Eruditorum Press

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Miracle Day and Death

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Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues. She’s also my wife, and would be as happy as I would be if you backed my Patreon campaign for weekly episode reviews of Season Eight of Doctor Who. Then come back here and read her being righteously and beautifully angry. 
It’s November 28th, 2013. Martin Garrix’s “Animals” tops the charts only to be ousted by Lily Allen’s “Somewhere Only We Know” two days later. Elsewhere in the world, mass protests are occurring in Thailand as tensions between the opposition party and the prime minister’s family (read: his exiled brother) mount and, apparently, The New York Times has shown it’s first front-page nipple. So there’s that. 
On TV: in a world in which no one can die, a young woman who has suffered what would formerly have been a fatal blood clot in her lungs. She is pregnant when this happens and is currently connected to all manner of drains and tubes and medical equipment in order to allow this fetus to gestate in her essentially dead body. She and the fetus she is carrying were deprived of oxygen thanks to that blood clot and her husband and parents look on in horror at the entire ordeal. Both the young woman and her husband were paramedics and understood the limits of what modern medicine could do, neither of them wanted her preserved this way. The Miracle destroyed any autonomy in death this young woman would have and should have had. 
Except it wasn’t the Miracle that caused this. It was us. Her name was Marlise Munoz and she was 33 years old when she died. Her husband did everything right, but there was nothing to be done. She was brain dead. But, the definition of death for John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas was somewhat more… flexible. They kept her heart beating for weeks because of a loophole in the law stating that life support could not be revoked from a pregnant woman despite her wishes. It was only when the hospital was sued for the “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse” and they admitted that the fetus was developing “abnormally” that Marlise was allowed to rest.
Miracle Day goes out of its way to make a parallel of our world, a world in which this could happen. It builds a platform for an argument about the treatment of illness, dying and death in our culture. It meticulously constructs a modest proposal indicating the natural extreme of our death-denying culture. So, after all that effort, what does Miracle Day end up saying about death? Well, it says nothing at all.
No, that is perhaps a bit harsh and untrue. Miracle Day clearly says that the way we treat the sick and the dying is bad and we should feel bad. Which is worth examining.
There is an inherent classism in healthcare on a global scale. Despite the long list of countries who have decided that healthcare is a basic human right, globally, healthcare is available only to those who have the means.
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“Like water to a blood red rose”: We Did It! 463 People Found!

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So let me set the stage. We’re sitting alone in our room trying to figure out what that vision meant. You remember the vision I told you about, right? It was like a ship that was there and then not, and then there again. A ship, unless its a shipwreck (which this wasn’t), has to have people onboard. On something as big as this one seemed to be, there were surely lots and lots of people. We took it as an allegory: Try to imagine all those people living and working together and going about their lives and what you could learn from that, and that’s the basic premise we start from. The ship is its people and the people are their ship. The story, like most stories do, comes to us as we try to parse out some semblance of meaning and resonance from the images we saw. The story is written because it needed to be written, because it is important and necessary, almost like destiny. It really is as simple as that. But, can we really make a story out of all their stories?

Now I’m sitting on a beach tending a campfire because we were getting ready to go on a surfing trip before you stopped us and asked me to talk about storytelling structure. So I gave you the best I could come up with.

Anyway.

One thing I think the philosophers might be on the right track about, as I told you before, is the idea that there might be some truth in the wheel. No, wait, that’s wrong. What I mean to say is, if you look at a wheel, that can maybe tell you something about the universe because it’s a symbol. It’s something that stands in for something else. You don’t need words, at least not the things we typically think of of as words, because the thing reflects the truth-bits you write onto it back at you all by itself. But this is all stuff you already know (you did watch the episode, right?), so there’s little point in me rambling on about it. Where I might disagree with the philosophers I think is the idea that everything goes around and around, constantly repeating itself (I’m not repeating myself, am I?). That’s a consequence of them fixating on the wheel so much.

I don’t write stories. I channel them. What that means to me is I don’t see wheels going around and around, but tides ebbing and flowing, coming and going. The tide goes out and comes back in again because it always does. We can predict when and where its going to happen (damn it, what did I do with that tide chart?), and though the tide is a little different every day and every night, it’s still there and still a tide. Remember, we can’t say precisely what’s going to happen in the future (I don’t think I’d even use that particular term, to be perfectly honest with you), but because we see things happening we know, by definition that they’ll happen.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 2nd, 2014)

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After a couple of people suggested it, I decided to try crowdfunding Season Eight reviews. So, if you are interested in a weekly column about Season Eight of Doctor Who as it airs, in which I will engage in almost certainly wrong speculation like any other punter and attempt to analyze television on the fly, I’m doing it as a Patreon campaign. It’ll run exactly twelve weeks, charging you a dollar every week if you back it. And if enough people back it, I’m throwing free ebooks at all backers, so it’s hopefully a pretty good deal.

