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In the Forest of the Night Review
Let’s play the Kill the Moon game again and put aside the question of public opinion, not look at comments, and just go straight out. Not because I’m about to go on another rave about how this is a transcendent piece of Doctor Who, although it basically is. You can basically fairly accuse it of being Kill the Moon as if it were the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and that’s a fair criticism, so, spoilers, I’m going to put it in second. Well, though you can fairly accuse Kill the Moon of being a pro-life parable. So I guess in the end it goes down to the aesthetics of the thing, and personal preference. I think the ending of Kill the Moon is paced a bit better. So still second, but damn, that’s close.
But the real reason I’m putting public opinion aside is that this is, as many thought possible, the Blake episode. And I should set that reading up quickly, because it’s tremendously important to the episode and how I’m going to read it. If you’re a Blake geek, this is a hell of a thing. So. The Doctor suggests that the forest comes from the manipulation of time, and specifically mentions the date 1795. That is the year Blake began printing the combined volume Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from which his famed poem “The Tyger” emerges. This is the poem the episode’s title is taken from, and the tacit reason that the Doctor, Clara, and Maebh are menaced by a tiger.
This connection is reinforced by Maebh’s description of seeing and hearing “ideas” flying around her, a description that consciously evokes Blake’s biography. Blake, and there’s not really another way to put this, had visions. These visions directly inspired and shaped his work, which was often an attempt to express the revelations he experienced. His famed miniature The Ghost of a Flea is, for instance, an illustration of a literal ghost he claimed to see. There is very little reason to think Blake was a charlatan in this regard. Certainly if he was, his act was terribly ineffectual. He lived in poverty his whole life, stubbornly clinging to his visionary art despite clearly being talented enough to fashion a career if only he were more disciplined. If he was a charlatan, the adaptability needed to craft so convincing an act failed him in every other aspect of his life. No, any reckoning of William Blake as a great artist and writer must accept up front – his art was the product of visions. Numerous hypotheses exist as to the nature of these visions, but they genuinely motivated his work.
So when Maebh Arden stands within a forest from 1795, and says she sees ideas, she is in explicit communion with whatever strange source was tapped to produce Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion and America a Prophecy. She communes with the hand that dared seize the fire.
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Hai! (The Power of Three)
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| It’s basically what watching this feels like. |
A reminder that I’m doing a launch party for the latest TARDIS Eruditorum book at the Way Station in Brooklyn tomorrow at 3:30 PM. It’s at 683 Washington Ave. I hope to see you there.
It’s September 22nd, 2012. Script is at number one, with Ne-Yo, Pink, Flo Rida, and Fun also charting. In news, Dale Cregan kills two police officers and is arrested, and the NHL begins a player lockout. While on television, it’s Chris Chibnall’s second effort for Season Seven, The Power of Three.
The Power of Three has its faults, most of them seemingly fairly broad, and few of them actually the objections usually raised. Yes, the villain is a bit rubbish, but that’s largely the point. This isn’t actually a story about alien invasion, it’s a story about the Ponds. It’s the first time we really start to see the narrative acceleration of Season Seven used with some purpose and deliberateness – the resolution of the plot is sped through because it’s not actually the part of the story that matters. The beats are all there, they’re just not given room to breathe. Really, the only two solid criticisms are that “the year of the slow invasion, when the Doctor came to stay” is rather badly undermined by him going away for the bulk of the year, and the closing monologue, with its painfully ham-fisted integration of the title, is absolutely wretched.
But on the whole, we have a story where the oddness of the previous three finally starts to be justified. I mean, in its own way it was in Asylum of the Daleks, which was at least a generative and productive hot mess. This is a simpler thing, though – a story that uses the sped up narrative to fit unusual things in the margins of a Doctor Who story. It’s not, obviously, the first time we’ve played in the margins of Doctor Who stories – that’s what Love and Monsters and Blink were for. But it’s the first time we’ve done it without largely removing the Doctor Who story from focus. Instead of looking at a Doctor Who adventure an odd angle, we’ve got a Doctor Who adventure playing out at an odd speed, so that we get to put the emphasis on different parts. However stuttering the execution, in hindsight, this is the first time they actually show us where this is all going, creatively.
More interesting, however, is the title. Under the fan nomenclature that sprung up around the new series, The Power of Three refers clearly not just to the numerical operation of “cubing” a number, nor just to the Doctor-Amy-Rory triad, but to the iteration of the Doctor played by Jon Pertwee from 1970-74. And true enough, Three looms large over this entire story. As he looms large over any “invasion of Earth” story, that being the format that defines his tenure. This is somewhat odd if one stops to think about it for too long – over his five years and twenty-four stories, only Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos, and Planet of the Spiders are actually alien invasions as such.
…
Comics Reviews (10/23/14)
And at long last, we’re back. As ever, in ranked order, best of the week at the end, with the caveat that I liked everything enough to pay money for it. And I just trimmed my pull account by 25%, so that means I like everything that little bit more. Or that it’s nearly finished. Would have picked up AXIS #3, but ended up not actually picking my own books up today, and forgot to ask Jill to grab it from the rack. I bet I wouldn’t have liked it, though. I didn’t like the first two.
The Amazing Spider-Man #8
I’ve not been loving this title since it came back, and it almost got cut, but I’ll give it at least through Spider-Verse. So, six more issues, apparently. This at least has Ms. Marvel in it, which improves anything.
The Unwritten Apocalypse #10
As I have often said, I am sure this will all ready very nicely as a collected edition, much like the same team’s run on Lucifer did. There too, I bought the comic for years after I no longer had the faintest clue what the fuck was going on, but read it all in the end and enjoyed it. Here, I even sort of can remember the plot issue to issue, so it must be even better, right?
The Multiversity: The Just #1
The long-awaited return of Bloodwynd. Past that, this is a fun little romp through a particular corner of DC’s history, but I admit, I found myself looking forward to the ending – this felt like it moved rather slowly. More broadly, Multiversity isn’t quite fitting together for me yet. Though at this stage, neither was Seven Soldiers, so the jury’s still out. But thus far… this feels a bit flat.
Stumptown #2
Not a ton of movement in this one – we spend most of it rejecting what is, to my mind, a fairly uninspiring theory anyway, namely that of European soccer hooliganism coming to America. I like the cross-team rivalry PI dynamic, though, and I trust Rucka. A slow second issue isn’t a major problem. And even when slow, this book is a lot of fun.
Lazarus #12
An issue of characterization between major plot swings, held up somewhat by the fact that Malcolm is playing his cards so close to the chest that it’s impossible to actually know what’s going on. We’re in a passive role watching puzzle pieces slot into place, which is fine, but I doubt can be sustained over an entire arc. We’ll see, I suppose, bot whether Rucka tries to, and whether it works.
Avengers #37
So, we know this is building to Secret Wars, which is almost disappointing, inasmuch as it means it’s not building towards the end of a story. But two months into this timejump, Hickman is spinning the plates well. The inherent mystery about what goes in the gap between these books and the present-day of Marvel works well. I like the twist with Sue Storm.…
An Imaginary Story (The Last War in Albion Part 67: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, The Apocalypse)
Last War in Albion will now be running on Wednesdays, with TARDIS Eruditorum moved to Mondays and Fridays for the remainder of its run.
This is the seventeenth 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: “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” opens with one of the more famous passages ever written by Moore, which proclaims that “this is an IMAGINARY STORY (Which may never happen, but then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good. It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the great miracles long since performed,” it explains, and proceeds to tease much of the plot of the subsequent two issues, before concluding that the story “begins in a quiet midwestern town, one summer afternoon in the quiet midwestern future. Away in the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky… but no: it’s only a bird, only a plane. Superman died ten years ago…
“This is an IMAGINARY Story… Aren’t they all?” – Alan Moore, Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow
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| Figure 499: The first issue of John Byrne’s Superman reboot carried an ad for Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run on its cover. |
It is worth highlighting the degree to which this is, within the context of 1986 DC Comics, actually controversial. Certainly John Byrne, who was inheriting the Superman books after this, did not like it, complaining years later about how he cannot hear the phrase “imaginary story” “without a snide and ennui soaked voice whispering in my ear ‘but aren’t they all?’” Indeed, he suggests that Moore’s preface to the story “goes most deeply to the root” of “the many things that can be seen to have gone wrong with American superhero comics.” His reason for this remarkable claim is that “when we ask ‘Aren’t they all?’ we are looking behind the curtain. We are seeing that the Emperor has no clothes.” While Byrne’s concern about the prospect of readers looking behind the curtain at that particular moment is wholly understandable, given that what they’d see was Byrne taking the job of an acclaimed thirty year veteran of the industry who had just been unceremoniously fired, it stands in marked and, more to the point, ideologically grounded contrast with Alan Moore, who noted that when he first got into comics at the age of seven he “was probably preoccupied with the characters themselves.
