Eruditorum Press

Fucking around and finding out is a valid epistemology

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

4

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.…

Continue Reading

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

, 10

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.…

Continue Reading

Before the Flood Review

125

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.)…

Continue Reading

Weird Kitties: Best Dramatic Presentation (Longform) Open Thread

58

Or, as I really do think of the category, “all the stuff that’s probably going to lose to Star Wars,” a film I would be shocked to find on my ballot given my dislike for both the franchise and the director. Call me cynical.

I’ll almost certainly be nominating Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road and, as the image suggests, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in its entirety (as I think it’s better-suited to this category than short form, where one would have to pick an episode). I’ve kind of got a slot pencilled in for The Martian, but I also probably won’t actually get around to seeing it in theaters to make sure of this. (I’d love to hear opinions of it.) 

Past that, I’m keeping my last slot open. The Force Awakens. Right now neither of the Marvel movies are making my list. I’m tempted to look at Daredevil, which I feel is better-suited due to the “all at once” release model of Netflix, but I’m also loathe to put too much television here. Jessica Jones is also a much more likely pick if I go that route. It Follows is also distinctly possible.

Also, as usual, more reviews for tomorrow are needed. I’ve got a couple of people who have suggested they might get me something, but nobody who has, so the cupboard may end up being bare, unless I get an Ex Machina review together or something, which I might do I suppose. …

Continue Reading

And do you know what she said? Her most famous quotation? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 13: Before Watchmen: The Comedian)

12

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s differences of opinions are numerous, but one of the most fundamental differences comes in their relationship to the atomic bomb. Both were profoundly concerned with nuclear warfare, but for Morrison it was a childhood fear he found respite from in superheroes, whereas for Moore it was an adult concern he worked through using superheroes as a metaphor.

In many ways, this is the heart of the disagreement between Pax Americana and Watchmen. Morrison sees superheroes as creatures of immense possibility whose value is as aspirational figures. For him it is the interminability of superhero narratives that is most interesting – the fact that characters get reinvented over and over again, with new ideas and new takes, and that the stories never have to come to an end. Whereas to Moore, at least in Watchmen, what is interesting are the limitations of superheroes – of what they are incapable of doing and representing. The superheroes of Watchmen are known archetypes that the audience has seen a hundred times before, only taken to logical endpoints. The point isn’t the possibility of the characters, it’s the impotence of them. Put another way, Morrison cares what superheroes let us be, while Moore cares what they let us see.

This division, or at least the underlying division over what the purpose of art is, is one that will persist, in some form or another, throughout the War. But ironically, when it comes to the actual disagreement over the possibility of superheroes as an optimistic genre, it is Morrison’s view that ultimately won the day. Part of Moore’s ultimate revulsion at Watchmen was precisely the way in which, as he put it, it became “a kind of hair shirt that the super-hero had to wear forever after that… they’ve all got to be miserable and doomed. And if they’ve got to be psychopathic as well, then so much the better.” Indeed, Moore was adamant that “imaginative fiction,” and specifically superhero fiction, “is something which is perfectly fine for adults,” a point he attempted to demonstrate in much of his superhero work following his departure from DC.

Arguably, then, this forms one of the few major chinks in Moore’s usually resilient armor of eternity – a point on which Moore can decisively and unambiguously be said to have changed. And yet it is easy to overstate this. Moore’s revulsion towards Watchmen is genuine, and yet it is not really a revulsion at the work itself. Rather, it is a revulsion at the world that Moore used Watchmen to look at – one that he found monstrous and twisted, and wrongly assumed that the rest of the world would see it that way as well. This is not just a matter of the fans who seized onto Rorschach in ways Moore found disturbing, but rather the entire way in which the nightmarish world he constructed, in which superheroes were the embodiment of humanity’s most self-destructive impulses tragically deluding themselves into believing that they were the world’s Watchmen and not its doom, was treated as something desirable.…

Continue Reading

“I’ve got a date, remember?”: The Quality of Life

, 2

The immediate problem with “The Quality of Life” is that it’s “Home Soil” again. This is something like the fourth or fifth time Star Trek: The Next Generation has done this brief, and, like clone degeneration or VHS signal decay, each iteration has been a successively less effective version of “Home Soil”.

