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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

27 Comments

  1. Scurra
    October 14, 2024 @ 6:11 am

    For me, this is the weakness of the ‘new’ RTD era – it too is trapped in the pop monoculture but now also exacerbated by the superfan syndrome (I mean, he obviously doesn’t have it as badly as Chibnall, but it’s more evident than it was back in 2005.)

    EEAAO does at least win out over, say, Doctor Strange, in that although the weak points become more obvious on a rewatch, there is also enough going on in the surroundings to mean that you see new things and little set jokes and so on, which makes up for a lot. Whereas the Marvel movies never seem to have that sort of a production crew, perhaps because the CGI makes that less of an option?

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    • Moon J. Cobwebb
      October 14, 2024 @ 8:22 am

      Imho RTD2 is engaging in pop aesthetics and populism, but working its damn best to push against monoculture within these contraints and the limits of needing corporate approval for mass distribution – these are limits, and not inconsiderable ones, I certainly have my reservations about the D+ distribution deal, and in general the impositions of streaming as a necessity in the modern TV climate, but given those externalities, and the degree to which courting large audineces and young audineces is vital, the need to be trendy to-a-tee, the solution in a pop monoculture environment is always going to be a Faustian pact of some kind.

      In which case the question becomes whether, under the clean, over-slick production aesthetic and the inevitable MCU pastiche finale setpiece, Davies is still making bold weird decisions – this is subjective, but for me, genuinely yes – every episode of the recent season, under the hood, has either been about demonstrating a hybrid of Davies’ and Moffat’s versions of Who (Church on Ruby Road, Space Babies, Rogue, Empire of Death), taken something which previously operated at ‘event’ status and demonstrated that the show can now toss it off as midseason filler (Devil’s Chord, BOOM), pushed the envelope in totally new ways (73 Yards), or taken RTD1 standards to breaking point (Dot & Bubble). The sole exception here is Legend of Ruby Sunday, which is just a pile of fandom trad crowdpleasers (UNIT fanfair, returning characters, iconic returning Hinchcliffe monster with original voice actor), strung together with various thoughtful soapy little character moments (ruminations on Susan, another Big Family Feels showstopper for Gibson, some actually very clever Legacy Character beats between The Doctor and Kate and The Doctor and Mel which actually take time over how to pay off legacy – in Kate’s case actually putting her relationship with The Doctor through some of the tests that Three/Brig went through routinely, in Mel’s case giving her the upper hand on The Doctor for being able to see past the young face and cool persona to the same stroppy child she’s always understood him as). And yes, in the context of treating the rest of the season’s innovations as a particularly impressive standard this is pure regressivism, Classic Series Wank Done With RTD1 Flavour… but also trad fandom, old school and slightly-less-old school alike, are a real contingent of viewers, really quite a substantial one in the UK, and certainly a very influential lobby in online discourse, there are both althruistic and utilitarian reasons to give them a slice of the pie.

      And even if you particularly dislike the result, I don’t think it smacks more heavily of the wider monoculture than it’s superficiual patina, except in that said monoculture is in part chasing after Davies’ and Moffat’s styles to begin with, not for nothing is the first Avengers film basically tracing from Journey’s End, let alone the extent to which the most recent live action Spider-Man takes more after Day of The Doctor than any of the many comics precidents for multi-spider teamups… this is, to some extent what it means for Doctor Who to have participated in the mass repopularization of nerd culture, or at least the inner-facing edge of having to resort to the showrunner most responsible for that process returning to the helm.

      Ideally, in time, the show will reach a height of success and popularity that under a bold new voice it can afford to trend-set, and break from looking or feeling like anything else in surrounding culture – no doubt it will do that either way eventually, and we can but hope the context is at the tipping point of an imperial phase rather than after a decline wherein concern for populism is no longer an urgent factor.

      Reply

    • Daibhid C
      October 14, 2024 @ 4:38 pm

      I mean, whenever I think of set-jokes and Marvel, my Scottish mind instantly goes to the scene in Infinity War where Vision and Wanda are watching events in New York in an Edinburgh chip shop, and next to the telly is a sign saying “We will deep-fry your kebab”. But I noticed that first time, so maybe it’s a bit more ostentatious and “Look! Look at the funny thing we did!”

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    • spork testing
      October 18, 2024 @ 7:59 pm

      I have the feeling that RTD2 has his fandom deeper but with less restraint now. Then again, I’ve been reading the interviews this time. Maybe I think too much and that’s the problem.

      Then again, Chibnall felt a bit surface level to me, like deja vu on top of deja vu as an amnesiac. It was still new, that’s all I can say.

