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There’s No Point in Growing Up (Amy’s Choice)

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This happens more often than you’d think. Trust me, I know.
My wife’s a hospice nurse.
It’s May 15th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” a song that sounds from the title very much like it is about sober and responsible behavior. Plan B, Aggro Santos, and Professor Green also chart. I’m going to go ahead and admit I’ve not heard of any of these. News I remember – BP continues to do a very bad job of stopping the Deepwater Horizon spill. Gordon Brown announces that he will resign as head of the Labour Party, which precedes David Cameron forming a coalition government with Nick Clegg. The Queen approves of this, apparently. Oh, and Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud started wandering by again. 
While on television, the midpoint of the season, Amy’s Choice. Let’s start with the end, since its implications are easy to overlook. In amidst the revelation that the Dream Lord was just a twisted reflection of the Doctor (which is to say, literally what he appeared to be all episode, as opposed to merely figuratively), it is easy to overlook the larger point, which is that Amy’s choice was always a false one. The episode spends most of its runtime positioning Amy to make a choice as to which of the two worlds is real, with this choice symbolically standing in for her choice between Rory and the Doctor. The final revelation is that this choice was illusory. 
This is not a small thing. The conventional wisdom, after all, would hold that Amy and Rory getting married would bring about the exact result it seems to in this story: they’d settle down in Leadworth and stop having adventures. Because growing up is antithetical to adventures. That’s the entire point of the Amy/Amelia dichotomy and the whole “run off with the Doctor the night before her wedding” idea. Instead of your Mickey-esque terrestrial partner you fall in love with a madman with a magical box. Of course for Amy, for whom sexual confidence is one of the first traits given, this was always going to be somewhat less chaste than the Rose Tyler era. Especially once she’s met River, and thus been tacitly invited to view the Doctor as a sexual being. 
And this logic is hardly unique to Doctor Who. Just over two years prior to this story Marvel Comics went to great lengths to undo the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man comics, saying that “When people get married, they tend to settle down — life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. You go out to dinner less, see fewer movies, your social life is curtailed and revolves, as it should, around your significant other. In short, life hands you a mini van. While marriage makes for an okay story, there is less drama in a (healthy) marriage than in a single relationship.” Just over two years after it, DC did a big reboot of its universe and, in the process, undid the Clark Kent/Lois Lane marriage before, eventually, clarifying that they were simply opposed to the idea of any superheroes being married, saying, “heroes shouldn’t have happy personal lives.”
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“Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway”: Come What May

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There’s something about Star Trek that inspires people, in spite of itself.

2004 marked the beginning of a period of tender, heartfelt introspection for Star Trek fans, perhaps unmatched at any other point in the history of the franchise. The mere fact that Star Trek Phase II (at this point still operating under its original name of Star Trek: New Voyages) exists here while Enterprise was in the middle of its third season and the “Save Enterprise!” campaign in full swing is probably a decent indication of the faith anyone had in the continued longevity of the sixth Star Trek series, or indeed Star Trek itself, at least as an extant and relevant mass media presence. Perhaps it was this zeitgeist, and the accompanying urge to “go back to where it all began” in an attempt to understand things, that was what motivated James Cawley and Jack Marshall to make their own Star Trek TV show.

But 2004 is also an interesting transitory period for independent TV shows. This is still before the advent of YouTube made easy and accessible Internet video hosting and sharing a major cornerstone of what’s come to be (somewhat inaccurately) called “Web 2.0”. One could imagine that had Star Trek Phase II come along just a few years later it would have resembled much more closely the recent Star Trek Continues: Kickstarter-funded and then given a major sponsor such that it attracted the much sought-after “buzz” and had an actual budget. But Star Trek Phase II didn’t have the luxury of any of that in 2004, being entirely funded out-of-pocket by Cawley’s career as an Elvis impersonator (which comes through delightfully in Cawley’s portrayal of Kirk in “Come What May”: Not only does his hairstyle look like an Elvis wig, he has appealing sense of artifice) and having to build its own web presence and following entirely from scratch. There’s a sense that this show is in some ways a throwback (but not a bad one) to a time when independent filmmakers could only rely on their own resources, ingenuity and tenacity, trying desperately to convey their visions in somebody’s backyard with a home VHS camera.

(Not that Star Trek Phase II looks cheap by any stretch of the imagination: The fact the creative team managed to convincingly recreate the sets from the Original Series is staggering, and the CGI effects shots, while obviously comparatively crude, look more dynamic and interesting than the ones on the actual show did.)

