Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

It Isn’t Really a Disease at All (Closing Time)

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My god, there really is an action figure set based on “Children
of the Revolution.”
It’s September 24th, 2011. One Direction are at number one with “What Makes You Beautiful,” while Pixie Lott, Example, Calvin Harris, and Maroon 5 also chart, the latter continuing to just hover at #2 with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, the US policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is finally repealed in favor of letting gay and lesbian service members serve openly, the NBA lockout results in cancelling a bunch of preseason games, and Occupy Wall Street starts getting some press coverage.
While on television, it’s the sequel to The Lodger, namely Closing Time. “You know that absolutely brilliant thing you did? Do it again” is, as assignments to creative people go, something of the biggest nightmare imaginable. Almost certainly, after all, you used the best ideas you had for the concept on the first go-around. Especially in the realm of something comedic, where you’ve almost certainly done a winnowing process the first time around, since the way being funny tends to work is that you try about five to fifty times as many ideas as you actually need so that you can cut the 80-98% that aren’t actually good enough. So the comedy sequel is an absolutely brutal thing.
And that applies very well here. So much of why The Lodger works is that it gets in, it executes a couple of great gags about the idea of the Doctor trying to live with a perfectly ordinary person, it throws in a romantic comedy plot, and then it finishes up and makes way for the Pandorica. It doesn’t need five minutes more, little yet forty-five. And in a real sense, a sequel is a terrible idea, because it cannot possibly live up to the original. All it can be is “the next best forty-five minutes of Craig/Doctor jokes.” 
And so from the start, Gareth Roberts makes an extremely sensible decision and makes this a different premise. This isn’t “the Doctor moves in with Craig again.” Indeed, in many ways Craig is a completely different character such that, other than a single scene in which he pouts at the Doctor, he’s a basically functional companion who broadly speaking understands how Doctor Who stories work. Given that the entire premise of The Lodger was that the Doctor was living in the spare room of a romantic comedy and mucking everything up, the change to a setup in which the primary guest star is now good at being in a Doctor Who story is such that it barely seems to count as a sequel.
So instead, the story focuses on the fact that Craig’s a father now. What’s interesting here is that this really doesn’t follow from The Lodger in any particularly logical sense. Fatherhood is not a logical follow-up to any of the issues there except inasmuch as sometimes when people fall in love there are babies. Craig isn’t out of character as such, but precisely none of the concerns that defined him in The Lodger are still in play here.
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“…dispersed in clouds of narrative language”: R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, “Canon” is the Keyword to Escape (With Love from the Lovely Angels Part 2)

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One consequence of subverting the stock Big Epic Season Finale plot four times over means that any attempt you do actually make to close your filming block off with a bang is sort of by necessity going to be unsatisfying. Somehow I think I’ve heard that somewhere before. The sensible solution would be, of course, to not do a Big Epic Season Finale plot for your season finale.

Regrettably, Sunrise do not adopt the sensible solution.

We have a hostage situation where the head of 3WA security, a painfully generic megalomaniacal villain, takes over the research firm (which is in a gigantic volcano for some reason), kidnaps Gooley and threatens to blow up Elenore City with a big-ass Lazer Cannon if he’s not given some exorbitant amount of money. The plot is bog standard “we leave nobody behind” military fueled science fiction: Kei and Yuri go against the 3WA’s board of directors to rescue Gooley and they positively leap at every single opportunity to sacrifice their lives for each other, which is supposed to cut against them bickering throughout the episode’s entire runtime. Kei gets a big, dramatic speech at the end when she thinks Yuri is killed that is meant to be a parody of such speeches, but it feels stilted, goes on way too long and is nowhere near as effective as the subtext in “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. The episode tries to rack up tension with exasperating pulp stalling, and the villain even gets a speech of unfiltered misogyny (yielding the story’s one good line when Kei responds with “For a young guy, you sure are old-fashioned”) in an attempt to force some strangled moral out of the past 26 weeks.

