Eruditorum Press

Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

The Three Doctors Commentary

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Jack Graham and I have struck again, this time with The Three Doctors. Technical difficulties did not stop us, although they did leave some strange noise artifacts on episode one to surprise you if you have the volume too loud, and a somewhat desperate attempt at the start of episode four to remember what we said the first time we tried commenting on it when I forgot to record it.

In any case, a zip file with all four mp3s is right here. Enjoy, and we’ll be back with The Ark in Space before too long I hope.

Previous commentaries:

The Rescue
The Mind Robber…

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Comics Reviews (May 6th, 2015)

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The Amazing Spider-Man #18

The storyline that fills the gap between Spider-Verse and Secret Wars ends, having accomplished its primary aesthetic goal of taking up three issues.

Convergence: The Question #2

Unsurprisingly, this runs up pretty hard against the fact that it’s two issues and the characters in question are presumably being wiped out of existence soon, although I’m not actually following Convergence and have no actual idea what it’s about. Rucka is still a delight with these characters, and not having him on a DC street level book remains the biggest problem with DC other than being run by Dan Didio.

Uber #24

One of those issues that you describe as “transitional” if you liked it and “filler” if you didn’t. Transitional, then, and with a couple rare moments of humor for Uber. I think the next “everything explodes a lot” issue of this is going to be extraordinary.

Secret Wars #1

An issue that is in some ways rough for the dedicated comics fan who has been following the promotion and lead-up to this series, but is surely necessary for the 200,000 some-odd readers who weren’t following Avengers and New Avengers. The Ultimate/616 punch-up is fun, not least in terms of how it could easily have been eight issues in its own right and is instead energetically spent as a one-off plot. Mostly, I’m glad this rumbles on with a second issue next week, and I hope it finds itself feeling well under way instead of catching up to its solicits.

The Wicked & The Divine #10

Another transitional/filler issue from Gillen this week, though this one is more blatantly the suture between Urdr’s arrival and whatever horrible and upsetting plot twists are waiting in issue #11. (Which has, I suspect, the best cover of 2015.) It works and gets from point A to point B, and has some excellent moments in the process, but this is nevertheless a quiet month for the comic.

Crossed: Badlands #77

This one’s not transitional. Instead the series accelerates gamely. It’s getting increasingly hard to see how the two timelines are going to reintersect, although this is the point in the story where that really doesn’t need to be clear. But they’re both moving with terrible alacrity. My only complaint is that we’ve had three issues so fast, and #78 is apparently waiting for June, which is not great pacing.

Spider-Gwen #4

The third issue of this left me slightly cold, but it really roars back into form here, including an absolutely brilliant Aunt May/Gwen Stacy scene. Everything about this book continues to delight.

The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl #5

It has a cameo from T-Rex. You know. The star of Ryan North’s other comic. God I love Squirrel Girl.…

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“Piecing it together”: Clues

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This is an episode that has always been noteworthy to me for being one I keep feeling as though I should like a whole lot less than I do. On paper, it sounds like it’s setting up an irritating “Shocking Betrayal!” plot involving Data supposedly lying to the crew, which is the kind of story I hate (and compounding the obnoxiousness, we’ve already been made to watch Data do something similar earlier in the season in “Brothers”). But it’s an episode I’ve always found to be perfectly enjoyable, and all of my hypothetical doubts are always assuaged every time I watch it.

I think what saves “Clues” from the hackish melodrama quagmire that sinks so many other productions in the fourth season is that it goes out of its way to hedge against the stock dramatic conventions this kind of setup would otherwise use as a crutch: The story takes extreme care to ensure we never once think Data actually is attempting to maliciously mislead or betray the crew-In fact, he makes a point of never technically lying (at least not any more than he has to, depending on your reading of the probe scene and the “30 seconds” bit), just withholding specific bits of information, dancing around some topics by answering in hypotheticals and speaking the literal truth that he cannot answer certain questions. And even when the, erm, clues, start to stack up, the crew never once suspects Data is willfully turning against them, but rather that he might be physically compromised in some manner or is being coerced not to participate in the investigation. Which, of course, turns out to be exactly what’s going on. Because of this, “Clues” gets to dodge the flak canon of hackneyed drama tropes to instead become a story about how much the crew really does trust and respect each other.

