#cyberon

1. Faction Paradox: Dionus’s War: The Diplomat by Aristide Twain

After James Hornby’s standalone Faction Paradox short story Eternal Escape was released as the first of BBV’s new FP audiobooks, someone somewhere made the call to spin off its protagonist, Gallifreyan deserter Dionus, into his own series, Dionus’s War. So far, so good. 

In parallel to my work on Sabbath and the King, I started work on a Dionus’s War story which would expound on Dionus’s life prior to his desertion, eager to flesh out the character as well as that of his wife, Susit, who was not much of a presence in the original Hornby tale. It was going to be strange; lighter and wittier than Sabbath and the King, but maintaining a clear sense of a slow-motion cataclysm in the backdrop. Characters clinging to happiness in the face of the world ending in equal-parts stupid and terrifiying ways seemed like the right sort of thing for Faction Paradox to be tackling in 2021.

Eager to get it right, I took my time working on it, and before I knew it, Dionus’s War got going without me, under the pen of the enigmatic J. T. Mulholland. Instead of straightforward audiobooks, his two Dionus plays were narrated in the first person by Dionus himself, with the part being taken on by none other than Bill Baggs. (If there is one thing that Bill Baggs cannot be accused of as a producer, it’s being too hands-off… he’s just hands-on in all the wrong ways.) 

Incidentally, I created the covers for these two stories, Call Me Ishmael and The Healer’s Sin, which meant it fell to me to decide what Dionus looked like. As seen in the never-before-seen concept art above, I decided Dionus would resemble Bill Baggs without quite being Bill; higher cheekbones, darker hair, a narrower mouth. I was rather happy with the result, which I got the chance to showcase on the Healer’s Sin cover. (Then, after all that, Phil Shaw just painted him as a photo-accurate Bill Baggs for Me & My Ghost, the fourth and final Dionus audio. Dammit.)

Anyway, I still hadn’t handed in my script when the Great Calamity occurred in October, leading Hornby to withdraw the rights to the character of Dionus from Bill Baggs and prematurely ending Faction Paradox: Dionus’s War. Dionus might pop up again (albeit in a different incarnation), but it’s unlikely that further Dionus-focused FP stories will be the name of the game where the brand is headed next, and quite right too. Therefore, I’m afraid “The Diplomat” shall remain untold. 

That is — untold in an official, definitive context, because here’s the plot breakdown.

The Homeworld, at the very start of the War. 

Most polite society among the Great Houses still can’t quite believe an actual War has actually started. Least of all Dionusavarnapexiandal and one of his oldest friends, Susit, a (male) fellow member of the Homeworld’s purely ceremonial palace guard. Susit, we learn, is on his last life — soon he’ll die and retire into the Great Houses’ personal Underworld. And he’s looking forward to his rest. Dionus points out that his valorous deeds have more than earned him a few extra lifetimes, but Susit is refusing to ask for them. “Di, I’d sooner marry you than remain corporeal a minute longer than I have to”. (A/N: Well, a line to that effect, but less… unbelievably clunky.)

In fact, most Sun Builders still think this conflict will resolve just like the Great Houses’ friction with the likes of the Osirian Court or the Space Lords of Fractallax: with some pro forma sword-rattling and the signing of a treaty. 

Thus, most everyone is welcoming when a mysterious man in clinking golden armour shows up at the gates of the Capitol, demanding to bargain on behalf of the Enemy. Assigned to guard the foreign dignitary, Dionus and his partner escort him around as he blusters and threatens various personages, makes arrogant demands, misses the immortal politicians’ subtle wordplay, and generally acts the part of a callous spawn of the lesser-species to a T. 

However, when the “Diplomat” starts asking a lot of pointed questions about the Houses’ Prison Planet, Dionus and his partner realise that the man is a charlatan — a representative of a minor cyborg warrior race, the Hyperspace Tyrants. Trading on the Houses’ wariness and lack of information on the Enemy, he actually came to the Homeworld to reclaim his clone army, which a routine House Military patrol had recently frozen in time and plucked out of the Spiral Politic, viewing it as little more than pest control. The Tyrant takes control of the time capsule meant to convey the imprisoned army to the Prison Planet; Dionus and Susit sound the alarm; the Tyrant shoots Susit and takes off.

