Eruditorum Press

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Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

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.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

The Empty Hearse

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This month we’re filling in the gap between the last TARDIS Eruditorum post and the start of the Capaldi reviews by doing Sherlock Season Three on Tuesdays. These posts are sponsored by my backers at Patreon. If you enjoy this blog and want to continue seeing media criticism past the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, please consider backing.

“We’re going to lie to you,” Sherlock announced to ring in 2014, and then it went on to do just that. It had, in the tradition of fair lies, told as much well in advance. “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” And so, of course, it was. Indeed, The Empty Hearse is in effect a ninety minute exercise in arguing that the question of how Sherlock survived The Reichenbach Fall is irrelevant, or at least largely uninteresting.

To call this a bold response to one’s own iconic pop culture moment seems an understatement. And the reactions at the time are worth recalling, even if it is only a year on. First and most interesting were those who felt that The Empty Hearse was mean-spirited in its treatment of fandom, a criticism that focused especially on the depiction of slash fiction within the episode. And yet it’s difficult to quite articulate what about the portrayal of slash fans is offensive here. The only person to really mock them is Anderson, and Laura’s observation that her Sherlock/Moriarty slash is no more ludicrous than some of Anderson’s own theories is, in the context of the story’s larger attitude towards the idea of “solving” Sherlock’s survival, significant. She, at least, is in on her own joke, which Anderson never gets to be.

And it is, ultimately, the joke that’s at issue, which is where this episode’s boldness comes in. That The Empty Hearse was going to be read largely in terms of how well it resolved the cliffhanger was, of course, a foregone conclusion. You don’t get to have that kind of media coverage and then not be judged on how you stick the landing. Devoting an entire episode to it instead of, as they had with the cliffhanger of The Great Game, lampshading it with an absurdly reductive resolution was essentially a necessity. But what wasn’t necessary was making The Empty Hearse into a ninety minute exploration of what it means to resolve the cliffhanger in the first place.

Which brings us to the second reaction, the accusation that the story was self-indulgent. Which misses the point in many ways. Yes, three separate flashback sequences of “how Sherlock did it” are a bit self-indulgent, but this is clearly the purpose of the exercise. The resolution isn’t how Sherlock did it, it’s Sherlock and John making amends over a ticking time bomb, hence the cut to the “actual” explanation (which may or may not be the actual explanation, but is, one suspects, the explanation they had in mind when they filmed The Reichenbach Fall) in the middle of the climax, so as to hammer home the point about what actually matters in resolving the cliffhanger.…

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It Was On The Planet Skaro: The Doctors Revisited (Paul McGann)

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As a piece of television – as a historical artifact, say, to be observed at some future date, – this is bizarre. It can only be described as a nineteen-minute DVD featurette for the TV Movie. To some extent all of The Doctors Revisited are DVD extras, and this one is one of those ones in the rather weird tradition of trailers for a thing you’ve already decided to spend money on. “Here’s the interesting bits of what you just watched,” essentially. Except actually put before the TV Movie.

As a result, it inevitably comes off as an apologia, which, to be fair, it basically is. Moffat’s intro feels more selectively edited than usual. They have Marcus Wilson, who for a couple episodes now has seemed to be taking over for Caro Skinner in the job of being asked nicely to say something by the producer and then having the camera be turned on (I will be honest, I have no actual idea whether Skinner or Wilson were actually big Doctor Who fans who were expressing their genuine memories of the time or whether they are, like John Barrowman blatantly is, being briefed on Doctor Who lore and then put on camera), talking about how nice it is that they have Sylvester McCoy back. They have Sylvester McCoy footage on the TV Movie. The odds that they had McCoy on camera doing his party piece about how the biggest problem with the TV Movie was that he was in it are pretty high. They’re clearly doing their damndest to spin the TV Movie into a credible way to entertain yourself for ninety minutes, though I imagine they ran commercials so it was more like two and a half hours.

For what it’s worth, their defense is a good one. They set the TV Movie up to basically be read as the not entirely adequate pilot for a never-made American television series that could plausibly have evolved into something very much like the modern Doctor Who had it been allowed to run. This may or may not actually fit the reality of the production, but it works. They find enough little moments to show that are quite clever, at least. I’ll admit, I had completely forgotten the gag of the Master convincing Chang Lee that the Doctor was secretly Genghis Khan. That’s properly brilliant.

