Tuesday 3 April 2018

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #67 – Downtime by Marc Platt

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#18
Downtime
By Marc Platt

We interrupt your regular Missing Adventures to return to the rather odd world of fan films, which vary in infamy, production value and tenuous association with Doctor Who.  At least this one has some familiar characters in it, so (unlike Shakedown) won’t need a lot of work done to resemble a Doctor Who book.  More’s the pity, since the off-video parts of Shakedown were arguably the best bits.

For his script, Terrance Dicks had two monsters and a single (pretty decent) shooting location, so it was logical for Shakedown to be a smash-and-grab actioner with no lofty ambitions.  It got the job done.  Downtime is a different beast.  Steeped in continuity and earnestly trying to build on it, with a plot largely reliant on metaphysical mysticism, it’s the long-delayed third act for the Great Intelligence.  (Millennial Rites doesn’t count.)  So quite ambitious then, especially with a script and novel by Marc Platt, who wrote a brilliantly complex Sylvester McCoy story… and then a New Adventure that was like reading spaghetti bolognese.  In all honesty, this could have gone in either direction.  (Platt’s Big Finish output is similarly all over the place.)

And I’ll own up right now: I haven’t seen the video.*  I’ve got it lying around but I thought it would be fun to look through the other end of the telescope, see how well Downtime works as a novel first.  I’ll watch it later.  For now I’ve got no idea which bits were added for the book, though I can hazard a few pretty obvious guesses.

(*I have since seen the video.  It’s, um.  Some of it’s all right.  If you’re at all interested in Downtime and you are able to pick and choose, I would suggest getting the book instead.)

Our first Obviously Added Bit is the Web Of Fear epilogue, for the Second Doctor and friends and then for the Brigadier, the latter tentatively setting up UNIT.  (This is done with more aplomb than Terrance Dicks himself in his Web novelisation; he absolutely crowbarred it in there!)  Platt reminds us how nervous Victoria could get on her travels, and how mindful she is of her father.  Mown down by Daleks, but just as much by fate for helping them in their schemes, he left a hole in her life that couldn’t be filled.  The Doctor and Jamie were there, and that was that.  It’s easy to forget that some of his companions had unhappy reasons for stepping into the TARDIS, and Platt embraces this wholeheartedly with Victoria – a companion that, if I’m honest, never seemed like much more than a scream factory.  But why should she be anything else?  She wasn’t travelling for the fun of it or to see the universe.  She more than likely just wanted to go home, except her father was dead, and her home had blown up.  Her decision in the very next story to step off forever and live with the first decent people she’d met makes as much sense as anything else.  Even if it’s not a be-all, end-all happy ending for her, it’s a chance at stability.  And perhaps any time would seem like the wrong century when your own world has gone.

Downtime confirms that it wasn’t enough, lovely as the Harrises were.  In a lengthy but satisfyingly packed first chapter, Platt finds Victoria trying to make it on her own years later.  (She still keeps in touch with the Harrises.)  She works with antiquities, privately catches up on the facts of the 20th Century while she’s doing it, and spends the intervening time dodging a belated will from her father.  She also feels a tremendous longing for something.  She occasionally drifts out of her body and moves towards what seems like her father’s voice, coming from Det-Sen Monastery, of all places.  Platt’s penchant for odd concepts isn’t new to me – see Ghost Light, “Ooh!”, or Time’s Crucible, “Huh?!” – but he makes consistent use of out-of-body experiences here.  It makes sense with a villain as disembodied as the Intelligence, and it makes a lot of sense for Victoria, who of all people does not have her feet on the ground.  She eventually finds Det-Sen and, after a charmingly not-to-be rendezvous with a promising new friend, awakens something she shouldn’t.  And then we catapult ahead to the present day (circa ’90s) where – bombshell – she’s working with the Intelligence.

On the face of it this is an odd way to treat a familiar character, even with the Intelligence’s record for possession.  And there is a degree of coercion involved, but it’s less than you’d think.  In the end Victoria seems to want to belong to something so badly that this will do, and she lets it happen.  (Possibly I’m reading too much into that, and the video makes it clear that she’s really just under the ’fluence.  Update: the video isn’t clear about much.)  She occasionally laments the absence of the Doctor and wonders what he’d say of all this.  Dealing with things in his absence is unavoidably one of Downtime’s themes, and it does an excellent job with Victoria’s not-particularly-happy story, without making such a miserable hash of it that you wish they hadn’t bothered asking.  And it doesn’t end very well for her, which I’m guessing is where the video left her, but the book’s epilogue lets us down more gently: it turns out the Doctor kept coming back in different incarnations to make sure she was okay.  Of course he was too late, but it’s a beautiful thought, and a sweet note to end on.  Moments like this, and all the references to Web Of Fear and Evil Of The Daleks, feel much more relevant and earned than your average bit of continuity.  (As for referring to the previous Yeti incidents as NN and QQ, which were their production codes on television, that’s more of a Nerd Alert – but then, shame on me for knowing that.)

