Month: April 2018

“NEVER play the same game three times running!” — Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth, Act II.

It is January, 2002. The Euro becomes legal tender in 12 EU nations. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle accuses the GOP of causing, “The most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation’s history,” to which the Republicans respond, “Hold our beer,” and proceed to reorient the economy primarily around credit default swaps. Brewer Freddy Heineken, restaurateur Dave Thomas, and singer Peggy Lee die. Apple introduces the iMac G4. I turn twenty-three.

Out this month on the Playstation 2 is Rez, a rhythm-based rail shooter inspired by the works of Wassily Kandinsky. It’s notable for the fact that in Japan, it came with a sex toy. I mean, not deliberately, but the designers wanted more powerful haptic feedback than the Dualshock controllers could provide, so they included a USB-controlled rumble-pack called — because Japan — the “Trance Vibrator”. And it came with a washable sleeve so it’s not like they didn’t know what the deal was or anything. It’s a fun and really trippy game even if you choose not to let it reward you with orgasms for playing.

Nickelback holds the top spout on the charts for half the month with “How U Remind Me”. It’s hard to believe now, but there was indeed a time when people actually liked Nickelback. Usher will take the spot from them for the second half of the month with “U Got it Bad”, part of a Bush-Era austerity drive that forbade songs in the top 10 from wasting three letters to spell the word “You” correctly. U think I’m making that up, but this is the fourth time a “U” song has been in the number one spot since 2001. “You” hasn’t been spelled correctly by a #1 song since last May’s “All For You”, and won’t be again until 2004, while two of 2003’s number ones will spell it “Ya”.

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast — the 1991 animated one — is back in theaters, at least those which support the IMAX format, to which it’s just been converted. Disney’s Snow Dogs also comes out this month, and the Hong Kong Cinema parody Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

Television this month will give us a fiftieth anniversary special for I Love Lucy, a sixtieth birthday special for Muhammad Ali, the thirtieth anniversary special for The Price is Right and the thousandth episode of Soul Train. Conspicuously Absent Franchise Title: Enterprise returns from its fall break with several new episodes, including “Dear Doctor”, justly maligned as the worst mangling of the theory of evolution Star Trek ever did. And if you don’t appreciate how much that is saying, remember: there’s an episode of Voyager where going faster than warp 10 causes Paris and Janeway to “evolve” into giant salamanders with Fu Manchu mustaches, and then fuck. The West Wing has three new episodes this month, and The X-Files is still on somehow, which surprises me. So is Dark Angel, which, it turns out, got way better after the six episodes I watched, and I will try hard not to slam it in the future.

Fun fact: I started writing this article almost exactly a year ago. Only I decided for some reason that I should do Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II: Electric Boogaloo first, and things kinda spun out of control from there, with me repeatedly losing my will to continue this project, or, indeed, do anything at all ever again. But we’re back now, I guess, and I won’t blame you if you’re confused.

So yes, I’ll cop to the fact that last summer, I ran a pair of articles which crossed over between our years-long meander through adaptations of The War of the Worlds with my years-long art project positing an alternative version of Doctor Who. And it followed the premise that the Doctor and his companion happened upon a plot to invade the Earth in October of 1938, and took advantage of the Orson Welles broadcast to trick the aliens.

And because I’m a hack, I lifted the broad concept of the thing from something which is real. To be clear, my version of “Invaders From Mars!” is not a straight lift from the twenty-eighth Big Finish audio drama. I had to make room for poorly colorized newspaper archive photos, poorly edited screenshots from the 1999 made-for-TV movie RKO 281, and dick jokes. But certainly, the general gist is there.

So, Big Finish. Is this the first time we talked about them? Big Finish is a British company that has been producing audio dramas for the past 20 years. Their focus is audio plays based on British cult media, mostly TV, and they’re best known specifically for their Doctor Who line, which started out by picking up out-of-work Doctor Who actors and having them reprise their TV roles in plays based mostly on Virgin’s New Adventures and Missing Adventures novel lines, along with some remakes of a late-90s series of fan productions that the producers had been involved with. But after a couple of years of that, they decided to try something bold and got Paul McGann to reprise his role from the ill-fated 1996 American TV movie, taking a stab at being the “official” continuation of the Doctor’s adventures.

