Saturday Waffling (January 24th, 2015)
As we find ourselves increasingly adrift from when it was an appropriate question, what were your favorite pieces of media of 1994? Films, TV shows, comics, books, music, video games, plays, whatever.…
Hey, Turn That Down: The Doctors Revisited (David Tennant)
At last, we reach the end of history, with an episode that is set up to, basically, repeat the same talking points about the Tenth Doctor that were being used when he was still on screen. This is as straightforward as it is possible to be – an unabashed display case for an era of Doctor Who that everybody knows is a classic.
Which, fair enough. There’s really no getting around the fact that the Tennant era was wildly popular, and that Tennant is always going to be one of the iconic portrayals of the Doctor. There are no apologias to make, and as of 2013, at least, the Tennant era hadn’t slipped into history, not least because Tennant was going to be making a return in less than a month anyway, with no explanation of why he looked older or anything like that necessary. There was, really, no other way to do this.
That said, the selection of what to focus on is interesting. Noticeably absent is any standing in the rain. There’s a little bit of the Bad Wolf Bay scene from Doomsday, but for the most part the two iconic emotional scenes from Tennant’s era, the departures of Rose and Donna, are entirely skipped over. This is even more striking given that Martha’s departure is featured in detail. There’s no mention of Human Nature/Family of Blood either. In other words, all the moments of Tennant’s Doctor being pushed to extremes are skipped.
Instead we get a focus on Tennant in default mode. There are sizeable clips from The Sontaran Stratagem and The Idiot’s Lantern, both of which are fine scenes, but which would appear on almost nobody’s instinctive list of major David Tennant scenes. To some extent, this demonstrates the level of confidence that they clearly have in the material: nobody is trying to sell David Tennant. Indeed, it’s somewhat refreshing to look at him in these scenes. Tennant’s best scenes are indeed extraordinary, but it’s easy to forget that he was also extraordinarily good at just being a foundation for the show to build on.
This also gets at the closest thing to a problem with this episode, however. For all its confidence, it shares the Peter Davison episode’s strange failure to actually ever describe what this iteration of the Doctor is actually like. Loads of talking heads are ready to line up and, quite rightly, say how wonderful David Tennant is, but nobody can actually nail down what his Doctor was like and why he was so iconic. Perhaps it’s simply too soon, but either way, it’s a glaring omission.
The other strange thing is the story chosen. It’s not that it’s a poor choice – indeed, there may be no story quite so Tennanty as The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. But the story notably, gets no coverage in the episode itself, unlike the previous few, which took pains to get the viewer up to speed on what they were going to watch. This works fine – really, who needs a substantial introduction to the most popular Doctor Who story ever?…
“Adapt to serve nature or become extinct”: Evolution
Natural selection is not teleological. A species does not evolve from an inferior state to a superior one, it changes in response to new environmental circumstances. There are no “higher” forms of life, and to claim otherwise is tantamount to race (and species) essentialism. Species adapt to harmonize better with nature, not to surpass and dominate it.
It’s with its third season, fans always claim, that Star Trek: The Next Generation finally got good and started to become the show we know and love. Older accounts would breathlessly emphasize how the show was apparently on the verge of cancellation because of how terrible the first two years were, and it was only “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1” that saved it and guaranteed it would go on to have a prosperous future. Nowadays, especially with mainline fandom’s re-evaluation of the Dominion War arc and the success of Battlestar Galactica, it’s become trendy to say that not only was Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s third season the beginning of “the good part”, it was unambiguously the best year of the entire series *by far* because it was the only time both Ronald D. Moore and Ira Steven Behr (the former being responsible for the reimagined BSG while both helmed the Dominion War) were on staff together. The true story of this fan-favourite run of stories is a bit more complicated then either of those accounts would lead you to believe, however, and there’s one very important person whose positionality always seems to get swept up in the torrent of the Master Narrative and overlooked.
