Eruditorum Press

Watch this space, you poor doomed motherfuckers

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: From Out of the Rain

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It’s March 12th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Taio Cruz, Alphabeat, Westlife, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets wrapped up in a prostitution bust and resigns, Barack Obama wins some more primaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling unveils his first budget.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Peter J. Hammond’s other Torchwood story, From Out of the Rain. Hammond’s two Torchwood scripts are, by any reasonable account, oddities. Hammond, as mentioned, is a longstanding television writer. He’s the closest thing to a writer shared between the classic series and the new series, in that he has, in effect, near-misses for both; he had a script rejected for Trial of a Time Lord (Pip and Jane Baker were, alarmingly, preferred), and wrote two for Torchwood. And unsurprisingly, there’s something a bit dated and old-fashioned in his Torchwood scripts. Characterization is lax at best. Hammond is clearly interested in the fact that Jack is over a hundred years old, but this is about the only aspect of Jack that comes up in either of his stories. The other characters are interchangeable – there’s nothing about Ianto that makes him the sensible choice to be fascinated by old film, and nothing about Gwen and Owen that would make them likely to randomly tag along with Ianto to the cinema, even with the vague mutterings of some historical rift activity. Tellingly, every scene of this is about revealing plot information; nothing hinges on anybody’s character traits. The only thing that happens to advance the plot is people finding out new details about the Night Travellers.
All of which is to say that most of the advances in televisual storytelling since Sapphire and Steel was on the air are ignored here, at least on the level of writing. This is old-fashioned storytelling, and the closest thing to a good argument that those who wish Doctor Who were more like the classic series have. Because it does more or less work. It doesn’t have the spark and snap that Small Worlds did, but that’s mostly a factor of its more esoteric subject matter. Small Worlds was an efficient and compelling take on a longstanding and classic bit of mythology that took Torchwood’s basic premise and its specific connection to the Welsh landscape in a direction that was essentially inevitable. From Out of the Rain is far more idiosyncratic – evil early 20th century circus performers and the preservation of old filmstock is an interesting premise, but it lacks the straightforward hook of Small Worlds. 
Still, it largely works and ends up as one of the stronger entries in an admittedly weak season of television. This is largely for the reasons discussed last time. Whatever its idiosyncratic simplicity, it is very much its own story with its own focus and interests. There’s a sense of vision here. What happens is clearly happening according to a logic unique to this story, as opposed to according to the logic of Torchwood’s format.
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Fuller Statement on my Wikipedia Banning

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EDIT 11/11: I asked the arbitration committee why the bit of policy that says “”if individuals have identified themselves without redacting or having it oversighted, such information can be used for discussions of conflict of interest (COI) in appropriate forums” does not apply in this case.

The response was that “I don’t think that what the Guardian described as an “angry blog post” is what the community had in mind as an ‘appropriate forum’.”

It’s official: the arbitration committee does not consider my blog an appropriate place to discuss conflicts of interest.

Original post below:

I’d do a Saturday Waffling about the Day of the Doctor trailer, but I’ve seen it and there’s not all that much to say. Still, feel free to discuss it in comments. Meanwhile, I’ve got a dead horse to beat.

Back on Wednesday, in an interstitial post, I mentioned that I’d been permabanned from Wikipedia and made some appropriately dark mutterings about this. But since the issue has continued to be contentious on Wikipedia I wanted to make a more detailed response, if only because the arbitration committee persists in making the suggestion that I haven’t “answered their questions.” (This, in practice, is much like the political tactic of declaring that one’s opponent has to answer questions, in that the questions are never stated and the answers are never acknowledged.) Indeed, the committee is currently misrepresenting what I’ve said and done in a variety of ways, and so it seems worthwhile to turn the spotlight on this body again and look at what passes for decision making on Wikipedia.

Let’s start with the basic facts. In my post entitled “Wikipedia Goes All-In on Transphobia,” which is, at the time of writing, my fourth most-read post on the blog and is thus linked on the sidebar, I revealed that an editor who was accusing people of conflicts of interest over the discussion on what the appropriate name for the article about Chelsea Manning should be on the basis that they knew trans people, and who engaged in disturbing and stalkerish behavior towards several editors was, in fact, an employee of the US Military. I did so by revealing their name and workplace.

