Doctor Who (doesn't) meet HP Lovecraft

[StCoop]

So... in a spectacular bit of bad timing this month's Main Range release from Big Finish was supposed to be "The Lovecraft Invasion" but it's been pulled of the schedule for release at an unspecified future date due to "production delays". First time in 20+ years that that's happened.

I'm sure it's got nothing to do with someone at BF (or the BBC) realising that now was not the the best time for Doctor Who in an adventure with an anti-semitic, misogynistic, racist, even if it was going to acknowledge what he was like as part of the story.

It probably didn't help that it followed on from last month's Main Range release which had some problematic interaction between the 6th Doctor and Nazis in WW2.

 

[Nightowl1701]

Production delays indeed. 'The Lovecraft Invasion' went to the recording booth in January, same time as the one you just mentioned ('Scorched Earth').

 

[Brendan Moody]

I’m reminded of when the two Short Trips featuring the metacrisis Doctor were delayed due to “production issues” a couple days before the first one was due to come out. Big Finish never bothered explaining what the issues were in that case, but it became obvious that they’d been editing out/replacing references to Earth Defence as a specific organization, either because the BBC asked them to or because the Rose Tyler box set had shifted from being Earth Defence to being The Dimension Cannon. I wouldn’t be surprised if some hasty re-editing was happening here as well.

 

[Brendan Moody]

The Lovecraft Invasion is out now, and someone who compared the first 15 minutes to an excerpt previously released on the Big Finish podcast notes that they’ve added in new dialogue from the Doctor more explicitly describing Lovecraft as a racist.

 

[StCoop]

The Lovecraft Invasion is out now, and someone who compared the first 15 minutes to an excerpt previously released on the Big Finish podcast notes that they’ve added in new dialogue from the Doctor more explicitly describing Lovecraft as a racist.

My BF backlog is such that it'll be a while before I get to it (I try not to listen to more than one story a week so I don't run out) but I wonder if that's all they changed. Even when they release the script as an extra it'll be the new version so I guess we'll never know.

 

[Brendan Moody]

I gave the story a listen this morning. It’s so consistently hostile to Lovecraft that it’s hard to tell which hits on him are new. I would guess a speech at the end where the Doctor basically calls him human garbage to his face has been a bit punched up, since it jars a bit with the “more in sorrow than in anger” tone of a sequence immediately thereafter where the Doctor discusses with his companions Lovecraft’s imminent death and the prospect of his having outgrown his bigotry if he’d lived longer. There’s another scene where a guest character from the 51st century who’s mixed-race, pansexual, trans, and non-binary tells him off, but that feels more like it was designed to be the big “grappling with Lovecraft’s racism” moment in the original script.

The final product definitely knocks Lovecraft around. The same TARDIS team are nicer to actual Nazi soldiers in the immediately preceding release than they are to Lovecraft here. It’s a bit odd to release something that’s basically a series of Lovecraftian namedrops and homages but stops every twenty minutes or so to remind you that Lovecraft was trash and you probably shouldn’t read him, but I suppose BF did the best they could in the moment to balance competing imperatives.

 

[JD]

That does seem like kind of an odd way to approach it. I understand people have a completely understandable problem with his attitudes, but it sounds like they went a both overboard ripping on him. Even if he had some bad attitudes, he has been a huge influence on our culture, and deserves at least a bit of respect and recognition for that. I would think just one or two moments to acknowledge his shortcomings would be enough.

 

[Lonemagpie]

And Lovecraft Country will kick the shit out of it anyway, like the book did.

 

[publiusr]

The thing about any kind of body horror is about fearing the other, isn’t it?

I think this might have worked better as a TNG time travel story, dealing with the Horror at Red Hook.

Picard would argue with Lovecraft, then see something supernatural.

Now Picard is used to diversity unlike HPL, and you had pretty diverse folk in New York.

So to visually show horror, I might key in on movement. The heroes would move 24 frames per second, and villains in CGI at a higher rate. Glenn Hetrick from FACE-OFF talked about sculpting making biological sense, but with CGI, you can invert the eyes and mouth as in those perception tests that yield the Thatcher Effect—having those characters vibrate up and down when seen from behind...seeing them advance towards a victim without limbs moving.

In this way, you can imply a sense of wrongness based on motion, not appearance.

So we might chid HPL on swooning upon seeing Worf, but not when fleeing the boneless.

What I would’nt give to go back in time to give HPL two things:

Star Trek, and The Thing.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

That does seem like kind of an odd way to approach it. I understand people have a completely understandable problem with his attitudes, but it sounds like they went a both overboard ripping on him. Even if he had some bad attitudes, he has been a huge influence on our culture, and deserves at least a bit of respect and recognition for that. I would think just one or two moments to acknowledge his shortcomings would be enough.

Agreed. He's been dead for 83 fucking years! And it's not like anyone has ever held him up as some paragon of moral virtue. He is only remembered today for creating deeply unsettling horror stories, most of which I doubt anyone bothers reading these days anyway. He's more of a concept than a man now, so his opinions are of no interest to me whatsoever!

BTW, as someone who didn't listen to it, what was the issue with the Nazis in the previous story?