Eruditorum Press

No ideas but in Swamp Thing

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:

A Good Dalek (Asylum of the Daleks)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as Oswin Oswald.
If you missed it, the latest volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is out. Print availability glitched yesterday, but it’s now fixed and available for ordering. My apologies for the screwup.
It’s October 14th, 2014, and this goes up in eleven hours. It’s a bit of a late start. My fault. People were wrong on the Internet.
If you’re reading this in the blog version, this is the first regular-season Moffat story to be placed in the proper order since The Beast Below, a tactic that has had the effect of jumbling the narrative of his stewardship of the program, slightly obscuring the business of actually making history out of it. If you’re reading this in the book version, this sentence will have a better ending reflecting whatever my final decision is on how to do the River entries there. (I’m kind of unhappy with the idea of the Tennant book not having Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and with the Smith book lacking Name of the Doctor. And if the conceit of the entries works out, ultimately reading the River Song entries in their correct places ought to work just as well as scrambling them.) 
It’s not the best time to be writing this, honestly – a statement with sly double meaning given that the real deadline is three hours, as that’s when Jill comes home from work and we need to head to bed, because it’s another 5am wakeup tomorrow. God help me, I’m on days. But what I mean is on October 14th, 2014, with what are probably just four more episodes of Clara’s story to air. Here I have to tackle the first part, and there’s an impossibly large amount of potential foreshadowing that might be worth highlighting. To pick just one possible example – something that could turn out to be a meaningless blip, or could turn out to be a major thematic point: Clara quite literally makes a good Dalek. Who knows what else there is. 
This is a characteristic of Moffat’s plotting, and is worth unpacking. There’s a popular theory within media criticism that says that, when plotting an extended storyline in a serialized medium, you should know where you’re going when you start. This, after all, helps with that whole Aristotelean unity thing. If you know the ending, you can set it up at the beginning. Many people – Alan Moore still visibly holds a grudge over this – say that’s what was wrong with Lost all along: that they were making it up as they go along. And yet there’s clearly an extent to which this is not true. I’ve been leafing through The From Hell Companion lately, and it’s full of amusing anecdotes highlighting the ways in which From Hell did and didn’t unfold according to a set design, and how Moore’s conception of it changed based on what Campbell did with the art. Yes, there are many ways in which the broad strokes were in place from the start, and even many specific details, but there was also lots that changed along the way.
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Book Launch of Fang Rock

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The screwup with the print version is resolved, and it is back on sale. Sorry for the glitch. Details in comments.

The blog version of TARDIS Erudiorum will run on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Today, some long overdue good news.

The latest volume of the TARDIS Eruditorum book series is now for sale. You can get it at the following locations.

US: Kindle, Print
UK: Kindle, Print
Smashwords (For non-Kindle e-readers)

It’ll be popping up on other ebook stores over the next couple days/weeks, including Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and iBooks. I make the same royalty off of all of the channels linked, so whichever one is most convenient for you is the one to go with. Previous volumes are available at the same sites, although the nature of the books is to be pretty self-contained, so if this is an era that interests you, don’t worry about the first four volumes.

This one covers the back four years of the Tom Baker era, primarily the Williams years, but also the first year of John Nathan-Turner’s run, covering everything from The Horror of Fang Rock through Logopolis. It thus contains:

  • Revised and expanded versions of every relevant essay, including all the Pop Between Realities, Time Can Be Rewritten, and other side trips of the era, and the gargantuan Kabbalistic Choose Your Own Adventure essay that is “Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis),” now with actual page-turning or clicking around. 
  • A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities post on Target, the show Graham Williams was poached from, and Philip Hinchcliffe was placed on following Season Fourteen of Doctor Who. 
  • Book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on Big Finish’s The Auntie Matter and BBC Books’ Festival of Death
  • An essay exploring the Guardians’ role in Doctor Who “canon.”
  • An essay on the John Nathan-Turner era and whether it was a complete and utter disaster.
  • A second “Now My Doctor” essay on Tom Baker, exploring what makes these latter years of his era so good.
  • An essay entitled “The Shada Variations” looking at the numerous attempts to complete Douglas Adams’s great unfinished story.
And then there’s one more essay, which I’m very, very proud to announce – a twenty page interview with Gareth Roberts on the Williams era, his love of it, how he’s approached writing stories set in it, and his thoughts on its continual influence.
It also includes what is, for my money, the best cover James Taylor (not that one) has ever done for me – a stunning homage to 70s science fiction novels that he explains his process for here. He’s also got a set of desktop wallpapers made of the cover for those of you who love it enough to want to cover it with your messy collection of folders and icons. Please, go have a look, as his work really is fantastic.
Thanks also to Alison Campbell and Millie Hadziomerovic, who provided copy-editing this time.
To answer obvious questions, the Logopolis book is coming along nicely.
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Mummy on the Orient Express Review

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This review was brought to you by 165 backers on Patreon, who would be very happy if you joined them.

