Eruditorum Press

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TARDIS Eruditorum

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 59 (Harry Potter)

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Let’s start with a quick update on the Kickstarter for the second edition of the Hartnell book. Short form: it’s doing amazingly. We’re well over goal, and working our way through stretch goals at a pleasant clip. Right now the stretch goals are commentary tracks for specific episodes. So let’s talk about that.

I’ve been musing off and on about whether there’s a sequel to be had in terms of TARDIS Eruditorum. And in terms of the blog, no, there isn’t. I’m not going to have much more to write on Doctor Who when I’m done. I mean, I’ll come back at the end of every season or so and do a catch-up, but it’s not like I’ve developed bold new interpretations of The Web Planet since 2011. But there’s always been a dimension the blog hasn’t been great at doing: the visuals and storytelling of episodes. Simply put, that’s stuff that’s easiest to talk about when you have clips in front of you. And while I’ve occasionally done video blogs (Here’s a random example) that talk about this, it’s just not what the blog is best at. It’s the wrong medium.

And so I want to at least experiment with another way to go through the series: commentary tracks that can be played alongside episodes such that I can talk about the stories in terms of how they’re put together and what their storytelling says. And right now the Kickstarter has moved on to funding some experiments with that.

So far we’ve unlocked commentary tracks for The Rescue, The Ark in Space, Paradise Towers, and The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. Next on deck are Kinda, The Mind Robber, and The Three Doctors. All told I have ten stories up for grabs. And what I’ll do is record commentaries on them over the next few months and post them for free.

If the commentaries are good and people like them we’ll continue in this vein, going out of order and posting commentaries on episodes. Eventually it’ll switch to a model where the latest one is free and the archive costs $.99 a story or so, bur that’s in the future.

So if you haven’t contributed to the Kickstarter yet and are interested in exploring possible futures for the blog and my Doctor Who criticism, please head on over and pledge. I’ve just added some new rewards, and there are plenty of shiny things to be had among the low-price rewards as well. Every bit helps. You can donate over here.

Meanwhile, today’s entry: Harry Potter.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle, so to speak. What almost everybody who comments on Harry Potter gets out of the way very early on is that there is not actually very much in it that is original. They’re straightforward instances of classic British children’s literature. The closest thing to innovation they can be said to have is that they perform a genre collision of the school story genre with fantasy, but this isn’t even new: off the top of my head Jill Murphy did basically the same setup in 1974 with The Worst Witch, and Mary Stewart had something along the same lines in 1969 with The Little Broomstick.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 18 (The Eighth Doctor Comics)

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First off, an announcement: I’m funding the second edition of the William Hartnell book via Kickstarter. The link is here. Please, contribute, spread the word, et cetera. There are some lovely perks available – most of the tiers amount to “pre-order the book,” but if you’re interested in signed copies, that’s up there too. Also, for all the people who have ever requested that I cover something in one of the future volumes, here is your chance to make me. Plus there’s a Kickstarter-exclusive essay to be had at any donation level.

You might fairly ask why I’m funding the project this way. The answer is pretty simple: I know the financials on a new book. I know how much a book makes in its first month and how to balance production costs against that. But I have no idea how to budget an updated edition, and I don’t want to put out a bunch of money on production and then have the book take six months to earn out. So I’m trying to fund it via presales. If the Kickstarter falls through it doesn’t mean the book won’t happen, but it’ll mean some… reevaluating.

Also, I have some really fun stretch goals if it funds, so, you know. There’s that. So, yes. On to today’s post.

As we said on Wednesday, there are six Eighth Doctor eras, abortive as some may be. And with this we come to the final one of them: the Doctor Who Magazine comic. It’s telling that of the eight Doctors to have had a comic in Doctor Who Magazine the only three where the comic is highlighted as a specific and important part of the era are the ones that coincided with what is widely, if not universally, considered a problematic era elsewhere. The Mills and Wagner Tom Baker strips provided a desired tonic to the controversial levity of Season Seventeen. The Parkhouse/Ridgway Sixth Doctor comics were valued in a large part because of how problematic the era itself was. And here we get the third era of Doctor Who Magazine comics that people are very invested in: the Eighth Doctor comics.

