Before the Flood Podcast
This week I’m joined by the wonderful Anna Wiggins, known to Eruditorum Press readers for her guest posts in the Super Nintendo Project and TARDIS Eruditorum, and known to Eruditorum Press writers as the person who makes the site actually work. Anyway, we talk Before the Flood, Toby Whithouse, disability representation, Whithouse’s frequent blind spots with regards to transgender and feminist issues, and many more reasons why we just don’t like Toby Whithouse all that much. Honest, it’s not a site editorial position or anything.
You know the drill.
We’re pleased to announce this month’s second installment of Pex Lives, which I literally had no idea was even happening until it popped up in my inbox yesterday, and which I hope will be as pleasant a surprise for you as it was for me. 
Arguably the most Hegelian moment in all of video games, at least in an aesthetic sense, comes at the start of E.V.O. as the player’s avatar – at this particular moment in the game a fish – meets a jellyfish and is welcomed to the dialectical process of evolution. The jellyfish explains the three rules of evolution: fight for survival and for food, only move forward never back, and evolve and become strong. At which point the dialogue ends, the player bites the jellyfish in the head twice, and then eats the juicy roast his corpse converts into thus regaining some health and gaining experience. The process reiterates until eventually the player evolves into a human being, defeats the monstrous Bolbox, and reaches Eden where he is finally allowed to become Gaia’s consort and bring about civilization.
Well, that’s what I get for getting my hopes up about a Whithouse story I suppose. This was just crap. Unambitious, unimaginative, uninteresting crap made at best semi-competently. By some margin the worst episode of the Capaldi era, and saved from being Whithouse’s worst script only by the fact that 
Or, as I really do think of the category, “all the stuff that’s probably going to lose to Star Wars,” a film I would be shocked to find on my ballot given my dislike for both the franchise and the director. Call me cynical.
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s differences of opinions are numerous, but one of the most fundamental differences comes in their relationship to the atomic bomb. Both were profoundly concerned with nuclear warfare, but for Morrison it was a childhood fear he found respite from in superheroes, whereas for Moore it was an adult concern he worked through using superheroes as a metaphor.
Arguably, then, this forms one of the few major chinks in Moore’s usually resilient armor of eternity – a point on which Moore can decisively and unambiguously be said to have changed. And yet it is easy to overstate this. Moore’s revulsion towards Watchmen is genuine, and yet it is not really a revulsion at the work itself. Rather, it is a revulsion at the world that Moore used Watchmen to look at – one that he found monstrous and twisted, and wrongly assumed that the rest of the world would see it that way as well. This is not just a matter of the fans who seized onto Rorschach in ways Moore found disturbing, but rather the entire way in which the nightmarish world he constructed, in which superheroes were the embodiment of humanity’s most self-destructive impulses tragically deluding themselves into believing that they were the world’s Watchmen and not its doom, was treated as something desirable.…
This week I’m joined by James Murphy of Pex Lives to discuss Under the Lake and, in typical Eruditorum Press style, a myriad of other topics, some of which actually have an obvious relationship to Under the Lake. Perversely, we manage to go on half an hour longer than Jane and I did about an actually good story. I have no explanation. 
From worst to best of what I paid money for, sometimes reluctantly.
Along with Pex Lives itself and the Shabcast, one of the podcasts Eruditorum Press picked up when we took Kevin and James onboard was Holly Boson and James Murphy’s City of the Deadpodcast, which is looking at all of the releases from Amicus Films in turn. Readers of this site probably know Amicus best for the two Peter Cushing Dalek films, but on the whole they’re better known for a series of horror anthology films that James described to me as a sort of cut-rate Hammer Horror. Today we’ve got a look at Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, a five-part anthology film featuring Peter Cushing as Dr. Terror instead of as Dr. Who, telling the awful fates of people on a train.