But in most regards, in hindsight, it’s what it’s not that’s significant. For one thing, it’s not a discussion of the Wilderness Years. Or, for that matter, an admission of them. This is in some ways genuinely sad, not least because they have Nicholas Briggs on there to praise Paul McGann’s performance, but Briggs never actually gets to talk about working with him and helping shape that performance, which he did for the overwhelming majority of McGann’s actual performance as the Doctor. And McGann is the only Doctor that Big Finish can say that about – most of the time Paul McGann has spent in his life performing the role of the Eighth Doctor has been for Big Finish.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 10th, 2015)

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I’ve been reading the A Song of Ice and Fire books, since I feel like I should before I start blogging that.

One chapter begins, “A white book sat on a white table in a white room.”

George R.R. Martin is no Terrance Dicks, clearly.

So, what are your impressions, thoughts, or histories with Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire? What sort of audience am I actually writing to here when I get to this next mad folly of mine?

Currently working on: The Secret Doctor Who Project and the Logopolis book

Post of the Week: Stealth Prophecy, but really the entire run of the V for Vendetta chapter so far. My concession, as it were, to clarity – I felt like I should continue the sort of frenzied high that the Swamp Thing chapter became, and just do nearly six straight posts of close-reading before crashing into an equal and opposite digression. Which starts now, obviously, and goes through… some varied and idiosyncratic places. If you like Antonin Artaud or Enid Blyton, you are going to enjoy the next few weeks. …

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Stealth Prophecy (The Last War in Albion Part 78: The End of Book Two, Europe)

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This is the sixth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore’s second book of V for Vendetta comes to a climax in a chapter entitled “Valerie,” which alternates between Evey’s apparent torture at the hands of the Norsefire regime and her reading of a letter penned by a previous prisoner of the regime telling her life story.

“With language now under surveillance he resorts to code. Stealth prophecy. Boils down oppression and resistance into glowering essences, to barbarous names.” –Alan Moore, Angel Passage

The art cuts back to Evey for the final row of panels, her face in shadow, a single tear visible, the narration returning to her instead of simply her quoting Valerie. “I know every inch of this cell,” she thinks, as she holds the scrap of toilet paper up, her face shrunken and lined with wrinkles that should be impossible for a woman who is only sixteen years old, and kisses it softly on the x. “This cell knows every inch of me.” And a final panel, her eyes and nose, weathered, single tear still suspended on her face, the edges of it simply fading out to the stark and infinite whiteness of the page. 
“Except one.”
Figure 599: Evey retains her last inch, refusing
to sign a false confession. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, in Warrior #26, 1985)
“Valerie” is followed by “The Verdict,” the last chapter of V for Vendetta to be published in Warrior. The chapter opens with Evey being offered the opportunity to confess to her “crimes” – that she was kidnapped by V, “systematically brainwashed by means of drugs and torture” and “frequently subjected to sexual abuse,” and that she aided him in “the unlawful killings of Roger Dascombe, Mr. Derek Almond, Dr. Della Surridge, and the Reverend Antony Lilliman, Bishop of Westminster,” and that “the above statement is genuine, and that it was not signed by means of intimidation.” This last statement is rather clearly untrue, however, as when she declines to send it she’s told that she’ll be taken “out behind the chemical sheds” and shot. 
Figure 600: The final page of V for Vendetta
to appear in Warrior. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from “The Verdict” in Warrior
#26, 1985)
And so Evey returns to her cell and reads Valerie’s letter again, waiting for Rossiter to come and take her to her execution. She’s given one last chance to sign the statement.
…

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Leave the Girl, It’s The Man I Want: The Doctors Revisited (Sylvester McCoy)

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It’s one of those days where, as I’m going to bed, I say “crap, I forgot to format and queue Last War in Albion, I’d better run a TARDIS Eruditorum in its place.” Whatever am I going to do in a month when I don’t have TARDIS Eruditorum for that? In any case, Last War in Albion is Friday this week.

