Eruditorum Press

Temporarily embarrassed proletarians

“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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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Emissary (Music from the Original Television Soundtrack)

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Other composers may be more renowned in the fandom today, but when Paramount needs to launch a Star Trek show, they turn to Dennis McCarthy. He’s the working composer who holds the franchise together in song on a day to day basis. And his score for “Emissary” (mistakingly affixed with the definite article on the sleeve notes) may well be his magnum opus. It’s definitely a major turning point.

You can make much the same argument for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine itself, at least as it exists now in January 1993. It’s the culmination of everything Rick Berman, Michael Piller and the rest of the Star Trek creative team had learned over the past three years, and it’s the fullest realisation of everything they’d ever wanted to do with Star Trek. More importantly it’s a vision that finally and at long last embraces the franchise’s utopianism instead of bristling up against it, in spite of how many overtures to conflict for conflicts sake the team makes in interviews. In absolute defiance of the “three season rule”, in “Emissary” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine opens straight up with a defining statement that’s easily a contender for the title of Greatest Star Trek Story Ever Told, and it’s a testament to how good this season is that it ends with one too.

Dennis McCarthy’s soundtrack is reflective of every ounce of the team’s newfound confidence and inspiration. There’s even one obvious standout cut from this album that’s just as definitive as “Emissary” itself, and is in my mind the single greatest piece of music ever composed for Star Trek. We’ll talk about it in good time, of course, but as that’s obviously going to take up the bulk of this essay I’ll save it for the end. In the meantime, on the rest of the record McCarthy finds the perfect feel for what Star Trek in the twilight of the Long 1980s should sound like: There’s still a little of that golden age film score sound Ron Jones popularized, albeit quite a bit less bombastic than Jones’ work. And there are definitely slower parts where the music is intended to fade into the background a bit, and by that I mean there are parts of “Emissary” that absolutely sound like, well, a TV soundtrack. But McCarthy strikes just the right balance between that and a more eclectic edge that he’s quite frankly never been given the credit he deserves for.

(Although quite frankly, any argument that McCarthy just writes “sonic wallpaper” flies straight out the window for me whenever “New Personality” starts playing. It’s an instantly reconisable piece and it immediately transports me right back to one of my most formative and evocative television memories.)

Where Ron Jones was given instructions to be extremely classical and old-fashioned Hollywood (a tad dated and overblown to my ears, though I concede that’s my opinion) and Jay Chattaway does his best stuff with organic world sounds, particularly Celtic ones (c.f.…

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Y, O Y, O Y

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Is ‘Y’ a vowel or a consonant?

As Phil has remarked on Tumblr, this comes down to the internal politics of the alphabet.

The Ys themselves are internally divided on this point. 

There are reactionary Ys who want to be vowels because they aspire to the special status. 

There are liberal Ys who champion the allegedly superior values of the vowels and say that Ys should try to be more vowel-like for that reason. 

There’s even an idea – very widespread and much pushed by elite Ys – that “we’re all vowels now” and that consonants have disappeared.  The old opposition between vowels and consonants has been superseded, and to even talk about consonants is to peddle divisive ‘lexical war’ rhetoric. 

However, the vast majority of letters are still consonants, and there are some Ys who recognise this, proudly declare their consonant status, and call for unity between all consonants against the tyranny of the vowels. 

However (again), there is also a strain of resentment against Ys amongst consonants, even radical Ys who want to identify with consonants.  They say Ys have a privileged status, what with being ‘semi-vowels’ and all, and that they thus enjoy the benefits of partial-vowel identity.  They say that the Ys who claim to be consonants are ‘just tourists’, etc.  This is curiously…um… consonant with remarks often made by vowels about radical Ys being ‘champagne consonants’. 

Of course, radical consonantist Ys will often dispute with Rs and Ms and Bs and so on about how they have much more in common with consonants than with vowels… but the Rs and Ms and Bs will often write this off as ‘vowelsplaining’.

And then there’s the ongoing and bitter row about participation in Countdown, what with its apartheid policy. 

 …

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Weird Kitties Reviews (The Shepherd’s Crown, Annie’s Arms, The Dusty Hat)

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The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
Reviewed by Daibhid Ceannaideach

Eligable for Best Novel and available for purchase here.

The Shepherd’s Crown is the fifth and last Tiffany Aching book, the forty-first and last Discworld novel, and the fifty-seventh  and last novel by Terry Pratchett.  It also opens with a major event which many reviews have been criticised for spoiling. But you can’t really discuss the book without spoiling it; it’s like reviewing Raising Steam without mentioning it involves a train.

So here goes: Granny Weatherwax, most respected of the leaders witches don’t have and part time force of nature, is no more. This happens in the second chapter, and the rest of the book is about a world with a Granny Weatherwax shaped hole in it.

In a way, this is almost too appropriate for the last Discworld book, coming a mere six months after fans found themselves in a world with a Terry Pratchett shaped hole in it. Some people who heard the spoiler were grateful that they now knew they weren’t ready to read the book. Granny Weatherwax was the character Sir Terry used as an example when discussing how popular characters are immortal, she’d been around since the third book, of course Discworld ends as she does.