“Share and Enjoy”: The Arsenal of Freedom
“The Arsenal of Freedom” is without question near the top of my list of highlights for Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season and I’ll never understand why nobody seems to talk about it. This isn’t just good with qualifiers, which is how you can describe a decent segment of this year if you were inclined to be uncharitable, it’s genuinely *great*. It’s a flagrantly experimental story that’s one of the first clear departures from the Original Series template Star Trek: The Next Generation is saddled with and is, in retrospect, probably the definitive example of the kind of risks the series only took in its inaugural year. Everything about this episode is demonstrative of a show that’s creatively energized, bold, confident and self-assured.
Funny thing then that “The Arsenal of Freedom” was also the subject of one of the biggest, ugliest creative disputes of its early years. The debate in question apparently stemmed from the scene where Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher fall into the underground control room. In the original script, Picard was to have been injured and Beverly would have to tend to him, confessing her feelings for him in the process. Writer Robert Lewin wanted it to be an extension of the romantic subplot that supposedly underwrites their characters, but Gene Roddenberry wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea so the roles were switched and the dramatic moments were toned down by Maurice Hurley, who handled the final script. As a general rule, Hurley was always fiercely loyal to Roddenberry as a producer and always kept in lock-step with whatever he thought he wanted. This spat resulted in Lewin leaving the show, and is sometimes cited as evidence of Roddenberry’s (and Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s) frustrating lack of interest in conflict and character development.
And it’s a bullshit argument.
While it’s true Roddenberry was not terribly interested in character drama (he was far more intrigued by ideas and concepts as both a writer and producer, sometimes to his benefit, other times to his disadvantage), there are several reasons why Roddenberry might not have approved of Lewin’s first draft. First of all, Beverly’s action would have been flagrantly a Hippocratic Oath violation, which is my first issue with it, but also the scene as originally written was simply put cornball and not Star Trek: The Next Generation. People always mistake this show’s pioneering work in utopian conflict resolution for a *lack* of conflict because they lack the media literacy necessary to understand there’s a difference (not even getting into the fact you can perfectly well have plot without any sort of conflict at all), this is what makes Star Trek: The Next Generation so incredibly difficult to write for and I think that’s what happened here.
Because the subplot as Hurley rewrote it is lovely: There isn’t a passionate, bombastic, angst-ridden declaration of love between Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher, no, but instead we get several wonderful scenes of two characters forced together through an emergency who keep themselves going by talking and getting to know each other a little better.…
You’re Fast Becoming Prey to Every Cliché-Ridden Convention in the American West (A Town Called Mercy)
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| The problem of Susan. |
It’s September 15th, 2012. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Let Me Love You,” with Pink, Public Enemy, and Fun also charting. In news, an attack on the American embassy in Libya results in the death of the US Ambassador, among others. Andy Murray wins the US Open. Also, I turn thirty. How ghastly.
While on television, A Town Called Mercy. It is easy to find fault with this story. This does not, however, make it any less worth doing. First and most simply is, of course, Susan, the trans mare. This marks the second time Toby Whithouse has completely fucked up trans representation (the first being his gobsmackingly transphobic bit of dialogue for Jack in Greeks Bearing Gifts over on Torchwood). One can certainly argue that Susan was not actually trans, and indeed, I am forced to do so, but let’s be clear that I am doing so only because the alternative is to have the Doctor misgendering someone, and no. One might argue that the intent was good, although I think you run aground pretty quickly when you realize that thus far all trans representation on Doctor Who has been for the purpose of jokes, which is actually pretty much the opposite of good intentions no matter how much you state it. It’s past fucking time we have a trans character on Doctor Who, played sincerely and sympathetically. Ugh.
