Eruditorum Press

Gaze not into the abyss lest you accidentally write a book

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:

You Were Expecting Someone Else 32 (Night and the Doctor)

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When the DVD set of Season Six came out, one of the biggest special features was a cycle of five shorts collectively titled Night and the Doctor. They total about sixteen minutes in length, and consist of two pairs of two shorts, one called “Good Night” and “Bad Night” focusing on Amy having insomnia on the TARDIS and catching glimpses of the Doctor’s extra adventures, the other called “First Night” and “Last Night” that are an explicit two-parter about the Doctor and River’s first date, alongside a fifth short, “Up All Night,” featuring Craig and Sophie in the immediate lead-up to Closing Time, and which feels not entirely unlike an unused prequel that was grafted onto the other four episodes somewhat arbitrarily.
These shorts fit into a larger tradition within the Moffat era that began with two special features on the Season Five box set, a pair of scenes entitled “Meanwhile in the TARDIS” and paired with early episodes. Both basically involve going through a bunch of standard premises of Doctor Who (“why did you make your time machine look like a Police Box” and “have there been other companions” and the like) as comic sketches. And it continued on the Season Seven set, with a trio of mini episodes there. At which point we should probably talk about the prequels to Name of the Doctor, The Bells of St. Johns, the couple of prequels to The Snowmen, A Town Called Mercy, Asylum of the Daleks, The Wedding of River Song, Let’s Kill Hitler, A Good Man Goes to War, The Curse of the Black Spot, and The Impossible Astronaut. And, of course, the two Day of the Doctor prequels, “The Last Day” and “Night of the Doctor.” And the “Time” and “Space” shorts for Red Nose Day. And Pond Life. So all told, there are something like thirty shorts set within the Eleventh Doctor era, comparing to, I believe, three plus Attack of the Graske for the entire Davies era. And one of those was by Moffat too.
Clearly the short is a thing within the Moffat era. This is not entirely surprising. Setting aside the prequels, which tend to serve as just a different sort of trailer, the bulk of the DVD-based shorts are comedies. Within Night and the Doctor, for instance, there’s “Bad Night,” which is an extended farce built around a plot in which aliens have apparently turned the Queen of England into a goldfish, in which all we get is a brief scene between Amy and the Doctor (and Rory, very briefly) in the middle of the adventure. “Good Night” is a sweet little thing about Amy’s changing memories that ends with Amy buying her past self an ice cream cone to cheer herself up on a bad day. 
This is, of course, a familiar structure for Moffat, who got his start in sitcoms. He’s good at structuring a sketch, knowing how to get in and out before a gag runs dry.
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Fear Makes Companions Of Us All (Listen)

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Thanks to the 153 backers at Patreon who made this review possible. If you enjoyed it, please consider joining them in their support for the project. 
 
The best cosplay I’ve ever seen at a convention was a gender-
swapped Link and Navi in which Link led her partner around
on a leash, having scrawled “no you listen” on his chest.
It’s September 13th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” while Iggy Azalea, Sam Smith, and Script also chart. In news, Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide, the US has been finding a new way to announce that it’s at war with ISIS, and it’s down to the wire with the Scottish Independence referendum, although really, we should save that for next essay.
 
While on television, Doctor Who does Listen. At the moment, and I’m writing this paragraph about ninety minutes after transmission, this seems set at near universal praise. 85% rating it an 8-10 on GallifreyBase, with a staggering 42.6% giving it a ten out of ten. The immediate post-episode reviews all seem to love it. Blog and Twitter comments are raving, although people who tend not to like Moffat’s stuff seem to really hate this one. Which is to say, ladies and gentlemen, that we seem to have an instant classic.
 
I’ve watched this twice now. And it deserves that and more. It is undoubtedly a “big Steven Moffat statement” of an episode, conceived on the level of The Day of the Doctor or Deep Breath. It is ostentatious and meticulous in the way that Steven Moffat at his best is. This is a writer who knows that he is at the height of his professional career and is cackling madly about it. It is also, unmistakably, him writing the cheap and disposable one with no budget – and doing it, by his own admission, because he wanted to “prove he could still write.” 
 
