Eruditorum Press

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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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Who Are You? (The Star Wars Trailer)

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So, yes, my ears perked right up when the first words of the trailer asked, “Who are you?” (Thank you, Carrie Fisher.) And as the trailer unfolded, I got very excited for this movie. And, perhaps, a bit reticent.

Trailers tell stories, of course, mini-condensed stories that act as hooks to get us to actually fork over time and money to watch them. This one (the American release) promises, by virtue of its structure and focus, a certain kind of story. It has to be a story that answers the Question, the oldest Question in the Universe, hidden in plain sight. Who are you?

The trailer doesn’t actually begin by asking the question, though. Not aurally. Visually, though, yes. We see a masked figure. Alone. In a world that’s post-apocalyptic, what with all the broken architecture, dead technology, dust and sand. And when the figure is most alone, most distant, it’s the most natural question in the world. Who are you?

“I’m no one,” comes the reply to the older woman’s question. Which is actually a poignant answer, alchemically speaking. It can come from two different places. One place (the more likely, given this is the first movie of a trilogy) is that of the beaten ego. Someone who doesn’t believe in herself, who doesn’t give herself intrinsic value, who has given up. Let us remember, though, that “giving up” or “letting go” is a precursor to Grace. For the second place such an answer can come from is from someone who has transcended ego. Who has left it behind, who has found a certain kind of emptiness inside such that space has been made to let something else in (i.e., “grace.”)

This promises, then, to be a story about Identity. How to find it. And from there, presumably, how to place it in service to something greater than one’s self. A story of grace.

The structure of the trailer reinforces this reading. It begins by strongly focusing on three individuals. First there’s Rey, the young woman we’ve briefly discussed. Next up is Finn, who’s on an entirely different spiritual journey. “I was raised to do one thing,” he says. “I’ve got nothing to fight for.” We see him crash land on a desert planet, presumably Rey’s. And it’s an interesting twist, in that what’s been a minor stock character – the Stormtrooper – is now made into a full-fledged character. Here’s the redemption story.

Next we focus on the villain, Kylo Ren. We never see his face, it being hidden by a cross between a gas mask and Darth Vader’s helmet. But what’s interesting here is that this is still a character study. He isn’t just menacing. He’s motivated. “I will finish what you started,” he says to the destroyed remnant of Vader’s mask. So, a revenge story.

It’s only halfway through the trailer that we start getting what’s usually taken to be typical Star Wars fare – a chase scene between spaceships. But even this is given a twist, because it’s not just any sort of chase scene, it’s a nostalgic one, for this chase scene features the Millenium Falcon.…

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“As If”: Q-Less

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Remind me again why I’m wasting my time here.

OK, at no point was this ever going to be a good idea.

The critique effectively writes itself. Neither Q nor Vash belong on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Vash was a bad idea to begin with and has never appeared in a good story. It’s silly in an incredibly awkward and forced way (granting as I do a lot of the comic dialog is good, so long as you divorce it from literally all of the rest of the context). More seriously and worryingly though, it gets extremely up in the audience’s face about forcing contrast to Star Trek: The Next Generation where contrast doesn’t need to be drawn. “I’m not Picard” says it all, frankly.

And it really does. “Q-Less”, like “Captive Pursuit” before it, is trying way, way too hard to prove to us it’s something that couldn’t be done on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is something of a problem for an episode explicitly conceived of as a crossover. When I see work like this, I can’t help but get an almost overwhelming sense of adolescent self-consciousness from it and it gets tiresome. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is at its weakest when its so painfully obviously being all neurotic and anticonformist, and this episode is an absolutely prime example of that. There was no reason to bring characters and plot devices like Q and Vash to Deep Space 9 other than to jump about waving your arms saying “See? See? *This* crew handles this kind of situation *differently* than the Enterprise crew would have! Aren’t we clever?”.

No. No you’re not. Go back and come up with something that actually justifies your own existence instead of being a poser and just trying to define yourself in opposition to something.

Which brings me to the primary criticism to level against “Q-Less”, apart from it being shit. John de Lancie summed it up when he said that Q works best when he’s used to explore philosophical issues and concepts, and this episode doesn’t do any of that. It’s Q in his most obnoxiously grating Great Gazoo mode, petulantly throwing a temper tantrum like a little kid who isn’t getting what he wants and fucking with people just because he can. I know that’s a common reading of who Q is as a character, but I think it’s an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous one because of how it works to sabotage and undermine the power he can wield when he’s not used that way. And it’s especially frustrating here because, and I’m actually going to walk back a little of what I said above, there actually were ways Q could have been used on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine other than brand mascot.

