Eruditorum Press

That’s not the voice of god, that’s just a ring modulator

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 26 (I, Davros)

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A commissioned essay for David Allen.
For all that the new series takes pains to avoid making declarations about “canon” that might clash with the classic series or the spinoff material, things got surprisingly close with Journey’s End, which, in an earlier draft, contained a flashback sequence that gave a capsule origin story of Davros. All fairly standard stuff – a shot of the one time he was ever on the surface of Skaro, him swearing to ensure the survival of his people, Davros horribly injured and screaming, and then a nice monologue about how “I became a victim myself. Perhaps it was necessary. To inspire me… Can you imagine? I had one idea! An idea that has never stopped. Rolling out across the centuries. I have slept, and woken, and died, and every time I open my eyes there they are. My Daleks. Outlasting eternity. And all from one man.”
It’s a lovely little monologue – the “outlasting eternity” line is a cute little throwback to the Doctor’s description of humanity in The Ark in Space, only inverting that into an act of singular, mad vision as opposed to a collective indomitability. It fits nicely with the larger metaphoric space of Journey’s End, and the decision to frame the Daleks as an idea – that is, as a narrative concept – is wonderful. It also, apparently dragged during the read-through and required a bunch of FX shots, and so got cut before filming. It’s always something. 
Had this sequence not been deleted, however, the result would have been a rare moment of contradicting what had come before, as back in 2006 Big Finish released a quartet of audios called I, Davros that offered a different and contradictory origin for him. Actually, the contradiction isn’t that jarring – the big one hinges on whether or not Davros has only seen the surface of Skaro once or not. The real difference is that Big Finish did four hours and forty minutes of audio about Davros’s origins whereas Russell T Davies wrote and cut about a sixty second flashback. They’re very different things.
But they both speak to an underlying concern about Davros, which is the need to approach him from the opposite direction. In practice Davros is a back formation of the Daleks. Terry Nation considered the question of what the Daleks’ origin might be and created Davros in their image. His physical appearance is derived straightforwardly from Ray Cusick’s iconic design of the Daleks. His basic concept and iconography as a Joseph Mengele figure comes from the Daleks’ existing Nazi Germany imagery. Everything about him comes from the Daleks, designed as a retconned origin for them. 
And so any attempt to provide an origin for Davros that leads to the Daleks is necessarily something of an odd process. It can never be an entirely satisfying narrative simply because the narrative is self-evidently false. It has the same problems as telling the true and complete story of the Doctor leaving Gallifrey – the reality of the narrative is that it was designed to function without that story, and thus that the addition to the story is fundamentally inessential.
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Tis the Season and Whatnot

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Excerpts from a project I don’t actually have time for, but wish I did.

You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch


The webcomic XKCD once slyly pointed out that radio airplay of Christmas songs amounts to an extended nostalgia project for baby boomers, with the top twenty songs clustered neatly around the 1950s and 1960s. “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” is not among those top twenty, but is clearly part of the same trend, coming from the 1966 How The Grinch Stole Christmas television special.

It is difficult to account for its status in the Christmas canon on any grounds other than sheer nostalgia. Its only connection to Christmas is appearing in a holiday special. The lyrics don’t mention the holiday at all, instead just insulting the Grinch for six verses

Indeed, lyrically, the song seems almost anti-Christmas. It is a character piece meant to establish the main character of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when the entire point of the character is that he’s missing the holiday spirit entirely. But his overall character arc over the course of the special isn’t contained in the song.

More to the point, the overall point of the special is in many ways a split decision. Yes, the Grinch makes nice at the end, but the point of the special isn’t the eventual reconciliation, it’s the giddy thrill of the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The special asks us to revel in perversity with the thin justification that order is restored eventually.

And this carries through to the song. On the one hand, the song is a description of the villainous Grinch and his awful ways. But as much as the song condemns the Grinch, its pleasure is clearly in the perverse excesses of its invective. One central joke of the song is the way in which the final line steadily increases in size, from “you’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel,” which fits the actual musical phrase, up to “I wouldn’t touch you with with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole,” which humorously crams too many syllables into one note, all the way up to “your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots,” a description in which there are simply too many adjectives. (“Mangled up in,” in particular, exists only to sustain the phrase a little bit longer.)

