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And she did it! She went out past Vega, out past Moulquet and Lambard! (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 11: The Dark Knight Returns)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: After considering various supposed influences that work more on the level of plot and characters, it became apparent that a more helpful theory of influence on Watchmen came in the form of William S. Burroughs, whose theories of language and magic were directly cited by Moore as influences, and actually help explain the book’s strange and vast influence on its world.

This also helps explain how Watchmen relates to what was, by the mid-80s, a significant body of revisionist takes on superheroes. The most obvious point of comparison here is Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which came out from March to June of 1986, with the final issue coming a week after the first issue of Watchmen. The proximity of the two nuclear paranoia-fueled revisionist tales of aging superheroes, along with a wealth of news articles that cited them, along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus as heralding a new, mature era for comics (usually, as famously noted by Neil Gaiman, carrying titles along the lines of “Zap! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!”), made them obvious bedfellows, an impression heightened by the fact that Moore and Miller were critical darlings among the same crowds.

Moore was also a vocal proponent of Miller’s work, and had been since 1983, when he wrote an essay in The Daredevils praising and analyzing the Miller Daredevil run whose reprints headlined the magazine. (He also, of course, wrote “Grit,” a parody of Miller’s Daredevil work, for the same magazine.) Indeed, he wrote the introduction to the first trade paperback edition of The Dark Knight Returns, calling it “one of the few genuine comic book landmarks worthy of a lavish and more durable presentation.” And indeed, the work is a perennial bestseller and a landmark work, although its status as a classic has, in recent years, found itself endangered by a larger shift in Miller’s critical reception brought on in part by his unfortunate late career turn towards crass Islamophobia in works like Holy Terror and his tendency to do things like call the 2011 Occupy protests “a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists” due to their failure to sufficiently oppose radical Islam. And indeed, More has been a part of that turn, proclaiming in 2011 that “Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years” before going on to criticize the majority of Miller’s work from that period, and suggesting, of his Occupy criticism, that “if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be much more in favour of it.” 

Figure 880: The sixteen-panel grid was as fundamental to The Dark Knight Returns as the nine-panel grid was to Watchmen. (Written by Frank Miller, art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #1, 1986)

This last crack on Moore’s part highlights the specific way in which these later skirmishes of the War echo back upon The Dark Knight Returns, and it is in a way that both shows why Moore viewed it as such a landmark comic at the time and how it is a profoundly different work than Watchmen.…

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“The picture you see”: Man of the People

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Oh good, Deanna Troi again. Well, at least we know what we’re in for.

But let’s be fair here. Deanna Troi is a fine character (regardless of what the creative team thinks) and Marina Sirtis is a fine actor, it’s just the combination of the two that seems to cause problems. In fact, this is probably the episode that proves this unequivocally beyond the shadow of a doubt. More to the point, this is an episode that probably shouldn’t exist, not because it’s particularly ethically reprehensible (well, it kinda is that a bit too) but because it’s plainly a stopgap story: “Relics” was supposed to go in this filming block, but James Doohan’s unavailability forced the team to push that episode to the following week. This necessitated a brand new script *right goddamn now*, with the brief given to incoming supervising producer Frank Abatemarco. It’s also another “Let’s Do” story, this time for The Picture of Dorian Grey.

(By this point in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jeri Taylor is effectively the sole showrunner, with Michael Piller temporarily stepping back a bit to spend more time on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to help it get off the ground and oversee the franchise more broadly. Abatemarco steps in here to ease some of Piller’s burden until things stabilize by mid season.)

So this is an episode quite frankly nobody has or should have any expectations for. It’s a “Let’s Do” story, stars a character nobody seems to have a good handle on, was thrown together at the last minute and given to a guy who was brand new to the show, effectively throwing him right into the deep end. Brannon Braga sums up the situation pretty well:

“I would have done it differently. I would have made it darker and much more a story about Troi’s dark descent from the psychological point of view. A scene we all wanted to see was Troi giving therapy to a young ensign – but make it twice as long and twice as dark as the one that was filmed, and make it much more of a Hannibal Lecter thing. This was a case where Frank Abatemarco saw a different show. He was focusing in on the show as a Prime Directive issue and looking at the character of the guy who was using Troi as a receptacle. To me, that was the utterly incorrect instinct. After six years, who cares about Prime Directive issues? It’s a Star Trek cliché. It should have been all about Troi and he would have been the catalyst in two brief scenes. The first three acts were still fun. It was enjoyable to see Troi acting strange and dressing in skimpy outfits. There was some argument in the structuring sessions. Ultimately, Frank was the writer and he was given the opportunity to do it the way he wanted to do it, and it suffered because he was new to the show.”
…

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Meat is Murder: Hannibal, True Detective, and the Anthropocene Extinction

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The anthropocene extinction, which Jack quite reasonably argues should be called the capitalocene extinction, is by some margin the most urgent philosophical issue facing humanity today. So let’s talk about a pretentiously well-directed television show that purports to be a crime drama, but is really just a vehicle for two men to urgently discuss the nature of the universe.