As much as I disliked “Tapestry”, given how close that episode was produced to this one and given how uncannily fitting certain oversignified aspects of it were, a savvy writer could have conceivably further developed that episodes thematic elements in a different context here.…

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Genre Competition (Kill the Moon)

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…and Zygons.

First, Kill the Moon. No, wait, first, what do I mean by “genre competition” and why in the world would anything like that matter? So let’s go back and review what’s already been established via TARDIS Eruditorum. Most readers here should be familiar with the term “narrative substitution,” which is what happens when we’re toodling along, all genre-savvy and boned up on TV Tropes, and suddenly the rug is pulled out from under us and the story we think we’re watching turns into something else.

Phil coined the phrase in his review of A Good Man Goes to War, where the “male revenge for his hurt woman” story trope is rejected for something quite different – instead, it turns into a story of Grace, which is delivered not by the Doctor, but by River Song. Or we might look at the “epic season finale” of The Pandorica Opens and how the fulfilled narrative collapse is supplanted by a small, intimate story of one family.

What we get in Kill the Moon is something similar, but it is structurally different, not to mention ramped up to 11. Rather than giving us one story, and then substituting it with something else, Kill the Moon cycles through a variety of genre tropes – especially genre tropes familiar to Doctor Who – and then puts them in competition against each other to see which will prevail. Which ultimately ends up being a statement of values, or perhaps a hierarchy of values, for the genres themselves have certain values implicitly coded into them from the beginning. To top it all off, the story then comments on this.

We should have seen coming from the cold open, which features Clara talking to us through our TV monitors. Of course within the story itself she’s talking to our fictional counterparts on Earth, but for our purposes that doesn’t matter – simply addressing the camera directly suffices in this day and age to imply a metafictional component. And metafiction, we should point out, as is the case with every kind of genre, carries with it certain assumptions and values. Which we’ll get to later. I would like to point out, though, that there’s another layer to this convention within Doctor Who itself, namely that it’s an invocation of the Second Doctor, who was often peering out of television monitors, always on the verge of breaching the veil between fiction and reality.

So let’s go through Kill the Moon’s various genre invocations, and what those imply both in terms of themselves and within Doctor Who.

After the credits we begin at Coal Hill (love the alchemical implication of the nigredo stage of the Great Work in the name of that school) where Clara talks to the Doctor about Courtney. Courtney, who’s already in the TARDIS, ready to go on an adventure, armed with motion-sickness wristbands and a bottle of disinfectant in case she still gets sick. In these opening moments, then, we have an invocation of Children’s Television.…

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Now Fight (Mortal Kombat)

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On September 13th, 1993, exactly four days after my eleventh birthday, the world slipped forever from my grasp. As with anyone for whom this happens, my reaction at the time was little more than a vague annoyance and sense of disapproval. I really never played Mortal Kombat, largely because it was very much Not The Sort Of Thing My Family Approved Of. This was not the Joe Lieberman sort of “this game shouldn’t be for sale” disapproval that constituted the main controversy over Mortal Kombat. I don’t even think it was a particularly outcome oriented objection; by this point in my life there was no real sense that I was likely to begin emulating media violence. But I flatly don’t think I could have gotten a copy of Mortal Kombat at the time Mortal Kombat was a thing.

Moreover, though, I didn’t want one. I was perfectly happy to embrace my censorship on this one. I did not like what I saw and knew of this game. Which was significant; I did see and know a fair amount. Video games were my thing; a topic of special and passionate focus even within the context of a video game friendly suburban middle school culture. Of course I knew about the massively advertised hugely popular video game where you could rip someone’s spine out. I just didn’t want to rip someone’s spine out.

To be clear, again, this was just me. My earliest genuine sense of political outrage was Lieberman’s video game censorship position, because even following the medium from afar in many cases I knew more about the games he was condemning than he did, and yet he was driving a national debate about them. I did not think that Mortal Kombat shouldn’t exist as a rule. I just didn’t want it. Indeed, for the most part I enjoyed not wanting it. I remember stray Mortal Kombat machines in restaurants, and the extended and mindful act of not playing them. (I could have gotten away with it. As a “come on can I try it everyone else gets to.” It was, in the end, a balance of financials; my parents would not spend $50 for something they disapproved of, but 50¢ was entirely achievable.)

