Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

Outside the Government: A Study in Pink

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It’s July 25th, 2010. Yolanda Be Cool vs D Cup are at number one with “We No Speak Americano,” with a duet between Eminem featuring Rihanna, Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg, Professor Green featuring Lily Allen, and 3OH3 featuring Ke$ha also charting – in fact, only two songs in the top ten are not collaborative: Eliza Doolittle’s “Pack Up” and JLS’s “The Club is Alive.” In news, the World Cup wound down with England eliminated the day after The Big Bang following a pathetic showing against Germany, and Spain ultimately winning in a scrappy final against the Netherlands. Also, Wikileaks releases over 90,000 internal logs of the US Military to a variety of news sources. 
While on television Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s massive hit Sherlock debuts with A Study in Pink. Why do Sherlock episode by episode? For one thing, because its production is bound up in Doctor Who’s. The shows respond to each other and learn from each other, and are, as countless critics have noted, a bit similar in some key ways. Yes, they’re also different. Hence “Outside the Government” at all. But to be perfectly honest, you learn more about the Moffat era watching Sherlock than you ever did about the Davies era by watching Torchwood. So here we are. Sherlock from the ground floor: A Study in Pink.
The more one thinks about A Study in Pink the more it becomes evident that it is quite a strange thing. What does it mean, after all, to create an introduction to a show featuring one of the best-known and most iconic fictional characters in existence? One cannot meaningfully introduce Sherlock Holmes as a character, as any introduction one makes is going to be immediately subsumed by the impossibly large paratext of a century of Sherlock Holmes. In its own way, it’s the same problem Moffat faced with The Eleventh Hour – how do you launch a program that’s already massively familiar to viewers and where everything you introduce is going to be read in context with years of existing material. 
With The Eleventh Hour, Moffat solved the problem by simply putting the program’s best foot forward and playing to all of its strengths as much as possible – an unapologetic charm offensive that worked. In effect he did everything he wanted to do differently, but in an episode that highlighted only the most superficial of his changes while mostly stressing what had remained consistent. But this was a solution for a program that had been on the air just a few months earlier. The solution isn’t quite going to work here. Nevertheless, A Study in Pink is, like The Eleventh Hour, an exercise in saying “here’s how it is.” It is at times almost television as FAQ – a narratively sequenced list of answers to questions beginning “how are you going to handle…” 
That it works is in some ways remarkable. More than almost anything else Moffat has ever written, this is an episode that relies on nothing save for his gifts at humor and exposition.
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“I don’t bother/To live my life as if I’m another”: Kitumba

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The original “Kitumba” was the very best submission made to the unproduced Star Trek Phase II. The episode adapted from it for the fan series that shares its name isn’t quite its own pinnacle, but it’s definitely the best episode since “To Serve All My Days” and a fitting closure for era of Star Trek.

It’s also fitting that this episode be penned by John Meredyth Lucas, one of the great unsung heroes of the franchise. Hand-picked by Gene Coon as his successor following the latter’s dispute with Gene Roddenberry over the ending to “Bread and Circuses”, which led Coon to furiously turn his back on Star Trek never to return, Lucas oversaw the one true Golden Age of the Original Series, from “The Immunity Syndrome” to “The Ultimate Computer”. Though he was a frankly bloody amazing producer, as a writer Lucas always seemed a bit more changeable: His first story was “The Changeling” which, well, wasn’t brilliant, to be perfectly honest, but it did provide the impetus for “In Thy Image” and by association this whole show and, arguably, the whole rest of Star Trek, so that has to count for something. Lucas also wrote the script for “Patterns of Force”, which I loved despite nobody agreeing with me (but nobody ever agrees with me, so it doesn’t matter), but he had help from Paul Schneider there. He also collaborated with D.C. Fontana on “That Which Survives” which was also a miniature classic, no surprises there.

