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The 1913 Zone

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This is actually the third and final part of a series of posts I began in 2012… which is pushing it, even for me. Here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 2. You don’t need to read them to understand what is below. While we’re talking about belated entries… I am planning some more Tricky Dicky and (unexpectedly) more Minnesota Normal. Be patient, my darlings. I finished Forward, to the Past! didn’t I?

The two televised Doctor Who stories which depict the First World War both approach it, as it were, from an angle, rather than head-on.  In ‘The War Games’ (1969), we see characters who are ordinary soldiers (both British and German) who’ve been abducted from the front in 1914-18, brainwashed, and placed in a simulacrum of the war, where they are commanded by alien impostors masquerading as representatives of the military top brass of both sides.  ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ (2007) is set in England in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, with ‘flashforwards’ to No Man’s Land during the coming conflict, and an epilogue set at a Remembrance Day ceremony many years afterwards.   An important secondary character called Tim Latimer is shown as a pupil at a public school before the war, a soldier during the war, and an elderly veteran after it.

The two stories are both highly regarded by fans – in many ways rightly so.  Both set themselves the task of ‘saying something’ about war.  The later story is more openly concerned with examining historical, political and moral issues, though it strives to find a balanced and non-partisan position.  The strategy of the writer, Paul Cornell, seems to have been to present the issues in a dramatic rather than a didactic way, by allowing various viewpoints to arise through the personalities of the characters.  The earlier story is more coy about its historical and political concerns, being seemingly content to present itself as an adventure story with a straightforward moral.  However, it also happens to be a slyly-radical, late-sixties, anti-imperialist parable. To understand how this happened, you only have to glance at the dates. It was written and produced in the aftermath of ‘68, the biggest global explosion of protest and insurgence in the latter-half of the twentieth century, a lot of which was focused on the Vietnam War. There is no straightforward, mechanistic, deterministic relationship between politics out in the real world and the politics of Doctor Who stories (or indeed any other stories) but there are certainly relations of influence. But I won’t belabour this point as it is a pretty fundamental assumption underlying both my own ‘work’ and Phil’s entire Eruditorum project, and a point that I suspect most readers of this site are already happy to accept, at least as a marker. (The question of exactly how the relation works is one over which a great deal of ink… and even some blood… has been spilt, and far cleverer people than I have weighed in on it and been unable to reach satisfying conclusions, so we’re not likely to clear it up here and now.)…

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Comics Reviews (February 11th, 2016)

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A very Marvel-heavy week, which is helpful in comparing some of the more intermittently frustrating titles in my pulls.

Guardians of the Galaxy #5

Like this, which will be the last issue I pick up. Bendis’s books always meander, but his Guardians has become pathological in that regard, lurching from point to point without anything recognizable as an overarching reason. With this issue, the new post-Secret Wars setup is undone and we return to the old setup while simultaneously providing a new origin for Yotat, which is at least two origins too many for a sublimely pointless character. Fun characters, as the movie has shown, but this needs a new writer.

Digital code: FCMK4CDAZHN1

All-New All-Different Avengers #5

The extent to which Waid’s pacing and shape on this book is thoroughly inept is genuinely shocking. The ouster of Ms. Marvel on the cover is awkward and unmotivated in the extreme – a transparent contrivance made all the worse by its complete lack of suspense. For the third time running the enemy is an out of nowhere silliness. I have no idea how a creative team and cast this good can be this bad, but man, it stinks. Will stay on through the Pleasant Hill crossover at least, but what an abject disappointment of a book this is.

Digital code: FCM2WNWVMJAF

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #5

This continues to slowly bend towards being pretty good, though the sense of its improvement being two steps forward one step back continues. This one focuses pretty much entirely on supporting cast, which is a mixed blessing. I still have trouble particularly investing in the high concept inversions of Matt Murdock as the Kingpin (although his t-shirt is hilarious in a sort of Eviler Seth Bingo way) and the like, but what the book is doing with them works, and that counts for a lot. Frustrating, but not in a way that makes me think about walking away from it.

