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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 7: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

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A satisfying and well-constructed end, although as predicted not my favorite of the series. In terms of what the episode does, it is largely in keeping with what has gone before; its only significant thematic addition is the actual Raven King, who, continuing in the weird fiction theme introduced last episode, is a non-speaking character who simply strolls across the landscape of the story, makes a few alterations for reasons that are entirely his own, and exits. It’s striking and bold, a jarringly small and uncanny role for something that’s been built since the series’s start, but in a way that feels deliberate and earned.
Similarly bracing in scope is the opening scene, in which, in a very real sense, England falls to the magicians. The Parliamentary proceedings do a good job of expressing the scale of transformation sweeping across England in the wake of Strange’s unleashing of English magic, although I wonder if the series as a whole wouldn’t have been improved by finding time (and more importantly money) to show some of the Northern uprisings directly instead of reading about them off of telegrams, just to give the story a sense of scale. There’s something odd about seeing the Battle of Waterloo but not the uprisings that destabilize the entire socio-political structure of England.
There’s also some decisions I quibble about in terms of pacing and structuring the ending, most obviously the sudden reappearance of Lascelles during the denouement proper, which feels like a somewhat awkward solution to the problem of figuring out how to give the character a climactic comeuppance whereby he appears much later in the climax than is actually warranted. As loathsome a toad as Lascelles is – and his murder of Drawlight and confrontation with Childermass are both wonderful scenes – having him drop back into the plot at the moment the attempt to summon the Raven King under the name “nameless slave” goes awry and summons Stephen Black instead feels clumsy. (Harness tries to lampshade this by having him then be casually and cruelly dispatched by the Gentleman, and it helps by making the story at least mindful of Lascelle’s profound irrelevance at this point, but it doesn’t solve the problem.)
But despite occasional missteps, there’s a wealth of masterpiece sequences here. The Strange/Norrell confrontation, with Norrell finally, pathetically begging Strange not to laugh at him is a particular highlight, at once surprising and firmly rooted in the characters. Similarly adept is the final scene, with Childermass delivering a near direct address to camera as he explains that Strange and Norrell have ascended to a mythic status within the material landscape of England, having already been revealed not as magicians but as a spell woven by the Raven King.
It’s worth noting that much of this ending is original to Harness; the broad strokes of Norrell and Strange rescuing Arabella but remaining trapped in the Black Tower are all from the book, but there are major changes. Perhaps the biggest change is the destruction of all magical books in England, including the last remaining copy of Strange’s, so that the rewritten (and unreadable) Vinculus is the only book of magic left.
…

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Saturday Waffling (July 25, 2015)

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The Davison/Baker edits are continuing to come along nicely; I’m firmly in the midst of the extra essays, which are mostly going to end up being Colin Baker extra essays, just because I think that makes for a better book really.

The last Brief Treatise for the foreseeable will go up on Monday, and then “Name of the Doctor” on Tuesday. I’ve got the first sentence of my Hannibal/True Detective piece, but it’s not quite cohering yet. I know the broad strokes of what I want to say, but the shape is still proving elusive.

So, Super Nintendo Project for a bit after that. The next stretch of games, namely “those that came out in 1993,” will take us pretty much right up to Doctor Who Season Nine, at which point I’ll switch to that.

Unless the Patreon hits $325 by then. If it does, I’ll run something alongside S9 reviews. Maybe another stretch of Super Nintendo Project. Maybe something else.

Speaking of which, are there any topics that would get you to back the Patreon if you’re not already a backer? With Brief Treatise off the table for a bit, I’ve very much got a slot for a blog project open, as it were. I’m very much open to input on what to do, and if someone throws something intriguing out, I may well follow up on it.…