He’s used the production schedule of Doctor Who very slyly here, doing a story that a twelve episode season requires, as a piece of BBC-produced drama, if it’s going to throw a whacking big CGI dinosaur into the opening three seconds of the season premiere for no reason other than to set up some jokes and a death scene for the Doctor to start investigating a mystery. It’s just that he then wrote it like it was The Big Finale. It draws all its structural tricks from Nick Hurran and Ben Wheatley, and shares its approach with Time of the Doctor and His Last Vow. Except there’s no actual monster – it’s all creepy edits and lighting changes. It could be the Silence. Maybe it is, and we’ll pay that off in some future episode, because this is only episode four and Doctor Who has plenty of surprises left in its back two-thirds. We’re still in the “introduce Peter Capaldi with episodes by the old hands from Seasons One and Two and Five, or who worked on The Sarah Jane Adventures.”
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Hey, You Guessed My Name (The Last War in Albion Part 61: The Nukeface Papers, John Constantine)

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This is the eleventh 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: Following the landmark vegetable sex issue of Swamp Thing, “Rite of Spring,” Alan Moore returned to the story he had delayed in order to write the return of Anton Arcane, “The Nukeface Papers.” 

“Hey, you guessed my name. Why would we be so coy with the miracles, Cassandra? Maybe because we didn’t want to scare the shit out of you.” – Kieron Gillen, The Wicked and the Divine #1
Figure 451: Swamp Thing is mortally
injured by the toxic touch of Nukeface
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve
Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp
Thing #35, 1985)
“The Nukeface Papers” provides an interesting split between its two installments. The first issue, when it was published, was basically a six-month old script, the story having originally been intended for publication in July of 1984. In many ways the first part shows this – it follows the basic structure Moore used for the first issues of his preceding three arcs, with the storyline’s threat intrudes upon and infects Swamp Thing’s world. In this case the threat is the eponymous Nukeface, a drunken derelict who has become deranged by and addicted to the nuclear waste buried in his hometown of Blossomville, Pennsylvania (a thinly veiled version of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town destroyed by an underground fire in a coal mine that is expected to continue burning for the next quarter-millennium), and who has come to the bayou because his stash in Pennsylvania has been cemented over and new waste is being deposited in the swamp instead. Swamp Thing dreams of Blossomville as Nukeface approaches, seeing a place where “something bright and awful kissed the world, and left its smeared blue lipstick-print. The soil is curdled, and all that grows, grows wrong. In a skin of black cinder, puddles reflect fire, red and wet and glistening like sores.” Disturbed, he goes to investigate, only to be touched by Nukeface, leaving a blue and bubbling wound on Swmp Thing’s body as he collapses. By the time the issue saw print six months later, Moore had stretched his wings creatively, and so the second part, published in February of 1985, had an altogether different tone. 
Figure 452: Steve Bissette worked physical newspaper clippings into
his pencils for “The Nukeface Papers.”
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Comics Reviews (9/11/14)

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As ever, from worst of my pulls to best.

Amazing Spider-Man #6

You know, I am just not feeling this run on Spider-Man. I quite liked Slott before Superior. But this just isn’t doing it for me. It’s very classic Spider-Man, but in the sense of being derivative and predictable. Sure, Peter’s specific life circumstances are different, but the storytelling is utterly flat and predictable. I’ll probably give this through Spider-Verse, but I’m pretty pessimistic.
The United States of Murder Inc. #5

Woo-hoo, watch those wheels spin!
Velvet #7

Still the best comic that I have no idea what the fuck is going on in. Also the comic most in need of a recap page. Still very fun, and I enjoy reading each issue, but man, this must work so much better in trade.
Avengers #34.1

Al Ewing does a one-off featuring Hyperion, which ends up being a quite good Superman comic that happens to feature one of Marvel’s knock-off Supermans. It’s difficult to quite know what to make of this – there’s something odd about such a straight up Superman comic being done without Superman. It feels like there should be more of a sense of what makes Hyperion an interesting take on the archetype, although to be fair, it’s also not clear that there actually is anything, Hickman’s protestations when creating this iteration to the contrary. Still, it’s a fun book.
Captain Marvel #7

An odd issue, and probably a necessary one, but not necessarily the best one. The first half does some needed character work, while the second half finally brings a subplot that’s been lurking in the background to the foreground. Both are fine, and I’m sure the next issue will be an utter delight, but this is definitely a “transition” sort of comic, as opposed to one with any really strong beats in its own right.
Hawkeye #20

The resolution of the Kate Bishop arc on this book. The release schedule (or lack thereof) did some real damage with this arc, and I admit I forget who the secondary cast is, which is definitely a problem for this issue, but I’m still left with an overwhelming sense that there should be a Kate Bishop solo series.

