Eruditorum Press

Temporarily embarrassed proletarians

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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Outside the Government: The Hounds of Baskerville

, 17

It’s January 8th, 2012. Flo Rida is at number one with “Good Feeling,” wiht Coldplay, Jessie J, Rihanna, and Raio Cruz also charting. In news, Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally convicted of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and Michelle Bachman dropped out of the Presidential race following Rick Santorum’s win (by a stunningly small 34-vote margin) in the Iowa Caucuses. 
While on television it’s The Hounds of Baskerville, an adaptation of what is arguably the most famous Sherlock Holmes story ever. This speaks to the way in which the confidence shown by Scandal in Belgravia was, broadly speaking, reflected in every aspect of Sherlock’s second season. From the start, Moffat and Gatiss announced the grandeur of their plans, with the still memorable trio of one-word teases: Woman, Hound, Fall. Immediately the three stories being used snapped into place, and nobody made any excuses – the plan was clearly to tackle the three most iconic Sherlock Holmes stories not to be Study in Scarlet. 
In hindsight, thinking about it, this was always going to be the tricky one. “Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem” are both massive stories in part because they put Sherlock Holmes in extremely unusual and dramatic positions. They largely modernize themselves. But The Hound of the Baskervilles is iconic more because it was a tremendously popular novel at the time, and has been frequently adapted. It’s not a story that involves any particularly major change for Sherlock Holmes. It’s just a particularly classic Sherlock Holmes story. Although, adding to the difficulties, Sherlock is actually not in large swaths of it.
Still, certain aspects of the approach all but decided themselves. Certainly this had to be the middle episode, by dint of being the one that least disrupted Sherlock as a character. It was also as self-evidently the one Mark Gatiss should write as Scandal in Belgravia was the one that Moffat should write. Past that, however, the way to approach this is almost all question marks and challenges to overcome.
To some extent, however, with Gatiss in place the solutions to most of these challenges became, if not self-evident, at least simpler. Gatiss is and always will be a nostalgia artist. And so when tackling something like adapting The Hound of the Baskervilles, he was always going to stick as closely as possible to the iconography of the original. And yet in many regards his most important decision in terms of how this episode works is the major change, which is to change Baskerville from being Henry’s family name to being a mysterious government research facility. Gatiss’s interview-stated reasons for this – that conspiracy theories are what’s scary these days – are as idiosyncratic as most of Gatiss’s stated plot logic, but it nevertheless proved a savvy choice for other reasons.
In effect, what the decision to have a gleaming white research facility as one of the major settings for this story did was, over the course of ninety minutes, make it so that it could go back and forth between the Dartmoor setting and a visually different place, allowing each location room to breathe.
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The Caretaker Review

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This review was brought to you by 163 backers on Patreon, who would love for you to join them. 

