Eruditorum Press

Haunt the Future

tom baker

Time Can Be Rewritten 14 (Asylum, BBC Books, 2001)

, 47

One more post of dotting ts, crossing is, and playing with some of the concepts from the Deadly Assassin Megapost, then we’ll do Face of Evil on Wednesday. Here I want to look again at the ways in which having an understanding of history and of the world more complex than the ones I critiqued in the Deadly Assassin entry – or for that matter in the Masque of Mandragora essay – makes for better writing than those of Big-Ass Science or the limited views of the nature of time and history espoused by mainstream fandom. And for that we have Peter Darvill-Evan’s almost but not-quite excellent book Asylum.

The first thing that should be said about Asylum is that Darvill-Evans is a much better writer than he is a historian. It’s actually a relatively minor point within the book, but he goes out of his way to have the Doctor endorse a particular historical view of Roger Bacon in which he is not actually a meaningful figure in the history of science on the grounds that his overall worldview was insufficiently empiricist. I am not a medieval/renaissance scholar, and I am not going to wade too far into this debate, but Darvill-Evans’s view amounts to a variation on the idea that the rise of science was a light switch that got thrown somewhere in human history in which everybody became an empiricist.

The argument Darvill-Evans gives the Doctor – that “his main objective is to prepare the Christian world for the coming of the Antichrist, which he believes is imminent” and that “he believes the universe is governed by the idea of the self-generation of likenesses.” The problem is that this argument would rule out Isaac Newton just as well, who was, after all, an alchemist who blew a lot of time predicting the date of the Apocalypse. And anyone who wants to rule Newton out as a scientist is a braver man than I am. 
The thing is, the rise of science wasn’t just a sudden thing. Science came out of an intellectual stew that included theology, what we now classify as occultism, philosophy, and a wealth of other disciplines. Empiricism – whether in soft or Big-Ass forms – ultimately traces its roots back to forms of thought that we now consider deeply unscientific. There’s really not a way around this, and drawing a fence around the development of science that rules Roger Bacon out is just not a good understanding of what science and human development are.

And this is very clearly what Darvill-Evans does. He has the Doctor say that Nyssa’s thesis is inaccurate. Her thesis is explicitly that Bacon is a proto-scientist and that an understanding of the “dawning of the technological age” should extend back at least as far as him, as opposed to merely to the twentieth century or the Industrial Revolution. To say that is flatly untrue is, well, flatly untrue. Whether or not Bacon ought be called a “scientist” proper is beyond my expertise, but he clearly has an important place in the history of science.

…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 19 (Children of the Stones)

, 8

The Deadly Assassin entry is, of course, a bit of a tome. This results in an odd paradox. As the old joke goes, “I apologize for writing such a long letter – I did not have time to write a short one.” Length, to some extent, begets length – the nature of a nearly 13,000 word entry is that it raises further points that require following up. To this end, because Season 14 of Doctor Who had an unusually long Christmas break that ran from late November to January, this entry and the next (A Time Can Be Rewritten entry) will be cleanup crew – some expansions and tidying up on points raised in that entry before we dive back into the wreckage for the coda to the Hinchcliffe era.

In some ways, however, this is the coda to the Hinchcliffe era. Children of the Stones – which ran roughly concurrently with The Face of Evil and The Robots of Death, airing on Mondays, just after sunset, at a quarter to five – feels in a number of ways like a sort of lost story of the Hinchcliffe era. It is a natural extension of and response to many of the ideas animating Doctor Who in this period. Its tone, mood, and iconography are deeply compatible with that of Doctor Who. More, really, than any Pop Between Realities we’ve done, this feels like a case of making sure we cover something that is inextricable from Doctor Who.

There are two basic ways to make very good British television. The first is to try to make very good British television and succeed. This is the way of the prestige project – the stuff that forms the meat of the British television export. I, Claudius is the archetypal example, with later examples being things like Prime Suspect, Our Friends in the North, Downton Abbey, and, since 2005, Doctor Who. These projects work by getting multiple leading lights of the British television industry together on one project and giving them enough money to do it well. It’s a very good system and it makes very good television. HBO reinvented American television, basically, by pinching the system and using it in the US.

