Eruditorum Press

Devoid of both military and civilian applications.

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.

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The Green One and the Not-Green One (The Crimson Horror)

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I don’t know that I’d call it a crimson horror, really. Really, it’s
more a rosy horror. Incarnadine horror at best.
It’s May 4th, 2013. Daft Punk have gotten lucky and made it to number one. Calvin Harris, Nelly, Macklemore, and, in a stunning feat of horror, will.i.am and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, James McCormick is jailed for ten years for selling fake bomb detectors, Labour and UKIP do well in local elections, and three more people are arrested over the Boston Marathon bombings. 
On television, meanwhile, The Crimson Horror, which is very possibly the most self-evident pairing of writer and concept in the history of Doctor Who. More than hiring David Whitaker to handle introducing a new Doctor over a backdrop of Daleks, more than giving Paul Cornell the small and personal story in the debut series, more even than giving Malcolm Hulke the giant lizards story, tapping Mark Gatiss to write the Victorian penny dreadful is simply a case of hiring a man to do what he’s good at. 
And correspondingly, in many regards The Crimson Horror is exactly what you’d expect. A ranting villain, a classic Doctor Who plot, broad gags. But as with Cold War, the details on this are all spot on. Yes, you’ve got a standard issue raving lunatic Doctor Who villain, but she’s played by Diana Rigg, whose appetite for scenery is gloriously boundless. (Surely there’s not a single person on the planet who does not love the line “the wrong hands.”) Strax irrevocably hits the “one note joke” point here, yes, but he also has his best gag with “horse, you have failed in your mission,” and to be fair, the bit where Vastra sends him outside because he’s gotten overexcited is, in fact, a new trick for the character, even if it’s basically the last one he ever gets. Neve McIntosh relishes getting to be the Doctor for a large swath of the story. The period stuff all looks great. And there are some lovely directorial flourishes, most notably the grainy film look used for the Doctor’s flashback exposition of how he got captured. 
And, yes, Gatiss deserves some specific praise here. This is not necessarily a story that’s long on logic, but everything moves along gracefully by dint of the fact that all the elements just go well together. And that speaks to a slyly good sense of judgment on Gatiss’s part. There’s no obvious reason why bright red bodies, the eyes of the dead holding images, Diana Rigg ranting, and Victorian finery should magically click together so as to make a coherent story in the absence of any significant plot logic, but they absolutely do. The Crimson Horror was never a contender for season-best, but it was tremendous fun when it aired – much more fun than you’d expect given that it seems like it should be very standard issue.
Indeed, this is the first story of Season 7B to be almost completely unfazed by the passage of more than a year since it aired.
…

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Reviews (December 17th, 2014)

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So, just reviews this week, because I want to open with music, as Seeming has a new album out called Silent DiscoVery, so let’s start with that.

It’s a discipline worth maintaining, I increasingly feel, to remain aggressively plugged into the rhythms and promotional cycle of pop media. Television and comics both work well for this, but given that the entire rhetoric of “pop media” comes from music, one really ought to have at least one. For me, it’s Seeming, for a variety of reasons. Yes, Alex is a dear friend, and Aaron’s a lovely bloke as well. Yes, it really does help with the “stay plugged into the immense nowness of pop” thing when Alex sends you a new demo every couple of weeks. (I’ve been rocking out to the lead single off the next release for months now.)

Also, I love it. I just unabashedly fucking love the stuff Alex is doing right now, and I want everybody to listen to it. It’s at once well plugged in to current pop culture concerns (it’s a wonderful time for eschatology and utopian nihilism) and vibrantly idiosyncratic. So, new album, very exciting, let’s talk about what it says.

Silent DiscoVery is the outtakes album from his brilliant Madness and Extinction. If you’ve not bought or at least listened to that album, please do. It’s streaming free on Bandcamp here. It’s worth checking out. And if you’ve not listened to it… well, Silent DiscoVery isn’t necessarily the place to start, although it’s worth checking out some of the songs.

But that’s outtakes albums for you – their entire conceit, in the end, is that they’re the stuff that didn’t quite work on the album proper. That doesn’t mean not good enough, certainly. But every track on an outtakes album, by its very existence, opens up a fan debate on “was this rightly excluded from the album?” Tellingly, the answer, for all ten of these songs, is “because they were great ideas that belonged on a different album” and not “because they weren’t good enough.”