Since Wikipedia is currently removing all links to that post (which was used as the main source for a Guardian article on the subject, incidentally, and which Brad Patrick, the former legal representative for Wikipedia, praised and shared), I won’t mention the editor by name here, just because, well, I want the people still arguing about this on Wikipedia to have the ability to link to what I’m saying here in order to dispel some of what can charitably be called the misrepresentations of what I’ve done. Regardless, yeah, I doxed a dude.

Shortly after the post went up I received the following e-mail from a member of the arbitration committee.

Please contact the Arbitration Committee to explain why you have posted personal, non-public information about another contributor on your personal blog. This blog post has direct ramifications on the project, and may put you in gross violation of the project’s norms and policies.

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Outside the Government: Something Borrowed

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It’s March 5th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” H Two O, OneRepublic, Basshunter, and David Jordan also chart, along with several more… notable artists. In news, former Thai Prime Minister and owner of Manchester City Thaskin Shinawatra returns to Thailand to face corruption charges. Prince Harry returns from a deployment in Afghanistan due to his location being leaked by the press. The Presidential Primaries rumble on in the US, with Hillary Clinton winning the Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas primaries, but Obama winning Vermont and the Texas caucuses, which results in him getting more delegates overall out of that state. John McCain, meanwhile, officially secures the Republican nomination.

While on television, it’s the pleasantly idiosyncratic Something Borrowed. It’s possible, looking at the dramatic improvement Torchwood undergoes in its last two seasons (yes, really), to suggest that Torchwood is simply not very good at done-in-one episodes, and that its natural format is the miniseries. Certainly it’s true, as we’ll get around to seeing, that the series undergoes a profound transformation and improvement with its third season. And it’s true that the first and second seasons are pocked with mediocre and occasionally dreadful episodes. But this is not in and of itself a refutation of its format. 
I bring all of this up because Something Borrowed is the last time Torchwood attempts a fairly light-hearted episode; indeed, a broadly comedic one. As it happens, it’s also the best episode of the season to date, and a credible contender for the best episode of the season outright. And so it represents a vanishing glimpse of another sort of Torchwood. The problem with the eventual miniseries format is that it is bombastically big. And while this can be terribly effective, it’s easy to forget that in the first two seasons Torchwood was at its best with small stories.
Because this is what appeals so much about Something Borrowed. It is, in the end, just a story about Gwen and Rhys getting married. It’s a human story. Something goes terribly wrong on their wedding day, and Gwen is determined to find a way to make it work because she refuses to let Torchwood interfere with this one. The result is that one of Torchwood’s absolute strongest points – the Gwen/Rhys relationship – is in the foreground. (Notably, this is what made Meat, the most recent more-or-less functional episode of Torchwood, work as well) And so we get the sort of thing Torchwood is good at – ordinary human moments juxtaposed with strange, eccentric spaces. 
There’s a line of critique about this episode that declares that Gwen is mad to carry on with her wedding. Which she very plainly is, and yet it’s an entirely human madness. Gwen is hardly the first person to become a bit monomaniacal on her wedding day. (And her initial justification is so perfectly accurate: “do you have any idea how much a wedding costs?” Because yes, that is exactly what it is like.) And more to the point, there’s a clear motivation, particularly in the wake of Rhys finding out about Torchwood.
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Dangerous, Mysterious, Hyperscientific (The Last War in Albion Part 17: The Stars My Degradation, The Stars My Destination)

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This is the final of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. Chapter Four will begin next week.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s first strip for Sounds, Roscoe Moscow, ended after a little more than a year, and was replaced with The Stars My Degradation, a science fiction parody strip…

“The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific McGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief-woman…” – Neil Gaiman


