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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 84 (Call the Midwife, Supernatural)

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Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues, a general badass, and my wife.
In case you missed the boom, Call the Midwife is a BBC period drama about a group of midwives servicing London’s East End in the 1950s, originally based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth. It is the newest big show to hit UK television with ratings roughly matching those of Sherlock and Downton Abbey and surpassing Doctor Who itself. Call the Midwife was also featured in 2013’s Comedy Relief sketch (partnering with Doctor Who in this endeavor) and has Paul McGann’s brother, Stephen McGann as a prominent character in their series. UK TV ends up being a bit incestuous. 

Medical shows are a hard sell to those who work in the medical field. Much in the same way those in the tech field often cannot help but point out the inconsistencies and illogical moments when tech appears in TV or cinema, those of us in the medical field see the problems others can safely ignore. Even “reality” medical shows fall afoul of this issue, I remember yelling at a Mystery Diagnosis episode that “there is dumbing the facts down for the laypeople and then there is outright lying to them!”
But this is a problem that Call the Midwife sidesteps so well. Because the medicine is very rarely, if ever, the focus of the episode. With the emphasis shifted, they only have to include as many medical facts as they see fit. We never get a long and convoluted explanation of what is going on or why things are stressful, we get just enough to see the broad shapes of the situation and are led to conclusions about the situation by the players reactions to it. They stay vague enough to avoid getting things significantly wrong (though I feel I should disclaim all this by mentioning I am very much NOT a maternity nurse, there may be errors I do not pick up on). This era is also just out of step enough with the present that, unless there are glaring “no, that cannot possibly make sense if they’ve got brains in their heads,” I may not necessarily notice the errors. These are all things I appreciate enormously. It is so nice to be able to watch a medical show without the nurse brain picking apart every little detail.
So what’s the focus of Call the Midwife if it’s not the medicine? Well, it’s the people of course. And not in the schmaltzy, soapy Grey’s Anatomy sense. It’s what I adore about Call the Midwife, it’s the key to how they do convey how stressful situations are. It’s never the stress of watching numbers trend down or hearing alarms blaring, it is watching the people who are in the trenches give each other knowing and mildly terrified looks, gritting their teeth and getting through it. It is watching these women get their patients and each other through heart-wrenching, soul-crushing and nightmare-inducing situations. It is about them going home and getting on with their lives after.
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“Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded”: The Neutral Zone

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Let’s address the obvious things first. Yes, “The Neutral Zone” rehashes key elements from both “Space Seed” and “Balance of Terror”. Yes, the Romulans as depicted in this episode bear no relation whatsoever to the way they were portrayed in the Original Series, in essence throwing all the interesting commentary and contrast they bring with them out an airlock. Yes, those bases were indeed meant to be destroyed as part of a story arc to introduce the Borg that gets promptly forgotten about as soon as this episode airs. And yes, the motivations of the main cast are seriously wonky and out of character such that characterization of people like Picard and Riker waffles back and forth bafflingly from scene to scene. This is all self-evident and indisputable. There, is, however, a pretty simple explanation for all of it that can’t just be laid at the creative team.

If you guessed it’s the Writer’s Guild strike, well, good for you! You’re getting good at this. I’m afraid you don’t win anything, though.

“The Neutral Zone” is basically a first draft spec script. The reason it is a first draft spec script is because it was the only thing the team had lying around to put into production to close out the year, and essentially nobody was allowed to actually revise it so it would, you know, make sense and be coherent. Every single fault the finished product has can straightforwardly be pinned on this, and to single out “The Neutral Zone” in particular for blame seems a bit unfair to me, not only given how sketchy things are going to get next year, but also due to the altogether reasonable defense that, through such gems as “The Naked Now”, “Code of Honor”, “Angel One” and “Skin of Evil”, this team has demonstrated itself to be perfectly capable of screwing up *without* an industry-wide Writer’s Guild strike to slow them down further. But also because, in spite of everything, “The Neutral Zone” really does work and contributes quite a lot to the unfolding text of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Romulans are, of course, a problem. After D.C. Fontana and others spent the better part (and I mean that quite emphatically in several senses) of the Original Series trying to make them a social parallel of the Federation, in some sense a people more cultured and sophisticated than us, “The Neutral Zone” basically undoes all of that in one fell swoop by making them an entire species of Dick Dastardlys. This does not, it should be noted, doom the Star Trek: The Next Generation Romulans for good: Future stories set in this continuity will make impressive strides with them and redeem this early tactical blunder by essentially depicting them as a fractured and splintered figurehead empire in decline…which actually *does* build off some themes from the Original Series, though they’re back to mustache-twirling by the Dominion War.…

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Comics Reviews (October 30th, 2014)

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As ever, ranked from least enjoyed to most, with everything being a book I was willing to spend money on.