So, for instance, the first track, “Everything,” is a great song. Brilliant, sweeping, epic, all sorts of fun. Only problem is that it’s not quite as good as “Everything Could Change,” and the two songs not only have similar titles, they have musically similar endings, and you just can’t put both of them on the same album. So to the outtake pile this gem goes. (I’ve been loving the line “do you see your reflection when my glass is dark” for years, though actually, at the time of writing, it’s “did you know birds and metal outlive the likes of you” that’s stuck on a loop in my head.)

Elsewhere you’ve got “Bayonet,” which is a great song for Alex’s previous band, ThouShaltNot, but that flounders ever so slightly as a Seeming song. And “Name Those Stars,” a peppy little number with a synth line that sounds uncannily like the bass hook from John Linnell’s “South Carolina,” and that, perhaps more importantly, is just a little too peppy and too upbeat for an album called Madness and Extinction.…

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An Unruly Torrent (The Last War in Albion Part 75: Violence and Versions)

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This is the third 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: Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta included some of his earliest uses of one of his signature techniques, that of paralleling narration or dialogue from one scene with images from another to highlight the contrast.

“Institutions and authorities designed for the far simpler reality of just a hundred years ago have burst their banks; have found their timeworn principles inadequate to a flash influx of insight and revelation, an unruly torrent carrying us all struggling towards the edge of a Niagra future in amidst our driftwood debris of outmoded ideologies.” – Alan Moore, birthday greetings to Chelsea Manning

Figure 570: V’s quotations from Macbeth in
the first installment resonate with his actions
in rescuing Evey. (Written by Alan Moore, art
by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior
#1, 1982)
But “Virtue Victorious” does not use its contrast for comedy, or, at least, not for any straightforward comedy, and the point is not the contrast between the bishop’s words and the images, but the way in which the two intersect and resemble each other. The bishop is praying for divine forgiveness for the child molestation he’s about to commit, but when he speaks of “the evil one who is surely come amongst us in this, the hour of our greatest trial,” the images of V fighting his way through the guards give clear double meaning to these words. The sequence is of course not unprecedented – it is in many ways simply a refinement of the technique Moore was using back in the first installment, where he had V quoting Macbeth while slicing his way through the Fingermen threatening Evey. But the refinement is in this case significant, with the text and images in “Virtue Victorious” coming from two distinct scenes that are allowed, in effect, to play simultaneously. As the comic went on, Moore grew even more confident, eventually doing away with most of the dialogue and words entirely and giving Lloyd stretches of pages at a time in which the storytelling is entirely visual, or where, to use an example from Book Two, a chapter in which the only dialogue comes from television broadcasts playing out in the background. These are in some ways small potatoes compared to the expansive formal and stylistic experiments that Moore would later become known for, but nevertheless, the advancement within the course of the serial is significant, and it’s not surprising that Moore refers to the comic as “one of the first real major breakthroughs I made in terms of my own personal style.”
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Now Just a Moment: The Doctors Revisited (Tom Baker)

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That this should prove so difficult is in many ways revealing. First, we should start with what this isn’t, which is an account of Tom Baker as the definitive Doctor. Satisfyingly, this isn’t accomplished with some deconstruction. This is unabashed hagiography – just not to the exclusion of other eras. The result is on a basic level satisfying: the joy that is Tom Baker’s Doctor is celebrated, but without the distorting effect that the era sometimes has.

But it’s curious that there’s no real attention given to the sheer span of Baker’s tenure. Indeed, what really jumps out about this is that Baker’s tenure is reduced almost entirely to its first half. There’s some clips from City of Death, and K-9 makes the companion list, but for the most part there’s not a breath of acknowledgment of anything that wasn’t part of the Hinchcliffe era. Romana isn’t mentioned outside of the City of Death clips. Davros is talked about entirely in terms of Genesis of the Daleks. The other stories to get decent clips are Terror of the Zygons, Robot, Talons of Weng-Chiang, and The Ark in Space.

It’s not full-out erasure, and there’s certainly no overt misrepresentations, but it’s strange to see the Hinchcliffe-only take on Tom Baker, simply because it opens a weird gap in the chronology of this – there’s a chunk as long as the Hartnell or Troughton eras that’s all but cut from the official history.

