Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

Some New Man (The Eleventh Hour)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a hospital roof.
It’s April 3rd, 2010. Lady Gaga and Beyonce are at number one with “Telephone,” while Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, and Boyzone also chart. I regret to inform my readership that we have also entered the dark days of the world: Justin Bieber is at number three. While we’ve been away Togo withdrew from the Africa Cup of Nations after an attack on their national football team, the Winter Olympics took place, and an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. While in last week, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church as “petty gossip,” rescuers reached 153 trapped miners in Shanxi, China, the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by North Korea, and, on April 3rd itself, the iPad was first released.
Of the exact same age as the iPad, then, is the Matt Smith era, which kicks off with The Eleventh Hour. What jumps out the most about The Eleventh Hour with nearly four years of hindsight is how confident it is. This is the one of Moffat’s scripts for his own era that hardly anybody seems to have a bad word for. Even the fiercest critics of the Moffat era tend to make some comment about the squandered promise of this episode. This is one of the rare episodes of Doctor Who that seems to basically please everybody.
Its major challenge is that this was, in practice, a bare minimum. Moffat, Wegner, and Willis have essentially nothing to rest on save for their own talent. This was a moment where every critic was sharpening the knife. The resulting episode had to be absolutely critic-proof. It could get people to tune in based on the accumulated good will the series had from the Russell T Davies era, but equally, more than any other moment in the series’ history, this was a point where everybody had a ready-made excuse to stop watching. Even a whiff of “not as good as it used to be” would be devastating to the series right now, and so this has to be the episode of Doctor Who that anybody who is ever going to like an episode of Doctor Who will like. 
The easy way to do this, by which I mean the way that would have gotten the series cancelled, would have been to do something that could more or less be described as Doctor Who by numbers – a story that was functionally indistinguishable from the Russell T Davies season openers.  Admittedly, those expecting a decisive break from the Russell T Davies era are ultimately frustrated by The Eleventh Hour, which is still grounded in the structure of the Davies era. Indeed, the entirety of Series Five is, on a superficial level, structured like a Davies series. The first three episodes almost perfectly track those of Series One – a present day alien invasion story introducing the new Doctor and companion, a kind of weird future story, and a celebrity historical.
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“We are such stuff/As dreams are made on”: Practice in Waking

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“Practice in Waking” is an interesting submission. It’s written by Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This is not, in and of itself, altogether promising, considering Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a cornerstone of the middlebrow, populist, mystique-chic New Age movement with a plot so dull and facile it led Roger Ebert to once memorably compare it unfavourably to The Little Engine That Could. There’s a very serious line to be drawn between actual magick, narrative or otherwise, and the kind of thing championed by the Western, and mostly United States, New Age fad, which more often than not tends to be built out of the exact same imperialism, syncretism and cultural appropriation that defines the rest of the West. If Star Trek wants to take its spirituality seriously, it really ought to stay as far away from this kind of thing as possible. Clearly, “Practice in Waking” is screaming towards disaster.

And, wouldn’t you know it, this is could possibly be the best episode yet. Funny thing that.

“Practice in Waking” opens up hauntingly prescient, very strongly evoking Star Trek: The Next Generation, in particular the first season finale “The Neutral Zone”: Out in deep space, the Enterprise discovers a derelict spaceship called Project Long Chance, one of the last sublight ships built by Earth in the early 21st century. After Xon exposits that the crew must have been placed in suspended animation, Decker takes an away team, consisting of himself, Scotty and antiques buff Sulu over to the Long Chance, where they find one active unit: The casket of chief engineer Deborah MacClintock. Before they can fully relay their findings to the bridge crew, Scotty accidentally touches a panel on MacClintock’s chamber, generating a massive pulse of energy that knocks the away team out and places them in instantaneous suspended animation.

Decker, Scotty and Sulu awake in sixteenth century Scotland in the middle of a forest. Having no memory of who they are and where they came from, they scarcely have time to get their bearings before they see a woman, MacClintock, who is being chased by a royal garrison and about to be put on trial for witchcraft. As the away team fights off the guards, MacClintock reveals that she does in fact believe herself to be a witch, because she has the power to dream events and objects into reality and declares that they too must be witches as well. Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, Kirk, McCoy, Xon and Uhura work feverishly to find out what’s happened to the away team and to find a way to safely wake them, for as long as they stay in a coma, their life signs will deteriorate, to the point they have only hours to live. Curiously, this parallels with events in the “dream world”, as pursued and eventually captured by the witch hunters, MacClintock, Decker, Sulu and Scotty only have hours before they’re burnt at the stake for witchcraft.

