Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
“I forgot to mention, I ran by the White House in this gorgeous lilac suit I had a little man run up for me. Later on, he ran down it again.”
Where the hell were we? Orson Welles and John Houseman are getting ready to adapt The War of the Worlds for radio. Their CBS boss, Bix Biro (yes, really) is being blackmailed into working for Cosmo Devine, a campy gossip columnist who is… No, still not going to spoil the surprise. While they haven’t yet, these plots are eventually going to link up with the intrigue in which the Doctor and Charlie find themselves. They stumbled upon the corpse of private detective J.C. Halliday, and after determining that he was killed by a radiation weapon, the Doctor stole the dead man’s identity and offered his services to femme fatale Glory Bee, who is looking for her missing nuclear scientist uncle. Halliday was killed by a pair of gangsters who were in the process of cheating their boss, Don Cheney. Confused? You won’t be, after this week’s episode of… Actually, no, wait. You’re totally going to be confused, because we’ve got at least two major twists coming up, and there’s a whole plot thread that hasn’t even started yet.
So Don Cheney’s deal is that he found a crashed alien, which he’s keeping locked up in his lair, and said alien is supplying him with energy weapons. Cheney actually does have a strategic plan for these, but at the moment, it seems like he’s just using them for the ordinary sort of dominance in a violent trade.
They haven’t done a great job yet of selling me on why these alien heaters provide such a tactical advantage to the gangsters. I mean, sure, they can kill you right good. But an ordinary sort of gun seems fairly adequate to the task already. The two times we’ve seen them used, it was at close range, against an unarmored target, who already had a gun drawn, and it seems to have helped only in that the would-be shooter was startled by the sight of it, giving the user time to shoot first. The sound effect of the gun — deliberately similar to the heat rays in the 1953 film — lasts several seconds, which suggests to me that it’s not markedly faster than a regular gun to fire, plus it seems like it has to power up before it can be used. Now, in a non-visual medium, we can easily imagine there being more to it than we’re told explicitly. But I’ve still got the laser weapon from the TV series in my head, remember? Where the aliens made a huge deal of how laser pistols would definitely win them this war, only when they show us one, it takes like 10 seconds to kill one person who’s tied up at the time?
This isn’t an uncommon problem in sci-fi stories that use alien weapons as a plot point. They confuse being viscerally terrifying with providing a concrete tactical advantage. Before I watched Stargate SG-1, I probably wouldn’t have noticed myself. That show did, I think, a good job of demonstrating that while, sure, the Goa’uld had scary-looking sci-fi weapons, you weren’t any less dead if you got shot by a USAF-issue submachine gun, and, ironically, visually flashy sci-fi beam weapons in TV shows tend to have much slower firing rates than actual automatic firearms on account of you want to be able to actually see them. But here, it just sort of goes without saying here that energy weapons are better than guns because they just are. Compare that to, oh, let’s say, The War of the Worlds. The Martian heat rays are certainly terrifying from the start, but even there, once the initial panic has worn off, the narrator doesn’t see them as an insurmountable technological advantage on their own. Against soft targets, the heat ray isn’t much different in efficacy than a machine gun: you can sweep it across a group of people and kill them all. It’s only when you couple it with the fact that it can destroy vehicles, buildings, artillery, that it’s mobile, and that on top of that, the Martian war machines are far less vulnerable to human weapons that the Martian weapons become properly dangerous. Once the rest of the New York underworld learns not to panic at the sight of the Cheney gang’s alien weapons, “Just shoot first,” is going to go a long way to neutralize their advantage.