The Brigadier is in the book slightly less, but no less significantly; Platt has a troubled future in mind for him also.  Lethbridge-Stewart becoming a maths teacher never made great heaps of sense to me, but then most careers would seem rather odd after UNIT.  His retirement dinner is getting steadily delayed as strange dreams alert him to the Intelligence’s return, and danger creeps back into his life, possibly via UNIT itself.  More importantly, his daughter is being menaced by something and she needs his help.  Suddenly the conflict of his personal life and his work life comes to the fore – an open wound he never talked about on screen, but one that fits the facts well enough.

Kate has the same name as her New Who counterpart, but that’s the only real similarity.  This one doesn’t want to know her father following years of familial ignorance (courtesy of his day-job), and she hasn’t even mentioned having a son.  Seeing her dad again doesn’t patch it all up – after some tender words, she still decides that if she has to keep her son away forever to keep him safe then she will – but sure enough, things improve.  There is some very nice writing here, as the Brigadier wells up seeing a picture of his grandson, and Kate begrudgingly admits the need to have her father around.  (“Today, rather to her horror, Grandad looked terribly solid and reliable.”)  Frankly I don’t like Kate all that much; it’s a fannish instinct, to not understand how someone couldn’t like the Brigadier very much.  But she’s also not terribly useful in a dangerous situation, and following a brief possession from an actually quite benevolent force trying to stop the Intelligence, she goes on and on about feeling “soiled” by it.  Oh, give over.

On a more positive note, the writing has a lot of time for little observations that make the story brighter.  Not to diminish the generally lovely prose surrounding Victoria’s melancholy life – “That voice was in her, too.  It embodied the despair and loneliness of a being cast out from its old and native haunts.” – but even small characters have their own conflicts, many of them funny.  There’s an acerbic UNIT officer: “‘The old bugger probably choked to death on a mince pie.’  It was a fate he wished the precocious young officer might enjoy as well.  But it was a long time to wait until Christmas.  We briefly meet up with Harold Chorley, whose elderly malaise seems tragically apt: “He called her Sandra and kept staring over her shoulder as if he expected a cue card to materialise out of the ether.  The Brigadier’s family history is at one point related with poignant amusement: “Anyway, Fiona had never talked to him either, not for years.  So that evened things out a bit.  And the Brig gets at least one hilarious line, not including a pretty naff attempt at remaking Five Rounds Rapid: “‘I give up, Hinton,’ complained the Brigadier.  ‘Am I asleep or are you dead?’”  A scene where he is forced to bluster and stall the bad guy in his finest Doctor impression makes amusing light of the Doctor-shaped hole in the story – and in their lives, of course – as does the hilariously sharp observation that to the Doctor, the Brigadier isn’t so much a magician’s assistant as a bewildered volunteer from the audience.  There is also a delightful dollop of world-building surrounding the Yeti, as in the animal ones, which have been proven to exist and can be seen in zoos.  They’re named after Travers.

On a less positive note, I’ve hardly mentioned the plot or the villains yet, because that’s where Downtime comes up short.

It can be tricky piecing together what’s good or bad because of budgetary restraints, since Platt surely has license to make everything a bit grander in print, but if you came here for the Yeti then you’ll be disappointed.  They do eventually show up, at first in a genuinely horrifying scene of a control sphere piercing a man’s chest and turning him into a Yeti – I’m not sure that’s how these things work but yep, that’s successfully horrid – and then in a full blown UNIT battle.  (Which makes me wonder why the Yeti are in this so little.  If they had a bunch of them in the video, where the heck are they?)  Platt tries conspicuously hard to get chills out of web – like, on its own – and occasional beeping spheres.  It’s a bit limp to just point at a few bits of iconography as if that’ll do.  Web and control spheres, to me, are signifiers of something else.  As for the human face of all this, Victoria’s inner struggles are perfectly interesting – see above – but her cohort in crime, Christopher Rice, is considerably less so.  At least, I think that was his name?  There are several more or less interchangeable characters involved, apologies if I’m naming the wrong one.  Shrug.  Professor Travers eventually shows up, having been completely ensnared by the Intelligence – although he gets away from it briefly – but he’s not put to a lot of use.  It might have been more interesting, not to mention creepier if he was more present in this.  (The presence of Deborah Watling’s real dad is a nice touch, though, adding serendipitously to her character’s journey.)