But in spite of all of this, Lucas also has “Elaan of Troyius” to his name, which was a racist and misogynistic trainwreck and cast a bit of a shadow over the rest of his tenure. It was never clear whether the failings of that episode could be safely laid at the feet of Arthur Singer and Fred Freiberger, who between them were responsible for much of what was memorable about the Original Series’ third season, or if they were really the fault of Lucas himself. “Kitumba” gives us our answer and thankfully it’s a resounding “no”, because this story is properly outstanding and marks the first time Star Trek Phase II hits actual brilliance. Today it wouldn’t seem like anything special, it’s a two-part epic about cloak-and-dagger political machinations in the Klingon Empire that threaten to plunge the galaxy into a bloody war and the Enterprise has to get involved to keep the peace. Hell, the Dominion War era did this story at least twelve times: Manufactured Civil War in the Klingon Empire was just another Tuesday.

But “Kitumba” would have been the first time Star Trek did this kind of story, at least for the Klingons. D.C. Fontana had of course tried to introduce political intrigue to the Original Series via the Romulan/Federation Cold War in “The Enterprise Incident”, but that didn’t go over so well because it was a third season episode. And actually, “Kitumba” is a very different sort of political story anyway: “The Enterprise Incident” was about diplomatic tensions and covert intelligence, or at least used that as a backdrop to examine the characters of Kirk and Spock.…

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Make Me a Warrior Now (A Good Man Goes to War)

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In this image, Clara is not cleverly disguised as a light, but
rather as a restoration field.

It’s June 4th, 2011. Pitbull and several other people are at number one with “Give Me Everything,” with Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, LMFAO, and Bruno Mars also charting. In news, the Arab Spring rolls on through its increasingly grim summer as civil war breaks out in Libya and grows progressively closer in Syria, with NATO forces helping out in Libya. Congressman Anthony Weiner finds himself embroiled in exactly the sort of scandal you should avoid with that surname. And World IPv6 day takes place. Rock on.

Meanwhile, on television, it’s Doctor Who’s first midseason finale. As we said, in his last season finale, Moffat took the structure of narrative collapse to its breaking point. Instead of averting the collapse, he let it happen in its entirety: the Doctor was locked in an inescapable prison, the TARDIS exploded, Amy was dead, and the universe ended. And then he built up a new story in its place. With A Good Man Goes to War, he fully realizes this approach, creating the definitive narrative technique of his tenure – what I will call narrative substitution. 
Where narrative collapse is based on threatening the basic functioning of a narrative structure so that further storytelling becomes impossible and then averting the collapse and reaffirming the structure, narrative substitution works by initially appearing to tell one type of story, and then rejecting that story, typically on ethical or ideological grounds, generally by revealing that the story was in fact an entirely different type of story all along. In hindsight The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang is an example of narrative substitution where the first narrative is rejected via an unaverted narrative collapse. But with A Good Man Goes to War we get a much more straightforward and pure example of narrative substitution – in many ways, in fact, the definitive one.
This is, in one sense, the big problem with it. In reality, A Good Man Goes to War is a savagely, furiously angry story. It indulges audience expectations for nearly its entire length before not only frustrating them, but damning them. Moffat will use the structure of narrative substitution again, but he will never again do it with quite this gusto. His future narrative substitutions are textual games that assume an audience who is on the lookout for the substitution and carefully watching the shells as they are cycled about the table. But this one is a trap – one that baldly tries to lure the audience into a specific misreading of the story just to turn around and punish them for doing so. It is angry and cynical in a way that not even Robert Holmes ever quite managed. Holmes could be masterfully petulant, yes, but when he wrote a story out of spite it was always a case of following the brief perfectly so as to expose the stupidity of it, audience be damned. But this is a story about satisfying supposed audience expectations, giving people exactly what they say they want, only to rip it away and condemn them for wanting it.
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“The Immaculate Misconception”: The Child

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There are a number of different ways to go about discussing “The Child”. None of them, it should be stressed, posit in any way that this was anything resembling a good idea: It wasn’t in 1978, and it flatly isn’t in 1988 or 2012 either. But in spite of it ultimately not working in the slightest, this is also something of a deceptive episode: It’s not as bad as as its reputation amongst at least the segment of science fiction fandom that I presume reads my blog would suggest (especially this version of it), though it remains so to such an extent the fact nobody at any point over the past thirty-odd years seemed to notice this is considerably worrying. More to the point though, it’s also bad in other areas.

