Eruditorum Press

Temporarily embarrassed proletarians

“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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Capitalist Pig 3: The Synthetic Rat

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I was there at the birth,
Out of the cloudburst,

The head of the tempest.

Murderer!

Murder of calm.

– Kate Bush, ‘Little Earth’

 

Let’s, for now, posit a classical Hegelian dialectical triad. And let’s take the pig as the first point of our triad: the thesis. And let’s – as per Phil’s suggestion – take cancer as another point of the same triad: the antithesis. What would be the synthesis?

 

It’s worth making a short digression actually, on the issue of whether or not cancer and pigs are antithetical. In one sense, obviously not. Pigs get cancer. Pigs are used in cancer research. Eating bacon – even a tiny bit, once – will definitely give you cancer, as research has recently proved.

 

David Cameron is a cancer eating away at the heart of our society, and he once had intimate relations with a pig… and yet it’s hard to say that those relations, for all their intimacy, were not antithetical. After all, the pig in question was dead, and had presumably been killed and decapitated so that it could be brought to table for the members (ahem) of the Piers Gaveston society. There can hardly be any more antithetical relationship between any two subjects than that between diner and dish… and yet they are also inextricably unified. Diner and dish, and thence stomach and contents, cells and nutrition, and – ultimately – rectum and faeces. Did Cameron and his fellow Gavestonians consume the pigs they debauched? Pigs, moreover, that had previously satiated their other appetites – be they sexual, socio-cultural, or some combination thereof? If so, they entered into a relationship far more complex than the antithetical one between subject and object. And yet the antithesis remains. In the dancing fluctuation of the dialectic, the opposites are unified and the negation is negated. Just as pigs can suffer cancer – thus unifying themselves with cancer – they are also negated by cancer (as ultimately are we all) and negate cancer in return by dying and thus killing the very cancer cells which have killed them. In the end, cancer is self-negating – as, it is to be hoped, David Cameron will be – and the pig is as good a vehicle – or delivery system, or host – for this self-negation, as any creature.

 

We have established two important principles:

 

1. That cancer and the pig are antithetical, and

 

2. That cancer and the pig exist in an inseparable unity of opposites.

 

We arrive at the point of the synthesis without even trying. The synthesis is that most Marxist of insights: the fundamental, dialectical interconnectedness, and mutual reproduction, of the exploiter and the exploited. But how can this synthesis take form? So far we seem to have been heading to the obvious point of, say, selecting faeces as the synthesis. The faeces of the pig-eater… and yet, if we are to continue to subvert our original classically Hegelian dialectic (an essentially idealist formulation) into a historical materialist dialectic, we must take note of the fact that David Cameron’s crap doesn’t lead us anywhere.…

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Comics Reviews (November 4th, 2015)

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Uncanny X-Men #600

As an ending to the now months old Bendis era, this is firmly… adequate. The cryptic and open-ended resolution in terms of Beast is frustrating, not least because I’m pretty sure the “Trial of Hank McCoy” was teased for over a year before coming to virtually nothing, and because there’s something unsatisfyng about putting a character in a position like this and then dropping him for another writer. It never leads to a good resolution. Add the fact that there was zero reason to hold this to fucking November and you have a recipe for a book I kind of scowl at and then go “well, glad I’m not following the X-Books anymore.”

As for the Iceman stuff, sure, OK, I guess it’s nice to have a gay character in the X-Books that are being consciously pushed to the edges of Marvel for licensing reasons. I’m sure it’ll mean a lot to all the kids who don’t actually read comics and live in a media world where coming out stories are an increasingly small part of queer narratives. Let’s be sure to take a nice victory lap by driving the price of the comic up reprinting a shitty and barely relevant thirty-five year old story in the back because we’re so proud of ourselves. 

Also, the story of how Cyclops got from here to the status quo at the start of Secret Wars? Literally more interesting than anything in this comic. And apparently not to be told. Brilliant.

Miracleman #4

A weaker issue, featuring what, chronologically, must have been one of Gaiman’s earliest uses of the “embed a prose story within his main story” trick. In this case it’s an overtly children’s story take on some sci-fi concepts that ends up revealing the ways in which the Miracleman mythos is impoverished more than it actually works, and takes this book back in the direction of “historical curiosity” and away from “fascinating.” This is surely a one-issue blip, and I’m terribly curious to see Evelyn Cream on the cover for next month, but nevertheless, a bit of a bum note. 

