Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
Here we are, the exciting finale of Big Finish’s crossover between Doctor Who and The War of the Worlds. And “exciting” is… Reasonable. If you’re coming to this from a primarily new-Who mindset, this last episode is certainly closer in structure and pacing to a modern Doctor Who story than what’s come before. Of course, you’ve already sat through over an hour of “Invaders From Mars” by now, so that’s a strange prospect. But certainly, there is a lot less wheel-spinning and a lot more getting-on-with-it in this episode. Enough that there’s moments when things seem maybe even a little too expedited. There’s plenty of critics of the new series who complain that, for example, the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is anathema to drama, because it frequently serves as an “easy way out” by simply resolving whatever problem the Doctor is facing with a flick of his wrist, like a magic wand. This complaint is largely bullshit, the product of near-illiterate thinking which imagines that the sum total of drama is a series of puzzles to be solved. Rather, in its modern conception, the sonic screwdriver does not defeat drama, but enables it, by letting us get on with the story rather than putting the brakes on the story in favor of five to ten minutes of the Doctor finding a way out of a locked room. If the lock needs to be an actual plot point, it’s simple enough to invoke a “deadlock seal”. Or make it out of wood. It is certainly true that in the ’80s, the sonic screwdriver was written out of the show on the pretense that it made things “too easy”, but one gets the feeling that the actual concern was that locking the Doctor in a dungeon for half an hour was an easy way to get 90 minutes of story out of 60 minutes of plot.
The Doctor doesn’t have his sonic screwdriver on him in this story, but he does pick two locks very quickly. The story so far, in case you’re joining us late, is that it’s New York, on Halloween, 1938, and local mob boss Don Cheney, who has been referred to as “The Phantom” twice because he lost part of his nose in a fight (don’t worry; it won’t come up again), recovered a batlike alien called a Leiderplacker from a crashed space ship, and has been exploiting it for advanced weapon technology, which they initially implied it extruded from its own body (don’t worry; it won’t come up again). He’s made a deal to hand over the alien and its ship to the CIA, which technically shouldn’t exist because it’s only 1938 (don’t worry; it won’t come up again until the end of the season), but the technology is also being sought by Russian agent Glory Bee (don’t worry; she fell off a bridge and won’t come up again) and Nazi sympathizer Cosmo Devine (do worry). Devine had also been blackmailing CBS executive Bix Biro, by kidnapping his lover, Jimmy Winkler, both of whom are now deceased, so don’t worry about them. The Doctor’s companion Charlie and Cheney’s lieutenant Ellis are currently prisoners of the Leiderplacker Streath and Noriam, who are, as we speak, parking their space ship near the Brooklyn Bridge. Streath and Noriam reflect, respectively, the Leiderplacker “joint second principles” of destruction and conservation, respectively, and are basically an old bickering married couple somewhere between George and Gracie and Statler and Waldorf. Of more immediate concern is a unit of German soldiers that currently have the Doctor, Cheney, and defecting Russian scientist Yuri Stepashin at gunpoint.
Well, “immediate concern” might be too strong of a word, because in our previous cliffhanger, Cosmo Devine just opened up the containment tank holding what turned out to be not a single sick alien, but thirty very hungry Leiderplacker babies. They proceed to eat the Nazis, and, it appears, Stepashin, as the others flee. Devine and Cheney are both surprised at the display of savagery from a technologically advanced species. “Well, they’re young, aren’t they?” the Doctor explains. “You know what young, carnivorous, alien, mammal-like monsters are like. Always getting into scrapes.” And then contradicts himself by presuming the adults are probably fierce and savage, based on the behavior of the newborns.
