Eruditorum Press

We’re not cancelled; these are just our Wilderness Years

“It is lonely when you’re among people, too”: What? We’re Heinous Kidnappers!

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Even the best of shows can have bad days. Yes, unfortunately, it is in fact possible for Dirty Pair to go off the rails, and this is a good example of what it looks like when it does. The streak is over: For the first time, we’ve come across an episode of this series that doesn’t really work.

The basic premise is a sound enough one. Throwing Kei and Yuri into a high fantasy story and seeing what happens is an entirely reasonable idea for a Dirty Pair episode, especially in the context of the way the genres of high fantasy and science fiction have evolved over time. Though the most famous iteration of it began as technophillic futurist speculative fiction about logic puzzles, sci-fi as of the 1980s is a profoundly different thing. This is in part due to Star Wars making it OK again to do sci-fi stories on a mass-market scale not in the US Golden Age Hard SF vein, but other ways of doing high-tech stories about starships and space travel and things like that have always existed. This secondary tradition is one Dirty Pair is very much a part of, in part because of the differences between US and Japanese Golden Age science fiction, but also because Dirty Pair is the kind of sci-fi that is able to divorce a futuristic setting from futurism: This is not a series that speculates about future technology, it uses its setting as metaphor and allegory for the issues it’s trying to look at. Again, this is a hallmark of Japanese science fiction in general, but Dirty Pair takes it to its logical endpoint.

(The crowning achievement in using sci-fi settings and imagery as narrative is, of course, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film version of which it is quite clear to me that the writers of this episode had seen, if not actually understood. More on this later.)

Because of this, perhaps counterintuitively, science fiction is uniquely suited amongst genre fiction to looking at extremely ancient and esoteric themes: Look once again at, for example, BRIAN’s role in “How to Kill a Computer”, or indeed, the resolution of last week’s episode and the Lovely Angels themselves. The Dirty Pair Strike Again effortlessly tackled really complex and heady themes about spiritual enlightenment and material social progress. High fantasy (and by this I mean the kind of tradition that sprung up in the wake of people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and that George R.R. Martin seems to be a part of), by contrast, tends to be very gritty and political, focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of human society and, due to its fixation on things like kings and queens and knights and princes, enjoys gossiping about the goings-on in the halls of power and nobility. Exploring the space between these two poles and the way the two traditions have developed the way they have is right in this show’s wheelhouse.…

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Saturday Waffling (July 5th, 2014)

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The hotel I am in has deeply mediocre wi-fi, so I’m going to make this quite brief.

In the most recent Doctor Who Magazine, Steven Moffat posed a neat trivia question of the sort that TARDIS Eruditorum thrives on: in what Doctor Who story does it become unequivocally the case that the Doctor is not human? Moffat points out, for instance, that it’s not An Unearthly Child. Sure, the Doctor says he’s not from Earth, but the series is full of humans that live on other planets. So when, he asks, is it absolutely unequivocally stated.

Bonus points for whoever can convincingly argue the latest point at which you can believe the Doctor is human. Let’s stipulate also that we take all statements made by characters as true unless there’s an active reason to believe otherwise – so no going “well the Doctor could have lied when he said…”

I’ve seen some discussion on it, but I’m curious what you lot settle on.

Oh, and due to the same poor wi-fi, next week’s post order is going to be screwy – I should be running Albion on Tuesdays while Eruditorum is thrice-weekly due to Thursdays being comics posts, but I don’t think I can process an image-heavy post on hotel wi-fi, so I don’t know what will be what day.…

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Outside the Government: Dead of Night