This is, in point of fact, a perfectly straightforward demonstration of what it looks like when a show tries to artificially inflate its stakes to do something self-consciously “big” to wrap up the filming block: It makes everyone and everything explode in a desperate effort to send the series off on an “epic” note, and it’s tragically unaware you can’t do this with Dirty Pair. The humour is back to feeling forced and inappropriate, it’s once again a story that isn’t really about anything except its po-faced epicness, and it has other problems too. As has become frustratingly the norm for late-period Dirty Pair, while the story is on the one hand trying to make a point about how special the Angels and their bond is, it still can’t resist the temptation to make Yuri the hero. Kei bumbles around as the comic relief, sticking her foot in her mouth, and making silly melodramatic speeches with Yuri as the consummate, quick-witted foil. Then there is, of course, Gooley himself, of whom I’ve spoken far too much lately. I’ll just say that it’s probably a bad sign that the episode had me agreeing with the board of directors’ plan to cause the volcano to erupt with him in it.…

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A Great, Great Partnership (The God Complex)

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No, no, that’s fine. I’ll find a different table. Really. It’s OK.
It’s September 17th, 2011. Pixie Lott has the number one slot with “All About Tonight,” with Olly Murs, Calvin Harris, and Ed Sheeran also charting. In news, a petrol pipeline explodes in Nairobi, killing 100, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is passed, putting an end to the practice of Prime Ministers getting to call for an election at a time they find strategically satisfying, and, on the day this story aired, a protest organized by Adbusters brought a thousand people to Zucotti Park in New York under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street.”
This last event did not end up getting any media coverage at the time, however, leaving plenty of room for everyone to pay attention to Doctor Who instead. And Doctor Who obliged, serving up a fairly marvelous episode with The God Complex. Let’s start with the less interesting bits, and build up to the real point. First of all, an obligatory complaint: the “Amy Williams” line is absolutely awful. Even if you try to pack in redemptive readings like that the Doctor is trying anything to break Amy’s faith in him so he can save her, the truth is that the episode doesn’t actually refute the Doctor. Of the writers on Doctor Who, it’s Whithouse who is most likely to go for a relatively unreformed deconstruction of the Doctor as a hero. This is someone who nicked a bit of Miracleman for a key scene in Being Human, so, you know, his influences are at least clear and consistent. And so the idea that the Doctor might not be a hero or worth having faith in isn’t something he pushes beyond the most superficial level in the script. In this regard, much as I like Whithouse as a writer, he’s behind the rest of the season, where Moffat has long since taken the “dark” hero notion on board and then moved past it. But that’s not a problem for the season – The God Complex ends up stating a set of positions that stories like A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song exist to surpass. It really does think it’s “I wasn’t talking about myself” line at the end is the height of thematic resonance. Which it isn’t, but it’s a useful stooge in that regard.
But within that, taking a character who had previously been defined in part by the fact that her marriage was “Mr. and Mrs. Pond” and not her husband’s name, because that’s just how it works for a character like Amy, and reverting her to her maiden name to put her in her proper place and disabuse her of these silly ideas she has is absolutely horrifying. And within this episode, that’s what happens. “Amy Williams” is treated as Amy’s “correct” identity, while Amelia Pond is a deviant little girl who’s too invested in fairy tales. It should never have seen transmission, and is, for my money, the single most misogynistic moment of the Moffat era, and possibly of the new series altogether.
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“I’ll be back”: Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator (With Love from the Lovely Angels Part 1)

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Though its broadcast run is now over, Dirty Pair does actually still have two shots left in its barrel for us.

Due to insufficient ratings, the Dirty Pair TV show’s parent network NTV pulled the plug on it in December of 1985, canceling it before the final two episodes could air. There seems to be a lot of conflicting opinions about why the show was ended when it was, the most common one being that Dirty Pair was pretty definitively a cult sci-fi show, and that wasn’t enough justification for NTV to keep it around (which makes Dirty Pair’s status as “The Japanese Star Trek” all the more fun and fitting). But because Sunrise still saw a passionate and loyal fanbase for the show, they did something somewhat unprecedented. No, they didn’t sell Dirty Pair as a syndication package to air in perpetual reruns or create a sequel show called Dirty Pair: The Next Generation directly for a syndicated market, but they did do something that was just as novel from a Japanese perspective as Paramount’s handling of Star Trek was from a US one.

What Sunrise did was take the last two episodes, intended to air in January of 1986, and release them as Original Video Animation, or OVAs. OVAs are roughly comparable to what Western audiences might call “direct to video releases”, or DTVs, as that aptly describes what they are, but the contextual meaning OVAs have in Japan are quite different from what DTVs do in, say, the United States. Where DTVs are usually seen as no-budget schlokfests that weren’t good enough to be released in theatres, OVAs are seen as niche, cult works that might not attract a huge mainstream audience, but have a passionate enough following to justify putting them on home videos people might buy.

In other words, OVAs share a quite similar audience to the kind of shows that would, in the US, go direct to syndication or cable, like, funnily enough, Star Trek. And, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation pioneered the viability of syndication for cult TV (just as it outgrew those selfsame cult TV roots almost immediately), so did Dirty Pair pioneer the viability of the OVA market for similar shows. OVAs also have a slight advantage over other avenues for niche properties, as, because they’re made completely in-house for home video, they’re not subject to any meddling by network executives or ratings figures, so they have the opportunity to be more unflitered artistic statements.

