and things take a turn for the sinister when bright red, petrified corpses start turning up in the nearby rivers. Mark Gatiss’s second episode of the year takes us to Yorkshire in 1893, where Madame Vastra, her companion Jenny, and Commander Strax investigate The Crimson Horror...

Composed of equal parts horror, comedy, period detective drama and SciFi, The Crimson Horror has a strong classic Doctor Who vibe about it, coated in a magnificent Victorian aesthetic. In many ways, the episode felt like a melting pot of genres, blending the 19th century crime drama and fun-filled SciFi adventure perfectly and interspersing the script with both the humorous and the macabre; it is the quintessential Gatiss!

From the opening, The Crimson Horror is a fairly Doctor-light episode, with the Doctor and Clara actually part of the mystery rather than the ones trying to get to the bottom of things. Instead, the focus is primarily being driven by the three sleuths: Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Commander Strax. The investigative trio have now kind of grown on me; maybe it’s the fact that as this episode’s leads, their characters felt more developed than before and weren't just secondary characters simply there for a quick gag or two. With the three of them carrying the first half of the episode, sans Doctor, we’re treated to a distinctly period drama-esque crime thriller which expertly manages to weave in a Silurian and a Sontaran as its lead characters without them feeling out of place. They were the perfect characters to drive this episode. And indeed, it’s great credit to Catrin Stewart, Neve McIntosh and Dan Starkey that they can evoke such a captivating tale of horror and intrigue without the show’s titular character being present for most of the story. It’s actually got me on board the bandwagon for a spin-off series starring these three!

It’s good to see their characters getting a bit more exposition, too. It’s a welcome step into the limelight for Catrin Stewart, with Jenny the lock-picking chambermaid leading the investigation, and proving to be quite the sizzling sleuth in the process. Meanwhile, Commander Strax is more than just the comedy Sontaran in this episode, displaying a certain degree of competency, but still walks away with the bespoke award for Most Humorous Dialogue (“Horse! You have failed in your mission. Do you have any final words before your summary execution? ... The fourth one this week, and I'm not even hungry.”).

As for the story itself, The Crimson Horror certainly had a compelling narrative. With the episode’s eponymous macabre mystery (and its even more terrible truth), and the conspicuous absence of the Doctor, the episode had set up a truly intriguing premise. This level of intrigue was carried throughout, with the truth behind Sweetville being slowly revealed piece by piece, and the identity of it’s mastermind, Mister Sweet, an enigma right until the end. Some of the elements of The Crimson Horror were incredibly dark - certainly the kind of thing that would have given the ten-year-old me a good few sleepless nights! - making it one of the more terrifying episodes of the recent series.

Executing Mister Sweet’s plans was the villainously unhinged Winifred Gillyflower, played by the excellent Dame Diana Rigg, who brings a superbly deranged and zealous preacher (and harbinger) of the apocalypse to the story. However, the absolute stand-out performance is Gillyflower’s much-abused daughter Ada, portrayed by Rigg’s real-life daughter Rachael Stirling. The highlights of the episode are certainly the scenes featuring both Rigg and Stirling, as they work fantastically opposite each other throughout, especially in the final scenes (although one hopes their mother-daughter relationship is somewhat better off screen!).

The Crimson Horror was an overall good episode. It’s blending of SciFi with period drama and detective thriller made for an interesting and well executed mix, and its use of the sinister and the macabre with comedic elements felt perfectly balanced. The reintroduction of Vastra, Jenny and Strax was certainly a welcome return, and after their inclusion in this episode, I’d like to see more of their characters in the future.

Next week, the Cybermen return in Neil Gaiman’s Nightmare in Silver. Considering Gaiman’s previous episode of Doctor Who, The Doctor’s Wife, (and his body of work in general!) this is an episode I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time!

If you missed The Crimson Horror because some deranged old woman dipped you in a vat of poison and tried to dispose of your petrified corpse, then I’m deeply sorry for everything you’ve been through, but I’m not entirely sure how you’re reading this. However, if you were were lucky enough to survive the process and are now back in the land of the living, you can watch the episode on iPlayer here.