Ms. Marvel #8
A slightly off issue for this – I suspect that the book would have benefitted from a slower issue here that spent more time on Kamala and Lockjaw, only getting to the Inventor plot at the end. More character beats and “ordinary girl superhero” stuff and less diving right into adventures would have been nice, and I feel like we’ve missed the opportunity for a wacky hikinks of Kamala and her new pet dog issue in favor of going right to another arc. Though I love the theme here of children caught in other people’s wars – especially for a book about Muslim-Americans. 

Annihilator #1

Grant Morrison nicks a substantial portion of the plot of The Fountain and proceeds to do a very Grant Morrison “fiction becomes reality” story with it and some very goth Flash Gordon stuff.

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Beyond the Police 1 (The Adventures of Ms. Smith and the Curator)

, 45

On Saturdays, the Curator comes by Ms. Smith’s house for tea, and then they go for an adventure in his time machine. 
Ms. Smith and the Curator walked across the Worldsphere. 
The drone that followed them, Ka!ditu, announced that the wreck was another kilometer away. They continued to walk. They were both quite elderly, and the Curator walked with a cane, slowly, and slightly hunched over, but even cursory observation would reveal them to be surprisingly spry for their age. Walking through the tropical woods, they looked like nothing so much as tourists on a package holiday gone utterly wrong, but who were nevertheless keeping calm and carrying on, and largely acquitting themselves admirably in their continued survival.
“How long was it for you between when you dropped me off with Mrs. Jones and when you came by for tea for the first time?” Ms. Smith finally asked, to break the silence.
The Curator thought about it. “I don’t know. It was a lot. I stopped counting years eight faces ago. Or I might have been lying. There was the Scottish one. And the Punch and Judy man. And Merlin… I don’t remember, really.” He paused for a moment. “aM!xitsa, how old did you say the wreck was?”
“‘I’m Ka!ditu, Curator,” the drone said with unhesitating patience, although it was the third time she had answered this question, and the fifteenth she’d been called aM!xitsa. “And the wreck is eighty years old.”
“It hardly seems fair to call it a wreck,” Ms. Smith said, for the first time. “I mean, it’s a man with a Vortex Manipulator. He probably fused with something teleporting in.”
“So why are we investigating this?” the Curator asked. “I’m cold.”
“Because there’s still a life sign,” explained Ms. Smith. The Curator accepted this explanation, as he had the previous time a few hours earlier. 
Shortly thereafter, they arrived at the wreck. The man’s body was thoroughly mangled, but still impossibly, uncannily intact. Only the face was relatively untouched. He had pronounced, handsome cheekbones, and a squared, heroic jaw. His hair was short, brown, and uncannily well tousled for a man having spent eighty years lying on a pile of rocks.  “You’re,” Ms. Smith began when she was him, but he cut her off.
“Captain Boe,” he said, flashing a Hollywood smile. “I’m an immortal time traveller, but I wrecked on the Worldsphere. My body usually heals itself, but there was an awful lot of damage, and eighty years of being stranded seem to have taken their toll. How did you find me?”
“Psychic paper,” the Curator announced confidently. “Hello, I’m the Curator. Would you like a Gummi Bear?” he asked, pulling a bag full of candy from his pocket. 
“Your biodata was detected by Professor Malone at the Cal Institute,” Ka!ditu added by way of explanation, “and we identified your crash site. Since we were not fond of most of the implications of something that could survive, badly injured, for eighty years, we aided you in issuing a psychic distress call.
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I Need A Bit of Help

7

Hey all – I’ve got a spot if trouble, and I suspect someone reading this can help.

My bank removed around $2000 from one of my accounts to cover an overdraft that someone I had a joint account had made on an account I had nothing to do with. To be clear, I have a savings account with my wife. I also had an old joint checking account with Person X. X in turn had a joint account with Person Y. The bank drew from my joint account with my wife to cover an overdraft on the account held by X and Y – an account I am not and never have been on.

Despite the fact that I had nothing to do with the account that was overdrafted, Bank of America refuses to return my money, saying that because I had a joint account with X I was liable for any of their accounts, even ones I wasn’t on and had no knowledge of.

This does not seem right.

If anyone can provide some pro bono legal advice on what I might be able to do to get what is, for me, a massive amount of money refunded, I would be grateful.

To make parsing advice easier, I would politely request that armchair lawyers not chime in. I need authoritative advice from people who know what they’re talking about, not a massive list of guesses and possibilities.

Help in comments or via email to snowspinner at gmail is appreciated. Thanks.…

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Steven Moffat is a Feminist and You Are Wrong if You Disagree

90

If you enjoy this post, maybe you might consider throwing a few dollars to support my blog’s reviews of Season Eight as it comes out? You can do that right here, over at Patreon. Thanks. 

