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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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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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