#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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