Eruditorum Press

Christmas and Easter nihilists

“Measure of a Non-Human”: I, Borg

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The Borg are somewhat unique in the pantheon of Star Trek species. While not the first to be portrayed as villainous or antagonistic, they are the first to be designed explicitly to fill that role from the beginning, and nothing else (or at least the first successful attempt at this, given the Ferengi are in some ways a rough draft of the Borg). In spite of the kind of stereotypical “planet of hats” jokes, every other alien culture in Star Trek, even the Original Series Klingons, was created to have more than one facet about them. Not the Borg though: They were very clearly designed to be an enemy the crew couldn’t debate or reason with intellectually, only fight with old-fashioned weapons and pray they could run away from relatively unscathed.

You can read this as beneficial or harmful depending on your perspective. One way you might defend this is to argue that, as such fitting metaphors for the engines of capitalism, it’s good that the Borg are a faceless evil who exist just to get blown apart by phaser blasts. After all, you’d want no quarter for the oppressing hegemony: It’s irresponsible to borderline collaborator levels to portray the kind of captailism the Borg represent as anything other than utterly irredeemable. However there’s also the small fact that these are sentient beings, not monsters you can take pot-shots at in low-rent action sci-fi, and it’s no less reactionary when Star Trek turns the Borg into their version of cannon fodder to satiate the bloodlust of a certain subset of its fanbase who really just wants brainless military science fiction where they can run through corridors shooting things. This is, for example, pretty much the default mode of depicting the Borg from about 1996 onwards, and it’s a hard sell to claim that did Star Trek any real favours.

So in that sense “I, Borg” is an important and necessary story to do. By putting a face to the faceless enemy it humanizes them (literally, in Hugh’s case) and points out the insularity and shortsightedness bound up in all forms of hate. Michael Piller is quit right to extol the virtues of this episode on that count, and to say this is a very Star Trek message to deliver. But as much as this episode might get praised for those reasons, it’s not quite as simple as some might want it to be and we can’t, in my opinion, go patting ourselves on the back for a job well done just yet. “I, Borg” for me is something of an inverse of “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend”, and kind of an outlier in my history with Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole. While those were episodes I always remembered strongly that turned out to be nowhere near as good as I though they were, this is a story that’s always been pretty iconic for me and that I can fully understand why it gets the praise it does…But I just can’t bring myself to like it and have never been able to.…

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Comics Reviews (August 5th, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I bought, although I should probably buy fewer comics.

Guardians of Knowhere #2

Bendis’s run on Guardians has been a touch hit and miss for me, and that’s translating poorly to the Secret Warsified Guardians. The crux of the problem here is that this book is about the nature/identity of Yotat, a new character, and his relationship to Knowhere, the Celestial head acting as Battleworld’s moon. The answer appears to be that he’s a Peter Quill alternate, but I couldn’t articulate a reason I’m supposed to care. It’s the sort of sloppy book that includes numerous mentions of a character called Mantis, and even dialogue addressed towards Mantis, but that by the end of I couldn’t tell you who Mantis is. She (I think) appears on a couple of panels but gets no facetime, and is I think killed at the end? Maybe?

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #3

I think I’m just kinda bored and done with Slott on Spider-Man.

Ultimate End #4

Apparently the Ultimate Universe has one issue until it’s over. I assume the premise of this book will be clear by then. This issue does not turn out to include a barely surviving Miles Morales atop a pile of dead heroes. Or, in fact, a pile of dead heroes. Or, in fact, Miles, except in one panel. Although he’s apparently important, for reasons that might be explained along with the premise of this book. There’s even a real chance that it will be a satisfying issue when all is said and done. But this series is a hot mess.

Blackcross #5

Ellis has really been fond of backloading his series recently, establishing the premise late in the books. Charitably, this means they read better in trade, but in this case the premise just feels like Ellis-by-numbers for this particular period in his career – a horror version of what he did in Supreme: Blue Rose without any of the conceptual grandeur that made that book’s half-revealing tone sing. Here’s the big explanation, next issue is the big fight, and the previous four issues were… the big tease? I dunno. Charitably, a minor work in Ellis’s career.

Darth Vader #8

Fun; Aphra has some great bits, Vader’s in an interesting bind, and I’m still buying a Star Wars comic for no reason other than enjoying watching the way the writer’s mind works, which is a silly reason to buy a comic, but then, at the end of the day spending $3.99 for most comics is silly.

