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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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The Last War in Albion Interview

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Why the title “The Last War in Albion”?

First, to be perfectly honest, because I like how it sounds. I knew I wanted to treat the Moore/Morrison rivalry as an occult war, partially for the obvious sensationalism, but also because I liked the idea of treating their beliefs in magic entirely seriously. And I liked the word “Albion” because it gave the whole thing a kind of mythic flavor – a sense that what they’re fighting over isn’t quite a real place at all – while still stressing the Britishness of the project.

And once you have that, the “last war” just feels appropriate. Like its a closed-off piece of history that one can write a dispassionate account of. Which, of course, I’m not actually doing, but which remains the underlying illusion or structure. In reality I suspect that this is Albion’s last war in the same way that World War I ended all wars, but I think the eschatological lens sharpens everything in a useful way. 

Why write this much about this topic?

There are a lot of reasons, really. I think it can support that kind of work, first and foremost. I think you have an extraordinarily gifted generation of talent that came out of the UK in a particular period, and that had a huge influence on art and culture despite working in what is, in fact, a pretty marginal field. And I think that’s an interesting story that’s worth telling in detail. But you’ve also got, in Moore and Morrison, a really interesting division. I think underlying their mutual dislike is a really interesting philosophical and aesthetic difference, and that you can trace the ramifications of that difference out, using a really big canvas to get a sort of epic history. And that seems interesting. Literary criticism and biography as epic history isn’t something that’s been done a lot.

I was also interested in the question of influence. So much of the feud between Moore and Morrison comes down to arguing over who ripped off from who, which always struck me as a rather banal way to talk about influence. So I wanted to treat the question of influence seriously, trying to show how any attempt to follow a thread of influence back results inevitably in finding more influences than you expect, and that any claim to have come up with an idea first is always murky at best. And, perhaps more importantly, trying to show how something can wear its influences on its sleeve while still being a very new and interesting idea. And that requires a wide lens and a willingness to spend a lot of time in the historical trenches, so to speak. 

But perhaps most importantly, because I love so much of the material in question. There are loads of things I’m beyond excited to get to reread and to write about, from major works like Promethea, From Hell, The Invisibles, Sandman, and Transmetropolitan to idiosyncratic picks like Angel Passage, Brought to Light, The Filth, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Planetary.…

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Outside the Government 17: K-9

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At the time I queued this, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter is less than $500 from ensuring thrice-weekly posts until we get to A Christmas Carol. If you’ve not backed yet, consider throwing in for one of the lower-level rewards like the ebook. 
Let’s start with the salient and strange fact: there exist people in the world who have watched this. This is an underlying truth of everything that exists in the world of greater media. Somebody’s seen it. Actually, in many ways the stranger and more salient fact is that something like six thousand people are going to read an essay on K-9, the Australian K-9 spinoff that is why the character vanished from The Sarah Jane Adventures for most of Season Four. And some number of those people are going to eventually pay money for a book containing this essay, or pledge money to a Kickstarter to help fund the writing of similarly arcane essays. To quote a similarly arcane object of media, these things’ existence is possible, but not very likely. So why does K-9 exist? For the same reason The Web of Fear exists: people thought they could make some money.
We are, however, at a sort of cultural end here. This is a deeply remote object. It exists and had some traceable impact on the world, and it did in fact come off of Doctor Who, and that’s the sort of thing we make sure to look at here. But in many ways that is all one can do: look at this thing. It passed through the world, and that is worth understanding. Because this thing is dead and sterile. Its Wikipedia article, in 2014, still proclaims with some measure of confidence that it is coming back. 
This does not appear to be true. Back in 2012 there were murmurings of a second season. There doesn’t seem to be any particular movement on that. The series’ official Facebook page – which is seriously about the only place anything about its current life is documented – reveals that its co-creator, Paul Tams, is currently running a Kickstarter for his and Bob Baker’s latest children’s television series Marti, starring a superhero meerkat. This Kickstarter actually launched at about the same time as mine, looking for £20,000 to create a pilot episode of this series. At the time of writing, it has so far raised £139 from five backers. There are still one hundred positions in the closing credits still open for backers. You can get a DVD of an exclusive behind-the-scenes production information for £15 on this Kickstarter, or, at least, you can if it funds. We’ve got til May 31st to make it happen, and for my part, I’m backing because that making-of DVD is going to be one of the most remote and minor objects of Doctor Who history, and frankly, I wanna upload it to a torrent site. So make that £162. (Paul Tams, for his part, has only ever backed one Kickstarter, for 21st Century Tank Girl, which raised £174,130 on April 30th.
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Sensor Scan: Eraserhead

