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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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The Zygon Invasion Review

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It is, in many ways, the most Part One of the two-parters we’ve had so far. Which is as it should be. I mean, it comes right out, first thing, and proclaims “we’re doing Zygon ISIS.” Pretty much right there, you’ve justified your second part. This isn’t some premise that requires a stealthy inversion at the halfway mark to work over ninety minutes. This is just an incredibly meaty, dense concept that it would be a travesty to even attempt in forty-five. Which makes it a beast to review, of course, but oh well.

Let’s stipulate up front, then, that much like Under the Lake/Before the Flood, a lot could go wrong in the second half. Clara – the actual one – is going to need something significant to do next week to avoid this contributing to a frustrating pattern of sidelining her this season. There’s an “immigration requires assimilation” subtext that, without some actively managed balance, could turn genuinely ugly, although there’s self-evidently no chance of this story going UKIP or anything, having already skewered them. And The Zygon Inversion could just suck. I’m pretty confident it won’t go wrong, though. Part of that is that I just have a lot of faith in an episode with the writing credit “by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat,” but much more of it is just that this is simply a very, very good episode of Doctor Who, and requires none of the “OK let’s be willfully sympathetic about what could easily just be abject sloppiness” that Under the Lake did.

From the start, there’s a deft balancing act going on between the two 1970s that Terror of the Zygons represented. On the one hand is the UNIT era that it ended, with all its political thrillers and sense of implied scale. On the other is the Hinchcliffe era it was a part of, with all its buried gothic horrors. The opening scene, as Osgood runs from a raging battle sold convincingly through a shaky camera and sound design into the police station is emblematic. The first part is neo-”Action by HAVOC.” The second is intimate dread. And the episode keeps toggling between those two approaches. On the one hand, the population of London is being sucked into the ground through its elevators. On the other, drone strikes in Generistan.

But this balance is all the more compelling when it’s tied unapologetically to the headlines in a way the series hasn’t really done since Davies left. When I say “Zygon ISIS,” I am not reading into the story to any meaningful extent. The radicalized Zygons are, first of all, actually described with the word “radicalized.” They send video messages of their hostages, whom they sometimes execute on camera. They have a sigil consciously designed to mirror the ISIS flag. This episode is not fucking around. Similarly, as a metaphor about immigration and assimilation, it’s as subtle as a brick, and gloriously so, both in the “they’ll think you’re trying to pinch their benefits,” a very particularly sort of classic Doctor Who line that just doesn’t show up much in the new series (“The rest were all foreigners.”…

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Weird Kitties: Best Fan Writer Open Thread

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A category in which I know a fair amount, but find myself with relatively few opinions, simply because there’s been an awful lot of smart stuff written about sci-fi this year, albeit not for the happiest of occasions. But many of my picks here are conflicts of interest and long shots anyway, so those with saner taste – inform us what’s good in this category, and we’ll be back later with Zygons. …

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2. No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Sixteen: Juxtaposition)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: DC took the somewhat unusual position that the real reason for Watchmen‘s success was their innovation in marketing it, a position embodied by Paul Levitz, who displayed a consistent attitude that what’s good for DC is good for freelancers and vice versa.

What’s perhaps odd is that Moore did not, at least at first, really differ from that belief. Indeed, the way in which Moore describes his falling out with the company is telling: “I was starting to realize that DC weren’t necessarily my friends.” Because it’s crucial to realize, Moore really did think they were. That’s the entire reason he never actually read the Watchmen contract: he trusted the people handing it to him had his best interests at heart. This was, of course, many things; hopelessly naive, for one. An almost inevitable extension of his honor among thieves approach to creating art, for another. But, perhaps most crucially, it was more or less how people like Paul Levitz were encouraging him to think. And so when Levitz subsequently got into a dispute with Moore and Gibbons shortly after Watchmen launched over whether or not they deserved royalties on the replica bloodstained yellow smiley badges that were being widely sold in comic shops (a dispute that was over, at most, a couple thousand dollars) and made a grand show of agreeing to a royalty without conceding the legal point by which DC had originally argued the badges, despite being sold in comic shops, were “promotional items,” Moore was understandably rattled, minor as the issue was. And when, later in 1986, Jeanette Kahn had lunch with Moore and Gibbons and made an off-handed comment about doing some Watchmen prequels and how “of course we wouldn’t do this if you were still working for us,” Moore was once again rattled by what he took as a threat. Indeed, as Moore put it when describing the incident in an interview four years later, “I really, really, really don’t respond well to being threatened. I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me on the street; I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me in any other situation in my life. I can’t tolerate anyone threatening em about my art and my career and stuff that’s as important to me as that. That was the emotional breaking point. At that point there was no longer any possibility of me working for DC in any way, shape, or form.”

Although it may well have been Moore’s breaking point, this was, as mentioned, still not quite the moment he decided to walk away from DC. But it’s a striking incident all the same, less for what it reveals about Moore (whose response was on the whole what you’d expect from him) but rather what it reveals about DC. The fact that Kahn remarked on how Moore’s willingness to work for them might impact their publishing plans is, after all, fairly compelling evidence that DC was already aware that they might be losing Moore as of 1986, despite the fact that at this point the only actual dispute between the two had been over the Watchmen buttons.…

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“Of a Kind”: Face of the Enemy

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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.…

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The Woman Who Lived Podcast

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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. …

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

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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].
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Comics Reviews (October 28th, 2015)

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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.…

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