Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

No Comics Reviews This Week

10

Sorry – I couldn’t get to the shop yesterday, so I’ve not actually read anything this week save for WicDiv, which I didn’t want to wait for, and so pirated in advance of buying a floppy today when I actually do make it. If I make it today. Which I might not, because I have to go into NYC to record that Slate podcast. So, yes, it’s a rather busy week.

WicDiv is marvelous though.

In any case, I’ll either run reviews on Sunday or fold the highlights into next week’s reviews. Last War in Albion will be up tomorrow, and is a fun one – pretty much all John Constantine, and one of the most extended discussions of magic thus far in the War. I’ve started writing the next chapter now as well, and that’s proving fun as well. I’ve decided that the sort of standard “two or three posts of historical background followed by a more or less chronological working through of the comics interspersed with digressions” approach that I developed starting around the Doctor Who/Star Wars chapter, and really honed for the Captain Britain chapter has clearly become a crutch to be discarded, if only for the sake of clearly establishing for the umpteenth time that thinking you know what to expect from Last War in Albion is never entirely safe. So the chapter has all the right bits, but not in the most obvious order – instead, it’s very much structured to come right off the end of the Swamp Thing chapter, and to maintain the tone that ends with. It’s the first time I feel like I’ve really used the “continual essay” aspect of Last War in Albion well over a chapter transition.

More broadly, I’ve finally gotten to where I’m looking at this first volume as a book unto itself, and it seems pretty clear to me that the one-two punch of Swamp Thing and V for Vendetta is the climax of the book. The first seven chapters are an extended exercise in anticipation – the structure of the Captain Britain chapter writ large, in effect. They go through almost everything they can possibly justify going through before getting to one of Moore’s masterpieces. Then we do two in a row in a big, triumphant roar of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century announcing himself to the world. And then it shrinks back down for the final two chapters, to try to get back to a sense of quiet and calm so that when I finally face Watchmen in Book Two, it lands in a world prepared to be completely upended. I suspect Chapter Nine will be 10+ parts again, but that Chapters Ten and Eleven will both be <10. I fully expect to weep, remembering the days I was foolish enough to believe that.

One of these days, I’ll have to sit down and outline Book Two. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to fulfill the promised structure on that, but I find myself weirdly confident that it can be done.…

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Reimagined Moments #3

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Onboard the Silver Carrier, the Doctor and Jamie are eating square blocks of food from a dispenser.

“Doctor, what do you think Victoria’s doing now?”

“Now?  Well, she’s dead Jamie.”

“Dead???”

“Yes, of course.  We left her in the late-twentieth century.  Looking at this technology, we must be at least a couple of hundred years on from then.  So unless she somehow managed to live to be more than 200 years old, she’ll have aged and died a long time ago.  Right now she’s probably just a brittle skeleton lying in a coffin, the flesh long since having bloated and peeled away and rotted and been consumed by bacteria and maggots and weavils and worms and stuff.  Unless they burned her up in a big fire.  In which case she’s probably scattered around somewhere in tiny fragments or sitting in a vase.”…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 82 (The Fades)

, 33

After the Moffat/Willis/Wenger team broke up, Moffat was paired with Caroline Skinner as his new co-executive producer. As we’ve already discussed, this was seemingly not a creative partnership that ended happily. Nevertheless, Caroline Skinner occupied a position on Doctor Who that was nominally as Moffat’s equal opposite number, and though her tenure is brief, it must surely be considered as important as, say, the departure of a script editor or a producer during the classic series. To wit, Caroline Skinner was, upon taking the Doctor Who job, most recently coming off of a BBC Three series called The Fades. This, then, provides us with one of our occasional opportunities to see what the BBC thinks Doctor Who’s nearest equivalent shows are. This is, apparently, how you get the top job at Doctor Who: make The Fades first.

