This is not a place of honor
Comics reviews this evening, but for now, a new episode of Pex Lives in which the boys are joined by author Kit Power to talk about Terror of the Autons. And apparently there’s some Stephen King stuff, although the description gives me no clue what that entails in any way, shape, or form. But evidently it’s a thing. So there you go. Listen here.…
A holographic little girl discusses the nature of imaginal reality with a formless being and a goddess. This is an interesting one.
We should begin with the personal identity theory and problem of self themes which naturally always crop up in any story like this. As one might expect from this show, particularly this show this season, the problem is addressed and dealt with rather easily. As a direct thematic follow-up to both “Inheritance” and “Whispers”, it’s never portrayed as ambiguous whether or not the colonists really are sentient beings. That is, if you discount Odo. Odo’s apparent uncertainty over this fact is a reflection of his own inner nature, not necessarily a statement of judgment: He’s accompanied Dax to the Gamma Quadrant to look for clues about his history and identity, and he wants hard and clear answers. Of course, Dax has helped him in this regard before, earlier in the season in “The Alternate”. But seeing “The Alternate” is not a necessary prerequisite for enjoying this episode.
Odo is a neoplatonist here, out searching for an objective reality he can define himself in accordance with. He’s also a detective, heavily invested in solving mysteries and getting to the bottom of a capital-T Truth he sees as being wrongfully withheld from him. It’s of little surprise that the mask he crafts for himself involves serving as a constable, an elected law-enforcement officer with changeably defined responsibilities. This is, of course, and always has been, the key to understanding who Odo is: The naturally fluid and amorphous shapeshifter yearns for form and rigidity because of his own reflexive questions and self-conscious insecurities. Odo likes hard facts and hard truths, things he can hold onto and be absolutely sure of. So naturally he’s going to be less than thrilled with the colony of holograms whose holographic nature is being hidden from them. To him, this is a willful Obfuscation of The Truth, a crime being committed that someone must be held accountable for.
Except Taya tells Odo that shapeshifters aren’t real. Which means, by definition, Odo isn’t real either. And things suddenly got all “Ship in a Bottle” up in here. Although then Taya says she wants to be a shapeshifter, because that would mean she could be anything and everyone would want to be with her. And maybe the better analogy is Promethea…
Taya and the rest of her people are real because Rurigan treats them as if they’re real. He designed them to be exact duplicates of his deceased family and friends on his homeworld and loved them the same way, which means the holographic villagers have become them. This is personal identity theory working on the plane of the imaginal: Not only the psychical continuity of one person, but an entire world kept alive through one person’s perspective of it. The imaginal is dynamically formless: Shaped by positionality, it can also influence it in turn. Gods inarguably exist in the realm of the imaginal, and gods can reshape themselves into new identities through mythopoeia.…
Phil is joined by Noah Berlatsky, author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics to talk about Grant Morrison’s new Wonder Woman graphic novel and the usual motley of off-topic subjects. Download that here.
I think I may have failed to actually mention the title of my own Wonder Woman book in the podcast. It’s A Golden Thread.…
Use of Weapons marks a clear transition in Banks’s career; it is the last of the Culture novels to have been revised from a pre-existing manuscript. It also serves as a temporary endpoint to the Culture series, which Banks put down for six years, penning two of his three non-Culture sci-fi novels in the gap. And it provides a conceptual culmination to the line of thought explored in the three of Banks’s science fiction novels looked at thus far (although by any reasonable standard Walking on Glass and The Bridge are also science fiction novels). It is unsurprising, perhaps, to find that this is the oldest of Banks’s pre-Wasp Factory manuscripts, and the book he first developed the Culture for; a fact that offers an easy narrative whereby Banks wiped out on the overly ambitious premise and structure of this book, spent a couple of books playing with its themes in other contexts, and finally, with a crucial assist from Ken McLeod, reattempted the magnum opus and got it right.
