Eruditorum Press

Post-Geek

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:

The Mighty Warrior Sheltering Behind His Gun (The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky)

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How are you holding up? Because I’m a potato.
And one more time in case you missed it, the first Tom baker volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is now out. It’s nice, rectangular, and easy to wrap.
It’s April 26th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake are at number one with “4 Minutes,” which exceeds its titular expectations by some margin and stays at number one for both weeks of this story. Mariah Carey, September, Usher, Wiley, and Sam Sparro also chart. In news, a bit of a spat breaks out between Jimmy Carter and the Bush administration over whether anyone ever advised him not to meet with Hamas. Wesley Snipes goes to prison for tax evasion, Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, and Boris Johnson unseats Ken Livingstone to become Mayor of London. 
While on television we have The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky. Perhaps the first question to ask is why this is even a thing. Once the series had brought back the big three villains at the sensible rate of one a year, the issue of returning monsters necessarily became a bit silly. On the one hand, a returning monster is always good for a day or two of press coverage, which is why we have new look Silurians, Ice Warriors, and Zygons now. On the other, after the Master we’re essentially out of villains whose return would play a substantively mythic role within Doctor Who. (There is sort of one exception, but we’ll get to him.) Instead the return of monster become what it was under John Nathan-Turner – an exercise that exists entirely for the purposes of promotion. This is not a bad thing – Doctor Who’s job is to bring ratings, and free publicity of the sort a returning monster gets fuels that. But it means that returning monsters stop being understandable in terms of their legacy. Rise of the Cybermen demanded to be read in light of The Tenth Planet just as Dalek actively invoked The Power of the Daleks and Last of the Time Lord reveled in the icongraphy of the Pertwee era.
But if we try to compare the Sontarans of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky with the classic series we find ourselves altogether more frustrated. As Rob Shearman has noted, the Sontarans are not monsters in the generic sense, at least not in The Time Warrior. They’re a single character, Lynx, who’s defined in terms of the Doctor. Even on their return in The Sontaran Experiment, they’re still specifically focused on the individual, with a joke about how they’re a clone species being used to explain why they have the same actor playing a different Sontaran. It’s not until The Invasion of Time that they became monsters in a generic sense, and that was an act of sheer desperation by a production team that was in so far over their heads it wasn’t even funny. And then of course there’s Robert Holmes’s own witheringly pointless revival of them in The Two Doctors, where they finally settled into existing for no reason other than drawing a few headlines.
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Fit to Lead the Life of a Dog (Planet of the Ood)

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If you missed it on Monday, the fourth TARDIS Eruditorum book, covering the first part of Tom Baker’s tenure as the Doctor, is now out. Thank you for supporting the blog.


It doesn’t taste anything like chicken!
It’s April 19th, 2008. Estelle remain at number one, and the only new entry into the charts at all is September with “Cry For You.” Chris Brown, who violently beat his partner, is also still in the charts. In news, Delta and Northwest agree to merge to become the world’s biggest airline, and Silvio Berlusconi starts his third stint as Prime Minister of Italy. 
On television, meanwhile, we have Planet of the Ood. It’s interesting that this is the second consecutive story to have a direct shout-out to the Hartnell era. But where The Fires of Pompeii was just a moment of arch-fannishness (albeit the most rawly fannish in-joke the series had produced to date, serving as it does no narrative function whatsoever), Planet of the Ood’s invocation of The Sensorites is a deliberate reference confirming something Davies had floated on Doctor Who Confidential when the Ood debuted. Davies, in other words, actively wants the Ood to be read in light of an obscure monster from a terribly unloved story in Doctor Who’s first season.
The Sensorites is an odd duck of a story. It suffers even more than most 1960s stories from its languid pacing, and to a modern eye seems terribly cliche. But it is in practice a story that is cliche because of how often it’s been imitated. Indeed, upon reflection it is the story that introduces the idea that the alien can be a sense of wonder instead of terror, as what appear to be terrible monsters at first are steadily revealed to be gentle, kindly, and even timid creatures. (Note how this is paralleled closely with Susan’s awed description of her homeworld – it’s not a side detail, it’s the entire point of The Sensorites)
This is useful background for Planet of the Ood, which begins by pretending to be a story about monsters and ends somewhere almost entirely different. At first we are led to believe that the story is as it was in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit – a story about the Ood being taken over to go bad in some fashion. The iconography of the episode encourages this, with the problem afflicting the Ood being that their eyes turn red and they start killing things. Under standard Doctor Who iconography, this means possession, especially given that this is historically what the Ood are for.
So the story appears straightforward. And yet even from the start it’s clear that there’s going to be some sort of comeuppance for the evil corporation. For one thing, there’s an evil corporation, and standard Doctor Who logic draws conclusions from putting an evil corporation in the first act. More broadly, the Ood are a pointedly unanswered question. The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit raised the possibility that there was more to them than appeared, but also never quite rocked the boat. 
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Robook Launch