Let us suppose for the moment that I am talking about True Detective. Certainly I am not mischaracterizing it, although in its second season it made a substantial effort to engage with the question of what role women have in a universe that exists primarily for men to urgently discuss the nature of. (And indeed, of white men; were I to make one and only one suggestion for a third season, it would be for a main character of color who might prove capable of deflating the pretensions of the other detectives in the way Ani did this season.) Indeed, in many ways it is this second season that is easiest to start with; the most straightforward way to understand what sort of show that it is, thus understanding why its failure to quite be that in its first season was so electrifying.

On its most basic level, True Detective is a piece of noir. The plot of the second season – criticized by unimaginative reviewers as a convoluted mess – is in reality no worse than the legendarily incoherent classic The Big Sleep. And Chandler is certainly a major touchstone for the specifically Califronian subgenre of noir that True Detective works in this season – it’s all very “down these mean streets a man must go.” (In contrast with its first, southern gothic-inflected take on noir.)  

Within noir, at least in the Chandler model, the story is not so much a mystery as it is a test of the detective’s soul. The investigation of a crime is merely a vehicle for this trial and tribulation. And that’s very obvious in Season Two of True Detective, where the overall structure is primarily that of a classical tragedy – the falls of Ray and Frank, presented in parallel at the story’s climax. But crucially, their downfalls are then subsumed by the third strand of narrative, Ani’s successful escape and eventual telling of the story. True Detective becomes, in other words, not a story about the tragic downfall of the male heroes, but about the act of surviving a Greek tragedy, Ani being, herself, named after a character who failed to do just that.

(This is one of the most basic themes of True Detective: the failures of masculinity. All of the leads of the show, Ani included, attempt to perform masculinity and, in crucial ways, fail and are shown to be inadequate: Frank’s blue balls in his heart, Ray’s pathetic threats to the father of his son’s bully, Ani’s self-destructive determination to fuck like one of the guys, Paul’s entire plot and conflict in a thuddingly literal way, and, for that matter, Rust and Marty in a variety of ways.…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 1: Maximum Stay 530 Years

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This year, the English have been making fools over themselves over a posh dead guy. Wow, there’s something you don’t see every day. Sorry, did I say that’s something you don’t see every day? Silly me, what was I thinking? I meant, of course, that that’s something you do see every day. Literally, every fucking day. It’s practically our national pastime; worshipping posh dead guys. When we’re not worshipping posh live guys, that is. Everywhere in England, this is our thing. And Britain generally, if we’re honest… though the rest of the United Kingdom has the excuse that the dead guys (generally posh within their own context) they fawn over tend to at least be people who in some way stood up to English imperialism.

What a strange relationship we have in my country! (As an Englishman, I have the luxury of being able to blithely think of other people’s adjacent countries as being bits of mine… though there is some progress to be seen in the fact that, these days, that generally only works with adjacent countries.) In my country you can travel, in a relatively brief time, from a place where there are statues of English guys who became statue-material because they killed lots of Scottish people, to a place where there are statues of Scottish guys who became statue-material because they tried to stop the English guys killing those very same Scottish people. Okay, you can do something like that in America too. But at least in that case the people weren’t really different nationalities; the ones in the South were just pretending to be because a minority of them wanted to keep using black people as farm machinery, as Vonnegut put it. Also, in America, it has the decency to take longer. Even so, the pattern reoccurs across time with depressing regularity; the hyper-speed of modernity accelerates the process and telescopes it in space. And like so many political phenomena, it reoccurs dialectically at different distinct historical levels and loci. For instance, you can travel from bits of London alone where there are statues of guys who became statue-material for massacring lots of Indians to other bits of London where most of the inhabitants are descended from the survivors of the same massacres. But again, something similar is often possible Stateside too… though you have to redefine ‘Indians’ to make it work.

Speaking of America, and passing over the mounds of corpses of massacred indigenous peoples, we in Britain have had our civil wars too. Parenthetically, it often puzzles me that we talk as if we only ever had the one civil war… but I suspect the intensity with which we insist upon 1642-1651 being the ‘English Civil War’ is less to do with denying the others and more to do with effacing the fact that it was more fundamentally a revolution.