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Take the techniques that make it a masterwork and use them for changing the world. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Two: The Nine-Panel Grid, History and Superheroes)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen is defined by its intense formalism, and yet no rule within it ever goes entirely unbroken, including its most basic unit of form, the nine-panel grid.
Figure 837: The experimental panel layouts of Swamp Thing are a marked contrast
to the rigidity of Watchmen and its nine-panel grid. (From Saga of the Swamp Thing
#30, 1984)
As a page layout, it is an unusual one, especially for American comics. For one thing, the standard approach in American comics since the emergence of Neal Adams has been to break the strict grid with irregularly shaped panels that allow for dramatic emphasis. On Swamp Thing, for instance, Bissette and Totleben constantly create new layouts that blend trapazoidal panels, panels splayed diagonally across the page, and panels that cut into each other’s space. It’s as basic a technique for Swamp Thing as the nine-panel grid is for Watchmen. Gibbons completely foregoes this, consciously denying himself a tremendous swath of techniques typically used to draw emphasis to specific beats of the story.
Figure 838: Even when not working in a nine-panel
grid, Dave Gibbons’s style is tidy and straightforward.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and Tom
Ziuko, from Superman Annual 1985)
For another, the nine-panel grid means that there are a staggering number of panels per page. The first issue of Watchmen averages 7.5 panels per page. In contrast, Moore and Gibbons’s story for the 1985 Superman Annual, “For The Man Who Has Everything,” averages 5.7 panels, nearly two panels per page fewer. Similarly, in Swamp Thing #52, which came out the same month as Watchmen #1, Moore gives Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala an average of 4.7 panels per page. But in some ways the more revealing fact is that the highest panel count for a page of “For The Man Who Has Everything” is seven, and the highest for Swamp Thing #52 is six. An average page of Watchmen, in other words, has more panels than the most crowded page of most American comics. Of his past work, only V for Vendetta averages anything close to Watchmen’s dizzying panel count, and this can be explained at least in part by the fact that Warrior had a considerably larger page size than US comics. But even in British comics Moore’s panel count generally remained well below Watchmen’s level: Marvelman tended to be somewhere between six and seven panels per page on average, whereas Moore and Gibbons’s most beloved British collaboration, “Chrono-Cops,” averages six. But mere panel count is in many ways misleading. Out of the first issue’s twenty-six pages, nine are true nine-panel grids. More to the point, out of its 196 panels, 177 are 1/9th of a page or smaller. The standard unit of storytelling in Watchmen, in other words, is in effect the comics equivalent of a miniature – a two inch by three inch rectangle.
Figure 839: The one time in “For The Man Who Has Everything”
that Gibbons violates a panel border.
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“An Introductory Reader”: Ethics

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There was an urban legend going around awhile back about an entire intro class failing due to rampant, universal plagiarism, the kicker being the reveal that it was an ethics class. I’ve also heard a variant where criminals were getting caught illegally profiting off of resold ethics textbooks. That’s sort of what I was thinking about as I was working through this episode.

“Ethics” is, to my knowledge, considered a highlight of the fifth season. In Starlog‘s episode guide from the mid-1990s (which for the longest time was my primary insight into what conventional wisdom on any of these stories was) there was a little Starfleet emblem next to the title of this episode, an indication that this was one of the editors’ personal recommendations. Longtime readers of my guides will have doubtlessly picked up on my thoughts about this already: Typically when I go into this sort of background before I actually start analysing things it’s a sign that I disagree with it just about entirely. Well, I’m certainly not about to go against type now. I’ve tried to like this episode, many times, in fact. But I just can’t get passed the fact that the fundamental, well, ethical stand the story seems to be taking just seems so fundamentally wrongheaded. Not to mention how there’s some cratering characterization problems on display.

So I mean first of all, Worf gets paralyzed in the most humiliating way imaginable. He’s “distracted” because he was too busy thinking about losing to Deanna in poker? Seriously? That’s not a tragedy, that’s a black comedy farce, which would be one thing if that set the tone for the rest of the episode, but it doesn’t. And Worf is embarrassed about losing to Deanna in a game of skill and bluffing where she clearly played more strongly? That doesn’t strike me as the way an honour-bound warrior would react to losing to a worthy or superior opponent and sounds uncomfortably like Worf is just sexist (and given how he’s the favourite of the writing staff, particularly Ron Moore, that’s an avenue I’d rather not go down).

This naturally leads into the episode’s big “ethical” dilemma, and its big “ethical” screw-up. At least the subplot between Worf, Deanna, Alexander and Will (we’ll…come back to Will) basically amounts to an examination of paraplegia and the right to die. And Star Trek: The Next Generation handles both with all the trademark nuance it displayed in such classics as “Blood and Fire”, “Angel One” and “Violations”. I can’t actually think of a way this could have landed more spectacularly wrong had it been deliberately trying to: First of all equating disability with something like, say, total brain death is basically appalling from any angle you care to mention and completely goes against the moral of “The Masterpiece Society” from just a few weeks back. Even if you grant the analogy and buy this is a right to die situation, which I very much do not advise you do, the central philosophical standpoint here still doesn’t work, what with every other character yelling and screaming about how cowardly and shameful assisted suicide is, especially when it’s apparently a sacred tenet of Klingon society.…

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Comics Reviews (July 22nd, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I bought. Which, erm, wasn’t much.

