Deep Ice: This is Orson Welles (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 1)

“NEVER play the same game three times running!” — Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth, Act II.

It is January, 2002. The Euro becomes legal tender in 12 EU nations. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle accuses the GOP of causing, “The most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation’s history,” to which the Republicans respond, “Hold our beer,” and proceed to reorient the economy primarily around credit default swaps. Brewer Freddy Heineken, restaurateur Dave Thomas, and singer Peggy Lee die. Apple introduces the iMac G4. I turn twenty-three.

Out this month on the Playstation 2 is Rez, a rhythm-based rail shooter inspired by the works of Wassily Kandinsky. It’s notable for the fact that in Japan, it came with a sex toy. I mean, not deliberately, but the designers wanted more powerful haptic feedback than the Dualshock controllers could provide, so they included a USB-controlled rumble-pack called — because Japan — the “Trance Vibrator”. And it came with a washable sleeve so it’s not like they didn’t know what the deal was or anything. It’s a fun and really trippy game even if you choose not to let it reward you with orgasms for playing.

Nickelback holds the top spout on the charts for half the month with “How U Remind Me”. It’s hard to believe now, but there was indeed a time when people actually liked Nickelback. Usher will take the spot from them for the second half of the month with “U Got it Bad”, part of a Bush-Era austerity drive that forbade songs in the top 10 from wasting three letters to spell the word “You” correctly. U think I’m making that up, but this is the fourth time a “U” song has been in the number one spot since 2001. “You” hasn’t been spelled correctly by a #1 song since last May’s “All For You”, and won’t be again until 2004, while two of 2003’s number ones will spell it “Ya”.

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast — the 1991 animated one — is back in theaters, at least those which support the IMAX format, to which it’s just been converted. Disney’s Snow Dogs also comes out this month, and the Hong Kong Cinema parody Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

Television this month will give us a fiftieth anniversary special for I Love Lucy, a sixtieth birthday special for Muhammad Ali, the thirtieth anniversary special for The Price is Right and the thousandth episode of Soul Train. Conspicuously Absent Franchise Title: Enterprise returns from its fall break with several new episodes, including “Dear Doctor”, justly maligned as the worst mangling of the theory of evolution Star Trek ever did. And if you don’t appreciate how much that is saying, remember: there’s an episode of Voyager where going faster than warp 10 causes Paris and Janeway to “evolve” into giant salamanders with Fu Manchu mustaches, and then fuck. The West Wing has three new episodes this month, and The X-Files is still on somehow, which surprises me. So is Dark Angel, which, it turns out, got way better after the six episodes I watched, and I will try hard not to slam it in the future.

Fun fact: I started writing this article almost exactly a year ago. Only I decided for some reason that I should do Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II: Electric Boogaloo first, and things kinda spun out of control from there, with me repeatedly losing my will to continue this project, or, indeed, do anything at all ever again. But we’re back now, I guess, and I won’t blame you if you’re confused.

So yes, I’ll cop to the fact that last summer, I ran a pair of articles which crossed over between our years-long meander through adaptations of The War of the Worlds with my years-long art project positing an alternative version of Doctor Who. And it followed the premise that the Doctor and his companion happened upon a plot to invade the Earth in October of 1938, and took advantage of the Orson Welles broadcast to trick the aliens.

And because I’m a hack, I lifted the broad concept of the thing from something which is real. To be clear, my version of “Invaders From Mars!” is not a straight lift from the twenty-eighth Big Finish audio drama. I had to make room for poorly colorized newspaper archive photos, poorly edited screenshots from the 1999 made-for-TV movie RKO 281, and dick jokes. But certainly, the general gist is there.

So, Big Finish. Is this the first time we talked about them? Big Finish is a British company that has been producing audio dramas for the past 20 years. Their focus is audio plays based on British cult media, mostly TV, and they’re best known specifically for their Doctor Who line, which started out by picking up out-of-work Doctor Who actors and having them reprise their TV roles in plays based mostly on Virgin’s New Adventures and Missing Adventures novel lines, along with some remakes of a late-90s series of fan productions that the producers had been involved with. But after a couple of years of that, they decided to try something bold and got Paul McGann to reprise his role from the ill-fated 1996 American TV movie, taking a stab at being the “official” continuation of the Doctor’s adventures.

