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A Short Guide to Janelle Monáe and the Metropolis Saga

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The June bonus post, as voted upon by my generous Patrons. 

A large amount of the critical discourse surrounding Janelle Monáe has focused on the question of why she hasn’t been more successful. I mean, sure, she’s got a major label record deal, is one of only a handful of black women to run her own record label, is one of the most critically acclaimed artists working, and is making a good living while making art according to her own vision and nobody else’s, but her best-performing album only hit #5 in the charts, so obviously she’s doing something wrong. And looking at her work and her career, I think I know what her problem is: she’s never had a white male science fiction fan whose only credentials for writing about music are having co-authored a book about They Might Be Giants write a detailed guide to her work.

An appalling oversight, to be sure, but one I’m only too happy to help correct.
The bulk of Monáe’s work consists of the five (and counting) part Metropolis Saga, released over two albums and an EP, and currently projected to run for seven parts, although it was previously slated as four parts. The suite focuses on the stories of Monáe’s alter-ego Cindi Mayweather, a time-traveling android.
Suite 0: The Audition
Monáe’s 2003 self-released album The Audition is not actually a part of the Metropolis Saga, but contains two songs that introduce the themes and concepts she would later explore in the Metropolis Saga: “Metropolis” and “Cindi.”
The first of these is interesting in that it serves as a concise and bespoke sketch of the Metropolis setting, describing a run down and oppressive city (“Population ten zillion and six”) from the perspective of a “cyber girl” living “on the wired side of town.” Most of the song is a liltingly wistful number about the unnamed narrator’s dreams of freedom, with a spoken word bridge about the prejudices faced by “wired folk” on the grounds that “we have no feelings no memories or minds.” Several major concepts that will be expanded on in the Metropolis Saga proper are introduced here, most notably the repressive Droid Control and the character of Anthony Greendown. 
The second is a two minute ballad that has no overt sci-fi trappings, instead being about the gulf between one’s dreams and one’s ordinary self, singing about “that girl in the mirror / with hair like a rock star / she wants to dance but she has cold feet/ her confidence is low / so much talent but who’ll know / when she’s afraid to follow her dreams.” But the lyrics make reference to trying “to be Cindi, in hopes that they’d notice,” a title drop that alludes to the robotic alter-ego she would eventually flesh out in detail. Crucial – indeed, as will eventually become clear, the entire point of the exercise – is the aspirational quality, one that’s implicit in the demo album’s title, The Audition. This is, in many ways, the eternal plot of the Metropolis Saga: Janelle Monáe’s continuing attempt to become Cindi Mayweather, a process that is indistinguishable from her continuing attempt to define what that means. 
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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.07: You Win or You Die

