Continuity Cavalcade #1 - The Master's Timeline

Stories can get complicated, but we're used to complicated here at the A-List. Welcome to the first episode of Continuity Cavalcade, a brand-new show all about examining what continuity is and how it works, as well as the particular idiosyncrasies of individual stories. Look forward to episodes on Star Wars, Star Trek, DC and Marvel Comics, and many more! In our first episode, we'll be untangling the timeline of the Master from Doctor Who!

Image Source: Findagrave

Book Club of Desolation #10: Operation H.A.T.E. (2012), by Richard Franklin

Well, this ought to be easy. I get to talk about Doctor Who again.

Welcome back to the Book Club of Desolation, as we continue to celebrate BOOKVEMBER! This week's book is Operation H.A.T.E., by actor Richard Franklin. Franklin famously played Captain Mike Yates of UNIT during the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee)'s era of Doctor Who in the 1970s, and Operation H.A.T.E. is essentially "official" Mike Yates fanfiction. I put quotes around "official" because, like a lot of the productions put together by BBV, the creators of Cyberon, Operation H.A.T.E. does not operate with an official BBC license (or licence, I suppose I should say). The book began life in 2002 as an audio book put out by BBV as one of their more controversial releases, as written and narrated by Franklin. The original story, called The Killing Stone, seemingly has almost no differences from Operation H.A.T.E. aside from a stronger emphasis on the Doctor Who elements. While BBV had acquired the licenses to aliens like the Krynoids and Sontarans, and characters like Liz Shaw and the Rani, they got in trouble for The Killing Stone as there was no way the BBC would have given BBV the licenses for the Doctor and the Master even if they'd asked. When Richard Franklin chose to release the text of the novel, he of course had to change the names to avoid copyright issues.

So that's the backstory. Did I mention this review is gonna be a lot of dry trivia? I do love a good dry trivia session but I realize it's not great reading. I do have some complicated feelings about this book and so I'll try to focus on those rather than simply annotating Doctor Who continuity references.

With the flimsy excuse that I am not the first person on the Internet to do, I am going to have spoilers in my synopsis. There will be helpful [brackets] along the way to explain the codes Franklin uses. Our protagonist is Captain Martin Bigglesworth [Mike Yates], and he has been discharged in the wake of his betrayal of the Special Terrestrial Operations Project Intelligence Taskforce, or STOPIT [UNIT]. He has retreated from public life to find himself as a person [as Yates did in Planet of the Spiders], and we learn that his betrayal involved helping an ecoterrorist plot [just like in Invasion of the Dinosaurs]. He reminisces about his STOPIT family, including an exiled two-hearted Guardian of Time named Professor Cosmos, or The Brain [The Doctor]; gruff STOPIT alien-buster General Hycock-Bottomley, aka "The Bum" [Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart/The Brig]; thick but charming WO Bloggs/"Smudge" [Sgt. Benton]; and The Brain's traveling companions, Joley "Dizzy" Darling [Jo Grant] and Mary-Ann "Sniffles" Peabody [Sarah Jane Smith]. Captain M, as Martin is sometimes called--making him one letter away from being the Game Master--is encouraged to take a long stay in Morocco. Along the way the text sees fit to give us many details about Richard FranklImean Captain M's life, including his hunting achievements, acting achievements, and knowledge of British geography.

While in Morocco, Martin has various adventures but eventually comes across a sinister snake charmer. The charmer reminds him of STOPIT's old enemy, another renegade Time Guardian whom STOPIT dubbed Moriarty [The Master], due to his role as the evil counterpart to The Brain's Holmes. As it happens, the snake charmer is Moriarty, and he has a non-lethal cobra spit in Martin's eye. When he awakes doctors inform him he has a gallstone. The gallstone, when extracted, resembles the amphora-shaped jug that Moriarty kept his cobras in. Upon returning from space, The Brain discovers that this gallstone is actually the Amphora Calculosa, a component which will enhance Moriarty's signature death-by-shrinking weapon, the Matter Mangler Gun, or MMG [The Master's TCE]. In a confrontation at a department store (far from the worst of the book's questionable choices), Martin outwits Moriarty and risks death to stop him. The Bum reveals that STOPIT was testing Martin's cool as an independent agent since they were interested in taking him back into the fold, with a promotion, to boot.

