Time for more movie reviews! We’re dipping into video nasty territory again – content warnings for rape and abuse themes apply – as I take in three Wes Craven movies. There’s his 1972 debut feature which ended up on Section 1 of the infamous “video nasty” list (comprising movies which were prosecuted for obscenity), his second effort from 1977 which was a so-called “Section 3” video nasty (not prosecutable for obscenity but prone to be confiscated), and a 1991 effort which wasn’t touched because it came out after the moral panic had largely run its course.
Each of these movies was written and directed by Craven, and each of them plays on a recurring theme of his – that of characters hailing from different subsets of American culture ending up in a life-and-death conflict, a culture clash within US society playing out in starkly violent terms. Eventually, Craven would take this theme and hone it to a fine satirical point, but his first go-around on the topic was somewhat crude, and legendarily brutal with it…
The Last House On the Left
Serial killer and rapist Krug Stillo (David A. Hess), his heroin-addicted son and accomplice Junior (Marc Sheffler), sexual abuser and murderer Fred “Weasel” Podowski (Fred Lincoln), and the sadistically cruel and frighteningly erratic Sadie (Jeramie Rain) are a gang of fugitives – Krug and Weasel having escaped from jail with the help of the others. As they hole up in an apartment in the city, the tension between wanting to get to somewhere a bit less busy where they’re less likely to be recognised and wanting to indulge their nasty habits increases.
Meanwhile, Mari (Sandra Peabody) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are two teens from a rural area who head out one night to catch a concert in the big city. When they make the mistake of approaching Junior to try and buy marijuana, he ends up luring them to the apartment, which begins a hideous nightmare of gang rape, torture, and violence which will ultimately leave both Mari and Phyllis dead. By the end of the ordeal, the gang are out in the countryside; when their car breaks down, they swing by the home of Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, billed as Gaylord St. James) and his wife Estelle (Eleanor Shaw, billed as Cynthia Carr), passing themselves of as travelling salespeople.
There’s just one problem: the Collingwoods are Mari’s parents. And when they see through the malefactors’ ruse and realise what they have done, they go to extreme lengths to take a brutal revenge. Krug, Junior, Sadie, and the Weasel will rue the day they visited The Last House On the Left…
I’m nearly out of Coen Brothers movies in my collection, and that means my deliberately incomplete cross-section of their work is nearly done. I’ve covered some of their early breakthroughs and their first really big peak, now it’s time to cover their second peak from the mid-2000s.
No Country For Old Men
One day whilst hunting in a remote spot in West Texas, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) encounters a bizarre sight – a circle of pickup trucks, with corpses scattered around them. Investigating, it becomes apparent that he’s stumbled across the sight of some sort of organised crime rendezvous gone horribly wrong; the slain men died clutching their weapons in the midst of a hideous firefight. Tracking down the one that got away, Moss finds him having bled out under a tree where he’d sought shelter, along with the thing he fled with – a thick briefcase stuffed with cash.
Moss thinks he’s got it made – just leave with the suitcase and there’s nothing to connect him to the incident, at least as far as any law enforcement investigation is concerned. Yet his conscience tickles him – for there was one survivor left at the crime scene, too wounded and incoherent to walk or drive away, begging him for water. Moss makes the fatal error of returning to the scene with water – only to find that the survivor is dead, and to get himself spotted at the scene by some interested parties. The backers of that deal want their money back – and to get it they hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hitman who unleashes all the hideous violence he is capable of for the sake of finishing the job – beginning by killing his employers so he can ultimately keep the cash for himself. Is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) equal to the task of taking down Chigurh? Has the modern world become too depraved for Bell’s folksy values? Or is it the case that the American West has been haunted by generations of cyclical violence, that facing it is a young man’s game, and this is No Country For Old Men?