Star Trek does not have the patriarchal neo-auteur construction of the “showrunner” that’s so common in modern parlance about TV shows: Cult of Gene Roddenberry notwithstanding, there’s no one person who it can be even pretended holds ultimate sway over any individual era’s look, feel or quality. Although Roddenberry is always keeping watch, always hovering around making sure his specific (though small) set of requirements are being met, his job is and always has been basically that of a sort of quality control analyst-He’s not, strictly speaking, an auteur or a creator. But it can be said Star Trek has had, over the years, people whom we might call primary creative figures-A creator or group of creators whose voice was strong and compelling enough that it shaped or facilitated a great deal of the tone of any given period.
To overgeneralize for the sake of argument, during the first two seasons of the Original Series, this was obviously Gene Coon, along with D.C. Fontana and Bob Justman, with John Meredyth Lucas taking over Coon’s role for the tail end of the second season. For the final year of OG Trek we had the somewhat infamous duo of Fred Freiberger and Arthur Singer butting heads with Justman, with Fontana coming back to hold the majority of the Animated Series together by herself.…
A Wishful Past, All Jungled Over (The Last War in Albion Part 80: Anarchism, Inspiration, Guy Fawkes)
This is the eighth 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: One of the major themes of V for Vendetta is the idea of anarchism, a philosophical movement Moore eventually described in some detail in an essay for Dodgem Logic, in which he listed various historical forms of the concept.
“Sounds like a wishful past, all jungled over, a heroic run and the what-for of everything fuck simple.” -Alan Moore, Crossed +100
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| Figure 613: William Godwin |
He turns also to Mikhail Bakunin’s Collectivist Anarchism, with was an important predecessor to Marxism, along with Peter Kropotkin’s rejection of private property, and, more contemporarily, Hakim Bey (who in addition to being an anarchist and pedophilia advocate was an open sorcerer, defining the concept as “the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness and its deployment in the world of deeds and objects to bring about desired results”). But for the purposes of understanding Blake, perhaps the most important thinker Moore touches upon is William Godwin, whose Political Justice, in Moore’s account, advocated “that the individual act according to his or her individual judgement while allowing every single other individual the same liberty.”
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| Figure 614: One of Blake’s illustrations for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life. (1791) |
Political Justice, more properly titled Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, was published in 1793, the same year as America a Prophecy, and Godwin and Blake traveled in similar circles – Blake did a series of illustrations for Godwin’s future wife Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life in 1791, for instance. (Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also named Mary, would go on to have a significant career of her own, largely under her married name, acquired from “Ozymandias” poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.) Blake followed Godwin no more than he did any other man, but the intellectual similarities are clear enough.
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| Figure 615: The cover for the third issue of The Northampton Arts Group Magazine, featuring an iteration of Alan Moore’s concept for “the Doll.” (c. 1973) |
For Moore’s part, at least in terms of V for Vendetta, the most obvious anarchist to mention is Colin Ward, whose Anarchy in Action was first published in 1973, when Moore was working with the Northampton Arts Group, putting out zines while writing spoken word pieces like “Old Gangsters Never Die,” submitting a doomed proposal for “a freakish terrorist in white-face make-up who traded under the name of the Doll and waged war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s” to future Starblazer publisher DC Thomson, dreaming up his sci-fi epic Sun Dodgers and the character of Five, “a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five,” and meeting Phyllis Dixon, who he quickly married the next year.
Comics Reviews (January 21st, 2015)
Worst to best.
Moon Knight #11
One of the most pointlessly decompressed comics I think I have ever read. All the optimism I had when the very cool twist of someone stealing Khonshu from Marc Spector has thoroughly evaporated in the face of this.
All-New X-Men #35
So, next month issue #38 of this ties in with the not-very-interesting sounding Black Vortex, which does rather make one wonder what the release schedule of this is meant to look like. I can only assume that this Ultimate Universe crossover arc was not, in fact, intended to stretch out past the announcement of how Secret Wars would be working such that it was drained of all its excitement, and that this was not meant to become the exercise in “dear god is this arc still going on” that it’s become. Oh well.
Fables #148
It says very little good about this exercise in “oh god why have I bought over 150 comics called Fables in my lifetime” that the story of Lauda, which has very little to do with anything else in the plot, is by miles the best thing going on in the issue.