So, since it seems to be the standard opening rhythm for these things, twenty minutes past transmission we’re at 59.7% at 8-10, with 8 being the most popular pick at 29.25%. Thread titles include “this years arc sucks,” “A thing! again,” “Clara’s skirt!,” and “Peter C was on fire tonight,” which, really, seems so utterly standard it’s hard to draw any conclusions. Twitter seems positive. For my part, I liked this a lot, although it definitely took the second viewing for me to really grok it, because I was busy being surprised by its tone on the first pass. I suspect it will watch much more smoothly to people who weren’t foolish (or fannish) enough to have expectations, however.
Ah, yes. Expectations. You know what, let’s take stock of where we are. First episode of autumn proper, halfway point of the season. It’s a good time for taking stock. 
In the UK, it’s well past night-time, to the point where this review is posting after people are largely gone to bed. Here, it’s a bit before sunset. My wife’s just left for her last night of work on the Oncology floor, before she transfers to a different floor to broaden her experience a bit. I’m up for a while yet, planning on writing some of the V for Vendetta chapter after this, after I walk the dog and grab some dinner. The episode’s not on for another three or four hours yet, so this is going to go out into the void to an extent, really playing only to the Americans who pirate it from the UK streams and late night Brits.
Based on the most current news, the program is on a ratings hot streak like it hasn’t seen in a while. All four episodes with final ratings have been in the top ten for the week, and there’s some high-powered competition on the air. This week is particularly dicey for ratings obsessives, as the BBC is confident enough to throw it up against The X-Factor. To be honest, expect a panic tomorrow when people start reporting the overnights, although it’s almost certainly going to stabilize out, whether through time-shifting (which always adds a healthy couple million to Doctor Who’s ratings) or through iPlayer (which doesn’t get counted yet in ratings, but adds another million or so).
There’s several ways in which the program feels like it’s genuinely in a different place than it was a year ago. This is worth noting explicitly in an episode that is, as much as anything, about reaffirming the end of the Eleventh Doctor era. This is the last episode of the half of the season where it was relatively easy to guess what you were going to get. It’s not that it’s been devoid of surprises – hello Listen – but the surprises have generally been within episodes. Every week after Deep Breath, you basically knew what you were going to get if you were paying attention to writers, episode titles, the Doctor Who Magazine descriptions, or, let’s be honest, the script and screener leaks, which vented an awful lot of spoilers into the atmosphere.
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Talking About Meatballs (The Last War in Albion Part 63: American Gothic)

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This is the thirteenth 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 second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the 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 introduced a new character, a working class British occultist named John Constantine, to serve as Swamp Thing’s guide for a journey across America typically referred to as the American Gothic arc.

“I am not talking about meatballs. I am talking about STEAK!” -Diamanda Galas, “Wild Women with Steak Knives”
This serves as the beginning of the so-called “American Gothic” arc (the name was never actually used in the comics), a storyline in which Constantine leads Swamp Thing on a tour of the United States to confront various classic horror tropes like vampires and werewolves. The timing is apropos – Moore had taken his first trip to the United States in August of 1984, midway through the Arcane arc of Swamp Thing, and the same month that Marvelman ceased publication in Warrior. There he had hobnobbed with DC executives and gotten variously praised and treated as a bit of a golden boy. He hit it off some of the DC staff – particularly with his editor, Karen Berger, and with Julius Schwartz, a long time DC editor, who impressed Moore by having the signature of H.P. Lovecraft in a scrapbook, having served as his literary agent late in Lovecraft’s life. Others proved chillier – Paul Levitz, a fanzine writer who had steadily ascended into upper management at DC, referred to Moore as his “greatest mistake,” a line that, whatever was meant by it in 1984, has bottomless depths of iciness in hindsight. 
Figure 470: The aquatic vampires of Rosewood
Illinois. (From Swamp Thing #38, 1985)
And so it was hardly a surprise that Moore would opt to explore the American-ness of his newfound success. And, given that his success was proving as a horror writer, a tribute to American horror must have seemed wholly appropriate. And on target – Levitz’s words perhaps ringing in his ear, Moore started the arc with a strangely barbed story. The choice of Rosewood, Illinois was not an arbitrary setting. Martin Pasko, early in his Swamp Thing run, wrote a story set in a town called Rosewood that featured Swamp Thing fighting vampires, with a father and son sacrificing themselves to flood the town and drown the vampires.
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Comics Reviews (9/25/14)

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Last week is last week. I shan’t go back.

From worst to best.

The Sandman: Overture Special Edition #3

I wouldn’t normally even count this as a release, as it’s a clearly gratuitous and unnecessary publication for collectors, but I felt like I should single this issue out for having the single worst interview with Neil Gaiman that I think I’ve ever seen.

New Avengers #24

A good week if this is the lowest of the new comics. Several interesting things going on here, and if Hickman can (as he does here) stay focused on the characters and not wander off into endlessly and vaguely restating the same hope/anxiety positions about the nature of the future, he could manage a very sharp finale to this run. And, I mean, I have to love any comic that uses a splash page reveal of Molecule Man as its cliffhanger.

