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“That would take us in the wrong direction”: The Vengeance Factor

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Another episode that tends to go curiously underappreciated during the otherwise fan-favourite third season, “The Vengeance Factor” has always been one of the most memorable episodes of the year for me, and this time for good reasons. It’s partially because this is another episode I saw quite a lot of and have very fond memories of, but also because I happen to think it’s fantastic.

It starts out with what is, for my money, one of the most unforgettable opening sequences in the series: Commander Riker, Doctor Crusher, Worf and Data make up an away team beaming down to an imposingly alien looking planetary settlement. There’s a palpable sense of mystery and foreboding perfectly accentuated by the terrifically eery green stage lighting as the team picks through the rubble of the bombed-out research centre. There’s no Captain’s Log to provide blase exposition, just a cold open with the team already on a head-start to a situation they know more about than we do. “The Vengeance Factor”’s opening moments really are a design triumph: That matte painting actually has a famous pedigree, as it’s the same one used in the science fiction classic The Forbidden Planet. Mike Okuda had wanted to use it in Star Trek: The Next Generation for a long time, and when he finally got the opportunity, he rented the physical piece for this episode. And the research centre really feels like it’s been built around that painting: The set design matches it so perfectly and so seamlessly it’s a shock to learn they don’t come from the same place.

From this point “The Vengeance Factor” doesn’t let up on the visual front, but like all good Star Trek: The Next Generation episode it’s got a solid story to tell as well. One perhaps gets a little worried early on upon learning we’re going to be dealing with a group of displaced people who’ve become nomads forced to plunder remote settlements to get vital supplies: This is an area of politics Star Trek is historically shaky on, and while this episode maybe doesn’t go quite as far as we’d really like, it does manage to take a stand that’s admirably not a reactionary default. The Enterprise crew, especially Captain Picard, are the most overtly sympathetic to the Gatherers’ plight and are in the position of constantly reminding the Sovereign to keep her decades of bitterness over the conflict between the two factions in check by reminding her that were she in their place she’d be demanding the same things (there’s even a terrific bit of 1980s design on display when we first meet the Gatherers, who apparently reside in world of fantastic postmodern cyberpunk urban decay and who resemble a cross between 1980s chain gang street punks and Mad Max-esque road warriors-I absolutely love it).

Then there’s Commander Riker’s plot, which is lovely. The episode plays an interesting sort of skip when it comes to diegtic information: At first, the characters know far more about the situation than we do, but, as soon as we move the action to Gamma Hromi II, they suddenly start to know far less as it’s revealed to us in one shot how Yuta is an assassin whose actions will work against peace talks and that she kills using some kind of biotech interface.…

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Lost Post

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“Twenty-eight minutes past,” said Felix, looking at his watch.  “Nothing.”

The Doctor consulted the black plastic Casio with a broken strap that she kept in her pocket.

“I make it 3.26,” she said.  “Any moment now.”

They were standing behind some empty flower tubs at the centre of a roundabout.  Every now and then a car would swoop past, but essentially they were alone.  A spray of chilly drizzle floated all around them.  It was almost frozen, and felt curiously oily.  Each droplet turned as bright gold as a cinder as it flew under the beams of the street lamps.

They’d left the TARDIS stuck half-way out of an Off Licence several streets away.

“How do you know there’s a roundabout around here?” Felix had asked.

“If we walk far enough in any direction,” the Doctor had replied, “we’re bound to come across one.  Roads need to diverge, you know.”

And, sure enough, a roundabout had eventually presented itself.  It was deserted, so they had strolled across the broad ring of tarmac to the little grassy hill at its centre.

And there they stood, side by side, like strangers waiting for a bus.  They did not speak for quite some time.

“Are you sure you’ve got this right, Doctor?” asked Felix at last, who was feeling wet and sick and cold, and increasingly sure that the Doctor was playing some kind of game, the aim of which was to fob him off.

“The instructions were quite clear,” she replied tersely.

“But I thought one had to wait at a crossroads at midnight,” said Felix.

“That’s if you’re waiting for the Devil.  We’re not.”

“I don’t think we’re waiting for anyone,” said Felix sulkily.  “I think you have been misleading me.  Again.”

It was a little while after this that they checked the time.  As they did so, a figure appeared on the other side of the roundabout, riding a bicycle.  The bicycle and its rider emerged from a patch of darkness between street lamps, without having entered it first.  The pedaling figure seemed simply to have formed itself from the darkness.  It began rolling slowly around the roundabout in what looked like a cloud of mist.  It had swerved into view and trundled up onto the centre of the roundabout almost before Felix and the Doctor had realised what was happening.

