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“ ”: Homeward

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I cannot remember “Homeward”.

I don’t just mean that I didn’t watch it during the original run, or missed it on reruns, or that it never left a meaningful impression on me. I literally cannot remember this episode exists: Every time I rewatch this show, I forget that “Homeward” is part of the filming block. I can’t remember what “Homeward” is about, or even that there is in fact an episode called “Homeward” at all. Every time it’s brought up to me I have to look it up, because the title draws nothing but an empty, blank vacuous absence of meaning. I have friends who were watching Star Trek: The Next Generation along with this blog and, given the schedule I write under, eventually they got ahead of me. They liked to chat with me about my rough thoughts on upcoming episodes, and just a couple of months ago as of this writing they got up to the seventh season. When they asked me about my feelings on “Homeward”, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about and had to turn to Memory Alpha. When I was planning this week’s essays a few days ago and saw that “Homeward” was coming up, I had to look it up again because any and all traces of it had vanished from the recess of my memory even though I’d just looked it up again a few months back.

*That* is how forgettable “Homeward” is to me. It belongs to a very select club of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes I simply cannot, for the life of me, ever remember as a material artefact of media, a club which also includes the likes of “The Survivors” and “The Masterpiece Society”. And, well, I can’t say it’s in terrible company, to be honest with you.

Longtime readers of the blog who are familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation…You know what I’m going to say about this. For those of you who are newcomers to Star Trek: The Next Generation but not to the blog: It’s a Worf story. It’s a Prime Directive story where they wheel in a guest star (Worf’s adoptive brother Nikolai Rozhenko, just to drive the point home by using a recognisable character) to lecture the main cast about why they’re once again on the wrong side of history. Naren Shankar even goes so far as to *literally* compare Star Trek: The Next Generation unfavourably to the Original Series by saying Captain Kirk violated the Prime Directive all the time while Captain Picard “hides behind it” (as usual, Shankar is right but for the wrong reasons. He also seems to have an alarmingly poor memory of his own show). The structure of “Homeward’ is built out of the most objectionable (well, to me at any rate) parts of stories like “The Defector”, “Captive Pursuit” and “Force of Nature”, and it’s not worth wasting the time and energy to me to critique it on those grounds.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 26th, 2016)

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Happy to have Last War in Albion back. It’s a hard project, and there are days I really don’t know how believable it is that it will reach a state that can be called “finished,” but my do I love it when things come together in it. 

Last Tournament in Albion also proceeds apace. Here’s the bracket after round one. Some impressive upsets there; I remain gutted that Alan Moore’s A Disease of Language, containing what are probably the two works of his to have most influenced me, got ousted by yet another BBC series with a dodgy sewer monster. And speaking of Neil Gaiman, a stunner as Coraline is ousted in a coin-toss finish by a Kieron Gillen work I might as well have sixteen-seeded, except I threw a Steve Moore novel on that I thought was even more obscure. That’s The New Games Journalism, his manifesto for what games criticism should be. 

Yes, you read that right. Coraline got ousted by aesthetics in video game journalism.

Also intriguing is the Fossil Angels vs Pop Magic! matchup, which ended with a narrow victory for Beard over Bald, and the surprisingly brutality of the first round to Warren Ellis, who was unable to get anything save for Transmetropolitan into the second round. He often did well – 45% for Nextwave against Animal Man, 43% for Gun Machine against Supergods, and 42% for Planetary against The Wicked and the Divine – but came up short save for his 65/35 drubbing of Grant Morrison’s anti-Invisibles, The Filth.

Anyway, second round match-ups have probably begun over on Twitter by now. Both today and tomorrow will have on-topic Moore vs Moorison matches; today pairing Morrison’s 2000 AD superhero strip Zenith against Moore’s Warrior strip Miracleman, tomorrow an all-Superman battle. There’s some really weird ones like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vs Phonogram and Young Avengers vs Swamp Thing. And next week’s got Watchmen vs Promethea and the discovery of whether Kieron Gillen can knock out “The Doctor’s Wife” in a battle of the things it would really be an indictment of The Last War in Albion if won. 

