Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

“…through death and life together”: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

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Let’s be perfectly honest here. This movie exists for only one reason, and it’s obviously well aware of this itself as well.

So, right away we have a situation that’s manifestly different than last time. To the point where Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn’t really even a film it’s possible to critique: It’s quite clearly not trying to be anything other than what it self-evidently is: Episode two of what’s become an unfolding serial. I’ll return to this theme a bit later, but first of all, there’s a curious observation I’d like to make here: If Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a B-movie that didn’t want to admit it was a B-movie, this film, by contrast and inversely, is a B-movie that doesn’t actively try to punch above its weight class, but somehow succeeds in doing so anyway. Yes, against all odds, I’d have to say this is the best Star Trek movie we’ve looked at to date.

Part of this is that, unlike the previous two efforts, this movie actually feels like Star Trek. From Kirk’s opening Captain’s Log recap of the events of the last film’s climax and aftermath, there’s a heart to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock utterly absent in either of its predecessors. Kirk isn’t just blatantly stating emotions and themes like he’s reading from the SparkNotes version of the script, he actually seems like he’s experiencing those emotions and attempting to deal with them. Kirk, and everyone else in this movie, feels like an actual character this time instead of a mouthpiece spouting Big Important Themes. It helps that the dialogue is considerably more naturalistic this time around, but I think what really salvages the show here are the actors themselves, who seem visibly energized in a way I don’t really think I’ve ever seen this cast behave before. Sure, they’ve conveyed loyalty, friendship and camaraderie and all those Important Star Trek Buzzwords in the past, but this is the first time they seem to openly embody and embrace them (or at least the first time since Star Trek: The New Voyages) and this gets written back into their performances: There’s a genuine, heartfelt sense that they finally understand why what they’re doing is so important.

Which is only fitting considering this movie is ultimately about the fact Star Trek is a beloved thing important to many people. The reaction to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan supposedly was what convinced Leonard Nimoy to come out of retirement again, and request the directorial gig on this film to boot (Nimoy, by the way, is a thoroughly capable director, makes an utterly more visually interesting film than young Nicholas Meyer did and paves the way for future Star Trek actors to make the switch to behind-the-camera work too). This translates to a genuine sense of fun in front of the camera, with each of the principle characters getting plenty of moments to be funny or do something cool (Uhura’s scene in the transporter room is an absolute moment of triumph: Seriously, you want to just cheer for Nichelle Nichols).…

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On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties.  Six if you include the Conservatives.  Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats.  I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party.  So that’s seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right – none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus – and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour… which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers.  Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.

That’s democracy for you.  That’s apparently the best we can do.  That’s the freedom I’m supposed to relish and celebrate.  What a barren wasteland of horror.  What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise.  This is politics, supposedly.  This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice.  This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.

But, I’m going to vote.  Not because I want to.  Not because I like any of the ‘options’.  I don’t want to.  I don’t like any of the ‘options’.  I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me.  I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper.  I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill.  But it has to be done.

I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine.  I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc.  I don’t expect my vote against them will change anything.  Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda.  Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements.  Roll on the day.  But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.

I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. …

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Saturday Waffling (May 17th, 2014)

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Morning everyone. It’s been your sort of standard issue busy week around here – lots of Kickstarter stuff and e-mails to reply to and a side of writing. Chapter Three of the secret Doctor Who Project is somewhere just shy of 2000 words, and Chapter Eight of Last War in Albion is just north of 5,000, and currently very fun, and also a complete mess where I have little to no idea of the overall shape other than “it’s probably chronological” and nothing like a guess on how long will be. But I get to type “Nukeface” a fair amount, and I have to admit, that’s kinda fun. Plus, the obligatory Blake section comes absolutely gift-wrapped for this one, and that’s always nice. 

