NB: This isn’t a BBC Book, but once again we’re exploring a range from the periphery, so in my book it counts. If you’d like to know more, or want to pick up a copy of any of Jim Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts, Intermixes or just plain books, you can reach him at jimbo-original-who@hotmail.com. Alternatively search for Jim Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts 2 on Facebook. Thanks to Jim for the review copy — and apologies for being ever so slightly (4 years) late reading it…
By Jim Mortimore
Beltempest is a book about growing pains, so it makes sense that it would not only continue to evolve but would do so in a strange and staggered fashion.
Unlike Mortimore’s earlier Blood Heat what we’re seeing here is not a full Director’s Cut. This is an Intermix. I’m still a bit unsure what that means, but if it helps I’m picturing it as the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration, with the Watcher momentarily sitting in between Baker and Davison’s blurry faces. A stage rather than a destination.
It’s an altogether quieter edit than Blood Heat 2.0 — but I suppose that should go without saying, since a full Beltempest Director’s Cut is still planned. Will that one resemble the kind of top-to-bottom revision of (I swear I’ll stop mentioning it soon) Blood Heat? It’s impossible to say right now. For starters, where that earlier project renamed both companions (for, I tend to assume, copyright reasons) and swapped out the Seventh Doctor altogether for a kaleidoscopic new one of Mortimore’s invention, Beltempest: Intermix most certainly sticks with the Eighth Doctor and Sam as they were on the first go around.
I have no idea if that’s something that will change in the DC or if this is simply a different sort of assignment, but I think it’s likely that the story is so entrenched in this Doctor and this companion that it would defeat the purpose to start them over. We’ll see. As they’re much the same here, however, I have to be careful not to write the same review again, as my feelings towards them haven’t changed all that much either. Said feelings are still relevant though, so I’ll summarise, or at least try to offer some different clarity.
I don’t think this is a technically invalid take on either character, but it’s not one that really folds into the ongoing series as it was when Beltempest first arrived. The Doctor is a bouncing ball of energy whose quixotic moods can make it seem like he doesn’t care. (Hardly a hot take as secondary characters take him to task for it.) This affects his relationship with Sam whom he passingly believes to be dead at least twice, and carries on with what he’s doing regardless. Yes, the weight of a star system is too much to sideline just because you’re preoccupied with a friend — that dilemma is literally represented in the dialogue at least once — but it doesn’t exactly feel like the Doctor is making that trade-off, more that he’s just having a whizzo time in general. If that disconnect is intended to suggest unfathomable depths then I’m not sure we’re quite there yet. Hopefully it’s something the Director’s Cut will smooth out.
And then we have Sam, technically hitting some Sam-accurate notes like the urge to grow up and be taken seriously and the urge to help people and make a difference. Never mind that she had grown up by this point in the series, the books having gone to great pains to let that happen, and making a difference had not often been a problem either, or not (as it’s generally framed here) a problem exacerbated by the Doctor’s expectations of her. Sam seems desperate to lead by singular example in this, at one point physically rejecting a bag of tools from the Doctor, and that seems a somewhat weird reaction for one half of a symbiotic duo. But then where the story demands that they be apart, symbiosis can’t occur. All in all, Sam’s crisis in Beltempest feels like a pay-off to a specific ongoing tension that wasn’t really there, lending the whole thing a slightly odd sidestep quality. (Of course, Sam is eventually possessed by another life-form, but this is very late in the story so it can’t account for her general mood/quest beforehand. Maybe it would be better if it had had an influence sooner — or maybe I’d like that even less, what with the loss of agency that inevitably must come with it.)
All that said — and said again, in some cases — an upside to reading Beltempest in this form, and/or just reading it a second time, is an increased sympathy with these takes on the characters. If you are able to divorce Beltempest from the preceding few novels, as an Intermix published decades later will do by definition, then it makes a bit more sense to approach the Doctor and Sam in this way. If you looked at those early character briefs there’d be plenty to say for Sam in particular acting like this — the whole failed crusade thing fits right in pre-Longest Day, alongside the likes of Genocide. She did have a lot to prove when she first arrived. (This sort of thing even happened after the jump, The Janus Conjunction being a prime example, only there Sam was doing her best despite being apart from the Doctor, not to make a point of being without him — a meaningful distinction that makes the implied need to return to symbiosis less of a castigating one.) I suppose what I’m trying to say is, if you’re not reading these getting-on-a-bit books in sequence, if you have in fact not read them in years or not read them at all, then Beltempest: Intermix could be argued as a solid one-shot statement of what these characters were about at one time or another.
