Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

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 Gift

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Last War in Albion will be up tomorrow.

It’s November 19th, 2009. The charts haven’t changed. STS-129, the third-from-last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, launches. Barack Obama makes an international trip to China. The Original of Laura, an unfinished novel by Nabokov, is published over his wish that it be burnt upon his death. France qualifies for the 2010 World Cup due to Thierry Henry committing a deliberate handball to score. Oprah Winfrey announces the impending end of her television show. The Large Hadron Collider is turned back on.

While on television… oh dear. The third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures has been in many ways uneven, but The Gift is frankly an unmitigated disaster. Attentive readers may recall a kerfuffle back in the first season of Davies-era Doctor Who when Lawrence Miles, enfant terrible of the late Wilderness Years, famously and controversially lambasted The Unquiet Dead for its alleged xenophobia. The argument went that the episode went to great lengths to have the Doctor refute Rose’s objections to the aliens being allowed to use human cadavers as bodies only to prove Rose right when the aliens really do turn out to be evil. At the time, I largely sided against Miles, suggesting that he was making a reading of the episode that no actual viewer would make, and thus was talking in a vacuum.
Which brings us to The Gift, a story in which a pair of Raxicoricofallapatorians explain that they are not members of the villainous Slitheen family, who had previously been the only Raxicoricofallapatorians we’d seen, but instead members of the virtuous Blathereen family. Much of the cast, particularly Clyde, treats them with suspicion, assuming from the outset that they’re evil. Rani is the only person who defends them, and even Sarah Jane stresses the importance of being suspicious of aliens. Eventually it turns out that the aliens are in fact irredeemably evil – so evil, in fact, that Sarah Jane has to kill them – and we get a final monologue about how there are some good aliens, while offering an overall moral that suspicion and paranoia are the correct way to treat people who are different than us until proven otherwise.
That this is done with the Slitheen, whose original concept was a deliberate cut against the idea that aliens are best identified as a species, is even crueler. The entire point of the Slitheen is that they were set up to trick the audience into thinking they were monsters, when in fact they were people and characters. And the vague hedge that the Blathereen were actually half-Slitheen accomplishes little other than suggesting that there are some people who are just irredeemably evil because they have bad blood in them, and they should probably be killed via explosive farts. 
So really, fuck The Gift. It’s consciously and deliberately xenophobic, there’s no way to read it as anything other than that, and it’s also unambiguously for children, which means that The Sarah Jane Adventures closes out its third season with an act of overt and conscious evil.
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Time Can Be Rewritten Final: The Day of the Doctor

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Which makes it all the stranger that he doesn’t.
Even before time was rewritten, of course, this was true. Davies deliberately inserts a gap between The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, even opting to develop the running Queen Elizabeth I joke within it. In this regard, The Day of the Doctor slots in with precision, just as it does with The End of Time, which it goes out of its way to make sure it still fits in with. So much so that Tumblr became an entertaining place in the immediate wake of The Day of the Doctor, as scads of people cried foul about how it contradicted the Davies era only to have scads of people point out all of the tiny little things that Moffat did to actively and meticulously match the Davies era. 
As with many fan debates on Tumblr, the immediate fallout of The Day of the Doctor had no shortage of straw men, with people angrily reacting against points that never actually got made. (See also the “legions” of fans who aren’t going to watch Peter Capaldi because he’s old and unattractive.) Still, there’s an interesting fault line that opens up in the question of just how much of a retcon The Day of the Doctor is – one that is revealing in terms of the sorts of details that each argument prioritizes. 
For one entirely sensible camp, The Day of the Doctor is a retcon only in an additive sense. It simply says “and here’s a bunch of stuff you didn’t know was happening” while playing very actively within the lines of what has gone before. What jumps out here is not the addition of an entirely new incarnation of the Doctor and the wholesale reversal of the end of the Time War, but rather on the numerous conscious nods to the series’ past inserted throughout the episode. So when the Time Lords declare that the High Council’s plans have already failed, this is notable precisely because it checks the box of “how does this fit in with The End of Time,” just as the decision to declare that Arcadia is a Gallifreyan city nicely nods at Doomsday. 
For another entirely sensible, The Day of the Doctor is a massive retcon because of how drastically it shifts the nature of the Time War from an abstract conflict of horrors in the vein of Faction Paradox’s Book of the War to being, basically, a Star Wars movie. Perhaps more significant is the nature of the Doctor’s ultimate weapon. In a Time War, a weapon called the Moment sings of strange and uncanny power. The sense is that the Doctor does not possess a weapon in a conventional sense, but a piece of time itself. Instead we find out that he has a bomb that can wipe out a galaxy and that happens to project an avatar of Billie Piper on the side. The question isn’t, in other words, whether you nod at all the details, but whether you nod at the substance of what the original stories were saying.
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An Act of Madness

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So, I decided I wanted to fill in the ballot for Doctor Who Magazine‘s latest “rate all of the stories” poll. And unlike my “take them one at a time” reviews that I’d been posting as “this is not a review blog,” I figured here I should go ahead and create a normal distribution of ratings so that there were 24 stories with a 1, 24 with a 2, and so on.