I haven’t worked out the exact logistics yet, but expect that reviews will be posted in a manner that will allow for discussion, and that the Saturday Wafflings for the twelve weeks that Doctor Who is on will also be open threads about the episode, so people can discuss here or wherever. And I’m probably going to participate in both threads, so if you can’t or don’t want to pay $12, you’ll still probably hear my thoughts. Might get around to linking my Tumblr as well, where I’m sure I’ll end up discussing them.

I feel a little odd doing this one, to be honest. but equally, to be honest, I’m going to have one book out this year compared to four last year, and the Last War in Albion Kickstarter was half the Eruditorum one (not a surprise in the least, or a problem), and it’s always something with money, so while we’re by no means in any seriously bad situation, we could also use a kind of profitable thing, so, here it is. A thing people will hopefully enjoy in exchange for a small amount of money. You can back it here. Thanks very much if you do. I appreciate it. 

Working on Williams-era essays. Being kind of obstinately lazy about it, mostly because it’s been an incredibly hectic few months and I’m enjoying a week or two of not having much to do. But it’s starting to itch at me, so I expect mad productivity will arrive again soon. So far I’ve got four done – Festival of Death, one on the nature of the Guardians, the “Now My Doctor,” and the commissioned essay – still got the Big Finish (probably Auntie Matter?) to do, as well as the Pop Between Realities on Target. Might end up throwing in some other 70s cop shows as well, although really, that essay exists to be a “the story thus far.” Might end up doing Target/Never Mind the Bollocks, Here Come the Sex Pistols. That would be a fun essay. And there’s one more thing that’s not quite a Time Can Be Rewritten, but will be very fun. Then it’ll be on to the extra material for the Logopolis book.

Since we’re on the subject of Season Eight, what are your thoughts on what’s been released so far? If you want to go so far as to discuss the Deep Breath leak or the script leaks, go ahead, but please no spoilers.…

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True Humanity Comes (The Last War in Albion Part 55: The Floronic Man, Goya)

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This is the fifth 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 is available here. 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 changed everything about Swamp Thing (and many things about American comics in general) with his first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, in which he rewrote the character’s origin such that he was no longer a human being turned into a plant monster, but a mass of plant matter that mistook itself as a human being, and with the arc that followed, in which Swamp Thing battled Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, while grappling with his humanity or lack thereof. 
“I thought of Martin Heidegger and his idea that true humanity comes with not bowing to the external world. I decided then that I should never bow to my own morality.” – Alan Moore, Marvelman
Figure 406: The contrast between the red and
green worlds. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Saga of
the Swamp Thing #23, 1984)
But however much Swamp Thing may consider himself to be separate from Abby’s people, he is animate now, and accepts that his place is not to simply sink into the green, but to live in the swamps, experiencing the vibrant ecosystem, and the arc ends with a splash page of Swamp Thing standing, arms spread, greeting the rising sun. It is not, to be sure, a subtle ending. The didactic nature of Swamp Thing’s rhetorical defeat of the Floronic Man and his barbed question to Abby are in fact crashingly obvious, although in a way that productively flags the comic’s intentions going forward. Saga of the Swamp Thing, it is immediately clear, has become an ecologically minded comic. But what is subtler is the degree to which this stems out of Moore’s larger and more surprising decision, which is to spend quite a lot of effort sincerely exploring the question of what it would be like, from a psychological perspective, to be a walking plant. The entire ecology debate between Woodrue and Swamp Thing is framed as the practical applications of the more spiritual experiences both characters have within the Green. The second issue of the arc, entitled “Another Green World” (an homage to a Brian Eno song, as is relatively typical of Moore), demonstrates this well – it ends with Swamp Thing finally arriving to confront Woodrue, but this is ultimately framed as a response to and extension of Swamp Thing’s initial meditations on the fact that “there is a red and angry world.
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“I want to give you all my love”: No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!

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What it comes down to is that we were compelled to write it. That’s the main thing.

It started, like most things do, with a vision. Some people say visions are messages from somewhere else telling you what you need to do next. But I don’t think that’s true, personally: For us…for me…It’s more of a brief flash of some image or feeling, always without any sort of context. We never comprehend the things we see as we see them. You have to understand that when we touch the visions we see are not clear at all-More…fuzzy and muddy. Those are words you could use for it. But the vision is still there, and it’s my job to bring it to you because, in my experience, visions usually tend to mean something. So now I suppose you want me to talk about the things we said and the order in which we said them. R-really? I mean, isn’t the story already enough for you? I’ve already said my piece. I’m a storyteller, not a philosopher. I just do my job and consider myself lucky to be able to do what I do. I can’t possibly be that interesting to you, can I?

