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Outside the Government: The Eternity Trap

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It’s November 5th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one with “Fight For This Love,” with Michael Buble, Robbie Williams, and two separate songs by the Black Eyed Peas also charting. In news, Rhode Island re-criminalizes prostitution, the Yankees win the World Series, and a U2 concert at the Brandenberg Gate celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall finds itself mired in a strange and ironic controversy as a large wall is build around the venue. 
“I hope this sci-fi show does a story about the conflict between rationalism and superstition,” said no one ever, and yet the wish is still granted for the umpteenth time in The Eternity Trap. The story is not bad – it’s a perfectly competent execution of “let’s do The Stone Tape for children,” managing to be a spooky haunted house story without ever crossing the line into objectionable or overly scarring. There’s something a little sad in the fact that it doesn’t try to scar children for life, but equally, The Sarah Jane Adventures doing a haunted house story probably should target fun instead of traumatic, so, you know. Plus, it’s got Donald Sumpter, who is positively gifted in the art of playing a raving and frothing bad guy named something like “Erasmus Darkening.” 
It’s also worth noting that The Eternity Trap takes a more ambiguous line on the science/superstition debate than is normal. Clear care has been taken in making Darkening inscrutable. The number of times the narrative goes “ah, yes, this may behave 100% like a supernatural event, but actually it’s got a vague scientific explanation” is impressive. No, the creature isn’t an unknowable monster… it’s just a completely unknown one from some parallel dimension. No, Darkening isn’t an alchemist. He’s actually an alien… from a totally unknown planet who created “a computer built from brass and iron,” a phrase that still carefully ties it to the 17th century period it ostensibly hails from. No, the house isn’t haunted by ghosts, because technically the people only got spirited to another dimension as opposed to dying. There’s a constant resistance to completely ceding ground to rationalism even as the underlying ethos of the episode is explicitly rationalist. 
This is, for the most part, more interesting. The arch-skeptical ideology is, let’s face it, boring. But more to the point, it’s preposterous within The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is in no way a rationalist show. I mean, this is the dirty little secret of every single sci-fi show to try to push the hardline rationalist perspective. Sci-fi isn’t rationalist. The Sarah Jane Adventures sure as heck isn’t. I mean, this is straightforward on a basic level. If you flop off to, say, RationalWiki or FreethoughtBlogs and start talking about how all those people who believe in ghosts are cranks because it’s obviously aliens that’s actually done it, you’re not going to be taken seriously. The conspiracy theories that say that the Illuminati is a front for the mind controlling space lizards are not, in point of fact, any more sane than the ones that go with more old-fashioned “it’s paranormal.”
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“Dream not of today.”: The Enterprise Incident # 4

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</I am now convinced I am being haunted by Margaret Armen. I keep running into her just after I think I’m finally rid of having to square away her influence for good. All that said, she has indeed cropped up once more so it’s time to look at her work yet again. I have to say, invoking Margaret Armen in any capacity other then “vehemently trying to pretend her scripts didn’t happen” is always going to seem a bit suspect to me. Nevertheless, she was one of the most seasoned and experienced writers of the period of Star Trek history, and considering she contributed almost as many stories to the Animated Series as she did to the Original Series it would seem D.C. Fontana was considerably more enamoured of her work than I am./>

Beneath the surface of Loren 5, Kirk and the Enterprise away team discover what Sanderson and his team had found while mining for Dilithium and what Kor’s crew was after: A sprawling underground city that seems ancient and deserted, and yet built around scientific and technological concepts far beyond the comprehension of any of the major galactic powers. As they search the site for clues, Kirk and Spock eventually locate what is likely to be the source of the city’s power and import: A gigantic Preserver obelisk, much like the one that stripped Kirk of his memory back in “The Paradise Syndrome”. Oh dear.

</The best way to approach this, or at least the only way I can think of that’s not horrible and soul-crushing, is to presume Fontana saw something in Armen’s work that I don’t, and that this is why she brought her back time and time again and why she gave her a nod in this story along frankly far more deserving candidates like Gene Coon and Nicholas Meyer. Armen was, of course, the only other regular female writer on either the Original Series or the Animated Series. This didn’t have to be the case: Both shows had very promising talent in people like Joyce Muskat, Joyce Perry, Jean Lisette Aroeste, Shari Lewis and Judy Burns who were, for whatever reason, never asked to come back despite many of the absolute best and most beloved episodes of either show being their work. And that’s not getting into the rabidly loyal and obscenely talented people in the fanfiction community, any of whom Fontana could have cherry-picked for the Animated Series in a heartbeat at any time. But be that as it may, the only significant female voice we get on “official”, “canon” Star Trek apart from D.C. Fontana until the 1980s is Margaret Armen./>

