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Enjoying several Sixth Doctor audio dramas once again lured me back to watching one of his television stories this week, in this case Attack of the Cybermen from 1985. It's really not bad though it's more than a little muddled.



According to Wikipedia, the story's authorship has such a complicated history that no-one seems to be quite sure who wrote it. From Wikipedia:

The serial is credited to "Paula Moore"; however, behind that name lies one of the most confused and controversial authorships in the entire series' history. Authorship copyright on the serial is divided between "Paula Moore" (real name Paula Woolsey) as the author; Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis as creators of the Cybermen; Eric Saward as the creator of Lytton and the BBC who hold the copyright on the series elements.

Several separate accounts offer differing versions of who actually authored the story. Most accounts agree that series fan and continuity advisor Ian Levine suggested a number of plot elements. At the one extreme, it is suggested that the story was authored by series script editor Eric Saward, with or without substantial input by Levine, with Woolsey only acting as the story's author to prevent problems with the Writers' Guild, who objected to script editors editing their own scripts. Alternatively, it is suggested that Woolsey originated the story, but Saward heavily rewrote it in his capacity as script editor. Levine himself claims that Saward wrote the dialogue to Levine's story and plot and that Woolsey "did not write one single word of that script". Saward has flatly denied this in an interview with Doctor Who Magazine.

One reason for the complexity and confusion around the script's origin is that under Writer's Guild guidelines, script editors were forbidden to commission themselves, and Levine's deal with the series specified that he could not receive any on-screen credit for his work. Thus the use of "Paula Moore" may have been an attempt by Saward to disguise the fact of his involvement from John Nathan-Turner.

One thing's for sure, the serial feels disjointed and scattered. The first serial of Colin Baker's first season as the Sixth Doctor--his second serial overall--it was the first regular serial to be divided into two forty five minute parts. The first part, involving the Doctor and Peri (Nicola Bryant) running afoul of a complicated heist in London, has a totally different tone and setting to the second part, set on the icy adopted homeworld of the Cybermen, Telos. But that's hardly new for Doctor Who--some of my favourite serials, like The Time Monster or The Seeds of Doom, also spend their last episodes in a completely different setting with a mostly different cast than their first episodes. It can be a wonderful way of showing the scope Doctor Who can cover.



In Attack of the Cybermen, though, it meant many elements were introduced only to all but vanish or be drained of interest. The heist element in the first part introduces some gangsters, often in location shots from modern London, that feel extraordinarily authentic, headed by Lytton, a returning character from the Fifth Doctor serial, Resurrection of the Daleks. It's hard to see in him the mercenary from that serial, though. Played like a ruthless mob boss by Maurice Colbourne, one wonders if he hadn't originally simply been cast in Attack of the Cybermen as a completely different character before it was decided his previous role on the series had been too recent for people to have forgotten it. He's quite good, in any case, before suddenly, inexplicably being revealed as a hero in the second episode.



Also among the gangsters is guest star Brian Glover as Griffiths, who would go on to star with the future Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann, in Alien 3. He brings a real sense of streetwise, authentic menace of the common gangster but on an alien world he's reduced mainly to finding different ways of saying, "What the hell is going on?"



The Doctor and Peri are separated in the second episode, each encountering members of the indigenous people of Telos, the Cryons, who are attempting to have vengeance on the Cybermen. They have an intriguing costume and make-up design and are all women for some reason. I suspect their bubble wrap moustaches were meant to look like something else.



In the moral compromises they make in their fight against the Cybermen, the story picks up the general theme from the Fifth Doctor's final season of the inevitable bad things one must do in the name of a good cause. I suspect this led to the bold idea of making the Doctor himself a bit of a coward and a bully in his new incarnation, something requiring a delicate balance that the Sixth Doctor stories never attain.



It's weird, though, I guess the audio plays really have made Six grow on me. I still have all the same complaints about him--Colin Baker's performance is a little flat, the costume is ugly. But I guess it says something for the fondness bred by familiarity that I kind of like all the things I hate about him. He's almost punk now. It is a bit like seeing the obnoxious young man with mustard smeared all over his face climbing on stage and making you suddenly realise he's Sid Vicious.



