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“Posthuman Blues”: The Schizoid Man, Unnatural Selection

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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).…

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Now with Sound!

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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.…

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Saturday Waffling (December 6th, 2014)

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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.…

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A Savage and Warlike Race (Cold War)

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“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.
…

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“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”: The Outrageous Okona

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The Agony Booth famously called “The Outrageous Okona” one of Star Trek’s single worst hours, almost “And The Children Shall Lead” bad, in fact. Like most things involving The Agony Booth, I disagree pretty strongly with that assessment. I can’t understand why this episode has the reputation it does: It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s nothing unfathomably offensive here either.

(Well…actually I *do* know where the majority of the criticism comes from, but I want to avoid talking about that for a bit.)

“The Outrageous Okona” has a rather unique origin as far as Star Trek episodes go. Instead of being built around somebody pitching a central concept or idea, it hinges on one character. The titular Captain Okona is explicitly a thinly veiled stand-in for a real person, namely his actor, William O. “Billy” Campbell. Campbell had actually auditioned for the role of Commander Riker and almost got the part, were it not for a last-minute intervention from Paramount higher-up John Pike, who felt Jonathan Frakes was more commanding and that Campbell didn’t have an onscreen presence that would compel viewers to “follow [him] into battle”. But the production team apparently still had affection for Campbell, and this episode feels very much like their attempt to show the audience how he would have interacted with the rest of the main cast. Okona is certainly written as the dashing, roguish, womanizing romantic lead Commander Riker has the reputation for being, particularly, and admittedly excruciatingly, near the beginning (and yet also note how Riker is in many ways depicted as Okona’s foil here: Indeed, in spite of his reputation, Riker actually does vanishingly little of this sort of thing anywhere on Star Trek: The Next Generation).

But the part of Okona that comes most directly from Campbell is his wanderlust. Okona’s entire character is built around never settling down and always feeling compelled to travel from place to place and Campbell himself is much the same way: When offered a role on Ira Behr’s The 4400, Campbell flatly said he’d accept, but only if the show could accommodate his schedule, for he was planning to sail around the world soon after the show was set to begin production. As a result, Behr had his character temporarily killed off while Campbell was on his journey, and brought him back once he returned to the United States. It seems very much as if Star Trek: The Next Generation was trying to pay tribute to the actor through his character here, and it’s a textbook example of how real life is far more wondrous and exciting than anything anyone can consciously invent, and how actors as so frequently so much more interesting and fascinating people than the characters they become famous for portraying.

Campbell-as-Okona is the limit case for Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s actor-driven form of characterization and character development: We’ve already seen this cast bring their roles to life by infusing them with so much of their own personalities and interests, and this is only going to continue as the show enters its next phase of life over the course of the coming year.…

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Comics Reviews (12/3/14)

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From worst to best, with everything being something I like enough to pay for.

Gotham Academy #3

I admit, I’m thinking of dropping this. Three issues in, and each one I’ve wanted to enjoy more than I do. The characters aren’t standing out for me, the plots aren’t grabbing me, and this is settling in as a book I like the idea of rather more than I actually like paying for. One or two more, and I may sit down and reread them as a chunk to see if the characters get better defined for me before I do, but I’m finding disappointment growing here.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #5

It’s a very good week to put this second from bottom, let me say. Interesting, good character work here. Good stuff here, and a story that really did benefit from the extra issue to breathe. And I’m really curious about the rapidly inflating TARDIS crew, not least because the book remains so focused on Alice Obiefune as the secondary lead, making Arc and Jones odd sort of side characters. Is this the best Doctor Who comic ever? I think it might be.

Chew #45

This came in strong this week. After playing at a mass of ugly deaths last week, this one goes in a surprising direction, with a kind of beautifully shocking last page twist that feels, to me, exactly as mean as it should be. I’m really finding myself to be into this book at the moment, which is quite nice.

Uber #20

A bit of a slow issue for Uber. The rapidly spiralling sense of world in Uber occasionally makes for tough going, and this is, for me, an example. Much of this issue consists of events that were made basically inevitable by past issues, so that it feels slightly glacial. Gillen knows how to mash the “disturbing as fuck” button hard enough to cover the gaps, and the use of Mengele is very, very savvy. And then the end is smart and clever and interesting. I love this book, even on the off months.

Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #1

So, Kieron Gillen does an Asgardian take on Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons. I was a bit leery of this one, simply because it’s such an odd property to put Gillen on, and the co-author vaguely suggests that this could be one of those “have a major writer half-involved in the first arc and then wander off” books that Marvel pulls occasionally. The structure here is really sharp and interesting, though, with Gillen writing the present-day section, and Marguerite Bennett doing the flashback in the middle. Good first issue. Worth checking out.

