Eruditorum Press

Keep getting stranger

“Of a Kind”: Face of the Enemy

, 14

The prevailing fan consensus on “Face of the Enemy” was always that it’s “The Good Troi Episode”: The one episode in the entire seven year run of Star Trek: The Next Generation that actually managed to do something interesting and compelling with Deanna Troi as a character. And that’s blatantly bunkum: “Face of the Enemy” isn’t the “good” Troi episode, it’s the definitive Troi episode. It’s the episode you show a Troi hater as the final closing argument for the defense of her character and for how brilliant Marina Sirtis is.

As an actor showcase episode, you’ll find none better in the series. Marina Sirtis’ last best outing, “Power Play”, still hinged on showing off one particular aspect of her acting range, albeit one we don’t typically get to see on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And even Brent Spiner’s numerous showcases mostly show off his knack for impersonations and comic character bits. By contrast, “Face of the Enemy” puts Marina front and centre and the story gives her an opportunity in every scene to deliver an incredibly interpolated and complex performance: Instead of locking her into “soft Marina” or “tough Marina” modes, “Face of the Enemy” finally gives her the chance to move through every emotion and pull the entire spectrum together into a very human and compelling performance that’s still larger than life enough to stick with us long after the credits role. It’s the absolute perfect venue for Marina to show off everything in her repertoire, and it’s the story she’s been starving for since at least the second season.

And yet “Face of the Enemy” is also a story that could in a sense only have come now. I mean idealistically speaking, as we are wont to do on Vaka Rangi, any reasonably conscious and aware casting director could have seen how bloody excellent Marina Sirtis was just watching the filming of “Encounter at Farpoint” and given her a pair of showcase venues in place of, say, “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor”. However acknowledging the realistic production history of this particular series (and also, to be fair, the fact saddling Marina with Deanna Troi was always going to be something of a crippling handicap), we needed to get through things like “Clues”, “Power Play” and even “Man of the People” before we could get “Face of the Enemy”: Both Marina Sirtis and the production team needed time to experiment with pushing the boundaries of what Deanna Troi could do as a character before totally breaking them down.

Which brings us to the nut of what’s really brilliant about this episode, which is that as much as it is a cathartic redemption of everything great we’ve always loved about Marina Sirtis and Deanna Troi, it’s also very much the logical follow-up to a specific antecedent. And, perhaps counterintuitively, that’s “A Fistful of Datas”. As we talked about in its respective essay, the big innovation of that story was that it was the first time the show had made an effort to channel Marina’s adaptability as an actor through the character of Deanna Troi herself.…

Continue Reading

The Woman Who Lived Podcast

13

This week I’m joined by Caitlin Smith, aka abossycontrolfreak on Tumblr, who previously contributed the searingly good guest post on Clara in Series 7 for TARDIS Eruditorum. It just seemed a good one to have her on for, what with Clara not actually being in it and all that. Anyway, she’s brilliant, and I’m a mad editor thing, and that makes for good radio or something. Have a listen here. And tune in next week, when we’ve got a massive exciting guest. …

Continue Reading

Tricky Dicky, Part 3: First as History, Then as Tragedy

7

William Shakespeare lived at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I and the start of the reign of James I (and VI of Scotland). This was a time when modernity was coming into being. Feudalism was crumbling and fading, and the capitalist epoch was in the process of being born. That’s why we call his time the Early Modern Period (another name for the Renaissance, basically). Modernity is essentially another way of saying capitalism, from its beginnings as a predominant social system onward. (We won’t here argue about whether we currently live in post-modernity.)

Shakespeare lived and died in an era of what Marx refers to as ‘primitive accumulation’. This was the process whereby feudal property was appropriated, broken up and turned into capital.

The basis of the feudal system was land, owned by lords, farmed by peasants who were tied to the land, generally not allowed to leave (which is why it’s such a clever joke when, in ‘The Androids of Tara’, the fourth Doctor responds to Zadek’s observation “You don’t look like a peasant” with “Well of course not, I’ve travelled”). The peasants farmed and produced their own subsistence directly. For the privilege of being allowed to do so (a privilege, incidentally, that people tend to grip hold of tightly when threatened with being forced off the land, out of direct contact with the means of subsistence, and into the wage system) they were obliged to produce surplus for the lord, to be paid upward to him in tribute. This manorial system was the basis of how feudal society was reproduced, i.e. fed and clothed day after day, generation upon generation.  Upon it was built a social system of ties, bonds and reciprocal (though not equal) obligations, arranged in strict hierarchy.