Complain about things in comments. Other than me, I mean.…

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Asmodeus is That Light Throbbing of Temple and Pulse Warning That Approaching Thunder Heads Our Way. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Twenty-Eight: Fearful Symmetry)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore simultaneously experienced the whole of his existence and also finished Watchmen. The experience left him a bit drained. 

Moore’s disorientation and confusion in the wake of Watchmen is wholly understandable. Even reading Watchmen is, at times, enough to generate a sense of dazed exhaustion. And this is very much the point – an effect consciously generated by Moore’s use of the dense uniformity of the nine-panel grid. As Kieron Gillen puts it in Kieron Gillen Talks Watchmen, “if we’re talking about the many icons of Watchmen, [the nine-panel grid] is the invisible one. It underlies everything. We’re to watch these little boxes – hundreds of them – and make sense by combining them all into a larger piece of meaning. Watch,” he says, and snaps his fingers to cue his projectionist to advance his PowerPoint to a shot of Ozymandias watching his wall of television screens. Gillen talks about the comic as a “clockwork machine” in which “everything is predetermined. The forces that are put into motion mean this… the clock will carry on ticking, and if you read Watchmen enough you’ll know what the next tick is.” Gillen, here, is talking about the comic’s famously ambiguous ending, making a strong case that in fact there is only one possible “next step” for the book to take, and that the inevitable momentum of that step hangs impermeably over the entire work, which is in turn what Morrison speaks of when he talks about how the god of Watchmen is always shoving his cock in the reader’s face.

Figure 944: Watchmen #5 (Written by Alan Moore, Art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins)

Nowhere is this sense clearer, perhaps, than Watchmen #5, the famed “Fearful Symmetry” chapter. It has been noted by many that Moore’s focus and enthusiasm for a project often wanes over the course of it. If so, it is hard not to see “Fearful Symmetry” as a crucial turning point in the comic. Moore has spoken in interviews of how the third issue marked the point where he and Gibbons really mastered the technique of juxtaposition that would serve as one of the major engines of the book. Similarly, issue #4, “Watchmaker,” is a virtuosic and experimental piece playing with the nature of time, in which Moore, channeling Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, depicts the life of Dr. Manhattan as a simultaneously occurring eternity. And with “Fearful Symmetry” Moore reaches the formal zenith of the work, if not of his entire career. In a real sense it is impossible to imagine that Moore could devote the focus and attention that “Fearful Symmetry” required to any subsequent issue. In terms of Watchmen as a set of storytelling techniques – the grounds on which Moore, at least, has long been inclined to judge it – “Fearful Symmetry” marks the tale’s end. On top of that, its release in October of 1986 marks the last issue of Watchmen to come out prior to the explosion of the ratings controversy that would result in Moore’s acrimonious departure from DC.…

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“We are only us when we are here”: The Alternate

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“The Alternate” is a study of Odo’s past. There is a clever fake-out during the first few acts, with the tease of an archaeological site in the Gamma Quadrant yielding clues about Odo’s people, and which actually doesn’t amount to much aside from the plot device needed to get the episode’s central…conflict in motion. Because while “The Alternate” is about Odo’s backstory, it’s not stupid enough to explain away an origin story for him outright, or even give too many hints that would tempt the audience to get distracted trying to solve a mystery instead of paying attention to the story. Rather, the past we learn about Odo is his relationship with Doctor Mora Pol, who becomes the Bajoran scientist who found and raised him Odo mentioned to Lwaxana Troi in “The Forsaken”.

As much as I enjoy the fake-out science fiction mystery worldbuilding that baits us away so we don’t notice the naturally more important exploration of characters an their relationship with one another until we’re already in it, something about this plot has never sat entirely well with me. Odo is written here as a bit of a prodigal son, a headstrong and wayward child who becomes estranged from his father because of his determination to chart his own course in life (it should be noted that this doesn’t really connect back to the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, but it’s become a common enough archetype I feel comfortable citing it. Star Trek itself uses it in this context some years down the road). This strikes me as ever-so-slightly a cliché, although it’s an unfortunately frequent enough occurrence in family dynamics that it’s not entirely so.

