I’ve been keeping a young man in my basement. Plus ça change, I hear you say.
Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
So the Doctor has just discovered that he’s been had; Glory Bee is not, in fact, Professor Stepashin’s American niece, but a secret agent from Soviet Russia, sent to ensure that the professor doesn’t defect (Though, these being early days for that sort of thing, Stepashin recognizes the concept, but not the word). Given the cordiality between Stepashin and Don Cheney, I’m not really clear now whether Stepashin was actually “kidnapped” at all per se, or if it’s more the case that Stepashin’s help with the alien technology is Cheney’s payment for facilitating Stepashin’s defection. Glory (we never get a real name) explains that once Stepashin disappeared, she was forced to resort to hiring a, “Disgusting capitalist private detective. No offense.” The Doctor cops to not being the real Halliday. Jessica Hynes’s “Russian” accent isn’t exactly a convincing Russian accent, but it’s a pretty good “Russian character in a cold war spy movie” accent, down to her suddenly losing the ability to use English grammar (“This is all to the good,” and “It seems we have both been played games.”), except for the fact that she occasionally drifts a bit Dracula as they slip out of Cheney’s lair to find themselves on the architectural support for the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.
It might be a little surprising, if you’re coming to Doctor Who from the new series, that the Doctor gets taken in like this. I’m not saying it never happens, but if this were a David Tennant episode, that last cliffhanger wouldn’t be the Doctor shocked to discover that Glory Bee isn’t who she said she was; he’d just offhandedly reveal, Sherlock Holmes style, that he knew she was a Russian agent the whole time because of the way she was wearing her watch or something. Honestly, Paul McGann seems a little uncertain when he’s introducing himself to Stepashin, like he’s not sure whether the Doctor genuinely believes he’s reuniting family or if he’s really aware of what he’s doing as he forces Glory Bee to out herself. In the end, he unambiguously owns up to having been duped, but I think it would’ve been a little better if he’d turned out to have suspected her despite playing along.
So why did the Doctor fall for it? Well, mostly, I think, because he’s the eighth Doctor and these are the “wilderness years”. This is a period where Doctor Who is a TV show which was cancelled almost fifteen years ago. And where the dominant narrative in the fandom is that it had been in a decline for almost a decade before that.
Even before McGann, in the days of the Audio-Visuals, from which Big Finish drew a lot of its early material, we had an eighth Doctor that spends most of a season suffering from a crippling drug addiction, has his brain surgically altered by the Daleks, murders a god, wipes out his own people, loses at least one companion, has to be repeatedly rescued from the brink of death by an evil time-wraith who only keeps him alive to torture him, and tries and fails to destroy Earth (Long and not very good story). The BBC Eighth Doctor books feature, among other things, the Doctor callously dismissing the deaths of companions and even family; the destruction of the TARDIS; the destruction of Gallifrey at the Doctor’s hand; the Doctor being tortured to the point of madness; the Doctor shoving a dude into lava; the Doctor cutting out one of his own hearts; the Doctor literally bringing the concept of death to a world where it doesn’t exist; and the Doctor’s own past and people being deleted in favor of a new continuity where he’s a magic crystal skeleton creature that turned itself human (This was later walked back when it became clear that the radical changes to continuity they wanted to do weren’t going to stick in light of a new TV series, but at the time, yes, the intention was that the Doctor was not and had never been a Time Lord because Gallifrey was not only destroyed but retconned out of existence). Big Finish is actually less of a downer, but still manages to have the Doctor literally go insane in two consecutive season finales, along with another string of companion deaths. And when a clearly Big Finish-derived eighth Doctor appears on-screen in “Night of the Doctor”, he’s again defined by failure: he is outright rejected by Cass, who chooses to die rather than allow herself to be saved by a Time Lord, before dying himself and accepting resurrection only by rejecting the title of Doctor.
In part, this can be explained as a function of the eighth Doctor being the Doctor of the 1990s. For legal reasons, Big Finish didn’t get their hands on him until 2001, but a lot of his characterization had already been established in fan lore. Science Fiction fandom in the ’90s, and some segments of Doctor Who fandom in particular, were in a hurry to reject the “glam” sensibilities of the ’80s and to be “darker and grittier”. This was a period when antiheroes were in vogue, body counts were high, and things like intellect and romance were rejected as being “gay” in favor of brute force and cynicism. The ’90s — the real ’90s — weren’t amenable to the sort of thing Doctor Who was, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the kind of Doctor Who that grew there was a broken kind of Doctor Who.
