Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

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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“Persistence of Memory”: The Enterprise Experiment # 1

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It’s such a perfect idea one wonders why it wasn’t done sooner. D.C. Fontana was the script editor for the lion’s share of the Original Series and had worked on the show since the beginning. She penned a number of the most popular and best-received episodes of the show and played a large part in shaping Star Trek into the form we now recognise. Even without taking into account reprising her role for the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, contributing to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with Peter Allan Fields and writing three video games, Fontana is simply a no-brainier to handle Star Trek: Year Four: It’s obvious, really-excepting the deceased Gene Coon, she’s without question the heir apparent to carry on the mantle of the Original Series.

</Although not D.C. Fontana’s first Star Trek work since The Animated Series, “The Enterprise Experiment”, a five-issue miniseries from 2008 that was a part of IDW’s Star Trek: Year Four line of titles, is at least the first to explicitly interact with this era of Star Trek’s history. For this project, Fontana reunites with her longtime collaborator Derek Chester, a comic book and video game writer otherwise known for his work on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and with whom she also worked on Star Trek Bridge Commander, Star Trek: Legacy, and Star Trek: Tactical Assault. />

“The Enterprise Experiment”, as you can probably guess, picks up in the aftermath of the third season episode “The Enterprise Incident”, where Kirk engages in diplomatic subterfuge to steal the Romulans’ prototypical cloaking device. Kirk and Spock are adrift in a shuttlecraft, trying to locate the Enterprise, which has cloaked itself using said device as part of an experiment to test its functionality as a potential asset on Federation starships. The cloaking device the Enterprise is using is a variation of the original Romulan design cooked up by Starfleet Intelligence and has, hypothetically, alleviated all the problems the Romulans had with its predecessor. However, it soon becomes apparent that not quite all of the bugs have been worked out, as the Enterprise fails to respond to Kirk and Spock’s hails. Presuming something has gone wrong, Spock opens the shuttlebay hangar doors with what basically amounts to a garage door opener (which is pretty funny) and the shuttle returns to the ship on its own. Climbing aboard, however, Kirk and Spock find it seemingly abandoned, with not a single crewmember in sight.

</The upshot to this is, of course, that it is deeply and bitterly ironic that D.C. Fontana ends up writing for a series set during the same time period as her *own* Star Trek series that everyone seems ready to forget actually happened. IDW editorial in particular twists the knife rather egregiously, whether intentionally or not, in their interview with Fontana that preceded this series: Every other question they ask for her thoughts on the “canonicity” of the Animated Series, leading to an especially revealing exchange where she lays into the character of Sybok in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, saying that it annoyed her because it flatly contradicted the backstory she personally established for Spock in “Yesteryear” (namely that he was an only child) capping it off with the equal parts wry and loaded statement “Apparently it’s not canon if I write it”.…

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Glug Glug Glug

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Read this.  Please.

Want a taster?  Here are some sentences from the article:

Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers’ Union.
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Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.
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The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.
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We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.

I propose a new fly-on-the-wall docudrama: ‘Benefit Farm’, detailing how the feckless, greedy, welfare-guzzling farmers are to blame for “Sunken Britain”.…

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Portrait of a Monday

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I probably could have found something interesting to bang out here this week. But instead I spent all day signing and packing books for the Kickstarter.

The books to sign. $2500 worth of books (and that’s bought at cost). Fifteen boxes, each with 24-32 books.

A box of Troughons, with the cover in sexy matte finish.

And the main event.

Fun fact – my signature that I use for legal purposes is just three vague scrawls that most people say look like three ws, and so I spent a while figuring out a new signature that looked vaguely like my name for this. These are various attempts where I went “goddammit, that P looks like an R” and “that S looks like an I don’t even fucking know.” Handwriting was not my strong subject in school.

Piles and piles of books. The ones in the back are signed and ready to pack. At time of posting, this table and two others are fully covered in books, and I’m about 1/3 done.

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Catching Them at Their Best

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The Pex Lives boys have done a supplemental podcast about the Star Trek movies.  Got me thinking about why I like Star Trek IV so much.  I decided to try writing something about it, since anything that even vaguely twitches my interest is worth grabbing hold of at the moment, what with my blogging mojo being critically ill and lying, sobbing and wailing, in a deep dark pit.

I don’t like the movie because it’s ‘tongue-in-cheek’ or because I have any sort of ideological attachment to the idea that SF in general (or Trek in particular) should be ‘self-aware’ or anything like that.  I like it because it is, essentially, a movie about a bunch of old relics from the 60s wandering around Regan’s America and disapproving of it heartily.

This is not a deep movie.  It isn’t hard to parse.  No great leaps of interpretation are needed.  Just look at what happens.

In order to survive in 80s San Franciso, Kirk must sell his beloved spectacles, a gift from Bones.  He, a man who – as we learn from this film – comes from a culture without money, must commodify something precious to him.