Amazing Spider-Man #13
This has lost some momentum from an exciting start, but has at least gained some of it back for the finish. I have to say, though, the Uncle Ben stuff feels like it was introduced far too late in the game to have the impact that the story seems to want from it. I just can’t bring myself to get that invested in the personal struggles of an alternate universe Uncle Ben, and the conceit of “he blames his own honorable nature for everything going wrong” is, while clever, just not doing it for me. I absolutely do not look forward to his inevitable heroic sacrifice next issue.
Captain American and the Mighty Avengers #4
This finally settles into being the book it wants to be, with Ewing getting to do his take on Sam Wilson as Captain America, as opposed to Sam Wilson as evil. It’s a promising book. I wish this had gotten to be the first issue. Still, four months to enjoy this before Secret Wars comes and fucks everything up again, I guess?
Guardians of the Galaxy #23
A few pages into its last issue, Planet of the Symbiotes reaches the planet of the symbiotes. I am to some extent reviewing past issues here, but I’m at a genuine loss for why we spent two near-identical issues fighting in space instead of just letting this be a two issue arc like it really wanted to be. Still, love the final page cliffhanger.
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #7
An extremely compelling first half of a two-part story, with some excellent plot twists for Alice and some compelling mysteries for the other characters. I love the Eternal Dogfight, and there’s some excellent Eleven-specific beats in this. Continues to be the best Doctor Who comic ever.
Loki: Agent of Asgard #10
This promised to finally pay off the long-simmering consequences of Kieron Gillen’s landmark Journey into Mystery run, and it does so in spades, carefully and meticulously dooming Loki in a fascinating way.…
“The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history”: The Ensigns of Command
It’s become accepted fandom opinion that Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s third season was when the show first “got good”; the beginning of the series’ golden age, if not the show’s single best year by far, *period*. This is, obviously, far more complicated than testimony this glib would imply it is. For one thing, I maintain that Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s early years were not entirely without merit, especially the first season. And while things most assuredly change this year and there are a number of reasons for this we’ll discuss in turn as we go along, the third season’s import and legacy comes mostly when taken together in restrospect. In the moment, the show’s production was no more or less chaotic and turbulent than it had always been.
Nowhere is the gap between the fan-esposued master narrative for what the supposedly near-”legendary Season 3 was and what it actually felt like for those who were in the trenches working on it more apparent than in the season opener “The Ensigns of Command”. Though aired after the story that actually went out as the year’s first episode, “Evolution”, “The Ensigns of Command” was actually put into production first, and it feels for all the world like an uncertain time of transition. Onscreen we get a number of fairly noticeable changes: There’s a new intro sequence, new costume designer Bob Blackwell, (hired at the recommendation of the departing Durinda Rice Wood, who herself replaced William Ware Theiss) was finally able to redesign the Starfleet uniforms by ditching the unfortunate spandex jumpsuits for cloth two-piece ensembles with pipped collars that are both far more fetching and far less destructive to the actors’ spinal columns and new director of photography Marvin Rush begins to reconceptualize the show’s lighting to great effect…Though he was actually only on hand for part of this episode, with key bits of it needing to be helmed by Thomas F. Denove.
But behind the scenes, it starts to feel depressingly a bit more like business as usual. Head writer and executive producer Maurice Hurley has long sense departed, him basically having checked out during the final third of the second season, and with Hurley goes the last tangible link to the creative team that was around when Star Trek: The Next Generation was originally conceived. Hurley left absolutely nothing behind that was in the remotest sense usable, and the only remaining actual writers on staff were Richard Manning, Hans Beimler and Melinda Snodgrass, the latter of whom had only been with the show (and writing for TV in general) for about half a season. With Gene Roddenberry starting to walk away from the show for health reason, the only person in a position of leadership left was Rick Berman, who was faced with the unenviable task of stringing together a functioning television production with roughly the same amount of resources and sense of preparedness as me.…
American Auton
One thing has become clear: Clint Eastwood is actually a deeply left-wing, anti-imperialist auteur with a profoundly sceptical and cynical attitude to America, war and patriotism.