The dying Susit is tended to by a panicking Dionus. He’s strangely serene. The real War is coming, he says, the day’s events will look like childish amusement in a few years. And if a joke like the Hyperspace Tyrant could rob him of his final life, Susit reflects, perhaps it’s just as well he won’t live to see the real thing. Dionus, having none of it, transfers one of his own lives to Susit, allowing him to reincarnate one more time into a younger, female version…

…Who opens a clenched fist to reveal the unique biodata key necessary to unlock the pod containing the clone army. Susit filched it from the Tyrant! The pod he stole is useless; the army might as well still be in the Homeworld’s custody. They celebrate; Susit finds she’s no longer in such a hurry to let herself die, now that she feels all the youth and possibility of a new lifetime ahead of her. Dionus gives her the last nudge she needed to commit to staying alive: she has a promise to keep. After all, she promised to marry him sooner than regenerate… so in point of fact — she’s late!

Epilogue: the wedding. Sweet, goofy — a pair of minor deities who’ve been around overacting the part of two heterosexual human beings, with a pantomime ceremony, but there’s genuine fondness behind it. The world might be ending, but they’re going to try and have fun while they can. Just as they’ve said their vows, the announcement comes in that the Enemy have launched their first full-scale attack, on the planet Dro…—

Reading it again, there are probably some things I’d do differently today. In fact, there’s probably things that would have changed before the story made it to the production stage, had I kept working on it. The title might have been one of them, actually — I kept feeling that “The Diplomat”, combined with a start-of-the-War setting, might make people expect me to tackle that “idealistic House diplomat” who got killed on the first day of the War… you know, him, with the blue box and the screwdriver. Which is of course the absolute crassest thing you could do with FP, especially if you’re just starting out a new series.

But sod it, I still like it, and it’s still canonical in my heart. I don’t suppose the question of how Dionus met his wife keeps many FP fans up at night, but, well, if you have wondered, here’s your answer.

I didn’t get as far as designing a final cover, but I did create this Return to Shada-slanted visual of a very non-NuWho-ish capital city of the Great Houses, with an eye on using it on such a cover. I liked it. So it goes.

2. Doctor Omega and the Monsters from Earth’s Core & Doctor Omega and the Moon Men by Cole Hrusovsky

It’s almost surprising, isn’t it, that BBV, never slow on the uptake where there was a legal opporunity to Doctor Who without the Doctor Who license, never did anything with Arnould Galopin’s coincidental William Hartnell lookalike, the eccentric Doctor Omega… 

(Not that Galopin’s book is lacking in literary merits, for a H.G.-Wells-lite romp! Too often are Omega revivals slandered as only caring about the character due to his posthumous Doctor Who connection; no doubt it is the reason for his unexpected second wind, but it is far from the character’s only appeal.)

Anyway, in 2021, under the pen of Cole Hrusovsky, a series of full-cast BBV Doctor Omega stories was in development. I understand Cole has not given up on making it happen in some shape or form, a luxury afforded to him by the public-domain nature of the Dr Omega character — although at present he is focusing on a different, entirely original audio project.

Hrusovsky’s series would have (or will?) reintroduce Professor Helvetius, Omega’s “mysterious colleague” from the original book, reimagined as a villain — “essentially an equivalent of the Master, with a dash of the Meddling Monk… an equal and rival of Doctor Omega”, characterised as “generally playful, but as the plot intensifies he becomes more serious and dangerous”. 

The series’ point-of-view character would not have been Denis Borel, Doctor Omega’s main companion in the original book, but a new sidekick, Edmond, meeting the good Doctor for the first time. “Edmond's role as the companion will be explored over time”, Hrusovsky promised; “early on he will discover that Doctor Omega has had multiple companions in the past, and fear the worst for his fate own based on the mysterious reasons as to why these companions are no longer around”.

