Eruditorum Press

Watery tarts distributing hammers and sickles

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:

Their Little Groups (Love and Monsters)

189

I’ve got your animated version of Shada right here, baby.

It’s June 17th, 2006. Nelly Furtado is at number one with “Maneater,” with Pink, Infernal, Baddiel, Skinner, and the Lightning Seeds, and Tony Christie also charting, the latter two with World Cup-focused songs. Over at the World Cup we’re still in the group stage, but England, having won their second game, are through to the knockout stages, albeit with a game against Sweden to deal with first. Other news is slow – a steady dribble of horrors out of the Iraq War, which has its 2500th US casualty this week, and a video of a marine singing a song about murdering Iraqi civilians.

So. Love and Monsters. Perhaps it was just the wrong story for a kind of cynical week. Perhaps that’s the only reason this plummeted to a 76% AI rating – the joint lowest the series ever attained (it was tied with The End of the World) – it was the wrong story on the wrong week. And surely can’t have been helped by being the Doctor-light story. So there you go. If you want, any negative reception this story has ever attained can be explained away straightforwardly.

Still, it’s not the usual explanation. “Too silly” is the usual explanation, which is perhaps a bit harsh for a story in which just about everybody dies horribly. Certainly it’s misleading to just call this a silly story as though that explains everything about it. It’s a story with a tremendous amount of silliness in its early acts, but one where the point is the abandonment of the silliness. Or, more accurately, the point is that the silliness has teeth. One of the key things about Peter Kay’s rendition of the Abzorbaloff is that it remains an absolutely ludicrous monster. No effort is made to disguise the monster’s status as a Blue Peter contest winner, and Peter Kay just leans into it completely with a gratuitously over the top performance that would be a train wreck if it weren’t contrasted perfectly with his intensely mannered Victor Kennedy performance. The garishly inappropriate scene of the Abzorbaloff chasing Elton down the street is in many ways the point – the inappropriately broad comedy being used to the same effect as the pit last episode, as something that marks the monster as fundamentally alien and not of this world.

Another way of looking at it is that the Abzorbaloff is perfectly sized for Elton’s tiny little world, in which his only two passions in life are an irritatingly catchy ELO song and his friends at LINDA. I mean, sure, and probably some of the other stuff he mentions, but we know Elton. We know that he’s just an ordinary person with an ordinary life that isn’t worth forty-five minutes of television, or, at least, doesn’t seem to be. Wouldn’t be, in fact, if it weren’t for the fact that he exists in the orbit of the Doctor. Again, the episode is leaning into its narrative constraints.…

Continue Reading

This Continues To Not Be A Review Blog

43

But equally, this continues to be a really effective way of handling a need for Tuesday content. God, what am I going to do after next week when I’m out of Last War in Albion to run? (Write more Last War in Albion, probably. The five entries I’m running now were some of the most fun I’ve had writing in the last year.)

Spearhead From Space: Fun, and with some great images, but a story we’ve largely allowed the VHS/DVD/omnibus versions of to replace the episodic structure. Watched as episodes one notices that the new Doctor doesn’t “debut” as such until well past the halfway mark, leaving Nicholas Courtney to hold down the fort. And only the mannequin scene provides us the Autons we know and love. A well-shot and reasonably fun story, but little more. 7/10

The Silurians: By most accounts a mispaced buildup with a fantastic final episode, it is in fact a subtle and lively buildup with a disaster of a final episode the implications of which have to be ignored because otherwise the Doctor becomes the willing employee of the casually genocidal. But this is splitting hairs – either way, it doesn’t quite work despite the good bits. 6/10

Ambassadors of Death: Whitaker and Hulke are both fantastic writers, and there’s more Whitaker in this story than people give it credit for. Unique among the UNIT stories in that it’s fundamentally hopeful and based on a sense of wonder, the thing the series most loses in this season and, really, the Pertwee era at large. A myriad of wonderful visual images, and John Abineri and Ronald Allen anchor it with two of the best guest performances the series ever had. A few decisions jar in relation to the rest of the series, but on their own merits hold up fine. (The bread van and the teleporting) Unlike any other Pertwee story – marvelous. 9/10.