In order to achieve their aims, Bones and Scotty must – essentially – bribe a sexist business manager with promises of the untold wealth which will come from a new commodity.  Commodification again.

In the course of acquiring some radiation (or something) Chekhov gets arrested by the US Navy, gets interrogated, called a “retard” and a “Russkie” by paranoid officers, and is chased to the point where he sustains a life-threatening injury.

In the course of rescuing him, Bones encounters an elderly woman, in need of dialysis, waiting unattended and forgotten on a gurney in a hospital corridor.

Kirk and Spock encounter a representative of a moribund counter-culture where the best the ‘rebellious youth’ can offer is loud anti-social music which screeches that “we’re all bloody worthless”.  (This is, admittedly, rather unfair on Punk.  The depiction is, at best, a clueless and curmudgeonly parody… but then, by this point in the 80s, the real remnants of Punk were, at best, commercialised and decontextualised parodies of the Punk movement.)

Kirk and Spock must team up with a right-on scientist who seems to be the only person who gives a shit about the whales.  Just as the animals are likely to be slaughtered for commercial reasons once they are sent back into the wild, so the reasons for their being so sent are implicitly commercial: they’re not enough of a draw to make them economically viable for the cash-strapped institute.

As if all this weren’t enough, how does Kirk justify Spock’s eccentric behaviour?  He places him in the context of the 60s.

Diegetically, Kirk et al are from ‘the future’… but, in this film, the future = America’s past.  Specifically, the crew are played as displaced representatives of the culture from which they extra-diegetically come: the 60s.  They are remnants of utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism.  Now, however much wrong there may have been with utopian Kennedyish 60s liberalism (and there was a fuck-ton wrong with it), it was mostly preferable to Reaganism, and – more importantly – certainly entailed popular ideas that were far in advance not only of Reaganism but also of its own actual practice. …

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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five

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[previously] On the other hand, the idea that the Doctor would deliberately murder a child to save the day is unthinkable. In fact, the degree to which it is unthinkable is central to Moffat’s soft retcon of the Time War to give the Doctor an out in Day of the Doctor. The way that Moffat renders the Doctor’s double genocide unthinkable is by declaring that Gallifrey was full of children – a thought that is unimaginable in the context of Davies’s vision of the Time War as an event in which the dead are simply brought back from an earlier point in time to fight again and again and the Time Lords became monsters as unthinkable as the Daleks. Moffat alters this by saying that the Time Lords weren’t all monsters, and he does this through unabashed reproductive futurism. Jack, on the other hand, has at this point functionally killed fourteen kids, putting him six shy of Adam Lanza.

And yet for all of that, he is unambiguously framed as the hero. When he is absent from the narrative for the entirety of “Day Two” it is consciously a disruption to the narrative’s function, and when he’s restored in “Day Three” he gets a cheeky and thoroughly gratuitous sequence where his hero coat is restored to him. There’s no way of reading Children of Earth as anything other than a story about Jack Harkness, the hero who saves the day. 
It’s tempting to read this as the frankly overly common trope of the tortured and morally ambiguous antihero – this is, after all, released almost exactly a year after The Dark Knight, when the love of taking heroes to “dark” places was at its highest. But Davies has never shown a particular attachment to the tortured antihero, and much as he pushes Jack into grim territory, he does ultimately end by putting Jack in a position to return to his galavanting, space-faring roots. For all that Jack’s actions and ending are grim, we should think about the next place we see him: a raucous bar full of all manner of colourful CGI characters. “The hero Cardiff deserves” this ain’t.
Which is to say that we are forced to take Jack’s actions as morally serious. This is, to be fair, not actually difficult. At the end of the day, it’s just another trolley problem, and the solution Children of Earth settles on is a perfectly mainstream answer to it. Killing twelve people to save twenty-five million is, if not straightforwardly ethical, at least reasonable and defensible. Killing one to save even more is likewise. The only things that make Jack’s actions especially horrific are aesthetic issues: the fact that the person he’s killing is a kid, and, more than that, his grandson. (Strangely, the fact that he’s also saving children has relatively little impact in practice.) 
And so by embracing this queer ideology in all its awful splendor, Jack liberates himself from the entire world. It’s interesting to note that his final scene is not actually necessarily a scene about how awful he found it to have to kill his own grandson.
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“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid.”: Year Four # 6

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This isn’t quite the end of Star Trek: Year Four: There’s a follow-up series that went out under this banner and, of course, IDW’s later “Year Five” series Star Trek: Final Mission (which are, spoiler alert, next on the docket), but this issue does mark the end of the initial run of the project. This means it somewhat begs to be read as a “season finale”, and what this does is cause us to wonder right from the outset which side of Year Four‘s instincts this story is going to fall on.

