We Apologize For the Delay
Last War in Albion will post tomorrow in lieu of Saturday Waffling. Lunch and I had a bit of a disagreement yesterday, and I forgot to get it queued up in the general muddle.…
“Yoikes and Away!”: Qpid
It’s absolutely inane. Let’s just dispense with that straight away.
Much like last year’s Q episode, “Qpid” (ugh) completely casts aside Q’s original symbolism as an extradiegetic challenge to the ethical underpinnings of Star Trek: The Next Generation in lieu using him as a vehicle to set up a pointlessly safe comedic runaround. It’s depressingly cynical, a Robin Hood romp done only to capitalize on Robin Hood’s popularity at the time, and yet another teeth-gnashingly sexist outing to boot: Q’s assessment of Vash aside, one of the bitterest ironies in the history of the series is that Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis were the only members of the crew trained in fencing and stage combat (in fact, they’re instructors themselves), and not only were they the only people *not* to partake in stage combat in the one episode where those talents would have come in handy, nobody, not even for just a moment, ever once thought to consult them when teaching the rest of the cast. To add insult to injury, it’s Ira Steven Behr’s only post-Season 3 contribution to Star Trek: The Next Generation and is a sequel to his own “Captain’s Holiday”, an episode the man practically disowns.
(And indeed even here, Behr’s grimdark sensibilities and deep-rooted bitterness show through: The much-vaunted mandolin scene, which I detest, by the way, was meant as another jab at Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s utopianism. Behr sympathized with Worf, whom he imagined being a bloodthirsty warrior stuck in a world he found insufferable “lying awake at night thinking ‘Can’t they just let me kill Geordi?’”. Geordi being a character whom Behr found “sweet” but “kind of underused” and unacceptably lacking in a “dark side”. Behr figures Geordi is the kind of person the Klingons “devour”.)
Lest you think I’m an entirely humourless curmudegon, I hasten to add I’ve nothing against genre romps, even though I tend to like my romps handled with a bit more nuance and sophistication than, well, this. The Star Trek: The Next Generation cast is famously fond of romps: It’s another manifestation of their inherent performativity. They get a huge kick out of spicing up old stock tropes and scenarios by bringing in their own unique sense of bravado, and in the hands of a production team who knew better how to respond to and play off of this there’s a lot of potential for some really clever metacommentary on fiction and narrative styles.
But this is what I think the holodeck is for: It’s a crossroads of storytelling where the Enterprise crew can dynamically interact with fictional worlds, transforming them and each other for the better. The holodeck also serves as a diegetic reinforcement of the show’s themes of performativity and role-playing, a knowing artifice in-universe acting as a microcosm of how they work on the whole. Having Q come in, wave his hands around and turn everything into a Robin Hood story seems a bit of a waste of his character, and a less-than-satisfying bit of metafiction than what the holodeck was already capable of.…
Vaka Rangi: Two Year Anniversary
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| The Dirty Pair, by Alan Gutierrez |
My entire past year can be summarised in just one phrase.
Dirty Pair.
It was almost exactly a year ago today that I began my week-long miniseries on the history of professional wrestling to lead into my essay on The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair that would introduce Kei and Yuri and change the shape of this project forever. It was an intentionally cheeky move, I admit, and I took great pleasure in watching you all try and guess where on Earth I was going with that tangent. I enjoy making unpredictable moves like that and keeping my audience on their toes: Not only is it fun for me, but it keeps the project fresh and is a way of offering a subtle reminder that Vaka Rangi is meant to be far from another standard-issue history of Star Trek narrative.
But of course Dirty Pair was never an out-of-the blue, 90-degree turn for this project. Even though I’ve only been a fan of the series myself for the past three years or so, I’ve known about its existence, and its shared history with Star Trek, for decades. I’ve been dying to look at Dirty Pair from a Star Trek perspective, and vice verce, ever since I learned what huge geeky fans of the show Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were. The Long 1980s are an age where truths are conveyed through aesthetics, images and emotions, science fiction is a genre primarily about ideas and possibilities, anime is a medium particularly well suited to broadening the imagination through cinematography, and the fact that it was the two design illustrators who were the most profoundly affected brings it all back full circle.
