Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

Comics Reviews (April 6th, 2016)

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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.…

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“The Handbags and the Gladrags”: Lower Decks

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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.…

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Tuesday Muffining

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I like muffins.

Jane’s going to be taking a vacation for the next few weeks; a literal one, I’m frantically editing the middle chunk of Last War in Albion Volume 1 so she can work on it on the plane. So starting next week I’m going to gear into book promotion mode for Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter to fund it in May, and running excerpts from the book on Tuesdays. Super Nintendo Project is also coming back in a couple weeks. A nice spring regearing against the alt-right, I suppose. Fun times at Eruditorum Press. 

The Last Tournament in Albion has a few hours to run, but the outcome seems pretty clear, so I figure I’ll offer some broad thoughts. First, the apparent winner, From Hell. Jed Blue and I were talking on Twitter about it; he had not been struck by the book when he read it, and wondered about its popularity. And I think that’s actually fair; it took me an age to get into it too. I’d actually already started writing Last War in Albion when I gave it what I consider its first proper read, and really felt like I got the book. But holy shit once I did. The comic basically invented psychochronography. I literally owe my entire literary and critical approach to it, even if that approach largely developed prior to my reading it as such. Which is utterly consistent with the critical approach it lays out, of course. Utterly brilliant. I didn’t know I was rooting for it going in, but I’m thrilled it (probably) won.

V for Vendetta‘s also a great one, of course, and a nice runner-up that I would not have been the slightest bit bothered by winning. It says something that we got an all-Moore final – something that’s probably true about the War as well. It’s a hell of a writer who pens these two works. Not for nothing is V for Vendetta getting two chapters, with another to come in Book Three; its weight in the War is comparable to few. That said, I am surprised that it was such an apparent blowout, especially given how dominant V for Vendetta was in what I had thought a fairly tough division. Phonogram was perhaps an easy quarterfinal opponent as such things go, propelled forward due to recentism, but it’s also a damn fine comic that was nice to see go on a run over genuinely good stuff like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Miracleman. This was, I think, a category hampered by obscurity in many cases, but quality-wise perhaps my favorite.

In proper bracket fashion, the semifinal that should have been a final was Watchmen vs From Hell. A couple people wondered what Watchmen was doing away from the superheroes while Sandman was in with them; the answer is just that the easiest way to define the superheroes division was “is it Marvel or DCU.” The result was a deliciously brutal division – I don’t think anything had as many heartbreaks as it did for me.…

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Review: The Black Archives (Dark Water/Death in Heaven)

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It’s a small club, and more than anything it’s nice to see a quality new contribution. I’m not going to say that the world is lacking in studies of Doctor Who because it’s manifestly not, but the aca-fandom corner of things is, as fields go, not one where it’s hard to keep track of the major players. So welcome to Philip Purser-Hallard, editor of and contributor to The Black Archives, Obverse Press’s new line of short book treatises on individual Doctor Who stories. They launched just last month with four books, on Rose, The Massacre, The Ambassadors of Death, and Dark Water/Death in Heaven, the latter of these by Purser-Hallard himself, and the one Obverse Books sent me a review copy of. (They’ve got four more planned over the rest of 2016, including Andrew Hickey’s take on The Mind Robber and Lance Parkin’s on The Pirate Planet, incidentally; it’s a hell of an exciting line.)

Let me start by saying this is a brilliant idea; a perfectly considered level of granular focus that has loads of room to find new things to say about tired old stories without sacrificing readability or approachability. The obvious analogue is the 33 ⅓ series of short books on music albums, which provide similarly appealing balances of depth, breadth, and the potential for idiosyncrasy. These are the right books at the right time, and it’s genuinely a thrill to have them join the conversation.