Star Trek Phase II is, predictably, in part a revival of the abandoned show from 1978 that Paramount had initially hoped would bring Star Trek back to TV and serve as the flagship programme for their new network. The name is slightly misleading, however, as it’s also pegged as the fifth year of the five-year mission depicted in the Original Series and Animated Series and is comprised of mostly original work. The show has the rather ambitious aim of linking together the various and disparate stories and timelines of the Original Series, Animated Series, Phase II and Original Series movies into something resembling coherence.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 12th, 2014)

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Hello all. I’ve finally gotten around to those tax things, so the general “here’s where things were in 2013 for Eruditorum Press” post should be up this week.

But for now, gossip! Discussion! Games!

The following eight posts will have other stories subbed in for them in the manner of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.

  • The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
  • The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
  • A Good Man Goes to War
  • Let’s Kill Hitler
  • The Wedding of River Song
  • Angels in Manhattan
  • The Name of the Doctor
  • The Time of the Doctor
The stories available to go into those slots are the first six as well as Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.
I have already selected which ones are going to go where, and have in my head some sort of spurious justification and plan for why I picked the order I did.
What order do you think I’m going to tackle them in? 
Give cool justifications for your picks and you might even change my order from the one I’m planning.
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Closer to Glorifying Ecoterrorism than Neoliberalism: The Alex Reed Interview

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Alex Reed of the band Seeming (and various other projects you may have heard about) was kind enough to provide an interview. You can read my earlier review of Seeming’s deliciously good debut album Madness and Extinction here, stream the album here, and part with your hard-earned money for a copy here and at various other places where one would expect to buy music.

Hello Alex!
Hello Phil!
Much as it’s a largely debased and meaningless term, at first glance Madness and Extinction appears to be something of a concept album. So, why madness, why extinction, and why together?
Right.  I think both madness and extinction are viable alternatives to a world overrun by people convinced of their own rightness, and of their own right to control others, kill living creatures, and poison the sky.  As options go, I’d even say they’re preferable, really.
One aspect of the juxtaposition between madness and extinction is that the album has a sort of apocalyptic confessionalism: of the ten songs you wrote for it, by my count, nine of them feature the first person, including “Convincing,” in which you break an unspoken pop taboo and invoke yourself by name. What’s the appeal of such personal engagement with the apocalypse?
Music is a way of connecting with people, but I’m not going to pretend that what we have to say on this record is a message that lots of other people relate to or would want to.  Oftentimes the most rewarding art is the stuff that feels dangerous or risky, and so I made the choice with this album to give up on dance songs, on love songs, or on cheesy motivational ideas.  I like making dance music and love songs and I’ve written some very honest and hopeful stuff, but if that’s what you’re looking for as a listener, there’s a whole world of music out there tailor-made for you, and I can’t compete with it.  What I can do, though—and what I think we did with this record—is paint a picture that stares you back in the face with more than a hint of wildness and cold distance.  The risk on this record is its uninterest in relating.  It’s kind of a martian portrait.  And I think that’s what makes it exhilarating for me, and I think that people are starting to get it.
Speaking of “getting it,” I saw an exchange on Facebook where someone suggested there’s a symbolic “side flip” to the album between “Goodnight London” and “Come Back”—a feature that you more or less confirmed.  Can you talk a bit about the album’s sequencing and this two-sidedness? Is there a dramatic arc that you see to the album? Do some songs respond to one another directly?
Well, you talked about a “concept album,” and I can tell you that we never planned this to be a concept record as such.  But once we had the songs assembled, certain patterns fell into place in the sequencing.  “The Eyes of Extinction” always sounded like an opener, though finding a closer was harder. 
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“Peace through superior firepower”: The War to End All Wars

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Summary of shakedown trials for prototype codename “VOYAGER”…

In orbit around Shadir, a planet whose inhabitants are rumoured to be highly cultured and refined aesthetes, the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a passing spacecraft that’s apparently been through a massive battle, as little remains of it but debris. There’s also the larger issue that Xon and Uhura can’t pick up any lifesigns on either the ship or the planet. Kirk takes Xon and McCoy over to the ship where they meet Yra, a soldier who claims she and her ship are casualties in a planetary war that has overtaken Shadir. Before Kirk can pontificate on the tragedy of such a civilization falling to warfare, a massive blast strikes the Enterprise, rendering Decker unable to raise shields and crippling its critical systems. As the landing party returns to asses the damage, Kirk sends Yra to sickbay, where McCoy discovers that she’s actually an android.