Having zeroed in on the energy signature from the firefight earlier, the Leiderplacker land at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, where Noriam is troublingly, almost erotically, interested in the engineering feat of building a bridge over water. This is the last time that the oddly sexualized Leiderplacker obsession with water comes up, and we never get any explanation, justification, or punch-line. They shoot their way into Cheney’s base with Ellis and Charlie in tow. Why did they bring them, when they’ve got a perfectly adequate holding cell on their ship? Because shut up. Devine tries to take charge and demands payment for returning their crashed ship. Noriam, despite having had a couple of conversations with Charlie and Ellis by now, proceeds by addressing him loudly and slowly, saying, “We have come to find ship. Star fall from sky. Full of treasure. We give some to you, if you help find it.” Devine quips, “Who do you think you’re talking to, Pocahontas?” which is bad enough, but what happens next is worse:
Charlie giggles and tells Devine, “They’ve got the measure of you.” Ick. Even Devine makes a little sound of offense. This bugs me even more than Cheney dropping a particular six-letter F-word last time. Cheney is a gangster. I expect him to be crass and I expect his insults to come from a place of machismo and toxic masculinity. And even so, he only goes to the homophobic slur in a moment of extreme duress — his life is being threatened and he’s just seen his men slaughtered by Nazis under Devine’s command. It doesn’t justify it, but Cheney, affable though he may at times be, is a bad person, and we’re not supposed to be okay with the way he acts (The story is a little uncertain about this, but that’s for another paragraph). But Charlie is the Doctor’s companion. She’s one of the “good guys”. The Doctor is going to make really incredible sacrifices to protect her over the course of her tenure. And here she is, taking a time out in the middle of confrontation with alien monsters to call Devine an Indian Princess and laugh about it.
Noriam pulls the Doctor and Devine aside for them to argue over who’s in charge, and explains about how their third brother had crashed on Earth with a “hatchling”, and they assumed the breeding had failed. I’m a little confused about the details of the Leiderplacker life cycle, since the Doctor suggested that they reproduced by “binary fission”, with one organism splitting into thirty. The most obvious problem with this is that “binary” doesn’t mean that. The second most obvious problem is that reproduction by fission is a thing single-celled organisms do. But okay, “binary fission” is perhaps not a completely impossible flub for “multiple fragmentation”. But still, Noriam and Streath repeatedly refer to a “breeding party” and speak of it as a thing their brother brought with him. How does this map to what we actually hear happen? Poorly. Cheney definitely has a live creature in his tank, which is capable of eating Mouse. One explanation is that Cheney had the third brother, who was concealing a clutch of eggs, and the Doctor is just plain wrong about the whole “Binary Fission” thing. But we never hear from the third brother, so, what? Did the hatchlings eat him? Plausible, I guess. Why wouldn’t he have, y’know, spoken to Cheney or Stepashin, though? Maybe he was too badly injured? But another thing to consider is that Cheney is surprised by the appearance of the baby Leiderplacker, pointing out that they look like large bats. It’s hard to take that as consistent with the creature they thought they had, the one Stepashin had been studying, as being recognizably Leiderplacker. The best possibility I can think of is that the third brother was killed in the crash, and what Cheney recovered was the “breeding party”. But this implies something very unusual about Leiderplacker biology. It seems like to be consistent with everything we know, the Leiderplacker larval stage is some kind of colony life form which presents as an animal, though not recognizably a Leiderplacker, and which ultimately separates into young but physically-mature Leiderplacker. Weird, but you can sort of imagine something that combines elements of a marsupial and a monotreme, with live birth of an underdeveloped “joey” followed by maturation in a kind of mobile egg sac rather than an internal pouch.