Certainly the book echoes the three previous books discussed in distinct ways. The Wasp Factory is perhaps the subtlest, as it’s easy to miss that it uses the same basic narrative structure as Use of Weapons. Much of this is because Use of Weapons is so ostentatious in its structure, with its two sets of chapters, one of which is numbered backwards so as to scream “we are working our way through a series of flashbacks towards some climactic reveal about the character’s origin” as loudly as possible. But The Wasp Factory uses the same approach of alternating between a forward-moving timeline and a chain of flashback revelations about the past – it just doesn’t separate the flashbacks into their own chapters. (And much like The Wasp Factory, Use of Weapons’s best reading is the second one in which the reader is free to focus on how the novel is constructed around the information revealed at the end.)
The similarities with Consider Phlebas are more straightforward; like Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons has a main character who is a mercenary not of the Culture itself. Unlike Horza, Cherardenine Zakalwe works for the Culture instead of their enemies, but he still has a distinct distance from them, actively declining to settle down within the Culture in favor of continuing to take soldiering jobs for them. In essentially every regard Use of Weapons is the smarter, subtler book here – readers interested in seeing how Banks developed as a writer could scarcely do better than reading these two and looking at two very similar protagonists who end up coming out very differently. But the pattern is largely the same.
You could easily argue that Gurgeh in Player of Games is another example of the pattern – as, indeed, is Frank, in that all of them are very much people who have been carefully shaped and designed for circumstances, even if only Horza and Cherardenine are weapons as such. And it’s true, this is a pronounced theme in the four Banks works discussed on this blog over the past year and change.…
Sometimes I wonder why I do this.
This is another episode I have vivid, fond memories of that left me sorely disappointed. It’s not that I think “Thine Own Self” is particularly bad, and in fact I’d go so far as to say there’s a lot to recommend in it. But it couldn’t live up to the position it had in my memory, and there’s some writing decisions made in it I’m pretty vehemently opposed to. I mean, just look who wrote the teleplay: I should have known. A lot of this season has surprised me by how little enthusiasm I can muster for it, especially on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where we’re at the tail end of a stretch of episodes that are all peerlessly iconic to me, but which I wound up writing some fairly mixed things about after I sat down with them again this time. This should be my absolute favourite era, and while there’s a lot of it I do like, there’s just as much, if not more, that I’m finding myself at more of a distance from then I ever expected.
I suppose in some ways this episode is a perfect microcosm for my entire experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation over the course of my journey with Vaka Rangi. It’s not an episode I recall watching during the original run, but I do distinctly remember seeing screenshots from it in calendars, guide books, magazines and that sort of thing. I saw it for the first time (that I can place) as part of TNN’s reruns in the early 2000s and thought it was utterly beautiful. I remember the subplot about Deanna Troi taking the Bridge Officer Exam and getting promoted beat-by-beat, but it’s Data’s story on Barkon IV that was the most iconic. The makeup work on the Barkonians is some of the most striking in the series, and shots of them, alongside Data in rustic mountain clothes with part of his circuitry exposed, are among the defining moments of this whole year.
Some of the writing here is nothing short of poetic (the title, for one): Talur’s speculation that the amnesiac Data is an “Ice-Man” from the “Vellorian Mountains” whose superhuman strength is an inherited trait amongst his people to help them “fight off the wild beasts that roam the mountains” is an absolutely spellbinding bit of worldbuilding. It’s evocative and haunting in a way Star Trek hardly ever is, and it captures the imagination in a way typically reserved for, let’s face it, superior genre fiction franchises. “Thine Own Self” also boasts one of the single greatest lines in the entire series, if not the franchise, bar none: When Gia comments that her mother passed away, she tells Data “Father said she went to a beautiful place, where everything is peaceful and everyone loves each other and no one ever gets sick.…
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| Figure 950: Ozymandias rejoices at saving the world. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987) |
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Part of what made Watchmen so successful was that its sense of apocalyptic grandeur was a good fit for the mid-80s. And speaking of apocalyptic grandeur, there seems to be this weird sense that the chapter is progressing towards some sudden and decisive turning point. Wonder what that’s about.