Well, fine, I guess you wouldn’t have called me here for any other reason…

I’m of the mind that things happen because we know they’re going to. Planets orbit their stars in the silent darkness as they always have, casting day into night and into day again. I don’t believe that space is an ocean, but I do think that our words, our songs and our mantras flow through us just like water flows through the oceans (which reminds me, I need to check the tide charts for Ocean Ridge. We’re going on vacation soon, you know). The very best we can strive for is to be able to channel this flow in a way that can help us. When we do this, I think we can feel a bit the arcs and rotations of the universe. Those philosopher guys who spend all their days in the casinos spinning wheel after wheel hoping that *this* time it will be different understand maybe some of this, but they’re so focused on spinning around and around in circles they never get to the point of realising they’re in the wheel too.

But look at me. Here I go on and on again like a silly broken record. This isn’t what you wanted to hear me talk about, was it? Well, what we saw that night was a ship adrift in inky night. It was an enormous ship clad in the loveliest shade of blue you’ve ever seen. It was sparkling and glowing, illuminating the darkness around it Except, not really. It was more like the idea of a ship…but also the idea of a ship not being there.…

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Comics Reviews (July 30th, 2014)

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No pick of the week this week, as I can’t honestly recommend anything point blank on its own merits.

Avengers #33

I gather other people found the “Captain America hurtles further and further into the future” arc rather more aggravating than I have been – for me, the done-in-one style of it has at least partially covered for Hickman’s tendency to dramatically over-estimate how much of his overly elaborate mythos the reader will remember from issue to issue. But here we run aground – a hugely decompressed issue that consists almost entirely of Hickman’s “big ideas,” which, far from being his strong point, are, for me at least, rapidly being revealed as a kind of sad and pointless exercise that tarnish his books. D

Cyclops #3

Really sad to hear Rucka is off this imminently, as he was the selling point, and more to the point, as this is quite good, and I suspect it won’t be as good when Rucka is replaced. Nice character work. A bit of an exposition dump in the middle, but the start and finish are lovely, and I’m terribly excited for next issue. B+

Guardians of the Galaxy #17

Well, it ends at point B, having started at point A, and I suppose that’s about what you can say here. I’ve talked before about how Bendis periodically has issues that do not particularly recommend his approach to structure. Case in point. C

Hawkeye #19

It’s strange to watch the book that, as Tom Ewing has pointed out, clearly became the model for how Marvel was going to work, i.e. throw weird takes at the wall and see what sticks, and has become such utter, high profile awards bait also abandon all sense of a release schedule and to clearly be marked for conclusion as Fraction apparently walks off to creator owned books after the trainwreck that was Inhumanity.

In any case, this is a fascinating issue, although very much one that’s actively difficult to follow (to some real extent by design, and by interesting design, in that huge amounts of it are based on sign language. I’m not sure I enjoyed it particularly, but I respected it tremendously. No grade, as I can’t bring myself to criticize it, but I didn’t actually like t much either.

The Manhattan Projects #22

I looked at this issue and realized I have no idea what this book is about, cannot remember the plot, and that this, like every Hickman book I have ever invested in, has completely disappeared up its own asshole in a massive festival of pseudo-intellectual wankery. And then I dropped the book. F

The Massive #25

So here’s an abstract question – do you take points off for a book only actually getting around to paying off its premise over two years in? Because I feel like I’m finally reading the book I wanted to be reading when I started on The Massive, but I’m kind of bitter about it being issue #25.…

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Outside the Government: The Blood Line