Crossed +One Hundred #1

A deliciously slow, methodical start to this comic, of the sort that every writer wishes they could do, but really only Alan Moore working for Avatar could get away with. It does the thing that many annoying first issues do of simply introducing the book’s premise. But this is Alan Moore, and the book’s premise is a beautifully layered slab of theme.…

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Laissez Les Bontemps Rouler (The Last War in Albion Part 73: The Villain)

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This is the first 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 did some underground-style work for Sounds, a newspaper strip called Maxwell the Magic Cat, some work for Marvel UK on Doctor Who and Star Wars comics, numerous Future Shocks and Time Twisters for 2000 AD, the continuing serials Skizz and D.R. & Quinch for the same magazine, a run on Captain Britain for Marvel UK, and broke out in the United States working on Swamp Thing for DC Comics. Concurrently with all of that, he wrote a serial called V for Vendetta in the British quasi-monthly anthology Warrior…

“Please. For us. For all of us… Laissez les bontemps rouler.” -Alan Moore, Swamp Thing
Figure 551: The chillingly prescient
image of widespread CCTV cameras
in London. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain”
in Warrior #1, 1982)
From its first installment, back in 1982, amidst Moore’s earliest works, V for Vendetta crackles with mad gusto. The first page brazenly sets a scene with all the fascist gusto of 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd, only with none of the broad comedic satire that characterized that strip. Instead it is an all too familiar near-future world, recognizably just a few of history’s happenstances removed from the world of its readers. It is a few months shy of sixteen years in the future, with an unsettlingly phrased radio broadcast identified as the “Voice of Fate.” The language is plastic and stilted, quietly evoking Moore and Lloyd’s previous collaboration on a story for Doctor Who featuring the evil plastic alien Autons: it is “the fifth of the eleventh, nineteen-ninety-seven,” a declaration that is followed by a bizarrely precise weather forecast promising that “the weather will be fine until 12:07 A.M. when a shower will commence lasting until 1:30 A.M.” Note the care with which Moore sets up the unsettling nature of this – the first number is weirdly over-specific, whereas the second is a nice, round number like one would expect from a weather forecast. This broadcast is contrasted with David Lloyd’s starkly monochromatic art, which begins with a soaring skyline before cutting to a mass of people heading home in wide shot. A third panel focuses on a detail from the image, a CCTV camera pointed at the street, a sign proclaiming, “FOR YOUR PROTECTION.” 
Figure 552: The spartan squalor of Evey’s apartment.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The
Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982)
From this introduction, the art and voiceover both take a turn for the dark.
…

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“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent”: Elementary, Dear Data

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If “The Big Goodbye” was the archetypical holodeck malfunction story, than “Elementary, Dear Data” can only be called the archetypical “holodeck characters gain sentience” story.

The plot and basic thesis are pretty simple to explain here. The episode is straightforwardly about artificial intelligence and what constitutes consciousness and sentience. It’s the same basic kind of speculative robot story Hard SF has played with since forever and that’s going to be a reoccurring theme this season, and there’s not a whole lot else to talk about with this brief other than that. Star Trek: The Next Generation does add a distinctive narrative elegance to the proceedings here by mirroring Professor Moriarty’s personal revelation with Data’s bet with Doctor Pulaski and displays its heritage by pretty overtly invoking Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum”. Data proves to Doctor Pulaski that he is capable of independent thought and deductive reasoning, and Moriarty declares to Captain Picard that if Data is to be granted full personhood status because of that than so should he. I don’t really want to introduce a debate on Cartesian philosophy here, so let’s just say I find the whole things pretty damn questionable and suspect and try to read this episode in a way other than the rote and obvious.

In lieu of this, “Elementary, Dear Data” is probably the pinnacle of Doctor Pulaski’s character as originally conceived and this pretty much marks the point where her big character arc should have ended. She bears witness to not one, but *two* artificially created life-forms pretty incontrovertibly proving their personhood status according to both her and the show’s diegetic standards (and notice how even in the beginning she refers to Data as a “he” instead of an “it”). Diana Muldaur is great, but she’s always great so there’s no news there. The only objection I would raise is the fact this isn’t tied off quite as neatly as would really have been nice (in particular, Pulaski and Data needed a scene together in the denouement) and, of bloody course, the kidnapping. To that, all I have to say is “Come on. Really? This is 1988 and that’s Diana Fucking Muldaur.”

(Data himself is, predictably, outstanding and Brent Spiner really doesn’t need commenting on by this point, but do take note of how he plays Data here: The “emotionless” android very clearly bluffs, panics several times and is obviously having a hell of a lot of fun playing his fictional idol.)