The Massive #27

Huge numbers of reveals, such that it’s rather difficult to see how there are three more issues of this. I suspect that there’s little this book can do to make me not feel like it was a bit of a wasted opportunity. Ultimately, I wish it had been written by Warren Ellis. Or someone who could actually do the book this is trying to be.

Chew #43

A strange sense of deja vu, inasmuch as I swear the comic has done this cover gimmick before. Plot marches on. I’ll be honest, this is a book I wouldn’t keep buying if issue #1 was at this level of quality, but at this point it would have to do something really infuriating to get me not to stick out to the end. Ah, the sunk costs fallacy, also known as the comic industry’s business model. Of course, fridging Olive like they seem to be setting up would do it.

Mighty Avengers #14

A sweet and ruthlessly optimistic ending to the current arc, setting up the “we like this book but it’s not selling so let’s do a title change and a new #1” reboot with aplomb, reminding people who have been buying the book why they like it, bringing this phase to what feels like an ending, and being well set up for the next round. Plus, it’s a book whose best line manages to be “Yay! Good work, team!” Which is cute.

Guardians of the Galaxy #19

OK, after a fluff of a first issue to this arc, this one is starting to grab my attention. The question of Gamora’s moral judgment of Quill works for me this time in a way that it didn’t the first time (probably because, having no idea of the background to this arc, I was busy being thrown by learning the questions at the same time Bendis was answering them). Curious how it resolves. And it had better resolve next issue, because I suspect three issues is a lot for this story.

Cyclops #5

This ends Rucka’s bit on the book, yes? A very solid, standard Rucka issue here.…

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Outside the Government: A Scandal in Belgravia

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It’s January 1st, 2012. Coldplay are at nuber one with “Paradise,” with Flo Rida, Rihanna, Ed Sheeran, and LMFAO also charting. Since Christmas, Samo aand Tokelau switched sides of the International Date Line, and Harry Burkhart committed two million dollars worth of damage in an arson spree in Los Angeles. 
While on television, Sherlock returns with A Scandal in Belgravia. This is, quite simply, a phenomenal piece of television. It belongs on lists alongside The West Wing’s “Two Cathedrals” and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “The Body.” It’s smart and ambitious, and everything it tries comes off nearly perfectly. It calmly and definitively sums up what this take on Sherlock Holmes can do, and why it’s valuable and interesting – a marvelous case of a show being its own best advertising. Even more than its barnstorming premiere, this is an episode you can show people to hook them on the show. 
With so much talent on display here, it seems silly to credit it all to Moffat. But in the end, this episode works because its script provides such a strong foundation. First and foremost, A Scandal in Belgravia consists of Moffat luxuriating in the structure of writing. Moffat has always been an intensely structural writer – as a farceur has to be, really. But more than that, Moffat has always been unafraid of foregrounding the structure, writing television in which part of the pleasure is watching the story unfold in the peculiar shape he’s put it into. 
But in the past, Moffat has relied on structural cleverness to create big, landmark episodes of series like Coupling and Press Gang where the budget didn’t give any other ways to go big. With A Scandal in Belgravia, on the other hand, he finds himself at a seeming summit of his career, with opportunities unlike any he’d had before. The ninety minute format gave him space to work that he’d never had before – he didn’t even have the obligation of a cliffhanger at the forty-five minute mark to work to. In Cumberbatch and Freeman he had as solid a cast as exists.  With Sherlock as a bona fide hit, there was the budget to do, if not whatever he wanted, at least more or less anything that might be required of an action-adventure plot. He’s got a top notch director.
The last time Moffat faced a situation like this he produced The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, but there, at least, he still had the advantage of low expectations. Here there’s no shield – Moffat’s only options are to show that he’s as brilliant as claimed or to disappoint. He didn’t disappoint. 
In many ways this comes from Sherlock’s structure, which is almost tailor made for Moffat to succeed with. The show is, by its nature, built around moments of dazzling exposition, that being, in a real sense, the entire point of Sherlock Holmes as a character. These are also the sorts of scenes Moffat excels at – he’s always been extremely good at using exposition scenes for characterization and comedy.
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I Owe it To My Friend To Try, Because I Got Her Into This (The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe)

