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“It’s only human”: In Thy Image (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)

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We are urgently requesting backup and further advice…Intel on the ground indicates that this timeline has been effectively secured by our forces for the moment, though installing a permanent presence here seems unlikely…While they’ve been mostly keeping quiet for the moment, there’s no doubt The Empire will eventually take notice of what we’re doing here and strike back with a vengeance, and skirmishes with the other renegade factions are a constant problem…We followed your instructions and The Prototype codename “VOYAGER” is complete and ready for a shakedown cruise, though we are concerned as to its structural stability and overall viability and worry it may not yet be capable of fulfilling The Purpose for which it was designed, and that activating it will alert The Empire as to our whereabouts…Please inform as to further action ASAP…

At some point it became inevitable.

While a tenaciously niche property throughout the 1970s, Star Trek gave no indication of ever going away, especially once new generations of fans started to get introduced to it. It had a uniquely built-in self-regenerating audience, and one that was big enough to eventually attract the attention of the higher-ups. It was never a question of if Star Trek would come back, but how and when. The answer to all of those questions eventually came in 1977, when Paramount announced plans to enter the television market with their own network, and a new Star Trek series as its flagship programme. The series, chronicling a second five-year mission of the newly-refitted USS Enterprise under the command of Admiral James T. Kirk, eventually got the name Star Trek Phase II and premiered the following year.

Star Trek Phase II was not the first idea Paramount had for ways to revive the franchise: Originally, there were plans for a British-produced feature film called Star Trek: Planet of the Titans, to be handled by a pre-Star Wars Ralph McQuarrie. This film was in development throughout 1976 and 1977, but was eventually abandoned in favour of doing this show instead (and, presumably, due to McQuarrie’s commitments to the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg camp). It was an interesting story, involving heavily redesigned Enterprise following the original five-year mission involved in a territorial dispute with the Klingons over a planet rumoured to be home to a mythical race of cosmic Titans, who apparently were very influential in the history of life in the galaxy. After a brief dust-up involving a black hole and time travel, the Enterprise finds itself back in time and orbiting prehistoric Earth, where the crew soon discover that they are in fact the mythical Titans.

But returning to Star Trek Phase II, the series premier, “In Thy Image”, was a real event: Unlike the Original Series, which sort of just appeared out of nowhere, Star Trek Phase II was hyped up with a big PR machine and took off with a massive two-hour pilot movie. With much of the original creative team returning, as well as the addition of talented and professional new team members like Andy Probert and Robert Wise, who will go on to leave their own marks on the history of the franchise, this is as good an introduction to the new Star Trek as we could have hoped for, showing genuine maturation and development of themes we’ve seen explored before, and that most Star Trek of promises to continue growing and learning along the way.…

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Venison with Mushroom Jus, Oven Roasted Potatoes, and Salad with Walnuts, Pears, and Goat Cheese

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I can make a really good rabbit dish too, if you’re wondering.

Some people have been oddly requesting that bits of my food writing make it to the blog one of these days. So here you go – a totally out of left field post to satisfy the two or three people who have requested that.

Background – Jill did a lot of the work with packaging the Kickstarter rewards, and so as a reward after the last day of it, I promised her a wine dinner. “Wine dinner,” in this case, means a game we play sometimes whereby she picks a bottle of wine and I go to the grocery store and cobble together a meal to pair with it. In this case we were already out, so we didn’t grab anything from my existing wine cellar. Instead we went to a liquor store and asked for a weird bottle, and they helpfully provided a bottle of Southern Right 2010 Pinotage. (A sort of odd South African cousin of Pinot Noir.)

There are tricks to this sort of thing. I use a pair of books Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg called What To Drink With What You Eat and The Flavor Bible. I’ve got both on Kindle, and can pull them up for quick reference on my phone. Both do what they say on the tin. The former has an index of foods and an index of wine varietals and recommended pairings for each. The latter is an index of foods with complimentary flavors and ingredients.

Among the recommended items for Pinotage was “game meats,” with venison recommended in particular. The Woman had been requesting I make venison for a while anyway, so I decided now was the time.

