A Present
I created this meme the other day…
…to be used in online debate when someone evades a sincere demand for answers.
Just don’t say I never give you anything.…
Saturday Waffling (October 19th, 2013)
Well that was a bit of a week.
I’ve a vacation at the end of the month, which I’m trying, in one of those doomed quest sorts of things one endeavors to do occasionally, not to spend most of working, on the logic that maybe I should try taking more than a single day off in a row for the first time since March. I hear all the cool kids do it. So in any case, it’s been a lot of getting ahead on the blog so that becomes possible.
Wonder Woman should be out imminently – I just need to do the layout, and to get the final cover design settled with James. Unfortunately, there’s been a snafu there – I gave the Kickstarter money to a family member to hold in an interest bearing account while I wrote the book, so I didn’t accidentally dip into it. Said family member just informed me they would not be returning it to me. So that’s a problem. (To be clear, this is just the Wonder Woman Kickstarter money – the Hartnell v2 money is safe in my own hands.) Not a huge problem – it just means the book is suddenly a financial risk for me where before it had already turned a nice little profit. I’m fine, this isn’t some “help the blogger keep his home” appeal or anything, but equally, if you’re on the fence about buying it, I’ll be thankful.
So, loads of work and frustration. Marvelous. Still, only one more Eruditorum entry to get written up, and then I can go play with other stuff and kind of relax for a week or two, which holy God do I need.
So, I’ve been thinking about Pop Between Realities posts, as the clock runs out on the blog. (I mean, there’s still loads to go, but less than a year at this point, I’m sure.) I’ve got the schedule locked through the end of the Davies era, but I’ve penciled in very little for the Matt Smith era. What stuff from roughly the present day feels like it should be covered alongside Doctor Who? What do you consider its current cultural context? What’s it in conversation with over the course of the Moffat years?…
“…suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion”: The Empath
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| “There’s no greater sacrifice than one’s self, and Joyce Muskat’s ‘The Empath’ proved that to SF fans worldwide.” |
Science fiction aficionados of a certain age will probably remember Starlog: A fan magazine looking at sci-fi and other genre film and television works, often focusing on the perspective of writers, actors and the community fans built for themselves. Starlog actually began as essentially an unlicensed fanzine for Star Trek fan culture that broadened its scope to avoid legal troubles, which was interesting for me to read: It was always a bit curious to see Star Trek get such a focus in the magazine, although back then I just chalked it up to the massive amount of cultural capital and ubiquity the franchise had at the time I was reading it.
Starlog was really my primary entry into the world of science fiction culture. I never went to Star Trek conventions or anything like that (OK I think I did once, but it was so long ago I remember next to nothing about it), nor did I have a bunch of spin-off or reference books (well, at first I didn’t at any rate). Partly because of this, I never considered myself a massive Star Trek fan, let alone a massive genre fiction fan. Star Trek had certainly captured my imagination, but a large part of the reason why it was able to do that was because at the time it was wildly popular and when I talked to people about television, it was naturally one of the things that came up.
But Starlog gave comprehensive coverage to a wide spectrum of film and TV projects: Articles on the latest Star Trek and sci-fi shows were mixed in with, retrospectives on the live-action Batman and Spider-Man shows, cartoons, bits on action spy fiction, cowboy westerns and interviews with the writers of really obscurantist stuff like The Powers of Matthew Star. Looking back, the magazine was probably my introduction to a lot of shows, like Buck Rogers, Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (which probably directly led to my years-long belief Doctor Who was some kind of peculiarly and flamboyantly British version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and why Jon Pertwee remains one of my favourite Doctors). It was also my first, and for a very long time only, exposure to Star Trek: The Animated Series: Seeing gorgeously lush and evocative screenshots and cells from what seemed to be a Star Trek cartoon that continued the story of the Original Series was unfathomable to me at the time, and all I knew was that I needed to see a lot more of it and as soon as possible. But no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find anything more on it, so it remained a part of the franchise’s history forever ungraspable to me.
Starlog then was my window into what went into making these programmes and what allowed me to read the reflection of the people and positionalities involved in bringing them to life.…
“The Beast Within”: Is There In Truth No Beauty?
