Entry tags:
Have you never heard of the double bluff?
Being sick of not writing about movies, I appear to be writing about TV instead. Some weeks ago, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit recommended me Chris Boucher's The Robots of Death (1977) on the grounds of David Collings and Tom Baker-era Doctor Who generally. The last time I'd seen the Fourth Doctor was "The Day of the Doctor" in high school when a friend who liked Douglas Adams rented The Pirate Planet (1978) with me. All I seem to remember of that one is a cyborg parrot. The Robots of Death delivers all round.
The story is straight science fiction, which I think of as rare for Doctor Who; visible influences include Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Karel Čapek, Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, Art Deco, and Agatha Christie, so we're talking a murder mystery in a remote outpost of a decadent civilization sustained entirely by the labor of artificially intelligent but strictly constrained robots, with sumptuous retro-futurist costuming (Morojo would be proud) and the elegant aerodynamics of streamline moderne everywhere. The robots themselves are sculpted in black and green and silver metal according to their grade and function, their classical features planed into perpetual smiles, their inlaid eyes as serenely empty as a Tiffany shade. As if flirting with the man/machine boundaries that they otherwise take such pains to reinforce, humans on this unnamed planet make up their own faces in the same contoured patterns, though much more delicately, mostly some linear accents around the eyes and nose. I got a slight glam rock vibe off the whole mise-en-scène, although it might just be this future's idea of reasonable hats. Everyone in the guest cast lives and works aboard Storm Mine 4, a vast mineral-harvesting ship on a world of sandstorm-swept deserts staffed by a small human crew and dozens more robots of all three classes. We get a few hints of wider worldbuilding—the Twenty Founding Families, Kaldor City, the Company—but the touchy dynamics among this small group are front and center, as is only appropriate when one of them is about to turn up dead. Strangled, so there's no chance of an accident, with a curious red disc stuck to his hand—a "corpse marker," which we shortly learn are used in technical contexts to identify irreparably damaged or permanently deactivated robots. Suspicion at once explodes in all directions among the already bickering crew, though there is one possibility no one raises until the arrival of the Doctor and Leela (Louise Jameson), the one the title portends. And should the mysterious serial strangler turn out to be a robot, a voiceless Dum, a reliable Voc, an autonomous Super-Voc with all the "million multi-level constrainers in its circuitry" somehow switched off and the ability to contravene the universal "prime directive" against harm to humans switched on? The Doctor's seen it before: "Oh, I should think it's the end of this civilization." We won't get to see that apocalypse, but we will witness the personal equivalent.
Collings plays Chief Mover Poul, a kind of engineering officer, and between this serial, Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), and the casting of ITV's Midnight Is a Place (1977–78), I'm close to concluding it is his life's work to play the characters I would naturally gravitate toward in any narrative where he appears. He has a trickster look here, too, sharp-faced, copper-haired, a dryly spoken observer with a gift for throwaway sarcasm—asked if a body was like that when he found it, his reply is, "Just a little fresher." The audience may guess that he's hiding something even before Leela observes that he "move[s] like a hunter, watch[es] all the time," but it's not obvious what, except that he feels the least likely of the human suspects. He sees more than he says, distracts when tensions escalate, laughs to himself but says nothing when the mine's commander repurposes one of Poul's own ripostes. He has a nervous habit of fiddling with the communicator that hangs like a medal from the breast of his sharp-shouldered tabard. Sometimes when no one's looking his face flickers apprehensively and he sputters with excessive denial at the Doctor's suggestion of killer robots, but his crewmates are dropping like flies with no solution in sight, who wouldn't be afraid? He smiles and talks easily and cynically with Leela about the money to be made sandmining, the only reason he claims he signed on to a two-year tour in this refrigerated, mechanized sluice box when he'd "rather live with people than robots, that's all." Between one scene and the next, very suddenly, he cracks.