The fact Dirty Pair turned out to be one of the single greatest and most personally meaningful bits of narrative fiction I’ve ever experienced in my life is really just icing on the cake.
Even though Dirty Pair was always going to be a part of Vaka Rangi in some form or another, I didn’t originally mean for it become so pronounced that it would end up standing on equal footing with Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I first started, I figured I’d give Kei and Yuri a Sensor Scan post, maybe a few-One for each broad category of the Classic Series. Then when I started to actually watch it for research, I immediately realised the series was way, way too good to be relegated to the between-season errata: This was actually leagues better than the stuff I was actually treating as my case study. At that point I knew it would have to be one of the major pillars of Vaka Rangi Volume 3-The book I spent almost the entirety of this past year writing. Even then though I wasn’t planning to serialize it on the blog: The decision to cover Dirty Pair episode by episode and bit by bit was made at literally the last possible moment when the traffic hits were coming in on the Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair essay and after I discovered the whole series was on YouTube and Hulu freely and legally thanks to Manga Entertainment.
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Comics Reviews (May 13th, 2015)
From worst to best of what I bought.
Thor #8
The odds that this was going to win me back in the final issue were low, and sure enough, it didn’t. It’s as I complained with #7 – if it’s Solomon, it’s obvious, if it’s not, it’s a cheap diversion. And by building it up as a mystery, Aaron opens space to not like the outcome. Which I don’t. At least, not compared to Solomon. Ros Solomon as Thor would be more interesting than Jane Foster is Thor, but being Thor makes her breast cancer worse, a setup that is mainly notable for making her expiration date and the restoration of Man-Thor inevitable. And I still don’t understand why anyone thought a mystery arc was the way to go. What was this supposed to accomplish? Why is this better than just debuting the concept eight months ago would have been? All in all, a disaster – will probably buy Thors, but can’t see myself returning post-Secret Wars.
Saga #28
Man, I’m cooling hard on this book. It’s good and I see all the very smart stuff it does and… I just don’t remember the characters or plot well enough month to month. Still, this is in with Chew and the other books of the Sunk Cost Fallacy club, and maybe one day I’ll dig up all the floppies and reread it and enjoy it. Or, more likely, I’ll torrent it even though I own it.
Darth Vader #5
That this is third from bottom is a mark of how good a week this is. I’m not entirely convinced of the plot twist, which, for me, runs into the axiomatic problem of a licensed comic like this, namely that it’s introducing better ideas than anything in the source material, but it’s going to have to put all of them back in the box at story’s end. But equally, it’s an interesting and cool plot twist, and I’m perfectly happy to follow it.
Blackcross #3
As with many an Ellis book, this was a slow burn, and it finally gets to where it’s doing interesting things. Still far from my favorite Ellis work, but at least I’m not just buying it out of obligation now.
Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #6
Well this certainly kicked off very nicely. Love the final twist, and yeah, Gillen and Bennett have built Angela into a usable and interesting Marvel character, which is no small feat. Curious where this will go as Gillen recedes into the background and Bennett takes over, but definitely on for the ride.
Ms. Marvel #15
Exactly what this book is for, through and through. Really enjoyed this arc when all was said and done. Look forward to the next.
Secret Wars #2
OK, I’m won over, at least for now. The basic operating principles of Battleworld are clever, and this strikes an ideal balance between “it’s an alternate world” and “it’s the Marvel Universe. Good high concept stuff, and Hickman’s philosophical ramblings work well in this context.…
“For The Great Mouse Ancestors”: The Nth Degree
Here’s another episode I never caught during Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s original run. In fact, I kind of went out of my way to avoid “The Nth Degree” because I always thought it sounded completely ridiculous, a suspicion not helped by the fact it’s always represented in magazines and reference books by stills of the final effects shot; that of the Cytherian ambassador. An effects shot which calls to mind descriptors such as “amazing” and “incredible”, except not in their original unironic contexts. So the other night, I actually sat down to watch this episode critically for the first time.
