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Haunt the Future

“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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Saturday Waffling (March 19th, 2016)

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I’ve only updated the bracket for The Last Tournament in Albion with day one’s matches, as I’m off to bed before Day Two’s morning set actually closes, but I’ll have them in once I get up, probably along with the afternoon. In any case, day three has already kicked off on Twitter with Phonogram vs the Neil Gaiman Miracleman run and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vs Ministry of Space (the latter already looking to be a tight race). And this afternoon we’ll have Journey Into Mystery vs Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and All-Star Superman vs Doom Patrol.

Anyway, go ahead and make your predictions about the ultimate winner or complain about the cruelty of my seeding in comments. …

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Minnesota Post-Hannibalism

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The second season of Fargo is a pretentiously well-directed television show that purports to be a crime drama, but is really just a vehicle for two men to urgently discuss the nature of the universe. In this regard it is a familiar thing. It’s also a familiar thing, of course, because it’s a spin-off of the acclaimed Coen Brothers film, previously discussed in these parts by Jack Graham, and more broadly is a show that giddily raids the Coen Brothers back catalogue for imagery and style. The fusion of these two familiar things, however, is gloriously unfamiliar.

Let’s start with the True Detective and Hannibal links, the better to cover up the fact that I’m not a huge Coen Brothers buff and haven’t actually seen the film version of Fargo or the first season (I’m working on it). On one level, it is True Detective that Fargo most fundamentally resembles, with its propensity for lengthy ruminations on the cultural decay and its ostentatious intrusion of the Weird in the form of occasional appearances from UFOs (a nod to the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There; I didn’t say I was a complete n00b). It’s tempting to say that the difference is that Fargo has a sense of humor, but of course, True Detective is often wryly hilarious in its own right (“True crime. That’s the genre, not the title.”), and emphasizing Fargo’s sardonic sense of humor mostly serves to play at some drama/comedy distinction that’s too tinged with value judgment to be useful.

No, the core of the difference, and the one that Fargo seems at times to be evoking True Detective specifically to emphasize, is that Fargo is studiously uninterested in the tragic mythologizing of the Detective as something that can possibly be True. Its two main detectives, Patrick Wilson’s Lou Solverson (a young version of Keith Carradine’s character from the first season) and Ted Danson’s Hank Larsson, are of the mould established by Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, described by Jack as “extraordinarily unextraordinary, she is simply competent at her job, fond of her husband, polite to her colleagues, etc.” They do not solve the case through any extraordinary response to pain and suffering nor through any astonishing powers of insight or deduction. They’re just good men doing their job.

In one sense, of course, this is also how it distinguishes itself from Hannibal; it does not engage in any Miltonian romanticization of murder. It comes close in the form of Bokeem Woodbine’s Kansas City heavy Mike Milligan, who deploys a practicedly folksy conversational style in the pursuit of intimidation and violence, but he’s carefully and deliberately undercut in this regard, most obviously by his ultimate fate as a middle manager in the generic office headquarters of the vast Kansas City criminal empire. But it is more complicated than that. Fargo’s response to True Detective is an outright negation of the premise. Its response to Hannibal – which seems equally self-conscious – is something else.…

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“Unbound”: Parallels

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And this is it. We’ve arrived: The greatest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation ever. Not necessarily in terms of abject quality, though “Parallels” is definitely one of the best outings of the year, and of the series in general, on that front as well. The reason this episode is the show’s finest hour is because of the repercussions the events of this story have on all of Star Trek.

“For any event, there is an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcome will follow. But there is a theory in quantum physics that all possibilities that could happen do happen in alternate quantum realities.”

What “Parallels” does is establish the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whatever else you want to attach to it by association, as a quantum multiverse of literally infinite possibility. This is the actual plot of the episode, with Worf shifting between one reality to the next, each different from the other in ways both negligible and profound. It’s textual on such a level that it’s impossible to deny. Just look at all those Enterprises out there, and than try to think about how many more there could possibly be. Or even Galaxy-class starships that aren’t called Enterprise and don’t serve an imperialistic Federation. If anything that can happen does happen somewhere, there are absolutely no constraints on plots or themes or characters or anything anymore: If you can imagine it, it exists. Captain Picard is a pirate. Ro Laren made commander. Beverly Crusher a respected scientist. Kestra Troi grew up to be her sister Deanna’s role model and best friend. Will Riker finally got together with Lyrinda Halk. Worf isn’t an asshole. Tasha Yar and Sela really were the same person, or Tasha Yar stayed aboard the Enterprise to be Geordi La Forge’s lover and closest ally.

