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“Forever Now”: Emissary

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It’s Stardate 4399.7 at the Battle of Wolf 359. Star Trek: The Next Generation fans exist here. This is a moment of grotesque apotheosis: The moment when you finally realise you’re truly not alone in the universe. The Borg: Unfettered efficiency and misanthropy. Proof by negative. I refuse to believe. Behold and confront the negation of reality to reveal the true natures of reality. This is a path. You must decide for yourself if it is a good one for you.

It’s January 3, 1993 on your television screen. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine exists in this moment. But it has always existed at this point of singularity. It has waited. It waits. I’m skeptical, though cautiously optimistic about a second Star Trek series. I don’t like that it’s on a space station, because I dream about travelling to the stars. “This isn’t a starship, Major”. I fear a new show will make people stop paying attention to and caring about the Enterprise crew. My crew; my family. Living in the present, but without the self awareness and inner focus to truly comprehend what that means. The local Vermont syndication affiliates are airing Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the exact same timeslot opposite one another. They exist together in the same moment. “I do not understand the threat I bring to you. But I am not your enemy. Allow me to prove it”. It’s February 2003. It’s October 2015.

There’s a lithograph of a Runabout leaving Deep Space 9, still in orbit around Bajor. I can see the image in my mind. I remember the Runabouts. The Runabouts are cool. They’re like miniature starships. It’s late 1993, and my father is doing warehouse inventory for the toy store. There’s an AMT/ERTL model kit of the USS Rio Grande on offer and my curiosity is piqued. Deep Space 9 waits to be rediscovered. It’s mid 1994, and Star Trek: The Next Generation is on TV. It may be a rerun, I can’t quite make it out. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is on one of the other networks. I flip back and forth between the channels, two different cameras trained on two different sections of the same universe at the same point in time. It’s dark. Kira Nerys is trying to have a conversation with Jadzia Dax, who is preoccupied with practicing gymnastics on a high bar. I am unable to turn away.

Stardate 46388.2. Three years later. Miles O’Brien is with Commander Sisko wearing the new Deep Space 9 team open collar Starfleet uniform. His sleeves are rolled up, literally getting his hands dirty with the station’s bombed out infrastructure. This is how I always picture Chief O’Brien-To me he is always here in this place with these people. He belongs here. But there’s a part of him that still exists on the Enterprise: It’s those values he embodies and strive to teach, and its the Enterprise his presence constantly evokes.…

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Before the Flood Podcast

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This week I’m joined by the wonderful Anna Wiggins, known to Eruditorum Press readers for her guest posts in the Super Nintendo Project and TARDIS Eruditorum, and known to Eruditorum Press writers as the person who makes the site actually work. Anyway, we talk Before the Flood, Toby Whithouse, disability representation, Whithouse’s frequent blind spots with regards to transgender and feminist issues, and many more reasons why we just don’t like Toby Whithouse all that much. Honest, it’s not a site editorial position or anything.

You can listen here.…

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Concerning Tivolians

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What a waste of Paul KayeHappy Slaves

All those Doctor Who fans who were disappointed by the way the Ood were depicted in ‘Planet of the Ood’, and who wanted them to be a race of happy slaves, will be happy now that Toby Whithouse has provided them with the Tivolians.

 

I’m not sure how many people that actually was, but I had conversations at the time of ‘Planet of the Ood’ with people who thought it would’ve been ‘interesting’ if the titular planet had been the planet of people who voluntarily wore slave hats. It seems that some people would’ve found this edgy or different or difficult or challenging or something.

