Pex Lives 27: The Invasion
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We’re pleased to announce the release of Pex Lives 27, in which James and Kevin are joined by, and I quote their episode description here, “the very clever and lovely Eliot Chapman to discuss The Invasion.”
Elizabeth Sandifer
About Elizabeth Sandifer
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Sleep No More Review
This is solidly Gatiss’s best-ever Doctor Who story. It is in several regards outright brilliant, in a giddy and brave way that makes a perfect little quiet breath of an episode in the tradition of Love and Monsters or Blink, which it most obviously resembles. I’ve not, obviously, run the timing of it, but it certainly feels like a Doctor-lite episode, sharing their structural trick of treating a Doctor Who story as a defined thing happening inside another story. But where those stories put the Doctor into a very different sort of story, here he’s put into a found footage horror film. The result, very cleverly, is a story that gradually unravels into two separate stories, with the Doctor falling out of the narrative instead of slowly overtaking it.
This unraveling is by some margin the highlight of the episode, and is done with deft panache. Information is conveyed through the subtle shifts of the narrative rules, so that the found footage approach moves gradually and cleverly from being a gimmick to being the entire point of the episode. This is handled smartly on multiple levels, including Gatiss’s script, Justin Molotnikov’s direction, and Reece Shearsmith’s performance, which is a beautifully clever blend of familiar forms of Doctor Who acting that shifts cleverly with each twist. The final scene is particularly beautiful, with just the right amount of ecstatic thrill in his evil plan and clear relish in his transformation into dust. What a finish.
On top of that, many of the ideas here are genuinely great. I imagine Jack and Jane will both be over the moon with aspects of this. The leisure time destroyed by unchecked capitalist growth rises up and consumes us, our dreams taking revenge on us for our failure to attend to them. The dust is watching us, and the story it tells about us will kill us. I mean, these are just the sorts of sentences you live to write as an anarcho-Marxist occultist television critic, you know?
There are, however, two significant weaknesses. The first is, simply put, the irreducible flaws of Gatiss. Even when he, as he does here, has genuinely brilliant ideas, he’s rarely inclined to push them particularly far. Given a concept with all the metaphorical heft and conceptual possibility of sleep monsters, we really should have something more interesting than the smashy brutes that are the Sandmen. He doesn’t even go as far as indulging in the obvious grossness of literal snot monsters with people getting transformed into Sandmen and crumbling to dusty snot as they die or anything. Just smashing, and a bunch of kills in the form of “oh no one got in the room with you and we cut to black.”
Beyond that, he remains infuriatingly rubbish at giving his characters interesting arcs or things to do. The supporting cast makes that of Under the Lake/Before the Flood look like Osgood or Ashildir; they’re banal cannon fodder for corridor runs. Clara gets to trip and fall into a box.…
Capitalist Pig 4: Black Mirror, Grey Miasma of Bland Cultural Commentary
There is a moment in the first episode of Black Mirror, in which, in the midst of conjuring the future that is now our pigfucking reality, a character mentions that the Guardian has posted a brief column about the cultural significance of the pig. The script does not specify whether it is by Jonathan Jones, but it’s safe to assume that it is. Call it a headcanon, as the kids say on social media.
It’s a soft jab, to be sure, not least because Brooker is himself a Guardian columnist, offering such gripping insights as an unfunny ripoff of Jack’s “Tricky Dicky” series and this shitty thing about a German project to build an adaptive AI to play Super Mario World in which Brooker blatanty brainstorms for the forthcoming-to-Netflix twelve-episode third season of Black Mirror while demonstrating a complete lack of interest in any sort of material understanding of the technology he’s decided to undertake as his journalistic beat. Or perhaps more accurately a loving jab; after all, part of the heady genius of “The National Anthem” is the sublime coherence of its premise. In short, it works because the choice of fucking a pig is tremendously clever.
Well, no, that’s too simple. It works because it constrains itself to the world it’s set in. It’s still built largely out of satirical absurdism, but it keeps its excesses carefully chosen and strangely modest, and then follows them to a logical end. Put another way, it’s about a man who fucks a pig, but it takes its pigfucking seriously, not just following the premise to its inevitable and squealing conclusion but appreciably far past it as mass spectacle turns to mass horror and finally the same banal political reality that presumably preceded it.
