Eruditorum Press

This is not a place of honor

“No, I won’t sit idly by as you hurl clichés at me”: Suspicions

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And this would be a good example of *why* Star Trek: The Next Generation is straining against its material constraints.

I was originally planning to criticize “Suspicions” for being grimdark-Just another boring and juvenile “lengths they will go”, “doing that which must be done” exercise in false depth. But in reality if it’s grimdark, it’s only halfheartedly so, because “Suspicions” is halfhearted everything. The grimdark stuff feels like going through the motions, as if there’s just this assumption that any story about a murder investigation simply has to be grimdark for the portagonists to have any stake in solving it (tracing grimdark’s lineage back to Frank Miller is almost a cliché these days, but the comparison does need to be drawn in this circumstance as those are his signature beats to the letter, albeit really watered down and done in a middling fashion). And, for that matter, that we need token “character development” every week to hold the show together. Which, if we’re being perfectly honest, is precisely the kind of assumption it’s reasonable to guess was floating around this production team’s offices, even if it’s not as dogmatic as it might be amongst their colleagues across the street.

But more to the point, “Suspicions” is just a boring and inept production. The flashback and voiceover stuff is resoundingly pilloried in fandom (which is something of a surprise for me to learn, as I’d always figured this episode was rather well liked for the aforementioned grimdark), and there is something to be said about the hackneyed use of such noir staples to the point it’s become an almost instantaneous signifier of the parodical. However, given that this precise format is going to be used to astronomical success and wild acclaim in little under a year just with Odo instead of Beverly, I’d be careful about writing that off as a fault of “Suspicions”. Maybe then Star Trek: The Next Generation is just bad at this kind of story: While writer Naren Shankar doesn’t say that, he does say that he didn’t think he was very good at writing murder mysteries.

While I can’t speak for Shankar, I do think it would be silly to argue this crew can’t do murder mysteries. It’s true that given its setting Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a little better poised to handle a brief like this, but it’s not impossible to do it over here. “Aquiel” from earlier in the year was a damn good one as far as I was concerned, and it was successful because it remembered the major strength of Star Trek, and especially this version of it, is competency porn and that this crew shines the brightest when you let them do the things they’re good at in service of working together to solve the mystery. And that the best way you do that is essentially write a kind of procedural, but the most naturalistic and engaging procedural you’ve ever seen.…

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Hell Bent Review

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Moffat must go.

 

  • It is stunningly reckless in its oversignification. Nearly every element of the plot is another thing along the lines of the Zygons in The Day of the Doctor – an unresolved question mark that could be expanded on at vast length. Similarly, nearly every element turns on parallelism with other pieces of the mythology.
  • The most interesting of these is of course the Me/Missy parallel, emphasized both by the ostentatious emphasis on Me knocking four times and on the tripled repetition of “Missy” from Clara to the Doctor to Me in such a way as to stress that “Me” would be a perfectly plausible alias for her.
  • And don’t give me that “how would you make that work with the continuity” bullshit. The answer is obvious: Clara eventually seeks out Faction Paradox to help her with the whole “has no pulse” problem, and in the course of that adventure Me is flung into the Looms. Duh.
  • What an absolutely perfect ending for Clara, though. Not a Time Lord. (Probably) not immortal. Entirely on her own terms, as what she is. But stealing a TARDIS and running away to see all of time and space. With Maisie Williams. Given that the character’s departure is in part defined by the fact that she’s had a half-dozen of them already, three of them fatal, the question of how she’d leave for the final time was vexed. And the episode leaned into that, most obviously with the massively emphasized pan away from the “things that need to be said” conversation. Within that problem, the answer “Clara founds her own discrete and feminine iteration of the basic narrative of Doctor Who and escapes from the narrative into it” is absolutely brilliant.
  • More brilliant, though, is the way in which Hell Bent uses its oversignification to create an “it’s all true” approach to its underlying questions of mythology. Numerous things almost happen, or are gestured at through parallels but not through exposition, such that any fan theory is no more than two lines of technobabble away from confirmation. And particularly the role that women have within this – note the way that the episode is haunted by several of them, including some who are actually in it.
  • Actually, just to take a quick detour into a bit of canon the episode is mostly content to let slide, isn’t it fascinating that the Sisterhood of Karn is off at the end of the universe with the Time Lords? There’s no evidence they have time travel themselves (and indeed it would fuck with their basic concept pretty hard if they did), so presumably they’re sort of tagging along with Gallifrey. Which is fine – I have no problem expanding the “what gets time bubbled” from “Gallifrey” to “the entire constellation of Kasterborous.” But this makes the question of “where is Gallifrey” somewhat odd for the Doctor, given that he clearly knows how to stop off to visit Ohilia in The Magician’s Apprentice, which should give him a pretty good clue where Gallifrey is if they’re linked like that.
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“Morphology of the amorphous”: Vortex

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Odo is a shapeshifter. I know that sounds obvious to any fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I’m not just talking about his plot superpowers here. Rather Odo being a shapeshifter is a diegetic allegory for the role he plays on the series, and clue as to his character’s true nature.

