Eruditorum Press

Christmas and Easter nihilists

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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“Love is the law, love under will.”: Love is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!

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An artifice is a kind of symbol, in that it is meant to stand in for something else. An artifice is a symbol that is caricatured to emphasize certain truth-facets of the thing it represents. A spectacle is a kind of artifice, but a spectacle, following Debord, is an artifice that abandons truth in favour of the hollow simulacrum of truth, that is, falseness. Vacuousness. However, an artifice that knows itself, indeed, even a spectacle that knows itself, is an artifice that invokes truth and, in so doing, thus invokes its own true self.

Goddesses and ideas live on within words.

The pipe organ towers over Clicky Goldjeff’s wedding. It is, in fact, a literal “tower”, one and the same with a skyscraper that serves as yet another defining feature of Elenore City’s skyline. It appears to rise from the Earth itself, the blinding concrete and steel as much a part of the world as any natural object. Clicky, the son of a massively powerful cruise line mogul, is being married off to at least a dozen women, with the hope this will keep his “wandering eyes” at bay. The woman at the organ is Joanca, and it’s in truth only her who Clicky has eyes for, and she feels the same way. Joanca proceeds to demonstrate this by firing blindly into the wedding reception as the male model waitstaff, dressed in skintight bunny uniforms, look on in stunned silence. Joanca shoots apart the chains with which Clicky was escorting his brides out by and the two elope together in a blimp.

Kei and Yuri are called in by the elder Goldjeff to retrieve his son, whom he claims has been kidnapped in exchange for a substantial chunk of his fortune. The girls feign interest in the mogul, as this is what male viewers of a female-led science fiction show expect to see and this is what Goldjeff’s secretary, who is giving them a tour of the company headquarters, expects them to say. In truth, Kei and Yuri are making small talk and do not like homewreckers, as they confide to each other, and by extension us, when it’s revealed the secretary is also Goldjeff’s mistress. When Kei and Yuri speak to each other in private, we know they are expressing their true selves, as this has long since become a regular motif of Dirty Pair. The girls only act infatuated when they’re with a potential client, and Kei only teases Yuri when someone else is watching. Or rather, when someone else is watching diegetically-Kei and Yuri never actually speak in complete privacy, because there is a camera on them at all times. This is, after all, a television show. But it’s a television show written and produced by Kei and Yuri, so they write these scenes in as a form of textual metacommentary. Graffiti on the fourth wall. The Angels do this as an act of love, because they love each other.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 28th, 2014)

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Got in quite late this evening, so not a lot of lead-up. Projects are all going just fine. Swamp Thing probably won’t quite be ready for Friday, but the first entry or two will be, so the omnibus will just be late. I’m thinking of waiting until the end of the chapter and making this omnibus a free promotional thing anyway, with only Kickstarter backers getting the in advance version this time. So we’ll see.

But discussion. So. First off, minor (but all publicly released and announced) spoilers for Series Eight of Doctor Who, but. A debut episode featuring the Paternoster Gang and called “Deep Breath.” With no other information whatsoever, what would you guess this episode is about?

I think it’s clear that they’re bringing back the Myrka, personally.…

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Someone Fabulous Like Me (The Last War in Albion Part 50: Alan Moore’s Image)

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This is the tenth and final part of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrapped his Captain Britain run with a characteristically ambiguous story full of ambivalence over the nature of Britain itself. After a few installments written and drawn by Alan Davis, Marvel UK launched a solo series for the character.


