Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

TARDIS Eruditorum

Outside the Government: The Nightmare Man

, 33

It’s October 11th, 2010. Cee Lo Green is at number one with “Forget You,” with Bruno Mars, Kings of Leon, Katy Perry, and Robbie Williams also charting. Since Sherlock wrapped its first season, Lord Pearson of Rannoch stepped down as the leader of UKIP saying that he is “not much good” at party politics. Ed Miliband proved rather good at party politics, becoming leader of the Labour party and beating his own brother to the job. And the US removed its last combat troops from Iraq.
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures are back. But The Nightmare Man sees The Sarah Jane Adventures arriving in a very different world. It’s still ostensibly a spin-off of Doctor Who, something that will be stressed loudly in two stories’ time but the Doctor Who of which it is a spinoff is gone. It’s still overseen by Russell T Davies, but Davies no longer has the big show. And the big show has done its farewell to Sarah Jane. While one assumes – or at least, one assumed at the time, before Sladen fell ill – that Sarah Jane was an obvious choice of people to have show up in Doctor Who again, The End of Time went to great lengths to make sure that there was no obligation for any Davies-era characters to return.
So it’s a fundamentally strange thing when, following this, the entire Davies era returns like it’s never been away. This is, of course, a short-lived transitional period. The combination of Miracle Day failing to quite generate the expected audience and Lis Sladen’s unfortunate passing meant that the Davies era shuddered to a halt not too long into the Moffat era. Nevertheless, for the first two years the continued presence of the Davies era exerted an odd pressure on the Moffat era. And The Nightmare Man represents the start of that.
Equally, we should note that this is the nineteenth Sarah Jane Adventures story and the start of the show’s fourth season. It is, at this point, a known quantity with relatively little to do other than show up and be itself. Except, of course, for the detail that the other original member of its child cast, Tommy Knight, is dropping down to a recurring role, so it also has to rejig the cast in the first episode. The sensible way to do that, of course, is to focus the episode on Luke. This being Season Four it doesn’t have to go to great lengths to reintroduce the cast – it can just do a Luke-centered episode and then show him the door.
What’s interesting, then, is the nature of the episode. On the one hand, it’s solidly in children’s television territory, with a villain largely modeled off of a clown and a resolution that amounts to the power of friendship blasting the bad guy into submission. But as with the program’s high point, Lidster’s previous The Mark of the Berserker, there’s a second sense of a program grappling with relatively sizable issues.
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Outside the Government 17: K-9

, 60

At the time I queued this, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter is less than $500 from ensuring thrice-weekly posts until we get to A Christmas Carol. If you’ve not backed yet, consider throwing in for one of the lower-level rewards like the ebook. 
Let’s start with the salient and strange fact: there exist people in the world who have watched this. This is an underlying truth of everything that exists in the world of greater media. Somebody’s seen it. Actually, in many ways the stranger and more salient fact is that something like six thousand people are going to read an essay on K-9, the Australian K-9 spinoff that is why the character vanished from The Sarah Jane Adventures for most of Season Four. And some number of those people are going to eventually pay money for a book containing this essay, or pledge money to a Kickstarter to help fund the writing of similarly arcane essays. To quote a similarly arcane object of media, these things’ existence is possible, but not very likely. So why does K-9 exist? For the same reason The Web of Fear exists: people thought they could make some money.
We are, however, at a sort of cultural end here. This is a deeply remote object. It exists and had some traceable impact on the world, and it did in fact come off of Doctor Who, and that’s the sort of thing we make sure to look at here. But in many ways that is all one can do: look at this thing. It passed through the world, and that is worth understanding. Because this thing is dead and sterile. Its Wikipedia article, in 2014, still proclaims with some measure of confidence that it is coming back. 
This does not appear to be true. Back in 2012 there were murmurings of a second season. There doesn’t seem to be any particular movement on that. The series’ official Facebook page – which is seriously about the only place anything about its current life is documented – reveals that its co-creator, Paul Tams, is currently running a Kickstarter for his and Bob Baker’s latest children’s television series Marti, starring a superhero meerkat. This Kickstarter actually launched at about the same time as mine, looking for £20,000 to create a pilot episode of this series. At the time of writing, it has so far raised £139 from five backers. There are still one hundred positions in the closing credits still open for backers. You can get a DVD of an exclusive behind-the-scenes production information for £15 on this Kickstarter, or, at least, you can if it funds. We’ve got til May 31st to make it happen, and for my part, I’m backing because that making-of DVD is going to be one of the most remote and minor objects of Doctor Who history, and frankly, I wanna upload it to a torrent site. So make that £162. (Paul Tams, for his part, has only ever backed one Kickstarter, for 21st Century Tank Girl, which raised £174,130 on April 30th.
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Outside the Government: The Great Game

