The Monthly Adventures #054 - “The Natural History of Fear" by Jim Mortimore

I don’t think there’s a writer I’m more indecisive over than Jim Mortimore. The man eludes me, everything he writes teaters between a wealth of unique, mad and intriguing ideas and utterly pretentious lunacy. His use of description and philosophy is enrapturing but his abuse of experimental structures and cerebral, ambiguous plots just cause me endless confusion. And then he’ll go and write something like Blood Heat, which is just a bog-standard political thriller and it confuses me even more. The Natural History of Fear is undeniably its own beast; it rivals Scherzo for most original Doctor Who story, it is an Orwellian descent into insanity that doesn’t even star our main cast that just struggles to make itself make sense.

This is the voice of Light City. A crime has been committed. A question has been asked. The Conscience has been called. Please return to your infotainment for the newest episode of “Doctor Who”.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Just like every Mortimore story (bar maybe one), The Natural History of Fear has one big defining aspect: its originality. A morose take on 1984 with some added philosophical debates, it’s a tale that barely even feels like Doctor Who; weird and unsettling and depressing and completely different from any other story. There is no reprieve here, people will die, the fascist, totalitarian leaders will prevail, our characters won’t win because it’s not even our characters. The choice to have our main cast, instead of being the returning regulars, as different people for a one episode is a mental choice that thankfully really paid off, every performance here is sublime, especially McGann’s and Fisher’s, the latter of whom I think is far more suited to playing antagonistic roles because this, A Blind Eye and Neverland are probably my three favourite performances from her. Of course, pretty much all of Mortimore’s strengths are on full display here; the atmosphere is palpable, exuding dark and gargantuan grunginess, a city choked in shadow and false light, which is how I, at least, pictured it, the great “voice of Light City” equipped with massive spotlights that shine onto darkened streets below. And that voice by the way is possibly my single favourite sound effect used in Doctor Who. The sound design is unbelievably good, Mortimore, also doing the audio as well as the script, knocks it out the park, everything sounds so vast yet claustrophobic and it ends up being the main reason the atmosphere is so effective, the world is enrapturing purely because of the wonders Mortimore did in the mixing booth. Another thing that really helped establish tone was the dialogue, which is pretty much perfect throughout. There’s a Jim Mortimore short story called From Eternity that amounts to basically a ten page monologue of a god describing watching the universe form and die and that cerebral, philosophical rambling paired with utterly stunning description is what makes up the dialogue here. Especially from McGann, playing the insane Editor slowly slipping away from lucidity as he talks of predatory information and the nature of thought. As for the story, well, we’ll get onto why it doesn’t really work, but one moment I must praise is the end. Not only for the insane twist that we haven’t been following a brain washed Doctor the whole time but just somebody imbedded with the Doctor’s personality but also the utterly haunting final sting of an entire city together in a revolution of questions, chanting “why?” endlessly until engulfed by chaos. It’s another marvel of sound design and simply a brilliant concept for a revolt against an Orwellian regime, the simplicity of the masses united in a mere question. Easily my favourite singular moment of this audio, mostly because it was a good concept executed well.

And that’s because the rest of this story is simply not executed well, at all. I’m sorry, maybe I’m just dumb or something but The Natural History of Fear is a narrative mess that makes absolutely no sense. Atmosphere? Dialogue? Vibes? Immaculate. Most of this story is just vibes, thriving on its unique atmosphere and enthralling tone but as an actual story, I don’t think so. I dare you to follow this plot and come out the other side with a complete understanding of what the hell just happened. This is my second time listening to this audio, and I assumed that on a relisten it would be easier to understand, I would know what was coming, I would be able to comprehend what I assumed to just be a complex and twisting plot. But now I see it just wasn’t thought out properly, this script thinks it’s a lot smarter than it is. Is somebody insane or waking up to reality? What is a hallucination and what isn’t? When is anything happening? Which character is which? So many times I found myself asking “what is going on?” and just not getting given an even slightly straight answer. This is a time when on the nose exposition was honestly needed because Mortimore can’t organically explain his plot properly; the world, maybe, but the story itself is so confusing, recycling actors and having twist reveals left right and centre, having characters go through something and then forget, so we’re not even sure if it happened, it’s so difficult to keep up with things and mostly because nothing is smoothly conveyed to the audience. It goes to show that a story can have a number of positives that greatly outweigh a number of negatives, and still falter because of the severity of the cons, this is one of the most confusing and infuriating plots I’ve ever experienced and it honestly makes me sad because so much of this story was so good and I was simply unable to enjoy a lot of it. Also, C’rizz is completely sidelined. It’s his second story and it feels like this script was written before he was even introduced, his roles could so easily be filled in by any random character.

