The Monthly Adventures #84 - "The Nowhere Place" by Nicholas Briggs

Nick Briggs is a truly confounding writer - an author who never seems to stick to a single style or tone or even level of quality and will just insert his own stories into ranges whenever he gets an idea he likes, for better or for worse. This has sometimes worked - with stories such as Creatures of Beauty - and sometimes really hasn’t - like with the boring as sin The Mutant Phase. Here though, he’s posited a story whose premise intrigued me. No, not just intrigued me, fascinated me, absolutely drew me in and grabbed me by the ears. But in the end, I don’t feel he delivered on it properly, but I’m not really sure why.

There is a sound. A sound that rings through time. And those who hear it are drawn away. Away to nowhere. The Doctor and Evelyn are on the trail of a centuries long mystery, and at the end of it is a place only ever theorised to even exist: Time’s End.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Nick Briggs is a writer who can really excel in atmosphere when he wants to - Creatures of Beauty and the first half of Embrace the Darkness are both proof of that - but somehow, The Nowhere Place just falls shy of the mark for me. On the surface, I love everything about this. The Doctor hears the sound of a bell projected through time and discovers that the crew of a spacecraft carrier can hear it too. When they do, they are compelled to walk through a door that shouldn’t exist into a mysterious “nowhere place”. Cosmic and existential themes combined with unique imagery and an omnipresent threat, what isn’t to like there? Well, I honestly don’t know. I love the idea of the door and for the first half of this story, I was really interested in knowing more about what exactly was happening, but nothing felt particularly tense. I think it was the fact that the door somewhat felt like an afterthought and not enough focus was placed on it. It was treated more like a neat sci-fi idea rather than the root of a cosmic evil and it caused the atmosphere surrounding it to dissipate somewhat.

There are still some brilliant moments and Briggs conjures up some incredible imagery: the bell portending death, the door on a wall that should lead into space but doesn’t, Evelyn seeing screaming faces inside the mouth of an unknowable horror beyond imagination, it was really gripping for a long while. However, I think things began to really turn when we got to the train. See, it’s discovered half way through that the bell people keep hearing is from a steam train in the 1950s carrying two British cold war agents and it's here where the story stops feeling like a ghostly base under siege and more like another one of Briggs’ stray ideas running amok. Things become too tangible, what was something beyond comprehension doing things beyond comprehension becomes a plot to stop humanity developing space travel, which feels like an idea out of a much different, more generic story. And that’s a real shame because if the script had focussed more on the cosmic horror aspects of it all, I think I would’ve liked it a hell of a lot better.

And that’s what this story really needs, it needs focus. We spend the first half on a freighter at the edge of the Solar System, whose crew is slowly being picked off one by one. Great premise, ripe for possibilities, but then we change focus to the stuff on the train and then when we return, it’s two months later and we’re back in the first location but now with the changed tone and it all feels very jumpy. The ending also really annoys me because it amounts to a lot of technobabble. The Doctor finds the entity behind the door and discovers it’s an alternate version of humanity who experimented with time travel and got trapped in “Time’s End”, the theoretical point in the future where the laws of physics break. Bitter, they then began to sabotage other versions of humanity - including ours - out of spite, trying to stop them from advancing past the edge of the Solar System. It’s a weird ending that is the final nail in the coffin towards the atmosphere here, it really sucks the life out of the script and makes it feel less like the atmospheric horror story it wants to be and more like a weird speculative fiction thing. Funny considering Embrace the Darkness had literally the exact same problem; I guess Briggs just does this for some reason.

Now, this review has basically amounted to me trying to work out why this story didn’t click with me as it should’ve but that’s not to say I disliked it. It’s still a neat little idea box with some great imagery and whilst it fell apart in the second half, the mystery was intriguing for the first hour or so. I also think that Briggs’ character work is a lot better here, especially with the overwrought Captain Oswin, who was a very interesting and layered take on the authority figure trope so often seen in the Classic Era. I also liked Briggs’ own performance as wishful astrophysicist Trevor, who became very likable in the short amount of time we spend with him. For all intents and purposes, this is a good script with a pleasant pace to it. It was just missing something for me, a certain spark, a certain extra level of atmosphere or scope that would’ve made it all click into place but as it stands, it’s more like a grab bag of different ideas.

A Briggs story could really go either way and I’m swinging to the positive side on this one. This was an enjoyable but muddled horror story whose greatest crime was not living up to potential. It’s well worth a listen but I can’t help but imagine what could’ve been if all these cool ideas and images were handled a little better. Briggs certainly has some worthy concepts rattling around in his head but he doesn’t always succeed at executing them.

7/10

Pros:

+ Really interesting existential themes

+ Contains some brilliant imagery

+ The mystery is incredibly intriguing

+ Interesting and intelligent side cast

Cons:

- Missing a certain spark

- Needed to focus in on one of its aspects

- The ending is a lot of technobabble

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Medicinal Purposes

This is such a bizarre story, I can't really think of any stories to compare it to. Maybe Midnight? But even then that's only really at the start. I will say, this is one of the more compelling mysteries I've heard in a Doctor Who story. It brings up a really interesting idea that there were countless other sentient species that evolved on Earth. But not like Silurians in that they evolved and existed in a different time to humans but instead that they were ocmpletely erased from time. It's really interesting and genuinely quite a scary thought, that there are completely different species that evolved like us, but nothing like us.

There's a point where the Doctor goes back in time, to a midnight train heading to some military base in the middle of the Cold War. This is a very atmospheric setting with the constant sound of the train, we've got a fairly small cast and I'm not sure how to explain it other than it feels cozy. On this train is some sort of scientist, not a famous one or anything but apparently he's idly sketched the basis for humanity's ability to travel the stars. It's a fascinating idea and it's likened to Da Vinci sketching helicopters and things like that. The reason this whole bit is in the story is because one of the many species erased from time has been preventing every other Earth species from travelling beyond the solar system and has now hitched a ride through Evelyn in the TARDIS so that it can go back and destroy these sketches, thus preventing humanity from achieving interstellar travel.

I thought the ending was a bit simple for stakes of this magnitude, but I don't particularly mind it and the rest of the story builds up such a compelling and haunting mystery that it could've ended with just about anything and I wouldn't have minded. Definitely one of the most inventive stories I've heard in ages.

Next Story: Pier Pressure