The Flavor Bible recommended a bunch of things for venison, but a couple jumped out at me: mushrooms, apples, pears, stocks, rosemary, and juniper berries. I also knew that venison was typically recommended with a marinade. I figured I’d go for something fairly simple: this seemed the time for a basic meat and potatoes dish, probably with a salad.

In terms of the salad, another pairing for Pinotage was goat cheese, so I figured there I’d go with something classic: a lettuce, fruit, nut, and cheese salad with a vinaigrette. It’s a really basic salad, and works almost every time. Since pears had been recommended for venison, I went with those, the goat cheese, and walnuts, and a cider vinaigrette. Simple and straight forward. Which was the watchword here – this didn’t seem a dish that was going to call for anything fancy or overly heavy. My usual logic is that when you have an unusual ingredient you’re trying to spotlight, you provide a pretty simple, basic platform for it.

For potatoes I thought a straightforward oven-roasted recipe. I usually do those with just salt and pepper, but I decided some rosemary would work nicely this time. It’s a longstanding preparation for me – I sometimes do it on the grill, other times in the oven, but it’s one of my go-to sides for meat.…

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A Woman (The End of Time, Part One)

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Wilf reacts to the news that Claire Bloom is playing the Rani.
It’s December 25th, 2009. Rage Against the Machine are at number one with “Killing in the Name,” a feat of countercultural rebellion cooked up by people who got tired of the crown of the Christmas #1 being dominated year after year by The X Factor and who thus decided to try to send a different single to number one. Also in the charts are Lady Gaga, Robbie Williams, Rihanna, Journey, Cheryl Cole, the Black Eyed Peas, and X Factor winner Joe McElderry.
In news, since The Gift made its bow, the Treaty of Lisbon has come into force, Terry Wogan has presented his final breakfast show, and polling in advance of the 2010 general election has shown the Conservatives with various degrees of leads. Also, David Tennant has been all over every talk show imaginable doing a farewell tour as the Doctor, as Christmas marks the first episode of his two-part departure, The End of Time. After all the festivities have died down, long after the episode has aired, it is possible to go and download the podcast commentary from the BBC and to watch the episode again, immediately, with DVD-style commentary. You still can, though it’s harder to do these days. 
The commentary consists of Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner, at 8:30 in the morning on December 11th, 2009 doing a straight shot of recording commentary for this and The End of Time Part 2 while simultaneously answering phones and checking e-mails as part of their new normal workday in Los Angeles, where they were in effect sent by the BBC after finishing Doctor Who with the mandate “make us some high profile co-productions, starting with Torchwood.” 
As with most commentaries featuring Davies and Gardner, it is in many ways an extended pat on the back for itself. They are quick to highlight how “marvelous” things are. But equally, they’re not wrong. Their first example, Bernard Cribbins, really is marvelous. But there is a subtler dynamic beneath the surface: Gardner and Davies both praise Cribbins enthusiastically, but then Davies digresses to point out that the street he’s walking down is one they’ve used in every other Christmas special. Gardner sits quietly, and then calmly declares that she wants to go back to talking about Bernard Cribbins, obviously finding the obsessive detail spotting involved in Davies’s fannish observation (which is firmly in the same tradition as any number of other fannish practices – “spot the recycled location/set/prop” is a positively august fan tradition) rather spectacularly less than interesting. It’s not quite a prickly moment, but it’s only one step away from it. And then a moment later the two of them are geeking out ecstatically over the nature of Bernard Cribbins’s acting skill and precisely what it is that he’s so good at. 
In under a minute of commentary the entire sweep of the Gardner/Davies partnership becomes clear. And this is a significant thing.
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Sensor Scan: Rocket Man

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Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Rocket Man” is usually read as a very poor imitation of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”. Both songs explore the mundane reality of space travel and both came out just as the wave of public interest in outer space and spaceflight had crested and was beginning to roll back (though “Space Oddity”, at least the original version, was far more timely in 1969, with “Rocket Man”’s 1972 release date already making it feel curiously dated, though do recall “Space Oddity” was re-released that year too) and, to top it off, both songs were even produced by the same guy: Gus Dudgeon. And of course, the critical consensus goes, no-one is going to call Bernie Taupin an especially poetic, captivating or moving songwriter, and David Bowie is, well, David Bowie.

