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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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Comics Reviews (October 22nd, 2015)

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From worst to best of blah blah blah

Invincible Iron Man #2

Picked up because it was a massively light week, so I figured I’d give Bendis another issue to impress me, which he didn’t really pull off, though I’m more inclined towards this book after two issues than one. It’s Bendis, and so instead of a big splash at the beginning we’re going to put a multitude of chairs in place in a heavily decompressed manner that’s only arguably suited to serialization. It also remains the case that Bendis is generally good at making this improbable approach work, or at least not fail. And he does write a good Tony. I’ll probably give this until Mary Jane shows up at least.

Darth Vader #11

And the trap Gillen has been building around Thanoth finally closes, and in a clever and exciting way, pitting Vader against Aphra, who manages the impressive feat of escaping with her life, at least for now. We’re plummetting towards a big crossover, and it’s pretty easy to see how we’re going to get from here to there, but the pieces are all carefully enough positioned that I’m still excited about it. Hell, I’m more excited about this crossover than The Force Awakens, whose trailer didn’t have nearly enough lens flare for a J.J. Abrams film.

Karnak #1

Really a book that sells itself: Warren Ellis writes a character whose superpower is identifying the flaw in all things. Karnak is one of those ideas that you wonder how Marvel didn’t do something with him (like give him to Warren Ellis) years earlier. No, he probably isn’t an on-going idea on the level of Iron Man, but he’s obviously someone who can be used for amazing and brilliant stuff. Ellis being Ellis, this is a patient start – an introduction to what Ellis writing the character means, whcih is lots of bitterly nihilistic snark and competence porn, of course. But it’s electric in that classic Ellis way, and a book it’s impossible not to love. Or at least, for me not to love.

 

 …

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City of the Dead 5: Dr. Who and the Daleks

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We’re pleased to announce another installment of City of the Dead, this time focusing on one of the Amicus films I suspect readers of this site are largely familiar with, namely Dr. Who and the Daleks, the first of the two Peter Cushing Dalek films. This time Holly and James are joined by some guy named “Phil” who probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about and should be completely and utterly ignored. What a jerk.

Anyway, despite his often annoying presence, it’s a good listen, and available right here.…

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“A shadow, a story”: Ship in a Bottle

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I doubt it was deliberately planned this way, but “Ship in a Bottle” is the absolute perfect pick for the first Star Trek: The Next Generation episode to go out into a world where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a material reality. After the chaotic upheaval of “Chain of Command” and the apotheosis of “Emissary”, Star Trek: The Next Generation needed to pitch something that would unequivocally prove it was still in the game: Something that it and only it could not just execute, but execute flawlessly to once more and for good demonstrate to us it’s not going to rest in its laurels, retire and hand the keys over to its wildly successful and popular younger sister.

(The audience figures for “Emissary” were, in case you were wondering, through the roof. There’s no question that in January, 1993 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the biggest and most popular show on television.)

And “Ship in a Bottle” is precisely that. It follows on from the intense symbolic power of “Emissary” and while it may be a lower-key and smaller-scale manifestation of it, that power is still there. This is a story about the lasting influence of ideas and fictional concepts and even reveals a subtle hint at the nature of reality itself. We’ve finally wrapped up any anxieties we might have had left over from “Time’s Arrow”…and shown how inaccurate the title of that episode really was in the process. And just incidentally, I find it somewhat interesting that immediately following “Emissary” we get a story about a supposedly forgotten person from Captain Picard’s past who holds a bitter grudge against him. However, the narrative never gives Moriarty the high ground here; his grudge against Captain Picard is never shown to be anything other than sadly misguided. Grudges and lingering bitterness are not constructive emotions.

Professor Moriarty is understandably upset at being shoved into cold storage for four years. But it’s not Captain Picard he should be upset with, but the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Although the Sherlock Holmes stories were in the public domain in the US in 1988, they were still under copyright in the UK, and the Doyle estate sent a sternly worded letter to Paramount saying that if they wanted to use the characters and setting again they’d have to ask permission and pay a licensing fee. The letter was more in response to the Young Sherlock Holmes TV series and not “Lonely Among Us” or “Elementary, Dear Data”, but it was enough to spook the Star Trek: The Next Generation production team into not using the consulting detective again until now.

The legal backstory is worth delving into a little further, because it actually runs up against the major themes “Ship in a Bottle” is trying to convey in an interesting way and, in doing so, it reveals where Star Trek: The Next Generation stands at this point in time in terms of a broad culture-scale ethical position.…

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The Eyes Have it (Doctor Who/The Girl Who Died)

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So I was wondering what I was going to write for this week’s essay. I knew it would be on Doctor Who symbolism, but what? The TARDIS as a Religious Object? The Circle in the Square? Eyes? Something on Mirrors, perhaps? I eventually decided I’d let Saturday’s episode decide it for me. As such, I was rather taken with the fact that the opening image was a close-up of a singular Eye. Upside down. In an episode which features a Mirror reflection and an invocation of the TARDIS as a vehicle of the gods at its emotional climax (which was distinct from the Faux Resolution of defeating the Mire). But the Eye came first, so the Eyes have it.