The second approach is the approach that characterizes the classic series of Doctor Who. In this approach, you slap together something to fill a timeslot on the schedule and shoot for nothing more than “sufficiently entertaining as to get people to watch it.” Then you miss horribly and accidentally hit “brilliant” instead. Children of the Stones is a perfect example of this approach – ITV Children’s entertainment, a style of television generally expected to produce things like Ace of Wands and The Tomorrow People, inadvertently turn out seven episodes of creepy supernatural horror of such quality that it frankly forces us to reevaluate our expectations of what television is.

By all accounts, Children of the Stones was a landmark piece of television – one children of the relevant generation were thoroughly spooked by.…

Continue Reading

Far More Than Just (The Deadly Assassin)

54

Fair warning – this entry is, er…
12,716 words long. 

It’s tough to pin down, but it’s probably somewhere in 1994 – I’ve got myself around 6th grade for this one. I’ve still got the VHS tape on my shelf. Well, by my hand now. Because my shelves are cluttered, I had to move two objects to get to it. The first of these was a DAPOL action figure of K-9 – the inexplicable green one. The second was a bottle of Yankee Candle branded Balsam and Cedar oil for use in an oil diffuser. For personal reasons of what I want to focus on in my meditation and thought these days, I am burning things with cedar in them of late. It was in my bedroom, near the table where I put candles and incense. I’m writing this in an armchair maybe two yards from it, which is also where I have been watching the episodes for the blog to this point – though I am moving in the next week or two.

The cover is exactly what I remember – Tom Baker in Prydonian robes staring straight out of the tape. He’s looking straight at me, right now, an eery reconstitution of Patrick Troughton’s screen-peering for a no-longer new media age. The tape was on the third shelf of books. This is a fact that will be lost on anyone who does not know me well. In the first year of my PhD program, I had started class before I had finished unpacking. Or, rather, I had done a very hurried unpacking in which I shoved books on shelves out of boxes however they were packed, vowing to organize my library later.

In one of my classes, we were reading Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf. It’s a history of the bookshelf. Which is to say, it’s a history of how we store and organize our knowledge. It ends with an amusing essay proposing various ways in which one could organize one’s books in the modern world – ways beyond the obvious ones like alphabetically or by subject. And Petroski shares amusing anecdotes or comments on the pros and cons of various methods. He talks of one friend who had a room that was, among everyone he knew, considered a marvel of interior design because she had orchestrated a complex color scheme for her library where various regions of the room, from paint to decor to the books themselves, were organized by color – reds fading through oranges to yellows across a wall of the room.

One method he proposes is by strict order of acquisition. That is to say, he proposes that whenever you get a new book, you shelve it immediately to the right of the previous newest. And I realized that, for reasons relating purely to my own idiosyncrasies, I could actually remember to a usable degree of detail the order in which I had gotten my books back to about 5th grade. Since then I’ve stretched it back further, though only with about five or six books from childhood.…

Continue Reading

I Don’t Look Back. I Can’t. (The Hand of Fear)

37

Eldrad must live. Eldrad must jive. Having the time of
her life. 

It’s October 2nd, 1976. ABBA remains at number one with “Dancing Queen.” After two weeks, Pussycat  unseat them with “Mississippi,” which sounds innocuous until you realize that Pussycat is a Dutch country music band, and that this is one of those moments where the British charts do what sane and rational people never would. Rod Stewart, Manfred Mann, and Chicago also chart.

In other news, the InterCity 125, a high speed train, begins service in the west of Britain. The Cultural Revolution formally ends in China. Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh resigns as President of Ireland after being loudly denounced by the Minister of Defense. As for Fords, Motors begins production of the Fiesta, and Gerald flubs badly in a debate against Jimmy Carter.

While on television, it is the end of an era. And not the obvious one. Yes, this is the story where Lis Sladen departs the series. But in terms of screen time, she’s only actually 2/3 of the way done with her tenure in Doctor Who and related shows. This is, for her, a sort of midpoint pause in her Doctor Who career. Those who want to reflect in polite sadness can read the eulogy I wrote when Sladen passed away in April. But this is not the end for Sarah Jane.

