Okay, this one was a really fun read. Granted, it only gives me a little bit to work with for the thematic season... but there's just enough here to warrant a post's work of content. So, let's define what we have here. Twelve Angels Weeping is a short story collection featuring, well, 12 Doctor Who stories. Each of them is about a specific alien species/threat from the show's long history, and the whole thing has a "12 Days Of Christmas" vibe to it. It doesn't seem to fit spooky month at first, but if Tim Burton gets to make a movie that hugs the border between a Halloween movie and a Christmas movie, then this collection can as well. The stories are all really good and varied, but a lot of them aren't what I'd call "spooky". You get some wild things like Time Lord detective noir on Gallifrey, or aliens teaming up to pull a heist (but not like a time heist or anything), or an actual depiction of the whole Nightmare Child thing from the Time War. Sometimes we see the Doctor and pals, and sometimes we don't. Of the 12 stories in the collection, three of them have enough horrific attributes to them for me to want to cover today. As I say, though, all 12 stories are neat in their own right. Let's kick it off with the titular one."Grey Matter" is a Weeping Angel tale that definitely gives a strong start to the whole affair. Having the Doctor show up on a planet of Doctors during a quarantine is a neat concept, as is the idea of the futuristic plague masks they all wear. As a short story, it plays around the edges of the tale, focusing more on the POV of Chief Medical Officer Perinne as his planet and its mega-cities succumb to a mystery plague, one by one. Oops, the plague's not really a plague. It's a Weeping Angel infestation and they're doing that thing they did in the Byzantium two-parter, turning other people into Weeping Angels... and nobody can tell because they all have those future plague masks on and can't see people's faces properly. All of the scarier stories in this collection focus on a level of existential dread, and Grey Matter kicks it all off well enough as you realize what's happening while you're in Perinne's head and the corner of his eye keeps bugging him, along with a flicker on one of his monitors. It's not a situation that really gets resolved or anything, either. The Weeping Angels always were haunting, and they don't even seem hungry in this episode; they just keep propagating this planet and changing people into statues. Which fits well with the next story...
"Ghost In The Machine" is a Cyberman story told from the POV of a random Cyberman, who keeps heading into battle and hallucinating the image of a girl in the middle of the battlefield. There have definitely been Cyberman stories which play up the absolute conceptual horror of what it must be like to be converted into an emotionless robot, but they're few and far between. They mostly get used as big stampy robots who chortle about emotions sometimes. Kind of like the Borg in Star Trek, where the original point of them got lost in translation along the way. Ghost In The Machine plays that up with a simple but fucking morbid twist: the girl the Cyberman keeps seeing is her old self, the last bit of humanity still remaining that it cannot delete. Just thinking of the implications of that is supremely fucked up, and it adds a whole new dimension of conceptual nightmare to the Cybermen. It's great stuff, and so is the last spooky tale.
"Student Bodies" involves everyone's favorite cosmic fuckups, the Silence! The structure of this one is interesting, as it's sort of a found footage thing involving the audio logs of a student on a lunar university staying home over Christmas break... but, since this is the same university River Song studies at, it's crawling with the Silence. Their whole memory wipe thing causes... issues, as do the nature of those cracks in time they caused erasing planetoids that our protagonist discovered. We get little cameos from River Song and good old Madame Kovarian, and the paranoia and dread over these fucked-up memory wiping monsters nearly drives our poor protagonist mad. It's got that whole found footage charm to it, even in the form of just someone's audio logs. I don't know if it would work as a televised thing,, but what's on the page works very well. There's even an audiobook of the collection, if you want to hear this story (I stuck with the book for now, but I bet that would be worth checking out.) Those are just the three short stories I wanted to cover, but again the entire collection is worth checking out. That'll do it for now. What's next? I have no idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment