Eruditorum Press

They’ll all look up and shout “Save us!” And we’ll look down and whisper “Back us on Patreon.”

The Game and How Toby Whithouse Lost It

21

This essay was kindly sponsored by my Patreon campaign. If you’d like to support coverage of Last Christmas, a January series of essays on Sherlock Season Three, and the future of this blog after the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, please consider backing it.

Right, I suppose I should start with what this thing is and why I want to write about it. The Game is Toby Whithouse’s six episode 1970s-set spy drama, seemingly originally intended to be a big BBC production before never quite making it to the schedule and making its debut on BBC America, where it got next to no coverage and largely sunk like a stone. To some extent, this last fact is what interests me about it. When announced, it felt like Whithouse’s audition piece: his big BBC One drama with which he’d become the inevitable successor to Steven Moffat. But between his absence from both 2013 and 2014’s Doctor Who and the fact that this basically landed flat on its face, the landscape has changed, such that Whithouse has largely fallen away as the heir apparent. And since this really looks like it’s going to disappear without much of a trace, that seems worth documenting.

So, first, because I assume essentially none of you have seen it, the basics. The Game follows an elite MI-5 team as they investigate a seemingly massive Russian operation involving sleeper agents in the UK. You’ve got a pretty standard set of stock characters. Brian Cox is charming as MI-5 head “Daddy,” Paul Ritter is the poorly closeted gay high society type, Chloe Pirrie is the secretary who proves terribly competent and eventually becomes an agent in her own right, Victoria Hamilton is what in a more modern-set show would be the profiler, Jonathan Aris is her autism-spectrum husband and audio specialist, Shaun Dooley is a cop assigned to MI-5, and Tom Hughes is the protagonist, Joe Lambe, who was blatantly cast on the principle of “cast me somebody who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch only a decade younger.” Over the course of the story, it becomes obvious that someone’s a mole. Is it Joe Lambe, whose loyalties have been questioned since a botched operation a year ago that resulted in the death of his lover, and who has old scores to settle now?

No, it’s totally Sarah, Victoria Hamilton’s character, which is in hindsight obvious because she’s the only one of the set who isn’t a blatant cliche, so clearly she has to turn out to be a femme fatale in the end.

This is making The Game sound like it’s excessively easy to mock, which, to be fair, it in many ways is. The 1970s espionage setting means that it’s unabashedly competing with two of the great heavyweights of British television drama: the BBC adaptations John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, and The Sandbaggers, an ITV number that famously only ran for three seasons when its creator Ian Mackintosh disappeared, prompting endless conspiracy theories suggesting that Mackintosh, a former Royal Navy officer, had revealed something he shouldn’t have on the show.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (12/10/14)

, 4

Worst to best, everything good enough to buy. Second Thursday post coming later in the day, btw – had hoped to have it ready by the usual 5am EST, but ended up having a more eventful Wednesday than I’d budgeted for.

Batgirl #37

Other than the kind of nasty transphobic streak, this is a marvelous issue. Pity about the kind of nasty transphobic streak, then. It’s thoroughly sickening, and serves as an unpleasant reminder that underneath the hood, this is still a New 52-era DC comic, with all the thudding “comics for boys” that this implies. Strictly on storytelling, this would be higher on the list, but I just can’t.

Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #1

Had this come out before Original Sin, it would have been a perfectly nice, fun, lightweight story, albeit one that in no way needed thirty-three pages to tell. (Frank Cho’s a fine and dynamic artist, but the book is saturated with big panels to the point where they stop having any impact.) Unfortunately, it came out after Original Sin, and so is instead a painfully predictable lightweight story that in no way needed thirty-three pages to tell.

Uncanny X-Men Annual #1

Part one of a two-part story filling in an old mystery of how Eva Bell, a character I only vaguely have a handle on who is, aged several years in a time travel accident. Some predictable beats, though the “seven years later” jump is clever. But one does rather suspect, if only because it’s how Bendis tends to work, that the second half of this is going to be the issue that carries the weight.

Avengers #39

A fine comic, although there’s something very strange about Reed Richards giving advice on “making plans and the proper execution thereof” to someone who is currently being fostered by Doctor Doom.