So far in the Coen Brothers segment of “Arthur uses his blog reviews to decide what media to keep in his collection”, I’ve covered Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink, three movies which took the Coens from scrappy indie filmmakers punching above their weight to filmmakers who were gathering respect and applause from critics and peers alike. For this article, I’m going to cover a trio of movies which between them cover their first big career peak and its immediate aftermath, beginning with the movie which cemented their rise to Hollywood royalty…
Fargo
It’s 1987 in Minnesota, and Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is a thieving sack of shit who, desperate not to be exposed as a thieving sack of shit, is about to become an even worse sack of shit.
Specifically, Jerry’s been embezzling money at the car dealership he works at, which is owned by his fearsome father-in-law Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell). The shenanigans he’s been running to cover the shortfall are wearing thin, and if he’s exposed Wade will have no mercy and Jerry’s wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) will surely take a dim view of Jerry shitting the bed at the job Wade was nice enough to give him. Jerry needs money, fast, so he cooks up a scheme in which he contacts North Dakota’s sleaziest dirtbags-for-hire, Carl Showater (Steve Buscemi) and Graer Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), and get them to kidnap Jean, the idea being that Wade will pay a handsome ransom for her, a chunk of the ransom money will go to Jerry to pay off the gap, and Carl and Graer get to keep the rest.
It’s a bad plan, not least because it requires trusting Carl and Graer to hand over the money afterwards – but Jerry’s prone to bad choices, and things will go awry well before Jerry has to worry about his cut of the ransom. Soon enough, the caper has a body count, and Brainerd, Minnesota’s police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) – is on the job. Can Marge untangle the twisted strands of Jerry’s scheme and capture a killer, all whilst juggling meeting up with an old school friend and dealing with being heavily pregnant in a chilly northern Midwest environment replete with authentic “Minnesoda” accents? You betcha!
The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…
Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.
In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.
Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…
Wolfe’s debut novel, hailing from 1970, takes place in a dystopian society where, after mass rioting from “urban” folk – note the dogwhistle – a leftist dictatorship has been established in the United States, the Constitution having been suspended due to the breakdown of order and the continuity government being run by bureaucrats formerly in charge of the welfare system. This government, because it is run by drab leftists who hate innovation, is opposed to technological innovation – and particularly hostile to the colonies on the inner planets established by scientific expeditions prior to the breakdown of the United States. John Castle, a physics teacher, must walk a careful line in his day job to avoid political persecution – especially since he and a few others have been picking up signals sent from the Mars colony, who are transmitting the technical knowledge necessary to establish a resistance movement…
Look, this just isn’t very good. Nobody thinks it is. Not even Gene himself liked it – he chalked up a lot of its plot points (like the, shall we say, mildly hostile attitude to urban populations) to him being much more of a “doctrinaire conservative” when he wrote it, and seems to have regretted being persuaded by Damon Knight to turn it into a novel in the first place (since it was originally a short story Wolfe submitted for one of Knight’s Orbit anthologies – an important venue for Wolfe’s earliest published tales). In interviews he would express the view that he simply was not ready to tell a novel-scale story at this point in his writing career.
This is all the more apparent when you drill down further. Wolfe originally submitted the tale to Damon Knight in 1965; this puts it at comfortably older than any of the tales in his first short story collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories(the title story hails from 1970 and is the earliest tale), or for that matter from any of the other Wolfe collections I own. Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days – collected in Castle of Days – has material spanning from 1968 to 1980, Storeys From the Old Hotel has picks from 1967-1988, and Endangered Species from 1967 to 1988 – and that’s it as far as Wolfe material of that vintage in my collection.
The expanded Operation Ares was picked up by Berkley Books, but only in 1967 – meaning that Wolfe was trying to write a full-length novel before he’d even thrown together any of his better-regarded short stories. Then it appears that Berkley got cold feet a little; after all, waiting 3 years to publish a book isn’t something a publisher does if they are enthusiastic about its prospects. The book was further mangled by an editing process which hacked out some 20% of the material, Wolfe having gone long.
