Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

“Till the sun grows cold”: Descent

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The Borg are back.

“Descent” marks an important turning point in a number of respects. Up front, it’s the first time Star Trek: The Next Generation has done a cliffhanger season finale more or less only because this is the sort of thing it does to close off filming block seasons; in other words, the first time the cliffhanger finale structure is implemented as a matter of course and functional habit instead of being the result of unexpected necessity. “The Best of Both Worlds” was born out of a narrative-melting crisis springing from the chaos of the third season’s production as well as contract disputes with Patrick Stewart’s agent. “Redemption” was a double length story done to lead into the 25th Anniversary year and to accommodate the bombshell return of Denise Crosby, as well as closing off Worf’s epic story arc about his isolation from his Klingon heritage (oh how naive we all once were). And “Time’s Arrow” wasn’t even going to be a a two-parter until the building hype for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started to concern viewers that Star Trek: The Next Generation was going off the air.

Interestingly enough, much of this remains palpable swirling about the thematic and aesthetic core of “Descent”. Most notably, of course, the Borg. What’s important to remember about the Borg’s status in Star Trek is their joint role as extradiegetic challenge and interloping threat: The Borg are not exactly a dark mirror of the Federation, and while it’s tempting to call them purveyors of narrative collapse, they’re actually not. “The Best of Both Worlds” threatened to be a narrative collapse, but if it had been that would have been the show doing that to itself-The Borg winning was a symptomatic result of the show’s panic-stricken crisis, not the cause of it. The closest Star Trek: The Next Generation has actually come to narrative collapse is the forced artifice of “Chain of Command”, which examined the potential threat of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine dispersing its older sister by purging Bajor and the Cardassian occupation from it. Crucially, this story came not long after two other double-length episodes meant to reassure us this wasn’t going to happen (one of which even featured a cameo by the Borg). Since then, we’ve seen Gul Ocett on this side of the lot and there’s even a Bajoran extra in “Descent” itself.

In practice, the Borg are actually more of a counterfactual narrative invader. They come from Star Trek’s future, and as iconic as they may be to Star Trek: The Next Generation in pop culture they fundamentally do not belong here. The Borg represent all the darkness and ugliness the Star Trek universe inherits as part of its pedigree, the terrifying end result of science fiction’s teleology and technological determinism gone horribly right. And, keenly aware of the show’s perpetually unfulfilled potential, the Borg lie in wait for a moment of weakness to strike and appropriate.…

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The Eruditorum Press Christmas Party Shabcast

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Take time off from wading through the flooded ruins of your home and join the entire ‘inner party’ (as it were) of Eruditorum Press – Holly, myself, James, Jane, Kevin and Phil – for Shabcast 14, a massive festive blather-session.  (Anna was invited, but was too tired from doing little things like, y’know, fixing the site.)

Like any office Christmas ‘do’ there will be simmering resentments and blazing rows, the awkward office joker will embarrass everyone, somebody will get spannered and photocopy their arse (or, these days, scan it and email it to people I suppose), the boss will be unconvincingly jovial with staff who can’t relax while he’s around, two people will sneak off for a tryst in an empty office, and the whole thing will be interrupted by terrorists led by Alan Rickman.

It’s undoubtedly the finest piece of Christmas-related media you’re likely to experience in the next couple of days.

Download or listen here. 

And have a pleasant end of December.

 

 …

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Comics Reviews (December 23rd, 2015)

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Chew #53

An odd issue that feels borderline like just establishing a new premise for the book seven issues from the end, which is an odd feel. Not really sure what to say about this book as it runs the clock out; it’s in the critically odd position of having been a book with promise that never quite fulfilled it and is heading towards conclusion and a permanent midlist obscurity. Which is a recipe for anticlimax, and this issue exemplifies that. Nothing objectionable, nothing exciting.

Nameless #6

Grant Morrison tries his hand at killing the moon, and ends up with something that frankly reads like a grimdark parody of Grant Morrison. The mind frankly reels at him complaining about the writing in Promethea and then turning out this laundry list of occult references wrapped in a plot that has to be obscurantist to remain at all interesting. A comic that aims to be about nihilism and ends up being about nothing.

Saga #32

This continues to read like a book that will read really well in trade, which is more than you can say for Chew. As a single issue, this one rumbled along pretty well in a welcome return to the characters that first grabbed you in the book. Fiona Staples remains one of the best talents in comics, Vaughn continues to write perfectly adequate serialized comics, and this remains a fun exercise in wishing I knew what was going in.

Darth Vader #14

Gillen basically has all the toys to play with here – the Star Wars cast, Vader, and his own Aphra/0-0-0/BT-1 team, and he relishes it. Being part four of a crossover it’s more setup than fireworks, but it’s another fun, satisfying romp with good bits for several characters, and particularly for Leia. Only real flaw is that Larocca is not well-served by the photo-referenced characters, ending up at his most static and awkward. Also I forget who the guy in the cliffhanger is.