And at that point, when you have stories in groups of 24, it’s not *that* hard to rank them within that. And once you’ve done that, well, you have something like this list of Doctor Who stories ranked in order of quality from worst to best. (For convenience, a double line break is employed whenever the numerical ranking increases by one.)

Now all I have to figure out is how to assign numerical values to the stories so as to strategically maximize the impact of my votes so as to try to get the final ranking in Doctor Who Magazine to match my own as much as possible. Number geeks – I encourage you to come up with schemes for assigning point values from 1-10. I suspect it’s going to be some frightfully elaborate scheme involving the results from the Mighty 200 poll a few years ago.

I of course make no guarantee that if I did this list again tomorrow it would be particularly similar, although I think my top and bottom ten are pretty solid.

In any case, the list.

The Celestial Toymaker
The Twin Dilemma
Warriors of the Deep
The Invisible Enemy
The Monster of Peladon
The Arc of Infinity
Death to the Daleks
Timelash
The Dominators
The Android Invasion
Attack of the Cybermen
The Keys of Marinus
The Lazarus Experiment
Night Terrors
Fear Her
Time and the Rani
Meglos
Underworld
The Power of Kroll
Destiny of the Daleks
Victory of the Daleks
Time Flight
The Mind of Evil
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks

Four to Doomsday
The Leisure Hive
Revenge of the Cybermen
The Kings Demons
Planet of the Daleks
Planet of Fire
The Invasion of Time
The Time Monster
The Mark of the Rani
Curse of the Black Spot
The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood
Invasion of the Dinosaurs

The Armageddon Factor

The Chase
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
New Earth
The Ark
The TV Movie
Forty-Two
Mission to the Unknown
Silver Nemesis
The Idiot’s Lantern
Tomb of the Cybermen
Boom Town

Marco Polo
Resurrection of the Daleks
The Next Doctor
The Masque of Mandragora
The Power of Three
The Reign of Terror
The Space Pirates
Planet of the Dead
Black Orchid
The Nightmare of Eden
Dragonfire
The Hand of Fear
The Doctor’s Daughter
Inferno
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
Planet of Evil
Horns of Nimon
The Visitation
Terminus
The Seeds of Doom
The Sontaran Experiment
Trial of a Time Lord
The Long Game
Smith and Jones

Dalek Invasion of Earth
Voyage of the Damned
Earthshock
The Wedding of River Song
The Abominable Snowmen
The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe
Fury From the Deep
Let’s Kill Hitler
The War Machines
The Massacre
The Smugglers
Robot
The Unquiet Dead
The Highlanders
The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People
The Mutants
The Moonbase
The Daleks Masterplan
A Town Called Mercy
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
Planet of the Spiders
The Sea Devils
The Runaway Bride
Amy’s Choice

The Daleks
Image of the Fendahl
The Wheel in Space
The Web of Fear
The Bells of Saint Johns
Nightmare in Silver
The Silurians
Journey to the Center of the TARDIS
The Androids of Tara
The Awakening
Castrovalva
Turn Left
Cold War
Tooth and Claw
The Daemons
The Creature From the Pit
The Two Doctors
The Stones of Blood
Battlefield
Day of the Daleks
Colony in Space
The Keeper of Traken
The Fires of Pompeii
Aliens of London/World War III

The Sensorites
Revelation of the Daleks
Planet of Giants
The Five Doctors
The End of the World
The Savages
The Beast Below
The Shakespeare Code
The Romans
The Underwater Menace
The Christmas Invasion
The Green Death
The Invasion
The Waters of Mars
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Partners in Crime
State of Decay
The Time Warrior
Pyramids of Mars
Hide
Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
The Vampires of Venice
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Closing Time

