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.