Right. Haven’t even looked at Twitter or e-mail, because they’re both slightly overwhelming, but GallifreyBase, well after both UK and US airings, is 82.66% in the 8-10 range, with 9 being the most popular pick, so this is apparently a popular one. To me, it is, in many regards, something of a baseline episode. It’s not a season highlight, largely because nothing in it ever soars to outright greatness. But it keeps things lively and never screws up. It’s the sort of episode that’s why I ultimately opted against letter grades – because any season of television is going to have a few like this.
What’s interesting to me, though, is that there’s been virtually nothing this season that seems to set out to be baseline. There are things that work better than others, but everything has at least tried to do something new. The only episode you can really accuse of trying to be ultra-traditional is Robot of Sherwood, and it came early enough in the running order that it was innovative in the way that turning a new actor loose on old standards can be in Doctor Who. Other than that, though, the M.O of this season has been trying to find something fresh. Whether it be a new twist on an old standard (The Caretaker, Listen) or something that Doctor Who’s just never really done before (Time Heist, Kill the Moon), the idea has been a real return to Doctor Who being a show that does things that haven’t been done before.
Not everything can be the best. But one really doesn’t get the sense that anything this season has been content to give up trying to be the best at the outset. Everything is trying its damnedest to be the shock favorite. It’s why I’m so inclined to call this my favorite season ever. For the first time since 2005, every episode has felt like it’s written with a hunger and a desperate desire to prove itself. And what that means is that even a baseline episode like this sparkles.
The device of the sixty-six second countdown, forcing the episode into real-time for a sequence, is marvelous. It’s set up and clearly established in the cold open, and then explored meticulously. Crucially, every iteration of it changes the approach or the rules slightly. It’s a fairly high-death episode, but every single death shifts the balance of power or the nature of the problem slightly. We learn new things about the rules of the mummy each time. The episode works like many of the best video games do – it introduces a mechanic and then explores progressive iterations of it. (And the on-screen clock owes no small debt to the visual grammar of the HUD) The fact that the series is now bold enough to casually introduce entirely new visual techniques each week and to take on a new philosophy of what the camera and the screen means is a massive leap forward, and will hopefully be the enduring legacy of the Moffat era.
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Loosen Your Astral Sphincter (The Last War in Albion Part 65: Windfall)

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This is the fifteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two 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 six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It’s available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: In amidst the American Gothic arc were a couple of one-shots, including one entitled “Windfall.”

“Tripping on 500 mushrooms might loosen your astral sphincter a little but it will not generally confer upon you any of the benefits of the magic I’m discussing here. Magic is about what you bring BACK from the Shining Realms of the Uberconscious.” – Grant Morrison 

Figure 484: Chester picks up a fallen
tuber. Note the implied face of Swamp
Thing in the tree behind him. (From
Swamp Thing #43, 1985)
In many ways, “Windfall” is a sequel to “Rite of Spring.” Like “Rite of Spring,” it engages explicitly with psychedelia, telling the story of two people who come into possession of one of the tubers that grow on Swamp Thing’s back. What is perhaps most notable about “Windfall,” however, is that the story’s protagonist is a drug dealer. Swamp Thing himself only appears in the first four panels of the strip, which show one of the tubers dropping off his back. At that point it’s picked up by an aging hippie named Chester (complete with Grateful Dead shirt) who may or may not be physically modeled off of Bryan Talbot’s Chester P. Hackenbush. Although at the time of the story Chester is, as he puts it, “doin’ ten days brown rice, tryin t’clean my system out, y’know,” he’s clearly a man with an extensive interest in ethnobotanicals and psychedelics, such that two separate people come to him looking for drugs.
The first is a man called Dave, whose wife Sandy is dying of cancer with only a day or two left to live, and is in excruciating pain. Although Chester is not sure what (if anything) the tuber does yet, besides suspecting that it might be somehow related to datura (which, in some forms is, notably, a rhizome), he offers Dave a piece. Immediately after Dave leaves Chester gets his second visitor: a boorish guy named Milo who declares bluntly that “I feel like getting screwed up tonight” before simply taking the biggest piece of the tuber without paying for it.
Figure 485: Sandy’s psychedelic death
evokes the imagery of the famed “Rite
of Spring” issue. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Stan Woch and Ron Randall, from
Swamp Thing #43, 1985)
At this point the comic begins a ten page section in which it alternates between a page telling Dave’s story and a piece telling Milo’s.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 33 (Assimilation²)

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Josh Marsfelder of Vaka Rangi, a critical history of Star Trek (he’s just started The Next Generation) and related topics (including an essay on Doctor Who), writes on the Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover comic by IDW. Also, speaking of comics, no reviews this week I’m afraid – won’t be around to pick up my books due to those Cleveland talks. 