Though further stories were loosely sketched out, including historical adventures and the aforementioned face-offs with Professor Helvetius, only two BBV Doctor Omega episodes were synopsized to any serious degree: Doctor Omega and the Monsters from Earth’s Core, and Doctor Omega and the Moon Men.

The former, inspired by Journey to the Centre of the Earth and At the Earth's Core, as well as Doctor Who stories Spearhead From Space and Doctor Who and the Silurians, would introduce Edmond as “ a miner (…) whose world is turned upside-down when a bullet-shaped spacecraft crashes into the mines”. This craft is the ship of Doctor Omega; teaming up, the two discover that beneath Earth's crust, there exists “a civilisation of intelligent amphibious creatures that now wish to rule the surface world”. Instead of the genocidal conclusion of Doctor Who’s original Silurian tale, the end of the story would have seen the amphibians taken to another planet to inhabit as Edmond began travelling with Doctor Omega. 

The second episode, Doctor Omega and the Moon Men, took the newly-formed duo of Doctor Omega and Edmond to the Dark Side of the Moon for a wry riff on a mishmash of retro conspiracy theories: Hrusovsky’s titular Selenites were “shape-shifting lizard creatures” who impersonate political figures and broadcast nefarious “radio signals” to Earth in an attempt to mind-control the population. One wonders why they bother with the impersonation business if they have mind-control rays, no? But then, you might as well wonder why Doctor Omega takes jaunts to the Moon instead of writing scientific papers about that unknown species of sapient amphibians he discovered last week…

3. Lupan Evezan’s Cyberon series

After my very good friend @drleevezan​ authored an outstanding novelisation of Cybergeddon, one of BBV’s vintage Cyberon audio dramas, Bill Baggs wrote to Lupan, asking them if they might be interested in planning out an entire series of original Cyberon books, which Lupan did. Quoth Lupan, few of these are much more detailed than "short story collection" or "ongoing series of novels" because “I just couldn't extract, despite my questioning, anything resembling a sense of what Baggs was actually looking for, (…) so I figured I'd go for pitching series structures and flesh out plots and such once I knew which he liked”.

Lupan’s loose plans for the prose continuation of the Cyberon series were as follows:

Cyberon Vignettes Book

A book featuring a collection of short stories each focusing on a different character or group of characters coming into contact with the Cyberons (e.g., someone affected by the drug trial seen in Cyberon, an original native of the planet Aurichall, a soldier in the Cyber-Wars, etc.). Would serve to demonstrate the wide impact of the Cyberons and give a full view of the Cyberon universe. Could be written entirely by me, or some of the stories could be pitched by other authors if there’s interest.

Sequel to ‘Cyberon’

A sequel to the original Cyberon film/novelisation, featuring Lauren Anderson post-Zygon as she struggles to adjust to her new life as a shapeshifter while also trying to ensure that there’s no Cyberon left on Earth (possibly making contact with other people and organisations, such as P.R.O.B.E., with similar goals). Anderson’s struggle with her shapeshifter identity could be contrasted with the erased identities of the Cyberon’s victims.

Cyber Wars books

Either a series of books or an anthology (whichever makes more sense to produce) set in the future during the Cyber Wars, continuing from Flight of the Cyberons, Cyber-Hunt, and Cybergeddon and starring someone who has joined the fight against the Cyberons (possibly Lauren Anderon, seeing as she was established to have survived into the 31st century in Barnyard of the Cyberons, or possibly an original character), journeying across the galaxies and encountering the Cyberons in various situations. I could write the first book/story (and potentially others), and we could accept pitches for other stories in the series, perhaps. There would be more freedom to create completely original, episodic Cyberon stories for this project, possibly with a central plot thread running throughout — something in the mold of the Doctor Who New Adventures series, maybe.