The larger issue this strays into is that by pushing Odo’s story in this direction (down to the whole “throwing a temper tantrum by turning into a monster” bit), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine risks trespassing into children’s literature territory, as it sometimes tends to do from time to time when handling this sort of material. I know I’ve described Star Trek during this era as being “children’s television for adults”, but the crucial variable in that statement is *for adults*. I’m not entirely sure a prodigal son narrative about making up with your dad entirely qualifies. For some reason this doesn’t strike me as quite as mature a handling of this kind of familial dynamic as, well, Lwaxana and Deanna Troi, for instance (especially after “Dark Page”). But besides, in “The Forsaken” Odo seems to describe his history with the character who would become Doctor Mora as frightening, being treated as an inanimate object of curiosity rather than a person. And that doesn’t quite always come across through James Sloyan’s powerful and sympathetic performance.

Another issue I have with this episode is Jadzia, namely that she spends a fair portion of it knocked unconscious. I sort of thought we were passed the point where writers would keep Dax bedridden or otherwise incapacitated for all of part of an episode because they didn’t know what to do with her, or otherwise treat her as anything other than one of the most capable and competent members of the crew (if not the most capable and competent outright).…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 5: By Dissembling

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This should be read as, in some ways, a continuation of the previous instalment.

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time.

Richard III, I, I

Used as the epigraph to Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation of ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’

 

In Richard III, as I started to talk about last time (in Part 4), Richard draws upon his ‘deformity’ for an identity. As noted in a previous instalment, Richard is a narcissist (hardly an original observation) and a vital part of his narcissism is expressed in his concentration upon what he sees – or spins to us, the audience – as his own physical monstrosity. He concentrates on his physical ‘defects’, talking them up, poetically riffing on them and exaggerating them (if he were as monstrous as he says he is nobody would be able to look at him let alone accept him as colleague or husband) until he turns the idea of himself as a monster into a source of strength. It motivates him because he makes it motivate him. It imbues him with power. Moreover, it imbues him with shapelessness which allows him to become protean. He becomes a shapeless mess, thus able to shift his shape to fit any and all occasions plausibly. (He’s almost very-proto-Weird… which is interesting in terms of what I said about him being constructed in a way similar to race-making, and thus also potentially of a different race, considering that the idea of race is a preoccupation of the haute Weird.) This is linked to his narcissism in that it stems from the instability of his core self. Narcissism is an attempt to compensate for a great gaping hole at the centre of the being where one’s ability to connect with others should be, where one’s ability to construct a sense of self from your relationships should be. “I am like no brother,” he says, “I am myself alone.” Richard is able to become anyone and anything he needs to be at any given moment because there is no real inner self that anchors him to one state of being. Like other great Shakespearean villains, particularly Iago, he does what he does because he is essentially empty, and is able to do what he does for the same reason. “I am not what I am,” says Iago. Richard never says as much, but he talks at length about his own instability of self via his boasting about his ability to change to fit any circumstance… about his ability to act, essentially. Iago spends the play Othello spinning various contradictory stories about why he’s doing what he’s doing, attempting to work it out himself, or to happen upon an explanation of his own behaviour that makes sense to him.…

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Comics Reviews (March 23rd, 2016)

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A short and faintly unsatisfying week.

The Ultimates #5

There’s much to like here, most particularly the attempt to make Marvel Time actually have a canonical and in-universe explanation, but there’s an inherent thinness to a twenty-page comic with three splashes, a double splash, and a max panel count of five on any of the other pages, and between that and the inherent anticlimax of the resolution (which amounts to cosmic forces telling the Ultimates that their plan for the last three issues can’t work and sending them home) makes this a frustrating experience despite the entertainment value. As always, though, Rocafort’s art is very pretty and Ewing’s writing crackles nicely.

Digital code: THMNBL47H67W

Cry Havoc #3

It’s increasingly hard to see how the London setting here is going to survive more than another issue or so, but for now the virtuosic time-hopping is working well, with Spurrier enjoying the thematic transitions he can make and the way in which the overall issue’s plot emerges out of his three settings. And the three colorists trick remains brilliant. But we’re very much in the mid-arc doldrums here, with a degree of “OK, hurry up and show us a new trick already.” In other words, a strong example of why Kieron Gillen is right that reviewing individual issues mid-arc is a little bit of a mug’s game.

