Eruditorum Press

Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

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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Unredeemed

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Spoilers for Game of Thrones… if the writers haven’t already spoiled it enough.
 

Aside from being just horribly and needlessly misogynistic (Moffat has nothing on this. Nothing.) and basically relying on the assumption that Jaime can be redeemed despite being a rapist (presumably because Cersei is such a b*tch that its okay to rape her), it also perfectly illustrates something I was banging on about in a post about The Borgias a few years back. 

It illustrates what happens when you purposefully remove consistent moral thinking from narrative texts just for the show-offy hell of it. 

Now, I’m not a moralising finger-wagger (at least, I try not to be because it’s a deeply unattractive and narcissistic trait) but I do believe that morality is a vital part of fiction.  Not in the sense that all stories should contain clear moral messages, or avowedly support a certain moral position, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that they should be aware that questions of justice and injustice are built into storytelling, at least in the Western tradition, and that it is literally impossible to tell a story in that tradition without raising moral questions, whether one wants to or not. 

Such narratives depend, for their interest, on our moral engagement.  (Would I do that?  How would I respond to someone who did?  That happened to me, I know how I felt.  Would I react the way he did?  Have I ever done anything that bad/good?  Would I have the courage to intervene?  Does anyone I know think like that? Etc.) 

The adaptors of GoT have committed to the Jaime-gets-redeemed arc that is in the books.  This clashes with their increasingly evident intent to make the GoT universe as brazenly nasty and cruel and violent and hateful and abusive as possible.  I realise that its pretty nasty as GRRM wrote it, but the TV has repeatedly added to his nastiness quotient.  The Jaime-redemption arc has now clashed with their rather adolescent – but also, sadly, rather widespread – intent to make the show into one without much of a moral compass, to show everyone as radically morally inconsistent. 

Now, on one level – fine.  People are not morally consistent.  People all do bad things, even broadly good people.  And shitty people sometimes do good things, etc etc etc.  This is all obvious, or should be.  And nobody wants simplistic, moralistic storylines which give us clear goodies and baddies and reassuringly makes the goodies perfect and the baddies irredeemable, and comfortingly has the goodies resoundingly and unambiguously triumphant.  That sort of thing just makes for bad stories, at any level. 

But.  But but butty but butty but but but.  Butsworth.  Buttington Buttarama.

There is still such a thing as a yardstick to judge people by.  It may be fuzzy and subjective, but its there.  Even in stories.  Perhaps especially in stories.  It’s easier to judge people in stories, and it always will be, and you can’t deny or efface that, any more than you can deny that stories inherently raise questions of justice and injustice. …

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The Pleasure of Smelling a Flower (Vincent and the Doctor)

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This is just showing off, really.
It’s June 5th, 2010. Dizzee Rascal is at number one with “Dirtee Disco,” with Iyaz, Eminem, N-Dubz, and Aggro also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is finally capped, which reduces the spill without actually stopping it. And twelve people die in a killing spree in Cumbria.
On television, it’s Vincent and the Doctor. One of the most interesting innovations that Moffat brought to the program was his focus on bringing in what might be called celebrity writers. His first two seasons feature his most brazen attempts at this, although Neil Cross was no small acquisition and Neil Gaiman was originally supposed to be in the first season, so describing this as a particularly well-structured process might be overstating things. Nevertheless, what jumps out first about Vincent and the Doctor is that it is by Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, creator of Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley, and also the guy who wrote The Boat That Rocked if you want to make him come off not quite as well. 
He is, in other words, not quite the sort of person you expect to be writing Doctor Who. This was, of course, not the series’ first experiment with celebrity writers. Way back in the 1980s it tried to get Christopher Priest to write episodes, and of course, Priest was first approached by a before-he-was-famous Douglas Adams. Andrew Cartmel tried and failed to get Alan Moore to write for the series in 1988, and Stephen Fry’s abandoned script for the early Davies era continues to be the subject of the occasional rumor. And there certainly are cases of reasonably well-established writers making the move to Doctor Who – Philip Martin in 1985, for instance. 
But Richard Curtis doesn’t feel like any of these. He’s not a sci-fi writer first and foremost. And while Philip Martin was well-established, it wasn’t like he had an Oscar nomination to his name. Only Stephen Fry seems in the same ballpark, and Fry has always been a bit of a geek. Curtis, on the other hand, bristles with middlebrow respectability. At least in theory, he writes the sort of thing that people who hate Doctor Who like. Getting him to write an episode of Doctor Who, in other words, is both strange and a shot across the bow. 
What is remarkable about the episode is twofold. First, it works quite well. Second, it’s visibly written by someone who has seen next to no Doctor Who before in their lives. (Curtis has admitted that he was not a fan, and that it was not until seeing The Next Doctor with David Morrissey that he decided to accept Moffat’s invitation to write for the series.) In some ways this is oddly liberating – it is in many ways the first time we’ve seen a Doctor Who story conceived of entirely in terms of what the series has been since 2005. 
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Wild Child: World Enough and Time