Poul, it turns out, suffers from something called "Grimwade's syndrome" or "robophobia," a hyper-awareness of the uncanny valley that causes "an unreasoning dread of robots" and can turn into full nervous collapse if pushed too far. It's the ultimate mental health stigma in a society that depends so intimately and ubiquitously on unquestioned robot labor; it led to a death in the one other case we hear about and the family hushed up the facts to save face. In a nice twist of hindsight, only after Poul's out of commission do we learn he was an undercover agent for the Company, paired with the robot detective D84 (Gregory de Polnay, really fine voice acting) and sent to investigate the possibility of a link between the brilliant, secretive, and missing roboticist Taren Capel and Storm Mine 4. The very talent for reading people that made him abstractly ideal for the job turned it inevitably into his personal hell. Eight months in daily proximity to the robots that his hunter's senses screamed at him were the "walking dead," pretending he thought nothing more of their presence than he did of a table or chairs, and no respite to be found even with his loyal, metallic partner, like an especially neurotic variation on Asimov's Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.1 He held himself together even after the killings began—and guessed the nature of the perpetrators, half insight, half paranoia, long before anyone else from his planet had a clue—but the sight of a dead robot with its silver hand sheathed in human blood pushes him over at last. He disintegrates with the head-clutching horror of silent film: "No! Oh, no! Please, no!" And it works, because Collings commits to it, because the contrast between the sardonic, decisive Chief Mover and the disconnected wreck of his next scene is genuinely upsetting. Leela finds him in the robot storage bank, sprawled blankly under a shelf as a deadly green-and-silver sentinel moves past him. He's been crying; it starts again as she speaks to him, as he begs her with mounting panic and plummeting lucidity not to give him away to the robots who are always watching, always hating, obeying human orders to preserve their pretense of subservience "but really—but really—" His mouth is the wrong shape for an adult. Leela has to wrestle him into silence before he gets both of them killed, shouting for the robots to spare him and take her. When she looses him finally, he rolls over with his face in his hands, his face to the wall, his whole body curled to hide. He looked like the character who could solve the mystery, the wry hero who could see the hypocrisies his culture tried to hide beneath hierarchy and filigree and not really jokes about robot masseurs accidentally dismembering their human clients; he did and it destroyed him.2 Merciful inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents, eat your heart out.
I should be clear that I like this story even when it isn't being Breakdowns of 1977. Some of the crew of Storm Mine 4 of necessity get more development than others, but it's notable to me now that they are a mixed-gender, mixed-race group who seem to have been written as neutrally and cast as diversely as the crew of the Nostromo.3 Russell Hunter's abrasive Commander Uvanov at first looks like the heavy with his rank-pulling, his class-based jabs at the impoverished aristocrat who works as his navigator, and his reluctance to leave off chasing a lucrative ore blow (I like how much storm-mining resembles whaling) just to investigate the death of a man he didn't like all that much anyway, but he proves a pragmatic and resourceful ally once he stops trying to pin the murders on the Doctor and Leela; he is unexpectedly gentle with his stricken Chief Mover and faces up to the world-warping fact of a mine's worth of robots with their first principles rewired by passing his second-in-command a handful of shaped charges and making like an action hero: "I think it's high time we went on the offensive." Pamela Salem's Pilot Toos injured her wrist in the near-sinking of the mine and was nearly strangled to death by a Voc in her own cabin, but she takes the blocks of Z-9 and follows Uvanov because she's a trooper, stubborn as when she held the sabotaged mine steady; it takes a creepily calm-voiced murder attempt to panic her and even then she defends herself with a vase. I like Leela, who dresses like an extra from One Million Years B.C. (1966), but is perceptive and unimpressed by technology and has no problem kicking dudes in the groin when they accuse her of murders she has not committed. "You must be stronger than you look," Poul appraises her, following his commander's misapprehension that she strangled the man in whose cabin she was found; she fires back at once, "You must be stupider than you look if you think I did that." Much of her function in the narrative seems to be to provide the Doctor with someone to explain things to, but at least the script notices and lampshades it. And as should always be the case in a story of this nature, the heart of The Robots of Death belongs to D84, the courteous, humane, rapidly evolving agent undercover as a mute, drudging Dum. His mild voice seesaws, sometimes stammers and sometimes vibrates with electronic glitches, but he pursues his own investigations even as his partner comes unglued, makes mistakes, learns from them. On the one hand, he's exactly what this culture should be afraid of: not a fancy automaton that can be reprogrammed into a killing machine, but an actual artificial person with a mind and personality of their own. On the other, he's wonderful. He is quite wrong that he's "not important." His rapport with both Leela and the Doctor makes him a tempting companion to imagine in some alternate version of Season 14. And he gets the incontestable best line in the serial, said in just the right tone of polite reproach: "Please do not throw hands at me."
If I am disappointed with anything about this serial, it's that the robot revolution is not self-willed: the human villain is fascinating once revealed, self-contradictory in plausible, meaningful ways and cleverly mirrored to both Poul and D84, but it somewhat undercuts the metaphor of class/race anxiety if the uprising of the exploited workforce is instigated from outside, no matter how strongly that outside wants to represent itself as part of the oppressed. If I look at it as an inversion of Metropolis (1927), where a robot provocateur sows dissent among a human underclass, I like it better. I hope that was intentional.
In short, this is one of the reviews where I come in late to a classic, but at least I came in. I am not surprised that it's a fan favorite; I don't even know that I can call myself a fan, but I think it's terrific. It's a good science fiction mystery. It has characters as well as cleverly interlocked ideas. It definitely gives good David Collings. This mental thing brought to you by my important backers at Patreon.