What you end up here, then, is the gutted remnants of a novel that Wolfe knocked out before he really knew what he was doing as a writer; it’s no surprise, then, that it’s kind of rubbish. As well as the political axes that Wolfe is loudly grinding, the characterisation is limp, there’s none of the playful mystery we associate with Wolfe, and it’s all very straight-ahead; the sort of thing Robert Heinlein could have written in his sleep before he got older, hornier, and weirder. Unlike more or less all of Wolfe’s other novels, this has seen no reprints and nobody seems to care to keep it in circulation – a state of affairs Wolfe seems to have been absolutely happy with for the remainder of his life, and since he lived for well over four decades after this turkey saw the light of day that’s saying a lot.
Whilst creative people are often the harshest and least forgiving judges of their own work, in this case Wolfe is 100% right: Operation Ares is an embarrassingly bad novel and it would do Wolfe no favours to revisit it. Better all round if we all agreed to just treat The Fifth Head of Cerberus as his debut – it’s more mature (in the best sense of the word) in terms of his craft, in terms of his worldview, and in terms of the ideas it brings to the table.
In a distant future, the totalitarian OneState purports to be the final perfected version of human society. With its people assigned numbers instead of names, housed in a vast city surrounded by a vast glass wall to isolate them from the natural world, and accommodated in glass-walled apartments in which there is no privacy outside the state-mandated rationed sexytimes, when you can put the blinds down, the people labour under the watchful eye of the Guardians and the ruler of OneState, the beloved Benefactor.
D-503 is pretty keen on all of this. His assigned duty is as lead designer on the Integral – OneState’s first starship, which is intended to begin the propagation of its ideology throughout the known universe. When the authorities encourage the population to make creative works celebrating the glories of OneState to be used in the Integral‘s payload of propaganda, D-503 diligently begins writing an account of his life in OneState, enthusing about the glory of this perfected totalitarian system.
As work progresses on his diary, however, a discordant note slips in. Sexual partners are assigned by the state; D-503 is one of the partners allocated to O-90, a nice enough person who harbours a desire to bear a child – without necessarily seeking permission, despite such an act carrying a death sentence. D-503 is oblivious to this, and is perfectly happy with O-90 as his companion… but then he encounters I-330, a mysterious woman who seems to delight in covertly flouting the law. What is I-330 up to? What is the conspiracy she seems to be a part of? And what are these strange emotions which stop D-503 simply reporting her to the Guardians until it is too late not to implicate himself? Can D-503 overcome the temptations of “I” by himself, or will it take an extraordinary intervention to bring him back into the warm bosom of We?
Professional translator Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan), who has been providing real-time translation for an academic conference on astronautics, is haunted by a disturbing dream – a garbled memory of a cheesy old 1950s sci-fi movie she saw in her youth but didn’t catch the end of, Footprints On the Moon, in which the mysterious Professor Blackmann (Klaus Kinski) arranges for astronauts to be abandoned unconscious on the surface of the Moon, in order to observe their reactions when they wake up to see the lunar module flying away without them. Alice wakes up Thursday morning and belatedly discovers that she can’t remember anything since Monday afternoon, when she was called in unexpectedly to fill in someone else’s translation shift at the conference.
A ripped-up, blank postcard she finds among her possessions advertises the Hotel Garma, on the island of Garma; with her being suspended on her job pending a disciplinary decision, due to her employers not buying the amnesia line, Alice has ample time to investigate. She has no recollection of being on Garma before – but plenty of people recognise her, not as Alice but as “Nicole”. Has Alice/Nicole been the victim of some sort of psychological fugue state? If so, what prompted it? And either way, what happened during her bout of missing time? To discover that, she’ll need to retrace her steps, pick up her trail, and follow her Footprints…
Footprints – AKA Footprints On the Moon, AKA Primal Impulse, AKA Le Orme, is one of the few giallos directed by Luigi Bazzoni, and would be his last theatrical release. Co-written by Bazzoni and Mario Fenelli, it is an (apparently quite loose) adaptation of Las Huellas, a novel by Fenelli. It’s recently enjoyed a rerelease on Blu-Ray via Shameless, which offers it in two versions – the US cut and an an “Integral Cut” restoring the full running time, albeit with some scenes only in Italian with English subtitles because an English dub for them either no longer exists or was never made. Emerging in 1975, Footprints is a product of the classier, artier side of the genre; one would be tempted to draw comparisons with Dario Argento, particularly when it came to the use of colour, except actually I’d say the Argento this reminds me most of is not any of his 1970s gialli but Tenebrae – it has a similarly cold, isolated aesthetic to it, which perhaps is meant to achieve a similar effect in terms of underlining the alienation of the main character.