The lord might use part of the surplus he controlled to buy things, or to employ people to produce things for him. Swords, for instance, or clerical records, or domestic service, or minstrelsy, etc. As in our world, the basic economic form produced a wide variety of attendant para-forms and relations. Whatever anyone tells you, today the basis of capitalism as a system of social relations is still industrial production (i.e. people producing stuff for a wage), and yet not every worker is involved directly in industrial production of physical goods (they never were actually, as Marx knew full well). So it was that under feudalism not everybody was either a landowner or a servile farmer. It doesn’t alter the fact that manorial land was the basis of the system.

There was a market even at the highpoint of feudalism, and feudalism became increasingly marketised as time went on. The existence of a market is not an exclusive trait of capitalism, nor it it enough by itself to signify or create capitalism. Capitalism is the ascendancy of market relations. Much work has been done, and many arguments conducted, by Marxists on the question of exactly how and why feudalism transformed into capitalism. Marx himself, to quote David Harvey, thought that

The dissolution of the feudal order, the dissolution of the power of landed property and of feudal land control, was largely accomplished through the powers of merchant capital and usury [not to be considered equivalent to ‘the Jews’, by the way].
…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (October 28th, 2015)

3

Batgirl #45

It’s a good week when this is the worst comic in it, as it’s not a bad comic in any way, shape or form. I mean, it’s Batgirl at a wedding. Sorry, a lesbian wedding. Sorry, a lesbian wedding where one of the characters is trans. Every part of this is marvelous. The only part that’s not wonderful is Dick Grayson showing up and being a complete jerk. Which is, to be clear, called out unambiguously in the text, but I dunno, apparently I have feels about Batman comics and one of them is that Dick Grayson shouldn’t be the overly entitled ex-boyfriend.

Stumptown #8

Rucka does his thing, plots advance, Dex does things that are clever and rash at the same time, and they end up biting her in the ass. The character bits between Dex and her sister leave me slightly cold, however, and I admit, this arc isn’t quite grabbing me at this point in it, with the main hook feeling contrived. I assume there’s a twist, but in said twist’s absence this is a bit rough.

Chew #51

Glad to see this book move into the homestretch, and even more glad to see it have such a sense of energy as it does so. Love the diegetic ad pages, glad to see an Olive-focused issue, she being the best character by some margin. And the intro in heaven is great too. When this book works, it has a delicious mixture of grotesque silliness, and for all my occasional frustrations, I’m looking forward to seeing the home stretch.

Mercury Heat #5

Not as good as the previous issue, due largely to having an awful lot of exposition to do, much of it needing to be delivered by videophone, which is just tough to draw excitingly, and Nahuel Lopez, being a standard quality Avatar artist, is not really up to enlivening it much. (“Lovely” brokeback on the cover, though.) But the ending is a piece of deliciously sick comedy that plays to the 2000 AD roots of this beautifully. Kieron Gillen at Avatar is apparently a recipe for Pat Mills homages. Not complaining.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1

Delightful in the way that only an issue of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl can be, this one has teleporters, food courts, German alien robots, and, of course, lots of squirrels that say important things like “Chkkt!!” and “Chukk.” Plus footnotes. And catchphrases. And computer science. I don’t know how to sell this book, but apparently Marvel does, so OK then.

The New Avengers #2

It’s such a good week that there are two comics featuring Squirrel Girl in it. And though this one features mind controlled Squirrel Girl, she’s mind controlled by a multidimensional entity unleashed by evil Reed Richards that replaces her head with a gemstone. Also Tippy-Toe’s head. There are panels with mind-controlled squirrels with crystals for heads. Much like computer science and footnotes, this seems like it should sell the book, y’know?

Black Magick #1

Another Greg Rucka comic, this one featuring a female detective who’s also a witch.…

Continue Reading

Vengeance on Varos Commentary

, 7

Hey, remember these? I barely do. This was recorded way back in early September and, basically, I’ve just been busy with this whole launching a website thing and forgot about it. In any case, here’s Jack and me doing commentary tracks on Vengeance on Varos for your amusement, and one of these days I reckon we’ll do Paradise Towers.