The New Avengers #4

The New Avengers fight space-Cthulhu, which they call exactly that, in a delightful slice of Claremont-style big team soap opera that feels as “now” as it gets, with the horror ideas of Nameless, a Hot Chocolate quote, and a major plot thread of Young Avengers resurrected. Plus Squirrel Girl. Basically, the Platonic ideal of a certain type of Marvel book in 2015. Well done.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #2

Basically the best thing ever; a joyful mad science romp with evil monkeys and dinosaurs and glowing green magic technology stuff. This is firmly Marvel recreating the formula that made Ms. Marvel work, and they’re doing it in fine fashion, creating a hero whose world is vivid and compelling and feels real precisely because of its majestic silliness. Really a highlight of the current market.…

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The Force Awakens Review

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Well, it’s no “Tilotny Throws a Shape.”

It seems almost obvious to suggest that The Force Awakens is a film that feels more like it was engineered than created as such. There is never a moment within it that doesn’t feel calculated. This is hardly surprising; the original film’s conscious aping of Joseph Campbell is at times overstated, but in the post-Save the Cat! cinematic world we live in the idea that a Star Wars screenplay was ever going to contain anything that seems to be there because of some actual interest, concern, or idiosyncrasy of the screenwriter is blatantly absurd. The cold reality is that The Force Awakens basically just had to shoot on film and go back to the “used future” aesthetic that Lucas ditched for the prequels and it was going to debut to cheery reviews about Star Wars being back.

Even by that standard, however, there’s something intensely rote about The Force Awakens and its unblinking tour through all the classic bits of Star Wars. It would be going too far to say that it’s cynical – everybody is clearly having a good time making Star Wars. But there’s a palpable sense, in basically every scene, that what they’re having fun is very much making Star Wars as opposed to making this particular movie. There are exceptions – in particular Domhnall Gleeson, who has clearly never tasted finer scenery in his life – but by and large nobody seems invested in this film.

That’s not terribly surprising, I suppose, given that this film (like Star Trek before it) really isn’t interested in anything more than “here is the setup for a new version of this classic thing.” The main beneficiary here is Rian Johnson, a filmmaker with an actual track record of interesting and challenging movies who inherits the plum Empire Strikes Back position, an accomplished cast, and an actual premise, and who thus presumably gets to go be interesting without having to waste acres of time going “look! Another plucky hero on a desert planet!”

Ah, yes, Rey. Along with Finn, the good part of the film. For two reasons. The first is simply the hilarious idiocy like the review Vox Day posted to his PUA sub-blog that objected to a girl beating a boy in a light saber fight before concluding that “women ruin everything,” or the Return of Kings review that says everything you’d expect it to say. The second, quite separate from the genuine pleasure of impotent nerd rage, is simply that it’s fucking wonderful to see heroes like Rey and Finn. A world where Daisy Ridley and John Boyega get to play the heroes of an action/sci-fi movie is a nicer world than one where they don’t. Countless movies have gone less well-cast because they didn’t have the bravery or ingenuity to hire actors like them.

And yet for all that the choice of sobriquets reveals the ugly motives for the critique, it’s hard not to have a whisp of sympathy for the people who accuse Rey of being a Mary Sue.…

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“Everything is alive”: If Wishes Were Horses

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The interpretation here seems obvious. So obvious, in fact, it almost feels hard to accept.

Stories have power. That much we have established: “What war hasn’t been a war of fiction?” as Alan Moore would say. Our ideas of how the world is are cultivated in the stories we tell about them and guide our actions in a myriad of ways, from the material psychology of the copycat effect to the more intangible power of symbols and synchromysticism. And so it’s no great stretch to see, in “If Wishes Were Horses”, our stories take on a very real life of themselves derived from the meaning we imbue them with. One way to look at it is to argue that all our knowledge of the world is in some sense a kind of story-A representative facsimile meant to stand in for experiential perception. Our conscious understanding of others in necessarily incomplete, based as it must be on what we see, what we are allowed to see and how we interpret what we see. Fantasies are narratives we outline ourselves deliberately built out of distortions and exaggerations.

None of this is new for us: We know spirituality goes hand in hand with performativity. Like Alan Moore also said, “there’s a certain amount of sham in shamanism”. Some shamanic rituals involve adopting the guise of spirits or the retelling of sacred stories. Magic, in the western sense, is just another form of symbolic language representation of individual experience. The occult is “hidden” specifically because it belongs to a realm we’re not consciously aware on an everyday basis. It’s also well-trod ground for Star Trek: The obvious point of comparison is “Where No One Has Gone Before”, but Michael Piller said since that was “six years ago on a different show” there was no reason not to do another story that “celebrated imagination”. I agree inasmuch as I believe it’s *always* important to tell stories like this.