I know “The Enterprise Experiment” is a massive bit of fanwank, but of all the people whose work Fontana could have pulled from, I’m at a complete loss to explain why one of them had to be Margaret Armen, a writer whose track record on Star Trek can charitably called “disastrous”. I’ve never understood why “The Paradise Syndrome” was considered such a beloved episode of the Original Series (well, actually I do, but I try to pretend I don’t to preserve my enthusiasm for this franchise and project, not to mention my faith in humanity in general): One could, I suppose, read the Kirk/Miramanee love story as an early version of the much more famous, and, for all its other faults, frankly better, manifestation of this kind of story in Carol and David Marcus in the Original Series movies.…

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Spike and Rape Culture

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A bit ago, someone gave me cause to write a brief thing about Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and particularly the way in which his character is handled after the moment he sexually assaults Buffy towards the end of Season Six

Here, for me, is the interesting thing about Spike. And I don’t think this is quite the reading that Whedon intended for Spike, but I think it’s close, and makes Spike an astonishing metaphor for rape culture and what it does. And, actually, the sort of approach to rape culture that could only really be pioneered by a feminist man, which interests me on several levels.

I mean, let’s be unambiguous here. Rape culture, as an idea and a critique, needed to be developed by women. Men are a support class in feminism, and this is as it should be. That’s the point. But equally, there are perspectives within the discussion that are both male and relevant. And I think the depiction of Spike is one of them.

The key thing, to me, about the bathroom rape scene is what Spike does next, which is to go on an extended quest for his soul. Because this ties into an important thematic narrative about vampires in Buffy, which is that they are true monsters. There are clearly shells of people wrapped up in them, but they’re explicitly irredeemable. Angel, somewhere or other, describes the demonic aspect of vampires as taking everything you are and twisting it, and fine, but let’s dig deeper here and note that the overall sense is that vampires are slaves to some external narrative about what vampires do.

Because it’s not just hunger in Buffy. It’s not just that vampires feed on innocents and have to. It’s not just temptation. These are the usual themes of vampire fiction, but Buffy mostly avoids them. Vampires in Buffy are visibly compelled into a larger narrative of evil deeds. They seem unable to resist becoming servants of powerful overlords with schemes for, at best, world domination, and at worst, things like the complete destruction of the planet. The state of soullessness means enslavement to a particular cultural narrative.

This is the recurring narrative for Spike. Even when he starts to redeem himself in Season Four, he’s redeemed by external force: by a chip in his brain that keeps him from indulging in the worst aspects of the narrative that his demon prescribes for him. It makes him less bad, but only in an instrumental way, in the same way that criminalizing rape sometimes locks predators up before they harm a second or third or fifth or twelfth person, but does fuck all to actually stop them from their first rape.

But somewhere in the course of his story, in looking in horror at what he’s done to Buffy, he changes. He rejects the narrative prescribed for him and seeks the power to write his own narrative. With Angel, the soul becomes a binary switch. Have one and you’re good, don’t have one and you’re not.…

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Outside the Government: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

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It’s October 29th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one, with Whitney Houston, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Buble, Jay-Z, and Robbie Williams also charting. In news, Morrissey collapses while performing “This Charming Man” in Swindon. Zine El Abine Ben Ali wins 90% of the votes in Tunisia and a five-year term of office, which seems like a sure bet that he’ll be around for ages. And footballer Marlon King is sacked from Wigan Athletic after a sexual assault conviction.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The biggest thing about this story is, of course, that the Doctor is in it. That this is demonstrably the most important thing about it is also in many regards the fundamental challenge of it: how does one do an episode of a spin-off to Doctor Who that features the Doctor and not have it become a de facto episode of Doctor Who instead of an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The first trick is a relatively obvious one: make the Doctor’s absence a tangible part of the plot. After teasing his appearance repeatedly in The Mad Woman in the Attic, we have a first episode here in which the sound of the TARDIS is in effect used as a sort of accent and punctuation: something that repeatedly teases the eventual arrival of the Doctor. It’s only the second episode in which Tennant features at all, and even there he effectively drops out of the climax so that Clyde can save the day instead. Tennant, in other words, is deliberately treated as something to use sparingly, so that this feels unmistakably like an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures and not like an episode of Doctor Who that went out with the wrong opening credits.
It is, of course, questionable whether or not this was necessary. There is in the end nothing that would have effectively made this anything other than a story where the guest star overwhelms the show. And in some ways that’s the real point of it: a private episode of Doctor Who for the kids. There is, after all, something thoroughly delightful in that idea. The usually not actually true statement that Doctor Who is for children (as opposed to the reality, which is that it is a show that carefully avoids not being for children) here applies wonderfully. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is a secret treat for kids – something that feels a bit like staying up past your bedtime.
In something of a concession to this reality, the second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith revels in these possibilities. Indeed, much of its runtime is devoted to a longer sequence of the Doctor running around with Clyde, Luke, and Rani than the plot actually needs – a sequence that exists mostly, if we’re being honest, to set up things like Clyde actually calling the Doctor out on an “I’ll explain later.” Which is wonderful and worth doing, to be fair.
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“Confessions of a King”: The Enterprise Experiment # 3

