Eruditorum Press

We’re all for praxis, just not for going outside

Ship’s Log, Supplemental Bonus: “Oh, don’t even go to the first season!”

, , , 2


Was what LeVar Burton once said in an interview with the now-defunct Star Trek Magazine when the DVD box sets for Star Trek: The Next Generation started being released. Even cast members, when prompted in fan environments, will tow mainline fandom’s party line and cringe on cue at the prospect of the series’ supposedly irredeemable first season. And while I grant there are issues to be found in this year’s crop of episodes, there are issues to be found in *all* of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s seven seasons and I’m still resolute in my belief the first year is unfairly singled out for blame. No, it’s not what we’ve come to expect from Star Trek: The Next Generation and yes, it’s a bit awkward in places, but Jonathan Frakes is correct to point out this was a year where the show took risks it wouldn’t take later on. And, love her or hate her, this is your only opportunity to see Tasha Yar as a crewmember.
So these are my picks for the absolute best of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Year One. Not every episode is a masterpiece, but each one is far better than its reputation would have you believe and well worth a look during any journey through the show’s mythos.
  1. “Encounter at Farpoint”
  2. “Haven”
  3. “Where No One Has Gone Before”
  4. “The Last Outpost”
  5. “Lonely Among Us”
  6. “The Battle”
  7. “Too Short a Season”
  8. “The Big Goodbye”
  9. “11001001”
  10. “Home Soil”
  11. “Coming of Age”
  12. “Heart of Glory”
  13. “The Arsenal of Freedom”
  14. “Symbiosis”
  15. “We’ll Always Have Paris”
  16. “Conspiracy”
  17. “The Neutral Zone”
 
Addendum: If this is your first visit to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I have to begrudgingly throw in “Datalore” as well. It’s not good, but the events it sets in motion come back to play an important part in later story arcs. But even without it, I look at this list and still see a pretty formidable success-failure ratio. I’m recommending roughly the same amount of episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 as I would from the entirety of the Dirty Pair TV series-While this season doesn’t have anywhere near the same number of unmitigated masterpieces as that one did, that’s pretty high praise coming from me.
Speaking of…
Since we’re compiling enumerated episode lists anyway and since I never officially did one for this show, here are my picks for the very best episodes from the Dirty Pair TV series, for the five DP fans who actually follow this site. While as of this writing I’m still going with Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia as my absolute favourite Dirty Pair story overall, the first two novels are a must-read if you can find them and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is probably worth a look at least once, they’re not included here (nor is any Classic DP material I’ve yet to cover) as I’m strictly focusing on the 1985 anime TV series today.
…

Continue Reading

“Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded”: The Neutral Zone

, 6

Let’s address the obvious things first. Yes, “The Neutral Zone” rehashes key elements from both “Space Seed” and “Balance of Terror”. Yes, the Romulans as depicted in this episode bear no relation whatsoever to the way they were portrayed in the Original Series, in essence throwing all the interesting commentary and contrast they bring with them out an airlock. Yes, those bases were indeed meant to be destroyed as part of a story arc to introduce the Borg that gets promptly forgotten about as soon as this episode airs. And yes, the motivations of the main cast are seriously wonky and out of character such that characterization of people like Picard and Riker waffles back and forth bafflingly from scene to scene. This is all self-evident and indisputable. There, is, however, a pretty simple explanation for all of it that can’t just be laid at the creative team.

If you guessed it’s the Writer’s Guild strike, well, good for you! You’re getting good at this. I’m afraid you don’t win anything, though.

“The Neutral Zone” is basically a first draft spec script. The reason it is a first draft spec script is because it was the only thing the team had lying around to put into production to close out the year, and essentially nobody was allowed to actually revise it so it would, you know, make sense and be coherent. Every single fault the finished product has can straightforwardly be pinned on this, and to single out “The Neutral Zone” in particular for blame seems a bit unfair to me, not only given how sketchy things are going to get next year, but also due to the altogether reasonable defense that, through such gems as “The Naked Now”, “Code of Honor”, “Angel One” and “Skin of Evil”, this team has demonstrated itself to be perfectly capable of screwing up *without* an industry-wide Writer’s Guild strike to slow them down further. But also because, in spite of everything, “The Neutral Zone” really does work and contributes quite a lot to the unfolding text of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Romulans are, of course, a problem. After D.C. Fontana and others spent the better part (and I mean that quite emphatically in several senses) of the Original Series trying to make them a social parallel of the Federation, in some sense a people more cultured and sophisticated than us, “The Neutral Zone” basically undoes all of that in one fell swoop by making them an entire species of Dick Dastardlys. This does not, it should be noted, doom the Star Trek: The Next Generation Romulans for good: Future stories set in this continuity will make impressive strides with them and redeem this early tactical blunder by essentially depicting them as a fractured and splintered figurehead empire in decline…which actually *does* build off some themes from the Original Series, though they’re back to mustache-twirling by the Dominion War.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (October 30th, 2014)

, 4

As ever, ranked from least enjoyed to most, with everything being a book I was willing to spend money on.