1. For maximum irony of the sort that comes to pass if a person does enough science fiction, Collings played 51st-century robot detective Daneel in a 1969 BBC adaptation of The Naked Sun (1957), which I assume like its source novel came down to the terrifying concept of positronic brains not bound by the Three Laws of Robotics—robots that could harm humans, even without knowing it—and which the internet helpfully tells me does not survive in any form barring some of Delia Derbyshire's sound work. Damn it, BBC. [edit] In fact, it looks as though the BFI did a reconstruction from the surviving soundtrack and stills, further details of which can be found at WikiDelia. I'm still side-eying the BBC.
2. I appreciate that he survives the story, though I mind a little that it leaves him at loose ends, catatonic on the bridge of the sandminer without even third-party dialogue to point toward his fate. My preferred headcanon would involve him getting offplanet somewhere he doesn't have to be around robots all the time, but it looks as though radio canon has him reappearing full bore loony some years later. Maybe I will ignore radio canon. Opinions? Everyone is just lucky I did not see this serial in high school instead of The Pirate Planet, because I wouldn't have written Poul fix-it fic—I didn't start writing fanfiction until I was out of grad school—but I am pretty sure hopelessly derivative original fiction would have been guaranteed.
3. I would love to know if there is believed to be any link between The Robots of Death and Dan O'Bannon and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), because I have to say that one looks a lot like a direct forerunner of the other, not just in the isolated, claustrophobic and-then-there-were-none premise, but elements of plot and atmosphere like company agents embedded in regular crews and futuristic long-haul work being just as tiresome as the twentieth-century kind. Ian Holm's Ash pretty much is what you would get if you combined Poul with D84 and turned the sympathy way down on both sides.
thisbluespirit recommended me Chris Boucher's The Robots of Death (1977) on the grounds of David Collings and Tom Baker-era Doctor Who generally. The last time I'd seen the Fourth Doctor was The story is straight science fiction, which I think of as rare for Doctor Who; visible influences include Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Karel Čapek, Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, Art Deco, and Agatha Christie, so we're talking a murder mystery in a remote outpost of a decadent civilization sustained entirely by the labor of artificially intelligent but strictly constrained robots, with sumptuous retro-futurist costuming (Morojo would be proud) and the elegant aerodynamics of streamline moderne everywhere. The robots themselves are sculpted in black and green and silver metal according to their grade and function, their classical features planed into perpetual smiles, their inlaid eyes as serenely empty as a Tiffany shade. As if flirting with the man/machine boundaries that they otherwise take such pains to reinforce, humans on this unnamed planet make up their own faces in the same contoured patterns, though much more delicately, mostly some linear accents around the eyes and nose. I got a slight glam rock vibe off the whole mise-en-scène, although it might just be this future's idea of reasonable hats. Everyone in the guest cast lives and works aboard Storm Mine 4, a vast mineral-harvesting ship on a world of sandstorm-swept deserts staffed by a small human crew and dozens more robots of all three classes. We get a few hints of wider worldbuilding—the Twenty Founding Families, Kaldor City, the Company—but the touchy dynamics among this small group are front and center, as is only appropriate when one of them is about to turn up dead. Strangled, so there's no chance of an accident, with a curious red disc stuck to his hand—a "corpse marker," which we shortly learn are used in technical contexts to identify irreparably damaged or permanently deactivated robots. Suspicion at once explodes in all directions among the already bickering crew, though there is one possibility no one raises until the arrival of the Doctor and Leela (Louise Jameson), the one the title portends. And should the mysterious serial strangler turn out to be a robot, a voiceless Dum, a reliable Voc, an autonomous Super-Voc with all the "million multi-level constrainers in its circuitry" somehow switched off and the ability to contravene the universal "prime directive" against harm to humans switched on? The Doctor's seen it before: "Oh, I should think it's the end of this civilization." We won't get to see that apocalypse, but we will witness the personal equivalent.
Collings plays Chief Mover Poul, a kind of engineering officer, and between this serial, Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), and the casting of ITV's Midnight Is a Place (1977–78), I'm close to concluding it is his life's work to play the characters I would naturally gravitate toward in any narrative where he appears. He has a trickster look here, too, sharp-faced, copper-haired, a dryly spoken observer with a gift for throwaway sarcasm—asked if a body was like that when he found it, his reply is, "Just a little fresher." The audience may guess that he's hiding something even before Leela observes that he "move[s] like a hunter, watch[es] all the time," but it's not obvious what, except that he feels the least likely of the human suspects. He sees more than he says, distracts when tensions escalate, laughs to himself but says nothing when the mine's commander repurposes one of Poul's own ripostes. He has a nervous habit of fiddling with the communicator that hangs like a medal from the breast of his sharp-shouldered tabard. Sometimes when no one's looking his face flickers apprehensively and he sputters with excessive denial at the Doctor's suggestion of killer robots, but his crewmates are dropping like flies with no solution in sight, who wouldn't be afraid? He smiles and talks easily and cynically with Leela about the money to be made sandmining, the only reason he claims he signed on to a two-year tour in this refrigerated, mechanized sluice box when he'd "rather live with people than robots, that's all." Between one scene and the next, very suddenly, he cracks.
