Vanishing Point: Doctor of the Soul (1986).

Being a fan of old radio dramas can sometimes be filled with a lot of interesting perks.  At least that's the case if you're the kind of story enthusiast who whose devotion to the world of fiction can sometimes lead you into all sorts of interesting avenues that have remained unexplored by the vast majority of the audience.  It's in wandering down all these forgotten pathways that you begin to discover all fascinating broadcast history that has fallen through the cracks.  For instance, the history of the radio drama is filled with a lot of forgotten names.  This can sometimes be a shame, because every so often you run across a writer, actor, or showrunner who for one brief moment was able to make a genuine contribution to the medium, and yet history has an often-cruel way of not remembering their achievements.  I think something like this is what happened to those now out of the way programs such as Vanishing Point.  If the name sounds at all familiar, that's because I've given the show a few moments of column space here on the Club once before.  

The whole show was very much a textbook example of the successful follow-up from a parent program.  Much the same way as the character of Frasier Crane was able to take on a life of his own after Cheers.  In the case of the show under discussion today, Vanishing Point grew out of the success of a previous Canadian Broadcasting radio entry known as Nightfall.  That earlier series was a classic example of the late-night Horror anthology.  A version of Tales from the Crypt for the theater of the mind.  It became enough of a ratings hit that eventually the CBC was ready to try and build a sister project.  This one would share the same late night anthology format as Nightfall.  Even some of its episodes would echo the previous entry in terms of genre and situation.  However, it was made clear right away that this new project wouldn't just be imitating the same ideas.  Instead, the new series was to be free to explore as much of the terrain of the fantastic as its writers wanted or felt they could get away with under a radio budget.  In other words, it didn't always have to be straight-up Horror.  Sometimes it could be Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, and even the occasional narratives delving into nothing more than slices of life.  It was going to be less Tales from the Crypt and more Twilight Zone for radio, in other words.

The result is a series that really seemed determined to explore as much of the range of the theater of the mind as possible.  It's an entry from this forgotten bit of Canadian broadcasting that I'd like to take a look at today.  Tonight's play is written especially for radio by David Helwig and concerns one of the greatest conundrums that mankind continues to grapple with.  So if you'll join us for tonight's journey into the unknown, I believe we're do for a most unusual appointment in a psychiatrist's office.

The Story.

Radio Announcer (intro): "What is the mind?  An aggregate of processes?  A faculty of the brain?  Intellectual power?  Is the mind something safely cradled in the crib of the skull?  Protected by those 21 immovable, interconnected bones which wall it off from the world at large?  Or is it something...immaterial...spirit - forever linked to the stuff of the universe?  Through the aperture of...the Vanishing Point".

It all started the day an otherwise unassuming looking woman entered a psychiatrist's office.  There wasn't anything remarkable about her at all.  Her looks might be described as plain, yet not unattractive.  Everything about her; age; occupation; home life; all of it seemed as normal as anyone can either want or get.  That was until she began to speak about the dreams she was able to recall from the night before.  She claimed it was possible to dream about events that had happened just a day or two ago with perfect clarity.  Now this in itself doesn't have to be any cause for alarm.  Perhaps she's just one of the lucky who find themselves cursed with the blessings of an eidetic memory.  The patient claims this is different however.  For one thing, she maintains she was able to rediscover aspects of the day before that had actually escaped her notice.  For another thing, she claimed that it was like being at the funeral of a friend, rather than just having a memory of it.  It all sounds a bit puzzling, yet the answer should be obvious enough.  The patient is either discovering what it is like to dream for the very first time, and is having trouble adjusting to what is (for her at least) a very new and novel experience.  Either that or she is suffering from some undisclosed disorder which is effecting her ability to perceive things in the normal way.  Probably the type of thing to be sorted out with prescription medication.

Then, however, the patient returns for her scheduled appointment, and makes a startling claim.  "The dreams I have are just...re-arrangements of things that have happened.  As if you put everything that went on for a week in a box, and all the bits of events got attached to new events, and yet there was nothing there that wasn't there before...Do you believe in psychic phenomena?  Clairvoyance, thought transfer? () Is the mind really open to anything outside or does just go on re-arranging its own contents"?  It was at this point that the patient told the doctor something very out of the ordinary.  "I had a dream with you in it".  She was asked to elaborate on this information, and so this is what she said.  