In their defense, it was a well regarded show. It got lovely reviews, and a BAFTA. It has a fine pedigree, and there are no reasonable grounds to complain about Caroline Skinner’s appointment based on it. There’s a few very reviewish paragraphs following this one, and they’re going to point out strengths and weaknesses, and it’s worth noting that all of the strengths are things that would have been in Caroline Skinner’s remit as producer, and all of the weaknesses can be laid at the feet of the writer, Jack Thorne. In other words, appointing her was a smart move – they got the producer of what was, in hindsight, apparently the country’s single best drama in 2011. 
No, neither the BBC nor Caroline Skinner can really come in for any criticism here. What can come in for some real criticism is, apparently, British drama in the year 2011, because The Fades is a bit shit. It’s a frightfully generic show. It’s clearly BBC Three trying to get another Being Human together. It’s a generic British horror show for teens and twenty-somethings made in 2011. It’s very post-Skins, and the writer worked on that show, but it’s just as much post-Buffy and post-Being Human and post-Supernatural (nope, not doing a Pop Between Realities on it) and, for that matter, post-Marvelman, about which you can at least say it has the decency to namecheck Alan Moore in the second episode. But the point stands – this is the same basic stunt with genre fiction that’s been going around since the 1980s. Whatever its merits, at the end of the day, The Fades is a TV show that can accurately be described as children’s telly tarted up with some Natalie Dormer nude scenes, and really, that’s a tough criticism to recover from.
On top of that, there are some infuriating things about the writing. It takes three female leads to have one who comes off as a remotely nuanced or interesting character, and one suspects that’s mostly down to Natalie Dormer, who’s one of those actresses that instantly elevates anything she’s in. But it’s perhaps more damning and accurate to note that neither Lily Loveless nor Sophie Wu, who are also both quite capable actresses, can rescue their characters.
…

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“A bon entendeur ne faut qu’un parole.”: Code of Honor

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It’s so bad.

Would you believe it actually gets worse?

Let’s square away the obvious right away. “Code of Honor” is catastrophically, disgustingly and inexcusably racist. I don’t think anyone disputes that. Jonathan Frakes describes it bluntly as a “racist piece of shit”, and his castmates emphatically agree: Michael Dorn calls it “the worst episode of Star Trek ever filmed” while Brent Spiner muses that “It was the third episode so it was fortuitous that we did our worst that early on and it never got quite that bad again”. Somewhere along the way, somebody, most likely an assistant casting director or wardrobe designer, made the absolutely unthinkable decision to make the Ligonians an entire culture of space Africans, when they had never once been specified as such in the original script, and on top of that has them kidnap a white woman. Story editor Tracy Tormé points out the obvious, saying “Code of Honor” features a “1940s tribal Africa” depiction of Africans. Even Gene Roddenberry, a man not always known for his enlightened and progressive view of nonwestern, nonwhite societies, fired the director halfway through filming for being racist to the cast, although he was apparently fine with the rest of the episode.

The bottom line is nobody important wanted this episode to happen, and indeed *everyone* important was trying desperately to ensure that it didn’t happen. So let’s take it as read that “Code of Honor” is utterly abominable at a conceptual level, try to forgive the people we’ll be spending the next seven years with (because it really wasn’t their fault) and take a look at everything else that sucks about this repulsive train wreck. The first thing we notice after stripping away the most obvious hideousness is that the plot is basically an apathetic retread of “Amok Time”, with a member of the Enterprise forced to fight in ritual combat, with the clandestine administration of a neurosuppressor agent to one of the combatants a key part of the battle. Not only does it eschew absolutely all of the complex sexual and world-building themes of “Amok Time” in lieu of fantastically shitty and racist ones, as Wil Wheaton points out, “Code of Honor” aired the week after “The Naked Now”…Which was another twelfth-rate rehash of an Original Series episode. Not exactly the message the all-new Star Trek striving to stand apart from its iconic forebearer wants to be sending three weeks into its run.

