Eruditorum Presscast: The Eaters of Light
At long last, we’ve got this week’s podcast up, so you can kill an hour before “World Enough and Time” comes on. Our guest this week is Elliot Chapman, and you can listen to our discussion here.…
Elizabeth Sandifer
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The Proverbs of Hell 13/39: Savoureux
The Patreon is healthily above $320 now, so podcasts are good to go. That said, there’s been a scheduling snafu on this one, so I’m not actually sure what day it’ll post. Sorry about that.
SAVOUREUX: I’ll just quote Fuller: “a savoury dessert appealing to diners with no interest in a sweet ending to their meal.”
Will is unambiguously hunting here, as opposed to fishing, and right on the heels of making the distinction with Abigail. There are more visceral demonstrations of the idea that Will has been pushed to the edge, but this is perhaps the clearest demonstration that this edge consists of more than just the side effects of encephalitis, also encompassing a genuine moral shift.
The first appearance of the Wendigo, aka the mature form of Will’s stag hallucinations, reflecting his understanding that the figure he’s been stalking is in fact Hannibal. What’s interesting, of course, is that Will doesn’t know that Hannibal is the copycat killer yet. His appearance here could be mere foreshadowing – that is, broadly speaking, the point of a hallucinatory cold open after all. But more to the point, it suggests that Will does not know all that he knows, and thus that his relationship with Hannibal is already motivated by a murderous desire.
One of Hannibal’s great feats of the supernatural. Not, mind you, getting Will to eat the ear, which we see in season two. Rather, making the timeline for this work. Even if we take Hannibal’s final scene with Abigail in “Relevés” as taking place before Will’s return to Virginia (despite appearing in the episode after), figuring out when Hannibal broke into Will’s house to force feed him the ear is a challenge. The answer, obviously, is that it took place in lost time.
Another clue Abigail is alive, however, is the fact that Hannibal feeds her to Will in the expectation that he’ll vomit her up, as opposed to consuming her.
HANNIBAL: What happened? Why was she afraid?
WILL GRAHAM: I hallucinated. I hallucinated that I killed her. But it wasn’t real. I know it wasn’t real.
In which Will is possessed by BOB.
More seriously, for all Will’s deterioration, his confusion about what is and is not reality is increasingly seeming to clear up. This, however, is not so much a process of rejecting his hallucinations as it is one of determining which of them are real.
The sequence in which Winston stands outside the police car whining plaintively at Will’s arrest can safely be described as “a bit fucking much.”
…BEVERLY KATZ: I can’t do the silent treatment. I can’t pretend I don’t know you and I can’t pretend we don’t both know what I’m finding under your nails. You called me once because you didn’t trust yourself to know what was real. This blood is real, Will.
WILL GRAHAM: I know.
BEVERLY KATZ: Do you know how it got there?
WILL GRAHAM: Not with certainty, no.
BEVERLY KATZ: Certainty comes from the evidence. I didn’t want to find any evidence on you.
The Eaters of Light Review
The nearest precedents for a classic series writer returning to do a new series episode were probably the P.J. Hammond episodes of Torchwood. And indeed, those two episodes provide a handy map to the pros and cons. “Small Worlds” felt brave and refreshing, “From Out of the Rain” like a clumsy collection of random ideas that belonged to a different show. More to the point, they do this without actually being very different as scripts, which goes to show you that the comeback tour is on a knife’s edge in terms of whether it works or not. And while Hammond and Munro are very different writers, The Eaters of Light has similar problems to the Hammond scripts. Most notably, the characterizations are slightly off. Bill has unexpectedly caught Amy Pond’s already fairly idiosyncratic fascination with Roman Britain, only without the “invasion of the hot Italians” explanation. The Doctor, meanwhile, has rolled back two seasons and change of characterization, becoming more surly and uncharitable than he’s been in ages. (Note the two very Series 8 catchphrases – he’s “against” charm and back to calling human lifespans “hilarious.”) Both Hammond and Munro visibly come from a pre-”tone meeting” generation of writers – these aren’t scripts that bother with the idea that your climactic scene has to pay off some thematic thread so that the whole episode is “about” one specific thing. All the stuff I keep saying Toby Whithouse is very good at the formal structure of but never bothers to develop? This episode mostly doesn’t even bother with it.