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Planet of the Ood will be covered on Tuesday.

I am pleased and indeed thrilled to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years in print and digital release. 
You can get it at the following locations.
Over the next couple of weeks it will appear in other ebook stores like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple, though if you have e-readers of that sort, I advise buying from Smashwords. Previous volumes, including the soon to be out of print first edition of the Hartnell book, are available from all of the same sites.
This book collects the TARDIS Eruditorum entries covering the first three of Tom Baker’s seven years in Doctor Who, from Robot through The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And so it includes:
  • Revised and expanded versions of every relevant essay.
  • Three book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on Managra, Corpse Marker, and The Valley of Death.
  • A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities entry on Shadows.
  • Book-exclusive essays on the nature of the Master, the TARDIS language circuits, matter transmats, how Genesis of the Daleks altered history, and the true history of the conspiracy.
  • Yet another brilliant cover by James Taylor, who discusses his process here.
  • Impeccable copyediting by Chris O’Leary.
  • Exactly four hundred and seventy instances of the letter Q.
If you do enjoy James’s phenomenal cover, mugs and t-shirts based on the design are for sale in the Eruditorum Press store. 
On Saturday, I asked what people were thankful for. I’m thankful for a lot of things, but one of the things I’m most thankful for is the community of readers that has formed around this blog, and that are unflaggingly and stunningly generous in their support. Every time I do one of these book launches I usually have a big spiel about this, but I’ll keep it short and sweet this time: writing is my job. If you enjoy my work, taking opportunities to support it by buying stuff is what keeps me able to do it. 
I expect the second edition of the Hartnell book to be available in early January. The second Tom Baker book will probably be in late summer of 2014. The Logopolis book will be slightly before that. 
Thank you everybody. This has been a heck of a month. 
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Saturday Waffling (November 30th, 2013)

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Hello all.

The Tom Baker 1 book is all finished, and will be launching imminently. Hartnell v2 is still on schedule. And that’s me releasing way too many books in a short period done with.

I’m in the midst of the first properly gonzo thing I’ve done in quite a while, so am going to keep this short. In the spirit of the recent American holiday, then, what are you thankful for?…

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He Sets Fire To Rome (The Fires of Pompeii)