The Doctor consulted her Casio again.

“Twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning,” she announced, waggling her Casio in Felix’s face, and sounding more smug than Felix had ever imagined possible.

Felix did not respond.  His attention was fixed on the thing that had just appeared in front of them.

One cloven hoof remained upon a still pedal.  The other rested on the ground.  It made the wet grass sizzle and steam and char.

“Shall we finish the argument later?” asked Felix in a hoarse whisper.

“Just because you’re losing…” muttered the Doctor.

The creature stepped off its bike and leaned it against a flower tub.  It was short – though still taller than Felix – and stocky.…

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Red Kangs Are Best

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I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives? Podcast, which looks at ‘Paradise Towers’.  During it, Kevin and James’ guest Jane (of achairforjane? and many fascinating comments – and an amazing guest post on Lost – at Phil Sandifer’s blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them.  Totally valid and satisfying reading.  (And I’m grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)

I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a  ‘Marxist reading’ or a ‘Marxist analysis’.  I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn’t in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a ‘Marxist analysis’ would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle.  I hold my hands up: that’s often what I do here, and it doesn’t really cut the mustard.

To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production.  A more proper sense of the term ‘Marxist analysis’ would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production – in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like ‘the culture industries’ or ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’ (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another).  I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation.  For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including – but also beyond – texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.

I’m often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a ‘Marxist reading’ or ‘Marxist analysis’ of this or that.  This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I’m not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing.  Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative.  Ye gods, I hope not.  I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact.  One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.…

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Saturday Waffling (February 6th, 2015)

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We’ve got a full week of content for the blog this week. Monday will be the last TARDIS Eruditorum. Tuesday will kick off A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones. Wednesday afternoon/evening will have comics reviews. Thursday will be Last War in Albion. And Friday is up in the air, but will be an audio post of some sort. Then on Saturday I’ll announce the schedule for the blog going forward.

The blog going forward is going to be funded by Patreon. Right now that’s at $279 per blog post. As long as it stays over $200, you can expect a blog post a week. If it gets to $400, that will increase to two, though I’ll still only charge people once a week. Just $1 a week lets you vote on the bonus posts.
I also have been posting regularly on Tumblr for a bit now, including lots of random short posts on topics of potential interest to readers. I have anonymous asks turned on there, so feel free to follow me and to pepper me with questions. 
But today, let’s just do a nice sort of… I think the kids call it an “AMA” in the comments here. Could take a bit for me to actually get to answering questions, as I’m kind of busy putting the finishing touches on Monday’s post, but I’ll tackle things when I can. So. Fire away.
To tackle the one I expect…
Logopolis is almost done – I’m going to do my last work on the manuscript on Tuesday, probably, then send it both to the copy-editor to triple check that all the “turn to page X” lines are correct and to James so he can finish off the cover art. Once it’s ready, I’ll get copies en route to everybody who bought them at the Kickstarter, order a batch to start sending copies to people who get signed copies, and then announce the book here for general order. It’ll be print only at first, though I don’t rule out an eventual ebook. I’ll start on the Volume 6 manuscript after that.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else Final: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who