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Commander Kor is not happy. He sits soliloquizing on the bridge of his battlecruiser reflecting on his humiliating defeat the the hands of the Organians and the Federation three years ago, a defeat which brought shame and dishonour upon his house. Decoding a message from Starfleet Command about a rich Dilithium deposit and mysterious and ancient archaeological ruins discovered on Loren 5, Kor sees this as the perfect opportunity to test the resolve of the Organians and the Federation both and moves to launch a full-scale invasion of the mining colony.

</As if the brutal fistfight between Captain Kirk and a Klingon on the cover of this month’s Star Trek: Year Four-The Enterprise Incident wasn’t a tip-off, the Klingons are back because of course the Klingons are back. In particular Kor, and in particular the pacifism debates from “Errand of Mercy” and “Day of the Dove”. But even so, what little we see of Kor in this issue is indicative of a minor, yet significant, reconstruction effort Fontana seems to have pulled. He’s behaviour is naturally very much more in keeping with the post-“Heart of Glory” or “A Matter of Honor” Klingons (or I suppose it’d be more accurate to say post-“Blood Oath” as Kor himself was featured so prominently in that one) rather than the Original Series Klingons, though do recall “Day of the Dove” proper had laid a lot of this groundwork already. But what’s more interesting to me is Kor’s desire to test the resolve of the Organians and the Federation:/>

Of all the Klingon characters to bring back from the Original Series, Kor seems like the best choice for the story Fontana seems to want to tell. “The Enterprise Experiment” is very much going down the road of problematizing Star Trek’s fixation, or perceived fixation, on valour and militarism, and that sort of critique takes us right back to “Errand of Mercy”. From the perspective of the Organians, who will likely go on to play extremely significant roles in the resolution of this story, Kirk and Kor were effectively representing the same viewpoints. Unlike as was the case with both Romulan Commanders though, we’re *not* meant to feel sympathetic to the captains in “Errand of Mercy”: These were not ordinary people who were victims of time and circumstance, these were people who committed reprehensible acts in the name of their respective empires and forced a third party to intervene and put an end to their warlike predilections. Bringing Kor back here is in fact significant, and reinforces the positive light the Romulan Commander was cast in last time.

</This is very much the kind of thing warriors do to people they consider equals, or people who they wish to see if they can consider equals. Kor is issuing a warrior’s challenge to Kirk (he hasn’t met Kirk yet in the story, but we all know that’s who he’s thinking of) and the Organians to see if they can earn the right to be called worthy adversaries.…

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Saturday Waffling (February 22nd, 2014)

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Well. This has been a week.

Let’s see.

Jed Blue is Kickstarting the second volume of My Little Po-Mo over here. Jed is good people. You should consider helping him out.

This raises a plausible and interesting question: what’s worth supporting these days? Whether it be Kickstarters, charitable causes, political causes, or whatnot, what are some things you think are worth spending money to support?…

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Outside the Government: The Mad Woman in the Attic