Thor #3

I feel like Aaron’s Thor run suffers occasionally from being unable or unwilling to quite make up its mind whether it wants to be epic or a bit wryly funny and personal. At its best, it’s… wryly funny and personal, and the thought bubbles approach to the new Thor is marvelous – I absolutely adore her character. Still, I want answers and flesh, not mystery. Still, glad we’re doing the inevitable Thor vs Thor next issue, if only so we can move on to the less inevitable stuff.

The Amazing Spider-Man #11

After a rough second installment, Spider-Verse gets back on track here. The relationship to the spin-offs is still a bit rough – I don’t think I’ve ever read a crossover that feels quite this insistent on spending time selling me the auxiliary books. But there are moments of real charm and wit here, and three issues in the mythos of the crossover is starting to actually stick for me.

Supreme Blue Rose #5

I remain happy to be along for the ride on this deliciously strange bit of Warren Ellis comic. I’d wonder if it’s any good, but it seems beside the point.…

Continue Reading

Daleks On The Streets (The Last War in Albion Part 74: Europe after the Reign)

, 24

This is the second 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 first five pages of V for Vendetta ended with the title character and the young girl Evey atop a roof, conversing…

“We would look out of the window every morning to make sure the bitch hadn’t put Daleks on the streets yet.” – Warren Ellis, on Margaret Thatcher
Figure 562: The explosion of the Houses of Parliament. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior
#1, 1982)
This leaves only Moore’s sixth and most audacious page. It opens with an extreme close-up on the man, so that only one slit eye of his mask and its painted black curl of an eyebrow is visible. He intones the aforementioned rhyme: “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason,” he continues, and at once, at for any of the readership for whom the mere shape and visual of his outfit and mask was not sufficient to identify the character he is playing, he stands revealed as a man dressed in a Guy Fawkes costume. As he provides the final three iambs of his rhyme, “should ever be forgot,” the tacit promise of this costume is suddenly and triumphantly realized. The panel displays the man from behind, so that the audience looks over his shoulder towards the Houses of Parliament, which are in the midst of exploding. The remains of what was once the clock tower burst outwards, black fragments shattering against the white background of the explosion, the circles of the clock faces still implied in the negative space of the devastation. This is followed by another extremely narrow panel, showing the girl’s shocked reaction with a close-up of one bulging eye – notably the left one, where the man’s eye two panels earlier was the right, implicitly constructing a completed face framing the destruction of London’s single most iconic landmark. “The Houses of Parliament,” the girl exclaims. “Did you do that?” 
Figure 563: The artist signs his work. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David
Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982)
“I did that,” the man replies simply. And as he does, the narrative captions return: “the rumble of the explosion has not yet died away as from far below comes the rattle of smaller reports. And suddenly the sky is alight with…” it trails off, and the trail of thought is continued by the girl, looking up joyfully at the sky and shouting, “fireworks!
…

Continue Reading

“Just listen.”: Loud As A Whisper

, 2

Like “The Outrageous Okona” before it, “Loud As A Whisper” is another episode inspired by an actor instead of a pitch. Howie Seago, who plays Riva, is deaf himself, and he and his wife (an enormous fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation) approached the producers with the idea of doing a story about deaf people to dispel common misconceptions and to tell a story from that perspective. Even Riva’s chorus comes from Seago, who had famously played the lead in Peter Sellers’ adaptation of Ajax where the play’s Greek chorus had been reconceptualized as a team of translators.

Seago jokes he only got into the producers’ offices because they were once again out of scripts thanks to the writers’ guild strike and had nothing else to do, but I’ll bet they bought the pitch because it was a really good story too. The deaf community themes are as good as you’d expect, and are quite successful in showing Riva to be a person who, while different from others in ways that gives him unique advantages and disadvantages, is no more or less then them as a result. My favourite scene here is naturally the one with Geordi on the bridge, where he and Riva bond over the commonality they share. But this isn’t just a story about hearing, it’s also a story about listening, and the rhetorical pirouettes the show does to meld the two themes are truly elegant.