That said, as a fellow traveler in the aca-fandom waters who has also written a book for the 33 ⅓ series, there’s not really a way for me to approach a book like this without immediately jumping to either ridiculous talking shop about critical approaches or early efforts to contextualize it in the larger discourse of Doctor Who criticism. I mean, this is the sort of book where my reactions include things like “oh, hey, he quoted Anna’s piece on Missy and trans issues.” (“Was it a good quote? Do I sound like an idiot?” Anna asked when I told her. She does not, unsurprisingly, though Purser-Hallard doesn’t buy her claim that the Master was dysphoric, historically. “Lol, I don’t either,” notes Anna. It also cites Jack for the claim that Revelation of the Daleks has vaguely implied necrophilia, incidentally.)  Neither of which is the natural fit for a book series that’s aiming at a general enough audience that it starts with an overview of the episode that includes transmission dates and a fairly detailed plot synopsis. And while I could try to turn all those instincts off and just enthusiastically review it as the interesting and compelling guide that it is, well, what’s the point in that? Especially when Purser-Hallard argues, quite brilliantly, in the book’s epilogue that “one day everything in this book will be wrong (if indeed it isn’t now, which is certainly a possibility). And that is the magic of Doctor Who.”

So let me instead pay Purser-Hallard’s Dark Water/Death in Heaven a much higher compliment than a mere “hey, this is worthwhile, check it out” and say that when the time comes to write the Capaldi stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum, I cannot imagine discussing this story without using it the way I used About Time so often in the classic series, which is to say pushing back against and expanding upon its conclusions.…

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“Entangled freedom”: Whispers

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Colm Meaney is an immense acting talent. We all know this. Chief O’Brien was elevated from a nameless bit part who was little more than an extra to become debatably the most lasting and memorable character in the entire series because it was evident to everyone from Day 1 on “Encounter at Farpoint” that this was a guy who had some serious chops, even before bringing in quite extensive and illustrious motion picture career outside of Star Trek.

How you respond to a talent like that probably says more about you than it does them. When you write material for a specific actor, you’re more than likely envisioning a specific subset of their range you’d like to see them give when they perform your script. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the creative team responded by giving Colm increasingly larger and larger parts until they could hang an entire story off of him, usually emphasizing his everyman characteristics by giving him a unique insight on or offhand reaction to the topic at hand. On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, they invented an entire new hyperlocalized genre of story entitled “Let’s Torture O’Brien”, and actually called it that internally. This probably ought to say it all, but in slightly more nuanced and descriptive terms for the newcomers, a “Let’s Torture O’Brien” story entails coming up with a relatively strangled science fiction premise that allows the writers to put Miles O’Brien through a psychological wringer so that Colm Meaney can masterfully convey an everyday, likable, relatable person enduring extreme, oftentimes traumatic events while we watch on with rapt attention.

I’m not going to say too much more about this approach and the mindset that might attract a creator to it. You all can fill in the blanks by this point. I would ask, however, that you at least reflect amongst yourselves upon why in particular someone might think this is the best way to showcase an actor’s range. Is it not possible that an actor could potentially convey powerful emotions that aren’t extreme mental and emotional trauma? Does the category of “good acting” by definition require that he do so? But neither will I deny that “Whispers” is a damn corker of an episode or that Colm Meaney is heartbreakingly formidable in it. Though it’s frequently cited as such, this isn’t actually the first “Let’s Torture O’Brien” episode, at least not by my count. In fact, that’s a minor issue I have with it, considering it comes immediately after “Armageddon Game”, which I find to be a more down-to-Earth and relatable way of making us connect with a character’s pain: The Chief’s workmanlike honour in the face of death is unbelievably moving, and is light years beyond anything that has ever been done with the Klingons ever.

Speaking of “Armageddon Game”, I almost wonder if Doctor Bashir wouldn’t have been a better choice for this story. Sure, Siddig El Fadil may not have the pedigree of Colm Meaney as an actor (at least not yet), but he’s still damn good himself and its his very youthfulness, both as an actor and as a character, that I think would have added a layer to the story here.…

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The Wreckage of Love, Our Regard Lies White and Broken (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Nine: Apocalypse)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen seemed not born so much as ground like pigment from its time; something that could only possibly have been created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1986, at that point in their career, out of the specific interests they had at the time.