Is any of that relevant? Nope. Is this first, second, or even third thing about the Leiderplacker which is way more interesting than any of what they actually do in the story? Nope. Do you maybe get the feeling that there was a draft of this story where the Leiderplacker show up earlier and are more involved in the plot? The Doctor tells Noriam that, appearances aside, the hatchlings are alive and well, prompting Noriam to say that the “invasion” can proceed as planned. But on the basis of Noriam sounding a little uncertain — basically, audible scare-quotes around “invasion” — the Doctor instantly works out their actual game. Yes, the guy who took half the story to identify Russia’s most obvious spy deduces the full scope and details of the Leiderplacker plot from the fact that Noriam hesitates a bit before declaring himself invincible. The Leiderplacker are, in fact, running a protection racket. Which, yes, is the same plot I put in my fake version of this story last year. The details are quite a bit different, though. The plan was to dump a bunch of feral babies on an unsuspecting planet, let them cause a bit of terror, and demand payment for making them go away. The Doctor describes this as, “An unimaginably huge protection racket,” but I’m not convinced. I mean, sure, those babies are fierce. But there’s no indication that the Leiderplacker are bulletproof (there really ought to have been). Thirty of them are hardly going to throw an entire planet into a panic. Sure, they could cause a night or two of carnage and maybe cause an existential crisis. But, “Thirty dangerous cryptids go on a killing spree in New York before being rounded up by the National Guard,” is hardly a solid opening gambit for global extortion. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but you’d need your salesman to be a lot more convincing than Noriam, who, as mentioned, gave the game away in one sentence. That’s why in my version, the pitch wasn’t, “Here’s us invading you. Pay us to stop and not do it again,” but rather, “Oops. Sorry to have spooked you; we’re in the middle of a huge off-screen space war which you probably don’t want coming here.”
There’s a strong implication here that Streath and Noriam aren’t very good at this. Which is fine. But what I don’t like is that Streath and Noriam aren’t actually running a con: it’s taken for granted that this is how the Leiderplacker as a civilization operate. Destruction and conservation are repeatedly cited by Streath and Noriam as the “joint second principles”; the first principle is exploitation (I assume that was the third brother’s gig, which I guess may explain why Noriam doesn’t have his pitch down). They apparently run this scam all the time, all over the universe. So why are they so bad at it? Also, why do they have a guy whose job seems to be to run around shouting “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!” when their MO is to extort, and, as Noriam confesses, they don’t actually have the firepower to take on a whole planet, even a primitive one like Earth. Streath doesn’t seem like he’s on the same page, and even grouses about how long he’s been denied that chance to destroy a planet he’d been promised. Again, weird if destroying planets is not a thing they even can do (don’t worry, they’ll backpedal on this). There are some solid parallels here to the Slitheen of the new Who story “Aliens of London”/”World War Three”. But the Slitheen were explicitly a crime family, working a complex con with limited resources and without the backing of their people, which was really necessary to make the whole concept work (Not, I will point out, that this stopped quite a few fans from simply rejecting the idea that the Slitheen were a crime syndicate and not backed by the Raxicoricofallopratorian government because that’s not how aliens in Doctor Whowork). It’s easy enough to see the Leiderplacker as a step on the evolutionary path to the Slitheen: ridiculous names; comical quirks; con artists; goofy physical appearance. But they’re only half-baked at this stage and don’t quite make enough sense to be believable. And when your alien plot compares unfavorably to one that begins “Hollow out the Prime Minister and wear him like a suit while making fart jokes,” you are not in a good place. I mean, it’s not like the Slitheen really “worked” as antagonists until they moved out of Doctor Who and went over to The Sarah Jane Adventures and could be proper children’s show villains (I do not recommend letting Mark Gatiss write a children’s show. He’d just end up making it like the Famous Five and have all the villains turn out to be surly foreigners who were easily identified from the first time you see them by virtue of them being surly and foreign and insufficiently deferential to their social betters).