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It’s July 22nd, 2011. LMFAO is still at number one, and my cheeky decision to do Billboard charts means I can’t get more than the number one single, so we’re going to be bored on charts for a while. I could switch back to UK charts, but really, this feels funnier. In news, the final Space Shuttle mission lands, and Anders Breivik kills seventy-seven people in Norway. 
While on television, Dead of Night. For the most part, the arrival of Jane Espenson was a major boon for Miracle Day. She is, after all, flat out one of the best writers of genre television working in the United States. Having trained under Whedon, she went on to amble about any number of shows, including a sizable stint on Battlestar Galactica, where she quickly shed the label she’d acquired on Buffy as your go-to writer for the light and funny episodes, instead establishing herself as a flexible writer who could make almost anything sing. She is, by any estimation, very, very good.
And it’s clear from the breakdowns of episodes that Davies picked her to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the show. Davies surely provided some lines here – “they’re so alive” is, for instance, almost certainly him. But Espenson is clearly set up to do the bulk of the actual writing – she’s the one with the job of making a majority of the scripts work. The trouble is that she’s been dealt a strangely unworked through hand. There’s a dramatic shift in tone that’s taken place between “Rendition” and “Dead of Night.” “Rendition” wanted to play at being a procedural – at being a story about what would actually happen if the Miracle took place. Yes, it cut corners in some key spots, but there was a real effort being spent to figure out what actual problems might spring out of this premise.
One episode later, however, that’s in tatters. We’ve got magic painkillers, the panels discussing what to do have derailed into being excuses to hammer on the pro-life movement instead of actual explorations of the premise, and suddenly the focus is on this Soulless cult, which is terribly ill-defined. Indeed, this is where the entire Oswald plot, dodgy to begin with, really gets into the realm of the fundamentally problematic. The problem, in a nutshell, is that you’ve got a fundamentally satiric idea – a celebrity cult around a pedophile murderer – being employed for entirely serious purposes. The “everybody falls in love with the horrible killer” story is doable, hence it having been done loads of times, but the point there is always to highlight the absurd notions involved in celebrity itself.
But this seems to be trying to employ that idea for serious purposes – as part of a quasi-realistic thriller. Although to be fair, this point could use unpacking. Certainly there’s an embrace of the ridiculous throughout Miracle Day. “Rendition” had loads of it alongside the Vera Juarez plot, and so does “Dead of Night,” with its magic contact lenses and all.
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“She who lives in harmony with herself…”: Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal

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After spending the last two weeks firmly and confidently declaring what it is, what it’s about and what it can do, Dirty Pair is now free to go back to gleefully playing around with other shows. And it pulls a real doozy of a meta-romp this time: For my regular readers, one way to read “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” is as Dirty Pair’s interpretation of the “Gunfighters”/”Spectre of the Gun”/”Living in Harmony” trilogy we looked at *way* back in 1968.

A brief refresher: Long about the same time in the late 1960s, Star Trek, Doctor Who and The Prisoner all did essentially the same story where the show’s hero (or heroes) became trapped in the narrative of a Western movie where either circumstances or some external influence conspire to force them into becoming killers (well, The Prisoner didn’t really as “Living in Harmony” was hastily adapted from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s other show Danger Man, but that’s beside the point). The crux of those stories was that while each show in some way acknowledged the performative nature of its existence, the logic of a Western was in some way anathema to all of them, that this was a role they were not meant to play, and doing so would be tantamount to narrative collapse. As the ever-astute Jack Graham, friend of the blog and frequent commenter, pointed out under the entry on “Spectre of the Gun”, it’s telling this is happening against the backdrop of the Cold War, such that the “foundational myth” of the United States is transformed into something horrific, symbolizing an inexorable predisposition towards violence and self-destruction.

Dirty Pair is, of course approaching this from a wildly different perspective. It’s not even indebted to Westernism itself as a fundamental ideology, let alone any cultural-specific manifestation of it in the United States. Furthermore, the key thing about Dirty Pair is that everything here is performative: Not only is the series itself recursively metafictional to a frankly silly degree, Kei and Yuri are professional wrestlers, so any violence we see is tacitly meant to be read as make-believe, which is an extremely good thing as an entire planet gets vaporized in this one. So clearly, any criticism this episode will be making of violence is going to be coming from the outside in and localized to the plot of the week instead of being depicted as a looming threat to the show itself. The first place this is obvious is the setting, which, far from cribbing the O.K. Corral shootout event from “Spectre of the Gun” and “The Gunfighters” or the Hollywood Western movie trappings of “Living in Harmony”, is actually doing Cowboy Bebop and Sukiyaki Western Django about two decades early.

Like in the former, we get a science fiction world that, while it is equal parts cyberpunk and old west cliches, is on the whole not actually all that removed from our own: There are street food vendors, boutique shops, Jeeps, semiautomatic weapons and the two rival gangs are both corporate political bodies.…

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My Multi-Dimensional Enfolded Realities Concept (The Last War in Albion Part 51: Len Wein’s Phonecall, Rhizome)

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This is the first of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

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 wrapped his Captain Britain run not long after getting a call from Len Wein with an intriguing job offer.

“My multi-dimensional enfolded realities concept had no name until I scrawled a weird geometric figure and explained it to Mark Waid.” – Grant Morrison


Not two years ago, in his very first interview, he’d seemingly summoned the Marvelman job out of thin air, expressing interest in the character at the exact moment that an opportunity to write it came up. So if he did intend to hook a fish out of the aether with his impish suggestion that what American comic books could really use was a creative genius to completely upend everything, he did a good job with it – the very next month he received a phone call offering him the opportunity to do just that. Specifically, Len Wein called him to offer him a job writing Saga of the Swamp Thing.

