Eruditorum Press

Incremental progress meets Zeno’s Paradox

Into the Dalek Review

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There is a certain perspective from which, going in, this looked like the most cynical thing imaginable. Since every Doctor requires a Dalek story, they get it out of the way up front, treating it as something to get over with instead of something to anticipate. Accordingly, you take the Daleks and an unapologetically high concept premise and basically give Capaldi a second episode of having lots of other stuff going on to cover as he beds into the role. And with Gatiss having finally cracked the problem of how to pander to the sorts of fans who want a return to the classic series without losing the other 100% of the audience last season with Cold War, an unabashedly straightforward “just like you imagine Doctor Who being” episode becomes the order of the day. Fair enough, but equally, the sort of episode that a segment of fandom (by which I really just mean myself) looks at and (along with next week) goes “well, at least there’s a proper Moffat episode coming on the 13th.”

(Mind you, there’s a logic to it. Matt Smith got the same basic treatment with River Song and the Weeping Angels in his first two episodes. This time they actually shot Capaldi’s first two episodes first, so they put the Paternoster Gang and the Daleks in to smooth out the transition. And the series can’t serve up my kind of episode every week because, again, the other 100% of the audience would rightly object.)

So with the caveat that this is not an episode after my own heart and that I went in with fairly minimal expectations, I thought this was quite good. I seem to not be alone – comments so far on the post are broadly positive, Twitter’s pretty enthusiastic, and the GallifreyBase poll has it running slightly better than Deep Breath was. (72.7% in the 8-10 range, but skewed higher in the range) I suspect that a year’s hindsight will help Deep Breath and hinder this a little, but we’re all about the now here, and this seems, in the immediate aftermath of broadcast, to have scratched the itch it aimed for.

The script, obviously, is primarily bibs and bobs of other Dalek stories, most obviously the ones by Rob Shearman. But this is not entirely unsurprising. Phil Ford’s an odd writer – his best script prior to this was, of course, the one Russell T Davies rewrote entirely. His next best was an episode of Torchwood. And then there’s a succession of Sarah Jane Adventures that range from the quite good (The Lost Boy, Prisoner of the Judoon) to the bizarrely lightweight and disposable (Eye of the Gorgon, The Eternity Trap). The late addition of a cowriting credit for Moffat suggests that in this case he was commissioned as a matter of production expediency – that he was there, in effect, to provide the broad shape of a script for Moffat to tinker with.…

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Random Thing #3

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And one more.  Please bear in mind, this is a fragment.

Marx saw creativity as essential to human nature.  He famously once said that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”.  The difference is that Marx saw such creativity as a potential in all people, and believed that class society stunted such potentials in the majority by forcing them to do work that was alien to their natures. 

Yet there is some truth to the idea of progress in the history of class society.  Marx is quite comfortable – sometimes a little too comfortable – with the idea that the accumulation of capital can also be the accumulation of progress, that even the imperialistic development of class society can push people ‘forwards’.  It’s just that he also sees horror in the process, eventually calling the ‘progress’ that British imperialism and capitalism brought to India as resembling a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”  This is far from an unproblematic way of putting it, but the point stands. 

It is a point later taken up by Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History, in which he describes history as both a triumphal procession and a great piling up of wreckage and horror. 

Moral progress is only found when the increase of power and knowledge is used to make life fairer or better for common people (i.e. the majority), and this is the exception rather than the rule.  And when it does happen, it isn’t a trickle-down effect.  It is the result of struggle from below.  And even the accumulation of power and knowledge in the hands of the rulers can only come from the unrequited labour of the masses.  Even when a genius makes an individual discovery, he usually sits on top of a great pyramid of unacknowledged workers.  Charles Darwin was only able to spend years in his study working and thinking and writing because he had servants, inherited wealth, and a wife who was related to the Wedgewoods.  And that’s the history of class society at its prettiest.  At other times it looks like Alexander, invading and slaughtering.  Alexander was one of those potentates who poured the fruits of human labour into makewaste vanity projects like wars and great opulent buildings for the top people.  Contrary to the assertions of classicists (who tend to assume that they would be reincarnated in the past as fellow aristocrats) Alexander achieved little to better mankind, even if he was taught by Aristotle, one of the undoubted ‘great men’ of history.  But then Aristotle himself defended slavery in his Politics, as he had to, given that his leisure to sit around all day thinking depended on it.