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“What? No. Don’t cast him. He’d make an awful Doctor. He
looks like a murderous cab driver for God’s sake.”
It’s April 12th, 2008. Estelle is at number one with “American Boy.” Sam Sparro, Kooks, Mariah Carey, Madonna and Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown (a domestic abuser) also chart. In news, Mark Penn resigns from the Clinton campaign, which is interesting mostly because he resigned for reasons other than gross incompetence. London does (depending on your perspective) a rubbish or great job hosting part of the Olympic torch run, as an anti-China protester manages to briefly snatch the torch. It goes similarly well in Paris, where the torch is actually extinguished by authorities. Then, in San Francisco, the torch and runner briefly disappear entirely before being run along a different route where nobody knows to watch or protest it.
Speaking of fire and the classical world, The Fires of Pompeii. First of all, before we go at all into this story, let’s agree to set aside The Waters of Mars. Everything here is obviously going to come up again in that post. But we did a fine job of shutting up about The Deadly Assassin while we worked our way through earlier versions of Time Lord history, and an equally fine job of ignoring The War Games until the time came, so let’s do the same here and take this story entirely on its own terms. Let’s also note that this was written prior to Day of the Doctor and makes no effort to understand the Time War in the context of that episode.
Similarly, when it comes to Peter Capaldi, let’s note that it’s sad that such a great actor blows his opportunity to be on Doctor Who in what is by and large an underwritten bit part. Given that the new series tends not to recycle actors, it’s borderline tragic that we’re not going to get to see him again after this. Also, one of the actresses playing the Sibylline Sisters is quite good, and wasted in the part. A pity, through and through.
It is no secret that I am not, by and large, a fan of stories that treat the alteration of history as a moral dilemma. I’ve discussed my reasons for this before, but the long and short of it is that it’s an entirely fake moral dilemma. Because altering history is at present completely impossible, there are no principles on which to hang an ethical debate about it. It’s as hollow an ethical debate as whether or not it’s acceptable to use grozzlebarks in order to banderflinch. Which is to say that any supposed ethical principles involved are, in fact, purely the invention of the writer. It’s an ethical debate without substance – one in which the writer picks the outcome they want and then creates some technobabble to explain why that’s the ethical position.
Except it’s worse than that, because the position taken is inevitably that changing history is wrong. And so the only sort of message that one can take away from these stories is that things must remain the way they are, often because of the incomprehensible explanations of the People Who Are In Charge Of These Things.
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Dawn Transformed the Sky into an Abattoir (The Last War in Albion Part 20: Moores’ Doctor Who Comics)

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This is the third 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. 
“It would be equally irresponsible of me to instruct up-and-coming writers on how to write sickly extravagant captions like ‘Dawn transformed the sky into an abattoir’ or whatever.” – Alan Moore, Writing For Comics
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Steve Moore, Alan Moore’s closest friend and confidant over the course of the War, came to work on Marvel UK’s newly launched Doctor Who Weekly in 1979, where he created the character of Abslom Daak, a close cousin of the Axel Pressbutton character he co-created with Alan Moore and wrote for Warrior. In one issue of Warrior, Moore interviewed his own “Pedro Henry” pseudonym on how to write comics…
On one level this is the same sort of tightly structural approach that characterizes Alan Moore’s work. But on another, there’s a fundamentally different sort of focus. As Steve Moore puts it, “if Dez asks for six pages, you give him six… the same as some editors will ask you for a set number of frames… and if they say forty frames, they don’t mean thirty-nine or forty-one. If you turn up saying ‘Sorry, boss, I couldn’t fit it in so I’ve used four extra frames’ then that, quite simply, is bad writing.” This highlights the degree to which Steve Moore writes his comics as a professional concern, within the material realities of publishing. That’s certainly not to say that Alan Moore doesn’t, but there’s a clear difference between the sort of ruthless targeting of what the editor wants and the storytelling Alan Moore engages in. 
This perspective on Steve Moore’s work helps explain the odd tone of Laser Eraser and Pressbutton. Moore was tasked with a specific set of editorial concerns; revamp the old Abslom Daak strips into something for Warrior, using the comedy character of Axel Pressbutton. That the resulting script is a bit disjointed in many ways speaks to just how good Steve Moore was at giving editors what they want, no matter how strange. But it contrasts sharply with Alan Moore, who took his Marvelman revamp and his mandate to make a Night Raven clone and ran in unexpected directions with them that ended up far from the original concepts. 
Figure 151: Unsurprisingly, Selene made an appearance in Steve Moore’s
Doctor Who comics (Steve Moore and Dave Gibbons, Doctor Who
Monthly #50, 1981)
This sort of diligence also explains why when Mills and Wagner departed the lead strip after Doctor Who Weekly #34, during the pause in the midst of Star Tigers, Steve Moore was promptly promoted to replace them.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Coffee (LOST)