Decker and Scotty tell Kirk the ship can’t survive another attack, but Yra claims another attack is forthcoming and asks to return to Shadir, where she might be able to help stop another projectile from being launched. Kirk agrees and takes her, Xon and McCoy down to Shadir to investigate. There, they learn that Shadir is organised around two basic premises: Upholding and preserving the sanctity of all life and the notion peace can be achieved through using armed conflict to resolve differences. The reason the ship’s sensors couldn’t pick up any lifesigns is because the Shadirians all live underground, but project their consciousnesses into android duplicates who fight a neverending war above ground and in space (an apparent “corruption” of the original purpose of Shadir). Furthermore, it turns out Yra was a double agent, and attempted to capture the Enterprise and her crew to attain a credit bonus from her superiors (so apparently war on Shadir isn’t just perpetual, it’s a form of capitalist labour as well).

I mean, it isn’t good. The fact I can barely remember any of the major plot details is probably a bad sign, as is the fact I kept thinking of the Original Series episode “A Taste of Armageddon” all throughout. Both stories look at worlds where war has become a banal fact of everyday life and is considered necessary to uphold a tenuous peace, and both stories end with a massive explosive conflict that brings about the end of the existing social order. “The War to End All Wars” comes across as the more effective and acceptable of the two because it has Kirk state on numerous occasions that war is never the solution to anything, as opposed to having him go on a bizarre tirade about humans being natural-born murderers (but then again, it damn well better come across as more effective given how morally bankrupt this show has gotten in recent weeks).

This episode’s particular tweak is the concept of voluntary rather than obligatory warfare. While it was never especially clear to me whether or not the Shadirians were engaging in this elabourate ritual for recreational purposes, there is the sense this is something they do not just to resolve disputes, but for excitement (Kirk says something to the extent of “the mistake the Shadirians made was that they became numb and needed to seek out more and greater thrills”).…

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Kid-With-Knife Is Behind You With An AK-47 (The Last War in Albion Part 39: D.R. & Quinch)

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Coming a day early due to the nature of this week’s extra post, this is the fifth of six parts 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 Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

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 for countercultural laughs.

“Kid-With-Knife is behind you with an AK-47.” -Kieron Gillen, Phonogram: The Singles Club

Figure 290: Northampton School for Boys, from which Moore
was expelled for dealing acid. Moore notes that he declined
to rat out his accomplice, who he says went on to become
a police officer.
Also important, of course, is the material itself. The anarchic glee that D.R. and Quinch builds its humor out of is an ideology that must surely have appealed to Alan Moore. The detail that the two lead characters have been kicked out of school makes this one of the earliest of relatively few instances in Moore’s career where one is compelled to read a story at least partially autobiographically. Moore, after all, was himself kicked out of school, and, if not under similar circumstances to those of D.R. and Quinch (he was only caught dealing acid, as opposed to harboring an extensive stash of high energy weapons), at least under a similar rhetoric. “The headmaster who had dealt with my expulsion had, I think, taken me rather personally,” Moore explains.  “He had written to all of the colleges and schools that I might have thought of applying to and told them that they should under no circumstances accept me as a pupil because it would be a corrupting influence upon the morals of the other students. I believe that he did at one point in the letter refer to me as sociopathic, which I think was rather harsh.” 
It is difficult not to find certain parallels between Moore’s wry interview humor in 2005 and the opening gag of “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth,” where Quinch explains that “my psychiatrist says I’m a psychotic deviant. But that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, right?” Similarly, in another interview, Moore describes how “I was just convinced I must get my revenge upon society, no matter what” for being kicked out, making it clear that his animosity was for “the government, it was the structure of everything.” Although this is delivered with similar humor (Moore encourages the interview to “try to picture, if you will, a little 17-year-old Alan sitting there, kind of staring, hallucinating”), the similarity between it and D.R.
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Vanished Even To His Shadow (The Vampires of Venice)