Odo got the first spotlight on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine following “Emissary”, and while it was excellent it was more about the setting of the titular space station itself and inviting comparison with Westerns than Odo himself; it’s that “Fort Laramie in Space” again (Star Trek certainly does seem fixated on its precious Hollywood Westerns and seems to want to invoke them whenever and wherever possible). While “Vortex” draws upon Westerns to a significant degree as well: The script took its inspiration from the movie The Naked Spur such that Peter Allan Fields hired Sam Rolfe, the writer of that movie and an old mentor of Fields’, to handle the teleplay for “Vortex” (Rolfe had previously written “The Vengeance Factor”, which is probably my favourite episode of the third season, and the script even specifies that Ah-Kel and Ro-Kel had at least two of those gloriously 1980s Gatherers as part of their crew!). But there’s more to this episode than simple genre romp pastiche, and “Vortex” is the key moment in establishing precisely who Odo is.

At first, it would seem like he’s being depicted as the stereotypical mythic lone gunman Western hero, with Odo, Croden and the script all waxing fairly poetically (and melodramatically) about being an outsider and not having a home to go back to. But this is actually obfuscating pomp and circumstance: Odo is projecting his anxieties about belonging onto his search for his origins. He feels out-of-place with Starfleet and the Bajorans alike and is hoping that if he finds “his people”, he’ll finally have a place to belong to (true, but not in the way Odo is conceptualizing it here). But what Odo doesn’t realise that the majority of his isolation is self-imposed, and that he’s too insular and self-conscious to figure out that his home has always been Deep Space 9. He probably knows this deep down, but he’s too stubborn to actually accept, admit and vocalize is to himself, much less to anyone else. So when he asks his pendant at the end about where home is, it’s every bit as much of a rhetorical philosophical question as it is an inquiry about a physical location. He’s not looking for a place to belong as much as he is looking for permission to admit that the place he belongs is where he’s spent the better part of a decade dutifully making a living.

And this does beg an interesting question: Can one actually “belong” to a place like Deep Space 9? The station is, after all, ultimately a port city, and port cities on Earth have traditionally been considered deeply liminal places.…

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Architects and Bees

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On ‘The Ark in Space’.

 

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” – Genesis, 3:7, KJV

“…a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” – Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…” – Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, 22nd May 1860

 

As I’ve said before, I think SF is fundamentally the reiteration of mythology in the idioms of modernity, particularly the age of science and technology brought in by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and their legacies. Christian stories of creation and apocalypse are probably the most important mythological narratives reiterated by SF because the genre originated in the West, and is fundamentally concerned with the implications of the modern epoch which began in Western Europe. But there’s more to it than that. There is a deep link between Christianity and the experience of the rise of technological modernity. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.  You don’t need to buy Weber’s bass-ackwards, cart-before-horse notion of capitalism born from Protestantism to see the connections.

The Eden story is about the end of one way of life and the start of a new one.  It is about the expulsion of humanity from pre-History into History. It tells this tale twice, on two tracks.

Contained in Genesis, right at the start, there is the garden.  The garden we had to leave because we acquired knowledge.  In the book, the knowledge is of good and evil, and consequently of pain and death.  It is the moment of our emergence from the animal world of sensation into the human world of consciousness.  Animals, after all, do not ‘know’ that they will die.  That is the curse of the conscious.  Here, in the first book of the Bible that the literalists so abuse by their crass slavishness, is a Darwinian acknowledgement of the emergence of the human mind from the blurry thoughtworld of the beasts.  The near-immediate legacy of Adam and Eve’s little picnic is the creation of the tool.

It is almost as though Genesis contains an ancestral memory of how the use of tools drove the rise of the big brain, which in turn powered the biological emergence of humanity.  It also seems to ‘remember’ the role of language in the creation of consciousness, and the role of consciousness in the adaptation of the environment to our needs.

