Eruditorum Press

You have always been one of us

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 Taste of My World (On the Boundary)

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On the Boundary (1988)

On the Boundary (live, 2011)

On the Boundary (live, 2014)

Caught a Lite Sneeze/On the Boundary (live, 2017)

“On the Boundary” is the rare Y Kant Tori Read song that is neither embarrassing nor good. It is of course another song of frustrated love, but unlike most of the album it is at least not bothering to pine for its subject. Here Amos is clear that the romance is over and is settling on castigating her lover for his inadequacy instead of holding out hope for fixing things. This has the pleasant effect of making the song one in which the swagger of Y Kant Tori Read makes sense, as the song actually casts Amos in a position of confidence and assertiveness.

The song is built around a reasonably effective crescendo from the verses to the chorus. The verses are built on an alternating major chord progression that’s largely carried by the bass, which blats out a two note pattern over some synth pads and, in later verses, a smidgen of acoustic guitar. The lyrics here show Amos sketching out her lover’s failures, which generally amount to his insistence on shutting Amos out and not letting her help him—”I was there to save you / but you’d rather drown”). Particulars are scant, but in a way that is both normal and arguably wise for anthemic pop, as it allows the listener to project themselves into the song. (To make the obvious and always applicable comparison for Y Kant Tori Read, go ahead and scour the lyrics of “Love is a Battlefield” for a hint of specifics.) The song gets to stand in for all the relationships in which a woman has been frustrated by her inability to rescue her partner from his own self-destructiveness, which is, let’s be honest, an awful lot of relationships. 

The chorus, meanwhile, is a soaring anthemic thing rooted in minor chords. The instrumentation shifts to be more guitar-forward, while the drum adds in the eighth note to give the illusion of a tempo shift. All of these are standard tricks for a song built around softer verses and harder choruses, and here end up as examples of “the classics are classics for a reason.” Where things get strange, however, is with the lyrics. The first part of the chorus, in which Amos, voice straining from intensity, wails “On the boundary / on the boundary baby / on the boundary / don’t you need my love” is at least a sensible extension of the first verse’s discussion of her lover pushing into dangerous situations and not letting her help him, although it’s not quite clear what the boundary is, but the chorus’s second half, “you won’t even let me / keep you from falling / from the boundary / that divides our love” is aggressively non-sensical, and not in the charming way that would become her hallmark later on. 

And so the song finds itself riding its chorus groove hard in a furious attempt to bluff it’s way past the nothing of its lyrics.…

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Someone Had to Lose (Fire on the Side)

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Fire on the Side (1988)

Fire on the Side/Purple Rain (live, 1996)

Fire on the Side (live, 2014)

Fire on the Side (live, 2017)

Another song of frustrated love, but ultimately one that is elevated by the particulars of its subject matter, which sees Amos tackling a classic of songwriting: infidelity. There are, obviously, three perspectives one can write a song about infidelity from. The most common is the person being cheated on, a perspective that allows for sadness (“I Heard it Through The Grapevine,” “Lyin Eyse”), anger (“You Oughta Know,” “Before He Cheats,” the first half of Lemonade), or more innovative perspectives (“Jolene”). Less common but still frequent is the cheater, which allows the singer to cast themselves as a villain, whether a self-pitying one (“The Call”) or an unrepentant one (“O.P.P.”, “It Wasn’t Me”). 

The least common, however, is the most consistently interesting: the other woman. Examples exist—Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” is the example par excellence here, although The Long Blondes’ “Giddy Stratospheres” deserves mention. And it is into this more arcane tradition that Amos steps with “Fire on the Side.” Amos approaches the subject, however, without any of the wizened and ironic distance of those artists. Both of those songs take the position of an illicit victor, Robyn full of compassion for the soon to be ex-girlfriend of her lover, the Blondes with nothing but glorious contempt. “Fire on the Side,” however, is a song of the vanquished. The lyrics are as overwrought as anything from the period (“ashes blow / in the windy skye / take my heart / as you go” is, depending on your perspective, either the worst offender or the biggest delight), but are all emphatically pointing in the same direction—a smoldering, frustrated desire for a lover that isn’t going to choose you, which results in the song having a focused coherence that neither “Fayth” nor “Heart Attack at 23” were capable of mustering, and that stands out compared to most of the rest of the album as well.

