Deep Ice: No further significance (Big Finish’s Invaders From Mars, Concluded)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Well now. This was a bit of a mess, wasn’t it? I went into this a little before, but man is there a lot of cruft around this plot. And it’s not even that great of a plot to begin with. Like, let’s start with J. C. Halliday. Remember him? I don’t blame you. Ostensibly, he’s the hook to get us into the story. Solving the mystery of what happened to Halliday is what involves the Doctor in all of this. But he never actually finds out what happened to Halliday. I mean, yes, his interest is because Halliday was killed by an alien weapon, and he finds out where the alien weapons came from and makes sure they don’t remain in human hands. But he never works out why or by whom Halliday was killed. We know from the outset, but we never really know why: why was Halliday there in the first place? What’s his interest in the whole thing? Why was he investigating the Excelsior Hotel before Glory Bee tried to hire him? What happened to the contact Mouse and Ellis were supposed to meet at Broadway and 34th when Halliday showed up instead? And what about scarecrow’s brain? The Doctor spends half the story impersonating Halliday, but we never get any sense of what Halliday’s deal actually was. Who was he working for?

And Halliday is only the most obvious of the plot elements not to get a satisfactory resolution. Why did Biro try to have Cheney killed at the restaurant? If he was already being blackmailed by Devine for the location of Cheney’s base, killing the don and throwing his organization into chaos seems counterproductive. For that matter, why did Devine go to the trouble of extorting Biro for this? If Biro and Cheney were enemies, wouldn’t that make Biro less likely to have access to that information? And if they were, Cheney didn’t seem to be in on it; he never mentions Biro, not even a passing, “And I’ve got a score to settle there too,” when the Doctor sends him to CBS. There’s no hint that Biro was anyone to Cheney, which contradicts Devine, Houseman and Welles’s suggestion that Biro was well-connected.

And what was the deal with the secret transmission? At the beginning, I got the impression that Devine was forcing Biro to send a coded message to the Germans, say, in a U-boat waiting off-shore, as part of a plot to sneak them into the country. That probably needs more detail to flesh it out, but it makes sense. You blackmail a radio exec to hide a secret message in a radio broadcast because you need to transmit information by radio. But what ends up happening? Devine actually wanted Biro to use his underworld contacts to locate Cheney’s secret base, and the radio signal was nothing more than a signal inviting Devine to come visit him at his office to pick up the information. This doesn’t make any sense. Devine had already talked to Biro on the phone to make the deal, so clearly they’re not afraid of using the phone. And besides, the arrangement was for Biro to send the signal at a specific time. So why even bother? Why not just make an appointment for Devine to show up at Biro’s office at that time in the first place? As it is, Biro sends the signal for no reason, and the matter of how Devine smuggles a troop of Nazi soldiers into New York is taken as so trivial as to occur offscreen in the space of about twelve seconds. The scenes of panic in the streets makes the whole “smuggling in Nazis” thing easier to swallow, but that was just a happy accident for Devine; it couldn’t have been his plan. Actually, it ought to have been his plan. That would’ve been a much stronger story than the one they told. Imagine: Devine wants to smuggle the German army into New York, he blackmails Biro into helping, so then Biro pushes Welles and Houseman to do War of the Worlds and to do it in a style that will cause a panic as a distraction. That thing in my version where Welles nearly scraps it in favor of Lorna Doone? That’s (broadly) based on history; there were a lot of difficulties in bringing to air. Howard Koch had a hard time making the script interesting or believable, and CBS’s legal department made them change all the names because they’d already anticipated it being trouble. There’s a perfect spot here to have Biro, rather than just being a jerk to Welles for no good reason, to instead be the guy who greases the wheels, encourages Koch to make it more believable, gives Frank Readick a tape of Herbert Morrison reporting on the Hindenberg, and quiets down the legal department’s concerns in hopes of causing the legendary panic. By the way, I’m also disappointed by the extent to which Gatiss boils down the production of War of the Worlds to a two-man show with Welles and Houseman. Howard Koch doesn’t appear at all, and only gets mentioned by name once. Also absent is Anna Froelick, Koch’s assistant, later a frequent collaborator of his, who was in the process of becoming a prominent screenwriter when she got blacklisted as a communist for her support of desegregation and labor unions. Frank Readick too is completely gone, which is kind of amazing, since he’s the star of the first act, which is the one that is actually useful in the plot of this story; when they reprise it at the Doctor’s bidding, his lines are given to Welles. To add injury to insult, there’s a bit early on where Houseman ribs Welles over his time as The Shadow and Welles responds with the Shadow’s signature evil laugh. But: Orson Welles didn’t do the Shadow’s signature evil laugh. Frank Readick did. Readick had narrated the original incarnation of the radio show from 1932 to 1935, when it was a genre anthology. Even when the show was rebooted as a drama with Welles taking over as the titular character, Readick’s introduction was retained. And I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, this story needed two additional characters like a radiation burn in the chest, but I’m still aggrieved that even from beyond the grave, Orson Welles is able to exert the narrative gravity to eclipse all the other people who went into making this thing. As it is, they end up instead introducing this big extra plot complication of having Welles do War of the Worlds a second time for a private audience. That doesn’t really add anything, and I think in a sense, it sort of robs the actual broadcast of some of its totemic power, since it’s not the famous (if apocryphal) 1938 War of the Worlds panic which figures into the plot, but a hastily-done remake.