All-New X-Men #33

The original X-Men touring the Ultimate Universe is proving a bit sloppy. Too many characters split up into too many storylines emphasizes one of Bendis’s weak spots, which is that an issue can pass without a sense that much has happened. Split that over four plots and you run into issues where not a lot actually does happen. A promising cliffhanger, but aren’t they all?

The Massive #28

The six-part structure of the final arc turns out to be at least slightly artificial, with this very much being the start of a new three-part arc. But I suspect calling it a six-part arc was wise, as there’s a real flagging in the momentum here. This is not unusual for this book, which has always disappointed a bit. Not bad, but I’m not going to miss this much when it’s over.

Guardians of the Galaxy #20

Hm? Oh. Yes. This plot. The death of Richard Ryder, and all that. It wraps up pretty well. I’m not sure it was three issues of story, and certainly not sure it was worth pausing the actual Guardians for three months, but fair enough. It wasn’t half bad. Glad to be moving on though.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #4

I admit, this threw me for a bit of a loop, just because I’d gotten used to done-in-ones, and really wasn’t expecting a multipart story, which in turn made the pacing feel weird throughout. Rereading it, it’s a nice setup for a story. Alice, in particular, gets some excellent material here, as she and the Doctor come into a subtle sort of conflict. This fits into Eleven’s overall story arc quite well, and into the way the nature of the companion has evolved over the Moffat era. Good fun, this. Still highly recommended.

Wonder Woman #35

And so the Azzarello run ends. The rest of the New 52 did away with this book’s ability to actually define a new generation’s Wonder Woman, but it soldiered on and at least provided an interesting vision of her that was consistently one of the few books in the New 52’s first three years capable of being interesting. Here it ends, with some nice callbacks to Marston and the book’s legacy. There’s even talk of submission. There’s little to be excited about in the next phase of Wonder Woman. This, at least, was a book you could be proud of. Good for it.

Saga #24

Is it possible to write a bad comic with a Lying Cat splash page? No. It probably is not. I should really archive binge this in the gap months to actually get up to speed on the plots and characters, because it’s self-evidently an absolutely brilliant comic. Apparently there’s a nice oversized hardcover of the first eighteen issues coming out. Lovely Christmas present, that.

Uber #19

The stuff this book is doing with war comics is absolutely fascinating.…

Continue Reading

“Trust no one. Question Everything.”: Conspiracy

, 7

Rightly regarded as a high-water mark for the first season, “Conspiracy” is praised and fondly remembered by a certain kind of Star Trek fan for its unexpected gore-filled climax straight out of a splatterhouse horror flick or one of the Alien movies, and by less frightening Star Trek fans for its shocking perversion of the heretofore untouchable Starfleet Command. Of course it’s not really. It was, as is so often the case with this sort of thing, just aliens after all. And yet even so, “Conspiracy” does push the envelope noticeably for Star Trek: The Next Generation, even if its overall impact is arguably more muted than it perhaps could have been.

The idea of something rotten afoot in the hallowed halls of the supposedly incorruptible Starfleet Command should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this season with any degree of care or nuance. The seed was planted arguably as early as as “Too Short a Season”, where Admiral Mark Jameson’s flawless execution of Starfleet’s hero archetype plunged an entire planet into a four decade long world war. Then we had this episode’s direct antecedent, “Coming of Age”, where Admiral Quinn and Dexter Remmick interrogated the Enterprise crew under concerns something very big and very grave was about to happen that would “threaten the very core of Federation society”. Both of those episodes were, in one respect or another, about showing how the Enterprise was very likely the last bastion of progressive hope and idealism in an increasingly hostile and uncaring universe, and that’s not even touching on the direct diegetic and extradiegetic challenges to its ethics and values the show’s seen elsewhere from characters like Q, the Ferengi, the Tkon Empire, the Microbrain and even, debatably, Lwaxana Troi. If Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season has been about bringing Star Trek back for the Long 1980s, it’s also been about forcing it to prove it deserves to exist in the Long 1980s.

And “Conspiracy” is the moment where this all comes to a head…or at least, it should have been. Because while it does build on these themes and neatly, satisfyingly wrap up the story arc introduced in “Coming of Age”, it doesn’t exactly do so in the way writer Tracy Tormé had hoped it would. The original plan was to reveal the Conspiracy to be just that: An actual conspiracy orchestrated by Starfleet Command’s higher-ups to instate martial law across known space and rule the Federation as a military junta. It would have been the deliciously perfect logical end result of Starfleet’s thinly veiled militarism: It doesn’t take much for someone surrounded by that kind of rhetoric and ideology to suddenly decide the world would be better off with them in charge. Couple that with the troublesome Philosopher King overtones Starfleet and the Federation have always had, and you get a recipe for a truly terrifying mixture of imperialism and grandiose self-entitlement.…

Continue Reading

Welcome to Night Vale – “The Librarian” Review

13

Abigail Brady would like to talk to you about Welcome to Night Vale.