The problem, to be blunt, comes when Black Mirror embraces technology, which it does with tedious half-heartedness. The second season episode “Be Right Back” is illustrative. In one sense it shares all the glimmering high points of “The National Anthem.” Its casting is impeccable – Haley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson are as good a leading pair as any show has ever had. It’s gleefully high concept, revelling in rural gothic iconography and cod-Frankenstein moments. It’s emotional and clever and well-done. And literally the only thing it has to say about the world is “social media’s kind of artificial, isn’t it?”
There are two problems here. The first is that Black Mirror, and indeed Brooker’s work in general, is irksomely non-materialist in its approach to technology. The aforementioned Mario AI column is instructive. Here’s the actual paper that inspired the article. What quickly becomes apparent here is the extent to which all of the enthused talk about how the AI “experiences basic emotions, is compelled to act by urges such as “hunger” and “curiosity”, and is painfully aware that he only exists within a meaningless two-dimensional artificial framework from which he can never escape,” in fact all that’s happened is that the researchers have come up with clickbait-friendly ways to describe the process of solving Mario.…
4. If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Eighteen: Moore’s Perspective on the Ratings Controversy)
Previously in The Last War in Albion: An epic squabble over a proposed ratings system for DC Comics ended with DC shelving the system and the various creators who had protested its imposition making a grand show of everybody getting on again, although, as Gary Groth pointed out in an editorial in The Comics Journal, very little had actually been won and the whole thing was more tempest in a teapot than battle for the heart and soul of the comics industry.
But there’s one name, of course, that’s conspicuously absent from the reactions: Moore’s. This is unsurprising; unlike Chaykin, Moore had no problem taking it personally, in no small part because it blatantly was personal. Geppi’s attack on the loose morals of American comics was specifically aimed at Moore, and blatantly accused him of corrupting the youth of America. And DC had given into the attacks without blinking an eye, then spent months dissembling about it in the face of his protests while, in his view, trying to threaten him into coming back to work for them. Indeed, in his largest single piece on the controversy, an editorial in the February 13th, 1987 edition of Comics Buyer’s Guide entitled “The Politics and Morality of Ratings and Self-Censorship,” Moore decried the “disappointingly personal abuse” he’d received, and set out his own position in strikingly intimate terms, talking about his own children and the intensity with which he feels the need to teach them how to survive “in a world that is constantly changing and increasingly precarious.” In his view, responsible parenting means that he lets them read what they want, and “in the instance of their coming across something which puzzles or disturbs them – much more likely to happen with a newspaper than a comic book, incidentally – then I will simply do my best to explain the source of their distress or bafflement as honestly and as accurately as possible.” As for Geppi’s idea of shielding them from the idea of violence and sex, he notes that “when my eldest child was five she returned from school requesting money for a collection. When I asked her what for, she replied that one of her schoolfriends’ elder brother had gone berserk and murdered his mother with a kitchen knife before turning on his younger sibling, who fortunately escaped with severe injuries.” Subsequently, he went even further, declaring bluntly that he considered the people pressuring DC to be “actually evil.”
Given that these were the terms on which he viewed the debate, it’s hardly a surprise that he saw its resolution differently. This carried some risk, as Moore put it, of him “looking like a shrill, over-reactive prima donna,” and certainly that was what DC sought to quietly paint him as, calmly explaining that, as Dick Giordano put it, the ratings system was not “a moral issue at all. It was essentially a business issue,” and complaining that “there was no way I could respond to people who were becoming so emotional about what seemed to me a very simple marketing device.”…
The Zygon Inversion Podcast
This week I’m joined by Gene Mays of the superlative Being and Time Lord to talk about The Zygon Inversion. We manage a record speed of getting completely off topic, and end up talking about Heidegger a bunch, so basically, business as usual. (Obviously this was recorded prior to Jack’s mammoth and brilliant post earlier today, or else we’d probably just be talking about it the whole time.) Download it here or be forever destroyed.
Comics Reviews (November 11, 2015)
Secret Wars #7
Well, it was perhaps inevitable that as every other bit of this series completely goes off the railst he main series would eventually suffer. The delays and distantly epic tone of this finally conspire to create an issue that’s just disjointed and contextless. Did large swaths of plot happen in tie-ins I didn’t buy? Did I forget things from last month? Should I care? I don’t know, but I honestly had no idea what anybody’s plan or goal was here, and the result was an entire issue spent waiting for a punchdown that got delayed to issue #8 as part of the bullshit extension of this series and a cliffhanger that blatantly wasn’t part of the original outline. Complete mess.
