Eruditorum Press

Fucking around and finding out is a valid epistemology

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: Sleeper

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It’s January 23rd, 2008. Basshunter, accompanied by DJ Mental Theo’s Bazzheadz, tops the charts with “Now You’re Gone.” Adele, Rihanna, Britney Spears, Nickelback, and Kanye West also chart. In news, a plane crashes at Heathrow, injuring thirteen people and delaying two hundred flights. Barack Obama manages to win more delegates in the Nevada caucuses despite actually narrowly losing the numerical vote, another sign of the degree to which his campaign was unnervingly well-organized. On the Republican side, Duncan Hunter drops out, a news event leading most people to realize for the first time that hew as running. Fred Thompson also withdraws, which is about equally interesting. And Heath Ledger dies, which is on the whole rather grimmer.
On television, Torchwood’s second season plods on with Sleeper. Here we get the rare episode of Torchwood that depends largely on its parent show for relevance. Taken on its own, Sleeper is, well, a bit sleepy. Its premise works, broadly speaking, but theres no particular sparkle to it, and it largely appears to be “Gwen cares passionately about someone who’s been caught up in alien malarkey,” a plot structure recognizable from large swaths of the first season. And this time the alien malarkey seems… well… a bit silly, really. Alien sleeper agents ready to wake up and embark on a frighteningly baroque scheme to use our own weapons against us as a means of taking over the planet? Really? Last year we had a sex alien, which, while not actually any mores sensible, is at least, you know, a sex alien. This is just ridiculous.
Except the thing is, Cell 114’s plan is bog standard. Invade the Earth via a baroque plan involving military installations and evil alien pseudo-humans? It’s the plot of Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, Terror of the Zygons, The Android Invasion, Aliens of London/World War Three and probably a few others that I’m leaving off the list. What we have here is a bog standard Doctor Who invasion, in other words, that never quite gets started. And in the time spent waiting for the big alien invasion to actually start – you know, the sort of plot that would usually involved the Doctor showing up – we instead get a human story about the people caught up in the wake of this alien invasion.
In this regard, we have the second consecutive story that has clearly thought through the point of being Torchwood. It’s a story designed to fit into the margins of Doctor Who and give them a human dimension. The basic mechanic of the series is well in place – Doctor Who is about exploring various narrative spaces, while Torchwood is about abutting them with human spaces. Not in the bland horror of Yeti-in-the-loo sense, but in a sense of ordinary lives deformed and deranged by the alien. 
In this regard it’s significant that the event that causes Beth’s life to turn upside down is an act of violence.
…

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Wikipedia Goes All-In on Transphobia

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(Previous post on this topic)

10/23: Update with recent developments added to the end of the post.

11/6: I have been banned from Wikipedia for the contents of this post. More information here.

We’ll start with the good news. After a second move discussion, Wikipedia has decided to move the article on Chelsea Manning back to her actual name instead of misgendering and misnaming her. This brings us to the bad news, which is essentially everything else, and in particular everything surrounding the arbitration committee case.   This case has led to the declaration that calling out transphobia on Wikipedia is unacceptable, that trans activists are disqualified from working on articles involving trans subjects, and that it’s more acceptable for people employed by the US military to covertly edit the Chelsea Manning article than it is for trans advocates to do so openly.

To recap, immediately after Chelsea Manning publicly came out and and announced her new name, Wikipedia updated and retitled its article on her. This set off a wave of controversy, resulting in the article being moved back to where it misnamed Manning and being locked there for thirty days. Those thirty days have now passed, and a second discussion over the topic resulted in overwhelming consensus to move the article back to its correct title.

A consequence of this, however, was that a request was filed with the arbitration committee – an elected body allowed to pass broad sanctions to settle disputes on Wikipedia, including banning editors. That process has also now concluded, and has concluded disastrously.