Have you listened to Welcome to Night Vale?  It’s a podcast.  That doesn’t explain it.  Podcasts are usually chat shows – Night Vale is a dramatic presentation, in the form of a talk radio show, presented by a chap we eventually find out is called Cecil Palmer (played by Cecil Baldwin).  It is set in a small desert town called Night Vale, a place where every conspiracy theory is openly acknowledged to be true.  I tried to condense it to a two-word pitch the other day, and the best I could come up with with was “Innsmouth FM”.  A four-word pitch would be “Innsmouth FM.  With jokes.”  Mind, they distance themselves from Lovecraft, pointing at plenty of other contemporaneous weird fiction authors, who are less massive racists, as influences.  As a writer, what I admire most about it is its ability to change tones so rapidly and yet so completely, between the comedy and the horror, without either undermining the other.  It has a highly enthusiastic and growing fanbase, gained through word-of-mouth rather than any marketing-led push.   A lot of it is that it it’s an ideal fit for tumblr’s combination of humour and politics.  But it still seems pretty amazing for it to go from nothing to a small media franchise just through personal recommendations.  Even more amazing for this to happen in a format – the audio drama – that is new to most of the listeners.  It really is that good.


I asked several people who attended the October London shows how exactly they go into Night Vale, and nobody could really remember.   I mean, I can’t even really remember how I got into it.  My only hard date is that I nominated episodes for the 2014 Hugo Awards, so that’s certainly by the end of January 2014.  Night Vale fandom this time wasn’t organised enough to get an episode on the ballot. “The Sandstorm” (a two-parter with a season-finale feel that I didn’t think to put down) picked up 30 nominations, only eight fewer than “The Name of the Doctor”.  Maybe next year the second anniversary episode, “Old Oak Doors”, will make it through.  Guys, let’s remember that, yeah?


“Old Oak Doors” was exceptional, and not just in its the way it used its status as a season finale to kick you in as more teeth than Buffy’s “Becoming” did.  It was a two-parter, at the end of the second year of the podcast, it was recorded live in New York in June 2014.  And I have to confess, I found that… it didn’t entirely work recorded?  Particularly the bits where it is obvious Cecil or someone is doing something funny on stage, but we don’t get the joke because we can’t see him but we have to listen to the crowd laugh anyway.  Night Vale live is a different thing to the podcast.  Podcasts are typically a solitary listening experience.  How you engage with the material is entirely up to you.
…

Continue Reading

A Wilderness of Tigers

8

The opposition between town and country is a perennial obsession of modern Western narrative art.  The idea of the division becoming diffuse and permeable, of the one bleeding through into the other, appears to be deeply threatening.  For Titus Andronicus, in a play in which precisely this bleeding effect occurs, Rome’s degradation leads it to become a “wilderness of tigers”.

This obsession is one that began at around the same time as modern map making.  

What people don’t realise is that maps lie to us.  They present a geographical landscape which is profoundly at odds with human psychic landscapes.

We think of the town having borders, beyond which there lies the country.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.  We think of the country as a great field of emptiness between cities and towns.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.

What actually happens is that the further you venture into the country, the more country you find.  The country isn’t a two-dimensional field, it is a three-dimension well which stretches ever downwards into more of itself.  Like the fractals generated by the Mandelbrot Set, the further you go into the country, the more it expands out ahead of you.  The more you sink down into it.  The towns get smaller, the desolation gets more and more desolate, the isolation gets more and more isolated.  The sinister vibe gets more and more sinister. 

The city, meanwhile, has no borders.  It is carried across all borders inside the mind of the city-dweller.  And all cities are connected.  If you walk far enough into London you will eventually find yourself in Paris or New York or Rome.  The more you walk into any city, the more you walk into its history, and the history of every city is the history of its relationship with other cities.  Walk far enough into modern London and you eventually find yourself in ancient Rome.…

Continue Reading

The Abandoned Line

0

All disused London Underground stations are connected via ghost trains that traverse conceptual topography. It’s called the Abandoned Line.

 http://www.smashinglists.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/aldwych.jpg

London’s Abandoned Line is in a state of perpetual Cold War with Metro 2, the secret parallel underground system in Moscow which was used to transport Party officials around the place. One of the many ideological differences between Metro 2 and the Abandoned Line is the very question of Metro 2’s existence. The Abandoned Line insists that Metro 2 exists. Metro 2 itself stubbornly denies this.…

Continue Reading

“A Night on Pegos Minor”: We’ll Always Have Paris

, 7

Most people tend to remember “We’ll Always Have Paris” as the episode where Michelle Phillips guest starred in an odd bit of celebrity casting (this being the second documented connection to the Phillips family and The Mamas and the Papas in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season). I remember it as the first episode where Tasha Yar wasn’t on the Enterprise.

