Eruditorum Press

We’re not on the blockchain, but we are blocked by Gareth Roberts

“Who are You?” Invasive Procedures

, 9

You don’t want to disappoint Commander Sisko, do you?

Wait, you thought I was going to let Star Trek: Deep Space Nine off the hook for being the younger show? Whyever would you think that?

I have held a grudge against “Invasive Procedures” since 1993. Everything about this episode, from top to bottom, from conception to execution, repelled me at every turn from the beginning. At the time, I was only just starting to become a serious fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, that is, becoming actually invested in the setting and the characters as opposed to just watching the general aesthetics unfold from a distance with cautious optimism. And though it was still fairly early, I already knew that Jadzia Dax was going to be my favourite character from this cast. I liked Major Kira a lot too and she was the other early standout for me (in fact extremely early on I got the two of them confused) but it was Jadzia’s cool competence and poise that won me over the strongest, So how do you think I felt when the *very first* episode I was cognizant of to deal explicitly with Jadzia’s character was also the one that depicted her at her absolute lowest? It’s the exact same experience I would have rediscovering Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation, like history repeating itself again

Somehow it strikes me as a bad sign that, when confronted with a joined character with several lifetimes of experience, the only way the creative team can come up with to convey this concept is to show what it’s like when she becomes un-joined. Emphasis on “she”-You don’t see The Doctor on Doctor Who suddenly unregenerate back to his nascent iteration with the show’s writers giving the excuse that they couldn’t figure out how to get across all his lifetimes of experience without a proof by negative. And you certainly would never see The Doctor reduced to a mewling, vulnerable damsel character to engender sympathy and give the male characters someone to fight for and protect. But that’s literally *all* anyone involved with “Invasive Procedures” talks about when defending their creative decisions: They all talk about how they needed to bring “vulnerability” and “tenderness” to Jadzia in order to “humanize” her and “develop her character”. It’s true that we all have moments of confidence and weakness and that we each have dominant and submissive sides, but that’s not what this story is about: This is a story about taking a strong, confident, independent woman and stripping away all of her strength and agency because the creators thought that made her distant and unrelatable.

And of course it would be Jadzia who would stump these writers. You could bring in Kira as a possible counter argument here by saying that her retaining all her power and authoritativeness cancels out what they do to Jadzia here, but that’s not how that works.…

Continue Reading

Lost Exegesis (House of the Rising Sun) — Part 2

, , , , , , , , , 5

Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Watership Down

I have to admit, I was wrong. In the White Rabbit entry I claimed that Watership Down was in four straight episodes. It is not. But have no fear, it will appear again. Nonetheless, we might consider that the book has been “invoked” by virtue of the rabbit on the bus outside the airport terminal where Sun decides to stay with Jin. As such, we will continue to explore this rather delightful tale.

In terms of plot, Part 2 of Watership Down doesn’t have much to do with House of the Rising Sun, but there are a couple of interesting resonances. For example, the rabbits, led by Hazel, form a new warren which they dig out underneath the roots of a massive tree. They call their new home The Honeycombe. So we have a convergence of bee symbolism, the World Tree, and “caves,” just like this episode.

The rabbits make friends with a large bird, Kehaar, who speaks with a thick accent and performs reconnaissance for them. They use this to their advantage when they realize they have no females amongst them (they are all “bucks”) and decide to go raiding other locations to find “does” – to basically steal females from other warrens. Well, one warren is run under martial law, while the other is just a girl’s rabbit hutch on a farm. Two “away teams” split off (hmm). One returns empty-handed, lucky to be alive, thanks to the timely intervention of a train (which is actually kind of how the Island’s “monster” sounds). The other leads to the wounding of their leader, Hazel, who nearly dies before he’s rescued by his brother. After this encounter, he decides he’s going to lead his rabbits to raid the militarized “other” warren and steal their “mothers,” effectively splitting his own “hive” as not everyone agrees with him.

There’s a couple of interesting broader-scale themes that emerge in this part of the book that are relevant to LOST. First, the question is raised on what it’s like to live “naturally,” with the farm-hutch rabbits and the militarized “other” warren used for contrast. And this of course applies to how the Losties are organizing themselves in a “state of nature,” as it were,. What kind of political system are they setting up? Leadership by the most dynamic individuals, for the most part, just like Watership Down’s rabbits, but with everyone pretty much free to do as they please. It’s a question and answer that’s actually brought up by the historical John Locke, so this fits nicely into the larger pattern of philosophical thoughtfulness that LOST has already staked out.