During this era, there were some pretty prominent fannish divides. One of these was the Frock-Gun divide, between those who were interested in fun adventures in time with character drama and humor and frilly costumes (hence the name) and those who were interested in hard-hitting sci-fi action with monsters and shooting (hence the other name). The other big divide was the Trad-Rad divide, between those who reckoned that the Doctor Who expanded universe was largely a caretaker position which should focus on producing nostalgic romps that recreated the feel of the classic series, and those who felt that, free from the shackles of having to be commercially viable, they should go nuts and explore new directions and be the cutting edge of science fiction media. These fights could get heated, with the frocks viewing the guns as a bunch of stupid meat-heads, and the guns viewing the frocks as — well, it was the ’90s, so they’d just use a homophobic slur. The rads would accuse the trads of necrophilia, while the trads would accuse the rads of mistaking novelty for quality, and question why the rads were bothering with Doctor Who in the first place if they wanted to do something that only vaguely resembled it.
The space Big Finish occupies is fraught in light of this. These loving reproductions of classic-style stories with the original cast and formatted into four-part serials with cliffhangers every twenty-two minutes are an inherently Trad endeavor, and the medium of audio is just inherently more friendly to frock sensibilities. But one gets the strong sense that on a personal level, the creative minds behind Big Finish are much more Rad and a little more Gun, which you see reflected in their eighth Doctor line, even if, as here, it’s being written by Mark Gatiss, who is pretty undeniably a Trad-Frock.
But whether one was a trad or a rad or a gun or a frock seemed to make little difference to the underlying presumption of how the eighth Doctor should be played (Well, except for the extreme Trads for whom the answer was “Not at all”). Failure is the default mode for a wilderness years Doctor, and especially for Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor, who, not without justification, is largely viewed as “the one who was supposed to bring the franchise back but didn’t.” The cancellation of the original series was a wound to fandom, and the coming of Paul McGann in the 1996 TV movie was heralded as the second chance that could heal that would… And then he just didn’t. As late as 2006, you were still seeing holdouts who refused to accept McGann’s Doctor as legitimate, who insisted that Christopher Eccleston should really be considered a replacement eighth Doctor, facilitated by the first season’s extremely light hand when it came to directly acknowledging the original. (And the fact that Eccleston’s Doctor was already the second officially sanctioned ninth Doctor, due to the stillborn animated revival staring Richard E. Grant.)
Like I said, this is less of a big deal in Big Finish than it is for other media, and this story in particular is a mild example of it. But we do see it here, with the Doctor being taken in entirely by Glory Bee. We’ll see signs of it again in a minute, but first, we’re off to New Jersey, where strange creatures have just set down, who are the vanguard of an invading army. More or less. Conservator Noriam and Destroyer Streath have arrived to recover their lost breeding party (way to ruin the cliffhanger, guys). The internet tells me that these guys are Leiderplacker, and that they resemble bats, though this does not come up in episode three, past the fact that they consider humans unusually hairless. Fun fact: Doctor Who already had an established race of batlike aliens. It’s slightly amazing that Big Finish missed a chance to recycle them. And this is sort of hard to explain, but despite the fact that this is audio and despite the fact that they are described as being large, I can’t help imagining them as muppets. Streath, as you may guess from the title, is eager to blow shit up, and he’s kind of screamy, sort of what you’d imagine if you remade Full Metal Jacket recasting R. Lee Ermy with Elmo. Noriam isn’t exactly opposed to blowing shit up, but insists on cataloging everything properly first, and has a correspondingly more urbane pattern to his speech. This is their shtick, and I find it a nice touch to make them seem like an actual alien culture and something other than just a generic monster: Leiderplacker culture appears to be based on maintaining a balance between the principles of conservation and destruction (they will explain this in a slightly awkward expository “As you know, Streath” sequence). That said, nice a touch as it may be, I do question whether it ends up adding anything useful in a story that already has so much going on, especially since it never becomes all that relevant to the resolution of the plot. In this episode, it only figures in insofar as Noriam repeatedly has to convince Streath to postpone blowing shit up. But it’s not like you need a cultural justification for that: “Wait, let’s find out if they’re useful before we kill them,” serves just fine. There also seems to be a thing where the Leiderplacker, or at least Streath, have a suspiciously intense interest in water.
