News from Elsewhere
Phil Sandifer very kindly asked me to contribute a guest post for his site. Here it is. I’m quite proud of it.
It’s about Merlin, strangely enough… but me being me, I ramble off topic.…
guest post
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 74: Merlin
Jack Graham, of Shabogan Grafitti, asked me a month or so ago if I’d seen Merlin. I said I hadn’t, but it was on the list to cover before Season Two of Sarah Jane Adventures. He then proceeded to tell me how appalling it was, and I decided that I’d rather read him writing about Merlin than actually watch it.
The Dragon, the Villain and the Closet
Whoah… where am I? I was just rummaging around in the back of the wardrobe and suddenly here I am, surrounded by fractal paisley.
Ah, I remember. I was supposed to come to this land of hallucinogenic monochrome and talk about… get this… Merlin.
Yes, Merlin, the extremely popular series – made by BBC Wales and Freemantle – which ran from 2008 to 2012. I recently watched it all the way through, for reasons that defy rational explication.
Okay, first the background. I’ll do this stuff in bullet points, so to speak, because it doesn’t really interest me.
BBC Wales. Julie Gardner (among others). Family show based on Arthurian legends. Various attempts prior to this (one involving Chris Chibnall). Tone based on Russell T. Davies’ mega-successful reinvention of Doctor Who, and on Smallville (i.e. the adventures of a famous hero when still a teenager). Openly and obviously a post-Who-revival show… not least because the two leads (Colin Morgan as Merlin and Bradley James as Arthur) look like they’re agents of the Remote, remembered into existence by people thinking about David Tennant. Morgan was created by someone who concentrated on Tennant’s lean and dark geekiness while James was constructed by someone more impressed by his cheekbones and pout.
Basic set-up. It’s the Middle Ages (sort of). In Camelot (which, in this version, is a kingdom rather than just a castle), magic is banned – and by magic we also mean Druidism and anything falling under the rather vague category of ‘the old religion’. Uther Pendragon, the king, has persecuted the sorcerers out of Camelot, and burns any he finds still within his borders. This doesn’t stop him trusting various random strangers who turn up wearing long magician-robes and long magician-beards, carrying magicky-looking staffs covered in runes and zodiacal symbols… because he’s a doofus. (He’s also played by Anthony Stewart Head, an actor whose immense popularity I find utterly baffling. Honestly, he’s not even talented enough to do coffee commercials.) Merlin is a young sorcerer. Naturally, he goes to live in Camelot, right by the king’s castle. Because that’s what I’d do if I was magic: head straight for the nearest genocidal tyrant who likes burning magic people alive. It later transpires that his mother sent him to Camelot for his safety. Let’s say that again: they lived outside Camelot, and when she discovered her son was magic, she sent him into Camelot… for his safety. (This gives you some idea of the writing.) Merlin promptly gets a job as the (only) personal servant to young, arrogant Prince Arthur.
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 41.5 (Mystery Science Theater 3000)
Seth Aaron Hershman, who is too awesome to fit in one blog, and so has two, fills in another major gap. Also, in case you missed it, I’ve put all of my books on sale through New Year’s.
This is a guest post written by a rank amateur. Please turn down your expectations, where applicable.
It’s November 24rd, 1988. Robin Beck remains at number one with “First Time,” a situation resolved two weeks later when Cliff Richard unseats her with “Mistletoe and Wine.” Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Rick Astley, and Salt-N-Pepa also chart.
In real news, Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan. The number of HIV positive people in the UK is pegged by a government report at 50,000, and it’s estimated that by 1992 as many as 17,000 people may die of the disease. Health Minister Edwina Currie causes a massive crash in egg sales through a carelessly worded claim about salmonella. The last shipbuilding facilities around Sunderland close. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuts.
The degree to which that last one qualifies as “real news” is at once unsurprising and completely and utterly baffling. Of course it’s not news to most people—MST3K debuts somewhat quietly on a third-rate UHF station in Minneapolis and St. Paul. But Joel Hodgson, the show’s lead writer and “host”, has appeared on Letterman and Saturday Night Live, and this has granted him a small degree of local celebrity. The show gets popular enough that, of that first local season, only three of its twenty-one episodes have not been recorded for posterity and put up on YouTube.
The degree to which recordings of MST3K are important is hard to explain without overstating. Unlike Doctor Who, MST3K is debuting at the cusp of the home video movement, so it’s unlikely any episode would well and truly be lost for good. To our knowledge, no episode actually is—even the three missing local episodes are safely in the possession of producer Jim Mallon, who isn’t willing to finagle the legal rights to the films therein in order to secure the release of what he and everyone else involved consider subpar work notable only as historical curiosities. And yet, there’s the thing—without home video recordings, there’d be no way to watch many of the episodes.