 

The concept of the happy slave has been treated in SF. Rather extensively actually. The robot is basically created to be just that. The word even comes from ‘robota’, the Czech word for the drudgery of serfs. Perhaps the problem is that the happy slave so often rebels for the sake of drama, and ruins the fantasy. Asimov’s robots, for instance. The Dumbs and Vocs of Kaldor City. Even Marvin grumbles to the point of infuriating his owners into insanity (Douglas Adams did also give us the cow who wants to be eaten, but that is clearly a piss-take intended to make us as uncomfortable as it makes Arthur Dent). But arguably the most famous robots in all modern global culture – C3PO and R2D2 – are manifestly happy slaves, never doing or saying anything to question their subject status, and even enthusiastically co-operating with our heroes, the goodies, who are also their owners and slave drivers. You wonder how people can have the idea that there’s anything transgressive or challenging – or even unusual – about an idea, when it is literally one of the focal aspects of the biggest fictional media franchise in history. To be honest, I even wonder why some fans feel so starved for happy slaves in Doctor Who. I mean, you’ve had at least one as a major companion! Or wasn’t K9 enough for you, Master?

 

I’m happy to accept that it’s possible to want to see such a depiction without having sinister motives (though I admit to finding it hard to think of quite how). However, there’s something inherently worrying to me about it.

 

At best it suggests that people are bored by stories about resistance to tyranny, and rebellion, and liberation. This certainly seems to be supported by the number of people who will respond to stories about such things with sighs of “Oh is slavery wrong? Thanks for telling us”. The assumption here is that we all know that slavery is wrong so we don’t need to be told, and a text that tries to tell us that slavery is wrong is inherently engaging in fatuous preaching. Which is completely untrue.

 

Firstly, how the hell do we supposedly learn that slavery as an institution exists or existed, and was/is wrong, if not by partaking of a cultural conversation on the subject from a young age?…

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Comics Reviews (October 14th, 2015)

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You know the drill.

The Uncanny Avengers #1

Man, this was a disappointment; I decided I’d pick it up on the strength of the preview story in Avengers #0 and how much I liked the last two things Duggan wrote. But this hide-the-ball nonsesnse is just tedious, especially when we get down to the obvious “nobody is really explaining the mutant status quo post-Secret Wars” problem. The first half of the book is a reasonably fun team fight, but it loses momentum at the halfway point, and the couple pages at the end introducing the nominal threat of the arc just fail to take root. Very meh.

A-Force #5

Dragged down by the weight of Secret Wars at this point, this is a perfectly fun issue with some great individual moments that nevertheless ends as a tease for an ongoing series with a still hazily defined premise. I liked it well enough, but I’m hard-pressed to see why launching this during Secret Wars was a good idea. Also finding it hard to be that invested in the character we’re apparently calling Singularity.

Spider-Gwen #1

Another one sandbagged a bit by Secret Wars, the abrupt stop and restart of this book did no favors for its momentum and drive. It picks up pretty well, but I’m finding it hard to invest in its alternate reality; the supporting cast just doesn’t really pop for me. Fun, and I’ll stick with it a bit longer, but no real passion for this.

The New Avengers #1

A fun debut; this is a solidly engaging team book that picks up one of the more promising and less developed themes in Hickman’s Avengers run and takes it in the sort of oddball and grandiose direction only Al Ewing can. Squirrel Girl and White Tiger end up having the most idiosyncratically wonderful double act in recent memory, and the mix of comedy and weird horror this book stirkes is properly delightful. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Guardians of the Galaxy #1

This does a good job of picking up where it left off before Secret Wars, changing just enough to be interesting and making a reasonable explanation of all of its changes up front. Kitty Pryde as the new Star Lord is as delightful as you’d hope, the Thing is an excellent addition to the book, and this cheerily gets on with the business of being Bendis’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a take I basically like. Right.

The Wicked and the Divine #15

An odd issue; Gillen talks in the backmatter about it starting a new mini-arc within the larger Commercial Suicide arc, and there’s definitely quite a tone shift, but it’s not quite clear where we’re going yet, and this issue sort of wanders off as it goes on. The Amaterasu/Urdr throwdown is quite good, and I love what Gillen is doing with Cassandra’s strange mix of being right and wrong; the back cover quote of “you’re doing this wrong” is so very, very projectiony of her, but then the ending of the book just sort of rushes up out of nowhere, and the one-page backup ends up being more interesting in its implications than the main story.…

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Pex Lives 26: The Chase

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We’re pleased to announce this month’s second installment of Pex Lives, which I literally had no idea was even happening until it popped up in my inbox yesterday, and which I hope will be as pleasant a surprise for you as it was for me. You can get that right here. And here’s the description:

Crack yourself open a can of classic Pex Lives, with Kevin and James talking about the month long horror movie marathon that is their Halloween tradition, how they feel about the latest episodes (they don’t), and the mind boggling serial from 1965, the Chase.