But this misses, I feel, a big part of the nuance “Rocket Man” actually displays. Yes, I’ll come right out and say it: This is pretty clunky song, and there are a fair few embarrassing verses and questionable lines. But I’ll also freely admit this is one of my favourite pop songs, and while I’m well aware my taste in music can be described as “eclectic” at best and “suspect” at worst, just hear me out for a bit. First of all, that chorus has got to be one of the most achingly beautiful things ever recorded, and that’s really all “Rocket Man” needs to become an instant classic, because in pop the hooks and chorus are unabashedly the most important parts of the song. Secondly though, “Rocket Man”’s origins are a bit more interesting than most people tend to give them credit for, as it was inspired both by a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name and Taupin witnessing a meteor or faraway airplane when looking up at the sky at night. Far from echoing David Bowie’s indictment of (or at least very mixed feelings about) the Space Age on “Space Oddity”, what “Rocket Man” is actually about is a world where rocketry, at one time the most exciting and fashionable technology around, is so commonplace and mundane that astronauts become like truck drivers.

This is what takes “Rocket Man” from being curiously out of time to being very much of its time: In the mid-to-late 1970s pop culture in the United States had a particular fascination with truck drivers and trucker culture, brought upon by a number of movies from this period glamourizing the lifestyle and the widespread popularity of CB radio. With the 1970s fuel crisis in full swing, many people, but especially truckers, used CB radio to coordinate fuel runs to stations that had the best gas prices and to organise protests against new regulations. Truckers were seen as, in a sense, bringing back lost “American” values of rugged cowboy individualism (never mind the fact this assumption had zero historical precedent and is due more to the popularity of John Wayne movies: The fact is it existed) and, as a result, truck drivers, CB radio, and the distinctive language of slang they used, became very fashionable.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 15th, 2014)

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Absolutely scrambling at deadlines right now, although I just about sort of kind of maybe but not really have them under something resembling control. Sorry, thus, for a recklessly short Waffling – I’m just absolutely buried.

Let’s just do Q&A, shall we? Depending on the level of response I may or may not get to everything promptly, but I’ll at least answer what schedule permits.…

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Resist in Peace Tony Benn

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Paul Foot on Tony Benn in the LRB:

For nearly a century, Labour MPs have been going to Parliament to change the world, but have ended up changing only themselves. Tony Benn is unique. He went to Parliament to change himself, but has ended up determined only to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it.

And in his book, The Vote:

Any workers fighting redundancy, any school standing up for the comprehensive system, any persecuted foreigner seeking asylum could rely on his active support.  Again and again, he deliberately abandoned his base in Parliament and worked among those who, he hoped and believed, would one day trigger a new Chartist agitation, and a revolution from below.

In 1999, after two years of the Blair Government, he made a historic announcement: he would not be standing for Parliament in the 2001 general election.  He would be leaving Parliament ‘in order to devote more time to politics’.  His own enormous experience in the highest places in the land drove him to the conclusion that the place to fight was in the lowest: that any future for an egalitarian socialist society rested not on what happened in Parliament but on the resistance and determination of the workers and the poor.

***

Despite his age and the cruel death from cancer of his wife, he continued resolutely down the path he had set himself: to argue and agitate for change from below.

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 29 (The Tennant Doctor Who Magazine Comics)