Right away, this is once again an episode that’s both structurally very sound and ahead of its time.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 77: Snapshots of 2010

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No Future


Near future prediction is always a rough game. The 1984 film 2010, an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel, managed a double error that almost perfectly defines the way in which the classic science fiction vision of the future fizzled. It’s first important to note the sort of endearing hubris of the film in the first place. In 1968, when 2001 came out, the future was thirty-three years off. But in 1984 the future was only twenty-six years off. There was still the resplendent belief in the onrushing scientific utopia that the culture had promised – a utopia wrapped up as a historical inevitable consequence of the then-present. Hence 2010’s amusing double error – the belief that humanity would be on the verge of going to Jupiter and the belief that the Cold War would be rumbling on.
Instead the American space program spent 2010 winding down, each of the three surviving Shuttles making their penultimate flights. The Cold War is dead and gone. Indeed, the entire apparatus of the future is long since gone, and has in fact quietly disappeared into the rear view mirror. Time memorably spend the tail end of 2009 declaring the aughts to have been the “worst decade ever,” and while this should be taken as Comic Book Guy style hyperbole with periods after every word, the case was compelling enough. A decade long war on terror culminated in a massive financial crash and the growing realization that electing a black dude President of the United States was not actually going to fix everything. 
Even the replacement future hastily drafted in after the original draft withered on the vine was floundering. It’s not that the Internet was underperforming as such, but on the other hand, its transformative promise was somewhat less than advertised. What had started as revolutionary technology was now just Facebook. 

The future had never really been built past the change of the millennium, and without that to anchor it there was just a vast, featureless present. Even technological advancement had become oddly fixed and predictable. The future came in regularly scheduled product launches headlined by Steve Jobs, incremental, predictable, and mostly leaked to rumor sites a few weeks in advance. It was not even a hugely pessimistic historical moment. Rather it was one captured by a grim banality. Nothing changes. Humanity sits past the ghost point, all the ideas and storming progress of the twentieth century ground to a point. For a hundred years now we had assumed we were building to something – that there was some sort of stable endpoint that all the churn and upheaval pointed towards. Whether that endpoint was utopia or armageddon was up in the air, but the broad idea that history was going somewhere wasn’t. Instead, however, the wheels simply fell off, and the tow truck never came. We sat, abandoned on history’s roadside, left thinking, “is this all there was?” And, seeing no sign of civilization, we tweeted about it.
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“Shiny Happy People”: Cassandra

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Theodore Sturgeon is an obvious pick to write for Star Trek Phase II. He wrote one of the most beloved and influential Original Series episodes ever, “Amok Time”, so it would make sense to give him the opportunity to make something equally memorable for Phase II. However, the thing about Sturgeon is that he *also* wrote “Shore Leave”, which was such a hot mess it was possibly the only work of fiction in the history of time to be actually improved by getting a retread sequel. So, would “Cassandra”, Sturgeon’s submission to Star Trek Phase II, channel the grandiose brilliance of “Amok Time” or the misogynistic clusterfuck of “Shore Leave”?

Naturally, it had to be the misogynistic clusterfuck.

“Cassandra” is pegged as a “comedy”, which is already a bad sign because Star Trek sucks at comedy unless Gene Coon and Dave Gerrold are writing, and neither of them are in this case. The Enterprise is monitoring a diplomatic conference on the planet Manlikt (an aside, here’s a stock Star Trek theme that gets more pronounced in Star Trek: The Next Generation that I never understood: Why is the Enterprise crew frequently put in charge of hosting diplomatic conferences? Aren’t they supposed to be explorers? Isn’t this the job of ambassadors?) between the warlike native peoples the Manlikt (great names) and the Breet. It seems to have gone smoothly at first, but no sooner does the conference wrap up than the Manlikt make a planetwide declaration that they will detonate a doomsday device if the Breet do not return their Sacred Monitor, a priceless Manlikt cultural artefact that seems to have gone missing.

As the bridge crew try to figure that out, our “heroine”, a young, fresh-faced and exceptionally clumsy Yeoman named Myra Kart stops by sickbay to give McCoy and Chapel a strange alien egg she found, but that she also managed to drop and crack. The egg hatches into a small, fuzzy bird-like thing named Cassandra, who seems to have the ability to parrot people’s words before they say them. Cassandra then escapes, and the rest of the episode pretty much consists of Kart chasing her all over the ship as she causes all manner of wacky and whimsical mischief while Kart runs into walls, pushes the wrong buttons and just generally wrecks shit and acts like a dumbass. Eventually, she manages to accidentally capture some Breet spies after Xon reveals to Kirk what everyone who wasn’t asleep figured out forty-five minutes ago, that Cassandra is the Sacred Monitor, was stolen by the Breet and hidden aboard the Enterprise and must be returned to Manlikt. Apparently, somewhere in all of this is there’s supposed to be humour.