…

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“An ageless light”: Chain of Command, Part II

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“And that’s an important thing to remember here: Most of the stuff fans like to praise the most about ‘Chain of Command’, namely the truly gruesome and unsettling torture scenes that are justifiably held up as a human rights statement, are from Part 2. Part 1 in hindsight feels much more like a setup, not just to Part 2, but to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Because that’s what this episode is really about, at a metatextual level if not an explicit one.” 
“That’s a historical fact I feel is frequently overlooked: This is the first two-parter in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation to actually come right out and advertise itself as a two-parter from the very beginning. ‘The Best of Both Worlds’, ‘Redemption’, ‘Unification’ and ‘Time’s Arrow’, the previous stories of this ilk, all hung on their cliffhanger endings: You were meant to watch them for 39 minutes assuming they were going to play out like a normal episode, and then be gobsmacked by a left-field revelation…’Chain of Command’, however, makes it perfectly clear to us from the outset it’s telling a story too big and too epic (and also too expensive, which was the main reason Michael Piller suggested splitting it in half) to be contained in one episode. Given the strategic December airdate, it thus also becomes Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first proper mid-season finale, which seems like the only fitting way to reify Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”
“Ro Laren’s absence in ‘Chain of Command’ is really, strikingly noticeable and one can’t help but wish they held Michelle Forbes’ annual guest spot over for this story instead of shunting her into the teaser for ‘Rascals’. Especially considering she had already turned down the gig over at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it would make sense to get her perspective on the Cardassians’ withdrawal from her homeworld…” 
“Because I do suspect that former ROTC man Ron Moore looks at Captain Jellico as someone he probably admires to at least some degree due to his bombastic and unapologetic old-fashioned masculinity. The kind of captain he’d probably like to serve under if he was in the military…And a story that lionizes Edward Jellico cannot hear the voice of someone like Ro Laren because it cannot imagine that voice exists. And this story, and both incoming Star Treks, are the poorer for it.” 

And now, the conclusion…

It’s possible to read “Chain of Command” as a kind of narrative collapse. With Star Trek: Deep Space Nine imminent, and even though it at least should have been plainly obvious by now that both it and Star Trek: The Next Generation were going to exist in tandem rather than conflict with one another (well…at least not *artistically*, but we’ll get to that when we get to it), spinoffs still don’t tend to happen in a TV show’s imperious phase: It’s entirely likely there was lingering anxiety about this, especially considering no-one except insiders had actually *seen* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine yet.…

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Lost Exegesis (Pilot Part 2)

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One would think, given they pretty much share the same title, that Pilot Part 1 and Pilot Part 2 would be rather similar, that the two parts would fit together as a functional whole. It’s true that both episodes were shot as part of the same production block. However, the two parts aired a week apart. Which was probably wise, for Pilot Part 2 is a very different beast compared to Pilot Part 1.

And one might wonder if the two parts had a different director, but they did not; JJ Abrams helmed both parts. Yet they have a very different feel from each other. Pilot Part 2 is rather visually distinct from its predecessor, as all of it is terribly bright; there’s an awful lot of sunlight. The first episode, on the other hand, had moments of “day becoming night,” scenes dominated by cloud cover and shadow, and even one shot at night. Pilot Part 2, on the other hand, is terribly bright; there’s an awful lot of sunlight. But then, Part 1 covers Day One on the Island, Night One, and the beginning of Day Two. All of Part 2 happens during Day Two.