In order to understand the arbitration commitee’s decision, it is important to understand the culture of Wikipedia. In its determination to avoid creating any top-down editorial structure, Wikipedia has instead repeatedly embraced a system of rules designed to eliminate thought from the decision making process as much as possible. Hence the policy that all information must be sourced to reliable secondary sources, with little concern for the biases that this demand introduces (what sources get published is, after all, heavily impacted by degree to which publication can prove profitable, a wholly distinct concept from what is accurate or important) or to the number of fields like the humanities in which secondary sources are not dispassionate attempts to synthesize materials but attempts to advance partisan and novel takes on existing material.

The fantasy has always been that with the right set of rules the encyclopedia would write itself, with optimal versions of articles just coming to exist naturally as a consequence of the self-evident rules about citation and secondary sources. The reality has always been that instead of actually thinking critically about content decisions people just think critically about how to manipulate and play with the rules.

Since this is, most days of the week, a geek blog, I assume the analogy to tabletop role-playing games and the type of player known as a rules lawyer will make sense. If not, allow a brief digression. A rules lawyer is a type of player whose pleasure comes not from any accomplishment within the game, but instead from the manipulation and contortion of the rules.…

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Outside the Government: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

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It’s January 16th, 2008. Basshunter are at number one with “Now You’re Gone,” with Rihanna, Nickelback, Britney Spears, Timbaland, and Take That also charting. In news, two days after Voyage of the Damned aired Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, bringing her political comeback to a rather decisive halt. A less successful assassination attempt against the president of the Maldives is stopped by a Boy Scout. Barack Obama pulls off a decisive win in the Iowa caucus, meaning that Hillary Clinton, widely expected to be the nominee, suddenly had a formidable challenger. He went on to narrowly lose the New Hampshire primary, meaning that the story would go on for absolutely bloody ages. And Spain decides not to add lyrics to its national anthem.

While on television, Torchwood returns with its second season premiere, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Even before we get to the episode itself, there’s things to talk about, like the fact that this is airing on BBC Two. Regardless of what one might say about the quality of Torchwood’s first season, and there are certainly things to say, it was enough of a success to get promoted from BBC Three. Broadly speaking, this meant that Torchwood became, in its second season, a bigger, more popular show, although this gets complicated about halfway through the run when it started running previews of episodes a week early on BBC Three, a situation almost identical to how the first season worked, where it ran repeats of episodes later on BBC Two. But this was still presented as a BBC Two show, reflecting a higher profile. This also had something of a tangible benefit for Torchwood, in that it was now no longer a slightly seedy post-watershed show on BBC Three. It could still push boundaries, but it couldn’t revel in doing so in quite the same way. It had to just be an adult sci-fi show instead of frolicking about giggling about what it could get away with. By and large, this helped it.

Which brings us to the actual episode. The most interesting aspect of it, obviously, is the kiss. It is possibly the most flagrant moment of fanservice in the history of television. More to the point, it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. It is James Marsters snogging John Barrowman.

I suppose it’s worth rehearsing the cultural context here, obvious as it may seem. James Marster’s signature role is as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There he played the rougish villain turned good guy, with a British accent that, while rubbish, was at least better than usual for trans-Atlantic accent imitations. Spike, as a character, evolved steadily over the season due largely to Marsters piloting him to being a fan favorite. He went from being a recurring villain in the second season to coming back as a half-hero regular in the fourth. After which the gravity of passionate Buffy/Spike shippers (I believe “Spuffy” was the preferred portmanteau) led to a proper romance plot, followed by Spike questing to regain his soul so he could become a proper good guy.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 19th, 2013)

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Well that was a bit of a week.

I’ve a vacation at the end of the month, which I’m trying, in one of those doomed quest sorts of things one endeavors to do occasionally, not to spend most of working, on the logic that maybe I should try taking more than a single day off in a row for the first time since March. I hear all the cool kids do it. So in any case, it’s been a lot of getting ahead on the blog so that becomes possible.