They’re not the salvation of the Paul McGann era. I mean, nobody expected me to say they were, right? They have some charming ones – most notably “Where Nobody Knows Your Name,” a one-off strip featuring the return of Frobisher. Several of the moments of high drama work quite well – when the Doctor’s main comic strip companion, Izzy, gets turned into a fish person there’s some lovely emotional beats. And a fake regeneration into Nicholas Briggs’s Audio-Visuals Doctor is delightfully cheeky, as plot twists go.

There are, in other words, lots of bits to love. But it’s still a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, which means characterization is at a minimum. The Eighth Doctor is as featureless here as ever, running firmly as “generic Doctor” with occasional outbreaks of fight scenes. As with the previous two times there’s been a selection of people who think that the comics are the “real” version of the Doctor, it’s more a criticism of the rest of the era.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 40 (Lucie Miller/To the Death)

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By the end of the Lucie Miller run, of course, things had changed somewhat. The audios were no longer being made for first transmission on BBC 7, although they still got around to being aired there eventually. The audios were instead transitioning to their current form, namely the Dark Eyes box set in which an entire short season of audios drops in one $60 box set ($35 for digital download) – in other words, to fan products supreme. But this transition didn’t rip out the existent DNA of the Lucie Miller run. These were still designed to be new series inspired stories for the modern era, as opposed to ones mimicking or following from the logic and structure of past eras.

But equally, now they were back to being aimed at the same fan audience of virtually everything else from Big Finish. And in the big conclusion to the Lucie Miller run, the two-part Lucie Miller/To the Death (another convention absorbed from the new series) we can see very clearly what the implications of this are. We’ve got Susan, her son Alex, Daleks, the plot of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Meddling Monk, and, for good measure, a plot thread picked up from one of the Sixth Doctor/Charley audios. This is as hardcore as continuity porn gets without namechecking the Borad.

But what’s interesting is that Big Finish have, by this point, figured out how to do both at once. They’ve got a character-based story – this is the old standard “the companion has to function without the Doctor” story that every Davies companion got at least one of. (The Christmas Invasion, Last of the Time Lords, Turn Left) It’s They’ve got payoff to things set up in previous stories. They’ve got a big tragedy for the Doctor that sends him off sulking. It’s all very successful season finale stuff of the sort nobody once got to work in the wilderness years. And it’s also absolutely swimming in Doctor Who continuity.

And as this is the last thing we’re going to look at that Paul McGann was actually involved with in some fashion, this is worth pausing and celebrating actively. I’ve argued previously that there’s a reasonable lens by which Doctor Who steadily improves in a technical sense. But one of the biggest holes in that is the Paul McGann era, which, if we’re being honest, never really managed the consistent quality of the New Adventures or the Cartmel iterations of the Sylvester McCoy era. And with this he finally gets something that feels like a precursor to the new series. It’s not, of course – it’s a post-new series attempt to do McGann adventures in that style. But it is the most successful fusion of the McGann era as it existed – dense continuity references for fans – and what the McGann era in practice led into.

And this does matter. It’s strange that it does, but it does. The standard configuration of Doctor Who eras is, after all, based on the lead actor.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 39 (Human Resources)

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Sorry I’m late. Was up late chasing a deadline on the Flood book and forgot to queue anything here. In any case, Human Resources. The cheekily-named Eighth Doctor Adventures line from Big Finish is an oddity. On the one hand it seems faintly ridiculous – yet another bite at the apple in terms of getting the fizzled McGann era to work right. On the other, with the exception of the TV Movie itself this is as high profile and mainstream as McGann ever got, in that the first season of these audios got their first airing on BBC Radio 7, with CD release following. Later seasons came out on CD first, but Human Resources is notable as one of only nine times Paul McGann appeared in a Doctor Who story that was designed for transmission to the general public instead of for sale to dedicated fans.