, 22

For the record, The Sarah Jane Adventures will start coverage next week with an Outside the Government, with The Nightmare Man running on Wednesday. There is still just over $1000 to go on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter before that run will be upped to thrice weekly – it would need to do that by a week from today in order to impact the first week’s posting schedule. 
It’s August 8th, 2010. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Beautiful Monster,” with Wanted, Flo Rida, Eminem, and Swedish House Mafia also charting. In news, violent protests break out in Pakistan and India over entirely unrelated issues. Sarah Palin’s daughter calls off her engagement with Levi Johnston due to his failure to not have children with other women. Wyclef Jean, in a memorable Wikipedia turn of phrase worth quoting “confirms he is to announce plans” to run for the Presidency of Haiti. (He is deemed ineligible to run eventually.) The World Sauna Championships are permanently abandoned when Russian finalist Vladimir Ladyzhensky dies during the competition. Also, Elena Kagan is sworn onto the Supreme Court. 
While on television, just two weeks after it showed up, Sherlock takes its bow. In so many ways, The Great Game appears the perfect response to The Blind Banker – a corrective that shows that Sherlock has learned the lessons it needed to learn. This is, of course, nonsense – The Great Game was in fact the first episode of Sherlock shot, with the season being made essentially backwards, and even if it weren’t, it’s not as though the production of a television show would allow Gatiss to look at the script for episode two and go “right, I see what I need to do differently.”
All of which said, The Great Game is notable for finally and decisively putting to rest the idea that Sherlock is going to be a procedural that does a case every week. Instead it highlights the degree to which solving a mystery is an almost incidental process for Sherlock that holds no meaningful suspense. By the episode’s end the question of “can Sherlock solve the mystery” has been in effect entirely drained of any dramatic tension – so much so that Sherlock is, by the episode’s end, a solid mystery ahead of the plot. Under the hood, this episode is just a rapid-fire succession of perfectly ordinary episodes hung together by the countdown/bomber plot, which is to say, wrapped into a parody of a season of 24. 
Few if any people actually talk about the five cases of this episode, and it’s a pity, as they’re all actually pretty good. Taking down cases with an average of eighteen minutes to spend on them is not straightforward, and Gatiss manages to make each of the five cases feel distinct and interesting. The first makes an interesting play and subversion of the epic. On the one hand, it’s a case that requires that Moriarty have been inside Baker Street itself, and more importantly, it’s flagged as Sherlock’s first-ever case.
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Outside the Government: The Blind Banker

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First off, I want to thank everybody for a fantastic first few days on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter. It’s doing better than I’d imagined.

I wanted to throw another announcement of it out alongside a proper Eruditorum post so I could stress the fact that all Kickstarter backers get to read the Doctor Who-related project I’m working on as it’s serialized. The first chapter of it is already up as a backer-exclusive update, and I should have the second one up soon.

I’ve also added a new reward tier – a full set of Eruditorum Press books (TARDIS Eruditorum 1-4 and A Golden Thread, along with the Last War in Albion book) in paperback. That’s $100, but if you’re quick and one of the first ten people to get over there, you can get it for $80.