Wonder Woman should be out imminently – I just need to do the layout, and to get the final cover design settled with James. Unfortunately, there’s been a snafu there – I gave the Kickstarter money to a family member to hold in an interest bearing account while I wrote the book, so I didn’t accidentally dip into it. Said family member just informed me they would not be returning it to me. So that’s a problem. (To be clear, this is just the Wonder Woman Kickstarter money – the Hartnell v2 money is safe in my own hands.) Not a huge problem – it just means the book is suddenly a financial risk for me where before it had already turned a nice little profit. I’m fine, this isn’t some “help the blogger keep his home” appeal or anything, but equally, if you’re on the fence about buying it, I’ll be thankful.

So, loads of work and frustration. Marvelous. Still, only one more Eruditorum entry to get written up, and then I can go play with other stuff and kind of relax for a week or two, which holy God do I need.

So, I’ve been thinking about Pop Between Realities posts, as the clock runs out on the blog. (I mean, there’s still loads to go, but less than a year at this point, I’m sure.) I’ve got the schedule locked through the end of the Davies era, but I’ve penciled in very little for the Matt Smith era. What stuff from roughly the present day feels like it should be covered alongside Doctor Who? What do you consider its current cultural context? What’s it in conversation with over the course of the Moffat years?…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 71 (Skins)

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One of the most consistently entertaining aspects of Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook’s consistently entertaining The Writer’s Tale is the two writers’ continual enthusiasm for Channel 4’s Skins. Davies went so far as to write fanmail to Skins creator Bryan Elsley. It’s all terribly endearing.

It’s also telling, because other than its manifest lack of aliens, Skins is striving for the same general cultural space as Torchwood. Which is already a bit of an odd observation, in that it puts Torchwood in the same general space a straightforward inspiration for Skins, Queer as Folk. But let’s put that outside of the equation for a moment, at least, and look at the similarities between Skins and Torchwood, as they’re non-obvious.

Skins, after all, is a teen drama, although not a straightforward one, in that it brazenly contains loads of adult content. Sex, nudity, and drugs abound in Skins; indeed, if you were to try to come up with a television show to piss off Mary Whitehouse, the only thing you’d want to do differently is to make it before she died. And yet its concerns are so visibly adolescent. This is a show about teenage lives and teenage concerns that takes great pains to stress its authenticity and the degree to which it mirrors the lives of real British teenagers. Being neither British, a teenager, nor in fact real, I have little to say on its authenticity. Nevertheless, let’s take at face value the basic claim here, which is that Skins is television that’s aimed at a generation of teenagers.

That Skins should do this while being so self-consciously “adult” speaks volumes about the degree to which the “adult” label is not really about target audiences in any meaningful sense. “Adult” really doesn’t mean much more than “going to get OFCOM complaints.” And indeed, for all that Torchwood’s high concept tagline is “Doctor Who for grownups,” this was never really its point. It’s Doctor Who for teenagers. Which was always a significant part of the new series’s targeting, hence the careful nicking from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and a host of other American shows aimed at that market.

In this regard, Torchwood is best understood as the new series of Doctor Who with most of the influences of things other than American television for teenagers stripped away. There’s an open question in how that differs from just imitating American television for teenagers, but that’s neither here nor there. It at least gives us an understanding of what Torchwood is supposed to be. Equally, however, most of what Torchwood takes from those American shows is a plot structure: a team of basically stock characters investigates paranormal events weekly over a light soap background.

In this regard, turning the lens such that we look at Torchwood as a cousin of Skins is interesting. Particularly given what Skins is really good at, which is its small human moments. Indeed, in its first season Skins was subject to many of the same criticisms as Torchwood; it was gratuitous, characters were underdeveloped, and the whole thing was a bit trashy.…

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Uncontaminated by Effect and Consequence (The Last War in Albion Part 14: Obscenity and Alan Moore’s Juvenilia)

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This is the fourth 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. Seriously. It’s been a hell of a week, and I could use it.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest comics owed a large debt to the “underground comix” tradition pioneered by people like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. These comics featured what is at once a troubling and alluring visionary quality, looking at the world and saying things that seemed unthinkable before them, and reflecting the peculiar genius of their creators. 