“I always new I was a special, lovelier-than-average person. It only makes sense that Jesus would turn out to be someone fabulous like me.” – Alan Moore
Three months later, Marvel UK relaunched Captain Britain as a comic in its own right, with the idea being that the comic would also get US distribution and feature exclusively UK-created material. In practice this meant that Captain Britain was accompanied by a reprint of Steve Moore’s Abslom Daak strips from Doctor Who Weekly, a reprint of the first Night Raven strip from Hulk Comic, and a strip featuring the Free-Fall Warriors, obscure backing characters from a Doctor Who Monthly strip written by Steve Parkhouse.
Figure 369: Alan Davis revisits a famous
panel. (Written by Jamie Delano, in
Captain Britain #2, 1985)
This time around Captain Britain was written, on Moore’s recommendation, by Jamie Delano, who had impressed writing the Night Raven text pieces after Moore gave them up. Delano’s run faces the exact problem one would expect following Moore’s, which is that there’s not a lot to work with besides bringing back Moore’s own concepts. Sure enough the Crazy Gang appears, as set up by Davis, allowing Davis to recycle his best panel from Marvel Super-Heroes #377, followed by a version of the Special Executive from a hundred years earlier than the original called Gatecrasher’s Technet. By Davis’s account, it was not an especially happy collaboration – Davis described Delano’s scripts as “dark, strange, cerebral,” tales that “didn’t fit in the super hero genre,” and claims that he “was the senior partner, initially supplying plots and long story, then mutilating and reworking Jamie’s scripts,” which led to Delano departing the title after only thirteen issues. Davis, by this time, had found work in the US and was largely uninterested in continuing to work for Marvel UK wages anyway, leading to the demise of the series after its fourteenth issue, a conclusion written and drawn by Davis. After that the character reverted to the American superhero he always in reality was, making a couple of appearances in Claremont-penned X-Men annuals and a suitably dreadful two issue appearance in Captain America before Claremont and Davis used him along with some X-Men castoffs to create Excalibur, a supposedly British superhero team that was written and published in the United States and consisted 80% of characters created by Americans, a move that essentially brought the character full circle a decade after his creation.
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“A Hard Day’s Night”: Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys

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As a genre, science fiction, especially science fiction that is in some way descended from Golden Age Hard SF, seems largely focused on the machinations and inner workings of giant, authoritarian, monolithic institutions. Be it some futuristic extrapolation of the army, the navy, the intelligence sector, the police or huge, sprawling technoscience corporations, science fiction seems one the whole unsettlingly comfortable with mulling about the halls of power, likely owing to the genre’s futurist roots. Remember, James Blish, a member of the influential group of sci-fi writers the Futurians and the guy who novelized the original Star Trek series, thought, somewhat bewilderingly, that Pfizer would usher in a Trotskyist revolution so long as we pledged support to them and bought their products.

This is, suffice to say, equal parts untenable and unacceptable.

There are exceptions to this trend. The first two Alien movies, arguably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, bits and pieces of Doctor Who at various points in its history. Star Trek itself tends to go back and forth on this: Though the point of the franchise is very much that the Federation is anything but an unambiguous group of good guys promoting a utopia and how our crews operate under that knowledge, this fact seems to have been lost on a worrying number of creative teams and this isn’t as emphasized as frequently or as strongly as it really needed to be. Raumpatrouille Orion is better, though that crew is still a bunch of ace pilots. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was anything but this, but invoking Nausicaä in this case does feel a bit like bringing a nuclear bomb to a knife fight.

Then there is, of course, Dirty Pair. Kei and Yuri may job for the 3WA and United Galactica, but they have a much higher calling than that and, by virtue of being professional wrestlers operating by cyberpunk logic and the way this show has been portraying them, we’re very much meant to read them as working class characters. Even so, the series hasn’t done a story overtly about this yet, and this is what “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” is about.

In some ways, this episode is “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” for Kei, with the Angels taking a job that puts them in contact with a childhood friend of hers who gets mixed up in the mission in some form. What this allows us to do is get a rare look at Kei’s backstory: Though the Sunrise anime and the light novels are of course two separate continuities, we can assume Yuri’s backstory is roughly similar here to what was described in “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”. In this episode though, we learn that our suspicions regarding Kei were correct: She grew up on a more urbanized planet and probably lived off of the streets. After Kaia, the leader of a fleet of space pirates who are after the precious gem the girls are tasked with escorting, introduces himself as someone from Kei’s childhood, Yuri even openly supposes he’s one of Kei’s “delinquent friends” from “back in the day”.…

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This Week in Comics (June 25th, 2014)

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Experimenting with tone a bit on these, for a couple of reasons, most of which are ones of trying to find a purpose for these while also enjoying doing them quite a bit. For the first few I was leaning towards comics evangelism, since I know contemporary comics are a niche medium. But someone asked me for some recommendations for good comics from the last few years the other day, and I had to admit, there weren’t that many that I enjoyed in a “tell other people to check them out” sort of way – more a cautious “if this is your sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it all right” way that is all too true for a lot of comics.