Wow. I haven’t seen an episode this manner of bad in quite awhile. This is the sort of thing that defines *painfully* bad: It’s physically difficult to watch because of how awkward, stilted and forced it is and how completely it lacks any manner of self-awareness of just how badly wrong and embarrassing it’s gone.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 22nd, 2014)

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Hello all.

Let’s get the unfortunate announcement out of the way first. There are some projects I’m trying to have wrapped and ready to go at the same time that TARDIS Eruditorum wraps, and looking at deadlines and progress, I’m behind. And so after nearly a year of five posts a week and three years of three TARDIS Eruditorums a week, I am finally giving in to temptation and cutting TARDIS Eruditorum to a twice-weekly blog. New entries will be on Mondays and Wednesdays, with Last War in Albion moving to Fridays. I’ll continue to provide bonus content, sometimes substantive, sometimes fluffy, on either Tuesday or Thursday of a given week for a total of four posts a week, plus waffling.

I suspect I care about this more than any of you actually do, but I’m nevertheless very sorry and disappointed that this step is necessary.

I do have some cool stuff to announce soon. In fact, let’s see what we can successfully tease.

  • The Last War in Albion Kickstarter is, as mentioned, coming. Most of the component parts are there – I just need to fulfill my promise to do a transparency post about my writing income in 2013 and to wait for James’s schedule to clear up so he can provide me some art for it.
  • The Last War Kickstarter will also include access to the backers-only blog where the occasionally mentioned Secret Project will be serialized as it’s written. Right now I’ve got one chapter written, and another about 1/3 done.
  • I’ve begun the earliest of early talks around the idea of Eruditorum Press expanding into publishing work by people other than me. More news on that in a few months but it’s something I’m terribly excited about, and the two people I’ve got tentative agreements with are absolutely great writers it would be a thrill to work with.
  • Related to this, I am thinking seriously about expanding my work a bit to involve some freelance editing work. This is at least vaguely related to the former. It would manifestly not be copyediting and proofreading, which I’m actually crap at (it’s a thing where ADD [diagnosed, mind you, not colloquial] really screws you up), but would be about fine-tuning ideas, refining the shape of a project, or figuring out how to beat an unruly draft into a smooth final form. In fact, anyone interested in that, please drop me an e-mail. Snowspinner. Gmail.
Finally, our discussion topic, which has to be, given the absolutely awful news of his death, Steve Moore. I’ve covered Moore’s work a few times on the blog – his Doctor Who comics got coverage in TARDIS Eruditorum here, and various bits of his work are all over the early bits of Chapter Four of Last War in Albion, particularly these two entries.
But his career is long and varied. He didn’t just create Abslom Daak and Kroton the Cyberman, he also was the subject of Alan Moore’s fascinating Unearthing, the author of the seminal Trigrams of Han, the writer of the first Tharg’s Future Shock, and did an absolute ton of other stuff.
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Anti-Moffat

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News from Elsewhere II: This Time It’s Polemical

I’ve done another guest post for Phil Sandifer’s site, here.  He wanted someone to put a case against the Moffat era before he proceeded to post his own thoughts about it.  He asked me to provide and, despite the obvious dangers, I bravely agreed… to attack someone who can’t answer back without looking like a massive prick.  Still, I’ve done it before.  Just never on a site with an actual readership.  The scarier thing is how Phil’s own subsequent posts will stamp all over me. 

I’ve steered well clear of having a go at the man personally, which means I’ve not engaged with any of his troubling public statements.  I’ve tried to argue from the texts.

Phil has called my post ‘A Case for the Prosecution’.  I’m glad he put “A” rather than “The”, because – inevitably – my attempt will disappoint some of the many people who care about this issue, not least because I didn’t have time to do much more than cobble together a (relatively) brief overview. 

To me, this bit of writing will always be called the ‘Anti-Moffat’.  Not that I compare myself to Engels.  In his Anti-Dühring, Engels not only wrote a blistering polemic, he also did the one thing that genuinely makes polemic valuable: he explained his own, alternative view.  It became one of the most brilliant and inspiring elaborations of Marxism ever written.  I, by contrast, have failed to even come away with something positive to say about what my favourite TV show should be like.  I also failed – apart from the odd hint – to find space to put the Moffat era in its historical and political context, as the Who of late neoliberalism, ongoing crisis, backlash and austerity.  (Maybe I’ll put all that in the book.)