I’m not convinced Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are different shows.

But going back beyond this particular series, the theme does tend to reoccur; “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” being possibly the other biggest example in Star Trek’s history prior to “Where No One Has Gone Before”. This does seem odd territory for science fiction, though: It’s the very thing you might think Hard SF, or at least the proponents of Hard SF, would denounce as fantasy at best and “woo” at worst. Mind and consciousness, and thus the experiential, is something traditionally seen as taboo for empiricism. And yet even in the celebrated works of the old masters you see things like “telepathic science”, hinting that perhaps the experience and the observational process aren’t as irreconcilable as we might think. Star Trek is not Hard SF, but this only means that it lacks the self-conscious narrow materialist focus that the genre has come to represent in this day and age: It does not mean, and should not mean, that it is anti-science.…

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The Feast of Steven

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For you holiday pleasure, I gift to you this little lovely essay on The Feast of Steven. Which is neither a reference to the current showrunner, nor to the marvelous Steven Universe, despite their similarities. No, this is the seventh episode in the epic The Daleks’ Masterplan, and quite possibly one of the best therein. See, at this point in the show, as Phil so eloquently inscribed back in the early days of TARDIS Eruditorum, Doctor Who had swung away from its counterculture ethics and aesthetics, and Masterplan was certainly a part of that swerve, an insistent undermining of the Doctor’s efficacy and the show’s overall optimism. But for one shining moment on Christmas Day, 1965 (despite a singular dark splotch within that moment) this was most certainly not the case.

The Feast of Steven is perhaps most memorably known as the most blatant case of the show breaking the 4th Wall, when at the end the Doctor turns to the camera and wishes everyone in the audience a Merry Christmas. In some dreary netherparts of our fandom, this is considered a mistake. Apparently the showrunners at the time, producer John Wiles and script editor Donald Tosh, weren’t too fond of it either, suggesting it was an ad-lib by Hartnell, a literal mistake. Of course it’s not a mistake. Everything in the episode was always leading up to this.

Not that this is an easy episode to analyze. The Feast of Steven was the first episode of Doctor Who to ever be junked – because everyone knew this was going to be the Christmas episode, and that people might not be watching on Christmas (how times have changed), they decided it would be something completely unnecessary to the larger serial around it; ergo, it wasn’t ever copied and shipped to other TV stations around the world with the other 11 parts of Masterplan.

So all we have is an audio recording, from which two main reconstructions have been reconstructed. On the one hand we have the version from stalwart recon studio Loose Cannon, which uses a variety of telesnaps (there were only 20, so even here there’s a dearth of material) in many creative ways to form the vague semblance of a visual narrative. The other is a crude animation, which is in some ways superior to the somewhat incoherent mélange of motionless stills of the former recon, but which elides any semblance of “performance” – gone are any of the actors’ expressions, the actual sets, and perhaps less obviously, the direction of the piece. Not that the Loose Cannon recon saved much in the way of direction, but its very lack of direction is ironically more honest. All that said, the animated version is certainly more watchable. Both are available at the usual places you might find such stuff.

The story basically consists of two parts, with some connective tissue inside the TARDIS – the story actually begins there, ends there, and that is the place that bridges the two main setpieces.…

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Christmas Is This Friday, So Here’s Another Post About Death

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A guest post by Jill Buratto

I’m not quite sure what more needs said about this. The episode rather says it all. Maybe discussing the differences between the death of Donna and the death of Clara made sense after Face the Raven (when Phil first asked if I would write this) but, let’s face it, Hell Bent was just such a lovely and succinct “fuck you Russell, that was fucked up” that I’m not sure there is much ground to cover. But this is a thing I am passionate about so forgive me a little redundancy. 

Because, ultimately, Hell Bent is an overt challenge to Journey’s End and the horrific violation of consent contained. It explicitly nods to the Donna mind wipe incident and challenges the very premise of it. “Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past.” And, this time, the Doctor agrees, backs down, acknowledges that right. And in that nod to the Donna debacle, implicitly acknowledges the past mistake. 