Secondly, there’s the matter of rabbit mythology. After Hazel’s near-death experience, his brother Fiver (the mystic) ruminates on the possibility of “another world”:

“Hrairoo,” said Hazel one evening, “what would we have done without you? We’d none of us be here, would we?”
…

Continue Reading

The Dark Enlightenment of Flint

24

A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones will return on February 29th.

Jack Graham notes that “if you want a vision of the future, imagine Flint, Michigan – forever.” The neoreactionary movement, meanwhile has been doing just that for several years. Neoreaction – essentially the pseudo-intellectual wing of the loosely defined alt-right (see also Gamergate, Trump, and the “human biodiversity” crowd) – has been clanking around the fringes of the discourse for a few years now, basically getting started when a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin started a sideline career blogging as Mencius Moldbug in 2007, and gathering proper steam when Nick Land, formerly an academic associated with the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit at the University of Warwick and one of the forefathers of accelerationism, made a dramatic heel turn in the form of an essay called “The Dark Enlightenment” in 2013 in which he, and I’m paraphrasing here, basically concluded that the best hope of a posthuman future where everyone has face tentacles lies in the form of white nationalists. I’m writing a book that’s more or less about them. It’ll be fun.

Anyway, the key detail in all of this is that the catastrophic decision to try to save $4m by switching Flint’s water system over to the Flint river was made by not by elected officials, but by an Emergency Manager, a position created by a 1988 law and expanded dramatically in 2011. The law allows the governor to appoint someone to take charge of a municipal governor if he certifies that the city is suffering from a financial emergency. This Emergency Manager is unelected, but his powers trump those of the elected government; indeed, he can remove elected officials at will. His sole mandate is to balance the budget (My second favorite detail in all of this: he’s forbidden from raising taxes to do it). The sole oversight is the Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board, a similarly unelected body that rubber stamps decisions over $10,000 including the sale of public assets. (My favorite detail: the law requires that Emergency Manager’s salary be shouldered by the city.)

What’s striking about the Emergency Manager position is that it’s more or less exactly what Mencius Moldbug proposes as the ideal system of government. Moldbug advocates for, essentially, government by CEO – an individual manager with absolute power subject to oversight by a board of directors who can replace him, with the metric for whether a government is successful being the degree to which the government turns a profit. Very much excluded from this – indeed consciously and deliberately excluded – is any notion of democracy. Moldbug despises democracy, viewing it as inefficient, duplicitous, and largely degenerate. In his view people are, whether they want to admit it or not, subjects of a sovereign. And given that, we may as well admit it and just return to actual monarchy.

It’s easy to laugh at Moldbug; he’s a more than faintly comical figure whose default style is meandering blog posts running thousands of words in which he badly stitches together clumsy readings of primary source documents in order to claim they reveal the bankrupt heart of modern democracy.…

Continue Reading

“Yo ho, yo ho”: Gambit, Part I

, 5

I suppose it’s worth pointing out the possible significance in the fact that the first few acts of “Gambit” chronicle the crew’s search for Captain Picard, missing and presumed murdered, and their efforts to discover the identity of his would-be killer and bring them to justice. I will still stubbornly maintain that Star Trek: The Next Generation can’t live without Captain Picard, and the symbolism behind a plot twist like this to me seems obvious. A Star Trek: The Next Generation without anyone would be unthinkable, but especially him, the public face of the series to millions. The only other character whose death would be more openly and visibly catastrophic to the show’s continued existence would be the Enterprise itself.

Ironic then how “Gambit, Part I” is the moment where this season finally gets its act together and stops faffing around. Not that this show has ever been terrific at season openers, mind, but the one-two punch of “Liasons” and “Interface” was excruciating in a way we’ve really not seen in six or seven years. This is a story I’ve always remembered as a highlight of this year ever since I saw it as part of TNN’s reruns (I might have seen it when it aired as well, but I don’t have strong memories of it from that time period), and I was perhaps understandably relieved to see that it’s essentially as good as I thought it was. My favourite scene is the teaser, with the crew undercover at a seedy alien bar: They naturally play their parts perfectly, and, as counterintutive as it perhaps might seem, it really feels like they belong in an environment like this (more on that later). That’s another thing I remember vividly from this run of stories: Dank extraterrestrial dives with dark mood lighting, abrasive characters and a lot of grates and sheet metal (except for the one time it was a cramped bar with a lot of bright, gold colours). In hindsight, it was probably the influence and cross-pollination from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Of course Captain Picard’s not really dead, and from there we move to what is in my opinion a positively delightful adventure mystery story. It probably tells you all you need to know that this is a two-parter both the fans and writers alike have a rather negative take on: Even Brannon Braga, who talks sense more often than not, says that “Gambit” is of a genre that’s “not usually taken seriously” and that it’s beneath the show to do an episode like this. He’s also of the mind that it was a bad call to open up with the whodunnit cliffhanger, because audiences were never going to buy that the captain was really dead. Which, to be frank, just displays a startling lapse in media literacy and a lack of understanding about how cliffhangers and dramatic tension are actually supposed to work.…