Like The Girl Who Never Was it’s doing so in the wake of the new series. Indeed, it’s almost certainly the new series that made the McGann audios on BBC Radio happen in the first place. Doctor Who was big business, so why wouldn’t Radio 7 try to get in on it? And given that there was no way the new series was going to spin off into audio unexpectedly the obvious thing to do was to use a past Doctor. And at that point since you’re basically recreating Big Finish’s schtick, you may as well just have Big Finish do it.

More significant in many ways is the fact that it was Paul McGann doing it. In many ways, he’s the only one who could have. Tom Baker might have done, but there’s a self-conscious retroness to that choice that Paul McGann doesn’t have. McGann is instead an oddly lost Doctor. He has name recognition, but his era, having mostly happened in the obscurity of fan-centric publications, for all practical purposes doesn’t exist in a larger cultural sense. As the Doctor who occupies the strange space immediately prior to 2005, he’s the one who can be reinvented for audio.

In practice, of course, it’s not a reinvention so much as a marginal refinement. By this point people finally had a sense of how to write for McGann specifically, and so we finally have audios that play to his strengths. He’s accordingly on form, and with good reason, as Human Resources basically gives him an unending flood of interesting things to react to, and so he gets to do what seems to be his favorite thing to do as the Doctor: react sardonically to various absurdities. The pace is accelerated a bit, there’s a decent amount of attention to character, and the whole thing feels refreshingly streamlined (in, oddly, a way that The Girl Who Never Was, recorded a year later, doesn’t).

Beyond that, the influence of the new series all but runs rampant. We’ve got forty-five minute episodes, with most of the season being self-contained stories. When we do a two-parter there’s a heft to it such that the story feels oversized (more about which in a minute).…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 58 (State of Play)

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As we’ve noted previously, Paul Abbott was one of Russell T Davies’ primary mentors in television. And State of Play remains his big prestige project, making it a useful thing to look at as we try to answer one of the most difficult questions about Doctor Who imaginable: what should we have expected Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who to look like. After all, we know the answer to this. We know it so well that it’s easier to look at Davies’ past career as a prelude to Doctor Who than it is to figure out what a reasonable set of expectations for his Doctor Who would have been. And so State of Play is interesting as a near-miss: a story by a writer Davies invited to work on the new series, written as a high-profile BBC One drama, but far enough away from Davies and Doctor Who that it doesn’t invite direct comparison. Instead it lets us ask the more important question: what does major BBC drama look like in the mid-aughts?

In many ways what’s most interesting is that we have major BBC drama again. The nineties were not good for the BBC, not least because of the consequences of John Birt’s management, itself a holdover from the Thatcher/Major era. But by 2003 Tony Blair’s Labour government was thoroughly established, life in Britain was seeming pretty peachy, and the swellings of something approximating national pride were underway – more on which next Wednesday. And the BBC was starting to get into a mood where it thought seriously about doing major productions again. It was getting a bit of Reithian spring in its step again and having executives unironically proclaim it a force for good and the like. And this changed the sorts of things it aired. Eventually it would lead to it having a daft idea to create family-friendly drama for a Saturday teatime slot in a mad bid to reclaim the time slot from ITV. But for now it’s somewhat simpler: the BBC starts making high profile event dramas again.

Or, perhaps more to the point, it starts making ones that aren’t costume dramas. Costume dramas, after all, were safe – endlessly exportable to America for flogging in the Masterpiece time slot. But something like State of Play? At six episodes it doesn’t easily and straightforwardly fit into anything except maybe the HBO/Showtime paradigm, and they hardly rush to buy random British programs. It wasn’t suitable for Masterpiece, nor for Mystery. So it was apparently going to have to live or die on its British qualities.

On the other hand the cast assembled for this is… impressive. A fair amount of it is “before they were famous” types, admittedly – David Yates wasn’t a film director yet, and James McAvoy was firmly up-and-coming. Nevertheless, this is a TV series that boasts James McAvoy, John Simm, David Morrissey, Kelly MacDonald, and Bill Nighy from the guy who went on to direct five Harry Potter films. You don’t assemble a cast like that unless you’re shooting for real quality, and you don’t attract them unless you have it in the script.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 38 (The Girl Who Never Was)

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It’s a fair question why this exists. The continuing adventures of the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard, long after their quasi-era had ended. Really, the entire existence of Big Finish as the last man standing from the wilderness years is strange. As we’ve pointed out before, almost all of the creative debates of the wilderness years are settled. Russell T Davies, by making Doctor Who an unequivocal part of the mainstream again, settled them. The future of Doctor Who was secured. What use can we have for the calx of the wilderness years? And this is, of course, the hardest to understand one. Nostalgia for the Davison or McCoy eras makes sense. Even nostalgia for the Colin Baker years makes sense as a sort of redemption. But nostalgia for the culturally irrelevant speck that is the McGann era? Why would we miss it? Why would we want to sustain it?