An Unearthly Child
Galaxy Four
The Claws of Axos
The Gunfighters
The Faceless Ones
The Crimson Horror
Frontier in Space
The Sunmakers
Delta and the Bannermen
The Myth Makers
Horror of Fang Rock
The Rings of Akhaten
The Krotons
Name of the Doctor
The Seeds of Death
Terror of the Autons
The Three Doctors
The Space Museum
The Angels Take Manhattan
Asylum of the Daleks
Full Circle
The Ice Warriors
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
Father’s Day

The End of Time
The Aztecs
Mawdryn Undead
Midnight
Logopolis
The Pirate Planet
The Edge of Destruction
The Web Planet
The Crusade
Vengeance on Varos
Frontios
Warriors Gate
The Curse of Peladon
The Robots of Death
The Deadly Assassin
Paradise Towers
The Tenth Planet
Spearhead From Space
The War Games
Terror of the Zygons
Rose
The God Complex
The Unicorn and the Wasp
A Good Man Goes to War

The Happiness Patrol
A Christmas Carol
Snakedance
The Time Meddler
Ambassadors of Death
Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone
The Macra Terror
Vincent and the Doctor
Enlightenment
The Snowmen
The Face of Evil
Genesis of the Daleks
The Girl Who Waited
Human Nature/Family of Blood
The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
Evil of the Daleks
The Lodger
Survival
School Reunion
Dalek
Kinda
Planet of the Ood
Day of the Doctor
Gridlock
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

Love and Monsters
The Eleventh Hour
The Rescue
The Mind Robber
The Ark in Space
The Enemy of the World
Ghost Light
The Brain of Morbius
Blink
Caves of Androzani
Carnival of Monsters
The Girl in the Fireplace
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways
Time of the Doctor
The Ribos Operation
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
Remembrance of the Daleks
City of Death
The Doctor’s Wife
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
The Curse of Fenric
Power of the Daleks
The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang…

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I Couldn’t Save Any Of Them (The Waters of Mars)

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Drip with me.
It’s November 15th, 2009. The charts have changed, but little else has. The Black Eyed Peas are at number one now with “Meet Me Halfway,” with Cheryl Cole, Ke$ha, and Britney Spears also charting. In the meager two days of news, New Zealand qualified for the 2010 World Cup, Belle de Jour, writer of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, upon which the Billie Piper vehicle Secret Diary of a Call Girl was based, revealed her real life identity as Dr. Brooke Magnanti, largely in order to scoop journalists from the Daily Mail who were working to out her, and Barack Obama met with the government of Burma/Myanmar, becoming the first US President to do so.
While on television, The Waters of Mars. If there is one thing about The Waters of Mars that remains curiously unfocused on, it is, of course, the ending. I do not, of course, mean the Time Lord Victorious stuff and Adelaide’s suicide, a sequence that has practically blotted out the remainder of the episode, but rather the final title card, dedicating the episode to the recently deceased Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who during the Jon Pertwee era. 
Letts is easy to overlook in the list of great Doctor Who visionaries, which is odd given that he presided over one of the program’s populist high points. It’s true that in many ways the program he made is the least like any other era of Doctor Who, but for a program defined by an aesthetic of strangeness it seems as though being the odd era out should be a badge of honor. And yet Letts and the Pertwee era retain their “problem era” status in spite of their historical and for that matter continual popularity. 
Much of this, as the several months and book dedicated to the Pertwee era will demonstrate, is a consequence of the fact that Letts’s version of the show was consciously good at doing a couple of things, and rarely was inclined to stray outside of its comfort zone. That these things were unique to the era doesn’t get around a sense that there is a certain lack of adventurousness in the era. Which, to be honest, is a criticism that it’s fairly easy to level at the Davies era as well, with its relatively formulaic season structure that meant that even the adventurous stories slotted into pre-ordained positions in the running order clearly marked out as “here things get a bit weird.” That Davies was doing things that nobody had done with Doctor Who before masked this to an extent, but ultimately no more than UNIT masked the repetitiveness of the Letts era. 
Central to Davies’s approach is what we noticed back when we started the Davies era all those months ago, with Rose: a mode of storytelling that is about the act of switching among differing narrative codes. A Davies story is often a shell game – a case of moving rapidly among different types of stories, trying to get the reader to forget a key component just in time for Davies to reintroduce it and interrupt an expected progression.
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Saturday Waffling (March 1st, 2014)

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Sorry that posts have been late the last two days. I’m having a rash of Blogger problems where things I tell to post instead save to draft and don’t publish. If you missed them, there was a Last War in Albion post on Thursday that contains a fantastically gratuitous visual gag (Figure 249) that I’ve been setting up over the course of a few posts, and for which there’s really no justification. (See also my three-post long parenthetical. Somebody stop me.)

