Ah, nostalgia. So seductive. So dangerous. And so odd to be feeling it for some of my own work. Nightshade, now looking like the brittle-paged Tenth Planet I had as a kid.What surprises me now, re-reading the book after so many years is how SERIOUS it is. Grim, in fact. But you have to remember that I was reacting against the sort of garish Who of the late Eighties. So I wanted Nightshadeto be an ultra- grim and horrific adventure in the mould of favourites such as Genesis of the Daleks, The Caves of Androzani and Frontios. I liked the irony also that it was a story about the dangers of nostalgia that was in itself, nostalgic.
Mark Gatiss on Nightshade (2006)
Nightshade was the 88h of the New Adventures range, and the first standalone story after the range started with the 4 part Timewyrm arc and then another 3-part arc Cats Cradle, after which they realised that the arc wasn’t really a necessary component to keep readers coming back. We pick up the story with the 7th Doctor and Ace still travelling together. They land just before Christmas 1968 in the village of Crook Marsham, near Marston Moor, 6 miles from York. Strange things are happening in the village. The landlady is haunted by visions of her brother who died when his ship was sunk during the war. In a retirement home Edmund Trevithick, star of the 1950’s TV Science Fiction programme Nightshade, in which he played the eponymous Professor, is disturbed one night after a repeat of his old series by the monsters he fought each week – monstrous insects. Out on the moor the Radio Telescope is being flooded with data, the village phones are all out of action and the local GP has disappeared. Soon the bodies start turning up or at least what’s left of them and all escape routes out of the village are blocked.
So, it is also timely to review this. As I write this, last weekend was the broadcast of Empress of Mars, Mark Gatiss’s 9th TV story, 12 years or so after his first ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Who knows, given the regime change about to happen, it could be his last. Certainly he was allowed by Steven Moffat this season to write the Ice Warrior story he always wanted to, maybe suggestive a sense of an ending. It is interesting to view this story – his first contribution to Doctor Who from August 1992 (that month in comparison I was at Reading Festival for Nirvana and Who was far from my thoughts) through the prism of his work on TV. That nostalgia mentioned in his introduction from the 2006 BBC Website ebook release of the novel, in some ways addresses some of the criticism aimed at him since then the warm, cosy, nostalgic glow that he imbues many of his stories with. Remember then that in the 1990’s he was just about to start out in the League of Gentlemen – the group that produced some of the darkest, scariest, blackest comedy seen on British TV. Remember also his love for the macabre, for the ghost story and horror. Nightshade contains nostalgia by the bucket load – but in the harshest, most horrific way possible – nostalgia and old memories that kill in the nastiest of ways. If you’d like Mark’s work on TV to be of a darker, more horrific, adult hue, then maybe give this book a try. It is still undoubtedly his voice, his preoccupations and loves, but just with more of an edge (not just the horror but for example in the racism towards Vijay the scientist) than we’ve seen in his TV work.
Crook Marsham – The non-quintessential English Village (depending on your view!)
One of the things Mark Gatiss set out to do when setting Crook Marsham in Yorkshire was to relocate the besieged/haunted Doctor Who village from the home counties to the much less explored (at least by the programme) North of England and instead of rolling southern English countryside, we get the bleakness of the moor. This, along with setting the story just before Christmas and in the 60’s gives the whole piece a much darker, colder feel than the likes of The Daemons, Android Invasion or The Awakening.
The village setting is split between a number of locations. The mixed team of scientists at the space tracking station – lead by a female scientist Dr Cooper, Dr Hawthorne who is quite a horrible racist character, particularly towards the young male scientist of Asian descent Vijay, who is also going out with Holly the other female scientist. There is also the old people’s home, where Trevithick is living, the cast of old people and Jill who runs the home who is very much younger. Then we have the village and especially the pub and police station – the main figures being the landlord’s son Robin, who takes an interest in Ace and the policeman Lowcock. Finally there is the monastery out on the moor, and the Abbot and Monks.