And so many of the familiar tics are present. The Cybermen on the cover make a “surprise” appearance at the end of the second episode. The first episode spends all of its effort setting up the surprise revelation of the story’s premise (also essentially emblazoned on the cover). These are small, niggling things, but nevertheless, eight years into the Big Finish era they’re still going on. There’s a stubbornness to this that borders on the sweet. Big Finish could have entirely thrown in the towel in the wake of the new series. Sure, they don’t have Eccleston or Tennant, but they could have turned overtly into new series clones. Instead here they are, cranking out 4×25 minute stories with the same pesky flaws they’ve always had. It’s almost romantic, in a way. Almost.
Elsewhere, however, the influence of the new series is more tangible. The structure of the episode is in effect a shell game, furiously moving the audience’s focus around in the hopes that they’ll lose sight of the foreknowledge that Charley is leaving this story and will thus be surprised by it in spite of themselves. This is standard practice for new series finales, but Big Finish had never really done it before. Of course, equally, by this point in Doctor Who “new series finale” and “departure of a major character” were essentially synonymous, especially when you consider that The Girl Who Never Was was, in practice, recorded in the wake of Doomsday. 
Indeed, it’s difficult not to see the two stories as causally related. Televised Doctor Who – by this point well established as legitimate and proper Doctor Who in a way that Big Finish never was nor could be – did a big companion departure in a story with Cybermen, so Big Finish followed suit, recording it almost exactly a year later. And it’s worth stresing that this is actually the first time Big Finish ever did a companion departure. They’d previously established how Evelyn parts company with the Sixth Doctor, but she didn’t actually get a departure story as such: the Doctor just shows up with Mel after Evelyn has departed and we find out why Evelyn departed. 
…

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It Was Too Late, And Therefore Necessary (The Creed of the Kromon)

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It’s January of 2004. Michael Andrews is at number one with “Mad World.” After two weeks Michelle takes over with “All This Time.” Black Eyed Peas, Victoria Beckham, Atomic Kitten, Kelis, Franz Ferdinand, and Scissor Sisters also chart. In news, Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity land and do not discover Ice Warriors. Tony Blair narrowly avoids defeat on a Higher Education bill. BBC Director General Greg Dyke, successor to John Birt, resigns in the fallout from the Hutton Report. And a whale explodes in Taiwan.

While in audios, The Creed of the Kromon. First off, Charley gets raped. Again. Which is, what, the third time, basically? Minuet in Hell, Neverland, and now this? Never mind her being the “in love” one. Apparently she’s the raped one. Goodie.

Of course, what we have here is a classic case of sci-fi rape, which is to say, rape that would not be possible without a sci-fi conceit of some sort. This causes an interesting problem for people, in that a lot of them are really good at pretending that sci-fi rape is not, and I use this term with the irony dial set to maximum, legitimate rape. For some reason if you rape someone with science fiction concepts it’s just a metaphor for rape, in much the same way that killing them with a phaser is just a metaphor for them being shot. Note that, by this bit of sarcasm, I do not mean that fictional characters who are shot by phasers are shot in real life. What I mean is that phasers are not treated as metaphorical violence within the narrative. Whereas with sci-fi rape there’s a bizarre and horrifying tendency for everyone to act like it wasn’t really rape, it was just a metaphor in a story.