Most obviously, we have the two warring factions of Solais V. Riva believes that the source of all conflict stems from a lack of communication and understanding, and his negotiation method involves helping both sides realise they share some sort of common ground. And yet Riva too is unwilling to listen: He arrogantly dismisses the crew’s attempts to fill him in on the centuries-long war, declaring that all conflicts all over the galaxy are the same, and that he has the tools to resolve any conflict anywhere it might crop up. From the moment he sees her, Riva immediately starts hitting on Troi, and their “dates” consist mostly of him talking at her and trying to impress her with sickeningly faux-poetic platitudes. This episode is a terrific showcase for Marina Sirtis in general, but I particularly love the way she has Troi constantly roll her eyes in exasperation at the camera whenever Riva starts acting particularly obnoxious: The script feels like it wants the affection to be mutual, but Sirtis makes Riva’s advances come across as pompous and silly as they are. Which just makes her scene with Captain Picard at the end all the more sweet.

(I’m not a huge fan of Riva’s chorus being so transparently the id-ego-superego model, even though it does help add to the episode’s theatrical performativity, but the one area where this does help us is by noticing that Riva speaks mostly either through the id-guy, when he’s lecherously hitting on Troi, or the ego-guy, when he’s rambling on to Picard, Riker and Worf about the diplomatic pop philosophical worldview he’s developed through his years of experience as a mediator.)…

Continue Reading

A Dark Secret After The Candle is Out (Hide)

69

You mean the episode isn’t about taxidermy?
It’s April 20th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one with “Need U (100 Percent,” with Nelly, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, and the Wizard of Oz Film Cast also charting. Wonder how that happened. In news, two bombs are detonated at the Boston Marathon, killing three people. One of the bombers is arrested a few days later – the other is killed in a police firefight. Everyone is far angrier about this than the explosion of a storage facility in Texas owned by the West Fertilizer Company, which killed fifteen people, and was due largely to corporate negligence and not angry teenagers. Weird how that works.
On television, meanwhile, we have Hide, which, within the context of Season Seven, begs to be read as the definitive haunted house story. But what does this mean? The haunted house, as a symbol, speaks of the decay of history. The haunted house is always a mansion: a monument to opulence and privilege. And yet it always marks the places where that privilege has rotted away and become twisted. This rot is, inevitably, caused by history: by some event that cannot be moved past. A haunting, in other words, is caused by a past event that is at once the end of a historical progression (inasmuch as all that can follow it is its own anguished reiteration) and nevertheless buried beneath the historical progression that happened anyway. 
In a previous discussion of haunted houses, we identified the image of the lens – a geometric figure created by two arcs – as crucial to understanding history within Doctor Who. The haunted house, then, is a cracked lens – a figure created by one complete arc (history’s progress) and a broken arc (the traumatic event). Where the usual lens of history serves as a vision that entombs history between the twin poles of start and finish, the haunted house suggests a lack of completion – it suggests that history eventually peters out and collapses inward, becoming a festering wound. 
And yet it also has to be noted that Caliburn House breaks the rules of haunted houses. There is, in fact, no historical trauma to be had. The ghost, far from being an object from the past, is in fact, a time traveller from the future. In this sense, the completed arc of the haunted house’s broken lens is in fact absent. But in another sense, the lens is still cracked – its just that the broken part is not the progress into the future, but the idea that events are rooted in the past. None of the causes of Caliburn House’s haunting have actually happened. There is no past moment to be stuck on. Indeed, nothing is stuck at all – the haunting is not a repeated trauma, but a single moment that plays out over the entirety of history. The definitive haunted house story, in other words, doesn’t actually have a haunted house in it.
Except that it does.
…

Continue Reading

Star Trek in Sound and Not Vision

, , , , 4

Hey all,

Back in June, I was a guest on the Pex Lives! podcast with my good friend Jack Graham (of Shabogan Graffiti and Xenomorph’s Paradox). The subject at hand was tacitly the Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann, but we very quickly spiraled tangentially off into a great conversation that had perishingly little to do with Doctor Who. The details largely escape me now, but I seem to recall at least touching on topics as disparate as Sliders, Homicide: Life on the Street, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Melora”, Super Sentai, capitalism and domesticity, capitalism and Pop Christianity, the difference between high fantasy and science fiction, the aesthetic of non-modern naturalistic generativity in sci-fi, Dirty Pair, Gothic cathedrals, fascism vs. anarchy, the origins of mainline fandom histories, radical politics and detournement in fanfiction and criticism, pop culture as western oral mythology, and Toho’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for the NES.