This was, in the real world, basically peak “wilderness years”, when it seemed basically impossible that Doctor Who would ever come back to TV. It was just about believable that the future of the franchise might just be low-budget licensed spin-offs in other media. And — this all seems like a weird fever-dream now — some people in fandom welcomed this. At last, they said, Doctor Who belongs to us, the fans, and we can finally do it properly, the way it should always have been, with a slavish adherence to continuity, and nothing even vaguely American, and long expository segments to canonize our pet theories, and NO GIRLS. And it would be great and show all those corporate suits that we know best and that living in our mom’s basements is too cool!

Draw what conclusions you like. Here’s the thing: Big Finish Productions are entirely competent at making high-quality audio dramas with talented actors and competent writing and entirely professional production values. And their series have produced many really fun and enjoyable things like Doctor Who and the Pirates and …Ish and Colin Baker getting to redeem his reputation by playing the Doctor in a period when everyone involved in the production didn’t clearly hate the show and want it to die, and they gave Paul McGann the chance to actually develop the character for himself, and really the only problem with Big Finish’s Doctor Who at a basic level is that the basic concept of what it is isn’t all that worthwhile of an idea. I mean, the target audience for Big Finish Doctor Who consists of 40-year-old men who desperately want an exact reproduction of a show that was cancelled thirty years ago, and are willing to pay a bunch of money to indulge their nostalgia. On the one hand, they’re free to do things that are innovative and new, because they effectively have a captive audience who will buy any old crap they put out. But on the other hand, their target audience profoundly isn’t interested in something innovative and new. They want something familiar and comfortable. Something that has cliffhangers every thirty minutes even if they don’t actually make any sense and fuck up the narrative flow of the story and reassures us that the Doctor never ever has sex and does not have any biological children, and takes time out of an audio-only narrative to assure us that they switched back to jaunting belts because no one liked the jaunting bracelets (that last one was The Tomorrow People).

What I’m trying to say is that the Big Finish Doctor Who audios are fine. Some of them are even good. But at no point do they ever really make any serious attempt to justify their existence. It’s a series that was tailor-made for a very specific audience who effectively had no real choice if they wanted to get their Doctor Who fix. It was the closest thing you could get to more Doctor Who (There was a line of novels produced by BBC Books at the same time, of course, but the novels never had any real claim to being the “legitimate continuation” of the series proper — they were, if anything, the successor to the series of novelizations produced alongside the classic series, and by extension were inherently positioned as supplementary). So nothing Big Finish did prior to 2005 ever had to answer, or even address, the question, “Why should I consume this particular media instead of one of the myriad other options I had.” And then 2005 came around and… honestly, they never managed to give a fully satisfying answer to why we should bother with them now either, but at the least, they didn’t take the presumably attractive option of hardcore catering to 40-year-old men who ragequit the new series because of the kissing and the women who serve narrative functions other than to twist their ankles and get captured. I assume. I mean, I haven’t really listened to much of their post-2005 output because why bother when there’s real Doctor Who to watch now.

Big Finish, at this point in their history, had sort of stumbled into being the de facto “main” continuation of the series. But it’s not like they’d won that title somehow; they were just the only viable option. And even today, it’s their version of the eighth Doctor, the sardonic one with short hair who doesn’t wear a Wild Bill Hickok Halloween costume, which is accepted as mostly-canonical. On paper, the BBC Books would seem to have the stronger claim, being actually produced by the BBC. But it’s the Big Finish companions Paul McGann names when toasting his own regeneration in “Night of the Doctor”.

Now, if I haven’t already set us up for failure sufficiently, I’ll reveal that the real Invaders from Mars was written by Mark Gatiss. If somehow you’re not familiar with him, Mark Gatiss is a writer, actor and comedian, who’s probably best known for his work on The League of Gentlemen and for playing Mycroft in Sherlock. Or maybe for his role in Game of Thrones, I have no idea. He’s one of those long-time ascended fanboys in the Doctor Who universe, having gotten his start as a professional writer in the New Adventures novel line, and his start in “TV” writing P.R.O.B.E., a direct-to-video Doctor Who spinoff that he would really prefer you not track down and watch because it’s terrible. He also wrote a number of episodes of the current television incarnation of Doctor Who and starred in several episodes, most recently as The Captain in “Twice Upon a Time”.