(In fact, OVAs tend to have on the whole higher budgets and production values then regular television shows as a result of this, another thing that sets them decisively apart from DTVs in the United States.)

These two episodes, “Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator” and “R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, ‘Canon’ is the Keyword to Escape”, tend to be grouped together in a subset of the larger first Dirty Pair series under a shared name that’s usually translated as either From Lovely Angel With Love or With Love from the Lovely Angels.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 9th, 2014)

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So, first of all, I have a bit of nice news – after polling the people who have backed the Patreon to fund reviews of Season Eight, the consensus is that people want the reviews to be open for everyone to read, which means those will be posting right here, replacing the Waffling for Saturdays. I will get reviews together as fast as I reasonably can so that people can have a discussion thread for the episodes as well.

Given that the Patreon backers are being so nice, you might consider joining them, not least because my apartment just ran out of heating oil, which means that half the Patreon is already spoken for, because it’s always bloody something isn’t it.

I want to talk a bit about the reviews at some point, if only to muse about the difference between writing TARDIS Eruditorum and writing episode reviews as the season goes, and on what criticism that’s based in the immediate present ought do differently than criticism that’s historicized, but that may be a next week topic anyway. In fact, I think that’s probably best.

Meanwhile, the Williams book has one and a bit extra essays left, which I’m hoping to take out this weekend.

As for talking, as we’re now exiting the “big summer blockbuster” phase of the year, what was your favorite big film of the summer? What did you actually see? What did you opt to pass up? And is there anything left this year you’re really looking forward to, film-wise?…

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The First Flower Grew (The Last War in Albion Part 56: America a Prophecy, The Demon)

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This is the sixth 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. Finding volume 2-6 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 first arc on Swamp Thing was a massive success, and DC immediately began a new promotional campaign for the book. Moore, Bissette, and Totleben, meanwhile, moved on to their second arc, the first issue of which drew its title by a print by Francesco Goya called “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” This print shares thematic ground with the work of Goya’s British contemporary William Blake, who wrote of Ahania, the female emanation of the mad god Urizen, who represents a higher form of intellect than the monstrous attempt to condemn the world to single vision. In Blake’s The Foar Zoas, Ahania was separated from Urizen and fell into a slumber, until eventually Ahania cast off her death clothes.
“It’s where Darkseid fell through existence to his doom. Leaving hell deserted. And there, in his absence, the first flower grew. So begins the myth of a new creation. Apokolips reborn as New Genesis.” – Grant Morrison
She folded them up in care in silence & her brightening limbs / Bathd in the clear spring of the rock then from her darksom cave / Issud in majesty divine Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy clapping his hands his feet his radiant wings / In the immense as when the Sun dances upon the mountains / A shout of jubilee in lovely notes responding from daughter to daughter / From son to Son as if the Stars beaming innumerable / Thro night should sing soft warbling filling Earth & heaven / And bright Ahania took her seat by Urizen in songs & joy.” For both Goya and Blake, in other words, some sense of balance is required – it is just that Goya fears the passions of man running unchecked, while Blake fears the prison of law and religion weaved by reason. 
Figure 414: Sullen fires glowing across
the Atlantic to America’s shore. (America
a Prophecy Copy A, Object 5, written 1793,
printed 1795)
And in another sense, Blake is closer still to Goya, on an almost literal level. It is, after all, once Urizen has been bound by Los, the fallen, human form of Urizen’s opposite number, Urthona, that Los’s emanation, Enitharmon, is split from him and gives birth to the monstrous serpent Orc. Orc, within Blake’s mythology, is the spirit of revolution, and makes his most substantial appearance in America a Prophecy, the first of Blake’s three “continental prophecies,” in which Blake reworks the recent political history of the world into another iteration of his mythology.
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“Are you making all the right moves? Or are you going through the motions?”: Are You Serious? A Condo is a Dangerous Place to Live

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What a strange episode to go out on.