The Natural History of Fear is an experience more than it is a story. It’s design, it’s ambition, it’s ideas and characters and dialogue are a joy to become absorbed in, to become lost in and the fact that it’s so hard to do something as simple as follow the plot upsets me, because it stops me properly enjoying what might’ve been one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever had it come together properly. Unfortunately, all we’re left with is a pretty face with nothing behind the eyes.

7/10

Pros:

+ Undeniably unique and innovative

+ Incredible atmosphere throughout

+ A+ sound design that effectively builds the world

+ Really good use of description and language

+ The ending twist and final moments are glorious

+ Great performances all around

Cons:

- The plot is near indecipherable

- Terrible at making clear what’s happening at any given moment

- C’rizz is thoroughly underused for his first trip outside his introduction

MR 054: The Natural History of Fear

This is the voice of Light City. Welcome to your new work day. Today is high productivity day. Loyalty and productivity will be rewarded with extra license broadcast hours. Your state loves you. Happiness through acceptance. Productivity through happiness.

Welcome citizen to your life in Light City! Refer to the approved mandatory infotainment broadcast for information on our glorious society. You will have no fear of the censor if you follow the approved rules, ask no questions, and report to your Conscience any deviant behavior. Remember: Questions lead to answers. Answers lead to knowledge. Knowledge leads to freedom. Freedom leads to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction leads to unhappiness. Your state wants you to be happy.

Alright, that's enough of that. We're gonna actually talk about the story now. This story is incredibly clever in so many ways. It's a story about a dystopia where the people are kept in strict line by a state, controlled by people who keep themselves in strict line. There are two classes of people. A prole, a worker, who is nothing. They don't even have names. They are just referred to by their job: the cook. The maid. The engineer. The fire chief. The nurse.

Then there are the upper class, but even they don't have names. Just their roles. The Editor. The Board. The DJ. The Conscience. The Censor. Their names are very Orwellian in nature, obscuring the true purpose of their jobs. They are afforded a certain amount of more privliges than the lower class. After all, someone must remember. How will we know what is forbidden if we don't have someone to remember it? How will we know that questions are bad if we don't even know what a question is?

That's a question. Questions are forbidden. It's a reductio ad absurdum of dystopian fiction. Questions just in general are illegal. But it cuts to the heart of the matter. Power is maintained through discipline and order. A monopoly on violence. Questioning that violence is what leads to power being toppled, eventually. So you can't let the questions start in the first place. Those that question get revised, their entire personality rewritten into a new person. Perhaps seen as kinder than simply killing them.

Indeed, ideas must be carefully and meticulously controlled. We have state approved broadcasts, infotainments, that are required viewing for all proles. These are created by the DJ for mass consumption and show the values that we must all follow to serve our state.

It's a well ordered system. A state that maintains itself on its threat of violence against everyone. Yet there is no benefit here. Nobody benefits from this. There is no wealthy upper class to benefit from the subjugation of the proles. Even those who have power are subject to the threat of violence, regularly being revised and replaced. The ideology exists to propagate itself for no reason. The story uses the analogy of a spinning top. It goes round and round and round. Never changing. Everything in its place. A well ordered, quiet machine. But one little push... and the whole thing falls apart.

The story itself is less important to the ideas being presented. We see Charley being revised multiple times. First she is a Prole whose husband asks a question. She calls the Conscience to arrest him and she ends up getting revised as well. Just being in the vicinity of someone asking a question means you are infecting. Ideas are infections. Just by exposing someone to them you are spreading them even if you don't believe them. So anyone exposed must be revised so they don't remember. Curing the infectious disease as it were.

Charley gets revised several more times during the course of the story. She is a Nurse. She is a Conscience. She is the ultimate Censor, each time growing in power. While C'rizz starts out as a Conscience and then becomes the new Editor when the Doctor as the Editor falls from grace.