These days, there’s a lot of people whose spines I’d like to rip out, but that’s just called adulthood. Eventually the realization that there are people you’d just rather not be in the world hits you in its full, ideological sense. This is not, to be clear, the same as the realization that you should rip their spines out. The decision to employ violent eliminationism is not the same as the taste of bile rising in your throat whenever you see them, whoever them may be. This is why the fight is our most basic play. We cannot help but split in two and struggle back to one.

Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter II, for instance. In many ways it’s just another metonym for the big dualism of the era.…

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“Ingress”: Birthright, Part I

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It could only happen on Deep Space 9.

It’s been called “the season of taking risks” by the production team. But Star Trek: The Next Generation was born capable of taking risks-Its mistake was in forgetting for so long that it was capable of doing so. It’s only now when the Enterprise has rediscovered what its place in the cosmos has always been, and it does so by voyaging here. Commander Sisko came to the Celestial Temple and Deep Space 9 to uncover the journey he was meant to take. The crew of the Enterprise come here to remember and be reborn again. But in turn, Deep Space 9 grows and is further sublimated through visiting with the Enterprise: Together, they are much more than they ever could be on their own. They belong together. They belong here and now.

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.

This is not to say that Deep Space Nine is merely a subset or subsidiary of The Next Generation, but rather to argue it was inevitable that Deep Space Nine would return the favour, and sooner rather than later. It’s silly to think there would never be crossovers, or even to think that crossovers aren’t going to be the actual *norm* from here going forward, because these two entities share their reality together in a very deep and profound way. A voyaging canoe is a community just as a village is, and just as a world is; there is no conflict between these concepts. The canoe and the village both symbolize the universe they are each a microcosm of: Each spirit, bringing with them their own talents and experiences, finds a role to fill through which we all can survive and grow. The canoe is the island, and the island is the world that we all share together.

So in the same way Star Trek: Deep Space Nine mirrors and compliments Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Birthright, Part I” mirrors and parallels “Emissary”.…

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The Zygon Inversion Review

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Holy shit that was good. An astonishingly well-tuned, clever piece of television full of surprises big and small. Every bit as good as you would hope from the writing credit, from the actors, from the directors, and really from Doctor Who. I am as thrilled to have watched this happen as I am jealous of those who got to see Terror of the Zygons on first transmission, and I have zero doubt that in 2055 fandom will talk about this like we talk about Terror today.

There is nowhere to start besides the big scene. It is essentially a ten minute long Peter Capaldi monologue. I mean, he has four other characters and three other actresses to work off of, but they are all obligingly standing in corners and letting him do his bit. And it’s basically perfection. This is true on essentially three levels. First of all, of course, is simply the fact that Peter Capaldi is very good at his job. There’s almost nothing more to say than that. I mean, just go watch it five times in a row. Go ahead. It will stand up to that. You will keep noticing new things and getting excited about new bits. It will be like falling in love with a song only with television.

Second of all, Moffat and Harness are very good at theirs (and this scene, at least, feels very much a… hybrid). This isn’t just well paced and well-acted, it’s well set up. Harness built the overall story very well. The basic decision to have the story’s sole actual Zygon Duplicate be Clara was very clever, as was the decision to have the actual villainous faction just be a raging ISIS-style splinter group. The result is on the one hand unambiguously a full on villain, and no effort is made to morally justify Bonnie’s lunacy as such, and on the other hand impossible not to empathize with because she’s played by Jenna Coleman. The resolution – the heartbroken “there’s nothing in the box, is there” – is astonishing, as is “you’re one of us now,” a line meticulously situated within the overall Invasion of the Body Snatchers rhetoric of the story, but given a strange and wonderful meaning contrary to what the line would normally do. And then there’s all the little verbal mirrorings – the use of the word “troublemakers,” with which the Doctor clearly implicates himself just as much as Bonnie, for instance.