This excess is, of course, quintessentially Seussian. But what is striking is not just the excess but the way in which it is overtly contrary to the supposed sense of the season. But the story of the redeemed curmudgeon has obvious history in Christmas – most obviously with Ebeneezer Scrooge. And while these stories are ostensibly about their main character’s redemption, they also show an important carnivalesque inversion of the usual order of things. Their presence deflates the gaudy artifice of Christmas.

The truth is, nobody in their right minds doesn’t want to punch the Whos in the face around the third “Dahoo Dores,” cloying little snots that they are.…

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Unpeople Undoing Unthings Untogether (Turn Left)

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What do you mean they cast the guy who mistook me for
a masseuse and wouldn’t go home? I’d have come back to the
series if they’d told me. 
It’s June 21st, 2008. Mint Royale are “Singin’ in the Rain” at number one, with Gabriella Cilmi, domestic abuser Chris Brown, and a will.i.am/Cheryl Cole duet also charting. In news, same sex marriage starts in California, while the UK ratifies the Treaty of Lisbon. And AIG ousts its CEO due to losses suffered in the subprime mortgage crisis, which is probably reasonable given that three months later the company went spectacularly bankrupt.
Given that context, Turn Left marks one of those uncanny moments where Doctor Who gets ahead of cultural trends. It’s also a funny little thing. In some ways it marks the point where the “Doctor Lite” episode becomes obsolete, as it finally plays out the most obvious Doctor Lite concept imaginable – what if the Doctor never existed. Or, in this case, what if he died two seasons ago. What results is one of the most bizarre mishmashes of concepts in the entire Davies era, or, in many ways, of any era.
There’s a fair case that it was not Davies’s best ever idea to decide that in the absence of the Doctor the UK would descend into fascism complete with labor camps for unwanted foreigners. The It Happened Here vibe of this is certainly interesting in its own right, and Davies will of course revisit all of these ideas with considerable aplomb in 2009, but there’s something off about it here. It’s not that a nuclear explosion eradicating London wouldn’t plausibly lead to exactly the sort of scenario we see here. Rather, it’s… well… Donna.
Because the real point of Turn Left – the dramatic arc that actually drives it – is Donna becoming a hero from a different direction than the one she actually took. Which means that Catherine Tate is back to playing a Catherine Tate Show character for most of the story. But there’s a subtle twist to her performance – one that Tate herself is more than equipped to handle. In The Runaway Bride Donna is a comedy character who, by the end of the story, becomes a reasonably well-realized character, albeit ultimately still a one-off. But here she’s Donna Noble, who has been the primary companion and co-lead in nine of the last ten episodes. Yes, she’s regressed to a pre-Doctor state, but that characterization can’t be undone by fiat. At this point, looking at her, we still see Donna Noble, not Catherine Tate.
This leads to a certain degree of perversity, particularly in the labor camps scene, as Donna chases after the truck demanding to know where it’s going when it’s perfectly clear to everybody else what’s going on. There’s a joke here that’s suddenly turned nasty; Donna Noble, who missed all the alien attacks prior to The Runaway Bride, now misses the establishment of concentration camps in Britain because she’s so comically thick.
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Saturday Waffling (December 14th, 2013)

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Again I shall be brief, for it is late and I am tired.

So let’s take our speculative guesses on Time of the Doctor. What do we think is going to happen there? How do the photos and teases that have come out fit together? Why is there a wooden Cyberman? (That last one may just be me, but it’s certainly the one I’m most curious about.)

See you all Monday.…

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So I Hit Him. What Would You Do? (The Last War in Albion Part 22: Alan Moore’s Feuds, Star Wars, Joseph Campbell)

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This is the fifth of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it. 