And, well… Mark Gatiss is a competent writer. Perfectly competent. But he’s… He’s got this kind of style to him. And it’s a style that can be a bit problematic. Let me put it this way: at one point, Mark Gatiss converted one of the rooms in his house into a Jules Verne-style Victorian Scientist’s laboratory. The kind way to put it is that he’s big on nostalgia. The less kind way of putting it is that he is kind of uncomfortably obsessed with an utterly undeconstructed love of the grandeur the imperial age of Great Britain with absolutely no apparent acknowledgement of just how incredibly skeevy that imperial past could be. To the point of occasionally blindly walking into things like speaking with a wistful longing for the days when foreigners knew their place, casually dropping racial slurs, and, on occasion, parroting the talking points of the British National Party. Which is strange for literally anyone, much less an openly gay man. He’s also almost serenely bad at writing women. I mean, you may think that his frequent collaborator Steven Moffat has some problems when it comes to writing women. But Moffat at his worst does still appear to have actually met a woman at some point in his life.

So Invaders From Mars is not necessarily an obvious brief from Gatiss. I mean, sure, it’s nostalgic, essentially Big Finish’s homage to the golden age of radio. But it’s an homage to the golden age of American radio. And that’s not really Gatiss’s particular thing. If you look at the rest of his Doctor Who output, it’s like, yeah, he wrote the one where the Doctor met Charles Dickens and he wrote the one where the Doctor hung out with Winston Churchill without a single bad word to say about him, and he wrote the one which is basically Moonraker in Victorian London, and he wrote the one where the Doctor met Robin Hood and he wrote the one where Victorian soldiers go to Mars and treat an Ice Warrior as Friday. On the one hand, “The Doctor fanboys over a historical figure” is very much a Gatiss thing to do, but on the other hand, the Doctor fanboying over someone who isn’t Victorian or at least British is odd. But okay, it’s not like “Mark Gatiss also likes American Golden Age Radio” is much of a stretch to believe. I mean, I like American Golden Age Radio and also post apocalyptic children’s television, so who am I to judge?

I like genre collisions, on principle. I’ve said this before. So Doctor Who-meets-Golden-Age-Radio should be a winner, even with Mark Gatiss to deal with. And in practice, we can expect that Big Finish won’t produce a complete train wreck at this stage in their creative output. But enough damning with faint praise. What’s the damn story about?

The Doctor is traveling with his companion Charlie Pollard, a self-described Edwardian Adventuress who he rescued from the dirigible R-101 (Internet personality Bill “The Engineer Guy” Hammick wrote a book on the subject), a doomed British airship which would probably be a lot more famous if it weren’t for that other doomed airship. Rescuing Charlie is in the process of destroying the universe, on account of it having changed history, since no one is supposed to have survived the R-101 crash.

I mean except that people did survive as a matter of historical record, and as Charlie was a stowaway, there wouldn’t have been any record of her being there in the first place so history wouldn’t notice her not dying anyway. And also the whole “You can’t change history!” thing is bullshit anyway, and treating it like an inviolate concept due to one line in “The Aztecs” back in 1964 is part of the fanwankish bullshit that is the hallmark of the worst excesses of the wilderness years, and I’m getting off topic. The point is that the current plot arc in the Paul McGann adventures is that the web of time is in serious peril. This is going to take the whole season to unfurl, so for the moment, it’s pretty subtle.

There’s no cold open. The theme music is a not-especially-good techno mix of the Doctor Who theme (I wonder a bit whether this is a deliberate rejection of the more orchestral arrangement of the John Debney version of the theme music used for the 1996 TV movie. Actually, I don’t wonder. Making a point to do something stupid and petty just to reject a thing that the fans didn’t like is basically peak Big Finish) which plays without any spoken titles. Given Big Finish’s distribution model — CDs at the time — this is a defensible choice, but given that I remember a guy from rec.arts.drwho who sent the BBC increasingly threatening letters raging at them about how intrusive their corner-of-the-screen channel bugs were once a week for six months until they told him to stop, I feel like probably what they’ve actually done here is broken with audio convention to avoid the fanboys complaining about them ruining the shitty techno cover of the Doctor Who theme by talking over it. Sorry. I shouldn’t be this bitter.