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| A Mr. “Noonien Singh” called. He wants his line back. |
Star Trek has made me feel a lot of things over the years: Warmth, pride, comfort, joy. Of course lately it’s been mostly white-hot anger and frustration, but that kind of comes with the territory. One thing I don’t think it’s ever made me feel before now though is utter confusion. For the first time, I may have found an episode of Star Trek I didn’t actually get.
I don’t think this is entirely my fault, however: “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” is just about the single most scattered and schizoid production I have ever seen. What should be a very straightforward parable about inner beauty vs. outer beauty becomes a disassociated mess of random, half-baked ideas and concepts and I’m not even sure the actors realised they were on the same show with each other, let alone gelled with the production team. More than any episode we’ve seen so far, this one conclusively demonstrates, if there was any lingering doubt, that nobody involved in making this show is on the same page anymore. This is the most crystal-clear example of people talking past each other I have ever seen.
And the whole first half of the story is so formidable too: Doctor Miranda Jones, one of the most powerful telepaths in the galaxy is escorting an ambassador to a race of people whose physical form is so incomprehensible the mere sight of one causes humans to go mad, yet who also supposedly have the most beautiful thoughts of any being. From the moment of her introduction, Jones becomes a powerful presence, as the first person to greet Spock with the Vulcan hand salute who isn’t a Vulcan or otherwise related to him. This leads into a delightful contrast with the characters’ behaviour towards one another, as there’s a hint of professional jealousy between Jones and Spock, who was also offered the position of emissary to the ambassador. This all builds to what is in my opinion frankly one of the single best scenes in the franchise so far, where Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Doctor Jones and her companion Larry Marvick size each other up over a formal dinner. Doctor Jones accuses Spock of wearing his IDIC pin (a famous symbol of the Vulcans both in and out of the Star Trek universe, which makes its first appearance here) in an attempt to intimidate her and flaunt his superior qualifications, while McCoy wonders why anyone would want to dedicate their life to working with someone who could potentially drive them insane. Kirk and Spock then accuse McCoy of holding to the very Greek (and very Western) idea that what is beautiful must by definition by good, and Kirk goes on to admit an appreciation for beauty is one of the last vestigial traces of humanity’s past they have yet to cast off, firmly and explicitly establishing, for the very first time in the history of the franchise, that the world of Star Trek is meant to be an expressly idealistic and utopian one.…
(Non-)Review Blog of the Daleks
The Eight Doctors: Occasionally people accuse me of blaming the TV Movie for killing Doctor Who. Nonsense. This is the book to blame – a turgid mess that insults its audience. Readers were understandably disappointed at the idea of taking the license away from Virgin, who had been brilliant, and restarting the book lines as explicitly less mature and intelligent. This book confirmed everyone’s worst fears – that BBC Books had no clue what they were doing. The Virgin line recovered from a bad start because it was all we had. But the BBC Books line consciously killed off something good and replaced it with something that, at first glance, looked awful. It never recovered. 1/10
Vampire Science: Quite marvelous, actually. Its only flaw is that nobody really picked up on this wonderfully daft characterization of the Eighth Doctor, and that this wasn’t taken as a template for how to do the Eighth Doctor as a contrast to the Seventh. Instead it was one of a handful of isolated moments of quality in the line’s early days. Alas. 9/10
Business Unusual: Dreadful. A pointless pile of fanwank, with the added misery of being fanwank about Russell’s previous fanwank. A story that was in no way crying out to be told, and another early nail in the coffin of the BBC Books line. Also one of several attempts to fix Colin Baker’s Doctor that don’t actually improve the character meaningfully. The pointless inclusion oft he Brigadier gives away just how banal and obsessed with ticking the boxes this book is. 2/10