“So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as “the soul.” So I hit him. What would you do?” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore wrote some clever comics about Doctor Who, including the beginning of an abandoned epic involving a war unfolding non-chronologically such that the first attack precedes the incident that sparked the war…

Figure 163: Alan Moore’s reputation for fights is often a part of more
caricatured depictions of him.
Moore was, apparently, intending to further flesh out his idea of a non-chronological war further, but circumstances intervened. Instead left the title along with Steve Moore, who had worked extensively on a plot outline for a third Abslom Daak story only to discover that the editor, Alan McKenzie, had already begun writing a story with the characters. Angered by this, Steve Moore abruptly quit the main title and was replaced by Steve Parkhouse, and Alan Moore followed suit in what Steve Moore has referred to as “a wonderful gesture of support that was remarkable for someone at that early a stage in their career.” While it’s true that Moore, who had not come close to establishing himself as a writer, took a genuine professional risk in quitting, the fact that he did so early in his career is the only remarkable thing here. It is, in fact, the first of many such gestures in his career. Moore has, within comics, become almost as famous for his tendency to get into professional feuds as he has for his comics work. Indeed, Moore’s capacity for umbrage is ultimately one of the primary casus belli of the War. 
It is worth, then, looking at this first dispute in order to better understand the nature of Moore’s umbrage. First of all, this dispute is interesting in that there is no way to frame it as being over a slight to Moore himself.
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There Should Have Been Another Way (Midnight)

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Such a heavenly way to die
I completely forgot to do the images for the next Last War in Albion before 4am, so I’m running that Friday and this today.
It’s June 14th, 2008. Mint Royale are at number one with “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Sara Bareilles, Duffy, Rihanna, and Ne-Yo also charting. In news, Euro 2008 is unfolding in Austria and Switzerland without England’s involvement. Apple introduces the iPhone 3G. The US Supreme Court decides Boumediene v. Bush, which ruled that foreign terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay could offer habeas corpus petitions in US courts. And massive floods break out in Iowa.
While on television, it’s Midnight. There is a school of thought that, not unreasonably, views Midnight as the greatest script Russell T Davies ever wrote for Doctor Who. It is not that this view is inaccurate so much as that it is a claim that often has a wealth of unseen premises. To be sure, Midnight is very good – a blend of creepiness and furious cynicism with real bite. But often the praise for it seems to tacitly be criticism of, well, essentially every other Davies episode. Midnight has few jokes, an ending that’s the polar opposite of “the power of love,” and, more broadly, is clearly Davies writing to push himself and get out of some of his ordinary tropes. In other words, it’s seemingly a Davies script for people who don’t like Davies scripts.
It is true that there is something strange about Midnight. Reading The Writer’s Tale, one gets the feeling that it’s an almost hallucinatory experience. According to the dates in The Writer’s Tale, on September 27th, 2007 Davies determined that the planned script for what was then episode eight of Season Four (it got moved late in production) wasn’t working out. On October 5th, after finishing rewrites to the Sontaran two-parter, Davies tells Cook that he’s thinking of writing it, though he frets about the time he has to do it in. Five days later, on Wednesday the 10th, he mentions to Cook the basic outline of it – everyone trapped in a bus (to save money) and a monster on the outside that possesses a woman (to be called Sky) who begins repeating people. What appeals to him, it seems, is both the creepiness and the fact that it would be technically difficult to shoot but very cheap – he speaks of “all that production-tension creeping onto the screen,” and about it being a story where the Doctor loses his speech. But he also admits that he has no idea how it ends. 
That Saturday he clears the weekend to work on it, with the goal of starting production on Monday if the script works out. The weekend is a buzz of e-mails between them in which Davies describes the intensity of writing it. He tells Cook about the difficulty of juggling eight person scenes, and says that his “brain is bleeding,” but less than ten hours later It’s “buzzing” and he’s having trouble keeping all his ideas in check.
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River, You Know My Name (The Husbands of River Song)

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as Professor River Song.

It’s December 25th, 2015. The Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir are at number one with “A Bridge Over You,” a 2013 song pushed to number one in protest of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s efforts to extend the hours of junior doctors. Justin Bieber, who supported the campaign, is in number two, three, and five, while Adele is at number four, a complete lack of any shift in the charts since Hell Bent. One Direction, Coldplay, and Stormzy also chart. In news, the Paris Accord on climate change is agreed upon, while Kellingley Colliery, Britain’s last deep coal mine, closes. Donald Trump calls for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, and Martin Shkreli is revealed to have been the purchaser of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and arrested on securities fraud charges.