It’s really not worth going into a lengthy bit of structural experimentalism with this episode as I have with previous Star Trek Phase II stories that have multiple versions: Unlike “In Thy Image” or “Devil’s Due” (or, I’m going to hazard a guess, the upcoming “Kitumba”), the 1978 and 2012 versions of “The Child” are essentially identical. There are a few differences: A couple random one-off redshirts are replaced by Peter and Sulu and keeping Star Trek: The Motion Picture canon necessitated swapping Ilia out with a new Deltan character named Icel, but this basically amounts to a name change. Kirk initially had a lot of scenes where he angrily lashed out at people, hurting Ilia and Irska, and these were thankfully cut or toned down considerably to match James Cawley’s interpretation. Also, Will Decker was dropped entirely, but what can you do? Other than that this is essentially a word-for-word, shot-for-shot loyal translation, which does make sense as it’s written and directed by the original author.

It’s the Star Trek: The Next Generation version that’s the most different, being more of a separate story loosely based on this one. It does tackle some similar themes to the original story, but they come across as significantly simplified and watered-down. I’ll briefly take a look at this a little later on, but the bottom line is the Next Generation version is without question the inferior one and this is the best of the three, in case any of you were really chomping at the bit to learn which version of “The Child” was the definitive one. One thing the 1988 version does get right, however, is the awkward tension between the mother and her co-worker ex: Jonathan Frakes plays his character very terse and uncomfortable, and while this doesn’t at all fit the Riker and Troi relationship thanks to Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s staunch idealism when it comes to interpersonal matters, it definitely fits the Decker and Ilia one, and the original script bewilderingly drops the ball on this: It barely has Decker interact with Ilia or Irska at all, and never once brings up their prior romance.

We must, I suppose, now talk about “The Child” itself. Well, if I have to…

This is an episode that’s actually rather important in the history of my association with Star Trek.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 26th, 2014)

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Behind on everything, as the fact that I had to publish the first part of the current Last War in Albion chapter without the omnibus. Still need to ship out replacement orders on the Kickstarter, edit the Nimon video, and get the Last War in Albion Kickstarter together. All hopefully over the next week, assuming these allergies/this sinus infection doesn’t just kill me.

Had my sister over for dinner this evening, and we ended up watching Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with the Moffat commentary tracks, which are particularly fabulous commentary tracks. (The Forest of the Dead track is basically my favorite commentary ever.) Which got me thinking, as I love good DVD commentary but find that the ratio of good commentary to commentary tracks consisting only of actors whinging about how cold a location was is often frustrating.

So. DVD commentaries – for Doctor Who or otherwise – that you’ve found particularly insightful and interesting.…

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The Promethean Age (The Last War in Albion Part 41: Marvel Comics)

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This is the first of an unknown number of parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. The omnibus for this chapter is not quite ready yet, and I’ll post it next week.

