Mission Report by UNIT Agent Bill Filer to Trap One - Subject matter: (Zygon: When being you just isn't enough)

This is a story that keeps popping up in discussions, mostly it seems as a source of ridicule - I might even be the most guilty of bringing it up any chance I get. But thinking about it, it is probably a full decade since I last actually watched it - so guess what I did last night?

What mostly gets brought up about this story is nudity and the soft porn, but as our resident TARDIS Guide Swede @Tian recently said, it is on par with a great deal of Nordic films. It isn't that excessive when it comes down to it, with only two sexual encounters. The first shows Lauren and Mike getting closer to each other after they have had a long affection for each other but have been unable to move along with the relationship because of the Doctor/Patient situation. The second sexual encounter is when Lauren is in the body of that random businessman, and is basically an exploration of Lauren's sexuality as she has sex with a woman, as a man. Her attraction to woman was shown earlier in the movie when she was eyeballing her colleague in the locker room. There is actually something really interesting going on here in terms of Lauren's questioning nature of her sexuality, but unfortunately it isn't explored much further and is buried beneath the plot.

The plot of the story with Mike forgetting he is a Zygon, and getting treated for a mental illness when images surface in his dreams is super interesting. The other Zygon, Bob, trying to use Lauren's professional relationship to Mike to get him to remember his Zygon nature, is again a good narrative idea but not explored enough. The movie is just too short at around an hour to actually flesh out the plot and the intricacies of Lauren becoming a Zygon, and her exploration of her sexuality, it needed probably another half an hour.

But I am kind of grateful that it is so short, because the production value is appalling. Really low visual quality, shaky cams, the same extras everywhere in the same clothes, weird editing in post-production, bad effects when Zygon stuff happens, the script needed a bit of a rewrite, and sadly acting that isn't quite up to scratch.

It's a movie that has a bunch of faults, but at the end of the day I think it has gotten an unfair reputation. I won't be rushing to watch it again any time soon, but I would still say this is a 3/5 :star: story.

End of report. Logged and filed at The Black Archive.

Few bylines, on a Wiki listing, are as depressing as "Lance Parkin, Jonathan Blum, and Bill Baggs". A script by two of the Wilderness Years' most talented, interesting writers — and the extended Doctor Who universe's most lamentable hack? That can only mean one thing: a tortured production resulting in a fundamentally compromised final work, and that, in essence, is exactly what When Being You Just Isn't Enough is. Never mind the title that sounds like an adult parody, and the sleazy cover of the original DVD release: this film isn't the cheap adult cash-in that its reputation as a fandom punchline would have you believe.

It's much sadder than that.

There are, plainly visible in the final cut, the bones of a very good spin-off film indeed. The basic premise is of a conflict between two Zygon sleeper-agents, one of whom has grown to enjoy his life on Earth while the other still looks forward to raining terror upon the primitive apes — which is essentially the material Peter Harness would revisit on television in Series 9, presented here as more of a character piece than the ostentatious satirical parable of Zygon Inversion. That the humanised Zygon, Kritakh, has forgotten his true identity and believes himself to be the human he became is an interesting twist. One which, perhaps, isn't given as much room to breathe as it would have been in the novels to which Blum and Parkin were better used — but it's as good a reason as any to work in the psychiatry angle, permitting the return of Jo Castleton; Cyberon's finest cast member returns in fine form, and the character she and the scripts craft deserves so much better than the DVD backcover blurb's description of her as (sigh) "a sexy psychiatrist".

Alright, so, the sex. It would be simplistic to say the sex scenes are only there by Baggs's editorial mandate; sexuality was clearly a part of the original thematic vision for the film. Lauren's unwilling transformation into a shapeshifter plays, at first, as a fantasy of total hedonistic freedom, and part of it is her decision to not only buy herself all kinds of nice things on a rich man's credit card after stealing his appearance, but also bedding his mistress while still in his body. But… you know… that's interesting! I daresay it even explores some surprisingly complex queer themes for a film written in the mid-2000s — Lauren's clear inner conflict about having enjoyed being with another woman for the first time in her life, but only as a man, is played with lovely subtlety by Castleton; the reveal in the 2020 Cyberon anthology that a future Lauren had embraced genderfluidity very much flows out of the material we get here. And yes, there are all kinds of ethical red flags about the circumstances of that tryst — but, again, that's the story. Lauren is tempted by the Mephistophelean Torlakh into some pretty morally-gray behaviour indeed, before walking back from the brink. It's an adult drama, not in the euphemistic sense but the actual, serious, literary one. The problem isn't any of that. The problem isn't even that [shock, horror] there is a bit of onscreen male nudity. All this, while not everyone's cup of tea, and quite far away from your whole teatime Tom Baker japes, is really quite respectable; it's what Torchwood wanted to be, and only rarely succeeded. None of it is the problem.

No, the problem is that the film was produced by a cheapskate, directed by an artless workman, and reedited five years later by a venal, shoddy disaster-artist who wants to put in more nudity because Sex Sells. All three of those film-ruining hooligans are, needless to say, hats worn by William Baggs himself. Jo Castleton and Keith Drinkel's lovely performances — and Daniel Harcourt's entirely serviceable turn — are trapped in flatly-lit rooms and unimpressive locations. Only very occasionally does Baggs take a stab at any interesting angles, lighting, shadow-work. The crime thriller scenes are not tense, the body-horror scenes are not horrible, and the sex scene is not sexy. In Baggs's terminally incapable hands, a moody, sensual tale of murder and temptation feels nothing so much as grubby. It's Clive Barker directed by Tommy Wiseau. (Sex scene singular, you'll note; perhaps surprisingly, there's really only one, laughable in how clearly superfluous it is, spliced into what was clearly supposed to be a tasteful transition between non-graphic foreplay, and the characters waking up a few hours later. Although there is also a gratuitous scene with a topless Lauren, plus the notorious instances of frontal nudity from the male leads, both of which are resolutely non-sexual.)

In the end, the watching experience is not without value if you're morbidly curious, or even a generous enough viewer that you're interested in trying to make out the outline of the film Blum and Parkin thought they'd scripted. If you've given the film a pass on the assumption that it was just a grubby cash-in, perhaps reconsider (although I wouldn't recommend giving Baggs any money over it). But if it comes down to a yea-or-nay — then no, this doesn't work. Of course it doesn't. It might have, in another timeline, and that is remarkable enough; but we aren't so lucky.