The Wicked & The Divine #13

Man, this is a tough one to review, because it’s a well-executed and very on-point comic about real issues, and any criticism of the book thus feels like a criticism of doing good work about those issues. It’s a skilled done-in-one. But… I dunno. Ultimately, I’ve followed the story of online abuse and particularly harassment of women pretty closely for a few years now, and a well-done but ultimately straightforward story about it doesn’t do a ton for me.…

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“I am not worth this coil that’s made for me”: Cost of Living, Imaginary Friend

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The episodes I look at for this project pretty unfailingly come in one of three forms. Bad episodes I know are bad but which I may or may not be fuzzy on the details of precisely why, good episodes I know are good because of longstanding vivid memories I have of them and episodes I have next to no recollection of whatsoever. “Cost of Living” and “Imaginary Friend” mark something an interesting milestone in this respect because they’re none of those things: Sadly, this is probably the first time (or at least one of the rare instances in which) a story that brought me a lot of joy in the past turned out to be nowhere remotely near as good as I remembered.

This essay is, I should mention, something of a strange one for me. Normally when I do these multiple episode recap-type posts I know in advance which episodes I’m going to be lumping together and what central shared theme I’m going to hang them on. This gives me time to schedule my watching and writing so I’m not down to the wire trying to fit everything in at the last minute. That, uh, didn’t happen the week I was writing this: I had initially planned to give each of these episodes their own posts as I had fond memories of both I wanted to reflect on. As it turned out…They both suck. And they both suck for dully pedestrian and identikit reasons. So I’ll freely admit this is a rough sort of cut-and-paste job, but I guess this means you now have the opportunity to see how my writing style adapts to contingencies.

I’ll run down the gamut of both episodes and the things I was expecting to talk about each of them. What I always remembered about “Cost of Living” is Lwaxana Troi’s interactions with Alexander. I remember her coming in, finding him out of sorts and immediately bonding with him and showing him the multitude of life’s little joys and wonders through the medium of mud baths. A great many mud baths. This was traditionally my favourite Lwaxana Troi story, after “Haven” and “Dark Page”: I always thought this episode was a terrific showcase for the more whimsical, breezy and inspirational sides to her character and I thought she made a delightful comparison to Alexander, someone who’s trying to find out what it means to be a kid in a family dynamic that doesn’t have any idea either. And all of those things are indeed there-The episode simply sings whenever Lwaxana and Alexander are onscreen together, and the first mud bath scene in particular, where Lwaxana tells Alexander about the “hundreds of little people” who live inside all of us “waiting for just the right moment to come out and save us from ourselves” is flat-out one of the greatest single lines of dialog in the show to date, at least from her.…

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Appeals to Authority

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Following the stoically mute Karkus, Felix and the Doctor found themselves in a seemingly endless grey corridor.  It felt like miles of the same tiny patch of space, extruded into infinity. 

“Why do we spend so much of our time in corridors?” asked Felix.

“Because we spend so much of our time fighting institutionalised hierarchies,” said the Doctor, “and institutionalised hierarchies depend upon armed force and bureaucracy.  Both of which require staff, and therefore also functional premises in which staff can operate.”

“Oh,” said Felix, “yes, I see.”

He didn’t pursue it.  Things had gotten quite socratic enough today already.

*

At the Doctor’s command, the Karkus had demanded admittance to the castle.  The great door had swung open for him, a grudging note in the creaking of its iron hinges.  The Doctor had wanted to have a few words with whatever jobsworth owned the voice from behind the door, but there was nobody there when she looked.

“Obviously such a minor character he never even got a physical description,” she said, “which explains the insecurity.”

Then she had turned to the Karkus and demanded that he tell her about the prison.  He had tried to deny knowledge, but so half-heartedly and guiltily that it was almost funny.  It took little more than a sigh of irritation from his new Mistress to make him crack.

“Lead us there,” the Doctor had commanded.

So the strange little band had made their way into the dark corridors of the castle.  They passed through a lazily-planned labyrinth, past cells in which razor sharp pendula depended menacingly over tables with shackles at each corner, past a courtyard in which a pair of feet stuck out from beneath a gigantic plumed helmet…

“How did you know he was involved in the prison?” Felix asked the Doctor.

“Just the sort of thing he’d be involved in… until the heroine turns up and makes him come over to the goodies.”

“Do these fictional people not have free will?” asked Felix.

“Well, that’s a tricky one,” said the Doctor.  “It could be argued we only have free will because all possible choices come true in some world or another.  Brigadiers and Brigade-Leaders, you know.”  (Felix didn’t, but he let it pass.)  “The people of the Land of Fiction have their variant iterations, just as we have ours.  But they also have creators.”