With a few lapses, I tried to keep that synopsis as objective as possible. By itself, Operation H.A.T.E. doesn't sound too bad. In fact, it sounds like a fun, if average, Classic Who serial. To be honest, my original interest in the story was piqued by several fan-nonsense things present in the uncensored Killing Stone version. For one thing, I'm a big fan of the Master. This story opens partway through Planet of the Spiders and ends after that serial has concluded, when the Third Doctor has returned from space. Given that that trip to space was what killed him and caused him to regenerate, the original story starts in the hands of the Third Doctor and ends with the Tom Baker incarnation. The Master, meanwhile, is portrayed as the bearded incarnation of the Third Doctor's era, played by Roger Delgado. Because Delgado tragically died in a car crash before the end of Three's era, the only versions of the Master that Baker's Doctor fought were the disfigured version played by Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers, and the again-bearded incarnation played by Anthony Ainley. I love every incarnation of the Master, but to see Delgado's take go up against the Fourth Doctor is a fantasy I share with a lot of Whovians. More relevantly to the book, however: I am also a fan of Mike Yates. While I love all of the UNIT family companions, Yates presented a lot of depth to the UNIT era, clearly having a vivid life outside of work, uncommonly for early Who, having a set character arc. I don't know if Mike would be in my Top Ten or even Top Fifteen list for favorite companions, but he was a nice character to see.

And this brings me to a pressing issue I have with Operation H.A.T.E.: there is a reason why, typically, actors do not write their own scripts. While certainly there are many actors who write and direct with as much skill as they show in acting, this is usually because their acting training has informed them that there are limits you have to impose on yourself when it comes to writing the characters whom you portray. Before I go further, I just want to say: Richard, I love your work. I am gladdened by the fact that you still love the character of Captain Yates, and you are an awesome actor--at some point I plan on buying the audio stories you with Tom Baker and AudioGo because they sound excellent. This is not an attack on you, and I will never oppose anyone publishing any book they want. If it's true that everyone has a story, by all means, tell it.

However, I can't read about the adventures of "Captain M" without the names Mary Sue and Miles Gloriosus coming to mind. Operation H.A.T.E. not only endows Yates/Bigglesworth with superhuman skills, cunning, wisdom, and handsomeness, but it does so while also shoving down the rest of the cast...and while continuously reminding us of just how amazing he is, and how stupid everyone else is. Now, I absolutely believe that this was done with the best intentions in mind, even though the ad blurbs for the book, and endless passages about Mike's backstory that suddenly become much more detailed than anything else, really do show us that Captain M is supposed to be Franklin with Yates' career (which complicates things when you wonder if some of the book's more damning offenses are meant to be products of Yates' perspective rather than Franklin's writing, and that the book's faults are done on purpose). I do have to wonder if any of Franklin's fellow Who actors have read his interpretations of their characters next to the Mighty Yates. To put it bluntly, everyone but Yates is an imbecile, reduced to their very base traits. Some characters end up getting fairer treatment than others, with there being at least one scene that only just exaggerates the spittle between the Brig and the Doctor, and where Benton gets one of those moments where he's genuinely clever, in his own way. Jo and Sarah Jane don't get that; Jo is a ditz in the show, but here it's basically her only trait. Sarah Jane cries, yes, but here...it's basically her only trait. Women are generally described only by their prettiness, and I think there are other female characters beside the pre-established ones ported over from Who, but they don't last, instead being present largely for Yates to ogle at.

As with himself and Yates, Franklin binds attributes of actors to their characters. It is briefly mentioned that Jo is "blind as a bat," and apparently Katy Manning, who played Jo, did require a lot of help on the set as a result of poor eyesight. Fair enough. But then we see that the last UNIT has heard of the Master was that he died in an accident with his traveling machine, in Turkey...the same fate as Roger Delgado. To throw the real-life death of an actor whom one co-starred with into such a farcical story alongside something like an inside-joke regarding an actress' bad eyes is more than a little tasteless. Unfortunately, the presence of the Master also exposes the story's issues with race. Franklin is someone who is probably not fond of "political correctness" but there does seem to be some implicit belief that the reader thinks Arabs are evil, or at the very least, weird and mysterious. The Master is disguised as an Arab when he poses as the snake charmer, but even afterwards there are references to the darkness of his skin, at one point even making the point of contrasting Mike's whiteness to him as a symbol of good versus evil. True, Roger Delgado was usually typecast as an evil person of color (usually Hispanic or Arabic), so presumably this is another inside-joke gone wrong, but there is a taste of imperialism here.

I won't comment on the quality of the prose itself, simply because writing is not Franklin's chief profession. Though he makes some shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes and the Bigglesworth books (as well as implying that Mike got a PPK from Q Branch), Franklin commits something I've seen in other inexperienced writers: the sentence structure, and word choice, to an extent, resemble something you'd see in a kid's book. It is passable, and I've been mean enough.