But that doesn’t answer the question of whether this is any good or not. After all, a forty-five minute episode of Doctor Who is a container that can’t possibly hold all the things a story is supposed to do. Every story has to pass on some aspects to make room for others. So this one is a bit threadbare on the TARDIS crew’s characterization and doesn’t hammer home a theme. What does it do? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly for a returning classic series writer, it splits the TARDIS crew up from the word go, has each side meet a different faction, and then spends a lot of time teasing out the mystery of what’s going on.
Oddly, the result doesn’t feel as much like a classic series throwback as Empress of Mars did. Gatiss is still a new series guy, after all, and wrote an episode built for 45 minutes, with a modern structure, which let the very classic series thematic components shine. This, on the other hand, is so committed to doing its own thing that it doesn’t actually quite feel like anything. Some parts of it are very new series – the entire “this is a myth about why crows caw” aspect is something you’d never see in the 1980s. But this in a lot of regards this doesn’t feel like a classic series throwback because it’s so steeped in an older tradition that it just feels weird instead. It simply doesn’t bother with the modern “move through 2-3 set pieces” structure.…
Eruditorum Presscast: Empress of Mars
Another week, another podcast. This time we’ve got Ian McDuffie, writer and artist of Feels and the force behind Violet Mice. And a Gatiss episode. One of those is worth getting excited about. The other is… fine. Find out which is which here.…
Proverbs of Hell 12/39: Relevés
RELEVÉS: Properly “removes,” but best understood in the sense of a relief pitcher, with the idea being that the course replaces the previous one. In practice, it is the big set-piece course, and so functioning much the same way that “Rôti” did.
GEORGIA MADCHEN: They say what’s wrong with you?
WILL GRAHAM: Just the fever. They’re trying to find out what else.
GEORGIA MADCHEN: They won’t find anything. They’ll keep looking and keep giving you tests and keep giving you false diagnosis and bad medicine. But they won’t find anything wrong. They’ll just know you’re wrong. (Pause) I hope you have good insurance.
One assumes the FBI has decent insurance, but it’s a delightful joke and, given how little time we actually get to spend with an on-the-mend Georgia, probably the key
The sense of being wrong, as opposed to having something wrong with you, is a deep-seated fear for Will. It’s worth recalling his description of the Chesapeake Ripper as “one of those pitiful things sometimes born in hospitals” that fails to die, a description that puts Hannibal in much the same place.
GEORGIA MADCHEN: They said I might remember what I did. I don’t want to remember.
WILL GRAHAM: You know what you did, Georgia.
GEORGIA MADCHEN: But I don’t remember it. I don’t remember it like I did it. It feels more like some horrible dream where I killed my friend.
Thankfully this comes well after Moffat’s use of a similar line in “The Wedding of River Song,” and so we can safely conclude that any influence was on Fuller and company as opposed to the other way around. Nevertheless, this serves as a late echo of the themes of identity and memory in “Rôti.” What’s striking is the aspirational approach that Hannibal takes to the conjunction of memory and identity. Georgia wants to control what she remembers so she can control who she is.
HANNIBAL: Silkie chicken in a broth. A black boned bird prized in China for its medicinal value since the 7th century. With wolfberries, ginseng, ginger, red dates and star anise.
WILL GRAHAM: You made me chicken soup.
The script calls says, “Hannibal offers a supportive smile. Of course he did,” but Mikkelsen’s reaction, which is considerably funnier, has him looking slightly miffed at Will’s reductiveness. Would Hannibal still have turned on Will if he hadn’t insulted his soup? Probably, but still.
It’s also notable that the black boned chicken makes this one of the rare meals we can confirm is non-cannibalistic. (Although “a broth” offers some concern.)
Amusingly obscured from all subsequent discussion of this murder is how Hannibal successfully tampered with Georgia’s oxygen chamber to both remove her grounding bracelet and slip a plastic comb in. This is probably for the best, as calling attention to it would damage the “he might not literally be the devil” interpretation that the show takes such tortured pains to maintain the faint plausibility of.