“So do we have a Creator,” said Felix.

“That’s debateable,” said the Doctor, “but I think a nice Catholic boy like you would want to say that our notional Creator gives us free will, yes?”

“That’s what the Church tells us,” said Felix.

“Is that an appeal to authority?” asked the Doctor.

“No,” said Felix, slightly stung, “I’m simply citing wisdom with which I happen to agree.”

“Well, in any case, the creators of fictional people definitely don’t allow them free will.  They make them do as they’re told.  They leave them no choice.  But then there are those variant iterations.  Re-interpreptations.  Reboots.  And then there’s fan-fic, of course. …

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More Trouble

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There’s a play called Sir Thomas More.  It is never performed, despite having bits in it written by Shakespeare.  Every Shakespeare play is performed.  Even the rubbish ones.  Except Sir Thomas More.  Sir Thomas More is never performed, ever.  Not any more.

Why?

Actually, in academia and the theatre world, it is well known how the play spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in its wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in Sir Thomas More, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

Basically, anyone who has ever seen Sir Thomas More performed has gone insane.  (I’m not sure how the actors managed to stage it, but there you go.  Perhaps actors are immune for some reason.)

But it’s worse than that.  Anyone who has even read the whole thing in its entirety has gone insane.

There are asylums stuffed with academics, Shakespeare scholars, students of Early Modern drama… all slavering and gibbering and banging their heads against their rubber-padded walls, chewing off their own fingers, sitting in their own faeces and happily eating it, because of this play.  There are multiple known cases of people slaughtered (usually with screwdrivers for some unfathomable reason) by people who have seen or read Sir Thomas More and immediately gone on wild-eyed killing sprees.

Most people, of course, have only read the Shakespeare bits.  Because no other dramatist of his time was any good at all.  But even reading a part of this play can drive one partially insane.  For instance, there are many who will attempt to claim that Shakespeare’s scenes in the play constitute a message of humanistic tolerance for refugees.  In the scene, More attempts to reason with a xenophobic crowd who are hellbent on driving back some asylum seekers.  More asks the crowd to imagine themselves in the position of the refugees and… shit I nearly did it myself there.  This insanity in insidious.  The mere iteration of the intact Shakespearean contribution integrated into the play instantly insinuates itself into my interiority and instigates incipient irrationality which instantiates itself into the imagination and iii iiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…….

Sorry.  I’m back now.

Yeah, as I was saying.  Otherwise sensible people will i-i-imagine that Shakespeare is making a humanistic plea for tolerance of strangers, which can then be adopted sentimentally by modern liberals.  Actually, what he’s doing is demonstrating the shit ignorance and fuck selfishness of ordinary people, the mob, who need to be lectured on basic Christian morals by Sir Thomas fucking More… who was, in the real world, a religious bigot and fanatic who persecuted and tortured people he disagreed with. …

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The Bloody Pantomime In Which You Have Enslaved Yourselves (Lemmings)

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They move ceaselessly forward. Always forward. They cannot do anything else; their nature is set. At best they may be acted upon by outside influences, but still they are like water. They may be diverted and rerouted, but there is nothing that actually stops the flow. They will walk until they drown.
It is the same with us, really. Time’s riptide pulls us all under, drowning us all beneath the waterline of history. We are perhaps more complex than the green-haired mascots of Psygnosis’s 1991 multiplatform classic, occasionally making what appears very much like a choice. But our choice is just the removal of all the other options; We are set within a system of rules and defined by outside influences. We are not protagonists; not individual avatars of some demiurgic player-souls. We are but part of the flock, buffeted by outside forces.
(And yet the outside forces cannot, strictly speaking, be described as “causal.” The path of history’s flow is defined and knowable, and yet nobody actually follows it with any precision. To use a specific example, we might successfully root the development of the masculine “gamer” identity in the Sega Genesis’s attempt to counter Nintendo’s family marketing with a male-skewing notion of coolness, but it is not as though every Genesis household spawned a Gamergate supporter, or as though there are no misogynistic fuckheads who owned a SNES.)
Perhaps one separates from the crowd. Often this is accomplished by literally elevating him above the rest, designating him with two of the three (or arguably four) permanent traits, namely Climber and Floater, which allow him to scale walls and subsequently parachute down from great heights. This newly minted ubervole will be forever marked as such, appearing under the cursor as “Athlete.” He will strike out and explore the vast landscape, reshaping it to whims that he no doubt imagines are his own. 
But this great reshaping’s only purpose is, in the end, to provide the path that the crowd shall flow through, so that his individuality is subsequently lost in the tide that follows. Indeed, the functions of reshaping –  Builder, Digger, Miner, and Basher – are all temporary roles. When the tasks are completed, whoever performed them simply recedes back to the faceless crowd, reclaiming their identity as “Walker.” The landscape has no author. Nobody made it this way. It simply is. 
More chilling is what is revealed about the the landscape itself when it is altered. Once it has been Dug or Mined or Bashed, or even Blasted, it is simply removed, and the shadows and texture remain fixed around it. For all the intricate play of light and shadows with which it is rendered, it proves flat, an illusion that can be torn through and scraped off. Individual points of landscape may be resistant to destruction or fatal to the touch, but it is all the same substance – a trompe l’oeil painted upon the world. 
This is the state of things: a world designed only so that a mass of people can flow deterministically through it, and a mass of people who exist only to sluice within it.
…

