Category: Doctor Who

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.

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

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.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Four minutes to bomb time (Big Finish’s Invaders From Mars, Part 4)

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.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Those Strange Beings Who Landed in the Jersey Farmlands Tonight (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 3)