Let me preface this by saying I am not a comics person. My first, and only, sojourn into the world of mainline United States sequential art was around the time there were several different Spider-Mans running around Marvel while at DC Supergirl was some kind of pink alien goo matrix or something. I took one look at that, promptly decided comics were fucked up and never looked back. I am, however, apparently something of an authority on Star Trek, which is why Phil has so graciously invited me to say a few words about the first, and to date only, time that other big polyauthored science fiction TV franchise crossed over with Doctor Who.
The one exception I made to my self-imposed rule of avoiding US comics at all costs came anytime there was a four-colour adaptation of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during the late 80s and early 90s, during the tail-end of the period I’ve come to call the Long 1980s. Back then, you couldn’t just queue up Netflix or Hulu (or other places) to rewatch your favourite show-You had to wait for it to be re-aired, which was if not rare, at the very least unpredictable, or wait for it to come out on VHS, which took a long time. And,  at least if you were someone like me, collecting TV shows on VHS was simply out of the question: Not only was it expensive (I’ve never been a terribly wealthy person), but it took forever for home video releases to come out, and it was hard to keep enthusiasm going that long. If I wanted new adventures with my favourite Star Trek heroes, I was limited to my imagination (which I daresay I’ve been blessed enough to have in abundance), or to the tie-in comic lines from DC and Malibu. Indeed, especially in the case of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, much of my memories of and perspective on the show came not from the TV episodes themselves, but the comics. 
It didn’t hurt that this was something of a golden age for tie-in comics: Most of them were written by talented authors and artists who also happened to have a deep appreciation for the source material they were tasked with adapting. Indeed, Ron Moore said a number of times that he was a big fan of Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos’ run on the DC Star Trek: The Next Generation book, because it was the only way he could actually experience new stories with a cast of characters he’d come to love as a member of the audience.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 83 (The 2012 Olympics)

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“One measures a circle starting anywhere.” – Charles Fort, quoted by Alan Moore in From Hell

Before we begin, a touch of housekeeping. The Williams book should be out within the week. I think it has something that will make a fair number of you excited in amidst the extra essays. Also, if you’re in the Cleveland area, I’m giving a pair of talks this week at the Lakewood Public Library. On Wednesday, at 7pm, I’m talking about Wonder Woman, doing “a comic for more or less every decade,” and then on Thursday at 7pm I’m doing one on Doctor Who that will be “a brief history of overthrowing the government.” Both talks are free, there will be books for sale and I’ll be signing, and it’ll be a good time, so if you’re local, please do come out. Now, on to the Olympics.

I think this will be the last time we do a Pop Between Realities that’s about a cultural event as opposed to another television series. Those have been sporadic features, and from time to time I’ve cheated – I did the Three Day Week of 1973 in the same post as Dad’s Army, for instance. But they’ve been a major part of what TARDIS Eruditorum is. So here we have yet another ending for the blog. Another tradition wrapped up. Another step towards the present.

The nature of how I write it these days is much closer to the early days than to most of the blog. I’m not back to writing things the day they post and them thus going up at erratic times, as they once did, but I am writing this about twelve hours before it goes up, trying to finish before bedtime, which is in about four hours because Jill and I are on days this week. I’ve just posted my Kill the Moon review, and have been enjoying the fires it lit. Over on Tumblr today, Jack Graham got an ask about TARDIS Eruditorum, and said some very sweet things, but mentioned a couple of objections, all of which are completely reasonable and insightful. But one managed to get under my skin, as the best criticism, which was his observation that I’m “overly teleological in this attitude towards the development of the show, especially with regards to the dawn of BBC Wales.” Which I absolutely am. Largely because I’m stuck being so. There’s always been a telos to TARDIS Eruditorum. Even when the specifics of its ending point weren’t completely fixed, it was always building to an ending out of necessity: eventually it was going to run out of Doctor Who. And because it’s presented itself as a narrative, that makes for an ending. Sure, I’ll do a Capaldi book eventually, and probably knock out a book whenever there’s an end of an era of Doctor Who, because I like writing about the series and the money’s good. But we’re still coming up on the end. Everything else will really just be appendices at that point.
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Kill the Moon Review

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This review is brought to you by 166 lovely people at Patreon. If you would like to join them in supporting these reviews, please do.

