Eruditorum Press

No ideas but in Swamp Thing

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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“Loser Sons”: The Icarus Factor

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Of late, Star Trek: The Next Generation has been trying to flesh out its characters a bit beyond the one-note briefs they were originally conceived as. Though the show started strong displaying its potential to be a powerful ensemble series, the first season frustratingly did end up as basically “The Picard, Riker and Data Show”. This season, in spite of everything, has at least made attempted inroads to correct this, with strong highlights for characters like Geordi, Worf, Deanna, O’Brien, Guinan and Doctor Pulaski (the latter if only because they were new additions to the cast).

That’s not to say there haven’t been a huge amount of exposure for the would-be triumvirate though: Picard and Data have both essentially worn out their quota for the entire year already, and Riker isn’t far behind with this episode. Although that said “The Icarus Factor” is straightforwardly the sort of thing that Star Trek: The Next Generation ought to be really good at: At its heart, it’s an interlocking series of vignettes about Riker, his father, Doctor Pulaski, Troi, Worf, O’Brien, Data, Geordi and Wesley, and this is pretty much the ideal structure for this show to handle character pieces because it takes a slice of shipboard life and shows how all these different characters react to a given situation and the kinds of relationships they have with each other.

Unfortunately, “The Icarus Factor” is also something of a hot mess.

This *should* be a relatively simple A/B plot structure with both halves of the narrative demonstrating the themes of family and where you make your home. Riker is (justifiably) estranged from his father because of his behaviour when he was a child while at the same time contemplating a promotion that would take him away from the Enterprise. Kyle (and actually Captain Picard, for that matter) acts as if Will is going to accept even before he’s made a decision precisely because it would put him in charge of a dangerous mission and they assume that he, like his father, can’t resist a challenge. Meanwhile, Worf is feeling lonely and isolated because he’s missing an important Klingon rite of passage meant to be shared with family, and he has no Klingon family to speak of and doesn’t think his friends on the Enterprise will understand. There’s even a bit of overlap when Worf asks to join Riker on his new assignment because the high risk would give them an opportunity to die in glorious battle together, and Worf considers Riker a comrade.

Notice how O’Brien, who is an many ways the lynchpin character here if for no other reason than he spans both plots, gives a succinct, yet stirring, speech about being able to choose your friends and co-workers, but not your family. And notice how, in both cases, the story is resolved by an acknowledgment that the Enterprise is home: Worf discovers who his true family is when they re-create the Klingon rite of ascension on the holodeck and Riker decides to turn down the promotion to stay with his fellow travellers.…

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Some Mercury Left Over (Nightmare in Silver)

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Figure Who Even Knows: Matt Smith’s Doctor Who faces down
himself with a facial prosthesis in front of a menacing green screen
projection.
This is an excerpt from a future chapter of The Last War in Albion, the precise placement of which remains ambiguous. Think of it as our “The Yesterday Gambit.” 
 
Previously in The Last War in Albion: At the same time that Gaiman was working on The Ocean at the End of the Lane, he was also writing his second Doctor Who story, Nightmare in Silver, where he brought back the Cybermen, the very same monsters that featured in Black Legacy, Alan Moore’s first professional publication as a writer, and that Grant Morrison had employed in his early-career Doctor Who Magazine work…
 
“Dreams!! Visions!! We are Cybermen, Medic… we do not run from shadows!” – Alan Moore, “Black Legacy”
 
Gaiman had considerably more affection for Doctor Who than either Morrison or Moore (who was known to suggest that all of the actors to play the part after William Hartnell made Doctor Who seem like a pedophile). And so it is not, in this case, his mentor’s take that he turned to, but rather his own memories of the Cybermen from childhood. Indeed, they were the series’ iconic monsters for the period when The Ocean at the End of the Lane is set, due to some curiosities with the rights to the show’s usual iconic foe, the Daleks, which meant that Doctor Who couldn’t use them for several years. Gaiman’s seventh birthday fell on November 10th, 1967, two months into Patrick Troughton’s second season as Doctor Who, a season that both opened and closed with a Cyberman story, and the book’s main action takes place during the season’s penultimate story. 
 
Indeed, this is much of why Gaiman returned to the program to do a second episode, as there was little reason for him to otherwise. The BBC’s pay was, by his standards, meager, especially for the amount of time The Doctor’s Wife took. But that script had been one of the highlights of his career over the previous few years, winning him a Hugo Award and considerable acclaim. He’d had, for that story, a rare thing in one’s career – an editor who was as skilled a writer as he was, and the collaboration had sparked him to heights that his late career work had not consistently attained. But most of all, Moffat dared him to “make the Cybermen scary again,” and he couldn’t resist it.
 