Victoria, some forgettable men and an occasional Travers aren’t much to write home about until the Yeti go ape, so Platt comes up with an intermediate baddie.  If you’re more familiar with Downtime than I am, you were probably waiting for this bit: aren’t the Chillys rubbish?  To back up briefly, Victoria (coerced?) is financing New World, a computer-based university that ostensibly makes teaching quicker and easier, but is obviously a cult and a front for the Intelligence.  It aims to use the internet to take over the world.  (Hey, didn’t New Who do that as well?  Platt should sue!)  The students wear caps and headphones and are brainwashed – the “Children of the New World”, they are known as Chillys.  And I just… I can’t believe that’s the name he went with.  They sound like ingredients, or a popular chain of restaurants, or some sort of sweet.  It’s a really weird abbreviation.  And they’re just a bunch of bloody teenagers with headphones on.  That’s it.  Kate calls her dad and puts her son into hiding, turning her life upside down because a bunch of plebs are hanging around.  So?  They don’t do anything!  Even the prose can’t seem to give them a break: “There were also increasing numbers of accusations about computerised brainwashing cults and the general appearance and behaviour of the Chillys.  Oh no!  Their general appearance is coming to get us!  Quick, walk briskly in the opposite direction!  It must have seemed like a great fix to have some vaguely uniform baddie to fill up the background in this, all for the price of some hats, T-shirts and dummy headphones, but it helps to actually make them antagonistic in some way.

Speaking of antagonism, the plan isn’t terribly clear – let’s assume it’s “come back and take over” in the main, but I didn’t catch the specifics beyond that.  In one eyebrow-raising cutaway we see a train derail and flail about in the air, and a lot of computers pick themselves up and jump about, which is pleasantly weird.  (Again I’m not sure that’s how the Intelligence operates, but why not.  Guessing these bits might be new to the book!)  New World just isn’t very concerning, since it’s filled with nonentities in baseball caps and stuffy villain-ish characters doing… something or other.  It’s hard not to imagine the rest of the world giving the place a bemused glance at best, then just getting on with their day.  UNIT are having an identity crisis in amongst all this, which is sort of interesting, but that doesn’t go anywhere interesting.  (Some of them are possessed.  Shocker?)  It’s neat to see Crichton again after The Five Doctors, and there’s some slightly confusing input from Captain (aka Brigadier) Bambera, which means this story happened before Battlefield.  Pausing the story to go “Hang on, where does this go?” isn’t the best idea.  (Maybe it’s a reference to UNIT dating.)

Sometimes your heroes are only as good as your villains, and apart from the quite interesting personal dramas going on for Victoria and the Brigadier there’s not much of a fight to be having.  (Save for the UNIT scrap at the end.)  The Brigadier just sort of ambles towards New World and the climax of the story from the outset, while Sarah Jane Smith – who I haven’t mentioned yet because this is how relevant she is – circles the same.  In the end, one of their best ideas is pulling a plug out.  The Brigadier’s moment of impersonating the Doctor might be a solid character beat for Downtime, but it also inevitably feels like a writer going through the motions.  I was left wondering how they defeated the Intelligence at all without the Doctor’s help, and if the thing could really have been trying in that case.

It’s a very different approach to Shakedown, which bundled its economical script into a 43-page “novelisation” and beefed up the before and (less so) after bits.  Downtime just novelises the video in earnest, and while it’s never noticeably padded, there’s a dearth of plot.  Platt, as is his way, grabs onto some interesting ideas here and there: the repeated theme of astral projection, with the Brigadier having whole disorienting conversations in another plane of existence, is an unusual way to advance the plot, but memorable.  That’s where Daniel Hinton comes in, the pseudo-heroic computer-whiz / powerful mystic / school drop-out who infiltrates New World, contacts the Brigadier in his dreams and ultimately helps save the world via Kate.  (“I’ve been soiled!”)  His character is pivotal, but all over the place; his convenient magic powers could definitely do with stricter limits.  Then we have Sarah, who shows up presumably because Lis Sladen was happy to be involved and not because Platt had anything for her to do.  If anything, some of her action could have gone to Kate and helped her contribute a bit more.  The dead end is even more obvious when he’s managed to make Victoria, a character for whom screaming was a super-power, interesting.

There’s a surprising amount to recommend about Downtime, which sets its sights on what certain characters did next and commits to that.  I mostly come to the Missing Adventures for the characterisation, so hooray.  But it’s not all like that, and despite the latent novelty of the thing – a Doctor Who story without the Doctor, another bout with the Great Intelligence – it ends up all seeming a bit naff and uneventful.  It feels, maybe unsurprisingly, like a low budget production.  But you don’t need a lot of money for thoughtful writing, and thankfully there’s some of that on offer.

6/10

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