Eruditorum Press

Haunt the Future

Time Travel Is Always Possible In Dreams (The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang)

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TARDIS Erootitorum
It’s June 19th, 2010. Shout is at number one with “Shout,” which lasts both weeks of this story. Kylie Minogue, Eminem, David Guetta, Lady Gaga, and Baddiel, Skinner, and Lightning Seed also chart, the latter with a hilarious belief that England might not crash pathetically out of the World Cup. Spoiler: the day after this story wraps, they do. Also in news, David Cameron apologizes on behalf of the government for the Bloody Sunday Massacre, and George Osborne presents a budget statement full of austerity. Also, on June 26th, the entire universe ends. 
There is no point in pretending that my opinion here is anything other than what it is. I think this is decisively and thoroughly a good thing. I love the Davies era dearly, but the Moffat era is, for my money, the pinnacle of the show. Indeed, it’s basically this pair of episodes that’s why TARDIS Eruditorum exists: because I could not get them and their implications out of my head. I have been looking forward to this post since I started, and the observations I want to make about this story are, ultimately, the observations that I created the blog to make. Although, having now gotten to it, it seems like so much of what I could say is stuff I’ve made obvious, and that nobody reading this needs to have pointed out. In many ways, everything I’ve said in TARDIS Eruditorum and the entire critical apparatus for looking at Doctor Who that I’ve built exists so as to make this story the most self-evident and explicable thing imaginable. If you’ve any understanding of how the thought processes of TARDIS Eruditorum work, you can figure out most of what I like about this story without effort. Its metafiction, its alchemy, everything about it is so thoroughly in line with the approach I take to Doctor Who that there’s almost nothing to say. By spending four years building to it, I’ve left such a clearly defined piece of negative space that filling it seems unnecessary.
Let’s, then, do the obvious thing and approach it in the context of Season Five. Much of Season Five, viewed through history’s lens, has felt, understandably, like an extended exercise in incremental change from the Russell T Davies era. Which is understandable – it’s easy to forget that the gap between The End of Time Part Two and The Eleventh Hour was only three months. To people who don’t pay attention to who the writer of an episode is, which is to say, to roughly 100% of the population, a period of bedding in was important. And so we had a season that retained numerous structural elements of the Davies era: a present/future/past triptych to start the season, a thirteen episode season consisting of seven single episode stories and three two-parters, et cetera. Yes, there were some changes – the first two-parter was, despite the presence of familiar monsters, the more adult and weird of them, while the second one filled the “for kids” brief.
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“There’s a terrible hatred hiding inside of me. I won’t be able to control it anymore.”: Q Who

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One thing should be established right away: This is not the first Borg episode. It is, depending on how you count, anywhere from the third to the fifth, with the deciding factor being how you choose to view “Angel One”, “Coming of Age”, “Conspiracy” and/or “The Neutral Zone”. “Q Who” is not a last ditch effort to give a floundering Star Trek: The Next Generation a life-saving jolt of creative restructuring, it itself is the strangled product of a powerless production team trying to sync up and distill half-formed, disparate and mutually contradictory ideas left behind by their predecessors in an attempt to keep the show as it exists now running a little bit longer.

The only reason, for example, the Borg look the way they do is because it would have been too expensive to make them insectoid as Maurice Hurley originally imagined them, thus severing this episode’s link to “Coming of Age”/“Conspiracy”. Furthermore, the writer’s guild strike prevented anyone from penning a proper follow-up to “The Neutral Zone” (not to mention the fact “Angel One” sucked), so the original intent of making the Romulans Red Herring antagonists who have been wrongfooted by the Borg’s unspeakable ruthlessness is similarly abandoned. There is an attempt to tie it back together in the most forgettable of throwaway lines where Worf describes the planet they come across as bearing the exact same signs as the outposts destroyed along the Neutral Zone, but if you managed to catch that you deserve some kind of medal. It’s a longshot to get people to pick up on that something like that *today*, when everyone marathons TV on Netflix for days on end let alone in 1989 when home video was impractical and you’re asking people to remember what happened in one episode from one night over ten months ago.

