Eruditorum Press

If you want an image of the future as we desire it, imagine a boot stamping on Jonathan Jones’ face… forever

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:

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)

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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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Comics Reviews (September 4th, 2014)

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As always, and by always I mean just like the last two weeks, from worst to best.

Original Sin #8

Well. That didn’t work. Which is odd, because so much of it felt so close to working. The “a secret is revealed” trick to tie into the crossovers was great on paper, but then got squandered when both Avengers and Uncanny X-Men just did their own plots without actually using the “truth bomb,” but branded them as Original Sin crossovers anyway. The plot wasn’t uninteresting, but it was continually below the level of what it felt like a big crossover should be. This was a small, personal story that affected, ultimately, one character who doesn’t even hold down his own title, but was done as a giant mega-crossover event, which just wasn’t the right frame for it. The art was quality, but almost consciously wrong for the slightly humorous story Aaron was telling. Nobody felt quite on the same page as anyone else. Pretty much a flop.

Miracleman #10

It’s not a bad issue, to be sure. But even in the original, this was a filler issue between the huge birth issue and the start of Book Three, and while there exist issues of Miracleman good enough that $4.99 feels reasonable, the sixteen pages of actual story in this book aren’t one of them.

Moon Knight #7

I won’t lie, I’ve gone off Brian Wood a bit since the sexual harassment allegations came up a while ago. It’d been coming, with my getting bored with his X-Men, Conan, and Star Wars runs in fairly rapid succession, but there’s no point in pretending that the slight cringe whenever I hear his name isn’t the biggest problem. So I went into this kind of expecting it to be the issue where I dropped Moon Knight.

Much stays the same – stylistic complexity, the one-issue story, et cetera. And, appropriately, much changes, as it should, since just doing a Warren Ellis imitation would be doomed. The problem is that the changes consist of taking things Ellis did that were interesting and replacing them with the boring. A tease in the final panel gesturing towards an arc. The way in which the high concept premise of the issue isn’t explored and plumbed, but is just the backdrop for some action sequences. All the stylistic innovations and structures that powered Ellis’s book feel like they’re receding, replaced by the ill-conceived Batman clone that Ellis was always fighting the gravity of.

It’s good enough to get another issue, which means it beat expectations, I suppose, but I’m still pessimistic.

Uncanny X-Men #25

It plays to Bendis’s strengths in many ways. The interactions among X-Men, particularly from both sides of Ye Olde Schism, are great. The big retcon, Matthew Malloy, gets enough space to breathe that he feels like a functional and interesting character. The extra story pages are used well, in equal measures to allow for more plot and to give the plot to breathe. It’s still a Bendis comic, with that strange anticipatory tone whereby everything that’s happening now is overshadowed by some promised future event that, whenever it arrives, will itself be overshadowed by the next big thing.…

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Outside the Government: The Curse of Clyde Langer

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It’s October 10th, 2011. Rihanna is at number one with “We Found Love,” a song whose video, consisting of shots of Belfast, provides a perhaps unintentional but amusing sense of what is meant by “a hopeless place.” One Direction, LMFAO, Dappy, and the Goo Goo Dolls also chart, the latter, still mysteriously, with “Iris.” In news, Paul McCartney gets married again, Steve Jobs dies, and mutterings begin that Occupy Wall Street will be moved out of Zuccotti Park so it can be “cleaned.” 
While on television, The Curse of Clyde Langer, Phil Ford’s final script for The Sarah Jane Adventures. Phil Ford is an odd duck. His two best scripts are co-authored – The Waters of Mars before this and Into the Dalek after. His Torchwood script is quite good, and arguably the highlight of a weak season. His Sarah Jane Adventures stories range from the quite solid to the Curate’s eggs. In many ways, he epitomizes The Sarah Jane Adventures, in that he is a writer one wishes was slightly better than he is, but who could be a lot worse. Certainly, as the primary writer of the series, he kept it at the basically watchable, which is more than one can say of Chris Chibnall on Torchwood. 
The Curse of Clyde Langer is in many ways the archetypal Ford script, in that it has some lovely bits and some crap bits, and is in other ways the archetypal Sarah Jane Adventures story, in that it could have fallen very flat, but is ultimately saved by Daniel Anthony. In this regard, most of what is good about it is the sort of thing we have come to expect from The Sarah Jane Adventures. The eponymous curse means that upon hearing Clyde’s name people instantly hate him, turning his friends and family against him. Clyde’s sputtering fear as he begs his friends not to abandon him is marvelous, as is his steady determination to survive and figure something out. 
The obvious transition here is that what’s bad about the story is for the most part more interesting. A major plot of the story concerns Clyde’s relationship with a homeless woman who gives her name as Ellie, and who takes him into a homeless community when he’s forced away from home. Some of this is also brilliant. In casting the story, someone had the absolutely brilliant idea of casting Lily Loveless, famous from seasons three and four of Skins, as Ellie. The result is that with very little screentime, Clyde and Ellie feel like a real friendship and budding relationship, as Loveless and Anthony are more than capable of selling the hell out of it. There’s also some great dialogue around it – when Clyde first meets her, before he’s cursed, he gives her money when she begs for it. Sky asks why she needed money, and he answers, “because she’s a scrounger.” Then Sky asks why he gave it to her, and he answers, “because it’s probably not her fault.”
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Outside the Government: Sky