But the most chilling part of Moore’s labyrinth is not the sense of doom that hangs over it. Rather, it is his exploration of what, at first glance, would seem to be an innocuous, even optimistic line of thought. A core element of superhero stories, after all, is that superheroes save people. So how might that apply to the nuclear eschaton looming over Watchmen? To pinch a framing from Grant Morrison, if the bomb is an idea, what better idea could superheroes possibly offer to counter them? But far from offering any sort of hopeful, utopian vision of superheroes averting atomic crisis (that hardly being an original notion, after all), Moore, thinking about this question, came up with a genuinely chilling answer. He did not take the obvious route that he would eventually explore in Miracleman of simply having the superheroes destroy all the nuclear stockpiles by force. Instead he comes up with a far more cracked and strange idea – Ozymandias’s mad scheme to slaughter the population of New York.
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| Figure 951: Ozymandias’s television viewing is explicitly presented as using the same nine-panel grid as the comic itself. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #11, 1987) |
It is, famously, an absolutely_p12_(comichost-dcp).jpg)
bonkers plot involving faking an alien invasion with a giant squid monster designed by a committee
of artists and scientists that would be teleported to New York with a
malfunctioning teleporter that
would kill it on arrival, releasing a massive psychic shockwave that would kill everyone. But beneath the basic ridiculousness is a dark and ominous vision in the form of Ozymandias’s animating obsession. There is something fundamentally unsettling about the image of a man who can intuit the pulse of the world deciding to take action to change it. Especially in the context of Watchmen, where Ozymandias’s Burroughs-inspired television watching is naturally allied with the way the world works. And Ozymandias’s plan, ridiculous as it is, hinges on a grim structural joke. The world of Watchmen consists largely of superheroes – Moloch is the only corresponding supervillain to appear, and the discussions of “costumed criminals” in the Under the Hood excerpts make it clear that these are fairly generic criminals who dress up in the same way that Hooded Justice or Captain Metropolis did. There’s no villainous equivalent to the sort of high-tech adventuring of Nite Owl, little yet anyone who displays actual or even quasi-superhuman powers like Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias. Except, of course, for Ozymandias himself, whose plan is a dead ringer for the sorts of elaborate world-spanning schemes of super-villains like Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, or Ra’s al Ghul might come up with.…
OK, this one’s absolute rubbish.
I’ve had my philosophical disagreements with this show this season, but at least those were on episodes that were basically well-constructed and where there was room for a nuanced discussion about different interpretations. “Paradise” is just hot garbage and the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode since “Invasive Procedures” I simply can’t defend or come up with any interesting tangential topics to venture forth into. It’s a directionless parable about cultism and the relationship the Star Trek universe has with its technology that can’t make its mind up about what it wants its actual point to be and plays out as a hideously boring rehash of “The Apple” from the Original Series and “The Masterpiece Society” from the fifth season. No amount of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine‘s lovely purple prose or Block and Erdmann’s praise for how how Commander Sisko “radiates” defiance in their Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion is ever going to upsell me on this story or convince me it’s anything other than some alien looking crap-on-a-stick.
I said I didn’t have any tangents to go off of here, but, now that I’ve said that, I actually think I do. It’s not a major theme in this story purely because of the fact the episode can’t take a stand one way or the other, but “Paradise” remains another example of a worryingly Luddite motif that’s been creeping into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this season and that will become more of a problem on the next series. Apart from Alixis’ tyrannical anti-tech cult in this story, there’s also stuff like Major Kira’s disparaging remark to Dax in “The Siege” that Starfleet officers have forgotten how to use their “natural instincts” because of their reliance on technology (and before anyone comments, we’re absolutely meant to sympathize with Kira here: This is from her Big Damn Hero making scene and that Dax comes across as well as she does is purely due to Terry Farrell). There seems to be the beginning of an idea that Star Trek (really Star Trek: The Next Generation, as all Star Trek from now in is going to be in some way a reaction to Star Trek: The Next Generation) is too overly sanitized and technologized, and that this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed and that the show needs to be taken to task for.