137

In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as a cardboard box.
It’s December 25th, 2011. A group assembled under the name “Military Wives” are at number one with “Wherever You Are,” which is more or less the song you’d expect, with Coldplay, Flo Rida, and Little Mix also charting. In news, since The Sarah Jane Adventures took its bow Muammar Gaddaffi was killed in Libya, the Curiosity rover was launched by NASA, and the global population hit seven billion. 
While on television is The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, which is, apparently, the worst thing Moffat has ever done, the second-worst story of the Moffat era, the third-worst of the new series as a whole, and the thirteenth-worst story of all time, coming in just ahead of Paradise Towers and just behind The King’s Demons, but notably beaten by Warriors of the Deep, The Time Monster, and The Horns of Nimon. Or at least, that’s the word from the Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary survey, which also thinks that Day of the Doctor is the best story ever and that Frontios is inferior to The Android Invasion, and that The Celestial Toymaker is superior to stories that aren’t The Twin Dilemma, so is perhaps… inclined towards error. 
But this gets at an issue worth exploring at least a little, which is that there are two mutually contradictory narratives of the Moffat era. In one, the initial promise of the great writer of Blink and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances was steadily squandered on a stream of mediocrity and repetition that has steadily driven people away from the show. In the other, the show remains stubbornly popular without any real evidence of people being driven away, especially when you consider that a statistically significant number of people have migrated to watching on iPlayer, which still isn’t counted in ratings figures. That one of these is based on personal preference while the other is based on the actual metric of success in the television industry is, of course, basically irrelevant. These are, it seems, the two options.
Still, it’s worth entertaining the myriad of criticisms frequently made of The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, if only to see if any of them have any substance to them. Let’s start with the most idiosyncratic, if only because they are the ones it is possible to mount the biggest case against the story over. For instance, the observation that the “women are strong because they can be mothers” twist is transphobic. Which… well, it’s not. It’s cisnormative, certainly, but just as heteronormative and homophobic are not actually synonyms, neither are cisnormative and transphobic, and while I am well aware that, as a cis person, I don’t get a vote in this, I would nevertheless, in a purely advisory capacity, strongly suggest that the trans activist community start realizing that a more nuanced vocabulary for discussing trans oppression might be useful.
Which is to say that while it’s certainly the case that there are many ways the story could have been more trans-inclusive, this is an accurate but fairly minor complaint, not least because any way to make the story more trans-inclusive would have involved being a very different story.
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Time Heist Review

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This review was brought to you by 155 backers on Patreon. If you like it, please consider joining them – the campaign is just $5.25 in pledges away from giving every backer free copies of my first three books.

Right, so, circumstances mean I can get this review up very quickly, and I’m taking the temperature of the fans who rated it on GallifreyBase within ten minutes of it airing. Two hundred and sixty-one raters, 55.55% of which are rating 8-10. Another 22.22% at a 7. About an hour later, and it’s still running right around there. For comparison, that puts it roughly in line with where the polls on Journey to the Center of the TARDIS and The Bells of St. John settled down, which suggests this one is going to be somewhat harshly remembered (although Rings of Akhaten got something more like 35% 8-10, so it’s merely a rough ride, not a drubbing). I politely disagree – I rather liked it. Although I can see the faults, on the whole, they were not unduly distracting for me. 
Still, it’s notable that this is by one of the less popular recurring writers. If Steve Thompson can be said to have one defining stylistic tic, it is that he is prone to creating elaborate plots and then populating them with thin cartoons of actual characters. The cynic might accuse Moffat of the same thing, although I obviously disagree, and certainly think Time Heist illustrates the difference. Which is to say that Sai is everyone’s first Shadowrun character, and Sabra is blatantly Rogue from the X-Men with the serial numbers filed off and a less sensible superpower, and it’s clear very little thought has gone into either of them past picking where to nick them from, in a way that just flatly isn’t true of… really any Moffat character who gets as many lines as either of them do, but let’s say Clara, just to really make the point. Although in this case, there’s barely any characterization of Clara or the Doctor either – it’s pretty much a straight shot high-paced thriller.
This isn’t, of course, inherently a problem, or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. It’s perfectly possible to have the elaborate plot be interesting enough to carry the story, and Time Heist illustrates this. Its central plot dynamic is terribly clever, in that it allows for exposition and plot twists to happen organically at more or less any moment. The heist itself provides a continual forward momentum, but all the key plot revelations concern things that have already happened, which makes for a neat structure that keeps things moving. 
There are, of course, some proper plot holes. (How exactly did the Doctor seed the bank with all of those cases without triggering the Teller?) But they’re proper refrigerator logic plot holes – ones that you don’t notice them until you sit down and think about it later. (See also the descendants of the murdered Viking settlers in The Curse of Fenric, which took me decades and Tat Wood to notice.
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Declare Yourself A Magician (The Last War in Albion Part 62: John Constantine)