At this point it’s probably worth explaining what, exactly, MST3K is for the uninitiated. Joel Hodgson plays Joel Robinson, a janitor for some nebulous technology company which houses a couple of mad scientists in its subbasements. Said mad scientists abduct Joel, chuck him into a satellite with an onboard movie theater, and attempt to drive him insane with B-movies and educational shorts. In response, Joel builds some robots, and two of them, Tom Servo and Crow, join him in the theater each week to make fun of the movie in real-time while silhouetted against the bottom of the screen. Every twenty minutes or so, the film cuts out and Joel and the ‘bots return to the satellite’s bridge for a few minutes to discuss the movie, parody it, or engage in some irreverence.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 49.5: Farscape
Logan Locksley helps fill in a needed gap.
The year is 1996. It’s a leap year. As usual for a year on Earth, all sorts of things are happening. Independence Day, Twister, and Mission: Impossible are among the highest grossing films of the year. Musical hits include Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something, Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, and Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic. In other news, a chess computer called Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov for the first time, the Nintendo 64 console is released, and France performs the last atomic bomb test.
On May 27, the Doctor Who TV movie starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor airs in the UK. The film fails to result in a new American co-produced series for several reasons, but mostly because it isn’t a very good movie. It kind of sucks, to be honest.
Hey there. I am, quite obviously, not Phil Sandifer. I’m not nearly as eloquent or erudite (am I using that word right? [Other than applying it to me, yes. – Phil]) as Mr. Sandifer, but I heard he was looking for someone to write a guest post and I jumped at the chance. He has graciously accepted me as a guest writer, and here I am. My name is Logan Locksley, and I’m here to talk about Farscape.
When were we? 1996. After the dismal Eighth Doctor TV movie, some other things happen, and 1996 comes to an end. Let’s fast-forward.
The year is 1999. Once again, all kinds of stuff happens. But we’re only concerned with one minor event. On November 29, a strange but endearing science fiction series called Farscape airs its first episode in the UK. Noted for its emotional poignancy, complex stories, and irreverent humor (as well as the use of puppets from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop), Farscape generates a relatively small but fiercely loyal fanbase.
Again, let’s fast-forward.
It is now 2002. In September, the Sci-Fi Channel opts to withdraw its funding of Farscape’s fifth season, cancelling the series just before Season 4 begins airing. Fans are angry and disappointed, and the cancellation receives considerable notice by news media. Mere hours after star Ben Browder and producer Brian Henson announce the cancellation during an online chat with fans, a campaign to “Save Farscape” has begun.
On March 10, 2003 “Bad Timing” airs in the UK. Farscape’s final episode ends on a truly bizarre, totally Farscapean cliffhanger, leaving many fans more than a little angry and confused. The fan campaign continues.
Fast forward to 2004. Thanks in large part to the massive “Save Farscape” fan campaign, several financial backers have given their support to Brian Henson. On October 17 and 18, a two-part miniseries called Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars airs in the US. The Peacekeeper Wars resolves the cliffhanger ending of “Bad Timing” and wraps up several unresolved plot threads.
For obvious reasons, 2004 is remembered as a noteworthy year for ‘Scapers. (Star Trek has Trekkies, Farscape has ‘Scapers.)
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 73: Final Crisis
Andrew Hickey writes on Final Crisis. His book on fifty years of Doctor Who, Fifty Stories for Fifty Years, is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, and, for print editions, Lulu. You’ll also probably enjoy the interview he just did with me for Mindless Ones.
Narrative Collapse
“There was a cosmic war. And the powers of evil won. And I know how this sounds, but they’re here among us now. I was kinda hoping you might be able to help me put some kind of team together.”
Grant Morrison, at the time Final Crisis was being released, said (in a now-deleted blog post, so I can’t quote it directly) that Final Crisis was clearly tapping into the same zeitgeist as Doctor Who, because of the number of superficial similarities between his story and The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. He may even have believed it. But Final Crisis rather conclusively missed the zeitgeist at least as far as its intended audience were concerned.
Both Final Crisis and The Stolen Earth were inspired by the comic-book tradition of the crossover, where you get characters from many different series, all of which ostensibly take place in the same fictional universe, to come together to face a threat too big for any one of them. In fact both were inspired specifically by one such crossover, the crossover by which all other crossovers in comics are judged, 1985’s Crisis On Infinite Earths, by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Len Wein, Jerry Ordway and others.
