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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Star Trek: Discovery

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By 2018, when Chris Chibnall commenced the third primary creative era of the modern Doctor Who, media franchises were not so much increasingly the norm as wholly established as the norm. These were the days when high profile returns of long dormant franchises were the norm, whether in the form of outright revivals as things like Murphy Brown and Roseanne staggered from their graves for a new season, or in the ever popular form of reboots, with Lost in Space, Magnum, P.I., DuckTales, Charmed, and She-Ra all making returns. Film was much the same—nine of the top ten films in 2018 were installments of pre-existing franchises, four of them based on Marvel Comics properties. (This was in fact low—2017 and 2019 were each ten for ten, where 2018 had the differently nostalgic Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody to break things up.) These are the sorts of facts that make you start to sympathize deeply with Alan Moore at his crankiest. 

Curiously absent from this tendency thus far was Star Trek. Sure there’d been the three Chris Pine movies set in what is apparently widely referred to within fandom as the Kelvin Timeline, but this was a shocking meager return—three films from 2006-2016—for one of the two most iconic American sci-fi franchises, especially in an era when fandoms and franchises were so very much the norm. And so it was much overdue in late 2017 when CBS launched their streaming exclusive Star Trek: Discovery, the first attempt at a Star Trek TV show in over a decade. Unfortunately, the result had much to say bout the painfully cynical nature of franchise media in the late 2010s. 

To start, the show had what can only be called a troubled development. It was originally the product of Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, who pitched an anthology series that would move to a new ship and era of Star Trek history with each season, starting just before the original 1960s series. Fuller worked on the show for the better part of a year before being sacked for failing to adhere to CBS’s over-ambitious production timeline for the show, and was replaced by Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harbets, who would eventually find themselves sacked for going over budget and for stories of abusive behavior during production. A microcosm of the tensions in play here comes with the discussion over uniforms, with Fuller originally wanting something that was based on the brightly colored 1960s uniforms, while CBS insisted on a more austere and military-style uniform, continuity (and for that matter nostalgia aesthetics) be damned. It’s a small thing, but indicative—the sort of thing that quietly speaks volumes about just how cynical an effort this actually was.

So it’s not a surprise that the resultant show was not good. If anything it’s a mild surprise that it was not bad either. Instead it hovers along at a vague watchability—a level that’s clearly tremendously disappointing from any perspective that holds a lot of hope about what Star Trek could be in 2017.…

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The Church on Ruby Road Review

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I’ve had “Goblin Song” stuck in my head for two weeks now. The other day when I was just throwing songs on from my iPhone whilst we sat around making dinner I put it between They Might Be Giants and 100 gecs and it fit in perfectly logically. It was fun—a nice bit of time spent in the buildup to Christmas constantly anticipating the song because Murray Gold wrote a really solid novelty earworm. It was a provocation of course—all the publicity here focused on the goblins, starting from “he’s not a myth he’s an actual thing” in Doctor Who Unleashed, in an ostentatious “oh yeah we’re doing this now” swerve from two weeks ago.

By the time it hit within the episode (at the halfway point of course), of course, it felt perfectly reasonable. I mean, if nothing else we’re doing Labyrinth. Of course it has a musical number. Davies is nothing if not a student of television grammar. (See also the way the credits transition straight into Davina McCall interviewing Ruby in an entirely coherent rendition of Long Lost Family, delivering Ruby out of the TV schedule in a literal virgin birth.) Plus we had one basically last week. And then Davies flipped his second card—the entire second half of the song in which the Doctor and Ruby sing and dance their way out of the goblins’ web. 

It’s great, of course. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before, luxuriating in the sheer libidinousness of Gatwa’s Doctor, smoothly transitioning out of the astonishing decision five minutes earlier to have him actively thirst for the Aristotlean coherence of the goblin tapestry. The Doctor learns the story he’s in and unstitches himself from it and it’s sexy as hell (and gosh has Davies decided to have fun with the fact that “hell” is allowed as a swear). 

All of this makes the ending more striking. Because, of course, the episode doesn’t quite end. Indeed, its final moments are oddly broken things, not least because they’re a structural reprise of the horror scene of the Doctor’s subverted victory, We see the Doctor crying when he leaves Ruby at the church and declines to probe the mystery of who left her. Then there’s the slightly weird stretch of him popping in and out of Ruby’s flat where her little old lady neighbor watches on, and then there’s a scene mirroring the Doctor figuring out that Ruby was gone with Ruby figuring out where the Doctor has gone. But what’s really weird is that the ending is entirely on Ruby—a wordless “bigger on the inside” scene and perfunctory “I’m the Doctor” and that’s it save for the midcredit mystery. It’s jarring, especially with that vertiginous moment of the Doctor fretting that he’s the bad luck—a beat that never actually resolves except inasmuch as when we next see the old woman she’s complicit in the Doctor’s narrative, nodding Ruby into the TARDIS.