Okay, that’s more than enough said about what hasn’t changed. What has? Well it’s here that I become sharply aware of the difference between an Intermix and a Director’s Cut. Unlike Blood Heat 2: Even Bloodier Heat I didn’t detect any new set-pieces. This was somewhat of a surprise given the galactic scale of the action, but again, we’re still in a larval stage at this point; maybe that stuff will come later. I occasionally found myself flicking between the new and old versions and invariably found that the more striking or odd moments were already present in the BBC Book, but in some cases they have a little added nuance or context in the Intermix. Some of the individual moons are given names, which really does help to get your bearings. A moment where the Doctor considers the military overreaction to all this planetary chaos is given more weight. There are some little tweaks and massages that I noticed, like the Doctor referencing The Lion King at one point instead of opera, or Sam’s analogous reference to a test tube being updated to a “host mother” to better hint at the story’s theme. The same scene has the Doctor inwardly reflecting that he isn’t sure what Sam is still doing here after her “sabbatical” — a slightly cold thought, but one in support of this novel’s overall read of the Doctor vs his companion. All to the good, then. (This extra matter also works to bed in who Sam actually is, which wasn’t really a worry 17 books into a series but — blah, blah, blah! — it’s helpful in a one shot.)
Going back to the name changes in Blood Heat, Mortimore updates a few here, albeit just the secondary characters. A tribesman goes from “Fastblade” to “Stonebreaker” (or just “Stone”), perhaps to add some familial sibilance with his fellow “Skywatcher”; “Conaway” is now a more manageable “Conway”; “Bellis” becomes “Wells”, possibly to remove an unhelpful repetition of “Bel” where that is also the name of the star and the beginning of all the planet names. The aforementioned moon names are a boon. (If you will.) He sticks with a few names that he was clearly happy with, such as “Smoot.” (And who can blame him?) I think a little more meat on that character’s bones would be helpful, with him showing up late in the proceedings with a turbulent ex-marriage to Conway that we just can’t get into in the time allotted. Perhaps that’s one for the next iteration.
I knew from the introduction that there had been some nips and tucks here which, saints forgive me, I didn’t then notice*. However I think that speaks to these being good choices: nothing that interrupts the flow has been lost, nothing is more confusing in the new edit. (*On reflection I’m pretty sure various references to earlier books have been cut out, which makes sense given when this book came out.) It’s still a bit surprising to me that such a relatively short book could stand to lose a few pounds, but I suppose that could go for any length of writing. I still feel that there’s room for expansion, and I know that’s an altogether redundant observation when we know another revision is coming. Should I make predictions? Would they be doomed to fail? I’ll keep it brief then, and minimise disappointment: I still want to feel what is happening on all those worlds on a more visceral level. Feel it, see it, not just hear about it. I would like to know Con(a)way better, especially since she has an unhelpful ex on the periphery, perhaps mainly because she’s with the Doctor more than Sam has occasion to be. And the last gasp of the story, for my money, deserves to let its breath out more slowly: Sam’s escape from this latest form of possession and her reckoning with what she’s been through here ought to be fully on the page, not merely a thoughtful few paragraphs and then the purview of the next book(s) in the range. (To be fair, Simon Messingham got some mileage out of it.)
Beltempest is an odd duck, and perhaps inevitably so is its Intermix. I don’t think it can be disputed that this is a stronger version, albeit not a wholly transformative one. It’s tighter and at times clearer. I think there’s a case to be made that isolating it from the series makes a stronger statement of its characters, although the overall tensions I found within the story — events on a scale that can’t be translated by smaller beings, or even perhaps readers — still persist. It’s still a book that seems aware of the distance between action and understanding, even putting that into the plot with Sam’s frustrated psychic communications and visions, but can’t quite resolve that into a book that feels its feelings. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s all to come in the Director’s Cut and maybe the Director’s Cut will do something else entirely. Here and now I’d say the Intermix is the best way to visit Beltempest. But still not, by its own stated definition, the best we’ll ever get.
6/10
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