Poul, it turns out, suffers from something called "Grimwade's syndrome" or "robophobia," a hyper-awareness of the uncanny valley that causes "an unreasoning dread of robots" and can turn into full nervous collapse if pushed too far. It's the ultimate mental health stigma in a society that depends so intimately and ubiquitously on unquestioned robot labor; it led to a death in the one other case we hear about and the family hushed up the facts to save face. In a nice twist of hindsight, only after Poul's out of commission do we learn he was an undercover agent for the Company, paired with the robot detective D84 (Gregory de Polnay, really fine voice acting) and sent to investigate the possibility of a link between the brilliant, secretive, and missing roboticist Taren Capel and Storm Mine 4. The very talent for reading people that made him abstractly ideal for the job turned it inevitably into his personal hell. Eight months in daily proximity to the robots that his hunter's senses screamed at him were the "walking dead," pretending he thought nothing more of their presence than he did of a table or chairs, and no respite to be found even with his loyal, metallic partner, like an especially neurotic variation on Asimov's Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.1 He held himself together even after the killings began—and guessed the nature of the perpetrators, half insight, half paranoia, long before anyone else from his planet had a clue—but the sight of a dead robot with its silver hand sheathed in human blood pushes him over at last. He disintegrates with the head-clutching horror of silent film: "No! Oh, no! Please, no!" And it works, because Collings commits to it, because the contrast between the sardonic, decisive Chief Mover and the disconnected wreck of his next scene is genuinely upsetting. Leela finds him in the robot storage bank, sprawled blankly under a shelf as a deadly green-and-silver sentinel moves past him. He's been crying; it starts again as she speaks to him, as he begs her with mounting panic and plummeting lucidity not to give him away to the robots who are always watching, always hating, obeying human orders to preserve their pretense of subservience "but really—but really—" His mouth is the wrong shape for an adult. Leela has to wrestle him into silence before he gets both of them killed, shouting for the robots to spare him and take her. When she looses him finally, he rolls over with his face in his hands, his face to the wall, his whole body curled to hide. He looked like the character who could solve the mystery, the wry hero who could see the hypocrisies his culture tried to hide beneath hierarchy and filigree and not really jokes about robot masseurs accidentally dismembering their human clients; he did and it destroyed him.2 Merciful inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents, eat your heart out.
I should be clear that I like this story even when it isn't being Breakdowns of 1977. Some of the crew of Storm Mine 4 of necessity get more development than others, but it's notable to me now that they are a mixed-gender, mixed-race group who seem to have been written as neutrally and cast as diversely as the crew of the Nostromo.3 Russell Hunter's abrasive Commander Uvanov at first looks like the heavy with his rank-pulling, his class-based jabs at the impoverished aristocrat who works as his navigator, and his reluctance to leave off chasing a lucrative ore blow (I like how much storm-mining resembles whaling) just to investigate the death of a man he didn't like all that much anyway, but he proves a pragmatic and resourceful ally once he stops trying to pin the murders on the Doctor and Leela; he is unexpectedly gentle with his stricken Chief Mover and faces up to the world-warping fact of a mine's worth of robots with their first principles rewired by passing his second-in-command a handful of shaped charges and making like an action hero: "I think it's high time we went on the offensive." Pamela Salem's Pilot Toos injured her wrist in the near-sinking of the mine and was nearly strangled to death by a Voc in her own cabin, but she takes the blocks of Z-9 and follows Uvanov because she's a trooper, stubborn as when she held the sabotaged mine steady; it takes a creepily calm-voiced murder attempt to panic her and even then she defends herself with a vase. I like Leela, who dresses like an extra from One Million Years B.C. (1966), but is perceptive and unimpressed by technology and has no problem kicking dudes in the groin when they accuse her of murders she has not committed. "You must be stronger than you look," Poul appraises her, following his commander's misapprehension that she strangled the man in whose cabin she was found; she fires back at once, "You must be stupider than you look if you think I did that." Much of her function in the narrative seems to be to provide the Doctor with someone to explain things to, but at least the script notices and lampshades it. And as should always be the case in a story of this nature, the heart of The Robots of Death belongs to D84, the courteous, humane, rapidly evolving agent undercover as a mute, drudging Dum. His mild voice seesaws, sometimes stammers and sometimes vibrates with electronic glitches, but he pursues his own investigations even as his partner comes unglued, makes mistakes, learns from them. On the one hand, he's exactly what this culture should be afraid of: not a fancy automaton that can be reprogrammed into a killing machine, but an actual artificial person with a mind and personality of their own. On the other, he's wonderful. He is quite wrong that he's "not important." His rapport with both Leela and the Doctor makes him a tempting companion to imagine in some alternate version of Season 14. And he gets the incontestable best line in the serial, said in just the right tone of polite reproach: "Please do not throw hands at me."