Figure 947: Eroticized war in Watchmen. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #7, 1986)

Moore has often made the joke that Watchmen was the result of a “bad mood” that he was in during the period. This is by and large understating things. In interviews from the time, Moore seems genuinely convinced that the world is going to end, certainly during his children’s lifetime, if not during his, and probably in some sort of nuclear explosion. In one interview, for instance, he notes that “in forty years the rain forests will be gone. If the rain forests are gone, we can’t breathe. Simple as that. There’s nothing that’s more simple than that: no trees, no air. One of my children is eight. She said to me the other day, “I’ll only be forty-eight, won’t I?’ and I said. ‘Yeah’. It’s a pretty depressing thought. What a horrible thing to have to think about. I mean, we brought these children into the world and it might not have that much longer left. Nuclear reactors, for another thing. They can’t be decommissioned because nobody knows how to do it. But they keep building them. We are going to have a Chernobyl every four or five years from now on. And more, because those reactors weren’t built to last for twenty-five years in the first place; and they were built thirty years ago. One of those reactors is going to go up every few years.” Obviously this proved unduly pessimistic, although to be fair Leah’s still only thirty-eight. But nevertheless, it was the world Moore saw in 1986, and with no surprise. It was the peak of the Reagan/Thatcher years, disarmament talks were failing, Chernobyl happened. A wealth of immediate threats to human survival loomed, and the political situation looked actively disinclined to even acknowledge them; indeed, the US government seemed at times to almost eroticize the notion of nuclear war. Apocalypse felt just around the corner.

Figure 948: The June, 1947 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, introduciing the Doomsday Clock.

It is impossible to fully understand the density of Watchmen absent this context. The point is not simply to be a comic that rewards reading and rereading at great length; the point is to be a comic with such density as to generate an inescapable gravity. Through its massively layered resonances and nonstop foreshadowing it conveys a constant sense of inevitability. This is, of course, flagged in one of the book’s most basic structural metaphors, the advancing clock on the back of every issue. This, in turn, alludes to the Doomsday Clock, a periodic feature of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences that declares the Bulletin’s assessment of the current danger of global disaster in the form of a clockface approaching midnight.…

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“Wuthering Heights”: Sub Rosa

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“Sub Rosa” is a fucking triumph, and I’m not at all ashamed to say so.

One of the most reviled entries in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a frequent sight on various “Worst Star Trek Episodes Of All Time” lists, like most stories in its class the reaction to “Sub Rosa” says more about the fandom at large than it does about its own textual quality. As is usually the case with these types of episodes, I enjoy “Sub Rosa” considerably more than the kinds of people who typically critique and review Star Trek episodes, but this time I have a bit more of a chip on my shoulder than I normally do for this sort of thing because the split in fandom is *so* blatant and explicitly defined the contrast couldn’t be drawn any clearer. If you’re looking for a microcosm of the schism in genre fiction circles that led to the rise of master narratives, you actually can’t find a better example than “Sub Rosa”.

Men hate it. Women love it. That’s what it comes down to, plain and simple, and that’s what it has always come down to. That has always been the line drawn in the sand. It’s as true for “Sub Rosa” itself as it is for every other controversy or debate we’ve talked about in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the entire history of genre fiction writ large. Where you stand on issues like this has always been and will always be determined by where you stand on the patriarchy/feminism binary.

Displaying a seasoned wisdom and savvy that only comes after making a career of spending years of their life immersed in the genre fiction mire, this is something that, for the very first time, the creative team has actually come out and admitted. They saw it back when this episode was made and commented on it then. And it even manifested in the actual production: The majority of the male creative figures were at best cautious about doing this story and at worst outright opposed to doing it sight unseen, while the entire female staff was very enthusiastic about it and showered Brannon Braga with constant praise and affection for his work on the teleplay. It is literally physically impossible for the network gap (which exists everywhere in society and has existed as long as agriculture and the division of labour have existed, but which is significantly magnified and exaggerated in genre fiction circles) to be defined any clearer.