Meanwhile, it’s just starting to get warm enough that I’m looking longingly at the air conditioners. Actually, the temperature is still fine, but only if I leave the windows open, and the humidity has been going nuts, so it’s just that ghastly time of year where no matter what, you feel slightly sticky at all times. Which is to say, summer is icumen in.
Any fun summer plans, anyone? I’ve somehow acquired the brilliant plan of “go to Phoenix for a week at the beginning of July,” which will be an entertaining exercise in seeing just how much of my ability to endure the horrors of Florida summers has completely evaporated over the last four years. 
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Outside the Government: Vault of Secrets

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The Kickstarter may have made enough to get through The Sarah Jane Adventures thrice weekly, but there’s still a ways to go before Torchwood: Miracle Day gets the same treatment. And we’re just $1200 away from securing Volume Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Plus, I’ve just posted the second chapter of the secret Doctor Who thing, which is, if I may say so myself, quite fantastic and worth throwing a few bucks at. Just fifteen days before the window to see it serialized as I write it closes forever.  All of which is to say that if you’ve not pledged yet, now’s a lovely time to. 
It’s October 18th, 2010. Cee Lo Green continues to be at number one with the charmingly euphemistic “Forget You,” while Bruno Mars, Labrinth, and Duck Sauce also chart. In news, John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, completes a takeover of Liverpool FC. There’s a bunch of back and forth over Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in which it’s overturned and then returned a couple times in court cases, including, notably, a day in which President Obama simultaneously appeals a ruling declaring it unconstitutional and declares that the policy will end during his presidency. And Mary MacKillop becomes the first Australian saint. 
While on television, it’s The Vault of Secrets. In any other season, this would have been the season premiere. There’s a formula, after all – every season kicks off with a story featuring a monster borrowed from Doctor Who. Sure, this, depending on your perspective, either breaks the formula by hinging on the return of a monster from The Sarah Jane Adventures instead or stretches it to its breaking point by grabbing the android men in black from Dreamland, but it’s still recognizably filling that slot: the story focused on drawing from The Sarah Jane Adventures’ mythology – both its own and what it borrows from its parent series.
But by shedding both the premiere status and the easily promoted monster The Vault of Secrets changes the formula slightly. In terms of the arc of Season Four, this is unambiguously a good thing. The Nightmare Man was the outright perfect story for Luke to depart with, and focusing on making sure that departure works instead of opening with something that’s easy to make trailers about is both brave and smart. Even if The Vault of Secrets had featured Sarah Jane, Rani, and Clyde encountering a Silurian, it still would be, on the whole, the better decision to open with The Nightmare Man.
But that does raise something of a question: why isn’t this story a Silurians story? Or something else from the Doctor Who vaults – your choice, really. It’s obviously not that this season is lacking in references to Doctor Who – heck, this story opens with a wonderfully cheeky nod to The Pyramids of Mars. But equally, there is a real shift in the nature of things when The Sarah Jane Adventures starts drawing on its own past instead of leaning on Doctor Who.
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Myriad Universes: The Wormhole Connection

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I don’t even need to come up with a Pop Christian reading. Just look at it.

It’s important not to understate the importance of the launch of DC’s first Star Trek comic line. For the entirety of its existence up to this point (and not counting the handful of US and UK newspaper comic strips that cropped up in the 1970s), Star Trek had been represented in sequential art form by Gold Key, a company basically run by about four people and with the somewhat dubious reputation of putting out all the licensed tie-in stuff simply to cash in on the brands of the day, regardless of quality (though they did have the rights to distribute Carl Bark’s Duck stories in the US and gave Mark Evanier one of his first writing gigs on their Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! book, which has to count for something). And while there were some genuine gems in the Gold Key series, there is something of a sense that this was a book that existed pretty much because it had to and oftentimes felt like just another product in the Star Trek brand.