That’s not to say the team didn’t try their best under the circumstances to make “Q Who” work: They did, it does, and it shows. The team adapted, which is something of a theme for tonight. “Q Who” is a story about Star Trek: The Next Generation trying to reconstruct itself; it doesn’t quite yet know what it’s going to eventually become, but it knows it has to be something other than what it is now. Every actor in play here seems aware things are more than a little off, and they scramble to compensate and adjust in an effort to make something a bit more tonally resonant. As usual, the key is that each character here is consciously playing some sort of role, but what’s crucial and different this time is that they’re also consciously ad-libbing and playing understudy to each other in an attempt to salvage a performance that’s gone off the rails. Q is the most obvious case: He quite clearly wants to go back to the way he was in “Encounter at Farpoint”, as is right and proper, but because Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t allow itself negative or otherwise fungible continuity he can’t ignore “Hide and Q”.…

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Harry Potter and the Popular Consumption of Hegemonic Bourgeois Moral Ideology

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Killing people.  It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?

We… (and, in this instance, by the word ‘we’ I mean that rather narrow band of people who produce and consume the artefacts of the Western narrative culture industries) … we want to tell ourselves – in those bourgeois morality plays we call entertainment – that killing is WRONG.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The killing curse is an ‘Unforgiveable Curse’.

“Make the foundation of this society a man who never would”.

Luke can’t be won to the Dark Side because he won’t kill his father.

“Coward.  Every time.”

“Stop!  I command it!  There will be no battle here!”

Etc, etc, etc.

But lookity here… our heroes kill people, or they support the necessity of killing people.  Even the ‘moral’ ones (i.e. the ones who aren’t James Bond) do so.  Luke is nobly refusing to kill his father even as Han and Leia and Lando are killing loads of Imperial soldiers in the big battles.  The Doctor refuses to kill the threatened people of Earth even as the survivors of the Gamestation are fighting and trying to kill Daleks, and Rose solves the whole thing by coming back as the Bad Wolf and committing magical genocide.  The Doctor decrees the end of the battle, but relies upon soldiers: the Brigadier, Bambera and Ancelyn… maybe even Ace too… and the Brig saves the world by pumping silver bullets into the Destroyer.

Etc, etc, etc.

Harry Potter never kills anyone.  He barely ever fights anyone.  But he manages this by hiding in a tent when the war comes, while Neville actually fights the Death Eaters in Hogwarts, and his mates form a resistance cell and an underground radio station.  Yet Harry accepts the necessity of killing Voldemort.  He passively accepts (as he pasively accepts everything) that killing Voldemort is his destiny.  Luckily, as in every other instance (something Voldemort rightly points out), something comes between him and the ugly necessity.  Wormtail dies when his own hand strangles him, assorted Death Eaters fall over and accidentally kill themselves and their friends in order to oblige Harry.  In the same way, Voldemort gets shot by a wand, acting of its own volition out of loyalty to Harry.

In the Potter stories, killing is categorically wrong, evil, unforgiveable.  So the goodies fight the magic-Nazis with jinxes that make you fall over.  Luckily, the magic-Nazis also (for some reason) generally refrain from using the killing curse.  Meanwhile, Voldemort clearly and explicitly needs killing… and Harry is Chosen to do it… yet he can’t do this without either

a) using the unforgiveable killing curse, or

b) getting very lucky (i.e. Voldemort accidentally trips over the hem of his own robes and falls onto the tines of a passing threshing machine).

Luckily, luck always comes to Potter’s rescue (as, once again, Voldemort rightly points out), and – through sheer good fortune – there’s some complicated business that means Voldemort gets killed by a sentient wand that, like so many expedient creatures before it, stands in front of Our Hero and does all the difficult, icky stuff for him.…

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Guest Post: The Impossible Girl

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Caitlin Smith is, so far as I can tell, the world’s leading expert on Clara Oswald. And yes, I’m counting Steven Moffat and Jenna Coleman. She’s also, generally speaking, one of the most insightful and interesting Doctor Who bloggers I know, and I’m honored to have her do a guest post for me. She blogs regularly on Tumblr, and is pretty much always this clever.

Oh, and if you missed it Friday, I’m doing my annual post-Christmas sale on books.