But this series of posts isn’t about that English Civil War. It’s about (albeit tangentially) one of the other ones. The one we charmingly call ‘the Wars of the Roses’.…

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Comics Reviews (September 23rd, 2015)

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Speaking of reviews, I could use Weird Kitties reviews for Sunday. snowspinner at gmail. Doesn’t have to be long at all; just a recommendation for something Hugo-worthy. (Next up on my reading list, The Dark Forest, but I don’t imagine it’ll be ready for Sunday.)

From worst to best of what I bought, which was surprisingly little this week. And next week will probably be even more ridiculously small. Ah, the direct market.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #5 There are some nice moments here – I quite like the Twelfth Doctor’s inversion of Hartnell’s “what’s a breach for” into “what’s a bridge for? Burning.” It’s a pity Neil Edwards is drawing him to look like Peter Cushing in the scene in question. More than a bit uncertain about the Ninth Doctor cameo as well – it seems like a pointless side trip, and the claim that no timeline exists in which he’s not “fantastic” is frankly ridiculous. All in all, a nice bit of fluff, but ultimately marred by being a five week summer event that had three weeks pass between its last two issues and concluded after the series came back and when better-than-average Doctor Who methadone like this was no longer nearly as needed. Fun, but it feels like it should have been so much more.

Nameless #5

Speaking of series hurt by their delays, here’s Grant Morrison’s engagement with nihilism. Somewhat puzzled by his pastiche of the famous seance-gone-wrong sequence in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing; is he trying to suggest that Moore is a nihilist? Dense and chewy Grant Morrison is always a pleasure, but his heart just doesn’t feel like it’s in this.

Batgirl #44

It’s interesting, there is, by any normal standard, too large a cast here. But the storytelling is clear and does a good job of reintroducing characters as it uses them, and the book is terribly fun. Particular kudos this month to Bengal, who steps in for Babs Tarr and maintains much of the book’s signature high panel-count style (no wonder Tarr needed a break) while bringing her own style to things. This really is one of the best superhero books of its day.…

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The Magician’s Apprentice: Podcast and Jack’s Thoughts

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Phil here atop Jack’s post to announce the release of the first episode of our brand new Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Series 9 Podcast. Basically, each week I’m sitting down with someone on the Eruditorum Press team or with a cool guest and talking about the latest episode of Doctor Who. And to start, well, who else would it be but Jack? (I mean, you’ve only had three hours of us talking so far this week. Clearly you need another two. Just be glad I’m holding the Vengeance on Varos commentary back for a week or two.)

 

Jack also ended up marathoning the bulk of Series 8 in preparation for the podcast, so we open by making him play the “rank the episodes” game and getting his views on Capaldi’s first season, then talk about the new episode. 

 

Meanwhile, Jack also has a blogpost on some of his thoughts, which runs below the line. 

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1. I’m So Damn Reasonable, it’s Untrue

 

I’ll be honest: there’s a big part of me that resents Steven Moffat when he rummages around in the history of Doctor Who and changes stuff, or adds stuff. It seems to be something he likes doing. In his worst and most excessive moments, he seems determined to overwrite his own ideas and personality on top of every last bit of the classic series, a bit like the Cat from Red Dwarf wandering around any new environment spraying his scent everywhere out of an aerosol and declaring “That’s mine… this is mine…” I particularly dislike it when he insists upon intruding upon aspects of the backstory of the classic series which were always left unspoken, mysterious, unknown.

 

Now, there are several things to be said about this.

 

Firstly, he’s the guy currently in charge. He’s the head writer and showrunner. It’s his job and his prerogative to do this.

 

Secondly, the fact that it bothers me is evidence of the itching presence of the fan reptile brain in me, sending me error messages about things that aren’t really worthwhile concerns. It’s not as if the very fact of going back to add or change stuff has any real effect (at least not in itself) on whether what I’m watching constitutes good drama. Nor does it have any inherent effect upon the politics of the show, its representations or ideology, or any of that other more interesting stuff that I like to think and write and talk about.

 

Thirdly, Doctor Who writers have always done this. Somebody decided to overwrite the Time Lords upon the blank space that had once been the Doctor’s origins. The Time Lords having been established, somebody decided to reformat them so that they became corrupt, senile old dodderers rather than godlike trans-temporal moral judges. And so on.

 

Finally, it’s really quite unreasonable of me to object, since I’d probably do the same thing given the chance.