Autobiography is a cheap but inevitable lens; certainly it’s the one that Chiccarelli favors, explaining that “I remember [“ Fire on the Side”] was really difficult for her—because with her, she really had to put her whole self in the song emotionally, so that one was a tough one because it dealt with a period of her life I don’t think she really wanted to re-experience.” But frankly, one doesn’t need autobiography to explain why the singer would need to be a bit amped out to belt out a chorus of “Baby it burns / baby it burns / baby it burns / to be your fire on the side.”  The song is built around a series of repeated three-note walkdowns, starting in the prechorus with “kiss goodbye / go back to your  / separate life” all phrased with a Bb-A-F walkdown, with “to your” adding an extra C-D at the bottom to tease the Gm chord that would resolve the key.…

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The Things We Do For Attention (Heart Attack at 23)

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Heart Attack at 23 (1988)

Generally speaking, Y Kant Tori Read is not nearly as bad an album as its reputation would suggest. Misjudged in its presentation, dated, and a poor use of Amos’s talents, yes, and certainly not an album anyone would still care about thirty-two years later were it not for Amos’s future career, but not the cringing embarrassment that Amos’s disavowals (highlights include “Madonna and Kate Bush in a headlong collision after eating bad mushrooms”) and decision to leave it out of print until 2017 would suggest. For the most part it is a competent minor 1980s album—not something you’d single out as a hidden gem, but not something on its own terms that is mockable or embarrassing.

“Heart Attack at 23” serves as the biggest exception to this. Most of Y Kant Tori Read has been at least partially reclaimed by Amos, worked into concerts as a winking extra for fans die-hard enough to recognize it. “Heart Attack at 23,” however, is one of two songs on the album that Amos has never performed live. Good-natured reclamation of your juvenilia has its limits; here we find Amos’s.

It’s not hard to see why. “Heart Attack at 23” is an absolute mess. Its opening forty-five seconds feature Amos attempting a swaggering greaser voice to talk about stealing the keys to her brother’s car. This constitutes the less dreadful part of the song. Once Amos talks about wanting to put her foot to the floor the song takes off with a scream of guitar. From there the only move it ever finds for itself is to try to get bigger and louder. On an album that lived up to the hair metal convictions of its cover, this might have worked, but Y Kant Tori Read, for all its Pat Benatar aspirations, is not a hard rock band, at least in its heavily label-meddled album form. On top of that, the song is pushed to an unsustainable 158 BPM, leaving a sense of everyone involved feeling like they’re struggling to keep up with it. With an energetic band that can push the song back this can be a conscious and savvy choice. Here it just sounds like a bunch of jobbing musicians in over their head. 

This would not be salvaged by a good chorus hook, but that’s ultimately beside the point as what the song has in practice is Amos howling about how “if I have a heart attack at 23 / I’m loving you too much” and insisting in the face of all audible evidence that “you’ll miss me.” By the time the backing vocals of “roll, roll, roll, roll on” start up in the bridge about 3:40 into the song (which stretches an astonishing 5:19) they’re just icing on a cake of misjudged bathos.

What went wrong here? As noted, the production is a big problem. The obvious person to finger here is the album’s producer, Joe Chiccarelli, but things aren’t quite that simple. Chiccarelli’s account, which has Amos calling him after the album is finished to say, “I really love this album, I’m so proud of it.…

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Lollipop Girls Pave the Street (Fayth)

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Fayth (1988)

Faith/Fayth (live, 2014)

Way Down/When Doves Cry/Fayth (live, 2017)

Flash forward seven years.

Our protagonist has spent all of them working towards becoming a pop star.  Her first serious effort in 1983, a recording session with Narada Michael Walden, who would go on to produce Whitney Houston on the soundtrack for The Bodyguard, produces neither anything of value nor anything that has made it into the public sphere, although lyrics including the chorus “give me the go/ and let me / rub you down /I’m in your power, when you’re / takin’ me down / I’ll just lay low until / you come around / good to go / rub down / good to go /rub down” suggest we’re not missing out. In 1984, she moved to LA, at first doing basically the same sorts of bar gigs she’d been doing in DC. In 1985, she cut a commercial for Kellogg’s short-lived Just Right cereal, where she’s cast as “the piano player who isn’t obviously supposed to look like Elton John.” That year, things finally began to coalesce. She met Steve Caton, a guitarist who will end up sticking with her through To Venus and Back, and ends up forming a band along with future Guns ’n Roses drummer Matt Sorum and a bassist, Brad Cobb. The group cuts a demo tape of five songs (the contents of which will be another Patreon-exclusive in a few months. Don’t worry, this won’t be a habit; the period of Amos’s career where we have a pile of extant demos that never went anywhere ends here).

