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“Whatever their hopes and longings”: Unification I

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It’s almost facile, trivial, in fact, to read “Unification”. The fandom narrative is both obvious and trite: The unification of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or to be more precise, their fans. Collectively the first and second parts of a three-part 25th Anniversary gala celebration that will heal once and for all the acrimonious rift in Star Trek fandom that has existed since 1986, or so the story goes. In truth, this is all merely comforting platitudes designed to hide a reality deeply uncomfortable to Trekkers; that there is no such thing as a Star Trek fan. There are only fans of specific incarnations and philosophies of the meta-work, something that the looming premier of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is only going to highlight all the more starkly.

Those classical Star Trek fans, who knew everything about everything and everybody, are now so small a minority as to be statistically irrelevant. Perhaps things are beginning to swing back to the other pole these days in the age of Netflix and binge watching, but this was most certainly the state of affairs in 1991. I know this as well as I can know anything because I was there. I was fully present and entirely swept up in the Star Trek 25th Anniversary fervor. A deeply strange celebration for me personally, I should add, as I knew next to nothing about the thing that was actually turning 25, and, to be honest, I didn’t much care to learn. All I knew was that the show I sat in front of the TV set transfixed by late at night was now suddenly everywhere and everyone I knew was talking about it.

We’ve of course established that Star Trek: The Next Generation was never a cult show, but even by its admittedly lofty standards things had definitely been kicked into high gear. Some of this is on me, as I never really talked about this sort of thing with other people (for the simple fact that I had nobody else to talk about it with: I don’t mean the show was unpopular, I mean I had no neighbours and my only friends were the people I was related to). But even so, I do seem to recall that this was the first time I started to become aware of Star Trek: The Next Generation existing as kind of large-scale media phenomenon-As if from nothing, there were suddenly Star Trek: The Next Generation toys showing up on the shelves of the local five-and-dime, which filled me with equal parts delight and astonishment. This was also around the time I started to get entertainment industry magazines like Starlog, and Star Trek: The Next Generation was the only thing on anybody’s mind. It felt exciting and affirmational to be a part of something that so many people clearly had so much affection for.…

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Comics Reviews (July 1st, 2015)

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Part One: Comics

From worst to best of what I voluntarily paid money for.

Secret Wars #4

It’s not even that it’s a bad comic. It’s just that, well, at this point it’s become impossible to read this comic as a separate phenomenon from the overall realignment of Marvel comics (see part two of this post). Here we have what is in effect a brutal rejection of an entire line of thought in Marvel comics that has been going for several years – the Cyclops-as-Revolutionary angle. The comic is explicitly configured to allow Cyclops’s vision of fiery rebirth a moment in the sunlight and then to cut it down. Specifically in favor of a Reed vs Doom story. Although with the knowledge that both X-Men and Fantastic Four are being consciously downplayed within Marvel right now for broader corporate reasons, it’s tough to see that as a promising dualism either.

The real problem, though, is that I’ve always wanted to root for the Cyclops-as-Revolutionary angle. I’ve always thought that challenge to what superhero narratives are was worth exploring seriously and allowing the possibility of moral validity. Hickman turns away from it very, very hard here. I reject that, aesthetically. It’s not even that I think Cyclops is morally right. I think that’s a functionally meaningless question within the melodramatic metaphysics of a superhero universe. It’s that I think Cyclops is a vehicle for giving voice to perspectives superhero narratives don’t usually get to explore, and that Hickman gave him depressingly short shrift here.

Yes, there’s more issues and this may turn around. But this is a review of this specific issue. And given Secret Wars demands to be read as a meta-commentary on the state of Marvel Comics, I think what it’s saying this month is rank fucking bullshit.

Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #1

Honestly, I just think it’s unfair to ask the world to offer any sort of critical judgment of this, and I’m half-inclined to say that I’m going to buy it and not review it. It’s clearly not a major Grant Morrison project. And look, I don’t begrudge him taking the money and running, which he’s clearly done with this. But this book is a Kirby pastiche reworking of the Mahabharata with an artist who is not Jack Kirby. And a writer who is not Jack Kirby. It’s pretty. It’s competent. But what on Earth is one supposed to say of it? Morrison is in the backmatter comparing himself favorably to Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare. This issue doesn’t stand up to either. But equally, it seems vital to note that the problem is not what the book is – a western comic based on Hindi mythology. The problem is that this is just a Kirby pastiche of novel subject matter.