That story was designed to clear up a DC multiverse which, according to geeks, had become “too complicated”, because of a plethora of different universes containing different versions of DC’s characters. The fact that this could be comprehended in seconds by any eight-year-old child reading the comics – “Oh, Old Superman and Flash With A Hat are from Earth-2, and Proper Superman and Proper Flash are from Earth-1, OK” – didn’t stop it from being an incessant source of worry for any reader who thought that Marvel’s self-consistent universe (a result of all Marvel’s main characters being the creation of three men – Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and, especially, Jack Kirby) was something that their main rivals should emulate.
And so, over the course of a year, came a comic which, however misguided its aim, was truly huge in scope. Its story involved a threat that destroyed a literally infinite number of earths, and saw the remaining five earths merged into one, and the whole of their history rewritten, so that where there had been an infinite multiverse there had now only ever been one universe. It also saw the deaths of beloved characters like Supergirl and The Flash (both of them got better).
It was a war in time, sparked initially by the actions of the oldest race of beings in the universe, the immortal godlike beings who claim the authority to police the universe, and who live at the centre of it. But it soon turned into a war between an absolute evil and a corrupted, broken, good, that ended with the whole of history being rewritte, and only a handful remembering that it had ever been different.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Coffee (LOST)
“Artists should not be trusted. If an artist is not deceitfulevery so often in the cause of his art, then he is a poor artist.”
— Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
LOST was quite possibly one of the biggest shows to hit television in the last decade. More remarkable was the fact that it was ostensibly “cult television” and yet it still hit it big in the mainstream. It was never the highest rated show on television, but it was in the American top-20 for most of its six-year run, it was the most recorded TV show at the time, and it was also an international sensation. It garnered 55 Emmy nominations (the American equivalent of BAFTAs) winning 11; many critics once called one of the greatest shows ever made.
As far as this blog is concerned, we shouldn’t be surprised. Like Doctor Who, LOST provided a means by which disparate genres could be smashed together. Doctor Who has the TARDIS; LOST had The Island. A place for people who were metaphorically lost in their lives, it allowed all kinds of different stories to play out. One week The Fugitive would be running about helping people and all the while trying to evade the law. Next week there might be a medical drama, followed by a comedy, a family drama, a love story, a con game, or a tragedy. This all got mixed in with the adventure of exploring a mysterious Island, populated by ghosts, time travel, an Island god, and a Smoke Monster for good measure. It hit the sweet spot of soap tropes and “genre” mythology.
Today its reputation is far different, and it’s impossible to go back and watch it again without keeping this in mind. The finale (as was the case for most of its final season) was largely panned, and it isn’t unusual to find it on a critic’s “10 worst” list of some sort or another. People expected answers that were never delivered; new but less compelling characters came to the forefront; the show veered into iconography better found in a greeting card penned by Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Which really begs the question: What the hell happened?
~~~ whooosh ~~~
KATE: We have to go back for him.
CHARLIE: Go back? There? Kate, there’s a certain
gargantuan quality about this thing.
(1×01: Pilot, Part 1)
~~~ whooosh ~~~
It’s August 15th, 2005. Oasis is poised to hit number one, with McFly, Babyshambles, Iron Maiden, and British Whale all charting. Americans are killing Iraqis, but Indonesia signs a peace treaty with the Free Aceh Movement, so there’s that. India celebrates its 60th Independence Day. Helios Airways Flight 522 crashes near Athens, killing 121.
While on Netflix, it’s Disc One of Season One of LOST. I inhale it quicker than Bill Clinton can suck down a cigar. Yes, I’m late, almost a year late to the LOST party (it premiered on September 22nd, the Fall Equinox of 2004) but it won’t take me long to go back and get caught up.
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Guest Post: Moths Ate My Girls Aloud CD
Abigail Brady will get the sole power to decide if you ever get to see me play Soldeed. She is also responsible for starting the entire Chelsea Manning feud on Wikipedia by moving the article to its correct title. Beyond that, she’s invaluable for checking random facts about London for various projects and is an Iron Man villain. She also happily stepped in for a guest post on short notice. She is, in short, one of the five greatest people never to be Verity Lambert.
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Now, I know what you’re thinking: what’s the connection between Phonogram and Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf other than on November 17th, 2013 I went straight from seeing a panel discussion containing the writer of the first to a performance of the second? After all, one is a comic taking an adult perspective on the someone from the middle of nowhere in the West Midlands’ teenage obsession, whereas the other… is the exact same thing but in plural.
Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf is a one-man standup show by Toby Hadoke, C-list Doctor Who celebrity, actor, writer and comic. It debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, and did a West End run in 2008. If you never saw it live, you’re now officially out of luck, as that performance I saw was supposedly the last (I speak as someone who went to two of Pitchshifter’s last tours) – an audio CD version released in 2007 by the BBC is your best bet. It’s a picture of the role that Doctor Who played in his life from his early childhood up to about 2005. There’s nothing massively unexpected: he is obsessed with it as a youngun, and eventually starts to lose hope about a return, then the new series is announced, which is quite good, and he bonds with his son over it. It’s quite funny: he does angry very well, with a nice sideline in self-mockery. The performance was double-billed with his new show My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver, not entirely to the latter’s benefit. The biggest laugh that Sonic Screwdriver got was in the opening, just after a 15-minute interval, when he kept to his usual script and said “you may have seen my other show, Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf”… Well, yes.
Phonogram is a comic, as well, but the other kind. This one is by Kieron Gillen (writing) and Jamie McKelvie (arting), and was published from 2006 to 2010 by Image Comics. Its topic is neatly summarised by the identity equation that Gillen scrawls when signing copies: “MUSIC = MAGIC”. It has an almost Mooreish take on matters, with the magic of music simultaneously being wholly metaphoric and completely literal. Thus far there are thirteen issues over two volumes. In the first, Rue Britannia, protagonist David Kohl, one of the few practitioners of music-magic (phonomancers) still rooted in the British guitar music scene of the 1990s, is tempted by the goddess Britannia into accepting a revival of Britpop.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 61 (Big Brother)
I could never have written this post as well as Richard Jones, and so I asked them to step in for a guest post. This is one of the best decisions I have made in the course of this project.
In 2009 everyone was hard at work writing blog articles in anticipation of ‘The End of Time’, the grand finale to Doctor Who’s Davies era. io9’s contribution took an interesting approach, offering a list of the errors the production ran the risk of making.
“Though there’s absolutely no denying Davies has successfully forged a massive popular (and, to a slightly lesser extent, critical) success with his revival of Doctor Who,” wrote Alasdair Wilkins, “I’m sorry to say that I’m still not entirely convinced he’s all that good at writing episodes of Doctor Who.” Yet hope remained. Perhaps Davies could learn from the mistakes the article identified and seize this last chance to convince? A key point on this syllabus of errors was the way Davies’ Big Climactic Epics interacted with pop culture. The article made it clear that it didn’t “have anything against Richard Dawkins having a cameo on Doctor Who” but that it’s “kind of a shame that Christopher Eccleston’s final appearance will forever be linked to Big Brother.”
For Wilkins, timelessness and obtrusiveness were what made Dawkins okay and Davina not, but for some who find Big Brother’s role in the 2005 finale to be a thing of shame there may be a few more cultural value judgements weighing down. Many fans have a lot invested in the idea that Doctor Who is one sort of television and Big Brother is another. For them to be occupying the same space so brazenly is a challenge. This is the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration story. This will be in lists. This grants “a Dalek plot involving Big Brother” the same eternally iconic status as “falling off a big telescope.” What are we supposed to do with this?
The BBC have on three occasions obtained the rights to broadcast shows using the Big Brother format. Two of them made it very clear how they felt about it. Extras was tediously and hypocritically anti, while Celebrity Big Brother was so uncritical that it found itself reabsorbed as an enduring stand of Big Brother, the fact that it was once a strand of Comic Relief quietly forgotten. If the very thought of Big Brother makes you angry then you’re going to get on fine with Extras and have no truck with Celebrity Big Brother. But what are you supposed to make of ‘Bad Wolf’?
It feels like it should be a showdown. The ratings demolition of ITV’s Celebrity Wrestling is such a part of the 2005 season’s industry mythology that it almost feels like that’s the arc here. Scripted Family Drama returns to a broadcasting landscape dominated by Reality TV! Scripted Family Drama casts down the Wrestley Champion sent by Reality TV to oppose it! Scripted Family Drama arrives at the Castle of Reality TV to do final battle with Big Brother, UNHOLY SIRE OF THE DARK POWER THAT HOLDS THE LAND IN THRALL!
Guest Post: Odin and the Doctor
Fairly early in the process of writing this blog I realized that it was useful to have some prior context for a given story before writing an entry on it. And so I bought the About Time books, which are fabulous and were my anchor for several stories in the classic series about which I’d have had little interesting to say on my own. But I was also, early on, aware that I was eventually going to hit the new series and there would be no About Time to help me.
The solution, I realized, was to get a friend hooked on Doctor Who so they would blog about it and I could just take off on their posts. Unfortunately for me, the friend I chose was Anna Wiggins. The problem with Anna, you see, is that she is vastly more clever and intelligent than I can ever hope to be, and so when my blog hits Series Six, about which she has blogged extensively, I am going to abruptly be found out as the pathetic fool I am and all of my readers are going to, quite correctly, go follow Anna instead. Oops.