Inferno: Not a bad story, but simply not the classic it’s believed to be. The parallel universe sequence is one of the most hackneyed ways of extending a story imaginable, and it amounts to the “we’re running out of ideas, let’s give all the actors different parts” runaround most series do midway through their third season. To see the Pertwee era doing it in its fourth story is an ill omen. With the added indignity that once back from the parallel universe in a blur of narrative momentum Pertwee has to spend most of the last episode modeling his death pose. Yes, Courtney and John are fabulous, but can anyone actually identify how the parallel universe plot impacts the resolution at all? I’d like it more if everyone else would agree to like it less. In reality, fairly average. 5/10

Terror of the Autons: The series is pulling itself apart at the seams as it tries to decide if it’s a gaudy, glam rock spectacle or a serious-minded action adventure show. But in the course of that comes this, a story where the contrasts between the two approaches end up balancing perfectly to produce something quite remarkable.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 65 (Fandom Redux)

, 133

This will be review for some people, but the blog’s picked up a fair number of new readers since hitting the new series, and some recap is thus in order. But let’s talk about orthodox Doctor Who fandom, shall we?

T-Zero in Doctor Who fandom is May of 1976, which is when the BBC officially recognized the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) as the official fan group, succeeding the Doctor Who Fan Club, which had been around since the 1960s. From DWAS came the first wave of pro-fans: David J. Howe, Jeremy Bentham, and John Peel are the most recognizable names. And many of them became instrumental in the meticulous documentation of Doctor Who. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke turned to them for The Making of Doctor Who, and most of the early reference books to the series came out of their work.

The thing is, their tastes in Doctor Who were… idiosyncratic. DWAS president Jan Vincent-Rudzki wrote one of the most legendary reviews of a Doctor Who story ever as he tore into The Deadly Assassin for its numerous supposed violations of past continuity. The irony, in hindsight, being that The Deadly Assassin was sufficiently good that it obliterated most of the faltering prior continuity about the Time Lords and became the standard piece of continuity, making Rudzki’s tone of outrage more than slightly farcical. Later highlights included John Peel declaring in all seriousness that City of Death, one of the most beloved Doctor Who stories ever, with a script largely by Douglas Adams, was “pure farce” with characters “so stupid as to be unbelievable,” and described it as “continual buffoonery.” Fandom was particularly history focused (it’s notable that Peel ended his review with “Come back, Pat Troughton, all is forgiven…”), and viewed the present day of the series as a falling off from some great ideal in the past.

Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, the BBC took fandom seriously. The changing nature of television in the late 70s/early 80s meant that Doctor Who’s family-friendly Saturday teatime slot was dying, and it got moved to a schedule befitting a soap opera in an attempt to create a male version of a soap targeted to its existing obsessive fans. John Nathan-Turner made the savvy in theory if misguided in practice decision to actively court fandom, revamping the Doctor Who Weekly comic magazine into a professional quality version of DWAS fanzines TARDIS and The Celestial Toyroom. Results were mixed – audience research techniques were too primitive in the late 70s/early 80s to realize that fandom was not in fact coextensive with “people who watched Doctor Who,” and despite basically having the right idea Nathan-Turner and his production team proved inadequate to the task of creating what was, for the early 80s, essentially an entirely new model of television.

The thing is, fandom wasn’t representative of the whole audience, nor even of the whole audience of dedicated fans. Gareth Roberts has written of his profound alienation from DWAS upon getting his first issues of their newsletter, which savaged the series as it existed in the late 70s because, as he puts it, “they believed that Doctor Who should be more like something called ‘the Barry Letts era’, whatever that was.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (July 6th, 2013)

39

First off, I’ve fixed the poor quality image in Thursday’s installation of The Last War in Albion. This is in no way an excuse to link that entry because a lot of people missed it due to the whole US federal holiday thing. Two more installments of that are queued up before it takes a break for a bit. I continue to really enjoy it. Readership numbers suggest you may or may not be enjoying it. We may have to talk about that.

Second off, it’s really, horribly hot. Sufficiently so that we’re butting up against the operational capacity of the air conditioners I own. I do not want to write. I do not want to think, or move, or be alive. I want to find a nice chest freezer and curl up in it until October or so.