Continue Reading

Legacy: The Siege

, 1

In the previous episode, “The Circle”, Major Kira undergoes an Orb experience and receives visions from the Prophets of the events of “The Siege”.

The Prophets’ connection to nonlinear time has already been well documented, but what I find interesting about their reappearance here (for the first time since “Emissary”, it may be worth noting) is the way this is conveyed: Images, experience and snapshots of memory, repurposed and rearranged. It’s a dream meant to convey a message through coded symbols built out of memory. My first exposure to “The Homecoming”/“The Circle” /“The Siege” was all in one piece as part of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine sometime in either late 1993 or early 1994. So when I watch Kira’s Orb vision in “The Circle”, I don’t see portents of events to come, but a distorted reiteration of events I already have a recollection of.

“The Siege” itself operates on the level of images. Namely, iconic memorable setpieces. The battle in Bajor’s atmosphere between The Circle and the transport runner piloted by Kira and Dax is one of the most spectacular action scenes from Star Trek’s golden age, a remarkable series of shots that pushes the boundaries of what can be accomplished with model-making practical effects on an episodic television budget. In fact, I daresay this is probably as complex and striking a scene as could ever have been done at this particular time with these particular resources. Once again, we get another bright, sunny and colourful outdoors setting, conveyed aptly through the use of a matte painting overlayed with shots of the motion controlled models.

But what I remember is actually the interior of the Bajoran raider, and Kira and Dax’s outfits: I think the bright colours of the control panels, their clothes and, funnily enough the phaser blasts all really compliment the verdant setting outside and help to convey a uniquel special and memorable vibe. I guess you could say this begins for me what you might call the real “summer blockbuster” phase of Star Trek, which I’ve always associated primarily with Deep Space Nine, and in particular this season. “The Siege” is really one great big action sequence, but it’s got a lot more going for it than most of the other Star Trek riffs on the action genre, and I prefer it head and shoulders above anytime the franchise attempts something like this in the years to come. One of these things is the colour coordination, which really does evoke a breezy, fun summer vibe to me, or at least the memories of that feeling.

There’s a deliberate and overt artistry to the action here I don’t see in most science fiction, especially Star Trek (and even most action films for that matter). Funnily enough, this sort of thing *is* the province of Dirty Pair, especially Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture and Original Dirty Pair, but actually now that I think about it the other place I can think of right off the top of my head that gives me a similar feeling is…Project A-ko.…

Continue Reading

The 1913 Zone

6

This is actually the third and final part of a series of posts I began in 2012… which is pushing it, even for me. Here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 2. You don’t need to read them to understand what is below. While we’re talking about belated entries… I am planning some more Tricky Dicky and (unexpectedly) more Minnesota Normal. Be patient, my darlings. I finished Forward, to the Past! didn’t I?

The two televised Doctor Who stories which depict the First World War both approach it, as it were, from an angle, rather than head-on.  In ‘The War Games’ (1969), we see characters who are ordinary soldiers (both British and German) who’ve been abducted from the front in 1914-18, brainwashed, and placed in a simulacrum of the war, where they are commanded by alien impostors masquerading as representatives of the military top brass of both sides.  ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ (2007) is set in England in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, with ‘flashforwards’ to No Man’s Land during the coming conflict, and an epilogue set at a Remembrance Day ceremony many years afterwards.   An important secondary character called Tim Latimer is shown as a pupil at a public school before the war, a soldier during the war, and an elderly veteran after it.