In order to ease the transition to all of you abandoning me in favor of my smarter and far cooler friend, I thought I should get a guest post from Anna about the relationship between the Doctor and Odin. And so I did.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, several Germanic tribes migrated to England. And they brought their gods with them. The British isles would be settled, resettled, and invaded by many peoples over the next several hundred years. The bones of Britain contain traces of dozens of cultures, and many of those cultures were Heathen.
To be clear, I’m using ‘Heathen’ in a fairly specific and uncommon sense. Prior to the encroachment of Christianity, a similar worldview and set of religious beliefs was practiced widely across Northern Europe and Scandinavia. The Romans termed these people ‘heathen’. So, I am using the term ‘Heathen’ to refer to this basic religious system, which largely included the same gods, myths, and folk legends. The more commonly known term for this religious system and worldview is ‘Norse’, as in ‘Norse Mythology’. But that is a misnomer – in practice, the same basic set of beliefs and practices held sway throughout northern Europe, and included, at various times, various parts of the British Isles. (I will also mention ‘modern Heathenry’ in the course of this entry – which is a reference to the reconstructionist religion that revives the worship of the Heathen gods)
And so, in the late 1980s, Doctor Who began to draw on these Heathen bones of British culture. The Seventh Doctor was cast as an explicitly Odinic figure, and this vision of the Doctor operating in a Heathen mode would have a lasting influence on the show.
Odin is widely known as the ‘chief god’ of the Heathen pantheon, and as a ‘god of war’ and, if you have a particularly verbose summary on hand, maybe a ‘god of secrets’ or a ‘god of wisdom’.…
Guest Post: David Bowie and Doctor Who
Among the ways in which the end was prepared for is that I, suspecting that the Logopolis post would maybe take a bit longer to write than most, decided to secure a guest post for today. Not wanting to leave you in the hands of anyone other than the best, of course, I asked Chris O’Leary of the fabulous Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which was quite rightly one of Time Magazine’s 25 best blogs of 2011.
I’ll be back Wednesday with the first of three posts I’ve got before we get to Castrovalva, two of which will belong to a brand new sub-series to go with Time Can Be Rewritten, Pop Between Realities, and You Were Expecting Someone Else. Then a week from Wednesday we’ll kick off the Peter Davison era proper. (Speaking of which… were there any good BBC Books novels set in the Davison era? I’ve got a golden turkey penciled in for that slot now, but if there’s something of actual quality I’d prefer that.)
But before all of those terrible things happen, you get the pleasure of a blog post written by someone who’s actually good. Enjoy it while it lasts.
—-
David Bowie, for much of his life, has been considered an ideal candidate for various iconic TV/film parts that he will never play. He’s the great James Bond villain who never was, for instance. And from the ‘70s on, Bowie was regularly rumored to appear on Doctor Who in some manner, from playing a supporting role (allegedly considered as a replacement for Alexei Sayle in “Revelation of the Daleks”) to a villain (an eternal candidate for the Master) to playing the Doctor himself.
Who and Bowie, two modern British institutions whose trademark has been a commitment to continual transformation, are also one long parallel, with each reflecting the other from their timelines to their aesthetics. They were born in the same ward: Bowie’s first-ever recording (an unreleased track for Decca called “I Never Dreamed”) was cut in London in August 1963, within a month of the shooting of the first “An Unearthly Child.” Bowie’s Mod and R&B singles coincide with William Hartnell’s term; Bowie’s sudden turn to Anthony Newley-infused psychedelia begins directly upon the arrival of Patrick Troughton, and “Space Oddity,” the culmination of this era, debuts mere weeks after the end of “The War Games.” Phil has already gone to great lengths to find connections between Ziggy Stardust Bowie and Jon Pertwee’s tenure. And the Tom Baker years are Bowie at his most visionary and influential, from Diamond Dogs through Station to Station, the Berlin trilogy and Scary Monsters.
You can keep it going for as long as you’d like. Bowie’s floundering in the mid-‘80s coincides with Who’s hiatus (during which Bowie recorded “Dancing in the Street”) and the ugly desperation of the Colin Baker years; the 1996 “modernized” TV movie appears just as Bowie’s dyed his hair copper and is attempting drum ‘n’ bass. And Bowie’s public career ends precisely at the start of Who’s successful revival: “Rose” was being filmed in Cardiff in early summer 2004 just as Bowie was playing what would be his final concerts.