Eruditorum Press

Haunt the Future

Outside the Government: Sky

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It’s October 3rd, 2011. Sak Noel is at number one with “Loca People,” with One Direction, Goo Goo Dolls, and Dappy also charting. There is presumably some reason why the Goo Goo Dolls are charting with “Iris,” a years old song at this point, but I certainly don’t know it off the top of my head. In news, really basically nothing has happened in the two days that have passed since The Wedding of River Song. There’s a factory fire in Surrey, and Amanda Knox’s conviction is overturned. And the day the second episode of this airs, there’s a car bombing in Mogadishu. 
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures returns with Sky. There is, of course, something of an dilemma here in terms of how to approach this final season of The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, they are a clear memorial to Lis Sladen – a run of episodes that can only be taken in the context of her death. On the other, they were never meant to be this. They’re just the first half of Season Five, shot alongside Season Four in the expectation that everyone would be back in a few months to finish the run. It’s just that the second half never got made because Lis Sladen died of cancer not long after these filmed. This paradox hangs over the entire season in a way that can’t be ignored.
It’s something we’ve talked about before, but it’s perhaps worth stressing once more how much of a blow Sladen’s death was. For a variety of reasons. The fact that it came so close after Nicholas Courtney’s was one. I mean, fandom always takes deaths of major players in Doctor Who kind of hard. On aggregate, we take actors the worst, and fair enough, because far more people know who Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney are than know who Verity Lambert and Barry Letts are. But Sladen and Courtney were big even by the standards of actors. They were people who figured generationally in people’s lives. Children who grew up watching Sarah Jane and the Brigadier watched Sarah Jane and the Brigadier with their children. Parents who grew up watching them watched them with their grandchildren. That hurts in its own unique ways.
But Courtney was 81, mostly retired, and had been in ill health, while Sladen was 65 and still a television star. For those who paid attention there was a sense something might be wrong, but for the most part it felt as though one minute she was on BBC One watching David Tennant regenerate, the next she was dead. I mean, it was the first time I decided to post something other than an actual TARDIS Eruditorum post on the blog, because it hit so hard that I felt like I just had to say something about it, because it was one of those days where writing was how I grieved. I remember a friend messaging me on Facebook just saying “Oh No.
…

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Flight Simulator: Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. (Famicom Disk System)

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Back when I started planning these video game posts it never would have crossed my mind that it would take until 1987 to properly get this phase of the project underway and that the first actual video game we’d be looking at wouldn’t even be a Star Trek one. And yet, Kei and Yuri must be heard.

There were a handful of Star Trek titles released for early PCs and home consoles like the Apple II, TRS-80, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Atari 2600 and Vectrex in the early 1980s, but they were all on platforms I either didn’t have at a formative age or are so arcane they’re difficult to get ahold of these days. Considering the way the pagination for Volume 2 is turning out, I may try to take a look at a few of them to flesh that book out, but we’re skipping them for the time being. The Star Trek video games I’m most familiar with date to the late-1980s and early 1990s and we’ll talk about those when the time comes, but, as it turns out, Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. predates them all. In the meantime, a whole bunch has happened in the video game industry, namely that there is now in fact a video game industry that has been around long enough to not only crash thanks to market saturation and Atari’s sloppy management, but come back bigger than ever before thanks to toy company from Japan called Nintendo.

The Famicom Disk System is a strange beast within the history of Nintendo. It was a Japanese-exclusive add-on for the Famicom (or Family Computer), which is what the NES (or Nintendo Entertainment System) was called in its home country. This naming discrepancy actually reveals a lot about how the history of the game industry in the United States differs from how it played out in Japan. See, by 1985 video games were seen as a dead fad thanks to the collapse of the monopolistic Atari that dragged the whole industry down with it in 1983. Because of this, Nintendo had to market the NES as essentially a children’s toy to get it to sell its first Holiday season, in the process changing the way video games are thought of even to this day (before Nintendo’s US success, video games were seen as social things for everybody, though primarily young, single, active adults). However, this was only true in the US, and in Japan, the console was marketed as what it straightforwardly was: A home computer designed for family entertainment.

(You can see this attitude play out even today: In the US, in spite of the industry’s major inroads in recent years, video games still can’t *quite* shake the stigma of being thought of as expensive playthings for lazy, socially maladjusted children, or adults with the mentality of socially maladjusted children. In Japan, the Nintendo 3DS is as ubiquitous as the iPhone.)

So, the Famicom Disk System is something that Nintendo would only ever have released in Japan at this time, along with the modem that also existed for the console at the time (yes, you could access something a lot like the Internet on your Famicom in 1983).…

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Bits and Bobs (‘Deep Breath’ 4)

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It ends with another mysterious woman, another predatory dominatrix older female.  She represents another story arc which we, the viewers, have no possibility of guessing or understanding until the inevitable ‘twist’ becomes self-evident just before being served up to you on a plate several episodes later than it could’ve been.

She speaks as if she is one of the audience and saw what we saw.  Like us, she couldn’t see if the Doctor persuaded Half-Face to commit suicide or if he pushed him to his death.  Again, a metatextual trick is used as a signifier of the enemy.

Another physical endurance test or test of skill becomes part of the nature of the monster-of-the-week.  The Weeping Angels were based on how long you could go without blinking.  The Sredni Vashtar (or whatever they were called) were based on how long you could go without touching a shadow with your own shadow.  The droids in ‘Deep Breath’ were based on how long you can hold your breath (a slightly dodgy thing to encourage in the playground possibly).

How much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

I said:  how much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

(To be fair, RTD was hardly unrepetitious – how many eleventh episodes ended with robotic things swarming in the sky and swooping down to shoot milling people?  Quite a few, as I recall.)

The business with the droids stealing bodies hooks into the corpse economy of Victorian London, but strips it of class significance.  Rich and poor alike get predated upon.  It’s not like in ‘Bad Wolf’ in which the Daleks harvest the tramps and the sick and the outcasts… and then start feeding on the TV audience which tunes in to watch bodies punished.

The episode has lots to say about faces, and how we acquire them.  The Doctor chooses (unconsciously, presumably) his new face as a way of being honest with Clara and trusting her.  He initially finds it hard to recognise as himself.  Vastra’s face is also the key to understanding and accepting her.  You perceive a veil if you are unprepared to see and accept who she is.  The droid has half a face (why couldn’t he have become a Springheel Jack-style urban legend called Jack Half-a-Face? – that would’ve been awesome) because he unconsciously recognises that it is not his own.  He is contrasted with the Doctor and Vastra in that his face is a lie that he essentially rejects despite his attempts to accept it, whereas they performatively reject their own faces as a way of making others accept their honesty.

Vastra’s larder mirrors the larder of the droids, their store cupboard of human bits and bobs.  It also mirrors the remark the Doctor makes to Clara about all restaurants being slaughterhouses, and his not remembering her becoming a vegetarian.  (As a longstanding veggie myself, I liked that bit – though his attitude was condescending… but then, let’s face it, the Doctor is often morally condescending, and so are vegetarians.) …

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Into the Dalek Review

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This review was generously funded by 145 backers at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider joining them in supporting the remaining reviews. 

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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