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It’s October 3rd, 2011. Sak Noel is at number one with “Loca People,” with One Direction, Goo Goo Dolls, and Dappy also charting. There is presumably some reason why the Goo Goo Dolls are charting with “Iris,” a years old song at this point, but I certainly don’t know it off the top of my head. In news, really basically nothing has happened in the two days that have passed since The Wedding of River Song. There’s a factory fire in Surrey, and Amanda Knox’s conviction is overturned. And the day the second episode of this airs, there’s a car bombing in Mogadishu. 
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures returns with Sky. There is, of course, something of an dilemma here in terms of how to approach this final season of The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, they are a clear memorial to Lis Sladen – a run of episodes that can only be taken in the context of her death. On the other, they were never meant to be this. They’re just the first half of Season Five, shot alongside Season Four in the expectation that everyone would be back in a few months to finish the run. It’s just that the second half never got made because Lis Sladen died of cancer not long after these filmed. This paradox hangs over the entire season in a way that can’t be ignored.
It’s something we’ve talked about before, but it’s perhaps worth stressing once more how much of a blow Sladen’s death was. For a variety of reasons. The fact that it came so close after Nicholas Courtney’s was one. I mean, fandom always takes deaths of major players in Doctor Who kind of hard. On aggregate, we take actors the worst, and fair enough, because far more people know who Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney are than know who Verity Lambert and Barry Letts are. But Sladen and Courtney were big even by the standards of actors. They were people who figured generationally in people’s lives. Children who grew up watching Sarah Jane and the Brigadier watched Sarah Jane and the Brigadier with their children. Parents who grew up watching them watched them with their grandchildren. That hurts in its own unique ways.
But Courtney was 81, mostly retired, and had been in ill health, while Sladen was 65 and still a television star. For those who paid attention there was a sense something might be wrong, but for the most part it felt as though one minute she was on BBC One watching David Tennant regenerate, the next she was dead. I mean, it was the first time I decided to post something other than an actual TARDIS Eruditorum post on the blog, because it hit so hard that I felt like I just had to say something about it, because it was one of those days where writing was how I grieved. I remember a friend messaging me on Facebook just saying “Oh No.
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Into the Dalek Review

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This review was generously funded by 145 backers at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider joining them in supporting the remaining reviews. 

There is a certain perspective from which, going in, this looked like the most cynical thing imaginable. Since every Doctor requires a Dalek story, they get it out of the way up front, treating it as something to get over with instead of something to anticipate. Accordingly, you take the Daleks and an unapologetically high concept premise and basically give Capaldi a second episode of having lots of other stuff going on to cover as he beds into the role. And with Gatiss having finally cracked the problem of how to pander to the sorts of fans who want a return to the classic series without losing the other 100% of the audience last season with Cold War, an unabashedly straightforward “just like you imagine Doctor Who being” episode becomes the order of the day. Fair enough, but equally, the sort of episode that a segment of fandom (by which I really just mean myself) looks at and (along with next week) goes “well, at least there’s a proper Moffat episode coming on the 13th.”