War of the Daleks: Interesting purely as the straw that broke the camel’ back and led a sizable chunk of fandom to just say “no, that’s not canon, and I don’t care,” regardless of whether or not they otherwise accepted the books as canon. It’s not hard to see why this turgid piece of crap inspired such a revolt. What stands out is not merely that it’s bad, but that it’s mean-spirited, seeking to piss on other stories for no reason other than to spite them and the people that like them. Horrifying. 1/10
The Roundheads: Ah, Gatiss. A bit of fluffy nostalgia. Harmless, and with a better characterization of Troughton’s Doctor than a lot of books, but ultimately a pointless exercise in nostalgia for its own sake that demonstrates why the historicals wound down as a genre. Difficult to have any real feelings about one way or another. 5/10
Alien Bodies: Ah, yes. That’s the book we all thought Miles was capable of writing. Brilliant, intriguing, at times maddening, but always fascinating and gripping. Miles was infamously hard to work with, and it’s thus not hard to understand why he didn’t get to drive the EDAs, but on the strength of this book, it’s difficult to see why anyone messed with his vision for the line, as it’s absolutely riveting. In the end this, along with Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War, Human Nature, and The Scarlet Empress are the absolute must-reads of the wilderness years, without which you cannot quite understand the history of how the show developed from Survival to Rose.…
“…a mere apendix.”: Spock’s Brain
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| The newspaper reads “Spock gets 2-year prison term“. |
“Spock’s Brain” needs no introduction. It is infamously terrible. Universally regarded as the single worst episode of the Original Series by those for whom “The Omega Glory” is too niche a pick. Every aspect of this story is iconic for all the wrong reasons: It’s just as memorable as something like “Arena”, albeit for being as bad as the former episode is good. And, to add insult to injury, it went out as the season premier for the fans’ hard-won third year of Star Trek, a move which has to go down as one of the biggest, most grandiose middle-finger salutes to a television audience in the history of broadcast.
I thought it was OK.
Now, I hasten to add “Spock’s Brain” isn’t good by any means either. Is it campy and cheesy? Oh, please. This is Roger Corman levels of lowballing it. Is it sexist? For sure: It’s a story involving a tyrannical matriarchal society of incompetent, childlike women who torment their male underlings with mixed signals-Of bloody course it’s sexist. It’s borderline racist too, with characters throwing around words like “primitive” and “apish” on a regular basis and Kirk’s ultimate resolution to the problems of the Sigma Draconians is to encourage them to follow a “natural” course of social evolution and learn how to think for themselves. It’s just “The Apple” all over again. And, as is par for the course for this season, there are logic lapses and exposition holes everywhere and the plot actually completely falls apart if you think too hard about it. (Although really it all boils down to “alien space women need Spock’s brain to control the computer in charge of running their library and central heating system”, which is arguably straightforward enough. Trust me: I watch 1980s Scooby-Doo. I’ve seen stuff that makes far less sense than this.)
But is “Spock’s Brain” the single worst episode of Star Trek, or at least the Original Series? Oh, Prophets no. It’s not even the worst episode of the season that we’ve see so far. As far as terrible Star Trek episodes go, it’s eminently watchable for a number of reasons, and in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s probably the most watchable bad episode of Star Trek that there is. There’s a certain entertainment factor in how charmingly lowbrow it is. Furthermore, “Spock’s Brain” is one of the most interesting episodes of the show to talk about, if not actually watch, and frankly, given a choice between this and another test of endurance like “The Paradise Syndrome” or “And The Children Shall Lead” I’ll go with the Morgs and Eymorgs every time. So I mean yes it’s bad, but not really in a way that would seem to justify the amount of vitriol it gets from mainline fandom. Unpacking how “Spock’s Brain” got quite the reputation it did is a worthy field of study, and we’ll return to it in a bit, but first let’s try and answer the most obvious question: Why does this episode even exist?…
The Obligatory Returned-Episodes Post
Hurrah, etc.
As Lawrence Miles says, there’s no point trying act all cool at a time like this. It’s great news and I’m very happy about it. Sincerely. You’d have to be a miserablist of a more perverse and determined stamp than I not to be as pleased as punch.
Of course, I could whinge about some things.
And will.
This blog has a USP after all.