Which is the other odd thing in writing about contemporary comics, which is that their sales are pathetic. For fun comparison, this week’s pick of the week sold 34,839 copies last month. Its runner up, the mega-successful Saga, sold 55,442. The top-selling comic of last month was the first issue of Original Sin, all the way up at 147,045. These numbers are expanded a bit by digital, but honestly, not by much.

Comics, in other words, really are a niche medium, and while it’s worth pointing to the good bits that shouldn’t be as niche as they are, when we are talking about Underwear Fetishists Punch People #Whatever or Countably Infinite Crisis on Fifty-Two Sins #0.437 Deadpool vs Batferret the truth is that this is an idiosyncratic paraphilia that we should go ahead and be honest about. Which is to say, since we’re largely discussing my embarrassing Marvel habit, let’s all acknowledge that anyone who gives a shit about how the latest issue of Guardians of the Galaxy is can therefore be assumed to be a fetishist as well.

Which is to say that I’m going to stop pretending that I’ll drop a comic just because it’s terrible every month. I don’t drop the equivalently priced Starbucks mochas just because they are essentially sugar weaponized into a slow-acting poison. I’m much more interested in this being a thoroughly partisan, modern equivalent to a fanzine column that will simply mouth off recklessly about where mainstream American comics should be looking at any given instant. Because with an audience as small as comics have, the fanzine is actually finally appropriate, as opposed to when they started and represented a tiny and irrelevant minority of the audience.

All of which said, they’ll be taking a week off next week, as I will be out of town and will not be able to get to the shop. Looking at what’s coming out, it’ll be Uber or Lazarus fighting for Pick of the Week (which will always be something I can recommend with a straight face that someone who is not me read), with Rocket Racoon and Moon Knight the dark horse candidates. Though if it’s a crap week, I could always pick Miracleman. Even though the really interesting issue of that is going to be in August.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 80 (Grey’s Anatomy)

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On October 6th, 2011, the American medical soap Grey’s Anatomy aired the fourth episode of its eighth season, entitled “What is it About Men.” The conceit of the episode was straightforward and clever: Grey’s Anatomy, normally a show dominated by and framed in terms of its female characters, did an episode in which the female characters were all pushed to the periphery and the focus was instead on the male characters. The voiceover narration that clumsily sets up the theme for a given episode, instead of, as normal, going to title character Meredith Grey or, as occasionally the case, going to a single other character, is instead split among all of the male characters, who opine about masculinity. 
This is, to be clear, a genuinely interesting take. Grey’s Anatomy is a heavily female-driven show, both for better and for worse. It passes the Bechdel test essentially every episode, which makes this episode’s unrepentant flunking of it an appreciably interesting thing. Because it is not as though this is suddenly an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that is envisioned as being “for” a male audience. This is still clearly conceptualized as women’s television, which is problematic in a number of ways, not least of all its existence as a category. All the same, the effect of “What is it About Men” is still interesting and worth highlighting: it provides a relatively rare cultural moment of the female gaze being applied to male bodies. It is first and foremost an episode about defining what masculinity is, and, crucially, defining a vision of masculinity that is desirable to women.
All of which is lead-up for the reason we care, which is that one of the major plot lines of “What is it About Men” concerns a crush at a sci-fi convention when five hundred people rushed the doors to try to be one of the first fifteen through them and thus to win a limited edition bit of Doctor Who merchandise (a plastic TARDIS signed by Russell T Davies). We should perhaps, because we are all anoraks of the most pathological sense, note that the actual TARDIS displayed was a perfectly ordinary and easily purchased toy that uses an electromagnet to make the TARDIS hover and spin over a base, and that the toy in question is clearly from the Moffat era, making the Davies signature an inexplicable anachronism. It is, in other words, seemingly written by someone who has looked Doctor Who up on the Internet as opposed to by a committed fan. (The episode also lands slightly astray on A Song of Ice and Fire, declaring a character to look like a Dothraki princess when that is at best a puzzling description, and then blithely overlooking some deeply inappropriate and stalkerish behavior in the course of that plot line. But then, valorizing completely inappropriate and abusive male behavior actually demonstrates a fairly thorough understanding of that fandom, doesn’t it?)
Nevertheless, there’s something of a cultural watershed here. If you told an American Doctor Who fan on October 6th, 2001 that a major piece of American network television would use the word “TARDIS” multiple times, it would have been unthinkable.
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