Oh right, Tasha Yar. I’ll come back to her later.

The point is, “Parallels” tells us Star Trek can be anything we want it to be. Anything. It canonizes the franchise’s status as a living modern oral tradition by abolishing the idea of canon: The Lovely Angels came back to destroy the God Canon once and for all. Your interpretation is every bit as true as mine, because we all have a universe inside of us and we all share a universe together. “Parallels” takes the way we generate truths through reading and the operational process of the imaginal realm and writes it back into itself through a science fiction metaphor. It’s astronomically brilliant, sublimely elegant and unfathomably oversignified genre fiction; the medium at its thematic and intellectual best. The kingmaking moment for Brannon Braga and, without exaggeration or hyperbole, the single most important and cosmically meaningful story this franchise has ever produced, or will ever produce. I can’t think of a single other large-scale, ostensibly corporate controlled populist mass media franchise that has ever, or indeed would ever, come out and explicitly say this about itself.…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 4: Of Performity

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Just a reminder: I recently guested (again) on the Oi! Spaceman podcast to talk about ‘Caves of Androzani’. Download here.

 

What makes an English king ‘bad’? It certainly isn’t starting wars, brutally oppressing peasants and vassals, invading places, or killing and exploiting lots of people. If it were, most of them would be seen as bad, and Edward III (who basically started the Hundred Years War) and Richard I (crusader) wouldn’t have the perennially good reputations they still enjoy. Generally we seem to decide a king is bad if he lost something. We – by which I of course mean ‘someone somewhere’ – seem to have decided that John, Edward II, Richard II and Richard III were the ‘bad’ kings.  Losers all.  John lost a lot of France, and a lot of his power to his barons, an event marked by Magna Carta. Edward II lost to Robert Bruce at Bannockburn, thus losing control of Scotland, and then lost control of his kingdom to his wife and Roger Mortimer, Earl of March. Richard II was challenged by the peasants’ revolt, and ousted from power twice by his barons, being finally deposed by Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Lancaster. Richard III, of course, lost at Bosworth Field to Henry Tudor, thus ending the Plantagenet dynasty and inaugurating the rule of the Tudors. It seems that what we don’t like from our kings, above all else, is failure.

Peter Ackroyd once wrote, beautifully, that when a man fails Shakespeare’s sympathy envelopes him… which you can see in almost all Shakespeare’s history plays. Even Shakespeare’s Richard III is allowed flawed introspection and guilt, and even some faint self-awareness, before his final battle, thus lending him tragic dimensions… and then gets his last moments of brazen, daring defiance (the horse remark having been, in my view, seriously misunderstood). But as for history, or rather for those ‘someones somewhere’ who have decided how history is told, generation upon generation, it seems that when a king fails, condemnation envelopes him. The reasons for his defeat, military or political, are then discovered by working backwards. John failed because he was ‘bad’. The flimsiness of his claim to the throne is played up, his apparent murder of a child pretender is paraded as proof of his perfidy, etc… all the way up to becoming a villainous cartoon lion advised by a snake. Edward II failed because he was too fond of his favourites, i.e. men of lesser nobility who exploited their access to him for personal gain, and who antagonised the baronage by cutting them out of the action and insulting them. It’s unclear whether people at the time though Edward was having sexual relationships with his favourites (historians disagree), though this has become the standard popular account since. The probably apocryphal story about the red-hot poker emerged years later, and seems to sadistically imply a fitting end for a sodomite. Marlowe’s play about Edward contains a charge of admiration for the frank love of two men, and Marlowe’s tragic overreacher version of Edward is now favoured in an era when many of us are inclined to sympathise with a man attacked for being gay.…

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The Last Tournament in Albion (And Also 3/16/16 Comics Reviews)

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Before we get to comics reviews, it being the season for big elaborate seeded brackets of things, I’ll be running The Last Tournament in Albion, an attempt to summarize a mostly still-unwritten sprawling epic history of British comic books via a series of Twitter polls. Sixty-four classics from the major players in The Last War in Albion (and a few guest stars), broken into four divisions (British Classics, American Superheroes, Literary Comics, and Non-Comics) and seeded into a series of appropriately brutal head-to-head match-ups. You can see the whole bracket right here.