This particular incarnation of the “Cyberon revival”, however, fell through even before the October scandal: “As it transpired,” Lupan explains, “he also wanted me to write all of these books myself, which was not originally clear (I'd figured he just wanted me to plan the series and find other contributors) — and wanted me to start with one of the few ideas that I didn't feel up to writing myself”. 

The book in question was the untitled direct Cyberon sequel featuring Lauren Anderson. Quoth Lupan: “I put that one in only because it was very clear (in fact, it was the only thing that was clear) that Baggs believes that the core appeal of the Cyberon concept is not the Cyberons, but Lauren Anderson. But, while I could try, the tone of the original Cyberon novelisation is, I think, a bit outside my usual range, and I really didn’t think they'd end up meshing (…) I told him as much.”

Bill didn’t write back to Lupan afterwards. But he hadn’t given up on his dream of creating further original Cyberon prose without Arcbeatle Press… bringing us to the next item on my list.

4. Minalopa by Callum Phillpott

With Lupan’s Cyberon ideas stalling before they’d really started, Baggs turned, in mid-September (on 9/11, in fact, in a rather bizarre detail), to Callum Phillpott, author of the other BBV-published Cyberon novel, Cyber-Hunt — a much-expanded retelling of Nicholas Briggs’s original audioplay of the same name, which cleverly wrote “Fred” out of the line-up of BBC Doctors without denying that he did use to be the man in the blue box. It did so through the mysterious figure of the ‘Man in Black’, written with the intent that he might just as easily be the Master/War King, the Genesis Time Lord Messenger, Death itself, or even, he assures me, Nyarlathotep. 

(Wait, isn’t Nyarlathotep the Doctor? Well, it’s not as though my story brushing on this topic was actually what anyone would call canon…)

Given that Cyber-Hunt itself clawed its way to the extended family tree of licensed DWU spin-offs through its licensed references to Faction Paradox’s Amazolian System and its planet of Aurichall, the recurrence of the Man in Black in Phillpott’s planned sequel would doubtless have made it one of the lucky few among the Cyberon catalogue to earn its coverage on Tardis Wiki. An interesting thought to ponder.

Anyway, here is Callum’s own account of the writing of Minalopa, the Cyberon novel that wasn’t. Sounds like it’d have been a doozy…

Around a month ago, Bill asked me if I had a pitch for a sequel to Cyber-Hunt. I didn’t, so I came up with a couple on the spot.

The one that won was given the working title “Minalopa” which featured a Holiday planet getting taken over and converted by the Cyberons. When I started working on it proper, I changed it to Minalopolis, and the Holiday Planet became more like Disneyland.

A summary of what I managed to write in the first draft:

Prologue: After the events of Cyber-Hunt, the Cyberon King is pissed. Why is there a Cyberon King now? I dunno, sometimes I just add things to see if I can get away with it, that’s basically what the Man in Black was. They were going to be this like giant Cyberon lich-thing with 6 brains, I suppose I wanted a sort of big Disney Villain vibe but honestly I don’t know if the King would’ve survived in the secd draft.

Chapter 1 basically introduces all 4 heroes: Derren, a janitor who unwillingly works at Minalopolis so he doesn’t get drafted by the Tellurian Alliance; Zeek, a refugee from Corupus who has definitely been traumatised by the Cyberon Wars; Hayley, a laid-back drug store cashier; and finally, returning from Cyber-Hunt, the mysterious robed man I added for… (checks notes) literally no reason. I just thought it’d be fun for people who’d already listened to the audio. Insistently called the Man in Black because I had lyrics to “Man at C&A” on the brain.