The Uncanny Avengers #2
Also a complete mess, but with an intriguing mixture of elements on the team that makes me kind of want to hang on for at least another issue or two, just because I’m increasingly intrigued by Duggan as a writer. But at $3.99 a pop, that’s hard to justify, and if this doesn’t pick up into something where I have an idea of what the fuck is going on in the Marvel Universe I’m probably going to start buying some more Image books.
Thors #4
Unsurprisingly, as this converges back towards Aaron’s ongoing Thor plot and back towards the shambling mess that is Secret Wars it faltered badly for me, with the ending being a confused mess of mostly identical looking characters. Still, there are some charming bits here from its actually good idea of “Thor-based police procedural.” I suspect Aaron is a writer I like more in the small details than the large plotting. Still, done with his Thor run for the time being, I think.
Spider-Gwen #2
The lengthy delay and alternate universe setting are really throwing me out of this, and it’s increasingly feeling like a book that’s all style and no substance. I think Spider-Gwen has generally worked best when adjacent to the rest of the Marvel Multiverse, as opposed to in her own AU, and may well drop this and just quietly hope the character gets the Miles Morales treatment down the line, because this just isn’t doing it for me.
All-New All-Different Avengers #1
A slow start to a promising book, ending with the team far from assembled and not a ton of impressive plot looming over things. Still, it’s a good writer and a good team, and much as the first story is a bit of a let-down the Ms. Marvel/Nova backup is a total hoot that redeems the package. Still excited for this book, even if I’m really shaking my head at the general sense of totally mismanaging this relaunch.
The Infinity Gauntlet #5
By far the best of the Secret Wars related books, due to owning the characters it created over its five issues and giving a resolution based on their stories and concepts that didn’t really tie in to the increasing clusterfuck that is the larger crossover.…
Now Fight (Mortal Kombat)
On September 13th, 1993, exactly four days after my eleventh birthday, the world slipped forever from my grasp. As with anyone for whom this happens, my reaction at the time was little more than a vague annoyance and sense of disapproval. I really never played Mortal Kombat, largely because it was very much Not The Sort Of Thing My Family Approved Of. This was not the Joe Lieberman sort of “this game shouldn’t be for sale” disapproval that constituted the main controversy over Mortal Kombat. I don’t even think it was a particularly outcome oriented objection; by this point in my life there was no real sense that I was likely to begin emulating media violence. But I flatly don’t think I could have gotten a copy of Mortal Kombat at the time Mortal Kombat was a thing.
Moreover, though, I didn’t want one. I was perfectly happy to embrace my censorship on this one. I did not like what I saw and knew of this game. Which was significant; I did see and know a fair amount. Video games were my thing; a topic of special and passionate focus even within the context of a video game friendly suburban middle school culture. Of course I knew about the massively advertised hugely popular video game where you could rip someone’s spine out. I just didn’t want to rip someone’s spine out.
To be clear, again, this was just me. My earliest genuine sense of political outrage was Lieberman’s video game censorship position, because even following the medium from afar in many cases I knew more about the games he was condemning than he did, and yet he was driving a national debate about them. I did not think that Mortal Kombat shouldn’t exist as a rule. I just didn’t want it. Indeed, for the most part I enjoyed not wanting it. I remember stray Mortal Kombat machines in restaurants, and the extended and mindful act of not playing them. (I could have gotten away with it. As a “come on can I try it everyone else gets to.” It was, in the end, a balance of financials; my parents would not spend $50 for something they disapproved of, but 50¢ was entirely achievable.)
These days, there’s a lot of people whose spines I’d like to rip out, but that’s just called adulthood. Eventually the realization that there are people you’d just rather not be in the world hits you in its full, ideological sense. This is not, to be clear, the same as the realization that you should rip their spines out. The decision to employ violent eliminationism is not the same as the taste of bile rising in your throat whenever you see them, whoever them may be. This is why the fight is our most basic play. We cannot help but split in two and struggle back to one.
Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter II, for instance. In many ways it’s just another metonym for the big dualism of the era.…
The Zygon Inversion Review
Holy shit that was good. An astonishingly well-tuned, clever piece of television full of surprises big and small. Every bit as good as you would hope from the writing credit, from the actors, from the directors, and really from Doctor Who. I am as thrilled to have watched this happen as I am jealous of those who got to see Terror of the Zygons on first transmission, and I have zero doubt that in 2055 fandom will talk about this like we talk about Terror today.
There is nowhere to start besides the big scene. It is essentially a ten minute long Peter Capaldi monologue. I mean, he has four other characters and three other actresses to work off of, but they are all obligingly standing in corners and letting him do his bit. And it’s basically perfection. This is true on essentially three levels. First of all, of course, is simply the fact that Peter Capaldi is very good at his job. There’s almost nothing more to say than that. I mean, just go watch it five times in a row. Go ahead. It will stand up to that. You will keep noticing new things and getting excited about new bits. It will be like falling in love with a song only with television.
Second of all, Moffat and Harness are very good at theirs (and this scene, at least, feels very much a… hybrid). This isn’t just well paced and well-acted, it’s well set up. Harness built the overall story very well. The basic decision to have the story’s sole actual Zygon Duplicate be Clara was very clever, as was the decision to have the actual villainous faction just be a raging ISIS-style splinter group. The result is on the one hand unambiguously a full on villain, and no effort is made to morally justify Bonnie’s lunacy as such, and on the other hand impossible not to empathize with because she’s played by Jenna Coleman. The resolution – the heartbroken “there’s nothing in the box, is there” – is astonishing, as is “you’re one of us now,” a line meticulously situated within the overall Invasion of the Body Snatchers rhetoric of the story, but given a strange and wonderful meaning contrary to what the line would normally do. And then there’s all the little verbal mirrorings – the use of the word “troublemakers,” with which the Doctor clearly implicates himself just as much as Bonnie, for instance.
But third of all, and perhaps most importantly, are the basic and particular ethics of it. The original Zygon ceasefire was an unusually philosophically deft move on Moffat’s part; a tacit quotation of the great liberal philosopher John Rawls. This moves beyond the pretty philosophical theory into terrain that is at once realist and full of empathy. The Doctor’s final turn into “of course I know how you feel you moron” is astonishing, as is the act of forgiveness. The arguments made are wise and sensible. Space is made for the legitimacy of violence, but none is made for the legitimacy of suffering, and the contradiction involved is accepted.…
Weird Kitties: Best Related Work Open Thread
For obvious reasons one of the categories I find most interesting, and one of those No Award triumphed in, Best Related Work is basically (and was indeed originally simply called) the nonfiction category for books about science fiction. I’ll almost certainly be nominating Alexandra Erin’s John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author And I Myself am Quite Popular, it being one of the funniest things I’ve read this year, and may do Space Helmet for a Cow, which I should probably finish and write a review of.
Speaking of which, as the lack of reviews the last two weeks suggest, those have rather dried up. There’s one or two in my e-mail that I’ve not posted because I’ve been waiting to get to the 3-4 I’ve been doing per post, so if anyone wants to oblige, snowspinner at gmail and whatnot.
Also, I was happy to see that George R.R. Martin’s first Hugo recommendations post included suggesting Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), a work I’m near-certain to have on my ballot, but had been assuming would be an idiosyncratic dark horse. And, more broadly, that Martin is doing Hugo recommendations, this being a conversation I continue to maintain we need to have loudly and in public.
Anyway, here’s the Hugo Wikia’s (incomplete as ever) list of eligible works. What are you planning on nominating?…
The Zygon Invasion Podcast/Al Ewing Interview
This week we’ve got a very special treat – a double length episode of the Series 9 Podcast in which I’m joined by comics writer Al Ewing, who co-wrote Titan Comics’ Eleventh Doctor comic, and is currently doing Contest of Champions, The New Avengers, and The Ultimates for Marvel. The first hour consists of us talking about The Zygon Invasion, while the back half is a wide-ranging interview about comics and numerous other topics. Yes, you read that right. Our podcast this week is like… a hybrid.
You can grab that right here, and I really recommend you do.
The episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe that Al mentions, incidentally, is available on YouTube here.…