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It’s October 22nd, 2009. Alexandra Burke and Flo Rida are at number one with “Bad Boys,” with Robbie Williams, Black Eyed Peas, and Michael Buble also charting. In news, about all I can actually find over the last week is the balloon boy hoax in Colorado. Oh, and Jenson Button wins the Formula One Drivers’ Champion. All right then.
So, television – another installment of The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is in some ways surprising that The Mad Woman in the Attic is a relatively messy and underwhelming story, not least because it’s by Joseph Lidster, who wrote the best Sarah Jane Adventures story to date with Mark of the Berserker last season. And yet it is, in fact, a mess. It’s not entirely clear what the problem is. It’s certainly possible that it’s just down to some performances that, while not bad as such, are also not quite up to the level they need to be. Neither Souad Faress as the adult Rani nor Eleanor Tomlinson as the alien Eve quite persuade. It’s not that their performances are bad in any specifically memorable way, but they are equally not particularly compelling or nuanced, which is a problem when both roles are required to carry a lot of the underlying emotional weight of the story. It could also be down to a script that, for all its pedigree, feels crowded and like it has one too many ideas, and that this excess has cost any given idea the space to be interesting. 
But the real problem is with the job the story seems to be trying to solve. This is an odd thing to say. After all, the job is one of the basic and reflexive functions of a series like this. The Mad Woman in the Attic exists to be a character focus episode on Rani. Given that she’s not really had one since her debut, which was so focused on getting her to be a business-as-usual part of the story that she barely had time to develop as a character, this makes total sense. Rani needs to be fleshed out. If this season went by without a heavily Rani-focused episode it would be anomalous to the point of opening serious allegations of sexism.
But Rani has, if not a problem as a cast member, at least a problem as a character. She’s there to fill a narrative contrivance in a manner not dissimilar to how Sarah Jane herself is. And just as Sarah Jane proved oddly unsatisfying as the center of an emotional story in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, so does Rani here. Rani was designed to be a plucky adventuress. She was never really given any character traits beyond that. And so a story about her emotional turmoil is unsatisfying because her character was never really meant to have that. Fault Souad Faress all you want, but it’s not clear what she could have done with this script. Old Rani is defined only by her narrative wrongness – by the fact that she’s not the correct version of the character.
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“Is that what we have become?” The Enterprise Experiment # 2

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We open on a flashback explaining how the Romulan Commander managed to escape “processing” in “The Enterprise Incident”. It seems she was involved in some form of prisoner exchange that was part of negotiations between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire. Sarek makes a brief appearance, expressing hope that the Romulans and the Vulcans would come to some sort of understanding given their shared lineage, but doubtful given the Romulans’ capacity for deception. Back in the present day of this story, the Commander remarks that it’s a appropriate she would find Kirk attempting to test a Federation cloaking device based on the one he stole from her.

</We open with another pointless continuity reference. Sarek’s presence at the exchange is obviously intended to foreshadow “Unification”, and as a result cheapens it by removing Spock’s personal desire to see the Vulcans and the Romulans reunited, and thus his primary motivation. Attributing this to Sarek not only diminishes Spock by attributing his character’s defining aspiration in the latter half of his life to “following in his father’s footsteps”, it also makes no sense because that dream was very much meant to come from Spock *himself*: It’s his own life experiences and view of the Romulans that grants him this positionality, and it’s this that allows him to take on a totally unsanctioned mission. Furthermore, Sarek’s comment about the Romulans’ capacity for “paranoia and trickery” is entirely out of line, and I’d’ve expected D.C. Fontana of all people to catch that: The Romulans were far from paranoid and devious under her tenure./>

From there we get what is frankly an utterly brilliant scene as Kirk and the Commander trade barbs across subspace. Kirk complains she’s violating the treaty agreement, she counters by saying she’s no more in violation than he was when he crossed the Neutral Zone, provoked attack and stole her cloaking device. The Commander then requests Kirk surrender or she’ll destroy the Enterprise and Kirk tries to bluff her by saying there’s an entire armada cloaked behind him ready to strike if she makes a move. The Commander immediately calls him by casually stating that this is an obvious lie because her ship intercepted the distress beacon Scotty and Arex had sent out in the last issue in hopes of letting Kirk and Spock know of their condition and, oh yeah, Kirk left the shuttlebay hangar doors open. This results in an exchange so utterly golden it could only come from D.C. Fontana:

</What is brilliant though is how Fontana handles the Commander and her crew. As soon as we return to the present day, the story quite boldly gives the moral high ground to the Romulans, and more than once in succession: The Commander rightfully points out that Kirk is in no position to complain about her violating treaty and that none of his signature poker bluff diplomacy is going to work on her this time. What’s also really intriguing is the thematic progression between the first few pages: We begin with Sarek’s comment about inherent Romulan duplicity, and then the story goes on to show the Federation, and not just the Federation, but our supposed *heroes*, acting incredibly duplicitous and untrustworthy.…

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Even Reverse the Flow of Time (The Last War in Albion Part 32: Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Alan Moore’s Time Twisters)