This was an important point for the show to emphasize, given “Clues” is technically speaking the first “regular” episode of our new Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the two-part premier event of “Data’s Day” and “The Wounded” and the strange, if fun, aberration of “Devil’s Due” (which was if nothing else a polite, but firm, declaration to any new viewer that Star Trek: The Next Generation is not Star Trek, which does in a sense follow on from “The Wounded” in one respect). It’s a reinforcement of the themes those earlier episodes introduced and a reminder of the commitment the show has finally made to being about utopian conflict resolution. It also might be interesting to take note of how structurally “Clues” is an inverse of “Data’s Day”: In that episode, we shared Data’s perspective looking in at the rest of the Enterprise crew from the outside. Here, that situation is reversed, with us being in with the rest of the Enterprise crew looking at Data with uncertainty and concern. But most importantly of all, that tension is resolved at the end with the crew being symbolically reunited at last.…

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In Defense of Sucker Punch

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A commissioned essay for Eric Rosenfield.

I will admit that I am not entirely sure how to go about constructing a defense of Sucker Punch. It seems to me a film that is its own defense . It’s intelligent, well-made, and has a clear and savage point to make – one that was important in 2011, and remains important today. Above all else, I recommend sitting down and watching it; the theatrical cut, specifically. (The extended cut has at least one change that is, to my mind, without doubt for the worse.) Certainly almost everyone I’ve pointed to has come away from the film broadly sharing my perspective on it. And yet there is a persistent vein of criticism against the film – one that seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand almost everything about it, and that is inexplicably common among people I wouldn’t normally expect such misreadings from. One of whom paid me rather a lot of money to set him straight.

All the same, defending the movie seems strange to me, simply because its critics seem to me, as I said, mostly to simply not accurately describe the film in the first place. So instead, perhaps, an explanation of Sucker Punch.

The author is of course dead, but it seems useful to start with Zack Snyder’s own comments on Sucker Punch, if only to shore up my claim that this is not some redemptive reading where I slyly read against the text, but blatantly and straightforwardly what the text is. Indeed, Snyder has talked about the way in which the film was misread, saying:

I honestly feel like a great majority of the time people just missed it — they missed the movie entirely. They missed the point of the movie. Like when I talk to people about “Sucker Punch,” they would say this is a hollow romp with these girls dressed like they’re from Frederick’s of Hollywood — and I’m like, really? You just need to watch the movie more carefully. But if zero percent of people said, it’s not a de-constructivist comment on pop culture, then I might go, you know what? I blew it.

He elaborates on this in several interviews, frequently returning to the question of the characters costumes:

Someone asked me, “Why did you dress the girls like that, in those provocative costumes?” And I said, “Well, think about it for a second. I didn’t dress those girls in the costume. The audience dressed those girls.” And when I say the audience, I mean the audience that comes to the movies. Just like the men who visit a brothel, [they] dress the girls when they go to see these shows as however they want to see them.

And, elsewhere:

It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us.

…

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Will You Even Tell Her if You Decide to Make the Sky Fall (SimCity, Populous, ActRaiser)

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CREATE AND MANAGE A LIVING CITY

The history of urban planning is ultimately one of control machines – of efforts to build spaces that will shape the lives and psyches of its inhabitants. Housing developments to sort and contain them, roads to dictate the ways in which they move through space, and lattices of utilities and infrastructure that transmute the abstract relationships of power that govern them into brutal physicality. It is the creative practice to which psychogeography is the criticism.

It is, of course, an illusion that the city is some sort of authored construct. Even moreso than the video game, where our convenient fiction of an auteur figure like “Will Wright” is in reality a mask worn by a team of developers and, in the case of a game like SimCity, a swath of teams responsible for the huge number of ports and versions. The iteration of SimCity that served as a launch title for the Super Nintendo is one of more than a dozen – it was a game that existed on the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Macintosh, the BBC Micro, and others, all taking the smear of psychic landscape attributed to Will Wright and adapting it to new forms, with varying degrees of success.

