Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

Avery the Pirate (The Curse of the Black Spot)

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I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU
It’s May 7th, 2011. LMFAO is at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” with Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Bruno Mars, and domestic abuser Chris Brown also charting. In news, Osama bin Laden has been killed, as has the Liberal Democrat proposal for the alternative vote. While on television, it’s The Curse of the Black Spot. 
Let’s start by raining on people’s parade, shall we? This is not a prequel to The Smugglers. Really, it’s not. The Smugglers specifies Avery’s ship as being the Black Albatross. The prequel to Curse of the Black Spot, meanwhile, sets it on the correct historical ship for Henry Avery (more properly Henry Every, it appears) to have been on, the Fancy. More broadly, Curse of the Black Spot depicts all of Avery’s treasure being thrown into the sea, which would make it difficult for it to then be found in Cornwall. And since Curse of the Black Spot is universally recognized as a Doctor Who story that contains no plot holes or errors whatsoever and is indeed a beloved story that is universally praised in much the same way that Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks is, these are clearly conclusive proof that it is not in fact a prequel to The Smugglers.
In addition to embodying narrative consistency, The Curse of the Black Spot marks the moment where Doctor Who makes a direct response to Downton Abbey, in this case by casting its lead actor. The analogy is not entirely straightforward, to be certain. Downton Abbey is set, at least at this point in its history, at an Edwardian manor. Curse of the Black Spot is set on a 17th century pirate ship. 
And yet both texts ultimately focus on the intersection of noble duty and money within the context of British identity. When Hugh Bonneville is playing Robert, Earl of Grantham, he plays the noble patrician whose paternal sense of duty is presented as the last beautiful glimmer of a fading light. Here, as Henry Avery, he inverts it straightforwardly: he is the noble man gone wrong – an officer and a gentleman who has turned pirate. 
What this is not, at least, is a commentary on the particular era or history that Downton Abbey explores. This is obvious, really – it’s not as though Stephen Thompson was writing the part for Bonneville. He was given the brief “pirates” and picked a specific historical figure because he was intrigued by the broad strokes of his biography. Short of the specific casting decision that took place, there’s not really a way to spin that as a commentary on Downton Abbey. But after the decision, when it became Doctor Who casting the star of the new biggest show on television, the connection became inevitable.
So what we have is in effect a visibly authorless text. Nobody consciously made The Curse of the Black Spot as a response to Downton Abbey, and yet the aggregate of individual decisions made it impossible for Curse of the Black Spot o be anything other than a commentary on Downton Abbey.
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Sensor Scan: Coast to Coast AM

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The Long 1980s are usually seen as the era when the sweeping hegemonic counter-revolution came in and tore down all the radical mainstream institutions and media artefacts people had spent the Long 1960s putting into place. And there is an extent to which this is true, and indisputable. However, by virtue of being in many ways the high water mark of what we now call “traditional” or “old” media, the Long 1980s were also the period where people working in those structures pushed them to their limits and beyond. People have something to say in every era, and there will always be those who call for positive change, and they will make their voices heard in one way or another.

So, put another way, even though the Long 1980s can be argued to be the point where large-scale media consolidated itself to be firmly and inexorably a part of the authoritarian establishment, there were just as many people who freely acknowledged this, yet continued to use their master’s tools against them. Television may have become the boot of the oppressor, but, whether you think it was successful or not, Star Trek: The Next Generation certainly strove to be a force for material social progress, as did its sci-fi colleague across the pond at the BBC (but we’ll get to that soon enough). You can say the cinema of the 1980s swept away the auteur, experimentalist cinema of the 1970s, but there were still films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Thanks to Nintendo, the video game industry was as energized, inspired and full of life as it would ever be. And, the Long 1980s were really the last time pop music was allowed to be openly radical and critical of the status quo without making a ton of concessions, with people like Siouxsie Sioux, Laurie Anderson and Nena topping the pop charts.

And on the airwaves, on the one hand you had most of the medium being co-opted into the neoconservative revolution leading to a profound shift in the essence of talk radio. On the other, you had Coast to Coast AM.

