Eruditorum Press

A Warning to the Queerious

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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“You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave”: The Royale

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“The Royale” is another episode that nobody in particular is especially fond of and that I frequently see gracing any number of “Worst Of” lists. One is certainly not enthused by looking at its production history: Originally pitched for very early in the first season, it sat ignored in the slush pile of unused scripts until necessity required its exhumation in the second. It was also the subject of yet another one of writer Tracy Tormé’s trademark spats with then-producer Maurice Hurley, and apparently it was the straw that broke the camel’s back too, as the dispute finally led Tormé to walk off of Star Trek: The Next Generation at the end of the year.

Tormé claims his original pitch hinged far more heavily on surrealist imagery and symbolism. His primary influence while writing it was The Prisoner, and he wanted to bring the same kind of abstract and multi-tiered psychedelia that characterized that show to Star Trek: The Next Generation. And you can see at least some of that in the finished product, with the eery revolving door afloat in nothingness, to the guests who act in bizarrely programmatic ways and the way the hotel itself operates. Apparently Hurley objected to this as well as the very prominent role the astronaut character was going to have, the former for vague and unspecified reasons (which is troublingly something of a hallmark of Hurley’s tenure) and the latter because he felt it wasn’t good for the show to have big guest stars and couldn’t afford it even if it was. This, of course, does little to explain Billy Campbell and Howie Seago showing up earlier in the season. Another thing it doesn’t explain is why Patrick McGoohan was tapped to appear for three minutes in “The Schizoid Man” when offering him the part of the then-living Colonel Richey here seems like the most dumbly obvious idea in the universe. Sadly, another hallmark of the Maurice Hurley era has been its pathological aversion to sense.

Given its origins then, its unsurprising that “The Royale” feels so much like an Original Series episode: Like “The Naked Now”, “Code of Honor”, “Blood and Fire”, “Justice”, “Angel One” and “When The Bough Breaks”, this feels straightforwardly like the creative team cherry-picked some narrative structures and devices from the old show, shuffled them around a bit and changed the names. Unlike those episodes, however, “The Royale” as aired is actually surprisingly serviceable in spite of itself: It doesn’t feel like a reiteration of the abjectly terrible aspects of the Original Series or an embarrassingly tepid attempt to ape its better ones, it actually feels like something the Original Series could have done and done quite well. It’s got the campy, performative fun of episodes like “A Piece of the Action” blended with the haunting and disquieting surrealism of something like “The Empath”. Granting both that the episode as aired is not what Tormé wanted it to be and that, like so much of this season, it was thrown together at the last minute just to get something on the air that week, it does seem as if “The Royale” is coming perilously close to standing among the very best of the Original Series just from that brief alone.…

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Reviews (December 17th, 2014)

10

So, just reviews this week, because I want to open with music, as Seeming has a new album out called Silent DiscoVery, so let’s start with that.

It’s a discipline worth maintaining, I increasingly feel, to remain aggressively plugged into the rhythms and promotional cycle of pop media. Television and comics both work well for this, but given that the entire rhetoric of “pop media” comes from music, one really ought to have at least one. For me, it’s Seeming, for a variety of reasons. Yes, Alex is a dear friend, and Aaron’s a lovely bloke as well. Yes, it really does help with the “stay plugged into the immense nowness of pop” thing when Alex sends you a new demo every couple of weeks. (I’ve been rocking out to the lead single off the next release for months now.)

Also, I love it. I just unabashedly fucking love the stuff Alex is doing right now, and I want everybody to listen to it. It’s at once well plugged in to current pop culture concerns (it’s a wonderful time for eschatology and utopian nihilism) and vibrantly idiosyncratic. So, new album, very exciting, let’s talk about what it says.

Silent DiscoVery is the outtakes album from his brilliant Madness and Extinction. If you’ve not bought or at least listened to that album, please do. It’s streaming free on Bandcamp here. It’s worth checking out. And if you’ve not listened to it… well, Silent DiscoVery isn’t necessarily the place to start, although it’s worth checking out some of the songs.

But that’s outtakes albums for you – their entire conceit, in the end, is that they’re the stuff that didn’t quite work on the album proper. That doesn’t mean not good enough, certainly. But every track on an outtakes album, by its very existence, opens up a fan debate on “was this rightly excluded from the album?” Tellingly, the answer, for all ten of these songs, is “because they were great ideas that belonged on a different album” and not “because they weren’t good enough.”