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From the outset, “World Enough and Time” seems immediately reminiscent of a great deal of previous Star Trek stories. It’s a mishmash hybrid of a thing built out of bits of “Time’s Orphan”, “Joanna”, “The Inner Light” and, well, the last episode, actually. Also The Tempest, but that at least seems intentional.

If I sound a bit cynical here it’s because I kinda am. It’s hard for me to get inspired to write about this kind of story, because so much if it goes over ground I’ve already looked at. The Romulans are doing some shady things, tricking the Enterprise into crossing the Neutral Zone so they can test a new temporal gravity wave weapon (I think), which backfires and blows up their fleet. Caught in the residual messiness, Kirk sends Sulu and Romulan linguistics expert Doctor Lisa Chandris over to the wreckage in a shuttlecraft to get some data Spock and Scotty will need to plan a warp course out of the trap. Stuff happens, the shuttle is lost and Sulu and Chandris need to be beamed back, but the transporter goes wrong (of course) and they wind up being time-shifted to a planet in another dimension such that when Sulu beams aboard, he’s thirty years older (so George Takei can follow Walter Koenig’s lead and get to reprise his role) and has a daughter from an entirely separate life he lived for what for the Enterprise crew was only thirty seconds. The young lady’s name is Alana, she charms everyone with her disarming and inquisitive nature, and naturally, she and Kirk fall in love, causing tension not only with Sulu, but when Spock reveals her being is bound to the temporal field, and breaking free will render her fate uncertain.

It’s not that any of this is especially bad-To the contrary, the script is as well-written as anything else the show has done so far, as one would perhaps expect considering the writer. Marc Scott Zicree is a veteran science fiction and TV writer, as well as a historian, perhaps best known for his comprehensive 1982 book The Twilight Zone Companion. Some of his more notable TV credits include Babylon 5, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Get Along Gang, Liberty’s Kids, The Real Ghostbusters and, of the most interest to us, the TV version of William Shatner’s TekWar series, “First Contact” (the episode, not the movie) for Star Trek: The Next Generation and “Far Beyond the Stars”, the episode I consider to be likely the pinnacle of Star Trek’s Dominion War era (really, only one other story gives it any sort of competition as far as I’m concerned). Zicree is also a regular on Coast to Coast AM and one of my favourite guests, with a captivating conversational tone and a genuine and intoxicating passion for science fiction and writing.

And in spite of its overt familiarity, Zicree and co-writer Michael Reaves have come up with a script that manages to tell a story that’s perfectly solid, valid and fitting for 2007.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 19th, 2014)

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Hello all. Life is good. Wrapped up the writing of TARDIS Eruditorum entries for Series Five yesterday, and got back on finishing off the next chapter of Last War in Albion today. That’s going well, and I’m quite happy with the chapter.

So, let’s see. I don’t think we’ve done a “what are you reading” thread lately if at all, have we?

What are you reading? Should the rest of us be reading it too? For me the answer is the Frank Miller Daredevil run, but that’s for an already discussed reason. It’s… historically very important and easy to see why people made a big deal about, but probably not essential reading for one’s happiness in life. It’s sort of beyond the scope of reviews: if it sounds like the sort of thing that will interest you, it probably will, and otherwise can be skipped.…

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