Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

“She most lives”: Dax

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So I need to get something off my chest right off the bat. The entire teaser and first act of this episode manifestly do not need to exist. They’re nothing more than horrid, stock Male gaze-y Damsel in Distress capture/escape/chase science fiction bullshit. Obviously, the writers wanted that precious “conflict and drama” and, because they’re science fiction writers, they think the best way to do that is to abduct a pretty, doe-eyed young woman who pleads for mercy while helplessly immobilized by the Standard Female Grab Area and then lead the macho military men on a chase through corridors on a starbase as they spout protocol at one another.

I’ll bet you can guess how I feel that Jadzia Dax is the character who gets the treatment in question. But what makes it even worse is that this actually doesn’t make any real dramatic sense! Think about it: How much more dramatic would it had been if, rather than deciding to indulge their Buck Rogers fantasies, the writers actually let us know this was going to be a courtroom drama from the start. Imagine if in the teaser the Klaestronians approach Dax in the corridor, validate her identity, and than flatly state “Jadzia Dax, you are hereby under arrest on suspicion of treason against the Klaestronian people and the first degree murder of General Aredlon Tandro, my father”. Tandro, Jr. slaps handcuffs on Jadzia, we pan up to a shot of her stoic and unmoved expression, and then fade right to black and cue credits.

Casting doubt on characters like Kira, Quark and Odo is one thing. Quark is set up to be a shady dude right from the start, from her first appearance Kira’s loyalty to us is in question (though if you’ll notice, that seems to have all be resolved as of this episode: Kira is one of Commader Sisko’s staunchest allies all throughout the investigation. Uh oh, the crew seems to be getting along! Guess it’s time to cancel the show then!) and before we got to know him better we could imagine Odo being the kind of person who might take his dedication to justice a bit too far. But Dax? The wise woman of DS9? I mean hell, if you’re looking to shock the audience and get them to distrust the characters (I mean, I personally don’t think that’s a great idea, but this team sure seems to think so) I can’t think of a blindside bigger than accusing Dax of all people of murder. High treason…OK, maybe. But murder? That’s a twist worthy of a teaser.

The rest of the story has its ups and downs and has a lot of fruitful material to discuss, and is obviously one that’s quite important to me, but that whole first sequence absolutely mars the episode and singlehandedly consigns it to the rubbish portion of this season it otherwise could have marked the end of.…

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Sleep No More Review

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This is solidly Gatiss’s best-ever Doctor Who story. It is in several regards outright brilliant, in a giddy and brave way that makes a perfect little quiet breath of an episode in the tradition of Love and Monsters or Blink, which it most obviously resembles. I’ve not, obviously, run the timing of it, but it certainly feels like a Doctor-lite episode, sharing their structural trick of treating a Doctor Who story as a defined thing happening inside another story. But where those stories put the Doctor into a very different sort of story, here he’s put into a found footage horror film. The result, very cleverly, is a story that gradually unravels into two separate stories, with the Doctor falling out of the narrative instead of slowly overtaking it.

This unraveling is by some margin the highlight of the episode, and is done with deft panache. Information is conveyed through the subtle shifts of the narrative rules, so that the found footage approach moves gradually and cleverly from being a gimmick to being the entire point of the episode. This is handled smartly on multiple levels, including Gatiss’s script, Justin Molotnikov’s direction, and Reece Shearsmith’s performance, which is a beautifully clever blend of familiar forms of Doctor Who acting that shifts cleverly with each twist. The final scene is particularly beautiful, with just the right amount of ecstatic thrill in his evil plan and clear relish in his transformation into dust. What a finish.

On top of that, many of the ideas here are genuinely great. I imagine Jack and Jane will both be over the moon with aspects of this. The leisure time destroyed by unchecked capitalist growth rises up and consumes us, our dreams taking revenge on us for our failure to attend to them. The dust is watching us, and the story it tells about us will kill us. I mean, these are just the sorts of sentences you live to write as an anarcho-Marxist occultist television critic, you know?

There are, however, two significant weaknesses. The first is, simply put, the irreducible flaws of Gatiss. Even when he, as he does here, has genuinely brilliant ideas, he’s rarely inclined to push them particularly far. Given a concept with all the metaphorical heft and conceptual possibility of sleep monsters, we really should have something more interesting than the smashy brutes that are the Sandmen. He doesn’t even go as far as indulging in the obvious grossness of literal snot monsters with people getting transformed into Sandmen and crumbling to dusty snot as they die or anything. Just smashing, and a bunch of kills in the form of “oh no one got in the room with you and we cut to black.”

Beyond that, he remains infuriatingly rubbish at giving his characters interesting arcs or things to do. The supporting cast makes that of Under the Lake/Before the Flood look like Osgood or Ashildir; they’re banal cannon fodder for corridor runs. Clara gets to trip and fall into a box.…

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The State of the Site: A Technical Update

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Hello kind friends!