Sadly, the recording and editing process was marred by a myriad of technical problems that can really only be described as “we fucked up big time”, so the episode hasn’t actually been able to see the light of day until now. But it’s been entirely reconstructed and pieced back together thanks to the valiant efforts of the Pex Lives! boys, so I can finally share it with you all today! You can download or stream the podcast here or here, and you too can marvel as I stammer incoherently while people far more articulate and cogent than I say very clever and thoughtful things!

Big thanks again to Kevin and James for the opportunity, and a happy, albeit terribly belated, anniversary!…

Continue Reading

“Posthuman Blues”: The Schizoid Man, Unnatural Selection

, 4

For a run of episodes that inspired the phrase “growing the beard”, a troubling portion of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s second season has been pretty dreadfully uninspiring so far.

These two episodes hinge entirely on hard SF concepts the show has already worked into the ground, despite how early in the year we are. They both prominently feature Data, or matters pertaining to Data, and I can’t actually talk about this in any sort of detail lest I risk “The Measure of a Man” post ending up being about 200 words because the show is going to come back to them *yet again* in that episode. They are both mediocre retreads on every level, this time not just of the original Star Trek (c.f. “Unnatural Selection”) but of Star Trek: The Next Generation *itself*. Even more obnoxiously, I can already foresee this being far from the only set of episodes I’m going to have to address in this manner this season.

One thing that unites “The Schizoid Man” and “Unnatural Selection” thematically is their shared exploration into posthuman speculation about humanity’s future. In “The Schizoid Man”, Ira Graves wants to transplant his consciousness into an android, namely Data, so that he might live on after his body’s biological death, while the scientists in “Unnatural Selection” hoped they might get to decide humanity’s future forms through their genetically engineered children. Both schemes are definitely of the techno-futurist, Machine Singularity type of transhumanism, and Star Trek: The Next Generation comes down pretty decisively critically of this in both cases. Or, well, it *tries* to, at least: In “The Schizoid Man”, this is basically an excuse plot for Brent Spiner to play a psychopath again, and if you remove the (creepy) details about Graves and his (creepy) fixation on his assistant, what you’re basically left with is another banal Evil Twin story. Yes, “The Schizoid Man” is just “Datalore” again (or perhaps it’s a gender-swapped “Turnabout Intruder”). Meanwhile,“Unnatural Selection” being basically a plagiarized knock-off of “The Deadly Years” means its moral about transhumanism essentially amounts to “don’t try to strongarm evolution with technoscience or you’ll evoke the plot of a shitty Original Star Trek episode”.

I really don’t have anything to add here that I haven’t already talked about in regards to posthumanism in other blog posts. We’ve looked at this theme a billion times already, and these episodes bring nothing to the table that hasn’t already been addressed in the context of Dirty Pair, whose deft blending of science fiction, mythology and spirituality Star Trek: The Next Generation eminently lacks at this point in its history, and even in the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation *itself* (go re-watch “11001001” or “Home Soil” for a far more nuanced handling of these issues). Although that said, while nothing here is a patch on “We’re Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It’s Like Magic?!”, which is probably the definitive statement on posthumanism, Dirty Pair is an interesting point of comparison here for a number of reasons: Firstly, because after Ira Graves uploads himself to the Enterprise computer at the end of “The Schizoid Man”, he prints out several equations that contain the variables “Kei” and “Yuri” and something called a DP (Angle).…

Continue Reading

Now with Sound!

1

You know the brilliant Pex Lives podcast, right?  Well I was a guest on it back in June, alongside my online buddy, the equally brilliant Josh Marsfelder, writer of Vaka Rangi (amongst other things).

Don’t remember that happening?  That’s because the podcast got swallowed into the echoing void…

But it’s been found!  Or perhaps I should say ‘reconstructed’.  Yeah, like ‘Power of the Daleks’, only better.

Me, Josh, and the aimiable and clever two-headed gestalt entity which runs the podcast, Kevames (or sometimes Jamevin – depends on its mood swings) talked about the TV Movie.  But don’t let that put you off.

I’m largely responsible for the podcast being temporarily stranded in conceptual space through my mountainish technical ineptitude.  Mind you, Josh claims the same thing, as does James.  The only person not claiming responsibility for the fiasco is Kevin, which leads me to think he’s probably secretly to blame somehow.

