“So, let me ask you a question about this brave new world of yours. When you’ve killed all the bad guys, and it’s all perfect and just and fair, when you have finally got it exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you? The troublemakers. How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?”

The 12th Doctor in Doctor Who: The Zygon Inversion

Big Finish has an impressive repertoire when it comes to delivering dystopian worlds. Probably the clearest example of that is its many seasons of Survivors, far exceeding the scope of both the TV interpretations of a worldwide pandemic that scoured away everything we knew and left a world raw and ragged. 

Well… we’ve done a worldwide pandemic now, and depressingly little appears to have changed for the better. We note with a certain unease that Big Finish has now started making V audio dramas. If the ships start dropping into our atmosphere any time soon, we’ll know who to blame…

But aside from its work in scaring the pants off us with new extensions of old franchises, Big Finish also has a reputation for investing in new talent and original drama, like Transference, Blind Terror and its VAMPD series.

OCAS, by Theo X, Charles Kirby, Andrew Kevin Fawn, is the latest such potential series, and it’s one that’s a bit special because like Survivors, it hits pretty close to home in terms of our own lived experience.

OCAS flips the script of the traditional dystopia, by creating a realistic Britain of just a couple of decades in our future, looking back on what it sees as the baffling dystopia that is our life in the here and now (or at least, in the very recent past – the pilot episode was originally written at least before the current Trump administration. If it was written before the Johnson, Truss and Sunak eras in the UK, then the three are clearly prophets and probably deserve an altogether different kind of public adoration than writing OCAS will bring them).

Obsessive Capital Acquisition Syndrome

The central premises of the story are twofold. In the first instance, what we have been conditioned to think of as simply greed and graft unbalancing ethical, business, and political decision-making is actually a treatable condition – Obsessive Capital Accumulation Syndrome – rather than just gittery and getting away with it.

And in the second, there was an incident, a day of protest in the UK not unlike January 6th in the States, only instead of demented cult-members wanting to overturn verified democracy, the protesters in the UK were poor people rubbed raw by greed and graft in government. 

They ultimately, and with at least some violence, replaced the government with a single new party, which has gone on to sweepingly end unemployment and homelessness in the UK, restructure and re-fund the NHS and the education system, and above all, to reframe the greed that led to the collapse of our society as OCAS, and sought to “treat” those who “suffer” from it.

The structure of the storytelling is understandably backward-looking in the pilot, as it establishes the world that has been replaced, and the events leading to its replacement, as seen both by people who were there and people young enough in the new world to find the past of our reality entirely baffling and counterintuitive. 

Leo (played with a degree of wide-eyed Bambi-ism by Arun Blair-Mangat) is the voice of incredulity. He’s been tasked with creating a 20th anniversary documentary of the uprising, the discovery of OCAS as a condition, and what life was like before the glorious future in which he believes he lives. His sound recorder Jamie (Alyth Ross) is at least a few drops more skeptical than he is, leading to an interesting if as yet undefined tension between the two as they interview a range of subjects to show the shift between worlds.

Voices Of Our Times

We hear from a former teacher, an ethical fashion house owner, a former fat cat MP and others about the way things used to be (and as they have at least been in our recent past – and potentially still are in our present), with rising prices, squeezed housing availability and skyrocketing costs. And we also get insights into the difficulties of making an ethical stand in industries which are fundamentally geared towards disposable humanity and wealth creation. 

Most refreshingly, we hear the MP absolutely revelling in the wild luxuries of the old days, the normalisation of hyper-profit at the expense of the proles, and the simple, avaricious joy of excess. It’s a point of view that, when baldly and nakedly expressed, makes the idea of OCAS as a condition seem importantly plausible, which helps make the rest of the world of the story believable too.

As we go through the pilot episode of course, there are important issues that arise. The revolution was achieved in violence, and one party appears to have been in power for the last 20 years, assuring a consistency of action. Yet Leo is a wide-eyed believer in the world in which he’s grown up, with its solutions to homelessness, educational burn-out and NHS underfunding.

Dystopia fanatics will be reminded a little of Sinclair Lewis’ It Couldn’t Happen Here, which paints an alt-history version of the rise of Fascism in Thirties America, particularly in the “consistency” of government, the restructuring of acceptable thought, and the broad strokes in which change is presented – as though, for instance, solving the NHS’ problems is just a case of removing greed, or OCAS, from the picture. There are resonances between the “removal of homelessness” in the OCAS pilot and “the complete ending of all crime” in Lewis’ book that make the dystopia-lover shiver.

Are There Devils In The Detail?

The shiver lives in the lack of detail behind the statements – quite how have the problems of society been solved? We get, admittedly, some inkling in the OCAS pilot, which goes to some length to show how education was restructured in the wake of the revolution, but there’s still enough vagueness in the history to leave us disconcerted. That, as much as anything, is why this is a pilot that needs a series, because it sets up an uncomfortable dichotomy in the listener’s brain.

Make no mistake, we are and have been living in a dystopia, with greed (or OCAS) polluting and perverting much about the way we think “normality” works. Arguably, as is true of people within any system, we only think it’s normal because it has yet to be violently changed (a societal example of Douglas Adams’ “puddle analogy” being lived day to day). 

But acknowledging the real issues of the now with which OCAS deals as the catalyst for revolution means we want the OCAS future to be good, and happy, and true. We want to identify with Leo in his appreciation for the post-revolutionary society in which he lives, with the solved health crisis, and the individualised learning strategies, and where greed (or OCAS) is to be treated and pitied, rather than reviled and potentially punched in the face.

It’s just that there are enough questions raised by the questions Leo has yet to realise he should be asking to make us nervous. Has society really been healed? Have the problems really been solved? If so, how have they? And what’s the cost?

And above all, is OCAS really a clinically treatable condition – or simply a cynically rebranded term to allow the greedy to milk pity from their society, rather than opprobrium?

Vive La Revolution?

The writing of the OCAS pilot is subtle enough to feel realistic while also allowing these questions to loom gently up over you, and leave you uncertain as to whether you’re just conditioned to being disappointed by human beings, given the world in which you live, or whether revolutions are always destined to start off with good intentions and end up filling secret charnel houses…

All of these questions, among many others, are dangled at the end of the pilot episode, and if OCAS is left to die on the vine as just a pilot, not only will we never know the answers to them, we’ll lose the opportunity to dive into what is distinctly a post-dystopian world of drama, but might well be a whole new form of post-greed hell to explore.

You know you can’t let that happen. Get your lugholes round the OCAS pilot today and see which side you’re on. Tony Fyler