The secondary problem with “The Quality of Life” is that it’s not “Cost of Living”. Prior to this watch I tended to conflate the two stories (in my defense, those are *criminally* similar titles: Almost as bad as “A Matter of Honor/Perspective/Time”: I’m stunned I never got *those* mixed up). This error on my part actually elevated the two stories considerably in my memory, as I had assumed the Lwaxana/Alexander story of “Cost…” was the A-plot of “Quality…”, with the Exocomp stuff as the B-plot (and also that it was a Season 5 story, which elevated that whole season considerably in my memory). The tertiary problem with all of this is that “Cost of Living” sucks canal water and the Lwaxana/Alexander story would have done nothing but drag this hypothetical episode down: As much of a retread as “The Quality of Life” might be, it’s still solid and watchable, even if it is also mediocre and forgettable.

That’s not to say, however, that I don’t have problems with this episode apart from it being a retread. My biggest issue is its handling of Captain Picard and Commander Riker, the captain in particular: Michael Piller-era Star Trek: The Next Generation has a bad habit of trying to force conflict amongst the Enterprise crew by writing someone, usually one of those two, in ways that seem weirdly and spontaneously out of character to me in order to put them at odds with somebody else in the crew. So we get things like Geordi’s humiliation conga in his solo outings, Riker flipping out at Worf in “Ethics”, Deanna Troi being a codgy stick-in-the-mud in “Cost of Living” and most things involving Captain Picard and artificial intelligence post-“The Measure of a Man”. It seems like whenever the story needs someone to play the role of a stodgy bureaucrat or square oldster who needs to have their worldview shaken up, the team would rather throw out Captain Picard’s established characterization instead of actually being creative.

Both Riker and Picard are off-puttingly out of sorts when it comes to the possibility the Exocomps might be thinking life-forms, Picard especially. I simply cannot buy that they would require an entire episode to become convinced that the Exocomps are alive when they live on a starship inhabited by hyper-evolved androids and sentient holograms. Painfully, “The Quality of Life” even *knows* this and gives us a whole scene where Data has to defend the Exocomps’ right to exist using the same rhetoric Captain Picard did in “The Measure of a Man”, even name-checking that very episode. It feels like it exists solely to try and handwave away this rather glaring affront to characterization continuity, which indeed it does and the creative team have all but admitted as much in subsequent interviews.…

Continue Reading

Tricky Dicky, Part 2: The Mirror Effect

8

Bit of an unplanned diversion for the Tricky Dicky series, this. Normal service to be resumed soon. (This series was always intended as a free-associating ramble.) We’re going to Shakespeare, albeit not in the way originally planned, so Spoiler Warning… um, for a play first performed about 423 years ago. Oh, and Trigger Warning, for discussion of recent violent acts, and some hardcore misogyny.

Apparently, the guy who recently murdered nine innocent people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon – let his name go unmentioned and unspoken, and be forgotten, for he is unimportant as an individual; and he made himself so – had the audacity to leave behind lots of written complaints at the site of his killing spree. They were mostly about not having a girlfriend, and about feeling that everybody else was crazy.

Oh, boo hoo. Join the fucking club, you fucking asshole. Most people have gone through the same or similar things at one time or another. A lot of people have gone through a lot worse.  What gives you the right to express your displeasure at a routine and banal human experience by violating other people’s right to live?

Thing is… this is basically the opening of Richard III by William Shakespeare. (And by that I in no way intend to glamourize or dignify the murders.)

 

1.

Richard opens the play by addressing the audience and telling them (us) his plans, much like one of these real-life murderers posting a manifesto (on paper, online, on YouTube, whatever) before embarking on his killing spree. (Because that’s basically what Richard does: go on a killing spree, albeit a rather more structured one.) Having whinged about how all the jocks are going around having fun and behaving like idiots now that peace has broken out, and about how ugly he thinks he is, and how he can’t dance and fuck and have girlfriends, Richard declares:

                    since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Almost immediately after this, Richard begins his campaign of sowing discord and blaming absolutely everything wrong with the world (which, to him and everyone he speaks to, means the court) on a woman, the Queen and her family – whom he asserts are all her tools.