It turns out there’s a wealth of Eye imagery to examine in The Girl Who Died. There’s the aforementioned opening image—the first time we’ve had an Eye closeup turned upside down. There’s a closeup of the wooden dragon’s eye, we’ve got Odin to cover, and of course the cleaving of the Sonic Sunglasses such that they become like an eyepatch.

Interestingly, there’s plenty of context to choose from. I mean, this season has already featured a variety of “eye” symbolism, in an era that’s regularly played with the imagery, which was already established since the beginning of the Revival, not to mention the fact that there are implications from the Classic series and filmography in general. And, of course, the Eye is a symbol that precedes all this. So first, let’s go back and look at the Eye’s semiotics, and then survey its use in Doctor Who before returning to The Girl Who Died.

 

Eye See You

First off, unlike The Chair Agenda, the symbolism of the Eye is relatively straightforward. The eye is one of the most important sense organs. So of course it’s used to mean “perception,” but it goes further than that. Vision itself is one of our primary metaphors for “knowing.” We see what other people mean, for example. In asking for clarification on something, we want some light shed on the subject. To communicate is to show something. We talk about knowing something from someone else’s perspective as seeing from their point of view. The attempt to gain knowledge is looking for the truth. Ignorance, on the other hand, is not being able to see, to be blind. To keep someone from learning something is to hide it, to cover it up, perhaps even to pull the wool over their eyes.

The metaphor of Knowing Is Seeing is so intrinsic, it informs all kinds of “knowing.” For Descartes, it was all about “the light of reason.” In this extended metaphor, Reason is like a Homunculus sitting in the mind, looking at all the Ideas therein as if they were objects on a screen. While indeed it’s quite likely that the visual cortex in the brain handles some of what we call thinking – from pulling up a picture of an old memory to visualizing the future – the truth is much more complex.…

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The Mushrooms Of Youth (Super Mario All-Stars)

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Our past, reflected back, is a strange sight, especially the first time we glimpse it. Nostalgia made its Nintendo debut in 1990 with Mega Man 3, a point I have discussed elsewhere. But the first time Nintendo itself embraced it came in 1993, when they released Super Mario All-Stars, a compilation of the three NES Super Mario Bros. games alongside, depending on your country, either Super Mario USA or Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, all given a 16-bit graphics remaster.

This seems positively ordinary these days, when HD remixes, mobile rereleases, and emulator-based compilations of classic games are everywhere. Indeed, in the age of Super Mario Maker this feels in some ways like the most pointless thing imaginable. But in 1993 it was genuinely unusual in the console market, and this game has to be read and understood in that context. Perhaps more importantly, it needs to be understood in the context of the very upgrade cycle nostalgia cuts against, not least because their relationship is oppositional, not antagonistic. (That’s the trouble with Nemeses.)

Put another way, a large part of why Super Mario All-Stars exists is simply that the NES was finally giving up the ghost in 1993. When this dropped at the start of August there was essentially only a year to run in terms of NES games (the only exception being Wario’s Woods, which ambled out four months later), and only twenty-eight more releases for the system total; the SNES had more than that before Christmas. And Super Mario All-Stars has to be read as an attempt to manage that transition, symbolically marking the end of the old system. Part of this, in turn, is motivated simply by the fact that the Mario games were perennial sellers that Nintendo knew full well they could continue profiting off of after their system went the way of all things.

But more fascinating than the reasons for its existence is the object itself. It is, in hindsight, a strangely kitsch object. The redone graphics are distinctly lovely, but are somehow less satisfying than the original games in all three cases. The vagaries of personal history require that there be someone, somewhere for whom these are the true versions of the games, crackling with the crazed and giddy thrill of childhood discovery and totemic power, but no matter the degree of their ardor, even they recognize the perversity of this belief.

Playing them, there is something ineffably unsatisfying. The controls feel looser and sloppier somehow. It is possibly, even probably an illusion. And yet the feeling is inevitable somehow. The curated, museum-like approach of the games put them at a strange remove, so every death, even if it is entirely our own fault, feels as though the game has let us down.

Or perhaps like we have let it down, and grown too sophisticated for its pleasures. This is especially visible when playing Super Mario Bros. It’s obviously not that the game, legitimately one of the great all-time classics of the medium, has aged poorly.…

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