You'll note that I've been referring to the characters generally by their Doctor Who names; unfortunately I don't believe that this one really works as an original novel. It seems to have been intended to simply be a Who novel under code. I won't condemn that--I have some complicated views on fanfiction and copyright, which is another story for another day. But even if you can follow the background elements, referencing what are ultimately Doctor Who episodes, you're left with a book that exists in a world uncannily similar to Doctor Who, with characters resembling ones from Doctor Who, by an author who had a regular role in Doctor Who. And that's going to mean a certain degree of continuity lockout for the average reader, but let's be fair here. I don't know if I would've found this if I was not a fan of the show, and I think that's typical. This is a book for the most intense of Captain Yates fans.

Operation H.A.T.E. will never be one of the worst books I've read, but I can't say I was expecting the faults the book ultimately contained. It's a piece of Doctor Who obscura resurrected ten years after it's creation, for all the good and ill that that implies. There's certainly a fair share of fun moments...again, I won't pass up the fanwank fun of a Fourth Doctor/Delgado!Master meetup. But in the end, it is rather like your grandpa (a good and solid grandpa, not one who gets you Plug and Plays when you ask for XBox games) writing a sci-fi story for the very first time--clumsy and occasionally embarrassing.

---

Image Source: Timelash.com

Cyberon (2000), by Bill Baggs

Fandom is a tricky concept these days. You have people who come up with new terms for describing their appreciation of a work, like headcanon and OTP, and then you have the people who hate those term-makers but will flip out when PETER VENKMAN IS A GIRL suddenly. Fanfiction is hated, but it's been around for literal millennia, such as with the Arthurian "canon" that people laud tremendously. And while it's true that fanfiction can be embarrassing, and in some cases, harmful (Fifty Shades, anyone?), I'm always curious to see where the interactions between creator and audience lead our stories and our concepts of them. I could drone on and on about Wold Newton and why you should get Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers series, and how I want to see mainstream examinations of the literary potential behind fan theories, but I want to get straight to the point: today's movie, Cyberon, shows that sometimes you can get a good story off of wanting to be something you're not.

Cyberon was the creation of BBV, also known as Bill and Ben Video, a company dedicated to fulfilling the staff's unrelenting love of Doctor Who. Over the years BBV put together works featuring elements from the Doctor Who universe, like the Sontarans and Zygons, as well as pieces that were heavily based on Doctor Who but weren't quite Who. This included The Stranger, starring Colin Baker as The Stranger and Nicola Bryant as "Ms. Brown," in what started as clear copies of the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown--this in turn was the spiritual to their audio series The Time Travelers, starring TV's Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy as "The Professor" and Ace's Sophie Aldred as...Ace. This one cut a bit too close for the BBC (especially since "Professor" was Ace's nickname for the Doctor), so it was rebranded as featuring "The Dominie" and "Alice." Like The Stranger, this eventually branched off to a point where it was clearly an original story. Though I don't want to go off on a tangent, I'm fascinated by how exactly BBV's use of Doctor Who elements was possible. Doctor Who isn't like most big-name sci-fi franchises: much of its individual parts are owned by their creators, rather than a central faceless entity craving only money (making Who like an inverse DC Comics, in a way). Therefore, use of the Krynoids, the Autons, the Rani, all that, was a matter of working with individuals for much lower licensing fees than what the BBC would offer. While they would never be able to tell stories about the Doctor, though companions Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Victoria Waterfield all made new appearances, played by their original actors, due to this unique situation.

Cyberon is pretty close to that second category of BBV productions, i.e. the not-quite Who stuff. Indeed, it's entirely absent of all canonical traces of Doctor Who, but if you know about the aliens from the show and you know that the title of the movie is also the name of the evil aliens the movie contains, then you should understand that the villains of this movie are going to be very familiar. Our hero is Dr. Lauren Anderson, a psychiatrist at a mental hospital of some kind. She meets Dr. Thomas Mortley, who is kind enough to let us know he will turn out to be morally bad by having the last name "Mortley." Lauren is frustrated with her inability to get results with patients whose afflictions are due to brain or spinal trauma, but Tom has discovered a new wonder-drug called Cyberon, which can cure literally any ailment. Cyberon is administered through a Star Trek-esque needle-less syringe, and Lauren has a good reason for her immediate distrust of it: it glows blue, and occasionally bizarre metallic faces can be seen reflected in it when it's in the syringe chamber. Of course, when these faces start appearing to the Cyberon patients, it's clear this miracle has a cost. And it's only going to get worse when those apparitions start killing the patients who resist the addictive qualities of the drug...