The Nazis, of course, are also a largely unsatisfying plot device. Okay, sure, I get a laugh-so-I-don’t-cry chuckle here in 2018 about the flamboyant homocon who’s chummy with the Nazis because they’re pretty blonde boys in snappy uniforms. But they literally show up for one scene for no purpose beyond winnowing the scene down to just named characters before they get eaten. Incidentally, Big Finish Nazi Fun Fact: a few years later, Charlie Pollard’s kid sister will show up in one of their Doctor Who spinoffs as a Nazi fangirl, remembered to history exclusively for the fact that she fucked a lot of them.

Glory Bee is possibly worse. She’s in a lot more of the story, but I can’t really say what good it does. Yes, she hires the Doctor, as Halliday, to find Stepashin. But since it turns out that the real Halliday was already looking into the Excelsior Hotel and Stepashin’s disappearance, you could omit her entirely, and have the Doctor follow the exact same path based on Halliday’s notes. Really, all she does is serve as a replacement companion while Charlie is in Devine’s cellar, there to prompt the Doctor for explanations. She has no backstory, nothing personal or interesting about her motivations, of course, she’s summarily dismissed once there’s another character around to fill the role.

And weird, isn’t it, that the character who takes over as temporary companion is Don Cheney? I didn’t make a big deal out of it, but he literally asks, “What is it, Doctor?” at one point. I said before that we can accept, on a storytelling level, Cheney doing awful things because he’s meant to be a bad person. But the truth is, the story has a hard time remembering that. He’s generally affable. He’s never a threat of any sort to anyone we actually like. He gets along great with the Doctor. even when he views him as a rival, it’s a polite rivalry, and once outside threats show up, he instantly and implicitly trusts the Doctor and defers to his judgment. Sure. He’s a crime boss. But he’s the “good kind” of crime boss, making a point not to sell out America to the Nazis, and being determined to stick to his deal with the CIA. It feels like a supremely Mark Gatiss kind of thing to do to get caught up in the romance and mystique of the gangster archetype that he’s completely let off the hook for being, y’know, a crime lord, a kidnapper, and a murderer. Also, they make a huge deal about Cheney’s missing nose being his berserk button and then completely forget about. I mean, we get told that it’s unwise to call him “The Phantom” to his face and… Everyone respects his wishes on this matter and doesn’t call him that.

It feels like what we ended up with are the remnants of a much longer script — or maybe of several scripts. If the large number of plot threads were more spartan, that would be one thing. But there’s so many details thrown in that seem like they ought to be important.