Anna the websquid here, with an update on the site. In short, we are aware of the various issues afflicting the site, and I’m working on them as fast as I can. This is a part-time gig on my part, so the amount of time I have to work on issues is limited. But we know the captchas suck, we know about the mobile formatting issues, we know pages are loading slow, we know about the 502s.

The best way to report site issues or complaints: check our issue tracker, and if you don’t see the issue there, you can send an email to websquid@eruditorumpress.com. (Alternately, if you’re the sort of person who githubs, feel free to open an issue directly on the issue tracker.)

Some technical notes, for the curious:

I’m currently prioritizing the latency/availability issues. Our current webhost is proving to be a bad fit for our needs in a number of ways, chief amongst them the difficulty in setting up meaningful monitoring metrics. As a result, we haven’t even been able to reliably identify where in the stack the latency issues are occurring, or whether the 502s are related to backend server latency. The 502s are being returned by hosting-service-provided Apache reverse proxy frontends, and our application server backend (running on gunicorn) doesn’t report any errors at all, except for the occasional “worker timeout” that doesn’t correlate with the periods in which the 502s spike. It’s a bad situation, and I’m digging us out of it. This will probably result in some brief downtime sometime this weekend while I migrate the site to a new hosting platform.

Once we have the major operational issues under control, I’ll turn my focus onto the most painful user-visible site bugs. They’re all on my radar, I just have limited cycles to spend.…

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Capitalist Pig 4: Black Mirror, Grey Miasma of Bland Cultural Commentary

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There is a moment in the first episode of Black Mirror, in which, in the midst of conjuring the future that is now our pigfucking reality, a character mentions that the Guardian has posted a brief column about the cultural significance of the pig. The script does not specify whether it is by Jonathan Jones, but it’s safe to assume that it is. Call it a headcanon, as the kids say on social media.

It’s a soft jab, to be sure, not least because Brooker is himself a Guardian columnist, offering such gripping insights as an unfunny ripoff of Jack’s “Tricky Dicky” series and this shitty thing about a German project to build an adaptive AI to play Super Mario World in which Brooker blatanty brainstorms for the forthcoming-to-Netflix twelve-episode third season of Black Mirror while demonstrating a complete lack of interest in any sort of material understanding of the technology he’s decided to undertake as his journalistic beat. Or perhaps more accurately a loving jab; after all, part of the heady genius of “The National Anthem” is the sublime coherence of its premise. In short, it works because the choice of fucking a pig is tremendously clever.

Well, no, that’s too simple. It works because it constrains itself to the world it’s set in. It’s still built largely out of satirical absurdism, but it keeps its excesses carefully chosen and strangely modest, and then follows them to a logical end. Put another way, it’s about a man who fucks a pig, but it takes its pigfucking seriously, not just following the premise to its inevitable and squealing conclusion but appreciably far past it as mass spectacle turns to mass horror and finally the same banal political reality that presumably preceded it.

The problem, to be blunt, comes when Black Mirror embraces technology, which it does with tedious half-heartedness. The second season episode “Be Right Back” is illustrative. In one sense it shares all the glimmering high points of “The National Anthem.” Its casting is impeccable – Haley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson are as good a leading pair as any show has ever had. It’s gleefully high concept, revelling in rural gothic iconography and cod-Frankenstein moments. It’s emotional and clever and well-done. And literally the only thing it has to say about the world is “social media’s kind of artificial, isn’t it?”

There are two problems here. The first is that Black Mirror, and indeed Brooker’s work in general, is irksomely non-materialist in its approach to technology. The aforementioned Mario AI column is instructive. Here’s the actual paper that inspired the article. What quickly becomes apparent here is the extent to which all of the enthused talk about how the AI “experiences basic emotions, is compelled to act by urges such as “hunger” and “curiosity”, and is painfully aware that he only exists within a meaningless two-dimensional artificial framework from which he can never escape,” in fact all that’s happened is that the researchers have come up with clickbait-friendly ways to describe the process of solving Mario.…

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4. If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Eighteen: Moore’s Perspective on the Ratings Controversy)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: An epic squabble over a proposed ratings system for DC Comics ended with DC shelving the system and the various creators who had protested its imposition making a grand show of everybody getting on again, although, as Gary Groth pointed out in an editorial in The Comics Journal, very little had actually been won and the whole thing was more tempest in a teapot than battle for the heart and soul of the comics industry.