Moving on, then, we get to more substantive issues. When looking at the allocation of episodes in this mini-season, the Moffat bookends seemed likely to be good, the Chibnall episodes seemed solidly unpromising, and then you had Toby Whithouse in the middle. Whithouse is an interesting writer – his three previous stories were good. His Torchwood script was at least well-crafted, which is one of the nicest sentences you can write that begin with the words “his Torchwood script.” Being Human is fabulous. He’s probably one of the more interesting possibilities for next showrunner, in that he’s got the basic ability to write in a bunch of different tones and to change things up within an episode. He can do scary, tragic, and funny in the same forty-five minutes, he’s got experience on big dramas. I’m really interested to see The Game when it drops, which, curiously, seems like it will be in the US before the UK. And so this looked quite promising.
But with A Town Called Mercy we see one of his basic virtues as a Doctor Who writer turn unexpectedly to vice. One of the things Whithouse has always been very good at is what we might call high-theme writing – the sort of thing that, in Doctor Who, came out of Paul Cornell’s early 90s embrace of Neil Gaiman’s “tell don’t show” approach, where you make sure whatever big statement about Doctor Who you want to make is actually delivered, as dialogue, within the text. This has been characteristic of the new series, and is actively reinforced with the famed “tone meetings” in which all the different departments are put on the same page about what the story is doing and then turned loose to contribute actively to the storytelling.
…
“But I still hear the call of the blood”: Heart of Glory
Like most of the first season, “Heart of Glory” is a moment notably effaced in the standard historical record. It is, quite obviously, designed to be the first big Worf and Klingons episode. According to fans, the first big Worf and Klingons episode is “A Matter of Honor” from next year, which is curious, considering that episode is far more about Commander Riker. It’s especially frustrating for me in this regard, because not only is “Heart of Glory” itself very good, it’s also the episode I always saw as ushering in the part of the first season that (with one notable exception) starts to get really consistently confident and adventurous.
This is not a story about Klingons, at least not entirely and not to the extent any of the Ron Moore penned stuff will be. Nor is it some angst-ridden character story about Worf where he’s forced to decide where his loyalties lie. There is never any doubt Worf will remain loyal to the Enterprise: In fact, the entire episode hinges on setting up a double feint where Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Tasha Yar (and, metatextually, us) all begin to doubt and mistrust Worf’s intentions with Klingon reactionaries aboard only to feel really ashamed at the end when Worf delivers a stirring speech about how true honour and glory lies with doing battle with your inner demons and trying to become a better person. It’s a bang-on perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation brief, which is all the more astonishing considering it was bounced around between four different writers like a hot potato. “Heart of Glory” is in truth a deeply touching commentary on empathy, personal journeys and where you make your home, and as good as some of the future Worf episodes are going to be, there’s an undeniable and irreducible idealistic maturity to this episode that gets lost under every single successive creative team to handle him and his people.
In some respects then “Heart of Glory” is another Original Series/Phase II revist, in this case John Meredyth Lucas’ “Kitumba”. That episode concerned a top-secret mission to the Klingon home world where the Enterprise crew had to stop a civil war that would have put all of local space at risk, all the while learning that while Klingon culture is very different to ours, it’s still manifestly a culture of its own that we must respect. D.C. Fontana worked on this script briefly, and she at least was surely aware of “Kitumba”, having been on Phase II‘s staff as well. When viewed this way, “Heart of Glory” does seem to be a bit after its time, considering the Klingons are manifestly supposed to be our allies now and thus “Kitumba”’s central punch no longer quite seeming to deliver or by necessary. However, “Heart of Glory” does hedge against this by going out of its way to paint Korris and his crew as reactionary fundamentalists obsessed with returning to an imagined past Golden Age of glory and honour.…
Flatline Review
This review was brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Please consider joining them. Also, if you’re in the New York area, I’m doing a launch party for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5 (it’s out, by the way). That’ll be next Saturday, October 25th, at 3:30 PM at The Way Station, in Brooklyn. Copies of all five volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum will be for sale, and I will be signing stuff if you want to bring copies you already own. There’s a Facebook event page here.
