outside the government
Outside the Government: Mark of the Berserker
Outside the Government: Secrets of the Stars
Outside the Government: The Day of the Clown
Outside the Government: The Last Sontaran
Outside the Government 15: Newtons Sleep
Outside the Government: Exit Wounds
You did notice the giveaway of two free copies of my new book on Flood that I started on Saturday, yes? You should go take guesses and win my books.
It’s April 4th, 2008. My long nightmare of being too lazy to check whether Duffy is a single person or a band is over, as now Estelle is at number one with “American Boy.” Madonna, Sam Sparro, and domestic abuser Chris Brown also chart. In news, the Justice Department approves the merger of the US’s two satellite radio companies, reflecting the steady decline of that spectacularly wrong technological bet. Harriet Harman becomes the first female Labour Party MP to answer at Prime Minister’s Questions. And researchers at Newcastle University create a human-cow embryo that survives for three days.
While on television, back to debuting first on BBC Two we have Exit Wounds, the second season finale of Torchwood, in which a large swath of the original cast is killed off. The story itself is, of course, a hot mess. To suggest that Gray does not quite hold up as a villain is the height of understatement. The structure, as ever, is lovingly ripped off from Joss Whedon, with the “little bad” being supplanted in the end of the narrative by the “big bad.” But there’s a fundamental error here, which is that you cannot supplant James Marsters with Lachlan Nieboer playing a man who has vowed revenge on a seven year old for letting go of his hand. The idea of a figure from Jack’s past coming back to haunt him works, as does the idea of having one who’s a bigger deal than Captain John, but Gray is so transparently created for the purpose of being the shock villain for the season finale that there’s no substance to it. He’s not a part of Jack’s past – he’s a series finale “big bad” who’s been casually grafted into Jack’s past, at a point so early on that it’s not even particularly interesting.
But by now the show seems to be staring into the mirror and realizing that it’s not working. Gray doesn’t work, but the episode seems to know this, recognizing that he’s not the point of the narrative. Jack chloroforms him out of the plot at the 2/3 mark, and he doesn’t even enter it until the 1/3 mark, making him a strictly Act II concern. He’s in the story for all of fifteen minutes. The story is really about… Ah, but here’s the rub. It’s not about anything. The first act is another “oh no, total devastation to the city.” The second act is ostensibly about Gray, but turns out to have been about meticulously moving Tosh and Owen into position for their death conversation. And by the third act we’re on to a story that was really about killing off Tosh and Owen. The structure holds together as a piece of steadily moving action television – the Doctor Who team has long been solid at doing stories that change shape and focus midway through.…
Outside the Government: Fragments
The week of my coauthor Alex Reed and I guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog in promotion of our book on They Might Be Giants’s Flood continues with Alex counting down the ten best TMBG non-album tracks. You can buy the book here.
It’s March 21st, 2008.
In Miracle Day there is a startlingly large continuity gaffe when Jack knows the “fixed point in time” explanation that he’s given in Utopia several decades too early. And yet this seems, in light of Fragments, to be just one of many gaffes in attempting to reconstruct Jack’s experience of the twentieth century. While employed by Torchwood, after all, he is seen to, for no apparent reason, enlist in the military to go to Pakistan, work for a travelling circus, and go romp around the US for a while. There is no coherent timeline to be had of Jack’s twentieth century.
This is strange given that the norm for Torchwood is rapidly shifting to being about various secrets from Jack’s long life that he’s been hiding. And yet these secrets exist in a fundamentally incoherent timeline. Jack’s twentieth century is so oversignified that it can contain anything. There are consciously no limitations to the secrets contained within it. He’s gone from having two years of his life that he knows nothing about to a hundred that the audience knows nothing about.
Which makes his life in Fragments odd, given that it is defined in essence by his being captured by Torchwood and steadily coming to accept their ways. The narrative is one of corruption – Jack goes from being appalled by Torchwood’s tendency to randomly murder aliens because it can’t think of anything to do with them to running the joint. Yes, he runs it in a more humane and less murderous way, but this is still the sense of progress that suggests that putting less evil people in charge of corrupt structures will fix them. Which is to say, New Labour.
In many ways this perfectly sets Jack up for the future of the show, in that it properly makes him a site of anxiety within the narrative. Jack is not a heo, but someone who has been corrupted by the system he sets out to work – a concrete demonstration of all that is wrong with the logic of changing the system from within. And yet on the other hand Jack is forever without – external to the world and to its systems. His status as a fixed point in time becomes all too symbolic; he becomes locked as a bridge between the world and its eccentric spaces. This liminal space is a source of danger. Jack becomes the eternal transgressor – always in between two spaces, but, unlike the character he derives from (who remains unspeakable within Torchwood) never moving as such. He is stuck on Earth, and festering there.
When, on New Year’s Day, he is finally given control of Torchwood Three, it is visibly a poisoned chalice. The site of too many crimes and murders.…
Outside the Government: Adrift
All this week my coauthor Alex Reed and I are guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog in celebration of our book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood coming out on Thursday. The latest post is my short essay “How to be Fifteen,” a reflection on teenage music fandom in the late 90s. If you miss the Nintendo Project, this post is in a similar vein.
It’s March 19th, 2008. Duffy’s at number one with “Mercy,” with Leona Lewis, Alphabeat, Utah Saints, and Nickelback also charting. Nickelback has been charting for a really long time, actually. It’s kind of unnerving. In news, Queen Elizabeth opens Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Geraldine Ferraro resigns from the Clinton campaign for saying stupid things, and Wales win the Six Nations tournament, taking the rugby Grand Slam in the process. There’s sizable unrest in Tibet, Bear Stearns goes under as the Great Recession gathers steam, and Obama gives his big race speech in Philadelphia.
On television, meanwhile, it’s Adrift. Where Something Borrowed marked a satisfying return to Torchwood’s strengths, Adrift marks an unabashed celebration of those strengths. Double banked with Fragments, it pushes the bulk of the regular cast to the margins to tell a story that is focused intimately on Gwen Cooper and on her personal supporting cast of Rhys and Andy. From the start of the series it has been clear that Gwen is its real star. Captain Jack may have the Doctor Who connection and the leading man charisma, but Gwen has the astonishingly gifted Eve Myles, who routinely offers an impressively brave performance that imbues the character with a warmth and humanity that never makes her feel like she was designed to be part of a generic action-adventure ensemble.
What really underlines just how impressive Gwen is as a character is the fact that even here, at the end of the first season, elements of her character that were designed to let her function as the “viewpoint” character are still in place. Initially, after all, Gwen was the character through which we found out about Torchwood Three. The first few episodes used the order in which she learned things as the order in which they were revealed to the audience, and her character was defined by her inexperience and lack of knowledge. By this point in the show, of course, that’s long gone; Gwen is thoroughly experienced with Torchwood and hyper-capable.
And yet elements of her initial characterization persist. Gwen wasn’t just a fish-out-of-water character, but a character who was defined by the fact that she did not originate in the world of Torchwood, which was first presented as a strange and eccentric space that superimposed itself over her world. What’s key in Everything Changes is in hindsight the way in which she slowly remembers her trip to the Hub, as a flickering dream that plays out over her world, not quite making contact. She is an ordinary person who comes to Torchwood. The next episode makes clear that this is a trait unique to her – every other member of Torchwood either originates from that world or has their ordinary life torn down around them before they join.…
Outside the Government: From Out of the Rain
It’s March 12th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Taio Cruz, Alphabeat, Westlife, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets wrapped up in a prostitution bust and resigns, Barack Obama wins some more primaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling unveils his first budget.