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Here’s another entry I know I’m likely out of my league on, but we’re doing it because we really don’t have a choice. David Lynch has been cited as a primary influence on an extremely significant creative figure for…not the period of Star Trek we’re about to enter, but the one right after that, and continuing on to 2005. And since 1977’s Eraserhead was Lynch’s motion picture debut and widely considered to be the best demonstration of his perspective, we need to take a look at it for the future’s sake.

Since context and influence is the name of the game today, I won’t beat around the bush and come right out and say the person I’m talking about is Brannon Braga. Braga is, suffice to say, a controversial figure within Star Trek, and definitely a misunderstood one. Along with Rick Berman, he is almost universally blamed for killing the franchise off in 2005 and his reputation in Star Trek fandom tends to hover between “Public Enemy Number One” and “Satan”. This in spite of the fact Berman helped shepherd Star Trek through what is typically seen to be its Golden Age and Braga helmed what was, at least for a time, the consensus fan-favourite Star Trek series, Star Trek Voyager, and co-wrote the consensus second-best Star Trek movie, Star Trek First Contact. We’ll deal with Berman another day, and, in regards to Braga, while it’s true he has a number of fumbles and missteps to his name, and in some cases quite egregious ones, he’s also someone whose positionality is frequently badly misread, and putting him into some kind of intellectual tradition will prove supremely helpful down the road.

Which brings us to David Lynch. What strikes me about Lynch is that he’s a filmmaker who is on the one hand regarded for his surreal, disturbing and frequently confusing style of cinematography, yet is also someone who wears his influences very obviously on his sleeve and is quite upfront about his positionality. This, to me, renders reading his work somewhat trivial. There are two major aspects of Lynch’s life that seem to crop up over and over again throughout his work: One, he has a major interest in dreams, and in particular the subconscious side of dreaming. However conversely, Lynch also seems to believe the only way to truly comprehend this is to be awake to engage with it, and Lynch seems to believe quite strongly in the ability of filmmaking to convey this kind of dreamscape, such as in this quote:

“Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I’m quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don’t control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I’ve made or discovered; a world I choose …”

So, it’s not actual dreams he’s interested in, but daydreams. This is actually a pretty significant distinction to make, because, at least judging from this, it means that Lynch is probably unfamiliar with the concept of lucid dreaming, because, a lucid dreamer actually can control her dreams when she’s asleep.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 10th, 2014)

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Hello all. Looking halfway decent for The Sarah Jane Adventures to go thrice weekly, so that’s nice. I’ve been writing those this week. Finished the first four of the seven posts. And then straight on to A Christmas Carol.

So, I’m working on promoting the whole Kickstarter thing. For a variety of reasons, I’d like to have an interview about Last War in Albion I can link to. So I figure I’ll lash together some reader questions into something or other and put that up on Tuesday so I can link to it.