Voting begins tomorrow, March 17th, on my Twitter. Watch for the hashtag #LastTournamentInAlbion. 

On to a light but high quality week.

James Bond 007 #5

This one’s odd, feeling very segmented and with awkward transitions between the segments. I strongly suspect Ellis of writing for the trade. This series is also starting to be hobbled by Jason Masters not being up to Ellis’s extended silent action sequences. This one has two – a five pager that’s entirely silent and an eight-pager with limited dialogue – and they just don’t have the crackle that happens when Ellis gives one of those to someone like Declan Shalvey or Gerardo Zaffino. Still, it’s a hell of a high bar when the worst comic of the week is an Ellis comic.

International Iron Man #1

Mostly a flashback of the form “Tony Stark and yet another bespoke girlfriend character,” but it’s Bendis and so that’s mostly tolerable, even if he is on autopilot for most of it. But as a first issue this works well, framing the flashback in a very short in media res action sequence that picks up the “Tony Stark’s biological parents” thread from Kieron Gillen’s run. It’s an intriguing way to do things with a secondary Iron Man book. The only weak spot – aside from Bendis’s autopilot – is that Alex Maleev’s action sequences are muddy and difficult to follow.

Digital code: FCM7CIG4KXBV

Injection #8

This is basically just wall-to-wall the best thing ever. Page upon page that just giddily pushes my specific buttons. The double page splash (and ensuing page of snarky dialogue) is the most obvious, but Viv’s several page monologue on Sherlock Holmes, love, and sexuality is also great. As is the turn to AI cults. And the use of narration. Seriously, this issue. Wow. …

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“Need not apply”: Sanctuary

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Here’s an episode I always remember being ambivalent about. It’s one of those situations where it always seemed like it was something I should like, but somehow it never quite clicked with me for one reason or another. Each time I would rewatch this episode (or, given where it falls in the year and the fact it’s a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode more generally, re-read) I would expect it to be good given my mental sorting algorithm filed it away as part of a stretch of episodes I’d just accepted as classic outright, and then I would always leave it feeling vaguely unsatisfied for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Well, the same thing happened this time, except now I know exactly why this episode has never struck a chord with me.

“Sanctuary” is ostensibly trying to Say Something Important about the plight of refugees, a humanitarian crisis that’s sadly just as pressing as I write these words now as it was in 1993, if not more so. This means of course it’s an “Issues” story, and we’ve just come off of a stretch of episodes that have proven pretty conclusively that “Issues” stories simply do not work in Star Trek in spite of what everyone thinks. Even though its cause is a just and noble one, “Sanctuary” doesn’t work any better than “Force of Nature” or “Melora” (indeed, those episodes’ respective causes were every bit as just and noble as this), and in fact it’s “Sanctuary” that casts into light even more stark why this kind of morality play is a bad fit for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It’s not, it should be stressed, that the depiction of a refugee crisis in this episode is a poor or ill thought out one: Indeed, the depiction is, if anything, depressingly realistic: Deep Space 9 becomes a staging ground for millions upon millions of starving and displaced refugees escaping oppression in their homeland. They’ve made a harrowing journey across great distances and the only thing that’s kept them going is the hope that their new home will afford them the realised dream of freedom denied them where they come from. But once they arrive, they find locals whose attitude runs a gamut between reluctant to help and outright bigoted and contemptuous. There’s even the reveal that the Skrreeans (which, as an aside, is a name for a fictional culture right up there with BeBeBeBeque in terms of sheer trollishness) see Bajor as their own holy land, a forsaken planet they are prophesied to bring light and hope back to. Which is of course a plot point clearly reminiscent of a certain real-world political situation in the middle east.