      Reply

  2. Aristide Twain
    October 14, 2024 @ 6:25 am

    It’s interesting to see where your lukewarm perspective on the film and my lukewarm perspective on the film diverge! In the realm of the trivial, I join Tim Brayton in not finding the hot dog fingers funny, not even a little bit. Grossout humour has never worked for me, whether it’s people with icky floppy fingers or a Bogeyman made out of snot. Some of the film’s sense of fun does work for me, mind, but a lot of it feels tiresomely juvenile — willfully dumb to disguise an inability to be clever.

    Putting this to one side, as a hardcore Jenny Everywhere guy, I can’t look at this film without noticing that, by design of accident, they made a poorer version of a Jenny Everywhere movie. The title scarcely disguises it. Evelyn isn’t very much like Jenny, but Jobu Tupaki is Jenny Nowhere to a tee. (Centring the cishet parent over the queer kid isn’t the type of mistake a genuine Jenny Everywhere project would have done, for one thing.) Which has interesting connections to your points in the “Haunting of Villa Diodati” essay: a public domain story redone, badly, as copyrighted property. Albeit a new copyrighted property rather than franchise shite.

    It does mean, though, that I’ve seen this done well; that I endeavour to do it well in my own projects; and thus that I take severe issue with your objections to “the Multiverse”. You equivocate a couple of times between “the Multiverse” in general and “this type of multiverse” in particular, and I won’t have that. The Multiverse done properly need not involve the same small set of characters endlessly repeated, nor indeed mere what-if scenarios branching from our own history; one of my formal criticisms of EEAAO, in fact, is that it pretends to be about a what-if tree of branching possibilities but realises that you’ve got to break out of it altogether if you want to really have fun. There’s no sequence of events that results in the world being a cartoon, and for that matter, no causal sense in which Hot-Dog-Evelyn need have anything to do with the conventional Homo Sapiens versions.

    In fact the Multiverse I’ve tended to write in “The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids” and, yes, “Jenny Everywhere”-related things, is one of genuine infinity. An infinite number of copies of every conceivable galactic permutation of atoms, and that’s just the start, given that those uncountable universes are but an infinitely tiny slice of the wider pie, which also includes infinite universes based on completely different physical laws altogether — anything from “things run on cartoon logic” to “universes so strange a human’s cognition genuinely couldn’t even perceive them, let alone comprehend them”.

    If that kind of Multiverse brings narrative limits, they’re ones that act as effective antidotes to the stupidest excesses of superhero fiction and the way they’ve wormed their way into broader genre storytelling. If you assert the ontological reality of every universe (conceivable and unconceivable) then “saving the universe” or somesuch becomes a kind of hollow goal, any pretense that your Chosen One or villain is uniquely good or singularly bad forcibly evaporates, and the idea of a story whose stakes somehow involve the whole Multiverse is downright laughable. It doesn’t hurt that I genuinely lean towards all this being valid metaphysics, give or take the ability to actually travel between these worlds yourself, but even as a thought experiment I find it thrilling and strange and expansive and ominous and joyous, quite unlike the mere “metaphor for questions of regret and the roads not taken” you take it for. At heart Jenny’s an experiment in creating a protagonist who functions within that sort of “enlightened” cosmology, and unlike Evelyn, it’s notable that she was directly inspired by the Doctor back in the day, among other points of influence.

    And again, the ways in which EEAAO falls short of embracing that idea are just sad, to me. It wants to be about the kind of nihilistic crisis that comes with contemplating that kind of absolute infinity, and yet, as you observe, it seemingly can’t conceive of a universe that doesn’t have Michelle Yeoh in it. Worse, it trots out the hoary old cliché of someone trying to destroy the entire Multiverse, without even a knowing wink as to its inherent absurdity. I tell you, there’s a better, stranger movie in there, and you don’t get it by having less multiverse.

    Reply

    • Christopher Brown
      October 14, 2024 @ 3:33 pm

      Oh, hello, fellow co-reader of Alternate Ending and Eruditorum Press!

      Reply

  3. prandeamus
    October 14, 2024 @ 12:51 pm

    You could argue within a story that travel to a multiverse is only feasible if you’re travelling between multiverses that are already pretty similar. In Trek terms the one in which Spock is part of an evil empire and has a beard is closer than the one where humans and Vulcans never evolved at all and the universe is ruled by the Tribble Empire. And purely as a matter of convenience this also makes story-telling more possible. You can take the TARDIS to the universe next door with Zepplins and a UK President, but the universe in which Roger Lloyd-Pack does a subtle take on the Rise of the Cybermen needs a hell of a lot of artron energy.

    Repeated visits to the same parallel universe have hugely diminishing returns. I’ve been re-watching DS9 recently and the rebels from the Mirror universe just casually pop in for tea and biscuits, which drains all dramatic impact. There’s a certain amount of fun seeing familiar characters in different outfits, but very little tension.

