Eruditorum Press

Incremental progress meets Zeno’s Paradox

“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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“The extraordinary world of 3D”: A Matter Of Honor

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I have a fascination with stereoscopic 3D as a creative medium. I know in film, TV and video games it is, or at least was, cool to complain about 3D being a pointless and expensive gimmick that just makes things look fake, but I find most of those sorts of arguments to be made out of ignorance about how the process works or how our brains process images. Done properly, stereoscopic 3D has the unique capability to remove the crutch of artifice while counterintuitively adding an entirely new level of immersion at the same time.

As a kid I loved the View-Master line of toy 3D film reels. If you don’t remember them, they were these miniature plastic reels that had tiny strips of film inside divided into pairs that were slightly offset. If you put them into a special View-Master viewer (that kind of looked like a clunky pair of binoculars) and held them up to the light, the effect was that you could scroll through a slideshow of 3D images. I was always really, really impressed with the 3D effect of View-Masters: Once you put those on, it was immediate and noticeable, and the reels always seemed to have a vibrant and lush colour scheme that just made everything pop even more. My favourites were always the ones based on live-action and animated television shows: Because you were looking at raw, actual film, View-Master gave you a look at your favourite shows that was strikingly different from anything you could see on TV unless you had a really expensive and high-end set, and even then it wasn’t quite the same.

“A Matter Of Honor” was the only Star Trek: The Next Generation episode to be adapted for View-Master, and yes, of course I had it. This means that, while my recollection of the second season as it originally aired is hazy at best, this episode is permanently burned into my memory because I looked at those View-Master reels *constantly*. I have an innate understanding of this episode’s beats, highlights and pacing at a very deep-seated level, because the View-Master adaptation dutifully cataloged every single scene, which I promptly memorized because I thought this thing looked bloody *gorgeous* and would click through it over and over again. So, even though I’ve only actually watched “A Matter Of Honor” maybe a couple of times, I likely know it better than any other episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which actually proved to be surprisingly off-putting for me this time, as it turns out there are subtle, yet very noticeable, differences between the episode as aired and the episode as rendered in 1980s consumer-grade stereoscopic 3D.

The first thing I noticed was that the effects shots used in the View-Master version of “A Matter Of Honor” are completely different. The TV episode, like a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation did, understandably relies mostly on reused stock footage for exterior shots of the Enterprise with new footage being filmed whenever it was supposed to interact with the Pagh.…

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The Game and How Toby Whithouse Lost It

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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.…

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Comics Reviews (12/10/14)

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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.…

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

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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!
…

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“Just listen.”: Loud As A Whisper

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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.)…

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A Dark Secret After The Candle is Out (Hide)

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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.
…

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