In Genesis, the deadly tools, the tools that see us kicked out of our idyllic biological pre-History, are the words with which to conceptualise ourselves, with which to become self-conscious and conscious of the other human selves outside us.…

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Comics Reviews (December 2nd, 2015)

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Invincible Iron Man #4

A very standard-issue Bendis issue, with all the attendant virtues and flaws. The amount of hide-the-ball as to the basic premise continues not to much appeal, but I expect that’s just going to be an attendant condition of Marvel through to the end of Secret Wars, and I’m grudgingly going to wait through it. As usual, Bendis cares not for the cover accurately describing the contents of the book – Mary Jane is in it, but doesn’t get to do anything, and is basically introduced as the cliffhanger. But Bendis does clever things with Iron Man; “Moonlight Ninja Fight Beach Party” is genuinely funny, for instance. But no real sparks here.

All-New All-Different Avengers #2

Waid is doing a clever semi-rewrite of the original Lee/Kirby Avengers intro here, complete with what looks like it’ll be the new Loki. But decompression turns out not to entirely be his forte, and one suspects this team is going to be a lot more fun when it’s assembled than when it’s being assembled. Which is to say, same problem with all the Marvel stuff right now.

Star Wars #13

This is fun. Some truly great R2-D2 stuff, a great Han Solo/Aphra face-off that promises to continue into the next issue, and a good cliffhanger that also promises to do interesting things next issue. I admit to reading the Star Wars issues of this more because they set up what Gille is going to do, but Aaron enjoys the zaniness of the Star Wars universe, and does good stuff with it.

Miracleman #5

Another interesting vignette of the Golden Age, though I’m definitely ready to see Gaiman move into the Silver Age stuff and eventually towars actually new stuff, just because I’m fascinated by the prospect of the suture here. But this is very good; another clever use of a bit of the Miracleman mythos to tell a strange and fractured sort of story. Nice backing material for once too – another issue that fully justifies its price tag.

James Bond 007: Vargr

The promise of “Warren Ellis does Bond” finally takes lift, with a profusion of stuff only Ellis would ever do with the character. Which is coextensive with “the stuff Ellis always does with this sort of character,” but that is after all the point of the exercise. It’s a gloriously smart fit, with the bits of James Bond and the bits of Ellis dovetailing perfectly into something that’s classic and fresh all at once. Tremendous fun, this book.…

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“If he rose/If he chose”: Frame of Mind

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It was only a matter of time before we returned to the dark recesses.

In many ways “Frame of Mind” is Brannnon Braga’s archetypal Star Trek: The Next Generation story. It certainly bears all of his trademarks: A bold and unafraid examination of genuinely dark psychological horror themes done with a deft and ambitious surrealist flair. Braga is also flatly unafraid to throw us some undiluted theory, with copious quotations, citations and visual nods to the work of Carl Jung. It’s a candid and refreshing bolt of unashamed intellectualism that goes a long way towards letting us know what Braga thinks his show’s audience is like: Star Trek isn’t exactly patronizing, or at least not as much as a lot of other television is, but even so it’s still rare for it to be this frankly and openly (and literally) philosophical, and every time it happens it feels like this really should be the way the show always operates. Pretty much nowhere else are you going to get a 200-level course on Jungian psychology and dream theory told through a mini piece of abstract sci-fi cinema on primetime television.

Braga’s debt to his idol David Lynch is certainly on display tonight. We wouldn’t expect to see blatant body horror on Star Trek: The Next Generation (…yet), but the suitably dreamlike (or should I say nightmarish) flow to the story brought exquisitely to life through James L. Conway’s direction remains undeniably Lynchian, and also very, very Brannon Braga. And yet in spite of the entirely deserved wild acclaim this episode gets from fandom (it’s yet another stellar highlight of an absolutely astronomical creative period), when you sit down to watch “Frame of Mind” it actually comes across as one of Braga’s more restrained and subdued offerings: As haunting as the concept of perceptive reality being in constant flux and turmoil is and as absolutely gripping as Jonathan Frakes is as the beleaguered Will Riker (unquestionably one of his absolutely finest hours on the series, end of: Frakes should have at least been nominated for something), the central premise remains surprisingly pedestrian, at least by Braga standards.