If that’s not enough to tempt you, I’m adding two unofficial stretch goals – if the Kickstarter can hit $6000 by the end of the week, I’ll resume thrice weekly posting for the remaining Sarah Jane Adventures stories, thus getting to Season Six just a little bit faster. And if it makes it to $8000, I’ll go thrice weekly for Miracle Day as well, shortening the mid-series gap for Season Six. I figure that while covering both is a necessary part of the blog, it’s nobody except for the person who’s going to pop up in comments objecting to this claim’s favorite stretch, and we might as well give ourselves a way to make it go a bit faster.

It’s August 1st, 2010. The Wanted are at number one with “All Time Low,” with Swedish House Mafia, Eliza Doolittle, Katy Perry, Eminem, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, significant flooding takes place in China and Pakistan, and Chelsea Clinton gets married. 
While on television, Sherlock’s back for another round. First of all, it is customary to point out that The Blind Banker is an unfortunate piece of Yellow Peril adventuring that leaves more than a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth. There’s not a lot to say about this besides pointing out that it is precisely as racist as you would expect from something overseen by two people who think there’s not really anything wrong with The Talons of Weng-Chiang besides the rat. But whereas that story at least makes sentences beginning “other than the racism” understandable, if not necessarily advisable, this one misses the “be really brilliant” part of the equation and ends up as the consensus crap episode of Sherlock.
That said, the reason it’s crap isn’t that it’s racist, but rather that it’s a fundamentally misconceived episode that doesn’t understand what show it’s a part of. This is actually more understandable than it sounds – I would bet good money that a sixty minute draft of this script existed. It is thus the one episode of Sherlock that unabashedly treats the show as though it’s a standard issue case-of-the-week show in which the point is to solve the mystery, tease the season finale, and cut to credits.
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Outside the Government: A Study in Pink

, 56

It’s July 25th, 2010. Yolanda Be Cool vs D Cup are at number one with “We No Speak Americano,” with a duet between Eminem featuring Rihanna, Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg, Professor Green featuring Lily Allen, and 3OH3 featuring Ke$ha also charting – in fact, only two songs in the top ten are not collaborative: Eliza Doolittle’s “Pack Up” and JLS’s “The Club is Alive.” In news, the World Cup wound down with England eliminated the day after The Big Bang following a pathetic showing against Germany, and Spain ultimately winning in a scrappy final against the Netherlands. Also, Wikileaks releases over 90,000 internal logs of the US Military to a variety of news sources. 
While on television Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s massive hit Sherlock debuts with A Study in Pink. Why do Sherlock episode by episode? For one thing, because its production is bound up in Doctor Who’s. The shows respond to each other and learn from each other, and are, as countless critics have noted, a bit similar in some key ways. Yes, they’re also different. Hence “Outside the Government” at all. But to be perfectly honest, you learn more about the Moffat era watching Sherlock than you ever did about the Davies era by watching Torchwood. So here we are. Sherlock from the ground floor: A Study in Pink.
The more one thinks about A Study in Pink the more it becomes evident that it is quite a strange thing. What does it mean, after all, to create an introduction to a show featuring one of the best-known and most iconic fictional characters in existence? One cannot meaningfully introduce Sherlock Holmes as a character, as any introduction one makes is going to be immediately subsumed by the impossibly large paratext of a century of Sherlock Holmes. In its own way, it’s the same problem Moffat faced with The Eleventh Hour – how do you launch a program that’s already massively familiar to viewers and where everything you introduce is going to be read in context with years of existing material. 
With The Eleventh Hour, Moffat solved the problem by simply putting the program’s best foot forward and playing to all of its strengths as much as possible – an unapologetic charm offensive that worked. In effect he did everything he wanted to do differently, but in an episode that highlighted only the most superficial of his changes while mostly stressing what had remained consistent. But this was a solution for a program that had been on the air just a few months earlier. The solution isn’t quite going to work here. Nevertheless, A Study in Pink is, like The Eleventh Hour, an exercise in saying “here’s how it is.” It is at times almost television as FAQ – a narratively sequenced list of answers to questions beginning “how are you going to handle…” 
That it works is in some ways remarkable. More than almost anything else Moffat has ever written, this is an episode that relies on nothing save for his gifts at humor and exposition.
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Make Me a Warrior Now (A Good Man Goes to War)

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In this image, Clara is not cleverly disguised as a light, but
rather as a restoration field.