All-New X-Men #33

The original X-Men touring the Ultimate Universe is proving a bit sloppy. Too many characters split up into too many storylines emphasizes one of Bendis’s weak spots, which is that an issue can pass without a sense that much has happened. Split that over four plots and you run into issues where not a lot actually does happen. A promising cliffhanger, but aren’t they all?

The Massive #28

The six-part structure of the final arc turns out to be at least slightly artificial, with this very much being the start of a new three-part arc. But I suspect calling it a six-part arc was wise, as there’s a real flagging in the momentum here. This is not unusual for this book, which has always disappointed a bit. Not bad, but I’m not going to miss this much when it’s over.

Guardians of the Galaxy #20

Hm? Oh. Yes. This plot. The death of Richard Ryder, and all that. It wraps up pretty well. I’m not sure it was three issues of story, and certainly not sure it was worth pausing the actual Guardians for three months, but fair enough. It wasn’t half bad. Glad to be moving on though.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #4

I admit, this threw me for a bit of a loop, just because I’d gotten used to done-in-ones, and really wasn’t expecting a multipart story, which in turn made the pacing feel weird throughout. Rereading it, it’s a nice setup for a story. Alice, in particular, gets some excellent material here, as she and the Doctor come into a subtle sort of conflict. This fits into Eleven’s overall story arc quite well, and into the way the nature of the companion has evolved over the Moffat era. Good fun, this. Still highly recommended.

Wonder Woman #35

And so the Azzarello run ends. The rest of the New 52 did away with this book’s ability to actually define a new generation’s Wonder Woman, but it soldiered on and at least provided an interesting vision of her that was consistently one of the few books in the New 52’s first three years capable of being interesting. Here it ends, with some nice callbacks to Marston and the book’s legacy. There’s even talk of submission. There’s little to be excited about in the next phase of Wonder Woman. This, at least, was a book you could be proud of. Good for it.

Saga #24

Is it possible to write a bad comic with a Lying Cat splash page? No. It probably is not. I should really archive binge this in the gap months to actually get up to speed on the plots and characters, because it’s self-evidently an absolutely brilliant comic. Apparently there’s a nice oversized hardcover of the first eighteen issues coming out. Lovely Christmas present, that.

Uber #19

The stuff this book is doing with war comics is absolutely fascinating.…

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The Day After The World Ended (The Last War in Albion Part 68: The Apocalypse)

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This is the eighteenth 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 fourth volume. It’s available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore paid off a year of eschatological foreshadowing with the unleashing of the primordial spirit of evil itself in a bizarre South American death ritual conducted by the Brujería, who represent the blackness at the heart of America.
“We all woke up, the day after the world ended, and we still had to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads. Life goes on, y’know?” – Alan Moore, Promethea