It occurred to me Nicola Bryant's performance is worse than Colin Baker's. Her inexperience as an actress seems much clearer beside him than it was in her scenes with Peter Davison and Mark Strickson. She also seems incredibly nervous, her voice constantly quavering and plaintive, something only partially explained by the Doctor trying to throttle her in the previous story. I wonder how differently Colin Baker would have come off in his angry fits if he were opposite Elisabeth Sladen or Louise Jameson. Leela probably would have cut him.



But I did enjoy the story. The Cryons were weird enough and the general confusion is sort of captivating.

To-day I also read the new Sirenia Digest featuring a new story by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "Behind the Wall of Sleep". Featuring H.P. Lovecraft's ghouls, it presents an effective series of dreamlike encounters. Focus is more on sensation and mood than a moving plot and as usual Caitlin wonderfully evokes a sense of experiences and environment both subtly and oppressively sinister and strange. As a story about ghouls, it's no surprise that it concerns death, but it does so in a nicely contemplative and solemn way. I can't remember reading another ghoul story that so nicely inspired this particularly haunting melancholy.

One of the most important things about effective weird fiction is for the prose to give a sense of the visceral experience. Caitlin R. Kiernan excels at this as she shows again with this month's new Sirenia Digest and its story, "Albatross (1994)".

As is often the case with Kiernan's work lately, it's not exactly linear, though the events presented are more or less in sequence. But she takes the sensory impressions of one experience and spreads them out over the rest of the story like a bassline. These impressions involve direct contact with the sea and the effective ruminations on the nature of that experience shade the descriptions of a mysterious, gigantic carcass washed up on the beach in an interesting way.

The influence of Lovecraft is as always very clear in her work and he was very good at understanding this kind of prose too--the necessity of capturing the thought processes of, and sensations experienced by, the central character. It's only in that amber that the specimen of alien creature of supernatural monster is captured, after all. So a few drops of the bizarre blooms into a full flower of really effective fiction.

Lately I've also been reading the first chapters of Dead Shrimp Blues by Kiernan's friend, Billy Martin, which you can read on Martin's Patreon. This is the unfinished sequel to the Liquor novels Martin published when he was going by the name Poppy Z. Brite. I liked Liquor a lot so it was nice catching up with the characters. But my favourite part is in the first chapter concerning a death resulting from a possibly bungled crime that has the kind of macabre irony combined with a sense of life's authentic weirdness that puts me in the mind of the Coen Brothers or Edgar Allan Poe. Become a donor to Martin's Patreon to check it out--his mother's in the hospital so this would be a good time.

This is the famous Wall Drug Dinosaur in Wall, South Dakota, and it features in "THE DINOSAUR TOURIST", a lovely new Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the Sirenia Digest. It may be the story in the Digest to feature the least amount of weirdness, being a simple tale of a man who picks up a guileless young hitch-hiker who's on his way to meet his internet boyfriend. A subtle chemistry develops between the driver and the hitch-hiker with interesting exchanges based on differences in breadth and kind of experience. It showcases Caitlin's fine ability to create the sensory elements of an experience and has the slow, nice pace of all good road stories, which this one is.

I've been reading a lot lately, maybe because I'm in a Japanese class now I suddenly have a contrary urge to read a lot of English. I'm still re-reading The Lord of the Rings and on Saturday or Sunday I reached chapter 4 from Book Four, or the second book in The Two Towers, "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit". And speaking of a slow and easy atmosphere, this is a wonderful chapter which Peter Jackson's film version really doesn't attempt to capture. Most of the basic elements of the chapter are present in the extended version of the film--Gollum fetches some rabbits and Sam decides to cook them, much to Gollum's indignation, who prefers raw meat. Gollum's "What's taters. precious?" line is even reproduced in the film. But there are many differences that completely change the tone and purpose of the scene.