Devine is desperate to betray humanity to someone, though, and suggests that since the Earth is, “Populated by trash and governed by weaklings,” the Leiderplacker could manage outright conquest despite their limited resources. With his guidance, a few targeted strikes could leave the governments of the Earth so crippled that they’d surrender. The Doctor counters with the claim that the Leiderplacker would do better to just round up the hatchlings and leave, since Earth is already being invaded, by, “Martians. From the planet Mars.” Before they can get into the details of it, the little’uns show up, causing enough confusion for everyone but Devine and Ellis to escape. Devine shoots… Something. A hatchling, I guess, but the Leiderplacker don’t seem to care about that. I mean, he basically just shouts, “I warned you!” and we hear the alien weapon sound effect, but there is literally no payoff to it. Noriam pacifies the hatchlings with a signal device, and stops Streath from killing Devine long enough to hear him out on his plans for world conquest. Ellis tells him, “You’re scum, Devine,” prompting the Leiderplacker to think his name is “Scummdevine”, which would’ve been a funnier way to do the joke than when they did it with “Ch-ch-charlie” last time if it were either the first or fifth time they did that joke, rather than the second and last. If you were hoping Ellis would get some kind of redemption arc, I’m sorry to report that Devine just unceremoniously kills him. That “Scummdevine” bit is his only contribution to this episode. Noriam orders Streath to pack up the stuff from the crashed ship, along with Professor Stepashin’s Leiderplacker-derived inventions for conservation. Streath complains — well, more sort of shrieks — about how it’s just going to end up gathering dust in the corner, but has it all shoved in their ship’s holding cell anyway.
Cheney, Charlie and the Doctor hop in the don’s 1929 Lamborghini (once owned by Al Capone)Fun fact: The first production Lamborghini was the 350GT, released in 1964. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. and head for the CBS studios. Cheney very quickly reconciles himself to giving up the deal with the CIA. He offers to call them for reinforcements, but accepts the Doctor’s plan without question when the Time Lord repeats that the alien technology is too dangerous to leave in human hands. I bring it up because last time, Cheney was more than willing to fight to the death in order to “Keep his woid” and uphold the deal.
They walk into Bix Biro’s office just moments after Orson gets off the phone with the CIA. Orson and Houseman had found Biro’s body, and decided that the feds would be better people to report it to than the local police, given that the local police are currently containing an angry mob outside (The Doctor’s party gets through because Don Cheney has “an understanding” with the cops). I’m not exactly sure why Orson would try the CIA, whose purview is intelligence and which has no law enforcement authority whatever. Maybe Gatiss thought involving another agency would be an unnecessary complication, but if that’s the case, um, too late. Is the FBI not as well known to non-American writers? That would make sense, with the FBI being mostly domestic-focussed, but I mean, it’s hard to have seen enough gangster movies to get the accents right without picking up that if your mobbed-up boss gets whacked, the federal agency you’d call is the FBI. I mean, this is a gangster story set in the era of Hoover’s G-Men. In any case, the CIA hang up on him, neither believing his story, nor being interested in doing any favors for the guy who just panicked America.
The Doctor asks if Biro was a “pen name”. Houseman doesn’t get it, which is fair, since, as I mentioned two weeks ago, Lazlo Biro only invented the ballpoint pen a couple of months earlier. Did not expect to get to use that factoid twice in one story. He also declares himself a big fan of Welles, and tells him he’s seen all his movies. What he does not do is explain what’s going on. You may have been expecting a tense scene of the Doctor breathlessly persuading Welles and Houseman of the seriousness of the situation and convincing them, despite the outrageousness of his claims, that the Earth is in immanent peril of an actual alien invasion. But we wasted three quarters of the run-time with comedy aliens and Russian spies and Nazis, so the whole thing is covered by the very simple expedient of Welles and Houseman having listened to the tape of Biro’s murder, so they already know that Don Cheney has an alien space ship in the left leg of the Brooklyn Bridge. Yeah. That was what all that business with Biro’s tape recorder was for, so that Welles and Houseman would be up to speed on the plot when it finally got around — with only about ten minutes of runtime remaining — to involving them.