While on television, Moffat’s final episode. I mean, yes, there are fourteen others. But never mind about all of that. Moffat has said that when he wrote this he didn’t know if he’d be back. I once heard an idea—I’m pretty sure it was Douglas Hofstadter’s originally, though Chris O’Leary uses the same image to talk about “Ashes to Ashes”—of writing a book that in fact ends in its middle somewhere, so as to remove the sense of coming to the end provided by the actual physical book. There are several things suggested for what to do with the excess pages, scaling up from leaving them blank to actually constructing a book that can go on for some time after it has reached its ending.

I would suggest that the Moffat/Capaldi era is something like that. It ends with The Husbands of River Song; the remaining fourteen episodes, good and bad (and there are several in each basket), are in a fundamental sense unnecessary. It is not that Moffat stayed too long—nothing about Series 10 is such a dramatic falling off from the mad and imperious glory days of Series 9 as to justify that claim.  It is simply that the actual ending is here. 

In this regard, two elements present themselves as inevitable in hindsight. The first is River Song herself. Having already had her first appearance serve as the beginning of the Moffat era eighteen months before the end of the Davies era, her appearance here provides a symmetry as convoluted as her timeline, and as effective to boot. The Name of the Doctor was never an entirely satisfying denouement to River’s story, in part because it was just never entirely satisfying period, but also because both the idea that River’s fate in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead was unfixable (as opposed to inviolate) and the idea that the trip to the Singing Towers could be squared away in a three minute farce released as a DVD extra are wholly untenable. 

Ultimately it is the latter that Moffat opts to revise, which is probably the better choice, since it works as a final story for River (and indeed requires that anyone else who wants to use her going forward has to go to some pretty extreme lengths to do so), whereas effectively resurrecting her would be something of a white elephant for Chibnall.…

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One Year Later

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Nearly one year on, these are the things I remember.

Going to my favorite breakfast restaurant the next morning and sitting next to a loudmouth man who talked about how he didn’t even want to have Christmas anymore, but who, as he paid for his meal, tried to get the waitress to stop by his car dealership.
The town piling up all the toys people donated in the basement of the town hall and letting kids just pick freely from them. After Chirstmas they still had so many that they had to make expensive plans to get rid of the absurd mass of toys that people donated with no thought whatsoever as to whether they were comforting anyone but themselves.
The woman who set up an ad hoc memorial consisting of little Christmas trees, which she described as having “pink lights for the girl angels and blue lights for the boy angels,” and my bafflement both at the fact that gender essentialism is somehow necessary after death and that the six adults got red lights.
The day it took an hour to drive the mile from my house to the comic shop because of the traffic around the church, not from people going to one of the funerals, but from news vans parked across the street filming people at the funeral.
The numbing awkwardness of meeting a bunch of Jill’s family for the first time at a family Christmas party two days after, and having a half-dozen identical conversations, all of which begin with someone I’ve just met asking where in Connecticut we live, and which end precisely one sentence later.
How it was too soon to talk about the politics of gun control right up until the impetus to actually do anything had passed.
Reading an article in Salon that offered a deconstructive take on the name of the bar Nancy Lanza frequented – My Place – viewing it as the epitome of American capitalist culture. My Place added a bar no more than a decade ago, and anyone local knows it as one of the main local pizza places; I first ate there over twenty years ago.
The signs some presumably well-meaning people put up suggesting that everything is God’s plan, and how I wanted to just drive out at 2am and tear them all down, along with the brightly colored signs comforting the town made by kids who had never been there and hung from every telephone pole, and all the other mawkish, brightly colored shit that consisted of nothing more than hollow platitudes trying to advance the sickening lie that there is anything OK about a world where one morning twenty first graders can be gunned down in their classroom. 
…

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Tact and Finesse (The Unicorn and the Wasp)

