Eruditorum Presscast: The Witchfinders
Join El and Annie Fish (whose delightful Patreon is here) for a discussion that is at times about The Witchfinders. Listen here.…
Elizabeth Sandifer
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The Witchfinders Review
The cynical account would be that this avoided endorsing the idea that witch hunters had some valid points, and so is within the context of the Chibnall era borders on being a triumph. The more considered account would be that this retains many of the Chibnall era’s most annoying tics, but generally de-emphasizes them while succeeding at finding some new spins on old standards, which is to say that it works out more or less like the best case for the era.
At its heart it offers “what if spooky Doctor Who but with Alan Cumming camping it up throughout. The flaw here is that there’s not really a reason for these things to combine; King James’s arrival is only vaguely motivated and the plot really doesn’t particularly need him. His only role seems to be to keep the script from just being a kind of dreary mud zombies story. But while there’s a sloppiness to how Cumming is worked into the episode, he’s blatantly the best thing about it. Doctor Who works off of contrasts, and the gloomy folk horror of the plot along with Cumming’s wanton consumption of the scenery is an effective one. That it’s thinly justified isn’t a huge issue; something is always thinly justified in a fifty minute episode.
More to the point, the mud zombies kinda needed the help. They’re not bad, but it’s telling that their name, history, and plan are introduced and then dealt with inside of the last ten minutes, and that this, while slightly jarring, does not really feel like it detracts from them. They’re very “standard Doctor Who stuff,” and their abrupt reversion from spooky atmospherics to a completely standard explanation for this sort of thing is fine so long as they’re functioning as a platform for other things to happen. So the story needs a King James of some sort.
Thankfully, the King James it goes with is delightful. Doctor Who fans have, of course, known that Alan Cumming fits well with Doctor Who stuff since 1993, but at last we have him in the series proper. But he’s bolstered by the bold decision to have King James be, to put it bluntly, fucking terrible. The ideology of hero worship is probably the biggest of the millstones around the celebrity historical, and throwing the Doctor with a historical figure who’s revealed to be a complete shit is tremendously refreshing. Cumming, meanwhile, is capable of taking a character whose every trait is negative and making him entertaining without any redemption arc whatsoever. An episode built entirely around him would probably be annoying, but balancing him with mud zombies is exactly the sort of contrast that makes good Doctor Who, and ultimately if you stick the result you can handwave the setup.
This also marks the first time anyone has thought to handle Jodie Whittaker by giving her a talented co-star and letting her have a bunch of big scenes with them. While still waiting for an iconic hero moment, the exchange with King James when she’s tied up is easily her best scene this season, followed, really, by the scene of her about to be drowned.…
Eruditorum Press Discord Server
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve set up an Eruditorum Press Discord server. If you’re not familiar with Discord, it’s a chat app originally designed for use by gamers, but that has spread to all sorts of uses and is apparently the hot thing with The Kids These Days. So if you’d like a place to discuss The Witchfinders before my review goes up later in the week, or just a place to hang out and talk about any number of topics with a pretty cool community, you can join the server via this link,
If you’ve never used Discord before, you’ll want to download the program itself first.
Enjoy.…
Eruditorum Presscast: Kerblam!
This week I’m joined by Deb Stanish of the Verity! podcast and Mad Norwegian’s delightful anthology Chicks Unravel Time to talk about the stunning mess that is Kerblam! Because obviously she’s just your go-to person for things with exclamation points in them.
Kerblam! Review
Back in my TARDIS Eruditorum post on The Caretaker, I mused on what Gareth Roberts might have written if he’d been allowed to write Doctor Who that reflected his politics of English middle class supremacism as opposed to being constantly pigeonholed into writing comedy romps, suggesting this would have been preferable and interesting. With Kerblam! we finally test that, and the results are as fascinating and infuriating as you’d expect.
On one level, this is the biggest political fuckup of an episode in recent memory. I mean, it’s a satire of Amazon that comes down firmly on the side of Amazon. It’s consciously pitched as a critique of labor activists in favor of exploitative corporations—one that is overtly hostile to younger generations and that treats concerns about the effects of automation on individual workers as contemptuous. It is overtly in favor of of corporations that aggressively micromanage workers’ exploitation in favor of efficiency, of bullying and abusive bosses, and of automated systems that kill people to make a point. It’s like the Cartmel and Davies eras as rewritten by Nick Land.