The theme music gives way to an old-time-radio-inspired stinger. That’s a gimmick for this episode, and the first evidence we ever see of Big Finish really being aware of their medium. In the years to come, Big Finish is going to get really rather good at leveraging audio as a medium and tailoring their storytelling to it, but the first few years, they come off much more as “TV with your eyes closed”. That’s going to work against them in this story, because there is a lot going on. Not necessarily too much for four episodes, but this would’ve been a lot stronger with three fewer plots and two fewer episodes. The first plot we’re going to encounter is a side-plot to a side-plot; a couple of mid-level mob enforcers are planning to rip off their boss, by absconding with some of “the merchandise”. Ellis, a generic thug of few words, seems to be the brains of the operation. His partner, Mouse, is a nervous, weaselly sort who ought to have been a Peter Lorre pastiche, but comes off more Nicely Nicely. Their buyer either is or has been replaced by J. C. Halliday, a former cop and current private detective, who’s set them up. We get some generic gangster movie banter where Halliday threatens them with the gun he inherited from his father, which never misses. Ellis responds with a sci-fi “thing powering on” sound effect which turns out to be the “merchandise”, an energy weapon which “frazzles” Halliday’s gut.

Once the gangsters have fled, we’re treated to the familiar sounds of the TARDIS arriving on the scene. The Doctor has been recapping the plot of “The Time Meddler” for his companion, Charlie, ostensibly to illustrate how dangerous it is to meddle with the web of time. We don’t see the inciting incident to the Doctor telling this story, and it fits oddly here, just because the actual “History’s gone amiss” arc is just starting up here; it hadn’t really come up in the previous season. The Doctor had intended to return Charlie to her original destination of Singapore, 1930, but has, once again, missed, depositing them in New York, 1938. He makes a snide comment on his companions always being in a hurry to leave him. From my modern perspective, I’m a little irked by the continuity porn of the Time Meddler reference back-to-back with revisiting the 1960s-and-1980s plot device of “The setup every week is the Doctor trying and failing to return his companions to their proper time and place”. Especially with Charlie, whose setup is, “Her proper place in history is to have died on an airship crash, so really she is a prime candidate for just buggering off to alien worlds and times.”

The time-travellers stumble upon Halliday’s body, and, as you do, decide to loot it. In a rare break from established Doctor Who cliche, they are not caught doing this by the police and immediately accused and convicted of murder. The Doctor doesn’t want to go to the police because, “I always seem to end up helping them with their inquiries,” a weird thing to complain about since:

• He clearly wants to solve the case.
• No, he usually ends up being suspected of the murder
• He’s going to go solve the case.

The Doctor, somewhat to Charlie’s discomfort, decides to seek out Halliday’s office and investigate further. He never really gives a satisfactory explanation for why he does this, or, indeed, anything at all. They try to imply that it’s just a matter of the Doctor wanting to play at being a hardboiled Film Noir detective, but it’s not very convincing and the Doctor himself seems to be going forward on compulsion rather than out of desire. Say what you like about the classic Who setup of “The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS, trips over a dead body, and is accused of murder,” it may be cliche, but it works as a way to get the characters involved in the action of the story. “Invaders From Mars” waits far too long to actually give us a reason why the Doctor and Charlie don’t just hop back into the TARDIS and have another go at finding Singapore.

There is one rather good thing about the exchange. Upon finding Halliday’s Private Detective license (or a business card or something; like I said, Big Finish is still getting the hang of audio storytelling at this point, so all we know is that they find something while searching the body that reveals him as a detective), the Doctor muses, “I believe it’s usual in these circumstances to find a clue  written on the back of a book of matches.” Charlie obliges by finding a matchbook in Halliday’s pocket. “Well done. What’s in it?” the Doctor asks. “Matches,” Charlie answers. “Ah. That’s the trouble with cliches.”