It’s the fake baby that proves it.
A sentimentalised emblem of American family life… represented on screen as something blatantly unreal, synthetic, cheap, ersatz, evidently and transparently fake… and yet none of the ostensibly admirable icons of American values notice it! Instead the fake baby is cooed over like a beautiful, perfect, inspirational, precious, living child… even as Bradley Cooper (who must have been in on Eastwood’s satirical joke at the expense of red-state America, the Pentagon and all so-called ‘Heartland values’) brazenly waggles the mannequin’s little plastic hand and pretends the baby is moving by itself.
Let’s repeat that: he pretends the baby is moving. In this we see not only a Swiftian subversion of the exploitation of children as a lachrymose pavlovian trigger for tears of jingoistic pride in the eyes of America’s right-wing ideologues, but also a deeply disturbing reminder of all those babies – blown to pieces, dissolved in white phosphorous, or starved – who will never move on their own ever again thanks to the rampant violence of American military adventurism.
The symbol of America’s bright and moral future is literally a dead, hollow, plastic replica… and none of the characters notice. Too brainwashed by flags and Fox News and the 4th of July to see the cold, lifeless truth even when they hold it. And the idealised American child, the child of the patriot who has killed again and again for the US imperium, is also a reminder of the countless really dead babies that America has left in its wake across the globe.
Moreover, we – the audience – are evidently supposed to pretend we don’t notice. And he’s tricked loads of reactionaries into doing just that. Praising this superficially jingoistic, neo-con movie while silently passing over an insultingly blatant (and, on the face of it, ludicrous) piece of diegetic disruption.
Eastwood – who is obviously secretly more far-left than Michael Moore – has trolled the entire country. He’s even trolled those critics who have pointed out the fakeness of the baby! Do they think he doesn’t know it’s obviously fake? How myopic are these people? How myopic are the liberal critics of the film who have totally failed to comprehend the depth of Eastwood’s scabrous, scathing subversion? Eastwood has placed a blatant and horrifying truth about fakeness and sentimentality right in front of the entire United States… and he has stood back and let us watch as they all fail to see it.
It’s Eastwood’s most ascerbic bit of leftist absurdism, his most acidically situationist bit of surrealist theatre since the talking-to-the-empty-chair masterpiece (a performance of inspired performative lunacy that he managed to trick the GOP into letting him do on stage at their conference!).
It’s also possibly the most devastatingly subtle – yet also furiously dyspeptic and radical – comment on modern America in recent cinema.
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The Sign of Three
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“These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” – Edgar Allen Poe
The basic dramatic engine of Sherlock, by this point, has become the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.
Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television. The Sign of Three is a prime example – it is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death, it contains not a single overt tease of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do to hold interest over the course of months and years.
Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who‘s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised – the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic climax of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else. The plot is based around a pair of extended flashbacks that don’t seem connected to each other or the larger episode until the end. Instead there’s the continual anticipation of resolution – of the moment where things slot into place and the seemingly disjointed plotting is suddenly revealed as the precise clockwork of dramatic unity.
The Sign of Three, in other words, shows Sherlock as a well-oiled machine. Sherlock’s best man speech – contributed largely (and obviously) by Moffat – is a marvel.…
Regeneration: A Personal History of Doctor Who
A planned guest post for today fell through at the last minute, and Anna Wiggins graciously stepped in to deliver her thoughts on Missy and trans issues, which is not really in chronological sequence, but again, the planned post fell through. And more to the point, it’s brilliant, so really, who cares about chronology. This is a blog about time travel, dammit.
Also! The fantastic folks at the Pex Lives podcast invited me on this month to talk about The Ribos Operation and Last Christmas. It was a hoot to record. I’m mostly just ranting and pontificating, but if you enjoy me spontaneously staking out excessively bold critical positions, you’ll love this.
It is the summer of 1993. I am watching PBS, which is showing a weird old British sci-fi show that I enjoy watching whenever I catch it on. On screen, Romana (a character I like a lot) is trying on different bodies. It’s silly, and the Doctor is being kind of mean to her, (I don’t know to use the word sexist yet) but the idea of trying on a new body is amazing. In the most secret part of myself, I wish I could do that. I wish I could look like princess Astra.