Braga himself puts it succinctly when he says “I’ve come to notice that whenever you infuse a show with sexual themes, some of these fans seem to short-circuit”. I think that sort of speaks volumes.

Of course, just because some women of a certain social class, occupation and predilection liked “Sub Rosa” does not mean “Sub Rosa” was enjoyed by all women across all circles of society did, or that it’s by definition good for feminism (although I would posit the fact the show was inundated with letters from grateful women who saw the episode, loved and, and thanked the creative team for finally writing to their interests likely says something).…

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On Shabogan Graffiti

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I am often asked about Shabogans.  People want to know whether this or that person they’ve seen could be a Shabogan, or whether this or that group they’ve seen could be Shabogans.  I generally reply that if you’ve seen them, they’re not Shabogans.  As with elves (at least of the household chore performing variety) the quintessential trait of the Shabogan is that one does not see them.  Castellans will sometimes speak of arresting, detaining, charging, and imprisoning Shabogans… but this is simply how Castellans talk.  They certainly spend a great deal of their time doing all these things to other gradations of the plebeian masses on Gallifrey, but Shabogans are never caught.  At least as far as we know. 

There are, supposedly, Shabogan legends about one of their number being caught drawing a moustache on a portrait of Chancellor Tavia, and subsequently being exhibited in chains in the Panopticon for the Time Lords to gaze upon with excited curiosity and thrilled loathing… but as with all accounts of what Shabogans think or say, we must treat it with suspicion, as it comes to us via the Time Lords and their genteel curation of facts.  The story goes that the exhibited Shabogan starved himself to death out of sheer fanatic perversity, despite the best efforts of his captors to save him.  In the accounts of ruling classes, the bravery and principled resistance of lesser mortals is always recounted as fanatic perversity.

It has often been observed that history is, by definition, written by those with the leisure time to sit around writing it.  It is thus, almost exclusively, the history of gentlemen, written by and for gentlemen.  Moreover, it is written by gentlemen who take it as read that, were they retroactively reincarnated in the past, they would be reincarnated as members of whichever patrician class they happen to be writing about.  Of course, when it comes to Time Lord historians, such assumptions have an extra edge of plausibility about them, which only makes them more toxic.

The great difficulty with relating the history of the Shabogans is that there are very few primary sources.  Generally, most historians think that most Shabogans themselves were, and presumably still are, far too busy working and/or rebelling against work, to leave time for writing things down.  Of course, it is equally possible that Shabogans spend a great deal of their time writing, reading, sharing manuscripts, debating theoretical and philosophical positions, etc, and that they simply guard their privacy so closely that no outsider has ever rumbled them at it.  It is, needless to say, illegal on Gallifrey for Shabogans to even learn to read and write, much less to actually do it.  Literacy with intent is a crime for which a Shabogan might – theoretically – be punished with dispersal.  Which is why, for Shabogans, graffiti is such a big deal.  It is not simply the things they might say when they scrawl on one of the green glimmering corrugated walls of the Ministry of Euphemisms or the Permanent Conclave of Obscurantism, it is the very fact that they write anything at all which is so incendiary. …

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Comics Reviews (March 30th, 2016)

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The Last Tournament in Albion continues apace; that’s the bracket after Round 2. Round 3 starts tomorrow.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Adventures Year Two #7

A bit of a comedown after an utterly charming issue, with the potential of Shada mostly being frittered on a Douglas Adams pastiche AI. Not a bad pastiche, mind you, but very much coming in below the excitement level generated by the previous issue. And the end thoroughly loses me; so far as I can tell River and Daak just sort of vanish? Anyway, largely reminded me of the sort of “this is almost great, oh, never mind” feeling that soured me after the first year of this, so probably back to done with it.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #6

The start of a crossover with Howard the Duck. Best part are Chip Zdarsky’s replies to Ryan North’s footnotes. Past that, it’s a standard (and thus delightful) Squirrel Girl issue, and thus delightful, if a bit fragmentary. I’m curious to see how the tone shifts when we move to the Howard the Duck conclusion next month, certainly.  