That is not, of course, to say that the apparent end to her involvement with the show is anything less than vital to this story. But in this case, we shouldn’t focus on the sentiment of Sladen’s departure, because doing so loses sight of a far bigger fact – this story marks a fundamental shift in the relationship between Doctor Who and contemporary Britain. More specifically, this is the story where Doctor Who gives up on  the idea that it is by default grounded in the real world of the viewer.

The easiest way to show this is with some raw facts. So here they are. The Hand of Fear is the last story until Terror of the Vervoids to feature a companion from contemporary Britain – a run of over a decade. The last time that was true was The War Games. And even in the Troughton era, at least one companion was from Britain at all times, albeit from its history. The last time there were no regulars who were overtly from Britain – the only time, in fact, in the series’ history before this point – was The Daleks’ Masterplan. From The Deadly Assassin through The Keeper of Traken, the Doctor does not even travel with anyone who is from Earth at all.

More telling, however, is this: from The War Machines (the first story in which the straightforwardly arrives in contemporary Britain) to The Hand of Fear, 28 of the 60 stories feature a threat to contemporary Britain – a rate of about 47%. From The Deadly Assassin through Survival only 11 of 72 do – a mere 15%. (You can move the numbers around a bit depending on what you do and don’t count, but the gulf remains.)…

Continue Reading

How Easy it Is to Be a Magician (Masque of Mandragora)

38

Close your eyes, give me your hand, darling.

It’s September 4, 1976. ABBA are at number one with “Dancing Queen,” a fact that says more about the zeitgeist than anything else I can hope to say. But for the sake of completism, it stays at #1 for all four weeks of this story. Wings, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, The Bee Gees, and Elton John and Kiki Dee also chart. And The Ramones release their first album, which is the sort of thing that means we can start talking about punk when the mood strikes us.

Since The Seeds of Doom, the most obvious thing to say happened is that Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as Prime Minister on March 16th, and the Labour Party voted James Callaghan in as his successor. This is, as it happens, not going to end well. In other news, Apple Computer was formed, the UK actually wins Eurovision, the Soweto riots begin in South Africa, Viking 1 lands on Mars, the Son of Sam killings begin, and Big Ben breaks down for nine months.

While during this story, Mao Zedong dies, which is a kind of definitive end to an era. A fatal air collision occurs in what is now Croatia between a British Airways flight and a Yugoslavian flight, killing 176. The 100 Club Punk Special, an iconic and formative punk concert that put The Damned, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols, and Siouxie and the Banshees all on one two-day long bill, takes place, which means we can really talk about punk just as soon as Doctor Who bothers to make that option relevant. In a less fortunate rejoinder, U2 forms.

While on television, we have the start of a new season of Doctor Who, and a return to the wide world of human history. Prior to my power/Internet exploding (and off and on since then), I found myself enjoying the great time-wasting distraction of the early 21st century, arguing with people on the Internet. Or, more specifically, I found myself arguing with people on the Internet over whether or not Doctor Who is best considered a science fiction show or a fantasy show. Mostly I find the distinction not particularly worth making, but there’s a flavor of the “Doctor Who is sci-fi” argument that I find sufficiently loathsome that I can be reliably dragged in on it, and that’s that Doctor Who in some way supports a rationalist/skeptical view of the universe.

This is an unfortunate disease within science fiction fandom in general. I mean, I’m obviously a fairly pro-science kind of guy, and I salute the people who devote time to taking down “alternative medicine” cranks that, in a real and literal sense, kill people. But there’s a second flavor of skepticism that amounts to an effort to eradicate non-scientific thinking in favor of the belief that science is the only meaningful form of truth. This is the sort of skepticism favored by evangelical atheists, anti-postmodernists of the Alan Sokal school, and other groups of people I am less than fond of (though, to be fair, most adherents to either perspective can be fairly easily brought around by encountering theists who are not theocratic lunatics or postmodernists who can speak reality when called upon to do so – most of the hardline skepticism crowd, much as they irritate me, are good folks).…

Continue Reading

Time Can Be Rewritten 13 (System Shock, Virgin Books, 1995)