When Phil asked me to write a guest post on the Impossible Girl arc, I was surprised and honoured …and completely lost on where to begin. It’s a relatively simple arc, after all. The Doctor is fascinated by who Clara is and how she can be twice dead and yet still alive, and he focuses on solving the problem of Clara, often forgetting the person behind the mystery. He gets called out on this several times over the course of the series – by Madame Vastra, by Emma Grayling and by Clara herself. And of course in the end it turns out that the Impossible Girl is just a construct by the Doctor, and Clara-the-ordinary-girl is the important one.
Simple. There are of course interesting things to say about how the audience is complicit in the Doctor’s mystification of Clara, particularly as a response to the common complaint that Moffat’s female characters aren’t ordinary enough. We, like the Doctor, are unable or unwilling to look beyond the surface, and thus our judgements are as flawed as we are accusing the work to be. 
But what I find particularly interesting, especially in light of series 8, is that the Impossible Girl isn’t just a construct of the Doctor, nor of the audience. It’s also a creation of Clara herself. It’s the first we see of the control freak, of the ego maniac needy game player. The Impossible Girl is the version of Clara that she most wants to be in Series 7.
When we meet Clara, she seems so very perfect. She’s clever, pretty and compassionate. She stands up to the Doctor, but not to the point of getting annoying. She’s confident, but not arrogant. She’s kind and loyal in how she stays to help the Maitland children. She ticks pretty much every box for what many people would consider perfect, and she definitely plays up to the societal expectations of her gender. All of these traits are the results of decisions Clara has made about the person she wants to present to the world. It would be so easy to believe that was the real Clara, because she makes herself so easy to like.
That was the first mask of Clara’s we saw, but it definitely wasn’t the last. For the rest of Series 7 we see her hero persona growing and blending with the ‘perfect’ mask of pre-Doctor Clara. She defeats a sun god with a leaf in “The Rings of Akhaten”, revealing not only how much she enjoys being the hero (complete with a deus ex machina), but also how much meaning she can give an ordinary object with the power of her determination.
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The Second Annual “I Hope You Enjoy That E-Reader You Got For Christmas” Sale

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Eruditorum will run tomorrow. Today, it’s time for the now traditional time when I celebrate the fact that surely some of you got things you can read ebooks on yesterday, and thus might conceivably want to spend money on my books by cutting the prices on them for the last week of the year. Here’s what we’ve got this year. You just buy the books at Smashwords, use the coupon code at check out, and enjoy.

TARDIS Eruditorum

Volume 1 (William Hartnell) Second Edition: $2.99 (Normally $4.99) with the coupon code YN52F
Volume 2 (Patrick Troughton): $2.99 (Normally $4.99) with the coupon code LL77P
Volume 3 (Jon Pertwee): $2.99 (Normally $4.99) with the coupon code DH84E
Volume 4 (Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years): $2.99 (Normally $4.99) with the coupon code CG64P
Volume 5 (Tom Baker and the Williams Years): $3.99 (Normally $4.99) with the coupon code DH25H

The Last War in Albion

Chapters 1-7: $1.99 (Normally $3.99) with the coupon code VH88F
Chapter 8 (Swamp Thing): $.99 (Normally $1.99) with the coupon code UP74D
Chapter 9 (V for Vendetta – The Warrior Years): $.99 (Normally $1.99) with the coupon code TV28W

And last but not least

A Golden Thread: A Critical History of Wonder Woman: $3.99 (Normally $7.99) with the coupon code AL42A.

Thanks so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy. See you tomorrow with a proper post.…

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“Shut up, Wesley!”: The Dauphin, Pen Pals

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Part of the original justification for adding a child character to Star Trek: The Next Generation was to show how regular teenagers could come to terms with regular teenage issues in a utopian setting such as this. The idea was that in this place and at this time, teenagers’ perspectives would be valued and respected as much as those of any other person, and they would be able to resolve their inner conflicts in ways kids don’t always have the opportunity to do in the real world. It’s a nice conceit, and you can see how it would be in theory easy to weave this theme in as a manifestation of the show’s children’s television for adults motif.

And then there’s Wesley Crusher. And episodes like these.