When they reach Halliday’s office, they meet a noir femme fatale calling herself Glory Bee, and if you guessed that this is a fake name and she is up to no good, you’d be right, though this will not become relevant for another hour. Glory Bee mistakes the Doctor for Halliday, and the Doctor, again for no very good reason, decides to roll with it. She tells how she’d made plans to meet her uncle, visiting from Europe for a conference, but he’d turned up missing, his hotel denying that he’d ever been there and the conference address proving a sham. Charlie nearly talks the Doctor into redirecting Glory Bee to the police when she lets on that the conference in question was about heavy water research. Having recognized that the real Halliday had been killed by a radiation-based weapon, the Doctor presumes a link between the missing scientist and Halliday’s murder, and impulsively takes the case.

This would, by itself, all be a nice straightforward plot with a hook that’s solid even if it comes in the wrong place. Halliday was clearly killed with an alien weapon, and that ought to be justification enough for the Doctor to investigate, but he doesn’t really seem interested in that angle until he learns about Glory Bee’s uncle. Instead, it feels like the Doctor is just letting himself be carried along by the requirements of the narrative for most of it.

Also, I kept the Doctor’s plot thread all together for want of any logical transition, but these events have all been spaced out by other parts of the plot. While the Doctor and Charlie were looting Halliday’s corpse, we switched over to the CBS studios for a bit. Right, because this is, after all, War of the Worlds and not just a story about gangsters with alien tech in the ’30s. Orson Welles and John Houseman are rehearsing, and Orson’s still half-inclined to scrap it in favor of Lorna Doone. “Who wrote this crap? I certainly didn’t write this crap,” Orson complains. “You will, Orson. You will,” Houseman replies, a reference to the fact that their eventual falling out will be over Welles demanding co-credit with Herman Mankiewicz for the screenplay to Citizen Kane. Interesting detail here is that one of the scenes we hear them rehearse is the final disclaimer at the end, declaring the whole thing a bit of Halloween fun.

That’s interesting because it’s historically correct, but it’s also part of the urban legend about the radio play. It’s widely believed that the ending disclaimer was added at the demand of CBS after reports of the panic started. Of course, in reality, the disclaimer was always scripted and CBS wasn’t happy about it because it sounded an awful lot like a confession to having done it on purpose. As you may have noticed from the fact that this is the first time it’s come up, War of the Worlds is woven through the storyline of “Invaders From Mars”, but it doesn’t really have that much to actually do with it. Welles and Houseman are more sort of plot-adjacent than plot-involved. They’ll eventually play a real role in the story, but that’s three episodes away. As far as the Doctor Who story is concerned, War of the Worlds is invoked more for its mythological role than as a historical event for the Doctor to crash into. As with the R-101 in the previous season, Doctor Who is getting involved less with the historical reality of the Mercury Theater broadcast and more with the story of “The War of the Worlds panic of 1938″. And that’s an idea that fits in with Mark Gatiss’s late Doctor Who work: the Doctor meeting Robin Hood in “Robot of Sherwood” or what’s basically a Kipling-Burroughs crossover in “Empress of Mars”. But right now, we’re still fairly early in Gatiss’s evolution as a writer, and so his fanboy obsessiveness undercuts a lot of what would work better if it went more over-the-top in the name of being more true-to-life.

David Benson’s Orson Welles, for instance, is almost shockingly understated. And that’s probably more accurate historically, but come on. We want him to cut loose. We want to hear about selling no wine before its time. We want him to be a prima donna. Instead, he spends most of “Invaders From Mars” tired, a little bored, and mildly irritated. Jonathan Rigby’s John Houseman, to my ear, comes off more flamboyant.

A lot of Welles’s irritation centers on Bix Biro, who is the network chairman of CBS and not, as the name implies, a character from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Biro makes some vague threats if Welles can’t get his ratings up — they’re on opposite Charlie McCarthy, as you’ll recall, but Biro is also in some trouble. Welles mentions offhand that Biro is mobbed up, and it turns out he’s being blackmailed. Not, mind you, by the mobsters we’ve met already, no, to understand that branch of the plot, we’ve got to backpedal again and follow another plot thread that’s been going on.