But for me the worst part of all of this is that this is an episode I once actively sought out and looked forward to seeing. Let me, uh, try to explain: I was badly, badly mislead by Starlog magazine in this case, and I don’t think I’ve quite gotten over that even now. “Code of Honor” was not an episode I saw when I was first introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn’t watch it when originally aired, or even during the syndicated reruns various networks would often run in later years.…

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Things That Worry Me #1

3

You know the pre-titles sequence in For Your Eyes Only, in which Blofeld tricks Bond onto a remote-controlled helicopter?

Why does the vicar make the sign of the cross as Bond departs in the chopper?

If he knows something deadly is afoot, he must be in league with Blofeld, so either…

a) he’s not really a vicar but actually one of Blofeld’s men disguised as a vicar, or

b) he is an actual vicar who’s been paid by Blofeld to be part of his assassination conspiracy.

If a), why?  And why doesn’t Bond ask about this new guy at the Church where Tracey is buried?

If b), why?  What would induce a presumably average, ordinary, law-abiding vicar to team up with Blofeld?  And also, why doesn’t he just shoot Bond in the graveyard?

And what does Blofeld need him for?  Okay, he delivers the fake message about Bond being needed at HQ.  But this is seemingly the only thing he does in the conspiracy (if he is indeed part of the conspiracy, as opposed to an innocent vicar who unwittingly relays a fake message) but the message could have been far more easily faked, given the apparent laxity of Bond’s precautions (he just accepts the message at face value without checking it in any way).

And I repeat: if he’s not a real vicar, why the religious sentiment with the sign of the cross?

And even if he is a real vicar, but an evil one who conspires to murder people with international gangsters, why is he still worried about giving Bond the last rites? 

He’s either a genuine vicar with terrorist-connections and a deeply ambivalent and wildly fluctuating attitude to his faith, or a hood with a very dark sense of humour… and possibly a sardonic vein of anti-clericalism in his character.

Or… another possibility entirely… he’s a genuine vicar with the gift of second sight and a fatalistic attitude to the future.

Or he’s a genuine (if morally weak) vicar with the gift of second sight, and he hates James Bond for some reason… so much so that he opportunistically chooses to let Bond go to his death.

Or possibly he hates the helicopter pilot for some reason and opportunistically chooses to let him die.

That actually makes a lot more sense because, if he can see the future, that must mean that he knows that Bond will escape the trap and only the pilot and Blofeld will die.  (It can’t be that he hates Blofeld because Blofeld isn’t there when he – the vicar – makes the sign of the cross, so there’d be no point.)

The only problem here is the implausibility of a specific guy who that particular vicar hates just happening to turn up at the vicar’s church in a helicopter on the day when he’s about to be murdered by Blofeld as part of an assassination conspiracy… but coincidences do happen.

As far as I can tell, this is by far the best explanation.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 32 (Night and the Doctor)

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When the DVD set of Season Six came out, one of the biggest special features was a cycle of five shorts collectively titled Night and the Doctor. They total about sixteen minutes in length, and consist of two pairs of two shorts, one called “Good Night” and “Bad Night” focusing on Amy having insomnia on the TARDIS and catching glimpses of the Doctor’s extra adventures, the other called “First Night” and “Last Night” that are an explicit two-parter about the Doctor and River’s first date, alongside a fifth short, “Up All Night,” featuring Craig and Sophie in the immediate lead-up to Closing Time, and which feels not entirely unlike an unused prequel that was grafted onto the other four episodes somewhat arbitrarily.
These shorts fit into a larger tradition within the Moffat era that began with two special features on the Season Five box set, a pair of scenes entitled “Meanwhile in the TARDIS” and paired with early episodes. Both basically involve going through a bunch of standard premises of Doctor Who (“why did you make your time machine look like a Police Box” and “have there been other companions” and the like) as comic sketches. And it continued on the Season Seven set, with a trio of mini episodes there. At which point we should probably talk about the prequels to Name of the Doctor, The Bells of St. Johns, the couple of prequels to The Snowmen, A Town Called Mercy, Asylum of the Daleks, The Wedding of River Song, Let’s Kill Hitler, A Good Man Goes to War, The Curse of the Black Spot, and The Impossible Astronaut. And, of course, the two Day of the Doctor prequels, “The Last Day” and “Night of the Doctor.” And the “Time” and “Space” shorts for Red Nose Day. And Pond Life. So all told, there are something like thirty shorts set within the Eleventh Doctor era, comparing to, I believe, three plus Attack of the Graske for the entire Davies era. And one of those was by Moffat too.
Clearly the short is a thing within the Moffat era. This is not entirely surprising. Setting aside the prequels, which tend to serve as just a different sort of trailer, the bulk of the DVD-based shorts are comedies. Within Night and the Doctor, for instance, there’s “Bad Night,” which is an extended farce built around a plot in which aliens have apparently turned the Queen of England into a goldfish, in which all we get is a brief scene between Amy and the Doctor (and Rory, very briefly) in the middle of the adventure. “Good Night” is a sweet little thing about Amy’s changing memories that ends with Amy buying her past self an ice cream cone to cheer herself up on a bad day. 
This is, of course, a familiar structure for Moffat, who got his start in sitcoms. He’s good at structuring a sketch, knowing how to get in and out before a gag runs dry.
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“It was only a kiss/It was only a kiss” The Naked Now