So, basically, it’s just a whinge.  But an entertaining one, I hope.

Engels.  Some people say Marxism wasn’t as good after he took over.

ADDITIONAL, 23/03/14:  Richard Cooper, over at his blog ‘Finger-Steepling and Sharks’, also has an excellent essay about the issue of Moffat and sexism, here, which pre-dates mine.…

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Guest Post: Steven Moffat – A Case For The Prosecution

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Personally, as I’ve said, I quite like the Moffat era. I dare say I love it. But I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and it seems fair, before we go in, to give the opposition a chance to state the case against. So here’s Jack Graham doing what he does best: being loud, angry, and leftist about Doctor Who. We’ll be back on Monday with a Pop Between Realities to kick off the Moffat era, and then The Eleventh Hour on Wednesday. Also, to clarify, the illustration on this one was my pick, meant as a cheekily representative example of anti-Moffat criticism, and not Jack’s at all.

I’m here to up the anti, so to speak.  As such, I’m a sacrificial lamb.  Firstly, I’m going to annoy you all by delaying the arrival of the proper posts about the Moffat/Smith era.  And Phil specifically asked me for a polemic, so what follows will be an angry screed.  There really isn’t space here to do more than gesticulate irritably at the issues (since I’ve tried to have some mercy on you regarding word count).  I’ve had to leave out lots of points, cut loads of stuff about the wider political context (I promise you – it was all in the first draft, and it was brilliant) and, of necessity, simplify.  So this post is going to sit here seething, vulnerable and alone, a hostage to fortune, as Phil winds up his phenomenal Eruditorum project with a series of (doubtless) nuanced and subtle redemptive readings of the era I’m about to intemperately trash.  At least nobody can say I balked at making myself a sitting target.  
(I must acknowledge Phil’s own ‘Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post’, which I used as a springboard, and the generous assistance of Richard Pilbeam and Jonathan Barlow, from whom I have cribbed shamelessly.  All errors are, of course, mine alone.)
Phil’s recent, devastating piece on ‘The End of Time – Part 2’ describes what I find most worrying about the late RTD era.  But for Phil, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was probably like the cavalry turning up.  For me, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was like the cavalry turning up and immediately opening fire on me.  
It’s interesting to note that whereas RTD usually drafted in celebrities – Chris Morris style – to satirise themselves without knowing it (which they always fell for), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore in to be flattered.  RTD got Sharon Osbourne and Anne Widdecombe to endorse Harold Saxon (i.e. the Anti-Christ).  Moffat gets Sir Patrick to play himself as a charming, twinkly-eyed expert.  Aside from lauding a well-known reactionary and sexist, Moore’s guest appearance is emblematic of a wider complacency.  Amy’s village is a retreat from anything like the Powell Estate.  This is maundering ‘long shadows on village greens’ territory. The episode celebrates cutesy, ostensibly lovable, eccentric Britishness.  
There’s a near-immediate attempt to problematize such things in ‘The Beast Below’… but the actual result is instructive.  Starship UK is all of Britain, divided into counties that are now housed within tower blocks. 
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“In Blue Hawaii”: Tomorrow and the Stars

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It makes sense that one of the first things Star Trek Phase II would attempt would be a revisit of a major Original Series story, theme or motif. In fact, it makes even more sense here than it did in the context of Star Trek: The Animated Series: That show was pegged as more or less a continuation of the Original Series, tweaking and revising it where necessary. It also only came five or six years after “Turnabout Intruder” fist aired, whereas “In Thy Image” came a decade afterwards and into a very different cultural landscape. The world, not to mention Star Trek itself, has changed, and Star Trek Phase II has to update itself accordingly.

It also, though I hate to admit it, makes sense that the first such story, and the first regular episode to air after the pilot, would be a revisit of “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Much as I despise it, it’s without question the most popular and iconic episode of the Original Series and usually considered the very best, or at least it is if you’re pretentious and joyless enough to turn your nose up at “The Trouble with Tribbles”. You’d want to kick off your new show with something that reminds people of the old show’s highlights, while also demonstrating that you’re now capable of improving on them. So, doing an episode inspired by and very much like “The City on the Edge of Forever” is eminently logical.

