Tony has a good idea
Where do you get your
ideas from?
It’s a question writers
get asked all the time. Politicians and dictators rarely get asked the same
question but seem determined to tell everybody at length in memoir after memoir
after interminable memoir.
People have a tendency to
assume everyone gets their ideas from some individual place in their brain. But
imagine, just for a moment, that’s not the case.
Meet Dracksil Forg, idea
salesman. For the right price, he’ll imagine you any darned thing you want,
from the plot of a major blockbuster novel to a way to crush your local star
system under your boot heel. The plans will be detailed, precise, not always
easy but always, always, foolproof. If you follow Dracksil’s recipe, you’ll get
the result you want.
Every time.
And the best bit is that
he’s strictly an ideas man. Strictly a service industry. Not for him the
ethical qualms of an activist. He merely solves any equation you bring him for
X, where X is the desired result.
Dracksil Forg is a gorgeous
idea in the Doctor Who universe because he’s not, in himself, evil, but he is,
or at least seems to be, a kind of anti-Doctor, a profit-incentivised version
of our favourite Time Lord. Where the Doctor goes careering through time and
space, fixing random problems he encounters, Dracksil Forg sits perfectly still
in his own time and space, and waits for problems to walk through his door. For
the right amount of money, they leave with a solution. The cosmos changes as a
result of his actions, but Dracksil Forg is like a ghostwriter – he never puts
his name to the actions that ensue from his plans, but those who need him will
know his name.
Except…
Except he’s started to
come to the notice of someone else. Some lanky, grumpy beanpole with fighting
eyebrows and a runaway mouth. Some would-be legend who, for instance, when paid
to poison a particular dignitary at a dinner, somehow manages to ensure they go
home remarkably unpoisoned. Someone who when faced with a drone army of
killbots reprograms them to pick plastic out of the oceans instead. Someone who
when he encounters a cut-price quantum Death Star…waves a screwdriver at it and
turns it into a planetary vending machine.
The Doctor.
Very specifically in this
instance, the Twelfth Doctor, as voiced by Jacob Dudman. The story is
essentially a shedload of set-up and bedding in, a handful of examples of how
the Doctor is causing, shall we say, radical customer dissatisfaction on the
part of Dracksil’s latest clients (Can you imagine the reviews? Nobody wants to
have an army of killbots turn green crusader on them just after they’ve issued
their proclamation of power, it just makes you look a pillock), and then a
build-up to one of those confrontations in which the Twelfth Doctor
particularly excels. When Dracksil and the Doctor face each other in Dracksil’s
office (like everyone else, the Doctor has to come and see Dracksil, rather
than vice versa), what we get is an immensely satisfying confrontation, not
because of any raised voices – the Twelfth Doctor is often most effective when
he lowers his voice – but because it absolutely shines with pure
distilled Twelfth Doctor tones. There’s a left-field beginning, that seems
there just for the fun, but isn’t. There’s an explanation of what’s really
going on, opening Dracksil’s eyes to a truth even he has never worked out about
himself. There’s a fairly casual insult or two, because, after all, this is
the Twelfth Doctor. And then there’s the hope. The Twelfth Doctor’s hope that
the universe can be better than its default setting of grim and grasping
nastiness if it just dares to be imaginative. If it dares to use its little
pudding brains, and can find the better way to be. Pudding, not poison.
Greenbots, not killbots. Hunger-ending vending machines, rather than
planet-blasting death machines. Think, is the Twelfth Doctor’s main
theme. Think. And then be kind.
Ben Tedds won the 2019
Paul Spragg Memorial Opportunity with this story, and it’s easy to hear why.
The imaginative leap involved in inventing Dracksil Forg is the kind of
blow-your-hair-back brilliance that seems obvious once it’s been done,
but which takes a very particular energy of mind to actually invent (arguably in
itself pre-empting the theme of the story). The notion of Dracksil’s business –
a kind of ‘We can imagine it for you wholesale’ service industry, dealing with
its clients at a long business distance speaks to both great science fiction,
in the lines of Philip K Dick and Douglas Adams, and to our real world service
industries today who, when things go wrong, scuttle away with their hands
raised and claim it was nothing to do with them. You could arguably draw a line
between what Dick did for memory and perception in We Can Imagine It For You
Wholesale and what Adams did for faith and belief with his electronic monk
in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Tedds does here for the
creative imagination – he farms it out to a service provider, irrespective of
what the intended goal might be, and Dracksil Forg is that service
provider. It’s an idea that absolutely has legs in the New Who universe, and you
can easily imagine how the premise and the examples of the Doctor’s
plan-thwarting could have been expanded to fit a whole TV episode.
It feels like Tedds knows
his expanded Who-universe, giving us a kind of Easter egg here in the form of a
bird-people species from the local cosmic area of the Shansheeth, only where
the funeral directors were vulture-people, Tedds gives us legal…ach, you can
probably work out which birds he has working heavily in the legal profession.
No?
And above all, the spirit
of the Twelfth Doctor sings out from the ending of this story. He’s not against
people having ideas. He’s not even against people paying someone else to have
their ideas for them. But he wants to collapse the callous disregard Dracksil’s
allowed himself to have for consequences, arguably echoing the ‘guns don’t kill
people, people kill people’ line of the likes of the NRA in our modern world.
Guns absolutely don’t kill people if no-one has the idea for guns, and the
people who do have the idea for guns can’t be separated from the
consequences of their ideas. Likewise, the Doctor argues here, people who have
the idea for planet-killing weapons or drone armies need to face up to the
consequences of the ideas they have, and the ideas they sell to a hungry
marketplace. Especially when kindness and imagination will allow them to have better
ideas. Kinder ideas. Ideas that make the universe a better place, rather
than a deader place.
It’ll be interesting to
see where Tedds’ career goes from here, but wherever it is, it’ll be worth
watching. And any time he gets another Big Finish gig, you’re going to want to
pre-order that thing, because The Best-Laid Plans punches well above the
weight of a new author Short Trip, weaving some fairly hardcore sci-fi
philosophy into the carpet of a thumping good adventure story with some
pitch-perfect Twelfth Doctoring to give you a shot of Old Attack Eyebrows that
feels like it could have been lifted straight from the screen. The best-laid
plans may aft gang wherever they like, but make getting a copy of this story
the best plan you lay today and you’ll end your day with a Twelfth Doctor
smile. Guaranteed by Dracksil Forg.
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