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There are several regards in which the IDW run of Doctor Who comics is an oddity. First and foremost, it is the only substantive body of Doctor Who material to receive no distribution in the UK. Panini, the Italian sticker company that bought Marvel UK’s operations in the mid-90s and, with it, Doctor Who Magazine, had the UK license for Doctor Who comics, and was disinclined to let an American upstart in. And so IDW ended up creating Doctor Who comics almost entirely for the American market.
Unrelatedly, IDW also ended up creating what was mostly a line of fairly crappy comics. They opened with a Tenth Doctor/Martha miniseries by longtime vanguard of mediocrity Gary Russell, continued with the damp and misguided squib of The Forgotten, and stopped off at their one UK-distributed series, and eventually did their Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover (distributed in the UK because they put Star Trek first in the title, meaning it was technically a Star Trek comic and thus not precluded by Panini’s license), skewered masterfully by Josh Marsfelder here, stopping off with various other mostly uninteresting comics along the way.
Of course, as we’ve seen over the years, Doctor Who comics are hardly the area of the series’ life where it has most regularly crowned itself in glory. There are moments of genuine charm, most often in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, and especially in those edited by Clayton Hickman. And there are moments that are interesting as objects of nostalgia – the weird alternate history of the John and Gillian period, the Frank Bellamy imitations of the Pertwee era, early career mediocrities from Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Grant Morrison, the surreal John Ridgway dreamscapes of the Davison and Colin Baker years, and the criminally under-appreciated Steve Moore run. But for the most part Doctor Who comics have been historical curiosities. The IDW run is mostly the same, although, truth be told, most of it isn’t even that curious. 
But on Christmas Eve 2013, the day before the end of the Matt Smith era, IDW released a one-shot that served as their farewell to the license before it passed on to Titan Comics. It’s been the norm for a few years for one of the Wednesdays around Christmas to get a heavily reduced slate of new release comics, quietly shipped to comic shops a week in advance, with all of the books being fairly high profile, major books. So in 2013, there were a total of eight new releases, with one of them being this – a $7.99 double-length issue to close out the run. Picked for the high profile assignment, in a notable departure from IDW’s usual somewhat uninspiring creators, was Paul Cornell, making what was, by 2013, a rare return to Doctor Who. The premise is a comics classic, and an homage to the “Earth Prime” days of the DC Multiverse – the Doctor falls through universes as he does sometimes, and finds himself in the real world, where his adventures are regularly chronicled in a TV show on the BBC. 
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“Hew-mon mating rituals”: The Price

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Random Operations Crew Lady is my kindred spirit here.

Stable wormholes! Galactic quadrants! Trade negotiations! Sexy romantic tension! The Ferengi! Almost feels like we’re on another show, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, looking at “The Price” just made me wish I actually was watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine instead. Or really anything other than this.

I would have so many questions about this episode were I actually inspired enough to bother to ask. Why is everybody treating majestic celestial phenomena like natural resources under late stage capitalism? According to their own ideals, the Federation should be staunchly opposed to any kind of wheeling and dealing involving the Barzan wormhole unless they’ve been lying to us through their teeth which, OK, but the Enterprise crew at least shouldn’t be on board with this plan. I can’t think of a *worse* group of people to host these negotiations: They should be firmly arguing for the wormhole to be left in the galactic commons where it belongs. This isn’t even me just projecting my own ideology onto the show-The whole philosophical model the show’s universe is built on is one of post-scarcity where material wants and motivations no longer exist or apply. It’s *told* us this *explicitly* a number of times. Why do the effects shots all look universally cheap and unappealing? And why is the Enterprise crew still hosting negotiations of any kind in the first place? They’re supposed to be scientists and explorers, not diplomats!

Then there’s the episode’s crux, the one-off romance between Deanna and Ral. Oh My God. This might be, in all seriousness, one of the single worst television romances I have ever seen. There’s the obvious fact Ral is transparently a sleazy manipulative womanizer (one sort of gets that feeling when he makes his appearance prancing onstage with a model hanging off his arm) who bullishly strongarms Deanna into falling for him: She gets little to no agency in the relationship, simply being swept off her feet by overwhelming masculine guile. Ral is a 24th century pickup artist, and the mere thought that this was supposed to be a story to flesh out Troi as a character sickens me. Was something this rote, hackish and frankly offensively sexist really the only thing this team could come up with to give Troi something to do? Apparently so, considering they got rid of her suboplot in “The Enemy”. I guess the only thing women are good for is cheesy dimestore romance novel stories. Except no, wait, this isn’t even a cheesy dimestore romance novel story-This is a *parody* of cheesy dimestore romance stories that doesn’t realise it’s a parody and isn’t remotely funny: The dialog and plot beats are so stilted and cliche it defies belief and there’s an absolutely staggering, and deeply uncomfortable lack of irony and self-awareness at every possible level.

Aside from its general terribleness, “The Price” comprehensively fails at being romantic *or* sexy, and you kind of need to hit at least one.…

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None More Goth (The Last War in Albion Part 82: Bauhaus, Enid Blyton)

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Comics Reviews will return on February 11th.