Though the pioneer of paranormal radio is widely accepted to be Long John Nebel, who for years ran a wildly successful talk show out of New York that dabbled in the supernatural and conspiracy theories, the archetypical, definitive example of the genre really can only be Coast to Coast AM hosted by Art Bell, and later George Noory. Like Nebel before him, Bell was a tremendous showman, bringing a fire and zeal to his performance and quickly gained fame and recognition for his dogged pursuit of a huge swath of different topics, from the expected paranormal gossip and hypothesizing to quantum physics, theology, philosophy, science fiction and flagrantly radical political topics from all angles of the spectrum (which was an early indication of both the strengths and weaknesses of Coast‘s overall impact in my opinion).…

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Street Corner, Two in the Morning, Getting a Taxi Home (The Wedding of River Song)

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In this image, Clara is disguised as an empty room. 

It’s October 1st, 2011. Dappy is at number one with “No Regrets,” while Maroon Five, One Direction, and several bands without numbers in their names also chart. It is also the hottest October day in history, and the day in which New York City police arrested seven hundred people during Occupy Wall Street. And it’s the day Doctor Who’s sixth season wraps with The Wedding of River Song.

The obligatory introduction out of the way, let’s start where we left off. This is, after all, an episode about answering questions. So let’s just give the answer. “By adding another twist to the A Good Man Goes to War/Let’s Kill Hitler subversion of the epic and having River heal the Doctor.” That, at least, is what the plan seems to be. We’ve already discussed the nightmare that production on Season Six turned into back with Let’s Kill Hitler, and so we don’t need to go into it here, but suffice it to say that the distinction between Moffat’s first draft and the shooting script is in this case largely theoretical. As a result, like Let’s Kill Hitler, this is an episode of television in dire need of fine tuning. To quote that post, “it’s not so much that the episode does the wrong things as it is that the episode doesn’t quite put the emphasis on the right beats.”

But in this case there’s something more. Almost all of the major storyline of the season is resolved at its center, with the revelation of who River Song is. All that’s really left for The Wedding of River Song to do is to square away how the Doctor cheats death. But this is not actually a particularly interesting question, simply because there are so many ways to do it. On top of that, the out of order nature of the season means that the whole thing is necessarily a bit of a shaggy dog story. The big climax of this arc already happened in the season premiere. All that’s left to do is to pull back the curtain and reveal how the trick was accomplished, which is by definition the least interesting part.
So yes, ultimately the entire mystery of the season is “the Doctor gets away by hiding in a shapeshifting robot.” This is not a particularly effective plot beat, and the fact that it’s placed so close to the end of the episode makes it bear more weight than it can possibly support, but again, as we’ve seen, with these two episodes in particular it’s important to try to discern intent, not so much in order to argue that the episodes are secret works of genius, but rather as a sort of archeological process to uncover what would have happened if Moffat had actually had the chance to revise any of this. 
Clearly the actual key beat of the story – the actual climax upon which everything hinges – is the scene atop the pyramid.
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Sensor Scan: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

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My house sits on a small meadow, at different tiers owing to the craggy glacial deposits that make up this part of the country. The lower portion of the meadow is flat, tapering off from its hilly upper portions and ending in a small pond we used to swim in a lot when I was younger. We don’t swim in it anymore though because a series of powerful rainstorms followed by two consecutive hurricanes in recent years, caused the pond to overflow its banks, kickstarting the process of ecological succession. It’s now slowly transforming into a wetland. The children of the previous owners liked baseball a lot, and used to use this part of the meadow as a baseball field. In fact, you can still see the small piece of shale they would use as home plate, though each year it vanishes further and further into the ground as the grass grows around it. The meadow is surrounded on all sides by mixed broadleaf forest, and on certain summer days in June the wind hits the deciduous trees at such an angle that the sunlight is reflected brilliantly off the bottoms of the leaves. If you were to look up on those days, you would see towering, rolling structures of cloud drifting by in the endlessly deep blue summer sky, and might catch a glimpse of a distant plane travelling far overhead.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a manga. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is somebody’s magnum opus. This is a life’s work collected to chronicle one person’s metamorphosis and growth over the course of a career. The piece we get to look at today is but a tiny, tiny fraction of an indescribably, incomparably sprawling work of philosophy and emotion (as all works of art ultimately are, but this one embodies this truth better than others), and yet even so it still manages to be a crystal clear, defining statement by and about its creator, even if it only catches him at one specific moment in time.
Where can I even begin talking about something like this? I suppose with Nausicaä’s medium, Hayao Miyazaki, an artist who is as acclaimed and beloved as he is misunderstood. Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli are major players in what’s often called the Renaissance Age of Animation: Roughly lasting the period between 1985 and 1995 (though people do squabble over the start and end dates), this period saw animation as a medium almost completely casting aside the negative connotations it had accumulated, however fairly or unfairly that may be, over the course of the Long 1960s. For the first time since the 1940s, critics began to sit up and take notice of the work animators were doing and cartoons began to be taken seriously as legitimate forms of creative expression for what was, in retrospect, probably the last time.
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Saturday Waffling (June 7th, 2014)

