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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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Myriad Universes: DC Star Trek: The Next Generation Volume 1

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As we discussed last time, much of the initial tie-in merchandise and spin-off works based on Star Trek: The Next Generation were created before the actual show was so that they could actually tie in to things. This poses an interesting case when discussing things that are actual textual narratives, as it means the authors are working with prototypical assumptions about the characters and setting, and are as a result operating from the exact same position of uncertainty as the people working on the show itself are.

DC’s first Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book, a six issue limited series that ran from Fall, 1987 until Summer, 1988, is one such work. The first issue, “…Where No One Has Gone Before!”, was quite obviously penned before “Encounter at Farpoint” had aired (as you can probably guess just from the title) and is endlessly fascinating because of it: The characters are all drawn from broad-strokes assumptions about what they’d be like, presumably because the creative team only had access to Gene Roddenberry’s writer’s guide. Captain Picard suffers the most from this, being even grouchier, angrier and more stringent than he was early on in the show, although the series does do a decent job balancing this out with a sense of hardened isolation and introspection he feels brought on from his years of experience in deep space. Commander Riker, by contrast, tends to alternate between being barely visible and forgettable to being a generic heroic Star Trek lead.

The other characters, however, are eminently more interesting: Deanna Troi is more prominent, commanding and fleshed out than I think she ever is until season six of the show (well, discounting for the moment her development in the later DC comics, that is): Perhaps owing to DC being a publisher mostly known for superhero books, Deanna is treated as an essential member of the team whose psychic powers, which are far, far more powerful than they are on the show (think Professor X but without the telekinesis) prove absolutely critical on more than one occasion. She also gets a whole lot of speeches, and brings every other character down to rights at least once over the course of the series. Data, meanwhile is fascinating because he is quite overtly emotional, and *extremely so*: He gets emotionally overwhelmed at every little thing (he’s even sad to have “adrenal pumps”), both positively, or at least inoffensively, in the first issue to dangerously negatively in issues four and five.

Die-hard fans might recoil with shock and horror at this, but let’s stop an actually think about Data for a moment. Is it ever actually said anywhere at any point in the first season, in particular this early on in the year, that Data is emotionless? Sure, he doesn’t understand a lot, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel anything. At the very least if Brent Spiner is supposed to be playing an emotionless character he does an abjectly terrible job of it, because Data is permanently smirky and wry for the entire year.…

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Comics Reviews (November 26th, 2014)

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From worst to best, but I paid for everything.

The Massive #29

One of those comics that leaves you going “really? That’s it?” Which is impressive for a comic featuring the apocalypse, and yet Brian Wood nevertheless makes it feel a bit underwhelming. I aspire, in the future, not to waste two and a half years of my life and $105 on comics this not good.

ODY-C #1

Not my thing, but if it is your thing, very good. Some lovely psychedelia and epic sci-fi, it’s all terribly pretty, and the opening octuple splash with two fold-out timelines and maps manage to out-Multiversity Multiversity and out-Hickman Hickman in one shot. Really, this is a fabulous comic that’s just not my cup of tea. If psychedelic sci-fi epics sound like yours, do check it out.

New Avengers #27

One of those Hickman comics that relies on the idea that the reader has remembered the mythology he’s been building up. I don’t, so, you know, oh well. The knowledge that the answer to all of these questions are in some fashion “Secret Wars” is a bit of a non-starter. But mostly… eh.

Stumptown #3

One that’s going to have to be reread when it’s finished for me, as I’ve definitely lost all sense of who most of the characters are. It looks very good, and has Rucka’s usual sense of characterization, at least in the bits that are self-contained enough to be understandable entirely from this issue, but this is definitely the comic I want to vote “most in need of a recap page and character guide” this week.

The Unwritten Apocalypse #11

I believe that this is the penultimate issue of this. In any case, it’s a lovely issue, building to a great cliffhanger and going through some nice paces to get there. Really, really looking forward to the “it’s all done” reread of this series.

Trees #7

Another series kicking into high gear, with a sense of things happening, if not of things converging. A bit puzzled by the decision to not bother with location captions, but if Ellis wants that level of attentiveness, he’s a writer who’s entitled to it, frankly. In any case, things happen. Is interesting.