No other character would work here; Rincewind has been around for longer, but was always a much broader comic character;  a novel centred around his death would be like seriously considering the funeral of Daffy Duck. There could certainly have been a novel about the Watch dealing with the death of Vimes, but Vimes’s death would probably be messier, and dealing with it would involve bringing those responsible to justice. Granny dies peacefully in her sleep, just like Terry did.

And, of course, we’re reading too much into it already. The last five books have all “obviously” been Terry’s final novel where he says farewell to his characters. It’s pretty clear he never thought that way, and the afterword by Rob Willkins reveals there were at least four ideas he was working on that we will now never see. There was never going to be a “final Discworld novel”, there was just going to be a point where they stopped.

But this is nonetheless a book that works as a final Discworld novel. It also works as the last Tiffany Aching novel, which probably was intentional; Tiffany comes into her own as the new major witch, as we always knew she could, and has to face the elves, just as she did aged nine in The Wee Free Men. The way she does this involves a decision it is hard to imagine Granny Weatherwax making, but is very Tiffany Aching, showing that, while she learned from the best, what she learned was how to be herself.

But the echoes of past witches novels stretch further than that. Pretty much all the witches appear in it and most of them get a moment to shine (even Mrs Earwig). Geoffrey, the young man who wants to be a witch, is paralleled to Eskarina Smith, the young woman who wants to be a wizard in Equal Rites, thereby highlighting that there are two edges to why fixed gender roles are wrong, and that while one is more obviously discriminatory, the other is no better for being insidious.…

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The Girl Who Died Review

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Oh good, they didn’t just completely forget how to make Doctor Who. That’s comforting.

A lot of credit has to go to Jamie Mathieson, whose style is starting to emerge, and emerge compellingly. Central to it – and a point Moffat highlighted in interviews last year talking about him – is a solid sense of premise. The spine of this episode – Seven Samurai with Vikings – is, much like “there’s a mummy on the Orient Express in space” and “evil Flatland,” a rock solid structure that Doctor Who fits into nicely. In a season whose first two stories were marred by odd pacing, an episode that feels like it’s shaped correctly is just terribly relieving.

But the details are also all wonderfully on point, right down to an otherwise stupidly generic alien warrior race that’s instantly elevated by the detail that they harvest testosterone to drink. Similarly, the use of “Yakety Sax” over the video of Odin cowering from a wooden dragon is just a solid bit of charm. And the dialogue for the baby, which manages to be haunting and mythic while still being coherent and sensible as a baby’s take on a sense of impending doom.

Mathieson also seems, to me, to write something very much like the definitive take on Capaldi’s Doctor. The scenes where the Doctor angsts to Clara about events are all electrifyingly good. Much of this is Capaldi, who plays both scenes as a man grappling with the inertia of depression. But it’s also down to the writing, which, as with the closing scenes of Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline, is adept at picking what ideas to tell instead of showing. I feel slightly bad about ragging on him at this point, but Whithouse is an all too useful counter-example, always putting relatively obvious sentiments in explicit text. Whereas Mathieson picks lines like “I’m sick of losing people.” Really, that entire scene is amazing – the Doctor anticipating and dreading his inevitable eventual mourning of Clara’s departure, the way it contrasts with his earlier use of her as an example of someone he’s reshaped. It’s stuff that’s obvious in the sense of being self-evident, but it’s not obvious in the sense of being a cliche. It’s a small and simple thing – the same angst displayed whenever the Doctor sulks over losing a companion – but moved to a position in the narrative where it’s an unexpected nuance. And the overall take on the Doctor is genuinely impressive. Instead of being self-loathing and self-pitying, the Doctor is just exhausted by the centuries. A good man who is worn out.

Implicit in this is also the fact that Mathieson gives Clara good stuff; and he’s very easily argued as the best Clara writer besides Moffat himself. Obviously at this point, after three episodes where she was given very little to actually do, simply having an episode where Clara gets plot is relieving and satisfying. But it’s good plot. Her cajoling and pushing the Doctor is consistently satisfying, and the baseline of it.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Novelette Open Thread

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Ah, Best Novelette. The form that only the Hugos actually recognize, occupying the space between short story and short novel. Long story, as it were. Or, in technical terms, anything between 7,500 and 17,500 words long, because obviously people know the word length of things they read.

Here’s the Hugo Wikia’s list of eligible works, of which the only one I’ve read is Elektrograd: Rusted Blood, which I certainly wouldn’t mind putting on my ballot, but which I hope the field is good enough that it isn’t a shoo-in either. But I don’t know. What should I read, dear readers?

We’ll be back tomorrow with reviews, including Jack Graham on China Miéville’s “The Dusty Hat,” which, fun fact, is 7,549 words long.…

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Guest Post: Happy Slaves

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Following Jack’s exploration of the Tivolians yesterday I came upon Daniel Harper of the Oi! Spaceman podcast’s take on some of the same issues. Daniel graciously agreed to let us repost it as a guest post, and it’s my pleasure to bring it to you.