[In practice, this is one of the rare cases where the console port is a highlight, at least in one sense. Ported by Nintendo EAD, it not only has the charming detail of Bowser in place of the generic lizard monster disaster, and adds an interesting system of special buildings like casinos and libraries that can be built under certain circumstances. Though in the end, little can remove the basic problem that a Super Nintendo controller is an unsatisfying replacement for a mouse when it comes to this sort of game.]

The city, like the video game, is multi-authored, a teeming mass of viewpoints and visions. And this includes not merely the ostensible creators – the programmers and urban planners – but those who are shaped and interpolated by it, and whose interactions with it define it; a city without inhabitants is as barren as a game without players. But citizens and gamers are two very different things. The gamer cannot, in the end, change the game in ways beyond those strictly delineated for him. The citizen, on the other hand, has meaningful resistance as an option.

Ironically, the difference is one of escapability. The gamer can quit the game, whereas nothing the citizen does can ever render them no longer a citizen – even if they move to some other city, they are still a citizen of something that has far more similarities than differences to the original. But because citizenship is inescapable, it in turn cannot fully reject the dissident. Put another way, the city can bulldoze the crime-ridden slums and replace them with a row of gleaming stadiums, but the list of the biggest problems in the city and a non-zero disapproval rate are irreducible elements of its existence.…

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“Time heals all wounds”: The Wounded

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The 24th Century Begins. Again.

If there was one story that perfectly encapsulated the virtues and strengths of Star Trek: The Next Generation and demonstrates the things it and only it can do, this would be it. “The Wounded” is an absolute masterpiece; as bold and defiant a statement of purpose for this show as exists, absolutely the story we needed after half a season of directionless navel-gazing and without question the definitive template for how it can stay fresh and relevant even four years into its run. This is it: This is where the new Star Trek: The Next Generation begins and the very first high water mark it must be constantly measured against. This is how good this show can be when people actually understand and care about it.

The reasons why “The Wounded” is a classic seem almost self-evident and obvious, and yet they seem remarkable precisely because of how much Star Trek: The Next Generation has been phoning it in and lowballing itself lately. It may be Star Trek’s definitive statement on conflict and racial tension, perhaps only to be undone in two years by an even more remarkable story, albeit one that would not exist without this one. This is noteworthy in its own right, because it means “The Wounded” is very possibly the first time in the history of the franchise these themes have been explicitly tackled: The Original Series got a reputation among its fans for being a post-racial utopia solely due to its (likely network encouraged) diverse casting and a few offhand remarks here and there, and Star Trek: The Next Generation began by declaring itself to be one, but we haven’t actually seen the material consequences of this before now.

And for the very first time we not only get to see how this plays out in practice, but the creative team itself finally seems to understand what all this utopian rhetoric really ought to mean. Every single character in this story is grappling with incredibly complex and difficult emotions, and the show never once uses them as a mouthpiece to preach at the guest cast from a self-appointed position of authority, nor gleefully and spitefully drags the mains through the mud in an attempt to show how they are “deceiving” themselves and others about their supposed entitlement. Instead, each and every character is allowed to behave in a way that is simultaneously human and idealistic. The creative team has at long last seemed to figure out what Star Trek: The Next Generation is really about-Utopian conflict resolution. Children’s television for adults, where very adult issues, concepts and dilemmas are explored with the clarity and patience of children’s television. Not a world where there are no problems and everything is perfect and idyllic, but one where we’re all mature enough to deal with conflict in a positive, constructive, and helpful manner.…

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Sons of the Harpy

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Brought to you by my backers on Patreon. There’s a new Milestone there, by the way, as we just unlocked the Marcelo Camargo post today. So at $325, $10 from where we are now, I’ll do a post on Night of the Doctor. 