If I am disappointed with anything about this serial, it's that the robot revolution is not self-willed: the human villain is fascinating once revealed, self-contradictory in plausible, meaningful ways and cleverly mirrored to both Poul and D84, but it somewhat undercuts the metaphor of class/race anxiety if the uprising of the exploited workforce is instigated from outside, no matter how strongly that outside wants to represent itself as part of the oppressed. If I look at it as an inversion of Metropolis (1927), where a robot provocateur sows dissent among a human underclass, I like it better. I hope that was intentional.
In short, this is one of the reviews where I come in late to a classic, but at least I came in. I am not surprised that it's a fan favorite; I don't even know that I can call myself a fan, but I think it's terrific. It's a good science fiction mystery. It has characters as well as cleverly interlocked ideas. It definitely gives good David Collings. This mental thing brought to you by my important backers at Patreon.
1. For maximum irony of the sort that comes to pass if a person does enough science fiction, Collings played 51st-century robot detective Daneel in a 1969 BBC adaptation of The Naked Sun (1957), which I assume like its source novel came down to the terrifying concept of positronic brains not bound by the Three Laws of Robotics—robots that could harm humans, even without knowing it—and which the internet helpfully tells me does not survive in any form barring some of Delia Derbyshire's sound work. Damn it, BBC. [edit] In fact, it looks as though the BFI did a reconstruction from the surviving soundtrack and stills, further details of which can be found at WikiDelia. I'm still side-eying the BBC.
2. I appreciate that he survives the story, though I mind a little that it leaves him at loose ends, catatonic on the bridge of the sandminer without even third-party dialogue to point toward his fate. My preferred headcanon would involve him getting offplanet somewhere he doesn't have to be around robots all the time, but it looks as though radio canon has him reappearing full bore loony some years later. Maybe I will ignore radio canon. Opinions? Everyone is just lucky I did not see this serial in high school instead of The Pirate Planet, because I wouldn't have written Poul fix-it fic—I didn't start writing fanfiction until I was out of grad school—but I am pretty sure hopelessly derivative original fiction would have been guaranteed.
3. I would love to know if there is believed to be any link between The Robots of Death and Dan O'Bannon and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), because I have to say that one looks a lot like a direct forerunner of the other, not just in the isolated, claustrophobic and-then-there-were-none premise, but elements of plot and atmosphere like company agents embedded in regular crews and futuristic long-haul work being just as tiresome as the twentieth-century kind. Ian Holm's Ash pretty much is what you would get if you combined Poul with D84 and turned the sympathy way down on both sides.
no subject
It may be less batshit than my memory! I just remember all the meticulous worldbuilding (which looks to me now like a direct descendant of Zamyatin's We (1924), which I wouldn't read until college) pulling up short with the ironic twist kicker that the deepest Levels themselves are just as vulnerable in the event of a nuclear accident as the lethally hot surface itself and, well, guess what? The end, no moral; that's the point. I felt extremely nonplussed about it.
I seem to recall that the screeenplay was by J B Priestley, who had loved the book, and directed by Rudolf Cartier and had an extra 10 minutes so they could do it properly. It's one of the better OOTUs that I've seen, but then wee apocalyptic David Collings is bound to make me think that.
Eh; it sounds pretty prestige. The screencaps you linked me look like direct descendants of the 1954 Nineteen Eighty-Four—which would make sense with Cartier—and that's is not a bad thing. I found that production much more powerful than the 1984 film I had previously seen.
It wasn't as much fun once they lobotomised him.
That's just a great summation.
and it turned out that the disc with Level 7 on was broken like David Collings, with a crack going right through it
That's like watches stopping around Sapphire & Steel. Maybe David Collings just attracts metaphor independently.
But one day I must because wee!breaky David Collings and weird 60s BBC SF and also James Maxwell is in the adaptation of Asimov's story The Dead Past, too.
If I find Level 7 and/or The Naked Sun for free on the internet, I will send them your way. I downloaded the soundtrack from WikiDelia, but haven't had the chance to listen to more than the first few minutes in which David Collings is instantly recognizable and James Maxwell has an agoraphobic breakdown.
David Collings hadn't had half enough to do before I stopped watching it and - indeed! - they coloured his hair in wrong, although if you have now seen my screenshots from Night Caller you will at least credit them for stopping to colour it in at all!
That was . . . impressive. I was impressed. Yes.