"Well, I was a puppet.  In the dream, I mean.  And I knew somehow that I was made of wood.  And I felt as if I was controlled by strings, but I could never see the puppeteer.  No matter how hard I tried.  I started to wonder if there wasn't any puppeteer holding my strings.  And even though I was a puppet, I was watching a puppet show.  A woman puppet was beating the man puppet with a stick?  Punch and Judy I guess it was.  And then I looked beside me and you were there".  It was very clear that the patient was indicating the psychiatrist himself with these words.  He was sharing her dream.  "You were carved out of wood and your mouth moved, up and down, like a puppet's.  You looked at the puppet show and you said to me, "Don't destroy me".  This particular therapy session wound up getting under the doctor's skin.  For one thing, there's no way the patient could even begin to know about such a rem event.  Because that was the exact same dream he experienced not too long ago, down to every exact detail.  Here's the unnerving part about it, though.  In the dream, one puppet turns to the other and asks her, "Just what is it you want"?  To which the patient dreamer replies, "I want everything you've got".

Conclusion: An Intriguing Idea in Need of Development. 

One of the great things about radio as a medium of storytelling is that it allows a greater sense of leeway in terms of what you can achieve or get away with when it comes to working within the genres of the fantastic.  For instance, I'd argue it's the closest were ever libel to get when it comes to the chance of having as perfect and adaptation of Lord of the Rings.  You can recreate the entirety of Tolkien's world with nothing more than the voices of the actors.  This type of creative freedom also applies to the creation of sonic soundscapes meant to try and conjure up the inner terrain of dreams.  That's the basic effect that CBC Radio's sound department is going for with this episode.  You can go into this one expecting to hear all sorts of echoing dialogue, occasional distortion techniques, and all of it is backed up by the best mid 80s synth style guitar music you find.  It doesn't hurt the episode's production values that this was made at that particular period where all the progress made in the music industry was available to allow the producers of Vanishing Point to utilize all these new, wonderful sound toys on the air.  It's what allows the programmers to create the kind of auditory landscape that is able to suggest at least the popular idea of what a dream sounds like.  These are the type of acoustics you might expect to hear within the confines of a painting by Rene Magritte.

The problem is that special effects can only take you so far.  If repeated experience has taught me anything, it's that any TV episode, radio drama, or film is only as good as the quality of the writing will permit it to be.  In other words, the story always remains paramount.  That's the issue the writer of this episode seemed to be struggling with.  Dave Helwig appears to have had one of those "what if" moments that can occur to writer's every now and then.  In his case, the idea seems to have expressed itself in the form of a question.  What if you discovered that you could not only enter or peer into the dreams of others, but also influence their minds as they slept?  Now, to be fair, it is perhaps always going to be possible to maintain that such a concept might have some genuine creative promise to it.  

It's by no means the most original idea out there.  For one thing, it's the basic premise of Wes Craven's original Nightmare on Elm Street in its entirety.  However, just because a story idea lacks originality can never be the same as saying it isn't good.  In cases like this, what matters most of all is how well the artist is able to help the concept develop to its full creative potential.  That's the challenge Helwig had set before him, and I think the final results speak for themselves.  Doctor of the Soul contains a lot of good moments during its half-hour runtime.  The author was smart enough to realize that setting his story within the dream life of the protagonists meant he was allowed to stretch his legs a bit in terms of imaginative possibilities.  In these moments, the script takes on the kind of gnomic, indirect, yet symbolically suggestive style that tends to mark out the experience of dreaming.  These are the moments when the writing is able to reach its best possible expression.  It also allows the CBC's radio effects department to have a great deal of fun trying to suggest what a dream sounds like.  It might all be just a pure flight of fancy, yet these moments manage to be entertaining enough.