Not, I hasten to add, that Footprints is remotely as violent or gruesome as Tenebrae – in fact, there’s vastly less in the way of direct violence here than is typical for the genre, and it’s also vastly less horny than the vast majority of its peers. The Shameless Blu-Ray has a 12 certificate, which is astonishingly low for a giallo. It isn’t without thrills – matters escalate to murder eventually, but it takes a good while to get there – but it’s much more interested in the “slowly deepening mystery” side of the genre than it is the cheaper thrills. This feels like the right call for the subject matter. There’s a melancholic air over the entire thing – a sort of aching sadness, where regular bouts of eroticism would seem incongruous.
The production was shot in a few weeks in 1974, split between Rome and Turkey, which perhaps helps give the sense of the fictional island of Garma as being a sort of no-place, with architectural flourishes that are here reminiscent of one culture, there reminiscent of another – we can think of it not as Rome, not Istanbul, not even Byzantium, but a fragment of long-lost Trebizond, a place where things can be lost and forgotten. If Alice is a citizen of the world – hailing from Portugal, working in Italy, translating a swathe of other languages – then Nicole must then be a citizen of Garma, a personality created during her jaunt that was only exposed on that island.
Alice’s investigation, then, is as much about inferring a psychological profile of Nicole as it is retracing her steps. Nicoletta Elmi has a striking role as Paola, a child who recognises Alice/Nicole and seems to want to be friendly, but her parents strongly disapprove of Nicole/Alice and try to keep Paola away from her. In some moments, it seems like Paola was hurt by Nicole somehow; in others, Alice’s insistent demands for answers seem to put her on the verge of hurting Paola – again? There’s been plenty of movies in which protagonists become aware of an inner, deeper darkness to themselves, but a lot of the time that dark side is actually just kind of fun and sexy; here Alice’s other side seems to be genuinely dangerous, which heightens the horror of her predicament.
(Elmi had a bit of a gala year in 1975 – as well as being an enigmatic kid here, she had a role in Deep Red as an enigmatic kid there.)
The visuals on the new Blu-Ray are a great improvement over the last version of Footprints I saw, really teasing out aspects that prior versions glossed over a little. There’s some day-for-night scenes shot with a heavy blue tint which gives them this striking look; other shots are overwhelmed with whites and greys (like Alice lounging in her cream-coloured clothes on her pale couch in her blank apartment), bringing to mind the monochromatic wasteland of the Moon (which itself prefigures the dusty otherworld in Fulci’s The Beyond). Something which is also emphasised is how the Professor Blackmann segments from Alice’s visions are shot in stark black and white with lots of artifacts, like the film-within-a-film is some tired-out B-movie – an aspect which is easier to perceive with the visual improvements to the rest of the movie.
Obviously, with a concept like this the resolution requires a deep dive into Alice/Nicole’s psychological state, which is where a lot of movies of this vintage end up fumbling things, but in this instance I can buy it. The depressing speech at the astronautics convention, alluding to a projected mass biosphere die-off on Earth due to pollution, weaves in a climate anxiety theme early on, and between this and the commented-on dissatisfaction that Alice has in her job it is believable that some sort of psychological episode could have been triggered by all that. It’s equally believable that, once the fugue kicked off, Alice/Nicole would seek refuge in a place and with a person she has little to no conscious memory of, but offers a side of life she has neglected, and which perhaps she feels this deep-seated need to explore.