Figure 377: Brian Bolland’s art for Camelot
3000 was the first step of the so-called British
Invasion of comics that eventually led to
Len Wein hiring Alan Moore.
Several accounts exist of how Len Wein came to decide that of the many English language comics writers of the world Alan Moore was the correct person to offer a failing book about a plant monster living in the Louisiana bayou. Perhaps ironically, Moore’s work on Captain Britain, a character Wein in fact worked on during its first gradual downward spiral in the late 1970s, is the one thing that nobody has ever suggested had the slightest impact in him getting the Swamp Thing job. Three other suggestions are regularly made. The first of these is Moore’s 2000 AD work. Certainly this was a respected publication, and Wein was familiar with it, having already poached Brian Bolland to illustrate Mike Barr’s Camelot 3000 and having worked with Dave Gibbons, who had already been in the early stages of some pitches with Moore to work on some then-disused properties, none of which had been formally submitted by the time Len Wein made his call to Alan Moore in May of 1983. But Moore’s contributions to 2000 AD at this point were a bunch of Future Shocks and part of Skizz, the latter of which was listed among Moore’s past credits when he was announced as the comic’s next writer. Although certainly good, this is not a body of work upon which Moore built his reputation in the UK, and it is in some ways difficult to imagine it impressing a US editor quite enough to make the leap that Len Wein did.
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Victory of the Icon 4

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At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction.  This is still the mainstream view today.  But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest.  For instance…

The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.

In the Second World War, many – probably most – ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but

the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war.  Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia. 

The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean.  He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.

Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.

The quotes are from Chris Harman’s, A People’s History of the World.…

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Outside the Government: Rendition

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It’s July 15th, 2011. LMFAO are at number one with “Party Rock Anthem.” In news, South Sudan becomes independent, and that’s about it. While on television, “Rendition.” And I should note, I did say posts would be short sometimes. 
One suspects that this, more than any other episode, is responsible for Miracle Day going down poorly. An opening episode with rough edges can be forgiven, but the obvious critique of “Rendition” – that it is an hour of people on a plane – is relatively solid. Sure, lots of other things go on, with Oswald, Esther, and Vera all getting meaty (if not entirely functional) plots, but the character that “The New World” established as the new lead and the two familiar characters are, indeed, on a plane all episode, dealing with a deeply silly plot. And the result is an episode that is spinning its wheels visibly.
There are structural reasons. A broad look at Miracle Day reveals that it is basically the structure of Children of Earth slowed down such that it’s a series of five two-parters. Each pair of episodes constitutes a distinct phase of the operation and take on the story, leading to a cliffhanger that moves to something else. On the whole, the degree to which this works generally increases over the course of the season – the episode five/six pair and the episode seven/eight pair are actually both very sharp. The problem really is early on, when it means that Miracle Day spends two hours getting to the point where its main cast is actually assembled and ready to start engaging with the plot. It’s a bad structural gaffe that in no way erases the later, more interesting things that Miracle Day, but that does get the entire thing off to a kind of rotten start.
Under the surface, however, there’s some genuinely interesting stuff going on. Or, at least, trying to. Esther may not be on a plane, but she ultimately spends all episode waiting for one to land. And Oswald is still misfiring badly. Most – indeed arguably all – of what works about “Rendition” are the scenes built around Vera Juarez, the one character who actually gets to explore the idea of the Miracle in a meaningful way. The scene in which she quickly and on the fly reworks the hospital’s triage system is absolutely wonderful, as is the image of a completely ad hoc team of people coming together chaotically to figure out how the world works now. On top of that, Vera is marvelously played by Arlene Tur, who unproblematically plays a hyper-competent badass while also feeling like an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances. She’s very much the season’s breakout character, and this episode, where she gets essentially all of the good plots, is a lot of why. How Tur hasn’t had a meaningful role in anything since this is completely beyond me. 

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t really the stuff that Torchwood is interested in.
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“So high I cannot feel the fire”: Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode

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You would think Dirty Pair would have a hard time topping that. I mean, we’ve been on a pretty unbelievable streak since episode 3, and that’s gotta be the pinnacle, right? No show, not even one this good, can keep that kind of momentum going for any longer, especially not after what we just saw. And, truth be known, “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” is more low-key than “Love is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!” was, though there’s more property damage this time if that’s your thing.

Yeah, but that doesn’t matter. No need to worry; this is another unabashed masterpiece.

