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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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“Gods and ungods”: Booby Trap

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If Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s new mission is to explore utopian themes through the interiority of its characters, than it’s reasonable to expect one of the first things it would do with this new mandate is to try and clearly reaffirm and rearticulate who those characters and what their accompanying positionalities actually are.

“Booby Trap” then is a good example of Michael Piller’s philosophy is it pertains to the show going forward and is very indicative of the sorts of things that are going to define Star Trek: The Next Generation in general and the third season in particular. Although kickstarted under Michael Wagner’s tenure, it’s a script that Piller and his team comprehensively rewrote and it passed through an impressive number of hands before making it to screen which is going to be kind of the norm from here out. But because of this, it gives us a fairly clear look at the creative differences between the two third season teams: Wagner’s version of the story would have had Captain Picard be the one involved with the holographic woman, perhaps because in the Original Series it was always the leading man captain who would get the girl of the week. But the very first thing Micheal Piller did upon getting this script was nixing that idea outright, figuring that it should be Geordi instead and the real story should be about him. As Piller himself put it

“It just said to me, ‘Picard should be on the bridge, not chatting with some woman.’ I said to myself, ‘It should be Geordi, because Geordi is in love with the ship and this is a story about a guy in love with his ’57 Chevy.’ That played into Geordi’s character, who’s always been a fumbling guy around women, but if he could just marry his car, he’d live happily ever after. He gets to create the personification of the woman who created the engine he loves. It’s sort of a relationship between he and his Pontiac.”

This is interesting, and I’m going to extrapolate a bit from Piller’s explanation if for no other reason than “Booby Trap” has been the butt of a seemingly unending stream of unfunny mechanophile jokes because of this reading, not to mention the fact that the behaviour that tends to get projected onto Geordi here hedges uncomfortably close to that of a certain kind of broken male genre fiction fan that’s frankly unbecoming of any member of the Enterprise crew, especially him (indeed, Star Trek: The Next Generation will tackle the issue head-on in a story at the other end of the season). Also, one wonders if by the time of that interview Piller hadn’t gotten the chronology of his episodes confused, as it had never previously been established that Geordi was unlucky in love. Sure, the only person he’d ever been shown to be interested in before was Tasha Yar during his non-starter romance with her in the first season (which this team certainly knew about, as they give it a touching nod in “Yesterday’s Enterprise”), but that didn’t mean Geordi was awkward around women in general.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 31st. 2015)

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In a similar vein to the question a few weeks ago about Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire, the bonus post for January voted on by Patreon backers (actually going up on Tuesday) is going to be on Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and will serve as a prelude to a gradual series of posts covering the Culture novels. So, Banks. How familiar are you with him? What are favorites of yours? Least favorites? General thoughts?…

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The Moment Has Been Prepared For (The Day of the Doctor)

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Well, at least it’s just the one who committed genocide and not the one in that
awful coat.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour, in this case, was actually about seventy-five minutes long, commencing at 7:50 PM on November 23rd, 2013. Martin Garrix was at number one with “Animals,” with Lily Allen, Lorde, One Direction, Lady Gaga, and Eminem also charting. In the six months since The Name of the Doctor had aired, Edward Snowden had created a major international stir when he leaked a significant trove of classified information about the extent of surveillance operations being routinely carried out by the US and UK governments, Mohamed Morsi was deposed as President of Egypt in a military coup, and Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines and Vietnam, killing more than six thousand people. The man, of course, was Steven Moffat. 
The Day of the Doctor did not quite win universal praise. It just won stellar ratings, an impressive 88% AI rating, the distinction of being only the second episode of Doctor Who ever to hit the number one slot in the weekly ratings, and Doctor Who Magazine’s 50th Anniversary poll for the greatest story of all time. Nothing is all things to everyone, but it is difficult to imagine something coming much closer than The Day of the Doctor did. And yet The Day of the Doctor arrived after an enormously troubled production season, and was hardly an uncomplicated production in its own right, with executive producer Caro Skinner quitting the series a few weeks before shooting began, on top of the entire mess of Eccleston initially expressing interest and subsequently declining to reprise the role. That it avoided being an outright disaster given these circumstances seems a lucky break. That it was an insta-classic seems a small miracle.
At the heart of its success is a script by Moffat that is unapologetically committed to the episode’s grandeur. The episode deploys big set piece after big set piece, rarely waiting long between them. The TARDIS helicopter lift starts at the two minute mark. At seven minutes, we jump into the Time War. Billie Piper shows up six minutes later, David Tennant six minutes after that, at around the twenty minute mark. At twenty-seven minutes, Smith and Tennant share the screen for the first time. The big Zygon awakening/invasion breaks out at thirty-five minutes. Six minutes later is the big “did you ever count the children” three-way confrontation among the Doctors, which, while lacking the immediate grandeur of some of the other instances, is nevertheless a huge moment. The biggest slow period of the episode is the subsequent ten minutes building to the Doctors blasting their way out of Gallifrey Falls No More, bringing us to the fifty-two minute mark. By fifty-eight minutes, all three Doctors are agreeing to commit double genocide. And seven minutes later the thirteen-Doctor montage has kicked off. And six minutes thereafter the Curator shows. 
But for all the accelerated pace involved in jumping from set piece to set piece, what’s also striking is the way in which the individual set pieces are generally given room to breathe.
…