This is the tenth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: A smaller but nevertheless significant collaborator on V for Vendetta was David J, who was also the bassist in Northampton band Bauhaus, whose first single was an ode to 1930s horror films entitled “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

“None more goth.” -Kieron Gillen, probably every morning when he looks in the mirror

Figure 630: Peter Murphy in The Hunger. David J’s bass is visible on the
left.
The result was a minor hit that stuck around in the independent charts for two years and, perhaps more significantly, marked the birth of goth music. Sticking with the period aesthetic from which they got their name and first single, Bauhaus quickly forged a distinctive visual style that drew from German Expressionism coupled with periodic trips to antique stores to, as J puts it, pick over “piles of moth-eaten Victorian velvet (in both the ladies and gentleman’s departments.”) This was coupled, in their live shows, by lighting design produced by Graham Bentley, who used stark industrial lighting and strobes to flood the stage with light, highlighting their monochromatic wardrobe. All of this served to highlight, in Moore’s words, “the rivetting stage presence of Peter Murphy as he writhes against his live backdrop of searing white light and contorted shadows” – a stage presence that would go on to become one of the defining images of goth culture when director Tony Scott used the song and Murphy’s performance for the opening credits of his classic 1983 vampire film The Hunger, with Murphy gyrating against and tearing at a wire mesh, a libidinous monster playing homage to the cinematic tradition Scott’s film succeeds.
Figure 631: Moore’s text was eventually used as the cover
for Bauhaus’s live album This Is For When
Moore, indeed, was one of the band’s early boosters, giving them one of their first pieces of national press in February of 1980 when he gave them a half-page writeup in Sounds, some eight months before their first full album, when they were still riding high on the back of two singles and a Peel session. Entitled “Phantoms of the Teenage Opera,” the piece concludes by proclaiming the band to have “a sound as clean as a razor, and a vision that doesn’t need dressing up in angry rhetoric or android accessories to make a point. Their music may have the shadow of the tall steel over it, but that’s a heartbeat you hear throbbing in the background, not a ring modulator.
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“Predictably treacherous”: The Enemy

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Now that we’re living comfortably(?) in a post-“Q Who” universe and we all know who the Borg are, this leaves Star Trek: The Next Generation with the troublesome task of figuring out what to do with the Romulans. Their reintroduction in “The Neutral Zone”, after all, was not exactly the most graceful of affairs, and they are hampered somewhat by having their one big story arc scuttled by the writer’s strike. Even if it hadn’t been though, the simple fact is that decoy bad guys aren’t really needed anymore once the real bad guys show up.

The thing is though, we have to be extremely careful when we talk about the Borg in this context, because even this early the creative team was keenly aware that they were something you only bring in on very rare and momentous occasions to preserve the impact that goes along with their presence. More esoterically though, it’s still the case that even though they seem like they were envisioned as such and all the official literature will say they were, the Borg are not actually villains for Star Trek: The Next Generation: They’re villains Star Trek is fated to face not in this incarnation, but at some point far in the future, and the show makes this very clear at both diegetic and extradiegetic levels. So not only do the Borg have to be held back for special occasions, those special occasions *also* have to involve some element of metacommentary on the state of the show and its parent franchise. The problem is though that because Star Trek: The Next Generation is action sci-fi (I don’t actually think it is personally, but we’ll presume it is for the moment for the sake of argument because that’s how it tends to get read) it needs to have reoccurring bad guys. And with the Klingons out and the Ferengi a laughingstock (as ill-warranted as that may be and even though people will doggedly, and successfully, continue to redeem them), this means the show sort of defaults on the Romulans.

And in spite of some roughness in “The Neutral Zone”, the Romulans have actually been depicted pretty well up until now, with Subcommander Taris and her crew being depicted as complete intellectual equals to Commander Riker and the Enterprise crew in “Contagion”. By “well” I mean “in keeping with the culture we saw established in the Original Series that values aesthetics and sensuality controlled by a crumbling empire”, or at least as a (n ironically) logical evolution of that culture given the span of a generation or so. With “The Enemy” though, we get the first symptoms of the Romulans drifting more towards the “programmatically shifty” characterization that will unfortunately come to define a lot of stories about them from here on out. Bochra stupidly refuses to trust Geordi at every turn, even when his life starts to literally depend on it, while Tomalak strategically withholds information from Captain Picard concerning the true nature of their venture on Galordon Core which accomplishes little but stalling the rescue of both crewmembers.…

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The Wasp Factory

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This is a bonus post written for my backers on Patreon. If you would like to weigh in on what the next bonus post will be, please consider backing – nominations are currently open. Plus, for just $1 a week, you can keep this blog alive and kicking. 