So, for instance, the first track, “Everything,” is a great song. Brilliant, sweeping, epic, all sorts of fun. Only problem is that it’s not quite as good as “Everything Could Change,” and the two songs not only have similar titles, they have musically similar endings, and you just can’t put both of them on the same album. So to the outtake pile this gem goes. (I’ve been loving the line “do you see your reflection when my glass is dark” for years, though actually, at the time of writing, it’s “did you know birds and metal outlive the likes of you” that’s stuck on a loop in my head.)

Elsewhere you’ve got “Bayonet,” which is a great song for Alex’s previous band, ThouShaltNot, but that flounders ever so slightly as a Seeming song. And “Name Those Stars,” a peppy little number with a synth line that sounds uncannily like the bass hook from John Linnell’s “South Carolina,” and that, perhaps more importantly, is just a little too peppy and too upbeat for an album called Madness and Extinction.…

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An Unruly Torrent (The Last War in Albion Part 75: Violence and Versions)

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This is the third 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: Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta included some of his earliest uses of one of his signature techniques, that of paralleling narration or dialogue from one scene with images from another to highlight the contrast.

“Institutions and authorities designed for the far simpler reality of just a hundred years ago have burst their banks; have found their timeworn principles inadequate to a flash influx of insight and revelation, an unruly torrent carrying us all struggling towards the edge of a Niagra future in amidst our driftwood debris of outmoded ideologies.” – Alan Moore, birthday greetings to Chelsea Manning

Figure 570: V’s quotations from Macbeth in
the first installment resonate with his actions
in rescuing Evey. (Written by Alan Moore, art
by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior
#1, 1982)
But “Virtue Victorious” does not use its contrast for comedy, or, at least, not for any straightforward comedy, and the point is not the contrast between the bishop’s words and the images, but the way in which the two intersect and resemble each other. The bishop is praying for divine forgiveness for the child molestation he’s about to commit, but when he speaks of “the evil one who is surely come amongst us in this, the hour of our greatest trial,” the images of V fighting his way through the guards give clear double meaning to these words. The sequence is of course not unprecedented – it is in many ways simply a refinement of the technique Moore was using back in the first installment, where he had V quoting Macbeth while slicing his way through the Fingermen threatening Evey. But the refinement is in this case significant, with the text and images in “Virtue Victorious” coming from two distinct scenes that are allowed, in effect, to play simultaneously. As the comic went on, Moore grew even more confident, eventually doing away with most of the dialogue and words entirely and giving Lloyd stretches of pages at a time in which the storytelling is entirely visual, or where, to use an example from Book Two, a chapter in which the only dialogue comes from television broadcasts playing out in the background. These are in some ways small potatoes compared to the expansive formal and stylistic experiments that Moore would later become known for, but nevertheless, the advancement within the course of the serial is significant, and it’s not surprising that Moore refers to the comic as “one of the first real major breakthroughs I made in terms of my own personal style.”
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“Nothing Lasts Forever”: Contagion

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At long last, Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s second season gives us its first inarguable, unqualified masterpiece.

It’s not that “Contagion” is any less the product of the season’s incredibly troubled production history, but this is the first time the show has been able to fully rise above it and put out something triumphant in spite of it. Indeed, Beth Woods, one half of the brainchild behind this episode, was literally the creative team’s tech support: She ran a personal computer store near the Paramount lot D.C. Fontana and Dave Gerrold liked to patronize, and they turned Gene Roddenberry onto her place when he was looking to buy his first computer. Woods even taught him how to use it, and Roddenberry later asked her to set up a computer system for the Star Trek: The Next Generation creative team. Roddenberry even invited Woods to submit a story of her own after learning she was a struggling writer herself (and also probably because they had no scripts), so she teamed up with comic writer Steve Gerber to pen “Contagion”.

So it probably makes sense that Woods and Gerber’s episode would deal prominently with computer technology and hinge on an alien computer virus. As cliche as that probably sounds today, this sort of plot was still sort of a new thing to US audiences even as late as 1989. Furthermore, Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the very few shows that can actually do a techno thriller, which “Contagion” definitely is, without coming across as banal. There are a couple reasons for this, the first likely being the show’s high-tech setting and focus on exploration gives it license to freely poke around mysterious areas of space and hyper advanced technology without being constrained too much by real world computer science. But the second is the sheer earnestness of the cast and crew that puts heart and soul into anything: None of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s techno thrillers look terribly exciting or innovative on paper, but in almost every single case the stories in question turn out to be incredibly memorable and captivating because of their unbridled imagination and creativity and the raw power and talent of the cast. And “Contagion” is the first time this all comes together for them, with a guest cast as passionate as the main one and a simple, yet incredibly gripping, central premise that helps bring it all together.