“But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent.” – Alan Moore, Lost Girls

Figure 106: Spain’s grim depiction of the end of Stalin’s life
in Arcade #4 (Spain, 1975)

While the underground clearly appealed to Moore on an ideological level despite the ethical failings of its leading lights, it is also worth discussing the aesthetic appeal. The gratuitous excess of the underground in and of itself is an odd fit for someone as focused on intricate structure as Moore. The tone of his praise in “Too Avant Garde for the Mafia” is telling – when he praises artists, it’s for things like being “creatively self-conscious in his use of the medium,” and the moments he chooses to single out are things like the final images of a biography of Stalin: “The narrative caption boxes relate how, during his final years, Stalin would travel by car along highways built for his solitary personal use across Russia. Wherever he stopped along the way there would be a room waiting for him specially constructed so as to be an exact duplicate of his room in the Kremlin, right down to the book lying open on the bedside table,” Moore explains, going on to describe the way these captions work in considerable detail, saying that “while this is sinking in, we see three pictures, showing a simple side elevation of a sparsely furnished, neat-looking bedroom. Each picture is identical to the others except that they get progressively smaller.” He goes on to describe the impact, saying, “in effect, we get the impression of an endless series of identical rooms stretching away into the empty distance, proving an unnerving glimpse into the mind of someone who once controlled half of the world.” When he does praise an artist of excess like R.
…

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Glug, Glug, Glug (Voyage of the Damned)

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What’s this “I wear a bow tie now” crap?

It’s December 25th, 2007. Leon Jackson is at number one with “When You Believe.” Leona Lewis, Take That, Girls Aloud, Timbaland, and, inevitably, the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl also chart. Since The Sarah Jane Adventures wrapped its first season, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link opened, and Nick Clegg won the leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

On television, it’s Voyage of the Damned. Here is the most important thing to realize about Voyage of the Damned: It has Kylie Minogue in it.

There’s a level on which there’s not much more to say. By design. If ever there’s been an episode of Doctor Who built around its guest star, it’s this one. Which is interesting on several levels; for one thing, the episode’s concept predates casting Minogue by some margin. Davies was planning on a big disaster movie for the Christmas special, got word that Kylie Minogue was interested, pitched her the episode, and ended up having her on board, at which point he actually started writing the script.

It’s impossible to overstate how big a get Minogue was. Voyage of the Damned was part of her post-cancer comeback – her proper comeback album, X, dropped a month before, and its lead single, “2 Hearts,” charted the same week that The Lost Boy wrapped. On top of that, you know, she’s Kylie Minogue. She’s one of the biggest stars in the UK. This is not, to be clear, a measurement of popularity – indeed, X has sold, in total, roughly 4% as many copies as people who watched Voyage of the Damned, and even “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” only sold a bit north of a million copies. But trying to understand Kylie Minogue entirely as a commercial force is fundamentally misunderstanding her. Kylie Minogue is famous, which is a different and entirely more interesting moment. Kylie Minogue isn’t a singer, or an actress; rather, she’s someone who lives in the tabloids. She’s not famous for being famous, but nevertheless, her fame is at this point her defining characteristic.

Nevertheless, she’s almost inevitable. Will Baker, her visual stylist, was a known fan who snuck Cybermen imagery into one of her tours, and staged an entertainingly cheeky photo of her asleep with a copy of Lloyd Rose’s Camera Obscura sitting beside her. These links, tenuous as they may be, combined with the fact that the gay fandom of the wilderness years was now running the show meant that Minogue was always the extremely famous person most likely to do a big Doctor Who appearance. Plus she, apparently, was a casual fan from her childhood in Australia (that would probably make her a Letts/Hinchcliffe era gal), and was, in any case, game.