Terry Eagleton has frequently pointed out that the Marxist view of history as simultaneously progressive and barbaric is a Tragic one, as Tragic (with a capital T) as Othello.  He asks (rhetorically) if even communism (as Marx envisaged it) would justify the necessary slog through class society. …

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Random Thing #2

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Another snippet looking for a home…

The fembot is an expression of a patriarchal and misogynistic power fantasy.  The woman who is your creation but not your daughter (and thus sexually available).  The woman who is programmable, controllable, designable to your own specifications and customisable to your wishes.  The woman who is literally a commodity (or at least a product) rather than a living being who has been reduced to one, and who it is therefore possible to own without guilt.  The woman who serves your needs unquestioningly, as her reason for existing.  The woman who never resents anything, or at least is designed not to.  The woman who is rightfully doomed to the subordinate position of servant, and who accepts it as a given and a duty, because of her innate inferiority and subhumanity.  The fembot isn’t so much a new idea as a modern reification of age-old ideological constructs of patriarchy.  The one specifically modern thing about her is her convenient inability to get pregnant – something that would have seemed a disadvantage to pre-modern patriarchs but which now, in post-sexual revolution Western capitalist culture, strikes many men as a bonus.…

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Random Thing #1

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This got cut from something else I was writing.  I’m putting it here because I’d rather put it somewhere than just delete it.

At first sight, Flint and Rayna in the Star Trek episode ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ look like a fairly standard sci-fi reiteration of Propsero and Miranda.  That’s been done a fair few times, of course.  Most famously in Forbidden Planet.  (The reiteration of Shakespeare is apt enough, given that Flint owns a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.  He never claims to have been Shakespeare, but probably would if prompted.)  Oddly though, the more ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ progresses, the more it looks like Othello rather than The Tempest.

Because ‘Requiem for Methuselah’ seems – rather astonishingly – to have a ‘double time’ scheme to it, very much like Othello.  The play is famous for having two apparently separate and irreconcilable chronologies mapped onto each other within it.  As many critics have observed, judging by the events we witness, there seems to be a space of about twenty-four hours between Othello and Desdemona’s marriage and Desdemona’s murder by Othello, and yet multiple other indications with the play – including flat statements by characters – imply that at least a week passes.   A casual reader or viewer is quite likely to imagine that the sojourn in Cyprus lasts several weeks before culminating in tragedy.  The two time schemes simply don’t match.  Apart from anything else, there simply isn’t enough time for Desdemona to have committed “the act of shame” with Cassio “a thousand times”, as Othello comes to believe.  But the play does work.  To quote A. C. Bradley:  “[Shakespeare] wanted the spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable.”

Something noticeably similar occurs in ‘Requiem for Methuselah’.  The episode has a strict time span imposed upon it, from the start, by the vicissitudes of what we might call the ‘A Plot’, the one about Kirk et al needing to get their hands on the (amusingly named) substance Ryetalyn, refine it so that it can be used to cure the Rigellian Fever and take said cure back to the Enterprise to save all the other regular characters.  The point is repeatedly made that time is of the essence.  Yet, despite the fact that they succeed in doing this, the episode feels like it takes much longer.  The episode manages to give the impression of massively compressing the events of, perhaps, several days.  First and foremost, Kirk falls for Rayna so heavily that it defies credibility that it could happen in the space of a few hours.  The episode really stresses this too, leaving Kirk devastated by Rayna’s death, so much so that Spock erases his memory of her at the end, to spare Kirk debilitating emotional pain.  In other ways too, Kirk, McCoy and Spock’s stay with Flint feels like a prolonged one.  There is time for everyone to relax and lounge around, playing the harpsichord or dancing. …

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By His Torment, The World Was Redeemed (The Last War in Albion Part 59: Down Among the Dead Men, Pogo)

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This is the ninth 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding volume 3-6 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 third arc on Swamp Thing featured a tremendously disturbing scene in which it is revealed that Abby has been being raped by her dead uncle who has taken over her husband’s body. The scene failed to pass muster with the Comic Code Authority, the industry’s self-appointed censor, leading DC to take the momentous decision to simply publish Swamp Thing without Code approval.