Darth Vader #18

As usual with Gillen’s Vader arcs, I’m finding myself really getting into this as we go on. I’m really enjoying how Gillen plays the austerity of Vader at this point, finding a wealth of very clever ways to work around the problem that his main character has no facial expressions and is pathologically averse to displaying any emotions. This arc has been particularly satisfying in that regard, working as a very methodical political battle with most of the pieces in plain sight, which combines well with Vader’s pecularities. Good stuff.

Saga #35

I know, I’m as surprised as you to see this doing well; I almost threw it back and dropped it, in fact. Still might after #36 in favor of trade-waiting, but in any case, as everything kicks into high gear for the climax this ends up working. The ultimate pay-off it’s building towards seems a bit too obvious – a crushing near-miss rescue of Hazel that will, in typical Brian K. Vaughan fashion, lead to another arc whose plot can be summarized as “several issues of individually focusing on characters as they travel.” But hey, you get what you pay for with Vaughan these days, and this was actually as worth $3 as any comic right now.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #5

An absolute delight. This is a simple issue with an unfussy plot – Moon Girl breaks Devil Dinosaur out of prison. And yet between its character beats showing Lunella’s anxieties and capabilities and its incredible knack for visuals (Moon Girl walking alongside Devil Dinosaur on giant spring stilts is probably my favorite), it’s an easy pick of the week – an untroubled thrill of a comic.…

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The One Word Test

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Not sure how we failed to post this yesterday morning. Sorry. -Phil

The following is an essay that will appear in 101 Claras to See, a charity anthology edited by Caitlin Smith.  The book will feature essays, art, and fic, all celebrating the character of Clara Oswald from Doctor Who and the fandom that’s grown around her, including contributions from both Phil and Jill.  The proceeds will help the One to One Children’s Fund. 

It is a game of wits, of intelligence, of one’s ability to manipulate words. To play, to win, one must understand the nature not just of stories, but of conversation, of dialectic… of alchemy.  The One Word Test demonstrates just how much Clara understands the nature of storytelling, not to mention the nature of so many underlying principles.

The game is played in a greenhouse – a kind of Garden, complete with chirping birds (one of Clara’s symbols). This is an inversion – a warm place in the middle of winter, a place of life, while outside the world slumbers in its annual death. This is an important alchemical principal, the union of opposites, and the power of negative space (the reversal of polarity, so to speak).  Indeed, the entire scene is a study in contradiction. Even Strax’s lines that open the scene (“Do not attempt to escape, or you will obliterated. May I take your coat?”) revel in the juxtaposition of violence and etiquette. 

Vastra sits in the larger of two wicker chairs: she is in the dominant position, and acts as a gatekeeper to the Doctor. The chair is large enough to form a halo around her. Clara sits in the smaller chair, and is not haloed; she has yet to realize her full potential.  The wicker of her chair is simpler than that of Vastra’s chair, with diagonal cross-hatching that resembles Oswin’s actual room at the Dalek Asylum.

JENNY: Sit.
VASTRA: There are two refreshments in your world the color of red wine. This is not red wine.

It’s interesting how the Test begins – before Jenny explains the rules, we get this: Jenny delivering a single word in the imperative (not to mention a Buddhist meme), and Vastra invoking the principle of Negative Space within the context of a dualism – the heart of contradiction.  Vastra does not offer the truth of what she is drinking. She only offers what it is not.

JENNY: Madame Vastra will ask you questions. You will confine yourself to single-word responses. One word only. Do you understand?
CLARA: Why?
VASTRA: Truth is singular. Lies are words, words, words.

Already Clara demonstrates that she’s more than qualified to play this game. The first response she gives is a single word, but it isn’t an answer, it’s a question. She has already reversed the roles that have been established (now she is asking the question) while adhering to the rules at the same time. Vastra, we should note, speaks the truth and yet lies at the same time.…

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