The tape is sent to Atlantic Records under the name “Tori Ellen Amos and her band named Y Kant Tori Read,” (the name, apparently, is a reference to her frustrations at the Peabody with regards to sheet music) firmly positioning Amos as the project’s focal point, and is enough to net Amos a contract that she’ll spend the next fifteen years working her way out from under. The resulting project is a messy compromise. Amos had only reluctantly shifted gears into the band setup, writing home to her parents, “I have to accept that the girl and her piano are dead. That time in history is over.” And so she reinvented herself in the vein of 80s arena rock. Upon being signed, however, Amos found herself at the mercy of an over-involved label. The ten tracks of Y Kant Tori Read were ultimately recorded across six studios with a rotating cast of musicians. Sorum remained the drummer across all of it, but Caton was exiled to “additional guitars,” and was ultimately one of four guitarists on the album, while Cobb did not appear on it at all save for a cowriting credit on “Fayth.” Pulled in so many directions, the album ends up being a smorgasbord of 80s cliches, almost all of them a few years past their sell-by date. The largest and most obvious inspiration, however, was Pat Benatar, a fact made obvious in the hiring of Joe Chiccarelli, fresh off of work on Benatar’s 1985 album Seven the Hard Way, as producer.…

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The Brotherhood of Baltimore (Baltimore)

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Baltimore (unreleased 1978 recording).

Baltimore (1980 single).

Like most pop artists, Tori Amos’s career has a vaguely embarrassing starting point. Fame comes slowly, and rarely on the first try, and most artists have some embarrassing recordings from their early efforts at success that are just waiting to be slapped up on YouTube or, in the case of “Baltimore,” tossed into VH1’s Before They Were Stars, a series dedicated to exactly this. The five minute segment in which this was publicly unearthed sticks mostly to a simplistic biography in which Amos’s piano bench gyrations in the “Crucify” video are juxtaposed with her upbringing as the daughter of a minister. The complexity of the story is acknowledged, but the underlying point is unequivocally rooted in teasing Amos for the naive innocence of her upbringing. “Baltimore” is introduced in a veering segue as the segment goes from the infamous image of Amos breastfeeding a pig in the Boys for Pele liner notes to her parents talking with rueful amusement about her love of shocking them, at which point the voiceover interrupts them to say “if you think that’s shocking…” as a leadup to Amos performing “Baltimore” on local television.

It’s cynical, more than slightly sexist, and ultimately effective, mostly because “Baltimore” is, at first glance, an absolutely ridiculous song, doubly so coming from Tori Amos. Its opening peel of morning show piano backed with a daydrinking hi-hat is utterly laughable in its twee insistence, and that’s before you get to the lyrics about how “the sun sets across the bay / I‘m glad to spend  my day / in a working American city / with the people who made it that way.” Everyone knows exactly what this track is: a work of juvenile over-sincerity—a cloying love letter from a not-yet-world weary Tori Amos to her beloved hometown for a 1980 contest to pen a song for the Baltimore Orioles. 

Virtually every part of this, however, is wrong. Let’s start with the notion that “in Baltimore / love is what you find,” as it is substantially more bathetic than many alternatives. Had Tori Amos written a jingle for her local baseball team in New York or Los Angeles, the sense of naive enthusiasm would still have been tangible, but the result would not have been ridiculous per se. Had she penned an ode to the Kansas City Royals or the Cincinatti Reds, it would have been slightly absurd, but in the sense of a disproportion between the song’s enthusiasm and the apparent cultural significance of the city. But with Baltimore she has a subject whose reputation is the polar opposite of the saccharine camaraderie she’s singing about.