There’s no one thing that makes this episode as memorable and effective as it is, it’s simply that the combination of all the little individual factors that go into it make the whole a lot greater than the sum of its parts. All of the regulars seem to be doing exactly the sort of thing it feels right for them to be doing, from Worf’s loyalty to Riker and Troi looking out for the crew and handling delicate negotiations with Commander Taris, to Geordi’s race against time to solve the mystery of Iconian programming and even Data’s blatant, yet charming “New Powers As The Plot Demands” 133t skillz.…

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Now Just a Moment: The Doctors Revisited (Tom Baker)

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That this should prove so difficult is in many ways revealing. First, we should start with what this isn’t, which is an account of Tom Baker as the definitive Doctor. Satisfyingly, this isn’t accomplished with some deconstruction. This is unabashed hagiography – just not to the exclusion of other eras. The result is on a basic level satisfying: the joy that is Tom Baker’s Doctor is celebrated, but without the distorting effect that the era sometimes has.

But it’s curious that there’s no real attention given to the sheer span of Baker’s tenure. Indeed, what really jumps out about this is that Baker’s tenure is reduced almost entirely to its first half. There’s some clips from City of Death, and K-9 makes the companion list, but for the most part there’s not a breath of acknowledgment of anything that wasn’t part of the Hinchcliffe era. Romana isn’t mentioned outside of the City of Death clips. Davros is talked about entirely in terms of Genesis of the Daleks. The other stories to get decent clips are Terror of the Zygons, Robot, Talons of Weng-Chiang, and The Ark in Space.

It’s not full-out erasure, and there’s certainly no overt misrepresentations, but it’s strange to see the Hinchcliffe-only take on Tom Baker, simply because it opens a weird gap in the chronology of this – there’s a chunk as long as the Hartnell or Troughton eras that’s all but cut from the official history.

Some of that is a product of the focus only on actors. The good old “gothic horror to comedy” transition that is part of the history of the program through this era is, fair enough, outside the remit of The Doctors Revisited. And the aspects of the Doctor’s character that are focused on are mainly the more comedic ones, so in a way, even if all the examples are Hinchcliffe-era, it’s the Williams-era version of the character that’s remembered. Which has kind of always been the case.

But another way of putting that is that this is account is almost completely uninterested in the stories. Tom Baker’s performance consumes everything around it, even today. The fact that this is the first installment of The Doctor’s Revisited to have the Doctor in question on hand to interview adds to that, although the actual use of Tom Baker tends to be as a slightly unreliable narrator of his own era. But the focus is very firmly on the character, which Tom Baker as good as says at the beginning, when he admits that the line between himself and his character got blurred.

None of this is helped by the choice of stories to show afterwards. The Pyramids of Mars is not a bad story, although its fourth episode is a bit of a mess. But it’s a tragically safe choice, and it’s telling that Moffat, in introducing it, finds himself mostly talking about Tom Baker’s performance once again before adding a few sentences about how the story’s pretty good.…

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“If you prick me, do I not…leak?”: The Measure of a Man

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I’ll admit I have a tendency to approach some of these marquee episodes with at least a marginal degree of skepticism. Too often I’ve been of the mind there are bits of the Star Trek franchise whose reputations have been badly inflated or, alternatively, are good but are praised for what I consider the wrong reasons. That’s not always the case, of course, sometimes things are popular and well-loved for a reason, and that’s a truth that’s far too often overlooked in pop culture discourse and critique.

This though is one that’s never quite sat entirely comfortably with me. It is unquestionably a triumphant statement of purpose from Melinda Snodgrass (in fact it’s so good it landed her the position of story editor for the remainder of this season and the first half of the next) and definitely bears more of the hallmarks of an “iconic” episode than anything else we’ve seen this season (and arguably will see, apart from the inescapable “Q, Who?”), but there have always been niggling questions and concerns Ive had with “The Measure of a Man” that I’ve never been able to fully put to rest. And unfortunately, I have to say this latest rewatch did little to change my mind.