“I’m always trying to recapture my youth. But he keeps getting away.” Because across town, flamboyantly gay gossip columnist and theater promoter Cosmo Devine is throwing a fundraising gala. After trading some bons mots with a “Mrs. van Buren” (a reference to Sylvia? I’d like to hope so), he disappears to make an important phone call. When we see him again, he’s holding Bix Biro’s boyfriend (say that three times fast) hostage in order to blackmail Biro into embedding a secret message into the evening’s broadcasts. Devine’s game will only become apparent later and it’s… Kind of amazing. Basically the peak of this thing turning into a clusterfuck of plot.

And yeah. We have the highest concentration of gay characters in a Doctor Who story since “The Happiness Patrol”, but man is it… Not exactly what you’d like. We’ve got three gay characters (though the boyfriend does little more than whimper), one of whom is mob-connected and the other is — the reveal will come later — significantly worse. On top of that, Bix Biro’s plot is that he’s being blackmailed because of his sexuality. Which is basically the excuse that was used to keep LGBT people out of positions of authority long after simple overt bigotry stopped being a good enough reason on its own. On top of that, Cosmo Devine is an over-the-top camp stereotype somewhere between Truman Capote and Paul Lynde.

This feels like a very Gatiss move. His nostalgia overriding any sense of twenty-first century standards of not-being-an-asshole. “Invaders From Mars” is drawn heavily from thirties pulp genre fiction — gangster, detective and sci-fi. And in thirties pulp there were basically two roles for gay men: blackmail victims and mincing camp stereotypes who actively sought to undermine good red-blooded American values. So to hell with the fact that these are harmful stereotypes that fed decades of oppression and which, in 2002, we were still at the very beginning of starting to overcome in the media. The blow is, I suppose, softened a bit by the knowledge that it’s a gay man writing these characters: we can be fairly confident that these archetypes, while informed by cultural homophobia, aren’t deliberately meant to reinforce those stereotypes. Mark Gatiss reckons he can get away with making some pretty regressive gay jokes for the same reason I reckon I can get away with making some pretty regressive Pollock jokes. Only I don’t actually go around telling Pollock jokes because I don’t think they’re funny enough to justify it, while for Gatiss, when it comes down to a choice between perpetuating harmful stereotypes and indulging childhood nostalgia, he’s always gonna pick the latter. And look, maybe Gatiss wanted to honestly reflect what was, harmful stereotype though it might be, the closest thing to inclusion you could find in those pulp genres, and that would be fine, except that he’s so darned uncritical about it. There’s room here to subvert those old stereotypes, and Gatiss just can’t be bothered. The closest we’re going to get is a bit of hyperbole when we find out just how far Cosmo Devine is willing to go to subvert “good old-fashioned red-blooded American values”.

While all of this has been going on, a bit closer to the Doctor’s plot, there’s still the matter of Ellis and Mouse. “Da Boss” whose merchandise they’d absconded with is Don Cheney, who, due to a disfigured nose, is sometimes called The Phantom, only not to his face if youse knows what’s good for ya. Cheney has taken his men out to dinner at Luigi’s. Ellis was able to show up in spite of the run-in with Halliday, but Mouse didn’t. I assume he had to go home and change his pants. More likely, Ellis left Mouse to take care of disposing of the borrowed “merchandise”, possibly as a deliberate set-up, since Cheney is slighted by Mouse’s absence. Some gunmen from a rival gang turn up, but Cheney or possibly Ellis dispatches them with a radiation gun.

We rejoin Don Cheney at the end of the episode, to the partial reveal of where these alien weapons are coming from. At the very outset of the episode, we catch a snippet of a radio news broadcast which mentioned a meteor that had been seen over New York a month earlier. Turns out said meteor was what meteors in science fiction stories nearly always turn out to be, and Don Cheney lucked into capturing its occupant. Though they find the alien disgusting, the fact that it apparently poops energy weapons makes it Cheney’s golden goose. Mouse is brought in and accused of skimming the “merchandise”. Mouse confesses his role, but plays dumb about Ellis’s involvement, trying to set himself up as an innocent dupe who didn’t realize the . Cheney accepts his story, but since he doesn’t see much value in keeping him around, orders Mouse to be fed to the alien. Ellis is helpfully on-hand to rough him up before the desperate man can rat him out.

End of part one

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• “Invaders From Mars” is available for download from Big Finish.