I noted on Monday that it was an obvious mistake to ignore the fact that Moffat’s ex cathedra statements on the history of Doctor Who have always been performative, both in his cranky Internet fan days and in his “not allowed to have opinions anymore” days. Which makes the introduction to Remembrance of the Daleks at the end of this episode something to behold, in that Moffat both admits that he thought Season Twenty-Four was a disaster (which I disagree with, but recognize that Moffat is exactly the sort of Doctor Who fan for whom the panto aspects of Paradise Towers, for instance, are going to be disqualifying in considering any other merits it may have), and then frames his reaction to Remembrance of the Daleks in terms of the fact that his own television career had begun at this point. His description of cutting short a production meeting to watch Remembrance and being blown away by it is visibly Moffat speaking as an outright fan, and not as a particular performance of fan opinions that he’s putting on for a puff piece.

All three of the 80s-era episodes have felt like conscious decisions to build to the episodes they show, whether in a strangely subverting way, as with Earthshock, or as a concentrated and focused attempt to get an episode to shine, as with Vengeance on Varos. In this case, an odd weight is put on Remembrance to illustrate something that is claimed several times, but never actually displayed in any of the clips, which is that there’s a darkness to McCoy’s portrayal. The episodes used for clips here are tremendously revealing: there is not a frame from Season Twenty-Six. Everything from McCoy’s first two seasons is used save for Delta and the Bannermen, which gets photos. The emphasis is overwhelmingly on the clownish aspects of McCoy’s performance, at least in terms of what actually gets shown.

Nowhere is this clearer than the treatment of Remembrance, where the Doctor and Davros’s confrontation is shown, only it completely evades all discussion of blowing up Skaro. Instead, it focuses on McCoy’s performance of “mock the ranting bad guy,” which does lead to McCoy’s memorable description of Davros as “Hitler only rotting,” but is an approach to talking about that scene that I don’t think anyone had ever tried before. And yet the talking heads bring up the way that McCoy added mystery to the performance repeatedly, even as the clips ostentatiously lack all mention of it.

The shocking absence, of course, is the climax of The Curse of Fenric, which would have allowed them to press the fleeting claim that McCoy set up the modern Doctor in a real and sincere way.…

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Comic Reviews (January 7th, 2015)

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From worst to best, with almost everything being something I paid money for…

Miracleman #14

I say almost because I put this back on the rack at the shop. Apparently a printing error rendered key portions of the dialogue in this issue illegible. Look, I’m willing to pay $4.99 for sixteen pages of story on the grounds that it’s a high quality reproduction of a historically important comic. I think it’s a bit much, and I wish this had other formats, but it’s obviously something I’m willing to pay money for. But for fuck’s sake, Marvel. If you’re charging what you do for this book, you don’t get to have printing errors. This is properly appalling.

X-Men #23

Between frankly awful art and an overly leisurely first issue, this was quite the disappointment. G Willow Wilson on X-Men is an auto-buy for me, and I’ll stick out this arc, but man, I’d have bet on this being in the top three of any week, and certainly of a week with only six books, so this is a bit of a shocker.

Amazing Spider-Man #12

While I appreciate the “let’s do a crossover where you don’t have to buy more than the main title” to pull it off ethos of Spider-Verse, I have to say, if the way this is accomplished is having a huge swath of every issue consist of Peter Parker basically going “uhhh, fight scene, can you hang on for a moment while I take a phone call in which someone gets me up to speed on the tie-in books,” it might just be better to declare it a twenty-part crossover and tell people to buy every book.

Trees #8

If you thought the end of the first arc (and what was originally possibly to be the end of the series) was going to in some way clarify the pacing or logic of this book, you were hilariously mistaken.

Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #2

I was eating lunch while I read this comic, and the scene with Angela returning the ball nearly killed me. The rest is good fun as well – I did not expect this comic to be quite so funny, in fact, which is perhaps strange given that Gillen is co-writing it.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1

Everything I wanted from this title. Big, colorful, silly, and with tiny extra jokes printed at the bottom of most of the pages, which isn’t really a surprise given how well Ryan North uses extra punchlines over at Dinosaur Comics. A total hoot. Very much recommended.…

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Where’s Mother: The Doctor’s Revisited (Colin Baker)

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There are two observations about this special that strike me as getting to the heart of it. The first is that, more than ever, Steven Moffat is the most interesting thing on display here. I’ve been making snarky jokes here and there about it nearing the 20th anniversary of his great “slag off most of Doctor Who” drunken performance piece at a con, but it’s here we have to admit that Steven Moffat has, at the very least, played two different characters in his life when it comes to commenting on the classic series. Which one is the authentic Steven Moffat is of course a matter for debate, and if you think the answer is either of them you’re a fool, but nevertheless, we all know he’s capable of a devastating and scathing review of this era that outdoes any other.

So it’s fundamentally interesting to see him relied upon so heavily to offer a defense of this era. It is, to be sure, not hard to reconcile the positions. His praise is based on the daringness of the ideas in the Baker era, which has always been the thing you can praise about it. It would have been easy to keep Doctor Who around as wallpaper, and by god it didn’t. But it’s easy to imagine a lengthy amount of unused footage in which he points out that absolutely none of these lofty ideas play out. Nevertheless, those with a fondness for literary biography are spoiled for choice in arguing that the inspiration for the Capaldi era came from trying to redemptively read the Colin Baker era.

This brings us neatly to the second observation, which is that it gives a surprisingly thorough sense of the turmoil of this era without ever speaking the names “John Nathan-Turner,” “Eric Saward,” or “Ian Levine.” Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are both visibly at the edge of saying that there were some major problems with the era. Baker, at times, seems at pains to be much more soft-spoken, and to highlight the degree to which his Doctor was a performance.

But more to the point, there’s no attempt to shy away from The Twin Dilemma. The strangling scene is there and acknowledged. Defended by Bryant, yes, and unfortunately, but there in all its upsetting glory. Nobody quite tries to defend the coat so much as explain it. You can tell this is a problematic era, even though the program is basically positive.

And it has to be said, it makes good points. Its acknowledgment of how Baker was allowed to improve his performance in his second season is a nice touch, but I was genuinely surprised to see them make the case that the nature of his improvement was set up in The Twin Dilemma. And Moffat’s end-of-episode plug of Vengeance on Varos is an enormously emphatic thing that’s based on a tremendous respect for it as a serious piece of television. The fact that he takes the time to highlight the presence of a serious writer on Doctor Who is enormously appealing, simply because it is such a Moffat thing to focus upon.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 3rd, 2014)

21

Right. Happy 2015, then. I just wanted to give everyone an update on what we’re going to be doing around here for the year. For January and the start of February, at least, the plan is more or less as it has been. TARDIS Eruditorum on Mondays and Fridays, The Last War in Albion on Thursdays, comics reviews on Wednesdays. On three Tuesdays in January, there will also be posts on Sherlock Season Three. Those will be funded by the Patreon.

There will also be one bonus post in January, with its topic to be determined by Patreon backers, so if you want say in what I write that on, well, you know what to do.

Come February 9th, TARDIS Eruditorum will end. At that point, the weekly schedule will shuffle, but for at least a while it will be the long-promised audio commentaries on Doctor Who episodes one day, Last War in Albion another, and a third day of… something. Game of Thrones reviews, initially, but it will vary. But as long as the Patreon remains over $200 per blogpost, I’ll post something media criticism related once a week. In addition to that, I’ll do a monthly bonus post, which will go up for free, without charge to anyone.

And if the Patreon makes it to $400 per blogpost ever, I’ll go to two posts a week, still only charging for one. So basically, for $1 a week, you can ensure this blog continues indefinitely, doing something or other. It’ll vary. Game of Thrones is going to be first, but I’ve got other ideas in mind for the future, and I look forward to getting to them all.

So. What’s your New Year’s resolution?

Currently working on: The Secret Doctor Who Project.

Post of the Week: Through Powdered Teeth (The Last War in Albion Part 77: Valerie)…

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I. Oh.: The Doctors Revisited (Peter Davison)

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The entire Doctors Revisited series takes a fundamental turn here, and largely not for the better. Where the Tom Baker episode merely brought in the actor who played the Doctor as one of its primary talking heads, here the show has access to essentially all of the major stars of the era. Where the first four episodes were basically anchored by two Scottish fanboys, here Davison, Strickson, Fielding, Sutton, and Waterhouse are the stars, with Tennant and Moffat contributing only choice insights.