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This is the twelfth 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 second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the 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: After killing Swamp Thing for the second time in his arc “The Nukeface Papers,” Moore brought him back alongside the debut of one of his most important creations, John Constantine.

“How to be a magician: Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.” – Grant Morrison, “Pop Magic!”

Figure 463: The protagonist of Phonogram:
Rue Britannia, David Kohl, is an authorial
analogue not unlike John Constantine.
(Written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie
McKelvie, from Phonogram #1, 2006)
Essentially every significant figure in the War has written the character at one point or another. Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis all wrote issues of Hellblazer, as have most of the more marginal powers: Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan both have sizable runs, for instance. The only major figure not to have actually written Constantine is Kieron Gillen, who reacted to DC’s 2012 cancellation of Hellblazer by noting that “part of me also thinks ‘you’re not a real British Comics Writer unless you’ve written Hellblazer.’ So that’s me doomed,” although as Gillen has also noted, his first arc of Phonogram, “Rue Britannia may as well be Hellblazer, of course,” which is accurate enough, and applies equally well to his run on Journey into Mystery. Beyond merely having a long running comic with an impressive array of writers, however, Constantine has also proven a profitable character for DC’s larger corporate owners, who spun out a quasi-successful movie version and, in 2014, a television series based on the character.
It is also notable that for all that Moore is known to spit occasional invective at his former employers for, as he memorably put it in one interview, “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night” in lieu of actually coming up with new ideas, Moore has never demonstrated any particular animosity over the continual use of John Constantine. As Moore himself notes, “ I understood that when I had finished with [Constantine] that it would just be absorbed into the general DC stockpile,” and even provided a blurb for Brian Azzarello’s 2000 run on the title. “I’ve never objected to that,” he stresses, in an interview where he elsewhere rails against DC’s propensity for doing “crappy Green Lantern stories” that were “based upon an eight page story of mine from twenty years ago,” further highlighting that Constantine, at least, is a character he’s at relative peace with DC’s continual profit from.
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No Comics Reviews This Week

10

Sorry – I couldn’t get to the shop yesterday, so I’ve not actually read anything this week save for WicDiv, which I didn’t want to wait for, and so pirated in advance of buying a floppy today when I actually do make it. If I make it today. Which I might not, because I have to go into NYC to record that Slate podcast. So, yes, it’s a rather busy week.

WicDiv is marvelous though.

In any case, I’ll either run reviews on Sunday or fold the highlights into next week’s reviews. Last War in Albion will be up tomorrow, and is a fun one – pretty much all John Constantine, and one of the most extended discussions of magic thus far in the War. I’ve started writing the next chapter now as well, and that’s proving fun as well. I’ve decided that the sort of standard “two or three posts of historical background followed by a more or less chronological working through of the comics interspersed with digressions” approach that I developed starting around the Doctor Who/Star Wars chapter, and really honed for the Captain Britain chapter has clearly become a crutch to be discarded, if only for the sake of clearly establishing for the umpteenth time that thinking you know what to expect from Last War in Albion is never entirely safe. So the chapter has all the right bits, but not in the most obvious order – instead, it’s very much structured to come right off the end of the Swamp Thing chapter, and to maintain the tone that ends with. It’s the first time I feel like I’ve really used the “continual essay” aspect of Last War in Albion well over a chapter transition.