Old Man Logan #3

This is increasingly just becoming a case of “old Wolverine wanders plotlessly through a variety of Battleworld realms,” which… is actually a genuinely awful premise for a comic, and I’m not sure why Marvel has decided to waste such talented creators on it. Within the confines of this there are some good moments; the scene with Boom Boom is absolutely lovely. But the overall package is astonishingly pointless.

Uncanny X-Men #35

A fun little issue that would have been quite pleasant had this denouement come at the pace Bendis wrote it for, but that is infuriating wheel-spinning at the pace this is actually playing out. I believe we’re three months now til the next issue of this? Stupid. In any case, a charming Goldballs-centric issue, and I continue to like Bendis’s take on the X-Men, not least because I’m seemingly dropping the line in All-New All-Different Marvel.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #16

This ends up salvaging the week, with one of the most Norse-feeling takes on Norse mythology that Marvel has done. I’m fascinated by the way in which Loki, over the course of this run, has been reconstituted so many times that they’re only sort of a singular character anymore, instead becoming, quite literally, a narrative force. With apocalypses all around, and Secret Wars really just being used as an excuse for one, the honing in towards a definitive statement on What Loki Is makes for genuinely interesting reading – I’m eager to see how this resolves next issue, which is more than I can say for a lot of Marvel right now, where I’m increasingly more interested in what’s next than what’s actually going on now.…

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“Demon War”: Power Play

, 4

OK, OK, we’ll cut to the chase. No-one is pretending “Power Play” is anything other than a rollicking action show. There’s really not a whole lot more under the surface here than that. But damn is it ever a good one. Michael Piller seemed to think this was a hollow, empty and effectively mediocre outing, but even if it’s not as openly provocative as Star Trek: The Next Generation can get on its best days, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot to love in “Power Play”.

The first obvious thing to say about it is that it’s plainly an actor showcase episode, and it’s very probably the best damn actor showcase episode this show ever does. It takes three of the best talents out of an already preternaturally talented cast, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner and Colm Meaney (and with the utmost respect to the other actors, all of whom I deeply adore, they are) and just lets them run completely wild for 45 minutes: Because of them (as well as the episode’s ample direction that works seamlessly with them), this never for one moment stops being positively gripping. Marina Sirtis is obviously the biggest draw here, and this is the moment she’s finally, at long, long last, allowed to come into her own and show us what she’s truly capable of. Now she finally has the chance to play the imperious hardass she’s always wanted to, and she absolutely owns and relishes every ounce and every second of it. As much as Marina Sirtis will say she appreciated and respected Deanna Troi’s empathy as a virtue and as an acting challenge, there’s just no way she’s not having a total blast here. We’re frankly sorry when it’s all over.

Colm Meaney gets to show off his range a little differently. His character starts off more of the muscle of the team and he’s perfectly capable of playing a hardened hired thug archetype, but the scripts give him these little moments where Miles’ personality starts to reassert itself a bit, possibly because it’s his technical know-how that’s crucial to the convicts’ plot. This I suppose makes him probably the most interesting of the three from a character development standpoint, and Meaney’s good at working his material so the little flashes of Miles come across as warped, twisted distortions rather than moments of actual sympathy: Even though he may superficially appear to have more dimensions than his co-conspirators, he’s still very much a hardened heel and we’re meant to never lose site of that. Brent Spiner, meanwhile, is just absolutely fucking terrifying: He’s back in his element playing a psychopath, but this is still a true challenge for him, as he has to make sure his character here isn’t too reminiscent of Lore (something Spiner often admits and comments on when talking about this episode). Of course, he succeeds well beyond the point of comfort.

As much as this is unquestionably Sirtis, Spiner and Meaney’s hour, the rest of the cast do get some important bits.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.09: Blackwater