The end effect is much like “Good Morning Baltimore,” the opening number of the 2002 musical adaptation of John Waters’s 1988 film Hairspray. In it, the main character, overweight but cheerful high school student Tracy Turnblad, wakes up and sings the praises of her city. But unlike “Baltimore,” “Good Morning Baltimore” is unequivocally playing with the irony of being so cheerful about Baltimore in particular, having Tracy sing about how “the rats on the street / all dance round my feet” and greeting “the flasher who lives next door” and “the bum on his barroom stool” as she goes to school, eventually missing the bus and hitching a ride on a garbage truck.…

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Boys In Their Dresses: Introduction

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So, my next blog project, starting on Monday August 5th, is Boys in their Dresses: A Psychodiscography of Tori Amos. And I wanted to start by talking a little bit about why this project interests me, and also a little bit about my short to medium term blogging plans in general.

I’ve had in mind to do some sort of piece about the largely female-fronted pop music I enjoyed during my 90s adolescence and how my understanding of my own love of it has shifted since transition. I originally imagined it as a series of essays, but eventually I got the idea of instead doing a deep dive on Tori Amos. The song by song blog has become, I think, one of the real classic structures of long-form blogging, and it seemed like an interesting thing to put my own spin on. And Tori Amos seemed a compelling structure for that—an artist who keeps trying new things and by extension keeps allowing for new perspectives on her work, and who has a sense of visionary personal mythology that appealed to me for all the reasons you’d expect it to.

But mostly I want to understand the sense of awe and possibility I felt at fifteen when I slipped a copy of Little Earthquakes into my Discman and put on headphones. It was an initiation to a world and landscape that I hadn’t known existed, but that felt more real and immediate than anything I’d known up to that point. Some of that, I know now, was dysphoria. But some of it—more of it, I think—was Amos, severe, brilliant, and mysterious, and the specific magic that her songs work. So off we go on a song by song blog, picking apart her career.

This blog will run on an erratic but frequent schedule. There will be posts every Monday, but they may be shorter than you’re used to depending on the song, and there may be posts elsewhere in the week as well. (Not to worry about the one on the 5th—it’s a nice meaty 3500 words.) If you’re not familiar with the music of Tori Amos, there’ll be links in every post, though the structure of a song by song blog means that we start with some slightly dodgy early material, so to get a taste of what we’re actually talking about you might want to go check out… oh let’s say Boys for Pele. Though if you want to get a sense of it in one song, check out “Precious Things” off of Little Earthquakes. 

The plan is for it to occupy the weekly slot of the blog for the foreseeable, with possible interludes for short-run projects. Once I finish the last five chapters of Last War in Albion v2 (which I’m not touching til I get Eruditorum v7 finished) I’ll start considering that for the weekly slot as well, and it’ll become more likely that I’ll alternate runs of the two. Unless, of course, I get bored or have some other brilliant idea or whatever.…

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Who We Want To Be Next (Twice Upon a Time)

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In 2063 they should do a special in which they cast different actors as William Hartnell, Richard Hurndall, and David Bradley, then have them all appear together in an adventure called The Three First Doctors.

It’s December 25th, 2017. Ed Sheeran is at number one with “Perfect.” The Pogues, Mariah Carey, Wham, and Eminem also chart, one of them with Ed Sheeran appearing on the track. We’ll call this an exercise for the reader. In news since Series Ten wrapped up, neo-Nazis held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that resulted in the death of a counterprotester, Heather Heyer, when a Nazi deliberately drove his car into a crowd. Following the rally, President Trump praised the “very fine people” on both sides of the  “are black people human” issue. There’s a lot of other Trump bullshit, but honestly summarizing six months of it in a paragraph is a challenge, so let’s just leave that at “also more fascism” and call it a day. Martin Shkreli is found guilty of a variety of crimes including disrespecting the Wu-Tang Clan. Vince Cable becomes leader of the Liberal Democrats. Theresa May’s government promises that Parliament will get a vote on any Brexit deal. Fifty-eight people are killed at a concert in Las Vegas when a gunman opens fire from an overlooking hotel window. Disney announces its impending acquisition of 21st Century Fox, delighting Marvel fans who don’t give a shit about growing corporate control of the media landscape, which is to say Marvel fans. Also, I start transitioning, which isn’t exactly news, but given the autobiographical strand of this project seems worth mentioning. 