The Leiderplacker are comedy relief aliens. I’m okay with that in principle. And I’m glad Big Finish was willing to do it, since that sort of thing tends to upset the humorless manbabies who are a core demographic. This whole story is a bit of a farce, so it’s not a bad choice to make the aliens fit into that framework. It’s a story that is in large part about performances and the power they hold, with Glory Bee, the Russian spy pretending to be a noir femme fatale, with Orson Welles the actor, with Cosmo with Devine’s over-the-top camp, with the Doctor pretending to be Halliday, even, to an extent, Bix Biro as a closeted gay man. And now we have, essentially, aliens playing at being Doctor Who aliens. That said, the Leiderplacker are somewhat lacking in a reality underneath their performances. Being the shouty, kill-crazy one is legitimately what Streath’s deal is, and likewise Noriam being the bureaucratic, officious one. The show they’re putting on is something different, and they’re kinda terrible at it. And there’s a sort of buzz underneath their voices which is physically unpleasant.
Devine, not accepting Charlie’s protestations of ignorance, has had her drugged in an attempt to find out how much she knows about the aliens, Cheney, Biro, and Stepashin. She still doesn’t have anything useful to tell him, mumbling incoherently about the dangers of altering history and King Canute turning back the tide. Devine decides the point is moot when Biro’s signal is sent over the last scene of War of the Worlds. I was under the impression that the signal had something to do with Devine smuggling Nazis into the US, but now Devine explains that the signal in fact just means that Biro knows the location of Cheney’s base of operations. This is a mess, honestly. We don’t know how Biro finds this out, and the signal doesn’t actually reveal the location; Devine has to show up in person to find that out. So the whole point of the signal was to summon Devine to CBS headquarters so Biro could tell him? We’ve established that they both have telephones. And are willing to communicate with each other over them, since that’s how Devine delivered his extortion demands. So what’s the point? In any case, now that he has a lead on Cheney, Ellis is surplus to requirements, and Devine prepares to kill him with an alien weapon that I guess Ellis gave him. Charlie recovers enough to spoil his aim and she and Ellis temporarily incapacitate Devine, though they don’t bother to tie him up or anything.
After discovering that Jimmy Winkler was killed by Devine’s wild shot, Charlie and Ellis escape, only to immediately be caught by Streath and Noriam. Streath misunderstands Charlie’s panicked stammer and refers to her as “Ch-ch-ch-charlie”. Ellis sings like a canary, despite not really understanding the question, and suggests that Earth’s defenses are centered in Manhattan and Staten Island. “We’ll take Manhattan! And Staten Island too!” Streath declares, as the humans are forced aboard their ship.
Aboard, Noriam confesses to Streath that if the breeding party is intact, it will have to be “business as usual”, which will require that destruction be “indefinitely postponed.” Streath complains on the grounds that this apparently happens a lot, and Noriam cautions him that they need to “continue to appear invincible,” in front of the locals.
Ellis laments his poor judgment in betraying Don Cheney, and vows to make amends by warning Da Boss before Devine and his Nazi henchmen can attack. He fails to do this, but it’s not his fault so much as the pacing of the story. The convenience of the Leiderplacker just happening upon Charlie and Ellis by chance bothers me. This could easily be solved by having them track the energy pattern of the alien weapon Devine used, but we clearly hear their ship land nearby before the fire-fight. Instead, it just seems like Gatiss doesn’t really have any sense of how big New York and New Jersey are. On a purely symbolic level, this isn’t so bad, and has perhaps a nice parallel with the idea that the War of the Worlds radio play panicked a nation despite the fact that the main character walks from Princeton to Sixtieth Street in New York City in the space of twenty minutes. But it’s clear that Gatiss’s nostalgic nerdery doesn’t extend to the geography of New York. This entire story takes place in about five locations, none of which are exactly major New York landmarks. The closest thing to a landmark in this story would be Don Cheney’s lair under the Brooklyn Bridge. There really are eight large rooms built into the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. Originally intended as a shopping arcade, the rooms were walled off and largely forgotten, serving off and on as municipal storage, including a cache of Cold War emergency supplies that went unnoticed until 2006. So it’s entirely plausible that a 1930s gangster could have set up shop in there just by paying off some minor bureaucrat to “forget” about one of the rooms. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gatiss, writing in 2002, had heard of the place when the art installation which had opened one of the rooms to the public was shut down in 2001 following the September 11 attack. Of the other places mentioned, there is a real Excelcior Hotel in New York, but the name only dates to the 1950s. In 1938, CBS’s New York operations were running out of 485 Madison Avenue, which is an office building today.To further the sense of plot-dependent time progression, Biro’s message is transmitted over the line, “From there I could see, standing in a silent row along the mall, nineteen of those great metal Titans.” Devine has time to recover from being hit with a chair, drive to Manhattan, and fight his way through the panicked mob outside 485 Madison by the time Orson gets to, “Suddenly, my eyes were attracted to the immense flock of black birds that hovered directly below me.” The entirety of the intervening dialogue is “Their cowls empty, their great steel arms hanging listlessly by their sides. I looked in vain for the monsters that inhabit those machines.” It only takes about twelve seconds in the actual broadcast, and David Benson is talking about 30% faster than the original. Also, Orson pronounces “laboratories” in the British way, “luh-bohr-ah-tor-ies” rather than “lab-ra-tor-ies”.