As the series is obviously not going to undo six years of character development and world building in 45 minutes, we know from the start the “real” world is the Enterprise, or some manifestation of it. The game then becomes trying to guess how many iterations we have to pass through and the meaning of a handful of specific psychological signifiers. Unlike Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, which I once compared to “Frame of Mind” long ago and far away, there’s never any genuine doubt cast here onto the true nature of observable reality, it’s always just a matter of getting to the bottom of the mystery that’s caused things to go all meta-Lynchian and freaky this week. Even when compared to the utterly sublime dreamworld symbolic logic of Braga’s own “Birthright, Part I” a few weeks back, “Frame of Mind”’s hook of “Riker wakes up in an insane asylum and doesn’t know how he got there” feels fairly straightforward and almost simplistic.…

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The Spectacle of the American Ritual Cycle

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“…the existence of a conventional order is contingent upon its acceptance; in fact a rule or understanding cannot be said to be a convention unless it is accepted. In ritual, however, acceptance and existence entail each other, for a liturgical order is perforce accepted in its realization, in, that is to say, the performance which gives it substance. Since obligation is entailed by acceptance, and the breaking of obligation is per se immoral, the existence, acceptance and morality of conventions are joined together indissoluably in rituals; they are, in fact, virtually on and the same.” — Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity

“When a more complex society finally becomes conscious of time, it tries to negate it, for it views time not as something that passes, but as something that returns. This static type of society organizes time in a cyclical manner, in accordance with its own direct experience of nature.” — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

I was already thinking about an essay on the US ritual cycle, what with our recent Thanksgiving holiday and all. Then I got Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle for Black Friday (thanks, Phil!) and a mythological story of cyclical time from Doctor Who on Saturday. So, yeah, time to get this one out here.

With Spectacle and Doctor Who already posted or written about here at Eruditorum Press, I will start with ritual. My favorite definition of ritual comes from the late Roy Rappaport, who put it as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers,” with the “entirely” being a late addition. It encompasses both secular and religious practice; today we’ll be concerned primarily with the former. Anyways, what’s notable about ritual is that it is performed, not just spectated; and it is cyclical, even when it varies wildly—not only does it transmit certain information about the larger social system in which it occurs, it orders and structures that very system. It also, in so doing, inherently creates a number of dialectics.

But it’s the distinction of performativity that distinguishes ritual from spectacle. Spectacle is a one-way transmission. Ritual, on the other hand, is self-indexical. For the participants aren’t just recipients of messages, they are also the transmitters, and indeed the message themselves. And because of this, the intersection of ritual and spectacle, kind of like a genre-competition, yields some very interesting results.

With all this in mind, let’s start with America’s “spring rituals” and work our way to the end of the year, which is where (when) we’re at here at the beginning of December.

 

Valentine’s Day

“Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.”
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On Some Stuff That Happened at Chicago TARDIS

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We don’t usually do breaking news at Eruditorum Press, but the initial reports I saw on this one were disturbing enough that I dug into it. The result, thankfully, appeared considerably less disturbing than first glance, but I’m going ahead and running the story anyway, if only as a reminder of the constant sexist background noise that pervades fandom.

Sunday afternoon, at a panel at the Chicago TARDIS convention, moderator Elliot Serrano made an extended joke about how Kingston’s “characters always seemed to have a thing for doctors” before presenting her with a fictitious doctoral certificate and asking “if Elizabeth Corday would like to have a cup of coffee some time.” Kingston, with the look of apparent disgust documented in the photo (posted to the Chicago TARDIS Facebook account with the caption “Alex Kingston reviews Elliot Serrano’s doctorate”), replied “what am I supposed to do with this?” Serrano went on to note that Kingston had been wearing Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears, which nominally reflect the wearer’s mood, and said “I wonder what they’d be doing if you were wearing them today.” Kingston’s response: “Probably running away.”

Chicago TARDIS’s anti-harassment policy proclaims that they are “dedicated to providing a harassment-free convention experience for everyone” and “do not tolerate harassment of convention participants in any form,” specifying that “harassment includes verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender” as well as “unwelcome sexual attention.” 

Contacted via Twitter, Serrano stressed that the exchange was “meant to be a comedic bit to liven the panel,” and noted that, upon being told backstage that people had taken exception to the joke, he approached Kingston to apologize, and that she took no offense and did not even realize what he might be apologizing for. He also stated, “I can see how some would find that type of bit inappropriate, and I won’t be doing that again out of respect for Chicago TARDIS and the fans.”

I am certainly heartened by the fact that Serrano clearly grasps the seriousness of what happened, and that the convention acted quickly in talking to him after the panel. All the same, things like this shouldn’t be happening, not least because of the message they send to convention-goers both about what behavior is considered acceptable and about how complaints of harassment might be treated by staff. To his credit, when I put this to Serrano he agreed that it set a bad tone. But I wish he’d realized that before sticking his foot in his mouth in front of an audience of fans. And more than that, I wish fandom weren’t a place where reports of Alex Kingston being sexually harassed at a convention sounded more like business as usual than like a shocking and appalling abberation. …

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