(Mind you, there’s a logic to it. Matt Smith got the same basic treatment with River Song and the Weeping Angels in his first two episodes. This time they actually shot Capaldi’s first two episodes first, so they put the Paternoster Gang and the Daleks in to smooth out the transition. And the series can’t serve up my kind of episode every week because, again, the other 100% of the audience would rightly object.)

So with the caveat that this is not an episode after my own heart and that I went in with fairly minimal expectations, I thought this was quite good. I seem to not be alone – comments so far on the post are broadly positive, Twitter’s pretty enthusiastic, and the GallifreyBase poll has it running slightly better than Deep Breath was. (72.7% in the 8-10 range, but skewed higher in the range) I suspect that a year’s hindsight will help Deep Breath and hinder this a little, but we’re all about the now here, and this seems, in the immediate aftermath of broadcast, to have scratched the itch it aimed for.

The script, obviously, is primarily bibs and bobs of other Dalek stories, most obviously the ones by Rob Shearman. But this is not entirely unsurprising. Phil Ford’s an odd writer – his best script prior to this was, of course, the one Russell T Davies rewrote entirely. His next best was an episode of Torchwood. And then there’s a succession of Sarah Jane Adventures that range from the quite good (The Lost Boy, Prisoner of the Judoon) to the bizarrely lightweight and disposable (Eye of the Gorgon, The Eternity Trap). The late addition of a cowriting credit for Moffat suggests that in this case he was commissioned as a matter of production expediency – that he was there, in effect, to provide the broad shape of a script for Moffat to tinker with.…

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By His Torment, The World Was Redeemed (The Last War in Albion Part 59: Down Among the Dead Men, Pogo)

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This is the ninth 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding volume 3-6 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’s third arc on Swamp Thing featured a tremendously disturbing scene in which it is revealed that Abby has been being raped by her dead uncle who has taken over her husband’s body. The scene failed to pass muster with the Comic Code Authority, the industry’s self-appointed censor, leading DC to take the momentous decision to simply publish Swamp Thing without Code approval.

“With each terrible death and resurrection, Crafty knew that by his torment, the world was redeemed. It seemed there was nothing that could truly kill him, and while he lived there still remained the hope that one day he might return and on that day overthrow the tyrant God and build a better world.” – Grant Morrison, Animal Man #5
Figure 435: Swamp Thing and Arcane
meet again in hell. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing Annual #2,
1984)
After its initial splash of controversy the Arcane trilogy resolved more or less predictably, albeit with the substantial wrinkle of Arcane killing Abby. Ultimately Matt Cable wrests control of his body back and casts Arcane back down to hell before using the last of his lingering superpowers to bring Abby back from the dead. Unfortunately, Matt is only able to revive her body, leaving Swamp Thing to journey into the afterlife to rescue her soul from hell, where Arcane cast it down. This journey is depicted in Swamp Thing Annual #2, a forty-page saga called “Down Among the Dead Men.” Moore has described the story as an attempt to provide “a preliminary map – a rough map – of the DC supernatural territories,” which is as good a description as any for a spiritual journey into the DC Universe versions of heaven and hell. Structurally speaking, the story is intensely episodic – Swamp Thing allows his consciousness to sink into the Earth, and then further into the realms of death. There he proceeds to meet a series of minor supernatural characters from DC history alongside a series of short encounters with various entities in the realms he explores. The two most notable of these are a scene where he meets Alec Holland in heaven, finally getting to exchange words with the man he thought he was, and a scene in which he meets Arcane, who is being tortured by vast numbers of insect eggs hatching inside his body.
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Comics Reviews (August 28th, 2014)

2

I liked doing these as a ranked list last time, so let’s do it again.

All New X-Men #31

The start of a new Bendis storyline, with all the attendant faults such as the storyline not actually starting until the last panel. I’m excited for the storyline, though.

Guardians of the Galaxy #18

This one’s tough for me, as it’s the retconned ending to some Marvel cosmic story I never read from a few years ago. It holds together in its own right well enough, but is fundamentally a book answering questions I’ve never asked, and only vaguely knew were questions, which puts a cap on how much I can dig it.