Because Jackson was so focused on creating a film with constant momentum, it's easy to see why he reinterpreted it. But in the book, it's one of the moments that most clearly reminded me that Tolkien was a World War I veteran. After the Dead Marshes and grey, featureless lands of Mordor, the Hobbits and Gollum come to a place that's strangely beautiful.

So they passed into the northern marches of that land that Men once called Ithilien, a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams.

It's easy to imagine soldiers, accustomed to the hellish landscape surrounding trenches, suddenly coming across areas not yet spoiled by the war.

Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tanmarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green . . .

It's after Frodo has fallen asleep that Sam slowly starts to remember the cookware and formulates his plan to make a decent meal for his master. The wonderful thing about the scene, and the reason Sam quickly takes over the narrative, is that we see him, much more than simply cooking a meal, single-handedly creating a familiar domestic atmosphere, motived both for himself and for the love he feels for Frodo watching him sleep.

Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the sharping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face had not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.'

After all the time Tolkien spends describing their slow, grim, and hopeless journey, it's wonderful that Sam instinctively wants to spend a lot of time and energy cooking and in the process he even turns Gollum into a familiar domestic figure, the lazy and surly servant lad.

'Smeagol'll get into real true hot water, when this water boils, if he don't do as he's asked,' growled Sam. 'Sam'll put his head in it, yes precious. And I'd make him look for turnips and carrots, and taters too, if it was the time o' the year. I'll bet there's all sorts of good things running wild in this country. I'd give a lot for half a dozen taters.'

The beauty in this scene is an interesting contrast to the impatience Frodo expresses regarding Hobbit culture at the beginning. It's easy to think again of men itching for glorious and worthy battle and then finding something horribly different in the first World War and suddenly foolish homebodies don't seem so foolish after all.

While eating lunch to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest, a new story by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "IN THE FLAT FIELD", a nice, low key witch detective story. It centres on a young woman examining some photographs for a client who, from the description, sounds like he looks a lot like David Jason as Jack Frost. The story's effectively eerie. I feel like I remember Caitlin posting on Facebook a photograph that may have inspired the ones in the story, but I'm not sure if I really do remember that or if it's my imagination, which is sort of perfect.



I've been seeing a lot of ravens at school lately so I'm glad Odin's keeping an eye on me. Last night I saw this one on an arch outside one of the stadiums at school where there was a rock concert going on.



The big fellow was gwoking in the direct of the concert being given by some Christian performer named Chris Tomlin. I didn't know who it was at the time, it sounded like a generic brand version of U2. I was there last night for the quickest final exam I've ever taken. It was for a nice film class I took this past semester. It took me about fifteen minutes to answer all the questions, it took me an hour and a half to get to school due to rush hour traffic and then the roads around the school being jammed with assholes who like Christian rock. I have a final project for another class that's been consuming all my time since Saturday so I was a little grouchy about having to come into class for this one little test but, well, it was a final. I remember once I missed a final exam for an astronomy class over a decade ago. I somehow still passed the class, which makes me think I would've gotten a really good grade if I'd managed to remember the correct day and time of the final--just recently I showed up for a language proficiency exam to find the doors locked and discover the thing wasn't in the room the web site said it was in. It was much later I found out I was supposed to go to a room labelled on the ticket for the exam instead of the one on the web site. But that's a whole other kettle of fish. My ditziness is by far my worst enemy.

Twitter Sonnet #991

A double tab amends toupees for lice.
Accordion ablutions shade the stretch.
In single grains the king was stacks of rice.
It's only gods who teach us how to fetch.
A running voice returns the faucet leak.
Calamity concealed in clouds reclines.
A vision split a second snowy peak.
A coach arrived to jump the steep inclines.
A steady rain of jelly beans ignites.
In passing cars the lamps're shutting eyes.
On query screens the cursor just recites.
A neon spike has broken rail road ties.
Exams are shifting 'neath a violet light.
The faintest echoes steal just out of sight.