Klaus #4

Another series with similar problems with the idea of reviewing it at this point, further hampered by the basic weirdness of a Santa Claus series whose last issue is slated for June. But there’s an underlying delightfulness to this that’s nearly impossible not to live. Morrison is perfectly suited to the task of balancing an at times quite hard-edged tale with the fact that it’s an origin story for Santa Claus, and the resulting tone brings a genuine smile on multiple occasions here. Dan Mora’s art is simple but effective; the way in which characters eyes widen and become cartoonish as they grow more sympathetic to Klaus’s cause is as unsubtle as it is well-chosen. This remains a real pleasure of a series.…

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“Reclaim Your Gods”: These Are The Voyages…

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So let’s make a pronouncement right off the bat, shall we? “These Are The Voyages…” is not a series finale. Yes, it’s the final episode in the final filming block of the series, but if you’re looking to it to resolve the show’s final story arc you’re going to be incredibly disappointed. It’s far more satisfying and sensible both to grant that “Terra Prime” was that and that this is a bonus episode. In fact, a lot of the this last season is really better seen as a handful of assorted specials anyway; Think about “In A Mirror, Darkly”: That had nothing to do with anything that came before and anything that came after, and so does this episode. So let’s just dispense upfront with the notion that this is Enterprise‘s series finale, because it’s going to save us a lot of undue aggravation as we go along.

As absolutely everyone who has ever commented on this episode has pointed out, it plays out far more as a Star Trek: The Next Generation story than it does an Enterprise one. Which is fine because, the textual quality of this particular outing aside, in spite of everything Star Trek: The Next Generation was frankly a better show than this one. And you have to remember the context into which this was coming: In 2005, Star Trek was going away from television, possibly forever. “These Are The Voyages…” wasn’t just closing off Enterprise‘s final filming block, it was closing off a sustained and uninterrupted period of Star Trek constantly being on the air dating back to 1987. You can’t think of “These Are The Voyages…” as being of the same ilk as “All Good Things…” or “Endgame”-Really the only remotely comparable thing I can think of in media history is Doctor Who‘s “Survival”. This is the end of an institution that has to acknowledge not just the end of the current incarnation, but pay tribute to the entire twenty-plus year era of history it’s a part of. In that context, the framing device of this story is more than fitting.

If you’re going to criticize “These Are The Voyages…”, do so within its proper context. Most of the arguments I see leveled against this episode are quite frankly idiotic: It’s a poor series finale and more of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode than an Enterprise one? No shit-That’s what it was *supposed* to be: A lost episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that addressed the New Universe of Enterprise. This was going to be the last episode of the filming block whether UPN renewed Enterprise for a fifth season or not. It’s fanwanky? Well, yeah. An episode like this kind of has to be fanwanky by default. And hey, have you, hypothetical interlocutor, even been paying attention for the past year? This whole season has been fanwanky as shit. So “These Are The Voyages…” is too weighed down by continuity nods and references, but utter nonsense like “The Forge”/“Awakening”/“Kir’Shara”, “Babel One”/“United”/“The Aenar”, “Affliction”/“Divergence” and “In A Mirror, Darkly” get a pass?…

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The Christmas Afterparty, Or, As We Call It, Spring

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So apparently after the legendary Eruditorum Press Christmas Party Jane and James snuck off to another room and… recorded another podcast. What, where did you think that sentence was going? Anyway, it being spring now it seemed the right time for that to finally drop. You can download it right here.

(EDIT: Major problem with the audio on that file; we’re working on getting a fixed version up. Will update when we have it.)

In other news, the brilliant and utterly deserving of a Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist James Taylor just finished the other half of the painting that became the cover of Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons. As per usual, he talks fascinatingly about his progress over at his blog, and you should totally check that out. …

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.09: The Rains of Castamere

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“Goddammit, we registered at Pottery Barn, not Williams Sonoma!”

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Wolves of the Wall: Jon Snow, Bran Stark

Wolves of the Twins: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark, Arya Stark

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

Tigers of the Twins: Talia Stark

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Dogs of the Twins: Sandor Clegane

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins, Dragonstone is vacant, King’s Landing is silent.

The episode is in twelve parts. The first part runs seven minutes long and is set at the Twins. The opening images are a series of deeply symbolic shots of Robb Stark’s map.