I think the thing that makes Cyberon so fascinating is its status as a sort of chimera--and I know just got myself in trouble for using that word. It really is a freak, a hybrid, and a beautiful one. (And if you got past "chimera," the Doctor Who fans present will hate me for saying "hybrid"...) It definitely tries to be its own movie, but it's still trapped in its presumed origin as a Doctor Who-linked Cyberman film. And even then, it has difficulty determining which type of movie its own movie is. These qualities work both against it and in its favor. First, let's talk about the Doctor Who elements. It turns out that the Cyberon drug somehow connects humans to another dimension where the Cyberon race lives. While they have some changes, saying that the Cyberons don't look almost identical to the Cybermen is like saying that Donald Trump is a good person--it's just wrong. The voices are the last tip-off. Whether the Cyberons are Cybermen or not, the premise behind them is kind of cool. Having them exist outside our dimension gives them a real menace, especially if you allow yourself to ignore that it's impossible to believe that the drug and these mysterious apparitions aren't related. In a way this story sort of precedes the New Who episode "Army of Ghosts," which also had Cybermen appear as specters before being revealed as other-dimensional and breaking through into our world to wreak havoc. I think, though, that episode ultimately did the premise better, because the insertion of the Cyberon drug into the story is pretty clunky. The drug has both physical and mental effects--healing all ailments while inducing a pleasurable psychedelic state--so it's unclear if the contact with the Cyberons is purely psychic or if the user's bodies are somehow integrated with their dimension as well. When he succumbs to addiction (because the drug apparently causes heroin-level cravings), Tom gains a metal hand, implying he's either becoming a Cyberon or the host of one. What's odd is that it seems unclear if Tom invented Cyberon by himself or if the Cyberons somehow gave him to the formula to it. There's a reason why the drug plot was inserted, though, and there's a reason why it's so clunky.

I do want to say that while I call this site my "A-List" because it is for reviews of movies that I consider to be "A-class." The creme de la creme, as it were. Cyberon is not A-class--it would probably be on my B-List at worst (with its fellow BBV movie Downtime), but it's more like to join its sibling The AirZone Solution on my C-List. By no means does that mean it's a bad movie--it's just not one of my classics. Cyberon shares many qualities with The AirZone Solution, honestly, though sadly this is a BBV production entirely without Doctor Who actors, whereas AirZone had four whole Doctors in it in its own way. No, AirZone and Cyberon both have a problem with their messages being all kinds of heavyhanded. AirZone's obsession was with pollution, which is a good thing to cover, but its subtlety leaned to the Birdemic side of things. Cyberon has two messages, one bigger than the other. The small one is about the horrors of modern technology. I was interested in this at first because Lauren is portrayed as being incredibly technophobic--she rages at a pub quiz video game and calls it rigged, and she criticizes electronic music for not being real sound, man. I thought this was going to be tied to the fact that the villains of the movie have a mechanical appearance, but the Cyberons don't really seem mechanical outside of having the word "cyber" in their name. So there's some wasted potential there.

The bigger message is that Drugs Are Bad. Really, extremely Bad. It's not made a secret that Cyberon sort of stands for medical marijuana--you have the well-intentioned hippie activist in the form of Tom, who believes his medicine will save the world but is nonetheless is addicted to it; and you have the level-headed, old-fashioned doctor in the form of Lauren, who believes that there is a way to get through medical tragedies but it can't involve shortcuts. In the end, it is Lauren who lives and Tom who perishes, and the film nearly ends on a shot of a "JUST SAY NO" poster or some equivalent. The AirZone Solution's heavy-handedness lives on as well in the fact that in the beginning we see that Tom has--choke--financial gain to be made from Cyberon, and he has a little bit of the Corporate Pig feel about him. Actually, if Cyberon is a movie about greedy people turning the helpless into Cybermen for fun and profit, AirZone Solution is a movie about greedy people turning the helpless into Sea Devils for fun and profit. Both movies even have ghosts in them...!

The A-List site will sometimes feature C-List material because the C sometimes stands for "curio." A lot of movies I like to make note of just because they are unique, even if they aren't really entertaining or worth watching. They are "hidden gems" as it were. And, despite the disappointments they bring, I've learned recently that I like learning firsthand about these freakish things. Cyberon is a fascinating example of when fan ambition is allowed to grow, but decides not to get far enough away to be its own thing. It happens to the best of us. There is nothing that is not derivative, and it's all about the sell. Cyberon was slow and repetitive enough to not quite sell me--but I'll keep it as a curiosity, and you should too. If you're a Doctor Who fan you can't've seen worse (read: Dimensions in Time), and if you're not that means there's no tiresome continuity here, so you can call it a beta for Sci-Fi Original Movies and get some joy out.