It’s June 4th, 2011. Pitbull and several other people are at number one with “Give Me Everything,” with Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, LMFAO, and Bruno Mars also charting. In news, the Arab Spring rolls on through its increasingly grim summer as civil war breaks out in Libya and grows progressively closer in Syria, with NATO forces helping out in Libya. Congressman Anthony Weiner finds himself embroiled in exactly the sort of scandal you should avoid with that surname. And World IPv6 day takes place. Rock on.

Meanwhile, on television, it’s Doctor Who’s first midseason finale. As we said, in his last season finale, Moffat took the structure of narrative collapse to its breaking point. Instead of averting the collapse, he let it happen in its entirety: the Doctor was locked in an inescapable prison, the TARDIS exploded, Amy was dead, and the universe ended. And then he built up a new story in its place. With A Good Man Goes to War, he fully realizes this approach, creating the definitive narrative technique of his tenure – what I will call narrative substitution. 
Where narrative collapse is based on threatening the basic functioning of a narrative structure so that further storytelling becomes impossible and then averting the collapse and reaffirming the structure, narrative substitution works by initially appearing to tell one type of story, and then rejecting that story, typically on ethical or ideological grounds, generally by revealing that the story was in fact an entirely different type of story all along. In hindsight The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang is an example of narrative substitution where the first narrative is rejected via an unaverted narrative collapse. But with A Good Man Goes to War we get a much more straightforward and pure example of narrative substitution – in many ways, in fact, the definitive one.
This is, in one sense, the big problem with it. In reality, A Good Man Goes to War is a savagely, furiously angry story. It indulges audience expectations for nearly its entire length before not only frustrating them, but damning them. Moffat will use the structure of narrative substitution again, but he will never again do it with quite this gusto. His future narrative substitutions are textual games that assume an audience who is on the lookout for the substitution and carefully watching the shells as they are cycled about the table. But this one is a trap – one that baldly tries to lure the audience into a specific misreading of the story just to turn around and punish them for doing so. It is angry and cynical in a way that not even Robert Holmes ever quite managed. Holmes could be masterfully petulant, yes, but when he wrote a story out of spite it was always a case of following the brief perfectly so as to expose the stupidity of it, audience be damned. But this is a story about satisfying supposed audience expectations, giving people exactly what they say they want, only to rip it away and condemn them for wanting it.
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People and Cars and Concrete (The Lodger)

63

In this scene, Meglos is cleverly disguised as a Silence ship.
It’s June 12th, 2010. David Guetta is at number one with “Gettin’ Over You,” with Eminem, Alicia Keys, and a duet between Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber also charting. Chris Brown postpones a UK leg of his tour because he can’t get a visa due to the fact that he’s a domestic abuser. The trial of Rod Blagojevich begins, and the World Cup kicks off in South Africa, with England playing their first game, a frankly dismal draw with the United States most notable for goalkeeper Robert Green badly fluffing a routine save. 
While on television, or, rather, slightly later in the day on television, Doctor Who offers a bit of late season levity as a calm before the storm. What’s interesting about The Lodger is, in many ways, just how influential it was. Smith’s Doctor had, from the start, been a creature of eccentricity and physical acting, but it’s not until Gareth Roberts wrote him as the funny man in a good old-fashioned comedy double act that the character became what is now the default and recognized version of the character. As with every major development in the Moffat era, this is at the moment visibly polarizing, but equally, given the sizable bloc of people who quite like the Moffat era, seems destined to eventually settle down into a consensus good thing, with the people who currently hate the Moffat era with a passion eventually fading away as its immediacy dissipates, leaving the Moffat era, like every other popularly successful era of Doctor Who, reflected upon primarily by the people who love it. 
Which is to say that the question of whether the post-Lodger characterization of the Doctor is any good is ultimately just one I’m not that interested in. Nothing is loved by everyone, but Smith’s post-Lodger Doctor is loved by loads of people, which is frankly good enough. Populism is not equivalent to quality, but the particular eccentricities of a version of the Doctor are a means to an end, and populism pretty much works to determine whether or not they’re succeeding at that end. 
Let’s instead, then, look at exactly what quietly changed with The Lodger and why it worked. The Lodger, of course, is itself an adaptation of a Gareth Roberts comic for Doctor Who Magazine featuring the Tenth Doctor and Mickey. “Adaptation,” in this case, is a terribly loose term. Several of the specific gags are recycled: the Doctor playing football, the sonic screwdriver/toothbrush confusion (although the subject of the gag switches), the “talk the girlfriend into doing something with her life” bit, and even the detail of the Doctor making an omelette are preserved. But “The Lodger” is basically a sequence of one-page gags based around the idea that the Doctor is good at everything, framed by a kind of sweet story about the Doctor trying to make things work between Rose and Mickey. 
The Lodger is straightforwardly a comedy, but its basic joke is different.
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The Pleasure of Smelling a Flower (Vincent and the Doctor)