, 11

Reasonable people, by which I’m pretty sure I mean Stephen, one of my wise and decorated commenters, expected me to go for Stephen Marley’s Managra, a metafictional romp through the history of British culture in the far future that even features Aleister Crowley. (I say pretty sure because Connecticut got slammed by the worst snowstorm I have seen in my life last weekend. Nearly a foot of heavy, wet snow falling on trees that still had leaves on them. This turned out to exceed their intelligent design parameters. The result is that 99% of my town is without power. The good news is, this time I am the 1%. The bad news is, I didn’t dodge the Internet outage, so doing things like actually checking past comments is beyond me. But I’m optimistic that I can at least keep a posting schedule.)

There are many good reasons why I would pick that book, and I see why probably-Stephen assumed I would cover it. The thing is, I’ve said an awful lot about metafiction and British culture already in the Hinchcliffe era, and while I’m sure I’ll do Managra when I take another pass in the book version, clearly I skipped it. Equally clearly, at least to those who read titles and look at pictures, is that I’m doing Justin Richards’s System Shock instead, a book which probably-Stephen expressed some surprise as to why I would do.

The answer, probably-Stephen, is that I am a sucker for 90s techno-thrillers about computers, and that I am completely powerless to resist any book that is set, quite literally, “when the information superhighway comes online” in 1998. So crack open a bottle of Zima and put on some Jewel. Because it’s 1995, and people are about to make some very, very embarrassing predictions.

That is of course, terribly unfair of me. But it’s very difficult to read System Shock in 2011 without laughing at its naiveté. The most obvious example is the one we’ve already discussed – the charmingly dated phrase “information superhighway.” This phrase rightly serves as a sort of memetic tombstone for a particular historical moment in digital technology – what we might call the last moment in which you could get away with being stupid about digital technology in public. (It is not, obviously, the end of public stupidity about digital technology in public – merely the end of where you can get away with it. Consider the degree to which, ten years after the date Richards pegs for the information superhighway coming online, the degree to which the ostensibly similar “series of tubes” metaphor proves to be a massive PR disaster for Ted Stevens)

The phrase does not have a clear inventor, although its prominence is due largely to Al Gore. Gore, who had been closely following digital issues as a Senator for decades before becoming Vice President, used the term with reasonable frequency, and so upon becoming Vice President, his newfound profile catapulted the term into the mainstream. But, equally crucially, Al Gore was a politician who liked giving money to the geeks.…

Continue Reading

You Were Expecting Someone Else 6 (Doctor Who and the Pescatons)

, 15

There is a thread that we should follow up on from Friday. We established that The Seeds of Doom was quite entertaining. But there is a serious ethical critique to be raised against it. And you’d kind of hope that there would be more people who would prioritize the ethical critique over the entertainment defense. There’s something terribly unfortunate about the fact that a story that is at best wholly amoral and at worst outright ethically bankrupt can be genuinely believed by fans to be the 16th best Doctor Who story ever.

Which brings us to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, about which it is far more easy to find things to criticize than it is to find things to praise. This in and of itself is hardly an unusual position for Doctor Who to be in. Nobody gets to active Doctor Who fandom without going through a few paragraphs that begin “In spite of…” There’s even a complex if unofficial set of rules to this sort of thing. It makes sense – loving Doctor Who necessarily involves a fair amount of taking green bubble wrap seriously. But there are also pathological elements to it.

Sometimes the pathology is harmless and, if you look at it the right way, even kind of endearing. There are people who factionalize hilariously within fandom, and come to love or hate a particular era with a verve that pushes them to absurdly indefensible positions. To use an example I mentioned in an earlier entry, say what one likes about “The Wedding of River Song,” but to complain that it’s a letdown in terms of how it resolves its plotlines while praising Pyramids of Mars as a classic when it pulls up lame as badly as it does in the fourth episode is to demonstrate a complete and utter disconnection from reality. 