Contest of Champions #2

Removed from the financial abuse that was its launch week, this is a fun and frothily madcap fight book that I can already tell I’m going to completely lose the plot of, although Ewing is usually reliable for reminding me issue-to-issue, so that should still work out. Especually because we have whole diagrams on the recap page. And I have faith that this is going to take some altogether more interesting turns as it goes on, so I’m content to stick around, just because Al Ewing on a big interdimensional punching book really is fun. Do be sure to stop back tomorrow, by the way, for the weekly Doctor Who podcast, where Ewing is this week’s guest, and where there’s a nice meaty interview about comics on the back half, including loads of talk about this book.

 

Invincible Iron Man #3

This is continuing to pick up nicely, to where I’m going to go ahead and add it to my pulls, especially because I admit to being terribly curious what Mary Jane is going to be doing in this book.…

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“Whoever sows evil”: Tapestry

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Also there’s this scene. That’s all I’ll say about that.

And here I was all ready to write a lengthy, poetic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind-influenced essay too.

This may have been the biggest shocker for me in all the time I’ve been writing about Star Trek: The Next Generation for this project. Here’s “Tapestry”, an episode so obviously a classic and a masterpiece it’s taken for granted-It’s right up there with “The Inner Light” in terms of stories that are absolutely peerless and are held up as definitive moments for the show without a second thought. Even I just immediately accepted it: I mean of course. It’s “Tapestry”. How can you criticize something like that? Yeah, it uses the It’s a Wonderful Life plot, which I find so far beyond hackneyed it transcends overused cliché to attain a new state of absolute fucking unwatchability, but this was traditionally the one exception I would suffer.

And I actually didn’t like it very much.

I hasten to add I don’t think this episode is conceptually flawed at all; not in the slightest. I think the core idea here is good, brilliant actually: Fundamentally, “Tapestry” is about coming to terms with the person you were in your youth, embarrassing mistakes and all, because all of your past experiences helped shape you into the person you are today. It’s the ultimate payoff for Commander Riker’s comment way back in “The Last Outpost” about how “we can hardly hate the people we used to be”. It’s an extremely Star Trek sort of moral, an immeasurably important one, and something I personally strive to live my life in accordance with even today.

The problem with “Tapestry” for me, and I say this with the caveat that I mean no disrespect to the man or his work personally, is that Ron Moore wrote it. I’m reasonably confidant I’ve now reached the point where I’ve realised I simply do not agree with Moore’s favourite themes or his take on Star Trek and never well. His trademark signifiers are justifiably and rightfully all over “Tapestry”, and that keeps me from getting into the story. There’s the conception of Q, a deft blend of his trickster god and judiciary personae playing the spirit who teaches Captain Picard a valuable lesson about aging. But this time it feels like there’s a biting cynicism to it, Q just forcing Jean-Luc into a humilation conga for our amusement. After all, Picard and his crew are all complacent and snooty and stuck up and need to get knocked down a few pegs.

Something similar happens in John de Lancie’s own “The Gift”, but somehow I don’t like it or find it anywhere near as effective here. Yes, Q humiliates Picard in the beginning, but that might have been a hallucination or an alternate timeline and it’s played more as payback for Q being humiliated in human form earlier in the series (that happened in the first volume of the comic line, if you recall).…

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Capitalist Pig 2: This Time It’s About Cancer

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Slabs of bacon fresh from the smoker and resting in the author’s kitchen.

Hey pig. Yeah you. Hey pig piggy pig pig pig. All of my fears came true. – Nine Inch Nails, “Piggy”

Amidst the defiant application of early Kubler-Ross stages to the recent news that bacon causes cancer was this collection of Islamophobic Twitter ravings, which, like any conspiracy theory, is right about everything except for any of the details whatsoever. The truth is more fundamental; the entire biomechanical edifice upon which bacon rests has once again been uncomfortably revealed to be wallowing in its own shit.

Religious prohibitions serve multiple overlapping ideological purposes. Among them: religious leaders are public health officials, a fact visible in the way in which local religious leaders and traditional healers have been successfully used in the apparently successful fight to eradicate polio in Nigeria, the last country in Africa to suffer from it – and note how Nigeria is part of the supposedly “uncivilized and barbaric” world of Boko Haram, the Taliban and ISIS. Even at the furthest edges of social collapse religion provides a public health service. (Consider also the way in which the American hospital system is to a significant degree church-owned, although this fact is more likely to deprive women of endometriosis treatment than to pay for their breast cancer treatment.)