Then there’s the Sherlock Holmes setting, which is of course good campy fun. London (and 221b Baker Street in particular) is realised in a lovely, sumptuous manner, and indeed so much so it’s one of the things that necessitated closing off the year with a clip show. Certainly with the as of this writing recent astronomical popularity of Sherlock Holmes as a franchise in pop consciousness, “Elementary, Dear Data” is probably a terrific episode to introduce people to Star Trek: The Next Generation with on that merit alone: It’s a veritable Sherlockian’s dream come true, from the beautifully rendered Baker Street apartment to the copious nods to the sacred “Holmes canon” to Brent Spiner’s grandstanding, Jeremy Brett-inspired turn as Data-as-Holmes.…

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Monsterism

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In his famous essay ‘The Dialectic of Fear’ (published in New Left Review #136, Nov-Dec 1982) Franco Moretti used Marxist and Psychoanalytic criticism to provide a coruscating account of the twin monsters of bourgeois culture: Dracula and Frankenstein.

The entire essay is well worth reading and is findable online if you hunt about.  Here are some of the best bits about Frankenstein (the book):

Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of ‘a Ford worker’). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature. He is not found in nature, but built. Frankenstein is a productive inventor-scientist…). Reunited and brought back to life in the monster are the limbs of those – the ‘poor’ – whom the breakdown of feudal relations has forced into brigandage, poverty and death. Only modern science – this metaphor for the ‘dark satanic mills’ – can offer them a future. It sews them together again, moulds them according to its will and finally gives them life, But at the moment the monster opens its eyes, its creator
draws back in horror: ‘by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; . . . How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . ?’

Between Frankenstein and the monster there is an ambivalent, dialectical relationship, the same as that which, according to Marx, connects capital with wage-labour. On the one hand, the scientist cannot but create the monster: ‘often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion’. On the other hand, he is immediately afraid of it and wants to kill it, because he realizes he has given life to a creature stronger than himself and of which he cannot henceforth be free. … The fear aroused by the monster, in other words, is the fear of one who is afraid of having ‘produced his own gravediggers’.

and…

‘Race of devils’: this image of the proletariat encapsulates one of the most reactionary elements in Mary Shelley’s ideology. The monster is a historical product, an artificial being: but once transformed into a ‘race’ he re-enters the immutable realm of Nature. He can become the object of an instinctive, elemental hatred; and ‘men’ need this hatred to counterbalance the force unleashed by the monster. So true is this that racial discrimination is not superimposed on the development of the narrative but springs directly from it: it is not only Mary Shelley who wants to make the monster a creature of another race, but Frankenstein himself. Frankenstein does not in fact want to create a man (as he claims) but a monster, a race. He narrates at length the ‘infinite pains and care’ with which he had endeavoured to form the creature; he tells us that ‘his limbs were in proportion’ and that he had ‘selected his features as beautiful’.

…

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Burnt Orange (The Rings of Akhaten)

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I am a leaf on the wind.
It’s April 6th, 2013. PJ and Duncan are at number one with “Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble,” which, on the face of it, looks like one of those inexplicable things that happens to the UK charts occasionally. I’m sure Tom Ewing will have fun with it when the time comes. Also charting are Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Nelly, Pink, and Macklemore. In news, and recalling that we haven’t actually covered a lot of that recently given the approach taken for The Bells of Saint John, the world visibly failed to end in 2012, although there was an impressive meteor strike over Chelyabinsk in February. Benedict XVI resigned as pope, and was replaced by Francis. Chris Huhne resigned from the House of Commons after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice over a speeding ticket, same-sex marriage was legalized in England and Wales, and, apparently, Illinois banned the sale of shark fins. 
Television, meanwhile, brings the much-maligned The Rings of Akhaten. As with The Bells of Saint John before it, this is an episode where it is slightly surprising how, after less than two years, it already feels like a part of history. Certainly the bizarre ninth-from-bottom finish in the Doctor Who Magazine 50th anniversary poll feels like as much of a historical aberration as the first place finish for Day of the Doctor. Certainly one imagines this story will always have its detractors, as it belongs to the tradition of Doctor Who as children’s science fantasy that houses such “silly” stories as Kill the Moon and The Space Museum, which is, really, a better comparison than anyone gives this credit for being. Put another way, it’s unabashedly The Sensorites for a more sentimental age, and there are some people for whom that’s always going to be the same sort of challenge “children’s panto J.G. Ballard” is. 
More than any other Moffat-era story, more even than his puzzle boxes and narrative substitutions, more than the disjointed and at times dysfunctional River Song arc, this is the episode where the original experience of watching it cannot be recaptured. Everything about this episode is stuff that vanishes into the Impossible Girl arc. This is the one most obscured by it. In hindsight, we know its solution: everything prior to The Name of the Doctor is in fact the origin story of a companion who does something particularly impressive one day to save the Doctor. What we see is actually what we get. 
In that regard, it’s significant how much The Rings of Akhaten is Clara-centric. This isn’t a Doctor-lite story, but it might as well be. Almost all of the big moments go to Clara – the Doctor’s only real victory in the entire thing is his convincing Mary Gejelh, although he kind of steps on Clara’s victory in the end (in a way that serves as a metonym for the entire story, really). Instead the focus remains on Clara, who spends just as much of this “being the Doctor” as she does in Flatline.
…

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