But there are cases that go further than this. Fans want desperately to love Doctor Who, and sometimes are far too willing to excuse real problems in order to do so. This is not unique to Doctor Who fandom. Indeed, it’s not really unique to fans. People are defensive of the things they love. A normal person would look at The Celestial Toymaker and say “well that’s racist crap.” But a Doctor Who fan, if they can bring themselves to admit that it is racist, is going to be actively depressed by that fact. And so many opt not to admit it, pretending that it or Tomb of the Cybermen are just fine. And this is a more pathological and upsetting aspect of fandom, and one we see pretty clearly with The Seeds of Doom.

But this brings us back to The Pescatons. Because while fans are willing to blind themselves to the faults of television episodes, it’s rare to see them so willing to protect spin-off material. Few people are moved to defend the New Adventures or Big Finish Audios with the same passionate fervor as people will line up to explain why, despite the overwhelming pile of evidence, to explain why The Celestial Toymaker isn’t racist.…

Continue Reading

An Unintelligent Enemy (The Seeds of Doom)

24

I was going to just caption this “It’s…”, but then I chickened
out because it seemed too obscure and decided on an
awkward meta-commentary instead. 

It’s January 31, 1976. Queen is dead, but it’s not particularly lonely on the living because ABBA are at number one with “Mamma Mia,” a song that performs that classic pop trick of setting itself a low bar to clear and sailing miles over it. It lasts for two weeks, and is unseated by Silk’s “Forever and Ever,” which lasts one week before falling to The Four Season’s “December ’63,” better known by its not-actual-title of “Oh What a Night.” a song that is frankly alarmingly easy to argue is about someone watching Barbara Wright be menaced by a Dalek so long as one ignores the detail that it’s an American song. It lasts two weeks before Tina Charles takes over with “I Love to Love.” Donna Summer, ELO, Manuel and the Music of the Montains, and The Who also chart.

While in real news, Cuba adopts its present constitution, an earthquake in Guatemala and Honduras kills over 22,000, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the disputed government of Western Sahara, is formed. For our purposes, however, most interesting is the revocation of Special Category Status for people arrested as part of the Troubles. (Special Category Status was a system whereby IRA members who were arrested for bombings and other crimes were treated as political prisoners and given certain privileges, most famously not having to wear a uniform. Its revocation was unpopular among IRA members, and many when arrested refused a uniform, engaging in protest by wrapping themselves only in their prison blankets. This became a powerful symbol for the Irish republican movement.)

Speaking of blowing things up, then, we have The Seeds of Doom. Which is apparently the 16th greatest Doctor Who story ever, at least if Doctor Who Magazine is to be believed. Which, given that it thinks that The Brain of Morbius is only 40th, it probably isn’t. But the fact that Tat Wood flags it in About Time as his least favorite story of the first six years of the Tom Baker era does mean that we have now identified Tat Wood’s most contrarian view about Doctor Who. And that’s interesting, because while I disagree with Wood on some big points, I’m pretty much of the view that he’s the most consistently intelligent commenter on Doctor Who to date. And on the comments, there’s been a larger debate brewing over whether the Hinchcliffe era is, in general, overrated. So here we have a story that, look, let’s just say up front is nowhere near as good as the 16th best Doctor Who story of all time that is flat-out loathed by Doctor Who’s best critic. If we’re going to talk about the overrated aspects of the Hinchcliffe era, here is, I suppose, where we must make our stand.

Wood’s critique stems from one – and actually, as we’ll see, in a way from all three – of the things everybody (By everybody, of course, I mean pathetic fans like me.…

Continue Reading

Sheer Poetry (The Brain of Morbius)

33

Marco… 

It’s January 3, 1976. Despite the fact that we have jumped three weeks into the future, Queen remain undisturbed at #1. It doesn’t move from number one during the next four weeks. Also charting are David Bowie, ABBA, Michael Oldfield, Barry White, and Greg Lake, the latter with “I Believe in Father Christmas,” which I would like to point out is easily one of the five best Christmas songs written by popular musicians in the latter half of the 20th century. Seriously not a bad four weeks for music there.