The final twist reveals that the thing that Alice/Nicole has to fear most is the ailment which sparks off these episodes in her in the first place – an illness which, as severe mental illness often does, separates and alienates her from others. In its plot centred on psychological fugue, it’s a sort of ancestor of Lost Highway; in its emphasis on melancholic investigation in picturesque surroundings, it reminds me a lot of Don’t Look Now, but whilst in that the final twist hinges on a case of mistaken identity on the protagonist’s part, here it reveals hitherto-unacknowledged aspects of the lead character’s identity. In establishing that the answers are to be found within instead of in the exterior world, Footprints manages to be both a compelling giallo and a fascinating anti-giallo.
Back in the 19th Century, Lilith Silver (Eileen Daly) attempted to intervene in a duel between her lover and Sir Sethane Blake (Christopher Adamson), only to arrive too late, her beloved shot dead by Blake. Seizing a gun, she shot Blake, only to be shot in turn by his second. You would think that would be the end of her troubles – but Blake turns out to be a vampire, and for reasons which are never adequately explained decides to make her one. Now it’s the 1990s, and Lilith is still alive. The main problem she faces in boredom, which she alleviates by hanging out in the sort of goth clubs which only have the most obvious Bauhaus and Fields of the Nephilim songs on their soundtracks and working as a sexy assassin. The latter feels like it would offer more novelty than the former, but on the plus side, both jobs mean she can wear latex and corsets 24/7.
However, other forces are swirling in the margins. After running into some unexpected opposition at her latest job, Lilith decides to look into the secrets of the target, and becomes aware that he was one of the Illuminati. Two police detectives – the grounded Detective Inspector Price (Jonathan Coote) and the obsessive true believer who refers to himself as the Horror Movie Man (David Warbeck) are on her tail. And it transpires that heading up the Illuminati is none other than Blake…
Jake West’s Razor Blade Smile comes across like a Garth Marenghi interpretation of Underworld, except it hails from 1998 and so anticipated it by some years. In fact, given that Underworld‘s lead team of Len Wiseman, Kate Beckinsale, and Michael Sheen were all British film industry sorts and therefore might have encountered this via the burst of utterly unmerited hype which greeted it, it’s wholly possible that Underworld turned into an exercise in sneaking as much Razor Blade Smile-esque nonsense under the radar as possible without the studio noticing.
As an independent production, however, Razor Blade Smile had no upper limit on how goofy it could get – there was nobody to step in to tell Jake West “no” when he went too far, and he rarely passes up an opportunity to do exactly that. The gunplay is just as prominent but more amateurish; the incongruous use of fetishwear on assassination missions is still a thing, but there’s absolutely no subtlety about it this time. (It does, at least, have the guts to imply that Lilith dresses like that because she gets off on it, which I suppose is more honest than Kate Beckinsale’s outfit being treated as some sort of serious business official uniform.) The movie culminates with a confrontation between the main character and the vampire that turned her in the first place. They even have extensive use of narration from the main character, and I swear Kate Beckinsale mimics the delivery from this when she does the voiceovers in Underworld.
At the same time, this goes way more cartoonish than Underworld had the guts to. There’s more quips, sillier lore, and the whole thing is several steps more lowbrow, more horny, and more amateurishly executed than Underworld (or, for that matter, Blade or Vampire: the Masquerade, both of which are likely influences). Lilith keeps her gun rack in a coffin, for crying out loud.
This was Jake West’s feature-length debut, and… well, how shall I put this? His subsequent output has included a few more narrative movies here and there, but he’s largely specialised in documentaries about movies – he’s done one on Phantasm, a string on the video nasties, and more besides – and it’s perhaps telling that he’s made a career largely off the back of material where he doesn’t have to write a story, direct actors, or oversee special effects work. The two things this doesn’t have more of than Underworld is werewolves (surprisingly absent, in fact!) and quality control.