Some of that is a product of the focus only on actors. The good old “gothic horror to comedy” transition that is part of the history of the program through this era is, fair enough, outside the remit of The Doctors Revisited. And the aspects of the Doctor’s character that are focused on are mainly the more comedic ones, so in a way, even if all the examples are Hinchcliffe-era, it’s the Williams-era version of the character that’s remembered. Which has kind of always been the case.

But another way of putting that is that this is account is almost completely uninterested in the stories. Tom Baker’s performance consumes everything around it, even today. The fact that this is the first installment of The Doctor’s Revisited to have the Doctor in question on hand to interview adds to that, although the actual use of Tom Baker tends to be as a slightly unreliable narrator of his own era. But the focus is very firmly on the character, which Tom Baker as good as says at the beginning, when he admits that the line between himself and his character got blurred.

None of this is helped by the choice of stories to show afterwards. The Pyramids of Mars is not a bad story, although its fourth episode is a bit of a mess. But it’s a tragically safe choice, and it’s telling that Moffat, in introducing it, finds himself mostly talking about Tom Baker’s performance once again before adding a few sentences about how the story’s pretty good.…

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The Advantage of my Antiquated TARDIS (Journey to the Center of the TARDIS)

63

I’ll be honest, I don’t have anything funny to say about this image.
I was just scrolling through the Google Image Search for this episode
and thought “you know, that is pretty…”
If you missed it, we had a post on The Game yesterday.

It’s April 27th, 2013. Rudimental is at number one with “Waiting All Night,” with will.i.am, Daft Punk, Nelly, Pink, and Psy also charting, the latter not with “Gangnam Style.” In news, the US stock market loses 1% of its value momentarily due to the AP Twitter feed getting hacked and releasing false news of a terrorist attack injuring President Obama, and, erm, that’s about it. 

On television, it’s Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. As with much of Season Seven, it’s strange how a year has changed this. At the time, it seemed an oddly disjointed story that was in need of another draft. Now… well, it still seems like that, admittedly. The “they convinced their brother he was a robot” twist is infamously absurd, although I admit, I’ve always felt like it’s a marvelous return to the completely bonkers legacy of a program that was unafraid to be ridiculous. I admit that I’ve never quite gotten over the moment, about half an hour in, when I was completely convinced the time zombies were going to turn out to be an origin story of the Silence (of course they’re forged in an exploding TARDIS!), only to have a wildly less interesting reveal. And the fact that the story can be summarized as “the TARDIS is hijacked by a bunch of black men because the Doctor let a woman drive” is, to say the least, unfortunate. 
And, of course, it is the story in which the complaint that Moffat is fond of reset buttons really does acquire legs. This is one of those cases where the one time something really doesn’t work ends up making all the times it did weirdly conspicuous and slightly suspect. It is true that there are a solid few times that Moffat does the “and at the end of the story we undo everything that happened” trick, but generally he avoids the extent to which this is a frustrating twist that’s too similar to “it was all a dream” by making it so that our main characters remember it both ways, allowing the significant consequences of the adventure to still count. Yes, The Big Bang and The Wedding of River Song both get undone at the end, but notably, they don’t get undone for any of the major characters within them. 
That’s not, unfortunately, how this one works. Journey to the Center of the TARDIS completely undoes the adventure for Clara. Which is immensely frustrating, because it actually has some very good character development for her. On one level, this is just a crass delaying tactic. It’s a way for the season to have its cake and eat it too, paying lip service to developing the Impossible Girl arc further and, in effect, spending a whole episode rehearsing the finale.
…

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The Game and How Toby Whithouse Lost It

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This essay was kindly sponsored by my Patreon campaign. If you’d like to support coverage of Last Christmas, a January series of essays on Sherlock Season Three, and the future of this blog after the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, please consider backing it.

Right, I suppose I should start with what this thing is and why I want to write about it. The Game is Toby Whithouse’s six episode 1970s-set spy drama, seemingly originally intended to be a big BBC production before never quite making it to the schedule and making its debut on BBC America, where it got next to no coverage and largely sunk like a stone. To some extent, this last fact is what interests me about it. When announced, it felt like Whithouse’s audition piece: his big BBC One drama with which he’d become the inevitable successor to Steven Moffat. But between his absence from both 2013 and 2014’s Doctor Who and the fact that this basically landed flat on its face, the landscape has changed, such that Whithouse has largely fallen away as the heir apparent. And since this really looks like it’s going to disappear without much of a trace, that seems worth documenting.