It’s actually not bad. But I was right about the effects shot.
“The Nth Degree” is in a lot of ways a response to the third season. There’s Barclay back, of course, but it’s also another “Let’s Do” episode, much like “A Matter of Perspective”. In both cases, the tack the show takes this time around is a little bit more nuanced and appreciable than it was last year. We’ll talk about Reg later, but the story we’re “paying tribute” to this time is the award-winning science fiction short story Flowers for Algernon, about a janitor who undergoes a special treatment to rapidly raise his IQ, but it doesn’t take. We’ve actually already looked at Flowers for Algernon once before, in the context of the Dirty Pair TV episode “The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie”, which was likewise an “homage” to the original story. The thing about the Dirty Pair episode though is that it was, charitably speaking, a gigantic shitshow, with excruciating forced wackiness, horrible characterization of Kei and Yuri, casual racism and a plot so overblown and dense it forgot to actually be about anything.
“The Nth Degree”, thankfully, isn’t, and from a plot perspective this is largely due to how it approaches its source material. “The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie” tried to show how anyone who undergoes the same kind of procedure Charlie does in the original story would naturally try to take over the world, believing themselves to be superior to others (as Yuri memorably puts it, “Listen. All intelligent beings eventually grow tired of taking orders from idiots.”), but it ultimately gets lost in its own central conceit of having a fascist regime ruled by a clan of hyper-intelligent mice before it can actually take the ethical stand it needs to, which should have been a commentary on the privilege of education and the elitism that so frequently accompanies it. The show almost gets there, but I had to bring in Avital Ronell’s reconceptualization of stupidity eighteen years ahead of time to redeem it enough to make its own point.
“The Nth Degree”, by contrast, drops all of the troubling connotations that would go along with a fixation on intelligence quotients to hone in on a different angle. It uses the Flowers for Algernon plot to explore what happens when a person undergoes a life-changing, transcendent experience…and then what happens to them afterward.…
Any Old Idiot Can Be A Hero (Final Fantasy II)
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Video games came from Toy Works. At least, in the Super Nintendo era they did. It moved around; the Nintendo era was mostly Toys ‘R Us, at least in practical experience, which was down by the mall, and is still there. (That’s also the area where the Funcoland that fueled my late high school/early college retrogaming phase, a second childhood of NES and SNES.) But in the summer of 1990, we moved to Newtown when my mother left the corporate world to return to academia. That was the high summer of my Nintendo days – a gap between when we could occupy the two houses meant that my mother and I spent a month or two living with my maternal grandparents in Mahopac while my father did a road trip to attend a math conference in Wyoming. My mother, appreciating that I was going to be bored to tears living there, went on a NES game buying binge, and I basically spent the summer in my grandparents’ basement playing Nintendo.
Toy Works was in Sand Hill Plaza, in the south of Newtown, which I remember the construction of, and which must have, based on other memories, been in late 1990/early 1991. The store is long since closed, and there’s a store for baby stuff there now. Originally, the video game section was over in this corner of the store, with a demo NES where I got some of my only tastes of games like Punch-Out (my father disapproved of boxing as a sport, so this was never a game I was allowed). The demo unit is what I now know to be a Nintendo M82, although that wasn’t terminology that existed in my vocabulary or worldview of the time. At the time the floor was an industrial carpet in that section only, giving it the same black/red/grey livery of the NES itself.
By the Super Nintendo, though, the video game section had moved to about over here, although by this time there was plenty of competition in the mall as well, where stores like Software Etc., Electronique Boutique, and Babbages sold both computer games and console games. (Indeed, the historical reality may well be that I got most of my actual games from those stores and not Toy Works, but the Super Nintendo Project is not about historical reality nearly as much as it is about memory.) They’re all Gamestops now, though mostly in the same locations, as is the Funcoland by Toys R’ Us. There’s a Gamestop in Sand Hill Plaza too now, actually. I assume the white and pastel linoleum of Toy Works is still there under that wood floor; it was still there when Simply Baby and Kids moved in, a jarring fossil of my childhood.