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“Love the one you’re with”: The Perfect Mate

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It’s fuck-awful. It’s “Elaan of Troyius” again. Famke Janssen, who would appear alongside Patrick Stewart again in the X-Men movies, was also Rick Berman and Michael Piller’s first choice to play Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but she turned them down fearing she’d grow complacent as an actor despite the opportunity. Even so, Janssen is herself responsible for redefining the Trill as we will soon know them, as it’s the spots on Kamala’s neck that will go on to be Jadzia’s signature look once the production team realised giving Terry Farrell Odan’s headpiece from “The Host” would be a crime against humanity (much like the rest of “The Host”) and Rick Berman told Michael Westmore “just give her spots like we gave Famke”. Speaking of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Max Grodénchik plays a Ferengi in this episode, and he too will get cast on that show next year as Rom.

I have now exhausted literally all of the erudition it is possible to glean from “The Perfect Mate”.

Because I have an essay’s worth of space to fill, however, I need to think of something to talk about. One solution might be to talk about Jadzia Dax, given how many links to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and her character in particular there are this week. There is an earnest danger in doing that, however: At the very least ever since I spent the bulk of “Ensign Ro” talking about the world-building that episode puts in place instead of the episode itself, which I now consider to be a catastrophic mistake on my part, I’ve sensed a overwhelming, and perhaps inevitable, desire to move on to the fourth Star Trek as quickly as possible. This is a bit heartbreaking for me though, because as much as I adore the show we’re about to see in less than a year’s time, it’s Star Trek: The Next Generation that’s my first and debatably still my greatest love, and I don’t want its legacy on Vaka Rangi to be entirely one of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential.

I grant there’s a great deal of that, however. A whole bunch more than I remember, in fact. This season in particular is unbelievably more rocky than my memory affords it (though not as much as the fourth season). Ironically, it’s the much-maligned first season that’s still standing out as the strongest and most consistently solid and on-target, even though this one has had a higher percentage of my favourite episodes and season six is looking pretty damn excellent from where I sit now. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be the soundest and most put-together show with the strongest sense of identity, ethics and storytelling technique this blog has looked at, but I’d definitely say it’s the third (since you’re going to ask, or at least wonder, the first two for my money are Original Dirty Pair and Miami Vice, respectively).…

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Viva Hate (Shabcast 9)

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This month, the Shabogan Graffiti Podcast sinks happily into a morass of bile and spleen.

I’m joined by the wonderful Holly B – star of the City of the Dead podcast, Pex Lives guest appearances and her own blog – for a gargantuan complaining session, an epic voyage into annoyance that goes on for so long I had to split it into two parts.  Hate is fertile ground.

Download or listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

In Part 1 we cover Doctor Who that we detest.  We both choose victims from both classic and new Who.

In Part 2 we move on to non-Who hates and lambast and villify a movie each (two of the most popular, lauded and loved movies of recent years as it happens – ha!).  We round things off by indulging in rants about pet hates.  I go for a soft target, Holly for a tougher one.

No clues.  You have to listen.

Proud of this one.  Lots of fun to record and (I hope) listen to.  And much credit must go to Holly who not only came up with the idea for the episode but also the structure of the discussion.

PS – This episode also features a cameo return appearance by a popular Shabcast star of the past.  But again, no clues.

PPS – Very excited about forthcoming Shabcasts.  Returning guests and new ones.  Great topics.  

As always, thanks for listening.  You’re peaches, all of you. 