So, first, because I assume essentially none of you have seen it, the basics. The Game follows an elite MI-5 team as they investigate a seemingly massive Russian operation involving sleeper agents in the UK. You’ve got a pretty standard set of stock characters. Brian Cox is charming as MI-5 head “Daddy,” Paul Ritter is the poorly closeted gay high society type, Chloe Pirrie is the secretary who proves terribly competent and eventually becomes an agent in her own right, Victoria Hamilton is what in a more modern-set show would be the profiler, Jonathan Aris is her autism-spectrum husband and audio specialist, Shaun Dooley is a cop assigned to MI-5, and Tom Hughes is the protagonist, Joe Lambe, who was blatantly cast on the principle of “cast me somebody who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch only a decade younger.” Over the course of the story, it becomes obvious that someone’s a mole. Is it Joe Lambe, whose loyalties have been questioned since a botched operation a year ago that resulted in the death of his lover, and who has old scores to settle now?

No, it’s totally Sarah, Victoria Hamilton’s character, which is in hindsight obvious because she’s the only one of the set who isn’t a blatant cliche, so clearly she has to turn out to be a femme fatale in the end.

This is making The Game sound like it’s excessively easy to mock, which, to be fair, it in many ways is. The 1970s espionage setting means that it’s unabashedly competing with two of the great heavyweights of British television drama: the BBC adaptations John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, and The Sandbaggers, an ITV number that famously only ran for three seasons when its creator Ian Mackintosh disappeared, prompting endless conspiracy theories suggesting that Mackintosh, a former Royal Navy officer, had revealed something he shouldn’t have on the show.…

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Comics Reviews (12/10/14)

, 4

Worst to best, everything good enough to buy. Second Thursday post coming later in the day, btw – had hoped to have it ready by the usual 5am EST, but ended up having a more eventful Wednesday than I’d budgeted for.

Batgirl #37

Other than the kind of nasty transphobic streak, this is a marvelous issue. Pity about the kind of nasty transphobic streak, then. It’s thoroughly sickening, and serves as an unpleasant reminder that underneath the hood, this is still a New 52-era DC comic, with all the thudding “comics for boys” that this implies. Strictly on storytelling, this would be higher on the list, but I just can’t.

Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #1

Had this come out before Original Sin, it would have been a perfectly nice, fun, lightweight story, albeit one that in no way needed thirty-three pages to tell. (Frank Cho’s a fine and dynamic artist, but the book is saturated with big panels to the point where they stop having any impact.) Unfortunately, it came out after Original Sin, and so is instead a painfully predictable lightweight story that in no way needed thirty-three pages to tell.

Uncanny X-Men Annual #1

Part one of a two-part story filling in an old mystery of how Eva Bell, a character I only vaguely have a handle on who is, aged several years in a time travel accident. Some predictable beats, though the “seven years later” jump is clever. But one does rather suspect, if only because it’s how Bendis tends to work, that the second half of this is going to be the issue that carries the weight.

Avengers #39

A fine comic, although there’s something very strange about Reed Richards giving advice on “making plans and the proper execution thereof” to someone who is currently being fostered by Doctor Doom.

Thor #3

I feel like Aaron’s Thor run suffers occasionally from being unable or unwilling to quite make up its mind whether it wants to be epic or a bit wryly funny and personal. At its best, it’s… wryly funny and personal, and the thought bubbles approach to the new Thor is marvelous – I absolutely adore her character. Still, I want answers and flesh, not mystery. Still, glad we’re doing the inevitable Thor vs Thor next issue, if only so we can move on to the less inevitable stuff.

The Amazing Spider-Man #11

After a rough second installment, Spider-Verse gets back on track here. The relationship to the spin-offs is still a bit rough – I don’t think I’ve ever read a crossover that feels quite this insistent on spending time selling me the auxiliary books. But there are moments of real charm and wit here, and three issues in the mythos of the crossover is starting to actually stick for me.