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“A family doesn’t need to be related”: The Bonding

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This is one of those marquee episodes that gets breathless amounts of critical acclaim, always tops fan lists for best episodes and is always held up as being a decisive sea change for the show. And all that praise is absolutely deserved. Oh yeah, this one is absolutely brilliant. More than that, it’s perfect. It’s about as perfect a blueprint for how Star Trek: The Next Generation should work and a self-demonstrating example of that structure in action as exists. But why precisely “The Bonding” works as well as it does and its true impact and legacy not just on this show, but on every Star Trek series to come, is actually surprisingly deceptive.

“The Bonding” is the end result of the early intersection of two forces new to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s of course Michael Piller’s debut as head writer, and it’s also the inaugural offering from the first new bit of creative blood Piller brought onto the show: One Ronald D. Moore, future Dominion War architect and Battlestar Galactica brainchild who, suffice to say, is going to be something of a major figure from here on out. Although, as Moore quite aptly emphasizes, the success of both this story and his subsequent Hollywood career is due to quite a lot of luck: Moore was a die-hard Star Trek fan who practically worshiped the Original Series and, beyond excited about the prospects of Star Trek: The Next Generation, submitted an unsolicited spec script to the writer’s office while working as a gas station attendant between jobs after his law career didn’t pan out. Thing is, you kind of *don’t do* that in Hollywood-Writers need agents and publicity teams; jobbing in Hollywood is not the sort of thing the average guy can just walk in off the street and decide to do some day.

Unless, that is, you happened to want to write for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989.

Part of Moore’s self-described good fortune comes from the second of two edicts Michael Piller made upon becoming head writer (the first being his staunch commitment to characterization and character development we talked a bit about in “Evolution”). Piller was at an absolute impasse with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s complete, actual, literal lack of material and he knew no matter how talented the writing staff he could pull together, there was simply no physical way he could keep up with the punishingly unforgiving schedule of weekly television on his own. So, after running it by Rick Berman and getting his endorsement for the idea, Piller made a decision so elegantly simple no-one had thought to do it before: He decided to instate Hollywood’s first, and to date only, open submissions policy. Thanks to Micheal Piller, Star Trek: The Next Generation became the only show on the block that anyone who was interested could submit a story to *sight unseen* with *no official representation or Hollywood backing*, a tradition that eventually carried over to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.…

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Super-Vampires Rule the Night (The Last War in Albion Part 81: Guy Fawkes Day, Bauhaus)

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Comics Reviews will return on February 11th.

This is the ninth 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: Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

“Earth 43: A world of darkness and fear where super-vampires rule the night as the BLOOD LEAGUE.” –Grant Morrison, Multiversity Guidebook