The two stories are both highly regarded by fans – in many ways rightly so.  Both set themselves the task of ‘saying something’ about war.  The later story is more openly concerned with examining historical, political and moral issues, though it strives to find a balanced and non-partisan position.  The strategy of the writer, Paul Cornell, seems to have been to present the issues in a dramatic rather than a didactic way, by allowing various viewpoints to arise through the personalities of the characters.  The earlier story is more coy about its historical and political concerns, being seemingly content to present itself as an adventure story with a straightforward moral.  However, it also happens to be a slyly-radical, late-sixties, anti-imperialist parable. To understand how this happened, you only have to glance at the dates. It was written and produced in the aftermath of ‘68, the biggest global explosion of protest and insurgence in the latter-half of the twentieth century, a lot of which was focused on the Vietnam War. There is no straightforward, mechanistic, deterministic relationship between politics out in the real world and the politics of Doctor Who stories (or indeed any other stories) but there are certainly relations of influence. But I won’t belabour this point as it is a pretty fundamental assumption underlying both my own ‘work’ and Phil’s entire Eruditorum project, and a point that I suspect most readers of this site are already happy to accept, at least as a marker. (The question of exactly how the relation works is one over which a great deal of ink… and even some blood… has been spilt, and far cleverer people than I have weighed in on it and been unable to reach satisfying conclusions, so we’re not likely to clear it up here and now.)…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (February 11th, 2016)

4

A very Marvel-heavy week, which is helpful in comparing some of the more intermittently frustrating titles in my pulls.

Guardians of the Galaxy #5

Like this, which will be the last issue I pick up. Bendis’s books always meander, but his Guardians has become pathological in that regard, lurching from point to point without anything recognizable as an overarching reason. With this issue, the new post-Secret Wars setup is undone and we return to the old setup while simultaneously providing a new origin for Yotat, which is at least two origins too many for a sublimely pointless character. Fun characters, as the movie has shown, but this needs a new writer.

Digital code: FCMK4CDAZHN1

All-New All-Different Avengers #5

The extent to which Waid’s pacing and shape on this book is thoroughly inept is genuinely shocking. The ouster of Ms. Marvel on the cover is awkward and unmotivated in the extreme – a transparent contrivance made all the worse by its complete lack of suspense. For the third time running the enemy is an out of nowhere silliness. I have no idea how a creative team and cast this good can be this bad, but man, it stinks. Will stay on through the Pleasant Hill crossover at least, but what an abject disappointment of a book this is.

Digital code: FCM2WNWVMJAF

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #5

This continues to slowly bend towards being pretty good, though the sense of its improvement being two steps forward one step back continues. This one focuses pretty much entirely on supporting cast, which is a mixed blessing. I still have trouble particularly investing in the high concept inversions of Matt Murdock as the Kingpin (although his t-shirt is hilarious in a sort of Eviler Seth Bingo way) and the like, but what the book is doing with them works, and that counts for a lot. Frustrating, but not in a way that makes me think about walking away from it.

Digital code: FCMPEKLE5UH0 (that’s a zero)

Darth Vader #16

A slow-burn start to an arc handled with the efficient competence you’d expect from Gillen. Nice cliffhanger, and some good character bits, but on the whole a lull in the book. 

Digital code: FCMQSR0FXZW9 (also a zero in there)

New Avengers #6

The decision to do two-issue arcs here hobbles it a smidge, with a good story that lacks some of the room to breathe that it could probably use. But the takeaway there is really “good story,” with the whole Demiurge/horrific demonic possession arc wrapping up in a way that pays glorious homage to the Young Avengers history of the characters, not so much on a plot point level as an aesthetic level. “Horror! Life is horror!” might end up being the funniest line of the week. In fact, yes, it is. Delightful, wonderful, kinda mispaced.

DIgital code: FCMT5AFM4Y44

 

Ms. Marvel #4

The “teen hero gets behind on everything” schtick feels a nbit tired and played out as Ms. Marvel plots go, and saps this book of some energy, as does the degree to which it retreads All-New All-Different Avengers (although obviously it does a much better job with those plot points). But…

Continue Reading

Lost Exegesis (House of the Rising Sun) — Part 1

, , , , , , , , , , , , , 1

It’s been a while since we had one of these LOST Exegesis posts! So sorry for the delay. It couldn’t be helped. And not just the nearly two months since the last one of these — I had trouble accessing Eruditorum Press last night.  Anwyays, enough excuses.  It’s been a while.  As such, please remember that Part 1 of the essay is spoiler-free. For those who’ve seen the entire series, the second part of the essay, titled “Through the Looking Glass” (and appearing next week in the second part of this massive post), applies foreknowledge to the episode at hand.

So, on to the episode at hand. House of the Rising Sun is complex. Not to say that it’s difficult to understand; on the contrary, it’s rather straightforward, at first glance. It’s here we discover that whatever preconceptions we had about Sun and Jin, they were a bit wrong – these characters are not crass stereotypes – she’s the spoiled rich girl, he’s the poor nice boy corrupted by her father, who would have guessed that? It may have been Walkabout when I fell in love with the show, but it’s House of the Rising Sun that first earned my respect.