This is the brainchild of Ira Steven Behr, who has gone on the record numerous times stating his open disdain for technobabble, his belief that it’s a dramatic crutch that hinders actual storytelling and that he “tried very hard to take the tech out of DS9”. But let’s unpack this concern a bit. First of all, let’s remember what the actual point of technobabble in Star Trek really is-In truth, it serves two primary purposes. The first, and most important, is to make the crew seem competent.…
Bit of a loose collection of bits and bobs this week. I’ve been both sick and very busy.
Firstly, I was recently a guest on the excellent They Must Be Destroyed On Sight! movie podcast, chatting with hosts Lee Russell and Daniel Harper (who is also, as you all must surely know by now, the co-host of the Oi! Spaceman Doctor Who podcast, and an online mate of mine). Check out my episode here (and check out TMBDOS’s other episodes because they’re worth it). In my ep, we chatted about the 1983 Coen Brothers debut Blood Simple (thus making the podcast kindasorta another bit of Eruditorum Press’s now recurring but irregular ‘Minnesota’ series… even though Blood Simple takes place in Texas) and the 1986 David Lynch masterpiece/freakshow Blue Velvet.
Blue Velvet is 30 years old this year, and a restored print is currently enjoying a limited theatrical re-release. It’s almost as worrying, baffling, and brain-frying as it ever was, though obviously it now exists in the context of three decades of subsequent American cinema at least partly shaped by its impact.
On that subject…
Blue Velvet (Just Some Stray Thoughts I Wish I’d Been Able to Develop in the Abovementioned Podcast)
One line of criticism praises the film as an expose of the dark, secret heart of American life. Lynch opens the film with white picket fences and other evocations of suburban American dreaminess. Eventually, of course, we are drawn into much darker and deeper waters. Another line of criticism critiques the film for keeping the dark world and the light world so separate. There are areas of interpenetration, but generally all the evil happens in the seedy, slummy, dark places where disreputable, sleazy, criminal people live. The nice people from the nice neighbourhood nearby might be fascinated by the darkness, but it is fundamentally alien to them. They go to it; it comes to them… but the darkness is not of them, or of their world.
And it’s true, Blue Velvet is not about the hidden horrors of a small town per se. But nor is it quite true to say that the horrors are entirely alien to the middle class and suburban people who discover them. First and foremost, the ‘nice’ characters are irresistibly drawn to the ‘nasty people’. Secondly, they dabble in the same vices… just in their own prettied-up, gentrified, morally-secure, arguably hypocritical ways. Thirdly, they seem less alive than the people in the nasty side of town. Fourthly, they derive their fullest and deepest senses of self from their interactions with the darkness, and the darkness suffers at their hands… though Dorothy ends up better off for her contact with Jeffrey… but then that’s part of the exaggeratedly happy, almost sarcastic, Sirk-esque happy ending.
There is a deeply-rooted ambiguity, much as there is in a film from which Blue Velvet obviously draws, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. (Shadow of a Doubt, by the way, features Agent Jack Graham, coming to Cutesville, USA and loving it, much like Special Agent Dale Cooper coming to Twin Peaks.)…
Spider-Man #3
A bit of a mess. I saw a Tumblr post complaining about last issue’s “I don’t want to be the black Spider-Man” bit and arguing that Miles should identify as Latinx, not Hispanic, concluding that Bendis shouldn’t be writing these topics because he’s too white, and kind of eyerolled at its “my vision of minority experiences is the only right one” tone. After reading an issue of browbeating Latin American grandmother stereotypes, however, I’m rethinking my eyeroll. Further points off for a desperately pointless Kamala Khan cameo. Seriously, two characters as great as Miles and Kamala and literally fucking nobody can write a good scene between them. Argh.
Digital code: FCMXQ647JZSM
Invincible Iron Man #8
Apparently this road leads to Civil War II. How exciting. That’s not actually true. This is not very exciting. This is Bendis-by-numbers with generic tech ninjas. Were it not for the big “The Road to Civil War II” banner at the top the plot would seem utterly disposable. Deodato continues to have never met a quantity of black he thinks is too much. Thoroughly meh.
