Eruditorum Press

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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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“Seeking something they have lost”: Where Silence Has Lease

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For me, Season 2 has always been “the weird season”.

It begins as early as the opening credits. The title sequence is the same as the first season, but the theme song is a new recording that sounds off-puttingly fake to me for some reason. Riker has his beard, but he’s still not properly stocky. The uniforms are the same familiar spandex ones, and yet Tasha Yar isn’t at the tactical console. Deanna Troi has the hairstyle and uniform she’ll sport for the majority of the series, but it’s the wrong colour. Geordi is chief engineer, but he’s only a lieutenant instead of a lieutenant commander. Worf is security chief and he’s got his chain-mail sash, but he lacks the makeup that gives him the iconic and recognisable look I associate with him in that position. Even the new creative team, fresh off the Mass Exodus of the summer, doesn’t stick around, so it’s hard to get too attached to anyone or anything here. The whole show is at this awkward transitory phase between one incarnation and the next, exhibiting traits I’d associate with both its first season and Micheal Piller-era formes, but never satisfyingly falling into either camp. It’s liminal to be sure, but it doesn’t feel liminal in a way that embraces the power of liminality: Rather, it comes across more as…immature and underdeveloped.

And then there’s Doctor Pulaski.

Probably the definitive embodiment of how “off” Season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation feels to me is that this is the sole season where Gates McFadden does not appear as Beverly Crusher. Gates had been fired abruptly at the end of the first season by Maurice Hurley for unspecified reasons, though it’s fairly evident Hurley simply didn’t like her very much and decide to act on this by giving her the pink slip. This was probably one of the single dumbest moves in the history of the franchise: Yes, there are conceptual issues with Doctor Crusher as a character, but you’d have to be mad not to see that everything that *was* good about Bev is directly thanks to Gates McFadden, and that as an actor she’s one of the show’s biggest assets and raw talents. That Hurley felt Gates didn’t deserve the same chance to make her character her own that every other actor on the show got is a black mark on his entire tenure as executive producer. Ironically enough, Hurley is a staunch defender of Denise Crosby and Tasha Yar and thought her loss was a shame. I mean it was, but you’d think that would have led him to behave differently.

Regardless, Gates McFadden’s exit necessitated creating a new chief medical officer character, and who the producers and the incoming creative team came up with was one Katherine Pulaski, possibly the most contentious and polarizing character in the history of Star Trek. Her ardent defenders adore her firstly because she’s not Gates McFadden, who (just as Maurice Hurley did) some people seem to surprisingly resent for some stupefyingly inexplicable reason, but secondly because she’s Diana Muldaur, returned to Star Trek for the first time in twenty years.…

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Saturday Waffling (November 29th, 2014)

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Hello all. Finished the V for Vendetta chapter, and am mostly through the next round of Logopolis revisions, though I’ll probably typeset the bugger before I send it back to Jane so she can check pagination, and that feels like an impossibly large task right now, though that may be because it’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m cold and tired.

Still trying to figure out what on Earth I’m going to use this blog for once TARDIS Eruditorum wraps. I mean, Last War in Albion, obviously. And the episode commentaries I owe from the Kickstarter. And the commissioned essays, I suppose. The trouble is, I’m really not eager to take on another massive project, but I also do want to keep up regular blogging. And I’m not sure how best to reconcile those. Maybe some shorter blog series.

Right. Discussion for the week. Hm.

Well, December’s waiting for us on Monday. What are you looking forward to in the last month of 2014?…

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My Mind Will Be Like That Of A Child (The Bells of Saint John)

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The totally gibberish computer code that is occasionally superimposed
over things is by far my favorite part of this episode.
It’s March 30th, 2013. I’m in a hotel in Clarion Pennsylvania with my wife, at the halfway point of a drive from Chicago to Connecticut. This is the trip back from our honeymoon, which was a tour of top restaurants in Chicago. We’ve had some of the best food of our lives over the last week, which is making the shitty Applebee’s takeout nachos just that little bit more disappointing. It’s not helping Doctor Who much either, which we’re watching on a laptop having pirated it in a Panera’s. The honeymoon was about as impromptu as all of this: we wanted to check out a restaurant called Next in Chicago, which does three menus a year, each very tightly around a theme. Their theme that spring was The Hunt, and it was all game meats and preservation techniques and the coolest thing ever, and we were thinking about a winter wedding, and were basically going as inspiration. So we added a few other fine dining restaurants and made a nice vacation out of it. You may have noticed the hitch in the chronology already, so to speak – we quietly eloped to secure me health insurance, and then ended up deciding to save on the wedding and just declare it all done, the result of which was to, frankly, get a far better wedding dinner than any bulk caterer is going to give you for, ironically, not actually all that much more a head. 
So let’s see, that means I had the Pertwee book coming out, and yeah, I did the last few edits in the hotel. Exchanged e-mails with Mac Rogers and got set up to do the Slate review thing for Hide. No idea what was in the charts, because despite four days of 6-8 hour drives in a single week I mostly just listened to Paul McGann audios because those were what was coming up in Eruditorum. Last War in Albion wasn’t even started. It feels like ages ago. 
Strangely, so does this episode. I thought it was crap on transmission, although as I said, circumstances. I quite liked it on this pass, but I liked it very much as a thing that felt over. As the past of the series. I watched it last night after dinner with my wife, on the big TV in the bedroom, with one of the cats curled up on my chest, and it felt like a nice thing to watch before bed, and now she’s at work and I’m writing it up and I have a bunch of interesting things I want to say about it. I remember it both ways – in Clarion and last night. Like time’s been rewritten, which I suppose is what becoming history is. 
The Capaldi era starts here, in a sense, though we didn’t know it at the time. So does Clara, though we had no idea what that meant and wouldn’t really all season even though we’re told.
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