As we’d correctly surmise from the Opening Eye of the episode, this episode is Sun-centric. But there’s a lot more this episode’s plate. While Sun’s Flashbacks and her husband’s current predicament on the Island form the primary threads of the episode, there’s also the trip to the Caves, which also ends up split in two, with Jack and Kate’s early friendship tested by differing philosophies regarding the camp’s next big decision, while Locke takes an interest in Charlie. There’s even a thread breaded in that’s devoted to Michael. So there’s a balance of five stories, and even more characters to juggle, all in forty-five minutes on a network budget. On top of that, we get another piece of mythology with the skeletons found at the Caves, some new takes on previously invoked symbols, continued thematic concerns, and several more cultural references to untangle.

It’s three episodes in a row now where we’ve started with an Opening Eye. This time it’s Sun’s. And this time it’s a Left Eye, as opposed to the Right Eyes of Jack and Locke. So from the outset, we’d anticipate an episode that’s Sun-centric, and we’d be correct; at the same time, however, the switch from right to left should harken something different, symbolically, than what we’ve seen before, given the dichotomy. And this is definitely an episode about dichotomy.

Previously we’ve identified the Opening Eye with some kind of enlightenment, and I’m happy to continue doing so. But let’s also consider that the Eye itself is often used as a way of describing certain celestial bodies. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the Right Eye represents the Sun, and the Left Eye represents the Moon. The sun shines during the day, making everything visible; the Moon shines at night, and still leaves much in darkness. And then there’s the matter of these two bodies being gendered – the Sun is typically male, the Moon typically female (though not always, obviously).…

Continue Reading

“Virtual XI”: Interface

, 9

Is it bad I can’t remember what this episode is called? I’ve literally had to go look up how the title is spelled three times since sitting down to write this.

Over the course of this project I’ve noticed Star Trek: The Next Generation takes a roughly annual delight in a sub-genre of story I’ve decided to call “Let’s Torture Geordi”. Ever since the third season (hmmmm) the show, for want of anything better to do with Geordi La Forge, decides to put him through an increasingly mean-spirited and downright ludicrous series of wringers more or less because they can. This team has, in turn, given him a neurotic complex he never had before, turned him into the creepiest human being imaginable by having him get it on with pretend women, forced him to mutate into a neon sea slug and had him brainwashed into a killing machine by his batshit insane murderous alien ex-girlfriend. Even Michael Jan Friedman is not immune to the fun, writing the two-part story “Seraphin’s Survivors”/“Shadows in the Garden” about Geordi acting uncharacteristically defensive and oversensitive when his childhood friend/lover comes aboard, thus blinding him to the fact she’s a space vampire who eats people. A few issues later, he had Geordi entranced by space mermaids in “I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing” and almost blow up the ship in his reverie.

All in all, sounds like an eminently respectful and legitimate, serious grown-up series of dramatic performances to give to LeVar Burton, national treasure and cultural icon who reads to children on Reading Rainbow and played Kunta Kinte on Roots.

“Interface” or “Interphase” or “Whatever The Fuck It’s Called I Don’t Give A Shit Anymore” is the episode I would call the requisite “Let’s Torture Geordi” outing for this season, although we got a nice preview in “Descent, Part II’ when Doctor Frankendata sticks strobes in Geordi’s forehead and tries to infect his brain with the Replicators from Stagate SG-1. It’s two half-assed stories stitched together into an even more half-assed whole: The first a bog-standard mid-90s virtual reality piece and the second a look into Geordi’s family history. Which, this team being this team, we have to explore by brutally killing everyone off and watching drooling, leering and slack-jawed as Geordi bears his grief for us, publicly retreating into his own mind and memories in the vain, desperate hope to be able to feel something again.

Jesus.

This was not an episode I watched at the time, and thus isn’t one that contributed anything to the mental landscape Star Trek: The Next Generation inhabits for me. The only thing I remember is the ridiculous-looking interface device itself from a shot in a magazine somewhere, and that I kept confusing it with the equally bullshit mind-control contrivance from that stupid fucking Manchurian Candidate story with Commander Sela from the fourth season. You’d think, with this episode being about inner worlds and psychology and everything, themes I’ve often gone on record as praising in this season, this would be right up my alley.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 104 105 106 107 ›»