So this is our discussion topic for the weekend. July: why should I even bother?…

Continue Reading

In A World of Antimatter (The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit)

100

Chap with the horns there, five… no, I didn’t think so.

It’s June 3rd, 2006. Gnarls Barkley is at number one, but is finally unseated a week later by Sandi Thom’s “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair).” Primal Scream, Daz Sampson, Ronan Keating and Kate Rusby, Nelly Furtado, and Pink also chart. In news, Ken Loach wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, John Snow resigns as US Treasury Secretary due to his intense lack of knowledge, and the Pirate Bay gets shut down, as happens from time to time. The federal government determined that New York City has no national monuments or icons, and the World Cup kicks off in Germany, with England playing their first game, a 1-0 victory over Paraguay  four hours prior to the transmission of The Satan Pit.

The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit is an odd story, held in considerable esteem by a certain segment of fandom (more about whom on Monday) largely because it feels so traditional. You can list the Doctor Who classics this pilfers – it’s a majestic blend of Pyramids of Mars, Inferno, The Three Doctors, The Daemons, and just about any base under siege ever. For any fan who’d been sitting around for fourteen months complaining bitterly that Doctor Who wasn’t like Doctor Who, this was a revelation. Notably, even its emotional content is toned down – a couple scenes of the Doctor and Rose talking about what they’ll do now that they’re trapped in this time and place in the first episode, and a pair of muted lines in the second are the only places that those pesky emotions creep in.

Under the surface – a concept that is surely more important here than in most episodes – there’s rather more anxiety about this than the story lets on. It may be constructed out of bibs and bobs of classic Doctor Who stories, but there’s an appreciable anxiety about this. It’s notably not until the Doctor is being lowered into the pit that we get a chain of references to past stories, and his declaration that the Time Lords invented black holes comes only after the plot has been resolved. The story is, to those who recognize the elements, the most classic series indebted one we’ve seen, in many ways much more so even than School Reunion, which brought the classic series back to alter it heavily. And yet even here there’s a sense of tentativeness about the classic series.

Nevertheless, we should be careful in trying to understand that hesitation. The first season was largely scrupulous about avoiding excessive references to the classic series. More to the point, it was Davies who was most prone to inserting continuity references, where other writers shied away from them out of fear that they would make the series insular. Which is to say that the idea that Davies had any anxiety personally on the subject of continuity references is, at best, strained.…

Continue Reading

This Dread World and the Rolling of Wheels (The Last War in Albion Part 3: William S. Burroughs, Michael Moorcock)

, 21

“This dread world and the rolling of wheels” -William Blake, The Book of Urizen, 1794

Figure 17: The working class neighborhood of Northampton
Alan Moore grew up in was called The Boroughs
[previously] Burroughs provides no such easy access route, and is beloved less by the academic consensus than by generations of committed counterculture figures who, like Ballard and Moorcock, “weren’t so much influenced by him as inspired by him.” At times not so much a writer than a stunningly competent criminal, Burroughs effectively hit on the brilliant scheme of supporting a drug habit by writing about it. Famed for shooting his wife to death in an ill-advised drunken William Tell impression, Burroughs’s style is an obvious antecedent for Ballard’s harshly visceral lists in The Atrocity Exhibition. His masterpiece is Naked Lunch, an unstructured ramble of a book that was the subject of several landmark obscenity trials, all of which it won. It wanders from misadventure to misadventure, steadily dissolving reality into a paranoid dreamscape that seems to have been Burroughs’s drugfucked experience channeled onto the page, a world where “One Friday Fats siphoned himself into The Plaza, a transulcent-grey foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamprey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow black erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk,” a paragraph that exists as part of a sprawling multi-paragraph sentence with no end in sight.
Figure 18: Heroin
Burroughs transitioned this into a literary career such that a reasonable circle of admirers that improbably allowed him to live a heroin-addicted lifestyle until the ripe old age of 83, sustaining a pleasant existence in Lawrence, Kansas where he could have his drugs without the preying cityscape waiting to devour him. But his paranoia was not merely of the perverted rabbit hole of criminal culture that urban drug culture offered him. Rather, he feared the very technology of language, describing it as a “control machine” that was indistinguishable from his own addiction in its tyranny over his thought. This sort of paranoia struck a chord as the technological utopias of the post-World War II era fully gave way to a more unsettled pre-apocalyptic nightmare of nuclear war led human science to become what Iain M. Banks, vanguard of the post-new wave generation of science fiction in the UK, described in 1996 as an Outside Context Problem – something that “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” As science became dangerous so did science’s imaginative dimension.
Burroughs, like many figures within and without the war, was overtly an occultist, creating with British performance artist Brion Gysin the cut-up technique, in which written works are physically shredded into strips and remixed to produce new phrases, a practice Burroughs believed to have actual magical import, to the extent that he joined the chaos magic organization the Illuminates of Thanateros late in life. His parallelism with Grant Morrison’s later work is profound enough that it is tempting to suggest him as the real origin for Morrison’s Near Myths stories.
…