And the Islamic prohibition against pork is a prime example of this function of religion. It’s rooted in the historical conditions of the Near East; similar prohibitions exist in Jewish law. Pigs, as literal urban shit-eaters, were unhealthy, parasite-ridden nightmares. Convincing poor people to not eat them in spite of their obvious cost efficiency was an important goal. Indeed, the cultural prohibition against pork extends far beyond the Middle East and into India, a fact that doesn’t fit Islamophobic biases and so is conveniently forgotten.

Obviously this is not a problem that still meaningfully exists. Or, at least, it’s one that can easily be overcome in a globalized economy. Its persistence is thus a mark of conscious difference. In modern Islam, the prohibition on pork is like the Hindu prohibition on cow or the American Catholic obligation to go to McDonalds on Fridays in Lent – an act of cultural solidarity. As, to be fair, is the Western tradition of pigfucking, derived as it is from Roman pig sacrifices and the basic fact that the forested terrain of Europe made for a food unmatched in succulence and efficiency.

Which is why the news that bacon causes cancer is so existentially unsettling to the West. Bacon is culinary technology; its efficiency, especially in its gruesomely industrialized modern incarnation, is profit, and, for that matter, military superiority, hence the Disney-made propaganda cartoon that reminded World War II housewives that “a skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory.” Bacon is capitalism made flesh.

And now that flesh betrays us. Moreover, it’s a specific property of bacon that does the deed. In order to preserve the meat longer, some of the salt used for bacon is what’s known as pink salt or curing salt.…

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Lost Exegesis (Tabula Rasa)

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One of the problems with Pilot episodes is that they’re made specifically in order to hook people (almost like fish) not just into watching a TV show, but to actually sign off on it being produced. As such, they tend not to be as representative of the series as a whole. So what a TV show has to do after its pilot is to kind of hit the reset button and start playing its cards, showing us what we might expect on a weekly basis going forward. As such, Tabula Rasa is a rather aptly named episode, given that it’s a fresh start for LOST, employing a number of techniques that we did not see previously.

For starters, we get a “Previously, on LOST” segment. It’s the sort of thing we’re all familiar with, nothing new under the sun in terms of TV, but just its very presence indicates what kind of show we’re dealing with, namely something that’s serialized. The vignettes in this segment briefly depict: the plane crash; the man wounded by shrapnel in his gut and Kate’s apparent interest in him; the fact no one has come yet to the Losties’ rescue; and a recapitulation of Locke’s explanation of backgammon to Walt (“Two players, two sides, one is light, one is dark”), that ends with Locke’s question to Walt, “Do you want to know a secret?”

The thing about a “previously” is that it’s supposed to remind us of what’s actually relevant in the previous episodes in terms of understanding what occurs in this one. Notably, then, we do not get anything about the Monster that tears down trees, or the Frenchwoman’s transmission, even though a significant portion of the character interactions in Tabula Rasa have to do with these big mythology questions. Furthermore, that bit with Walt and Locke is relatively long given that both characters are only part of a rather minor secondary plot thread in this episode. On the other hand, it certainly plays into the final shot of the episode, a shot full of foreboding, so it’s not like it’s pointless or anything.

Another new element is the use of a “cold open” before the show’s title card. It’s actually here that the two major mysteries established in the pilot episodes are recapitulated, as well as establishing the focus of the episode, namely the discovery of Kate’s mug shot by Jack and Hurley.

So it should not be too surprising that the episode ends up being Kate-centric. And that’s a term I use very specifically, given the third major conceit introduced by Tabula Rasa – the episode features five Flashbacks, all of them about Kate. The Flashbacks themselves end up serving as the B-plot of the episode, detailing Kate’s time in Australia: a drifter, she ends up getting work at Ray Mullen’s farm, but he betrays her for a $23,000 rewards, setting up her capture by the Marshal. So not only do we see how she ended up on the plane, we also get a hefty amount of characterization – Kate would do almost anything to escape, like crashing Ray’s truck, but when the truck catches fire she pulls him to safety, at the cost of her own freedom.…

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Enough to Save Me (Secret of Mana)

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By Anna Wiggins

I’ve said before that Japan (the fictional Japan of 1990s America, constructed through the distorted lens of its often poorly localized artifacts) almost killed me. That might have been uncharitable of me. Yes, the culture I consumed from Japan was full of crappy gender stereotypes and cross-dressing gags, and it did delay my transition. It hurt me, like so many other things hurt me, without my even being fully aware of it.

