Saturday Waffling (January 17th, 2014)
As we exit the season where it’s an appropriate question, what were your favorite pieces of media of 2014? Films, TV shows, comics, books, music, video games, plays, whatever.…
Elizabeth Sandifer
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Bye: The Doctors Revisited (Christopher Eccleston)
It’s surprising how easily this era slips into history. On the one hand, there is nothing being said here that was not said in DVD commentaries and Doctor Who Confidential ten years ago, often by the same people. And yet there is none of the breathless self-promotion of Confidential, which is what this most obviously resembles. The imminent, thrilling need to celebrate the basic existence of Doctor Who is absent. Just as the tail end of the classic series was drained of all its conflict, this is drained of all its triumph.
For those who remember what the Eccleston series actually felt like as it happened – that is, classic series fans – this is slightly disorienting. Eccleston is basically explained as “he was a Doctor for the 21st century and not quite what anyone expected.” And yet the scenes shown are exactly the ones you’d expect, with no real oddities among them. In marked contrast to the McCoy era, where we spent bizarre amounts of time on Time and the Rani, here we get Eccleston’s Emmy reel.
The issue, one quickly realizes, is that this is essentially the first time these set pieces of the “Doctor Who Season One as vital text in television history” argument have been done without Russell T Davies, who continued his politely silent 2013. And, of course, Eccleston is absent as well. As with the McGann episode, there’s a hole in the middle of this narrative.
It is worth noting that there is actually some suspense at this point in time. This went out on September 29th, the day after it was announced that there would be a trailer soon for Day of the Doctor, but nearly two months after the announcement of Peter Capaldi. “What is Doctor Who these days” was an astonishingly relevant question, with, at that moment in time, essentially three Doctors besides the incumbent having some sort of active “what’s going on with” question, one who’d never appeared, and one who’d only had a minute of speaking time.
The result was a historical moment where there was a past/present line on what Doctor Who was that Eccleston was exactly on the wrong side of. Which was at the time useful. Doctor Who was not a young series – it was already into season numbers well higher than most shows get, and it was at the time highly visible that it was a half-century old. Finding ways to justify calling your “this is where you should start watching” point as recent as possible mattered. So declaring Eccleston to be history was an easy decision to make.
And he’s history by his own choosing, admittedly – we should remember that the entire landscape of Doctor Who would have looked different right now had Eccleston been in Day of the Doctor, or, at least, certainly this special would have. But no, right now the scale of Doctor Who is very much 2006-14. And all of this is bluntly literalized in the closing moments of Moffat’s introduction to Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways, when he mentions the fleeting appearance of David Tennant as a highlight.…
Dolorous Hissings and Poisons (The Last War in Albion Part 79: Europe a Prophecy, Anarchy)
This is the seventh 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: The radical and anarchic spirit of V for Vendetta resembled that of William Blake, particularly in his Continental Prophecies, the second of which was Europe a Prophecy
“With dolorous hissings & poisons Round Enitharmons loins folding, Coild within Enitharmons womb The serpent grew casting its scales.” – William Blake, The Book of Urizen
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| Figure 606: Vala hiding beneath the ground. (William Blake, Europe a Prophecy, Copy K, Object 4, Written 1794, printed 1821) |
Vala opens Europe a Prophecy by railing against Enitharmon, asking her, “wilt thou bring forth other sons? To cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found.” She speaks of how she, “sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine” looks up at heaven and the stars and seizes “their burning power” so she can “bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings. Devouring & devour’d roaming on dark and desolate mountains In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.” But Enitharmon, she claims, foils her in this. “I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames,” she says, “and thou dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad and leave me void as death.” But the prelude ends with a strange sense of hope, with the shadowy female asking “who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? To compass it with swaddling bands? and who shall cherish it With milk and honey? I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past.”
This prelude poses an interesting ambiguity, especially when taken in light of the remainder of Europe a Prophecy and, for that matter, of Blake’s mythology. Vala/the shadowy female is not generally a positive figure, but rather an embodiment of nature (itself a complex concept within Blake’s system), and a warlike death goddess. She speaks of her nature, saying “my roots are brandish’d in the heavens, my fruits in earth beneath Surge, foam, and labour into Life, first born & first consum’d! Consumed and consuming!” Ultimately, she will prove responsible for Albion’s fall. And yet it is difficult not to see her as a sympathetic figure in this exchange with Enitharmon – her revolutionary, destructive spirit is the obvious tonic to Urizen’s ghastly order. And it is worth stressing that it is Blake’s most famous image of Urizen, as the Ancient of Days, that serves as the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, a fact that further strengthen’s Vala’s moral legitimacy.
Comics Reviews (January 14th, 2015)
Worst to best, everything I paid money for.
Also, boo to Marvel for not reprinting Miracleman #14. As someone who has paid $65 towards getting a full run of Miracleman in single issue form, I find the fact that they’ve decided to just not release a readable version of one of the best issues in the run a slap in the face. What, would it just not be a run of Miracleman without completely fucking up at some point? Moore was wise not to have his name on this shitshow.
Rat Queens Special: Bragga #1
I’ve not been excited about this book in a bit, and so came at this as a sort of “why am I pulling you again” issue, since a one-off special ought be a good place to showcase the book’s strengths. This was competent but doesn’t seem to have anything new to say over the last few issues, and I think I’ll drop it.
Captain Marvel #11
I’ve more or less enjoyed DeConnick’s Captain Marvel, and I like the basic idea of the character and DeConnick’s approach, but I haven’t felt excited by the book in a while, and I think this is my jumping off point. I thought the “let’s do an issue back on Earth” was going to be a great premise. Instead it’s mostly concerned with stopping a kind of two-bit villain from the end of DeConnick’s Avengers Assemble run. With both this and Rat Queens, I have the sense that the writers had a brilliant miniseries worth of concept, and are wasting it on a pretty good extended run.
SHIELD #2
Will not be adding this. I see what it’s going for, and the ending is sweet. Waid is good at this sort of book – I remain fond of his unloved The Brave and the Bold at DC. But it’s not grabbing me, and even Kamala Khan, who looks a strong contender for “most important new Marvel character of the last ten years,” doesn’t enliven this much, in part as I’m not massively sold on her characterization by Waid.
Daredevil #12
As I’ve said, we’re into the tail end of this run, and it’s best ideas are used. This is fine and fun, and I’ll read it to the end. Was a great Daredevil run. But I’m not going to miss it when that end comes.
Star Wars #1
Adequate. I’m not much of a Star Wars fan, but this is solidly written and paced. It seems to cover the same basic conceptual ground as Brian Wood’s Star Wars series late in the Dark Horse license. But it’s well done. I’m mostly sticking around because it’s got a Kieron Gillen series to tie into, though.
Silver Surfer #8
I’m interested to see how this plays out, which is good for the first issue of a storyline, but equally, it’s the sort of plot that tends to go very wrong for me when it goes wrong. Still, we’re getting Michael Allred-drawn Galactus next issue, and that’s exciting no matter how you slice it.…
The Empty Hearse
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.…
It Was On The Planet Skaro: The Doctors Revisited (Paul McGann)
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.…
Saturday Waffling (January 10th, 2015)
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. …
Stealth Prophecy (The Last War in Albion Part 78: The End of Book Two, Europe)
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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
Leave the Girl, It’s The Man I Want: The Doctors Revisited (Sylvester McCoy)
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.…
Comic Reviews (January 7th, 2015)
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.…