Continue Reading

When You’ve Seen The Ages That I’ve Seen (The Idiot’s Lantern)

59

In the original version the Wire was to steadily move up
Maslow’s Hierarchy until, in the climax, it shouted “lacking
in opportunities to express my creativity” instead of just
“hungry.”

It’s May 27th, 2006. Oh look. Gnarls Barkley. What a shock. Busta Rhymes, Rihanna, Red Hot Chili Peppers, LL Cool J, and Shayne Ward also chart. In news, Montenegro has voted for independence from Serbia, and scientists have confirmed that HIV originated among Cameroonian chimpanzees.

Anyone hoping to be enlivened from a slow week by a fresh episode of Doctor Who would have found themselves at least somewhat perplexed by The Idiot’s Lantern. As has been noticed by more people than I care to count, The Idiot’s Lantern does not quite work. This is mostly not interesting – it tends to go loud when it should go quiet and vice versa. Eddie Connolly is portrayed as a straight villain from the get-go when too much of the plot revolves on sympathy for him – there needed to be scenes where he’s given an underlying dignity as a man struggling to keep a family going. Gatiss’s decision to avoid the title “The One-Eyed Monster” is, of course, as unforgivable as it is completely understandable. And if we’re being perfectly honest, it is ever so slightly possible David Tennant does not wear a bouffant well. But these are small reasons and uninteresting to anyone not heavily invested in writing as a craft. Which is to say that I could go on about them for ages, but that I don’t want to unless they say something substantive about the evolution of the show as well.

So let’s move on to the interesting way that The Idiot’s Lantern fails – the fact that the script is actually harmed by David Tennant, or, more accurately, by the fact that it’s not written for him. There’s a very fundamental difference in how Tennant and Eccleston play the part, and this difference requires some attention in writing. In short, Tennant plays the role with a narrower range of tones that he can take, but with a lot of very deliberate turns and reversals within those tones, whereas Eccleston tends to flit about manically and respond in ways that are very slightly off from the expected tone. And in this script that causes two problems.

The first is in what I already noted – the story’s poor decisions on when to go loud or quiet. Tennant’s Doctor is, from the start, designed to not have a lot of gradiations in angry. No second chances and all. But even as an actor, this is true – Tennant does shouty and angry the way he does shouty and angry. He doesn’t have a setting for “kinda shouty and angry.” So where Eccleston finds new ways for the Doctor to be angry, Tennant continually goes back to one terribly effective way of doing the Doctor incandescent with rage. This is fine, but it means that the Doctor’s anger has to be deployed much more carefully than with his predecessor.…

Continue Reading

Man of Steel: A Redemptive Reading

114

I’ll put my premise in the first sentence: Man of Steel is a scathing deconstruction of Superman and particularly of Grant Morrison. The second sentence will warn about spoilers for Man of Steel and, for that matter, for Sucker Punch.

Let’s start with the Watchmen movie, since it wasn’t very good. Because the thing is, as many bad things as there are about it, it at least tried very, very hard to be a Watchmen movie. It’s clear Zach Snyder wanted to film the movie version of Watchmen, and just failed, largely because you can’t make a movie version of Watchmen.