This was, in the real world, basically peak “wilderness years”, when it seemed basically impossible that Doctor Who would ever come back to TV. It was just about believable that the future of the franchise might just be low-budget licensed spin-offs in other media. And — this all seems like a weird fever-dream now — some people in fandom welcomed this. At last, they said, Doctor Who belongs to us, the fans, and we can finally do it properly, the way it should always have been, with a slavish adherence to continuity, and nothing even vaguely American, and long expository segments to canonize our pet theories, and NO GIRLS. And it would be great and show all those corporate suits that we know best and that living in our mom’s basements is too cool!

Draw what conclusions you like. Here’s the thing: Big Finish Productions are entirely competent at making high-quality audio dramas with talented actors and competent writing and entirely professional production values. And their series have produced many really fun and enjoyable things like Doctor Who and the Pirates and …Ish and Colin Baker getting to redeem his reputation by playing the Doctor in a period when everyone involved in the production didn’t clearly hate the show and want it to die, and they gave Paul McGann the chance to actually develop the character for himself, and really the only problem with Big Finish’s Doctor Who at a basic level is that the basic concept of what it is isn’t all that worthwhile of an idea. I mean, the target audience for Big Finish Doctor Who consists of 40-year-old men who desperately want an exact reproduction of a show that was cancelled thirty years ago, and are willing to pay a bunch of money to indulge their nostalgia. On the one hand, they’re free to do things that are innovative and new, because they effectively have a captive audience who will buy any old crap they put out. But on the other hand, their target audience profoundly isn’t interested in something innovative and new. They want something familiar and comfortable. Something that has cliffhangers every thirty minutes even if they don’t actually make any sense and fuck up the narrative flow of the story and reassures us that the Doctor never ever has sex and does not have any biological children, and takes time out of an audio-only narrative to assure us that they switched back to jaunting belts because no one liked the jaunting bracelets (that last one was The Tomorrow People).

What I’m trying to say is that the Big Finish Doctor Who audios are fine. Some of them are even good. But at no point do they ever really make any serious attempt to justify their existence. It’s a series that was tailor-made for a very specific audience who effectively had no real choice if they wanted to get their Doctor Who fix. It was the closest thing you could get to more Doctor Who (There was a line of novels produced by BBC Books at the same time, of course, but the novels never had any real claim to being the “legitimate continuation” of the series proper — they were, if anything, the successor to the series of novelizations produced alongside the classic series, and by extension were inherently positioned as supplementary). So nothing Big Finish did prior to 2005 ever had to answer, or even address, the question, “Why should I consume this particular media instead of one of the myriad other options I had.” And then 2005 came around and… honestly, they never managed to give a fully satisfying answer to why we should bother with them now either, but at the least, they didn’t take the presumably attractive option of hardcore catering to 40-year-old men who ragequit the new series because of the kissing and the women who serve narrative functions other than to twist their ankles and get captured. I assume. I mean, I haven’t really listened to much of their post-2005 output because why bother when there’s real Doctor Who to watch now.

Big Finish, at this point in their history, had sort of stumbled into being the de facto “main” continuation of the series. But it’s not like they’d won that title somehow; they were just the only viable option. And even today, it’s their version of the eighth Doctor, the sardonic one with short hair who doesn’t wear a Wild Bill Hickok Halloween costume, which is accepted as mostly-canonical. On paper, the BBC Books would seem to have the stronger claim, being actually produced by the BBC. But it’s the Big Finish companions Paul McGann names when toasting his own regeneration in “Night of the Doctor”.

Now, if I haven’t already set us up for failure sufficiently, I’ll reveal that the real Invaders from Mars was written by Mark Gatiss. If somehow you’re not familiar with him, Mark Gatiss is a writer, actor and comedian, who’s probably best known for his work on The League of Gentlemen and for playing Mycroft in Sherlock. Or maybe for his role in Game of Thrones, I have no idea. He’s one of those long-time ascended fanboys in the Doctor Who universe, having gotten his start as a professional writer in the New Adventures novel line, and his start in “TV” writing P.R.O.B.E., a direct-to-video Doctor Who spinoff that he would really prefer you not track down and watch because it’s terrible. He also wrote a number of episodes of the current television incarnation of Doctor Who and starred in several episodes, most recently as The Captain in “Twice Upon a Time”.