It’s not that West’s outright incompetent – he makes the material he’s got look as good as he can. But he’s clearly not working with top-grade action movie actors or stunt people, and some of the visual ideas onscreen are flashily executed but absurd in their underlying conception. There’s a surreal dream sequence with special effects you’d think would be well beyond the budget of this nonsense, for instance, and an Internet segment which is risible even for 1998 – not a cyberpunk VR sequence, just regular web browsing and video chat – and I’m not sure which of those is more trippy. There’s absolutely no middle gear when it comes to the use of blood either – there’s either absurd amounts or a tiny trickle, and that’s it. The script (also by West, who handled the editing too as well as directing) is pretty risible too, throwing in dialogue like “Pain rides tight on pleasure’s back” and being very obviously built on cool scenes West wanted to shoot without putting much priority on the whole thing making sense.
Bizarrely enough, this was made by Manga Films and distributed by Manga Entertainment, who Brits of a certain age will remember as the folk who – as the title implies – built their business on importing some of the more violent and horny anime releases on home video in the UK back in the 1990s. I guess this was a bid at throwing together a British-made live action movie catering to the same audience; if that’s the case, they largely proved that the indie-tier British movie industry didn’t have the chops to pull this concept off in anything but the most hilarious so-bad-it’s-good fashion. Though some moments are clearly played for laughs, there aren’t enough of these to really sell the idea that it’s a parody, especially since the thing it works best as a parody of – Underworld – hadn’t been made yet.
After a rough first season, a second season which showed some improvement, Star Trek: The Next Generation managed to find a happy equilibrium in its third season, in part because the incessant struggles over creative direction had been settled. Gene Roddenberry found himself sidelined, just as he had been in the movie series – and ironically, this time around it was largely due to the actions of those he’d appointed to act as his stooges on the production team, bringing about the exact outcome he’d feared in the first place. Still, it’s one thing to finally have a creative direction which will hold up over more or less an entire season; could the cast and crew keep it going for another? Let’s take a good look at season 4 and see how that goes.
We’ve got The Best of Both Worlds Part 2 to deal with first. This is where the crew get Picard back, after he’d been assimilated by the Borg at the end of the first part – but there was a possibility that it wouldn’t have shaken out that way. There was, apparently, some doubt as to whether Patrick Stewart would sign on for more seasons after season 3, so part 1 was crafted so it could lead into a permanent departure for Picard if necessary – hence the stuff about Riker being regarded as ready for command of his own ship, since unless Frakes quit at the same time slotting in Riker as the new captain would be a no-brainer.
This episode, then, must do for Picard what The Most Toys did for Data – have the rest of the crew react to Picard’s apparent loss and give us a taste of what an Enterprise without Picard might be like, and then show us the big rescue. On top of that, we get the infamous Battle of Wolf 359, in which the Borg utterly wreck the shit of the assembled Starfleet forces – thanks, in part, to having assimilated Picard’s knowledge of Starfleet technology and tactics – prompting a wonderful Guinan moment where she tells Riker that if he’s going to beat the Borg, he’s going to need to let go of his admiration for Picard, the implication being that the only way to beat them now is to handle things in a way Picard would not expect of Riker.
We don’t see Wolf 359 itself – but we do get some excellent special effects shots of its aftermath to get across what a bad day for the Federation it was, something also helped by the last, panicked transmission from Admiral Hanson. It’s no surprise that they went back to this for a backstory concept for Sisko in Deep Space Nine and… Erm… Hold on… Shaw from Star Trek: Picard season 3. (Sorry gang, I had to look up his name because like a whole lot of Picard characters he’s very forgettable.)
Whilst Big Finish’s monthly range of Doctor Who audio dramas had previously shuffled about from Doctor to Doctor for the first year and a bit that they had the licence, they began 2001 with four releases all from the same Doctor. This is because something very special happened: Paul McGann agreed to come back to the role of the Eighth Doctor, having had a blink-and-you’ll-miss it televised tenure in the TV movie, and Big Finish realised that by issuing a clutch of four four-part audio dramas one after another, they could give him the full season in audio he had been denied in television.