So. Questions about Last War in Albion. From the very obvious and basic to strange and arcane points people wonder. Fire away, and I’ll start off answering in comments before transferring the whole thing to a blogpost.…

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The Old Straight Tracks and the Sacred Stones (The Last War in Albion Part 43: Hulk Comic)

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The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion has made it to its first stretch goal! Next up is a commitment to blogging through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

This is the second 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: The 1976 launch of Captain Britain, Marvel’s first comic created for exclusive UK release, was filled with a lot of fanfare, but under the hood the fact that it was blatantly created by Americans was altogether obvious…

“I am Elen, Goddess of the old straight tracks and the standing stones! Once only in seven times seven score years can mortal man gain the powers of Earth and Fire from the stones of this place.” – Grant Morrison, Captain Clyde

The fact that only sixteen issues into his own series Captain Britain not only needed to be propped up with a high profile guest star, but had to be propped up by the exact character he was demonstrably designed as an imitation of speaks volumes about the problems the series was facing. And these problems can hardly be called a surprise – of course a series with a hook of “Britain’s very own superhero” is going to be lackluster when it’s produced by a bunch of Americans with a minimal-at-best connection with Britain. At least Claremont was born in the UK, even if he moved away too young to have any meaningful memories of it – but Herb Trimpe’s UK bona fides consisted of having vacationed there once, an experience that seems to have mostly left him with the view that he “didn’t believe that a superhero could be popular in England.” But as tenuous as the initial creative team’s connection to the UK was, Friedrich’s arrival marked the point where the series became a revolving door of creators with no connection whatsoever – Trimpe left after issue #23, with John Buscema, a longstanding artist most associated with The Avengers, drawing seven issues before being replaced by Ron Wilson, around which point writing duties became a complete mess. Issue #36 was plotted by Friedrich but had dialogue entirely written by Larry Lieber, issue #37 was scripted by Len Wein, with Larry Lieber joining Bob Budiansky for plotting duties, and issues #38 and 39 were plotted by Bob Budiansky with dialogue by Jim Lawrence. By this point the comic had long since deteriorated to where it was no longer profitable to print it in color, and with issue #39 it was cancelled entirely and, in the usual Marvel UK way, merged with another title, in this case the newly reminted Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain.…

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Sensor Scan: Alien

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I actually went back and forth a bit on whether to cover Alien or not. It is certainly one of the most important movies from this period and a landmark in its genre: I’m not disputing that. The influence on Star Trek, at least of this particular film, is tenuous at best, but it’s not like that’s ever stopped me before and Alien does do many things right that subsequent science fiction works should emulate more frequently. The catch was never whether Alien was an important movie worthy of discussion, but whether or not it was an important science fiction movie, because in spite of its futuristic outer space setting, Alien is actually more properly thought of as a horror movie.

However, there’s simply no getting out of talking about the sequel in 1986 and there’s another movie related to this one I’d kind of like to talk about a bit once we reach the 1990s, so to LV-426 we go.

Like Star Wars before it, Alien is a movie about which I have extremely little to add to the discourse that’s already out in the wild, and this time I don’t have an especially meaningful personal story to relate to make up for my lack of erudition. Its setpieces are, of course, iconic, and all of its most memorable themes and scenes have been analysed and re-analysed countless times over. I’m reasonably confidant anyone reading this knows what this movie is and what it does, so there’s not a ton of new material to build an essay out of here. But there is some. There are three primary things I’d like to discuss about Alien and its impact: The first is that, as horror movie expert James Rolfe points out, Alien is fundamentally a slasher movie set in outer space. More specifically, it’s a throwback to the old haunted house movies that characterized the early 1930s, where a group of ill-prepared travellers show up somewhere they’re not supposed to, come into contact with some kind of supernatural horror and get picked off one by one.