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It’s May 17th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake have been at number one for substantially more than “Four Minutes.” Usher, Coldplay, and Kylie Minogue also chart. In news, attempts to provide relief aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis drag on, largely due to reticence on the part of the government of Myanmar. California’s Supreme Court declares that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. And, on the same day as this story airs, Portsmouth FC defeat Cardiff City in the final of the FA Cup.
Also on television is The Unicorn and the Wasp. There is a simplicity to this story. It is, of course, a Gareth Roberts script, which means it is a giddy, often very funny celebration. Roberts is not the writer you hire for critical and ambivalent takes on a subject, and so what we get here is wall-to-wall glee about how wonderful Agatha Christie was.
There are of course unsettling problems with this. Christie was a reactionary bigot of the worst sort-  a fact that requires a complete whitewashing so that we can all revel in the Downtonesque  glamour of the period setting without having to feel problematic in the least. It’s on the one hand difficult to be too upset about this – the point of the story, after all, is to be a big, frothy Agatha Christie pastiche in which the final twist is that the killer is an alien. Deconstructing the Agatha Christie style is a valid move too, but it’s a fundamentally different move.
Instead the point is to be absolutely, giddily bonkers. This is a story that’s supposed to be funny and inventive. And it is. The Agatha Christie title jokes fly fast and furious, well beyond what’s even remotely required. (I remember, about a year after this aired, solving a puzzlehunt with an Agatha Christie themed puzzle in it based on titles, and laughing out loud solving it as I realized just how many of the titles were what I had previously taken as perfectly ordinary lines from this episode.)
So Agatha Christie becomes not a historical figure but a genre, which is, of course, how Doctor Who generally prefers its history anyway. Then, added to this, is a cheekily recursive joke in which the Agatha Christie genre gets Agatha Christie thrust into it as a character. Roberts, being Roberts, was always going to write this as a giddy celebration of fannish love, and so we get the double recursion whereby it’s an Agatha Christie mystery starring Agatha Christie in which the reason the story feels like it’s straight out of an Agatha Christie mystery is, in fact, because the characters have been reading Agatha Christie. It’s gobsmackingly meta. 
And so we get a story that, like any Agatha Christie story, is full of revelations. This is the standard structure of an Agatha Christie story – every character has some secret that causes them to act suspiciously. Typically the character who is the least obviously suspicious ends up being the murderer.
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Saturday Waffling (December 7th, 2013)

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So. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman.

I’ll confess up front that I haven’t seen her in anything. The only one of the Fast and the Furious films I saw was the first one, which was a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie of the sort Vin Diesel is very good at appearing in. My only memory of it is the bit where the car drives under a semi. I assume the subsequent movies are memorable in exactly the same ways.

Which is to point out what everybody with a brain and a keyboard already has, which is that there’s nothing in her resume that inspires confidence. This is not in and of itself a problem – Lynda Carter had a thin resume as well, and she was phenomenal in the part. Everybody has a big break.

And I’m not one of the people who’s intrinsically down on the movie because it’s a Zack Snyder film. I like Snyder, and think he’s largely misunderstood. I liked Man of Steel. The problem is that everything I liked about Man of Steel is also a reason why it’s a terrible cornerstone to try to build a big DC Universe franchise out of. I liked Man of Steel for being a cynical take on Superman that was the first well thought out response to Grant Morrison’s stuff to date. And I still think it was that.

And it’s the director of Sucker Punch doing Wonder Woman. And I think Sucker Punch is a flooringly brutal, angry feminist film that was criminally misunderstood. It’s one of my favorite movies of the last decade. And while I don’t imagine the director of Sucker Punch is going to make a straightforward and iconic Wonder Woman movie, there are many ways in which the prospect of a Wonder Woman movie from him just sounds phenomenally exciting. I want to see his take on Wonder Woman.

The thing is, that’s not what this is going to be. Wonder Woman seems to be in the movie as part of a commitment to establishing a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel’s. And Snyder’s the wrong guy to do that. He does angry deconstructions, where what you need here are the iconic, straightforward takes on characters carefully and well-executed. Man of Steel was, for me, a great Superman movie, but it’s an awful start to an ongoing Superman franchise. And I can’t help but fear Wonder Woman will end up in a similar position here. And given that she, unlike Batman and Superman, doesn’t have a history of coming back again and again in film, that’s worrisome, because as many have pointed out, this is probably the only chance we’ll get for ten or twenty year.s

But all of that has little to do with Gal Gadot, who is taking on a role with a lot of expectations. I hope she nails it. And while I have no reason to think she will, I also have no reason to think she won’t.

Thoughts?…

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