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In space, no-one can hear you scream.

Bob Justman once said he felt the original “Naked Time” should have been the premier episode of Star Trek. Given Justman was on staff as a producer, perhaps that’s why “The Naked Now” went out as the second, but first regular, episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This does not make that decision any less catastrophic.

It is not, I stress, simply that “The Naked Now” is a shitty remake. It unquestionably is a shitty remake, the shittiest, in fact, but there were underlying problems with the structure it inherits that the original still had in droves and this one merely doubles down on them. The absolute best you reading you could pull out of “The Naked Time” is that it was probably a bad idea to drive a starship while space drunk (although it’s hilarious when it happens) and the worst is that confronting your emotions is distracting to the point of self-destructive and everyone should man up and bottle those emotions away somewhere because they interfere with duty. Let me address this as bluntly and succinctly as possible: I have witnessed firsthand what happens when people try to deny their feelings and hide their emotions from others because they’re ashamed of them. That can be utterly devastating to a person’s mind and mental health. Furthermore, this is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The entire point of the show is to demonstrate how humans can deal with their emotions in an idealistically healthy and fulfilling way. There is essentially no brief more contrary to the series’ foundational thesis statement than this.

There’s also the matter of leading off the series with an episode that is unabashedly a remake of an original Star Trek episode, complete with Picard and Data looking up Kirk’s logs from the first episode to come up with a solution to their own problem. Gene Roddenberry wanted no overlap between the two Star Trek shows *whatsoever*, feeling, rightly, I might add, that Star Trek: The Next Generation needed to prove itself and stand on its own. Obviously, he was voted down in this case by his Star Trek fan producers who wanted to throw in continuity references to the Original Series whenever possible in lieu of actually telling a story. Perhaps the idea was that skeptical OG Trekkers would appreciate the nods to the old show, in much the same way the main viewscreen has running lights deliberately reminiscent of the ones on the set from the Original Series. But that’s the fundamental mistake: The existence of “The Naked Now” is proof positive Paramount is misjudging and misunderstanding who its target demographic is, which isn’t obsessive Star Trek nerds, but mainstream audiences for whom The Next Generation is their very first Star Trek who are being introduced to the franchise’s concepts and ideals for the first time. And anyway, serious Trekkers would just look at something like this and use it as further evidence the new show is a pale imitation of the “real” Star Trek.…

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Fear Makes Companions Of Us All (Listen)

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Thanks to the 153 backers at Patreon who made this review possible. If you enjoyed it, please consider joining them in their support for the project. 
 
The best cosplay I’ve ever seen at a convention was a gender-
swapped Link and Navi in which Link led her partner around
on a leash, having scrawled “no you listen” on his chest.
It’s September 13th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” while Iggy Azalea, Sam Smith, and Script also chart. In news, Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide, the US has been finding a new way to announce that it’s at war with ISIS, and it’s down to the wire with the Scottish Independence referendum, although really, we should save that for next essay.
 