Then the next chapter introduced us to one of the villains, Gruber Minalopa. He’s basically inherited the role of Walt Disney and desperately wants to move away from the silhouette of Ozzie Hare and into city planning (hence why he colonised and entire dwarf planet). Oh yeah, and I of course gave him some knockoff mascot characters, this time based on Oswald-era Disney stuff instead of Mickey stuff just to be unique (though I did at one point consider Larold Lemming). They included Ozymandias “Ozzie” Hare, the Mad Doctor Ohm, and Peta the Gorilla. I was sort of inspired by Walt Disney’s proposed city plan when I was making it, except somehow worse (as if a town where you’re encouraged to move out, people in the theme park next door can watch you, and you can’t vote can be worse)

But how does he manage to keep this place exempt from Tellurian Alliance drafting? Arms dealing, also maybe inventing new weapons for them (I just thought it was funny to have him offhandedly say “The Imagineers have made you a new nuke”).

Anyway, so the chapter perspectives alternate between Gruber and one of the 4 protagonists (mainly Derren or Zeek). Derren and Zeek slowly grow close to each other; meanwhile, Gruber is forced to help the Cyberons. See, he also deals weapons to the Cyberons to keep them away. And so they kinda have him in their pocket. They send over a Lear, “Oswald”, to instruct him on what to do. Lears were basically going to be spies constructed by the Cyberons to look like what they think a human looks like (it’s slightly off, and sometimes they’re a bit too weak).

The intent was to sort of build anticipation, “oh no, when is the horrible Cyberon invasion going to effect the main characters”… who knows if it actually worked or if it just came off as an interesting story getting interrupted by a boring story. This would all culminate in the sort of “point of no return” event where the Cyberon invade a party and the true horrors of conversion begin. Meanwhile Derren, Zeek, Hayley and the Man in Black run away.

Beyond that, I’ll admit I didn’t have plans. I mean, I knew I wanted things to happen like Gruber getting converted into the Cyberon Leader of Minalopolis, probably some character drama, they’d see some of the rides I’d named after Who episodes, etc.

I did have an outline with a finale, but by the time I started writing I decided the proposed finale wouldn’t work and still hadn’t replaced it with anything. Thus end my ramblings, now I can finally take all those post-it-notes down, making room for Kasper and the Sea Prince.

5. P.R.O.B.E. Case File: Faction Paradox by James Hornby

Most of you, by now, will have learned that the Faction made their very technical live-action debut in BBV’s P.R.O.B.E. Case Files: Volume 2 in two short subjects written by James Hornby, and visualised in typically cheap fashion by Bill Baggs and Warren Lewis. 

What may not be obvious is that, as scripted, these two fairly insubstantial near-encounters between the Faction and the Preternatural Research Bureau were intended as buildup for the “season finale” of Volume 2, which would bring things to a head via a video call between Giles and an actually, properly live-action FP member. Below is a costume test for the character in question.

The story would reveal the Faction with whom P.R.O.B.E. had been interacting as a group of Post-War survivors (which only makes sense, as several clues in Out of the Shadows made it clear that the Arcbeatle-era P.R.O.B.E. stories are set in the Post-War Universe, concurrently with the Welsh Series). After some back-and-forth and mutual outwitting, Giles and the Faction splinter-group’s leader would agree to a treaty comparable to the Gregorian Compact, giving the Faction the chance to build a new Eleven-Day-Empire-esque home base out of the lost time of England’s daylight savings.

This fairly lofty project’s late scrapping is probably to blame for Bill having “made up the count” of Case Files on the Volume 2 DVD with Legend, a scrapped trailer for The Brigadier Adventures that makes for quite a poor tenth and final entry in the Volume. But that’s what you get when you alienate all the people interested in helping your company’s output be, er, good.

The project was ambitious by the standards of the Case Files — although one hopes that if and when more definitive live-action Faction content than whatever this is surfaces, it will be bigger and bolder still! 

Mind you, it was surely dwarfed in scope by the project of a direct-to-DVD anthology of horror shorts from the worlds of Faction Paradox, loosely adapted from Obverse’s Wallowing in Pessimism’s Mire. Bill, for once, had a decent budget lined up for that one, and had even managed to sign up a semi-prominent Doctor Who actor to appear in one of the shorts. That one actually collapsed the day before the October scandal, as, on the morning shooting was supposed to begin, Bill was assaulted in the street by a masked man who tore the script from his hand and ran into the distance. (I know this sounds like an outrageous tall tale, but I assure you it’s every bit as real as the Obverse anthology. Here’s some evidence. Also the unlisted YouTube upload of the demo theme tune. Seriously.)