I guess we should talk about the voice work. Strictly speaking, I should’ve brought this up sooner, but last week’s article was already close to five thousand words. I can comfortably say that these are some of the most convincing American accents Big Finish has ever produced. This should not be mistaken for them being good. They get a boost here from the fact that the previous eighth Doctor adventure, “Minuet in Hell”, was also set in the US. While “Invaders From Mars” is set in 1930s New York, “Minuet in Hell” was set in the near-future bible belt, in a hypothetical future state named, in a rather shocking level of Big Finish not having a clue of what is a realistic thing to happen in America, “Malebolgia”. That story, adapted from an old Audio-Visual of the same name, was full of fake Americans faking non-specific or vaguely southern accents poorly. “Invaders From Mars” has the advantage here that no one’s doing “generic American”; they’re all doing various shticks. David Benson voices Orson Welles, and he doesn’t quite manage to accurately reproduce a Mercury Theater-era Welles so much as he does a shockingly faithful reproduction of Maurice LaMarche’s Orson Welles voice, enough that I almost expect Houseman to ask him, “Gee, Brain, what’re we going to do tonight?” And I think it’s a strong choice for the role; being strictly accurate to Welles isn’t nearly so important here as evoking the zeitgeist of Welles, which this voice absolutely does. Benson also voices Halliday’s brief appearance, which is basically just his Welles toned down a bit. Later, we’ll also hear him affect a thick accent as Professor Stepashin, the missing uncle. Jonathan Rigby is similarly good as John Houseman. It’s distinctive enough that you can tell who he’s supposed to be, with a very distinctively “British Ex-pat” accent. He does come off a lot more British than the “classic” John Houseman accent, but I can’t say if that’s ahistorical; Houseman had been living in the US for about a decade at this point in his life, but it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that he would become well-known in front of the camera, so the Houseman voice we associate with Smith Barney commercials and his posthumous cameo in Scrooged is the voice of a man who’s spent another fifty years on this side of the Atlantic. Rigby does lay it on maybe just a bit thick with his tendency to end every other sentence with “, my boy.”
Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) — you may know her as Joan Redfern and her identical granddaughter Verity Newman in televised Doctor Who — plays Glory Bee with a considerable dose of Mae West. Her most consistent slip is that she pronounces Charlie’s last name, “Pollard” correctly, as Po-lard, where a legitimate American would change it to Pahl-ard. As with everyone, she’s more “Person trying to sound like archetype” than “Archetype”, though for reasons which become clear later, it makes sense for her character. WHat really makes these fake Americans more palatable than what Big Finish (or Doctor Who in general) usually provides in the way of “Americans” is that a lot of these performances are performances of performances. Orson Welles is an actor; John Houseman is a Romanian-born half-French half-Irish Brit trying to make it in America; Cosmo Devine is playing a public persona of a camp gay celebrity. So it’s expected that everyone should sound a little fake. The gangsters too, sound like characters out of a gangster movie. Simon Pegg voices Don Cheney, which is a surprise. His accent slips quite a lot, but even when he does, he doesn’t sound like Simon Pegg. John Arthur’s Cosmo Devine also slips out of his accent a lot, but I’m not sure that’s accidental; maybe they’re intentionally trying to signal that his exaggerated effeminate tone and mannerisms are an affect for public consumption. The gangsters, Pegg’s Cheney included, are all going for a generic sort of thuggish lout type; these are more your Cagney style gangsters than your Brando style. Ian Hallard’s Mouse is a fun contrast as the nervous-weaselly one, though it would get pretty grating if he lasted past episode one. Hallard returns with a more subtle accent as Jimmy Winkler in this episode.
We return to the story the next morning, where Charlie finds that the Doctor has stayed up all night reviewing Halliday’s files. This is a weird Wilderness Years Expanded Universe thing where the Doctor only sleeps when he’s sick or injured. He’s discovered that Halliday was already investigating the Excelsior Hotel, where Professor Stepashin was last seen. I don’t think we’re ever going to find out why Halliday had been involved with this business, since he doesn’t seem to have been hired by any of the other players. The Doctor and Charlie have to slip out on the fire escape when the police turn up, having found Halliday’s body, and in the chase, it takes the Doctor a minute to notice when Charlie gets kidnapped by Ellis.
When he reunites with Glory Bee, she convince him that Charlie’s abduction must be linked to Stepashin’s, and they proceed together to the Excelsior. Again they deny any knowledge, but a contrived distraction by Glory Bee gives the Doctor a moment to check the guest register. Based on the sound effect, he seems to speed-read it flipbook-style, as the televised Doctor would go on to do with The Lovely Bones in “Rose”. He finds an altered page where Stepashin’s name has been removed and leads Glory Bee to room 1504 based on the mismatch between the replaced page and the pen impressions on the page beneath. I’m not an expert in pens. But I object to this on the grounds that it’s 1938 and the first commercially viable ballpoint pen was only invented four months ago, and wouldn’t be on the market until the mid-forties. I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think you can apply enough pressure with a nib pen to leave marks that would be visible to the naked eye on the page beneath, particularly on the sturdy sort of paper used in guest registers. The Doctor picks the lock, only to be greeted by a gangster, who informs them that, “Glad youse could join us. Da boss would like a word. I understand youse been askin’… questions…”
Their arrival at the hotel and interest in Stepashin is overseen by Ellis, who is in the middle of connecting this plot thread to another via a clandestine meeting with Cosmo Devine. It was an agent of Devine’s who Mouse and Ellis had expected to meet the previous night when Halliday intervened. Given that Don Cheney is having the Excelsior watched, this seems like a dumb place for Ellis to meet with the guy he’s selling out to. Ellis was also behind Charlie’s kidnapping, and has delivered her to Cosmo’s New Jersey lair. Despite his divided loyalties, Ellis refuses to reveal to Devine where the alien weapons came from. He does allude, though, to Cheney’s involvement in the disappearance of Stepashin.