Given that Georgia’s issues with memory provide a thematic counterpoint to Gideon, it’s a pity room for her couldn’t be found in “Rôti,” as her swift incineration in this episode seems like a waste of a character who, while she probably didn’t have a substantial arc in her, was still probably good for a few more scenes.…
Empress of Mars Review
In what seems likely to be his last script for the series, Mark Gatiss finally manages to get ruthlessly trad Doctor Who to work in the new series. Sure, we’ve had straight-up bases under siege and throwbacks, but most of those were at their root prettified versions – what people thinking back to the highlights of Doctor Who half-remember the series as being. But this is what the series actually was – a quaintly stagey morality play in a cave. More than, I think, any new series episode to date you could imagine this one with Jon Pertwee in it. Sure, the Victorian expedition would be down to about five people and you wouldn’t do the pop culture jokes, but this belongs to the series that made Colony in Space, The Mutants, and, yes, The Curse of Peladon in a way the new series simply hasn’t before.
It’s easy to make this sound like an unimpressive trick – and it’s not like the three stories I listed there make many people’s top ten lists. (Though I think they’re all underrated.) But, and I really want to stress that I’m not damning with faint praise here, one need only look at how long Mark Gatiss has spent trying to make Doctor Who feel like the Pertwee era to see that it’s not even remotely easy to make something simultaneously feel like 1972 and not feel like a jarring mess in 2017.
Part of what makes it work is what always made me less pessimistic about the Gatiss episode this year – the fact that Victorian explorers fighting Ice Warriors on Mars is so utterly, pathologically Gatiss that it holds things together. What’s interesting, then, is that it’s an idea it’s impossible to actually imagine Letts and Dicks going for. It’s not that it’s too gonzo for the production team that brought us The Claws of Axos, but it’s gonzo in the wrong way. Literally nobody but Mark Gatiss would ever suggest it. But more to the point, it’s too unvarnished in its political critique – when the Pertwee era did the Empire it was as the “Earth Empire,” and already in its collapse phase. Actually doing the Victorians and treating them as invaders would have been too much. (Although to be fair, part of why this feels so Pertwee is that “Earth invades Mars” turns out to be indistinguishable from The Sea Devils aside from the costumes.
The irony, though, is that of course this isn’t a critique Gatiss wants to push too far either. He puts the obligatory lines in, sure. And the basic conflict between Godsacre and Catchlove is a critique of Victorian culture. But he’s not Peter Harness, and he’s not going to do a rigorously political episode any more than he’s going to bother characterizing Bill in more depth than “the one that makes pop culture references.” Given the choice between biting political allegory and riffing on Edgar Rice Burroughs some more, or indeed between most things and riffing on Edgar Rice Burroughs some more, it’s not hard to guess what’s going to win.…
Eruditorum Presscast: The Lie of the Land
I’m joined this week by Kit Power, who has more kind things to say about The Lie of the Land than I do. So, really, any kind things.
Anyway, you can listen to that here if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. Or we can just sit here in uncomfortable silence. That’s fine too.…
The Proverbs of Hell 11/39: Rôti
RÔTI: Roast, specifically roasted game birds, but in this case likely a straightforward case of “and now we arrive at the big centerpiece courses.”
HANNIBAL: Someone who already doubts their own identity can be more susceptible to manipulation.Dr. Gideon is a psychopath. Psychopaths are narcissists. They rarely doubt who they are.
DR. CHILTON: Tried to appeal to his narcissism.
HANNIBAL: By convincing him he was the Chesapeake Ripper.
DR. CHILTON: If only I had been more curious: about the common mind.
HANNIBAL: I have no interest in understanding sheep. Only eating them.
One of Hannibal’s more bluntly callous secret confessions. Its unusual viciousness is probably explained by his understandable frustration at having to relate in any way, shape, or form to Chilton. Also interesting is the selection of animals for the metaphor – a departure from the show’s default choice of pigs that flags the particular disdain with which Hannibal holds Chilton.
DR. CHILTON: I thought psychic driving would have been more effective in breaking down his personality.
HANNIBAL: Psychic driving fails because its methods are too obvious. You were trying too hard, Fredrick. If force is used, the subject will only surrender temporarily.