6. The Rani Adventures by James Hornby, Aristide Twain & others

As independently confirmed by Obverse’s Downtime, Pip & Jane Baker wrote multiple further scripts for BBV’s Rani audio series, which would have continued to star Kate O’Mara. Unfortunately, the poor sales of The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind put an end to these plans. However, as Micah K. Spurling was novelising the aforementioned story, Bill began considering digging up those old scripts and adapting them in prose format, turning the novelisation into a backdoor pilot for a new series of Rani Adventures.

Since Kate O’Mara’s Rani’s likeness rights are another kettle of fish entirely from the rights to the Rani character, the assumption was that the novels would star an original Rani incarnation, postdating O’Mara as well as Big Finish’s Second Rani. Matching its real-life status as O’Mara’s last hurrah, the novelisation of …Reaps the Whirldwind was reworked into the final chronological adventure of the original Rani, ending with her regeneration, a special scene written by Hornby as an epilogue to Spurling’s novel. This was, pro forma, a regeneration into what was implied to be Big Finish’s Second Rani, meaning that the Third Rani novels wouldn’t have followed on from it quite as directly as “THE RANI WILL RETURN” might have implied — but the spirit was there.The true “new Rani” was meant to be a younger, South Asian incarnation — a mysterious girl, keeping the fierce intelligence and cold efficiency of Kate O’Mara’s portrayal but very much striking out in a new direction for the character. 

Knowing Bill’s occasional unreliability in these matters, we advised him to get in touch with Pip and Jane Baker’s heirs — despite his claims that his original agreement with the Bakers should allow him to adapt the scripts they’d produced at the time, albeit decades later. 

To his credit, for once, he listened to us and did get in touch with the Bakers’ surviving relatives, who put him in touch with the agent handling the Rani copyright. Negotiations seemed, at the time, to be going well: “we have scripts by the character’s creator already, we just want your go-ahead to produce them” is a pretty compelling bargaining position.

With the hope growing that BBV would get the rights not just to adapt the Bakers’ scripts, but to then continue to spin the Third Rani into wholly original content, plans began to be drawn. 

Among the novels loosely sketched out was my own Helix, an eerie tale of genetic engineering inspired by the Island of Doctor Moreau, where the Third Rani and an innocent “companion” character (a lad in his late teens, probably from some human-like alien species rather than a human) would end up “cast away” on a planet that the Rani had used as a dumping ground for mutant experiments in a previous incarnation, and which had developed, over centuries, into its own psychedelic closed-loop ecosystem, with two main intelligent races, one of blue ape-creatures and another of giant, moth-like insects. They both remembered the Rani (the original Rani, that is; O’Mara) in their makeshift religions, in a cargo-cult sort of way, but one side had her as a harsh-but-fair Creator figure, while the other pictured her as a kind of Devil. I didn’t get as far as truly plotting the thing out, but, of course, they’d have met the Rani-worshipping side first, leading the real thing to make some very reckless assumptions and identify herself openly to the other side when she ran into them…

Anyway, another idea floated around was that the Rani would join the Doctor the Optimistic Diplomat from Drornid and the Master the War King in the Faction Paradox series. I had my own ideas of how that should play out, which I’ll keep to myself for now, but things started going wrong when it turned out that Bill himself did, and he’d started writing a FP Dionus’s War story himself. In fact, he got so excited that he went and released his rather lackluster effort before negotiations with the Bakers had concluded, scraping off the serial numbers to turn “the Third Rani” into “Nari”. Which is embarrassing in itself, but it’s probably for the best that the real Rani didn’t have to be associated with the disgrace of an audio in question, Me & My Ghost.