Ultimate End #3

There’s a shell game here, obviously. This book inherits its premise from other bits of Secret Wars. Not all of those bits are out yet. So the precise nature of Manhattan and of this mash-up of the 616 and Ultimate Universes is not yet revealed.…

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Spare Parts, A Love Story (more podcasting)

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Yet more audio news, listeners. 

This time I’m a guest on the lovely, cuddly, clued-up Oi! Spaceman podcast, hosted by married couple Daniel Harper and Shana Wolstein. 

Here‘s my episode.

We discuss the Big Finish cyber-masterpiece ‘Spare Parts’ by Marc Platt, and loads of other stuff including Cybermen in general, emotion in drama, capitalism, communism and fascism…

I know, it sounds a bit dry, but we also do loads of nerdy chatting about Doctor Who, and there’s plenty of mucking about and giggling.  Also, I receive my first ever aural blowjob. 

Shana and Daniel have a great podcast going (I’ve been enjoying their back catalogue and its been a blast) and I was honoured to be asked on.  I had a great time, and I think you will too if you lend us your ears.  Your spare ones will do.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Gene Roddenberry

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On October 24, 1991 Gene Roddenberry passed away.

It may seem strange to grant him an entire chapter in this book. Roddenberry has, after all been an undeniable presence since the very beginning of Star Trek, and no small amount of digital ink has been spilled on my part, or on the part of others, trying to piece together precisely who he was and what his contributions to Star Trek really were. I’m not going to do this every time a major creative figure exits our story permanently, but given the stature Roddenberry had, and to some extent still has, and the synchronicity of his death happening almost exactly parallel with Star Trek’s 25th Anniversary, there’s no way this was going to be seen as anything other than a massive event even among a 24-month year marked by massive events. There’s only one other primary creative figure in all Star Trek who casts a remotely comparable shadow over the series’ heart and soul to the one Gene Roddenberry does: He’ll get his due when his own time comes (in fact he’s in many ways *more* deserving of tribute than Roddenberry, a true unsung hero), but right now this is something that needs to be properly addressed for good.

From the beginning of Vaka Rangi, I have been exceedingly and harshly critical of Gene Roddenberry. I did not, I want to make eminently clear, start this project with a chip on my shoulder and an ax to grind. This was supposed to be a voyage of peace and understanding. And I went out of my way to be as even-handed about him as I possibly could in my inaugural essay on “The Cage”: That episode is, without question, Star Trek as Gene Roddenberry saw it. It’s the purest, most distilled version of his original vision for what the series should be, and even though he had a ton of help cleaning it up and making it presentable from Bob Justman and Herb Solow, that remains plainly on display in the finished product. But the other thing about “The Cage” is that, unfortunately, it is fucking terrible. So that’s also where things start to go wrong for both Gene Roddenberry and Vaka Rangi.

The period of the original Star Trek Gene Roddenberry was the showrunner for, from “The Corbomite Maneuver” through “Dagger of the Mind”, does not inspire confidence (with the extremely notable exception of “Balance of Terror”). Nor does the fact Roddenberry thought, for whatever reason, that “Mudd’s Women” and “The Omega Glory” would have been suitable pilots for Star Trek. Once I started to actually dig into the behind-the-scenes history of Star Trek and actually cast a critical lens upon it, I discovered two things. One, I wish I had never thought to do that because the whole thing is way over my head and way too dangerous for me to me to even conceive of messing around with.…

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A Short Guide to Janelle Monáe and the Metropolis Saga

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The June bonus post, as voted upon by my generous Patrons. 

A large amount of the critical discourse surrounding Janelle Monáe has focused on the question of why she hasn’t been more successful. I mean, sure, she’s got a major label record deal, is one of only a handful of black women to run her own record label, is one of the most critically acclaimed artists working, and is making a good living while making art according to her own vision and nobody else’s, but her best-performing album only hit #5 in the charts, so obviously she’s doing something wrong. And looking at her work and her career, I think I know what her problem is: she’s never had a white male science fiction fan whose only credentials for writing about music are having co-authored a book about They Might Be Giants write a detailed guide to her work.