During the few weeks in which Steven Moffat’s Philip Hinchcliffe’s bold new idea of a midseason break for Doctor Who have played out, also known as Christmas, Carlos the Jackal and others kidnapped delegates at an OPEC meeting in Vienna, and a bomb at LaGuardia Airport in New York kills eleven and does not lead to a decade of pointless war for the United States. While during this story’s transmission, the trial of members of the Red Army Faction begins in Germany, the first commercial Concorde flight takes off, and the Scottish Labour Party is formed.

While on television, we get a classic. I mean, a bona fide, proper one – another one of the stories that people rave about as one of the best Doctor Who stories. The Hinchcliffe era has a lot of these. But here, I’ve got to admit, I was definitely under the spell. I had the irritating cut down hourlong version of this that came out on VHS, and on the one hand could tell it was great, but on the other could tell that something was missing. And I remember being absolutely thrilled when the full version came out, and devouring it. I must have watched this one a good half dozen times over the course of two years between the two edits. This would have been… ooh, 1993-94. So this is another one that’s a tentpole of both Doctor Who and my childhood.

In many ways, this story is where the Hinchcliffe era to date comes together – in a story with as much density and power as Genesis of the Daleks, only better written and not reliant on nostalgia for its evocative power. It is another story that raises the bar for what the show is capable of. It is utterly and completely fantastic. So let’s just talk about why. And then maybe towards the end we’ll try something ambitious like declaring what the entire point of Doctor Who is.

First of all, there is the writing. This story benefits from extraordinary fortune in the scriptwriting stage. Terrance Dicks pitched a script based on the idea of doing a reverse Frankenstein story in which the scientist was a hideous monster who creates a perfectly normal-looking human. Then, after delivering the scripts, he went on vacation. Looking at them, Robert Holmes observed the same problem any script editor worth his salt (Dicks, no doubt, included) would have noticed: a story in which the impressive monster appears at the start and the big reveal is an ordinary person has some serious structure problems.

…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 18 (Space: 1999, I Clavdivs)

, 23

Yes, I really am tackling Space: 1999 and I, Claudius (or, as I insist on referring to it for no other reason than “it makes me happy,” I Clavdivs.) in one entry. It even makes sense to do so. Because one thing that we’re going to have to deal with over the remainder of the series is the fact that the nature of television is shifting rapidly. And the beginnings of that shift are starting to happen around what we’re watching now. One of the easiest lenses to look at that through, at least for our purposes, is the way in which British television is made for the export market. In other words, shows designed to make money by being sold to other countries.

The BBC, of course, had done this to some extent for years. In terms of Doctor Who, this has been tracked extensively by the folks at BroaDWcast. But notably, these sales were mostly to Commonwealth countries, with Hartnell and Troughton stories often airing well into the 1970s. Despite Innes Lloyd eying the possibility in the 1960s (hence the conscious reintroduction to the premise of the show at the start of Tomb of the Cybermen), no successful effort to show Doctor Who in the US happens until 1972, when Time Life, who bought the distribution rights, sells a package of Pertwee episodes to a PBS station in Philadelphia. (In a moment of explaining things to a different side of the Atlantic than usual, PBS is basically what the BBC would be if Rupert Murdoch got his way – an underfunded and stitched together coalition of local stations with an extreme lack of money for producing new content outside the children’s market. They market to the sorts of people who in the UK watch a lot of BBC4 and read The Guardian. But more on them in a few paragraphs.) But it’s not really until the late 70s/early 80s when Doctor Who manages to take off in a meaningful sense in the US, so we’ll mostly drop that strand until… oh, The Five Doctors sounds like a pretty good place to pick it up next, no?

The logic behind this is fairly straightforward: there are a whole lot of English speakers in the US, so it’s a really obvious market to sell in. But right around now there’s an odd transition going on in the nature of what a typical UK to US export looks like. In the 1960s, had we done a piece on exports, we’d have talked mostly about ITC – Lew Grade’s production company that made, of the things we’ve talked about so far, The Prisoner. In the UK, Grade’s shows went to ITV, whereas in the US they usually ended up in CBS.

Several things characterize the ITC approach. First of all, they were generally budgeted with the export market in mind. This gave them the budgets to do glitzy action set pieces that BBC productions couldn’t touch. Second, they were generally put together so that episode order didn’t matter that much.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 4 5 6 7 ›