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State of Play


The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister
Ships of King’s Landing: Davos Seaworth
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
Burning Hearts of King’s Landing: Stannis Baratheon
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
Harrenhal, Pyke, Winterfell, the Wall, and Qarth are all empty. 
The episode is in one part running fifty-one minutes and set in King’s Landing; it is in seventeen sections. The first section runs three minutes; the opening image is of black water and a ship moving across it. The second runs two minutes; the transition is by dialogue, from Davos’s son speaking of his captain to Tyrion, his counterpart in King’s Landing. The third runs two minutes; the transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei Lannister. The fourth runs four minutes; the transition is by music, from Cersei to men singing “The Rains of Castamere.” The fifth runs three minutes; the transition is by sound, the bells warning of Stannis’s arrival tolling over both scenes. The sixth runs one minute; the transition is by equivalency, from Tyrion to Davos. The seventh runs three minutes; the transition is by dialogue, from Stannis’s fleet to Bronn talking about ships. The eighth runs two minutes; the transition is by image, from a fire within the Red Keep to fires burning outside. The ninth runs two minutes; the transition is by family, from Tyrion and Joffrey to Cersei. The tenth runs five minutes; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Tyrion and Joffrey. The eleventh runs four minutes; the transition is by family, from Tyrion and Joffrey to Cersei. The twelfth runs three minutes; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Tyrion and Joffrey. The thirteenth runs three minutes; the transition is by family, from Lancel to Cersei. The fourteenth runs seven minutes; the transition is by hard cut, from Cersei to the combat outside. The fifteenth runs four minutes; the transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei. The sixteenth runs two minutes; the transition is by image, from the Hound walking out Sansa’s door to Tyrion’s men opening the passage out of the city. The seventeenth runs three minutes; the transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei. It features the death of countless people. The final image is of Cersei hugging Tommen as Tywin announces that he has solved a riddle whose answer is chess.
Analysis

As with the first season, the ninth episode proves to be the point of the entire exercise. Once again, it is a masterpiece. And yet the two episodes could not be more different. Baelor may have had one trick that outdid them all, but worked because it was a succession of climaxes that careened towards Ned’s death. This, on the other hand, is an ostentatious set piece. “Baelor” is designed to seal the deal – it shows off all the show’s strengths one by one, then tops them all.
…

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“I can’t seem to forget”: Conundrum

, 4

Well it’s an interesting one indeed.

“Conundrum” is first off incredibly deceptive. On paper it sounds for all the world like one of the most stock things Star Trek: The Next Generation has ever done and a prime example of a show running on empty: I mean come on, really? An amnesia story? For real? But in truth this is yet another fifth season highlight and a prime example of how the show has never been stronger than it is now. The first clue is that this isn’t actually your typical amnesia story,which would have involved either a mysterious hero wandering into an unfamiliar setting where we have to learn about their past alongside them or a tragic accident where the supporting cast has to try and jog the memory of the amnesiac protagonist in a forced, strangled attempt to wring hollow drama out of the show’s premise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation can’t do either of those plots, not just for the eminently sensible reason that they’re both dumb and hackneyed ideas, but also because its narrative structure would preclude that. The amnesia is just a plot device to get at the heart of what “Conundrum” is actually trying to look at, which turns out to be several different interesting things. The original idea for the submission, according to Michael Piller, was the concept of mentally reprogramming people to be soldiers by manipulating their memories and sense of identity, and thus that it was a critique of militarism and the military-industrial complex. Piller feels “Conundrum” doesn’t do justice to the original pitch and he’s right to make that criticism as that’s not quite what this story is (though there’s a bit of that at the end), but that doesn’t mean the episode as aired is any weaker as a result. If anything, this just allows it to get even more clever and fascinating.

And anyway, the first key concept “Conundrum” is exploring does actually tie somewhat into the original pitch: What would happen, the story is asking, if you had all the conscious mental signposts of how you defined your identity stripped away from you? What parts of you would remain, and would those parts still be you? The easy answer is yes, as even though Kieron MacDuff puts on a convincing ruse, the Enterprise crew simply cannot accept his evidence that they’re cold-blooded killers. But there’s a further thread to examine here, several, in fact. Through this, “Conundrum” is also making a statement about what our identities actually are and where precisely they lay-As important as the context of our life experiences are (they’ve doubtlessly shaped the Enterprise crew even when they can’t consciously remember them, after all), our innate personhood goes beyond that.

I’m not trying to tread into Cartesianism here, but you can imagine a situation where you might hold similar beliefs and make similar decisions even if your life turned out differently. You would be a different person of course, but not necessarily an unrecognisable one.…

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Variant Iterations

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“I can’t think why you would want to spend so much time here Doctor,” said Felix, “it seems a very odd place to choose as a regular holiday destination.”

“I think it’s rather pleasant,” said the Doctor brightly, “especially since we cleared out the former management.”

“The former management?” asked Felix.

“Oh, Drumlins Westmore tried to enclose this place a little while ago,” said the Doctor.

“Drumlins Westmore?  Sounds like a British general.  General Sir George Drumlins-Westmore OBE.”

“Ha!  No, it’s a corporation.  The Drumlins Westmore Interplanetary News and Entertainment Media Group.  Or something like that.  There’s probably an Inc in there too somewhere.  They set up a department on one of their office worlds devoted entirely to fiction.  Hired loads of struggling wannabe authors.  Lured them in with promises of agents and publishing contracts and regular meals.”