Digital code: FCMPEKLE5UH0 (that’s a zero)

Darth Vader #16

A slow-burn start to an arc handled with the efficient competence you’d expect from Gillen. Nice cliffhanger, and some good character bits, but on the whole a lull in the book. 

Digital code: FCMQSR0FXZW9 (also a zero in there)

New Avengers #6

The decision to do two-issue arcs here hobbles it a smidge, with a good story that lacks some of the room to breathe that it could probably use. But the takeaway there is really “good story,” with the whole Demiurge/horrific demonic possession arc wrapping up in a way that pays glorious homage to the Young Avengers history of the characters, not so much on a plot point level as an aesthetic level. “Horror! Life is horror!” might end up being the funniest line of the week. In fact, yes, it is. Delightful, wonderful, kinda mispaced.

DIgital code: FCMT5AFM4Y44

 

Ms. Marvel #4

The “teen hero gets behind on everything” schtick feels a nbit tired and played out as Ms. Marvel plots go, and saps this book of some energy, as does the degree to which it retreads All-New All-Different Avengers (although obviously it does a much better job with those plot points). But…

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Lost Exegesis (House of the Rising Sun) — Part 1

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It’s been a while since we had one of these LOST Exegesis posts! So sorry for the delay. It couldn’t be helped. And not just the nearly two months since the last one of these — I had trouble accessing Eruditorum Press last night.  Anwyays, enough excuses.  It’s been a while.  As such, please remember that Part 1 of the essay is spoiler-free. For those who’ve seen the entire series, the second part of the essay, titled “Through the Looking Glass” (and appearing next week in the second part of this massive post), applies foreknowledge to the episode at hand.

So, on to the episode at hand. House of the Rising Sun is complex. Not to say that it’s difficult to understand; on the contrary, it’s rather straightforward, at first glance. It’s here we discover that whatever preconceptions we had about Sun and Jin, they were a bit wrong – these characters are not crass stereotypes – she’s the spoiled rich girl, he’s the poor nice boy corrupted by her father, who would have guessed that? It may have been Walkabout when I fell in love with the show, but it’s House of the Rising Sun that first earned my respect.

As we’d correctly surmise from the Opening Eye of the episode, this episode is Sun-centric. But there’s a lot more this episode’s plate. While Sun’s Flashbacks and her husband’s current predicament on the Island form the primary threads of the episode, there’s also the trip to the Caves, which also ends up split in two, with Jack and Kate’s early friendship tested by differing philosophies regarding the camp’s next big decision, while Locke takes an interest in Charlie. There’s even a thread breaded in that’s devoted to Michael. So there’s a balance of five stories, and even more characters to juggle, all in forty-five minutes on a network budget. On top of that, we get another piece of mythology with the skeletons found at the Caves, some new takes on previously invoked symbols, continued thematic concerns, and several more cultural references to untangle.

It’s three episodes in a row now where we’ve started with an Opening Eye. This time it’s Sun’s. And this time it’s a Left Eye, as opposed to the Right Eyes of Jack and Locke. So from the outset, we’d anticipate an episode that’s Sun-centric, and we’d be correct; at the same time, however, the switch from right to left should harken something different, symbolically, than what we’ve seen before, given the dichotomy. And this is definitely an episode about dichotomy.

Previously we’ve identified the Opening Eye with some kind of enlightenment, and I’m happy to continue doing so. But let’s also consider that the Eye itself is often used as a way of describing certain celestial bodies. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the Right Eye represents the Sun, and the Left Eye represents the Moon. The sun shines during the day, making everything visible; the Moon shines at night, and still leaves much in darkness. And then there’s the matter of these two bodies being gendered – the Sun is typically male, the Moon typically female (though not always, obviously).…

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“Virtual XI”: Interface

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Is it bad I can’t remember what this episode is called? I’ve literally had to go look up how the title is spelled three times since sitting down to write this.