Figure 621: William of Orange was crowned William III in the
Glorious Revolution. Here his 1688 arrival is depicted by
James Thornhill (1675-1734).
It is not that this is entirely unsympathetic. Fawkes himself was a Catholic supremacist, but he fit into the same centuries-long tradition of religious dissidence in England that would eventually produce William Blake. And as David Lloyd noted, the basic cheek of trying to blow up Parliament is rather appealing. In the end, though, is not so much the precise ethics of Fawkes the man that are most relevant to the development of V for Vendetta as it is the holiday that sprung up in the wake of the plot. Following its uncovering, the public were allowed to celebrate the plot’s failure by lighting bonfires. The next January, Parliament passed the Observance of 5th November Act, which established a standing holiday commemorating the King’s survival. This holiday persisted, not least because in 1688 William of Orange’s arrival in England to overthrow James II happened to land on November the 5th, the day after his birthday, giving the holiday new resonances. Over time the custom of bonfires came to incorporate first burning the pope in effigy, and then, somewhat more moderately, burning Guy Fawkes in effigy – a tradition that led to the creation of the Guy Fawkes mask, with allowed one to give one’s anti-Catholic effigy a suitably grotesque holiday. 
Figure 622: An 1870s effigy of Guy Fawkes built by a London fruitvendor.
The holiday also, in the 19th century, gradually became a holiday more associated with the working class, a transition that led to a transition away from celebration of victories of the monarchy and towards a more anti-authoritarian approach. Over the course of the century, Fawkes found himself incorporated into popular fiction, starting with William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1841 novel Guy Fawkes, which rehabilitated Fawkes into a more sympathetic character who, by 1905, was appearing as a hero in illustrated books like The Boyhood Days of Guy Fawkes; Or, the Conspirators of Old London. This was very much the spirit in which Moore was introduced to the holiday – he talks of how “when parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton.” 
…

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An Ageing System

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It’s always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older.  You’d think that the opposite would happen.

I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them.  You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable.  You’re more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are.  You’re more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts.  You’re more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched.  You’re more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don’t pay off in anything like the way you’re told they will when you’re younger.  You’re more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age.  You’re more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance.  You’re more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn’t have to pay through the nose for.  You’re more likely to meet more and more people of different ‘races’ and nationalities, and thus to notice that they’re not too different to you.  You’re more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs.  You’re more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had.  You’re more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two.  You’re more likely to have observed the way the world’s weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades.  You’re more likely to have seen friends’ lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress.  You’re more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age.  And you’re more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face.  A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents’ home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system.  And on and on it goes.

Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems.…

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“Off the Verandah”: Who Watches The Watchers

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Oh look. Vasquez Rocks.

There should be an entire genre of Star Trek story called “Star Trek Does Not Understand How Anthropology Works.”

So the obvious problem with “Who Watches The Watchers” firstoff is that it’s a Prime Directive story, which means it sucks. It also has a kidnapping subplot, which means it sucks even more and I also hate it for that. But what really arouses my ire is that for the first time Star Trek explicitly connects the Prime Directive with anthropological fieldwork which…no. No, no, no, no. You know that one person who’s so specialized in a certain field they get irrationally upset when bits of pop culture misrepresent that field through innocent ignorance? Yeah, I’m pretty much that person when it comes to anthropological methods. I’m sure everyone has their own justifications for getting incensed over stuff like this: Because we’ve dedicated a lot of our lives to working with and studying it, we think things like particle physics or paleontology or thermodynamics or ballistics or whatever is The Most Important Thing In The World and that when TV shows get it wrong it will surely send society onto a path of utter ruination.

But here’s the thing. Pop culture is a shared language and is the first exposure roughly 99% of everyone is going to have with certain concepts, fields and ideas, and getting them wrong can in specific cases be actually misleading to the point of being irresponsible. And Star Trek has been as guilty on this front as anything else, being at times egregiously sketchy on things like history, legal jurisprudence, developmental biology and yes, cultural anthropology. There’s a certain political and social responsibility associated with these things that you can’t just cast aside and ignore in favour of squeezing more melodrama out of your script, especially if it’s particularly shitty melodrama. And call me biased all you want, I am casting cultural anthropology in that group because cultural anthropology is fundamentally about how people communicate with and understand each other. If you don’t know how to do that, or teach people how to do it poorly, you are provably being a toxic and counterproductive force in the world.

Cultural anthropology is first and foremost a framework for empathy. It’s an academic structure that facilitates talking to people and getting to know them and the way they think better. There’s a reason one of the field’s most sacred tenets is called “participant observation”: Anthropologists think the best way to learn about people is to live with them, talk to them and do what they do. There is a necessary sharing and exchange of of positionalities that happens when we do this, and both the insider and outsider perspectives are equally valued. This is how thinking and living anthropologically can help make the world a better place, because when positionalities meet people are exposed to truths and ideas they might not have been otherwise.…

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