Remember last time we talked about the ambitious, arriviste Woodville family who married into the Yorkist monarchy? The Queen in the play is the former Elizabeth Woodville, later Lady Grey (widowed), now Queen Consort Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV – Richard’s eldest brother. The play depicts her and her family as essentially innocent and good, which is historically doubtful but serves to underline Richard’s villainy, especially when he badmouths them and, at length, engineers the deaths of many of them. Lots of people will tell you that Shakespeare had to depict her positively as she was the great-grandmother of Elizabeth I (it’s complicated) but the play is actually very far from simply being Tudor ‘propaganda’, and Shakespeare depicts Edward IV (Elizabeth I’s great-grandfather) in decidedly mixed terms in the three plays in which he appears as a character.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (October 7th, 2015)

5

From worst to best of what I paid money for, sometimes reluctantly.

Avengers #0

So let’s start with why Marvel can go fuck themselves, which is releasing three $5.99 books in the same week, two of them preview books (the third being Amazing Spider-Man #1, which is what, the second one in two years?). Seriously, could none of these have been launched on last week’s super-light week? It’s not as though the preview book is a pinnacle of comic art, since a typical preview book consists of eight-pagers that have to intrdouce a premise and then not do anything with it because someone might buy issue #1 without buying the preview. Frankly, this is the sort of shit that should be being released for free online, since it’s advertising. This book is literally the reader paying to have these books marketed to them. Anyway, despite that there are some promising titles in here – I love Al Ewing’s take on America Chavez, and Uncanny Avengers actually catches my eye, not least because Duggan is good. But all that means is that the advertising was effective for other books – it doesn’t make this any less of a complete rip-off.

Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #4

Only picked up because my shop wasn’t ordering rack copies and I didn’t want to stick them with one; I’ve made up my mind to drop this cheap name cash-in due to the fact that it contains nothing that can meaningfully be described as writing. This month they’ve even done away with the bad Grant Morrison interview in the back.

Contest of Champions #1

I have high hopes for this book in spite of the problems – it’s the sort of big, fun premise Al Ewing does excellent work with, and I’m sure his crashing together bits of Marvel will be entertaining. But here’s the thing – this is a $4.99 first issue, released the same week as another $5.99 preview book framed by a Contest of Champions issue. That’s basically $11 for the first installment of a story that trumpets its “based on a free-to-play mobile game” status, which is the most transcendently perverse thing I’ve seen in comics in a long time.

Invincible Iron Man #1

The marquee book of All-New All-Different Marvel Now, a banner so shitty I notice they’re not actually putting it on the covers of things. I suppose I should thank Marvel for not charging extra for the cardstock outer cover. But man… this is bog standard Iron Man. It’s the same Iron Man that Kieron Gillen was writing, and that Matt Fraction was writing before him. Yeah, we’ve got Bendis dialogue, which suits Tony well, but this is neither new nor different. And look, in a week where Marvel has already put me in a mood that says “their books are mainly rip-offs,” having the marquee book of your latest relaunch be indistinguishable from every previous take is just… not a great idea? I mean, Jonathan Hickman said that he wanted to call Secret Wars #1 “A Great Jumping-Off Point.”…

Continue Reading

City of the Dead: Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors

1

Along with Pex Lives itself and the Shabcast, one of the podcasts Eruditorum Press picked up when we took Kevin and James onboard was Holly Boson and James Murphy’s City of the Deadpodcast, which is looking at all of the releases from Amicus Films in turn. Readers of this site probably know Amicus best for the two Peter Cushing Dalek films, but on the whole they’re better known for a series of horror anthology films that James described to me as a sort of cut-rate Hammer Horror. Today we’ve got a look at Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, a five-part anthology film featuring Peter Cushing as Dr. Terror instead of as Dr. Who, telling the awful fates of people on a train. You can grab that here.

Attentive listeners have already gotten to hear Holly back on Shabcast 12 talking about Kesha, and it’s my pleasure to give you all another dose; she’s one of the smartest voices in fandom right now, and it’s our sincere hope that she’ll be doing a lot more work for us here.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 149 150 151 152 ›»