“With each terrible death and resurrection, Crafty knew that by his torment, the world was redeemed. It seemed there was nothing that could truly kill him, and while he lived there still remained the hope that one day he might return and on that day overthrow the tyrant God and build a better world.” – Grant Morrison, Animal Man #5
Figure 435: Swamp Thing and Arcane
meet again in hell. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing Annual #2,
1984)
After its initial splash of controversy the Arcane trilogy resolved more or less predictably, albeit with the substantial wrinkle of Arcane killing Abby. Ultimately Matt Cable wrests control of his body back and casts Arcane back down to hell before using the last of his lingering superpowers to bring Abby back from the dead. Unfortunately, Matt is only able to revive her body, leaving Swamp Thing to journey into the afterlife to rescue her soul from hell, where Arcane cast it down. This journey is depicted in Swamp Thing Annual #2, a forty-page saga called “Down Among the Dead Men.” Moore has described the story as an attempt to provide “a preliminary map – a rough map – of the DC supernatural territories,” which is as good a description as any for a spiritual journey into the DC Universe versions of heaven and hell. Structurally speaking, the story is intensely episodic – Swamp Thing allows his consciousness to sink into the Earth, and then further into the realms of death. There he proceeds to meet a series of minor supernatural characters from DC history alongside a series of short encounters with various entities in the realms he explores. The two most notable of these are a scene where he meets Alec Holland in heaven, finally getting to exchange words with the man he thought he was, and a scene in which he meets Arcane, who is being tortured by vast numbers of insect eggs hatching inside his body.
…

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“…and You’re Not James Bond Either”: Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture (Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N.)

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Stories are retold across different times, places and culture. While the forme of their symbolic power may change and morph to adapt to each new context, the underlying power remains whenever they are invoked. Stories can split off from each other and be shaped by the forces of mythopoeia, and can become as different from each other as they are similar.

It’s fitting that Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture be named after the first Star Trek movie as it’s existence is every bit as much of an inexplicable puzzle as that of Gene Roddenberry’s abortive magnum opus. The last Dirty Pair outing had been the OVA Affair of Nolandia two years ago, an open acknowledgment of the franchise’s by this point niche audience and a direct attempt to court them. Affair of Nolandia, despite being unambiguously brilliant, was not (and still isn’t) terribly well received by fans who had long since fallen in love with the first Dirty Pair series, with which it was explicitly and manifestly made to contrast with. The same month, that very show had been canceled with two episodes left to air for reasons that remain uncertain, but are widely believed to have something to do with poor ratings. One might speculate then that with the sort of property the animated Dirty Pair franchise seemed to be turning out to be, the next logical step would *not* be a lavish, big-budget feature film released to theatres.

Indeed, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture seems like the complete opposite of Affair of Nolandia in every conceivable way: While Affair of Nolandia was a conservatively-budgeted OVA aimed at a niche group of science fiction fans (even, *gasp* using limited animation!) that bent over backward to differentiate itself from the TV series, this is a glitzy, grand-scale motion picture extravaganza self-consciously trying to ape the look-and-feel of the TV show in order to attract the broadest possible audience while also constantly trying to one-up and build upon it and somehow still trying to function as a standalone work. It really does feel like Sunrise’s MO was “whatever we did on Affair of Nolandia, do the complete and total opposite this time”. Where Affair of Nolandia felt organic, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is all bright lights and neon strobes. Where Affair of Nolandia was atmospheric, contemplative and intimate, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is sprawling, flashy and spectacular. Where Affair of Nolandia felt psychedelic and spiritual, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is a digital, computerized, high-tech sensory overload.

This has both positive and negative consequences. The first major plus is that, anticipating all this, the editing and cinematography here is beyond amazing and as a result Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is a movie that understands the power of imagery, mood and emotion like nothing else. This is, in all honesty, the most visually astounding and mesmerizing science fiction movie I have ever seen. The first twenty minutes alone are worth watching all by themselves: The film throws us Dirty Pair, Star Trek, Miami Vice, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, James Bond, Cold War thrillers, MTV, late-80s house jazz influenced synthpop and every piece of Golden Age science fiction cover art you’ve ever seen crushed and blended together and served up as a hyper-concentrated tropical drink that’s like a sledgehammer to your senses.…

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Comics Reviews (August 28th, 2014)

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I liked doing these as a ranked list last time, so let’s do it again.

All New X-Men #31

The start of a new Bendis storyline, with all the attendant faults such as the storyline not actually starting until the last panel. I’m excited for the storyline, though.

Guardians of the Galaxy #18

This one’s tough for me, as it’s the retconned ending to some Marvel cosmic story I never read from a few years ago. It holds together in its own right well enough, but is fundamentally a book answering questions I’ve never asked, and only vaguely knew were questions, which puts a cap on how much I can dig it.

Silver Surfer #5

Well, at least they sort out the odd cliffhanger from the previous issue quickly. There’s an argument to be made that we’ve reached some sort of limit point here of how much plot you can get away with in a single issue. This is mental to the extreme, in the sort of way that when Grant Morrison does it, it gets accused of being self parody. What’s strange, though, is that this is paired with a plot that’s taken five issues to get to what’s obviously the premise of the book, which is the Silver Surfer and Dawn traveling the cosmos. So we have a book that’s weirdly balanced between a ridiculous excess of ideas and a slow burn. It’s something I may eventually conclude is brilliant, but at the moment it’s just sort of odd.