Silver Surfer #5

Well, at least they sort out the odd cliffhanger from the previous issue quickly. There’s an argument to be made that we’ve reached some sort of limit point here of how much plot you can get away with in a single issue. This is mental to the extreme, in the sort of way that when Grant Morrison does it, it gets accused of being self parody. What’s strange, though, is that this is paired with a plot that’s taken five issues to get to what’s obviously the premise of the book, which is the Silver Surfer and Dawn traveling the cosmos. So we have a book that’s weirdly balanced between a ridiculous excess of ideas and a slow burn. It’s something I may eventually conclude is brilliant, but at the moment it’s just sort of odd.

Original Sin #5.4 Thor & Loki: The Tenth Realm #4

Al Ewing continues to execute a perfectly competent and interesting Marvel Asgard story. Some great Loki in this issue, and it feels like it’s building to an interesting new status quo for this corner of the Marvel line, although this is still very much a Marvel fan’s comic.

Avengers #34

Whatever concerns I may have about Hickman’s pacing, and they are many, I remain interested. There’s a lovely, properly good Captain America scene here. The eight month jump forward seems like it’s sure to screw some of Hickman’s plot arcs, but I want to see where he’s going with it. I remain mildly skeptical of Hickman as a creator (note that I did finally just drop Manhattan Projects), but I can see the appeal, and I hope this story works.

Cyclops #4

A character piece by Greg Rucka, and as good as you’d expect from that descriptor. Really a pity he could only find time for five issues of this. Rucka is always a treat.

The Massive #26

My irritation that this book has the white guy as its lead character and not the more interesting characters continues, as does my sense that a book that started from the premise it’s setting up in its final arc instead of ending with it would have been a stronger one. Nevertheless, I really, really love what this book is doing right now. It’s been an overly long ride, but I am on the whole glad to have taken it at the moment.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 81 (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

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Jen writes My Little Po-Mo, the TARDIS Eruditorum of ponies.

In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a pony named Rose.

Consider a fandom. A curious beast, an amorphous, shifting mass of people wrapped around a core of fiction. Despite the variation in cores and size, fandoms all look basically the same. The swarm of flesh devours the core over and over again, yet the core is unharmed. The beast excretes its assumptions and predictions by consensus, layering it around the core like an invert pearl, fanon-grit encrusting a glittering center. Fanficcers and shippers and “expanded universe” authors build their own structures, grit and crystal in varying amounts, arcing off the core. Sometimes these extend all the way out of the beast, where they draw in their own squishy masses of fan; sometimes, rarely, they break off, forming the cores of new beasts, drawing their own paradoxical factions of fans. That is how the beast reproduces; mostly, though, it just grows, feeding on the source work, drawing new fans into itself with reviews and memes and recommendations by slightly pushy friends.

 
But then the beast gets old, and something strange happens: the core cracks. Grit gets inside the pearl. The inmates start running the asylum.
 
This is where things can get weird, when the flow from work to fan ceases to be unidirectional.
Which brings us to December 24, 2010. Christmas Eve. As per tradition, tomorrow will be a new Doctor Who special, “The Christmas Carol” to be specific, Matt Smith’s first. Over on American and Canadian televisions, however, the Doctor is showing up in an entirely different, and probably accidental, form.
 
We have, you see, two beasts to consider, and two shows at their core. They have more in common than it seems on the surface, Doctor Who and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Both are revivals of shows from decades prior. Both were originally educational shows for children, but abandoned that calling early in their runs. Both intentionally build in something “for the dads.” Perhaps most importantly, both reject the ethos of cynicism and violence.
 
And both are cases of the inmates running the asylum. Lauren Faust, the first showrunner of Friendship Is Magic, played with My Little Pony toys as a child. There still exists a drawing she made in her teens which is recognizably one of the characters she would eventually create, Rainbow Dash—her equivalent, perhaps, to Moffat’s Usenet post about us getting the word “doctor” from the Doctor rather than the other way around. 
 
Unsurprisingly, therefore, both like to tweak their fans with little references, meaningless to the primary audience of children, but perhaps entertaining and recognizable for the older viewers. The major difference here is the source of those references: for Doctor Who, with its enormous length and emboitment of all television, they point inwards; for Friendship Is Magic, outwards. So in Doctor Who under Moffat we get offhand references to Metebelis 3 and the Brigadier’s daughter running UNIT, while in Friendship Is Magic we get brief glimpses of background characters who look like the cast of The Big Lebowski or an episode that presents the problems of Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” and solves them with “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
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