An appalling oversight, to be sure, but one I’m only too happy to help correct.
The bulk of Monáe’s work consists of the five (and counting) part Metropolis Saga, released over two albums and an EP, and currently projected to run for seven parts, although it was previously slated as four parts. The suite focuses on the stories of Monáe’s alter-ego Cindi Mayweather, a time-traveling android.
Suite 0: The Audition
Monáe’s 2003 self-released album The Audition is not actually a part of the Metropolis Saga, but contains two songs that introduce the themes and concepts she would later explore in the Metropolis Saga: “Metropolis” and “Cindi.”
The first of these is interesting in that it serves as a concise and bespoke sketch of the Metropolis setting, describing a run down and oppressive city (“Population ten zillion and six”) from the perspective of a “cyber girl” living “on the wired side of town.” Most of the song is a liltingly wistful number about the unnamed narrator’s dreams of freedom, with a spoken word bridge about the prejudices faced by “wired folk” on the grounds that “we have no feelings no memories or minds.” Several major concepts that will be expanded on in the Metropolis Saga proper are introduced here, most notably the repressive Droid Control and the character of Anthony Greendown. 
The second is a two minute ballad that has no overt sci-fi trappings, instead being about the gulf between one’s dreams and one’s ordinary self, singing about “that girl in the mirror / with hair like a rock star / she wants to dance but she has cold feet/ her confidence is low / so much talent but who’ll know / when she’s afraid to follow her dreams.” But the lyrics make reference to trying “to be Cindi, in hopes that they’d notice,” a title drop that alludes to the robotic alter-ego she would eventually flesh out in detail. Crucial – indeed, as will eventually become clear, the entire point of the exercise – is the aspirational quality, one that’s implicit in the demo album’s title, The Audition. This is, in many ways, the eternal plot of the Metropolis Saga: Janelle Monáe’s continuing attempt to become Cindi Mayweather, a process that is indistinguishable from her continuing attempt to define what that means. 
…

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Theses on Hannibal

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Series 3 of Hannibal is, of course, largely about people who have been horribly wounded.  Cut to pieces.  Shattered.  Reassembled.  Stitched back together in new shapes.  They’ve spent months ‘recovering’, only to discover that the process has fundamentally changed them.  They cannot ‘recover’ their old selves. 

The show itself is taking episodes to ‘recover’ from the trauma of the end of Series 2.  That episode horribly wounded the show itself.  Cut it to pieces.  Shattered it.  Dismembered it.  We are now watching a show, a formula, a set-up, in fragments.  Roughly stitched back together but unable to return to its former shape. 

If Series 1 was a police procedural slowly going mad because of its own affinities, and Series 2 was a police procedural actually being slowly and gradually usurped and warped by those ascendant affinities, Series 3 is a police procedural shattered into fragments and glued back together by a triage doctor in an afterlife casualty ward. 

Because Series 3 shouldn’t exist.  It shouldn’t be on the air.  It is the ghost of a television programme.  It is the reanimated zombie corpse of a television programme.  Series 3 is what television programmes look like after they’ve ended, after they’ve been cancelled and are no longer being made and only exist in the television afterlife.

Which is bitterly ironic, if you think about it.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.06: The Old Gods and the New