 

Look, when the kid at the start of ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ turned out to be Davros, it annoyed me.…

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“Portrait of a frightened man”: Realm of Fear

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“Realm of Fear” has always been memorable to me for two reasons: Being my favourite Reg Barclay episode (I’ve always hated “Hollow Pursuits”, was skeptical of “The Nth Degree” and forgot he was in “Ship in a Bottle”) and being a great example of a solid, all-bases-covered Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It’s been ages since I last saw it though, and considering how much this project has made me come down with self-consciousness and self doubt about my own taste-making abilities, those positive memories could be meaningless.

Happily past me did well this time: “Realm of Fear” is great, and this season is off to a strong start so far.

This episode is pretty obviously about a fear of flying. It’s kind of hard to read it any other way when Geordi tells Reg “transporting really is the safest way to travel”, and writer Brannon Braga (who suffers from mild aviatophobia himself) freely admits that was the impetus. Simple as the concept may be, that’s a legitimate fear many people face, and it’s a fitting thing for Star Trek: The Next Generation to look at. The primary thing that makes “Realm of Fear” so successful is that this is the rare occasion where all the different little stylistic sub-genres this show can effectively play with come together harmoniously: Given its cut-and-dry brief, you could potentially read this as a mild “Issues” story and the inclusion of Barclay gives the story’s dramatic focus to a guest star, which worked to great effect in stories like “Half a Life” and Separation Anxiety and means the show doesn’t have to cripple one of the mains by writing them bizarrely out of character.

(Braga also admits inspiration from the famous Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”: I’d never thought of that before reading that, but it does make sense. I suppose this means you could also read “Realm of Fear” as a “Let’s Do” story too, though Michael Piller says he felt it was important to downplay any such comparisons.)

Again like last time, and fittingly given this is a Brannon Braga story, “Realm of Fear” is also a decent tech mystery. Some might argue there’s an overabundance of technobabble here, especially during the last act, but frankly I don’t have a problem with that. The way I see it, the technobabble in Star Trek: The Next Generation serves two purposes at this point. Firstly it serves as window dressing to reassure a certain subset of obsessive viewer that the Star Trek universe obeys its own scientific rules (regardless of whether or not those rules map on to anything remotely resembling any real world science) and makes the constructed world feel richer and more believable, which is what it’s always done. But now it fulfills a secondary role in the narrative, which is giving each member of the crew a chance to show off their unique skillsets: Beverly gets to solve a life sciences mystery while helping to save Reg’s life, Deanna offers her psychology expertise, Will and Worf offer Reg support and encouragement and Geordi, Miles and Data come up with a technical solution to save the day while helping guide Reg through his anxieties and apprehensions.…

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Shabcast 11

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Here’s Shabcast 11, featuring myself in conversation with Phil Sandifer.

This was recorded before Eruditorum Press went live, so events have overtaken it somewhat.

We discuss Doctor Who (before the start of Series 9), Susan, Gareth Roberts, Thomas Ligotti, God, Alan Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Jimmy Saville, Frank Miller, Vox Day (because Phil just can’t help himself), Hegel, Marxism, technological determinism, the Situationists, Engels, evolution, revolution, the Anthropocene extinction, Jonathan Jones, and the existential terrors of the Right.

But the main attractions of the podcast are our discussions of Hannibal (which had just ended when we taped), True Detective, and the life and crimes (artistic and otherwise) of John Nathan-Turner.

Chatting about Hannibal, we coin the term ‘hannibalism’, decide how to do Buffalo Bill in 2015, and come to the conclusion that Hannibal himself is a Miltonic Lucifer in a gnostic universe created by a deistic god and, possibly, Hannibal himself.

Be aware of spoilers and triggers (note the references above to Jimmy Saville and JN-T).

*

P.S. – Phil’s mention of “the fucking Thales idiot” refers to a passing right-wing pillock calling himself a ‘Philosopher DJ’ with whom Phil (and, to a lesser extent, I) had an argument on twitter, during which I (somewhat sarcastically) asked him what he thought about the tripartite anatomy of the Doctrine of the Notion to be found in Hegel’s Logic, whereupon he responded (after a few days) with some vague stuff about Hegel’s dialectic (which is a distinct thing), which is why Phil asks me about the tripartite anatomy of the Doctrine of the Notion during the course of the conversation (a question I don’t get around to properly answering, tragically for all of you Hegel-fans listening).…

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Ars Specula: Humans/Ex Machina (plus Mr Robot)

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Artificial (adj.)