And, well… Mark Gatiss is a competent writer. Perfectly competent. But he’s… He’s got this kind of style to him. And it’s a style that can be a bit problematic. Let me put it this way: at one point, Mark Gatiss converted one of the rooms in his house into a Jules Verne-style Victorian Scientist’s laboratory. The kind way to put it is that he’s big on nostalgia. The less kind way of putting it is that he is kind of uncomfortably obsessed with an utterly undeconstructed love of the grandeur the imperial age of Great Britain with absolutely no apparent acknowledgement of just how incredibly skeevy that imperial past could be. To the point of occasionally blindly walking into things like speaking with a wistful longing for the days when foreigners knew their place, casually dropping racial slurs, and, on occasion, parroting the talking points of the British National Party. Which is strange for literally anyone, much less an openly gay man. He’s also almost serenely bad at writing women. I mean, you may think that his frequent collaborator Steven Moffat has some problems when it comes to writing women. But Moffat at his worst does still appear to have actually met a woman at some point in his life.

So Invaders From Mars is not necessarily an obvious brief from Gatiss. I mean, sure, it’s nostalgic, essentially Big Finish’s homage to the golden age of radio. But it’s an homage to the golden age of American radio. And that’s not really Gatiss’s particular thing. If you look at the rest of his Doctor Who output, it’s like, yeah, he wrote the one where the Doctor met Charles Dickens and he wrote the one where the Doctor hung out with Winston Churchill without a single bad word to say about him, and he wrote the one which is basically Moonraker in Victorian London, and he wrote the one where the Doctor met Robin Hood and he wrote the one where Victorian soldiers go to Mars and treat an Ice Warrior as Friday. On the one hand, “The Doctor fanboys over a historical figure” is very much a Gatiss thing to do, but on the other hand, the Doctor fanboying over someone who isn’t Victorian or at least British is odd. But okay, it’s not like “Mark Gatiss also likes American Golden Age Radio” is much of a stretch to believe. I mean, I like American Golden Age Radio and also post apocalyptic children’s television, so who am I to judge?

I like genre collisions, on principle. I’ve said this before. So Doctor Who-meets-Golden-Age-Radio should be a winner, even with Mark Gatiss to deal with. And in practice, we can expect that Big Finish won’t produce a complete train wreck at this stage in their creative output. But enough damning with faint praise. What’s the damn story about?

The Doctor is traveling with his companion Charlie Pollard, a self-described Edwardian Adventuress who he rescued from the dirigible R-101 (Internet personality Bill “The Engineer Guy” Hammick wrote a book on the subject), a doomed British airship which would probably be a lot more famous if it weren’t for that other doomed airship. Rescuing Charlie is in the process of destroying the universe, on account of it having changed history, since no one is supposed to have survived the R-101 crash.

I mean except that people did survive as a matter of historical record, and as Charlie was a stowaway, there wouldn’t have been any record of her being there in the first place so history wouldn’t notice her not dying anyway. And also the whole “You can’t change history!” thing is bullshit anyway, and treating it like an inviolate concept due to one line in “The Aztecs” back in 1964 is part of the fanwankish bullshit that is the hallmark of the worst excesses of the wilderness years, and I’m getting off topic. The point is that the current plot arc in the Paul McGann adventures is that the web of time is in serious peril. This is going to take the whole season to unfurl, so for the moment, it’s pretty subtle.

There’s no cold open. The theme music is a not-especially-good techno mix of the Doctor Who theme (I wonder a bit whether this is a deliberate rejection of the more orchestral arrangement of the John Debney version of the theme music used for the 1996 TV movie. Actually, I don’t wonder. Making a point to do something stupid and petty just to reject a thing that the fans didn’t like is basically peak Big Finish) which plays without any spoken titles. Given Big Finish’s distribution model — CDs at the time — this is a defensible choice, but given that I remember a guy from rec.arts.drwho who sent the BBC increasingly threatening letters raging at them about how intrusive their corner-of-the-screen channel bugs were once a week for six months until they told him to stop, I feel like probably what they’ve actually done here is broken with audio convention to avoid the fanboys complaining about them ruining the shitty techno cover of the Doctor Who theme by talking over it. Sorry. I shouldn’t be this bitter.

Continue reading Deep Ice: This is Orson Welles (Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Invaders From Mars, Part 1)