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Hello everyone. I’m out of town for the weekend and checking the blog minimally, so will keep this brief.

So, many of us have seen the 50th Anniversary poll from Doctor Who Magazine. For those who haven’t, TheSmilingStallionInn gave the top and bottom 40 in a comment over here.

I cannot imagine that this is not enough to fuel a solid weekend’s discussion. So. Thoughts?…

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Silky, Luminous Cobwebs (The Last War in Albion Part 47: Captain Britain in The Daredevils, Psychedelia and Marvel Comics)

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This is the seventh of ten parts 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: After killing and resurrecting Captain Britain, Moore did a series of stories engaging with various points regarding the character’s past.
“These strands… you’re made of them too… everything’s made of them… silky, luminous cobwebs…” – Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #34
Figure 347: Wardog and Zeitgeist, of the
Special Executive, made their first
appearance in an early Moore strip for
Doctor Who Monthly (From “Black Sun
Rising,” written by Alan Moore, art by
David Lloyd, in Doctor Who Monthly
#57, 1981)
This, however, is just an extreme case of a tendency that Moore displays throughout his Captain Britain run. It is not that he doesn’t introduce new characters. But all of them are clear extensions of characters that predated his run. The Fury is a solid enough villain, but he’s also created to explain where the superheroes of the alternate earth went. Captain UK, one of those superheroes, was mentioned in passing by Dave Thorpe back in Marvel Super-Heroes #379, and her husband, Miracleman, is a barely veiled Marvelman. Vixen herself may be an original character, but Vixen’s gang appeared all the way back in Captain Britain #3. Even the Special Executive are borrowed from Moore’s earlier Doctor Who work. Moore’s Captain Britain is populated entirely out of the existing comic book world of Captain Britain. In this regard, Moore manages to largely sidestep the question of what Britain is. Britain isn’t even depicted in this comic – certainly it takes several steps backwards from the overt political content of the Thorpe era. The Britain of which Braddock is Captain is, in other words, firmly a comic book realm and not a real one. As Moore puts it, “he’s pure Marvel! He’s there in the Marvel Universe with a billion other super characters all around him. You can’t get that same realism.”
In many ways, then, Alan Davis’s account of things is correct in the broad strokes, but incomplete. Moore ramps down the politics and up the cosmic weirdness, yes, but only as part of ramping up the general superheroishness of the strip. In this regard he is closer to Thorpe’s approach than he lets on: where Thorpe attempted to ramp up both politics and his “peculiarly British surrealty,” Moore opts only for the latter. It is tempting to accuse this approach of being apolitical – a dangerous accusation when dealing with an intrinsically nationalist symbol like Captain Britain.
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Sensor Scan: Reading Rainbow

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Talk about Roots all you want, it definitely deserves it. But from my perspective, if you want to get a handle on LeVar Burton’s personality, style of acting and overall legacy, there’s only one place to look.

It doesn’t get commented on anywhere near enough that Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation were on the air at the same time. Having started Reading Rainbow four years before being cast as Geordi La Forge and continuing an additional twelve years after the television voyages of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D came to an end, Star Trek was LeVar’s night job, quite literally so in some cases. This makes him somewhat unusual among the Trek pantheon, and also means that between 1987 and 1994 he was arguably one of the busiest, most hardworking people in Hollywood. And consider what that was like for an entire generation that was at the age where they would have been familiar with both shows: Imagine how cool it felt to see one of your childhood heroes in costume onboard the Starship Enterprise on one of the highest rated and most talked about shows of the time.