The 1960’s is very much swinging elsewhere – in London, Paris etc. This is reflected through the thoughts of Jill – the young manager of the care home, who dreams of the Paris student riots and her friends enjoying the 60’s elsewhere, but is stuck with the old in a Yorkshire village. The 1960’s setting is also quite astute in that it gives more rationale to the life and death of the residents of the village – the First World War is in range for the older residents – two of which fought on the Somme and wartime losses from the 2nd World War are very close for the middle-aged villagers. As we’ll see later this provides some quite startling, horrific images.
The Horror
Well this is a horror story, lots and lots of people die – a fair chunk of the Crook Marsham population. Too many people die really, it could maybe do with being a bit less bleak – but it does really up the stakes and unlike some of the 80’s TV stories, they die for a reason and we find out something about them before and while they die. Something comes back, a memory or loss or longing from the past and almost tempts them into death. Death by grief or loss or remembrance or regret or nostalgia, someone you loved comes back and ends your life in the grimmest most horrible way imaginable.
There is a nice variety to this as well, for exqmple Betty the Landlady is killed by an image of her own brother, who didn’t want to go to war, but she shamed him into it – his ship lost in the Pacific, floating in the sea waiting for the sharks. An old man is lured away by an image of his still alive wife in her youthful prime in a red dress, long before she turned old and bitter and resentful. A resident at the retirement home, who through her dementia already believes her long-dead husband to be alive, sees him come back to life, before he kills her. Her story is particularly tragic – based on a true story, the telegraph from the war office never arrived and the first she knew of her husband’s death was the arrival of a package containing his bayonetted, blood stained pocket book. Holly, a scientist at the radio telescope eventually falls to her dead fiancé, who she lost, unable to resist him. Hawthorne – the loathsome misanthropic, racist scientist, one of Mosley’s supporters is trapped by a tar baby (hand on his ankle, under the bed in an echo of Listen) from the Brer Rabbit story he was scared of in his youth. A villager who fought at the Somme is attacked along with the surviving villagers in the church by the gas masked soldiers – his fallen comrades. Gas mask zombies – sound familiar? That scene in the church where the survivors of Crook Marsham are under attack from the dead soldiers is very effective – classic Doctor Who really.
Even the Doctor is not immune to Sentience (the entity causing all of this, which the Earth formed around – sound familiar – the Racnoss?), he repeatedly sees visions of Susan, his guilt at leaving her and not going back after he promised. The Doctor is one aspect that I don’t feel is quite right in this story though. For no apparent reason he suddenly decides that he want to walk away and retire, possibly to return to Gallifrey. Now that is an interesting story in its own right, but it really needs building up and needs to be the focus of a book or TV programme or audio, not thrown away as it is here. One idea too many really. Ace typically sees her errant Mother – but she is passed that now, she at least is able to reject the creature. This aspect I do quite like, Ace being manipulated feels old hat by the end of season 26, never mind into a series of novels following on from them. Unfortunately quite a lot of people seemed to pick up on that as something interesting and it all just gets a bit out of hand. By the end of the book, we are unfortunately back into the territory of the Doctor treating Ace badly and it feeds into the next book as well.
It is instructive to his character that Edmund Trevithick is different from the experiences of our regulars and the other villagers. Even though, in a startlingly similar way to Professor Quatermass (!) he has lost his daughter in an auto-bahn accident and his grand daughter to a hippy cult (The Planet People maybe?), neither appears to him – it is the creatures from his TV show – his ‘glorious’ past when he was famous that haunt him. Alien insect creatures, maybe Mark should just have them Martians on tripod legs.
And the greatest of these is love
The counter to all of that horror is the love the victims feel for those they have lost, it is horribly used and corrupted by the Sentience so that it can feed, but the love and loss are still there. And Ace finds love, with Robin, a local lad. This isn’t the strongest aspect of the book, but it does just about work and is part of Ace starting to grow up in a more realistic way than for example her attempted seduction of the soldier in Fenric.
The Nightshade Experiment
The policeman and the old man are tired. Their faces, in tight close-up on the television screen, blurred by the crude film process. The policeman’s nerves are close to breaking point. What do you mean, not of this world? The older man puts a comforting hand on the constable’s arm. I know it’s difficult to accept, my boy, but I’ve encountered these things before. They are the vanguard of an invading force from the planet M…
The policeman screams as a huge, scaly claw bursts through the window. Professor! Professor Nightshade! For God’s sake…! The older man’s face zooms into view. Grim and determined. Fade to black. Thunderous chords bellow out the familiar theme tune as the word Nightshade is superimposed on a roll of rather jerky credits.