There are two main ways of going about looking at this episode depending on who you think the main character is. Classical fan logic slants Data into this role, as it’s his rights that are at stake and so much of the story hinges on his personal experiences and sense of self-awareness. From Data’s perspective, this would put “The Measure of a Man” squarely into the territory of “Elementary, Dear Data” and its Hard SF “what manner is a non-human?” A-plot to the point it almost feels like a bit of a reiteration. Indeed, this isn’t even the first time Star Trek: The Next Generation has tackled these issues: Back in the “Home Soil” post I even threw it in with a whole series of other episodes overtly looking at the rights and sentience of artificial intelligences. There’s nothing strictly new to be talked about there. “The Measure of a Man” similarly follows in the footsteps of a number of episodes this season examining who and what Data in particular is: The aforementioned “Elementary, Dear Data”, as well as “The Outrageous Okona” and “The Schizoid Man”. Not to mention any of the season’s earliest scenes featuring Doctor Pulaski.

The thing about giving the lead to Data here though, as intuitive as it may seem, is that the entire dramatic weight of the episode is a foregone conclusion. Nobody watching Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989 needed the show to diegetically state Data is a person or even needed to see an in-universe assessment of that. We travel with Data and can gather everything we need to know about his personhood from narrative subtext. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing when a story’s resolution lacks any sort of suspense, I think people place far too much emphasis on things like surprise, twists and plot originality anyway.…

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Frankensound

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Yes, I’m on Pex Lives again.  (I know, it seems like I’m trying to invade the podcast… but you have to remember that, from the point of view of me and Kevin and James, the last one I did was in June.)

This time I’m guesting in a special Christmas bonus episode alongside Gene Mayes, and chatting about the Hammer Frankenstein movies.  Download it here.

This is a good, fun episode… and I think I’m better on this than I was on the last one (more relaxed, as James noticed).…

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The Advantage of my Antiquated TARDIS (Journey to the Center of the TARDIS)

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I’ll be honest, I don’t have anything funny to say about this image.
I was just scrolling through the Google Image Search for this episode
and thought “you know, that is pretty…”
If you missed it, we had a post on The Game yesterday.

It’s April 27th, 2013. Rudimental is at number one with “Waiting All Night,” with will.i.am, Daft Punk, Nelly, Pink, and Psy also charting, the latter not with “Gangnam Style.” In news, the US stock market loses 1% of its value momentarily due to the AP Twitter feed getting hacked and releasing false news of a terrorist attack injuring President Obama, and, erm, that’s about it. 

On television, it’s Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. As with much of Season Seven, it’s strange how a year has changed this. At the time, it seemed an oddly disjointed story that was in need of another draft. Now… well, it still seems like that, admittedly. The “they convinced their brother he was a robot” twist is infamously absurd, although I admit, I’ve always felt like it’s a marvelous return to the completely bonkers legacy of a program that was unafraid to be ridiculous. I admit that I’ve never quite gotten over the moment, about half an hour in, when I was completely convinced the time zombies were going to turn out to be an origin story of the Silence (of course they’re forged in an exploding TARDIS!), only to have a wildly less interesting reveal. And the fact that the story can be summarized as “the TARDIS is hijacked by a bunch of black men because the Doctor let a woman drive” is, to say the least, unfortunate. 
And, of course, it is the story in which the complaint that Moffat is fond of reset buttons really does acquire legs. This is one of those cases where the one time something really doesn’t work ends up making all the times it did weirdly conspicuous and slightly suspect. It is true that there are a solid few times that Moffat does the “and at the end of the story we undo everything that happened” trick, but generally he avoids the extent to which this is a frustrating twist that’s too similar to “it was all a dream” by making it so that our main characters remember it both ways, allowing the significant consequences of the adventure to still count. Yes, The Big Bang and The Wedding of River Song both get undone at the end, but notably, they don’t get undone for any of the major characters within them. 
That’s not, unfortunately, how this one works. Journey to the Center of the TARDIS completely undoes the adventure for Clara. Which is immensely frustrating, because it actually has some very good character development for her. On one level, this is just a crass delaying tactic. It’s a way for the season to have its cake and eat it too, paying lip service to developing the Impossible Girl arc further and, in effect, spending a whole episode rehearsing the finale.
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