Figure 508: Judith’s transformation is a triumph of
psychedelic body horror. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #48, 1986)
The unleashing of this horror, in “A Murder of Crows,” in Swamp Thing #48, comes when one of Constantine’s allies, Judith, betrays him to the Brujería and agrees to serve as their messenger. This involves a ritual in which Judith vomits out her intestines and allows her body to shrivel until only her severed but still talking head remains. The Brujería then place a black pearl in her mouth, at which point her head steadily transforms into a bird, a process that is laboriously and disturbingly described, at which point the bird is released to summon the nameless dark power by delivering a pearl held in its mouth to a distant destination. Although this transformation is presented as a physical corruption ripe with body horror, the fact that it is brought about via Judith ingesting an unnamed root places it in the larger thematic tradition of psychedelic plants within Moore’s Swamp Thing. It is, in other words, inexorably linked with the bad trip – the negative, monstrous aspect of the spiritual plane. 
Figure 509: Swamp Thing meets his ancestors in the
Parliament of Trees. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Stan
Woch and Ron Randall, from Swamp Thing #47, 1986)
But the summoning of this dark power is the third issue of the arc. The second, coming between it and the Crisis tie-in, presents a second, equally important aspect of this setup. In it, before journeying to the Brujería’s cave, Constantine takes Swamp Thing to the Parliament of Trees, also located in South America, in this case at the source of the River Tefé in the Amazon. Here Moore pays off the idea introduced in “Abandoned Houses,” revealing the resting place of all the past plant elementals of the world and allowing Swamp Thing to seek communion with them.
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“Trust no one. Question Everything.”: Conspiracy

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Rightly regarded as a high-water mark for the first season, “Conspiracy” is praised and fondly remembered by a certain kind of Star Trek fan for its unexpected gore-filled climax straight out of a splatterhouse horror flick or one of the Alien movies, and by less frightening Star Trek fans for its shocking perversion of the heretofore untouchable Starfleet Command. Of course it’s not really. It was, as is so often the case with this sort of thing, just aliens after all. And yet even so, “Conspiracy” does push the envelope noticeably for Star Trek: The Next Generation, even if its overall impact is arguably more muted than it perhaps could have been.

The idea of something rotten afoot in the hallowed halls of the supposedly incorruptible Starfleet Command should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this season with any degree of care or nuance. The seed was planted arguably as early as as “Too Short a Season”, where Admiral Mark Jameson’s flawless execution of Starfleet’s hero archetype plunged an entire planet into a four decade long world war. Then we had this episode’s direct antecedent, “Coming of Age”, where Admiral Quinn and Dexter Remmick interrogated the Enterprise crew under concerns something very big and very grave was about to happen that would “threaten the very core of Federation society”. Both of those episodes were, in one respect or another, about showing how the Enterprise was very likely the last bastion of progressive hope and idealism in an increasingly hostile and uncaring universe, and that’s not even touching on the direct diegetic and extradiegetic challenges to its ethics and values the show’s seen elsewhere from characters like Q, the Ferengi, the Tkon Empire, the Microbrain and even, debatably, Lwaxana Troi. If Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season has been about bringing Star Trek back for the Long 1980s, it’s also been about forcing it to prove it deserves to exist in the Long 1980s.

And “Conspiracy” is the moment where this all comes to a head…or at least, it should have been. Because while it does build on these themes and neatly, satisfyingly wrap up the story arc introduced in “Coming of Age”, it doesn’t exactly do so in the way writer Tracy Tormé had hoped it would. The original plan was to reveal the Conspiracy to be just that: An actual conspiracy orchestrated by Starfleet Command’s higher-ups to instate martial law across known space and rule the Federation as a military junta. It would have been the deliciously perfect logical end result of Starfleet’s thinly veiled militarism: It doesn’t take much for someone surrounded by that kind of rhetoric and ideology to suddenly decide the world would be better off with them in charge. Couple that with the troublesome Philosopher King overtones Starfleet and the Federation have always had, and you get a recipe for a truly terrifying mixture of imperialism and grandiose self-entitlement.…

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Welcome to Night Vale – “The Librarian” Review

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Abigail Brady would like to talk to you about Welcome to Night Vale.

Have you listened to Welcome to Night Vale?  It’s a podcast.  That doesn’t explain it.  Podcasts are usually chat shows – Night Vale is a dramatic presentation, in the form of a talk radio show, presented by a chap we eventually find out is called Cecil Palmer (played by Cecil Baldwin).  It is set in a small desert town called Night Vale, a place where every conspiracy theory is openly acknowledged to be true.  I tried to condense it to a two-word pitch the other day, and the best I could come up with with was “Innsmouth FM”.  A four-word pitch would be “Innsmouth FM.  With jokes.”  Mind, they distance themselves from Lovecraft, pointing at plenty of other contemporaneous weird fiction authors, who are less massive racists, as influences.  As a writer, what I admire most about it is its ability to change tones so rapidly and yet so completely, between the comedy and the horror, without either undermining the other.  It has a highly enthusiastic and growing fanbase, gained through word-of-mouth rather than any marketing-led push.   A lot of it is that it it’s an ideal fit for tumblr’s combination of humour and politics.  But it still seems pretty amazing for it to go from nothing to a small media franchise just through personal recommendations.  Even more amazing for this to happen in a format – the audio drama – that is new to most of the listeners.  It really is that good.