And yet I have to be extremely careful with this one. This is a story that’s at least in part about the differences between Kei and Yuri, it’s altogether too easy to pass value judgments when doing this, and plenty of people have. Yuri is without question the most popular of the two Lovely Angels, especially in Japan, and I could see a loyal Yuri fan being royally pissed off at what happens here. In approaching this piece, I have hazards of my own to navigate: I’ve made a big deal in the past about how you can’t take one Angel without the other, but even I still have a deep and personal connection with one particular character here, and that definitely shapes not only how I read this episode, but how I react to Dirty Pair in general. I’ll elabourate on this later, but the short of it is my challenge for this post is to explain how this episode remains a classic and a prime example of Kei and Yuri’s undying and unbreakable bond that transcends metafiction while the story itself still quite clearly paints one of them doing something that on the surface seems irredeemable from the narrative’s perspective.

The dilemma Yuri faces in this episode is, in truth, uniquely hers. And it’s worth unpacking this extremely carefully, because the trap she falls into here is the exact same one Kaia tried to spring on Kei in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” and that (literally) blew up hilariously and spectacularly in his face. And it’s really, really hard to not let this reflect negatively on her: After all, she spends the majority of this story perfectly willing and eager to abandon her career and life up to this point, not to mention her actual life partner and soulmate, to run off with a boy she hasn’t seen since she was seven. And she’s utterly horrid to Kei, smugly brushing off her genuine concern and feelings of heartbreak by accusing her of being jealous. Kei even rightfully points out Yuri has no idea the kind of person Billy is now, in a nice callback to what we learned last week about how people change over time. Considering Kei just recently went through a similar experience and immediately saw through Kaia’s ham-fisted attempts to mobilize one of the corniest melodrama plots in the known universe and Yuri seems completely oblivious, this is absolutely gut-wrenching.…

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An Image Post

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Rushing to pack and just had a bunch of things blow up in my face in a frustrating and time consuming manner, so I really have no time to generate extra content for this week.

Accordingly, here’s a Frank Miller-drawn cover to Marvel Premiere in the period where they were reprinting the early Doctor Who Weekly strips. This contained parts 5-8 of The Iron Legion and a Steve Moore backup strip, and came out in November of 1980, the same week as the second part of Days of Future Past and the first part of State of Decay, and a week before the first appearance of Abelard Snazz in 2000 AD.

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Outside the Government: The New World

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It’s some time in early July, 2011. Let’s go with US transmission, since that is first transmission. So July 8th, 2011. Does that mean we should do Billboard charts for these? Yes, let’s. That means Adele is at number one with “Rolling in the Deep,” with Pitbull and Lady Gaga placing and showing. We are approximately one month into Doctor Who’s new “midseason break,” and from now on the break is going to feel like it takes forever. In news, News of the World is announced to be no more. On a spiritually related note, the Anthony Weiner photo scandal happened. And, the day this episode airs, the final Space Shuttle mission launches.
So, to start, we’re back on thrice weekly posting for the next couple of weeks. The next three, specifically – the final two episodes of Miracle Day, which are interspersed with the back half of Season Six, will go back to twice-a-week treatment, with Doctor Who on Monday and Torchwood on Wednesday. I am also pre-emptively doing away with all sense of what a post length is for Miracle Day. I’m covering it episode-by-episode, but if an episode only has a couple hundred words to write about, well, it’ll be a short post that day. 
All of this sounds rather grim, so let me also put in at the outset that I, at the time, rather liked Miracle Day. Of course, at the time I rather liked Torchwood Season Two as well, and that turned out poorly, so there’s certainly the possibility that this is all going to get very hostile and dour within a few entries, but for now, at least, my vague guess for where we’ll end up with Miracle Day is more or less redemptive. Equally, there’s no point in dodging the overall narrative here: after the stunning success of Children of Earth, Davies took Torchwood to America and promptly killed it. Miracle Day is a massive critical flop that did poorly enough that nobody really wanted to make more Torchwood after it was done. 
All of which said, “The New World” is a puzzling little thing. Much of why this is true is down to the circumstances of its production. Following the end of their time running Doctor Who, Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner were basically sent to the US with the intention being that they’d generate some high-profile American co-productions, starting with the fourth season of Torchwood. Whatever high hopes they started with ultimately faltered a bit – Gardner has managed to get a production career going on a number of b-list shows like Da Vinci’s Demons, but Davies ultimately left the US after Miracle Day, albeit for reasons entirely unrelated to that show’s success or failure. (His partner had brain cancer, and he returned to the UK to spend time with him and care for him, abandoning the show he was developing for Showtime in the process.) 
No small part of this was down to the choice of US co-producers, namely Starz.
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