Let’s try something different. 
Let’s write this flat-out, without any reference to GallifreyBase, to second watchings, to anything. I have opened up the laptop the moment I finished it, and I am writing first impressions, as an honest, open review. I’ve not looked at Twitter reaction. I’ve not looked at comments. I am making an honest stab at staking out a critical position without any lens of history whatsoever. Because I don’t really care. I don’t want to contexualize this in the immediate critical reaction. I want to charge out all guns blazing and make a point, fully cognizant of the risk that I might turn out to be in a lunatic minority. 
This was the single best episode of Doctor Who ever.
I am using that sentence with perhaps an odd degree of precision. It is better at being Doctor Who than any previous episode, given that so much of what makes it work is that it is an episode of Doctor Who. It is unapologetic, and indeed triumphant about pulling tricks that only Doctor Who can do. “The moon is an egg.” I mean, that’s the most gloriously trolling reveal imaginable. It all but invokes Poe’s Law on a particular segment of criticism of Doctor Who.
And the joke is that the episode as a whole is a decisive move towards the classic themes of science fiction they espouse. Harness was apparently instructed to “Hinchcliffe the shit” out of the first fifteen minutes, and he did, but equally important is the way in which he Lamberted the shit out of it. On a very basic level, this starts like the show did back, well, in the immediate aftermath of two teachers from Coal Hill School confronting a secretive alien in their school. It starts with “here’s a weird place, let’s go explore it.” It does a self-consciously back to basics opening, complete with the Doctor not using the namechecked psychic paper and instead doing a classic, fast, and utterly believable bit of talking his way into command of a situation. There’s a self-conscious move, throughout the start of this episode, to frame Doctor Who in a very classic way.
That’s been a mission statement all season, but with the exception of Into the Dalek, which combined a visually splendid “here’s what Terry Nation wished you could see” with the same warmed over Dalek story we’ve been redoing since 2005, there hasn’t really been the decisive turn to doing the “here’s Doctor Who as you expect it, only not quite” approach that this season has been developing onto something that’s almost entirely composed out of the series’ golden age science fiction heritage. 
The series has gotten very smart about how it handles the near future, fully embracing the fact that it’s going to be proven wrong by longevity and accepting that you can still do interesting television that’s a clear extension of the immediate-term.
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More Hurt As I May Hold (The Last War in Albion Part 64: Criticism of The Curse, American Gothic)

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This is the fourteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two 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 six volumes. This entry covers stories from the third and fourth volumes. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. The fourth is in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore began a lengthy storyline usually referred to as the American Gothic story, in which Swamp Thing encounters traditional horror monsters in various American locales. One of the most notable stories in this arc is an issue called “The Curse,” about menstruation and werewolves in rural Maine.

“I is not want for come no more alive by fire, as like to this. It is not right. It is more hurt as I may hold.” – Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire
“The Curse,” however, was not an uncontroversial story. Indeed, it generated so much response that the letter pages of both Swamp Thing #45 and #46 were devoted entirely to letters regarding the story. For the most part, however, these letters were in favor of the story. The only outright critical letter in Swamp Thing #45 comes from a gentleman in (ironically) Northampton, Massachusetts, and complains that Moore repeats the phrase “hungry for the moon” too often, objects to the story’s generality in speaking for all women, and complains that the display of steak knives is unrealistic (“no market worth its liabilities would ever, ever, never-ever display its cutlery so dangerously”). Of these three complaints it is, in an idiosyncrasy typical of the sorts of comics readers who wrote in to DC letters pages in the 1980s, the steak knives that seem to be the biggest problem. Another letter, however, takes issue with the ending of the story, while still generally praising it. 
Figure 478: Phoebe lying dead under the howling moon.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing #40, 1985)
This sentiment is shared by one of the two letters presented in Swamp Thing #46. This letter, by Mindy Newell, takes up most of a page, and Moore offers an equally long response in the letter page. Newell’s objection is straightforward – that Moore’s decision to have Phoebe kill herself is a weak cop-out of an ending. Newell writes, “I also understand that you were trying to point out to our male audience that women don’t deserve to be treated in such a horrific manner… that you were striking a blow, not just for equal rights, but for equal understanding.
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Comics Reviews (October 2nd, 2014)

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As always, ranked from least favorite to favorite, with the caveat that I like everything enough to pay money for it.