There is, of course, a bit more to it than either of those interpretations might lead you to believe. Not much, I’ll grant, but some. “We’ll Always Have Paris” is essentially Star Trek: The Next Generation doing Casablanca, with Captain Picard as Humphrey Bogart, Michelle Phillips as Ingrid Bergman and a great big fuck-off mad science experiment with time distortion in place of World War II and Nazis. This is all, of course, fairly standard operating procedure for the show at this point: The Manheim Effect, which causes one specific point in time to repeat itself, is rather transparently supposed to be a metaphor for Jenice meeting Captain Picard again and the latter’s subsequent re-examination of his past life choices. In this regard, it doesn’t bring much new to the table in terms of maturation themes then the likes of, say “The Battle”, “Too Short a Season”, “Coming of Age” or “Heart of Glory”. It does, however, handle romantic relationships a hell of a lot better than “The Naked Now” did.

What I love about this episode is how emotionally honest everyone is, especially Captain Picard. There was room here for the character to be played very gruff and uncomfortable, as if he’s unwilling to own his past mistakes (“Enough of this self-indulgence!” springs immediately to mind for me here), but Patrick Stewart, as usual, plays against this, and infuses his lines with a delicate balance of remorse, nostalgia, affection and acceptance. But due to the script’s stronger moments and the actors’ considerable skill (Michelle Phillips is, perhaps surprisingly, quite good as well), “We’ll Always Have Paris” comes across as a very emotionally mature story about two adults coming to terms with their past lives and past selves. In that sense, while it doesn’t particularly *add* anything to the themes Star Trek: The Next Generation has been working with over the course of the past year, it does very clearly build upon them. It’s a story the Original Series not only wouldn’t do, but was flatly incapable of doing, and its another sign that in spite of its occasional missteps, Star Trek: The Next Generation genuinely has transformed Star Trek into something newer, fresher and better in its inaugural season.

There’s a lot of subtler moments outside of Patrick Stewart’s and Michelle Phillips’ turns that make this clear as well. The fact that we *can* so casually and dismissively say the sci-fi plot and the human story are meant to be allegories for one another means we’ve reached the point where we can take that for granted, and that’s extremely telling.…

Continue Reading

In the Forest of the Night Review

, 201

Thanks as ever to my 168 backers on Patreon.

Let’s play the Kill the Moon game again and put aside the question of public opinion, not look at comments, and just go straight out. Not because I’m about to go on another rave about how this is a transcendent piece of Doctor Who, although it basically is. You can basically fairly accuse it of being Kill the Moon as if it were the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and that’s a fair criticism, so, spoilers, I’m going to put it in second. Well, though you can fairly accuse Kill the Moon of being a pro-life parable. So I guess in the end it goes down to the aesthetics of the thing, and personal preference. I think the ending of Kill the Moon is paced a bit better. So still second, but damn, that’s close.

But the real reason I’m putting public opinion aside is that this is, as many thought possible, the Blake episode. And I should set that reading up quickly, because it’s tremendously important to the episode and how I’m going to read it. If you’re a Blake geek, this is a hell of a thing. So. The Doctor suggests that the forest comes from the manipulation of time, and specifically mentions the date 1795. That is the year Blake began printing the combined volume Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from which his famed poem “The Tyger” emerges. This is the poem the episode’s title is taken from, and the tacit reason that the Doctor, Clara, and Maebh are menaced by a tiger. 
This connection is reinforced by Maebh’s description of seeing and hearing “ideas” flying around her, a description that consciously evokes Blake’s biography. Blake, and there’s not really another way to put this, had visions. These visions directly inspired and shaped his work, which was often an attempt to express the revelations he experienced. His famed miniature The Ghost of a Flea is, for instance, an illustration of a literal ghost he claimed to see. There is very little reason to think Blake was a charlatan in this regard. Certainly if he was, his act was terribly ineffectual. He lived in poverty his whole life, stubbornly clinging to his visionary art despite clearly being talented enough to fashion a career if only he were more disciplined. If he was a charlatan, the adaptability needed to craft so convincing an act failed him in every other aspect of his life. No, any reckoning of William Blake as a great artist and writer must accept up front – his art was the product of visions. Numerous hypotheses exist as to the nature of these visions, but they genuinely motivated his work. 
So when Maebh Arden stands within a forest from 1795, and says she sees ideas, she is in explicit communion with whatever strange source was tapped to produce Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion and America a Prophecy. She communes with the hand that dared seize the fire.
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 167 168 169 170 ›»