It’s likely that such unprofessional behaviour would have turned the Baker heirs off the deal anyway — but after the scandal and BBV being dropped by its other licensors (e.g. Hannah Hatt), I think it’s clear the solo adventures of the Third Rani are no longer on the table. It’s pity — I think Helix would have been a good book… And the last trace of the plans in officially Rani-licensed media crumbled when Hornby asked that his Rani regeneration be taken out of The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind before it went to print.

7. Faction Paradox: The Night War Came To Luparia by Christa Mactíre

The night The Halloween Apocalypse aired, debuting Chris Chibnall’s race of dog-like “Lupari”, was a fun and infuriating one if you happened to share a Discord server with Christa Mactìre, long-time writer of a Thirteenth Doctor Adventures fanfiction series prominently featuring a species of wolf-like humanoids called Luparians. 

All at once, the fanfics found themselves unexpectedly canonised, and any chance of the originals being approached on their own terms by new readers disintegrated. Not unlike that fateful day Russell T. Davies decided that his Ninth Doctor would be reeling from a great Time War that ended with him destroying Gallifrey and its Time Lords… but not quite like in the EDAs.

History might have been repeated itself a lot closer still — because a month or so prior, Christa was working on an audio story that would have brought Luparia into the official Faction Paradox cosmology, as the location of a remote Faction outpost.

The people of Luparia have not known conflict since deposing their last king five hundred years before, when an enigmatic traveler arrived to plot revolution. But that time of peace is coming to an end: a war unlike anything the universe has ever seen is raging. Luparia is caught in the crossfire… and they have no idea of the danger that lies ahead.

One night, a member of a shadowy organization known as the Faction crash-lands in the backyard of a Luparian widow, and as they are nursed back to health, a strange partnership is formed. And in the process, Luparian history will change forever. War is coming, and they will need all the resources they can get if they are to survive a War of Time.

This one didn’t have time to go very far — I don’t recall if Bill Baggs ever saw the pitch, although I believe James Hornby did. Still — an interesting might-have-been… I understand Christa’s wolf-people might pop up in the official DWU, although they’ll likely have been forced to go through some kind of name change by then!

8. P.R.O.B.E./The Brigadier Adventures: The Paimon Affair by Charles P. Murphy

I thought it was the only fitting that I’d save for last this story by the steadfast Charles E. P. Murphy, given that it came closer to “really happening” than any other. Unlike our last six items of interest, this story’s script was fully-written, and on the brink of being recorded by Bill when the scandal broke and Charles withdrew it. It will now doubly not happen, given that it starred the Brigadier, being intended as the full crossover between the Brigadier Adventures and P.R.O.B.E. Case Files ranges that Giles’s appearances in the framing device of the former already implied. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy Charles’s script online for free, by special arrangement with the man himself, who was also kind enough to write up the behind-the-scenes of it all especially for this post! Go read the story, then come back for…

The Annotations of Paimon!

The germ of the story was the mental image of Giles doing one of The Brigadier Adventures read-throughs and suddenly realising that this was related to a P.R.O.B.E. case: the shocking discovery that things hadn’t actually been resolved and the threat has had fifty years to fester. And if it’s had fifty years to fester, how much worse is it going to be to face? You may have no choice but to run… 

It seemed like a clever way to tie both series together. It would also mean The Brigadier Adventures would be shown to ‘count’ more, we weren’t just doing stories squeezed into the continuity gaps but could do things that affected the modern day.

I very cheekily pitched this as a two-part story. The first audio would be a Brigadier Adventures story where he seems to have stopped Paimon, and then you’d get a surprise cliffhanger for next month’s P.R.O.B.E. Case Files. My idea was that it would be a big thrill to anyone listening for the first time, and that it would help sales, and primarily that I would get to write two things instead of just one thing. James Hornby requested I turn it into one audio so it wouldn’t alienate the customers.