The Conscience is the police and a therapist all rolled into one. They are very powerful. They exist to stamp out dangerous thoughts before they become widespread. The Editor exists as the ultimate Conscience, the judge, who deals with these ideas on a higher level. He believes there is a conspiracy to revolution brewing in this city and he intends to find it. Revolution is hiding in the shadows. A boogey man, waiting to strike.

The Conscience (C'Rizz) confronts the Nurse (Charley). He has a plan to spread revolution by giving her the Doctor's memories. But she believes it is a test. Later the Editor confronts the Nurse and tries to do the same thing, saying he is on the side of the revolution, but this is actually a test. You can't trust anyone. You don't know if they really are who they say they are or if they are testing you.

The Conscience really did have a plan to incite revolution and the Editor revises him. He's after the Nurse now, he believes the Nurse is the key. He visits the DJ for clues as to whether the Nurse really does have the Doctor's memories, but the DJ exhibits a surprisingly large amount of freedom, and the Editor wants to arrest him. But the DJ kills himself or the Editor killed him, it's not clear. Either way, the Editor is accused of his murder as his perception of events start to deviate from the Board's perception of events. He runs away, searching for the Nurse, trying to kill the revolution that he knows exists.

He lives off rats, trying to find her. He does, in a cave outside the city and she shows him things outside the city: things that his brain has no way of perceiving. This was an interesting idea. You have no way of understanding what you're seeing, no perception of it because you've been inside this city for so long, that you seen nothing. But the Nurse helps him to see what the State hides from them.

He brings her back and she gets revised. She is now the new Conscience and arrests the former Editor, now brought low. He still thinks he can stop the revolution, but now it is his turn. He knows the Conscience used to be the Nurse and he thinks the Doctor's memories are buried there. So he lures her out, does the same thing she did to him. Expose her to the outside world. The sound a spinning top seems to coerce the memories of Charley out of her and she reveals that the Doctor's memories are inside that spinning top. The Editor smashes it, convinced he's killed the revolution and now convinced he's the Doctor. He desperately wants to be revised. He calls it his reward for working so hard for the state. He doesn't want to remember being the Doctor. Yet the new Editor thinks he's part of the revolution, convinced of it in fact, and wants him to confess.

We get the Doctor's memories of when they arrived in Light City. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley arrived here and thought it was beautiful. They arrived right at the start of the Jubilee. The Jubilee is the quarterly festival in which all crime is legal, kind of like the Purge. The Proles are allowed to think whatever they want, say whatever they want, ask as many questions as they like. So when they encounter people asking questions non-stop, the Doctor thinks it is some sort of greeting. They end up getting seperated and lost in the chaos. Thousands of people will die in this Jubilee and so the Doctor agrees to give them his memories (and Charley's and C'Rizz's memories) in exchange for finding them and keeping them safe. Their memories will be used in the production of infotainment, carefully edited to project the values and messages of Light City to the proles.

The Jubilee serves an interesting purpose as well. It is a way for the upper classes to see what needs to be edited and revised in the infotainment, what ideas need to be purged. While it seems like freedom, it is still a vital method of control.

Ultimately, The Editor is brought before the Censor (Charley). The Censor remembers everything that has been forgotten. The Censor explains that society is like a child. It must be strictly controlled. But it will grow up into an adult and find its own way. Perhaps this society has only existed for a short time, strictly controlling its children until a revolution inevitably topples it. The Censor says there have been revolutions in the past and there will be in the future. They are necessary for advancement. Now it is perhaps time for the Editor's revolution. It is time to topple this society and begin anew.

The Censor reveals the ultimate twist here. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley all have four limbs. Two arms, two legs. Yet the people in this story have eight. The Doctor lives for thousands of years, his friends live for decades. Yet a thousand of these people's generations wouldn't fit into one of the Doctor's years. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley are long gone. They left immediately after giving away their memories. These are just people using these memories, believing they are these people, to incite revolution.

This is a fantastic story. Well written and well crafted. It is absolutely about a survelliance state and every single scene takes place on a screen. Someone is watching everything going on. Indeed, this framing device is used several times. The Editor watching the Proles. The Prole watching herself. It can easily be confusing: twisting and turning with its plot, but that is very much on purpose. The characters constantly change, revised over and over. The society is a jumble of people who don't even know who they are anymore. That's the point. They have no identity, but they do know that they love the state and venerate the regime.