The flipside of faking its audience out with four separate episodes that could have served perfectly as a season finale but manifestly and decidedly weren’t is that the episode with which the original broadcast run of Sunrise’s first Dirty Pair does actually sign off on comes across as more than a little underwhelming. It’s an off-week and, annoyingly, it’s a week that’s off in pretty much all the ways we’ve already talked ad nauseum about. The closest analogue is “Nostalgic Blues Makes a Killer Soundtrack” (and it’s about a murderer to boot) in that it has a handful of really great ideas mixed in with a few too many sour notes to elevate it above mediocrity. My biggest complaint is, as usual, Kei, whose characterization has by this point shot entirely past “less competent than Yuri” and landed square in “lowbrow comic relief, nothing more”. Literally nothing Kei does in this episode either advances the plot or hints at a potential meta-reading: Yuri does all the legwork, figures out the whole case all by herself and her attitude towards her partner can be summed up as “Aw, look! She thinks she’s a Trouble Consultant! How cute!”. And then there’s Gooley, who’s back to patronizing his top agents. And who I am by now beyond sick to death of.

The case itself, on the other hand, is somewhat interesting and the episode has a decent sense of humour, at least towards everything that isn’t Kei. There’s a serial killer who poses as a salesman going about murdering young woman and carving weird symbols into their forehead. The murders seem to follow a pattern, and the Angels are staked out in a condo that’s the next likely target. As they pass the time, they’re visited by not one, not two, but three salesmen, plus a police officer, all of whom have stupefyingly obvious motives and means. The first guy is a middle aged pervert who sells lightsaber kitchen knives (yes), the second is a “ladykiller”-type who sells novelty electrified bras and moonlights as a petty thief, and the third is a twelve-year old boy who has a blind hatred of all women because his mother was a bad person. Meanwhile, the police officer comes in midway through the episode to round up the suspects and generally disagree with Yuri’s deductions, so he obviously turns out to be the killer. Or rather one of them, as it turns out it’s really two twin brothers playing chess with each other and the murder weapon looks like Freddie Kruegger’s glove, so there’s that. Yeah, whaddya want from me? I have little sympathy for the generic and formulaic whodunnit structure.

Neither does Kei, actually: She name-drops Agatha Christie in the teaser for this episode that ran after “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”, even going into a campfire scary story voice to tell us “Now you can be Agatha too!”.…

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Comics Reviews (August 7th, 2014)

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Right. Fun week. Pick of the week’s idiosyncratic, I’ll freely admit.

Bravo, by Greg Rucka

Not a comic, but certainly adjacent, Greg Rucka, writer of numerous very good comics, one of which is reviewed later in this comic, has a novel out as of a few weeks ago. The second in his Jad Bell series, which he seems to be focusing on now in his prose writing, which has, at other times, involved his phenomenal spy series Queen and Country and his quite solid PI/procedural Addicus Kodiak series, which executes a hilarious on the spot conversion from being a good old-fashioned detective series where the detective is a private bodyguard to suddenly being an assassin espionage procedural Tom Clancy sort of thing about human trafficking. Astonishingly weird.

In any case, it’s Rucka on one of his strongest themes, which is gender. The first Jad Bell was a kind of cute little “action movie in a theme park” book that played with conventions in some neat ways, but felt to me like a bit of a slender thing, so it took me a while to get around to this. Was pleasantly surprised – did some neat things with perspective and overlapping narratives, and ends up being a strange sort of romance between two heroes of ever-so-slightly different genre movies, while the political world of the book executes a series of disasters and big events that feels like you could suddenly have an important character with the surname Carlyle turn up and the plot could carry on seamlessly to something else. If you like Greg Rucka’s work in general, do check this out. And to be clear, I am very much interested in Greg Rucka’s work in general. If nothing else, his work is increasingly a series of very smart leftist takes on some genres with traditionally right-wing leanings, and that’s a really interesting aesthetic project.

(I really wish he were British. I’m half tempted to pretend via Queen and Country, but it’s cheating. I get him for 52 and a bit of Final Crisis, and that’s it. Oh, and Morrison’s Batman, a little. J.H. Williams is a background figure in that, and I really can’t ignore Williams.) A

God is Dead Book of Acts: Alpha

I admit, I’m not really reading God is Dead. After the issues Hickman had any hand in, I basically completely lost track of the plot, and wasn’t enjoying it enough to bother. Jill is still enjoying it, so I’ll freely admit the problem is me. But in any case, the bit anyone really cares about here is Alan Moore’s story, in which he finally explains Glycon for everybody, and makes a Honey Boo Boo joke in the process. Gratuitous as all hell, utterly “for fans only,” and in no way worth the $5.99 price point. A+ (Pick of the Week)

Guardians of the Galaxy

I am Groot. A

Lazarus #10

And Rucka again. Lazarus has been shockingly good. I think it may be Rucka’s best-ever work, or at least, it has a chance to be when it all shakes out.…

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Yes, I Shall Come Back (The Girl Who Waited)