To continue to come up with inventive page layouts and subversive cat gags week in and week out is one thing. To labour excessively on a reasonably humorous sci-fi parody strip in order to cover up inadequate artistic skills is another. 
Figure 130: The Stars My Destination was
first serialized in four issues of Galaxy in 1956
In this regard there’s something strangely apropos in Moore’s choice of parody subjects in The Stars My Degradation. The title – indeed the entire opening rhyme – is a parody of Alfred Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, originally titled Tiger! Tiger!. Bester is very much a science fiction fan’s science fiction writer – one who enjoys rather more renown within science fiction fandom than without. To name The Stars My Destination as one’s favorite science fiction novel is not in the least bit controversial – it’s widely and repeatedly cited as one of the best. But it is not a particularly famous book outside of science fiction circles. Unlike writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, whose work became influential and widely known outside the sci-fi community, Bester remains at once obscure but terribly well-respected: Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Michael Moorcock have all identified it as their favorite science fiction novel.
Figure 131: Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
(Howard Chaykin, 1979)
On one level, The Stars My Destination is a fairly straightforward pulp-style novel. It was serialized over four issues of Galaxy, and features the sort of episodic content familiar to such material. What elevates it is the character arc of its protagonist, Gully Foyle.
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The Post Wikipedia Doesn’t Want You To See

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Due to my revelation in this post that the Wikipedia user Cla68, who has been arguing that transgender people are too biased to edit the article on Chelsea Manning, is in fact a member of the US Military and thus has clear biases of his own, the Arbitration Committee of the English language Wikipedia has removed my administrator privileges and banned me indefinitely, forbidding any appeal of the ban for a year.

As discussed in the post, Cla68 has, prior to this, been open about his participation on Wikipedia, freely giving quotes to the media and engaging in discussion on Wikipedia about those quotes. It’s only now that he’s begin editing with an obvious conflict of interest that he has suddenly developed a desire to keep his identity a secret. My “revelation,” in other words, is nothing of the sort. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how this decision comports with Wikpiedia policy, which declares that “Posting another editor’s personal information is harassment, unless that person had voluntarily posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia.” Which, again, Cla68 has done.  Since my post, in fact, Cla68 has posted on Wikipediocracy, a Wikipedia criticism site on which he’s a forum moderator, confirming his employer. Furthermore, I’ve made no mention of his identity on Wikipedia, nor have I linked to that blog post from there. I revealed his identity in my capacity as a z-list blogger, not as a Wikipedia editor.

My reasoning for outing Cla68 was and is simple: it’s in the public interest. The sixth largest website in the world is sanctioning trans allies and Chelsea Manning supporters for being “too involved” to work on the Chelsea Manning article, but is giving a pass to members of the US Military, who apparently have no conflict of interest. This is straightforwardly something that deserves to be talked about.

This shockingly harsh sanction – the harshest the committee ever hands down – takes on an unnerving tone when one considers that the bulk of that blog post consisted of criticism of the Arbitration Committee’s decision to punish editors complaining about transphobic behavior on Wikipedia more harshly than they punish transphobic behavior itself. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see this move as anything other than petty retaliation.

Particularly entertaining is that I’ve been banned for attempting to disinfect with sunlight with regards to Chelsea Manning. Not only does this sanction look petty, it looks particularly ridiculous when applied on the topic of someone who is in jail for her commitment to transparency. I’m actually taken aback by the comedy of it. The Arbitration Committee censures its critics for leaking things in the public interest. Over the Chelsea Manning article.

It is not the ban in particular that bothers me. I rarely edit Wikipedia anyway, have not used administrator powers in ages (though they were quite nice for finding well-written articles on fiction that got spuriously deleted on “notability” grounds). I knew there was a risk in criticizing the Arbitration Committee, and I took it because the consequence – banning – wasn’t one that personally mattered to me much at all.
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Outside the Government: A Day in the Death

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It’s February 27th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Kylie Minogue, Adele, Nickelback, Rihanna, and Kelly Rowland also charting. In news, the British Government officially nationalizes the failing Northern Rock bank, Tottenham Hotspur defeat Chelsea in the Carling Cup final, and Pakistan, in an attempt to censor the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, blocked access to YouTube and, in doing so, inadvertently took the site down worldwide.