Possibly the harshest blow, though, is that the whole bit with Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds broadcast? Doesn’t even end up mattering. The Doctor doesn’t save the day. In fact, what does the Doctor do in this episode that figures into the resolution? Not a damn thing. His big plan to involve Orson Welles fails. The Leiderplacker take care of the Nazis and Stepashin takes care of the Leiderplacker. The only effect the Doctor’s plan has is to get Devine thrown in the brig in time to be someone for Stepashin to monologue to as he activates his bomb. As with the comparison I made before to “Aliens of London”, if you are feeling generous, you might see this as an evolutionary stage on the way to the Christopher Eccleston era trope of having the Doctor rarely save the day himself, but more often enable and motivate the people around him to step up and save the day. But the Doctor doesn’t actually do anything to inspire the ultimate resolution here either. If you take the Doctor out of the story, very little changes. He doesn’t even manage to reduce the body count. Halliday still dies, Biro still dies, Jimmy Winkler still dies, Ellis and Mouse still die, Stepashin still dies, Glory Bee still dies, and a throng of nameless gangsters and Nazis still die. If anything, the Doctor increases the body count since he’s responsible for Glory Bee finding her way to Cheney’s lair (Charlie similarly might be credited with a kill, since had she not been there, Devine would have shot Ellis, but possibly let Jimmy go). Stepashin had already built the bomb (for peaceful purposes) before the Doctor arrived, and nothing the Doctor does has any bearing on his decision or ability to use it later. If you take the Doctor and Charlie out of the story altogether, here’s what changes:

• Glory Bee never gets kidnapped by Ellis and taken to Cheney’s lair, and therefore survives to return to Moscow having failed her mission.
• Ellis dies in Devine’s basement instead of dying half an hour later inside the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Devine is still on the bridge making plans with the Leiderplacker when the bomb goes off. Stepashin is mildly disappointed he doesn’t get to watch Devine die.

This all fits in with what I said before about the predominant narrative of the eighth Doctor era being one of failure. Even more than that, it fits in with a recurring theme of Big Finish’s take on the eighth Doctor in particular: that, in sharp contrast to the sometimes Machiavellian machinations of the expanded universe seventh Doctor, getting “involved” isn’t really the eighth Doctor’s thing so much as it is for his previous incarnations. The Doctor describes himself as an “observer” to Cheney, and repeatedly characterizes himself as a “tourist” — there’s even a story a couple of seasons down the line where he gives “tourism” as his religion on some paperwork. That’s not to say that the eighth Doctor never takes an active role, but it’s really a particular foible of the Big Finish interpretation of this particular Doctor that he can go through this entire story without contributing anything to the resolution of the plot, and it doesn’t really feel all that strange that he doesn’t.

So in all, this is an extremely Big Finish sort of Big Finish story. A bunch of talented people got together and did a good job at doing something that probably they oughtn’t to have done in the first place. A faithful attempt to recreate elements of a forty-year-old TV show in a context where those elements don’t make sense. A product that ultimately feels like nostalgia being productized as a sort of therapy for grown-ass men who are still as hurt by the cancellation of Doctor Who in 2002 as I was back in 1992 (It took a while for me to find out that it really wasn’t coming back).

And yet… I got to admit it. Up until the point where I get to the fridge and actually have the time to get all deep an introspective about it, I kinda love it. Sure, the plot is a mess, and sure, the whole thing is a bit of a shaggy dog tale. But it’s fun. It’s lots of fun. The dialogue is far more high notes than clunkers. Everyone’s in on the joke; no one expects you to take Simon Pegg seriously as a 1930s gangster, no one expects you to take Jessica Hynes seriously as a Russian spy, and no one expects you to take Streath and Noriam seriously at all. The only character who’s outright evil is the over-the-top camp gossip columnist. I’m going to just say that sentence again, because how often do you get to say that? “The only character who’s outright evil is the over-the-top camp gossip columnist.” The fact that we get a pretty solid straight-man character in John Houseman is a pleasant bonus.

And, of course, we’re encouraged to listen through the lens (earmuff?) of golden age radio. And in that light, things like frequent misleading cliffhangers and over-the-top characters are all part of the interpretive framework. You can even view, if you’re feeling generous, the coming and going of subplots that don’t actually move the story as a whole, as part of that. Not of this kind of golden-age radio drama, but as another kind of drama that got its start in radio’s golden age: the soap opera. Plots that fade in and out without altering the status quo which mostly serve as a vehicle for character drama is very soap opera, and it’s the infusion of soap opera sensibilities into action-adventure that would turn out a few years later to be a winning formula for reviving Doctor Who on TV. So once again, maybe what we’re really seeing here is an embryonic precursor to what Russel T. Davies will eventually get right.