    Reply

    • Daibhid C
      October 14, 2024 @ 4:46 pm

      The tension is “Ooh, any of these characters who I only care about to the extent of them being kind of like the characters who aren’t going to die could DIE!!” And by “any” I mean “whichever mirror-Ferengi are even left by this point'”, because nothing raises the stakes like turning character death into a running gag.

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      • prandeamus
        October 15, 2024 @ 12:26 pm

        Repeated deaths: Come to South By South West Park: “OMG they killed Kenny Prime! Bar Stewards!”

        Somewhere out there, there’s a version of Sliders that works. But that’s different because the key returning characters are the SAME but placed into different bizzaroworld situations. I know El trashed Sliders way way back as as part of a compare and contrast exercise on the TVM. I’ve only seen two episodes and they didn’t make me want to return very much, but the idea surely has legs, even if the 90s execution of those ideas did not.

        Reply

  4. Charlie
    October 14, 2024 @ 2:12 pm

    It is weird that Doctor Who has barely touched on the multiverse in its 60 years. I mean, there’s Inferno, Rise of the Cybermen and I think that’s about it for TV?

    Reply

    • Madeline Jones
      October 14, 2024 @ 3:23 pm

      Funnily enough, the very episode this review is “focused” on DOES vaguely comment on the multiverse, with Tacteun saying her plan is to wipe out this universe and have the Doctor join them in a completely different one.

      A pretty vapid mention (and it highlights MY personal issue with multiverses, which is that if you don’t handle the concept with care and make the existence of multiple realities so casual as they do here, it risks deflating all the stakes of this very universe being in danger in any stories if people can do like Rick and Morty and just pop into another dimension that’s 99.99% the same), but one nonetheless.

      Reply

      • spork testing
        October 18, 2024 @ 7:54 pm

        I was going by the Divergent Universe being the next one over. But even in a world without a trace of The Doctor, still a Doctor Who world, of course, the expanded universe makes clear the possibilities. Of course there’s the EDAs and the Unbounds and so on to show this. But someone who has thought about the show and has seen some Classic could do this.

        Anyway, I thought that a move to a universe with no Doctor Who intervention at all (thus more scope and more actual change) had potential. Like a series of Monk Earth but with a bit more Inferno. But I also hoped that if we weren’t doing earthbound, we’d go spacebound and that it was the time for bold swings and that Wild Blue Yonder was a base under siege and that The Master wouldn’t come back and that maybe it was going somewhere in Series 11 and that it has to be going somewhere, how will they pull off a clean slate? I’ve been wrong many times is what this run-on comment means.

        Reply

    • Malk
      October 14, 2024 @ 5:32 pm

      I think it’s miserably telling that whenever I do see a Doctor Who fan insist that the show should engage with the multiverse, it’s always the exact sort of thing El describes in this entry: “We can see the Universe where X Doctor never regenerated!” (implying that genuinely don’t care about the fact that this is a time travel show where they can just show up anyway, or that Big Finish release 200 new adventures with old Doctors a year: it’s purely about wanting to “canonize” versions of the show that never move on), or “We can see a Universe where THIS actor plays the Doctor!” …because for some reason they’d like to see someone run around in costume and do an undercooked Doctor performance for an accumulated 30 minutes of screentime, like the second coming of Jo Martin?

      Reply

      • Hugh
        October 14, 2024 @ 9:49 pm

        This was one of the coping responses to the Timeless Child too. It apparently created the space for “so many more stories”, but whenever anyone who made that claim decided to specify what stories, it ended up being “my fan fic Doctor can now be canon” or “Peter Cushing is now canon” or “Richard E Grant’s 9th Doctor is now canon” – in short, space for stories like any other that Doctor Who has ever produced. Beyond the reality that there has always been a space to contain endless generic Doctor Who adventures – the future- it’s also just the case that I don’t give a shit if someone’s crappy OC Doctor can no be said to be a Division agent or whatever.

        Reply

        • Malk
          October 15, 2024 @ 8:11 am

          Not only that, but I think it’s revealing that I rarely saw anyone who actually makes fanwork joyfully saying “Now my Doctor is canon!”, whereas it was mostly people who’ve never touched fic in their life going “Now the broad notion of Fan Doctors are canon, I bet the people who make fanfic are happy!”, which proves how devaluing and empty the whole idea is. Surely if I had my own OC Doctor, one of the key points is them being in continuity/conversation with the actual character and television program that I’m attached to, as opposed to the generic notion of The Doctor, But Not Actually The Same Person as The One You Care About Except On A Genetic Level, And Also They’re Defined By Being a Cop Now.