I could, for instance, mention the way Nigeria – where the episodes were found – has suddenly swung briefly onto the mental radars of people who, until a few days ago, probably had only a dim idea that it existed at all. It’s ironic because, at more or less the time when those missing episodes were made, the Wilson government was helping the corrupt Nigerian military dictatorship crush Biafra. Britain continued arming the junta for years, despite government denials. The regime was engaged in a longstanding war against the Ogoni people – one of the forgotten persecuted peoples in the world. Shell’s exploitation of oil reserves in their region has had untold environmental and human costs, making the Niger Delta one of the most petroleum-impacted regions on Earth. In 1995, the Nigerian government – utterly in thrall to and bound up with Shell – began a campaign of ruthless repression against the growing anti-Shell protest movement. The ‘Ogoni Nine’, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were arrested and executed, causing a (brief) international outcry. Nigeria achieved formal democracy in 1999 but the corrupt government still wages war against the living standards and rights of the Nigerian people in the service of international oil profits. Indeed, as in so many places, this war is a condition of IMF debt relief and loans. The American government occasionally declares itself troubled by the rigged elections and violence in Nigeria, but Nigeria supplies them with large amounts of oil – the country is up there with Saudi Arabia when it comes to oil exports – so they never do anything beyond the pious declarations. The crippling economic situation in Nigeria, with a huge portion of the population living in slums, is the root cause of ongoing ethnic and religious violence. Even the BBC is capable of making the connection between the violence and the poverty rate (above 60% and rising). Boko Haram, an Islamic fundamentalist group responsible for many attacks – including this last month – are based in the predominantly Muslim north-east, hardest hit by poverty. Go figure.
But they also had ‘The Enemy of the World’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ on a shelf somewhere, so I guess its swings and roundabouts, yeah?
Back in what I like to call my TARDIS Whingeorium, I could also mention the relative importance given by some to the release of these old episodes and the wanton sell-off of Royal Mail, which was announced on the same day and which constitutes a swindle on the taxpayer to the tune of millions, possibly billions… with much of the benefit available only to huge international ‘sovereign wealth funds‘. …
Nearly Silent
Simon Schama gets a huge slab of BBC money and airtime to obfuscate the truth in the service of Apartheid state Israel, taking official Israeli lies as the basis of his ‘case’. See here.
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| Simon Schama, thinking profound thoughts about history ‘n’ stuff. |
Licence-fee money well spent there.
Best bit, on the wall:
“I want to say, nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say that shouldn’t have happened, the wall shouldn’t have happened. Before the wall happened, hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks; after the wall happened very, very few….”
Actually, since the start of the wall, over 4,000 Palestinians have died… but they obviously don’t come into the category of ‘people’ for Professor Schama, no more than the Haitian slaves who didn’t get mentioned in his massive book on the French Revolution.
He continues:
“In some senses, if you don’t live in Israel — I don’t live in Israel — you are morally obliged to be nearly silent.”
So shouldn’t that mean that Professor Schama should be “nearly silent” about it? No, of course not. He means that people who disapprove of the wall should be “nearly silent”. That’s the viewpoint that is invalid if it comes from a non-Israeli. Fascinating how clever people can talk circular, babyish drivel and think it profundity… while being totally unconscious of how they themselves are broadcasting – in this case literally – their own moral hypocrisy.
Or maybe Schama’s programme constituted ‘near silence’… it was, after all, of little substance.
If only the Palestinians were allowed to be as “nearly silent” on the ‘objective’ BBC as the Zionists. …
Saturday Waffling (October 12th, 2013)
Right, then. Since we’ve all had some time to watch them… what did you all think of Enemy of the World and Web of Fear?
Enemy, for me, was as much of a treat as I’d hoped. The ending is a bit more rushed than I’d realized from the reconstruction, but it is on the whole a piece of wonderful subtlety and nuance, and it keeps the plot moving well. Troughton is better than I’d imagined – the little tip-offs when he’s playing the Doctor impersonating Salamander are fantastic. In particular, the start of Episode Two is just so wonderful – all the little flicks of the eyes and small Doctor-like gestures that bubble up under the improvised and hurried impersonation.