You can grab it here in a handy zip file containing both episodes.

Past Commentaries
 
…

Continue Reading

“Worlds in time”: Past Prologue

, 6

To elaborate a bit on some of the discussion in the last chapter, a big thing that underwrites the difference between “A Man Alone” and “Aquiel” from a narrative procedural standpoint is the differing, though complimentary, central focus of their parent series. In the context of those episodes, I phrased the difference between Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as being primarily one of scale-The former works best when it’s seen as a counterintuitively intimate show about a close-knit family team of voyagers, while the latter gives us a community-sized look at an entire urban geopolitical region extrapolated to a science fiction setting with interweaving stories about several different families set against a large-scale cast of characters.

But there’s one other major distinguishing characteristic of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s approach, and it’s one “Past Prologue” is the key episode in setting in motion. Namely, although it’s every bit as utopian as Star Trek: The Next Generation, it examines this utopianism from a different angle: Whereas the Enterprise is a utopian setting by default, even down to the fact “Encounter at Farpoint” essentially establishes it that everyone aboard knows each other in some capacity already and has some history with at least one another person (the exceptions would seem to be Worf and Tasha Yar, solely for the reason they were last-minute additions to the cast, though the mid-fourth season reboot does retcon shared backstories for Tasha and Captain Picard in), Deep Space 9, in accordance with this show’s key themes about building and healing, has to be made utopian through the generative and commutative efforts of the people who live there. That sense of community and mutual trust that comes so easy aboard the Enterprise isn’t here yet, and by design, and a significant portion of the first/sixth season is about fostering that.

A lot of critics will turn this contrast into a judgment of quality, making the claim that the lack of familiarity aboard Deep Space 9 is objectively better than the premise of Star Trek: The Next Generation because it encourages conflict and conflict is always better in absolutely every circumstance for everything. I don’t think this is the case for a healthy variety of reasons…Setting aside for the moment my extremely well-documented distaste for the (in my opinion) crass and juvenile conception this team has of what the word “conflict” in a dramatic sense actually connotes, by the very narrative structure Star Trek: Deep Space Nine operates under, this crew is going to get to a level of Enterprise-style intimacy and comfortable familiarity at some point, and presuming that “conflict”, where “conflict” is defined as “people screaming at, disappointing and betraying each other constantly”, is always better all the time would seem to be setting up the show for what they would consider failure at some future date. Were they just planning to cancel Deep Space Nine whenever the crew started actually getting along with each other?…

Continue Reading

I’ll See You in Hell (Alan Tudyk’s “Con Man”)

, , , , , , 3

Alan Tudyk’s crowdsourced Con Man just finished releasing on Vimeo OnDemand. The web series comedy (comprised of 13 ten-minute episodes) tracks the ne’re-do-well sci-fi actor Wray Nerely, who was part of the critically acclaimed TV show Spectrum (cancelled after a half season), and who now makes his living on the sci-fi convention circuit. He’s a “convention man,” or “con man” for short. And he’s in hell.

His hell, mind you, is not mine. I’ve been to a few science fiction conventions. It’s not like I’m a die-hard regular on the con circuit, but they’re fun, and perhaps a bit more than that. My first was a Doctor Who convention in Detroit in the mid-Eighties. I just went for the day. Cosplayed the Fifth Doctor, because it was easier to get a beige trenchcoat on the cheap at a thrift shop than Romana’s pink one. Borrowed one of my Dad’s panama hats, used a twistie-tie to affix a sprig of celery to the lapel, and I was all set. Cosplaying wasn’t so big back then, but quite a few people had long multi-colored scarves. Sadly, I had to ditch the costume pretty quick, because I was roasting in it.

Anyways, at the convention I felt both weird and “at home” at the same time. At home, because I’d finally found other people who were as wild about Doctor Who as I was. Weird, because a lot of people at cons are really quite strange, so what did that make me? But it was fun. Sarah Sutton was there, told the obligatory story about Matthew Waterhouse showing up hungover for the final scene of Castrovalva. I bought a couple brooches. Some Target novelizations. Saw my first proper Troughton story, The Krotons.