I had this draft lying around, so I figured, let’s do some Tuesday content, eh? I’ve already written the so-called “Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post,” which was intended as a sort of preliminary mission statement summing up my take on the Moffat/feminism controversy prior to my covering the Moffat era, and which instead went kind of viral and became the most read thing I’ve ever put on this blog. And I’ve talked about some of these issues in isolation – people looking to see my argument in a detailed form, particularly my feminist readings of specific Moffat stories, will probably find my posts on (deep breath) Joking Apart, Coupling, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, The Beast Below, A Good Man Goes to War, Let’s Kill Hitler, The Wedding of River Song, and The Angels Take Manhattan enlightening. I am not going to retrace the feminist reading of the Moffat era that I’ve made in those posts here in detail, although there’s no real reason that anyone should have to read those posts to get the argument I am making here.

More broadly, however, I would politely point to the fact that I have nearly a dozen existent essays on topics related to Moffat and feminism as evidence that this is an issue I have thought about somewhat extensively. Perhaps more to the point, I would note that my opinions on Moffat’s work are based on having seen literally every episode of television he has ever written, having listened to nearly every DVD commentary track he has ever recorded, and having read countless interviews with him conducted over the course of around twenty years. I am reasonably confident, between my qualifications as a PhD in media studies and this level of background research, that I am among the, oh, let’s say fifty people in the world most qualified to speak authoritatively on the subject of Steven Moffat’s career. I do not say all of this as some sort of prima facie evidence that I am correct, but rather to note that this is not a debate in which I am an idle participant.

These disclaimers seem to me necessary because the suggestion that Steven Moffat is misogynistic has become quite widespread, to the point where it’s often taken as a sort of assumption such that the only debate is “how misogynistic.” This claim, despite its popularity, is, in my view, incorrect, not simply on the level of “it is something I disagree with,” but on the level of “it is possible to factually disprove this claim.”

This, then, is my attempt to conclusively refute the claim that Steven Moffat is misogynistic, and, in a related but distinct move, definitively demonstrate that he is, by any reasonable standard, a feminist writer.…

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Outside the Government: The Man Who Never Was

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It’s October 17th, 2011. Rihanna is still stuck in a hopeless place. Maroon 5, Christina Perri, LMFAO, and One Direction also chart. In news, Liam Fox resigns as defense secretary, Occupy London starts up outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Israel and Hamas engage in a prisoner swap at a ratio of roughly 1027:1. 
While on television, it’s the end of The Sarah Jane Adventures with The Man Who Never Was. Let’s start by reminding ourselves what The Sarah Jane Adventures was. Not just what it strove to be – an intergenerational celebration of Doctor Who’s effect on children. But what it was, which is to say, a consistently well-made piece of children’s drama that was watchable and enjoyable by adults. This used to be one of the UK’s great cultural exports. Now television is essentially devoid of any shows comparable to The Sarah Jane Adventures that aren’t animated, and most of the animated ones aren’t British. It’s a show that boldly held the line on an important sort of television that’s tragically faded from popularity, and its existence and the effort put into making it good was one of the things that the BBC could point to and sincerely, honestly say “look, see, we’re not just another commercial television station, we’re a public good.” At its best, it’s a series that took its audience seriously, treated them with respect, and was unafraid to tell emotionally honest stories about difficult and complex topics. At its worst, it was at least usually all good fun. 
It’s not, I assume, a surprise to anyone reading at this point that I strongly consider Gareth Roberts the best writer that the series had. I’ll admit to not being completely unbiased here – Roberts is at this point one of those sorts of casual Internet friends one acquires via things like Twitter. We’ve e-mailed a couple of times, he follows the blog. It’s also the case that I genuinely like his work and look forward to his episodes of things, and that I really do think he was consistently one of the strongest arrows in The Sarah Jane Adventures’ quiver. So it’s a fortunate thing that he’s the one who writes the finale. 
It’s an even more fortunate thing that it’s one of his best scripts for anything, ever. There are a load of good things about it. Many are the sorts of things one expects from The Sarah Jane Adventures. The story is, at least in part, about Luke and Sky finally and properly meeting. It handles this well, acknowledging the difficulty and complexity of acquiring a sibling, especially via the foster system, which is at least ostensibly how Sarah Jane adopted Sky. Which is a real thing – there are genuinely unique challenges to forming a sibling relationship with someone who you meet at age twelve as opposed to meet as an infant and watch grow up. The resulting relationships are not lesser sibling relationships, but they have their own unique features, and The Man Who Never Was does a genuinely lovely job of acknowledging that. 
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Robot of Sherwood Review

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This review exists because of the generous support of 149 backers at Patreon. Please consider becoming the 150th. Or 151st, or whatever, if someone beat you to it. In any case, you can contribute here. Also, a second reminder that once the comments section gets a certain length, displaying all comments requires you to hunt and click the “load more” link. It’s right above the ad at the bottom of the page.