The original vague idea was that ‘Paimon’ would be a real entity who was trying to alter mankind so we could fight off alien invasions. Once there were enough sociopathic psychics among us, they’d take over for our own good. That ended up being massively scaled down to fit one audio and I think I prefer it this way: no grand conspiracy with grand aims, just grubby bastards doing grubby things. (It would also have meant, if it came out, nobody has to wonder why nobody else runs into Paimon’s forces – whereas anybody could slot Mortown into the background of a story, on a government committee). 

Originally, I’d thought of specifically stating this is happening the week after “the Schädengeist Affair” – meaning Candy Jar’s The Showstoppers, where Lethbridge-Stewart gets his promotion. That was dropped so we didn’t step on any toes. The brief reference to the Korean War and the Brig gathering information & connections for his group are meant as subtle nods to the Candy Jar series. While The Fall of Shield Sentai was about someone’s account of meeting the Brig, this time I wanted to try writing it from his POV – or at least, how he’d write things up. In retrospect, his descriptions of telekinesis and pyrokinesis are a bit clunky but I was pretty sure Alistair wouldn’t know what the hell that was and would assume his boss didn’t either. 

I did like the idea that the Brigadier’s pretending ‘oh yeah it’s witchcraft, mate’ as his cover story. The surnames for our baddies (and Marric) are taking from the many pen-names of writer John Creasey. I forget why I decided on that… probably just “I know a source of surnames”. Regina Blanc was a warping of Jean Grey, as the four-guys-and-a-girl setup fit the original X-Men roster. “Weird happenings” is a nod to Paul Cornell using the term in the Wisdom comic, which is itself taken from Excalibur having a Weird Happenings Organisation (WHO) with a Brigadier Stuart and her brother Alistaire. 

Summerfield was here to help build up the Brigadier Adventures micro-continuity. The very first audio, Peel’s Memories of Tomorrow, had introduced Captain Summerfield as a long-time valued sidekick of Alistair’s. In that case, I felt, he should appear in things set before then. Hornby asked Peel if I could use him, Peel kindly gave permission, and so here’s Lt. Summerfield, new to all this but showing himself to be a cool operator. 

Marric the muckraker’s book about the Brig is meant to make him a crap version of James Stevens in Who Killed Kennedy. Much like Stevens does, he’s writing about this odd Lethbridge-Stewart man and his sinister UNIT force, but unlike Stevens he’s a venal little git.

Hereditary peerages ended under Tony Blair, while Black Rod is the official who keeps order in the House of Lords. “Nobody in Geneva or Cardiff” ties to U.N.I.T. and Torchwood both being shut down in recent Doctor Who, “the ghouls in Department C4” writes out Nimrod and the Forge as allies, and P.R.O.B.E. having no ties to the U.S.A. or the E.U. is just to emphasise nobody’s coming. Alas, the P.R.O.B.E. anthology Out of the Shadows says they do have ties to an American group and have a French equivalent! Ah well, assume the former can’t help them and the latter are occupied.

Once the crossover became one story, I could directly compare Alistair and Giles. That allowed for character work and mean the Brig remained as a presence in the middle of the story. The “serial killer on the moors” is from Hornby’s The Brigadier Adventures: New Pastures. 

There’s a few places in this where I wanted to play around with the audio format. Due to budget, the Adventures were always going to be narrated prose but I wanted to use tricks that would only work in audio. So, you have the end credits starting early, you have dialogue edited out, you have it suddenly becoming a live broadcast as baddies attack, and Giles recording bits and pieces over different times. (Similarly, in Shield Sentai I wanted to make use of the Giles-tells-us-about-files-he-found format to mess about with the narrative: multiple documents have to be used and they’re not complete, he’s reading a translation.)

Gary Russell’s Vault now belonging to P.R.O.B.E. was established in the Cyberon novelisation-slash-anthology.

I think the ending could’ve worked a bit better, but I wanted the resolution to be grounded in something from P.R.O.B.E.’s own stories. Maxie was that something as she seemed the most recurring character in the P.R.O.B.E. Case Files and her skin-dyeing meant that she could sneak around in disguise.