The major obstacle that Helwig can't find his way around is the crucial issue of how do you find the right ending to a setup like this?  It's a question that the writer never seems to have found a good answer to.  The story kind of has to suffer as a result of it.  This is an outcome I've seen more than once in my years as a reader.  I've encountered it often enough to realize what it means.  It's a literary signal for that moment when the writer loses their grip on the Imagination, and the story has no choice except to run out of steam because of it.  It's the sort of thing you can tell is happening if you pay attention to how the narrative plays out, whether on the page or screen.  The excitement of the plot begins to falter.  The characters and their situations begin to sound and act hollow.  The whole fantasy begins to turns lifeless.  Something vital has gone out of the story.  It's usually the kiss of death for any narrative, no matter how talented the author.  It's the problem Helvig's script ends up facing, and the ultimate failing of the episode as a whole.  The writer simply couldn't find any good and workable closer to his story.

The way things turn out, the episode doesn't come to an end so much as it just sort of peters out with the psychiatrist and the dreamer patient at either this kind of odd standstill between one another.  Or else it's implied that the doctor might be on the verge of finding a way of breaking free of the dreamer's grip.  The fact that I unable to tell you precisely which scenario is in play by the time the credits role should be the biggest clue you'll need in order to understand just how poorly the material wound up getting handled.  Helvig's inspiration seems to have taken him just so far before seeming to shrug its shoulders, and then walk off, leaving the writer holding a lot of empty pages.  As a result, we're left with one of those stories where the dramatic potential can only take both artist and audience together so far, before the creativity tank runs out of gas.  One of the worst things that can happen to an author, in my mind, are those moments where the ending of the story isn't there when they need it.  It's like having a longtime trusted friend ditch you out of the blue for no discernable reason.  For the audience, there's the inherent sense of being cheated out of their time and money by a plot that proves itself to be mediocre.  For the writer, there's the curse of knowing that the initial idea has gotten away from you.

In retrospect, what Helving probably should have done was to give the creative idea more time to marinate in the Unconscious for a while longer.  This is one of those concepts that needed room to stretch its legs a bit more, and it just never happened.  The most plausible reason for why this happened would have to be because the entire script was written under a tight deadline.  Now, to be fair, this can often be the standard operating procedure on a lot of anthology shows, even those that don't require the use of visuals.  It is still possible to churn out a good final product in those circumstances, and its been done more than once.  However, this turned out to be one of those other occasions where the story itself just wasn't there.  If I had to offer any constructive kind of criticism here, then one suggestion I might make is to say that things could have gone in one of three different ways.  The first outcome would be to let the initial dream that the narrative starts with to come true.  Let the psychiatrist become a human puppet at the mercy of this crazy person who has discovered a new form of mind control through the power of dreams.  The second course of action would be to take the story in the opposite direction.

Here, what happens is that the psychiatrist could find a way to free himself from the dreamer's influence, and maybe even find ways of getting rid of whatever power it is that allows her to enter others dreams.  One possible solution here would be the simple application of the right drugs.  The kind of medication that gets prescribed for some folks that actually somehow manages to block them from accessing the Unconscious level of the human mind from which dreams come from.  The last option would be to double down on the plot's innate sense of surrealism.  Let the plot reach a point where its no longer possible to tell if what's happening is real, or if the entire situation we've been watching play out is in fact itself a dream, and we can't tell whose sleep vision it is.  Those are the best ideas I could have suggested if I were a troubleshooter for Helvig's script.  As things stand, even this isn't too original when you consider that all I've done here is to describe the plot of Craven's original Elm Street once again.  So in other words, not much in the way or originality to go around.  At the same time, it's kind of difficult for me to see any other ways of how this could have been treated so maybe it all really was the case of one artist cribbing off the work of another on very short notice.  I can't say on that score.

What I do know is this.  I've seen (or rather heard) better.  That's the final verdict I'm going to have to pass on this episode, I'm afraid.  Because of all the issues this story has as discussed above, it sort of goes without saying that this is one of those examples of a potential creative idea petering out due to an unfortunate lack of Imagination.  It was just too much of a challenge for the author in this case.  It's also what makes it kind of shame, when you think about it.  With the high level of audio effects quality that this show had at its disposal, a better script might have left the CBC with the chance for a real thought provoking, mind-bending psychological thriller in the truest sense of the word.  Instead, all we're left with is the warmed leftovers of Wes Craven.  As a result, I'm afraid Doctor of the Soul proves to be one of those swing and a miss efforts.  There's very little to recommend here, as a result.  There are plenty of other entries in the Vanishing Point archives.  This, however, proves to be one of the poor showings.