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For once I’ve picked the image because it illustrates a point and not to make
a bad joke about it. So I’ll just give you a bad joke with nothing to do with
the image. What’s brown and sticky? A stick.
It’s September 10th, 2011. Example are at number one with “Stay Awake,” with Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, Olly Murs, and Calvin Harris also charting. There’s not exactly been a ton of news in the last twenty-four hours, with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces declaring a state of emergency, along with Barack Obama, the former covering Egypt, the latter Texas. While on television, it’s The Girl Who Waited. 
The Girl Who Waited marks one of a handful of times that more or less the entire Doctor Who fandom was properly blown away and surprised. Nothing about Tom McRae’s previous Doctor Who story, the largely unloved Tennant Cybermen two-parter, really suggested that he was capable of this story. And so when McRae was announced as the writer, a large swath of the audience was not particularly enthused. It wasn’t until the title, which magnificently baited the audience by drawing unapologetically on the Moffat era’s established iconography and mythos, that things started to seem a bit more interesting, and not until the revelation of the story’s real premise, the heavily aged Amy Pond, that it started to become clear that, far from being a dud filler episode marking time between the big River episodes on either side of this half-season, The Girl Who Waited was a stunningly interesting episode in its own right.
First and foremost, The Girl Who Waited is a piece of superlative character work. There’s a school of thought, not entirely unjustified, that suggests that Karen Gillan’s interest in Amy declined over the course of the show, and that she phoned in large swaths of Season Six and more or less the entirety of Season Seven. There’s another that says that Gillan was actually fine, but that Moffat ran out of things to write about the character, hence her spending most of Season Six as fridge bait. This school of thought is, as we’ve seen, self-evidently ludicrous, but it’s worth acknowledging as well. Both, ultimately, end up treating Amy as something of a problem companion in this period. But in many ways, both lines of criticism almost necessarily have to avoid this story (and it’s telling, I think, that the “Moffat is an arch-misogynist” crowd mostly steers around this story in their criticisms) in order to work.
Certainly, whatever one might say about her in Season Seven, Gillan is absolutely on fire here, managing to distinguish Young Amy and Old Amy as real and distinct characters through a host of subtle but deliberate ways. Old Amy carries her body differently, speaks with a slightly different timbre, and genuinely, properly feels like a different character to Young Amy. The entire episode is set up to live or die by the strength of Gillan’s performance, and she rises to the occasion magnificently in a way that anchors everything around her.
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“Today I settled all family business”: Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge

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“Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge” suffers from nothing so much as it does from following the 463 two-parter. Anything coming in the wake of that story is somewhat doomed to pale in the inevitable comparison, which is a shame because this one is actually really good. Dirty Pair breaks its frustrating ping-ponging quality curse…just in time to see it through its final two episodes. Which is unfortunate (though an argument could be made the pattern was broken, for the worse, with “Come Out, Come Out, Assassin”). But while this episode may not quite stand up to its immediate predecessors and it might have been nice to see it seven or eight weeks earlier in place of a couple of those others, the fact remains this is still an excellent outing and one to enthusiastically recommend.

Judging from the title alone, you’d be forgiven for figuring this might be a sequel to “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, with the Lovely Angels perhaps returning to exact justice on Lan and Jerry for betraying their trust. But no, as is typically the case on this show, this story has nothing to do with the older one. Barring that, the obvious comparisons seem to be to The Godfather: Mahogany is immediately reminiscent of Don Vito Corleone, not only in appearance but in characterization as he runs a sprawling criminal syndicate based on the drug trade that seems to have much of United Galactica in its grasp. Mahogany is even an actual “father”, as in a religious leader, which certainly adds to the series’ tally of anti-authoritarian points. Mahogany’s empire is so vast and threatening it actually raises the stakes of the entire Dirty Pair franchise: Shockingly, Mahogany is powerful enough to sway influence over the 3WA, and gets Gooley himself to call off Kei and Yuri’s siege on his stronghold right when they were perfectly poised to take him down once and for all.

This is a game changer. I’ve been of the mind Gooley and the 3WA have been irredeemable since “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode”, and this does nothing but reinforce my opinion. Like all organisations based around capitalistic authority, the so-called World Welfare Works Association is nothing but a corrupt sham designed around no other purpose then lining its own pockets and protecting its cronies (though I wonder what Haruka Takachiho made of this reconceptualization). Which is maybe telling, because while this episode didn’t turn out to be a sequel to “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, it is very easy to read it as a spiritual successor to “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode”. It’s once again about Kei and Yuri’s relationship and, following last week, it’s about how nothing can truly come between them. Furthermore, it’s about what happens when you underestimate their capabilities, their dedication to material social progress through revolutionary change…or to each other.…

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