Not that he's not always good, of course, but it was such a different role to the things I've seen him in that it was hard to imagine when I saw the casting, but he's amazing - best person in it, as he should be.
That's one of the reasons I've been interested! I am not surprised but still glad to hear he lives up to expectations. Sam has always been my favorite character, which is probably predictable.
And Bill Nighy's two (sadly v short) pieces, my absolute favourites of all the songs
I've never heard him sing before. Those are wonderful. Thank you.
I didn't recognize Stephen Oliver's name, but the sound of his music was familiar to me; it turns out he did the music and occasional lyrics for the RSC's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, which I love. I do not think I will have a problem with his music for The Lord of the Rings. To clarify, if it's all of this caliber, I'll probably try to find a copy.
I also just wanted Poul to be okay again after, heh.
Seriously.
(There's not much but a lot of it was either by, for, or came up via me. I'm not sure whether that's a terrible confession or a good one, but hey...)
I think starting a niche on AO3 is something to be proud of, especially if people write for you.
Most of it is fairly cracky, but some of it isn't, including the resulting Leela/Poul.
I really like "Robophobia (And How to Cure It)." It does slingshot the ending a little, as warned, but you've got the voices right and that's harder to do with media-based stories than not borking the prose. I can hear David Collings and Louise Jameson. There are also some very nice narrative lines and some blocking, especially for Poul, that is exactly correct. And your drawing out of the parallels between Poul and Taren Capel is great.
[edit] I just realized that the character tag confirms something that had crossed my mind during The Robots of Death: I wondered if he was named after Poul Anderson, but I do not associate Anderson with robots in the same way as Asimov or Čapek and I concluded it was either a very low-key in-joke or I just hadn't encountered enough other people named Poul—I don't believe his first name is ever mentioned in the serial itself. Hah.
I had forgotten, but my inevitable reaction to watching S&S was to write a D84 fixit with Silver, because obviously, and also because Silver/Any sufficiently advanced AI is clearly a workable ship, at least in passing.
Aw.
I like your capturing of the precision of Silver's gestures, that look like human comfort or affection but come from entirely different impulses. (Sapphire in Assignment 6 taking Silver's face between her hands to make his memories visible: "Love to." He kisses her palm afterward. It is and is not what it appears to convey.)
And maybe I won't need to say more later, because I'm usually a little more coherent in fic than in comments, but I will try, because I did have some thoughts. (Somewhere.)
Well, this post and I will still be here.
(Good luck with your con!)
Thank you!
no subject
Ah, the inevitably peeled-back TV version can't have all of that, and so just feels like typically bleak apocalyptic anti-nuclear fare. (The ending was one of the things I liked about it; but maybe you will get to see it somehow. But basically, David Collings was right about everything in it.)
That's like watches stopping around Sapphire & Steel. Maybe David Collings just attracts metaphor independently.
I once tried to make a fanvid of David Collings breaking down, but it broke down and killed my memory stick and all that remains is an even earlier and rougher draft full of placeholders (but it does feature Bernard Archard feeding him to the invisible hyenas here.)
I downloaded the soundtrack from WikiDelia, but haven't had the chance to listen to more than the first few minutes in which David Collings is instantly recognizable and James Maxwell has an agoraphobic breakdown.
Ah, sorry, I think I've confused you: Paul Maxwell is playing Lije Baley. I mentioned James Maxwell because he was in another OOTU Asimov adaptation, and he is an obvious draw for me (if nobody else) in an expensive boxset! David Collings AND James Maxwell AND 1960s BBC SF *check*
I do not think I will have a problem with his music for The Lord of the Rings. To clarify, if it's all of this caliber, I'll probably try to find a copy.
I'd say yes. I'm not sure which is my favourite piece, but obviously the main theme is the first that comes to mind and I could find it online.
I think starting a niche on AO3 is something to be proud of, especially if people write for you.
:-D I oppress people into writing old telly things for me; I am a terrible person. (Actually, the Poul fic is almost as much Liadt's fault as mine, I realised afterwards. In fact, she's probably far more to blame for more RoD/Kaldor fic than I am! I just flirt with the Poul tag every now and then.)
And, aw, thank you! I'm glad you liked them. The Poul one is pretty old now, but I think quite a few years' worth of having RoD living in my head went into it.
And, yes, Poul was a ref to Poul Anderson; Uvanov is an even less obvious nod to Isaac Asimov. The full names come from Corpse Marker (Uvanov is Kiy Uvanov and Toos, Lish Toos - unfortunately the others didn't survive to feature in it!) I think the only name that I know was an in-joke was Grimwade's Syndrome, which was a ref to a director called Peter Grimwade, who did several DW eps, although not that one. (I'm not sure why!)
Sapphire in Assignment 6 taking Silver's face between her hands to make his memories visible: "Love to." He kisses her palm afterward. It is and is not what it appears to convey.
