Eruditorum Press

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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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Notes Towards a General Theory of Peter Harness

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Another preview essay from my end-of-year collection Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, available for preorder at this link (and in the UK here). There it will be accompanied by a book-exclusive interview with Peter Harness about The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion. And to answer the question that people have asked in comments every week, yes there will be a print version; it’ll go up closer to release.

One of the most exciting talents to emerge in science fiction and fantasy recently is undoubtedly Peter Harness, who, over roughly a thirteen month period, put his name to ten of the best genre scripts on television in the form of the Doctor Who episodes “Kill the Moon,” “The Zygon Invasion,” and “The Zygon Inversion” and the entire run of the BBC’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell adaptation. Any one of these would make him one of the most compelling voices of the past few years; their aggregate is as extraordinary a creative run as exists.

Or at least that’s generally been my opinion, which I’ve spouted on the Internet a few times, leading to the amusing consequence of Mr. Harness getting linked to my blog and reading it and enjoying some of the bits that weren’t about how clever he was as well. Which led to him sitting down for two interviews about his work, transcribed in the two chapters following this. So consider this the annoying bit where the interviewer talks for too long before getting to the good stuff. I’ll try to make it a really sprawling set of remarks that offers something approaching a general theory of how politics and science fiction interact, so as to really give the authentic “shut up and get to the interviews” experience.

I think the obvious starting point when talking about Harness’s work is that it is overtly and consciously political. It’s equally obvious at this point that Harness’s politics are at a minimum leftish. Despite this, however, both of his Doctor Who stories were, to varying degrees, embraced by right-leaning chunks of fandom, generally in the belief that their political views were being supported by the episodes. In both cases I think this is straightforwardly based on inattentive readings of the episodes, but it’s nevertheless striking, especially in a year where discussions of politics and science fiction have become increasingly split into two camps neatly mapping the left/right divide, a process largely driven, let’s be clear, by Vox Day and his inane “pink vs blue SF” rhetoric.

A key phrase in all of this, and generally one slung around with reckless imprecision and universal contempt, is “message fiction.” At this point the mere inclusion of any sort of diversity in the cast seems to qualify as a “message,” such that even stories like Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” in which a group of drunks who beat a man into a coma in the mistaken belief that he’s gay or Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which features a genderless species as “message stories.”…

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“A person who trusts no one cannot be trusted”: The Nagus

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There’s always been an aspect of duality to the Ferengi. On the one hand, they’re meant to be dangerous and threatening capitalists, working as pirates and marauders who use intimidation and strongarming tactics to turn profit at all costs. On the other hand, thanks to their infamous “crazed gerbil” depiction in “The Last Outpost”, there’s an undeniable and irreducible silliness to them that at once seems at odds with this intended narrative function.

However as I have previously argued, I feel these two interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive; there’s a great deal to be said, after all, about a group of antagonists who at once embody ruthless capitalist values and blatantly misogynistic attitudes (many of which are at least taken for granted and accepted as “the way things are” in modernity, thus becoming hegemonic, or, in the absolute worst case scenarios, idealized and triumphed) and are also seen as a completely harmless laughingstock by the Star Trek universe. I still believe “The Last Outpost” walks this line fairly well, gerbils notwithstanding, but subsequent Ferengi stories have had a rougher time trying to maintain that careful balance. Too often we’ve been expected to see them as genuinely menacing and ignore their kind of inherent silliness, which is kind of a hard swallow given the aformentioned gerbil jumping (though there was a Michael Jan Friedman story from the third season that actually managed to pull it off in my opinion). Or, the opposite problem: Writers will portray the Ferengi as a total joke and not taken seriously whatsoever. In stories like “Ménage à Troi”, “The Price”, “The Perfect Mate” and “Rascals” the Ferengi’s clownshoes quotient is dialed up to such a degree they become so grating to the point of becoming absolutely unwatchable.

By the first/sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and our first regular Ferengi character in Quark, the show has been sort of forced to develop some more nuance with them, although it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing either. After a good show in “Emissary” and a few assorted memorable moments in other episodes (most notably Quark’s subplot in “The Passenger”), for as much good as we’ve gotten there’s also been a lot of bad. As fun as Quark and Odo are to see bicker, when they get overexposed to the point of hijacking the show, such as in the insufferable “Odo and Quark Save the Day” of “Babel”, things become less fun. And then there’s the utterly obnoxious grovelling Quark is made to do in last week’s stupefyingly awful “Move Along Home”.

With “The Nagus” though we now have an entire episode pretty much dedicated toward exploring Ferengi culture in ways we haven’t really gotten the chance to see until now, and thankfully the show more or less manages to pull it off and make it seem somewhat respectable (well, as respectable as the Ferengi can ever get I suppose).…

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Heaven Sent Review

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As I’ve said many a time, what I want out of Doctor Who is something I’ve never seen before. And so I’m not going to argue with anybody who puts this among their masterpieces. If you want to claim it as the equal of Listen or Blink then be my guest. For me, it’s a solid 9/10, and won’t be ahead of The Zygon Inversion in my rankings, so the result is that we’re going to start defensive and then move to the positive.

I suspect the crux of my disagreement with those who will put it higher is simply how much one values the basic idea of the “experimental” in Doctor Who. Which in some ways brings us back to Sleep No More, and in others back to In the Forest of the Night, two episodes that were distinctly experimental and also distinctly flawed. In both cases I value them considerably more than the consensus, and specifically for the odd things they did. And moreover, yes, obviously anyone who’s read any of my work on Doctor Who recognizes that I love its weird tradition, which has always been a huge part of the show, from The Edge of Destruction on. I’m definitely in the general camp of fandom that thinks The Mind Robber, The Deadly Assassin, Warrior’s Gate, and Vengeance on Varos are all cool just for being what they are.