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It’s September 9th, 2011. Maroon 5 is at number one with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, India and Bangladesh resolve their border dispute, and a ferry disaster off the coast of Zanzibar kills 240 people. On television, meanwhile, Miracle Day finally wraps up with “The Blood Line.”
You can say this about “The Blood Line”: At least it’s clear that Russell T Davies had something to do with this one. Guessing who did what in a coauthored script is always a bit of a mug’s game, but the writing credits here make it at least somewhat easy to figure out what happened here. Story by Russell T Davies, Script by Davies and Espenson suggests that, in effect, this is by Davies in the same way that The Daleks’ Masterplan is by Terry Nation, which is to say that some notes and scenes were dropped off by cab at Espenson’s door and she proceeded to try to build an episode out of them.
Parts of it are unmistakably Davies, in other words, or at least, Espenson doing an impeccable Davies imitation. Gwen’s whole “the breath” speech is vintage Davies, mixing the structure of Rose’s “this is how I died” speech with content and spectacle that is exactly the sort of thing Davies writes and excels at. The underlying dynamic – a two-sided confrontation at opposite sides of the world, the “introduce blood at both ends” approach, the elevator access to Shanghai, and the basic theatrical “everybody in one room” setup of the finale – is also very Davies-esque, very much feeling like it came from the same mind that approached Rose’s departure from the image of “two levers” or Tennant’s regeneration from the image of the two-chambered box.
So the appearance is that of a story that Davies had a beginning and end in mind for, entrusted to other people for the middle, and kind of wandered away from entirely. This is not necessarily a surprise – it really does appear that Davies was burnt out on sci-fi by this point, and it’s telling the show he’s working on now, Cucumber, is one he’d been talking about while Miracle Day was still going out. This feels like the contractual obligation album. 
But for all of that, there’s an interesting underlying dynamic of the show. It starts feeling like Americanized Torchwood and ends feeling like a Welshed version of the generic American thriller. The final scene is a gratuitous tease for a fifth series that never came, but it also functions as a delightfully unsubtle queering of the show, where the ultra-generic American character who’s been a bit homophobic through the entire series finally gets queered by Jack. (And there’s some properly potent imagery in having immortality come from a blood transfusion – a sort of bizarre reverse-HIV image that feels like something amazing could have been done with it, although we obviously never got to explore it.) The breath is a marvelous image, and handling the tail end of Gwen’s monologue in a time-dilated reaction shot after the climax, unpacking a single breath into a long moment  right before everything goes to hell, is a great shot.
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“O Sister, Where Art Thou?”: Nostalgic Blues Makes a Killer Soundtrack

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Irritatingly, the much-discussed pattern is still in effect. You know what that means.

Although truth be known that’s being a tad unfair. “Nostalgic Blues Makes a Killer Soundtrack” isn’t terrible: There’s a handful of things about it to recommend and it’s not ethically bankrupt, but the fact is this is still an off week and this still means it doesn’t work either. The big problem is this is yet another episode that lacks thematic cohesion: The best way I can come up with to describe it is that it seems to be a combination of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and The Defiant Ones. Also the blues for some reason. Why…I honestly couldn’t tell you, unless I’m missing something particularly blatant, which is always a possibility.

The first film is credited with finally killing off the western genre in the US and chronicles the falling out between a bounty hunter and an outlaw who decide to terminate their partnership and come to blows over the money, while a mercenary discovers the whereabouts of a hidden stash of Confederate gold during the Civil War. The other two find out, and proceed to generally try to swindle and betray each other throughout the film’s runtime. Our analogues here would I guess be Blues the assassin and his target, the business tycoon of the “Miss Creamy Gal Beaty Pageant” (and I can’t believe I actually wrote those words: This is going to look so, so wrong outside the context of this episode) who killed Blues’ mother, a Blues singer, by throwing her into the gaping maw of an active volcano for reasons I don’t think are ever actually explained. The owner is running an insurance scam on the local hotel and plans to blow it up, and Blues is out to stop him and avenge his mother’s death.

The second is the classic story about two convicts, a black man named Noah and a white man named Joker, who escape prison, hate each other, but are handcuffed together and are forced to co-operate and learn to appreciate each other in order to survive. The analogues here are clearer, with Blues as Joker and Kei as Noah, as they spend the majority of the episode in handcuffs bickering with each other and have to team up against the greater evil of the owner. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly also has a scene where Tuco, the bandit, is captured by Union forces and is handcuffed to his captor. Both it and this episode also have scenes where trains and bathrooms play pivotal roles: Tuco uses a trip to the men’s room to escape in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by leaping from the moving carriage and killing the Union soldier he was chained to and Dirty Pair uses restrooms to make a really lame and unfunny joke. And indeed, trains do prove important to the climax here, as the owner has rigged a ridiculously convoluted scheme that involves running a monorail over a precise section of track at a precise moment in time to detonate a bomb that will burn down the hotel.…

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Build High For Happiness (Night Terrors)