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This is just showing off, really.
It’s June 5th, 2010. Dizzee Rascal is at number one with “Dirtee Disco,” with Iyaz, Eminem, N-Dubz, and Aggro also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is finally capped, which reduces the spill without actually stopping it. And twelve people die in a killing spree in Cumbria.
On television, it’s Vincent and the Doctor. One of the most interesting innovations that Moffat brought to the program was his focus on bringing in what might be called celebrity writers. His first two seasons feature his most brazen attempts at this, although Neil Cross was no small acquisition and Neil Gaiman was originally supposed to be in the first season, so describing this as a particularly well-structured process might be overstating things. Nevertheless, what jumps out first about Vincent and the Doctor is that it is by Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, creator of Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley, and also the guy who wrote The Boat That Rocked if you want to make him come off not quite as well. 
He is, in other words, not quite the sort of person you expect to be writing Doctor Who. This was, of course, not the series’ first experiment with celebrity writers. Way back in the 1980s it tried to get Christopher Priest to write episodes, and of course, Priest was first approached by a before-he-was-famous Douglas Adams. Andrew Cartmel tried and failed to get Alan Moore to write for the series in 1988, and Stephen Fry’s abandoned script for the early Davies era continues to be the subject of the occasional rumor. And there certainly are cases of reasonably well-established writers making the move to Doctor Who – Philip Martin in 1985, for instance. 
But Richard Curtis doesn’t feel like any of these. He’s not a sci-fi writer first and foremost. And while Philip Martin was well-established, it wasn’t like he had an Oscar nomination to his name. Only Stephen Fry seems in the same ballpark, and Fry has always been a bit of a geek. Curtis, on the other hand, bristles with middlebrow respectability. At least in theory, he writes the sort of thing that people who hate Doctor Who like. Getting him to write an episode of Doctor Who, in other words, is both strange and a shot across the bow. 
What is remarkable about the episode is twofold. First, it works quite well. Second, it’s visibly written by someone who has seen next to no Doctor Who before in their lives. (Curtis has admitted that he was not a fan, and that it was not until seeing The Next Doctor with David Morrissey that he decided to accept Moffat’s invitation to write for the series.) In some ways this is oddly liberating – it is in many ways the first time we’ve seen a Doctor Who story conceived of entirely in terms of what the series has been since 2005. 
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Intelligent Alien Beings (The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood)