Original Sin #5.4 Thor & Loki: The Tenth Realm #4

Al Ewing continues to execute a perfectly competent and interesting Marvel Asgard story. Some great Loki in this issue, and it feels like it’s building to an interesting new status quo for this corner of the Marvel line, although this is still very much a Marvel fan’s comic.

Avengers #34

Whatever concerns I may have about Hickman’s pacing, and they are many, I remain interested. There’s a lovely, properly good Captain America scene here. The eight month jump forward seems like it’s sure to screw some of Hickman’s plot arcs, but I want to see where he’s going with it. I remain mildly skeptical of Hickman as a creator (note that I did finally just drop Manhattan Projects), but I can see the appeal, and I hope this story works.

Cyclops #4

A character piece by Greg Rucka, and as good as you’d expect from that descriptor. Really a pity he could only find time for five issues of this. Rucka is always a treat.

The Massive #26

My irritation that this book has the white guy as its lead character and not the more interesting characters continues, as does my sense that a book that started from the premise it’s setting up in its final arc instead of ending with it would have been a stronger one. Nevertheless, I really, really love what this book is doing right now. It’s been an overly long ride, but I am on the whole glad to have taken it at the moment.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 81 (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

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Jen writes My Little Po-Mo, the TARDIS Eruditorum of ponies.

In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a pony named Rose.

Consider a fandom. A curious beast, an amorphous, shifting mass of people wrapped around a core of fiction. Despite the variation in cores and size, fandoms all look basically the same. The swarm of flesh devours the core over and over again, yet the core is unharmed. The beast excretes its assumptions and predictions by consensus, layering it around the core like an invert pearl, fanon-grit encrusting a glittering center. Fanficcers and shippers and “expanded universe” authors build their own structures, grit and crystal in varying amounts, arcing off the core. Sometimes these extend all the way out of the beast, where they draw in their own squishy masses of fan; sometimes, rarely, they break off, forming the cores of new beasts, drawing their own paradoxical factions of fans. That is how the beast reproduces; mostly, though, it just grows, feeding on the source work, drawing new fans into itself with reviews and memes and recommendations by slightly pushy friends.

 
But then the beast gets old, and something strange happens: the core cracks. Grit gets inside the pearl. The inmates start running the asylum.
 
This is where things can get weird, when the flow from work to fan ceases to be unidirectional.
Which brings us to December 24, 2010. Christmas Eve. As per tradition, tomorrow will be a new Doctor Who special, “The Christmas Carol” to be specific, Matt Smith’s first. Over on American and Canadian televisions, however, the Doctor is showing up in an entirely different, and probably accidental, form.
 
We have, you see, two beasts to consider, and two shows at their core. They have more in common than it seems on the surface, Doctor Who and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Both are revivals of shows from decades prior. Both were originally educational shows for children, but abandoned that calling early in their runs. Both intentionally build in something “for the dads.” Perhaps most importantly, both reject the ethos of cynicism and violence.
 
And both are cases of the inmates running the asylum. Lauren Faust, the first showrunner of Friendship Is Magic, played with My Little Pony toys as a child. There still exists a drawing she made in her teens which is recognizably one of the characters she would eventually create, Rainbow Dash—her equivalent, perhaps, to Moffat’s Usenet post about us getting the word “doctor” from the Doctor rather than the other way around. 
 
Unsurprisingly, therefore, both like to tweak their fans with little references, meaningless to the primary audience of children, but perhaps entertaining and recognizable for the older viewers. The major difference here is the source of those references: for Doctor Who, with its enormous length and emboitment of all television, they point inwards; for Friendship Is Magic, outwards. So in Doctor Who under Moffat we get offhand references to Metebelis 3 and the Brigadier’s daughter running UNIT, while in Friendship Is Magic we get brief glimpses of background characters who look like the cast of The Big Lebowski or an episode that presents the problems of Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” and solves them with “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
…

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Sensor Scan: Aliens

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There are, as we have learned, two ways to do morally and ethically defensible action sci-fi in the 1980s. You can either take the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind route and depict the violence as something awe-inspiringly grotesque to be avoided at all costs, or you can go the Dirty Pair route and wear your artifice completely on your sleeve (or really, to be more accurate, strip down to nothing but an artifice bikini) and just go wild in your wholehearted embrace of camp performativity. Both paths share one thing in common, however: The spectacle, irreducible from all forms of action sci-fi, is translated somewhere else, such as the breathtakingly imaginative worlds both works show us or, in the case of Dirty Pair, fully acknowledging we want to see fun and colourful explosions and gleefully giving them to us with wild and knowing abandon.