On television, Torchwood, broadly speaking, improves. It would be overstating things to suggest that A Day in the Death works. It doesn’t. But it fails in an interesting way more evocative of Season One than of the banal mediocrities of Series Two. Whatever else might be said of it, A Day in the Death is trying to do something interesting and new. It’s an intimate character piece that focuses tightly on Owen and works to give us his perspective on his new status quo as an animated corpse. It’s a story that works hard to stay on the human level.

There are problems. Maggie is perhaps a bit overdone – losing her husband is probably sufficient reason for her to be up on a rooftop contemplating suicide without needing to add the bathos-inducing wedding day car crash. The ending is mawkish. Owen’s overall plot still doesn’t really do anything; it’s not a functional lens on any aspect of human experience. There’s some stuff that’s vaguely evocative of people putting their lives together after an extreme trauma, particularly one leaving them with permanent disabilities, but the metaphor never quite crystalizes. There’s too much focus on the imagery of death, and particularly on Torchwood’s usually more interesting “there’s nothing” image, and it distracts from the plot being about anything other than its own science fiction conceit. It’s not that science fiction only works when exploring understandable and familiar spaces; that’s the opposite of true. But it is that science fiction that’s just about coming up with weird concepts isn’t very interesting. Yes, something odd is happening to Owen, but there’s no metaphoric depth to it, not even here, in the episode that focuses on it.

But there are real strengths. Richard Briers does a phenomenal amount with his brief appearance, although it lacks some of the intensity of his previous appearance within Doctor Who. The bizarre alien artifact that serves as the story’s MacGuffin is, in fact, just a pretty alien artifact that emits beautiful light displays. It’s completely harmless; it wasn’t keeping Henry alive, and it wasn’t a bomb. This is a wonderful plot beat of the sort that Torchwood (and for that matter Doctor Who) doesn’t do often enough; one in which the world of the alien is actually the wondrous thing it’s usually advertised as being instead of just a source of unimaginable horror. And while it seems strange to mention it, Martha works quite well here. She’s a minor character and her departure scene is shoehorned in in a fashion that’s utterly extraneous to the plot, but she actually has something to do here that both extends sensibly from her character and fits into the story such that she doesn’t need to be knocked out of the plot at the two-thirds mark by some contrivance.…

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Book Review: Magic Words

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At this point the overlap between Lance Parkin’s interests and mine is downright unsettling. How am I ever going to get anywhere with my interests when I have to compete with someone as good as him? It’s not enough, apparently, that he be one of the best writers of Doctor Who auxiliary material and a damn fine scholar of the show, as evidenced by his marvelous volume of the Time Unincorporated series. He’s got to go write about Alan Moore as well. Actually, he’s on his second, having written a quite solid introduction to him for the Pocket Essentials series. But Magic Words is something else; a landmark, definitive tome that immediately establishes itself as one of the absolutely essential works for anybody interested in Alan Moore.