It's a state that maintains itself largely on the people in it. It depends on the Proles reporting others and themselves if they question or think the wrong thing. And they are happy to do so. Several times we see people call the Conscience on themselves or others. The state REQUIRES participation to maintain its monopoly on violence.

The acting is fantastic here as well. Paul McGann is absolutely brilliant as the Censor. He dives headfirst into this roll, every bit the strong actor we know. He's at once sympathetic and sinister, spiriling out of control until he's begging for revision. India Fisher does a phenomenal job playing several different revised versions of herself. The Prole and the Nurse, fearful of the people above her, happy to maintain the status quo. The Conscience and the Censor, part of the maintenance of the power of the state, confident in her abilities. This is an odd one for Conrad Westmaas because we don't really know anything about C'rizz at all apart from that he's a Monk. It's only his second story and yet we're doing something so experimental as this. This is the kind of thing that you'd want to do when you already know the characters particularly well, like with the Doctor and Charley. We hardly know C'rizz. Still, he plays the part very well, playing the Conscience who tries to incite revolution and the Editor trying to draw out the old Editor's plans.

I don't usually talk about it either, but I have to compliment the sound design and music as well. The editing is superb. You can hear the camera backing up and revealing that someone is watching a scene on a screen. The theme itself fades into a screen as if it too is being watched. There is a theme made specifically for this story that fits, dark and oppressive and moody.

This is a phenomenal production from start to finish. I remember adoring this story when I first heard it and I haven't changed my mind on that. It is very experimental and it probably isn't for everybody, but it's an experiment that works wonders.

07.04.2023

A very tasteful play on 1984, with a phenomenally deep lead and a rich world of which you feel every room.

I never would've thought a dystopia would be a logical thematic continuation of a weird timeless world outside the universe, yet it fits perfectly, giving me a new understanding of the genre. This ties up the previous (e52) episode nicely and for my taste concludes the saga perfectly, even if there's more after.

The final twist is the best kind of twist there is.

5/5 and a must-relisten status for myself.

I think this is a masterpiece. The narrative is beautifully complex, creating a rich and unique world with engaging and believable characters. The messages imbued thought this story are interesting and thought-provoking. The final twist is so unexpected but makes so much sense and will likely keep my mind working for some time to come. The acting, particularly Paul McGann's but also the rest of the casts', is so strong and powerful, while the sound design and score fits in effortlessly.

I cannot recommend this more highly. The only thing I would note is that you need to give this audio pretty much your full attention at all times in order to follow it fully. Other than that, I would recommend everyone to jump into it right now. You don't even really need any context. The Doctor is travelling with Charlie, a human, and C'rezz, an alien, through another universe and they're not in controll of where they travel to. That's all you need.

🙏🏼52% = Average! = Not recommended! 

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time! 

WHEN CONFUSING YOU SIMPLY ISN’T ENOUGH!

Within the opening moments of The Natural History of Fear, I know this entire story will be a momentous struggle to get through. I don't know who is who or what is what here, and I’ve never been as effectively lost when listening to a Big Finish audio.

It’s very difficult to review a story that you cannot get a hold of; the characters are so strange and distant, the story is all over the place, and the atmosphere is unfathomable most of the time, with glimpses of reason appearing now and then.

The story gradually reveals that it takes place in a tightly controlled state, altering everyone's memories and perceptions and effectively dealing with non-conformity. The Doctor assumes the role of the Editor, exercising strict control; Charley serves as his faithful ally; and C'rizz, the Conscience, starts to question everything. But even after this, the story seems to go off on a tangent every so often, to maintain your confusion and prevent it from making you too comfortable.

The tension grows throughout this adventure and is palpable towards the end, even if you don't grasp the narrative itself. The strakes make themselves felt and keep you on edge, which helps you get to the end of the story. The last part does tie the loose ends together just enough to help you get an overall grasp of what it’s trying to achieve.

The performances are good, even if it's difficult to get a hold of the characters and who they represent.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

The biggest takeaway from this story is the interesting parallels drawn between the Buddhist view on reincarnation and the Doctor’s cycle of regeneration.