San Diego Comic Con in 2008 was the last con I went to. It was huge and intense and overwhelming. It was then I realized that cons are actually alternate realities. They are not, however, governed by the mythologies of the science-fiction shows which ostensibly bring people together. They’re governed by an entirely different set of interlocking ritual concerns. Sure, some of that is simply the enactment of capitalistic consumerism, like the collecting of autographs and memorabilia. More importantly, though, is that conventions are a place where the marginalized “weird” people of geekdom can come together and have a place where their cultural concerns become “normal.” It’s perfectly normal to walk around in a Darth Vader outfit and geek out over your favorite shows. It’s perfectly normal to be geeky; if anything, the geekier you are, the more social status you are accorded. As such, conventions are kind of like Carnival, an inversion of the social order.

Well, except for the fawning over of celebrities. The actors and writers of SF shows are still at the top of the food chain at conventions… with a caveat. Because that caveat includes an implicit promise to hold up the values of science fiction and establish a marginalized geekdom in a temporary social center – which is to say, to embrace an alternate reality, and with it, to embrace the characters that one has brought to life – or, perhaps preferably, to embrace one’s place as a “celebrity.”…

Continue Reading

All Of The Weapons You Need (Street Fighter II Turbo)

8

We all have in our heads the idea of an art of fighting. Not necessarily any interpretation of that art, but the fundamental concept of its existence. That fighting should be an artform seems self-evident. No shortage of cultural work must go into an instinctive equation like that. And examples abound: all discussion of boxing as dancing (and indeed the way both boxing and fencing are largely matters of footwork); indeed, the existence of ritualized fighting sports, which tie it inexorably to the notion of play. This can even be pinned to E.V.O.-level concerns if we want; one need only watch the play of our domestic pets to see that the act of combat is our oldest game. (Literally true; c.v. Spacewar) And with games come strategy and skill, and with those art. That this particular art is also how we topple empires is beside the point.

The fighting game is a distillation of this, and in some ways the best example of the idea of playing with and within a system. Done well, and Street Fighter II Turbo is done very well, it is a genre that works in the chaos engendered by the rules. Each character has a finite moveset – in Street Fighter II (you’ll forgive me if I just start calling the game this) a light, medium, and heavy version of punch and kick, with variations depending on whether you’re crouching or jumping. There’s a rudimentary block, some grabs/throws, and some special moves for each character, but that’s it; a simple framework for movement.

And then there is the game – the actual act of throwing down and fighting. And suddenly a wealth of variations emerge. Even if you ignore special moves – and let’s face it, a sizeable number of people to play this game, especially in the arcade, had no earthly idea how to perform any of them – the differing speed, power, and reach of characters and moves quickly impose fighting styles, which then vary again based on your opponent. Add the special moves that, for instance, give Ken and Ryu viciously good defense against aerial attacks (while also being able to punish players who try to maintain wary distance) or make it near-suicide to get caught unaware in close range with Chun Li or E. Honda and you have a game of astonishing depth.

And my does it have depth. It’s simplistic compared to modern fighting games where the fine-tuning that goes on for elite players and edge cases is so intense as to be nearly incoherent to most players. But I remember at the time reading something or other that listed a bunch of combos, and just being in awe of the obviously wildly superior skill that was required to even have a snowball’s chance in hell of executing one. Hell, half the time getting the D-Pad roll needed to pull off a fireball was slightly beyond me, and I say this as someone who was generally speaking one of the better video game players in my school.…

Continue Reading

“Missing Persons”: Aquiel

, 0

What immediately struck me about watching “Aqiuel” in contextual sequence for the first time is that in many ways it’s really a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine script. That’s not to say it was actually pitched to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it was very much conceived of as a story explicitly for this show. But in many ways it’s a story that would have been a better fit on the other one, namely because it’s a murder mystery and murder mysteries tend to work better in settings that aren’t about voyaging. It makes sense how the Enterprise gets involved in the case here, but from a genre perspective it’s kind of weird to have them in the role of private investigator as they have no permanent investment in the area they’re investigating.