This would have been where people bought Final Fantasy II. It wasn’t for me, though, as I never bought this game, although I did rent it. That would have happened in Stop & Shop, two doors down from Toy Works, and still there.
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“Are You Afraid of the Dark?”: Night Terrors
“Night Terrors” is another episode derided by pretty much everyone: From the people who worked on it to the people who watched it, almost nobody has anything kind to say about this story and it’s frequently held up as being among Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s absolute worst of the worst.
You should know where this is going by now. I always thought it was pretty good!
What we’ve got this week is another step in the show’s transition into its next form. Like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is a story about the Enterprise crew in the thick of a mind-bending cosmic mystery that warps their conception of reality. It’s also a competently mind-bending psychological thriller for the audience as well, with some unsettlingly well-done hallucinatory scenes and a plot that goes out of its way to showcase the power of dream logic and dream imagery. A great many future Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will be comprised of one or both of these storytelling archetypes in roughly equal measure, and while “Night Terrors” isn’t the best or most ambitious iteration of either one of them, it is a very noticeable first draft.
It’s also not really safe to say that “Night Terrors” is the point where this becomes the show’s default mode, and of course the very best Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes will find ways to blend this with its pre-exisiting commitment to utopian conflict resolution, but, perhaps fittingly, this episode is a sort of vision of things to come-A decent first look at what’s going to be more or less a baseline average for the show going forward. Which is really not a terrible thing as far as I’m concerned.
Also like “Clues”, “Night Terrors” is another strong ensemble outing where each and every character gets to show off their talents and particular skillsets. Deanna Troi obviously plays the biggest role and we’ll talk about her a little later on, but this is a great showing for everyone in the main cast. I think what I enjoy the most about the act of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from an entertainment standpoint is seeing the crew work together comfortably and effortlessly to figure something out and the trust they have in one another in the process: It’s that “competency porn” idea again, and this episode is a good example of that. The twist this time is that the dream deprivation is testing the limits of their capabilities and sanity both, and the hook is in watching how the crew responds to this.
And in this regard the actors really drive home some stellar performances: I know they always do and I always say they do, but it’s especially noticeable when their acting is bolstered by writing they can really play off of, as is the case here. Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden are particular standouts for me, as they play Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher slowly and subtly growing more and more frazzled and unhinged, yet never once wavering from their heroic dedication to saving their friends and their ship.…
Kill the Boy
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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
The Lion, Tyrion Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Burning Hearts of the Wall: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth
Kraken of Winterfell: Reek
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Swords of Mereen: Dario Noharis
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandrei
Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear, Jorah Mormont
King’s Landing, Dorne, and Braavos are empty.
The episode is in parts. The first is five minutes long and is in sections; it is set in Mereen. The section is seconds long; the opening image is of the lamp flickering by Grey Worm’s bedside. The other is five minutes long; the transition is by image, from Missandrei watching over Grey Worm to Daenerys standing over Ser Barristan’s body.
The second part is nine minutes long and is set on the Wall. The transition is by family, from Daenerys Targaryen to Maester Aemon Targaryen and, subsequently, Jon Snow, and by dialogue, from Daenerys to Maester Aemon and Samwell talking about her.
The third is nineteen minutes long and is in sections; it is set in Winterfell. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is indirectly by family, from Jon Snow to Brienne watching Winterfell and musing about Sansa. The second is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Brienne talking about Sansa to Ramsey and Myranda doing the same. The third is fourteen minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, at last to Sansa herself.
The fourth part is seven minutes long and is set on the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Roose and Ramsey talking about Castle Black to Castle Black.
The fifth is five minutes long and is set in Mereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis’s armies riding south to Grey Worm.
The sixth is eight minutes long and is set in Valyria. The transition is by dialogue, from Daenerys in Mereen to Tyrion and Jorah talking about going to Mereen. The final image is of Jorah staring at his greyscale stricken arm.