But third of all, and perhaps most importantly, are the basic and particular ethics of it. The original Zygon ceasefire was an unusually philosophically deft move on Moffat’s part; a tacit quotation of the great liberal philosopher John Rawls. This moves beyond the pretty philosophical theory into terrain that is at once realist and full of empathy. The Doctor’s final turn into “of course I know how you feel you moron” is astonishing, as is the act of forgiveness. The arguments made are wise and sensible. Space is made for the legitimacy of violence, but none is made for the legitimacy of suffering, and the contradiction involved is accepted.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Related Work Open Thread

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For obvious reasons one of the categories I find most interesting, and one of those No Award triumphed in, Best Related Work is basically (and was indeed originally simply called) the nonfiction category for books about science fiction. I’ll almost certainly be nominating Alexandra Erin’s John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author And I Myself am Quite Popular, it being one of the funniest things I’ve read this year, and may do Space Helmet for a Cow, which I should probably finish and write a review of.

Speaking of which, as the lack of reviews the last two weeks suggest, those have rather dried up. There’s one or two in my e-mail that I’ve not posted because I’ve been waiting to get to the 3-4 I’ve been doing per post, so if anyone wants to oblige, snowspinner at gmail and whatnot.

Also, I was happy to see that George R.R. Martin’s first Hugo recommendations post included suggesting Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), a work I’m near-certain to have on my ballot, but had been assuming would be an idiosyncratic dark horse. And, more broadly, that Martin is doing Hugo recommendations, this being a conversation I continue to maintain we need to have loudly and in public.

Anyway, here’s the Hugo Wikia’s (incomplete as ever) list of eligible works. What are you planning on nominating?…

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“But do I have the right?”: Captive Pursuit

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One of the common criticisms leveled against Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its early years is that its episodes had a tendency to be “too much like The Next Generation”, with the typical argument generally going that these episodes either had technobabble or plots that weren’t uniquely Deep Space Nine centric. I personally don’t think this is the case at all; in fact, of the episodes we’ve looked at so far, by my estimation that only one that could conceivably have also been done on Star Trek: The Next Generation was “Babel”-the one that was actually originally written for Star Trek: The Next Generation. And even “Babel” was worked over really well to fit the setting and character dynamics of the new show.

This makes it terribly interesting for me to see “Captive Pursuit” held up by pretty much the entire creative team as a great early example of a show that could never have been done on Star Trek: The Next Generation, because as far as I can tell the big problem with “Captive Pursuit” is that it’s a story that doesn’t belong to either Star Trek: The Next Generation *or* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

The first obvious issue is that it’s a Prime Directive story, and Prime Directive stories are without exception always terrible all of the time. For my arguments as to why, go re-read literally anything I’ve ever written about the Prime Directive spread across four books. The Deep Space Nine creative team’s reasoning as to why it’s only here that we could get to see Starfleet officers breaking regulations to go up against an obvious moral travesty is very revealing, and actually pretty offensively disingenuous in my opinion: They claim that it’s because the Enterprise crew are “squeaky clean” and would never dream of going against their superiors, citing the scene in this episode where Chief O’Brien only gets the idea to go against the Federation after listening to Quark. But that’s provably untrue, and it’s not just my wish fulfillment projecting onto Star Trek: The Next Generation, that’s an actively ahistorical reading of the series easily refuted by citing concrete textual evidence.

No matter whether you think they’re actively renegade scientists and explorers as I do or think they’re bureaucratic officers trying to do the best they can within the constrains of the system they’re working in (which to me is actually a better reading of this show, actually) the fact of the matter is the Enterprise crew go against Starfleet regulations *all the time*. We had them taking down the admiralty as early as “Too Short a Season” way back in *1987* and as recently as “Chain of Command”. The Enterprise even has a pretty notorious history of violating the Prime Directive itself: In “The Drumhead”, Admiral Satie accuses Captain Picard of violating it *nine times* (which he had, and rightfully so) prior to the the events of that episode, which was way back in the fourth season.…

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The Zygon Invasion Podcast/Al Ewing Interview

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This week we’ve got a very special treat – a double length episode of the Series 9 Podcast in which I’m joined by comics writer Al Ewing, who co-wrote Titan Comics’ Eleventh Doctor comic, and is currently doing Contest of Champions, The New Avengers, and The Ultimates for Marvel. The first hour consists of us talking about The Zygon Invasion, while the back half is a wide-ranging interview about comics and numerous other topics. Yes, you read that right. Our podcast this week is like… a hybrid.

You can grab that right here, and I really recommend you do.

The episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe that Al mentions, incidentally, is available on YouTube here.…

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