For this specific instance, at least, it is to the program’s detriment. The thing is, of course, that we know both Moffat and Tennant’s opinions of the Davison era, since they each, in their own ways, expressed it in “Time Crash.” Moffat, in particular, has been an outspoken defender of the Davison era for nearly twenty years now. There are hints of their impassioned defense of Davison throughout, but it’s easy to wish they’d spent a little less time spoiling all the twists of Earthshock right before they showed it and a little more time fleshing out the initial claim that Davison brought “believability” to the part.
And yet it’s equally worth noting what isn’t here. Nobody is being snarky. Davison and Fielding, in particular, have been positively withering about aspects of their time on the program elsewhere, but here both of them give thoroughly enthused performances. Nobody says anything nasty about Adric or the effects. The only thing anyone giggles at is the celery. As we turn the corner into 1980s Doctor Who, there’s not a hint that they’re entering a problem area. Indeed, people were generally more willing to laugh at the Troughton and Pertwee eras than they are this.
The result, though, is soulless. The era is presented as good, but without the clear case for what was good about it that the first four installments made. It feels like people mumbling bland platitudes and explaining the plots of thirty year old television episodes, which, of course, it is, just like the first four installments, but they did much better jobs of covering that. And we should, perhaps, wonder what bits of interview got left on the cutting room floor.
Which does rather bring us back to Earthshock. It was inevitable, of course, that we were going to get this or The Caves of Androzani, and while one might have hoped for the latter, you kind of knew it had to be this. And in some ways that’s good. We complained that Spearhead From Space made it too easy on the Pertwee era. The same could easily have been said about Caves of Androzani, and it really can’t of Earthshock, which strays into camp in more ways than just Beryl Reid. And while nobody introduces the episode that way, the fact that they hype its surprises while simultaneously spoiling both of them does, shall we say, set up a few other surprises for audiences for whom this is an introduction to history.
…

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Through Powdered Teeth (The Last War in Albion Part 77: Valerie)

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Last War in Albion will now be running on Thursdays.

This is the fifth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore’s second book of V for Vendetta largely sidelined the title character in favor of focusing on Evey Hammond, the girl he rescued in the first chapter.

“We gasped upon Devonian beaches, huddled under Neolithic stars. Spat blood through powdered teeth, staining each other as we kissed. Always we loved. How could we otherwise, when you are so like me, my sweet, but in a different guise?” – Alan Moore, The Mirror of Love
Figure 584: The title character makes a fleeting appearance in
Book Two, tacitly answering Gordon’s question. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “Variety” in Warrior #19, 1984)
The next few chapters focus on her life with Gordon up until he’s killed when a deal goes wrong and she attempts to avenge him before apparently being arrested. The most interesting of these is probably Chapter Six, “Variety,” which takes place within The Kitty-Kat Keller, a gentleman’s club in which an unnamed dancer goose-steps to a fascist cabaret song (“So if some blonde and blue eyed boy / would care to teach me strength through joy / and see that all my liberal tendencies are cured; / if it should be decreed by fate / that you invade my neighbouring state / then you will find my frontiers open, rest assured.”) as Evey observes the various patrons: Rose Almond being tossed out because her card is overdrawn, an associate of Gordon’s named Robert being told by Almond’s replacement at the Finger that he’ll no longer be honoring their deal to keep his elderly mother out of a home (“Homes? They’re gas chambers!” Robert exclaims, to which Creedy responds, “Not gas. If you want the truth, Robert, there’s just three good South Ken boys with iron bars.”), and another associate from Scotland named Ally Harper, who will turn out to be Gordon’s murderer next chapter. This selection of petty and everyday degradations offers a perspective not really seen yet within V for Vendetta, one that pays off its original conception as a 1930s mystery strip in the noir tradition, and culminates in Robert having a breakdown, shouting to the bar that “we shouldn’t have to live like this” and that “I wish the bastard bomb had ‘it bastard London. That’s what I wish. I wish we were all dead!” at which point the Fingermen in the bar surround him and beat him.
…

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