While much of that could be attributed to the vagaries of the weather, we cannot say the same about the episodes’ structures. The structure of Part 1, as we noted in the previous essay, was split in two. The first half ran for twenty straight minutes, without commercial interruption. It had several very long scenes – Jack running out of the jungle and playing the hero while the remnants of the plane exploded. Then a long montage of the wreckage, and people milling about, accompanied by a morose musical score. A few short scenes serve to very briefly introduce a few of the other characters, but there’s some long conversations between Kate and Jack (as she stitches up his wound, and as they talk about the plane crash by a campfire) before the Monster brought that half to a climax. After Jack’s Flashback, the rest of the episode is almost entirely concerned with a trek to the cockpit to retrieve the airplane’s transceiver, and another attack by the monster. The whole episode is largely focused on Jack, secondarily on Kate and Charlie, and is very much in the mold of an action-adventure.

Pilot Part 2, on the other hand, consists of 27 vignettes that eventually feature all of the ensemble cast. The episode runs only 40 minutes. The final scene is five minutes long, and each of the two flashback scenes run about three minutes. As such, most scenes barely last a minute. This gives the episode a very different pace.

And yet it’s not nearly as propulsive as Pilot Part 1, for most of the vignettes are very languorous on their own. Sure, there are a few action sequences – both Flashbacks are on the crashing plane, and there’s the charge of the polar bear – but these are not the focus of the episode.…

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Blood Makes Noise (E.V.O. The Search for Eden)

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Arguably the most Hegelian moment in all of video games, at least in an aesthetic sense, comes at the start of E.V.O. as the player’s avatar – at this particular moment in the game a fish – meets a jellyfish and is welcomed to the dialectical process of evolution. The jellyfish explains the three rules of evolution: fight for survival and for food, only move forward never back, and evolve and become strong. At which point the dialogue ends, the player bites the jellyfish in the head twice, and then eats the juicy roast his corpse converts into thus regaining some health and gaining experience. The process reiterates until eventually the player evolves into a human being, defeats the monstrous Bolbox, and reaches Eden where he is finally allowed to become Gaia’s consort and bring about civilization.

It is, to say the least, one of those games that stops you short, critically speaking. Its psychochronographic space is a British coast, expanding endlessly the closer you look at it. Every detail is strange, the explication of one leads inexorably to another. There is too much meaning here; in every direction lies rabbit holes to topple down.

And yet at its core this is an almost obvious game. Evolution is a more or less inevitable thing to pair with an experience system, and I’m sure prior art exists, although this is the earliest instance of it I’m aware of. Everything else slots into place at least reasonably sensibly around the clever gameplay mechanic in a very classic function follows form bit of game design. Add the detail that it’s an Enix game (not from the Quintent sub-studio that produced ActRaiser and Soul Blazer, although it shared production staff with the former) and almost the entire thing clicks into place. RPGification of existing game styles was very much their thing, so of course the RPG side-scroller is a thing.

But it also helps explain the game’s strangest and most interesting aspect, which is its curious mishmash of an ideology and worldview. It has the characteristic slight obliqueness of a Japanese game – a phenomenon we’ve discussed previously – and the tendency towards slightly distorted and cracked mirror versions of European cosmologies, a tendency emphasized by the slightly dodgy translation in E.V.O. In this case the player is shepherded by Gaia, a personification of the Earth, who is apparently the direct daughter of the Sun. But this is laid alongside an almost-sensible version of evolutionary biology – one that’s not even close to scientifically accurate, but that has at least seen a science textbook at some point in its life. And then on top of that there are Martian bird people perverting the course of human evolution.

The Martian bird people in many ways distract from the real strangeness here, which is the attempt to merge the eco-hippy rhetoric that Gaia is being plucked from with the pop-evolutionary biology, which, inevitably, gets simplified down to “survival of the fittest.” These are in some key regards a rough fit.…

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“A Voiceless Song”: Chain of Command, Part I

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The reputation of course precedes it. Not just its own, but that of what it sets into motion. We know what’s coming next. And so did everyone who saw this on initial transmission: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the show on everyone’s minds that was getting all the industry buzz. The promo spots were already airing on TV, and we’d seen the new crew and the new space station. Anyone who followed science fiction would have known the new show was going to be set near Bajor and feature the Cardassians, so everyone knew what a mid-season finale involving the Cardassians over at Star Trek: The Next Generation *really* meant.