The thing is, that’s actually a hell of a pitch. And the first part of it is key—this episode is technically steeped in what made those eras work. It’s full of good ideas that are intelligently put together. Warehouses are a brilliantly achievable setting for Doctor Who. The Kerblam! bots are a delightful mix of creepy and charming. It does a great job of satisfyingly leaning on Doctor Who tropes while still feeling fresh and weird. And I mean, it has killer bubble wrap. I’m ridiculously and overwhelmingly there for killer bubble wrap. The mixture of bright and colorful with spookiness and action sequences is a balance that almost always works for Doctor Who, and it works here. And, in common with scripts that haven’t had Chibnall’s name on them, there’s a sense of focus to this. It knows what it’s about and has the intelligence to focus on the theme. Indeed, it even uses its politics to good effect, trusting in the standard morality of Doctor Who to do the work of setting up red herrings without it having to actually comment on anything so that, for instance, the audience is suspicious of Kerblam! because of its labor practices even when the Doctor doesn’t actually say anything about them. It’s a perfectly good episode of Doctor Who that just happens to be, you know… evil.
In terms of judging its quality, that’s easy enough. Contrary to my detractors who accuse me of exclusively judging Doctor Who by its politics, I’ve been consistent in my view that well-done conservative science fiction is worth doing. This qualifies. I am fascinated by its pathologies—by what it does and doesn’t let itself notice about the world it’s set up, and by how it manages to make this completely and utterly fucked ethical and political assessment work in the context of Doctor Who. In one sense, the detail at the end of closing the plant for a month but only giving the workers two week’s pay is as fantastically perverse as the detail of Cordo’s father’s body being worth more than his life savings in The Sunmakers.…
Eruditorum Presscast: Demons of the Punjab
We here at Eruditorum Press are unrepentant SJWs, and so we care about diversity. Accordingly, we decided it wouldn’t do to have an entirely homogenous lineup of podcast guests, and so have made a token diversity hire this week to bring you an actual cishet male to comment on Doctor Who. We would like to assure you that Jack was hired with no consideration whatsoever to his merits, and his entire existence is simply an act of crass virtue signalling.
Demons of the Punjab Review
In any previous season, this would have been a minor gem; in this context, it feels like a cool drink of water in the desert. After five episodes that repeatedly struggled at the task of being about things where the one that seemed to know what it was doing had its own deep problems, here we get an episode of admirable clarity and focus that deftly balances the broad historical and intimate personal scales. There’s nothing save for the agonizingly overdue engagement with India that makes the story extraordinary, but there’s also a refreshing lack of any significant flaws, and all in all this feels like the most developed idea of what Doctor Who should be in 2018 that we’ve had to date.
Let’s start with the politics. There are obvious fallings short; the clangingly bad line about the Doctor forwarding Prem’s complaints on to Mountbatten next time she sees him being the worst. And more broadly, there’s a milquetoast tendency throughout to place responsibility for the violence of partition on the masses instead of on the British empire, which finds itself blamed more for the carelessness of partition than for the exploitation that preceded it. None of this was sufficient to spoil my enjoyment; I suspect Jack will feel differently. Indeed, in some ways I hope that he does, because the show should be held to account for things like this. But as an American who learned a lot about partition from this episode, I’ll merely flag it as a concern and return to it in the podcast.
Instead, let’s turn to the story’s notion of what history is. Unlike with Rosa, what we have here is much more consistently a Whtitakerian “not one line” to history’s permanence. As with most of the Hartnell era (The Aztecs, ironically, excepted) this is not presented as a moral point so much as a pragmatic one. The TARDIS team is simply not put in a position to make changes to history. This isn’t a celebrity historical where the Doctor meets Mountbatten (which is part of why that line rankles so badly); it’s a story where she’s on a farm in a remote part of the border outside the Welshest forest in India. Changing history isn’t a concern in the first place. Even the inevitable death of Prem is largely taken out of the Doctor’s hands, positioned outside of morality by the fact that any other outcome would eliminate Yaz from history. The same sense of passivity that pervades Rosa is in play here, but it’s justified as something other than moral duty, and finds itself working, much as it did in 1964.
Indeed, this is in many ways the closest to a pure historical the new series has yet come. Rosa may have been low on sci-fi trappings, but the plot was still fundamentally science fiction: two time travellers fighting over history. There’s no way to rewrite it as a pure historical without losing the central plot. But there’s no real reason the Vajarian need to be here.…
Eruditorum Presscast: The Tsuranga Connundrum
This week I’m joined by Beth Axford of Doctor Who Magazine‘s Time Team and the delightful blog The Time Ladies to talk about The Tsuranga Conundrum, which we gradually find is very hard to say out loud and decide to rename. To what? Listen and find out.
This podcast also features the “classic” version of the Eruditorum Presscast theme, because elections make me cranky. As usual, it’s by my good friend Alex via his band Seeming, which you can and should check out here.…
The Tsuranga Conundrum Review
If the Chibnall era is, as theorized last week, a latter-day Pertwee era, this is the equivalent of The Sea Devils. Not so much flawless as without any major issues, at several points veering into fascinating but still basically uninspiring, and an all around good showing for the period. As is clearly usual for Chibnall’s solo scripts, it is simply unconcerned with the idea that it should be “about” something. Instead it is a jumble of elements being juxtaposed purposelessly, with all the unexpected pleasures and awkward dissonance that implies, although at some point one has to admit that the consistency with which the balance trends towards the former implies some sort of underlying aesthetic sense.