And so, somewhat unexpectedly, my fifth ever long(ish) form blogging project starts up a week before my fourth. The fourth even has a title and everything. Whereas this one… doesn’t, because I hadn’t been planning on starting it until mid-April at the earliest. And perhaps more to the point, this is very much an exploratory project. To date, the Iain (M) Banks novels I’ve read are this, Player of Games, and Use of Weapons. So I’m still very much drawing a critical bead on him. I’m not even entirely sure I can articulate why I want to write a ten-plus post blog series on the Culture novels yet.

Nevertheless, it begins here, with Banks’s first published novel, in his literary, M-free identity, The Wasp Factory. It is worth noting that Banks’s early career features a mildly complicated chronology. The Wasp Factory came out in 1984. His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, came out in 1987. But drafts of Phlebas and the next two Culture novels, Player of Games and Use of Weapons, all pre-date The Wasp Factory.

Which is to say that the broad shape of Banks’s career is misleading. He has said that he always considered himself a science fiction writer first, and that he tried his hand at literary fiction when science fiction wasn’t quite working out for him. And more to the point, he’s said that he inwardly thought of The Wasp Factory as a science fiction novel. As Banks explained in a 2008 interview, the isolated setting of a small island near a remote Scottish village allowed him to treat a realist setting in a manner not unlike an alien planet, and the, shall we say, eccentricities of the protagonist, Frank, meant that they was not entirely unlike writing about someone from an alien culture.

But in the context of his later work, or at least, in the context of the bits of it I’ve read, there’s another theme that emerges – one that I’m willing to hazard a pretty strong guess is going to prove to be one of Banks’s major topics across his career, which is the idea of people as technology. The big twist in The Wasp Factory is that Frank, who goes through the book thinking that their genitals were bitten off in a dog attack when they was young, is in fact a woman who has been being given male hormones by their father throughout their life as part of what their father drunkenly describes as an “experiment.”

A digression here, because although I don’t actually find the trans issues most interesting about this book, I know what is expected of me as a blogger. First of all, let me say that I wish to hell there were some thorough trans perspectives on The Wasp Factory.…

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Outside the Government Final: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

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Given that The Day of the Doctor was massively successful and immediately catapulted to the top of the “best Doctor Who stories ever” list, it is perhaps no small thing that it was not actually the most beloved piece of the fiftieth anniversary. That honor, of course, goes to the spectacle of Steven Moffat visibly wishing he was sitting in the chair from Terror of the Autons during the botched satellite link-up with One Direction during the BBC Three “afterparty.” But second to the single most sublime moment of television that Steven Moffat has ever provided the world was Peter Davison’s The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. 
It is worth stating, up front, that this is a genuinely sweet and delightful piece of television. It is routinely hilarious, from the brilliant use of the Shada clip to cover Tom Baker’s lack of involvement to the Peter Jackson/Ian McKellen cameo to Sylvester McCoy’s beautiful delivery of “I’d like to go home now” to Steven Moffat playing with action figures in his office to… I mean, this paragraph could go on for quite a bit, couldn’t it? This is a joyous thing chock full of charming moments. 
In some ways, actually, that’s the headline. Colin Baker has said in at least one interview that he genuinely was hurt not to be included in Day of the Doctor, especially given that Tom Baker was. This is an old wound, of course – the same one that flared twenty years earlier over the disparity of emphasis in The Dark Dimension. But it’s honestly difficult to imagine that Davison and McCoy didn’t have similar emotions. Of course they were all jealous of Baker and McGann for getting involvement. Wouldn’t anyone be? 
And yet this exists, full of warmth and humor and good feelings. On, to be clear, all sides. Moffat is there to send himself up as a disdainful and cantankerous man who has it in for any part of the series he didn’t create. Because, of course, he’d have loved to do The Thirteen Doctors as much as Colin Baker would have loved to be in it. Nobody didn’t want to see all of the classic series Doctors. And perhaps more to the point, in skewering himself so thoroughly, Moffat is tacitly making it clear that he understands Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s disappointments, and, more to the point, is sympathizing with them.
One might, of course, fairly ask why he didn’t just give them parts in the special then. But the reason for that is straightforward: the special still had to, at the end of the day, work as an episode of television and as a narrative. And the available options for trying to craft a narrative featuring all of the Doctors were all, in their own ways, unappealing. Seventy-five minutes is not nearly enough to handle eight leads with their own plot threads – an ensemble of that size needs far more room to breathe. And a chain of cameo appearances would quickly grow dull.
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