Eruditorum Press

Haunt the Future

People and Cars and Concrete (The Lodger)

63

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

19

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

1

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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We Confuse Rebellion With A Hairstyle (The Last War in Albion Part 40: D.R. & Quinch, Alan Davis)

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This is the sixth and final part of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords  for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s D.R. & Quinch featured juvenile delinquency and massive amounts of destruction played initially for countercultural and satirical laughs, but eventually played for little more than its own sake. Early installments rail against corrupt authority and the cruelties of war, but the final storyline is a largely toothless (albeit terribly entertaining) satire of Hollywood.

“We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle. Nightmare of the teenage jobscape, suddenly made stupid, weak and clumsy there among the calloused adults.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

The specific style in question dates to MAD #4, from 1953, and from the acclaimed story “Superduperman,” although following the success of that story it became the house style for MAD. Still, “Superduperman” is a known influence for Moore, who has credited it as an influence for both Marvelman and Watchmen, and as such is as good a vehicle to describe the style as any. In many ways “Superduperman” reflects the style of short story that Moore characterized as a “list story” when writing Future Shocks for 2000 AD. Its structure is in effect a frame for going through a bunch of parodied aspects of Superman and, later, Captain Marvel.
Figure 298: Wally Wood’s extremely
detailed art packs in a number of
entertaining sight gags. (Click to
enlarge.)
And so in rapid succession the strip introduces Clark Bent, Lois Pain, and Billy Spafon, who with the magic word SHAZOOM! (Strength, Health, Aptitude, Zeal, Ox, Power of, Ox, Power of Another, and Money) becomes Captain Marbles and proceeds to have an extended fight with Superduperman. The story drips with irony – Superduperman’s chest insignia constantly changes from panel to panel, often serving as various corporate logos or notes that the space is for sale, while Captain Marbles has openly given up being a superhero in favor of making money. All of this is a barely veiled parody of the then-current legal case between National Comics (the then-owners of Superman) and Fawcett Publications, who owned the at the time more popular Captain Marvel. 
Although there is a plot – Superduperman meets and fights Captain Marbles and finally defeats him by tricking him into punching himself in the head, only to find out that Lois Pain still considers him (quite correctly, given his habit of using his X-Ray vision to spy on the women’s room) to be a creep – the plot is, like that of “Sunburn” or “They Sweep the Spaceways,” mainly an excuse to pack in jokes, including elaborate sight gags within Wally Woods’ hyper-detailed art and various suitably awful puns in the vein of Clark Bent.
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“The Undiscovered Country”: To Serve All My Days

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We’re told birthdays and anniversaries are celebrations of people and of life, but they remain, to a degree, backwards-looking: A ritualistic remembrance of a date long since passed, that seems to grow ever further distanced with each reiteration of the ritual. Western culture is fixated on dates, numbers, patterns and schedules. Nonmodern societies have seasons and cycles, the West has calendars and planner books, endlessly tallying up time and counting down to the next obligatory observation. Perhaps that’s why so many people in the West view birthdays not as a time to reflect on themselves, but as a time to become overcome with an impending sense of dread at the fear of mortality and the inevitability of aging. Once you decide time is linear, it has to end somewhere, because humans can’t accept a ray.

2006 was the fortieth anniversary of Star Trek, but it wasn’t a birthday, or rather, if it was, it was one of those birthdays we celebrate of people who have already died: “Such-and-such would have been this old today”. Enterprise had signed off a year prior, and with its cancellation came the sense that Star Trek was actually dead. It was a puzzling thing to bear witness to Star Trek fandom around 2006 and 2007: I don’t recall any talk about continuing Enterprise or any of the other Star Trek series (except for in the obligatory tie-in Pocket Books lines, but those sorts of things will always exist), or coming up with unique and transformative takes on them: Instead, there was a lot of solemn reflection about what Star Trek was, what it used to mean and where it all might have gone wrong.

What few ideas I do remember almost universally revolved around a “Star Trek XI” motion picture made out of the long-abandoned “Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy” pitch from the mid-1990s. And then, of course, there was always Star Trek: New Voyages. In every way, Star Trek fans tried to dowse their future by feverishly digging up the skeletons of their long-departed past. Perhaps it was the shock of Enterprise‘s cancellation combined with the holdover belief from 1990s fandom that Star Trek, as an extant mass media Soda Pop Art franchise, was a thing that would continue on in perpetuity, forever coasting on the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation. For people who can’t conceive of rays, for a time there Star Trek fandom was remarkably quick to embrace them.