And there was an altogether more normal post on Mona Lisa’s Revenge yesterday. Well, normal on my end. On The Sarah Jane Adventures‘ end, I’m not so sure.

Right. Your weekend update. Kickstarter stuff has one more day of work to do on it before I take it to the post office. My guess is Tuesday for the last day of work, and by Friday for the post office. After that I just have to edit the Soldeed video, get it to the backer so she can do what she will with it, and I’ll be ready to post a Year-In-Review of the writing business, since I think I owe a degree of transparency for how often I shake the cup.

Not long after that, there’ll be a fresh Kickstarter for a stretch of Last War in Albion, probably targeting about $2.5k and featuring mostly digital rewards. That will also include the occasionally mentioned Secret Project, which I will spoil is Doctor Who-related. If it succeeds, I’ll be able to stick to the current status quo of regular blogging for the next year or so.

Let’s see. I’m feeling like a music weekend. I’m terribly looking forward to Alex (co-author of the Flood book) having his new album out in early March. He’s under a new band name called Seeming, has samples including the phenomenal pair of album tracks “The Burial” (my wife’s favorite song at this moment) and “Everything Could Change” up at Soundcloud. Information about the album here. I’ll probably do some proper promotion for it in a week or two, like a nice juicy interview with the gentleman. I’ve heard most of the album at this point, and yeah. I recognize that I’m biased, as he’s one of my best friends, but holy fuck, it’s good.

What music are you caught up in right now? Links to YouTube videos with a few sentences rapturously describing how the song will blow me away are strongly invited. I may even get around to adding some, having discovered the music video for Bat for Lashes’ “Lillies” over a year after I was properly obsessed with the album. And I maintain that the CHVRCHES cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is a thing of outrageous beauty.

(Example: The start of the second verse of “Everything Could Change” is an absolutely fantastic moment in which the song declines to crescendo when it’s supposed to, instead deciding to be something altogether weirder and more disturbing than the synth-pop earworm the song keeps suggesting it could be.…

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Outside the Government: Mona Lisa’s Revenge

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It’s November 12th, 2009. JLS are at number one with “Everybody in Love,” with Ke$ha, Cheryl Cole, Westlife, and Lady Gaga also charting. In news, Hugo Chavez tells Venezuela to “prepare for war” against Colombia, the US House of Representatives passes the first version of the health care law these days more commonly known as Obamacare, and, in a desperate attempt to get a third news item, Willie Bain wins the Glasgow North East by-election.
While on television, it’s Mona Lisa’s Revenge. It is difficult to get around the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge features the TARDIS as the Mona Lisa. That this involves certain eccentricities of chronology does not even seem like much of a problem: after all, in The Doctor’s Wife one of the major conceits is that the TARDIS does not experience time chronologically, and thus there is no particular reason why the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge was made two years earlier should have any bearing on the causality here.
We must also admit that Mona Lisa’s Revenge ties in conspicuously with City of Death, the previous time that Doctor Who has intersected the Mona Lisa. From that we know that the Mona Lisa that comes to life here is, if not a fake, at least not strictly speaking the original – that da Vinci in fact painted six additional versions on canvases onto which the Doctor had scrawled “this is a fake” in felt tip marker. 
This latter fact is worth stressing simply because back when we dealt with City of Death, one of our primary concerns was the fact that it was a story about the nature of authenticity – what Walter Benjamin deemed “aura” in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” That is to say, City of Death is a story about the strange and quasi-mystical allure of the authentic object. The thing that has been touched by the hand of the artist, as it were. Mona Lisa’s Revenge, for all that it is an odd bedfellow to that story, is firmly in the same tradition.
After all, the key event of the story is the presence of the Mona Lisa – the fact that it is on loan from the Louvre, and in the UK. The museum is drenched with Mona Lisa merchandise, and the story thus stresses in a number of ways how many copies and imitations of the image there are. But what’s important is the fact that the Mona Lisa – the one that comes to life and turns out to be rather evil – is the one that Leonardo da Vinci painted. Indeed, the explanation for what’s going on in this story, such as it is, hinges entirely on the medial reality of the painting. The Mona Lisa comes to life because she was painted with paint that happened to have alien rocks in it, or something like that. The explanation is terribly vague, but the underlying point stands: everything that happens in this story stems from the physical object of the Mona Lisa.
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Curdled to Sea Foam (The Last War in Albion Part 33: The Reversible Man and Chrono-Cops)

