We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

Skip to content

Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

16 Comments

  1. Christopher Brown
    February 28, 2020 @ 4:05 pm

    Damn. This series is really hitting its stride…I can’t wait to see where it will go next.

    Reply

  2. TommyR01D
    February 28, 2020 @ 4:25 pm

    YouGov’s profile pages used to include a left-right political gauge. This showed, for instance, where fans of Audis stood in relation to fans of Volvos, or how Justin Bieber’s fans compared to Miley Cyrus’s.

    I recall that William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker and so on up to Matt Smith all lay somewhere on the left. Pertwee’s fans had the right to themselves.

    Reply

  3. tmmuy
    February 28, 2020 @ 5:53 pm

    Wait, why this one doesn’t have an introduction like the others ?

    Reply

    • Elizabeth Sandifer
      February 28, 2020 @ 5:55 pm

      Because I forgot to write one.

      Reply

      • John G. Wood
        February 28, 2020 @ 10:03 pm

        And there was me thinking it was because of the rule that you had to start by talking about Paul Cornell’s 1993 review…

        Reply

  4. (Not That) Jack
    February 28, 2020 @ 11:52 pm

    Damn, we’re really going after all the sacred cows of the Eruditorium here. What’s next, dismantling material social progress in the Brain of Morbius?

    Reply

  5. Daibhid C
    February 29, 2020 @ 8:49 pm

    While I don’t disagree with the premise, I don’t think Third’s “Gentlemen never talk about anything else” is the best example of him being a creature of the establishment. It’s him pricking the pretensions of the establishment, surely … although admittedly, he is totally doing so from the inside.

    (The line he’s responding to always reminds me of the quote by Nancy Mitford that Ogden Nash uses for his poem “M.S. Found Under a Serviette in a Lovely Home”, where she says that because Americans don’t have an aristocracy they are always talking about dollars, whereas “the English seldom sit chatting about pounds”.)

    Reply

    • Lambda
      March 2, 2020 @ 8:31 am

      I don’t get interpreting the Doctor’s “in the club” claim as meaning he actually goes to “the club” either, when he would obviously be bored silly and clearly just wants to tinker with technical things. He may act it convincingly like someone who does, but the simplest interpretation of that is just that the third Doctor is a good actor.

      The biggest actual “Tory Doctor” moment which I recall would be the classist “ham-fisted bun vendor” insult.

      Reply

  6. Voord 99
    March 1, 2020 @ 10:05 pm

    Since this is the one week where I cannot shut up about Ireland and Doctor Who: –

    One thing to note about UNIT is that Northern Ireland was more salient in British experience in 1971 than the Vietnam War. Britain stayed out of Vietnam, but from the very end of the ‘60s, British troops were deployed for the first time in a long while on UK soil against a domestic threat. That is by far the most prominent context in which viewers would have been used to seeing British soldiers on the six o’clock news at this time.

    1970-71 marked a critical stage in the conflict, in which the IRA attacked the British army, and the British responded with increasingly severe measures, culminating (after this programme aired) with the spectacularly counterproductive own-goal of internment.

    This is relevant not only to the military element in the Pertwee era in general but to the fact that this specific story contains a Northern Irish character (played by Harry Towb using his native accent – contrast The Seeds of Death) who is heavily coded as Unionist: McDermott is the voice of tradition and the loyal subordinate to an authoritative English figure (the elder Farrel).

    Reply

    • http://viewtraveling.com/mumbai-to-maldives-cruise
      March 14, 2020 @ 7:55 am

      The GPU choices on the new iMac, while an improvement over its pioneers, paying little regard to everything trail behind the staggering Radeon Pro Vega 56 inside the base model iMac Pro. In addition, Apple starting late reestablished the iMac Pro structure to gather decisions with a Radeon Pro Vega 64X, which gives generally more perspective force.

      Reply

  7. Paul F Cockburn
    March 3, 2020 @ 1:21 am

    So… you can’t even mention Richard Franklin by name, now?

    Reply

  8. Steve
    March 4, 2020 @ 3:17 pm

    You often find that political poseurs are literalists at heart. Does anyone still fall for the silly idea that the Doctor saying: “I was saying to him in the Club only the other day, wrong sort of chap is creeping into your lot, Tubby, I said” means (a) that he frequents gentlemen’s clubs, (b) that he’s on nickname terms with the Establishment and (c) that he’s actually met any of the Establishment?

    If so, they really need to explain how they can call the Doctor an Establishment figure when we know from The Green Death that he works as a charwoman and so must be low-paid manual working class. What? You mean he was only pretending in order to fool the gullible?

    Reply

  9. Matt Moore
    March 19, 2020 @ 7:07 pm

    Has anyone read Shock And Awe: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062279804/shock-and-awe/

    I found it fascinating…

    Reply

  10. moto x3m
    March 25, 2020 @ 6:00 am

    The more general approach is represented here, where the military is a sweet and beloved facet of a wild and youthful glam aesthetic.

    Reply

  11. Strejda
    June 13, 2021 @ 6:13 pm

    Okay, I admit I’m not great at spotting this, but I never got impression Jon Pertwee’s acting was bad? Is this something everyone thinks and just doesn’t bring up? Like, I get despising his Doctor, but I can’t say I thought he was doing bad job at playing him? Am I just dumb?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from Eruditorum Press

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading