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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 81 (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

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Jen writes My Little Po-Mo, the TARDIS Eruditorum of ponies.

In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a pony named Rose.

Consider a fandom. A curious beast, an amorphous, shifting mass of people wrapped around a core of fiction. Despite the variation in cores and size, fandoms all look basically the same. The swarm of flesh devours the core over and over again, yet the core is unharmed. The beast excretes its assumptions and predictions by consensus, layering it around the core like an invert pearl, fanon-grit encrusting a glittering center. Fanficcers and shippers and “expanded universe” authors build their own structures, grit and crystal in varying amounts, arcing off the core. Sometimes these extend all the way out of the beast, where they draw in their own squishy masses of fan; sometimes, rarely, they break off, forming the cores of new beasts, drawing their own paradoxical factions of fans. That is how the beast reproduces; mostly, though, it just grows, feeding on the source work, drawing new fans into itself with reviews and memes and recommendations by slightly pushy friends.

 
But then the beast gets old, and something strange happens: the core cracks. Grit gets inside the pearl. The inmates start running the asylum.
 
This is where things can get weird, when the flow from work to fan ceases to be unidirectional.
Which brings us to December 24, 2010. Christmas Eve. As per tradition, tomorrow will be a new Doctor Who special, “The Christmas Carol” to be specific, Matt Smith’s first. Over on American and Canadian televisions, however, the Doctor is showing up in an entirely different, and probably accidental, form.
 
We have, you see, two beasts to consider, and two shows at their core. They have more in common than it seems on the surface, Doctor Who and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Both are revivals of shows from decades prior. Both were originally educational shows for children, but abandoned that calling early in their runs. Both intentionally build in something “for the dads.” Perhaps most importantly, both reject the ethos of cynicism and violence.
 
And both are cases of the inmates running the asylum. Lauren Faust, the first showrunner of Friendship Is Magic, played with My Little Pony toys as a child. There still exists a drawing she made in her teens which is recognizably one of the characters she would eventually create, Rainbow Dash—her equivalent, perhaps, to Moffat’s Usenet post about us getting the word “doctor” from the Doctor rather than the other way around. 
 
Unsurprisingly, therefore, both like to tweak their fans with little references, meaningless to the primary audience of children, but perhaps entertaining and recognizable for the older viewers. The major difference here is the source of those references: for Doctor Who, with its enormous length and emboitment of all television, they point inwards; for Friendship Is Magic, outwards. So in Doctor Who under Moffat we get offhand references to Metebelis 3 and the Brigadier’s daughter running UNIT, while in Friendship Is Magic we get brief glimpses of background characters who look like the cast of The Big Lebowski or an episode that presents the problems of Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” and solves them with “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 31 (The Eternity Clock)

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Frezno has done such a nice job continuing The Nintendo Project that I felt like I should let him play on this blog too.

1985 was a very eventful year, when one looks back on it from a broad perspective. Swap out your wide-angle lens and zero in towards two of the important moments of that year, for our purposes. In England, Doctor Who was supposedly struggling to entertain the masses. The Doctor, he of bright coat and bravado, faced off against deadly foes like the Bandrils and the tree mines. The final straw came just as Peri Brown was running away from a cannibal with bushy eyebrows. The program failed to get a passing Grade and was put on hiatus. As has been noted, this was the first major blow to Doctor Who in the 1980’s. One could argue it was the blow that eventually killed it. It got better, though.

You know what else got better? Video games. 1983 saw video games in North America face their own Ragnarok at the hands of over-indulgent capitalists. Howard Scott Warshaw, unfairly maligned man that he is, did what he could. The world ended. It was up to a red and white box from a land that did not exist now. It transcended the sea between worlds and became corporeal, becoming a magical grey box that was bigger on the inside. The Nintendo Entertainment System was born. Video games existed again. Put the wide-angle lens back on, and zoom out to track the course of history that stems from this grey box’s success. The NES gives way to the Super NES. Plans are made to give the Super NES an upgrade, a CD expansion. Nintendo works in tandem with Sony on this, but creative differences cause it to never happen, relegated to a different universe where we all have pods in our ears. Sony, to its credit, uses this knowledge to create the Playstation. Its success gives way to Playstation 2, and then to Playstation 3… and that leads us back to a world where the anoraks have taken over the asylum since the novel days, and Doctor Who is The Biggest Thing On Television. Naturally, licenses are made and agreed upon, the ever-present billowing dress of Lady Capitalism securing the creation of something that will make plenty of money. This, friends, is Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock.

It would probably help, then, to define what The Eternity Clock is. Aside from being a mystical video game Macguffin to be collected. Doctor Who dabbled in video games before. None of them really turned out to be all that good. This isn’t even the first Doctor Who video game since it came back; there were a handful of adventure games with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond running around solving puzzles. The Eternity Clock goes in a different direction, and turns the Doctor Who video game into a cinematic platformer, not unlike Prince of Persia or Another World. Really, it’s the best direction one could have gone with when considering a Doctor Who video game.…

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Miracle Day and Death

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Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues. She’s also my wife, and would be as happy as I would be if you backed my Patreon campaign for weekly episode reviews of Season Eight of Doctor Who. Then come back here and read her being righteously and beautifully angry. 
It’s November 28th, 2013. Martin Garrix’s “Animals” tops the charts only to be ousted by Lily Allen’s “Somewhere Only We Know” two days later. Elsewhere in the world, mass protests are occurring in Thailand as tensions between the opposition party and the prime minister’s family (read: his exiled brother) mount and, apparently, The New York Times has shown it’s first front-page nipple. So there’s that. 
On TV: in a world in which no one can die, a young woman who has suffered what would formerly have been a fatal blood clot in her lungs. She is pregnant when this happens and is currently connected to all manner of drains and tubes and medical equipment in order to allow this fetus to gestate in her essentially dead body. She and the fetus she is carrying were deprived of oxygen thanks to that blood clot and her husband and parents look on in horror at the entire ordeal. Both the young woman and her husband were paramedics and understood the limits of what modern medicine could do, neither of them wanted her preserved this way. The Miracle destroyed any autonomy in death this young woman would have and should have had. 
Except it wasn’t the Miracle that caused this. It was us. Her name was Marlise Munoz and she was 33 years old when she died. Her husband did everything right, but there was nothing to be done. She was brain dead. But, the definition of death for John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas was somewhat more… flexible. They kept her heart beating for weeks because of a loophole in the law stating that life support could not be revoked from a pregnant woman despite her wishes. It was only when the hospital was sued for the “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse” and they admitted that the fetus was developing “abnormally” that Marlise was allowed to rest.
Miracle Day goes out of its way to make a parallel of our world, a world in which this could happen. It builds a platform for an argument about the treatment of illness, dying and death in our culture. It meticulously constructs a modest proposal indicating the natural extreme of our death-denying culture. So, after all that effort, what does Miracle Day end up saying about death? Well, it says nothing at all.
No, that is perhaps a bit harsh and untrue. Miracle Day clearly says that the way we treat the sick and the dying is bad and we should feel bad. Which is worth examining.
There is an inherent classism in healthcare on a global scale. Despite the long list of countries who have decided that healthcare is a basic human right, globally, healthcare is available only to those who have the means.
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Video Blogs On The Eleventh Hour

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So, a while ago someone asked if I was going to do a video blog on The Eleventh Hour, and I declined, mainly because video blogs are time consuming and I didn’t have loads of it.

This turns out to have been a wonderful idea, as two separate people have proceeded to do video blogs on their own initiative, and both of them are way better than anything I would have done anyway.

First off is Alison Jane Campbell, who noticed that Jack Graham had tied her in guest posts and thus decided to get ahead again with this number, which I was planning on posting today.

Except then, yesterday, Bennett indulged in a wonderfully cheeky “video comment” on The Eleventh Hour, which was also brilliant, and so I figured I’d go ahead and throw it in too.

Seriously, both of them are utterly fantastic and say all sorts of great things that I will be shamelessly referencing in Moffat-era posts to come, and I can’t thank them enough.

And while we’re posting videos, this has been going around and seems a charming transition into Friday’s post.

Thank you to everyone who spared me from doing real work this week.

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Guest Post: Steven Moffat – A Case For The Prosecution

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Personally, as I’ve said, I quite like the Moffat era. I dare say I love it. But I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and it seems fair, before we go in, to give the opposition a chance to state the case against. So here’s Jack Graham doing what he does best: being loud, angry, and leftist about Doctor Who. We’ll be back on Monday with a Pop Between Realities to kick off the Moffat era, and then The Eleventh Hour on Wednesday. Also, to clarify, the illustration on this one was my pick, meant as a cheekily representative example of anti-Moffat criticism, and not Jack’s at all.

I’m here to up the anti, so to speak.  As such, I’m a sacrificial lamb.  Firstly, I’m going to annoy you all by delaying the arrival of the proper posts about the Moffat/Smith era.  And Phil specifically asked me for a polemic, so what follows will be an angry screed.  There really isn’t space here to do more than gesticulate irritably at the issues (since I’ve tried to have some mercy on you regarding word count).  I’ve had to leave out lots of points, cut loads of stuff about the wider political context (I promise you – it was all in the first draft, and it was brilliant) and, of necessity, simplify.  So this post is going to sit here seething, vulnerable and alone, a hostage to fortune, as Phil winds up his phenomenal Eruditorum project with a series of (doubtless) nuanced and subtle redemptive readings of the era I’m about to intemperately trash.  At least nobody can say I balked at making myself a sitting target.  
(I must acknowledge Phil’s own ‘Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post’, which I used as a springboard, and the generous assistance of Richard Pilbeam and Jonathan Barlow, from whom I have cribbed shamelessly.  All errors are, of course, mine alone.)
Phil’s recent, devastating piece on ‘The End of Time – Part 2’ describes what I find most worrying about the late RTD era.  But for Phil, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was probably like the cavalry turning up.  For me, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was like the cavalry turning up and immediately opening fire on me.  
It’s interesting to note that whereas RTD usually drafted in celebrities – Chris Morris style – to satirise themselves without knowing it (which they always fell for), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore in to be flattered.  RTD got Sharon Osbourne and Anne Widdecombe to endorse Harold Saxon (i.e. the Anti-Christ).  Moffat gets Sir Patrick to play himself as a charming, twinkly-eyed expert.  Aside from lauding a well-known reactionary and sexist, Moore’s guest appearance is emblematic of a wider complacency.  Amy’s village is a retreat from anything like the Powell Estate.  This is maundering ‘long shadows on village greens’ territory. The episode celebrates cutesy, ostensibly lovable, eccentric Britishness.  
There’s a near-immediate attempt to problematize such things in ‘The Beast Below’… but the actual result is instructive.  Starship UK is all of Britain, divided into counties that are now housed within tower blocks. 
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Guest Post: Torchwood and Cardiff

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Steffan Alun writes on the subject of Torchwood and Cardiff…

It’s October 22nd, 2006.  I’ve been back in university for a few weeks, and I’ve just come back from a choir trip.  Some music is in the charts, but I don’t have to listen to it, because I’ve finally acquired a DAB radio, allowing me to listen to Radio 4 despite Aberystwyth’s unacceptable inability to find it on FM.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts, and I am extremely interested in the portrayal of Cardiff in this show.  Most of my old school friends went to Cardiff for uni, but the city is still reasonably unfamiliar to me.  I spend most of my visits in their rented accommodation, talking about Doctor Who.

Fast-foward to the present day, and I now spend most of my time on public transport thinking about comedy.  I am a standup comedian, a job which takes me all over the UK.  I’ve performed hundreds of gigs, but nearly a quarter of them have been in Cardiff.  It is, by now, a city I know incredibly well.  Thanks to the particular eccentricities of standup comedy, I can even tell you how high the ceilings are in over thirty venues.

Let’s quickly cover the history of Cardiff and Doctor Who so far.  Russell T Davies (like me, he’s from Swansea – in fact, we grew up on the same street, decades apart) has revived the show and made it a BBC superbrand.  That’s their word, not mine, but I quite like it.  Superbrand.  It’s fun to say.  The show is filmed in Cardiff, as part of the offer made to get Julie Gardner on board.  Julie Gardner is also from a part of Wales.  My parents never thought to tell me where she grew up, so let’s Occam’s Razor the question of where she’s from and assume that she, like Russell T Davies and Steffan H Alun, grew up on Lôn Cae Banc.  Anyway, the first new series of Doctor Who features two episodes set in Cardiff, one of which was filmed in Swansea.  Following so far?  Good.

What we have in Everything Changes, the first episode of Torchwood, is something that starts off looking like tedious Joseph Campbell nonsense, but ends up as a wonderful subversion.  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder … until the reality of the supernatural turns out to be so horrific that a woman whose job it is to research the supernatural takes her own life.  “The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man?”  No, the hero joins a team who research alien powers without the slightest intention to share these powers with anyone else.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.  You only need to know one of those reasons – specifically, that while Gwen slowly learns about Torchwood, the audience is slowly learning about Cardiff.  Most of the audience is familiar with the idea for Torchwood – I’d be amazed if many of the 2.8m viewers hadn’t seen any of the first two series of Doctor Who, and even more so if “secret organisation fighting aliens” was new to them.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 32.5: Star Cops

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Iain Coleman offered me a guest post on Star Cops ever so slightly too late to make it in for the holiday run of them I did, so I held it for later. Since running one this week massages my schedule such that all the Children of Earth entries fall into the same writing week, here it is.

It is 6 July 1987. The Pet Shop Boys are at number one with “It’s a Sin”, having knocked The Firm’s “Star Trekkin’” off the top spot a week earlier. The European Community has passed the Single European Act, a key step towards the European Union as we know it today, and a court in Lyon has sentenced the city’s former Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. And at 8:30 pm on BBC 2, the first episode of Star Cops is broadcast.

Star Cops was created by Chris Boucher, who wrote five of the nine broadcast episodes. By this time, Boucher was an old hand at TV SF, having written three well-received Doctor Who serials before moving to Blake’s 7, where he was script editor on all four seasons as well as writing that show’s best episodes. After killing off Blake and his crew he had moved on to script editing established BBC police dramas Juliet Bravo and Bergerac.

As a cop show set in outer space, Star Cops combined both major strands of Boucher’s career. With its blending of genres, it was intended to appeal to a cross-over audience. Unfortunately, it never achieved high ratings and met with limited critical acclaim. Its initial nine-episode run was never repeated, and there was no second series.

To understand what went wrong, we have to understand spaceflight in the 1980s, and the toxic influence of Cold War military thinking upon the US space programme.

Space has been militarised for as long as there has been space travel. The early successes of space flight were as much public demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missile capability as they were forays into extraterrestrial exploration. The R-7 Semyorka rocket that launched Sputnik 1 and kicked off the Space Age was the world’s first ICBM, and by putting a beeping ball into space the Soviet Union was demonstrating that it could put a hydrogen bomb over Manhattan. More advanced missiles were similarly pressed into service to launch larger spacecraft, manned and unmanned, over the following decade.

And not all these payloads were as innocent as Sputnik. Low Earth orbit became the ultimate observation post for military reconnaissance, with spy satellites capturing the movements of military forces on the Earth below, and eventually the US would launch a constellation of signalling spacecraft to allow its troops to pinpoint their positions anywhere on the globe. (You have a deliberately degraded civilian version on your phone.)

But in the 1980s this militarisation became suddenly threatening, with the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Immediately nicknamed “Star Wars”, this merrily gung-ho idea was to station armed spacecraft in orbit that would be able to destroy Soviet ICBMs in flight, whether with interceptor missiles or with powerful X-ray lasers, the latter being advocated by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.…

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Outside the Government 15: Newtons Sleep

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Unnoun unwrites an unpost about Faction Paradox.

Newtons Sleep is the only Faction Paradox book published by Random Static. It’s available to download as a free e-book, but please donate to help them out!
It’s 1666 A.D. A spittle’s-worth of dark humour has responded to the drawing power of matter and impacted with a young man’s head; the struggle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living
It’s January 12th 2008 C.E. A small printing company has just released a book as part of a bizarre sci-fi series supposedly about a Time Traveling Voodoo cult. The bizarre sci-fi series is the true successor to the legacy of that cultural giant Doctor Who.
It’s 1807. 1802 actually, but close enough for our purposes. Major hit songs of the year include Ludwig van Beethoven’s Mass in C, the ballet Hélène and Paris, the operas Joseph and La Vestale, and Thomas Moore’s publication of Irish Melodies. Again, actually it’s 1802. So replace those with Beethoven’s Second Symphony, the opera Urania, and Franz Kommer’s Concerto for 2 Clarinets in E flat major, Op. 35. Sorry. I don’t have many sources other than Wikipedia. Phil was kinda lucky with that one. 1807 was pretty good for music. 1802 sucked. While in non-musical news, Napoleon makes an attack on Russia, Aaron Burr is acquitted of conspiracy, the England/Argentina soccer rivalry has pre-season friendly as Britain mounts a disastrous attack on Buenos Aires, and Robert Fulton launches his first American steamboat. And I tried looking up other stuff in 1802 and couldn’t find any in the five minutes it took to write this bit. Sorry.
While in London, William Blake abandons his masterpiece actually he’s just sent a letter to his friend Thomas Butt. Heh. Butt.
Meanwhile, in the time between this story and the last, (or, at least, the last one we’ve so far covered,) there’s been a bit of a scuffle primarily in the Middle East, one in which the United States and United Kingdomand royal sympathies – so often clothed as though of a part with gentle living and good government – conceal the actions of those true and monstrous traitors who have suckled their love of slavery from the teat of theShe-Wolf. All Earthly affairs thus lightly conceal the true conflict that shapes the cosmos, and all occurrences are as portents of the divine, or of the damned.
It’s November 15th 2013. A 30-something Faction Paradox fan has just been asked to help a friend she’s never met in person with an emergency by writing a guest post for his blog that she’s grown obsessed with.
It is March 26th 2005. Despite what anyone else will tell you, a terrible calamity has occurred. The impossible dream of a thousand alchemists has been snatched away, smothered in the crib. An imposter has laid claim to the mantle of Material Social Progress forcing the true heir to the throne into hiding Yet as the divine recedes, it seems also terribly closer.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 78 (The Time Traveller’s Wife)

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Alison J Campbell’s piece on LOST was so well received, she was inspired to write something else. How could I possibly say no? Technically this one should go somewhere in the Moffat era, but I’m still on vacation, so think of it as a message from the future, a New Year’s present – for the moment.

Aviary Box by Joseph Cornell. Trust me on this.
The problem with time-travel stories isn’t in the contradictory nature of their construction — neither in the apparent paradox of information that doesn’t seem to have a causal origination, nor in the notion that time can be rewritten. The main problem with time-travel stories is that they’re too often taken literally. Time travel stories are inherently metaphorical, because our most basic conceptions of time itself are ensconced in metaphor. Without the metaphor of Time as a Dimension of Space, wherein everything we know experientially about moving through the three dimensions gets applied to Time, we would never have the concept of time-travel, let alone time-travel stories. (We also conceive of Time as a Moving Object, particularly a River; and third as a Resource, something that can be apportioned and managed as other resources are.) 
The second and much less trivial mistake is that time-travel stories aren’t logical constructions, but are laid on the foundation of dramatic concerns. It’s in this respect that Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife really shines (unlike its botched movie adaptation) and most likely why it’s been so thoroughly pilfered by Doctor Who. 
Indeed, it bears many features of a Doctor Who story. First and foremost, it plays with the notion of smashing different genres together. One the one hand, we’ve got the stalwart SF trope of time-travel, presented in science terms – Henry DeTamble is a Chrono-Displaced Person, his Chrono-Impairment deriving from some redundant “clock genes” that create an electromagmetic pulse in his brain, not unlike an epilectic seizure, which sends him careening backwards in forwards in time, without apparent rhyme or reason, and certainly without any control. In this respect he’s not unlike the good Doctor himself, at least in the early days of the show, when he could barely navigate the TARDIS.
On the other hand we’ve got a romance, detailing his relationship with Clare Abshire, who isn’t a time-traveler. We get first dates, hot sex, a wedding, and triangles for them both. Henry is the leading candidate for Reformed Rake, the bad-boy turned good by the influence of the right woman; for much of the story, Henry and Clare are Star-Crossed Lovers, kept apart by Henry’s fatalistic displacement; at the same time, they are truly Fated To Be Together. There are, in fact, a lot of novel ways that Romance tropes can be exploited through the mechanism of time-travel.
Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that TTTW is neither a SF story, nor a Romance, nor really a weird cross-breed of the two. On the one hand, it’s rather slim in its use of SF tropes – the genetic explanation is dodgy as all hell, and aside from the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals that Henry takes in a vain attempt to master his condition, there aren’t any scientific concerns to speak of at all, at all.
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