So it’s fitting that for Star Trek’s wake, it should once again call upon D.C. Fontana to bury it, if not to praise it. For as much as “To Serve All My Days” is a character study about Chekov, who, thanks to exposure to radiation finally succumbs to the illness he survived in “The Deadly Years” and comes face to face with his mortality, it’s also a story about the legacy Star Trek leaves behind as it transitions into a new form. Let’s address the bombshell right from the start: Yes, Fontana kills off Chekov here, supposedly an episode set before the film series in which Chekov very obviously appears (at the request of Walter Koenig, who wanted closure for his part in Star Trek history and who gives the literal performance of a lifetime as the aged and dying navigator) and yes, this pretty blatantly flies in the face of established canon.…

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Transparency Report for 2013

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Right, this is one of those things I’ve been promising to do before another Kickstarter, and I have the numbers handy, so let’s go ahead and have a look at how the whole writing career went over the last year.

I’m doing this mainly because I do have to shake the cup occasionally and ask for money, and encourage people to buy books to support the project. And I feel like if I’m going to plead with you for money, you have a right to know what my financial situation is.

So, first of all, I am not the primary earner in my household. That would be my wife, who is an oncology nurse at a fairly large hospital. She makes about what you’d expect for that, which is to say, a fraction of what she deserves. We live in Danbury, Connecticut, which is around the 66th percentile in terms of cost of living in the US – a two-bedroom apartment in decent but not great repair runs us $1250 a month, to give you an idea, and that’s pretty much standard market price.

I made $12,409 in royalties in 2013. $3169 of those came from the bundling of books in the Storybundle Doctor Who deal, while the other $9240 came from general sales, for an average of $770 a month. In practice this helpfully supplements my wife’s income in a given month and means that we enjoy the considerable luxury of never having to get too stressed about where rent is coming from in a given month.

There was also the matter of the Kickstarter. I made some errors in calculating shipping costs that resulted in much, much more of the Kickstarter being used to fulfill rewards than I had expected. Between paying for editing and design services on four books in 2013 and rewards shipping, all but about $5000 of the Kickstarter was spoken for. (Design is about $800 a book. Final costs on shipping aren’t quite nailed down because I still have some replacements to ship due to my screwing up and not using sturdy enough packaging, but they were around $6-7k.)

That $5000, along with the Storybundle windfall, essentially went to two things. The first was our honeymoon, which we took in Chicago after eloping. We drove out, stayed in a Pricelined hotel, and put all the money towards eating at nice restaurants. It was an absolutely amazing time, and we would both like to thank everyone for making it something we could do.

The second was my wife’s birthday present for me, a very nice grill that lets me do all sorts of fun cooking things. I was going to include a picture of it, but I ended up writing this at about 3am, so really, not the best lighting for it. Still, I love it dearly, and have made some really lovely dinners on it. (Next up, a grill-roasted duck with potatoes, also grill-roasted.)

To sum up, then, between this job and my wife’s work, we’re able to maintain a pretty nice middle class existence for two.…

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Intelligent Alien Beings (The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood)

102

Karen Gillan is a particular specialist at the “pretend you’re
in the middle of an earthquake” aspect of acting in Doctor
Who.
It’s May 22nd, 2010. Roll Deep remain at number one with “Good Times,” which is unseated after a week by Bob and Bruno Mars with “Nothin’ On You.” with Jason Derulo, Usher, Fyfe Dangerfield, Leeds United Team & Supporters, and the cast of Glee also charting. In news, the so-called Borisbus design is debuted. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, and David Miliband all announce that they’ll stand for leadership of the Labour Party. And not much more happens.
While on television, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, a nice, meaty, two-parter. Which is to say, a relic. The two-parter, as a story structure, has seemingly been deprecated, becoming the pure historical of the new series. Like the pure historical, it lingers into the second major creative era of the show before being quietly and unremarkably done away with – two-parters are a mainstay of Series Six Part One, and have suddenly vanished by the back half.
Moffat has spoken about two-parters skeptically as a structure, arguing that the way in which they can be made to work is to have the second episode start in a markedly different place from the first – a logic that, when taken to its extreme, eventually gets you things like The Snowmen and The Bells of Saint John or The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor in which the broadest form of the two-parter is preserved, but the individual stories are wholly distinct. And sure enough, the five two-parters of the Moffat era almost all do this, with  the setting change in Flesh and Stone, the unexpected time jump in Day of the Moon, and the introduction of the Ganger Doctor in The Rebel Flesh. There’s a notable exception here, of course, and it’s this story.
It tries, certainly – the switch to a historical narration from the perspective of 3020 is an attempt to make Cold Blood a materially different sort of story than The Hungry Earth. But it’s a feeble attempt designed to try to cover up the truth, which is that The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is a case of the new series doing a two-parter that is utterly faithful to why there are two-parters in the first place, namely a desire on the part of Russell T Davies to preserve the cliffhanger structure of the classic series. 
In this regard the most interesting question about these episodes, in many ways, is what Tat Wood is going to think of them. As one of the few people capable of suggesting that the new series ought be more like the classic series without sounding like an utter fool, these episodes ought be of particular interest to him. Not least because they harken back consciously to the Pertwee era in more than just the choice of antagonists. The opening sequence is drenched in Pertwee iconography, from a giant drill (Inferno) to the bucolic Welsh setting (The Green Death).
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