Hannibal is, of course, obliquely discussing his own efforts to make Will Graham believe himself to be a killer. Of course, it’s not as though Hannibal isn’t using force, after all – he literally killed a man to ensure Will’s diagnosis would remain secret. Hannibal’s real point is, as ever, aesthetic – Chilton’s approach was clumsy, heavy-handed, and, most damningly, lacking in elegance.
There’s an odd structure to the episodes from “Trou Normand” through “Releves.” “Rôti” seems to want to follow up directly from “Trou Normand,” flashing back to the totem pole as a metonym for all the murders Will has been looking at, while putting Georgia Madden off to the side. Then “Releves” will pick up the Georgia Madden case, as though it would prefer to follow up on it. Was there a change in episode order? If so, other than the disjuncts, it’s a sensible one that results in Will’s psyche disintegrating further with each episode, but there’s an odd sense of cycling through several parallel stories of Will’s collapse.
Given that the script for “Buffet Froid” compares Will’s misdrawn clock to Dali, it’s fitting that this episode should go with the amusing image of a melting digital clock. Although on the whole the focus on imagery of rushing water for Will’s delusions is slightly odd given that he’s running a fever. Presumably it’s meant as an extension of the frequent motif of Will awakening drenched in sweat, but there’s a clear contrast between last week’s “set his mind on fire” and this week’s flooding. The easiest reconciliation: Will’s delusions are in fact a respite from his illness – he hallucinates water as a means of calming his body down. This is clever, but doesn’t really work.
…DR. CHILTON: I can’t take responsibility for your actions, Dr. Gideon.
DR. GIDEON: Sure can. It’s why I’m suing you.
The Lie of the Land Review
Let’s start with the mid-episode twist, i.e. the point where any hope that Toby Whithouse was going to do anything other than Whithouse all over the damn floor died. At this precise moment, a ton of threads that have been going on for a while are converging. Most immediately, we’re doing the trailered regeneration. We’re also at the climax of the trailered “the Doctor has joined the monks and Bill stands against him” plot, which is the hook this episode was previewed on since the initial Radio Times summaries. And, of course, we’re at the halfway point of the climax of the ballyhooed “Monk Trilogy,” resolving fully three weeks of storytelling. What do we get, then? A scene in which a room full of people literally cracks up that we fell for any of it.
It’s not, obviously, that I mind narrative substitution. I mean, I coined the phrase and all. But the substitution has to actually mean something instead of just being an empty placeholder. The point of narrative substitution is that the second narrative critiques the first one. It’s not just chucking out a plot because you’re bored with it and laughing at the audience for being so naive as to think you might actually have something to say.
And I mean, it’s not as though the Doctor apparently being with the bad guys that have brainwashed the world was a hugely interesting plot as opposed to a hackneyed genre TV standard, but it was something. For a brief moment, just after we learned Missy was in it, it even looked like it might tip into interesting. Bill and Missy teaming up to fight the Doctor? That’s a story worth telling. But even the hackneyed standard of “evil Doctor” would have been something. Hell, even a 1984 knockoff so banal it can’t be bothered to do more than substitute “memory crime” for “thoughtcrime” would have been something. A world whose history has been completely reshaped by the Monks could have been at least interesting. And the script clearly knows that, with its aggressively on-point lines about historical warnings of fascism and fake news. But the one scene that grapples with any of this consists of the Doctor spouting obviously wrong defenses of totalitarian order and Bill making non sequitur replies cribbed from fifty-four years of liberal moralizing in Doctor Who. It doesn’t even try – Bill’s defense of free will is literally just “you made me write a paper about it.”
But OK. At least the episode we’re substituting is Missy. Even Toby Whithouse can’t fuck up “team up with Missy to save the world,” can he? Ha. Of course he can! Sure, Moffat can’t have expected Whithouse to do anything interesting with “Missy tries to turn good,” not least because even Moffat can’t possibly be going to do anything other than the obvious “but she fails” with the concept because the odds of him breaking the concept of the Master in his last year on the program are nil.…
Eruditorum Presscast: The Pyramid at the End of the World
The podcast for The Pyramid at the End of the World is up for your listening enjoyment. You can download it here.…