This is not to say DC’s book is any less of a product or a tie-in, it absolutely is, but the climate is a little bit different in 1984 than it was in 1967. While Gold Key was attempting to promote a show that first wasn’t exactly setting the Nielson ratings ablaze, and then technically didn’t even exist as it puttered around in syndicated reruns for the next ten years. DC is coasting off of a successful movie and a wildly successful movie and launches right when a third movie is about to premier (a fact which is not without its problems, as I’ll talk about later). With Star Trek big business at the box office now, Paramount began to clamp down on their tie-in line and invoked a much stricter sense of quality control over what went out under the Star Trek name, and that shows here, for better and for worse.

The first thing that’s noticeable about this line is that it overtly follows the events of the last movie. Previous Star Trek comic stories have been standalone affairs that simply evoked the structure of the TV series without directly referencing onscreen events (a few nods in the Gold Key stories Doug Drexler worked on aside). This story, however, is explicitly designed to fit in with established canon, which is interesting as Star Trek doesn’t actually have an established canon yet, considering Gene Roddenberry and Richard Arnold wouldn’t give their famous interview until the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is likely due in part to the book’s editor and head writer, Mike W. Barr, who is a veteran comics writer and first generation Star Trek fan, and this issue marks some of his earliest Trek comic work. This introduces a new sort of status quo for Star Trek comics: From here on out, as long as new Star Trek is being filmed, the comics will forever be playing catch-up and trying to slot themselves into the gaps between “canon” stories, with mixed levels of success.…

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A Country That Instinctively Hates The Foreign (The Last War in Albion Part 44: Dave Thorpe’s Captain Britain)

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The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion is just $1500 away from committing the blog to running through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Also, Last War in Albion will be running on Thursdays for this and the next two installments. 

This is the fourth 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: Dez Skinn oversaw a successful revival of Captain Britain as a supporting character to the Black Knight in Hulk Comic, the first Marvel UK comic consisting primarily of material created originally for the UK market. But a little over a year after taking over at Marvel UK Skinn left the company, eventually creating his own company, Quality Communications, where he would publish Warrior, an anthology comic featuring two well-received strips by Alan Moore…
“We’re not supposed to be a country that instinctively hates the foreign and spies on itself.” –Warren Ellis, Jack Cross
Figure 327: Alan Davis’s first published
comics page features a memorable
Z-shaped panel layout as Captain Britain
and Jackdaw travel from dimension to
dimension. (From Marvel Super-Heroes
#377, 1981. Click to enlarge.)
Meanwhile, during the nine months in which Warrior was under development, Marvel had decided to try again with Captain Britain, picking up where Steve Parkhouse had left the character in his Black Knight serial, namely being sent back to Earth accompanied by the elf Jackdaw. Helming the strip were a pair of fresh faces – Dave Thorpe, who had mulled around Marvel UK’s editorial staff for a year and change waiting for a writing gig to open, and Alan Davis, making his artistic debut. Like many British comics creators of the time, Davis was a part-timer who came to comics as a second job, in Davis’s case alongside driving forklifts for a warehouse. Famously, Davis was unaware that comics pages were typically drawn on oversized sheets and shrunk down for reproduction and so drew the art for his first issue at print size, resulting in there not being enough room for the dialogue and in the strip having to be printed in six pages instead of the intended five. 
Nevertheless, Davis’s style is recognizable and distinctive from the start. with the cartooning influence that would characterize his later D.R. & Quinch work already in evidence. He’s immediately adept at character design, managing to introduce the strip’s villains, Mad Jim Jaspers’s Crazy Gang, in crisp detail. He shows an immediate aptitude for drawing expressive faces and particularly fluid action – in his first page he manages a visual gag in which Captain Britain and Jackdaw land on what appears to be Earth, with Jackdaw, who lays back as though reclining, crashing onto the ground while Captain Britain lands in a dynamic pose, already prepared to fight. 
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The Pit

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I want to take a moment to tell you all about some music I love.  I am a devotee of movie soundtracks.  I am particularly fond of two movie scores by Eliot Goldenthal.