So we have Charley drugged, impregnated, subjected to brainwashing, and put through intense physiological changes whereby she becomes a giant insect. These are the events of extreme fetish pornography. Actually, I suspect it would be less upsetting as extreme fetish pornography, as at least then one imagines everyone would be willing to admit to the fact that this is a story about rape. Instead we get a story that seems to think it’s just a fairly usual romp about people getting captured by aliens and rescued, albeit one with a bit of a social conscience about runaway capitalism. Charley remembers nothing of what would euphemistically be called her “ordeal” and accurately called her “extended rape,” and so everybody decides it’s basically OK and they go off adventuring again. Without telling her what happened.

What bothers me here – OK, well, where to start, but what bothers me most fundamentally here is the fact that this would not be handled this way if it were anything other than sci-fi rape. It’s only rape that gets the magic veil of metaphor whereby as long as it happens with imaginary things it doesn’t count. Which is typical, really. I mean, it’s just the same mildly sociopathic crap that infests the program in almost all of its really stupid moments since the 1980s.…

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Better With Two (Scherzo)

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It’s December of 2003. Will Young is at number one with “Leave Right Now,” which lasts for half the month at which point Ozzy and Kelly Osbourne take over with “Changes” for a week. The Christmas number one goes to Michael Andrews’s version of “Mad World.” Girls Aloud, Westlife, Michael Jackson, Ja Rule, Outkast, the Black Eyed Peas, Dido, Evanescence, Christina Aguilera, and Darkness also chart.

It’s been a bit news-wise. Switzerland joined the United Nations, Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed during re-entry, SARS and the Iraq War broke out, the Human Genme Project was completed, Rowan Williams was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, and Roman Abramovich took over Chelsea. This mont, meanwhile, the M6 opened a toll branch to relieve congestion, and Mick Jagger became a knight.

While in specialty shops, the first story of the Divergent Universe arc, Rob Shearman’s Scherzo. Scherzo takes Rob Shearman’s approach to its natural endpoint. All of Shearman’s stories are about self-made prisons: the worlds we cannot bring ourselves to fall out of. Over his first three he steadily expanded the scope of these prisons: the individual psychic hell of The Holy Terror into the indictment of the class system and its victims in The Chimes of Midnight out into a sprawling but incisive critique of the entire notion of collective mythology in Jubilee. He’s steadily gone larger and larger, and here, with his last full-out original Doctor Who story, he takes the last road open to this approach: he goes very, very small.

Scherzo is a two-hander. It cheats a little bit – it does actually have a third character – but that character consists entirely out of sounds made by the Doctor and Charley for most of the story, and when it does start speaking for itself it’s still played by McGann and Fisher. But virtually the entire audio consists of the Doctor and Charley talking. This makes it a profoundly intimate story – character driven in a way that no story since The Edge of Destruction possibly could have been. (And its debt to The Edge of Destruction is as profound an influence on Scherzo as The Power of the Daleks is on Jubilee.)

But the story goes considerably further than just the intimacy of scale. It’s not just that this is an audio with only two people, it’s an audio where the world is as small as it can possibly be. Scherzo, for virtually its entire length, features the Doctor and Charley making their way through a featureless void. But what’s really notable is the way in which the world collapses inwards: the Doctor and Charley lose all of their senses save for hearing, such that the phrase “walking” takes on a strange meaning. Eventually their physical bodies merge, rendering their very corporeality suspect.

What happens, in other words, is that their world collapses to be as small as it can possibly be – for much of the audio there is nothing to their world but what is in the audio.…

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Chronic Hysteresis (Zagreus)

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and continuity, everyone at least got to do celebrated party pieces. Were they pale imitations of what they had actually meaningfully accomplished in the past? Yes, but at least it was celebratory. It’s at least perfectly easy to sit down with The Five Doctors and have a good time. Whereas with Zagreus you just get four hours of listening to people putting in far more effort than the material deserves.

The person worst served in this regard is Paul McGann. And as with much of Zagreus, the worst part is the nagging sense that people are sincerely trying for quality. McGann spends virtually the entire story talking to himself, or, in other places, talking to a random set of sentences recorded by Jon Pertwee for a fan film mixed so as to be virtually unintelligible. It’s all very amnesia and uncertainty as to who he is, and it gives an awful feeling that the point of the exercise was to really give Paul McGann a chance to act. But like Minuet in Hell there seems to be a bit of confusion about what acting is: it’s not actually the practice of saving a poorly written scene. Yes, McGann is good enough to save most, though not all of the scenes he’s in, but it’s dreadful to hear him set on the task in the first place.