I asked several people who attended the October London shows how exactly they go into Night Vale, and nobody could really remember.   I mean, I can’t even really remember how I got into it.  My only hard date is that I nominated episodes for the 2014 Hugo Awards, so that’s certainly by the end of January 2014.  Night Vale fandom this time wasn’t organised enough to get an episode on the ballot. “The Sandstorm” (a two-parter with a season-finale feel that I didn’t think to put down) picked up 30 nominations, only eight fewer than “The Name of the Doctor”.  Maybe next year the second anniversary episode, “Old Oak Doors”, will make it through.  Guys, let’s remember that, yeah?


“Old Oak Doors” was exceptional, and not just in its the way it used its status as a season finale to kick you in as more teeth than Buffy’s “Becoming” did.  It was a two-parter, at the end of the second year of the podcast, it was recorded live in New York in June 2014.  And I have to confess, I found that… it didn’t entirely work recorded?  Particularly the bits where it is obvious Cecil or someone is doing something funny on stage, but we don’t get the joke because we can’t see him but we have to listen to the crowd laugh anyway.  Night Vale live is a different thing to the podcast.  Podcasts are typically a solitary listening experience.  How you engage with the material is entirely up to you.
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A Wilderness of Tigers

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The opposition between town and country is a perennial obsession of modern Western narrative art.  The idea of the division becoming diffuse and permeable, of the one bleeding through into the other, appears to be deeply threatening.  For Titus Andronicus, in a play in which precisely this bleeding effect occurs, Rome’s degradation leads it to become a “wilderness of tigers”.

This obsession is one that began at around the same time as modern map making.  

What people don’t realise is that maps lie to us.  They present a geographical landscape which is profoundly at odds with human psychic landscapes.

We think of the town having borders, beyond which there lies the country.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.  We think of the country as a great field of emptiness between cities and towns.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.

What actually happens is that the further you venture into the country, the more country you find.  The country isn’t a two-dimensional field, it is a three-dimension well which stretches ever downwards into more of itself.  Like the fractals generated by the Mandelbrot Set, the further you go into the country, the more it expands out ahead of you.  The more you sink down into it.  The towns get smaller, the desolation gets more and more desolate, the isolation gets more and more isolated.  The sinister vibe gets more and more sinister. 

The city, meanwhile, has no borders.  It is carried across all borders inside the mind of the city-dweller.  And all cities are connected.  If you walk far enough into London you will eventually find yourself in Paris or New York or Rome.  The more you walk into any city, the more you walk into its history, and the history of every city is the history of its relationship with other cities.  Walk far enough into modern London and you eventually find yourself in ancient Rome.…

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The Abandoned Line

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All disused London Underground stations are connected via ghost trains that traverse conceptual topography. It’s called the Abandoned Line.

 http://www.smashinglists.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/aldwych.jpg

London’s Abandoned Line is in a state of perpetual Cold War with Metro 2, the secret parallel underground system in Moscow which was used to transport Party officials around the place. One of the many ideological differences between Metro 2 and the Abandoned Line is the very question of Metro 2’s existence. The Abandoned Line insists that Metro 2 exists. Metro 2 itself stubbornly denies this.…