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What do you mean Girls Aloud are “on hiatus”?
It’s May 8th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” with Taio Cruz, Usher, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the bombing in Mogadishu is widely blamed on Al Qaeda, protests begin in Greece against austerity measures, and the general election takes place, with results described in a Pop Between Realities post at the start of the Smith era, although the actual formation of a government does not take place this week.
Meanwhile, on television, Toby Whithouse’s The Vampires of Venice. The decision to bring back Toby Whithouse was, in many ways, obvious. He had experience with Doctor Who, but had by this point distinguished himself with Being Human and shown that he could more broadly handle genre-based character drama. But there’s a second and subtler reason at play here, which is that in many ways Whithouse has been brought back to write the same story he did last time. School Reunion was one of the better notes of the 2006 season, but one if its main purposes was to rehabilitate Mickey such that he would serve as a functioning companion instead of the buffoon he was initially portrayed as.
In many straightforward regards, The Vampires of Venice is visibly designed to serve the same purpose. It is the “reintroduce Rory” episode, and, more to the point, the one in which he becomes a regular companion. And Rory served many of the same purposes in The Eleventh Hour that Mickey did way back in Rose – he’s the good but slightly inadequate guy that the new companion leaves in favor of a life of adventure. In that story he’s nobody’s favorite character, and this is by design. His role is to be replaced by the Doctor. And so when he does come back in The Vampires of Venice, the audience’s reaction is necessarily one of slight hostility. He is, after all, a third wheel on our brand new TARDIS team that we’ve been set up to love over the past five episodes. 
Another way of putting this, then, is that the series has so far led us to, if not root for Amy to abandon her wedding and run off in the TARDIS, at least to fail to have any strong feelings that she should go back and marry Rory. It is, at this point in the narrative, more or less impossible to have those feelings: Rory isn’t developed enough as a character to motivate them. And since marrying Rory is explicitly set up as a threat to the fun adventures in time and space, the audience has been carefully positioned to be relatively hostile to the idea. This is not ironclad, of course – surely there exist people who sided with Rory from the start. But the series has been constructed so as to give the sense (without actually having said much of anything about it) that it is on Team Doctor, to borrow another text’s milieu.
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“Allamaraine, if you can see/Allamaraine, you’ll come with me”: To Attain the All

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Bloody hell.

“To Attain the All” has got to be the worst episode of Star Trek Phase II by *far*. “Cassandra” was bad. “The Child” was awful. “Savage Syndrome” was appalling, but that was by Margaret Armen, so that’s par for the course. And nobody really expected greatness from “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?”: A brief like that is angling for major problems from the outset. But this? Wow. There’s no excuse for this.

While investigating a system of planets strung together like a pearl necklace (so *that’s* where Star Trek: Year Four got the idea from. Seriously, how do you screw up a visual like that?), the Enterprise is suddenly transported to a realm outside normal spacetime where they are visited by a hyper-evolved energy being called The Prince who claims to represent an infinitely old culture who hold the secrets of the universe, and declares he’s going to test the crew to determine whether or not they’re worthy of attaining a form of enlightenment called “The All” (and it should be an indication for how bloody long this show has been going on that a brief like that feels hackneyed and boring). The Prince says he wants two representatives to face a series of challenges, to which Decker and Xon immediately volunteer for their own reasons (Xon thinks it’s logical, while Decker is starry-eyed at the prospect of learning and new discovery). Reluctantly, Kirk agrees, but at the same time begins to work with Uhura and Ilia to find a way to free the Enterprise.

After that bit, Decker and Xon go off to rainbow space land to play Legends of the Hidden Temple. They are faced with a series of puzzles and physical challenges they must overcome by using a combination of logic and intuition to progress to the next stage and reach The All while The Prince occasionally pops in to give them advice. You thought I was kidding. I wish I was. While this is going on, Kirk begins to notice that the remainder of his crew are starting to act disturbingly similar to each other: McCoy and Chapel are having a professional disagreement, but then start to see each other’s points, Sulu is starting to display character traits more associated with Chekov and vice versa, and Uhura and Ilia are starting to speak for each other. Eventually, this culminates in the entire crew, save Kirk and Decker, becoming subsumed by The All, which turns out to be a great big ancient hive mind that goes around assimilating other people, so naturally the two manly action heroes have to go and punch some sense into everyone and aggressively re-introduce them to good ol’ American Individuality.

Christ on a bike.

Where do I begin? The All is self-evidently enlightenment, obviously coded as a Buddhist version of it to boot…and the show thinks this is an evil, horrible thing. Idiotic and embarrassing children’s gameshow trappings aside, this is the fundamental problem with this episode. It dwarfs everything else and puts Star Trek into a dangerous position the likes of which it hasn’t ventured near for at least twelve years.…

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Here Standing In Front Of You (The Time of the Doctor)

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as the number 2.

It’s December 25th, 2013. X-Factor winner Sam Bailey is at number one with “Skyscraper.” Eminem, One Direction, and Pharrell Williams also chart, as do Leona Lewis and AC/DC. In news, since Tom Baker last appeared as Doctor Who, the Syrian civil war rumbles uncomfortably on, and the official intermediate report on the Sandy Hook shooting was released. Paul Walker died, as did Nelson Mandella. Pope Francis gives his first Urbi et Orbi speech. Matt Smith regenerated into Peter Capaldi. 