Over the course of this project I’ve noticed Star Trek: The Next Generation takes a roughly annual delight in a sub-genre of story I’ve decided to call “Let’s Torture Geordi”. Ever since the third season (hmmmm) the show, for want of anything better to do with Geordi La Forge, decides to put him through an increasingly mean-spirited and downright ludicrous series of wringers more or less because they can. This team has, in turn, given him a neurotic complex he never had before, turned him into the creepiest human being imaginable by having him get it on with pretend women, forced him to mutate into a neon sea slug and had him brainwashed into a killing machine by his batshit insane murderous alien ex-girlfriend. Even Michael Jan Friedman is not immune to the fun, writing the two-part story “Seraphin’s Survivors”/“Shadows in the Garden” about Geordi acting uncharacteristically defensive and oversensitive when his childhood friend/lover comes aboard, thus blinding him to the fact she’s a space vampire who eats people. A few issues later, he had Geordi entranced by space mermaids in “I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing” and almost blow up the ship in his reverie.

All in all, sounds like an eminently respectful and legitimate, serious grown-up series of dramatic performances to give to LeVar Burton, national treasure and cultural icon who reads to children on Reading Rainbow and played Kunta Kinte on Roots.

“Interface” or “Interphase” or “Whatever The Fuck It’s Called I Don’t Give A Shit Anymore” is the episode I would call the requisite “Let’s Torture Geordi” outing for this season, although we got a nice preview in “Descent, Part II’ when Doctor Frankendata sticks strobes in Geordi’s forehead and tries to infect his brain with the Replicators from Stagate SG-1. It’s two half-assed stories stitched together into an even more half-assed whole: The first a bog-standard mid-90s virtual reality piece and the second a look into Geordi’s family history. Which, this team being this team, we have to explore by brutally killing everyone off and watching drooling, leering and slack-jawed as Geordi bears his grief for us, publicly retreating into his own mind and memories in the vain, desperate hope to be able to feel something again.

Jesus.

This was not an episode I watched at the time, and thus isn’t one that contributed anything to the mental landscape Star Trek: The Next Generation inhabits for me. The only thing I remember is the ridiculous-looking interface device itself from a shot in a magazine somewhere, and that I kept confusing it with the equally bullshit mind-control contrivance from that stupid fucking Manchurian Candidate story with Commander Sela from the fourth season. You’d think, with this episode being about inner worlds and psychology and everything, themes I’ve often gone on record as praising in this season, this would be right up my alley.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.05: Kissed by Fire

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“That’s not a fucking kiss!”

State of Play

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

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

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

The Boat, Davos Seaworth

The Burning Heart, King Stannis Baratheon

Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell

Tigers of Riverrun: Talia Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

The Stag, Gendry

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins.

The episode is in parts. The first runs four minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The opening image is of Thoros of Myr stepping into frame as he calls upon the Lord of Light. It features the death of Berric Dondarion, his head cut in half by the Hound. It doesn’t take.

The second runs six minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow.

The third runs one minute and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The fourth runs three minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by region, remaining in the Riverlands.

The fifth runs three minutes and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by family, from Jaime to Cersei Lannister, and also from Harrenhal to its lord. The second section is twominutes long; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Tyrion Lannister, and from talking about the Tyrells to Olenna.

The sixth part runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion eating sheepishly to Gendry smithing.

The seventh runs five minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by region.

The eighth runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Robb to Arya Stark, region, the image of fire, and dialogue, with Arya and Thoros discussing Robb.

The ninth runs five minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by dialogue, from Thoros and Berric discussing the Lord of Light to Selyse praying.

The tenth runs six minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by hard cut, from Selyse holding the ship Davos made her to Brienne in the bath.

The eleventh runs two minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from a spasming Jaime to Davos asleep.

The twelfth runs five minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by dialogue, from Shireen talking about the Targaryens to Daenerys’s camp.

The thirteenth runs two minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan to Robb’s battle plans.

The fourteenth runs seven minutes and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing.…

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“Leadership”: The Circle

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There are two Circles that give their name to the title of this episode. One is, naturally, the xenophobic nativist fascist terrorists we were introduced to last week and who execute their master plan in this episode. But the other is the circle of friends on board Deep Space 9: A major theme in this story arc is demonstrating how close knit and fiercely loyal to one another this team has grown in just the short period of time they’ve been together: Last time there was Commander Sisko’s breezy interactions with Jake, Kira and Dax, O’Brien’s dedication to Kira’s cause, and Dax’s gentle but firm support and guidance.