As we’ve discussed previously, this series exists at an odd juncture between trying to fill a gap in the history of Star Trek and doing Original Series-style Star Trek for 2007 and 2008, and it’s been on the whole a bit changeable on both fronts. Way back in the post on “Operation — Annihilate!” I mentioned that the season finale it as we now conceptualize it didn’t really exist at this point in the history of television. Most finales were, if not simply average episodes of the series, “big” episodes that were only subtly larger in scope or stakes than the norm, brought upon just as often by the production team feeling energized about going out on a high note than the writers consciously writing vastness into the script. And we can see this in Star Trek itself: Of its three season finales, only “Assignment: Earth” actually feels like anything remotely resembling a finale, and that doesn’t really count. Then we go back to “The Omega Glory”…Which we really don’t want to read as a finale. Actually in that season, it seems far more fitting to call “Bread and Circuses” a finale as there’s a sense of closure about it and it’s the last story Gene Coon worked on as a regular member of the creative team.

So, were issue six to be some grand, sweeping modern-style epic of a finale, that wouldn’t be at all keeping with the tone of the original Star Trek circa 1969-1970. And, thankfully, it’s not: We get a parting glimpse of the Enterprise warping away to its next mission that implies this chapter has come to a close, but more adventures are in store, and the rest of the book is pretty run-of-the-mill Star Trek: Year Four. This means, of course, that the story is nothing special: The Enterprise is investigating the disappearance of the starship Pasteur, last reported in the vicinity of the Gobi system. Beaming down to the third planet, Kirk, McCoy, a redshirt and Lieutenant O’Hara, the sister of the Pasteur‘s missing captain, find themselves suddenly transported to the decontamination chamber of a gigantic warehouse operated by a robot named Avatar (who seriously looks like a Star Trek version of Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons) who guards over and ships the planet’s valuable merchandise.

After the redshirt goes the way of all redshirts, the landing party discovers the merchandise in question are genetically engineered infants artificially created from the genetic material of many different alien species, the end result of the native population’s fertility experiments and now all that remains of their people.…

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Saturday/Sunday General Breakfast Buffet (February 15th, 2014)

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Hello all. Not sure why this didn’t post this morning. Here it is.

This week has been pretty focused on Last War in Albion, and it looks like I’ll have about half the Skizz/DR and Quinch chapter done by the end of the weekend. Having some good fun with bits of it – summarizing Thatcher’s first term in a thousand words was interesting. Have to firm up exactly what I’m doing next, though. I’m going to switch publishers, because Halo Jones is wholly on the other side of Moore’s US success and so has to come after Swamp Thing.

So it’s probably time to circle back and do Moore’s Marvel UK stuff, which is the last run of stuff that can be written off as uninteresting early career work. But then comes the real decision – do I put V for Vendetta in before or after Swamp Thing?

Marvelman is definitely getting held back. In fact, I’m going to deal with it in parallel to Watchmen. My plan is to spend a long time on Watchmen – roughly as long as everything before Watchmen is going to take. If I do book versions of Last War in Albion (and I’m almost certain to do at least one) then I’ll put the dividing line right before Watchmen, and book two will just be called The Battle of Watchmen or something better if I can think of it, because I don’t actually like that title. So a host of stuff is going to get subsumed into that – all Moore’s non-Swamp Thing DC work, Marvelman, Grant Morrison’s UK career (Zoids and Zenith, as it were), a dash of Neil Gaiman, and Moore’s falling out with DC. As well as the background stuff you’d expect – the history of Charlton, the history of Fawcett, Frank Miller, a bigger history of DC than what the Swamp Thing chapter will give, et cetera.

So the two possible orders are Captain Britain, Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, or Captain Britain, V For Vendetta, Swamp Thing. The latter is more accurate to chronology, but… V for Vendetta. I want to come back to it after Watchmen, to be honest. I’m really interested in that few-year period after Watchmen where Moore sort of wrapped up his previous career, right before he started self-publishing and, shortly thereafter, snake-worshipping. Moore in parallel with the breakout days of Gaiman and Morrison, fleeing the industry right as what he enabled made the careers of a dozen or more of his fellow comics scenesters.