The problem, if you will, is that this ending doesn’t actually work with the logic of the episode.…

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Ending Explained (Part 4)

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Final part of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.

In The Mouth of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore’s Providence, metafiction, the ‘fourth wall’, China Miéville’s ‘arche-fossil’, and the Marxian ‘real abstraction’.

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In the graphic novel Providence, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows, H.P. Lovecraft is bred to be a redeemer or messiah by a secret society or cult whose aim is nothing less than the rupturing of the division between reality and fiction to permit the re-entry into reality of the Old Ones, the Old Gods, the Outer Monstrosities, the presiding cosmic entities of the haute Weird.  In an early twentieth century America which seems to partly be the world in which Robert Chambers sets The Repairer of Reputations (first story in The King in Yellow), closeted gay journalist Robert Black makes a tour of lovecraftian events and characters which represent the activities of the cult – events and characters which directly mirror and reiterate events and characters we know from Lovecraft stories.  He meets H.P. Lovecraft, who listens to his tales and reads the material he has amassed.  Lovecraft then turns this material into his own fiction.  Mirroring the rise of Lovecraft as a massively freighted cultural touchstone in the real world, Lovecraft’s fiction then goes on to reach a critical mass of critical appreciation and cultural belief, which triggers the apocalypse desired and engineered by the cult.  As a result of a concentration of semiotic hegemony and cultural influence, Lovecraft’s fiction comes into being.  Lovecraft’s fiction, and his cultural footprint, thus becomes a conduit for outside entities who take over humanity’s collective consciousness, bringing our nightmares into reality.  The Old One entities are depicted as a kind of corporate cloud of sentience which, via its human representatives among the cultists, wants and engineers this turn of events.  

I am not in a position to engage in responsible criticism of Providence itself, having only read it once – and that a few years ago – but it seems to owe something to John Carpenter’s 1994 movie In The Mouth of Madness, or at least to be mining a startlingly similar seam, albeit with a more dense, literary, and specifically referential (though not reverential) approach to Lovecraft in particular.  

Moore has the advantage of being able to consider the recent extraordinary upsurge of interest in Lovecraft, and the history of Lovecraft’s growing bottom-up success which fed into it, even as he – Moore – contributes to it, enfolding his own consideration into the phenomenon he is thinking about and vice versa.

One of the things about John Carpenter as an artist is that he sometimes seems almost uncannily ‘of his moment’ but also intensely prescient of forthcoming cultural preoccupations.  As with Halloween, The Thing, and They Live!, with In The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter was well ahead of the curve.  …

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God Rest Ye Erudite Gentlemen

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Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. And those that don’t, for that matter. Absolutely no reason you should be obliged to have a shitty December 25th just because you don’t go for a holiday.

I’ve got a busy day and while I’ve got time carved for watching The Church on Ruby Road, I’m far less confident that I will have time to get a review up before tomorrow. We’ll see, but don’t go endlessly refreshing the page wondering where it is, y’know?

But I’ll offer a small festive treat in its place—the latest edition of my periodically evolving Christmas playlist. Designed to work in four roughly CD-sized chunks (the four versions of O Come, O Come Emmanuel are the dividers), it freely mixes classical, pop, and idiosyncrasies of personal taste from across decades. I’ve got it up on both Apple Music and Spotify.

Hope you have a good holiday, and that someone got you TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8. If they didn’t, you can still grab it on Amazon.…

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Three Minute Record 002: The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle

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We Learned More From A Three Minute Record returns for our second episode proper, tackling Springsteen’s sophomore album The Wild The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle. Very special guest Andrew Matey brings in sight and passion, and Kit and James reflect on the joys of exploring a work you don’t know very well from an artist you admire. Learn which fan favourite/classic will get each podcast member kicked out of The Boss Club for not liking, who Andrew considers to be the secret weapon of the first two records, and whther or not Kit will remember which numbered street is under idsucssion this time. Enjoy. We did 🙂

https://pexlives.libsyn.com/the-wild-the-innocent-and-the-e-street-shuffle…

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Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter Twelve: 1963

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Moore’s move into self-published and wholly independent comics had an obvious cost. The bulk of the Watchmen money had been spent failing to get Mad Love going, and none of Moore’s personal projects were advancing or earning money; A Small Killing was trapped under the crumbling wreckage of Victor Gollancz’s sale, Lost Girls and From Hell were coming out in Steve Bissette’s Taboo, which managed to produce seven issues in five years and only paid $100 per page, to be split between Moore and the artist, and Big Numbers simply didn’t exist. By 1992, Moore was broke and only nominally a comics writer, in that he simply did not have any current projects that were actually coming out anywhere.