Analysis
We are, at last, to the part of the season where Game of Thrones is finally freed up to do things that are interesting as opposed to necessary. A King’s Landing-free episode marks the point where we are finally, in a sense, free of the season’s opening, the first episode having been framed in terms of Cersei. This week the only Lannister is Tyrion, by now firmly enmeshed in Daenerys’s plot.
Without the South or Arya, we get an episode about the North – a thirty-five minute stretch of episode – with Daenerys wrapped around it. This structure also produces the most flagrant “Jon Snow is a Targaryen” acknowledgment yet as Maester Aemon talks about Daenerys being all alone in the world and the camera then pans to Jon entering the scene, which is absolutely hilarious.…
Saturday Waffling (May 9th, 2015)
In case you missed it, The Three Doctors commentary.
The Super Nintendo Project will be running on Tuesdays for the duration of Game of Thrones. Tomorrow’s review will be up as soon as I can get it, but it won’t be quite as fast as the first four I’m afraid. Relatedly, I’ll try to get to the Marcelo Camargo essay in the next couple weeks. Patreon is at $315 a week, $10 away from me writing the McGann/Eccleston book’s essay on “Night of the Doctor as a public blogpost in the next month or two.
Everything proceeds apace. There are too many things right now, and things are slipping through the cracks more than I’d like, but I should get the first set of pages of Volume 6 of TARDIS Eruditorum out to the editor today.
Absolutely gutted by the election results, of course. The polls gave so much false hope, and were so shockingly wrong. The size of the rightwing turn is so depressing; the policies proposed so self-evidently destructive and with such potentially devastating longterm consequences. Please go ahead and vent in comments. Or, if you’re a Tory, gloat, but let’s be honest, everyone’s gonna hate you for it.
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The Word “Fuck” Typed Eight Thousand Times (The Last War in Albion Part 95: American Flagg)
This is the seventh of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.
The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.
Also, I’d like to apologize if I inadvertently persuaded anybody that because the early comics of Alan Moore were so good the UK should just go back to the Thatcher era. That was not the intended thesis statement of The Last War in Albion.
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote a large number of very minor works in his early years, generally in keeping with his primary creative goal of being able to feed his family.
“I want to see eight thousand words. Printable words. I still remember that essay you wrote when the Beast got elected. I do not want to see the word ‘fuck’ typed eight thousand times again.” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan
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| Figure 722: The first page of Alan Moore’s 1984 Batman text story. |
This vision is not some mere alternate history of a world where there never was a War, where Moore’s Scottish devil had no great master whose career he could illustrate, where a Hampshire journalist never gets a vital lesson in writing comic scripts, and where a boy from Essex and games journalist from Bath don’t have a comics industry waiting to receive the next British genius with open arms. Rather, it is a career that happened alongside the familiar narrative of Moore’s chain of successes from 1979 to 1986 – a career that consists of nothing more or less than the sum total of works that don’t fit into the tale of Moore’s relentless march to success, and even some, like much of his 2000 AD work, that do. Nor is it as though Moore’s American career brought an end to his time taking minor British gigs. Far from it, almost immediately after taking the Swamp Thing job, Moore found himself writing a humorous two-page text piece for the 1984 Superman Annual – not, to be clear, Superman Annual #10, which featured an Eliot Maggin/Curt Swan tale called “The Day the Cheering Stopped,” but a UK Superman annual in the same basic vein as the Dukes of Hazard annual he’d contributed to the year before. Moore’s piece, entitled “Protected Species,” is written in the form of a resignation letter by Graunch Quiglow, who is quitting his job capturing endangered alien species so that they can be kept safe by the Interstellar League of Gentlefolk Concerned About Endangered Wildlife following a disastrous attempt to “rescue” Superman. The next year he contributed another piece, “I Was Superman’s Double,” an extended narration by an unscrupulous cab driver about the day he was drafted in as a substitute Superman after the real one had a nervous breakdown (his passenger, “that Kent Clark guy” from The Daily Planet, is unimpressed), as well as a more serious piece for the 1985 Batman Annual entitled “The Gun.”