Both of these episodes deal in some way with developing Wesley as a character and both of them fail pretty conclusively at it. To be fair to “The Dauphin” and “Pen Pals”, there isn’t really a whole lot for them to actually go off of to begin with: Of all the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters, and with the utmost of respect to Wil Wheaton who consistently and gamely does the best he can with often unworkable material, Wesley Crusher is the one who has the most seriously and egregiously fatal conceptual flaws, and this makes it *extremely* hard to get behind anything he’s involved in. “Pen Pals” isn’t even expressly about him; his plot only comprises the B-story of an episode that is largely about Data. Problem is, Data himself has picked up Wesley’s slack from the first season to become badly overexposed himself this year, and his story ultimately boils down to another Prime Directive runaround which means it sucks by default. Frankly, the fact that the Prime Directive has gotten us to a point where it would condone us leaving an innocent and adorable little alien girl to die on a planet that is literally exploding should tell us all we need to know about how cartoonishly evil, simplistic and impractical it is as a philosophical worldview.

The only thing remotely of interest in regards to the A-story of “Pen Pals” is Captain Picard’s objection to helping Sarjenka’s people, that the destruction of her planet and civilization might be part of a larger “cosmic plan” the Enterprise is not meant to be a part of. This is obviously intriguing considering the ethical foundation of Dirty Pair and all the Dirty Pair references that have been showing up in Star Trek: The Next Generation lately. Typically when Kei and Yuri inadvertently bring about the destruction of a planet, it’s because something had marked its people very early on in the story as dangerously self-destructive, toxic or reactionary. It’s also not usually the case that the girls’ investigations end in a 100% fatality rating: More often than not there’s a remnant that survives as a reminder to the readers that their mission is a positive and constructive one in spite of what it looks like, and that those who survive will probably end up with a better life than they started with.…

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Last Christmas Review

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Instant reaction has it with 76.88% at an 8-10, with an 8 being the most popular rating, which is pretty standard issue. And to be fair, its faults announce themselves somewhat forcefully. There’s a bit of a pacing problem – the ten minutes or so after Santa wakes everybody up the first time and before the sleigh sequence are an entirely unnecessary bit of padding, and I found myself getting restless on first viewing. Second viewing was kinder, but also solidified my sense that there’s a problem there. Yes, it resolves a few levels of the Inception pastiche, but it’s not delivering any significant development, and mostly seems there to get a forty-five minute story to take an hour. Also, the “last Christmas” metaphor is a bit vapid, or, at least, seemingly missing a definite article. 
But the reason these problems seem so visible is because this story’s chief virtue is its sheer level of confidence in what it’s doing. Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus. The fact that Doctor Who is at a point where it can do that, for a mass Christmas audience with an unusually large number of non-fans, is genuinely impressive. And yet the episode just gets on with it, trusting that the individual components of this are all broad and high concept enough to work so long as you spend a little time establishing them. 
A corresponding part of this is also the confidence that they can do all of this. Here the virtue of casting Nick Frost really announces itself. He’s a fantastic choice for Santa, or, at least, for Steven Moffat’s Santa, which, as you’d expect, is mostly a series of jokes about how Santa is no harder to explain than anything else in Doctor Who. Frost’s instincts on how serious to pitch the performance are spot on. But there’s also a tremendous amount of confidence in the visuals. The sequence in which Santa arrives to save the day, with an army of toys marching into the polar base is flat out one of the maddest things Doctor Who has ever done, but there’s not a trace of the program seeming embarrassed by this or worrying whether or not it can get away with it.
As a result, it pretty much does get away with everything. Even the obvious accusation that Moffat is recycling things, and he unabashedly is, seems silly here. It’s difficult to imagine how the sentence “it’s business as usual: Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus” would even seem like a sensible and coherent thing to say about Doctor Who only two years ago. That this feels like a completely organic and sensible thing for the show to be speaks volumes about the degree to which the program has become flexible and varied even by the standards of Doctor Who.
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Comics Reviews (December 24th, 2014)

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From worst to best, with everything something I willingly paid money for, if not wisely.