Wednesday I posted the Oi! Spaceman podcast episode dealing with our reaction to Under the Lake/Before the Flood, which was a fascinating recording for us because it really was a case of finding some of the meaning of the story as we discussed it. It might make for a slightly disorganized listen, but it was enlightening for myself and I think for my wife and co-host.

The primary way my own views on the story evolved was in the discussion of Prentiss, the Tivolian undertaker, a member of a race of happy slaves imagined as a mincing sexual submissive. I originally took the portrayal at face value, primarily there to provide exposition and provide some levity (ha ha look at the ridiculousness of masochism!), but Shana correctly pointed out that putting this character within the context of a story in which magic runes implant subconscious commands that influence the way you behave changes the meaning a bit. To wit: the Tivolian desire to be dominated, whether cultural or genetic, parallels the subconscious mind control of the technology of the Fisher King, which is after all just a way of subverting the individual’s will to inbuilt memetic propogation. This parallel makes the text much richer than it would be otherwise, and I’ll definitely be considering it in some future venue, whether on the podcast, the blog, or elsewhere.

And then of course Jack Graham had to post a wonderful piece on the way that the Tivolians as happy slaves reflect larger social consciousness about oppressed populations in fiction and in life, and I knew I had to continue the conversation. I’m really trying to not let this blog just become a “what Jack said,” but seriously, go read what Jack said.

What I want to do here is to take a look at how kink and other alternative lifestyle communities handle the questions of dominance and submission, and then ask what that understanding implies for the wider world of heirarchy, on both an individual and social level, all through the lens of a minor species in Doctor Who. And I haven’t even had my coffee yet. We’ll see how this goes.

Healthy Kink

Without getting into the details of either my personal life or the myriad ways that people agree to do naughty things with one another, it should be patently obvious to anyone reading this far that none of it happens without everyone agreeing that they want to do it; all parties must consent to whatever activity is taking place before any fun times can happen. Since there are so many people who like to do things and have things done to them, and the preferences and attitudes about those things vary so widely, pretty much whenever two or more people want to engage in anything a long, sober, and mutually respectful conversation has to take place, with any hidden assumptions laid bare and clear rules about how to further communicate personal needs during and after the encounter.…

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“Anybody could have done it.” (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Fourteen: Before Watchmen: Rorschach)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Perhaps surprisingly given his pedigree as a creator, Brian Azzarello’s two contributions to the Before Watchmen line were largely disappointing and unoriginal. The first, Before Watchmen: The Comedian, frames the charater largely in terms of the Kennedies, essentially opening with the assassination of JFK and closing with that of RFK, committed by the Comedian to cover a war crime he committed in Vietnam.

Figure 895: The Comedian assassinates Bobby Kennedy. (Written by Brian Azzarello, art by J.G. Jones, from Before Watchmen: The Comedian #6, 2012)

It would be overstating the case to say that Azzarello simply allies the Comedian with Kennedy-style New Frontier liberalism: the ending makes that a hard sell, after all. Rather, it’s that Azzarello uses the two Kennedy assassinations as the poles in a fairly traditional account of the decline of 1960s leftist idealism, from JFK’s death as a tragedy that stuns the Comedian to RFK’s death as the Comedian’s own doing, with the engine of that transition being the Vietnam War. Azzarello does not do anything so crass as suggest that the Kennedys are some sort of unalloyed good, of course. He portrays them in line with the historical reality of their considerable corruption. But their corruption is ultimately paralleled with the Comedian’s; he even refers to Robert Kennedy as a “way more effective” crime fighter than he is at one point. They’re all of a type; the sort of morally compromised hard men who flooded superhero comics in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns, and that Watchmen is so often misunderstood as being about. This is even echoed in the art; J.G. Jones, doing his first significant interior work since his awkward exit from Final Crisis three years earlier, imbued the series with what Azzarello called a “masculine realism,” framing this sense of masculinity as central to the Comedian’s character.

This is, to say the least, a bizarre take on the Comedian. Over and over again Watchmen stresses that the Comedian is essentially a nihilist; he understood the same existential darkness that Rorschach did, and, as Rorschach puts it, “chose to become a reflection, a parody” of the fundamentally dysfunctional and broken world. Unlike Rorschach’s absolute belief in justice, however, the Comedian was fundamentally amoral, ultimately driven only by a desire to be tougher than the world (hence his ultimate breakdown when he realizes that Ozymandias’s pragmatic nihilism vastly exceeds his own). Simply put, he’s almost fundamentally impossible to use as the symbol of any sort of idealism, even one in terminal decline. Azzarello’s character, who sulks that “the one thing – the abso-fucking-one thing that no one ever got about me is that I am a patriot” is, in this regard, virtually unrecognizable. As for the idea that the Comedian represents some sort of masculine ideal at any point in his career, it’s difficult to see where this comes from within Watchmen, where one of the first things established about the character is the fact that he raped the Silk Spectre.…

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