So this is something very Classic Doctor Who, having everyone get kidnapped and locked up for an episode. Having the Doctor and the companion both get independently kidnapped is a little on the extravagant side, but it happens. Bit of a neat twist that Ellis orchestrates both kidnappings, but for different employers, though not much comes of it. Ellis also presumably orchestrated the original kidnapping of Stepashin, who is at Cheney’s lair, using his expertise to study the captured alien. Devine had put us on to the fact — it’s kinda weird in context that Devine would care — that in addition to being a nuclear scientist, Stepashin is a firm believer in extraterrestrial intelligence. His scientific curiosity has led him to an uneasy alliance with Don Cheney, who intends to sell the alien technology to “the highest bidder.” Stepashin is horrified by the possibilities stemming from that, but Cheney reassures him that he’s confident the ultimate buyer will be the CIA, and that the Nazis aren’t welcome to the auction. Historical fun fact: the CIA was established in 1947. Its presence here is an anachronism that will eventually be revealed as connected to time being up the spout.The mention of the Nazis brings up a curiosity: some people seem confused when the prospect of a coming war is brought up, and others don’t. Houseman alludes to the war in Europe in response to a crack from Orson about a Czech taxi driver, but Glory Bee is confused when the Doctor mentions an approaching war — doubly surprising given her actual deal.
Charlie wakes up in Cosmo Devine’s basement and meets Jimmy Winkler, Biro’s kidnapped lover. He at first assumes her ignorance to their captor’s identity is due to Devine’s public persona being such a contrast to his true loyalties. And this, an offhand scene that easily could’ve been cut, around the middle of the episode, is where we get a reveal that really ought to have been saved for the end-of-episode cliffhanger. Cosmo Devine’s plan, the reason he’s blackmailing Biro, the reason he’s interested in the missing nuclear scientist, the reason he’s recruited Ellis to steal Don Cheney’s alien weapons, is to sneak the German army into New York. Cosmo Devine, gossip columnist, theater promoter, flamboyantly gay man-about-town in his lilac suit, is a Nazi sympathizer. And I know what you’re thinking, but remember, this is 2002; he was only 18.
Dammit, Gatiss. This is the thing about Mark Gatiss. He’s not the sort of writer who stops to ask himself, “Even though this is accurate to the prejudices of the historical genre I am trying to evoke, am I sure I want, here in the twenty-first century, to uncritically reproduce the arguments of fascists, racists, or homophobes?” You’ve got to figure Gatiss had at least a passing familiarity with the claims being made in homophobic circles about the Nazis being pro-gay, and if not that specifically, certainly the decades of portraying gays as fifth columnists.
So Cosmo Devine is using Winkler as leverage to force Bix Biro to transmit a coded message to his Nazi allies offshore. Biro, for what it’s worth, was behind the assassination attempt on Don Cheney the previous night, for reasons that never become clear. Biro seems kind of pusillanimous for something like that. We check in with Biro to pick up that tidbit, and also to establish that he just had a dictaphone installed in his office, courtesy of the Anton Chekhov Recording Device Company.
In the studio, Orson, still hung over from last night’s drinking (which also took place at the Excelsior… Is Gatiss aware that New York is actually a fairly large city?), rehearses the opening monologue to War of the Worlds. His delivery is a bit too fast.
Don Cheney is listening to Charlie McCarthy instead. But one of his thugs ruins it by asking how you can tell that Edgar Bergen’s lips aren’t moving. In frustration, he has the radio switched over to CBS. I will note here that we hear the beginning of the broadcast, with the introduction identifying it for what it is. Nevertheless, by the time we get to episode 3, it’s going to be assumed that the gangsters missed the beginning, only tuning in for the news broadcast segment. It occurs to me that this is one place where, had this been television, they could have taken advantage of having an extra information channel to actually run War of the Worlds in parallel with the main plot and time things properly so that different characters were in the right places at the right times to hear different parts of the broadcast.