But there’s one name, of course, that’s conspicuously absent from the reactions: Moore’s. This is unsurprising; unlike Chaykin, Moore had no problem taking it personally, in no small part because it blatantly was personal. Geppi’s attack on the loose morals of American comics was specifically aimed at Moore, and blatantly accused him of corrupting the youth of America. And DC had given into the attacks without blinking an eye, then spent months dissembling about it in the face of his protests while, in his view, trying to threaten him into coming back to work for them. Indeed, in his largest single piece on the controversy, an editorial in the February 13th, 1987 edition of Comics Buyer’s Guide entitled “The Politics and Morality of Ratings and Self-Censorship,” Moore decried the “disappointingly personal abuse” he’d received, and set out his own position in strikingly intimate terms, talking about his own children and the intensity with which he feels the need to teach them how to survive “in a world that is constantly changing and increasingly precarious.” In his view, responsible parenting means that he lets them read what they want, and “in the instance of their coming across something which puzzles or disturbs them – much more likely to happen with a newspaper than a comic book, incidentally – then I will simply do my best to explain the source of their distress or bafflement as honestly and as accurately as possible.” As for Geppi’s idea of shielding them from the idea of violence and sex, he notes that “when my eldest child was five she returned from school requesting money for a collection. When I asked her what for, she replied that one of her schoolfriends’ elder brother had gone berserk and murdered his mother with a kitchen knife before turning on his younger sibling, who fortunately escaped with severe injuries.” Subsequently, he went even further, declaring bluntly that he considered the people pressuring DC to be “actually evil.”

Given that these were the terms on which he viewed the debate, it’s hardly a surprise that he saw its resolution differently. This carried some risk, as Moore put it, of him “looking like a shrill, over-reactive prima donna,” and certainly that was what DC sought to quietly paint him as, calmly explaining that, as Dick Giordano put it, the ratings system was not “a moral issue at all. It was essentially a business issue,” and complaining that “there was no way I could respond to people who were becoming so emotional about what seemed to me a very simple marketing device.”…

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“Regress”: Birthright, Part II

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“The idea of doing a crossover between Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is such an intuitive one it writes itself. There are no two iterations of this franchise that mesh and blend together quite as well as these do: Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are a part of each other’s existence in a way that’s not true of any other Star Trek. Deep Space Nine opens up with the straightforward declaration that it’s a part of The Next Generation-Its opening moments literally take place in a Next Generation episode, its entire setting is inherited from one and The Next Generation plays an integral role in the plot of “Emissary”. This isn’t like Doctor McCoy showing up for one brief scene in “Encounter at Farpoint”, Captain Picard and the Enterprise are actual essential aspects to that plot.” 
“Of course the artefact that ends up triggering Data’s dream programme comes from the Gamma Quadrant. When we open our minds to the possibilities of different knowledge-spaces and expand our awareness to the harmonious interplay of people and events, we discover the things we are meant to find. Doctor Bashir cannot study the artefact with the resources he has on Deep Space 9; he needs Beverly Crusher’s lab aboard the Enterprise. Data could not unlock this heretofore unknown level of his potential had he not gone to investigate, or had the Enterprise not come to Deep Space 9 at this point in time. He could not have done so had he not met Doctor Bashir.” 
“But that ‘Birthright, Part I’ actually manages to live up to so much of what it hints at and points to is telling. It could only happen on Deep Space 9.
Honestly, I almost don’t want to see part 2.”

And now, the conclusion…

There’s an interesting structure to “Birthright” we haven’t necessarily seen in previous two-parters. This is the first time the show has done a story like this purely for creative reasons instead of responding to external pressures: “Chain of Command” was partially split into two for narrative reasons, but a big contributing factor there was finances and, to be honest, the fact that it was a mid-season finale and a spinoff series was going to be premiering directly after it. But there’s no ratings reason to drop a two-parter here, roughly midway through the second half of the year: The only reason there’s a “Birthright, Part I” and a “Birthright, Part II” is because the team through the story was too big and too good to contain in just one hour of television.

This leads to the interesting structural consequence that superficially, “Part II” has next to nothing to do with “Part I”. While Worf’s plot was introduced last week, Data gets a whopping one line in this whole episode and the entire story of him developing the ability to dream and the visions of his father he’s experiencing isn’t addressed even in passing; not even in the teaser.…

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The Zygon Inversion Podcast

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This week I’m joined by Gene Mays of the superlative Being and Time Lord to talk about The Zygon Inversion. We manage a record speed of getting completely off topic, and end up talking about Heidegger a bunch, so basically, business as usual. (Obviously this was recorded prior to Jack’s mammoth and brilliant post earlier today, or else we’d probably just be talking about it the whole time.) Download it here or be forever destroyed.