The second runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Walder Frey to one of the Unsullied.

The third runs two minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan side-eyeing Jorah to Sam and Gilly walking through the snowy woods.

The fourth runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands near the Twins. The transition is by hard cut, from Gilly in awe at the Wall to the Hound and Arya riding.

The fifth runs three minutes and is in two sections; it  is set in the Gift south of the Wall. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by family, from Arya to Bran and Rickon Stark. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by family, from Bran and Rickon Stark to Jon Snow.

The sixth part runs three minutes and is set outside the Twins. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The seventh runs seven minutes and is set in the Gift south of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya to Bran and Rickon Stark.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Ygritte watching Jon ride away to the pyramid of Yunkai.

The ninth runs three minutes and is set in the Twins. The transition is by hard cut, from guards streaming into the square to an establishing shot of the Twins.

The tenth runs three minutes and is set in the Gift south the the Wall. The transition is by family, from Robb and Catelyn to Bran and Rickon Stark.

The eleventh runs one minute and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Osha sneaking off with Rickon to Daenerys’s camp.

The twelfth runs thirteen minutes and is set in the Twins. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to the band playing “The Bear and the Maiden Fair.” It features the deaths of Joyeuse Frey, Grey Wind, Talia Stark, Catelyn Stark, and Robb Stark, killed by various sharp implements, mostly on the orders of Walder Frey. The final image is of Catelyn Stark failing spectacularly to achieve a Full Web.

Analysis

So this is how they decide to split A Storm of Swords: convert the Red Wedding, which takes place in the fifty-first of the book’s eighty chapters, into their ninth episode set piece, killing three credited regulars in a single scene.…

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“The Butterfly Effect”: Rivals

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Chaos theory is the principle of mathematics that states dynamical systems which are subject to any number of individual initial conditions, such as the commonly cited example of a butterfly flapping its wings ultimately leading to a dramatic shift in weather at the opposite end of the planet, behave in such a way that defies prediction in the long-term. These systems are called chaotic, where by this definition chaos is not random, but is so impossible to predict by any meaningful system of measurement that it might as well be random.

This is ostensibly the premise “Rivals” was pitched under. But the neutrino-spinning gambling machine Martus Mazur brings to Deep Space 9 hardly constitutes an example of chaos theory. Instead, it operates by altering the laws of probability, as numerous characters state at various points in the episode. Far from large-scale effects being generated seemingly at random by an otherwise inconsequential initial event, the device arbitrarily dispenses good luck and bad luck across the station, which is a very different sort of phenomenon. Perhaps it’s small wonder than that the “chaos theory” pitch languished around in production hell for over a year before Michael Piller got around to it, by which point the finished product could hardly be called something that could be traced back to its source. Actually, that‘s a better example of chaos theory than anything in the actual episode as aired.

But this isn’t a blog about mathematical models of scientific processes. I’m sure you can find oodles of critique of Star Trek’s clumsy handling of those issues elsewhere. We all know that Star Trek’s scientific concepts are usually the least interesting thing about any given story, and the same is certainly true here. The only trouble is there’s not a whole lot else to “Rivals”: It’s an aggressively unfunny attempt at a low-stakes story that leaves me without a lot to talk about. I suppose that’s the first thing I could mention, because it’s not a good sign to see Star Trek: Deep Space Nine trip up on a low-stakes story like this. “Rivals” is precisely the sort of episode that should be absolutely in this show’s wheelhouse and it should be able to churn out this kind of material practically on autopilot. This is what the series was built to do, and that it can’t seem to wrap its brain around it is concerning. Maybe the show has epiced itself out following the season opening three-parter and big dramatic attempts like “Necessary Evil”, “Invasive Procedures”, “Cardassians” and “Sanctuary”.

Maybe the answer is that troublesome brief. Either chaos theory doesn’t make a great Star Trek story, or the creative team doesn’t know how to make it a good Star Trek story. The fumble on the chaos theory thing has tripped me up for years, and I’ve spent longer than any human being should trying to piece together what this story actually has to do with a field of theory I’ve actually found kind of interesting at varying points in my life, only to finally realise it actually has fuck all to do with it.…

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