(Except you.  Yes, you.  You know who you are.)…

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Saturday Waffling (August 1st, 2015)

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So, you may recall a month or two ago when I ran a big, juicy story on how the website Doctor Who Online was ripping off advertisers. And that got me thinking about my own advertising, and about how I’d much rather be offering advertising to other small businesses within the fan/geek community than selling them via Google and hosting loads of crap ads using phrases like “one weird trick” and “professors hate him” unironically.

So I’m pleased to announce that I’ve switched advertising over to Project Wonderful, an advertising network created by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics/Squirrel Girl fame, and working mostly among webcomics and other independent websites. Which means that you, yes you, can now easily advertise on my site.

Ads are bid-based, so they cost, basically, as much as people are willing to pay for it. The ads helpfully self-advertise how much outbidding the current ad would cost you, and if you click on the text beneath the ads they’ll give you nice and easy directions on how to advertise. I get more page views per day than Doctor Who Online, and charge a fraction of the price for ads. So please, if you’ve got something you want to advertise, go ahead and do it. My guess is it’ll only cost you a couple bucks a day.

As for things to discuss, I admit that I’m more than slightly bemused and intrigued by Colin Baker’s somewhat indecorous feud with Doctor Who Magazine over the practice of publishing ranked lists of things (his feelings are described in detail towards the top of his site), not least because I’ve settled on the ranked list as the house style for reviews here. And while I admit my view is roughly “I feel like Colin Baker should be more concerned about the fact that his tenure in Doctor Who asked the audience to accept a domestic abuser as a sympathetic protagonist than about the hurt feelings of whoever comes in last in a fan survey,” it seems an interesting enough thing to discuss. So, anyone feel like stepping up and defending Baker’s position that the least popular members of a set should be spared the indignity of coming in last in fan polls? Or, if you want the broader philosophical topic, bad reviews: what’s the point of them?

We’re back on Monday with the start of the next round of The Super Nintendo Project. See you the.…

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Round and Round

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Jeremy Corbyn is a decent man, and he’s closer to my viewpoint that just about anybody else in mainstream politics, but he’s still basically just a moderate Social Democrat.  The media buzz about him being “hard Left” is ludicrous nonsense.   It’s a sign of the media’s extreme Right-wing agenda/viewpoint, a centre-ground shifted to the Right beyond anything known since the early 20th century, and the widespread (and very consciously inculcated) political illiteracy that now pervades the UK like a plague.

I think Corbyn’s usefulness lies almost entirely in the opportunity he presents for us to push the conversation in certain ways.  I will push him over the other candidates, and I will support the good stuff he says and does as Labour leader (if elected) because it’d be insane to do anything else.  The opportunity for propaganda is itself reason to do this.  The subsequent opportunity for anti-reformist, anti-Labour propaganda when Corbyn sells out – because he will, make no mistake… they always do, the structural logic of the situation makes that inevitable – will be worth having too, speaking as a revolutionary.

The Labour Party will be relieved to learn that I have no intention of practicing entryism.  I will not be paying them £3 for the chance to vote for Corbyn.  I have no illusions about Corbyn, or the Labour Party, or what Corbyn can do with the Labour Party, or Labour’s chances of winning in 2020 whoever’s leading it.  The last thing Corbyn needs is people joining, voting for him, getting him elected, and then never getting further involved in activism, or in helping him push the party leftwards (which is what will happen with the new members). 

In many ways, Liz Kendall is a much better leadership prospect for the ‘really-existing Labour Party’.  Corbyn is the candidate for people like Owen Jones, who have an essentially fantasy-based idea of what the Labour Party is.  It’s a machine for controlling and containing the Left and Social Democracy.  There’s an idea out there that the Labour leaders are cowed into abandoning Left-wing principles by the media.  Bollocks.  You don’t climb the Labour Party’s internal greasy pole unless you are, in real terms, very very Right-wing indeed.  Labour is a thoroughly – even fanatically – neoliberal, atlanticist party which provides a kind of kennel for those elements who would otherwise be dangerously homeless.  Its main purpose it to sidetrack people who want Social Democratic policies, and channel them safely into a reformist project that is, essentially, a neverending roundalay.  Moderate the slogans to get elected.  Get elected.  Play it safe.  Get voted out when playing it safe lays you open to the vagaries of an unchallenged capitalist system.  Then play it safe to get elected again.  ‘Twas ever thus, to an extent, but especially since the Blair revolution, when the Labour Party was essentially remodelled into a slick, larger-membership, higher-profile version of the SDP.

I am so sick of the Labour Left’s delusions about what can be achieved with this rigged game. …

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