And the two things you have for that are the end of V for Vendetta and the tail end of Marvelman. So I actually want to deal with V for Vendetta in a very limited form early on, because I have to leave myself a second take on it. So I figure initially I’ll treat it as the weird, very British thing it is, and then later treat it as a Major Work of the Great Genius Alan Moore.…

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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four

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[previously] Reproductive futurism invests itself in a future without content. It has to, because the future is defined as the place where we don’t live but where our children do. But Jack, as we said, does live in the future. He’s not just from the future, he is ageless and deathless such that he will, in practice, live to see the entirety of it, outliving the Earth itself. This is why he is a queer figure, in the end.
But in opposition to this is the idea of temporal attachments – that is, the longstanding themes of immortality in which the immortal figure must mourn how everyone they love grows old and dies. This is alluded to at the start of the story, with Jack’s declaration that he doesn’t like being a couple – “couples” being, after all, the basic unit of temporal attachments and reproductive futurism. Ianto’s death, then, consists of forcibly severing Jack’s ties to that rhetoric and allowing him to fully embrace the queer ideology he truly represents. It is worth looking at the specific context of Ianto’s death – coming as it does in the midst of a big, heroic scene in which Ianto and Jack attempt to heroically speak of humanity’s potential and how there’s nothing they won’t do to protect their children. That is, they speak in defense of reproductive futurism, which is spectacularly ineffectual. Ianto dies, thus forcing Jack to a new type of strategy – one that actually works, but that works precisely because it completely rejects reproductive futurism and instead involves murdering his own grandson.
It is worth noting that the particulars of Ianto’s death – a virus – hold specific symbolic weight. One of the things that has most often been important in understanding Davies’s work, particularly when same-sex relationships show up in it, is the difference between homosexuality as a sexual orientation and the specific institution of gay culture. This is what’s ultimately invoked in the memorable monologue way back in Bob and Rose in which Bob declares that “I was born gay, I’ll die gay and I’ll have a gay gravestone” – not, self-evidently, that he therefore was never going to be attracted to a woman, but that his self-identity and image came out of gay culture. (A fact implicit in the idea that a gravestone can be gay.) And Davies often writes about gay culture as much, if not more than he writes about same-sex relationships. Indeed, his inclination in much of his later work is specifically to avoid making same-sex relationships a topic – observe, for instance, how Ianto basically plays a reverse version of the Bob and Rose game, rejecting any identity implicit in his romance with Jack when asked by Rhiannon. Gay culture, to be clear, is in no way coextensive with homosexuality – it does not provide a description fitting all or even most gay men. Nevertheless, it still has significant cultural impact.
All of which is to say that the fact that Jack – an ostentatiously queer character who, especially in 2009 once John Barrowman had become a ubiquitous presence on television such that it was impossible to look at his character in Torchwood and not see in part the high-profile gay man playing him – loses his lover specifically to a deadly virus is impossible not to read in part as a quiet invocation of the role that HIV/AIDS played in gay culture and gay history. 
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“The future is now, thanks to SCIENCE!”: Year Four # 5

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It is said our visions of the future tell us the most about the present. In the case of Star Trek, the futurism it imagines is oftentimes most revealing about what the loudest voice in its fandom currently is.

The Enterprise is overseeing a large-scale deep space particle acceleration experiment using a gigantic collider made up of twin space stations. The goal is to scale up similar experiments done by twentieth century physicists in an attempt to create quark-gluon plasma, a kind of primordial matter that existed at the birth of the universe, the theory being this would give them a unique insight into what the universe looked like at the dawn of time. While Spock oversees the experiment on the stations, Chekov takes his place at the Enterprise science station while his own relief officer Arex (that orange three-armed extraterrestrial we first saw in issue 1) expresses concern the experiment could have disastrous side-effects. Kirk dismisses Arex’s worries, stating that taking risks in the name of furthering science is what their mission is all about. However, Arex’s concerns prove to have merit as no sooner does Spock initiate the acceleration then the ship is hit by a bolt of energy as the plasma forms a singularity and engulfs the stations, taking Spock with them. It now falls to acting science officer Chekov and the rest of the bridge crew to find a way to salvage the experiment, rescue Spock and also themselves, as the Enterprise becomes trapped in the black hole too.

This book is, plot-wise, probably about as banal and uninteresting as Star Trek: Year Four has been since its first issue. It essentially boils down to yet another “lengths the crew will go to to save one of their own” bit of loyalty and camaraderie, which for me sort of feels like character development-by-numbers: I know this is a signature type of Star Trek story, but by this point it’s feeling pretty worn and rote to me. We know Chekov is going to pull through, we know Spock is going to have some snarky quip ready when he beams back so it seems like he’s ungrateful and we know Kirk and McCoy are going to angst and snap at each other in the meantime. Again though, like we said with the debut story, generic is still preferable to godawful. It’s a testament to the average level of quality Year Four has been able to reach that a kind of character drama driven plot like this seems like filler whereas it felt like a welcome change of pace in something like “The Immunity Syndrome”. Without knowing what next month’s finale is going to be like and the wild extremes of issues three and four perhaps notwithstanding, Year Four has done a more-than-acceptable job of coming up with a kind of “baseline Star Trek”, which is something worth taking note of.

(And indeed, part of the reason issue four was able to work as well as it did is because it relied on the audience having some kind of understanding about what a “generic” Star Trek episode is supposed to look like.)…

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