Alien‘s major innovation in this regard is that the slasher villain is an extraterrestrial and the haunted house is a crashed spaceship on a foreboding planet on the edge of outer space in the far future. But while the trappings are horror, the plot is very heavily indebted to B-movie science fiction of the 1950s, namely It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which Alien is, plot-wise, essentially the exact same movie as. This is both completely intentional and completely forgivable: Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, who we’ll be talking a great deal about in this entry, flat out said “I didn’t steal from anyone. I stole from everyone.” in regards to his script for Alien. Forgivable firstly because that’s so charmingly glib, but also because Alien is a case study in how actually unimportant plot is to crafting a successful and influential work of fiction. Alien is of course legendary for the way it conveys narrative through atmosphere and setting, and director Ridley Scott and designer H.R.…

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How to Read The Last War in Albion

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Occasionally the comment is made, whether as an accusation, a complaint, or a compliment, that The Last War in Albion is a difficult text. You can see – it’s right there on its embryonic TV Tropes page.

It would be churlish of me to suggest that this is untrue, but it is at least my hope that it’s not excessively true. So in the interests of populism, some observations and comments on how The Last War in Albion is structured and suggestions on how to get the most out of it.
First of all, I want to stress that I have never written Last War in Albion with the idea that the audience should understand all of it. The general idea is that if you don’t understand one bit, there’ll be another one along in a few sentences anyway. Part of the fun of Last War in Albion is its sweep and its scope. Given that, a bit of confusion is not only OK, it borders on the desirable. Certainly it helps emphasize the scale of the thing.
So, big picture: there’s an bit of joke underlying its structure, namely the never-ending essay in which paragraph transitions are maintained across entries. The structure is consciously based on comic book series and on the idea of serialization and cliffhangers. A single blog post isn’t the whole story, or even a complete story in and of itself, but a single element in a story. This is, these days, how single issue comics work, for better or for worse.
Plenty of people, in response to that format, “wait for the trade,” as the saying goes – that is, wait until a story is completed, and then buy a collection of issues to read in one shot. Plenty of comics are consumed that way – nobody reads Watchmen or Sandman as monthly serializations anymore, and there’s a strong case to be made that both are improved in trade. 
For exactly this reason, I publish the equivalent of trades for Last War in Albion alongside the first installment of a chapter. If you can’t spare or don’t want to toss $2 at the trade, that’s fine too – you may find archive diving more satisfying. Certainly it’s a very different project when taken in chapter form as opposed to in blogpost form, and I imagine it’ll be different yet again in book form.
I really don’t want to say it’s better in chapter form, though. For me, things like the parenthesis that would not die are much better in blog form, where the start of the parenthesis isn’t in the same entry as the end, than in chapter form, where its just a really long parenthetical. 
For me, the blog format highlights the larger structure of The Last War in Albion, which is pointedly not just a description of a bunch of comics but rather an account of the entire world in which those comics exist. Inasmuch as it is military history – and obviously that’s the conceit – it’s the sort of military history that’s focused on the causes and consequences of the war as opposed to on the mechanics of the battles.
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Outside the Government: The Great Game