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Council estates are nothing to be scared of, unless you are frightened of inequality. 
– Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History
Oh boy, creepy children/dolls! I’ve never seen those before!
It’s September 3rd, 2011. Olly Murs is at number one with “Heart Skips a Beat,” with Calvin Harris, Maroon 5, and Emeli Slade also charting. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of news since “The Gathering.” Actually, literally the only thing I can find is that a plane belonging to the Chilean Air Force crashed, killing all twenty-one on board. And, of course, Night Terrors aired.
I have in the past come out on record as saying Night Terrors is my least favorite story of the new series. This sets up a somewhat awkward situation, in that the expectation becomes that I am now going to explain why it is my least favorite story of the new series, which I can do, but the answer is pretty underwhelming: because I enjoy watching it less than all the others. I know. Which is to say, if you’re looking for some definitive argument about why this is the absolute worst episode and Victory of the Daleks or The Sontaran Stratagem or 42 or Fear Her are superior, sorry. It’s just that if you told me I had to watch one of those six, I wouldn’t pick Night Terrors.
Nevertheless, I do think the episode has significant problems that are worth talking about. Although even there, I have to admit that some of the problems it has are not entirely it’s fault. First and foremost, it was painfully poorly served by the last minute decision to switch it with Curse of the Black Spot (a decision taken so late that Night Terrors is featured prominently in the post-Christmas Carol trailer). This proved problematic for two reasons, one of which should have been apparent at the time, the other one of which was wholly impossible to predict and, nevertheless, ultimately the larger problem with the story.
The foreseeable issue was largely structural. This is not what you would call a terribly complex story. It wears its intentions on its sleeve, or, at least, in its title. It’s supposed to be the scary one – the definitive take on the haunted house story. That’s its entire brief: be the extremely scary one. This was, ostensibly, why it was moved: because putting it in the first half of the season meant that essentially the entire first section of the season was scary, dark, and indoors, and by swapping it with Curse of the Black Spot they added a story that was scary, dark, and outdoors instead. But what this ended up doing was moving this story away from the position it would have originally had, where it would have, in effect, served as the definitive statement on how to do straightforward Doctor Who horror before a bunch of other stories started to change things around a bit. Even there it would have suffered coming after The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, which already changed the “scary Doctor Who” paradigm dramatically, but it would have been improved.
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“Heart of Wax”: An Unjustified Lover’s Grudge. Let Me Love You Without Revenge

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Over at Teatime in Elenore City, webmaster Nozmo has a list of mini-reviews of several animated Dirty Pair stories with ratings out of five. Apparently, this one was terrible enough to warrant Nozmo’s lowest possible score: A 1 out of 5. Now, I can certainly see how this episode could rub some people the wrong way, especially if you happen to be of a Hard SF predisposition, as this is essentially the opposite of that. It is *quite* silly and there are times you worry because you’re not sure which way it’s going to go, but its not long before it becomes clear this is, at least as far as I’m concerned, yet another classic.

For the first time in what feels like ages, though in reality it’s only been three weeks, Dirty Pair is actually shooting for the stars and hitting its target. There are moments of undeniable wackiness; almost to the extent of the Mouse Nazis, but this time there’s enough charm permeating the whole production that it doesn’t feel off-putting or inappropriate. And furthermore, much to my delight, “An Unjustified Lover’s Grudge. Let Me Love You Without Revenge” is once more as cosmic and profound as this series has ever been. But before we can get into that, we should square away what is likely the biggest complaint about this episode right away. You would think that after all I’ve ranted and raved about lately in regards to Kei and Yuri being written badly, badly out of character and the narrative constantly mocking them I would throw an absolute *fit* here. This is, after all, an episode where Kei and Yuri seemingly spend an inordinate amount of time competing for the affections of a reclusive suave bishōnen millionaire, each trying to prove she’s a “better woman” then her partner. Well, in between blatant pratfalls at any rate.

Ah, but this isn’t even what’s going on at a textual level: The girls are undercover again, this time extradiegetically. Kei (natch) even comes right out and tells us (that is, she looks straight into the camera and addresses the audience directly) their mission is to show their client what real women and real love are truly like. They fear Reamonn’s dedication to Meshuzura, a plaster statue, is unhealthy and counterproductive, especially as they go in thinking he’s a raving misogynist. He’s not, just *literally* allergic to women (hence why he only allows himself to be intimate with plaster statues), but his inability to coexist with them is nevertheless seen as a problem that needs to be corrected. So, Kei and Yuri put on various elabourate displays of femininity they assume Reamonn, a dashing, upper-class aristocrat, will find attractive and appealing. Naturally, they fail hilariously and spectacularly, because Kei and Yuri can never and will never be subsumed by traditional gender roles and commonly held notions of ideal femininity.

(This is, in some ways, a scene that is more relevant today then it would have been in 1985, with contemporary young Japanese society *literally* divided along gender lines due to confusion over the collapse of traditional gender roles.)…

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