And the plot is, in fact, really good. The underground bunker twist is very smooth – smoother than I’d thought, really. There are enough tip-offs that Salamander has some secret way of controlling volcanos. When you actually see the extended volcano sequence in Episode Two, the bunker ends up feeling much fairer. And the elaborate visual sequence of getting down there, in which the rules of the records room are set up, calls much more attention to it.
I hadn’t really appreciated how consistently suspicious Giles Kent was through the whole story. Benik is even more unnervingly sadistic than I’d imagined. Barry Letts’s direction is fantastic, balancing action shots with intimate close-ups. Really, virtually everything about this story came out at the high end of what I’d imagined, with Troughton absolutely blowing me away. Absolutely wonderful – such an complete joy. It’s really an incredible experience to have hyped the story this much for myself and then to have it absolutely nail and surpass my expectations. I don’t really have much to say beyond what I already have said; this really is an absolutely amazing piece of work.
The Web of Fear, on the other hand… I was never one of the major boosters of The Web of Fear, although I did always assume that it was the most competently done of the Season Five bases under siege. I’m less confident of that now. Indeed, I think that’s actively wrong – The Ice Warriors beats the pants off this.
In The Enemy of the World, everything left ambiguous from the audio broke in the story’s favor. The action sequences in the first episode really were quite good. Most things that looked like plot holes were filled. With The Web of Fear some things break in the story’s favor… but others decidedly don’t.
Episode Three still being missing hurts it a lot. The first two episodes are very padded, and Episode Three is the point where the story actually picks up decently. With that as a reconstruction, it’s not until Episode Four that the story gathers any sort of momentum, and that’s squandered in a time-wasting Episode Five in which the Doctor plays with screwdrivers for the entire episode.
The Arnold revelation is worse than expected, which is unfortunate.…
“Seduction of the Innocent”: And The Children Shall Lead
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| “Does it need saying?” |
Bloody hell.
Every time I think this show has bottomed out the floor vanishes from beneath my feet. I haven’t been as angry at Star Trek as I was while watching “And The Children Shall Lead” in quite awhile. This is execrable. This is the worst parts of every retrograde story this show has ever done distilled to their core essences. This is “Omega Glory” standards. Actually, no, not even: “And The Children Shall Lead” starts as a third-rate retread of “Miri” and then dovetails into one of the most bald-facedly reactionary and youth-hating things I’ve ever seen, and it’s another sloppy, incoherent and cack-handed production on top of that. This isn’t just as bad as the show has ever been it’s worse.
Well, where to begin? How about with the absolutely bleeding obvious? Kirk, Spock and McCoy discover a Federation colony where all the adults have died out leaving only their children behind, who are suspiciously unnerved by the mass deaths. When they beam back aboard the Enterprise, it’s revealed the children are part of some scary and mysterious cult with strange language and unfamiliar customs built around worship of a “friendly angel” whom it is further revealed is actually another Alien Entity of Pure Evil who has enslaved the children. The being then orders them to commandeer the ship in an attempt to convert more brainwashed slaves for his army, with which he intends to take over the galaxy. In the end, the alien is dispatched by Kirk convincing the children adults always have their best interests at heart and can always be trusted, and demonstrating the Gorgon (which is apparently the alien’s name, as Kirk refers to it as such even though at no point in the episode did he ever learn this) requires faith and obedience to live, without which he is revealed as the evil (and, naturally, horrifically disfigured) being he truly is.
I mean, do I really need to spell it out? This couldn’t be more transparently an attack on the counterculture if Spock made some comment about how Earth was almost destroyed in the late-1960s by a group of misguided youths who were led astray by an Evil Alien Communist who told them to distrust the United States and protest the Vietnam War as evidence of historical precedence. The Gorgon is even dressed in a flowing, paisley gown and I’d say his design makes him look like a shoddy knock-off of something from the Doctor Who serial “The Mutants” except for the fact “The Mutants” wasn’t actually filmed until 1972, which leads me to believe Arthur Singer and writer Edward J. Lakso had some kind of right-wing time machine that could only be fueled by fear, hatred and the tears of children. I’m actually dumbfounded: I thought I’d have to wait until the 2010s and Internet culture to find an example of a show that held as much active contempt and loathing for its fanbase as this one does.…