While on television, Doctor Who does Listen. At the moment, and I’m writing this paragraph about ninety minutes after transmission, this seems set at near universal praise. 85% rating it an 8-10 on GallifreyBase, with a staggering 42.6% giving it a ten out of ten. The immediate post-episode reviews all seem to love it. Blog and Twitter comments are raving, although people who tend not to like Moffat’s stuff seem to really hate this one. Which is to say, ladies and gentlemen, that we seem to have an instant classic.
 
I’ve watched this twice now. And it deserves that and more. It is undoubtedly a “big Steven Moffat statement” of an episode, conceived on the level of The Day of the Doctor or Deep Breath. It is ostentatious and meticulous in the way that Steven Moffat at his best is. This is a writer who knows that he is at the height of his professional career and is cackling madly about it. It is also, unmistakably, him writing the cheap and disposable one with no budget – and doing it, by his own admission, because he wanted to “prove he could still write.” 
 
He’s used the production schedule of Doctor Who very slyly here, doing a story that a twelve episode season requires, as a piece of BBC-produced drama, if it’s going to throw a whacking big CGI dinosaur into the opening three seconds of the season premiere for no reason other than to set up some jokes and a death scene for the Doctor to start investigating a mystery. It’s just that he then wrote it like it was The Big Finale. It draws all its structural tricks from Nick Hurran and Ben Wheatley, and shares its approach with Time of the Doctor and His Last Vow. Except there’s no actual monster – it’s all creepy edits and lighting changes. It could be the Silence. Maybe it is, and we’ll pay that off in some future episode, because this is only episode four and Doctor Who has plenty of surprises left in its back two-thirds. We’re still in the “introduce Peter Capaldi with episodes by the old hands from Seasons One and Two and Five, or who worked on The Sarah Jane Adventures.”
…

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Hey, You Guessed My Name (The Last War in Albion Part 61: The Nukeface Papers, John Constantine)

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This is the eleventh 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 second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the 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: Following the landmark vegetable sex issue of Swamp Thing, “Rite of Spring,” Alan Moore returned to the story he had delayed in order to write the return of Anton Arcane, “The Nukeface Papers.” 

“Hey, you guessed my name. Why would we be so coy with the miracles, Cassandra? Maybe because we didn’t want to scare the shit out of you.” – Kieron Gillen, The Wicked and the Divine #1
Figure 451: Swamp Thing is mortally
injured by the toxic touch of Nukeface
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve
Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp
Thing #35, 1985)
“The Nukeface Papers” provides an interesting split between its two installments. The first issue, when it was published, was basically a six-month old script, the story having originally been intended for publication in July of 1984. In many ways the first part shows this – it follows the basic structure Moore used for the first issues of his preceding three arcs, with the storyline’s threat intrudes upon and infects Swamp Thing’s world. In this case the threat is the eponymous Nukeface, a drunken derelict who has become deranged by and addicted to the nuclear waste buried in his hometown of Blossomville, Pennsylvania (a thinly veiled version of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town destroyed by an underground fire in a coal mine that is expected to continue burning for the next quarter-millennium), and who has come to the bayou because his stash in Pennsylvania has been cemented over and new waste is being deposited in the swamp instead. Swamp Thing dreams of Blossomville as Nukeface approaches, seeing a place where “something bright and awful kissed the world, and left its smeared blue lipstick-print. The soil is curdled, and all that grows, grows wrong. In a skin of black cinder, puddles reflect fire, red and wet and glistening like sores.” Disturbed, he goes to investigate, only to be touched by Nukeface, leaving a blue and bubbling wound on Swmp Thing’s body as he collapses. By the time the issue saw print six months later, Moore had stretched his wings creatively, and so the second part, published in February of 1985, had an altogether different tone. 
Figure 452: Steve Bissette worked physical newspaper clippings into
his pencils for “The Nukeface Papers.”
…

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