Oh, Elements, and their inhuman flirting that is and isn't! It clearly is serving a purpose; it clearly also is what passes for an intimacy with them. (I'm sorry, i'll start degenerating into incoherency and keysmashes or something. We'll save that for the eventual S&S post. But <3)
Oh, and I know I keep mentioning B7, and I'll try not to do it again, at least for a few comments, but it's rather hard not to in connection with RoD, and it was Chris Boucher that led me there from Doctor Who. In general, I would say that is a series to be watched in order, but perhaps you might find this interesting at some point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj7XEIdDY0E
It's Shadow S2, ep2, and Chris Boucher's first episode for the series (although he wrote large amounts of S1 as script editor, because Terry Nation always tended to pass in first drafts and swan off to the US to sell Daleks), and while it's by no means one of his best, it does have the right feel to connect it to Kaldor, and it's interesting and gives every regular something to do, even the often-neglected Gan. (Although it's hardly Vila's most shining episode! Poor Vila. He deserves what he gets in this one, though.)
no subject
That was literally just a case of me typing one name for another (Paul Maxwell is an actor I thought I'd never heard of, though it turns out I have seen him in a couple of very bit parts), but I appreciate the check-in.
Uvanov is an even less obvious nod to Isaac Asimov.
Yeah, the link there is pretty much "it sounds Russian."
I think the only name that I know was an in-joke was Grimwade's Syndrome, which was a ref to a director called Peter Grimwade, who did several DW eps, although not that one. (I'm not sure why!)
That one I know! According to the BBC, Grimwade was a production assistant on The Robots of Death and complained that there were always robots in the storylines he ended up working on. I've also seen references that the line was scripted with another name for which Tom Baker ad-lib substituted "Grimwade," but everyone liked it so much they kept it.
no subject
At least three of the letters are also the same!
The ad-lib story is the one I've heard, but I'd not come across (that I remembered) someone actually giving a reason for it, just an in-joke.
no subject
As reasons go, it's pretty good TV immortality.
no subject
Ah, the inevitably peeled-back TV version can't have all of that, and so just feels like typically bleak apocalyptic anti-nuclear fare. (The ending was one of the things I liked about it; but maybe you will get to see it somehow. But basically, David Collings was right about everything in it.)
It looks available, so chances are quite high that I'll see it (if not necessarily tonight, because I was on nearly eight hours straight of programming and have another panel tomorrow at noon). The runtime looks right.
[edit] Okay, I watched until David Collings blew up and now I'm going to bed.
"What's the matter with your arm?"
"I think it doesn't want to press any more buttons."
(He does remind me of a young Peter Cushing. Some of it is the Nineteen Eighty-Four echoes and the expert falling apart. Some of it is the cheekbones.)
[edit edit] I kept watching until everything blew up.
There are some notable differences between teleplay and novel, including X-117's plotline and the specifics of the apocalypse, but it's haunting in its own way. The final scenes are correctly nightmarish. I'm glad it wasn't lost.
"Every twelve days. Did you know that?"
And, aw, thank you! I'm glad you liked them. The Poul one is pretty old now, but I think quite a few years' worth of having RoD living in my head went into it.
I almost asked when it was written and then was unsure if it would be taken as rude.
I'm sorry, i'll start degenerating into incoherency and keysmashes or something. We'll save that for the eventual S&S post.
I swear I will get that written once my brain and my typing ability come back online. Being at Readercon is at least useful for making me feel less like I am just permanently stupid at people, although it is amazing how many other writers assume I'm wearing the brace for a flare of RSI.
In general, I would say that is a series to be watched in order, but perhaps you might find this interesting at some point
Thank you. I don't know if I will watch it before the rest of the series, but even if not, I'll keep an eye out for the Kaldor links. I did read both of Tanith Lee's scripts a number of years ago when I found published versions, but that was when I had no expectation whatsoever of ever seeing Blake's 7 myself.
no subject
Knowing you were at a con, I didn't expect a reply till after the weekend!
And, aww, you found Level 7! I never think about Dailymotion. I'm not good at watching things online, but it's nice to know where I can go to at least see the bit where his arm doesn't work if I feel the need.
There are some notable differences between teleplay and novel, including X-117's plotline and the specifics of the apocalypse, but it's haunting in its own way. The final scenes are correctly nightmarish. I'm glad it wasn't lost.
Interesting! Can you remember any of the particular changes, because I was curious myself, but without much brain to read and the book not being all that easily/cheaply available, I couldn't find out. I'm glad you liked the ending; I did too.
[edit] Okay, I watched until David Collings blew up and now I'm going to bed.
This made me LOL more than it should; especially since I seem to remember literally doing that myself. (WIth his UFO ep, definitely: aliens turned him into a human bomb and exploded him twenty minutes in.)