But equally, the “experimental” field is crowded these days. At even the stingiest definition you’ve got to tag Listen, Last Christmas, Sleep No More, and Heaven Sent as experimental episodes in the last two years, and I’d be inclined to widen the net, and count bits of relatively non-experimental episodes like the Beethoven’s Fifth bits of Before the Flood and the two-hander first half of The Woman Who Lived, as well as much of In the Forest of the Night and the direct to camera bits of Kill the Moon. By and large this is why I’m loving the show so much right now. But it causes a small but distinct problem for something like Heaven Sent, which is that the fundamental limitations of how experimental Doctor Who can be really become visible when they’re run up against as often as they are these days. Doctor Who can do brilliantly experimental takes on all sorts of genres: western, Vikings, Restoration comedy, political thriller. But it can’t do an experimental take on experimentalism. That’s just not what it’s for.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the fundamental limitations of how experimental Moffat can be have long since become visible, and for the admirable reason that he keeps punching away at them with glorious stubbornness. This is, somewhat flagrantly, the basic concept of Time of the Doctor done as the show-off sequence in the middle of His Last Vow, with a middle finger emphatically raised at the entire “Moffat fetishizes the Doctor and this is a problem” crowd.

All of which is a very long way of saying that, slightly depressingly, this manages to be a hugely experimental one-hander that doesn’t actually do anything new aside from be a hugely experimental one-hander.…

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“Inner Space”: The Chase

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“The Chase” is definitive Star Trek: The Next Generation for me. It’s one of those episodes I find truly iconic, everything I want this show to be and one of the first stories that comes to mind whenever I think of it in passing. There’s quite a lot of those this year.

And yet I’m finding it hard to come up with things to say about it that aren’t obvious. I guess I’ll address the only real potential criticism I can think of straight away: The von Dänikenism stuff at the end is a little bit iffy and arguably anthropocentric, even if it does fit into the continuity of the established Star Trek universe without incident. But that’s sort of the problem with this kind of writing, isn’t it? Science fiction writers can focus on details like world-building minutiae and miss the larger social implications of their work. It must be said, however, that Ron Moore and Joe Menosky cite Carl Sagan’s Contact rather than Chariots of the Gods? and “The Chase” does provide the interesting wrinkle that the protohumanoids were responsible not for the cultures and religions of the species they gave birth to, but to existence itself, theirs being the only intelligent life in that part of the galaxy (and I like the stipulation “this part of the galaxy” because it hedges against the common sci-fi tendency to downplay the immense size of the observable universe: Maybe intelligent life evolved in other forms elsewhere in the universe. Maybe even in our galaxy, like, say, on the other side of that wormhole near Bajor).

I also adore the protohumanoid’s speech: It’s such a beautiful and fitting Star Trek message delivered with warmth and conviction by Salome Jens. And from a Vaka Rangi perspective, it’s even more appropriate: Cherish and respect life, because we are all living beings bound together by consciousness. And it’s entirely fitting that this is a message we hear at the conclusion of a vast, galaxy-hopping adventure (and it’s a testament to how much progress we’ve made this year that I don’t even feel the need to point out how well served the cast is, with everyone getting to show off their skills in an effective and memorable way to help solve the puzzle): It’s a perfectly effective Star Trek metaphor for the very things we voyage to understand.

Jens’ one-scene wonder also showcases what an absolutely killer week this is for guest stars: Apart from her, Norman Lloyd is absolutely wonderful as Captain Picard’s old archeology professor and mentor, and he brings a lovely and moving bittersweetness to every scene he’s in. Just in passing, Professor Galen’s subplot with Captain Picard is a naturalistically flawless demonstration of what’s become such a hallmark of this series: An examination of your life guided by awareness, and acceptance, of the weight of your past on your present self. Jean-Luc’s words to Beverly about the weight of the past resonated particularly with me: I think it’s the best depiction of this theme in the season, and one of the best in the whole series.…

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Face the Raven Podcast

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I’m joined this week by our very own Holy Boson to discuss Face the Raven and whatever else we got off talking about. Apologies for some early audio quality issues with my end; I had a mic problem that straightens out ten minutes or so in. Listen here while you face the turkey.

Also, I apologize that there will be no Last War in Albion this week; I forgot to queue it up before leaving for Thanksgiving, and lack access to key materials for adding images to it, so I’m just giving myself a holiday break on that one. Unless I get struck by some weird burst of energy and write something off-topic and absurd to post tomorrow, which is the sort of thing that sometimes happens. I do have a half-imagined essay about Placebo’s cover of “Running Up That Hill” that could exist. You never know. But realistically, see you Saturday. …

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Shabcast 13

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Join Jack (i.e. me) and my buddy, actor Elliot Chapman (Big Finish’s new Ben Jackson, and recent Pex Lives guest), for our very belated Hallowe’en Shabcast, in which we chat Dracula. 

Elliot’s company have recently performed Liz Lochhead’s acclaimed theatrical version of Bram Stoker’s novel, and we use that as a subject in itself and as a springboard for a wider discussion… during which I think I can safely say that we touch upon every single piece of Dracula-related media ever created, and thoroughly cover each and every one of them.

You should know: this is the first Shabcast to experiment with a new process… Glorious Immersive Scenariosoundarama™.

Please download here.  And listen at night, in a large room lit only by candles. 

Cheers me dears.…

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