One has to wonder if there wasn’t some element of design in this. Patrick Stewart’s later phenomenal acclaim tends to eclipse the historical reality that he was by no means intended to be the main attraction of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the beginning. He was hired because he’s a gobsmackingly brilliant thespian, of course, but, just like everyone else on that cast, he was an unknown in the United States and any fame he came to was the *result* of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s success, not a cause of it. Well…When I say everyone was an unknown, I mean everyone except LeVar Burton, that is…who *was* already well established thanks to both Roots and a beloved and award-winning children’s television programme he hosted. Yes, believe it or not, LeVar Burton was the one bit of celebrity casting Paramount allowed themselves, was wildly more known and popular than any of his co-stars at the time, and was likely somebody who was the main draw for Star Trek: The Next Generation to a lot of people in its early days, be they skeptical OG Trekkers, mainstream audiences, or kids who were fans of Reading Rainbow.

I know he was for me. I was one of those people who came to Star Trek through LeVar Burton, being a big admirer of his other work. In fact, the very first piece of Star Trek merchandise I ever got was the reissued Wave 1 Playmates Geordi La Forge figure. That’s not to say there weren’t other things that caught my attention about Star Trek: The Next Generation, there definitely were, but LeVar was a *major* contributing factor in my becoming a fan and as a result, when I first started watching, Geordi was the character I focused on almost exclusively. I mean, I liked everyone else just fine: I enjoyed the sense of dignity Patrick Stewart exuded as Captain Picard and I really enjoyed how dynamic and commanding Jonathan Frakes was as Commander Riker.…

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The Week In Comic Books (May 5th, 2014)

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No idea if this will become a regular feature. It very well may not. Certainly there are numerous potential issues such as “I don’t have time for this sort of thing” and “I don’t always manage to get my comics on a Wednesday making the Thursday position of this a bit dodgy.” But hey, let’s see what we can do. Here’s what I picked up at the shop today, with some arbitrary letter grades tacked onto the end. All titles are links to where you can grab the issues at Comixology if you’re interested in reading.

Avengers World #7

Think I’m dropping this, actually, which makes it a bit of a sad note to lead on. I started pulling it because it was nominally tied to the rest of the Jonathan Hickman Avengers arc, but Hickman seems to not be writing the book anymore, and I’d be a liar if I said I had any idea what was going on in it. It’s been the thing I leave for last every week it’s come out, and I’m just not feeling it. This time we’re introducing a team of Chinese superheroes, it seems, which has been done before. And one of them is modeled on Su Wukong, because God forbid anyone ever draw on another part of Chinese mythology. Boring. C-

Cyclops #2

Greg Rucka is a favorite, with a knack for character-driven stories, nice pacing, good dialogue, and books that are generally a good time whether they’re experimental or straightforward. This time it’s a father/son roadtrip through space, with the father apparently hiding a few secrets. Good. Fun. Enjoyable. As of issue #2 it’s still got plenty of cards it’s keeping to its chest, so it’s tough to comment too much, but this seems set to be a fun ride. B+

Iron Man #27

I’ve said elsewhere that Kieron Gillen’s run on Iron Man feels like some squandered potential to me, and this fits the bill. I love bits of it: the left-wing journalist, the Silk Road reference. But I consistently feel like the book would be better if it went more towards its Warren Ellis instincts and less towards its mainstream superhero instincts. The last page reveal is flaccid. It reads well enough, but there’s no spark here. I find myself glad Gillen is off the book soon, not so much because I’m eager to see what someone else does with it as because I’m eager to see him doing something else. B-

Loki: Agent of Asgard #5

First of all, let’s back up and say that Al Ewing is absolutely killing on this book. Given a ludicrous challenge of following Gillen’s absolutely iconic run on the character, he’s been keeping most of what Gillen did well while making the book his own. There’s a lot of nice buildup and payoff here, and I’m eager to see the consequences of the climax play out. Really hoping the book doesn’t lose momentum taking two months off to do a big crossover.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Writer’s Tale