However we apportion culpability, the thing has been rescued from oblivion by people other than me working very hard (labour doesn’t have any value, does it?) and here it is, or here, ready to download.

Hear my actual voice saying things!  Hear me make half-formed points that I now refuse to stand-by, and interrupt people, and generally witter!

I had a blast.  I hope you like it too.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (December 6th, 2014)

7

So, next week you can all expect a review of The Game, a 70s-set spy series by Toby Whithouse, which is wrapping up a first run on BBC America despite being made by the BBC proper. That’s supported by the Patreon, which is undergoing a bit of a transformation. It’ll be funding that and the two Christmas posts (one on Last Christmas, one season wrap-up) this month. Next month, it’ll fund something as of yet determined (I’m tempted to have it be Sherlock Season Three). And come February and beyond, it’ll fund… whatever goes up on this site.

Ultimately, the nature of that is going to be up to a vote of the backers on Patreon, and the amount of it will be determined by how much the Patreon makes. If it makes a solid $400+ a week, thrice-weekly content of some sort remains very viable. If it makes less than that, we’ll see. Last War in Albion will of course run at least once a week until the end of time, but other than that, it’ll be the Patreon that determines what happens at this blog, and how often.

So, if you’re interested in having a voice over what sorts of things I cover, backing the Patreon as it funds December and January’s content and weighing in when I actually start framing those numbers and laying out options would be a good idea.

(Right now, the leading candidate in my mind is a Game of Thrones blog, relatively short run, going episode by episode. Other possibilities include the episode commentaries, should those prove popular. Or a book of some sort. Or video game writing. Or who knows.)

So, please consider backing the future of this blog on Patreon. More discussion there. And here, if you like.…

Continue Reading

A Savage and Warlike Race (Cold War)

49

“Sorry, sorry, I’ll sing ‘Rio’ instead.”
It’s April 13th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one, with Pink, Justin Timberlake, Nelly, Bruno Mars, and Bastille also charting. In news, things are mostly sleepy. There’s a beautiful entry on the Wikipedia list of historical events reading “Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley decides to tax the rain,” which apparently really just means that there’s a new tax on homes to help fund preservation efforts of the Chesapeake. The entire Paris Brown silliness happens, which probably speaks volumes about the tenor of UK culture right about then, though what it says is certainly open to interpretation. And Margaret Thatcher dies a few days before this, which had the sort of cultural impact you’d expect given what she came to represent in popular culture. 
On television, Doctor Who proves a bit too prescient, launching its 80s themed story in the wake of all of this. I’m sure there’s a reading that’s long on synchronicity to be made here, but I feel like 2014 isn’t the time to make it. Let’s instead focus on what this story is doing, because I do think that’s interesting in this case. On paper, the pairing of Gatiss and Mackinnon seems like it should be perfect in every regard except for quality. Both are people one describes with the backhanded compliment “workmanlike.” Gatiss’s scripts are, as we’ve by now thoroughly established, long on nostalgic recreations of things that worked in the past. Mackinnon, who we’ve not really talked about at great length, is a functional director with a weakness for colored lighting. Taken together, one expects a bog standard episode of Doctor Who, which is not strictly speaking an inaccurate way of describing Cold War.
Since a running theme so far in our coverage of Season 7B has been its early historicization, it’s perhaps worth looking at Mackinnon’s contributions to Season Eight, since he directed 25% of it, and it gives a better sense of what he’s capable of than The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and The Power of Three. His episodes are generally quite good – Listen is a very credible pick for season’s best. I was critical of the direction of Time Heist, and I stand by the claim that its attempt to mask its use of the same corridor through rapid changes of lighting color was a weakness in an episode without any major strengths. But even Listen is a functional job in which Mackinnon’s main job is to make the five settings feel distinct so that the episode is easy to follow. And Flatline is smart and efficient, much like its script. One can argue that this makes him as good as his material, but the other way of looking at that is that he can reliably get his teeth into the structure of a story and sell the big moments. 
Similarly, Gatiss has approached this particular bit of unabashed nostalgia with a sort of steely determinism. The production circumstances are, in this case, revealing.
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 194 195 196 197 ›»