Digital code: FCMCRPH2D2VB
Spider-Women Alpha
Picked up because I don’t intend to drop Spider-Gwen due to this crossover, or at least I hoped not to. And I won’t be – this is fun, sets up a nice premise with deftness, and has three solid and distinct leads. I’m particularly really liking this take on Spider-Woman, and would invite people reading her series to let me know if it’s worth checking out in comments. This doesn’t look set to be earth-shattering, but it looks set to be good superhero fun with three characters who aren’t so done as to seemingly only be capable of self-parody. Speaking of which, wickedly good Tony Stark joke here.
Digital code: THMN246PTTNH
Black Panther #1
No surrpise that there’s some roughness here; Coates is still learning to do comics, and ends up using the entire issue to set the stage instead of getting off to a storming start, which feels like a kind of archetypal “brilliant writer unaccustomed to twenty-two page comics format” mistake. But everything you want out of Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black Panther is here – the deep regard for the history of what he’s doing and the probing, demanding mind that insists on making the book a big and dramatic statement about the very idea of an African hero-king. This is going to be one to watch. And I hope things happen next issue. That said, seriously, Marvel? $4.99 for twenty-two story pages? Fuck you.
Digital code: FCMJ0ZVXTAGW
Batgirl #50
With the news that this creative team is off the book with Rebirth, this ends up being something of a viking funeral for their take – an oversized conclusion to an arc that celebrates a particular configuration of DC female Bat characters. It’s big and fun and a solid reminder of why the Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr run has been such a revelation – those big “X vs Y” splashes were particularly great. This has a good team coming onto it for Rebirth, and I’ll probably still buy it, but man, I’m going to miss this era.…
This is the one episode that seems to unite all sides of the fanbase. In a rare moment of nonpartisan respect and consensus, hardcore Star Trek fans and the more heretical voices who have been raising their tone in the discourse for the past few years both unanimously agree that “Lower Decks” was A Good Idea. So naturally, I’m going to be the contrarian dissenter who casts doubt on that assumption.
It’s odd, if you think about it, that this would be the one episode from this season that would be universally beloved because it’s so drastically different from everything the party line says is good about Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has next to nothing to do with any of the regulars, and hangs the entire dramatic crux of the story on a bunch of one-shot guest characters (excepting Alyssa Ogawa), including one character who only showed up once in a episode three years ago. Indeed that Michael Piller greenlit this story in the first place earned him more than a few double-takes from the writing staff because it flagrantly violates the first hardline rule he established at the beginning of his tenure: That every episode had to be about one or more of the main characters and that guest stars should not be allowed to carry a story, because that would be “overshadowing” the regulars. The reasoning employed by both Piller and this episode’s fans for letting “Lower Decks” through is that the story shines a light on an important and all-to-often overlooked perspective: The nameless and faceless workaday junior officer who walk in the shadows of giants.
Perhaps it does. Indeed, when I first saw this episode as part of TNN’s reruns in the early 2000s, I loved it for those very reasons: I thought it was terrific how we got to see what the Enterprise looked like from a different vantage point, and I found myself really invested in the day-to-day concerns of the crew’s junior officer contingent. You’d think, if anything, “Lower Decks” would be absolutely right up my alley, what with my constant contention that Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reject anything it might have inherited from the action sci-fi genre. However, as I came to revisit it for this rewatch, my opinion of it cooled significantly. In particular, I think it’s worth considering exactly whose viewpoint is truly being examined here, and what that says about how people are reading the overall climate of this series’ environment.
To those looking for a glimpse at the Star Trek universe’s underclasses, those left behind by master narratives of history and grandiose tales of war, conquest, glory and political heroism, you’ll certainly not find it in “Lower Decks”. These are all Starfleet officers (or all but one), just not bridge officers. Our hero is even Sito Jaxa, disgraced one-time Academy cadet whose presence here (and story arc) is an explicit callback to “The First Duty”, an episode which, regardless of your feelings on it, you must at least grant is controversial.…