The thing about “Tomorrow and the Stars” though, is that it’s not *like* “The City on the Edge of Forever”, it *is* “The City on the Edge of Forever”. In that episode, a dangerous ailment plagues one of the crew leading to an accidental time travel incident where Kirk ends up in mid-20th century Earth, where he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be involved in a major world event that cannot be altered for fear of changing history, so Kirk must let her die to preserve the timeline. In this episode…a dangerous ailment plagues one of the crew leading to an accidental time travel incident where Kirk ends up in mid-20th century Earth, where he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be involved in a major world event that cannot be altered for fear of changing history, so Kirk must let her die to preserve the timeline…

Oh sure, the details are fudged around with a bit: In “City…” Kirk ends up in the 1930s and his paramour is a social worker who will bring about the downfall of civilization with her radical and dangerous idea that maybe bombing the shit out of each other isn’t the best approach to world politics, while in “Tomorrow…” he ends up in the 1940s (and, of interest to me and this blog, Hawai’i) and his lady friend happens to have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Namely, Pearl Harbour on December 6, 1941 Also, Kirk is translucent for reasons that are never really explained and which serve no purpose to the story.…

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A Scary Culture (The Last War in Albion Part 36: Skizz, E.T., and Margaret Thatcher)

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This is the first 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 animageblog 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 finally got a regular strip in 2000 AD with Skizz, conceived of as a clone of E.T. Unfortunately, Moore had to write it before E.T. actually came out in the UK, thus leaving him with the unenviable task of ripping off something he hadn’t seen. 

“England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” – Warren Ellis, Planetary #7
“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” tells the story of a winged man who crashes to ground in the courtyard of Pelayo and Elisenda. But the story focuses resolutely on Pelayo and Elisenda’s experience and not on the nature of the winged man in their courtyard. Its memorable first paragraph carefully holds the titular detail back until the end so that it becomes just one of a host of details about their lives. “On the third day of rain,” Márquez writes, “they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench.” Only at the end of the paragraph about this rainstorm does the narration turn to the fact that there was “ a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.” The story never moves beyond this approach: the nature of the old man is not explored. Instead the story tells of how Elisenda thinks to charge for admission to see the old man, who is proclaimed over the objections of the local priest to be an angel. But over time the old man becomes commonplace – his status as the town’s star attraction is usurped by a “woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents,” and who had none of the old man’s reticence about being a carnival attraction. The old man, meanwhile, only musters up a few odd miracles “like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.” In time he convalesces and flies away without explanation, and the story ends, never having stopped to consider much of anything beyond the question of what it is like for a poor family to have an old man with wings literally crash into their lives. 
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A Split in the Skin of the World (The End of Time, Part Two)

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The lengths people will go to in order to get License to Kill
written out of canon…
A bombed out husk of imagined Londons, all the dead and abandoned futures piled up alongside each other. All the things that could have been, united by their shared experience of a moment where it became obvious that they actually never could be. Futures that have run out, been spent, boiled away to ruins, our cultural memento moris, reminding us all of the looming and inevitable death that is nostalgia. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. I don’t want to go.”
It is tempting to end on a more positive note. It is not as though I don’t enjoy The End of Time, or the Davies era. I quite love both. Really, I do.
But the Davies era has long since ended. We have parted the ways, and faced doomsday. We have seen the journey end and long since seen the next Doctor. We’ve praised it, buried it, critiqued it, and disinterred it several times to do it all again. And now we have The End of Time, an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything. With the Davies era refusing so spectacularly to die, few other options seem to exist but cutting off the very possibility of time’s advancement. End everything and you might just manage to kill it off too. 
If, in fact, there’s even any time left to have. By this point the contours of the last Davies episode are self-evident. It is going too far to suggest that all of Davies’s season finales (and this clearly counts) are the same, but there is a structure to them: a whirling mass of conceptual quotes, flipping channels endlessly until it resolves by declaring the permanence of Doctor Who as a narrative fixture. A regeneration story is going to be no different. A shell game – where in the narrative is the trap that kills the Doctor? Inevitably, the point will not be what kills the Doctor but the fact of his ongoing narrative role: a story that never ends. The justification for this lack of resolution will, as always, be populism. Doctor Who is loved, so it is not cancelled.
Underneath all of this, very low in the mix, is a very different sort of story. In every season after the first, the most interesting moment in terms of Davies’s own scripts has been the inevitable spiky and difficult story – the one where Davies stops trying to be quite so populist and throws something a bit ugly and unnerving on the screen. (And the only reason this can’t be said of the first season is that practically every Davies episode that season does it.) Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight are all cases where one can see a very different sort of Davies: an angry one clearly considerably more skeptical and cynical about the world.
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