Alien 3 (which I’ve been thinking about lately because of this)

and

Titus

Amazing scores.  Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start.  The rest of the score is equally good.

I also adore George Fenton’s music for Mary Reilly.

I’m using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer’s music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper’s gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

) while trying to write a fiction project I’ve currently got on the boil.  I really don’t know why I’m telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.

By the way, the films I’ve mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie).  Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly.  In fact, I love them.  And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).

My fiction project is basically a ‘serious’ reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote – and drew! – between the ages of 9 and 11.

I am about to have a baked potato.

I’m reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough.  No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey.  So far, it’s fun.

Pardon this silly post but I’m clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying “hello again world”.  Bye.

Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger. …

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Vaka Rangi: One Year Anniversary

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Like any good student of synchromysticism, I’m well aware of the importance of dates, in particular anniversaries. Especially when they’re mine.

It was, in a sense, inevitable that I would one day have to do a lengthy project about Star Trek. No large-scale media franchise, or indeed possibly no work of fiction, has consistently meant as much to me or been as much of a source of inspiration (and frustration) over the course of my life as Star Trek. I would have had to address my personal history and issues with Star Trek in some fashion at some point, and that was before my Internet writer colleagues pushed me to work them out through a large-scale serialized blog project.

So, first and foremost, Vaka Rangi has always been more about me than it has been about Star Trek. You may have noticed. Sorry about that. But, as someone trained to notice, analyse and compare positionalities, and also simply knowing it would be pointless to do *yet another* “Let’s watch every episode of Star Trek in order and write about it” thing, I also figured my perspective might allow me to say some things that might not get said in mainline cult sci-fi discourse. But this also means this is a particularly personal project for me, as it’s my reaction to Star Trek that informs not just the kind of critical perspective I offer, but that kind of person I am. I never wanted this to be a straightforward critical history, even a subversive one, and the project was never going to let me make it into one.

Growing up cut off from the kind of pop culture discourse that seems to have morphed into Nerd Culture, I guess I assumed the things I saw in Star Trek were what everyone liked about Star Trek, but it very quickly became evident that I was wrong, and any evidence I found to the contrary seems to have been deliberate misrepresentations in marketing buzzspeak. As a result, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to structure this project to get this across, and I eventually settled on the idea of comparing Star Trek’s idealism (at least the way I saw it) to the philosophy of the ancient Polynesian navigators for various reasons. Obviously, as a cultural anthropologist I’ve read about and studied them a lot, as Polynesia is one of anthropology’s favourite classic case studies and Hawai’i in particular has a very deep and spiritual connection to the night sky. But it’s also a region I feel connected to myself in a very deep and personal way I can’t exactly articulate (there are a few places around the world that are like this for me, but Polynesia was the first one I consciously noticed my connection to). More specifically, I genuinely do see and try to find a kinship in the way the navigators conceived of growing, learning, travelling and the concept of a global community and what I think Star Trek really ought to stand for.…

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Outside the Government: The Nightmare Man