Admittedly, this is not the worst job Doctor Who has done at calculating how hard it is to travel between Manhattan and New Jersey.
Houseman’s secretary reports news of the general panic they’ve raised. Houseman is more shocked to learn that anyone is listening. Biro shows up to rage at them, ordering Houseman to pen an apology (presumably, the one we heard Orson rehearsing back in episode one) before retreating to his meeting with Devine. Once Biro has handed over the location of Cheney’s lair, Devine reveals Jimmy Walker’s fate, and shoots Biro — with a silenced pistol rather than a radiation gun. He leaves before Biro finishes falling over dead, thus not hearing the “tape being rewound” sound effect that reveals to us that Biro’s dictaphone recorded the meeting.
Now, while the past two thousand words of this article have been going on, the Doctor, Glory Bee, and Professor Stepashin have been in a stand-off on top of the Brooklyn Bridge with Don Cheney and his thugs. See what I meant about the passage of time being kind of messed up? Cheney: You’re the two Ellis found at the hotel?
The Doctor: Yes.
Cheney: The ones he told me were locked up?
The Doctor: Yes.
Cheney: Would you recommend I get myself a new second in command?
The Doctor: Probably. Cheney has closed the deal with the CIA, and means to deliver the alien, its technology, and Stepashin to them. Glory reckons that Stepashin’s contribution to keeping the alien alive gives the Soviet Union claim to the technology. The Doctor insists that the technology is too dangerous to give to humanity and wants to take it away himself, but Cheney presumes from the Doctor’s accent that he’s actually trying to claim it on behalf of Neville Chamberlain. Stepashin seems to generally agree with the Doctor, on the grounds that the alien technology falling into the “wrong” hands would be unthinkable, though he’s still hopeful that it could be put to peaceful purposes for the betterment of mankind. Oh, and also he offhandedly mentions that him and a dude named Anton have built a prototype atomic bomb.
The stand-off is interrupted when one of Cheney’s men arrives with the news that the Martians have invaded. “I sincerely hope not,” the Doctor says. He assumes at first that this is the alien’s fellows come to rescue it, only later recalling the date and having a good laugh as he works out what’s going on (Though they place the broadcast on Halloween, rather than on the historically correct Saturday before). In plot-time, this is immediately undercut when actual aliens do arrive. But as it’s composed in the show, there’s several intervening scenes, including an “establishing” scene of the panic in the streets, portrayed by the din of traffic over which a woman shouts, “The Martians are coming!” only to be told, in what I assume is an homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, “They’re here already!”
In the confusion caused by the Leiderplacker ship flying overhead, Glory Bee tries something, and Cheney’s goon shoots… Something. The handrail, maybe? Glory Bee goes over the side of the bridge, and despite Cheney himself joining the Doctor in trying to rescue her, she falls to her death. I don’t know if this would’ve worked better in a visual medium where we could see what was going on, or if this scene actually benefits from the ability to be vague on how two grown men manage to get to her in time to grab hold of her, but still can’t stop her from falling. There’s also a longish gap in the audio between her scream trailing off and the sound of her body hitting the water which gives the whole thing a bit of a Looney Tunes feel.