So here we are at the last entry of TARDIS Eruditorum. Nothing flashy, I’m afraid. I can’t possibly go bigger than I did for Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, and the elaborate structural games of things like Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways or Ghost Light don’t quite seem appropriate. Just an ordinary entry, as befits an ending where, in truth, everything carries on perfectly fine without me.
Still, some cards on the table. Why here, first of all. After all, due to the twice-weekly schedule of the Smith era, these posts have carried on well past Series Eight. Why not blog it? Because Time of the Doctor is a good end, ultimately. And I needed one. You have to to end somewhere, and a regeneration story at the end of the program’s fiftieth year is a good place to do it. It gave me an end I could build to for a nice, long while, and gave me the same advantage with the Smith era that I had in every other era, which was knowing where I was going with it. And, as I discovered to my pleasure when it aired, it’s a good story. One of my favorites, in fact. 
Second, since this is the last of the posted-out-of-order entries, why have I been posting some stories out of order ever since I put The Name of the Doctor in place of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Which perhaps gets at another nagging question I should answer before walking off the stage, which is why I do odd things like this in the first place. The answer, for better or for worse, is to explore the idea of non-linear storytelling in a more direct way. So much of the Moffat era takes place out of chronological order, with consequences preceding causes and explanations preceding the things they explain. And that seemed worth dealing with. The obvious vector was River Song, the character in the Moffat era most defined by her non-chronological nature, and so I decided to put the River Song posts out of order. I considered both along her own timeline and backwards, but neither seemed quite appropriate. River’s own timeline simply prioritizes a different story while retaining chronology, and backwards was always going to be a big risk if she appeared again. So I decided to do it genuinely out of order, picking stories for slots based on what thematic concerns they engaged and what would come of contrasting those with the points in the chronological narrative they fell.
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“…a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood”: Lord Bobby’s Obsession

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“Lord Bobby’s Obsession” is described as “Space Seed” meets “The Squire of Gothos”. This is the most accurate description in the history of things describing other things because that’s literally what it is.

It doesn’t even pretend to be something different. It is, beat-for-beat, the exact same story as “Space Seed” with the exact same scenes and the exact same plot twists except the supervillain is an alien fascinated with the British Empire, is acting alone this time and the submissive female humanities expert smitten with him stays on the Enterprise instead of departing with him at the end of the episode. This is my least favourite kind of story to write about, because it gives me essentially no material to work with. Even Margaret Armen gave me enough to complain about that I could find 1800 words to squeeze out of “Savage Syndrome”. You could practically take my “Space Seed” post, change the names around and write your own Vaka Rangi review of “Lord Bobby’s Obsession”.

That said, like “Tomorrow and the Stars” before it, this doesn’t mean “Lord Bobby’s Obsession” doesn’t manage to improve on its source material such that this is the superior version of the story. It definitely does, and this alone makes it noteworthy and deserving of at least a little attention. Once again, the Star Trek Phase II version manages to distill out the essence of the story by removing all of its more problematic ethical hangups. In this case, most of the welcome changes come from the title character himself: Robert Standish, Third Earl of Lancashire. Modeling him after Trelane instead of Khan is actually something of a genius move, and the result is we get someone whose latent charm and charisma belies the fact he’s really a petulant, childish, self-centred wannabe with a seriously inflated sense of self worth and importance. And because Lord Bobby isn’t a godlike being, he’s just a regular guy with access to some advanced technology, this neatly avoids the problems we read into Trelane’s character back in “The Squire of Gothos”. And in doing so, “Lord Bobby’s Obsession” manages to deftly invert that episode’s structure, demonstrating that, despite everything, Star Trek really has come a long way.

What I mean by this is that the basic issue I found with “Gothos” was that Trelane is set up as a kind of dark parodic mirror of William Shatner’s interpretation of Jim Kirk, namely, a drag action hero fixated on honour, duty, valour, the chain of command and warmaking. The intended point being, as I saw it, that in spite of Shatner’s noble attempt to skewer the inherent silliness of all that by taking Kirk in a different direction then how he was originally written, by the mere fact of playing Kirk and playing the hero of this show, he was in some sense at least partially complicit in the original Star Trek‘s unsavoury predilections. The problem came about in the climactic reveal, where it turned out Trelane was literally a child, the spoiled offspring of a couple of standard-issue hyper-advanced energy beings, thus removing any claim Trelane had to offering any sort of serious critique.…

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