Lazarus #13

Not only are things heating up, I feel like I understand them without having to reread a ton of past issues. There’s no recap page, but pertinent information is given through dialogue reminders, and there’s solid character work – I love the poker game amongst the Lazari, in particular. Not a jumping on point, but a solid reminder of why this is one of my favorite series going.…

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LaBostrie Feels His Skin Crawl (The Last War in Albion Part 72: Tygers, The Return of the Good Gumbo)

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This is the twenty-second of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two 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 six volumes. This entry covers stories from the sixth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are left as an exercise for the reader.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s last Swamp Thing arc involved a series of sci-fi stories, including one featuring the Green Lantern Corps, a DC property Moore had played with in a trio of short stories as well.
“In the darkest part of the swamp, he pauses. A monstrous black bird flaps overhead, momentarily eclipsing the sun. LaBostrie feels his skin crall and moves on. Below, in the green tank of swamp water, something stirs. And rises.” – Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, Swamp Thing

Figure 542: The concepts Alan Moore and
Kevin O’Neill created for “Tygers” would
eventually become a central part of the DC
Universe in the form of the Red Lantern Corps.
But it is in most regards the second of his three Green Lantern stories that is most interesting. One of two collaborations he did with Kevin O’Neill while at DC, the story, entitled “Tygers,” tells of the death of Abin Sur, the predecessor to Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern for Earth’s sector of space. The story is notable for several reasons. For one, it is the story that Moore was referring to in later interviews where he accused DC of “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of night.” The story responsible for provoking that comment was a 2009 Green Lantern-based crossover written by Geoff Johns, which actually owes relatively little to “Tygers” save for featuring further characters from the alien planet on which it is set, although it is true that an extended prophecy given within “Tygers” has been extensively mined by both Johns and other writers for story concepts. 
Figure 543: The horrific Qull of the
Five Inversions. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Kevin O’Neill, from
“Tygers,” in Tales of the Green Lantern
Corps Annual #2, 1986)
For another, as its title suggests, the story owes a considerable debt to William Blake. The bulk of this debt is subtle – no actual Blakean concepts or images appear within the story, and although Kevin O’Neill draws a number of memorably grotesque and bizarre horrors in the story, his style in “Tygers” is far from a straightforward imitation of Blake, nor even an homage. O’Neill’s art is nevertheless striking, and in many ways he comes closer to Blake by doing his own strange and visionary style instead of an imitation.
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Totemic Artefacts: Galoob Star Trek: The Next Generation

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What’s the value of merchandise? You ask collectors or Internet scalpers, apparently “more then the down payment on your house”. Other people, however, probably the sorts of people who share a fervently anti-hegemonic leftist perspective, will tell you “less than nothing”, and will likely go on to you at length about the injustices of sweatshop labour or the damaging effects the overuse of petroleum products has on the environment, or how capitalism appropriates play and obfuscates our sacred link to the natural world through selling kids worthless plastic tchotchkes.

There’s an important discussion to be had here, and one I’m entirely uninterested in having myself. My sole contribution to the debate would be twofold: One, stressing the power of generative homebrew maker and enthusiast culture to undermine this industry just as it has the potential to do to all industries, and two, simply offering a humble reminder that toys are important to kids, and thus, are important to everyone. Play is how we all conceptualize and make sense of situations throughout life: It’s another form of metaphor and storytelling, and a very old one.

Every culture throughout human history has had some form of sacred totem or figure upon which people project symbols and meaning, and these, just like any object with personal significance, are important to them. Maybe toys are our version of this phenomenon. I know for me the appeal of dolls and action figures is this: It’s deeply meaningful for me to have a physical representation of a character I admire, and it’s almost as if the toy’s presence reminds me of what the work they hail from means to me. When I was a child, action figures helped spark my creativity and inspired me to come up with stories featuring the characters they represented. In fact, even today, whenever I find myself writing about a story from pop culture, I tend to surround my workspace with whatever bits of merchandise pertaining to the series I have, and I find it both inspires me and helps me write better.

Shinto tradition even holds a belief in spirits called Tsukumogami; inanimate objects that obtain sentience after reaching a hundred years of age or depending on how they’re treated. There’s even a ceremony called Ningyo Kuto, where children essentially hold a wake for dolls they no longer wish to keep, paying respects to the toy so that it’s soul is laid to rest. And who can honestly say they don’t have a beloved personal possession that holds such sentimental meaning to them because they’ve had it forever or because it reminds them of a special moment, or person, in their lives? That capitalism has co-opted toys and play is the fault of capitalism and its relentless engines of dehumanizing assimilation, not that of toys or the toymakers themselves, who really only exist to bring joy and meaning to people. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation is a strange show to base a toy line around if you stop and think about it.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea Final (Game of Thrones)

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Well, something had to knock Doctor Who off its Hugo perch. And after competing in long form for its first season, Game of Thrones seems to have cemented itself as the Hugo frontrunner with back-to-back victories over Doctor Who in 2012 and 2013. 2012 was perhaps understandable: It wasn’t an extraordinary year for Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones did have “Blackwater,” which was a stunningly good Peter Dinklage vehicle of an episode. Even in 2013, you can possibly criticize the strategy of having Doctor Who go in with Day of the Doctor, Name of the Doctor, An Adventure in Time and Space, and The Five-ish Doctors as possibly weaker than the strategy of just chucking “The Rains of Castamere” up.