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 and Alan Davis had a vibrant and popular creative partnership in 2000 AD on the D.R. & Quinch strips, but the roots of their collaboration go back to 1982 and their work together for Marvel UK…

“The Promethean age had been announced; the time of men as gods who bore fire in the palms of their hands had come.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods
This is hardly surprising for what was, by the time of D.R. & Quinch, a well-honed creative partnership. Moore and Davis had been working together since June of 1982 when Moore, having made his bones on the Star Wars and Doctor Who titles published by Marvel UK, was given the reins of Marvel UK’s Captain Britain, at the time an ongoing series in the monthly anthology Marvel Superheroes. Davis had been drawing Captain Britain for the comic since September of 1981, where he made his mainstream debut illustrating a script by Dave Thorpe that served as the character’s first appearance in that title. But the history of the character stretches back considerably further.
Figure 307: Uncanny Tales, one of the many
pulp magazines published by Martin
Goodman.
To understand the nature of Captain Britain as a character it is necessary to understand Marvel UK, which in turn requires an understanding of Marvel Comics. The company originated out of the broader publishing portfolio of Martin Goodman, born Moses Goodman in 1908 to Lithuanian immigrants to the United States. Goodman’s family was large and poor, and Goodman had to drop out of school in the fifth grade to enter the workforce, and finally started traveling the country as a teenager, riding the rails and staying in hobo camps throughout the Great Depression. Eventually he returned to enter the publishing industry, rising through the ranks at Eastern Distributing Corperation, and then jumping ship to form his own company, Newsstand Publications with Archie Comics cofounder Louis Siberkleit. In 1934 Newsstand Publications went bankrupt when their distributor went under, leading Silberkleit to depart the company, but Goodman managed to convince creditors that he could turn the company around, which he proceeded to do.
Goodman’s business model was based on trend-surfing. He changed the insignias on his titles regularly, creating different lines to house different sorts of books, and was ruthless about pushing out clones of successful titles. The bulk of his magazines were pulps in the classic model: All Star Adventure Fiction, Ka-Zar, Two-Gun Western, Uncanny Tales, and, in a title that Goodman would use later to more success, Marvel Tales.
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“There is no me.”: Enemy: Starfleet

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“Enemy: Starfleet” marks an important turning point for Star Trek Phase II. This is best exemplified in the title credits, as it’s the first episode to actually go out fully under that name (the previous episode had the title card cheekily change from New Voyages to Phase II midway through). This, combined with the addition of Xon as a full-time character (though he appeared in the last episode, he was little more than an in-joke) and the teaser at the end featuring James Cawley proudly declaring the next episode is “The Child” mean the writing is on the wall for whatever the original conception of this show may have been.

Perhaps predictably, perhaps not, “Enemy: Starfleet” is the most straightforwardly Original Series-esque episode so far. The title is misleading-Considering all the signs and portents we’ve been building since “To Serve All My Days” about a potential climactic showdown with Section 31 and the Federation’s seedy underbelly, I was expecting a very different story than what this actually is based on the name “Enemy: Starfleet”. D.C. Fontana’s Star Trek: Year Four-The Enterprise Experiment miniseries for IDW was long out by now, and James Cawley and his team had surely read it. Perhaps they were trying to make it canon to Phase II, but even that story never gives us the moment of triumph this show seems to call for (indeed, I doubt Fontana had ever wanted one, considering “To Serve All My Days” itself).

Either way, “Enemy: Starfleet” turns out to be a very familiar, almost stock, story about Federation technology falling into unscrupulous hands who go on to reverse engineer it to wage a war against their now hopelessly outmatched adversaries, who initially blame the Enterprise for the ensuing years of slaughter. There’s a lot of speeches about Federation values of selflessness, and Kirk gets to fret a lot about how he refuses to let death and destruction be carried out in Starfleet’s name. Barbara Luna (who played Marlena Moreau in “Mirror, Mirror” and Veronica in “In Harm’s Way”) even gets to come back as evil warlord Alursa, who is seemingly deliberately designed to be a rote iteration of the 60s vampy seductress space tyrant queen archetype. Luna’s good and always fun to see, but she does seem a but miscast at times (after all, Marlena Moreau was explicitly and purposefully not this) and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of irony or self-awareness about her performance, which is the only thing that saved Marta Dubois’ Ardra in “Devil’s Due”. They should’ve gotten Kate Mulgrew to reprise her role as Queen of the Spider People instead, or better yet, William Shatner.