It is the end of summer, 1998. I don’t want to be alive any more. In a couple of weeks, I will try to kill myself. I will slip outside in the middle of the night, walk several miles into the woods down trails only I know about, to a clearing I spend a lot of time hiding in. I will take the razor blade on my swiss army knife and try to cut my wrist open. But the blade won’t be sharp enough, and the pain and shock of seeing my own blood will stop me before I go too far.
I will spend the next ten years feeling like a coward. I will regret failing. I will think often about trying again.
It is April of 2010. A new friend of mine is in town, and is talking about how great the new Doctor Who is. He suggests I watch it some time. My hazy, pleasant memories of Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward help make his case, and a few weeks later I marathon series 1 with my husband. I am hooked, and catch up just after series 5 ends.
It is May 14th, 2011. The Doctor’s Wife is on TV. Neil Gaiman just used some throwaway dialogue to casually write in the possibility of time lords changing gender when they regenerate. The exact dialogue is a bit irksome, but I don’t care; this is huge and affirming and very clearly a challenge for the showrunners to live up to. I’m thrilled about this. Exactly one month ago, I legally changed my name to Anna Rose Wiggins.
It is August 4th, 2013. I am watching a live stream of the Peter Capaldi announcement. The last few weeks have been interesting for me, because this is the first regeneration I’ve been an active fan for.…
Myriad Universes: Star Trek: The Next Generation FASA Role-Playing Game
Here’s another one of those things that crop up every now and again that, while I’m sort of obligated to cover them, I’m a bit out of my depth and don’t really have any business talking about them.
I never played tabletop RPGs growing up. To this day, I have still never touched a tabletop RPG. Actually, I’m not even entirely certain *how* you play tabletop RPGs, though I have a basic, functional understanding of what they are and what they do, mostly through tracing the lineage of video game RPGs and because my work and interests mean I tend to rub elbows with Nerd Culture with some amount of frequency. But the fact remains that this is still something wholly and entirely outside of the wheelhouse of my personal experience. I’ll freely admit I don’t “get” these and never have.
From what I can gather, the primary draw of these types of things is that they’re a form of generative storytelling set in a shared and recognisable universe, and that I *definitely* understand. I think I’ve always been some kind of natural-born performer, and when I was a kid one of the things my friends and I liked to do was pretend that we were our favourite characters and act out our own imaginary stories in the backyard. We would play it as almost a sort of writer’s jam session, coming up with a basic prompt and then just sort of freewheeling it from there: Somebody would randomly shout out some big plot twist, and we would all have to immediately deliver a reaction based on what we understood of our character and how we thought he or she would react-Thinking back on it, it was basically a crude version of improv theatre, considering we were basically actors ad-libbing the entire play. I would guess more or less every kid did some version of this when they were young, though I don’t know how many of them privileged the freeform improvisation aspects of the game to the extent we did.
But it’s this very experience that makes it difficult for me to completely *get* tabletop RPGs. To me, they just look too complicated: You’ve got a weighty tome (sometimes several) with all kinds of tables, charts and statistics that’s supposed mathematically define every single little bit of worldbuilding, which strikes me as running contrary to the generative anarchism of the experience. My regular issues about reducing culture, personality and human behaviour down to numbers aside, it’s forcing what to me seems like an unnecessary structural middleman onto the instinctual compulsion of writing stories. Although, I suppose I *can* see how basing your actions and plot twists around die rolls or playing cards or whatever might be preferable to hinging everything on the whims of your friends, who might suddenly decide to sink the ship or call in a massive Borg invasion fleet or something.
Another thing I never really understood about these games is that, from my admittedly paltry and limited experience with them, they seem to emphasize the world-building minutiae more than the characters: The books I’ve skimmed all talk about building characters from the ground up around pre-existing narrative roles, skillsets and character classes, and while that makes sense for something like Dungeons and Dragons I can’t see it working at all with a property like Star Trek.…