Notably, he moved on to Sucker Punch, a film that is about pretending to offer one kind of pleasure only to suddenly turn on a dime and become a blisteringly angry critique of that pleasure. It starts by being about sexualizing badass women who are horribly scarred, and then ends by being about the importance of giving survivors the agency to tell their own stories. It’s a glorious inversion of the male gaze. After all, the act of gazing that the film is most focused on is the one the film repeatedly elides. Whenever the narrative comes to a moment where Babydoll begins her erotic dance it switches realities to an over the top action sequence. We’re repeatedly given the wrong kind of pornography, and then we cut back to close-ups of the post-orgasmic bliss on the faces of the men who have seen what our pornography of violence was standing in for. So the male gaze is being complicated and critiqued from the get-go.

Similarly, I think it’s telling that the final sequence openly admits that Babydoll is not designed to function like a real person. Everything in the film is working towards that voiceover and its call for allowing survivors to tell their own stories. That’s the eponymous sucker punch.

If the movie fails – and I’m at least willing to grant that a movie that spectacularly misread has failed in part – it is because we are too trained to take pleasure in the violence-as-sex pornography that the film attacks such that the point when it turns ugly simply isn’t upsetting enough. Though I think the scene where Blondie and Amber are killed is quite upsetting, and consciously so – it’s the scene where Blue really becomes properly unhinged, and he’s genuinely scary in it. And the violence is allowed to be shocking and fast, in marked contrast to the excessive slow-motion used for the pornographic violence. But it perhaps doesn’t go quite far enough in turning on the audience and making them suffer for having enjoyed the film. (And note that there’s no more “fun” violence after that.)

Still, this is clearly what the film is trying to do the entire time. It is carefully constructed to turn ugly and then, finally, show a viable alternative to what it critiques. The worst that I think you can say about it is that the turn could have been crueler and more effective.…

Continue Reading

You Were Expecting Someone Else 24 (I Am A Dalek)

, 18

The Quickreads initiative was one of those feelgood things New Labour was great at. Taking off from Wold Book Day, an earlier New Labour creation in which kids were given coupons to take a pound off the price of any book alongside the launch of books conveniently priced at just that, Quickreads was ostensibly focused on adult illiteracy and low literacy. The idea that was that major writers would write short, accessible books that would sell for cheap to adults who might not ordinarily read.

Doctor Who’s inclusion in this is thus a bit odd. The basic shape of the Quickreads format, after all, has ample precedent in Doctor Who: 128 pages, accessible, we’re basically just talking about Target novelizations here. But those are not exactly what you’d call aimed at adults. That the next two Quickreads releases hired Terrance Dicks at least seems to speak volumes about where they’re going, but at the start of the series you instead have a textbook case of Doctor Who striking an odd tone as it attempts to compromise among several audiences and goals.

It makes sense that the Quickreads books, for Doctor Who, would settle efficiently into being children’s literature with an adult audience a la the Harry Potter books or Philip Pullman’s work. The problem is that it makes sense in a large part because that’s what Doctor Who has already done. Not only in its previous book series – this is, after all, exactly what the New Series Adventures have been doing with their bizarre decision to up the price and lower the grade level of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. And more to the point, it’s what the new series itself has been doing.

This is something we talked about with both Aliens of London/World War III and Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel – that every Davies season does a similar story as its first two-parter, and perhaps more to the point every Davies season’s first two-parter is harshly criticized by a large chunk of fandom. There is an extent to which this can simply be described as missing the point: these two-part stories are the entries in the seasons most overtly geared towards children. They exist to be big romps full of action set pieces aimed, roughly speaking, at ten year olds. They’re the price we pay for Father’s Day and The Girl in the Fireplace – stories that are equally unapologetically targeted at the sort of mature adult audience who obsessively watches a children’s show and writes a blog about it.

What constitutes children’s television? We’ve talked about a lot of children’s television over the years in this blog, some of it very good. The best ones we’ve talked about have typically sparkled because they push things just a little too far, presenting a world just a bit darker and more menacing than it feels like children’s television should. Children of the Stones is probably the iconic example out of things we’ve talked about, although Knights of God or, for that matter, Dark Season would do just fine.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 146 147 148 149 ›»