Unfortunately, perhaps because Gaiman had time for fewer drafts, perhaps because Moffat was too occupied with other projects to edit as extensively, Nightmare in Silver harkens back to mediocrities like 1602 and Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader in which Gaiman offers a fairly hollow riff on pop culture nostalgia. Where The Doctor’s Wife had been progressively refined at Moffat’s urging to give more weight to its most interesting idea – Doctor Who being able to communicate verbally with his Tardis – Nightmare in Silver never settles down on one particularly interesting idea about the Cybermen.
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“Dead Alive”: Time Squared

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There came a moment while watching “Time Squared” when I was suddenly reminded for a brief moment of what it felt like seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time over twenty years ago. Somewhere, in betwixt Commander Riker making breakfast, Geordi and Data trying to figure out how to get the shuttlepod operational, Geordi’s later tech briefing to the staff in the conference room and Deanna’s conversation with Doctor Pulaski in sickbay, this momentarily stopped being “the show I write about for work” and once more became “the show I remember”.

This might be partially because the central conceit of this episode, a causal time loop, reoccurs again a few seasons later in “Cause and Effect”, which is one of my very favourite episodes in the series. Not that the actual plot of “Time Squared” is any sort of precursor or that “Cause and Effect” is derivative; what happens here is far more oblique and mysterious than the time loop from the later story. It’s a bit more accurate to say that what we see here is an example of a branching dimension, and Troi even says as much at one point during the episode. One way to read this would be to roughly compare it with an actual physics theory called the “many-worlds interpretation”, which, put general, states that when witnessing the spin state of an electron, there are two possible observations: One where the electron is observed to have a positive spin “up” and one where it’s observed to have a negative spin “down”. Well, the many-worlds interpretation states that for every individual instance where the particle is observed to spin “up”, there is another world where, for that same instance, the particle is observed to spin “down”, and vice versa. This is frequently extrapolated to the level of physical actions by humans on the macroscopic scale in the pop discourse.

So in “Time Squared”, we have two possible worlds: One where Captain Picard leaves the ship in the shuttlepod in an attempt to save the Enterprise from the energy entity and one where he doesn’t. What would appear to be happening is a temporary intersection between these two universes, and the dilemma the crew faces is that they know from the log tapes that Picard’s attempt to save the ship in the “leave the Enterprise” universe proves to be futile, but they can’t figure out what the other observational state is. And here’s where Star Trek: The Next Generation shows itself to be better than other science fiction, because not only does it not stop here (it would be perfectly acceptable, after all, for a Hard SF work to make a big deal just about doing a story built around the many-worlds interpretation, leaving it at that and waiting for us to tell it how clever it’s being), but this gimmick isn’t even the real point of the episode: Instead, it’s a narrative device to tell a story about Captain Picard.…

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The Green One and the Not-Green One (The Crimson Horror)

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I don’t know that I’d call it a crimson horror, really. Really, it’s
more a rosy horror. Incarnadine horror at best.
It’s May 4th, 2013. Daft Punk have gotten lucky and made it to number one. Calvin Harris, Nelly, Macklemore, and, in a stunning feat of horror, will.i.am and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, James McCormick is jailed for ten years for selling fake bomb detectors, Labour and UKIP do well in local elections, and three more people are arrested over the Boston Marathon bombings. 
On television, meanwhile, The Crimson Horror, which is very possibly the most self-evident pairing of writer and concept in the history of Doctor Who. More than hiring David Whitaker to handle introducing a new Doctor over a backdrop of Daleks, more than giving Paul Cornell the small and personal story in the debut series, more even than giving Malcolm Hulke the giant lizards story, tapping Mark Gatiss to write the Victorian penny dreadful is simply a case of hiring a man to do what he’s good at. 
And correspondingly, in many regards The Crimson Horror is exactly what you’d expect. A ranting villain, a classic Doctor Who plot, broad gags. But as with Cold War, the details on this are all spot on. Yes, you’ve got a standard issue raving lunatic Doctor Who villain, but she’s played by Diana Rigg, whose appetite for scenery is gloriously boundless. (Surely there’s not a single person on the planet who does not love the line “the wrong hands.”) Strax irrevocably hits the “one note joke” point here, yes, but he also has his best gag with “horse, you have failed in your mission,” and to be fair, the bit where Vastra sends him outside because he’s gotten overexcited is, in fact, a new trick for the character, even if it’s basically the last one he ever gets. Neve McIntosh relishes getting to be the Doctor for a large swath of the story. The period stuff all looks great. And there are some lovely directorial flourishes, most notably the grainy film look used for the Doctor’s flashback exposition of how he got captured. 
And, yes, Gatiss deserves some specific praise here. This is not necessarily a story that’s long on logic, but everything moves along gracefully by dint of the fact that all the elements just go well together. And that speaks to a slyly good sense of judgment on Gatiss’s part. There’s no obvious reason why bright red bodies, the eyes of the dead holding images, Diana Rigg ranting, and Victorian finery should magically click together so as to make a coherent story in the absence of any significant plot logic, but they absolutely do. The Crimson Horror was never a contender for season-best, but it was tremendous fun when it aired – much more fun than you’d expect given that it seems like it should be very standard issue.
Indeed, this is the first story of Season 7B to be almost completely unfazed by the passage of more than a year since it aired.
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