102

Karen Gillan is a particular specialist at the “pretend you’re
in the middle of an earthquake” aspect of acting in Doctor
Who.
It’s May 22nd, 2010. Roll Deep remain at number one with “Good Times,” which is unseated after a week by Bob and Bruno Mars with “Nothin’ On You.” with Jason Derulo, Usher, Fyfe Dangerfield, Leeds United Team & Supporters, and the cast of Glee also charting. In news, the so-called Borisbus design is debuted. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, and David Miliband all announce that they’ll stand for leadership of the Labour Party. And not much more happens.
While on television, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, a nice, meaty, two-parter. Which is to say, a relic. The two-parter, as a story structure, has seemingly been deprecated, becoming the pure historical of the new series. Like the pure historical, it lingers into the second major creative era of the show before being quietly and unremarkably done away with – two-parters are a mainstay of Series Six Part One, and have suddenly vanished by the back half.
Moffat has spoken about two-parters skeptically as a structure, arguing that the way in which they can be made to work is to have the second episode start in a markedly different place from the first – a logic that, when taken to its extreme, eventually gets you things like The Snowmen and The Bells of Saint John or The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor in which the broadest form of the two-parter is preserved, but the individual stories are wholly distinct. And sure enough, the five two-parters of the Moffat era almost all do this, with  the setting change in Flesh and Stone, the unexpected time jump in Day of the Moon, and the introduction of the Ganger Doctor in The Rebel Flesh. There’s a notable exception here, of course, and it’s this story.
It tries, certainly – the switch to a historical narration from the perspective of 3020 is an attempt to make Cold Blood a materially different sort of story than The Hungry Earth. But it’s a feeble attempt designed to try to cover up the truth, which is that The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is a case of the new series doing a two-parter that is utterly faithful to why there are two-parters in the first place, namely a desire on the part of Russell T Davies to preserve the cliffhanger structure of the classic series. 
In this regard the most interesting question about these episodes, in many ways, is what Tat Wood is going to think of them. As one of the few people capable of suggesting that the new series ought be more like the classic series without sounding like an utter fool, these episodes ought be of particular interest to him. Not least because they harken back consciously to the Pertwee era in more than just the choice of antagonists. The opening sequence is drenched in Pertwee iconography, from a giant drill (Inferno) to the bucolic Welsh setting (The Green Death).
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There’s No Point in Growing Up (Amy’s Choice)

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This happens more often than you’d think. Trust me, I know.
My wife’s a hospice nurse.
It’s May 15th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” a song that sounds from the title very much like it is about sober and responsible behavior. Plan B, Aggro Santos, and Professor Green also chart. I’m going to go ahead and admit I’ve not heard of any of these. News I remember – BP continues to do a very bad job of stopping the Deepwater Horizon spill. Gordon Brown announces that he will resign as head of the Labour Party, which precedes David Cameron forming a coalition government with Nick Clegg. The Queen approves of this, apparently. Oh, and Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud started wandering by again. 
While on television, the midpoint of the season, Amy’s Choice. Let’s start with the end, since its implications are easy to overlook. In amidst the revelation that the Dream Lord was just a twisted reflection of the Doctor (which is to say, literally what he appeared to be all episode, as opposed to merely figuratively), it is easy to overlook the larger point, which is that Amy’s choice was always a false one. The episode spends most of its runtime positioning Amy to make a choice as to which of the two worlds is real, with this choice symbolically standing in for her choice between Rory and the Doctor. The final revelation is that this choice was illusory. 
This is not a small thing. The conventional wisdom, after all, would hold that Amy and Rory getting married would bring about the exact result it seems to in this story: they’d settle down in Leadworth and stop having adventures. Because growing up is antithetical to adventures. That’s the entire point of the Amy/Amelia dichotomy and the whole “run off with the Doctor the night before her wedding” idea. Instead of your Mickey-esque terrestrial partner you fall in love with a madman with a magical box. Of course for Amy, for whom sexual confidence is one of the first traits given, this was always going to be somewhat less chaste than the Rose Tyler era. Especially once she’s met River, and thus been tacitly invited to view the Doctor as a sexual being. 
And this logic is hardly unique to Doctor Who. Just over two years prior to this story Marvel Comics went to great lengths to undo the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man comics, saying that “When people get married, they tend to settle down — life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. You go out to dinner less, see fewer movies, your social life is curtailed and revolves, as it should, around your significant other. In short, life hands you a mini van. While marriage makes for an okay story, there is less drama in a (healthy) marriage than in a single relationship.” Just over two years after it, DC did a big reboot of its universe and, in the process, undid the Clark Kent/Lois Lane marriage before, eventually, clarifying that they were simply opposed to the idea of any superheroes being married, saying, “heroes shouldn’t have happy personal lives.”
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