We also saw another example of the more congenial side of Odo and Quark’s relationship in a way we haven’t really seen since “Babel”: Yes, they’re still trying to outplay one another, but there’s a familiarity and respect there. And this carries through to this episode as well-Although the “deputy” subplot is largely played for laughs, Quark still comes to Odo willingly because he’s concerned about the Deep Space 9 community being put into danger by The Circle’s actions. Furthermore, he goes straight to Commander Sisko in the climax with the crucial information about where Kira is being held and it was, of course, him who gave Kira Li Nalas’ earring in the first place, letting her know that he was still alive and where to go to find him.

Kira herself sums it up to Li pretty well by stating that while she may not have wanted this job at first, Deep Space 9 has become a home to her, and her fellow residents have become her friends. We could say much the same for the show itself. And the scene in Kira’s quarters near the beginning really drives it all home: It’s a routine straight out of a Marx Brothers film (literally, in fact, to the point director Corey Allen had it done all in one take, just like in A Night at the Opera) and captures the unique and distinct personalities of everyone involved perfectly. Kira’s arc in this trilogy effectively mirrors that of a presumed audience: She begins in self-imposed isolation away from daily life on Deep Space 9, her loyalties still primarily with Bajor. It’s only when confronted with the possibility of being removed from the station, and after suffering through the persistence of the crew, that she begins to realise how much affection she really has for the place and the people. And at the end of the episode, after witnessing the crew risk their lives to save her even though she’s no longer one of them, that she fully accepts and understands where she belongs.

Although it at first must seem like a traumatic crisis of faith for Kira, it does help her to find Bajor has betrayed her trust in them. Much of Bajor supports The Circle, who are far more dangerous and powerful than anyone anticipated and, backing by the Cardassians aside, are working in direct opposition to everything Deep Space 9 stands for and that Kira has come to as well.…

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Saturday Waffling (February 6th, 2016)

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I’ve just gotten to the final section of the book I’m now calling Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Plans for release exist, and it’ll be out sooner than you think. Indeed, probably sooner than Last War in Albion Book One, though I got the first set of pages for that off to Jane this week as well. Now to confront the horror that is “Fearful Symmetry.” 

Anyone done their Hugo ballots yet? Post what you’ve got in comments. 

Oh, fine, three shorter-than-a-sentence excerpts from Neoreaction: A Basilisk:

Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is what nerdy teenagers in the 1980s read instead of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, largely to their credit.

the contemporary pagan community, which includes a white nationalist strain in the Nazi occultist tradition, of turning to European folklore to escape the corruption of Jew-tainted Christianity in amidst the NPR-listening Wiccans with artisan granola businesses

what other terms can Satan’s rebellion be described in besides “dude took the red pill hard?”

…

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Neat Little Analogy, Huh? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Five: Scenes from The Nativity)

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Figure 923: The signatures upon the contract that led Dez Skinn to go to a seedy bar to pick up a couple thousand dollars in cash.

This installment of The Last War in Albion contains graphic images of childbirth below the cut. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: In a comedy of errors, Alan Moore’s Marvelman series, originally published in Warrior, was republished under the title Miracleman by Eclipse Comics in the US. But with the reprints running out, Eclipse had to clear the way to commission new material from Moore, which required appeasing Dez Skinn.