Cheney, the Doctor and Stepashin retreat into the Don’s lair, only to be met by Cosmo Devine and the Nazis. Just for the record, it’s about five miles from 486 Madison to the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2018, it would take about half an hour to cross that distance. I don’t know how fast you can transport a unit of armed Nazis across Manhattan at nine o’clock on a Saturday (or possibly Sunday) in 1938 with, apparently, a riot going on, but I’m still calling shenanigans.
Cheney uses a homophobic slur I will not repeat, though I point it out here because there are only two explicitly homophobic lines of dialogue in the entire production, and honestly, this is the less bad of them. So get ready. Cheney also calls Devine a “fifth columnist”, so the dude’s got a vocabulary. Devine fawns a bit over attractive, well-dressed blonde Aryan men he’s brought with him. Now, back in 2002, this sounded stupid and ridiculous. I mean come on, an over-the-top gay man who decides to throw in with the Nazis because they’re dapper and attractive? But it’s 2018 and Milo Yiannopoulos is a thing now, so fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-
Okay, bringing it back down now. Okay. Okay. Devine orders the Nazis to start packing up the alien technology, but he doesn’t reckon that the actual living alien will be of any interest to the Fuehrer, so he tells them to open the tank and kill it. The Nazis are reluctant to face the alien themselves, so Devine opens the tank, just in time for our cliffhanger: the alien wasn’t, despite Stepashin’s assumptions, dying, but reproducing, and Cosmo has just released thirty hungry babies.
End of Part Three
Which we already knew, of course, with Streath and Noriam referencing a breeding party. See, this is why I was complaining about the need to structure the story around four twenty-two minute episodes. The fact that Cosmo Devine is working for the Nazis is perfect for a shocking reveal to put at the end of an episode. Instead, we found that out halfway through episode two and instead end on the reveal of Glory Bee as a Russian spy, which is okay, but it doesn’t really end up going anywhere. This time, they ruin the reveal that the captive alien has reproduced by having the other aliens refer to it as a “breeding party” early in the episode.
So now we’ve met the Leiderplacker, and okay, comedy relief aliens aren’t a terrible idea. But we’ve still got all these other plot threads hanging around. So we very casually kill off Jimmy Winkler, Bix Biro and Glory Bee. Neither one’s death is especially satisfying, and neither one’s plot really advanced anything. What bothers me about all these plots — Ellis’s side-deal with Devine; Bix’s assassination attempt on Cheney; Devine’s kidnapping of Winkler and blackmail of Biro — is that they don’t advance the story as a whole. In fact, they do the opposite: all these plots exist not to move the story forward, but to slow it down. Ellis was working with Devine, and he knows where Cheney’s lair is. The only reason to add the complication of Devine needing Biro to get the location of Cheney’s lair is to justify him not showing up there two days earlier and short-circuiting the plot. Why should Bix Biro know where Cheney’s lair is anyway? Why did Biro try to have Cheney whacked (no, we never find this out)? Why does the Doctor decide to impersonate Halliday? Why does Ellis independently kidnap both Charlie and the Doctor but deliver them to different people? We’ve got Orson Welles here, but he hasn’t actually done anything. Even the alleged panic hasn’t really affected the plot. It hasn’t even affected travel times in Manhattan. None of these plot threads serve any purpose but to take up space and put off introducing the Leiderplacker.
This leads to another problem because Big Finish doesn’t have a good feel for the medium here. On screen, frequent scene changes and jumping around between plot threads makes the story feel dynamic and reinforces a sense of simultaneity. But without the visual dimension as a silent channel for keeping us all on the same place, the frequent scene changes can get us lost, and it falls on the listener to keep track of which characters are in which scene. And the simultaneity works against them here because we’ve got the War of the Worlds broadcast effectively acting as a running clock for the episode, and so we’re left with the impression that it takes Cosmo Devine about twelve seconds to get to Manhattan from his New Jersey home, and that the stand-off between the Doctor, Don Cheney, Glory Bee and Stepashin on the Brooklyn Bridge goes on for an hour and a half.
We’ve got one episode left. There’s still a bunch of plots to tie up. We do get to actually involve Orson Welles, but don’t get your hopes up too much. The last episode will see us in some ways try to settle down and get on with storytelling, so it’s denser. On the other hand, a lot of the resolutions are going to be unsatisfying.
- “Invaders From Mars” is available for download from Big Finish.