But “The Rains of Castamere” is also an episode worth looking at because it gets at the way in which much of the talk about what makes Game of Thrones good is desperately silly. Because essentially all “The Rains of Castamere” has to recommend it is that it has a lot of really shocking character deaths in it. This is, to be fair, part of the show’s brand. Its first big, iconic cultural moment was the killing of Ned Stark, Sean Bean’s character, late in the first season after having previously presented him as the show’s main character (which, to be fair, he was up until his decapitation). And this is, if we’re being honest, one of the great deaths in television history.


But the reason that it worked wasn’t that it was a shock death. Shock deaths are, frankly, overused on television. What worked so well about killing Ned Stark was that it, in one shot, altered the status quo for every other character in the show. It was a plot twist that actually changed things. Which you can’t really say about the famed Red Wedding of “The Rains of Castamere,” which butchers a significant chunk of the cast, but which mostly has the effect of either preventing things that would be been interesting from happening (destroying any possibility of Tyrion and Sansa coming to understand each other, keeping Arya wandering around) or terminating plotlines that weren’t really working that well anyway (Robb and Catelyn). It was, frankly, a cheap move, and for my money, one of the weaker episodes of the third season.


So if not its body count, what is so good about Game of Thrones? It’s tempting to say a word I’m usually quite down on: worldbuilding. But instead I’ll go with “structure.” Game of Thrones is the most lusciously structured show on television. Under the hood, it is almost ostentatious in its simplicity: it’s epic fantasy structured as a soap opera, using the same basic trick of Doctor Who whereby you sell the sense of the epic with one or two tremendously expensive effects shots per episode, thus covering the fact that every other scene is just two British actors sitting in a room talking.


But where the show really sparkles is in its use of editing and structure within an episode.
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“And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time/’Till touchdown brings me ’round again to find…”: No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!

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What could I possibly say? This was perfect. A perfect story serving as a perfect capstone to a perfect show. Words fail me trying to convey the mixture of emotions I’m feeling right now.

There really could have been no better way for Original Dirty Pair to go out. A finale that knows it’s a finale and knows the promises it must reaffirm. Who else could Kei and Yuri be but Space Truckers? Sure, they’re technically undercover again, this time to infiltrate an independent truck company on the verge of folding due to corporate pressure, but it feels a little bit different this time. There’s no obvious diegetic guise the girls slip into here, and they certainly don’t seem to be acting very hard. Indeed, Kei and Yuri are for one final time handled perfectly, and this might be the story that shows their relationship in the best and purest light. They’re just being themselves here, which is the boldest, most brazenly revolutionary thing they can do. And they clearly relate to and empathize profoundly with the truck drivers, and why wouldn’t they? They share a common bond as travellers on the cosmic highway, as fated to be alone together as they are to constantly journey from place to place. The title “No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!” couldn’t have been more accurate: It’s as apt a summary of the episode itself as it is a crystal clear statement of purpose for Dirty Pair on the whole.

(And notice how, in the teaser for this episode, it’s *Yuri* who gets the most excited about becoming a trucker, saying it’s something she’s “always wanted to do”. Try as she might to pass herself off as a romantic, refined Yamato Nadeshiko heroine, at heart Yuri is just as much a working class wanderer and voyager as Kei is, and her true colours shine the brightest and most vibrant of all.)

We’ve seen Space Truckers in Dirty Pair before, in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys”. But that episode, much like the TV series it’s from, had an extremely goofy, tongue-in-cheek tone to it. That wasn’t a bad thing, and a lot of the first Dirty Pair show was laugh-out-loud funny. But this time it’s played a bit more serious and a bit more sophisticated. Not that there aren’t still laughs to be had, of course, but the comedy tends to come more in light doses delicately woven into the fabric of the narrative itself, rather than shoved front and centre in slapsticky glory. There’s an elegance, nuance and sense of mature dignity to the writing here that really sells the quiet tragedy of Uncle Jayd and the truckers, and Kei and Yuri effortlessly fit right in. This has been a signature of Original Dirty Pair from the beginning, but it’s so very important that this episode in particular embodies this sophistication as well as it does, because of its delicate subject matter.…

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