The idea of Our Heroes being framed for something, or being incidentally implicated by accident, is such a stock and hackneyed plot structure I don’t need to elabourate. Even the idea of a renegade starship impersonating the Enterprise and committing atrocities in its name is well-trod, for me immediately calling to mind for me a number of other expanded universe works, in particular the superior Star Trek: The Next Generation comic arc “Those who fight monsters…”.…

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Q&A of the Damned

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Sometimes I get asked questions. Sometimes I answer them. And sometimes I compile those answers and post them here on a week when I’ve not gotten around to writing something better.

Disney World?

I enjoy it, but less than I want to. The immaculately well-designed plastic experience should appeal to me utterly. But something about it just feels… the fact that it ideologically wants you to resist approaching it as the artificial experience that it is rubs me the wrong way. I remember doing the “behind the scenes” tour when I was, like, twelve, and being disappointed that it didn’t go behind the scenes enough. I want to approach Disney World on a level of pure artificiality, in full awareness of its underlying fakeness and cynicism. And it doesn’t want to let me. To me, Disney World should consist of doing things like saying “Man, Splash Mountain is a great ride. Is there like, a movie it’s based on or something?”

Are you keeping a running tally of all the things you’ve said in a funny caption that Clara was disguised as? If you aren’t, can you please update me on someone that is? 

No, and no, but I can tell you off the top of my head that it’s a candle, some crown moulding, River Song, a hospital roof, the BBC logo, and the number two. The gag is building, shaggy dog style, to an utterly disappointing payoff.

On the subject of interviews – if you were allowed to ask Davies and Moffat just one question what would it be? (And to make it tricky it has to be the same question for both of them.)

I mean, this is actually not really on the subject of interviews, because an interview is based much more heavily on flow and arc than it appears. I mean, even an interview like my one with Alex, which was an e-mail interview where he reworked my questions a bit… actually, that’s a really good example. My original question list was in places quite different (I prompted for things on specific songs at times, and he often cut that to pick what he presumably thought was a more interesting song for a given point.), and almost all of the little interjections on my part are actually things he added.

But the shape of the interview is very much mine. There’s a conscious move from talking about the album as a whole, then larger philosophical themes, and then transitioning to the material. The form of a question might change – I had originally pitched the Goodnight London question in terms of the earlier demos, several of which I have copies of, with the idea that we might use clips to talk about the evolution of the song, which Alex ultimately decided he didn’t want to do, so he rephrased the question almost completely. But he still answered the question I asked, just without providing clips of the acoustic demo/military choir/big dumb synth-rock versions. So that still became what it always was – a question about the material process from writing a song to recording an album track.…

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People and Cars and Concrete (The Lodger)