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This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s flagging middle period of short stories for IPC came to a fortuitous end with the introduction of the Time Twisters line of stories, which provided his work with a renewed energy.
The flood of animal emotions surging in the street. Present desires precipitated. Curdled to a sea foam. – Alan Moore, The Highbury Working
Figure 247: The narrator of “The Reversible Man” sees his wife for the last
time. (From “The Reversible Man,” written by Alan Moore, art by Mike
White, in 2000 AD #308, 1983)
Moore has commented that “The Reversible Man” was “pathetically easy to write,” and that he was as a result surprised by its reception, speculating that its popularity was because “the events of our lives become dulled by reputation and it takes an unusual view of them for us to see life and its emotional implications anew,” disclaiming that the story’s success “had very little to do with me as a writer.” This is, perhaps, false modesty, however – elsewhere he proclaims it “one of the best stories I’ve ever done,” and boasts of how “during their lunch hour, the day that came out, it had all the secretaries weeping.” But even in that interview, where he breathlessly describes the emotional effect of how “an ordinary little scene of two people meeting, their first meeting… becomes their final departure,” he suggests that the story came mainly out of his inclination to “do something to see what will happen” and to experiment within the confines of the format. 
The story may have been straightforward to write, but the suggestion that there is no writerly skill involved in its success is clearly untrue. Much of the story’s power comes not just from the way in which it frames the events of a man’s life, but in its specific choices of what events to frame and how to frame them. For instance, when the narrator’s father is dug up and brought to the hospital and eventually goes home, the narrator’s mother, understandably, moves out to live with her newly un-dead husband. The narration describes how “they took several of our things with them to furnish their home. Mostly antique furniture. We didn’t mind.” The choice of the furniture as a detail for this reversed event – the death of the narrator’s father – is a carefully chosen one. There are many things that accompany the death of a parent, but the choice of a mundane, material thing like dealing with their old furniture is a well-chosen one, such that the word “antiques” speaks volumes.
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Outside the Government: The Eternity Trap

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It’s November 5th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one with “Fight For This Love,” with Michael Buble, Robbie Williams, and two separate songs by the Black Eyed Peas also charting. In news, Rhode Island re-criminalizes prostitution, the Yankees win the World Series, and a U2 concert at the Brandenberg Gate celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall finds itself mired in a strange and ironic controversy as a large wall is build around the venue. 
“I hope this sci-fi show does a story about the conflict between rationalism and superstition,” said no one ever, and yet the wish is still granted for the umpteenth time in The Eternity Trap. The story is not bad – it’s a perfectly competent execution of “let’s do The Stone Tape for children,” managing to be a spooky haunted house story without ever crossing the line into objectionable or overly scarring. There’s something a little sad in the fact that it doesn’t try to scar children for life, but equally, The Sarah Jane Adventures doing a haunted house story probably should target fun instead of traumatic, so, you know. Plus, it’s got Donald Sumpter, who is positively gifted in the art of playing a raving and frothing bad guy named something like “Erasmus Darkening.” 
It’s also worth noting that The Eternity Trap takes a more ambiguous line on the science/superstition debate than is normal. Clear care has been taken in making Darkening inscrutable. The number of times the narrative goes “ah, yes, this may behave 100% like a supernatural event, but actually it’s got a vague scientific explanation” is impressive. No, the creature isn’t an unknowable monster… it’s just a completely unknown one from some parallel dimension. No, Darkening isn’t an alchemist. He’s actually an alien… from a totally unknown planet who created “a computer built from brass and iron,” a phrase that still carefully ties it to the 17th century period it ostensibly hails from. No, the house isn’t haunted by ghosts, because technically the people only got spirited to another dimension as opposed to dying. There’s a constant resistance to completely ceding ground to rationalism even as the underlying ethos of the episode is explicitly rationalist. 
This is, for the most part, more interesting. The arch-skeptical ideology is, let’s face it, boring. But more to the point, it’s preposterous within The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is in no way a rationalist show. I mean, this is the dirty little secret of every single sci-fi show to try to push the hardline rationalist perspective. Sci-fi isn’t rationalist. The Sarah Jane Adventures sure as heck isn’t. I mean, this is straightforward on a basic level. If you flop off to, say, RationalWiki or FreethoughtBlogs and start talking about how all those people who believe in ghosts are cranks because it’s obviously aliens that’s actually done it, you’re not going to be taken seriously. The conspiracy theories that say that the Illuminati is a front for the mind controlling space lizards are not, in point of fact, any more sane than the ones that go with more old-fashioned “it’s paranormal.”
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Spike and Rape Culture

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A bit ago, someone gave me cause to write a brief thing about Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and particularly the way in which his character is handled after the moment he sexually assaults Buffy towards the end of Season Six

Here, for me, is the interesting thing about Spike. And I don’t think this is quite the reading that Whedon intended for Spike, but I think it’s close, and makes Spike an astonishing metaphor for rape culture and what it does. And, actually, the sort of approach to rape culture that could only really be pioneered by a feminist man, which interests me on several levels.