Then there’s the Leiderplacker. They’re ridiculous, and not as funny as they ought to be and not as scary as the narrative thinks they are. But when I listen to them,  the only thing I actually dislike is the high-frequency buzz that’s layered under their speech (Is that supposed to be echolocation?). I mean, they’re basically muppets. Joss Whedon managed to make a convincing muppet episode on Angel and that was a way darker show than this. But more than muppets, they’re another radio genre wandering in.

I said at the outset that it was surprising to see Gattis latch on to American radio drama. But it’s not just American radio drama. The Leiderplacker are quite obviously refugees from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It seems obvious to compare them to the Vogons, particularly the leather-clad guard who expels Arthur and Ford from the Vogon ship. More than that, Streath reminds me of Number Two from the Golgafrinchan B-Ark.

It’s really the breadth of the genre mash-up here that makes it work. Because all of those plot threads that sort of peter out, they’re really all in different genres. War of the Worlds may be the jumping-off point, but the largest part of the story is a gangster drama. The Doctor himself is playing out a Noir detective story, but it turns out that Glory Bee is from a cold war spy thriller. Cosmo Devine, meanwhile, is the antagonist in a World War II intrigue that’s sort of reminiscent of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie series where Holmes fights Nazis despite being Victorian. Then the Leiderplacker show up and finally we’re in the more traditional Doctor Who genre of alien invasions.

Except, of course, we’re not. Of all those genres, only one of them is really a traditional golden age radio drama genre — the Doctor’s noir detective story. But of course, it’s not being played remotely straight, what with the Doctor being the Doctor, and the detective getting killed off in the first scene. Meanwhile, thanks to the Hayes code, you’d never see a genuine gangster movie or radio drama of the 1930s that treats the gangsters so sympathetically, with Don Cheney being allowed to be both a violent criminal kingpin and also a basically heroic character in terms of the story as a whole. The characters might be inspired by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, but the story has much more in common with post-code or even post-The Godfather organized crime movies. Meanwhile, Glory Bee turns up as a Cold War Soviet spy a decade before Cold War movies were a thing, and  within a couple of minutes of the reveal, she dies an anticlimactic death by accidentally falling off a bridge. Devine’s Nazi story too comes too early for what it is; we’re still three years out from the US entering the war, at a period when, in a statement that used to be hard to believe, public opinion was divided in the US over whether or not the Nazis were bad guys. “It’s secretly the Nazis!” isn’t a period-appropriate reveal for 1938, and even still, of all the players involved, it’s the Nazis who are the least threatening. The Nazis, basically the existentially threatening bad guys in fiction of the second half of the twentieth century, are upstaged by a gossip columnist and dispatched by baby bats. By the time the Leiderplacker show up, it’s no real surprise that this alien invasion story — which, yeah, sure, has exactly one precedent in the radio drama of 1938, but is really more of a ’50s thing — is practically parody.

“Invaders From Mars” is a slightly mad mash-up of genres which homages golden age radio drama yet almost entirely draws from sources outside golden age radio drama. And yet, it… kinda fits. “The femme fatale who hires the hardboiled private detective is secretly a Russian agent,” is historically inaccurate for 1938, but it feels right, because from our point of view many decades in the future, the Cold War Espionage Thriller is very much an evolution of the Noir Thriller. And if “Gangsters team up with the good guys to stop the Nazis from getting advanced technology,” sounds familiar, possibly that’s because it’s the plot of The Rocketeer. The plots aren’t historically accurate, but they’re not historically accurate in the same way that the War of the Worlds panic of 1938 isn’t historically accurate: it’s less what was, and more what we later reckoned it ought to have been.

So in the end, yeah. It’s fun. It works for me. Dammit, Gatiss, your lovingly uncritical, unreconstructed nostalgia got me again.

At least the Nazis were the bad guys.

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• “Invaders From Mars” is available for download from Big Finish.
• And I feel dumb for neglecting to bring this up or even reread it until now, but like five years ago, Elizabeth Sandifer covered this story for her Tardis Eruditorum series.