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At its heart, of course, it’s a fairly unreconstructed base under siege. As is often the case with Chibnall, however, the reduction to influences doesn’t quite work as an explanation. The convention of base under sieges, especially in the modern era, is to use the support cast as a supply of potential deaths to be drawn from when things are getting a bit dry. There’s typically at least some effort to give them characterization so that these resulting deaths have some emotional resonance, but everyone’s point is still basically to die. But that’s not what’s going on here. There are only two deaths, and one of them is a heroic completion of an arc as opposed to a tension builder. Only Astos exists to die and advance the plot.
Instead we have an episode structured as a bunch of people getting on with their private dramas while an alien attacks their ship. The result is compelling in its weirdness, particularly around Yoss and his baby, a plot which ends up absorbing half the regular cast and contributing literally nothing whatsoever to the nominal focus of the episode. The resultant final sequence, where Yoss’s delivery is intercut with the defeat of the P’Ting, is possibly the most rawly batshit sequence we’ve seen in Doctor Who since The Zygon Inversion. It is not entirely unreasonable to judge the worth of a Doctor Who episode in terms of how completely insane its weirdest sequence would look to a channel surfer. By that measure, this is a thunderous tour de force.
The plot around Eve is more straightforward: a character flagrantly marked for death dies. But it’s still handled competently, and keeps the cast doing things other than getting picked off by the P’Ting. Whittaker, meanwhile, is finding new ways to play figuring stuff out and being given new angles on the problem—her bit responding to the computer’s explanation of the P’Ting with an enthusiastic line about feeling really well-informed is a deft lampshading of kludgey exposition dump. The problem of dealing with the P’Ting feels well-sized and suitably vexing, and the resultant solution is a clever use of the gun that was carefully positioned on the mantelpiece.
The whole is defiantly valued at the sum of its parts, but in this case the math checks out.
Die Review
Doctor Who review won’t be up until Tuesday at the earliest, as I spent most of Sunday running my Werewolf: The Apocalypse game and didn’t watch it until late. But speaking of my gaming habit, I got a chance to read the first issue of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’s forthcoming comic Die, so I can at least tell you all sorts of interesting stuff about that. Well, sort of. This is my first time in the weird realm of embargos and “spoiler-free” reviews. So I have to tell you how awesome this thing is without actually telling you anything about it that hasn’t already been spilled in interviews already.
Let’s start with the obvious. This thing is awesome. It’s a fascinating book that has all the signs of being a major statement on the nature of fantasy and escapism. You should definitely pre-order it; if you buy physical comics, call your local shop. If you’re into digital or haven’t really bought many comics and just want an easy way to do the thing, you can pre-order it on Comixology. Pre-ordering is massively important with comics because it is an insane industry where nothing is done in a remotely rational manner, so really, if the following sounds like your thing, please go do the thing.
Right. So Die. The premise is simple enough: in 1991, six kids sat down to play a roleplaying game. They disappeared. Two years later, five of them reappeared. When asked what happened and where they’d been, their only answer was “I can’t say.” Surprising nobody who’s consumed any contemporary fantasy media whatsoever, what happened is that they were transported into a magical realm. And now, twenty-five years later, they have to go back.
The most interesting element here, for my money, is the twenty-five years later bit. This gives us middle-aged characters. This isn’t just interesting in terms of Kieron’s work, which has focused on teenagers and young adults to a degree that has been a defining bit of style for him. It’s also interesting as a lens on both roleplaying games and fantasy. I mean, the middle-aged geek is obviously a thing in popular culture, but it’s not actually a perspective represented within it very often, and when it is it tends to be in the Hook/Christopher Robin vein of “reawakening a lost sense of wonder.” Die has the same sense of melancholy implicit in that, but the emphasis is in completely different places; there’s no assumption that growing up involves losing some vital connection to the fantastic. The wounds being confronted are very different from just not being sixten anymore.
The other interesting thing is the suspicion of fantasy. I mean, it’s still the hook of the book, and you’ve got fantasy worlds rendered in lush glory by Stephanie Hans, who’s one of the great painter-artists working in comics right now. She gives the book a opulent, emotional moodiness that’s well worth drooling over. This is a book that relishes the iconography of fantasy. And yet it’s also a book that, in a typically Gillen-esque theme drop, proclaims the game they’re about to play in 1991 to be “fantasy for grown-ups,” then muses “we were sold.…