Thor #1

Why bother launching this on The View if the end result is going to be to spend an issue highlighting how much this is just a continuation of the previous volume of Thor? Why end this with the reveal of the character on the cover? Why have comics not moved beyond the storytelling prowess of 1970s Terry Nation stories? Goddammit.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #3

It’s interesting to see what parts of this book come from what writers. On the evidence, Al Ewing is providing more of the emotional heft, while Rob Williams provides more of the zany and big ideas, this one incorporating a bevy of twists. The result is something that feels more like the generic Doctor Who licensed comics we always get and less like what had been making this book special in the first two issues. Not bad by any measure, but the fact that a noticeable dip in originality and freshness came with the change to the second writer is a sad sign.

Moon Knight #8

I’m still not entirely sold on the turn to arc-based and continuing plotting. This was fine and a good issue of Moon Knight, but the loss of Warren Ellis’s ideological purity is just that: a loss.

Miracleman #11

I forgot the way this book kicked up a gear in Book Three. V for Vendetta does the same thing, though nobody ever notices because it’s collected in one volume. As should Miracleman be, given that it’s actually not much longer than Watchmen in terms of page count. Instead, as ever, we get $4.99 issues for sixteen pages of story. Bastards.

Silver Surfer #6

At last, the book arrives at its actual premise. And it’s fun, and exactly the sort of “Jack Kirby’s Doctor Who” feel that this book promised over half a year ago. Comics. The medium for people who resent it when things happen in their media. Still, it’s churlish to overly resent this comic because the previous five took too long to get here. This is very fun, and the better of the two Doctor Who comics I bought today. It may share some problems with Thor, but the problems are in past issues, not this one.

Rat Queens #8

No idea what the plot of this book is anymore, but it’s one of those I simply don’t care. It’s fun. Every month. By the time I get to the end of the issue I’m at least enjoying the characters in the issue. Should sit down with this and get into it, as I really enjoyed the first few issues when I shotgunned them. Not working for me as well serialized, but that’s true of a lot of comics.

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All comics below that line there are ones I would with a straight face recommend people pick up if their premises sound interesting.…

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Outside the Government: The Reichenbach Fall

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It’s January 15th, 2012. Jessie J is at number one with “Domino,” with Flo Rida, Coldpay, David Guetta, , and Rizzle Kicks also charting. In news, the Scottish government announces that the independence referendum it’s been promised will go forward in 2014, and William Daley steps down as White House Chief of Staff. 
And on television, Sherlock finishes up its second season. To those paying attention to such things as writers, this looked ominous in one key regard, in that it seemed a mirror of the one outright dud in the first season of Sherlock – the one written by Steve Thompson and not directed by McGuigan. Thompson’s oeuvre at this point, at least in terms of things Doctor Who fans looked at, consisted of The Blind Banker and Curse of the Black Spot. To give him the big epic finale seemed an exercise in madness. And yet the result was the peak of Sherlock’s cultural capital – an iconic cliffhanger that casually owned popular culture for a while in its wake, and again in the lead-up to its resolution. It’s difficult to overemphasize how big this episode was. It may have been the lowest rated of its season, but it was by far the most impactful. In the immediate aftermath of transmission, the pop culture was absolutely obsessed with the cliffhanger. It may not be the most watched or the best episode of Sherlock. But the end of this one is the iconic and defining moment of the series. 
Cynics will suggest, not without reason, that this story was by Thompson in the same way that The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit was by Matt Jones or The Celestial Toymaker was by Brian Hayles. And certainly there’s no way that Thompson wasn’t closely supervised here. It’s also the case that when watched without the giddy excitement of context the joins and frailties of the script are somewhat more visible. This is a desperately untidy affair in which the twin motors of a plot that moves faster than its holes and the sense of Aristotelean tragedy keep afloat a story that could easily have gone the way of Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. 
Which is, to some extent, the reason that putting Thompson on this story was always going to be OK, because the sheer scope of the story was going to overwhelm its quality. For all that this owned popular culture momentarily, ultimately, it’s only the last bit of the episode that anyone cares about. And fair enough – it is a wonderful cliffhanger, simply because it embraces its own inevitable resolution. The episode doesn’t even bother trying to leave any ambiguity or suspense over whether Sherlock survives. Even his death isn’t really trying to be sincere, with a carefully and meticulously scripted bit of John’s POV that’s clearly there to leave enough space in the margins to come up with a plausible means of Sherlock’s survival. The episode never deludes itself into thinking its mystery is going to be “whether” and not “how,” and leans into it beautifully.
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