Before we get to any of that, however, let’s start with the fact that the book is absolutely gorgeous. This is a sumptuous, lush book. Its cover, a green-tinged photo of Moore staring out at the reader through the smoke of the almost certainly not tobacco cigarette in his hand, is augmented by a bellyband proclaiming the title. The edges of the pages are inked black, giving the exterior a sleek elegance. Inside is similarly well-designed, save for a frustrating decision to use a cod-comics lettering font for chapter headers. Still, it’s one of the nicest physical objects of a book I’ve laid hands on this year.
That bit of geekery aside, the book itself. It is, to be clear, a biography. It is not Gary Spencer Millidge’s (very excellent) Alan Moore: Storyteller, nor George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. The former is an overview of Moore’s work; the latter an extended interview. This, however, is an attempt to grapple with Alan Moore the man. This obviously involves a lot of looking at his work, but mainly in terms of how it explains his evolving career.
This is, to be sure, an interesting subject. Moore’s career, after all, is a fascinating litany of brilliance and idiosyncrasy. First of all, there’s the somewhat puzzling matter of him worshipping a snake puppet. Second, there’s the stark litany of fairly explosive feuds he’s had with various people. Third, there’s the fact that his life is simply full of idiosyncratic and extreme beliefs, positions, and courses of action, most of which are backed up by complex and nuanced explanations.
Complicating Parkin’s task is the fact that, up until the very end of the writing process, Moore wasn’t participating in the biography. Moore was shown what was at the time intended to be the final draft, and was impressed enough to both give a charming blurb (“In Magic Words Lance Parkin has crafted a biography that is insightful, scrupulously fair-minded and often very funny – a considerable achievement given its unrelentingly grim, unreasonable, and annoying subject. Belongs on the shelf of any halfway decent criminal profiler.”) and what Parkin has described as the most wonkish Alan Moore interview ever, as it consisted of no questions regarding well-trod subject matter, and instead consisting entirely of issues like sorting out Grant Morrison’s claim that Moore had written him a threatening letter in response to Morrison’s unsolicited submission of a Kid Marvelman script (Moore says it never happened, and Parkin backs the claim up with a Dez Skinn interview) and why Moore decided to do his ABC work as a work-for-hire such that he doesn’t own Tom Strong or Promethea (still unclear, actually, though I have my speculations for a few years from now). 
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Outside the Government: Dead Man Walking

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It’s February 20th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” Goldfrapp, Kelly Rowland, H Two O, and Feeling also chart. In news, Kosovo declares independence from Serbia. Steve Fossett is declared legally dead. Toshiba abandons the HD DVD standard, leaving Sony’s Blu-Ray format as the preferred physical medium for high definition content, which would be great if digital distribution weren’t about to eat physical media alive. And Fidel Castro resigns the Presidency of Cuba.

On television, meanwhile, we have Dead Man Walking, the first episode featuring the reincarnated Owen. From the start, there is something odd and haphazard about this plot line. The nature of the plot was changed at the last minute – originally it was to be Ianto who would die and quasi-return. Similarly late in the game was the decision to kill Owen and Tosh in the season finale – they weren’t informed until a month or so before filming began on the episode. This is, in other words, not entirely well thought through, as evidenced by the kind of weird double death of Owen.

On the other hand, the basic contours of this plot are so very nearly bullet proof that it’s difficult to complain too much. From its first episode, with the resurrection glove and the revelation of Jack’s immortality, Torchwood has been a show about death. The way in which Dead Man Walking returns to these basic tenets of Torchwood gives it an odd power that other episodes this season have lacked. For the first time since Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang we have a story that only Torchwood could actually do.

The problem is that there’s still a significant muddiness to this. Yes, it’s a very Torchwood story, but giving the series a second quasi-immortal character is a strange decision. It’s difficult to read Owen as anything but a poor man’s Jack. Even the adventure this time feels like a knock-off. The incarnation of death itself feels like a weaker version of Abaddon from End of Days, right down to Owen’s eyes turning jet black and him chanting in incomprehensible languages, which is apparently a fixation for Matt Jones, who previously wrote basically the same thing in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, and which similarly evokes the “ancient evil coming out of the darkness” thread of those stories. Even the resolution – the immortal character allowing death to attack him and proving too strong – is essentially the same.

On top of that we still have Martha, although in this case she’s sidelined relatively early, and in such a way that she has a sensible function within the story. With Owen serving as the episode’s central mystery, he can’t very well do all the medical technobabble himself, which is a problem given that the mystery, in this case, is all medical technobabble. Having another doctor in place is useful, and Martha is one who can be imported without much explanation. Notably, once the story gets out of “explain the technobabble” and into the actual adventure at the hospital Martha is completely sidelined through what is pure plot contrivance, allowing the actual Torchwood cast to get on with it.…

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An Unused Can of Monster’s Cat Food (The Last War in Albion Part 16: Maxwell the Magic Cat, The Stars My Degradation)

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This is the sixth of seven installments of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest works included not only his underground-inflected Roscoe Moscow, but Maxwell the Magic Cat, his attempt at a newspaper strip featuring a talking animal. What started as a children’s comic (at least in the editor’s mind) steadily drifted into something altogether stranger…
I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl. – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Figure 123: A late Maxwell the Magic Cat strip that plays with the formal
constraints of the comic medium (Alan Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1986) Click
to expand.