She is not, of course, the first famous person to be cast in the new series. That honor goes to Billie Piper, who similarly came to Doctor Who from the tabloids. Indeed, it’s difficult to look at Billie Piper’s music career as anything other than serving some time as a lesser version of Kylie Minogue.…

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(Non-)Review Blog of the Daleks

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The Eight Doctors: Occasionally people accuse me of blaming the TV Movie for killing Doctor Who. Nonsense. This is the book to blame – a turgid mess that insults its audience. Readers were understandably disappointed at the idea of taking the license away from Virgin, who had been brilliant, and restarting the book lines as explicitly less mature and intelligent. This book confirmed everyone’s worst fears – that BBC Books had no clue what they were doing. The Virgin line recovered from a bad start because it was all we had. But the BBC Books line consciously killed off something good and replaced it with something that, at first glance, looked awful. It never recovered. 1/10

Vampire Science: Quite marvelous, actually. Its only flaw is that nobody really picked up on this wonderfully daft characterization of the Eighth Doctor, and that this wasn’t taken as a template for how to do the Eighth Doctor as a contrast to the Seventh. Instead it was one of a handful of isolated moments of quality in the line’s early days. Alas. 9/10

Business Unusual: Dreadful. A pointless pile of fanwank, with the added misery of being fanwank about Russell’s previous fanwank. A story that was in no way crying out to be told, and another early nail in the coffin of the BBC Books line. Also one of several attempts to fix Colin Baker’s Doctor that don’t actually improve the character meaningfully. The pointless inclusion oft he Brigadier gives away just how banal and obsessed with ticking the boxes this book is. 2/10

War of the Daleks: Interesting purely as the straw that broke the camel’ back and led a sizable chunk of fandom to just say “no, that’s not canon, and I don’t care,” regardless of whether or not they otherwise accepted the books as canon. It’s not hard to see why this turgid piece of crap inspired such a revolt. What stands out is not merely that it’s bad, but that it’s mean-spirited, seeking to piss on other stories for no reason other than to spite them and the people that like them. Horrifying. 1/10

The Roundheads: Ah, Gatiss. A bit of fluffy nostalgia. Harmless, and with a better characterization of Troughton’s Doctor than a lot of books, but ultimately a pointless exercise in nostalgia for its own sake that demonstrates why the historicals wound down as a genre. Difficult to have any real feelings about one way or another. 5/10

Alien Bodies: Ah, yes. That’s the book we all thought Miles was capable of writing. Brilliant, intriguing, at times maddening, but always fascinating and gripping. Miles was infamously hard to work with, and it’s thus not hard to understand why he didn’t get to drive the EDAs, but on the strength of this book, it’s difficult to see why anyone messed with his vision for the line, as it’s absolutely riveting. In the end this, along with Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War, Human Nature, and The Scarlet Empress are the absolute must-reads of the wilderness years, without which you cannot quite understand the history of how the show developed from Survival to Rose.…

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Outside the Government: The Lost Boy

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It’s November 12th, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “Bleeding Love,” where she remains for the next week as well. Alicia Keys, Westlife, Britney Spears, and Timbaland also chart, as well as Kylie Minogue, as part of her comeback after battling cancer. But really, what’s that got to do with anything? In news, discussions to form a government of Belgium reach a record hundred and fiftieth day. Large scale student protests break out in Venezuela over a referendum to give Hugo Chavez more power. Benazir Bhutto spends a day under house arrest, Barry Bonds is indicted for perjury, and nobody else with an alliterative B name does anything that would allow me to complete this joke.

While on television, season one of The Sarah Jane Adventures wraps up with The Lost Boy. The Lost Boy is a standard issue season finale for Doctor Who in this period. The premises of the series unravel; everything that can possibly go wrong does, followed by several more things going wrong, and it ends with a big action set piece resolved by what people widely and wrongly refer to as a deus ex machina. (In this case, it’s much more of a machina ex machina.) Unlike the last two attempts at one – End of Days and Last of the Time Lords – The Lost Boy largely comes off.