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This is the eighth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten 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.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After an initial period of promise and originality, Moore’s future shocks began to fade into repetitiveness as the limits of the format became increasingly and painfully clear…

“We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass.” -Grant Morrison


Figure 242: “The Wages of Sin” even recycles the final
joke of “They Sweep the Spaceways,” with the major
difference being that Talbot arranged his panels
vertically and Leach horizontally. (c.f. Figure 235)
(From “The Wages of Sin,” written by Alan Moore, art
by Bryan Talbot, in 2000 AD #257, 1982)
But many other stories in the period are flatter at best. “A Second Chance,” a two-pager in which the last man on Earth finds a woman, is utterly devoid of any point. “All of Them Were Empty,” in which a siege on a American truck stop is revealed to be conducted by sentient cars wanting a fill-up, is similarly uninspiring, as is “No Picnic,” in which a man is buried alive on Easter Island to become one of the famed heads. And when Moore did hit gold, it was often by rehashing his own previous work. One of his best stories of 1982, “The Wages of Sin,” is a redo of “They Sweep the Spaceways,” this time focusing on the training that would-be galactic conquerers go through. It’s not that it is a pale imitation of “They Sweep the Spaceways.” In fact, its jokes are a step sharper, and the art by Bryan Talbot is superlative. But it’s still just a refinement of an earlier strip.
For the most part this stretch of Moore’s work is characterized by a heavy reliance on straightforward twist endings. Some of these are reasonably clever – “The Beastly Beliefs of Benjamin Blint”,” for instance, uses the basic twist of the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder,” whereby the eponymous Benjamin Blint tells his therapist about the horrible creature that periodically appears to him. The strip shows several such encounters, between a typically square-jawed man and a suitably horrible looking creature. The final panel reveals that Blint is in fact the monstrous creature, haunted by the “hideous” ordinary human, who Blint finally admits can’t possibly be real, because there just isn’t room in the real world for creatures as stomach-turning and loathsome as that.”
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Outside the Government: Prisoner of the Judoon

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It’s October 15th, 2009. Chipmunk are at number one with “Oopsy Daisy,” with Shakira, the Black Eyed Peas, and two separate Jay-Z tracks also charting. In news, since July, Ireland approved the Lisbon Treaty on the second attempt, the 2016 Olympics were given to Rio di Janeiro, and North Korea freed two American journalists following intervention by former President Bill Clinton. While more around the time of this story, Tim Berners-Lee publicly apologizes for excessive backslashes in urls, a Ugandan MP proposes making certain instances of homosexual activity capital offenses, and Stephen Gately, one of the lead singers of Boyzone, died in Spain. Also, Edgar Allen Poe’s funeral is held.
On television, meanwhile, The Sarah Jane Adventures is back. It is interesting to compare the positions of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures going into their third seasons. Torchwood was a show in visible need of some sort of revamping or, at the very least, of Davies actually being heavily involved in the season instead of largely sitting on the sidelines. The Sarah Jane Adventures, on the other hand, was rapidly perfecting a sort of business-as-usual approach that served it well. So where the mantra of Children of Earth amounted to “everything really does change for once,” the mantra of The Sarah Jane Adventures in its third season amounted to “let’s do it again.”
Prisoner of the Judoon exemplifies that, ticking all the boxes of what one would expect a season premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures to be while still managing to be its own thing. You’ve got the return of a Doctor Who monster, a story built so that everybody gets at least one moment to shine, and a nice high-concept premise to hold it all together. The latter, of course, is that Sarah Jane’s found herself possessed for the first time since The Hand of Fear. Lis Sladen, unsurprisingly, plays it with gleeful relish – Sarah Jane as possessed by the Androvax is all lascivious growl and menace. 
It’s an interestingly calibrated performance – it would have been easy to make the big “Sarah Jane is possessed” story an opportunity to be scary. The last time Sarah Jane was absent from the story was Mark of the Berserker, which used her absence to make the story scarier. Without Sarah Jane to keep things in line, Clyde’s father became an extremely threatening figure capable of doing much more damage than any villain possibly could when Sarah Jane is around. This time, however, Sarah Jane’s absence is, if not comedic, at least a source of fun – an opportunity for Lis Sladen to let her hair down and act out instead of being the buttoned-up, straight-laced figure. The story is a big party in the same way that New Earth was for Billie Piper.
Meanwhile, the rest of the cast gets to shine as well. Luke gets to capably act as a surrogate Sarah Jane and stop the aliens, Rani gets some lovely comedy bits with her parents, and Clyde gets to be practical and a leader figure.
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