I mean, let’s be unambiguous here. Rape culture, as an idea and a critique, needed to be developed by women. Men are a support class in feminism, and this is as it should be. That’s the point. But equally, there are perspectives within the discussion that are both male and relevant. And I think the depiction of Spike is one of them.

The key thing, to me, about the bathroom rape scene is what Spike does next, which is to go on an extended quest for his soul. Because this ties into an important thematic narrative about vampires in Buffy, which is that they are true monsters. There are clearly shells of people wrapped up in them, but they’re explicitly irredeemable. Angel, somewhere or other, describes the demonic aspect of vampires as taking everything you are and twisting it, and fine, but let’s dig deeper here and note that the overall sense is that vampires are slaves to some external narrative about what vampires do.

Because it’s not just hunger in Buffy. It’s not just that vampires feed on innocents and have to. It’s not just temptation. These are the usual themes of vampire fiction, but Buffy mostly avoids them. Vampires in Buffy are visibly compelled into a larger narrative of evil deeds. They seem unable to resist becoming servants of powerful overlords with schemes for, at best, world domination, and at worst, things like the complete destruction of the planet. The state of soullessness means enslavement to a particular cultural narrative.

This is the recurring narrative for Spike. Even when he starts to redeem himself in Season Four, he’s redeemed by external force: by a chip in his brain that keeps him from indulging in the worst aspects of the narrative that his demon prescribes for him. It makes him less bad, but only in an instrumental way, in the same way that criminalizing rape sometimes locks predators up before they harm a second or third or fifth or twelfth person, but does fuck all to actually stop them from their first rape.

But somewhere in the course of his story, in looking in horror at what he’s done to Buffy, he changes. He rejects the narrative prescribed for him and seeks the power to write his own narrative. With Angel, the soul becomes a binary switch. Have one and you’re good, don’t have one and you’re not.…

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Outside the Government: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

, 26

It’s October 29th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one, with Whitney Houston, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Buble, Jay-Z, and Robbie Williams also charting. In news, Morrissey collapses while performing “This Charming Man” in Swindon. Zine El Abine Ben Ali wins 90% of the votes in Tunisia and a five-year term of office, which seems like a sure bet that he’ll be around for ages. And footballer Marlon King is sacked from Wigan Athletic after a sexual assault conviction.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The biggest thing about this story is, of course, that the Doctor is in it. That this is demonstrably the most important thing about it is also in many regards the fundamental challenge of it: how does one do an episode of a spin-off to Doctor Who that features the Doctor and not have it become a de facto episode of Doctor Who instead of an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The first trick is a relatively obvious one: make the Doctor’s absence a tangible part of the plot. After teasing his appearance repeatedly in The Mad Woman in the Attic, we have a first episode here in which the sound of the TARDIS is in effect used as a sort of accent and punctuation: something that repeatedly teases the eventual arrival of the Doctor. It’s only the second episode in which Tennant features at all, and even there he effectively drops out of the climax so that Clyde can save the day instead. Tennant, in other words, is deliberately treated as something to use sparingly, so that this feels unmistakably like an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures and not like an episode of Doctor Who that went out with the wrong opening credits.
It is, of course, questionable whether or not this was necessary. There is in the end nothing that would have effectively made this anything other than a story where the guest star overwhelms the show. And in some ways that’s the real point of it: a private episode of Doctor Who for the kids. There is, after all, something thoroughly delightful in that idea. The usually not actually true statement that Doctor Who is for children (as opposed to the reality, which is that it is a show that carefully avoids not being for children) here applies wonderfully. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is a secret treat for kids – something that feels a bit like staying up past your bedtime.
In something of a concession to this reality, the second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith revels in these possibilities. Indeed, much of its runtime is devoted to a longer sequence of the Doctor running around with Clyde, Luke, and Rani than the plot actually needs – a sequence that exists mostly, if we’re being honest, to set up things like Clyde actually calling the Doctor out on an “I’ll explain later.” Which is wonderful and worth doing, to be fair.
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