Ellis has had Glory Bee and the Doctor blindfolded and delivered to Cheney’s lair. He repeatedly lets more slip than he should, and cautions his captives against commenting on Cheney’s disfigurement. The Doctor easily escapes: being good at locks is one of the eighth Doctor’s Things. They find Stepashin, but Glory Bee is reluctant to reveal herself to him, wanting the Doctor to hang back so they can observe in secrecy. The Doctor pushes forward and introduces himself, but Stepashin claims to have no family. Glory thanks the Doctor for his assistance, and explains to Stepashin that it isn’t personal: she’s under orders to retrieve him for (and at this point only does her accent change) Mother Russia…
Golden age radio stinger and roll credits.
End Of Part 2… (And We Haven’t Even Seen The Monster Yet)
Episode two… I mean, there’s some nice stuff in it. But it feels thin. Basically only two things important to the story moving forward happen: the Doctor and Glory Bee getting kidnapped and delivered to Cheney’s lair, and Devine revealing that he’s a Nazi sympathizer. Drop the scene at Luigi’s, and you could easily move the important parts of this episode back up into episode one and tightened up the story quite a bit. This is a constant problem with this era of Big Finish: they have a very firm sense of how Doctor Who should be paced and padded which is drawn very solidly from when a Doctor Who story was delivered to you over the course of a month in thirty-minute chunks, while you had other things going on in-between and were, probably, a child. And that maps imperfectly to the experience of getting your story all at once on a mail-order CD. This story is in four parts because they want it to play out similarly to a four-part TV serial. But realistically, you’re going to listen to part one on the way to work and part two on the way home, and possibly finish the story while you cook and eat dinner.
We’re at the halfway point of the story right now, which is a fine time to introduce a plot twist, but what’s actually going to happen is that they’re going to introduce the A-plot, because for better or worse, this is Doctor Who and that means that for tax purposes, the main plot hasn’t begun until the actual aliens show up. Which, as noted, they haven’t. There are people who complain about modern Doctor Who being too simple, because it tends to follow a normal television A-plot/B-plot structure, where there are two closely-coupled threads through an episode which join up at the end to form a resolution. The most common form of this is the structure where the Doctor and the companion get separated and spend a big chunk of the episode trying to get back to each other. Classic Who has those kinds of plots, but they’re not enough to carry an entire 90-to-120 minute serial, so you’ve got a ton of other things going on. The plot with the noble villain who might be persuaded to see reason and find a nonviolent solution, but gets betrayed by his ambitious lieutenant. The human traitor who sells out the heroes to the bad guys. The comic relief guest star who contributes nothing to the resolution. The human authority figure who spends half the story trying to have the Doctor executed. The government bureaucrat who refuses to believe in aliens up until the moment they are eating him. I’ll call it what it is: padding. Classic Doctor Who serials always had a lot going on, but rarely had a lot happening. This was palatable in the ’60s, because you only got it half an hour at a time, and there weren’t DVRs or anything, so you couldn’t rewatch episode one a month later: it would be unreasonable to expect the audience to retain more than a small number of key points from the first half of the serial all the way to the end, so you had to write a lot of stuff that didn’t really matter beyond its immediate entertainment value.
But it’s still padding. God help me, I actually prefer the first Peter Cushing Dalek movie over the second William Hartnell serial for the pacing (I mean, the movie is shit, and the serial is a classic, but the movie is well-paced shit while the serial is a slow plodding mess of a classic). And Big Finish productions of this era embodied this old-school mentality that the pacing of their stories should be first and foremost determined by how they fit into the structure of four twenty-two minute episodes, each one ending in a mini-cliffhanger (Doctor Who pop quiz: what’s the one thing you are guaranteed not to see in the first thirty minutes of a Doctor Who serial whose title includes the words “of the Daleks”? Answer: a Dalek. They’ll never appear before the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode. As though it was going to be a genuine shock that an episode called “The Nastiness of the Daleks” was going to turn out not to be a Cyberman episode). So “Invaders From Mars” ends up with, what, four different groups of characters whose plots are only very loosely coupled.
It doesn’t have to be an unwieldy amount of plot, but it ends up being mostly unnecessary; I’ll get to why next week. And it’s only going to get worse, because once the “proper” plot actually shows up in episode three, it’ll be time to start wrapping up the superfluous plot threads, and the casual way in which plots get discarded is only going to reinforce the sense that they didn’t really matter much anyway.
- “Invaders From Mars” is available for download from Big Finish.
Is it just coincidence that Cosmo Devine sounds like Cosmic Deviant?
Also that’s an old standing joke, American have no concept of the age of a English cities and Brits have no concept of the size of our cities.