Eruditorum Press

If you want an image of the future as we desire it, imagine a boot stamping on Jonathan Jones’ face… forever

“Rumors, conjectures, that’s a giant leap forward.”: Deadlock

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“Deadlock” is incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, it’s the first Star Trek episode to deal overtly with the dark side of the Federation and Starfleet, but on the other hand it’s not because it doubles-back on itself and refuses to actually fully commit to the accusations it levels and issues it raises. It opens seemingly promising to make explicit a lot of the implicit concerns and reservations we’ve held about Star Trek from the very beginning, but because of its ultimate balking and painfully bog-standard climax and conclusion, it actually ends up feeling less satisfying and critical then previous efforts.

Answering a distress signal from the USS Intrepid (no, not that one) in “Uncharted Region 019”, the Enterprise is suddenly and inexplicably called away to Starbase 7, leaving Kirk suspicious and Decker enraged. Upon arrival, a Commodore Hunter informs Kirk that he called the Enterprise away to participate in a series of top-secret Starfleet psychological experiments. The crew’s first assignment is to shut down all power to the ship and await further orders from behavioural scientist Lang Cardon. Troubled, Kirk asks Scotty and Xon to come up with an algorithm that would allow them to take the ship from a cold stop to mission stations at the first sign of danger.

While powered down, the crew experiences a series of hypnotic, flashing psychedelic images. The crew becomes entranced, with the exception of Xon and Ilia, who have altogether different and disturbing experiences. Afterwards, Xon tells Kirk that he and Ilia had visions of grave danger, and a message: “Enterprise, you must escape! Report to Starfleet…A plot-Cardon is…”.After learning Cardon’s experiments had been suspended some months prior with no official explanation given, the crew decides to investigate the starbase themselves. Kirk beams over to check things over for himself, instructing Decker to wait an hour, at which point, if Kirk hasn’t checked in, he’s to seize and secure Starbase 7, using any means necessary.

While “Deadlock” initially seems like it’s going to be a deconstruction and criticism of Starfleet ethics and operational structure, what it in practice turns out to be is another of Star Trek’s semi-regular “let’s try and do a current events story” type of episodes. This time, it’s Star Trek’s stab at Project MKUltra, which was a series of CIA experiments looking into the feasibility of controlling human behaviour through various stimuli. From in the 1953 to 1973, Project MKUltra tested a whole suite of techniques running the gamut from illegal to unethical to completely ridiculous, such as sexual abuse, torture, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and, most famously, clandestinely dropping LSD into random people’s drinks to see if the ensuing acid trips could be used as a form of mind control. Some historians believe the endgame of Project MKUltra was to create a kind of mentally servile supersoldier, while others posit the theory that the more out-there experiments were deliberately emphasized by the CIA to draw attention away from its real purpose, which, according to this theory, was to find more effective means of that favourite government buzzword: “Enhanced interrogation”.…

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The Perfect Companion

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Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong, capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.

But this is just the job of the companion.  Even the worst of the classic series companions – Victoria, Dodo, etc – gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required.  They don’t tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them.  It’s a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully.  That’s not something that’s entirely untroubling, but – for good or ill – it’s how this works.  In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions.  It’s actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha.  But the point is that they all step up because that’s what they’re in the text to do.  The ones that don’t, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).

You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion.  Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor.  Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment).  Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem.  Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor.  The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be.  It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc.  But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.

The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their ‘duties’ as a companion, right the way through.

Amy’s character – i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of ‘companion duties’ – is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc.  The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines.  Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll.  House.  Car.  Marriage.  Etc.

River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor. …

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Piece of Cake

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Someone nice on tumblr just asked me:

Do you think that it’s fair to criticize a work of art for the failings of the culture around it? This is a question I’ve been mulling over the past few days and I’m sure you have an interesting response.

My answer got a bit long, so I decided – opportunistically – to post it here.

*

I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.

What do we mean by ‘failings’?

What do we mean by ‘culture around it’?

Failure is, of course, subjectively judged.  Something I think is bad may be seen as good – or neutral, or normal, or inescapable – by others.

It is perfectly possible for something that is a ‘failure’ with regards to general human wellbeing to be a ‘success’ for a social system.  (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)

Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society – including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture – then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.

*phew* long sentence.

This is the ‘culture around it’…

BUT…

I think it’s really important to realise that art doesn’t just sit there surrounded by culture.  It is culture.

We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced.  It’s just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks… and that’s without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.

More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.

A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit… but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism.  The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things.  Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it’s impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.

The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.

You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.…

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Video Blogs On The Eleventh Hour

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So, a while ago someone asked if I was going to do a video blog on The Eleventh Hour, and I declined, mainly because video blogs are time consuming and I didn’t have loads of it.

This turns out to have been a wonderful idea, as two separate people have proceeded to do video blogs on their own initiative, and both of them are way better than anything I would have done anyway.

First off is Alison Jane Campbell, who noticed that Jack Graham had tied her in guest posts and thus decided to get ahead again with this number, which I was planning on posting today.

Except then, yesterday, Bennett indulged in a wonderfully cheeky “video comment” on The Eleventh Hour, which was also brilliant, and so I figured I’d go ahead and throw it in too.

Seriously, both of them are utterly fantastic and say all sorts of great things that I will be shamelessly referencing in Moffat-era posts to come, and I can’t thank them enough.

And while we’re posting videos, this has been going around and seems a charming transition into Friday’s post.

Thank you to everyone who spared me from doing real work this week.

…

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Policy Announcement

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I hate having to delete comments.  You can leave a comment saying I’m wrong, disagreeing with me violently, that’s all fine.  But I won’t publish comments that contain ableist slurs.  I don’t refuse to publish comments lightly, but that’ll do it.

This is something the vast majority of my lovely comment-leavers would never do, of course. …

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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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