Also, as I am now more aware of my Christmas schedule, my Last Christmas review should manage to go up sometime tomorrow, and not, as previously expected, on Boxing Day. You can still back that at Patreon, as well as my Doctor Who in 2014 wrap-up post and, starting in January, coverage of Sherlock Season Three, just to fill the gap between the last Eruditorum and the start of the Capaldi reviews.

But now, comics.

The Massive #30

Thirty issues of my life I’ll never get back.

All-New X-Men Annual #1

I’d hoped that this would cohere more in its second issue, but it didn’t really. There’s no sense in which this story needed two over-sized issues and $10 to tell, and it didn’t benefit from being held back for months after the actual event in the comics. On the whole, kind of a mess.

Daredevil #11

New storyline. I think I’ve definitely hit the point of being a bit bored with Mark Waid on Daredevil. This is a perfectly serviceable “the sort of thing Mark Waid does on Daredevil” story, but it’s increasingly clear he’s gone through his best ideas and is on to the second tier of them.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #3

Woo! Axis is over! This book can actually get on with doing interesting stories now! This isn’t bad, and has a good fight scene, to be fair.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #9

Loki wielding Thor’s hammer is beautiful, but I have to say, this entire arc gets overshadowed by its cliffhanger. Still, this is the only Axis-related comic that’s held my interest at all, and that deserves some credit. Was this the worst Marvel crossover in recent memory? I struggle to think of something quite this dire in a while. Given the one-two punch of Original Sin and this… well, at least I have hope for Secret Wars.

New Avengers #28

Hickman’s finally gotten his eight months later pieces on the board how he wants them, it seems, and is now getting around to making interesting things happen. And this issue, while not necessarily full of interesting things, at least has some interesting things that happen in the final couple of pages.

Uncanny X-Men #29

Surprisingly eventful, with an absolutely fascinating state of play at the end of the issue. I’m excited to see where this goes, not least because of the teases for Cyclops’s future offered by Hickman in Avengers.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #6

I worried that the Rob Williams issues of this were going to be weaker than the Ewing issues, but this is a fantastic formal experiment that makes strong use of the structure of a comic book, and has a Nimon in it to boot. THE NIMON BE PRAISED.…

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The Breaker of Rules (The Last War in Albion Part 76: This Vicious Cabaret)

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This is the fourth 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 Moore’s earliest formally experimental strips was the sixth chapter of V for Vendetta, “Versions,” which consisted of two monologues, one by Adam Susan, the fascist leader of Great Britain, the other by V. This script was a replacement script after Moore and Lloyd decided that Moore’s first effort, to be called “Violence,” was not good enough.

“Nomax the Rebel! Nomax the Breaker of Rules!” – Grant Morrison, Annihilator

The more rigid structure, along with the title and declaration of each monologue as “first version” and “second version” puts considerably greater emphasis on the idea of V and Susan as representing contrasting visions of the world. But this gets at the more significant difference between “Versions” and “Violence,” which is that where “Violence” contrasted V and the fascists on the basis of their tactics, “Versions” contrasts them on a more fundamental philosophical level. And for all that the comic is clearly on V’s side, it goes out of its way to present Susan’s position, if not quite sympathetically, at least credibly. Moore has talked on several occasions about the effort he put into writing the fascist characters, and specifically about how this evolved over the course of working on the series, talking about how “I’d look at a character who I’d previously seen as a one-dimensional Nazi baddy and suddenly realize that he or she would have thoughts and opinions the same as everyone else,” and about how, for all that fascists were in practice his real-life political enemies, “in fact fascists are people who work in factories, probably are nice to their kids, it’s just that they’re fascists. They’re just ordinary.”
In this regard, perhaps the most significant thing about “Versions” is the way in which it depicts, in effect, three possible choices. The first is Adam Susan’s embrace of Fate, which is on one level a literal object in the form of a computer, but on another is clearly meant to include the abstract concept, the notion that outcomes are pre-determined by some outside and higher power being fundamentally in line with the ideology of fascism. The second is Justice, who both V and (in V’s telling at least) Susan aspire towards, but which is also, ultimately, suggested to be a tool of fascism. And the third is V’s new mistress, Anarchy, who, as he puts it, “is honest. She makes no promises and breaks none.”
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