We Will Reach The Promised Land: Liberal Science Fiction at the Fall of Democracy
There isn’t any promised land. This is just… it’s a superstition that you have picked up from all the humanity you’ve stuffed inside yourself. – Doctor Who, “Deep Breath”
I’ve been on a weird media kick for the past month. It started with that HBO Max West Wing reunion, which sparked a nostalgia for a show whose impeccable craft of writing is matched only by its absolutely dire sense of politics. That led to rewatching some favorite episodes in the lead-up to the election, a carefully tailored medial junk food to wash out the obvious taste. Then, in the wake of the election, as Donald Trump’s idiot coup meandered onwards, I found myself reading Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land. And around that time Season 4 of The Crown dropped, which Jill and I watch, so obviously I sat down with that, and by the time it had roughly caught up with Earthshock I’d well and truly fallen down a very strange rabbit hole of ritually fetishized liberalism.
Consider this essay my climb back up.
Let’s start with The West Wing, which has aged more strangely than any other critically acclaimed TV show I can think of. On the one hand, its sparkling dialogue and immaculately precise construction stands up as one of the finest writing lessons out there—one that you can tell Steven Moffat studied intently. On the other… woof. Its most rightly acclaimed stretch of episodes features a plot in which it’s publicly revealed that the President has repeatedly lied to the American people (in his case, concealing the fact that he has multiple sclerosis). The result of this, which can in hindsight safely be called breathtakingly optimistic, is a concrete process of accountability in which transparent investigations take place and there are clear public consequences. These admittedly do not ultimately involve the President losing his reelection campaign (which plays out as a repudiation of a thinly veiled George W. Bush, culminating in a debate in which Martin Sheen’s bookish yet folksy New Hampshire scion Josiah Bartlett roundly humiliates the dunderheaded governor of Florida), but the fact remains that The West Wing portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people matters.
More than that, however, it portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people is something that can be straightforwardly handled by the existing system of structural checks and balances. Where, in fact, this system is a reified and beautiful thing, certainly not blind to whomever is in charge of it, but fundamentally capable of handling the prospect of those empowered within it engaging in egregious misconduct. To put it mildly, this was an extremely strange thing to watch in the leadup to an election that Donald Trump came very close to winning and, at the time of writing, may yet manage to stage a coup to overturn.
Thinking about it, I realized what the experience most obviously resembled: watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its easy and woefully unexamined confidence in the utopian potential of post-scarcity capitalist imperialism.…
After quite a lot of delay, Eruditorum Press is proud to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy. Adapted from a blog about Doctor Who I imagine you’ve heard of, this is the revised version of my essays on the final years of the original television show and the first phase of the Wilderness Years, the Virgin New Adventures. Over 600 pages it covers every televised Sylvester McCoy episode and the highlights of the Virgin line. It’s also got a huge bevy of book-exclusive essays, including new ones on Nightshade and The Pit, an essay on Lloyd Rose’s The Algebra of Ice, an essay on the recent Seventh Doctor comics by Andrew Cartmel, and a bunch of essays on arcane points of Doctor Who continuity like “When Was the Time War?” and “Was He Half-Woven on His Mother’s Side?” 
The date is October 31st, 1973. My sister and I huddle cowardly in the dark, hopped up on sugar, two little girls spellbound by the rituals of Halloween. I still remember the ghosts, the lions and leopards, the vampires and wolves and sheep. I think we were lions that year. Our costumes would have been onesies.