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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
The Direwolf, Catelynn Stark
Dragons of Qarth: Daenerys Targaryen
Mockingbirds of Harrenhal: Petyr Baelish
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Lions of Harrenhal: Tywin Lannister
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
The Direwolf, Robb Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark, Joffrey Baratheon [sic]
Direwolves of Harrenhal: Arya Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
Pyke is abandoned.
The episode is in fourteen parts. The first is eight minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The first image is of Maester Luwin running into his chamber. It features the death of Roderick Cassell, beheaded poorly by Theon Greyjoy.
The second is three minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Bran and Rickon Stark to Jon Snow. 
The third is four minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark. 
The fourth is six minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya to Jon Snow. It features the death of several unnamed wildlings.
The fifth is six minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Sansa Stark. It features the death of Jocrassa Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day-Slitheen, torn apart by an angry mob.
The sixth is four minutes long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by theme, with both scenes featuring monarchs who cannot control things.
The seventh is four minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Daenerys discussing conquest of the Iron Throne to Tywin’s battle maps. 
The eighth is tjree minutes long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Arya to Robb. 
The ninth is three minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Robb Stark to Jon Snow, and by the theme of inadvisable sex.
The tenth is two minutes long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Robb Stark.
The eleventh is two minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by dialogue, from talking about Theon to Theon.
The twelfth is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by theme, from Osha’s use of sex to Shae.
The thirteenth is one minute long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by dialogue, from Shae telling Sansa to trust nobody to Osha demonstrating the point to Theon.
The fourteenth is two minutes long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by dialogue, with Daenerys talking about whoring herself for a boat after Bran and Rickon’s escape. It features a significant depletion in the number of Dothraki in the series. The final image is of a man carrying Daenerys’s dragons towards a tower, his identity a riddle whose answer is chess. 
…

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“A sense of duty was my one intention”: The Game

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Oh, hell no. Fuck this. Fuck everything about this.

It’s never a good day when Wesley Goddamn Crusher shows up. Doubly so when he stars in a horrid piece of youth-hating reactionary drivel. It’s bad enough he’s back in insufferable early first season “Wesley Saves The Day by Out-Thinking the Ship Full of Trained Scientific Professionals” mode without the show then putting him in a plot reminiscent of a Bush-era After School Special.

“The Game” is about a bunch of aliens trying to hook the Enterprise crew on an addictive video game that’s really a mind control device in disguise in order to spearhead an invasion of the Federation. And in 1991, at the height of Sonic the Hedgehog mania and the dawn of the fourth console generation, there’s really only one fucking way to read that. Even though we’ve not quite arrived at the defining video game moral panic of the 1990s set in motion by Mortal Kombat and Doom, there was still mounting concern over the industry’s rapid rise to prominence throughout the Long 1980s and “video game addiction” was certainly starting to become a popular buzzword and the hip new way for moral guardians to clutch their rosary beads and fret about the poisoning of the youth. And with this episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that had a not-insignificant level of clout with kids, is throwing its lot right in with them.

Although he makes overtures to Invasion of the Body Snatchers too, even writer Brannon Braga explicitly confirms this is what this episode is about. And of course it is. Literally, what else could it be about? And while video game addiction is an actual thing (in fact, it’s probably way more of a thing now then it was in 1991), I do not want to hear the hyperconservative Long 1990s take on this issue ever again, and *certainly* not from Brannon fucking “I now write 24 and that awful fucking reboot of Cosmos” Braga. Don’t get me wrong, the man’s terribly underrated as a creator and has his talents (and we’ll get to them in another season or so), but he doesn’t make a convincing case for himself at all in his debut outing as a staff writer. Seriously, when your story makes Codename: Sailor V look progressive by contrast, something has gone irreparably off the rails somewhere along the way.

Ashley Judd is in this episode. She is good. That’s all I have to say about that.

I suppose I’d better provide some background context to all this for those reading who didn’t live through more video game hardware cycles than they’d care to admit or spend way too much of their free time in a Sisyphean endeavour to write about the industry positively and productively. The transformation of video games as both a medium and an industry over the course of the Long 1980s is an interesting one (Well, to me it is at any rate): To start out with, and I know how hard this is to believe looking at them today, but video games actually started out as a pastime for active social adults.…

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 3: The Education of a Magician