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

The Lion, Tyrion Lannister
Lions of Dorne: Jaime Lannister
Lions of Casterly Rock: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Mockingbirds of Winterfell: Petyr Baelish
Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell
Burning Hearts of the Wall: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
Snakes of Dorne: Elaria Sand
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Chains of Dorne: Bronn
Swords of Mereen: Dario Noharis
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandrei
Stags of King’s Landing: Tommen Baratheon
With the Bear, Jorah Mormont

The episode is in eight parts. The first is one minute long and is set in Volantis. The opening image is of a boat in the harbor at night.

The second is three minutes long and is set on a ship in the Narrow Sea. The transition is by image, from ship to ship, any by family, from Tyrion Lannister to Jaime.

The third is ten minutes long; it is set in King’s Landing. The first part is three minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime Lannister to Cersei.

The fourth is nine minutes long and is in two parts; it is set on the Wall. The first part is six minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Margery walking away to boys sparring in the yard of Castle Black. The other three minutes long; the transition is by image, from Jon Snow at his desk to Stannis at his.

The fifth part is five minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by image, from a candle in Stannis’s office to Sansa lighting candles, and by dialogue, from Stannis to Sansa and Littlefinger talking about him.

The sixth is nine minutes long and is set in Dorne. The transition is by image, from Sansa in the dark of the crypt to Jaime and Bronn’s boat rowing ashore in the dark.

The seventh is three minutes long and is set on a small boat. The transition is by hard cut, from the Sand Snakes to an establishing shot of the boat.

The eighth is six minutes long and is set in Mereen. The transition is by dialogue, from Jorah and Tyrion talking about Daenerys to Daenerys. The final image is of a mess of bodies, including Grey Worm and Ser Barristan Selmy.

Braavos is empty.

Review

It is difficult not to think of the first four episodes of Season Five as something of a unit, given their simultaneous release. And while the leak was unintentional (though evidently unproblematic, with “The Wars to Come” bringing a record high rating for the show, although subsequent episodes have been roughly level with the fourth season, and this is the first season in which the lowest rated episode will not beat the highest rated of the previous), it came from the official HBO screeners, which sent out the first four episodes as a unified block.…

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This Irregularity Has Been Recorded

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Doctor Who frequently did stories which critiqued capitalism to one degree or another.  But there’s an interesting dialectical twist to this, which is that it usually cloaked such critiques in the aesthetics of (for want of a better term) ‘totalitarianism’.

It begins, arguably, with ‘The Macra Terror’… though so much of what that story does ‘first’ is actually just being done openly and consciously for the first time.  Other examples include (most graphically) ‘The Sun Makers’, ‘Vengeance on Varos’, and ‘The Happiness Patrol’.  I’d argue for a few others to go on the list, but these are the most obvious examples.  ‘The Beast Below’ carried on the tradition, as did ‘Gridlock’ before it (albeit mutedly).  Yet many of these stories have been subject to readings which interpret them as right-wing and/or libertarian attacks on aspects of socialism and/or statism (often assumed to be synonymous).  I might even (overall) support such a reading in some cases.  ‘The Beast Below’, for example, is a story which critiques aspects of the capitalist world, but which (to my mind) ends up supplying more alibis than indictments – partially through its use of totalitarian/statist tropes.  I think the thing that leaves them open to such readings is their ‘totalitarian’ aesthetic.  The (myopic, ideologically-distorted) view of socialism which sees it as inherently coercive and statist can grab hold of the aesthetically magnified symbols of statism which litter these stories.

I think this tendency to wrap critiques of capitalism in totalitarian aesthetics comes from the influence of the Nigel Kneale / Rudolph Cartier TV version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which starred Peter Cushing.

 Stylistically, this production appears to have been deeply influential to the rising generation of programme-makers who would write and design Doctor Who in the 60s.  The totalitarian affect pioneered visually in that production gets embedded in Doctor Who‘s internal semiotic repertoire as a stock way of expressing worries about social freedom.