And so in the spring of 1992, when Bissette approached him with an offer of work, Moore was receptive, even though it would mean wading back into the mainstream American comics industry that he had so definitively departed five years earlier. Bissette was in fact acting as a messenger—the job offer was from Jim Valentino, who wanted Moore and Bissette to do an issue of a comic called ShadowHawk. And in 1992, Jim Valentino was very possibly the single most interesting man in all of comics.

Valentino got his start in the late 70s/early 80s post-underground scene, appearing in anthologies like Dope Comix alongside underground veterans like Aline Kominsky-Crumb to tell the story of a bad trip on belladonna, or putting out his solo book Yer Basic Comix. He wrote a backup feature for Dave Sim’s Cerebus called normalman, about the one non-superpowered person in a world of superheroes, which eventually turned into a series, first at Sim’s Aardvark-Vanaheim, and then with Renegade Press when Deni Loubert effectively kept the title in the divorce, then went on to do a book of autobiographical comics called simply Valentino.

Eventually his career saw him drift into superheroes, and he settled into a job at Marvel writing and drawing Guardians of the Galaxy. This had been a longstanding minor property at Marvel, first created in 1969 by Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake along with Gene Colan. The team languished in obscurity for two decades hamstrung by the detail that they were from the 31st century and thus largely outside of Mravel continuity, but around the turn of the decade Tom DeFalco, then editor-in-chief at Marvel, saw the concept as a way to cash in on the popularity of the new Star Trek series. Coincidentally Jim Valentino had just worked up a proposal for the characters, having been a fan of the most substantial effort to date to make the spacefaring team work, a stretch of issues by Steve Gerber, who had long been notable as one of the figures in superhero comics with the closest ties to the underground, and so he joined the book as a writer/artist.

Valentino’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy offered a gradual evolution over the twenty-nine issues that he did. On the one hand, his roots as a cartoonist are evident, especially early on, but he was adept at using these as a springboard for clear, expressive storytelling.…

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The Giggle Review

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If you go look at the Patreon-exclusive Discord thread I have for this episode—and yeah, I recognize this is an extremely venal opening sentence—there’s a moment where I note that the second pre-released clip, with the “David Tennant spits out ‘the Toymaker’ in the same voice he did ‘the Macra’” moment, was squarely at the twenty minute mark, and where I bet on another big turn at 40. And yes, I knew my spoilers and was expecting bi-generation, but I still just want to start by pointing out the fucking clockwork of it. In fact there’s another turn at roughly 30–that’s where the “return to 2023” beat happens, neatly bisecting the second act. And I think that’s key, in the face of the sheer, stupid cheek of this episode, to understanding why it works so well.

I mean, it’s worth saying it out loud, just so I can get it quote-posted on Tumblr—a pantsless Ncuti Gatwa emerges like Athena, instantly establishes himself as the faggiest Doctor ever to fag, then hits the TARDIS with a giant mallet because “we won the game, you get a prize honey” to split it in two so that David Tennant can be the Doctor forever. You can’t make it up, not least because Russell T Davies already did. It sounds like a joke, and in many ways is—the clue’s in the title and all. It was essentially spoiler-proofed, because anyone who’s the sort of fan that’s pouring over spoilers reads that and is just left wondering how this could possibly work out. And the answer is that it’s being done by a damn maestro of the form who understands how to structure the mother of all throat clears before you go and reset the show for gen alpha TikTok users.

The central trick is, of course, that third act pivot into doing a multi-Doctor story for the anniversary after all, with David Tennant having turned out to be the past Doctor all along. That is, above all else, simply fabulous television, and Davies understands that all you actually have to do is put it on a platter. Everything around it is just a series of decisions about tone—an almost mechanistic execution of scaffolding to ensure that moment is a thunderous drop that sends the dance floor wild instead of landing with a damp thud of authorial perversity. It’s fitting that he has the Toymaker attack through television because at the end of the day this operates through literally nothing save for the fact that Davies understands how to use the medium to engineer what is at the end of the day its original pleasure—its creation of cultural events. At the end of the day, there are rules, and Davies knows how to play. 

Much as with Rose, there’s a real temptation to break it down scene by scene, but this is the fast reaction, so let’s work in outline. Like I said, three act structure. Act one uses a cold open to put two premises on the table: Neil Patrick Harris is a weird evil guy and he’s done something to television.…

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Ending Explained (Part 3)

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Part 3 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.  Putting aside the issues I said I would address this time, let’s instead go back to the film and try to start drawing things together a bit.  If previous installments in this series were prefatory, this one gets down to it.