But in hindsight, there were some very important moments of validation that came out of those cultural transmissions, too. Some were obvious: Wandering Son aired right as I began my transition, and it did more to make me feel like someone understood than any of the therapists or support groups or forums. Some were more of a secret history, parallel and hidden until much later: Maddie Blaustein’s transition makes me inclined to go a bit easier on Pokémon. And some of these moments were right in front of me, and I knew that they meant something to me but I didn’t know exactly what.

Secret of Mana was released in October of 1993. I’m pretty sure we got it for Christmas that year. By this point, we had a system for RPGs: my brother took the top save slot, and I took the bottom one. The spot(s) in the middle were a no-man’s land; good for temporary saves, but no guarantees on whether they’d get overwritten. And at first, that’s exactly what happened. He took save #1, I took save #4, and we both started playing through the game.

Except, after the first few hours, we realized that this game was multiplayer. After that, we abandoned save #4, and only played when we were both able to play. This wasn’t the first cooperative game I’d ever played (Bubble Bobble and Gauntlet come to mind), but it was certainly the first one I fell in love with, and that made me realize just how much I preferred cooperative gameplay to competitive.

Secret of Mana has three playable characters: Randi, the boy-turned-accidental-hero protagonist; Primm, the competent and determined nobleman’s daughter, and Popoi, the sprite child. Now, my brother immediately chose the boy, which was fine by me. And the standard trans narrative goes “and I picked the girl, because I always picked the girl.” Except I didn’t. I never did. I was afraid of associating with anything the least bit feminine, because I was afraid people would somehow know about the thoughts I had. The ones I tried to keep myself from noticing.

And so I chose Popoi. The Japanese release of Secret of Mana carefully avoids ever using a gendered pronoun for Popoi; they are explicitly intended to be ambiguously gendered. The US localization slipped up a bit, and uses ‘he’ a handful of times. But mostly, Popoi is basically genderless. Many of the spoken references to them are not kind – a lot of disdainful “it”s and “that”s – but they don’t seem bothered by it.…

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“You hear, but you do not understand”: Babel

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Realistically speaking, I don’t think this is an episode anyone is particularly excited or enthusiastic about. I do think it’s a grave misconception and the deepest of follies to dismiss this first half-season outright, as much of mainline fandom is wont to do: In fact I’d argue this crop of episodes is part of the single greatest season in all of Star Trek, counting Star Trek: The Next Generation alongside it, of course. On the other hand this is not to say that each and every story this year is a triumph, and, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at least, we’re about to enter a run of episodes where the new show, so imperious and strong right out of the gate, is…less than successful.

Not unrelentingly terrible, it must be said. I don’t think there’s an episode in this run that is unwatchably or offensively bad, and there’s at least one interesting and/or memorable scene in all of them. And each and every one does contribute something to the show’s rapid and astonishing rate of development and maturation, even if it’s only something as simple as “never do that again, ever”. But even so, we are entering a phase where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to be struggling to define itself a bit, and while there’s no shame in that it does cast perhaps more of a shadow over the year than it otherwise would have given that, from this show’s perspective, it’s a truncated half-season. Normally I would applaud a restricted episode count like this and while I do still definitely believe it’s infinitely preferable to have fewer episodes a year than more, that usually comes with the unspoken expectation that each and every episode is going to be, if not a masterpiece, at least really, really good and demonstrative of how attention to quality trumps quantity.

“Babel” is not that. None of these episodes are. Although that said it’s probably by my count the second-best of this run…It’s entirely watchable, and I didn’t ever find myself annoyed to the point I wanted to switch it off and go back to rewatching Original Dirty Pair (any time not spent watching Original Dirty Pair ought to be well-justified). The actors’ performances are still remarkably compelling and they’ve all already clearly found their voice with their respective characters (even if they’re being given material like this to read) and it’s got a decently suspenseful pace to it. It doesn’t have any cripplingly massive flaws that are worth spending an entire essay complaining about…except for the obvious really big one that the premise is too self-evidently ludicrous and silly to take seriously or get invested in (not the last time this will happen in this run of stories, I’m afraid).

A pandemic isn’t even a terrible idea to base a Deep Space Nine story around, especially a pandemic involving a breakdown in communication: We had a murder investigation in “A Man Alone” and an episode all about differing perspectives and Kira’s past in the resistance cells in “Past Prologue”, and there’s a lot of potential mileage to be had in exploring how a team of operations administrators deal with an outbreak and having to invent quarantine procedure effectively on the spot.…

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