On television, meanwhile, the Moffat era ends how a lot of people would expect: an undisciplined and messy story long on misplaced confidence and casual sexism. That the people who expected this were mostly wrong about the entire rest of the era is ironic, but does not change the underlying matter here. It’s not that Twice Upon a Time is bad; merely that it isn’t great. It’s not a triumphant final statement of any of the eras that it closes, instead coming off as sort of line one of those decent but clearly extraneous bonus tracks that get put at the end of album rereleases and end up vaguely diminishing the album’s close. It would have been a better ending for the Capaldi era had it closed with a slightly longer World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls that found time for a regeneration speech. Not, again, because this is a bad story, but simply because that was an emphatic statement and this is a pleasant mess.

This is not a surprising, given that it’s the second extension of the Moffat/Capaldi era that we’ve had. After being persuaded to stay one more season after his “could be my last” Husbands of River Song, Moffat discovered that Chibnall did not wish to kick off his tenure with a Christmas episode, and so agreed to figure out his third way of departing the series in two years.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Rick and Morty

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On October 7th, 2017, just over two months after The Doctor Falls, police were called to several McDonald’s locations following a disastrous promotion in which the fast food restaurant brought back an obscure McNuggets dipping sauce, “Szechuan sauce,” that had briefly been released nearly twenty years earlier to tie-in with the release of Disney’s Mulan. The limited amount of sauce released to select McDonald’s was wildly insufficient for the crowds that arrived, which consisted of hundreds of people lining up for hours only to discover that restaurants had as few as twenty sauce packets. The result was bedlam—young men (the crowds were almost exclusively male) hurling obscenities and venting their frustration on minimum wage workers. On Twitter, people seriously suggested class action lawsuits and claimed that any workers who had a bad day deserved it because of the company’s bad actions.

The key bit of context needed to understand this madness is why McDonald’s was bringing back an ancient dipping sauce that Eater described as having “the color and consistency of strawberry jelly” and tasting “mainly like corn syrup with maybe a tiny bit of Worcestershire thrown in.” The answer is that several months earlier, when the third season premiere of Rick and Morty dropped unannounced on April 1st (so two weeks before The Pilot), the episode had culminated in a monologue in which Rick Sanchez, one of the two title characters, declares that his only real motivation in life is to eat that sauce again.

Well. Sort of. The more accurate description of what happens is that Rick stands above his grandson (Morty, the other eponymous character) as he cowers, whimpers, and sobs, angrily telling him that he deliberately broke up his parents’ marriage out of spite and to become “the de facto patriarch of your family and your universe” before threatening him if he ever tells anyone about this conversation and revealing his end goal of Szechuan sauce. It’s a genuinely distressing scene, in ways that are difficult to quite get a handle on. The distress is clearly intentional—the scene makes an active point of focusing on Morty’s fear and anguish, and on making the horror of what Rick is saying clear. But it’s also clear that the scene is meant to be funny, complete with Rick making a fourth-wall breaking claim that he’ll get the sauce “if it takes nine seasons.” 

This tension is not so much common for the show as the nominal point. If you assert that Rick and Morty is a bad television show on Twitter, you will quickly be assured by somebody that the show is in fact a critique of Rick’s nihilism. This is an interesting claim. Certainly the claim that Rick and Morty is a highly intelligent show that is routinely misunderstood is common enough that a chunk of copypasta beginning “to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty” became a meme. And as the Szechuan sauce scene demonstrates, the show is open about the fact that Rick is a terrible person.…

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This Old Body of Mine (World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls)

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Moffat sent Capaldi off with an acting challenge to rival Heaven Sent, namely selling the line “A Mondasian Cyberman!”

It’s June 24th, 2017. Artists for Grenfell, a charity supergroup including Stormzy, Robbie Williams, Brian May, and Pete Townshend, are at number one with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which lasts for a week before “Despacito” makes its inevitable return. Little Mix, Rita Ora, and DJ Khaled also chart. In news, a terrorist attack occurs in Finsbury Park as a man drives a van into a crowd near a mosque while shouting “Kill all Muslims,” while ISIL destroys the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri in Mosul. And Theresa May finally reaches an agreement with the DUP to support her government for the low, low price of one billion pounds. 