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It’s strange, I’ve been writing about the Tennant era for nine months now, and yet reading the compiled Tenth Doctor comics from Doctor Who Magazine the thing that jumps out most immediately is the amount of time enveloped in them. It helps that there’s a change in editors and a late change of direction as a result, but even without that there’s a sense of size and history here that is perhaps lost when looking at the story-to-story changes of the Tennant years.
Actually, let’s start with that change in editors. The majority of the Tenth Doctor’s comics are edited by Clayton Hickman. No account of of Doctor Who is ever going to allege that Hickman is one of the great and most important figures in the history of the series, which is true in a sort of blandly factual sense, but obscures the fact that on the occasions where Clayton Hickman does enter the margins of the story he inevitably acquits himself marvelously. Whether as the talking head who obligingly filled in context so that some washed up 70s actress or another appears to actually make sense in Doctor Who Confidential, as Gareth Roberts’s funnier writing partner on audio, television, and ideally, a bizarre and inscrutable DVD extra for The Masque of Mandragora, as the cover designer for the classic series DVDs, as the terribly sweet seeming judge for Companion Academy, or just as that nice man on Twitter who keeps mistakenly saying good things about my blog, Clayton Hickman is very possibly the figure in Doctor Who it is least possible to say mean things about without feeling like a complete and utter bastard.
But one thing that becomes clear reading the commentary at the end Panini Press collections of Tenth Doctor comics is that there is nowhere in his contributions to Doctor Who that Hickman is more in his element than editing the comics for Doctor Who Magazine. None of this is meant as a knock against the last run of Tenth Doctor comics, edited by Tom Spilsbury. The final run, an ongoing story with a comics-exclusive companion, is a satisfying homage to the way comics were before the arrival of Doctor Who as a global megabrand, and the final Donna story, “The Time of My Life,” is both clever and terribly moving. But nowhere in the Panini books does one get the sense of Tom Spilsbury as an editor who lived and breathed the details of the comic. (Although it’s certainly possible he’s actually just less prone to talking about himself.) 
(It’s also worth briefly acknowledging the second line of comics in Doctor Who Adventures – over five hundred pages of short done-in-ones that tended to pick up with the Doctor and Rose already in some sort of danger, and to romp madly through absurd premises. Good fun, but not something I’m going to cover in detail.)
Hickman, on the other hand, is clearly the sort of nightmarish editor a good writer dreams of: one who is going to challenge detail after detail, who has no tolerance whatsoever for crap, and who is going to make damn sure anything that goes out under his editorial name is going to be brilliant.
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Myriad Universes: The Star Fleet Universe

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The idea of doing licensed products for Star Trek in the gap between the Animated Series and the film series was, let’s admit it, a strange one. It’s not like today, where any genre fiction work is seen as a potential massively lucrative (and desperately needed) franchise and is milked for everything it’s worth from the moment it hits the scene no matter how paper-thin the source material is or how niche the fanbase. Back then, there were definitely properties that made money and were popular and those that weren’t, and you didn’t tend to get merchandise out of properties that weren’t.

Star Trek itself fell into an interesting space on this spectrum: It was certainly well-known, but, as far as an entire generation of people were concerned (and momentarily discounting the few die-hard fans who had remained obsessed with the show all this time), it was likely a show they hazily remembered that hadn’t been relevant in almost a decade. But there was also that contingent of new viewers who were just now getting exposed to the show through the syndicated reruns: This was the first exposure to Star Trek they had, and they didn’t have things like Mr. Spock’s Songs from Space anymore. This alone probably explains the longevity of things like the Gold Key comic series and the Pocket Books tie-in novel line, but it also led to some things that were, in retrospect, a little weird. Considering the audience Star Trek had was now firmly established as a niche one, and given the backdrop of the late-1970s this is happening against, what we wound up with was a situation where there was clearly a fanbase that could be served, but one that was comparatively small enough to justify not actually making serving it a serious priority.

Because this was happening in the days before a Disney-style obsession with brand uniformity took over the mindset of ever single producer and executive in the entertainment industry such that every sci-fi property has to be closely monitored and kept “official” (partially out of necessity it must be stressed: Hollywood, and really the entire industry, is in a deeply perilous position as of this writing), we get really odd and fun little artefacts like Star Trek: The New Voyages, which was a rather unprecedented direct contact between a very small production team and the fanfiction community, which is something that plainly couldn’t happen today. Should Marvel or Lucasfilm (both really Disney) or Doctor Who (really the BBC) attempt something like that for any of their properties today, it would first have to be fed through about a million different marketing committees and sub-committees before being hastily abandoned for fear the fics wouldn’t be “on message” (which, in the case of The New Voyages, they *absolutely* weren’t, and that was *wonderful*).

But Star Trek’s weird liminal position allows for things like this: In those days, if you wanted to license a Star Trek work, you wrote up one dude at Paramount studios, told him or her what your idea was, and they’d say “Sure.…

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Fantasies in the Here and Now (The Last War in Albion Part 35: Skizz and E.T.)