This isn’t surprising at all, since the aesthetics of totalitarianism have proven a popular and enduring way of expressing such worries in the wider culture, as the proliferation of SF dystopias has shown.  They’re now almost a basic, fallback position for YA books and films.

But we need to do more than just gesture to a particularly influential production.  That’s not enough.  It’s not an explanation.  You can’t just say ‘this production here was influential’.  That’s just begging the question.  The real question is: why was it influential?  What was it about it that made its aesthetics stick so hard?

I think the answer actually lies back in the book.  Much of the horror of the book is the everyday horror of squalor – whether it be the squalor of coldness and dirt and forced ‘healthiness’, or the moral squalor of everyday ideological management.  Orwell gets the former from his experiences of public school (which he wrote about elsewhere with loathing) and the latter from his experiences of working within the BBC.  Even Newspeak is derived from work he did for the BBC World Service in India. …

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Saturday Waffling (May 2nd, 2015)

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Hello all. Just time for a quick one of these today – I just cut the Three Doctors commentary with Jack (out next week sometime) and I’ve been otherwise spending the day drawing up notes for my interview with Theodore Beale, which is an actual thing that’s happening.

So, May. Wow there’s a lot going on in May. Comics have Secret Wars, obviously, which is probably going to be very silly, but also Providence starting up over at Avatar, which is Alan Moore seemingly doing the From Hell of H.P. Lovecraft. Neal Stephenson’s got a new book out, Seveneves, which is always exciting. And Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell spins up on the BBC, from Peter Harness and Toby Haynes. Possible I’ll be doing episode-by-episode coverage of that, actually; more as this story develops. 
So, what are you looking forward to this month?
See you tomorrow with “Sons of the Harpy,” and Monday with SimCity, Populous, and ActRaiser. 
…

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The Great Gran’pappy of All Dirges (The Last War in Albion Part 94: Not the World Cup)

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This is the sixth 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.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The Bojeffries Saga was hardly the only minor work of Moore’s early career.

“A dirge… space-trucker talk for a hard luck story. And this was the great gran’pappy of all dirges.” – Alan Moore, “The Killer in the Cab”
Figure 715: Alan Moore’s cartoons alongside
his glossary of trucker slang. (From The BJ and
the Bear Annual 1982)
For instance, in 1981 before Warrior had even launched, when his career consisted of The Stars My Degradation, Maxwell the Magic Cat, his Doctor Who work, and his earliest Future Shocks, Moore had a gig writing and illustrating text pieces for Grandreams’s 1982 BJ and the Bear Annual. BJ and the Bear was an American television series about a trucker (BJ) who drove around the country with his pet chimpanzee (Bear) that debuted with a pilot movie in October of 1978 and wrapped up in May of 1981 forty-eight episodes later. Its British 1982 Annual was, in other words, a marginal piece of cultural ephemera even when it was printed at the end of 1981. It did, however, contain a three page illustrated glossary of trucker slang compiled by Alan Moore that helpfully informed readers that “keep your nose between the ditches and Smokey out of your britches” meant “drive safely,” a piece that got recycled a year later for the 1983 Dukes of Hazzard Annual. The BJ and the Bear Annual also featured a three page illustrated account of various stories about monkeys, such as the story of how some villagers from Eelberdale, in the Hargesia region of Somalia, fought a pitched two-day battle with attacking monkeys, resulting in injuries to six villagers and the death of three hundred and sixty-three monkeys, and the story of a couple of chimpanzees attacking police in Tarzana California, a town that sprung up around a ranch owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which Moore ends by fondly musing on how “right there, in the home of the Lord of the Jungle, the apes of Tarzana struck a blow for animal liberation!”
Figure 716: Illustration to Moore’s “Sawdust
Memories.”
These stories are also instances of Moore’s early career dabbling in straight prose writing – a sideline from comics writing that exists across his career. This is not the first instance of this to emerge in the War – several of Moore’s contributions to The Daredevils also fall under this umbrella. And these are not the only examples. For instance, in 1984 Moore contributed a short story, “Sawdust Memories,” to the magazine Knave.
…

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