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“Artists should not be trusted. If an artist is not deceitful
every so often in the cause of his art, then he is a poor artist.”
— Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
LOST was quite possibly one of the biggest shows to hit television in the last decade. More remarkable was the fact that it was ostensibly “cult television” and yet it still hit it big in the mainstream. It was never the highest rated show on television, but it was in the American top-20 for most of its six-year run, it was the most recorded TV show at the time, and it was also an international sensation. It garnered 55 Emmy nominations (the American equivalent of BAFTAs) winning 11; many critics once called one of the greatest shows ever made.
As far as this blog is concerned, we shouldn’t be surprised. Like Doctor Who, LOST provided a means by which disparate genres could be smashed together. Doctor Who has the TARDIS; LOST had The Island. A place for people who were metaphorically lost in their lives, it allowed all kinds of different stories to play out. One week The Fugitive would be running about helping people and all the while trying to evade the law. Next week there might be a medical drama, followed by a comedy, a family drama, a love story, a con game, or a tragedy. This all got mixed in with the adventure of exploring a mysterious Island, populated by ghosts, time travel, an Island god, and a Smoke Monster for good measure. It hit the sweet spot of soap tropes and “genre” mythology.
Today its reputation is far different, and it’s impossible to go back and watch it again without keeping this in mind. The finale (as was the case for most of its final season) was largely panned, and it isn’t unusual to find it on a critic’s “10 worst” list of some sort or another. People expected answers that were never delivered; new but less compelling characters came to the forefront; the show veered into iconography better found in a greeting card penned by Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Which really begs the question: What the hell happened?
~~~ whooosh ~~~
KATE: We have to go back for him.
CHARLIE: Go back? There? Kate, there’s a certain
gargantuan quality about this thing.
(1×01: Pilot, Part 1)
~~~ whooosh ~~~
It’s August 15th, 2005. Oasis is poised to hit number one, with McFly, Babyshambles, Iron Maiden, and British Whale all charting. Americans are killing Iraqis, but Indonesia signs a peace treaty with the Free Aceh Movement, so there’s that. India celebrates its 60th Independence Day. Helios Airways Flight 522 crashes near Athens, killing 121.
While on Netflix, it’s Disc One of Season One of LOST. I inhale it quicker than Bill Clinton can suck down a cigar. Yes, I’m late, almost a year late to the LOST party (it premiered on September 22nd, the Fall Equinox of 2004) but it won’t take me long to go back and get caught up.
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Believing the Victim

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A week or two ago there was a bit of a to-do within American comics fandom when Brian Wood, a prominent writer often praised for his commitment to feminism and his well-written female characters, was accused of sexual harassment by Tess Fowler, an illustrator and artist. This has been the occasion for a lot of hand-wringing about the chronic problem of harassment at conventions, which mostly seems to consist of people making blog posts about how this is a serious issue. There’s very little sense of what can be done.

So here’s a suggestion: by default, we should believe the victims. On a basic, human, personal level, if someone makes an accusation of abuse, assault, or harassment, we should believe them.

Here’s what happens instead. Fowler’s account of what happened was, inevitably, picked over by large swaths of the male-dominated comics fandom who were eager to minimize the severity of what Wood did or to find a way to blame her for it. All of this is accompanied by lots of skepticism, usually with phrases like that Wood is “innocent until proven guilty” or that it’s “his word against hers.”

It’s not, of course. Fowler noted that she had several people who had e-mailed her with similar experiences. I’ve seen at least one person come forward with a similar allegation against Wood. There’s a pattern of behavior on Brian Wood’s part that’s disturbing, to say the least.

But never mind the specifics. Let’s look at some of the usual canards that get brought out around this point in the discussion, just in the abstract case. Because this isn’t really about Brian Wood. “Innocent until proven guilty,” for instance. Which is an important principle… in criminal law. It’s there because the standards by which the state can declare that someone ought be locked up in prison really should be high. If we are, as a society, going to sanction violence against people then we need to have serious safeguards. And one of them is that we wait until there’s proof in a court of law, beyond a reasonable doubt, of guilt.

