Eruditorum Press

Some sort of samizdat wind effect

“Worlds in time”: Past Prologue

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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?…

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

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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.”…

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

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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.…

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“Missing Persons”: Aquiel

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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”.…

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In the Loop

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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?…

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The Woman Who Lived Review

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There’s an odd tone to this, which is mostly good, although there’s a big exception. Perhaps the most striking thing is that the first half is essentially a two-hander; an extended character study in Me. This is an interesting exercise, especially coming off The Girl Who Died, and it’s by some margin the most successful the “all two-parters” experiment has been. Between the fact that she’s a Big Guest Actor and the fact that we just spent an episode being introduced to her character, Maisie Williams conspicuously does not need an introduction, and so the story sets about giving her one.

As expected, Catherine Tregenna is well-suited to this. And it’s remarkably tricky ground, especially given the decision to make Me an unsettling and borderline-villainous character, which immediately brings in a lot of mirroring, an approach that can crash into dull cliche with ease. Tregenna is good at this, deftly balancing the big tell-don’t-show lines with slightly surprising and unexpected perspectives throughout. “I stopped caring because everyone died” is obvious. “I left it there to remind me not to have any more children” is staggering. “They value life because it’s fleeting” is yawn-worthy if sweet. The act of caring as “falling off the wagon” is deliciously unnerving. She’s done this sort of thing before, and hat-tips Captain Jack in the script, but the experience in finding new takes on “person out of time” she brings to the job pays off mightily.

But a lot of credit also has to go to Maisie Williams. The Ashildir/Me role is not one that a lot of people could do, requiring as it does the ability to convincingly play a child and then convincingly play a centuries-old immortal who is actually the same person as that child. The list of people who can do that – and it is of course a matter of age and skill both – is very short. Maisie Williams is on it. It’s as simple as that. Whereas The Girl Who Died involved playing off of her role as Arya repeatedly, here her role is almost always to be alien and disturbing, and she relishes in it.

In short, Tregenna’s a great choice to write a story about a different sort of immortal, and Maisie William’s a great choice to play one. The result is that this story has a pretty foolproof basic engine. Basically put, you’re not going to go wrong with Catherine Tregenna writing forty-five of Maisie Williams as an immortal, and you don’t. And given that, it’s tough to call the fact that Doctor Who ends up being a guest in its own programme a problem. (And it’s manifestly Doctor Who, not the Doctor, who’s a guest here.) Indeed, it’s a refreshing variation, which is doubly welcome in a season that deliberately has fewer moments of completely reinventing the tone of the show than some.

What is a problem is that you can tell that Catherine Tregenna’s previous disinterest in writing Doctor Who was, in fact, a genuine sentiment.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Novella Open Thread

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Oh, let’s go ahead and wrap up the big prose fiction categories with Best Novella, the “just shorter than a novel” category, defined as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words. Which is a length I really like, having written two books (both nonfiction, admittedly) that land in it; it’s at a beautiful cusp where you can still get away with a book that’s all suggestion and no conclusion, but where you can have the suggestion be labrynthine in its complexity.

Unfortunately, much as I love the category, I’ve not read anything in it this year. Here’s the Hugo Wikia’s list, which I do note has Paul Cornell’s latest, Witches of Lychford. How was that? How were other things?

Still need reviews for Sunday, by the way. snowspinner at gmail. Perhaps a review of Witches of Lychford? The Martian? Seveneves? …

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A Surfeit of Lampreys

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I learn from Phil and Kev on the latest Eruditorum Presscast, that ‘The Girl Who Died’ has been called ‘silly’ by some discontented fans.

This is true, and good. And if you think otherwise then I humbly submit that you have missed the point. Indeed, you have arrived at the exact inverse of the point.

Let me nuance this a bit. I think ‘The Girl Who Died’ is, at least in part, about silliness.

People are silly all the way through the episode.

The Doctor behaves in an intensely silly manner, nicknaming the Vikings, clowning around. But he’s not doing it for no reason. As Clara points out, the Doctor is doing it because he doesn’t have a plan yet and he’s waiting for a plan to form. In the meantime, the clowning around is his way of coping with the stress, processing the variables, getting to know everyone, stalling for time.