Eclipse’s solution, ratified in a new contract dated February 1986 (the same month that Miracleman #6 is dated), was to buy the right to produce new Miracleman material from Skinn for a further $8000, payable in three installments, one of which Skinn recounts was given to him at a meeting “with Jan Mullaney – Dean’s brother – in New York, in some really seedy bar. He turned up looking like a real hippie with a couple thousand dollars in cash in a brown envelope. And I’m sitting there, this sort of funny Englishman in this really scary place and he comes in and this is like some dodgy transaction taking place as he slides the envelope over to me with a couple thousand dollars or more in cash and he says, ‘you will count it, won’t you?’” This contract also seemingly marks the point where Skinn abandoned his support for Alan Davis’s objections to having his work reprinted, noting simply that “Eclipse also assumes the sole responsibility of payment to and for the creative talent on all issues of Miracleman or any such other titles featuring “Miracleman” and the Characters, including payment of artistic royalties to Alan Moore and Gary Leach representing Alan Davis on the stories reprinted from Warrior Magazine,” and transferring all of the design copyrights Skinn had previously asserted that Davis held to Eclipse.

This is perhaps unsurprising – the fact that Skinn had chosen to direct his letter regarding Davis’s objections to Moore suggests that the position was more about trying to force Moore back into playing ball with Dez Skinn than about concern for Alan Davis. Whereas the entire point of this agreement was to clear the way for Eclipse to hire Moore directly (as opposed to the obviously unworkable plan of having Skinn/Quality employ him). For the purposes of filling out Miracleman #6 and publishing #7, Moore’s involvement was minimal – he’d been ahead in scripting for Warrior, and had three installments written but not drawn. But the problem of getting them drawn was more substantial, since it’s not as though Alan Davis was going to be returning to the gig. Unfortunately, Eclipse’s stable of available artists did not come close to matching that of the major companies. They presented Moore with a few options, and of them he picked an neophyte named Chuck Austen, though he was at the time still going by his birth name of Chuck Beckum on the grounds, as Austen put it, that he “didn’t draw everybody so that they looked like they were superheroes in street clothes.”…

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“Misery Loves Company”: Liaisons

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There’s a scene near the beginning of “Liaisons” that kills the entire episode for me. It’s where Worf and Commander Riker are putting on their dress uniforms and Worf grumbles about the outfit being “too feminine”. This earns him a deserved reprimand by Riker, which I still hate for two reasons. One, I hate any scene like this where one character upsets another, especially a friend. Two, it’s impossible for me not to read the narrative as siding with Worf: Worf is manly and grumpy and the writers love him because of that, and they hate this lame stuff about “utopianism” and “equality” that constrains their beloved “conflict”.

You know what? Fuck off. This one scene is emblematic of absolutely everything that has ever been wrong with Star Trek: The Next Generation since these guys took over in 1989.

I’m really not motivated to look further into the episode after that, frankly. It’s not like “Liaisons” is a particularly beloved episode and it’s not like I’m missing a whole lot: The entire premise of “alien dignitaries trying to experience strange and unfamiliar human emotion by deliberately pissing people off” sounds like a brief for a particularly weak Original Series episode (or at least memorably weak, as they were, to be blunt, *all* weak). Bad Original Series knock-offs were passé in the first season. To have one show up in the seventh is frankly astonishing, and that’s another indication of something that’s always been wrong with this show: Nobody seems willing to take it on its own terms. Nothing can ever escape the shadow of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, even (especially) when it’s already been explicitly killed off.

The original pitch for this episode was apparently for a “Let’s Do” take on Misery, the Stephen King story about a famous author who is kidnapped by an obsessive, murderous fan after getting badly injured in a car accident. I am dumbfounded the team even bought the pitch, because for the life of me I cannot figure out how in the universe that *wasn’t* going to turn into a horrific disaster. Misery is frequently read as being about the perils of fan culture, and in the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation in its final year that could only be projected onto Star Trek fans. And applying that to Trekkers, even indirectly, seems like a crateringly awful decision that could go wrong in a myriad of different, equally appalling ways.

For one thing, it’s staggeringly hypocritical for a show made exclusively by and for Star Trek fans to be criticizing other Star Trek fans. Oh, so it’s bad now to be an overzealous Star Trek or science fiction enthusiast? I’m not disagreeing, but who in the hell are the biggest, most overzealous and overenthusiastic Star Trek fans in existence if not the people currently writing this show and using it as methadone for their sexually frustrated creative impulses sparked watching the Original Series as little boys (and yes, I’m using deliberately gendered language here)?…

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