Fog (home video)
Fog was a P.R.O.B.E. home video short released as a download by BBV Productions on their new website in 2021.
The story featured extensive location shooting by the standards of the story, and, at 12 minutes, had an extended runtime. It tied in with BBV's Sontarans audio story Old Soldiers; although the story had no license to the Sontarans, it brought back the Sontaran prisoner form that story, using the security measures by which Giles was forced to abide in order to keep him out of shot and elide all copyrighted details about his appearance and species.
Publisher's summary[[edit] | [edit source]]
Giles meets a curious alien prisoner.
Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]
On 13 February 2021, Giles begins to record a case file on a mysterious fog which has fallen over Great Britain and seems to be interfering with communication signals, as well as being correlated with incidents of unexplained memory loss among the population. Maxie Masters runs some tests and finds that the fog has been detecting electromagnetic field anomalies which interfere with human brainwaves. Analysing the higher frequencies, Maxie finds something more than the ordinary soup of modern Internet and phone signals.
Giles begins to wonder if this might be evidence of a government conspiracy, and his worries are not alleviated when he has an ambiguous, brief encounter with Sir Andrew Williams, during which he is unable to determine of Sir Andrew was trying to encourage his current line of investigation or warn him off from it. Tasha Williams promises to speak to her father to try to get some clarity out of him, having confirmed that he's frequently this unreadable even to his close family. As he's recording a video diary segment explaining all this, Giles is surprised to get a phone call on his personal number; when he picks up, a loud noise erupts from his mobile and the video feed cuts off.
When he signs back on, Giles is outside, where the fog seems to have cleared — explaining that he was one of many people who got anonymous calls right before an electromagnetic surge caused a phone blackout. He gets another call from someone calling himself Bios, which he recognises as another code name for the Cold War-era program of smuggling German scientists to the West before Soviet Russia could get their hands on them. He quickly learns that the program also involved the transfer of non-humans who had been in German custody.
Given directions to a heavily-guarded safehouse in whose basement the alien is being kept, Giles waits a while before being given clearance. Meeting the alien, a clone warrior kept on a life-support drip, he has a long conversation with him, during which he learns that his knowledge has been key to several technological and military advances over the course of the 20th century, and also that the fog and associated electromagnetic anomalies were his own doing, in an attempt to get the attention of people other than his captors.
Giles makes repeat visits to Field Marshal "Bios", telling him about P.R.O.B.E.; the alien is particularly interested to hear about Maxie, P.R.O.B.E.'s alien team-member who is considered a valued, free member of the group rather than a prisoner to be used. He eventually persuades Giles to bring him a burger purchased in the outside world, which Maxie does for Giles; after thorough scans, he is eventually allowed to bring it to "Bios".
Soon enough, however, Giles learns that the human food proved fatally poisonous to "Bios", who soon expires. He realises that, based on the messages he carried back and forth between them, Maxie read between the lines and realised the prisoner had been looking for a way to commit suicide to escape his situation, and she selected the burger in full knowledge of what it would do to his alien biology. Though upset at Maxie having used her to achieve this, Giles understands her decision and trusts that Maxie remains an ally to P.R.O.B.E.. Sir Andrew, meanwhile, is overall relieved at "Bios"'s death putting an end to the overall ethical quandary of his secret imprisonment, a reaction which somewhat unsettles Giles.
Even with "Bios" dead, a few aftershocks of fog and electromagnetic disturbances still recur over the following weeks. Giles is left to ponder the strange fact that the occasional amnesia spells among the population are what "Bios" left them to remember him by.
Cast[[edit] | [edit source]]
Characters[[edit] | [edit source]]
Mentioned only[[edit] | [edit source]]
Crew[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Writer - Bill Baggs
- Script editor - James Hornby
- Art - Warren Lewis
- Theme - Mark Ayres
- Logo - Lucas Kovacs
- Editing and Post-production - Callum Brown and Bill Baggs
- With special thanks to Simon Gerard & Colin Hill (audio adventure 'Old Soldiers'); James Hornby and James Wylder at Arcbeatle Press
Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The victims of amnesia include James, 29, who was found "wandering aimlessly around his local park" by his partner, as well as Louise from Inverness, who was found on the floor of her garden shed with no idea who she was, and Kevin from Pembrokeshire, who was found in "a supermarket two towns over, wandering by the freezer section with no idea how he got there".
- Winfried Otto Schumann was a scientist who was brought to America in 1947 as part of Operation Paperclip. He discovered that the Earth's electromagnetic field's frequency matched the frequency of human's natural brainwaves.
Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- James was a cameo by then-prominent-P.R.O.B.E.-writer James Hornby.
Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The story positions itself as a sequel to AUDIO: Old Soldiers [+]Loading...["Old Soldiers (BBV audio story)"], with Field Marshal "Bios" evidently being a code-name for Brak; Alice Wells is name-dropped to strengthen that link. Although Brak apparently died at the end of Old Soldiers, this story asserts him to have been nursed back to stable health and placed on life support against his will.
- The EMF meter from WC: Peckham Poltergeist [+]Loading...["Peckham Poltergeist (webcast)"] is seen again.
- Maxie Masters is an alien, and Giles is aware of this, as per PROSE: She Came From Another World! [+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)"].
External links[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Official Fog page at bbvproductions.co.uk
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