Hello folks. Let’s take the temperature of the world, shall we? Comments thus far are quite positive. GallifreyBase has an impressive 84.4% in the 8-10 range, with 9 being the most popular at 32.69%, which has this at slightly more popular than Mummy on the Orient Express. I’ll be honest, that surprises me a bit, as I was, for the first time this season, a bit underwhelmed.
That said, this one is tricky, and in a way that feels as though there’s an unusually high chance of my revising my opinion on it upon seeing what it’s actually building to. We’re to the point in the season where the finale is tacitly hanging over things, and this one in particular seems to be making some points about Clara that could feel very different in a couple of weeks. But for me, right now, it feels messy and untidy. Like Mummy on the Orient Express, its emotional resolution is consciously ambiguous, in a way that makes it end off feeling slightly less developed than I think the story actually is. This is due in part to the sneaky power of endings to redefine and reimagine everything that has come before, but it’s also due to the ending actually just not quite fitting with what’s come before completely.
So much of what is going on here hinges on the question of what Clara being elevated to having to “be the Doctor” actually means. Which is indeed a complex question, given the way in which the season has largely treated the Doctor as an object of the sublime – at once wondrous and terrifying. And so for Clara to become the Doctor is not merely aspiration.
This is a marked change – typically the “companion steps up” story is about the companion striving to be better. With Clara, it’s not quite. Indeed, there’s a genuine sense that in becoming the Doctor she has become lessened. In a season in which we have repeatedly been asked to consider the idea of a dark Doctor, and have in many cases simply done so unbidden, without the text particularly pushing us to, just by the knowledge that Peter Capaldi is playing him. Instead, however, especially as her relationship with Danny continues to paint her into an increasingly unsympathetic corner, it feels as though it’s in fact a season about a dark Clara.
And the contours of this revelation have been slyly hidden in the way in which the Doctor’s part has never been written as a traditional lead.…
The Darkness Finally Screamed (The Last War in Albion Part 66: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow)
This is the sixteenth 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’s Swamp Thing tied in with Marz Wolfman and George Pérez’s epic Crisis on Infinite Earths.
“In the beginning there was only one. A single black infinitude, so cold and dark for so very long that even the burning light was imperceptible. But the light grew, and the infinitude shuddered, and the darkness finally screamed, as much in pain as in relief.” -Marv Wolfman, Crisis on Infinite Earths
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| Figure 491: The cover of the debut issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths. |
This story, published as a twelve-issue limited series, was a watershed moment in the history of comics. It came about due to the confluence of two seemingly unrelated things: the fact that DC Comics took place in a multiverse consisting of infinitely many parallel universes, and the fact that over the course of the 1970s and 80s American comic book retailing had steadily transitioned from being dominated by newsstands and other magazine vendors to being dominated by shops focusing exclusively on comic books.
This tendency began in 1972 when a bookshop owner and comics convention organizer named Phil Seuling created East Coast Seagate Distribution after negotiating deals with most of the major comics publishers to allow him to buy comics at a deep discount in exchange for the comics purchased being nonreturnable. Because this dramatically decreased the risk for publishers (who were, as ever, facing declining sales), this proved acceptable to the companies. Seagate then arranged to ship those comics to specialty shops. Over the course of the ensuing decade, this eclipsed newsstands as the primary means of distributing comics, in no small part because Seagate could routinely get comics to shops a week faster than the newsstands got them, a fact that comics fans quickly picked up on, bringing more traffic towards the specialty shops and away from newsstands. In 1973, the direct market consisted of approximately 25% of comics sales. A decade later, it was newsstands that made up only 25% of the market, and the industry was awash in regional distributors all in competition with one another.
One consequence of this was a fundamental shift in the nature of comics readers. Whereas in their early days American comic books were read by a wide and general audience, the direct market sold entirely to people who were dedicated enough comics fans to go to a shop stocking specifically comics, as opposed to people who happened to pick them up from a magazine rack at the supermarket.