And it’s not just Journey’s End. Davies doesn’t have a great track record with agency at the end of stories in general. It’s not just Donna, though the forced mind wipe is the most egregious example. Ignoring her informed consent and performing a procedure she flatly stated she did not want was nothing short of reprehensible and still makes my skin crawl. But it happens with Rose too. Both times really. In Doomsday, her decision to stand by the Doctor is first ignored by the Doctor himself, slipping the teleport medallion on her without her knowledge and sending her to the parallel universe. Once she finds her way back, her decision is once again undermined by her own father, pulling her with him through the closing Void. Both times, her choice was overridden by Those Who Know Better. And, to a lesser degree, this happens to her again in Journey’s End. Having finally reconnected with the Doctor, all she wants to do is stay with him and, instead, she is given the consolation prize/baggage of a newly formed Donna/Doctor clone (a hybrid, you might say). Instead of continuing her adventures, she is saddled with a dark, angry and unpredictable new life and essentially told to figure it out because the Doctor says so. It happens to Jack the first time, when he is left alone on a decimated space station with the dust of corpses and a new immortal life to figure out without any guidance or explanation. Again, none of these moments are quite as stomach churning as watching Donna beg and plead to keep her memories to no avail but still contain remove any element of choice from the companions who are exiting.

And it has been said before, but the biggest problem with the scene is that you are supposed to empathize with the Doctor. He made a hard choice for someone he cared about, he is the hero and his actions are justified. His motives and actions are not questioned by the narrative, it was just the thing to do and we know he is tortured by this decision because he spends some time crying in the rain.…

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“…rose from a solid sea”: Timescape

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A river, flowing to eternity. Frozen.

But even when frozen, water does not stand still. There is movement and kinetic energy at the molecular level, imperceptible though it might be to normal human senses. Water’s mercurial nature is in its ability to remain fluid throughout many different forms.

In the depths of space, due to the extreme temperatures, water does not solidify into the crystalline lattice commonly associated with ice, but ice still exists. It is still freezing. In space, ice forms as an amorphous solid, transitioning in an instant to a kind of cosmic glass. Amorphous ice is likely the most common form of water in the universe.

On Earth, a lake frozen over in winter appears still and silent as the world around it appears locked in suspended animation. But beneath the surface, life goes on: Some fish, such as trout, are actually *more* active during the winter, while many species of insect spend their larval stages underwater during the winter in temperatures that can average a balmy 1-4 degrees Celsius in places. Winter is not a finite cessation of life, but a part of the continuing cycle of life.

There are events still in motion even as the world seems to sleep, setting the stage for the inevitable spring. And so the cycle begins again.

There are few stories that have become so much a part of my being and existence as “Timescape”. Rewatching it the other night reminded me why. There are some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that instantly come to mind when I think of the series-I’ve already mentioned “The Chase” is one this season. “Timescape” is not one of those episodes. It’s in a category beyond that, existing only as a vivid sensory memory. When I think of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I don’t think of this *story*, I think of its *images*: The Enterprise locked in combat with a Romulan Warbird. The eerily silent dreamlike atmosphere of the ship itself as she and her crew remain suspended in the unfolding moment. Deanna Troi making her way through a frozen sickbay, visibly astonished at the sight of Doctor Crusher in the midst of being crippled by a disruptor blast. Those images have lingered in the back of my psyche as clear as they were on first transmission for over twenty years.

Not so much Captain Picard playing with the warp core breach in engineering, though it’s every bit as evocative and fitting. It certainly plays well for Tumblr, though.

I sometimes forget who else is stuck with Deanna outside in normal space-time. Not because Captain Picard, Data or (Prophets forbid) Geordi are low-key or forgettable presences, but because Deanna is the person I seem to have fixated on the most in these sets of images. Perhaps I’ve subconsciously connected “Timescape” with forthcoming episodes like “Dark Page” and “Eye of the Beholder” that share the same space in my memory, are equally dreamlike and in which Deanna also plays an important role.…

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Saturday Waffling (December 19th, 2015)

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Happy almost solstice.

Behind on everything, like one is before Christmas. The conspicuously delayed next Last War in Albion chapter is proving very thorny. I think it will be good, but the punishing nature of writing it is making me eye Fearful Symmetry nervously, lemme tell you.

We recorded the Christmas Special Shabcast this afternoon, and by we I basically mean everyone. That’s very silly. Thursday I believe?

Here’s one that ought be interesting: under what circumstances will you be watching The Husbands of River Song?…

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Paradise Towers Commentary

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UPDATE: The original zip file (up until Friday afternoon) had a bad version of Episode 4. That’s fixed in the zip, but if you downloaded it and need episode 4, that’s available on its own right here.

Jack and I are back again to blather all over perfectly good Doctor Who episodes, this time having frankly an excess of fun watching Paradise Towers, which is simply a wonderful and brilliant piece of television that we should be overjoyed to have in the world and anyone who disagrees should be fed to the tentacle beasts at the heart of modernism.

Anyway, download a .zip of all four commentary tracks right here. Awesome. You’re so cool now.

Also, Jack Graham fans, which is to say anyone with taste, should make sure to check him out on the Oi Spaceman! podcast where he talks Planet of the Ood, which is another story that’s just an expression of pure fucking joy. Grab that here.

And now to sit down and record the Christmas Special Shabcast. 

Yes. That is a thing.

God help us all.…

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