The article Gene mentions within can be found here.…

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The Zygon Invocation

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The recent Zygon two-parter (which I shall, from now on, refer to as ‘The Zygon Inv’ for convenience’s sake) by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat was an extremely well-crafted piece of television in almost every respect. Aesthetic considerations aside, it was a politically committed piece of drama which engaged with vital and loaded current issues.   In many ways, it answered a call that I have repeatedly made in recent years for Doctor Who to re-engage with social and political issues, and to position the Doctor as a social actor in struggles. Moreover, it was clearly and unambiguously intended as a liberal statement of tolerance and opposition to war – a surprisingly forthright one, given the current political climate, and the current predicament of the BBC, surrounded on all sides by reactionary hounds baying for its blood.

In many ways, this story shoots for picking up the baton dropped by Malcolm Hulke long ago. Malcolm Hulke was, of course, only the most open and conscious of the many Doctor Who writers to infuse their stories with liberal politics. Yes, I said liberal. In his writing, he reveals himself to be a liberal rather than a communist. Only in ‘The War Games’, in which he and Dicks are pushed leftwards by the cresting wave of the struggles of the 60s, does he look even a bit like a communist. The rest of the time (by the end of ‘The War Games’ actually) he is writing from what is recognisably a liberal perspective. The backbone of his (if you’ll pardon me) whoeuvre is formed by ruminations on racism, bigotry, war, colonialism, corporations, environmentalism, conservatism, authoritarianism, utopianism, etc… and all from a liberal perspective, with all the strengths and weaknesses that this implies. The recent Zygon two-parter succeeds in inheriting the mantle of Malcolm Hulke, and those same structural strengths and weaknesses of liberal politics are still hitching a ride.

 

Good Liberal Points

I love that the genocide gas which would (ostensibly) turn all the Zygons inside-out was designed by Harry Sullivan. An acute bit of writing. Harry was a bit of a duffer but a jolly fine chap. The product, no doubt, of the English public school system. Rugger, school cups – maybe even a Prefect. No spectacular academic achievements, but he came out with a solid character. And then a medical degree and into the British Navy, where he doubtless served Queen and Country with distinction. Old fashioned and simple hearted. Fine and true. A tribute to the playing fields, old colleges, and institutions of Great Britain. The kind of thoroughly decent sort who was the bread and butter of two world wars.  Exactly the sort of person, in other words, to happily exterminate an entire race of inconvenient people for his government.

Then there’s the drone-strike operative at the UNIT base who refuses to press the button and bomb the people in the town because some of them look like her family. Would she press the button without a qualm if they didn’t?…

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Comics Reviews (November 11, 2015)

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Secret Wars #7

Well, it was perhaps inevitable that as every other bit of this series completely goes off the railst he main series would eventually suffer. The delays and distantly epic tone of this finally conspire to create an issue that’s just disjointed and contextless. Did large swaths of plot happen in tie-ins I didn’t buy? Did I forget things from last month? Should I care? I don’t know, but I honestly had no idea what anybody’s plan or goal was here, and the result was an entire issue spent waiting for a punchdown that got delayed to issue #8 as part of the bullshit extension of this series and a cliffhanger that blatantly wasn’t part of the original outline. Complete mess. 

The Uncanny Avengers #2

Also a complete mess, but with an intriguing mixture of elements on the team that makes me kind of want to hang on for at least another issue or two, just because I’m increasingly intrigued by Duggan as a writer. But at $3.99 a pop, that’s hard to justify, and if this doesn’t pick up into something where I have an idea of what the fuck is going on in the Marvel Universe I’m probably going to start buying some more Image books. 

Thors #4

Unsurprisingly, as this converges back towards Aaron’s ongoing Thor plot and back towards the shambling mess that is Secret Wars it faltered badly for me, with the ending being a confused mess of mostly identical looking characters. Still, there are some charming bits here from its actually good idea of “Thor-based police procedural.” I suspect Aaron is a writer I like more in the small details than the large plotting. Still, done with his Thor run for the time being, I think. 

Spider-Gwen #2

The lengthy delay and alternate universe setting are really throwing me out of this, and it’s increasingly feeling like a book that’s all style and no substance. I think Spider-Gwen has generally worked best when adjacent to the rest of the Marvel Multiverse, as opposed to in her own AU, and may well drop this and just quietly hope the character gets the Miles Morales treatment down the line, because this just isn’t doing it for me.

All-New All-Different Avengers #1

A slow start to a promising book, ending with the team far from assembled and not a ton of impressive plot looming over things. Still, it’s a good writer and a good team, and much as the first story is a bit of a let-down the Ms. Marvel/Nova backup is a total hoot that redeems the package. Still excited for this book, even if I’m really shaking my head at the general sense of totally mismanaging this relaunch. 

The Infinity Gauntlet #5

By far the best of the Secret Wars related books, due to owning the characters it created over its five issues and giving a resolution based on their stories and concepts that didn’t really tie in to the increasing clusterfuck that is the larger crossover.…

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