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UNIT, a History

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A commissioned essay for Assad Khaishgi.
Since Doctor Who first hit upon the idea of doing stories set in the present day, a fundamental aspect of its mythology has been the question of how civil authorities might respond to the bizarre events that take place in the Doctor’s wake. The most enduring answer to this question is UNIT, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, formerly the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce – a military organization specifically focused on unexplained events, particularly aliens. This, in turn, is most iconically connected to the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor was at one point a full-time employee of UNIT living on Earth, and throughout his tenure treated UNIT headquarters as a sort of home base on Earth to which he would regularly return. But while this is the most iconic iteration of UNIT and thus of officially sanctioned responses to alien threats, it is not the only version of either, and must be taken in a larger context.
At first, the governmental response to crises was imagined to be ad hoc. Part of this can be explained by the fact that the first two present day crises – The War Machines and The Faceless Ones – took place on the same day. The government simply responds to them to the extent that they find out about them, and they are treated as, in effect, freak occurrences. Where this begins to shift is The Web of Fear, which also introduces the character with whom UNIT is most associated: the Brigadier. Well, sort of. As we said back at the time, The Web of Fear is clearly not trying to introduce a major new character, nor for that matter an official and consistent answer to how the government will handle alien attacks. Instead, it assembles a military crew straight out of a bunch of standard war movies, and then drops a character named Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in as a commander midway through. Lethbridge-Stewart is notable as a relatively realistic, sensible military commander – quite unlike the cliches he’s generally surrounded by. He’s an effective officer put in impossible circumstances, and he acquits himself well considering. 
On his second appearance, however, in the next year’s The Invasion, Lethbridge-Stewart has seen a promotion to Brigadier, and is now in charge of UNIT. This constituted a major shift in his character. Where before he was a reasonably straightforward military character who got dumped into a strange situation, now he was the person designed to lead a human response to the unknown. This still required being imperfect, not least because the entire point is to have the Doctor be the person who gets things right, but he’s nevertheless a character who is designed for the purpose of doing extraordinary things. This is, in and of itself, a major shift. The first three big “a threat to contemporary Earth” stories are all based around the idea that this is out of the ordinary. But from The Invasion on, threats to contemporary Earth are sufficiently common that there are standard responses to them.
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“A Night on Pegos Minor”: We’ll Always Have Paris

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Most people tend to remember “We’ll Always Have Paris” as the episode where Michelle Phillips guest starred in an odd bit of celebrity casting (this being the second documented connection to the Phillips family and The Mamas and the Papas in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season). I remember it as the first episode where Tasha Yar wasn’t on the Enterprise.

There is, of course, a bit more to it than either of those interpretations might lead you to believe. Not much, I’ll grant, but some. “We’ll Always Have Paris” is essentially Star Trek: The Next Generation doing Casablanca, with Captain Picard as Humphrey Bogart, Michelle Phillips as Ingrid Bergman and a great big fuck-off mad science experiment with time distortion in place of World War II and Nazis. This is all, of course, fairly standard operating procedure for the show at this point: The Manheim Effect, which causes one specific point in time to repeat itself, is rather transparently supposed to be a metaphor for Jenice meeting Captain Picard again and the latter’s subsequent re-examination of his past life choices. In this regard, it doesn’t bring much new to the table in terms of maturation themes then the likes of, say “The Battle”, “Too Short a Season”, “Coming of Age” or “Heart of Glory”. It does, however, handle romantic relationships a hell of a lot better than “The Naked Now” did.

What I love about this episode is how emotionally honest everyone is, especially Captain Picard. There was room here for the character to be played very gruff and uncomfortable, as if he’s unwilling to own his past mistakes (“Enough of this self-indulgence!” springs immediately to mind for me here), but Patrick Stewart, as usual, plays against this, and infuses his lines with a delicate balance of remorse, nostalgia, affection and acceptance. But due to the script’s stronger moments and the actors’ considerable skill (Michelle Phillips is, perhaps surprisingly, quite good as well), “We’ll Always Have Paris” comes across as a very emotionally mature story about two adults coming to terms with their past lives and past selves. In that sense, while it doesn’t particularly *add* anything to the themes Star Trek: The Next Generation has been working with over the course of the past year, it does very clearly build upon them. It’s a story the Original Series not only wouldn’t do, but was flatly incapable of doing, and its another sign that in spite of its occasional missteps, Star Trek: The Next Generation genuinely has transformed Star Trek into something newer, fresher and better in its inaugural season.

There’s a lot of subtler moments outside of Patrick Stewart’s and Michelle Phillips’ turns that make this clear as well. The fact that we *can* so casually and dismissively say the sci-fi plot and the human story are meant to be allegories for one another means we’ve reached the point where we can take that for granted, and that’s extremely telling.…

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