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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 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 wrote numerous short stories for 2000 A.D., but the holy grail of comics assignments in early 80s Britain was an ongoing series. In March of 1983, he finally got a crack at one…

“Best bet is to set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.” – Neil Gaiman


Moore finished his time doing shorts for IPC the way he began it – by trying to learn new storytelling techniques. In this regard his comments about “doing an apprenticeship in public” and using short stories to learn “to do all the things that you will have to do in a bigger work but in a much more constrained space” are very much on target through and through. He used his time at IPC to learn his trade and craft. That not all of his experiments came off is, in many ways, proof of this fact. But notably, many of the experiments that did come off demonstrate techniques he would later make considerable use of, up to and including his confidence in purely visual storytelling that he was clearly trying to build in his last few strips. The effect is not entirely unlike the old story about Michelangelo creating the David by taking a block of marble and removing everything that wasn’t the David. The figure that is Alan Moore visibly emerges into the narrative, and comes ever more into focus over the course of these dozens of short stories.
Figure 261: 2000 AD‘s humorous conceit that its
comics were produced by robots under the command
of the alien Tharg the Mighty did not always result
in the most dignified of public portrayals of its
employees. (From 2000 AD #322)
Indeed, it’s clear that by the time he was done with his Future Shocks that he had, in practice, emerged. He visibly stopped doing Future Shocks in order to focus on his new and much higher-paying gig doing Swamp Thing at DC Comics. There is no serious way to describe Alan Moore in the autumn of 1983 as a tentative journeyman. Indeed, as we noted, even within the period working on Future Shocks for 2000 AD there is a clear dividing line in March of 1983, when Moore began writing his first ongoing for 2000 AD, Skizz.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 28: The Forgotten

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A commissioned essay for ?ukasz Bury.

The Forgotten is a different sort of Doctor Who comic to any we’ve discussed before. For one thing, it’s American – so American, in fact, that it didn’t even get a UK release. This was a peculiarity of IDW’s deal to acquire the license: because Panini has the UK license already, none of IDW’s Doctor Who comics could be distributed in the UK (which is why their Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover led with Star Trek – because that made it technically a Star Trek comic that could thus get UK distribution. No, really, the licensing rules are that dumb). 
IDW, upon acquiring the license, commenced with a two-pronged approach. First was a six issue run of Tenth Doctor/Martha Jones comics by Gary Russell, with art by Nick Roche, which was published alongside reprints of 70s/80s Doctor Who Magazine material starting with Doctor Who and the Iron Legion, all with quite slick colouring. (These books are presumably out of print or on their way out of print now that IDW has lost the license, and I actually highly recommend them if you can track them down. Voyager has never looked so good.) The initial Ten/Martha series was followed by Doctor Who: The Forgotten, intended to be by Tony Lee and Pia Guerra, the latter fresh off the esteemed Y: The Last Man series with Brian K. Vaughan, and the former a writer with some Doctor Who pedigree, having written a few Tenth Doctor strips for Doctor Who Magazine (which we’ll speak more of on Wednesday). Technically this is a bit old – it’s properly set right after Journey’s End. But I like doing comics stuff at the end of a Doctor – it’s become quasi-traditional. So. 
The major hook for The Forgotten was that it was the first “all the Doctors ever” story of the new series. That this would be at all novel already feels like an odd historical moment – even if we’ve not had a televised The Thirteen Doctors due to some actors being inconsiderately dead, we get compilations and sets of the entire line of Doctors fairly regularly at this point. And given that this was pointedly not “all the Doctors meet” but rather a story about the Tenth Doctor regaining his memories by exploring a museum of his past selves. Still, this was by far the most substantive crossover between the new series and the classic series that existed to date – especially given that the first issue predated The Next Doctor, and thus predated our first on-screen montage of the classic series.
On the one hand, then, this is a fairly slick production. Tony Lee knows his stuff pretty well, and has researched the rest. There are bits where his characterizations are a bit inept – his Hartnell never feels right, and his Romana is miles off base – but it’s not as though plenty of longstanding Doctor Who writers haven’t fluffed characterizations in their day.
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