Right. Top-line assessment is that this one’s a bit more polarizing than the last two, which seemed to be widely liked with an inevitable pool of detractors. The first comment on the episode to come through declared it to basically be the worst thing ever, and GallifreyBase currently has it at 55.48% in the 8-10 range. Which is on the whole still pretty good, but clearly the most mixed reception of the season to date.

For my part… well, look, this was never going to be my favorite episode. I’m not a huge fan of Gatiss, the celebrity historical is not my favorite Doctor Who subgenre, and I’ve seen enough Doctor Who at this point in my life that the business as usual/meat and potatoes episodes, while often enjoyable, aren’t exactly highlights. And this was, at the end of the day, a meat and potatoes celebrity historical written by Mark Gatiss.

But none of those are reasonable things to hold against the episode on any level other than ranking it in the list at the end of the review. One can’t critique a beach for not being a paperclip. Instead, what jumps out is that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re doing. This alone puts it ahead of Gatiss’s previous swing at a celebrity historical, in which nobody quite seemed to know what tone to go for at any given moment. Here, everybody from Gatiss on down understands that they’re doing a fluffy one.

Perhaps more to the point, however, everybody gets how best to approach one of these. Gatiss is at his best when he’s taking an old and well-worn structure and giving it a spit and polish to modern tastes (The Unquiet Dead, Cold War, The Crimson Horror), and so this is firmly in his wheelhouse. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the script (indeed, when the first five scripts leaked, more than a few people proclaimed four of them good and this one to suck), but it moves through its set pieces and knows what it’s doing at any given moment.

But this isn’t a story about the clever script. It’s a story about dancing merrily through the obligatory set pieces. Gatiss holds up his end of the bargain by getting them all in and keeping the pace up. But the heart of this one is the execution, and it’s there that this does sparkle. It’s pure melodrama, and everybody gets that. The episode would be completely derailed if either of the two major guest roles (Robin and the Sheriff) pulled a Graham Crowden (or, if you want a more recent option, a Roger Lloyd-Pack).…

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The Svadishtana Chakrah (The Last War in Albion Part 60: Rite of Spring)

, 8

This is the tenth 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 an epic storyline featuring the return of Anton Arcane and the death of and resurrection of Abby Cable, Moore offered a pair of self-contained issues by guest artists, starting with a pastiche of Walt Kelly’s Pogo entitled “Pog.”

“It slithers up towards the Svadishtana Chakra, just three finger-breadths below the navel, corresponding to the lunar sphere of dream, imagination, sexual fantasy… opening inside us, a six-petal lotus, an ecstatic flowering of possibilities, fantastic, sensual, limitless… and the snake moves. And the snake turns.” – Alan Moore, Promethea #8
Eventually the aliens encounter Swamp Thing (who, in this issue, speaks only in an incomprehensible string of symbols), and explain to him their origin, telling him how on their planet (which they call the Lady) “there was one solitribal breed of misanthropomorphs who refused to convivicate with elsefolk. They constructed their own uncivilization, and excluded anykind else from joining it. They were the loneliest animals of all. They took our lady away from us.” He goes on to explain the horrible things these animals did, running medical experiments and, worse, killing and eating the other creatures until Pog and his shipmates set forth in their ship Find-the-Lady to find a new Lady on which to live, which Pog believes that they have now done. 
Figure 444: In a surprisingly bleak twist, Pog’s crewmember
Bartle is devoured by real gators. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Shawn McManus, from Swamp Thing #32, 1984)
In response, Swamp Thing sadly takes Pog to Baton Rouge to show him the nature of the planet on which they have landed – a silent sequence of humans cooking and eating meat, which Pog stares at in dumbstruck horror before weeping and crying out that “they can’t own this Lady too! We were going to be happy here!” Swamp Thing and Pog rush back to the swamp, but are too late to save one of Pog’s crew, a cute alligator-looking alien named Bartle, from being killed by attacking gators in the swamp. After a funeral for Bartle, Pog and his crew return to their ship and fly off, trying still to look for a planet unspoiled by man, giving the story a bleak finish that is both surprising and effective.
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