Being at Readercon is at least useful for making me feel less like I am just permanently stupid at people, although it is amazing how many other writers assume I'm wearing the brace for a flare of RSI.
Anything like a con is all-consuming! I'll look forward to it whenever you're able.
no subject
I never thought about Dailymotion until quite recently, when it started turning up British TV that wasn't available on YouTube. I have no idea how long this will last, but while it does it's handy.
Can you remember any of the particular changes, because I was curious myself, but without much brain to read and the book not being all that easily/cheaply available, I couldn't find out.
The major ones I remember are the timeline, the romance, X-117, and the details of the ending. The teleplay starts with the creation of the bunker society and progresses relatively directly through blink-and-miss-it World War III to the total and final devastation of Earth; the novel opens in medias res and unfolds much more gradually, with a wider cast of characters and subplots that explore different aspects of life on Level 7 and other levels—carefully scrubbed by Roshwald of all identifying national characteristics, so as to universalize the story, while Priestley's script sets it casually but firmly in the UK. I don't blame him for that any more than I fault him for compressing the action; he had an hour and Roshwald had an entire book. But it gives the teleplay a sense of newness and urgency from the start, whereas much of the novel's mood is tedium and unease until something goes wrong. As far as I remember the romance, X-127 in the novel has a relationship with a staff psychologist rather than a teacher like R-747 and it is much more a marriage of convenience or resignation than a love affair of any kind. X-117 is still a push-button officer and a misfit on Level 7, still with the conversion disorder of the hand that doesn't want to push buttons but minus the lobotomy, although he does undergo some coercive combination of drugs and brainwashing that returns him to work looking haggard and pale and haunted but apparently capable of doing his job; he's on duty with X-127 when the order to push all the buttons comes through. He does three-quarters of his job and breaks down at the fourth and final button. He's dragged away from his station and a replacement officer launches the last, worst bombs. Goodbye, surface world. X-117 has several hysterical scenes in hospital afterward and finally—shocking X-127—hangs himself. Against all scientific expectations, fallout begins to filter down through the upper levels. Levels 1 through 6 die from radiation sickness creeping downward; Level 7 holds out until an accident with the nuclear reactor that provides their power irradiates them all just as surely as if they'd been up top when the bombs fell. X-127 appreciates the irony. Soon he's the last human left alive on Earth, writing the last shaky page of his diary as the recorded music plays out its twelve-day repeating cycle. As in the teleplay, the war started by computer glitch. The novel is bleaker, I think, but also pulpier, with weird streaks of black humor and a much higher-keyed narrator than Keith Buckley's X-127. Also splatterier in the biological sense, since its radiation sickness is the realistic kind rather than Priestley's blindness and paralysis. One minute X-127 is jotting ethnographic notes on his post-war subterranean society and the next minute everyone around him is vomiting and dead. That may be part of the reason it categorized itself as "batshit" in my memory. It's much more emotionally jagged. I don't know if you would enjoy reading it. It may be sufficient to imagine the extra mad scenes David Collings didn't get the chance to play. I'm not sure I'd enjoy re-reading it, although having dredged it up out of my memory I probably will.
(WIth his UFO ep, definitely: aliens turned him into a human bomb and exploded him twenty minutes in.)
I'M NOT EVEN SURPRISED.
Anything like a con is all-consuming! I'll look forward to it whenever you're able.
I am home from Readercon! Now I want to sleep for a week!
no subject
It seems to be good for when there's been a take-down on YouTube and vice versa, I suppose!
Ah, thank you for the detailed list of the differences. That is interesting, although, LOL, as you say, we could have had so much more breaky!Collings!
I was amused at the unconvincing deaths from radiation poisoning, until watching it again, it struck me that they never said that was what it was, and there was actually a strong possibility it was a nerve agent, which would no doubt still have been messier but would have matched the symptoms they were displaying better. It's been long enough that I can't remember why I came to that conclusion, though.
There seems to be a theme running through it that there's a point at which everyone has something that re-humanises them (and then they break). But it's been a while. It sounds as though maybe that was more the adaptation. (X127's love for Michele Dotrice, and her love for chocolate, and X117 full stop, but there were also things with the other characters. But it has been a while, sorry!)
(Also, if you're after the other Douglas Adams DW - I am nosy, I read all the comments! - there's the unfinished Shada, and City of Death. City of Death is probably the best of the three, though. It included a location shoot in Paris, and has a wonderful turn from Julian Glover as the villain. ("I don't think he's as stupid as he seems."/ "My dear, no one could be as stupid as he seems!") He was script editor for S17 (and the very last serial of S16), though, so even the worst eps are at least enlivened by random Adams jokes. He reused a lot of Shada, which was never broadcast at the time, in both Dirk Gently and some of Hitch-Hikers.)