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It’s October 11th, 2010. Cee Lo Green is at number one with “Forget You,” with Bruno Mars, Kings of Leon, Katy Perry, and Robbie Williams also charting. Since Sherlock wrapped its first season, Lord Pearson of Rannoch stepped down as the leader of UKIP saying that he is “not much good” at party politics. Ed Miliband proved rather good at party politics, becoming leader of the Labour party and beating his own brother to the job. And the US removed its last combat troops from Iraq.
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures are back. But The Nightmare Man sees The Sarah Jane Adventures arriving in a very different world. It’s still ostensibly a spin-off of Doctor Who, something that will be stressed loudly in two stories’ time but the Doctor Who of which it is a spinoff is gone. It’s still overseen by Russell T Davies, but Davies no longer has the big show. And the big show has done its farewell to Sarah Jane. While one assumes – or at least, one assumed at the time, before Sladen fell ill – that Sarah Jane was an obvious choice of people to have show up in Doctor Who again, The End of Time went to great lengths to make sure that there was no obligation for any Davies-era characters to return.
So it’s a fundamentally strange thing when, following this, the entire Davies era returns like it’s never been away. This is, of course, a short-lived transitional period. The combination of Miracle Day failing to quite generate the expected audience and Lis Sladen’s unfortunate passing meant that the Davies era shuddered to a halt not too long into the Moffat era. Nevertheless, for the first two years the continued presence of the Davies era exerted an odd pressure on the Moffat era. And The Nightmare Man represents the start of that.
Equally, we should note that this is the nineteenth Sarah Jane Adventures story and the start of the show’s fourth season. It is, at this point, a known quantity with relatively little to do other than show up and be itself. Except, of course, for the detail that the other original member of its child cast, Tommy Knight, is dropping down to a recurring role, so it also has to rejig the cast in the first episode. The sensible way to do that, of course, is to focus the episode on Luke. This being Season Four it doesn’t have to go to great lengths to reintroduce the cast – it can just do a Luke-centered episode and then show him the door.
What’s interesting, then, is the nature of the episode. On the one hand, it’s solidly in children’s television territory, with a villain largely modeled off of a clown and a resolution that amounts to the power of friendship blasting the bad guy into submission. But as with the program’s high point, Lidster’s previous The Mark of the Berserker, there’s a second sense of a program grappling with relatively sizable issues.
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“Khan, nothing more?”: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

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I don’t like it.

Yeah, I said it. As far as I’m concerned, the consensus-best Star Trek EVER is a bunch of *ridiculously* overrated tat. But honestly, you must have expected this by now. Was there really ever any suspense over how I was going to read this? Surely, there was no way I was ever going to taken in by Star Trek going whole hog into Horatio Hornblower naval pomp and circumstance? Not after everything I’ve yelled and screamed about here for the past year. I think it’s a mistake, I think it gets Star Trek’s philosophy utterly wrong, I honestly don’t think its a particularly captivating movie in its own right and I can’t in good conscience recommend it. So there. You can all close the book or the browser tab or whatever, as I’m sure my yay or nay on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what you’ve been waiting breathlessly all this time to find out about.

Anyone still here? Good. Then we can continue.

The first, most obvious problem I have with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is in fact bringing Khan back in the first place. “Space Seed” was an utterly abhorrent episode that posited Star Trek’s utopian future would be built on the back of Philosopher Kings and enlightened despots who benevolently oppress us while they squabble over turf by manipulating catastrophic gang wars and indulging in extravagant, overblown dick measuring contests. It also made the passionate claim that women gain their inner strength through submissiveness and subservience and that rape culture is the natural hierarchy of humanity. And Khan himself was a spectacularly racist amalgamation of generically “exotic” nonwhite, nonwestern motifs the script bewilderingly seems to think will add to his “charm”. Charm, incidentally, is the one thing Khan wasn’t hurting for simply because the show hired Ricardo Montalbán to play him, who was an amazing stage presence and the one likable thing in that whole dreadful hour.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan does at least manage to be better than “Space Seed” as it drops pretty much all of the symbolism and themes Khan was originally written with in mind, bringing him back simply to exert gravity as a powerful antagonist, which is a role he’s perfectly suited for. No, Khan does work here, which is more than can be said for any of his other appearances in Star Trek, but the problem this movie has is that, by virtue of being so obviously a sequel (something I’ll talk more about later on) and because it was so phenomenally well received, this retroactively makes “Space Seed” seem like it was actually a good idea to any generation of Trekker who grew up with this movie, and in doing so renders both stories completely untouchable. And *that* has done provable harm to Star Trek’s legacy, because any version of Star Trek that takes “Space Seed” as the definitive display of its philosophy is a Star Trek that’s inherently wrongheaded and toxic.…

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