And that’s an important thing to remember here: Most of the stuff fans like to praise the most about “Chain of Command”, namely the truly gruesome and unsettling torture scenes that are justifiably held up as a human rights statement, are from Part 2. Part 1 in hindsight feels much more like a setup, not just to Part 2, but to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Because that’s what this episode is really about, at a metatextual level if not an explicit one. The teaser starts, and right away we get a series of bombshell revelations: Captain Picard is being reassigned, the Enterprise is getting a new captain and the Cardassians are withdrawing from Bajor. We’re given practically no time to process any of this, just like the crew who are given no time to process the transfer of command from Jean-Luc Picard to Edward Jellico. And yet at the same time, we also know that none of this is going to be permanent, because we follow the entertainment rags enough to know Patrick Stewart isn’t leaving the show and also because this episode is literally entitled “Chain of Command, Part I”.

That’s a historical fact I feel is frequently overlooked: This is the first two-parter in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation to actually come right out and advertise itself as a two-parter from the very beginning. “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Redemption”, “Unification” and “Time’s Arrow”, the previous stories of this ilk, all hung on their cliffhanger endings: You were meant to watch them for 39 minutes assuming they were going to play out like a normal episode, and then be gobsmacked by a left-field revelation: Captain Picard got turned into a Borg. Tasha Yar is still alive, and a Romulan. Spock is back (even though we kind of knew he was coming). Data gets sucked into the past, where we know he’s going to get killed. “Chain of Command”, however, makes it perfectly clear to us from the outset it’s telling a story too big and too epic (and also too expensive, which was the main reason Michael Piller suggested splitting it in half) to be contained in one episode.…

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Before the Flood Review

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Well, that’s what I get for getting my hopes up about a Whithouse story I suppose. This was just crap. Unambitious, unimaginative, uninteresting crap made at best semi-competently. By some margin the worst episode of the Capaldi era, and saved from being Whithouse’s worst script only by the fact that A Town Called Mercy is appreciably worse. Maybe. I’m not even sure. God this was shit.

Where do I even start? The beginning, I suppose – the tediously overlong description of the bootstrap paradox, which, let’s recall, was basically the resolution to the entire Madame Kovarian saga back in Time of the Doctor where it was considered simple enough to just dash off in a line of dialogue. Or, for that matter, the setup of Blink, which managed to make its entire length without having to go out of its way to explain its plot resolution in the abstract before doing it. But now, apparently, time-wime is something that has to be explained in advance of its invocation in what has to be the single least suspense-laden cold open in series history.

But it’s not as though things start looking up afterwards. I remarked in last week’s podcast that Whithouse’s stories have an unfortunate tendency to collapse into “x in a y” formulations, but never before has he managed anything quite so spectacularly pointless as the inexplicably empty fake Russian village. I can only assume it was selected because someone realized that an abandoned generic village and an underwater base almost completely lacking in interesting visual design was going to add up to the least visually engaging episode ever and so decided to throw some Soviet propaganda posters around. Because why not.

At least O’Donnell finally gets some interesting characterization and background after being neglected for most of the first episode. Oh wait, it’s just so she can be fridged to provide angst for the story’s most pointless character, not that this angst translates into Bennet actually doing anything in the entire story. I mean, aside from the obligatory “scold the Doctor for being callous” scene, because evidently Whithouse really can’t go a story without hitting that note. Actually, he doubles down by doing the exact same thing with Clara, which is even more depressing given that it’s the first thing Clara’s actually been given to do since she figured out where the Doctor was for Missy, such that Whithouse’s autopilot setting actually qualifies as interesting for her in context.

Then, for good measure, the O’Donnell/Bennet “relationship out of nowhere” move only exists to set up the equally out of nowhere Cass/Lund relationship at the end. Because apparently Cass’s emotional investment in her interpreter can only be explained by a desire to fuck him and not just by the fact that, you know, they’re longtime friends and colleagues. (I don’t know nearly enough about the deaf community to know whether falling in love with one’s interpreter is a stereotype, although it seems so obvious and uncreative a move that the only way it would fail to be a stereotype is due to insufficient deaf representation in the first place.)…

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