“You mean they started publishing novels?  They created a sort of novel factory?”

“No, they didn’t publish anything.  They got the writers to spend all day writing stories featuring brilliant, dynamic, hyper-capable, unbeatable employees of the Drumlins Westmore Corporation.  Heroic corporate accountants and lawyers and lobbyists and marketing executives.   Capitalist atlases who never faltered in their noble determination to cure all of society’s ills by privatising everything… into the hands of Drumlins Westmore, naturally.  The writers took to it with depressing ease and speed.  As a rule, the more principled a writer, the quicker they accomodated themselves to the work.  You should’ve heard the byzantine self-justifications I had to listen to.  Anyway, the fictional Drumlins Westmore employees from the stories all appeared here as a matter of course.  And, also as a matter of course, they immediately set about taking over.  It worked too.  Effectively, Drumlins Westmore pulled off a hostile takeover of the Land of Fiction.”

“But that’s all over now?” asked Felix.

“Oh yes,” laughed the Doctor, grinning so widely Felix thought her head was about to split in two, “we couldn’t be having that sort of thing now could we?”

They walked and the Doctor expounded.

“It’s the people you meet here, you see.  That’s why I keep coming back.  That and a strange feeling I get… a feeling of coming home.  But in a good way.”

“It doesn’t seem entirely safe here,” said Felix, “even without those Drumlins and Westmore gentlemen.”

Felix looked around warily, as if expecting a corporate accountant or a marketing executive to leap out at him and attack.

He was still somewhat on edge after half an hour of hiding behind a rock from a platoon of huge robotic tripods.  He and the Doctor had spied them in the far distance.  The Doctor had insisted they duck out of sight, just in case.  Even so, she had leaned around the rocks and spied on the things with her telescope.  Felix had taken a turn.  Through the telescope he saw them, metallic tendrils flailing from the bulbous bodies suspended at the tops of their tall and jointed legs.  They were lumbering towards a far-off cluster of settlements connected by rivers, backed by gorges, and interspersed with farmland filled with grazing sheep.…

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 6: The Black Tower

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FUCKING RAVENS EVERYWHERE
My favorite episode to date, and I suspect it will remain so. I also suspect I’ll end up out of sync with the bulk of other reviews here. Much as I found “Arabella” to be a bit blandly straightforward compared to the (in almost everyone else’s eyes overly) expository and theme-heavy  “All the Mirrors of the World,” I will end up in the minority for my love of “The Black Tower.” In turn, I suspect I’m going to be a bit let down by the denouement, simply because it’s going to revert more towards plot than theme and not provide anything quite like the giddy thrill of this episode’s central moment for me. No matter; for my money, this is comparable to “Kill the Moon” in its genius, and it establishes Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell as a genuine classic of What The BBC Is For. 
It is, for what it’s worth, and I think the answer to this is “very little unless you are the sort of person who is seriously considering openly declaring himself a Peter Harness fan and injecting some of his critical capital into the claim that he’s one of the greatest writers in British television right this second,” not quite as good as Kill the Moon. This is, I think, mainly down to direction. Toby Haynes is excellent, but he is very slightly on the wrong side of a stylistic evolution. You can see it in the conclusion – the Restoration of English Magic itself – which is ever so slightly too naturalist. To my mind, what’s Very Interesting In Prestige Television right now is the the sort of artifice-heavy subjective trickery that people like Nick Hurran and Paul Wilmshurst have been bringing to the style – the sort of thing that’s even more embraced by Hannibal and Mr. Robot right now. And the big “ravens explode everywhere” moment, I can’t help but feel, needed a bit more of the uncanniness that style brings. Haynes broke ground with this televisual style five years ago with “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang,” and those episodes remain classics, but there have been aesthetic developments since that would have been helpful here. 
Anyway, there’s my utterly minor nitpick for the die-hards. Now for the fun bits. 
One of the dualisms central to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been the Enlightenment rationality of Mr. Norrell and the Romanticism of Jonathan Strange. But the actual content of Strange’s Romanticism has not really been explored much. Here that changes with wondrous decisiveness, with an episode that immediately focuses on Strange as a Romantic figure (indeed, he’s, hilariously, someone’s rebound after Lord Byron), foregrounding the act of visionary madness.
Meanwhile, the mythology of the Raven King starts to flesh out in earnest. This began to be alluded to last episode, with its suggestion of the Raven King as a figure of populist uprising, but here it moves center stage as the Raven King’s restoration (entextualized within the body by Vinculus) moves back into the foreground.
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