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones is brought to you by my backers at Patreon.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Eddard Stark
Stags of King’s Landing: Robert Baratheon, Joffrey Baratheon
The Lion, Jaime Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Vaes Dothrak: Daenerys Targaryen
Bears of Vaes Dothrak: Jorah Mormont
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Kraken of Winterefll: Theon Greyjoy
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
The Eyrie is deserted. 
The episode is in eleven parts. The first runs five minutes; it is set at the Lannister encampment in the Riverlands. The opening shot is an establishing shot of the camp. 
The second runs eight minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing.  The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime and Tywin Lannister to Cersei. The other is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Cersei leaving the godswood to a street in Flea Bottom. 
The third runs two minutes and is set in Winterfell; the transition is from Ros to Theon. 
The fourth runs two minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Osha talking about the things north of the Wall to Jon sighting the returning horse of a dead ranger.
The fifth runs seven minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by family and dialogue, from Jon Snow reacting to Benjen’s empty horse to Ned. It features the death of Robert Baratheon, murdered by a pig (and by Cersei Lannister). 
The sixth runs six minutes and is set in Vaes Dothrak; the transition is by dialogue, from Ned and Varys talking about the order to kill Daenerys to Daenerys and the attempt on her life.
The seventh runs seven minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by family, from Jorah to Lord Commander Mormont. 
The eighth runs six minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Ned Stark.
The ninth runs two minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by family, from Ned Stark to Jon Snow.
The tenth runs four minutes and is set in Vaes Dothrak; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Daenerys Targaryen.
The last runs seven minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by theme, from Daenerys riding off to take the Iron Throne with King Robert’s assassin being dragged behind her horse to Ned Stark being informed of King Robert’s death and the passage of the Iron Throne to King Joffrey. The final shot is of Ned Stark with Littlefinger’s dagger at his throat, as Littlefinger hisses “Mornington Crescent.” 
Analysis
Given that it is the last episode to feature him in the bulk of it, it is fitting that “You Win or You Die” provides Ned Stark with a classical tragedy in miniature, taking him from his position of relative strength at the end of “A Golden Crown” as someone who has figured out the truth of Jon Arryn’s death and who literally need only succeed in making it into a room with Robert Baratheon and pointing out that Joffrey isn’t his son before he’ll have basically won to being completely and utterly defeated.
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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.04: Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones is generously funded by my backers at Patreon.
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Eddard Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark
Stags of King’s Landing: Robert Baratheon, Joffrey Baratheon
Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister
The Direwolf Catelyn Stark
Dragons of Vaes Dothrak: Daenerys Targaryen, Viserys Targaryen
Bears of Vaes Dothrak: Jorah Mormont
Mockingbird’s of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Robb Stark, Bran Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
And the Lion of Winterfell, Tyrion Lannister
The episode is in twelve parts. The first runs five minutes and is set in Winterfell; the first shot is of a raven flying through the castle as Bran stands drawing a bow. 
The second runs three minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is deceptive continuity, with a cut from Theon watching Tyrion ride away to an overhead shot of a man on horseback who turns out not to be Tyrion. 
The third runs seven minutes and is set in Vaes Dothrak; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Daenerys Targaryen.
The fourth runs seven minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Viserys talking about the Red Keep to Sansa and Septa Mordane walking into it. The other is five minutes long; the transition is by family and dialogue, from Sansa talking about her father to Ned. 
The fifth part runs two minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by family, from Arya and Ned Stark to Jon Snow.
The sixth runs six minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Ned Stark. The transition marks the halfway point of the episode. 
The seventh runs three minutes and is set on the Wall; he transition is by hard cut, from Jory walking away from Jaime to people dining in the mess at Castle Black. 
The eighth runs one minute and is set in Vaes Dothrak; the transition is by dialogue, from Thorne talking about sniveling boys to Viserys, and by family, from Jon Snow to Viserys and Daenerys. 
The ninth runs six minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Daenerys saying “hands” to a shot of Sam’s hand scrubbing a table.
The tenth runs one minute and is set in Vaes Dothrak; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Daenerys Targaryen.
The eleventh runs six minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by dialogue, from Daenerys talking about her brother possibly taking back the Seven Kingdoms to a shot of Robert. The scene features the death of Ser Hugh of the Vale, killed by Gregor Clegane in the joust. 
The last runs three minutes and is set in an inn on the Kingsroad in the Riverlands; the transition is by family, from Ned Stark and Cersei Lannister to Catelyn and Tyrion.
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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.03: Lord Snow

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones is generously funded by my backers at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider, for just $1 a week, supporting both this project and my compulsive “having a roof over my head” habit.

State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Eddard Stark, Catelyn Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark
Stags of King’s Landing: Robert Baratheon. Joffrey Baratheon
Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen, Viserys Targaryen
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Peter Baelish
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Bran Stark, Robb Stark
And the Lion of the Wall, Tyrion Lannister. 
The episode is in fourteen parts. The first runs fourteen minutes and is in three sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is nine minutes long; the first shot is the Stark bannermen riding through the gates. The second is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Varys saying they serve at Lord Stark’s pleasure to Cersei treating Joffrey’s wounds. The last is five minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Cersei and Joffrey talking about the Starks to the Starks. 
The second part runs three minutes and is set in Winterfell; the transition is by family, from Ned and Arya to Bran. The cliffhanger is resolved sixteen minutes in, when Bran appears for the first time. 
The third runs three minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by family, from Robb and Bran to Catelyn. 
The fourth runs one minute and is set on the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger talking about Tyrion to Tyrion. 
The fifth runs two minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by dialogue, from Jeor Mormont talking about the Starks to Ned. 
The sixth runs two minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by family, Ned Stark to Jon Snow.
The seventh runs eight minutes and in four sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue and by family, from Tyrion informing Jon Snow that Bran has woken up to Ned and Catelyn in Littlefinger’s brothel. The second is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger and the Starks talking about the assassin’s attempt on Bran’s life to Jaime and Cersei talking about theirs. The third is two minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Jaime saying he’ll kill Ned Stark if need be to Ned Stark. The last is five minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Ned talking about Robert to Robert. At the episode’s halfway point, Ned and Catelyn are saying goodbye for the last time in their lives. 
The eighth part runs three minutes and is set in the Dothraki Sea; the transition is by dialogue, with Jaime talking about killing Aerys Targaryen to Daenerys Targaryen. 
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The Wasp Factory