But though there are parallels between the plight of the Skrreeans and the great western identity crisis that is the Israeli-Palestinian-Christian conflict, the clearest connections are to the history of the United States, which “Sanctuary” has pegged depressingly well.…

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A Teaser For An Upcoming Project

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Jane’s taking the week off, so here’s a 3000 word preview from near the middle of Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter in May

And to be clear, the vicious little shit qualities of your garden variety neoreactionary are clearly part of the point, at least for Nick Land. In part 4d of “The Dark Enlightenment” he constructs an extended metaphor around the word “cracker,” in its sense “as a slur targeting poor southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry,” describing them as “grit in the clockwork of progress,” and as Qabbalistic forces of “schism or secession” based on the power of cracks “to widen, deepen, and spread.” His meaning is clear: racist hicks are awesome forces of abstract horror. He tacitly reiterates this in “Phyl-Undhu,” which notes, in a variety of ways, that strong tribal affiliations and hostility to outsiders is likely the soundest survival tactic in most practical eschatons.

He may well be right in this, although one gets the sense that he’s rather glad not to be a part of that American culture; elsewhere in the labyrinthine Part 4 of “The Dark Enlightenment” he remarks fondly about how “there is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned.” Instead, it always seems as though he views the bulk of neoreactionaries as a sort of petri dish in which he can observe the spasming collapse of the technosingularity. Perhaps they are a suitable microcosm. But in this regard, at least, Moldbug has a point. In the “Gentle Introducion,” he praises the 18th century loyalist Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver, essentially suggesting that reactionaries like him are better than revolutionaries like John Adams because Oliver “is a man you could have a beer with.” And he notes, “you can’t actually have a beer with Peter Oliver, but you can read his book.” The truth is that, despite Land’s evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there’s not a great case for reading their books either.

But if I might be so bold as to suggest, there are other ways of saying “no” at this point in the argument that don’t require hanging out with banal edgelords who get off trying to see how close to saying “Hitler was right” you can actually get without losing the ability to semi-credibly say “but I’m not a Nazi or anything” afterwards. Indeed, when it comes to recasting philosophy as horror it is safe to say that the sort of immediate lurch to the most dramatic form of negation to hand is in most regards the least interesting. The obvious truth of horror philosophy is that there’s an aesthetic; one based on a tightrope balance between the initial “yes” that one is fleeing from and the eventual “yes” that interrupts the series of “nos.”…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.08: Second Sons

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If I’d seen Deadpool I bet I could make a really good joke here.

State of Play

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

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

The Ship, Davos Seaworth

The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon and Melisandre

Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell

Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Stag, Gendry

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

Winterfell lies abandoned and in ruins, Riverrun is silent, Harrenhal is vacant, Dragonstone is inexplicably not in the credits.

The episode is in ten parts. The first part runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The opening image is of a rock, with Arya out of focus behind it.

The second runs five minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by image, from the Hound riding to the horses of the Second Sons.

The third runs six minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan to Melisandre landing.

The fourth runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis to the walls of Yunkai.

The fifth runs seven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Dario to Sansa in the mirror.

The sixth runs seven minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, the wedding scene to Gendry.

The seventh runs eleven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Stannis magickally killing Joffrey to Joffrey at a wedding.

The eighth runs four minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion and Sansa to an establishing shot of Daenerys’s camp.

The ninth runs one minute and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from the drapery on Daenerys’s tent to the similarly patterned grate in Tyrion’s chambers.

The tenth runs seven minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion smiling thinly to a landscape shot. The final image is of a Full Web of birds.

Analysis

With “Second Sons,” at last, the fundamental limitations of the emphasis on episode structure over season structure that has dominated for the past few episodes stands revealed. The heart of this episode – everything but the first and last scenes – cycles among three plots selected and unified by the title phrase. Two – Tyrion and Stannis – embody it in its literal sense, while the third contains the actual title drop. This is, by any standard, a motley assortment – you can just about argue that Tyrion’s plot, by dint of focusing on his relationship with Tywin at several turns, at least vaguely related to his status as a second son, but Stannis’s plot essentially doesn’t touch the topic.…

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