          Reply

          • John Binns
            October 15, 2024 @ 10:12 am

            Presumably not on a genetic level, at least not in the way genes work in our world. And not now in the sense that their memories survive intact-ish from one body to another, either…

          • Cyrano
            October 15, 2024 @ 12:34 pm

            Obverse Books have released a few charity collections called Forgotten Lives, dramatising the Morbius Doctors a bit. I don’t think they explicitly link them to The Timeless Child stuff on TV, but they also released the first one not long after it.

            It’s all for charity, so justifies its existence on that basis but I think they are genuinely interesting reads. A lot of the writers hint at the idea of the stories being not merely pre-Doctor Who’s fictional history, but pre-Doctor Who as a text. Concepts are hauntingly familiar but different, the TARDIS initially absent or different not because Rassilon hasn’t invented it yet but because Sydney Newman’s imagined forerunner hadn’t crystallised the concept.

            And some are not doing that at all, and one of the Doctors strand of stories is unreadably bad. But on aggregate, an interesting project.

          • Aristide Twain
            October 15, 2024 @ 3:07 pm

            “Forgotten Lives” isn’t particularly linked to the Timeless Child, no — as I understand it, the second volume hints at a completely unrelated reason for the TV Doctors to have partially forgotten those lives. And certainly no one is working for the Division. It’s really more connected to Lance Parkin’s Virgin-era Morbius Doctors stuff than anything else. (It’s not quite congruent with my own anti-Chibnallian take on how the Morbii should work, but it’s infinitely preferable.)

    • prandeamus
      October 15, 2024 @ 12:13 pm

      “Turn Left” gets an honourable mention. Though it’s technically a creepy-crawly-timey-wimey-thing rather than a Multiverse, it does get to explore a what-if timeline where the Doctor didn’t have a companion and dies at the end of the Runaway Bride. Functionally close to multiverse, because Rose mirrors her way across in some way, right?

      Reply

  5. Jesse
    October 15, 2024 @ 12:02 am

    “I know very little about the alternate universes where, say, Napoleon defeated Nelson at Waterloo, but I’m confident that in absolutely none of them did all the same people have sex over the course of centuries and have the exact same spermatozoa fertilize the exact same eggs to produce a present day population that’s got all the same people as our world in a slightly different geopolitical context.”

    I am glad that I am not the only person with this bugaboo. (And I actually like multiverses and alt-histories.)

    Reply

    • Ross
      October 15, 2024 @ 8:23 am

      This reminds me of a particularly toxic poster from the days of radw who objected hard to the existence of Ricky in Pete’s Universe, because “Everyone knows it’s impossible for the same sperm to fertilize an egg once even a single molecule within the light-cone of the earth has changed and they’re all laughing at you for believing it! Only a gay man wouyld write such drivel because he wants to turn your kids gay since rejecting the obvious truth about objective reality is the first step to getting people to accept unnatural sex acts!” (“They’re all laughing at you” was one of his favorite insults; like all conservative trolls, he was deeply paranoid about being mocked and assumed everyone else was too).

      Reply

  6. Dr Thomas R Tyrrell
    October 15, 2024 @ 2:47 am

    Also, I assume the substitution of Nelson for Wellington is a clever joke?

    Reply

    • prandeamus
      October 15, 2024 @ 12:17 pm

      I hope so. If the Seventh Coalition used the ten-years-dead Admiral to command armies, the mind boggles.

      Reply

  7. Isaac
    October 15, 2024 @ 3:27 pm

    Wow, I am not shocked that El does not fully sign off on the film arguing against nihilism.

    Reply

    • Elizabeth Sandifer
      October 17, 2024 @ 5:53 pm

      I don’t really make this argument in the essay I don’t think.

      Reply

    • WeslePryce
      November 1, 2024 @ 10:24 pm

      Tbf, the film’s argument against nihilism isn’t really an argument, it’s moreso that “oh love and good-naturedness can overpower nihilism.” But also El clearly was not discussing that aspect of the film in the essay: the film’s fundamental style and mechanical writing choices (who the plot is focused on, how the screenplay is written, etc) are examined and found to be a bit unimaginative, that’s all. The themes never really came into the argument, besides a brief touch on the accidental “people should accept abuse because family” thing the movie semi-accidentally invokes.

      Reply

  8. spork testing
    October 18, 2024 @ 7:32 pm

    This elaborated on my problems with the film, which I haven’t been able to satisfyingly word in a way that anybody will listen to. (Figured out how to word the abuse thing after watching; unfortunately I was not in thinking company.)

    Thanks for writing this. Definitely taking this into account on my next Flux rewatch – whenever I can stomach continuing Series 11 and 12 from my still ongoing current rewatch, by then I assume K9: TimeQuake will finally be out.

    Reply

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