More broadly, I’ve finally gotten to where I’m looking at this first volume as a book unto itself, and it seems pretty clear to me that the one-two punch of Swamp Thing and V for Vendetta is the climax of the book. The first seven chapters are an extended exercise in anticipation – the structure of the Captain Britain chapter writ large, in effect. They go through almost everything they can possibly justify going through before getting to one of Moore’s masterpieces. Then we do two in a row in a big, triumphant roar of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century announcing himself to the world. And then it shrinks back down for the final two chapters, to try to get back to a sense of quiet and calm so that when I finally face Watchmen in Book Two, it lands in a world prepared to be completely upended. I suspect Chapter Nine will be 10+ parts again, but that Chapters Ten and Eleven will both be <10. I fully expect to weep, remembering the days I was foolish enough to believe that.

One of these days, I’ll have to sit down and outline Book Two. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to fulfill the promised structure on that, but I find myself weirdly confident that it can be done.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 82 (The Fades)

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After the Moffat/Willis/Wenger team broke up, Moffat was paired with Caroline Skinner as his new co-executive producer. As we’ve already discussed, this was seemingly not a creative partnership that ended happily. Nevertheless, Caroline Skinner occupied a position on Doctor Who that was nominally as Moffat’s equal opposite number, and though her tenure is brief, it must surely be considered as important as, say, the departure of a script editor or a producer during the classic series. To wit, Caroline Skinner was, upon taking the Doctor Who job, most recently coming off of a BBC Three series called The Fades. This, then, provides us with one of our occasional opportunities to see what the BBC thinks Doctor Who’s nearest equivalent shows are. This is, apparently, how you get the top job at Doctor Who: make The Fades first.

In their defense, it was a well regarded show. It got lovely reviews, and a BAFTA. It has a fine pedigree, and there are no reasonable grounds to complain about Caroline Skinner’s appointment based on it. There’s a few very reviewish paragraphs following this one, and they’re going to point out strengths and weaknesses, and it’s worth noting that all of the strengths are things that would have been in Caroline Skinner’s remit as producer, and all of the weaknesses can be laid at the feet of the writer, Jack Thorne. In other words, appointing her was a smart move – they got the producer of what was, in hindsight, apparently the country’s single best drama in 2011. 
No, neither the BBC nor Caroline Skinner can really come in for any criticism here. What can come in for some real criticism is, apparently, British drama in the year 2011, because The Fades is a bit shit. It’s a frightfully generic show. It’s clearly BBC Three trying to get another Being Human together. It’s a generic British horror show for teens and twenty-somethings made in 2011. It’s very post-Skins, and the writer worked on that show, but it’s just as much post-Buffy and post-Being Human and post-Supernatural (nope, not doing a Pop Between Realities on it) and, for that matter, post-Marvelman, about which you can at least say it has the decency to namecheck Alan Moore in the second episode. But the point stands – this is the same basic stunt with genre fiction that’s been going around since the 1980s. Whatever its merits, at the end of the day, The Fades is a TV show that can accurately be described as children’s telly tarted up with some Natalie Dormer nude scenes, and really, that’s a tough criticism to recover from.
On top of that, there are some infuriating things about the writing. It takes three female leads to have one who comes off as a remotely nuanced or interesting character, and one suspects that’s mostly down to Natalie Dormer, who’s one of those actresses that instantly elevates anything she’s in. But it’s perhaps more damning and accurate to note that neither Lily Loveless nor Sophie Wu, who are also both quite capable actresses, can rescue their characters.
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