Supreme Blue Rose #5

I remain happy to be along for the ride on this deliciously strange bit of Warren Ellis comic. I’d wonder if it’s any good, but it seems beside the point.…

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Daleks On The Streets (The Last War in Albion Part 74: Europe after the Reign)

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This is the second 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: Alan Moore’s first five pages of V for Vendetta ended with the title character and the young girl Evey atop a roof, conversing…

“We would look out of the window every morning to make sure the bitch hadn’t put Daleks on the streets yet.” – Warren Ellis, on Margaret Thatcher
Figure 562: The explosion of the Houses of Parliament. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior
#1, 1982)
This leaves only Moore’s sixth and most audacious page. It opens with an extreme close-up on the man, so that only one slit eye of his mask and its painted black curl of an eyebrow is visible. He intones the aforementioned rhyme: “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason,” he continues, and at once, at for any of the readership for whom the mere shape and visual of his outfit and mask was not sufficient to identify the character he is playing, he stands revealed as a man dressed in a Guy Fawkes costume. As he provides the final three iambs of his rhyme, “should ever be forgot,” the tacit promise of this costume is suddenly and triumphantly realized. The panel displays the man from behind, so that the audience looks over his shoulder towards the Houses of Parliament, which are in the midst of exploding. The remains of what was once the clock tower burst outwards, black fragments shattering against the white background of the explosion, the circles of the clock faces still implied in the negative space of the devastation. This is followed by another extremely narrow panel, showing the girl’s shocked reaction with a close-up of one bulging eye – notably the left one, where the man’s eye two panels earlier was the right, implicitly constructing a completed face framing the destruction of London’s single most iconic landmark. “The Houses of Parliament,” the girl exclaims. “Did you do that?” 
Figure 563: The artist signs his work. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David
Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982)
“I did that,” the man replies simply. And as he does, the narrative captions return: “the rumble of the explosion has not yet died away as from far below comes the rattle of smaller reports. And suddenly the sky is alight with…” it trails off, and the trail of thought is continued by the girl, looking up joyfully at the sky and shouting, “fireworks!
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A Dark Secret After The Candle is Out (Hide)

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You mean the episode isn’t about taxidermy?
It’s April 20th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one with “Need U (100 Percent,” with Nelly, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, and the Wizard of Oz Film Cast also charting. Wonder how that happened. In news, two bombs are detonated at the Boston Marathon, killing three people. One of the bombers is arrested a few days later – the other is killed in a police firefight. Everyone is far angrier about this than the explosion of a storage facility in Texas owned by the West Fertilizer Company, which killed fifteen people, and was due largely to corporate negligence and not angry teenagers. Weird how that works.
On television, meanwhile, we have Hide, which, within the context of Season Seven, begs to be read as the definitive haunted house story. But what does this mean? The haunted house, as a symbol, speaks of the decay of history. The haunted house is always a mansion: a monument to opulence and privilege. And yet it always marks the places where that privilege has rotted away and become twisted. This rot is, inevitably, caused by history: by some event that cannot be moved past. A haunting, in other words, is caused by a past event that is at once the end of a historical progression (inasmuch as all that can follow it is its own anguished reiteration) and nevertheless buried beneath the historical progression that happened anyway. 
In a previous discussion of haunted houses, we identified the image of the lens – a geometric figure created by two arcs – as crucial to understanding history within Doctor Who. The haunted house, then, is a cracked lens – a figure created by one complete arc (history’s progress) and a broken arc (the traumatic event). Where the usual lens of history serves as a vision that entombs history between the twin poles of start and finish, the haunted house suggests a lack of completion – it suggests that history eventually peters out and collapses inward, becoming a festering wound. 
And yet it also has to be noted that Caliburn House breaks the rules of haunted houses. There is, in fact, no historical trauma to be had. The ghost, far from being an object from the past, is in fact, a time traveller from the future. In this sense, the completed arc of the haunted house’s broken lens is in fact absent. But in another sense, the lens is still cracked – its just that the broken part is not the progress into the future, but the idea that events are rooted in the past. None of the causes of Caliburn House’s haunting have actually happened. There is no past moment to be stuck on. Indeed, nothing is stuck at all – the haunting is not a repeated trauma, but a single moment that plays out over the entirety of history. The definitive haunted house story, in other words, doesn’t actually have a haunted house in it.
Except that it does.
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