Yes, there are moments of real charm through all of this. The Alice in Wonderland stuff is a great idea. But even with that there’s a horrible cynicism to it. The story flirts with deciding that Doctor Who is really Carrollian before having Romana declare it all a lot of nonsense. Similarly, there’s obvious promise in the idea that maybe we’ll deal with a Doctor/Companion love story, except that Charley is characterized as being in love with the Doctor with all the complexity and subtlety with which Orllensa was characterized as the Russian one in Embrace the Darkness. It consists of nothing so much as Charley delivering the line “I love you” in a variety of different tones of voice. And that’s before we get to the TARDIS becoming a creepy jealous lover who tries to take revenge on Charley because of the Doctor’s loyalty to her. And, of course, almost everything to do with Uncle Winky feels a hair’s breadth from brilliance.

But let’s look at why it’s so bad. In particular, let’s look at the story’s central idea, the absolute duality between time and anti-time. We gave this idea a pretty thorough hiding back with Neverland, but there the objection was largely political. And, well, let’s face it, there’s still a fair chunk of Doctor Who fandom that wants to insist that the series is apolitical, so let’s switch gears and make the more straightforward objection: the time/anti-time dualism is just boring. It’s one of the oldest sci-fi tropes imaginable. It has no meat left on the bones. There is nothing whatsoever interesting to say about it. Absolute dualism is, in fact, so boring that when given it as a story premise back in 1978 Robert Holmes rebelled and wrote The Ribos Operation instead.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 57 (Firefly)

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The argument for Firefly’s influence on Doctor Who is marginal at best. Moffat hadn’t seen the show until a year or two ago, and while Davies might well have, there’s nothing obvious about his Doctor Who that draws from Firefly in the same way that there is about, well, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance. Nor is there any particularly overt influence from Doctor Who on Firefly. I mean, nobody would be surprised to learn that Joss Whedon grew up watching Tom Baker on PBS or anything, but nobody rattling off Firefly’s major influences is going to hit on Doctor Who. Which is actually ever so slightly unfair, as one decent account of Firefly would be “if Robert Holmes had created Star Trek.” I mean, Holmes wrote two space westerns already…

But no. The truth is that the relationship between these two shows is not one of direct influence. Nevertheless, Firefly proves instructive in two regards. First, the history of Doctor Who is still in part a history of cult television, and Firefly provides an odd watershed moment in that history. Second, even if Firefly is not itself a direct influence, both it and contemporary Doctor Who share an aesthetic and structural similarity that is worth comment. There is, if you will, a standard manual for how to craft and structure good genre television these days, and Firefly is as good an example as any as to how it works.

Obviously there are huge differences. Firefly is a huge ensemble show that uses the multitude of relationships within its cast to generate a variety of perspectives on a focused topic. Conceptually, at least, the show is just “Star Trek where the Federation is evil but Captain Kirk isn’t,” or, as I said before, Star Trek if Robert Holmes had written it. It’s not a limited premise by any measure – “guys with a vehicle go to places” is, after all, pretty flexible. But still, when people talk about Firefly it’s not the flexibility of the premise they focus on, it’s the cast. Whereas Doctor Who works with a minimal regular cast and a the most ludicrously extensible premise imaginable.

But there’s a tightness of characterization that both shows share. What Firefly does is use its large cast to generate an even larger number of things it can do. There are thirty-six different two-person scenes that Firefly can do, and eighty-four three-person scenes, and that’s just with the regular cast. And unlike something like a soap opera where characters tend to stick to their own plotlines, Firefly throws characters in the mix regularly. Some are certainly more or less promising than others – I cannot, off the top of my head, think of any particularly memorable Wash/River scenes, for instance (Thanks to several readers at Whedonesque for finding a better example there than the first one I had), and some combinations like Jayne/Inara are god for little more than variations on a given comedic theme. But you have a lot of different combinations.…

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