But that’s not the standard that should apply to everyday interactions. If a guy at a comics convention offers to take you up to his room and you know that three people have reported that he’s sexually harassed them or assaulted them, you’re not unreasonable for deciding that you don’t want to go up there. Even if he’s never been “proven” guilty. And you’re not unreasonable for thinking that if someone knows that the guy chatting you up has a litany of accusations against him they should probably warn you about it.

Similarly, the “his word against hers” line. Yes, it is. But once you have an accusation of assault or harassment, the person being accused has a pretty obvious reason to deny it regardless of what actually happened. Whereas the victim… doesn’t really. I mean, yes, false accusations happen occasionally. But they’re very, very rare – much rarer than the rate at which sexual assault and harassment take place.…

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The Size of the Mouth and the Size of the Brain (Partners in Crime)

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DEMIURGE! (This has to be the most obscure caption
I’ve done in ages.)

It’s April 5th, 2008. As you might imagine, very little has changed. We’ve just calmly plowed from the end of Torchwood Season Two into Doctor Who’s fourth season, specifically Partners in Crime.

Partners in Crime stands out as one of the most structural pieces Davies has ever done. Davies, on the commentary track, describes the story as in part a work of petulance on his part. Given that everyone expected he’d do a darker story to help change the perception of Donna from The Runaway Bride, he decided to turn towards comedy more thoroughly than he had in the past. And yet in all of this what jumps out is that Catherine Tate doesn’t do any comedy bits until her “mime at the Doctor” sequence when they finally meet. She’s in a comedy, yes, but she’s playing it straight the entire time.
This, more than anything, constitutes the reinvention of the character. Had Davies taken the obvious route of just throwing Donna into something dark and serious (i.e. either of the next two stories) he would have ended up with a functional character, but at the expense of having any reason to give the role to Catherine Tate. You don’t cast Catherine Tate for the latest iteration of generic companion. So Donna needs to retain the frisson of wrongness that animated The Runaway Bride. There the joke was that David Tennant was stuck with a character off of The Catherine Tate Show, and this was not a narrative he was well-suited to. 
But a comedy sketch character can barely be stretched over an hour (Davies, quite sensibly, gives her an emotional arc so that she grows at the end). To do it over a season would be suicide – a fact so self-evident that even Doctor Who fans realized it and panicked when Tate was announced as the new companion. And so Donna had to be moved away from being a sketch character while still finding a way to retain the fact that she was an unusual choice as a companion.
Hence the structure, where we get an overtly comedic episode in which Catherine Tate gets exactly two comedy bits, only one of which – the one at the very end of the episode – involves her playing a Catherine Tate Show character. This provides a sort of halfway house for Donna as a character – she retains the genre colliding aspects she was first created with, but doesn’t actually have to be that character full-time in the narrative. 
Instead, Donna is built up as a sorrowful character. The key sequence comes when she all but watches a woman die, then goes back to her mother’s where she’s berated and belittled for a scene (done gorgeously in time lapse, with Donna sitting wearily at a table, never moving as the scene cuts forward on her mother’s diatribe), and then goes to talk to her grandfather who is supportive but inescapably sad.
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Saturday Waffling (November 23rd, 2013)

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Let’s talk about Jack Graham, writer of Shabogan Grafitti, who has just wrapped up his 50 post countdown of Marxist readings of Doctor Who scenes across the years. Cheeky, passionate, insightful, and altogether wonderful, it has been, for my money, the best part of the 50th Anniversary so far.

Read them all, but if you must have highlights, 3, 4, 15, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32, 37, 47, and 49.

Seriously. I have not even been in the running for best Doctor Who blog this month, and it’s not just because I spent it stuck on sodding Torchwood. It’s because Jack has hit this one out of the park. Repeatedly. I’ve read each one with a hint of jealousy, wishing I’d written them. He’s just about the most vibrant voice in Doctor Who blogging these days, and this has been an absolute masterstroke by him. Unless there’s something on TV you really want to watch, there’s no better way to spend your time today than reading these.

Wait, is there something on TV today?

Edit: Oh, hey, yes, there was. Thoughts?…

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