While on television, the end, or at least, the beginning of it, as Moffat ultimately found himself persuaded to do one more Christmas special, as Chibnall wasn’t going to be ready for one yet. Indeed, this final duology serves to interestingly highlight the nature of a regeneration story by taking the two crucial elements of one and splitting them into different stories. Twice Upon a Timegets the marquee moment in which Peter Capaldi is bathed in glowing light and becomes Jodie Whittaker, which is indeed a crucial scene. But World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls is the one that gets the larger structural substance: an adventure that gets out of hand in which the Doctor wins at a terrible price. 

It is this part, I would suggest, that is the more important half of the experience. Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and John Hurt all had regeneration scenes, but they lacked stories of their phyrric victories leading up to those scenes, either going down for minimal reason at the start of their successor’s debut or departing in a scene tacked onto the end of their only story in order to avoid loose ends. And in each case there is something missing—far more of a something than the vaguely cut off and incomplete resolution of The War Games. 

No, there’s something crucial to the story of a Doctor’s fall—something ultimately far more important than getting a monologue about when the Doctor was him or a swirling montage of past companions. The story in which the Doctor loses allows an era to make at least some comment on its vision’s limitations. The fact that the Doctor doesn’t simply always triumph makes the extra-diegetic concerns of actor replacement into diegetic ones, giving each era the opportunity to tell a story that is in part about the need to change and move on. Done correctly, as with The War Games or The Caves of Androzani, the regeneration story becomes a piercing study of an era’s shortcomings. Done wrong, as with Planet of the Spiders or The Time of the Doctor, it’s still an utterly fascinating exercise in drawing a line under what has come before. (That’s not me knocking The Time of the Doctor in general, to be clear, nor even me knocking Planet of the Spiders; they’re just not coherent responses to their eras in the way that The War Games or The Caves of Androzani are.)…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Missy Chronicles

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And so begins the endgame of an era, in which I traditionally wander around a bit and look at other things before actually resolving the era. We’ve two more Capaldi-era stories and five entries to cover them with. And today we dip into the BBC Books line for the fourth time this era because I want to talk a little more about Missy, and the alternative is Big Finish’s box set and, well, we don’t do that anymore. So instead we get BBC Books’ anthology of Missy-centric short stories.

Like most BBC Books products, it suffers from the obvious problem of dead weight writers. I’m sure Peter Anghelides is a lovely person (although really you’d think I’d have been burned enough times by the BBC-sanctioned pro-fan class to just stop with that assumption), but there’s simply no reason why one of the writers of The Ancestor Cell should be writing new release Doctor Who material in 2018 except for the fact that they haven’t actually changed editors since the book after that. And yes, there’s also an inevitable firmly adequate story by James Goss and an effort by Cavan Scott that includes metaphors like “a look that would wither Krynoids” and “I’ll gut you like a gumblejack if you use that tone again,” both of which are, charitably, about as well crafted as a Bandrill ambassador. 

But sometimes Richards’ EDA-era rolodex makes good, and this time it offers the delightful double dose of Paul Magrs and Jacqueline Rayner. Magrs is in particular a self-evidently brilliant choice for this—his brand of campy and postmodernist wackiness is an utterly delicious fit for Missy. His story features Missy as a 1920s governess with a bafflingly elaborate plan involving a sentient wish-granting teddy bear named Teddy Sparkles. It’s insane and at one point features a failed attempt to alter timelines that results in 1925 London being attacked by dinosaur skeletons. (“I’ve done it all wrong! I’ve mixed up plain reality with awful whimsy… and now there’s chaos everywhere!,” Teddy says, in the greatest Second Doctor line ever written for another character.)

Rayner’s inclusion, meanwhile, both avoids the deeply embarrassing goof Big Finish managed of having no female writers on Missy (although in this instance the TV series is just as bad—if we continue the assumption that the last scene of Eaters of Light was Moffat, Rayner is presently the only woman to have written Missy) and results in one of the most hilarious and delightful stories in the anthology. It’s an epistolary story taking the form of messages between the Doctor and Nardole coordinating Missy’s shopping lists while she’s in the vault, some automated e-mails from an Amazon-equivalent, a couple of news articles from the St. Luke’s Gazette about a robotic chicken attack, and a series of messages sent by Missy through the two-way space-time telegraph with time-scoop facility she builds with a helmic regulator, azimuth sprockets, sulphuric acid, mercury, and some sugar in which she attempts to incite various historical women into mass androcide.…

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