Ashildir behaves in an intensely silly manner. She challenges the unknown enemy, who manifests in the shape of Odin and kills all the warriors of her village, at exactly the moment when Clara has talked him down. She does so out of pure bravado and righteous anger. In so doing, she brings the wrath of the Mire down upon her village. Later, as the situation looks hopeless, she plays like a little child with a toy sword and a dummy Odin to make herself feel better.

The entire village behaves in an intensely silly manner, refusing to leave and save themselves, preferring instead to stay and invite their own deaths. Out of loyalty, pride, grief, a warrior ethic that was supposed to motivate the warriors (who weren’t helped by it), and the lack of any idea what to do instead. We might admire the courage, but it’s still silly when looked at in purely pragmatic terms.

None of this silliness is entirely contemptible. Some of it is downright admirable.  It comes from conviction, solidarity, etc.  It can all be seen in context, socially and dramatically. It is play, used to express and/or cope with anxieties, grief, social cohesion, stress, etc.

Then there is the silliness of the Mire, which is of a different order. Their silliness is certainly about social cohesion and anxiety (or perhaps ‘insecurity’ would be a better word), but beyond that it is entirely contemptible.  It is the farcical and disingenuous and self-aggrandizing silliness of the bully and the imperialist.  (I might not equate these things in an actual, serious political analysis of the real world… but as a storytelling strategy, it’s not worthless, certainly not as mockery.)

The Mire are baddies in the classic Robert Holmes mode: they are dangerous precisely because they are silly, petty, narrow-minded, pretentious. They need to drink testosterone to provide themselves with strength. I don’t know if the episode expects us to take this literally, but you could easily read it as the silly and performative nonsense that it would be in reality. It’s almost a quip. “Oh, he’s so butch he probably drinks testosterone”.…

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“Geometrically Demonstrated”: A Man Alone

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Of course Jadzia Dax would spend her free time meditating. With a video game, no less. Technological media does not supplant spiritual experience (except when appropriated by hegemonic forces of social control), but it can offer a glimpse of it, or at least a simulacrum of it. We can’t spend every waking hour in an altered state of consciousness, so art exists that we might not lose sight of what’s real. 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is in the position of justifying its existence. With its pilot, the show has decisively seized the zeitgeist, but it still needs to let us know the sorts of things it’s going to do and how it’s going to operate on a week-to-week basis. What we see in “A Man Alone” is already very compelling, however: The plot is a simple sci-fi murder mystery the likes of which even Dirty Pair on an off day can do, but even that is an important indication of one of the things that sets this show apart from its sister. Star Trek: The Next Generation is ideally a show about voyaging and exploration-The Enterprise crew is best seen as a team of scientists going out and doing their jobs, which are in the business of making new discoveries about themselves and the universe. The inhabitants of Deep Space 9 are a far more heterogeneous bunch, however; most of them are civilians and business owners and the joint Starfleet/Bajoran action staff are basically administrators. My favourite analogy is to think of the Enterprise as a research vessel and Deep Space 9 as a port authority.

This means that the Deep Space 9 team are going to be spending most of their time dealing with situations that crop up in their jurisdiction, so to speak. If you can imagine the station as a kind of port city, you can conceive of a lot of things that could only happen in a setting with that sort of eclectically striated society. That’s not to say we won’t get a fair bit of world building to go along with that: Bajor alone is ripe with infinite possibilities for storytelling, and the Gamma Quadrant is their very own “vast unexplored reaches of the galaxy” waiting to have research teams sent into it, just like Miles tells Keiko here. But it’s the station itself that will unquestionably be the primary setting, so “A Man Alone” does a great job showing us what this looks like in practice.

Against that backdrop, a murder mystery is a straightforwardly sensible thing to throw out as your first nominal episode. There’s Prophets-only-know how many detective shows and police procedurals on the air, so it’s a solid idea to use that as a case study for how this series can do urban slice of life in deep space. But while it’s Odo’s story that’s obviously front and centre this week, there’s a multitude of other stories going on all over the city as different family units and circles of friends try to get themselves situated: We have the expected (and ever-so-slightly stock) marital strife with the O’Briens, the beginning of the Jake and Nog Comedy Show and the quite fascinating Sisko/Dax/Bashir dynamic that’s beginning to take shape that I’ll be spending a great deal of time parsing out, but we even get a look at the lives of characters who are effectively extras.…

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