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This is a bonus post written for my backers on Patreon. If you would like to weigh in on what the next bonus post will be, please consider backing – nominations are currently open. Plus, for just $1 a week, you can keep this blog alive and kicking. 

And so, somewhat unexpectedly, my fifth ever long(ish) form blogging project starts up a week before my fourth. The fourth even has a title and everything. Whereas this one… doesn’t, because I hadn’t been planning on starting it until mid-April at the earliest. And perhaps more to the point, this is very much an exploratory project. To date, the Iain (M) Banks novels I’ve read are this, Player of Games, and Use of Weapons. So I’m still very much drawing a critical bead on him. I’m not even entirely sure I can articulate why I want to write a ten-plus post blog series on the Culture novels yet.

Nevertheless, it begins here, with Banks’s first published novel, in his literary, M-free identity, The Wasp Factory. It is worth noting that Banks’s early career features a mildly complicated chronology. The Wasp Factory came out in 1984. His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, came out in 1987. But drafts of Phlebas and the next two Culture novels, Player of Games and Use of Weapons, all pre-date The Wasp Factory.

Which is to say that the broad shape of Banks’s career is misleading. He has said that he always considered himself a science fiction writer first, and that he tried his hand at literary fiction when science fiction wasn’t quite working out for him. And more to the point, he’s said that he inwardly thought of The Wasp Factory as a science fiction novel. As Banks explained in a 2008 interview, the isolated setting of a small island near a remote Scottish village allowed him to treat a realist setting in a manner not unlike an alien planet, and the, shall we say, eccentricities of the protagonist, Frank, meant that they was not entirely unlike writing about someone from an alien culture.

But in the context of his later work, or at least, in the context of the bits of it I’ve read, there’s another theme that emerges – one that I’m willing to hazard a pretty strong guess is going to prove to be one of Banks’s major topics across his career, which is the idea of people as technology. The big twist in The Wasp Factory is that Frank, who goes through the book thinking that their genitals were bitten off in a dog attack when they was young, is in fact a woman who has been being given male hormones by their father throughout their life as part of what their father drunkenly describes as an “experiment.”

A digression here, because although I don’t actually find the trans issues most interesting about this book, I know what is expected of me as a blogger. First of all, let me say that I wish to hell there were some thorough trans perspectives on The Wasp Factory.…

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His Last Vow

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There is, I think, a real case to be made that this is Moffat’s best-ever script, although to be fair there are ways in which it’s difficult to tell. Certainly this is elevated tremendously by the work of everyone else involved. It is ridiculous to pretend that this episode can be praised without acknowledging the toweringly good work turned in by Nick Hurran, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, and Amanda Abbington, and really, stopping there does plenty of people discredit. All the same, the script is a work of stunning genius.

It seems impossible to begin anywhere other than the ending. As I have noted before, this is a script that blatantly advocates for the extra-judicial murder of Rupert Murdoch. Sure, yes, Magnussen is only a transparent metaphor for Murdoch and not Murdoch himself, but all the same, and especially given how willing Moffat has been in interviews to double down and say that he thinks killing Magnusson was the right thing to do, it’s hard to overemphasize the moment, especially given the glorious bluntness with which Mary puts it: “People like Magnussen should be killed. That’s why there are people like me.”

And indeed, this quote gets at one of the central questions of His Last Vow, namely “what exactly sort of person is Mary Watson?” Actually, this is in some ways the only central question of His Last Vow. Certainly a central question is not the superficial issue of “how far ahead of the game is Sherlock,” although this is possibly worth unpacking. We have, by this point, been trained by two consecutive episodes to realize that this is not actually a question upon which Sherlock is inclined to put much weight. The nature of the game is deliberately constructed to twist and wriggle around. Much of the episode is structured around a pair of contrived editing tricks, and while there are occasional clues (“I have an excellent memory’) and the episode does technically play fair, it’s still blatantly changing the rules of the episode in arbitrary and essentially unguessable ways.

