Doctor Who

December 7, 2014

Star Trek in Sound and Not Vision

Forest of Illusions Bonus Posts, Doctor Who, Me Elsewhere, pex lives, Podcasts 4

Hey all,

Back in June, I was a guest on the Pex Lives! podcast with my good friend Jack Graham (of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph’s Paradox). The subject at hand was tacitly the Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann, but we very quickly spiraled tangentially off into a great conversation that had perishingly little to do with Doctor Who. The details largely escape me now, but I seem to recall at least touching on topics as disparate as Sliders, Homicide: Life on the Street, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Melora”, Super Sentai, capitalism and domesticity, capitalism and Pop Christianity, the difference between high fantasy and science fiction, the aesthetic of non-modern naturalistic generativity in sci-fi, Dirty Pair, Gothic cathedrals, fascism vs. anarchy, the origins of mainline fandom histories, radical politics and detournement in fanfiction and criticism, pop culture as western oral mythology, and Toho’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for the NES.

Sadly, the recording and editing process was marred by a myriad of technical problems that can really only be described as “we fucked up big time”, so the episode hasn’t actually been able to see the light of day until now. But it’s been entirely reconstructed and pieced back together thanks to the valiant efforts of the Pex Lives! boys, so I can finally share it with you all today! You can download or stream the podcast here or here, and you too can marvel as I stammer incoherently while people far more articulate and cogent than I say very clever and thoughtful things!

Big thanks again to Kevin and James for the opportunity, and a happy, albeit terribly belated, anniversary!…

September 4, 2014

Sensor Scan: Doctor Who

Forest of Illusions Doctor Who, Sensor Scans 12

Hi everyone. Since we’re all friends now and this is a judgment-free zone, I’d like to tell my story here today as part of sharing time. I know we’ve all been talking lately about the things we grew up with and how they shaped us into the people we are today, so in light of that I have a confession to make. I never grew up with Doctor Who.

Let’s be realistic here. Nobody reading this needs me to explain to them what Doctor Who is. It is, as of this writing, arguably the biggest, most talked about, most beloved and most overanalyzed television show on the air today. It has a cultural weight that utterly demolishes everything else remotely comparable, and regularly sweeps the science fiction awards shows year after year partially because it’s the only science fiction show left on TV. As I write this I’m coming off of the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013, a year where it absolutely dominated entertainment headlines and was an omnipresent sight in every store, at every convention, and in every neighbourhood. Doctor Who currently has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level of media presence, so trying to historicize it in any way feels bemusing and inauthentic. You know what this is, I know what this is, let’s not kid ourselves.

It’s not that I’m bitter or jealous, it’s just that Doctor Who is not a cultural phenomenon that I’m along for the ride with. I occasionally watched the New Series off and on between 2005 and 2012, but I eventually just lost interest in it completely and it’s not something I have any sort of emotional investment in. Doctor Who interests me mostly at an academic level: The current phenomenon is sort of fun for me to watch unfold as it reminds me a bit of what Star Trek: The Next Generation was like in the early 1990s, but now I’m on the other side of the glass, as it were. But also, as many critics, including many of my personal friends, have pointed out, Doctor Who is a show that does some very clever things with things like narrative and metatext and, thanks to a handful of the architects who worked on it in formative years, inherits a relatively unique kind of progressive edge. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about that here, because there are people who can explain it far better than me and have dedicated a not-insignificant part of their lives to doing just that. You could go ahead and check out, say, Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, Andrew Hickey, Alex Wilcock or the co-hosts of the Pex Lives! podcast.

What I will talk about is my history with the franchise and what we can glean about Star Trek through looking at it. The Doctor Who I remember is an unusual thing: It’s not the show itself, even though it was on the air at the time.…