Before long any resemblance between Maxwell the Magic Cat and a children’s comic was gone, and eventually the Northants Post conceded the point and moved the strip off the children’s page entirely. It’s not that the strip was ever child-unfriendly as such, though after a few months it becomes hard to imagine any child particularly enjoying the jokes about pairing red wine with fish or Robert Mitchum. By the time Moore got to tins of cat food sitting on death row and the tragic end of Liver Chunks in Oyster Sauce any pretense that the strip was aimed at children was firmly out the window. Instead Moore turned the strip into a general gag-a-week strip that wandered through any number of interests: politics, complex formal play with the structure of the comics medium, bleak existential jokes (a captured mouse asks Maxwell what happens after death, and Maxwell describes cat heaven.The mouse admits that this doesn’t sound that bad, and asks where mice go when they die. “Oh, they go to cat heaven as well.”), and, of course, wonderfully dreadful puns. (Maxwell 4 page 30 for formally complex strip)

Figure 124: Alan Moore’s acerbic commentary on the Falklands War (Alan
Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1982)

By and large, this worked. Moore’s intensely structural approach lends itself well to comedy. This is something that even a cursory examination of interviews with him reveals: he is a terribly funny man. Even when Moore is working with a bit of a shaggy dog punchline he frames it in a precisely worked set of comic beats.

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Outside the Government: Reset

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It’s… still February 13th, 2008. Torchwood has rejiggered its schedule slightly, showing next week’s Torchwood a week early on BBC Three immediately following the BBC Two broadcast. This has an interesting effect, as it moves the first airing of the show away from its main airing. Torchwood is still treated as a BBC Two show. But it now has a “for the fans” transmission a week early. It, in effect, makes Torchwood the opposite of event television.

Which is funny, because Reset is, in practice, an event episode. First and foremost, of course, is its ending, which features the shock death of Owen Harper. Although the contours of this are questionable since, again, once this goes out on BBC Two it’s immediately resolved by “Dead Man Walking” showing on BBC Three. (This seems to have basically worked, in fact – 849k of the 3.8m people who watched Adam tuned into Reset on BBC Three. The next week, one million of Reset’s 3.2m viewers went for Dead Man Walking. The total ratings, however, remained about level, making this a curious experiment.) But the other big event is that this is the first of three Torchwood episodes in which Martha Jones makes a guest appearance.

Bringing Martha Jones back is tricky business, to say the least. She has to be brought back, of course. The world of the new series forces that on you. Because companions never really leave and we get them bound into their home lives, returning them to their home lives isn’t a departure. This isn’t a complaint, though it does force a sort of ludicrous escalation of stakes on companion departure episodes as writers try to find bold new ways of stranding someone so that the Doctor can never see them again. The move towards companions who have lives outside the TARDIS is, on balance, a good thing, in that it allows companions who are more than just plot functions. Even the classic series had basically moved to that by the end, with Ace’s disconnection from her life on Earth becoming a factor of Ace actively wanting to get away fro her life, as opposed to just an incidental and unacknowledged fact.

This really is important. Because plot-wise, the companion’s job is fairly straightforward. They’re supposed to act in a particular way within the narrative. In that regard they’re fairly interchangeable. Most basic plots would work with any companion. Nothing about what Jo Grant does is that noticeably different from what Mel or Rose or even Romana would do in a similar situation. Yes, the flavor of it would change – the dialogue changes, and some of the mechanisms by which characters accomplish things change, but the basic shape they fill in a plot is the same. Which leads to a sort of diminishing returns – all you can do with them is switch the iconography around. A knife-wielding savage! A bossy Australian stewardess! Bonnie Langford!

By giving companions lives outside the TARDIS you get the ability to do different sorts of stories – ones in which who the companions are matters.…

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