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“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”

– Fredric Jameson

The hostile manifestation in human ‘reality’ of the characters and places of mass-produced mass-cultural mass-fiction is, of course, a textual expression of commodity fetishism.  This is true but is a generality.  This is true of the entire sub-genre of fiction in which fiction itself springs to life and confronts the reader or viewer as something “hostile and alien”.  It is equally true of the entire nest of genres in which artificial human images, human replicants, human created automata, etc, etc, etc, so spring to life.  The era of bourgeois modernity is the era in which humanity is surrounded by the products of their own labour alienated from them, hostile to them, reinforcing their oppression and exploitation.  It is the era in which, as Marx observed, society treats things as people and people as things, makes relations between people into relations between things, and vice versa.  This is precisely why Horror and SF are the quintessential genres of modernity.

To be specific about In The Mouth of Madness we need to go beyond this essential but basic ground assumption, as does In The Mouth of Madness itself.

In the Mouth of Madness is a zombie apocalypse movie, but the zombies are us, normal people living normal life, and the apocalypse is caused by those who wake up from their zombified state and rebel.

The normal world is the apocalypse.  “Nothing surprises me anymore,” says John Trent (Sam Neill), “We…” (he means the human race collectively) “…fucked up the air, the water, we fucked up each other. Why don’t we just finish the job by flushing our brains down the toilet?”  He’s referring to the massive sales, the global cultural phenomenon, of the writing of Sutter Cane.  The books are explicitly pulp trash.  Their covers are designed to look lower-brow than Garth Marenghi.

The film opens with shots of massive printing presses churning out copy after copy after copy of Cane’s newest novel.  The comment on ‘authenticity’ inherent in any summoning of ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ is only emphasised by the music playing: a Carpenter-created pastiche of a track by Metallica (notorious guardians of their intellectual property) to which he couldn’t get the rights.

In a key, early scene, Trent is walking through the city at night.  He looks at urban walls covered in posters for Cane’s books; these posters are tattered yet omnipresent.  …

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Wild Blue Yonder Review

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Well gosh, that was nice, wasn’t it?

More than anything, I’m just delighted that Davies bothered. Like, the three specials structure could have been all big ones. This slot could have been a big scary Cybermen one or something, and the Fourteenth Doctor era would still feel complete and varied across the three. By most reckonings that would have even been the better idea. But no, instead he decided that this should actually feel like a season of Doctor Who and have a weird one in the middle. There’s something absolutely decadent about spending a third of your big Tennant-Tate reunion trilogy doing something that feels as though it’s overtly striving to be described as “proper Doctor Who.”

I remember, way back on the Forest of the Dead podcast commentary, which is legitimately one of the best forty-five minutes it is possible to spend on being terminally That Sort of Fan, Davies, Tennant, and Moffat enthusing about the first episode of The Ark in Space and how you could just shoot it with no changes to the script and it would still sparkle. And now here we are, with Davies doing an episode that begs for comparisons to Heaven Sent and Listen in its “a cheap one proving I can still write” ostentation—a weird spooky two-hander on a spaceship. 

Well. “Cheap.” Obviously this continues to luxuriate in the stupidity of its budget from the moment they step out into that corridor set, which of course looks fantastic. The CGI body horror is genuinely startling. You suspect it still did come out cheaper than The Star Beast, but it’s still being ostentatious in its quality across the board. There’s ambition and confidence in every shot of this, and like Isaac Newton it’s frankly sexy as fuck.

What shines for me is the character work. The parallel scenes of the Doctor and Donna trying to figure out who the fake is (and note the very sly decision to do a deceptive shot-match so that the fake Donna comes out of a green corridor like the one we just saw Donna in) in which Donna gets it and the Doctor doesn’t, which sets up the subsequent beat of the Doctor IDing the fake Donna based on the fact that she volunteers to insult her own intelligence. Or even just the ways in which the not-things (as the subtitles charmingly call them) work—the grinning sadism with which Tennant delivers “when something is gone it keeps existing” is beautifully chilling. Davies has always been strong when he lets his nihilistic streak shine, and he uses it here—along with two phenomenal leads—to make cosmic horrors feel at once convincing and charismatic. 

It feels significant, then, that it’s the not-thing version of Donna that relates so emphatically to the devastation Flux. And I don’t mean that as snark about Chibnall. For all that I deadpanned “yeah man, I felt that way about the Chibnall era too” during the Doctor’s frustrated tantrum, the thing that’s really striking about Davies astonishingly gracious salvage job on the emotional desolation of his predecessor’s tenure is the not-thing’s awed “you have owned it” and the way it sells the horrified tumult of this new version of Tennant, reeling from a trauma to rival the Time War.…

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Pex Lives: The Star Beast

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After El Sandifer’s considered, brilliant review of the latest episode and before we get to hear her upcoming brilliant podcast, you can keep yourself going with this: the only episode of Pex Lives certified to murder Henry Kissenger. You’re also now able to sate your previously unquenchable hunger to learn what your old buddies Kevin ‘n’ James thought about the newest Doctor Who. Listen now. We’re back and we’re always different, always the same…

https://pexlives.libsyn.com/star-beast

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