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For the record, The Sarah Jane Adventures will start coverage next week with an Outside the Government, with The Nightmare Man running on Wednesday. There is still just over $1000 to go on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter before that run will be upped to thrice weekly – it would need to do that by a week from today in order to impact the first week’s posting schedule. 
It’s August 8th, 2010. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Beautiful Monster,” with Wanted, Flo Rida, Eminem, and Swedish House Mafia also charting. In news, violent protests break out in Pakistan and India over entirely unrelated issues. Sarah Palin’s daughter calls off her engagement with Levi Johnston due to his failure to not have children with other women. Wyclef Jean, in a memorable Wikipedia turn of phrase worth quoting “confirms he is to announce plans” to run for the Presidency of Haiti. (He is deemed ineligible to run eventually.) The World Sauna Championships are permanently abandoned when Russian finalist Vladimir Ladyzhensky dies during the competition. Also, Elena Kagan is sworn onto the Supreme Court. 
While on television, just two weeks after it showed up, Sherlock takes its bow. In so many ways, The Great Game appears the perfect response to The Blind Banker – a corrective that shows that Sherlock has learned the lessons it needed to learn. This is, of course, nonsense – The Great Game was in fact the first episode of Sherlock shot, with the season being made essentially backwards, and even if it weren’t, it’s not as though the production of a television show would allow Gatiss to look at the script for episode two and go “right, I see what I need to do differently.”
All of which said, The Great Game is notable for finally and decisively putting to rest the idea that Sherlock is going to be a procedural that does a case every week. Instead it highlights the degree to which solving a mystery is an almost incidental process for Sherlock that holds no meaningful suspense. By the episode’s end the question of “can Sherlock solve the mystery” has been in effect entirely drained of any dramatic tension – so much so that Sherlock is, by the episode’s end, a solid mystery ahead of the plot. Under the hood, this episode is just a rapid-fire succession of perfectly ordinary episodes hung together by the countdown/bomber plot, which is to say, wrapped into a parody of a season of 24. 
Few if any people actually talk about the five cases of this episode, and it’s a pity, as they’re all actually pretty good. Taking down cases with an average of eighteen minutes to spend on them is not straightforward, and Gatiss manages to make each of the five cases feel distinct and interesting. The first makes an interesting play and subversion of the epic. On the one hand, it’s a case that requires that Moriarty have been inside Baker Street itself, and more importantly, it’s flagged as Sherlock’s first-ever case.
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Sensor Scan: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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“’You’re probably right, but that’s not what the public is expecting — this is Hollywood and I want to give people something that’s close to what they expect”

-Steven Spielberg to Jacques Vallée

It is named, of course, after J. Allen Hynek’s system of classification. Hynek was an astronomer who worked with the United States Air Force as a scientific consultant into their studies into the UFO phenomenon, most famously Project Blue Book. Initially a staunch skeptic, Hynek’s views began to change as he investigated more and more and more cases and it became less and less easy for him to discount the credibility of the witnesses he interviewed. After a falling out with the Air Force, Hynek spent the rest of his life investigating UFO cases on a personal basis, and is considering the pioneer of scientific research into UFOs. His famous scale is as follows, in order of increasing high strangeness:

  • Nocturnal Lights: Sightings of unexplained lights in the night sky.
  • Daylight Discs: Sightings of disc-shaped objects during the daytime.
  • Radar-Visual: Confirmed radar hits.
  • Close Encounters of the First Kind: A UFO observed less than 500 feet away.
  • Close Encounters of the Second Kind: A UFO, sighted less than 500 feet away, with a seemingly discernible physical effect.
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind: A UFO sighted less than 500 feet away, accompanied by sightings of animated beings.

That Steven Spielberg named a movie after Hynek’s scale (not to mention casting Hynek himself as an extra in the climactic meeting with the Mothership, along with UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, famous for his interest in the Roswell case) is well known for being the impetus for it becoming ingrained in pop consciousness. But it also reveals the extent to which Close Encounters of the Third Kind is genuinely indebted to a specific philosophy: Friedman’s presence aside, this is not actually a movie about UFOlogy. Indeed, ironically in spite of his influence on the field, Hynek was not what we’d think of today as a UFOlogist and the work he did would likely be met with some suspicion, if not outright scorn, in modern UFOlogy.

No, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a movie about spiritualism, childhood, wonder, and the sacred music of the universe. And that makes it pretty much the single most important and powerful work we’ve looked at so far.

Steven Spielberg, as a creative figure, is often criticized for his fixation on a somewhat vapid notion of “childlike wonder”, and there is something to that. Spielberg has always privileged the child’s perspective (or what he perceives a child’s perspective to be) and does seem to feel there’s something genuinely special about the way children see the world. And certainly it can be argued that starting with E.T. he begins to dutifully recite these themes as comfortable platitudes film after film. But, in regards to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in particular, two things really need to be established early on: One, though this is Spielberg’s first post-Jaws work, he’s still something of an up-and-coming filmmaker coasting on the latter film’s success.…

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