It’s even really easy, even at this early point in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s history, to see how this story would have translated. Imagine Aquiel being one of the Bajoran technical staff, let’s say. Maybe even a nationalist and former resistance member, to play up her allegedly spotty past. The somewhat questionable usage of the Klingons as red herring adversaries being filled instead by the Cardassians, perhaps the crew of a “supply ship” being run in “good faith” in the interest of “joint Cardassian and Federation relations”. There’s Sisko and Kira caught in the middle of a potential diplomatic incident neither of them are prepared to deal with. Former ambassador Dax plays confidant to them both. Picture Julian Bashir in Geordi’s position, taking on the case out of his brash exuberance and desire to make not just a difference, but a grandiose, heroic difference and becoming predictably smitten with his subject. Put Odo in Commander Riker’s place, grudgingly taking Julian on as “deputy”, cautioning him on his overt investment and maybe clashing with him over interpretations of the evidence. Complicated, naturally, by the ultimate revelation that the killer was a shape shifter; itself potential foreshadowing to “Vortex”.

This probably would never have happened because Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had literally just done a murder investigation the week before, even if a bizarre call on the part of a Paramount higher-up sent “Past Prologue” out ahead of “A Man Alone” in spite of the latter episode featuring all of the exposition one would normally expect to see in the first regular episode of a TV show. Although that said, this thought experiment does highlight some important differences between Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or at least differences in the assumptions about how the two series operate held by their respective creative teams. Because “Aquiel” is a different sort of murder mystery plot than “A Man Alone” and has a very different reputation. While I feel “A Man Alone” is underrated and understudied, it’s still held up as a solid first step for Deep Space Nine while “Aquiel” holds a standing in mainline fandom opinion just slightly above “Code of Honor”.…

Continue Reading

In the Loop

, , , , , , , 14

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, recently asked Seumas Milne to be his director of communications. Milne is one of the few journalists currently working in the British media who is genuinely worth reading. Milne, for instance, wrote The Enemy Within, which is not the novelisation of the 1996 TV movie (Gary Russell courageously tackled that one), but rather a rigorous investigative expose of the way the Tory government – with help from the ‘security services’ and the tabloid press – set about trying to covertly undermine, smear and frame the NUM and Arthur Scargill during the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.

Certainly, when you recall that David ‘Pigfucker’ Cameron’s choice for an equivalent post was Andy Coulson, you see evidence of a stark division – authentically based on a decency and honesty gap – opening up between the parties for the first time in quite a while.

Milne, however, is one of those Left-wing journos who has been repeatedly (and rightly) criticised by Media Lens for being less than brave about criticising the paper he writes for, even as he savages bias elsewhere. So he will already have ability to ruthlessly criticise other people for doing stuff that his own employers do too – something that will come in handy for the director of communications for a political party.  (Just so as you know, Phil – if you start supporting Western imperialism, I’mma call you on it, ‘kay?)

Milne’s appointment has been hysterically decried by the Right (well, obviously) and also by figures ostensibly on the Left in ostensibly Left-wing publications (I won’t link to any of this tripe – if you want to see some of it, just google ‘corbyn milne’ and it’ll be the first stuff you see).  Milne’s great crime is supposedly that he’s ‘an apologist for dictators and terrorists’, etc.  If you actually go past the gibbering rhetoric of the denunciations and look at the articles they link to, you find Milne objecting to the ridiculous, dangerous, and hypocritical way Vladimir Putin (of whom I am certainly no fan) is demonized, or trying to provide valuable historical context for terrorist attacks on the West, and turmoil in the Middle East, and having the bad taste to locate such context in the sordid history of Western ‘intervention’.  (The detractors link to these articles seemingly confident in the hope that you either won’t bother reading them, or that you’ll be wearing the same kind of ideological blinkers they do.)  I don’t agree with every syllable of what Milne writes, but to call him an apologist for terrorism is just dishonest; and the whingeing about his Oxbridge background is hypocrisy of the highest order coming from the British media and political elites. 

Relatedly, somebody asked me on Tumblr if I thought that Jeremy Corbyn has been so comprehensively smeared in the press that he is now useless against David Cameron. In other words: has a man who looks like Ben Kenobi (after resigning from the Jedi and becoming a Geography teacher) now been so traduced that he seems like a worse option than a man who lies like other people breathe, and whom most people seem to consider a plausible candidate for necrophiliac beastiality?…

Continue Reading

«‹ 145 146 147 148 ›»