The Doctor reckons that Devine is right, and with his help, the Leiderplacker could do “unprecedented damage”. I am less convinced, but I’ll roll with it. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” the Doctor explains to Welles, who doesn’t understand the reference. This is funny on the surface of it, Orson Welles, not recognizing a quote from Hamlet, and seeming to not even recognize Shakespeare’s name when the Doctor tries to explain it. It’s ahistorical, of course; Welles had done Hamlet for CBS a few years earlier and was at the same time as this episode takes place working on a stage production of Five Kings, a play written by Welles based on Shakespeare’s War of the Roses cycle (The play was a disaster, but formed the basis of his much better-received 1960 film Chimes at Midnight). But Welles’s unfamiliarity with Shakespeare here isn’t just a joke; it’s actually foreshadowing. It’s not the season-long “something is wrong with time” thing directly, but a couple of episodes down the road, the Doctor’s going to discover that his perennial enemies, the Daleks, are in the process of trying recon William Shakespeare out of existence as their end of a deal with a twenty-first century dictator who reckons Shakespeare’s too good for the unwashed masses and wants him all to herself. Yes. This is a real thing which Big Finish does. Having planted the seed in their minds of the possibility of another, more formidable alien invasion, the Doctor thinks he can spook them by having Welles, Houseman, Charlie, Cheney and himself put on an encore performance of the first half of The War of the Worlds, using the TARDIS to shift the transmission onto the Leiderplacker’s private frequency. Orson takes on the role of Carl Phillips for the reprise, with Houseman and Charlie as the studio announcers, and Cheney as Wilmuth. The Doctor writes a part for himself, as a Martian commander who, honestly with only a little less hesitation than Noriam, promises to scourge the planet.
The transmission reaches the Leiderplacker while Devine is explaining which countries they should attack. Noriam at first takes it for a report of their arrival in New Jersey. Despite Devine’s protestations for them to ignore it, though, it becomes clear that the aliens in the broadcast are far more dangerous than they are. Once Streath decides that Devine has been playing them, the would-be emperor of America is only spared execution because even Noriam agrees that what he deserves is a long, drawn-out death. He’s shoved in the brig instead while they take off and head into orbit.
Unfortunately, when Charlie brings them the news that the TARDIS sensors show the alien ship departing, everyone starts celebrating their successful hoax without bothering to turn the microphone off. The ship starts returning to Earth, out for vengeance.
Meanwhile, down in the holding cell, Professor Stepashin emerges from the breeding tank, mortally wounded, but not yet dead, and very pleased to see both Cosmo Devine and all the stuff from his lab, since he can find the “answer” to a “puzzle”. Since the Leiderplacker are, “Wonderful creatures, but not, I think, very bright,” and, “Saving the Earth is not a bad thing to die for, eh?”, he puts some pieces together and reveals the “question” to Devine: “Am I, Yuri Stepashin, the first man to build a working atomic bomb?”
On the command deck, Streath outlines how he’s going to destroy the world. I guess we’ve given up on that whole, “We can’t destroy anything; we don’t have the firepower” business:
Streath: We will destroy all of it! Every last atom!
Noriam: Except for the parts we conserve.
Streath: Oh shut up, you old fool. This is a time for action. I, Destroyer Streath, will plunge this Earth into a pit of flame! I shall watch its death throes as I tear it apart, stone by stone. Boil away its waters! Purge its devious hairless things in the pure flame of my unquenchable vengeance!
Noriam: Uh… What’s that ticking?
The explosion of the Leiderplacker ship is officially passed off as a fragment of the previous month’s “meteor”, and anyone who says different is dismissed as suffering from mass hysteria thanks to Welles’s broadcast. The CIA gets back in touch with Welles, agreeing to take care of the business with Biro. Once the Doctor reassures him that he’s about to become, “The most famous man in America,” Welles goes to face the press with Houseman. The Doctor tries to warn him not to let the studio recut The Magnificent Ambersons, but cautions himself that he musn’t interfere. McGann must have objected to this interference as well, because his delivery is strange and lifeless. Cheney offers the Doctor Ellis’s job, which he politely declines, suggesting Cheney should himself find a less dangerous line of work. The don gets to play the baffled onlooker who sees the Doctor and Charlie enter their strange blue box and vanish…
Old time radio music sting and theme song out.
End of Part Four. Stay Tuned for the Conclusion…
- “Invaders From Mars” is available for download from Big Finish.