{"id":2984,"date":"2015-03-29T18:43:43","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T01:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=2984"},"modified":"2018-05-18T18:16:55","modified_gmt":"2018-05-19T01:16:55","slug":"lights-out-as-thinly-veiled-doctor-who-fanfic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/2984","title":{"rendered":"Lights Out as Thinly-Veiled Doctor Who Fanfic"},"content":{"rendered":"

At one point in Dark Fall: The Journal<\/em>, the player has access to a character’s smartphone and can read his recent emails. One of them was a reminder to renew his membership to a Doctor Who<\/em> fan club. I read this as the writer trying to show that this character was a bit of a nerd. After all, this game was made in 2002, three years before the show was revived, which means he was still an active fan — active enough to pay fan club dues — of a show that had been canceled 13 years ago.<\/p>\n

Lights Out<\/em> was written by a different author, with a different perspective<\/del>. [Correction: Both games have the same author. I don’t know why I thought differently.]<\/strong> Rather than mocking Doctor Who<\/em> fans as nerds, he’s sending out dog-whistles to let them know he’s one of them. There’s a Sarah Jane<\/a> mentioned in the historical materials in the lighthouse museum, as well as repeated mention of an oceangoing vessel called the Ribos<\/a>. And of course the whole business of a glowing madman in a lighthouse is basically lifted from The Horror of Fang Rock<\/a>. Apparently the Doctor even quotes the Flannan Isle poem at one point in Fang Rock<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And even apart from these directly-referential details, much of the story’s shape so far just feels Doctor Who<\/em>-ish. It starts with a period piece, then throws in a mysterious anachronism. Some of the best episodes of classic Who<\/em> started the same way. It gives us the framework of a ghost story, but then starts giving the ghosts sci-fi explanations like time travel and possibly aliens — one document mentions a large cylindrical object falling from the sky. And it’s all about figuring out what’s really going on, which is a large part of Doctor Who<\/em>‘s charm — much of the time, the Doctor’s initial motivation for getting involved in the story is curiosity. This, it strikes me, is a point where licensed Doctor Who<\/em> games have generally fallen down, by focusing mainly on confrontations with well-known bad guys.<\/p>\n

Now, there are enough references to characters from Dark Fall: the Journal<\/em> — most notably Polly White — to make it clear that this game takes place in the same universe, if not exactly the same timeline<\/a>. And that makes the shift to the Doctor Who<\/em> world-view strange, because the events of the previous game were pretty definitively supernatural, involving actual ghosts and evil spirits rather than time-travel and extraterrestrials. I suppose Lights Out<\/em> could be about to retcon it all into rationalism, but that seems disrespectful. No, as far as I can see right now, we just have two coexisting stories, one about ghosts that are ghosts and one about ghosts that are not ghosts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At one point in Dark Fall: The Journal, the player has access to a character’s smartphone and can read his recent emails. One of them was a reminder to renew his membership to a Doctor Who fan club. I read this as the writer trying to show that this character was a bit of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[72,76,77,85],"class_list":["post-2984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dark-fall","tag-dark-fall-2-lights-out","tag-doctor-who","tag-mystlike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2984"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5556,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions\/5556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}