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There we go.
It’s perhaps ironic that, having spent two episodes building up the Jonathan Strange/Mr. Norrell dualism that’s the core engine of the series, it’s the act of splitting them back up that drives it to its most emphatic heights thus far. 
In strict dramatic terms, this works because of Lady Pole. Even though Strange and Norrell are in different locations and pursuing entirely divergent interests through most of the episode, the dynamic of Arabella trying to uncover what is wrong with Lady Pole and Norrell working to keep the matter secret links events up well. It’s in some ways surprising this works so well – the plots really are quite separate in terms of what happens, with Strange entirely insulated from events in London, and vice versa. 
The linking moment is instead entirely symbolic – Strange being pushed to attempt ancient magic, and learns of the ways in which this magic is tacitly dangerous. On rawly symbolic terms, of course, it’s significant that Strange’s spell is a lesser version of Norrell’s original sin – both spells involve undoing death. 
But there’s curious nuance underlying this – up to this point the danger of ancient magic had largely been expressed in terms of the Gentleman as an essentially Faustian danger. Old magic involved trafficking with faeries, and faeries are dangerous and untrustworthy. But Strange’s spell to make the dead speak does require any such deals. And yet it is nevertheless clearly dangerous magic, with Strange unable to get the dead to stop speaking again. The danger, in other words, is not merely something that can be tied to the peculiarities of the Gentleman, but rather to something more primal within that sort of magic, having to do with the way in which the magic involves traversing between worlds. 
This is, obviously, unsurprising ground for a story of British fantasy. It seems all but inevitable that we’ll be getting an actual portal to faerie before this tale is done. And it’s striking that Strange’s horror at the consequences of his magic is fundamentally a horror of the uncanny – the fact that the consequences of his magic are monstrous.
The key cut, then, is from Strange cowering from the speaking dead to Norrell’s appalling callousness as he visits Lady Pole, in which he bluntly informs her that she is an innocent casualty of war and of the development of magic, and simply informs her that she will suffer for seventy-five years without respite. The cruelty of it, especially coming after nearly two straight episodes of consciously building sympathy for Lady Pole’s plight, is genuinely shocking, and it is only Marsan’s performance, which emphasizes the extent to which Norrell is aware of how monstrous his actions are, that keeps him from simply becoming an outright villain of the piece. (Note also, of course, the cut back to Strange, unable to extricate himself from the consequences of his own spell.)
The sense of ancient magic as an object of uncanny horror finds resonance in the scenes featuring the Gentleman himself, which begin to make textually explicit the way in which his character is drawn to the marginalized members of society.
…

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Saturday Waffling (June 27th, 2015)

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Update: Mr. Brook has responded in the comments. Jack Graham, on Twitter, characterizes his response as “bluff and bafflegab and nothing else,” which is pretty much the long and short of it. I’ve got a funeral today (not mine), so I won’t be able to address it in detail until tonight. I’ve replied in the comments, and updated the original post. The tl;dr is “regrettably it seems like only legal action is appropriate, and that victims should contact UK Trading Services via Citizens Advice.”

The original post follows.
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Surprising nobody, this is pretty much all about the article I posted on Thursday accusing the website Doctor Who online and its owner Sebastian Brook of fraud. We’ll be back with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tonight.

The reports of Sebastian J. Brook and Doctor Who Online ripping people off continue to roll in, both over this and over a wealth of previous slights to a variety of people, both prominent and obscure, over the past decade. Seemingly nobody actually has a good word to say about him or the site.

Meanwhile, Brook remains silent, his only response to people who ask for a response to my article being to block them, or to privately insinuate that there are inaccuracies without offering a shred of detail as to what those inaccuracies might be. I would suggest that at this point his silence speaks volumes.

For my part, what I want is for small business owners in and around the Doctor Who community to be safe from predatory and fraudulent offers. That’s it. That’s literally my only goal here. I think by far the easiest way for that to be accomplished would be for Sebastian Brook to show the barest modicum of integrity and respond to the evidence I’ve unearthed in a convincing way that allows everybody to move forward with confidence. I continue to call on him to do that, both because it saves everyone a lot of trouble, and, more to the point, because it is literally the only remotely moral response available to him.

Beyond that… Over the past week, Doctor Who Online has been running a Twitter hashtag #whatwhomeanstome.

That’s obviously not a 140 character sort of question for me, hence, you know, the books and all. But certainly a part of what Doctor Who means to me – the largest single part – is that it’s an expression of a moral viewpoint that says “stand up to crass and petty jerks who hurt other people.” A viewpoint that is completely and utterly uncompromising on that. What Doctor Who means to me, more than anything else, is standing up and saying “no, this is wrong.”

Look, if you read that article and don’t think there’s a compelling case that Doctor Who Online has a moral duty to answer, fine. I disagree with you, but go on your way.

But if you read it and thought “god, that’s awful,” then for God’s sake, step up and help do something about it.…

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