Which brings us to Aliens. The first thing that we should square away is that the whole idea of doing a sequel to Alien in the first place is inherently a bizarre one-There’s not a whole lot of room in that movie to build subsequent works out of, it’s pretty self-contained. Furthermore, Alien is a bit of a one-trick pony: There’s simply no way a sequel can be expected to deliver that same level of shock and impact or posses the same sort of novelty. So, given the fact that a sequel to Alien was, in fact, greenlit, this sort of forces whoever the incoming creative team will be to improvise quite heavily to avoid feeling entirely repetitive. And this, I think, touches on the largest complaint against Aliens from fans of the first movie: Aliens is, in fact, quite different from Alien in a number of significant respects, and arguably on a fundamental thematic level. But the thing about that line of reasoning is that not only is James Cameron not Ridley Scott or Dan O’Bannon and thus is sort of by default not going to be approaching this movie with the same positionality, his film furthermore *had* to stand apart from theirs one way or another if it was going to see any manner of success.

And, like it or not, Aliens was very, very successful.

The stock criticism of Aliens I seem to have noticed is something along the lines of that, while the first movie was an intelligent sexual horror film that also proved to be a unique and innovative take on 1950s pulp sci-fi and horror archetypes and cliches, this one takes all of that and swiftly shoves it out an airlock in favour of flashy action sequences, unreconstructed militarism, wisecracks and Bill Paxton. Bluntly, this isn’t even remotely true. Aliens does in fact lack the same level of, for want of a better phrase, sexual maturity, of Alien and has one or two annoying gender issues of its own (and I will address all of them a little later on), but this absolutely does not mean it’s a mindlessly unironic action movie.…

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The Veil (‘Deep Breath’ 3)

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The veil.  A politically loaded symbol.  It carries all sorts of old semiotic baggage, of course.  Weddings.  Widowhood.  Ladies in Conan Doyle who want to hide their identities (thus it has a trajectory into the figure of Madame Vastra via Victoriana).  In genre TV these days, a woman wearing a veil is likely to be a tragic or vengeful figure, hiding a facial scar of some kind.  (See ‘Silence in the Library’ / ‘Forest of the Dead’.)

The veil is thus something that implies a particular set of social situations for women.  The connection appears to be the concept of separation.  The veil is a boundary between the woman and society.  It creates a space in which she can hide her unsightliness, either disfiguring grief or grievous disfigurement, from those who don’t want to have to see it.  The wedding veil is lifted as the woman is taken possession of in the marriage ceremony; thus it is there to emphasize her acceptability by temporarily putting it in doubt.  It is, of course, the symbolic tearing of the hymen.  The man takes possession and breaks through the barrier.  All very nasty. Not to mention anatomically inaccurate.

Vastra’s veil takes on enormous significance in ‘Deep Breath’.  Indeed, the whole episode is full of talk about faces, with them being stolen, exchanged, worn, hidden, changed… with them contemplated in mirrors.

Vastra is married to Jenny (by Silurian law perhaps?), and yet this marriage hardly seems to have anything to do with Vastra’s veil (unsurprising, given that it is black rather than white), since Vastra and Jenny’s relationship fails to fit easily into any patriarchal schema.  There is no sense in which Jenny owns Vastra.  Indeed, the power relationship appears to go the other way (with implied consent).

There is a sense in which Vastra could be said to be mourning.  She is an isolated figure in some ways, cut off from her lost people.  But this is hardly emphasised at all.  She doesn’t seem tragic, and her complete lack of vengefulness is so complete as to be worrying (to me anyway).

As mentioned, she reiterates – in some ways – the figure of the veiled lady from Victorian popular fiction, via her place in the regurgitated Victoria trope pyramid.  But she inverts this, to some degree, by being the detective.  Her veil isn’t to hide her secrets from the investigator, rather it is to hide the secrets of the investigator from the client – as long as is necessary.

There is another significance to the veil in our culture at this time: the immensely freighted issue of the hijab… or perhaps I should say, the immensely freighted issue of Western ideas about the hijab.  I’ve likened the Silurians to the Palestinians before now, which would obviously chime… especially when you remember that Vastra has plonked herself down at the hub of the British Empire as a kind of refugee, and the British Empire was mucking around with the area that became Palestine from the 1830s onwards (though Victoriana places Vastra well before the disastrous British interventions of the early 20th century).  …

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