MRS CARSON: He’s changed. Different somehow!
NIGHTSHADE: All right, Barbara, don’t get hysterical. (Nightshade sits her down next to her unconscious husband and beckons Dr Barclay.)
NIGHTSHADE: Any word on those meteorites, Barclay?
BARCLAY: Not yet, sir. But we’ve found traces of Enstatite.
NIGHTSHADE: Hmm. Normal enough. And the rocket crew?
BARCLAY: There’s no trace of them. Anywhere.
(The seated astronaut begins to moan, eyes staring ahead.)
CARSON: Help me! Help me!
MRS CARSON: What is it? Robert? Don’t you know me? Can’t you say just one word?
(Nightshade takes her to one side.)
NIGHTSHADE: Leave him, Barbara. He’ll come round. In time.
Well, love, nothing more we can do here.He turned to Trevithick. You’re sure there was nothing taken, sir?
(The telephone rings. Barclay answers.)
BARCLAY: Yes? Yes, of course. Right away.
NIGHTSHADE: What is it?
BARCLAY: They’ve found something, sir. Down at the crash site.
NIGHTSHADE: Come on!(They run from the room. Fade to black.)
Well of course Professor Nightshade is Quatermass, which like Mark, I love with a passion. There are direct references and pieces of script from various of the Professor’s stories – Nightshade and the Imps for example. Something that I found interesting is that Trevithick starts the story as a vain, rather grumpy 70-year old, but as the story progresses he becomes a much more sympathetic character he starts to become Professor Nightshade, working alongside a Policeman, fighting the monsters. In the end, instead of Quatermass (excepting maybe the 70s version) he is Mathew Roney or Leo Pugh, sacrificing himself to give the Doctor a chance to win. He is a really nicely written character, who goes on a very clear journey from being abandoned by life in a home to finding fame again through the BBC repeats of Nightshade, slowly becoming his character as the story unfolds and finally giving up everything and becoming the hero that fans of his programme always believed that he was.
History, myth and legend are used to build up and provide scale to the menace very effectively, in a way familiar to fans of the genre and of Doctor Who. There is a side trip in the middle of the book (reminded me of Conan Doyle) where we see the aftermath of the Battle of Marston Moor and the destruction of the Cavaliers who flee to the castle on the moor and the reactions of the pursuing Roundheads. This section is very nicely written and adds flavour to the story along with the Palaeolithic quarry. All of this uses a trick from Quatermass and the Pit and Hound of the Baskerville s before it I suppose, the Doctor researching the history of the disturbances in the area and finding that the apparitions and hauntings go very far back. It is also a trick that The Daemons, Terror of the Zygons and Image of the Fendahl all use to very good effect as well – so Mark is at least in good company. Another touch point is Sapphire and Steel, particularly serial 2 . We get Pack up your Troubles, the ghosts of First World War soldiers and second world war sailors, all of which appear in the abandoned railway station in that story. There are other passing references – an entirely blank, smooth face at one point (used again in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’).
Overall, the story works rather well, but Mark is right it is rather too grim and earnest. It is far too strong for a Saturday Night TV family TV audience – but when you take away the horror of the deaths and the grimness of the location, well you are left with something like The Idiot’s Lantern – which I rather like, but I seem to be on my own in that opinion. The ending feels slightly confused – it feels like it needs a flow chart to support it, although I liked the astronomical and scientific detail, with The Sentience enticed away to feed on a nova, before collapsing into a black hole. And finally we have the Doctor deciding not to take Ace back to Crook Marsham to live her life with Robin – so they are back to square one, something I’ll look at again in the next book It is a combination of the traditional and the new, maybe not too broad and deep for TV, but certainly too horrific. If you prefer your books to be at the more way out end of the spectrum (‘Transit‘ for example), this one might not be for you, but for me it works rather well and I enjoyed reading it again.
A Journal of Impossible Things 