The basic mechanics of The Sarah Jane Adventures as it understands itself in its first season are on full display here. At its heart, this is a story about adoption. Its central anxiety is a familiar one for any adopted child – the nature of the birth parents. Luke goes through the nightmare scenario here – his apparent birth parents show up to take him away, and they really don’t love him. (I mean, not only do they lock him in a room, but it’s a room covered in Chelsea merchandise.)

This gets paralleled in the Alan/Maria story, as Alan has to figure out how to be a father to a very different sort of daughter than he expected. Throughout the story, in other words, we have a struggle to make families work. Not to form them, but to get them to work. And to get them to work in two specific and common cases of slightly non-standard families. Sarah Jane has to show that she’s legitimately Luke’s mother, and Alan has to show that he can serve as the sole parent for Maria (a point hammered home by Chrissie showing up to be useless bordering on malevolent). In both cases, parents have to demonstrate that they deserve their role as parents. But in typical Sarah Jane Adventures style, this is not the occasion for an overwrought meditation on family.

Indeed, the plot takes pains to avoid any sort of realist setting. The sequence where Luke is taken from Sarah Jane adheres to no real-world logic to speak of. Particularly visible is the fact that nobody seems to think that there’s anything suspicious about Sarah Jane having Luke until it becomes clear that Luke has no memory of anything about his supposed life as Ashley.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 12th, 2013)

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Right, then. Since we’ve all had some time to watch them… what did you all think of Enemy of the World and Web of Fear?

Enemy, for me, was as much of a treat as I’d hoped. The ending is a bit more rushed than I’d realized from the reconstruction, but it is on the whole a piece of wonderful subtlety and nuance, and it keeps the plot moving well. Troughton is better than I’d imagined – the little tip-offs when he’s playing the Doctor impersonating Salamander are fantastic. In particular, the start of Episode Two is just so wonderful – all the little flicks of the eyes and small Doctor-like gestures that bubble up under the improvised and hurried impersonation.

And the plot is, in fact, really good. The underground bunker twist is very smooth – smoother than I’d thought, really. There are enough tip-offs that Salamander has some secret way of controlling volcanos. When you actually see the extended volcano sequence in Episode Two, the bunker ends up feeling much fairer. And the elaborate visual sequence of getting down there, in which the rules of the records room are set up, calls much more attention to it.

I hadn’t really appreciated how consistently suspicious Giles Kent was through the whole story. Benik is even more unnervingly sadistic than I’d imagined. Barry Letts’s direction is fantastic, balancing action shots with intimate close-ups. Really, virtually everything about this story came out at the high end of what I’d imagined, with Troughton absolutely blowing me away. Absolutely wonderful – such an complete joy. It’s really an incredible experience to have hyped the story this much for myself and then to have it absolutely nail and surpass my expectations. I don’t really have much to say beyond what I already have said; this really is an absolutely amazing piece of work.

The Web of Fear, on the other hand… I was never one of the major boosters of The Web of Fear, although I did always assume that it was the most competently done of the Season Five bases under siege. I’m less confident of that now. Indeed, I think that’s actively wrong – The Ice Warriors beats the pants off this.

In The Enemy of the World, everything left ambiguous from the audio broke in the story’s favor. The action sequences in the first episode really were quite good. Most things that looked like plot holes were filled. With The Web of Fear some things break in the story’s favor… but others decidedly don’t.

Episode Three still being missing hurts it a lot. The first two episodes are very padded, and Episode Three is the point where the story actually picks up decently. With that as a reconstruction, it’s not until Episode Four that the story gathers any sort of momentum, and that’s squandered in a time-wasting Episode Five in which the Doctor plays with screwdrivers for the entire episode.

The Arnold revelation is worse than expected, which is unfortunate.…

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