(It’s not too late! RTD, please, do the wise thing and give McGann a season! You could do it as a spin-off show – call it the Eighth Doctor Adventures or something. Your broadcast partners at Disney+ are hungry for spin-offs, after all. You’ll need to do it before he’s aged out of the role – Night of the Doctor having set a pretty firm end point – so get on with it already!)
This was perhaps Big Finish’s biggest challenge to date. With their Bernice Summerfield line, they began with audio adaptations of some of the Doctor-less New Adventures novels (from after Virgin lost the rights and retooled things so Benny was the protagonist), giving them a clear model to work with. With Doctor Who, the television show obviously gave them ample precedent to work from; the biggest departure so far had been with the Sixth Doctor audio drams, but even then so the main difference thus far was that they gave him good stories.
With Paul McGann’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor, however, there was much more of a blank slate to work with. Sure, the TV movie happened, but nobody wanted a repeat of that – the fans wouldn’t want more of that, Big Finish’s authors didn’t want to write more of it, and Paul wanted to push past it as firmly as possible. There had, of course, by this point been years worth of Eighth Doctor Adventures novels from BBC Books, and Eighth Doctor comics in Doctor Who Magazine – but the thing about novels and comics is that they don’t require actors.
Big Finish decided – or, perhaps, were obliged to under the terms of their licence – to make their own continuity for the Eighth Doctor audio adventures, giving themselves permission to make the odd nod to the other strands of tie-in media if they wished but not regarding themselves as bound by it. This gave McGann the freedom to likewise ignore all the other tie-in media and perform the Eighth Doctor and interpret the script the way he wanted to. He’s still doing audios with Big Finish to this day, fitting them in around a fairly healthy schedule of movie, television, and stage projects, so he clearly still thinks it’s worth it – so let’s enjoy Paul McGann’s first full season of Doctor Who from a time when, despite oddball experiments like Death Comes To Time and Scream of the Shalka, he was still the incumbent Doctor.
Storm Warning
The Doctor is, as we saw him at the end of the TV movie, doing some reading in the TARDIS library – enjoying former companion/future acquaintance Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically. Suddenly, the TARDIS systems alert him to a nearby kerfuffle in the time vortex: another time ship has crashed and is stuck in a time loop, with extradimensional vortisaurs flitting about it for good measure. His attempt to intervene sees the TARDIS assailed by the beasties, forcing an emergency landing. Meanwhile in 1930, the new British Imperial Airship Scheme’s flagship, the R101, is taking off for Karachi. Among the passengers is Charlotte “Charley” Pollard (India Fisher), who’s pretending to be a boy in order to infiltrate the crew.
Charley fancies herself something of an adventuress, though this is admittedly her first adventure; caught out in her deception, she’s now a fugitive stowaway – just the sort of friend the Doctor likes to make. When the Doctor helps Charley evade pursuit, she’s quite taken with him, not least because of all the historical figures he namedrops; the Doctor, perhaps, sees something of himself in her, what with them both being runaways with romantic souls and a big dose of wanderlust. Perhaps this is the start of a wonderful friendship – or maybe more than that…
But there’s more at stake here than just the Doctor and Charley’s personal liberty and possible sparks of romance. Something sinister is going on aboard the ship, involving an unregistered guest being kept under unusual circumstances – and the vortisaurs have followed the TARDIS out of the time vortex and are harassing the R101. And once the Doctor finds out which ship he’s on, on what date, he’s even more perturbed – for the Doctor remembers that this is the R101’s final flight, which history records ended in disaster and the loss of dozens of lives, though later overshadowed by the Hindenburg. (Less people died on that, but there were cameras onsite capturing the disaster.) It would be an act of cosmological violence to save the ship, but can the Doctor resist the urge to break the laws of time just a little by saving Charley? Perhaps – especially since he has a strong sense that her presence here is already violating the fabric of time…
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 