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On 1 Mar 2014, at 21:01, Philip Sandifer wrote:
Ben –
So, cards on the table, I have no idea what I’m doing. Honestly, this just seemed like a neat idea. “I know Ben Cook’s a fan, I wonder if he’d like to help with the Writer’s Tale entry so it can mirror the structure of The Writer’s Tale.” But from there I’m not sure where to go. I have a vague set of themes and ideas I’d love to wander by, and stuff I’m mostly unconcerned about (if I ever ask “what’s Russell like?”, please just spike the whole project), but it’s all in the Maybe, as the book would put it.
Why don’t I start with my experience of the book? I paid money for it during my last semester in grad school, which was not a point in my life when I had a lot of money to pay for a hardcover. But I kept hearing good things about it… I’m not even sure where from, since I wasn’t hugely active in fandom. But it sounded fascinating, and I remember just losing an entire workday to it. I absolutely inhaled the book, and it was the exact book I needed then. I was over the immediate shock of my wife leaving me and my father’s stroke, but I was living alone and trying to finish up a PhD. And I remember an overwhelming sense of just… getting it. Of reading this weird and confessional document where Russell (it’s so weird to go with a first name there, incidentally, but it seems appropriate for this book) is at times visibly laying out more than he’s comfortable with. And of, over and over again, either thinking “yes, that is exactly what working long hours on a creative project in solitude feels like” or “yes, that’s an excellent explanation of why that is or isn’t a good idea,” both of which are thoughts that came fairly naturally to someone in the final stages of a dissertation for a PhD in English.
And I’ve never really talked about the book with anyone. To the point where I’m not sure if my romance with it is normal or not. I mean, it’s obviously a well-loved and successful book, but I’ve always wondered why other people love it, since my love for it is so intimately tied to when I read it. And people who spend a year holed up in their apartment alone more nights than not and working feverishly on a book that only a half-dozen people are ever going to read aren’t normal. So I’ve always been afraid that other people are really enamored with the behind-the-scenes gossip or the writing advice, which is good, but was never the heart and soul of the book I loved.
What about you, though? You must have realized you were working on something absolutely golden well before the end of it. What was that like? Especially as a massive fan. I mean, you’d obviously been close to production before because you were on DWM, but you were seeing pages before Julie Gardner or anybody.
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Sensor Scan: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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If I need to explain to you who Mister Rogers is, this can only mean one of two things. You either hail from somewhere that isn’t North America or Hawai’i or something has gone badly wrong with the universe. Because the only thing that needs to be said about Mister Rogers is that he was one of the greatest television personalities, if not one of the greatest human beings period, to ever live. For almost forty years, he asked generations of children and children-at-heart to be his television neighbour for a half an hour each day. And, anyone who took him up on his invitation knew that for that time they would feel welcome and safe and enjoy sharing the company of someone who truly cared about them and was interested in what they were thinking and feeling.

The more pertinent question is why now? I could have looked at Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at literally any point in this project, that’s how important Fred Rogers was to our collective memory and for how long. But I wanted to take just a little time to talk about him, his show and his legacy here, in the mid-1980s for a number of reasons, one of which is because in an era so deliberately and self-consciously steeped in artifice and performativity, it’s important to keep in mind that all this spectacle isn’t just for its own sake. There are real, genuine truths we’re trying to talk about here, even if we’re approaching them from odd angles, and we must never lose sight of that. Performativity and artifice do not equate to vacuousness and falseness, and nobody understood that better than Mister Rogers.

The Neighborhood only ever existed on TV, and Mister Rogers was well aware of this. There’s a reason he always called us “television neighbors”, after all. It clearly operates by televisual logic, and most certainly hails from a time when television was seen as disposable theatre. The show always opened with an aerial pan over the Neighborhood, which is very obviously conveyed through miniatures.We then cut to inside Mister Rogers’ house, where he hasn’t arrived yet. Then we pan over to the front door, and Mister Rogers comes in singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, taking off his coat and shoes and putting on his sweater and sneakers. Likewise, the show always ended by doing the opposite, panning away from Mister Rogers’ house and retracing the steps in reverse.

I always got the sense that the show’s intro was meant to depict each one of us coming to the Neighborhood from different places: Mister Rogers probably hitched a ride on the Neighborhood Trolley, which you can always see making the rounds in the street, and then walked the rest of the way. As for us, perhaps we flew because we exist on the other end of the television and can travel via camera angles. Each episode then is a different visit to the Neighborhood, which is a place we all come to from somewhere else at the same time, even Mister Rogers himself.…

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