Whether you think this is clever or not is largely a personal decision. But in what we might call the normal order f things, the point of these fair but unguessable twists would be to find ways of putting the hero in considerable danger. And yet in His Last Vow, the two times in which Sherlock is disastrously wrong (as opposed to when he’s just blindsided by Mary) are not actually particular problems for him. When he’s wrong about the glasses in the restaurant it’s essentially irrelevant – he moves calmly on to his Christmas plan barely skipping a beat. Being wrong about Appledore’s physical existence is at least more of a problem, but it’s clear he always had “shoot the fucker in the head” as a fallback plan, what with telling John to bring his gun.

Which makes sense. Sherlock, after all, is an ontological character, defined as the one who is always ahead of everybody else in the game.…

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The Sign of Three

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This post is one of those supported by my backers on Patreon. If you can spare a dollar a week to help keep this blog running past the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, it would be greatly appreciated. 

“These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” – Edgar Allen Poe

The basic dramatic engine of Sherlock, by this point, has become the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.

Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television. The Sign of Three is a prime example – it is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death, it contains not a single overt tease of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do to hold interest over the course of months and years.

Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who‘s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised – the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic climax of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else. The plot is based around a pair of extended flashbacks that don’t seem connected to each other or the larger episode until the end. Instead there’s the continual anticipation of resolution – of the moment where things slot into place and the seemingly disjointed plotting is suddenly revealed as the precise clockwork of dramatic unity.

The Sign of Three, in other words, shows Sherlock as a well-oiled machine. Sherlock’s best man speech – contributed largely (and obviously) by Moffat – is a marvel.…

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The Empty Hearse

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This month we’re filling in the gap between the last TARDIS Eruditorum post and the start of the Capaldi reviews by doing Sherlock Season Three on Tuesdays. These posts are sponsored by my backers at Patreon. If you enjoy this blog and want to continue seeing media criticism past the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, please consider backing.

“We’re going to lie to you,” Sherlock announced to ring in 2014, and then it went on to do just that. It had, in the tradition of fair lies, told as much well in advance. “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” And so, of course, it was. Indeed, The Empty Hearse is in effect a ninety minute exercise in arguing that the question of how Sherlock survived The Reichenbach Fall is irrelevant, or at least largely uninteresting.

To call this a bold response to one’s own iconic pop culture moment seems an understatement. And the reactions at the time are worth recalling, even if it is only a year on. First and most interesting were those who felt that The Empty Hearse was mean-spirited in its treatment of fandom, a criticism that focused especially on the depiction of slash fiction within the episode. And yet it’s difficult to quite articulate what about the portrayal of slash fans is offensive here. The only person to really mock them is Anderson, and Laura’s observation that her Sherlock/Moriarty slash is no more ludicrous than some of Anderson’s own theories is, in the context of the story’s larger attitude towards the idea of “solving” Sherlock’s survival, significant. She, at least, is in on her own joke, which Anderson never gets to be.

And it is, ultimately, the joke that’s at issue, which is where this episode’s boldness comes in. That The Empty Hearse was going to be read largely in terms of how well it resolved the cliffhanger was, of course, a foregone conclusion. You don’t get to have that kind of media coverage and then not be judged on how you stick the landing. Devoting an entire episode to it instead of, as they had with the cliffhanger of The Great Game, lampshading it with an absurdly reductive resolution was essentially a necessity. But what wasn’t necessary was making The Empty Hearse into a ninety minute exploration of what it means to resolve the cliffhanger in the first place.

Which brings us to the second reaction, the accusation that the story was self-indulgent. Which misses the point in many ways. Yes, three separate flashback sequences of “how Sherlock did it” are a bit self-indulgent, but this is clearly the purpose of the exercise. The resolution isn’t how Sherlock did it, it’s Sherlock and John making amends over a ticking time bomb, hence the cut to the “actual” explanation (which may or may not be the actual explanation, but is, one suspects, the explanation they had in mind when they filmed The Reichenbach Fall) in the middle of the climax, so as to hammer home the point about what actually matters in resolving the cliffhanger.…

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