  1. made by human skill
  2. imitation; substitute
  3. pretended; contrived; feigned
  4. lacking in spontaneity; affected
  5. (biology) relating to superficial characteristics not based on the interrelationships of organisms

— from Latin artificialis, “of or belonging to art,” from artificium (see artifice).


Artifice (n.)

  1. a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device
  2. crafty or subtle deception; trickery; guile
  3. ingenuity; skill; inventiveness

— from Latin ars, “art,” + facere, “do, make”

 

As Above, So Below

Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, is a slick and intellectual film that charts the journey of Caleb Smith, a computer programmer for a Googlish company who’s won a “lottery” that grants him an invitation to the northern retreat of the company’s founder, the grotesquely hypermasculine (and misogynist) Nathan Bateman. Nathan wants Caleb to perform a Turing Test over the course of one week on his latest creation, an android named Ava who seemingly possesses artificial intelligence. Each day, Caleb interrogates Ava in a numbered “session,” made apparent to us through the use of interstitial title cards. Caleb dutifully examines Ava, then reflects afterwards with Nathan, conversations which serve to flesh out some of the film’s themes, ranging from art to human nature.

Humans, on the other hand, is the first season of a British/American adaptation of a Swedish TV show, Real Humans. Set in the near future, “Synths” have become a ubiquitous labor force around the world, seemingly human but lacking the consciousness typically associated with “humanity.” Well, except for a select few, who are on the run from the ruthless hunter Hobb, a former engineer on the Synth project now employed by capitalist patrons. Humans charts the intersection of these conscious Synths with the dysfunctional Hawkins family, with a particular focus on the mother, Laura, the emotional heart of the show played brilliantly by Katherine Parkinson.

Even though both shows are rather different on the surface — one is practically an arthouse movie, the other an ongoing serialized drama that’s still got at least one more season up its sleeve — they do share much in common. In particular, the construction of their narratives reflect their conceptions of Artificial Intelligence.

In Ex Machina, the emphasis of artificial intelligence is on artifice and rationality, a thinking movie about thinking. It introduces its themes by posing the question of whether Ava can “pass” the Turing Test, which is typically conceived as an interaction between a human and a machine where the human never realizes they’re speaking with a machine. The very idea of the Turing Test is based in language, equating the manipulation of words and symbols with “intelligence” and hence sentience. Here, though, there’s a twist: Caleb is fully aware that Ava is a machine, which makes the challenge even greater – can she convince him of her sentience despite this disclosure?

This stripping away of artifice is reflected in the aesthetics of Ava’s special effects. We see through her limbs and torso that there’s machinery inside; Ava is made not just of metal, but glass and translucent plastic.…

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The Twin Book Launch

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Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6: The Peter Davison and Colin Baker Years.

You can get it in the following editions at these links:

US Print ($17.99)

US Kindle ($4.99)

UK Print (£13.99)

UK Kindle (£3.99)

Other eReaders/Smashwords ($4.99)

Here’s what this one’s got:

  • Revised editions of every TARDIS Eruditorum post from the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras.
  • A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea essay on the musical Time, an oft overlooked influence on Trial of a Time Lord, and the expansion of another one to include Box of Delights and Robin of Sherwood.
  • New essays in praise of Tegan, addressing the stuff left out of my Enlightenment essay, exactly and precisely whose fault the cancellation was, and a completely rewritten essay on “A Fix With Sontarans.” 
  • New Time Can Be Rewritten essays on Burning Heart, Dave Stone’s Doctor Who/quasi-Judge Dredd mashup, Peri and the Piscon Paradox, Nev Fountain’s two-Doctor timey wimey fish farce, and The Holy Terror, Rob Shearman’s first-ever Doctor Who story.
  • A pair of Now My Doctor essays looking at the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras as wholes.

And last but most certainly not least, a massive nearly forty page long interview with Rob Shearman about his work with Colin Baker at Big Finish and his genuine love for the Eric Saward era.

Thanks to our very own Jane Campbell for copyediting and transcribing the Shearman interview, and of course to the inimitable James Taylor, whose vintage covers are frankly better than the books; the back cover on this one features screenshots from a non-existent Doctor Who video game. He talks about his design process here, and it’s fascinating.

But most of all and as always, thank you. Your generosity supporting this site and buying these books is humbling and an honor. And thanks especially to those who spread the word, who recommend the books to friends, who leave reviews on Amazon, and without whom this entire mad scheme wouldn’t work. Thank you for your support, I hope you enjoy this one, and I’m pleased to say it’s not going to be our final release of 2015 either.…

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