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In this scene, Meglos is cleverly disguised as a Silence ship.
It’s June 12th, 2010. David Guetta is at number one with “Gettin’ Over You,” with Eminem, Alicia Keys, and a duet between Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber also charting. Chris Brown postpones a UK leg of his tour because he can’t get a visa due to the fact that he’s a domestic abuser. The trial of Rod Blagojevich begins, and the World Cup kicks off in South Africa, with England playing their first game, a frankly dismal draw with the United States most notable for goalkeeper Robert Green badly fluffing a routine save. 
While on television, or, rather, slightly later in the day on television, Doctor Who offers a bit of late season levity as a calm before the storm. What’s interesting about The Lodger is, in many ways, just how influential it was. Smith’s Doctor had, from the start, been a creature of eccentricity and physical acting, but it’s not until Gareth Roberts wrote him as the funny man in a good old-fashioned comedy double act that the character became what is now the default and recognized version of the character. As with every major development in the Moffat era, this is at the moment visibly polarizing, but equally, given the sizable bloc of people who quite like the Moffat era, seems destined to eventually settle down into a consensus good thing, with the people who currently hate the Moffat era with a passion eventually fading away as its immediacy dissipates, leaving the Moffat era, like every other popularly successful era of Doctor Who, reflected upon primarily by the people who love it. 
Which is to say that the question of whether the post-Lodger characterization of the Doctor is any good is ultimately just one I’m not that interested in. Nothing is loved by everyone, but Smith’s post-Lodger Doctor is loved by loads of people, which is frankly good enough. Populism is not equivalent to quality, but the particular eccentricities of a version of the Doctor are a means to an end, and populism pretty much works to determine whether or not they’re succeeding at that end. 
Let’s instead, then, look at exactly what quietly changed with The Lodger and why it worked. The Lodger, of course, is itself an adaptation of a Gareth Roberts comic for Doctor Who Magazine featuring the Tenth Doctor and Mickey. “Adaptation,” in this case, is a terribly loose term. Several of the specific gags are recycled: the Doctor playing football, the sonic screwdriver/toothbrush confusion (although the subject of the gag switches), the “talk the girlfriend into doing something with her life” bit, and even the detail of the Doctor making an omelette are preserved. But “The Lodger” is basically a sequence of one-page gags based around the idea that the Doctor is good at everything, framed by a kind of sweet story about the Doctor trying to make things work between Rose and Mickey. 
The Lodger is straightforwardly a comedy, but its basic joke is different.
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“The Mouse Problem”: Blood and Fire

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Of the many unproduced scripts Star Trek has accumulated over the years, “Blood and Fire” is, aside from “Joanna”, likely the most famous. Actually, make that “infamous”: Notorious as the cause of Dave Gerrold’s split from Star Trek: The Next Generation six weeks into production, it’s also gained a reputation in recent years for being “that one awkward story about gay people and AIDS the show almost did”.

…Yeah. This is gonna be an uncomfortable one.

Before we get started, let’s dispel a few myths, because Star Trek’s history with LGB, transgender, queer, asexual, nonbinary, etc. issues, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s, is a major source of misinformation and misunderstanding. The common reasoning goes that Next Generation was appallingly and spectacularly heteronormative and reactionary (if not outright homophobic) and thus a story like “Blood and Fire” would have been the most callous, thoughtless, trainwreck of an episode imaginable. The reasoning then goes on that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine improved things a bit, but not enough, and Star Trek ends up completely hypocritical in terms of its claim of utopianism because of it’s failure to engage with these issues in a serious and adult manner.

This isn’t actually true. Multiple Star Trek: The Next Generation creative teams did in fact want to address queer concerns at numerous points throughout the show’s run, but extenuating circumstances always prevented them from actually building episodes around them. Usually this was due to orders from Paramount executives, who felt (sadly probably correctly) that overt depictions of homosexuality, transsexuality or anything else of that nature would not go over well with US audiences, especially in the 1980s. That said, it’s probably also true that there were certain people involved with the near-fifty year history of the franchise who were less tolerant than others, though I’m not going to begin to speculate as to who. Either way, whenever a particular pitch got far enough along to actually get made, stuff tended to be bungled, mismanaged or micromanaged, leading to unfortunate confused aimless things like “The Outcast”.

The situation is best summarised by Rick Berman. Berman had the unenviable position of being both an executive and Gene Roddenberry’s heir apparent, was caught between the show’s creative teams and studio management and likely got it from both sides. He once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that of course the Next Generation staff wanted to show how queer sexualities and nonbinary identities would be accepted in the utopian 24th century, but the problem was that it was A. difficult to actually do a story about these things (because, by virtue of it being a utopian setting, there would be no conflict to build a story around) and B. The studio wasn’t having it anyway and the team didn’t want to do it unless they could do it right. Nobody ever came up with a solution that would satisfy everyone, and this had the regrettable side effect of meaning Star Trek never actually properly engaged with one of the biggest progressive concerns of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (and yes, today too, but Star Trek isn’t around in this form anymore), making its implied author looking like a total fucking hypocrite.…

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