Eruditorum Press

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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)

51

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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The Day I Finished It, He Died (The Last War in Albion Part 31: Abelard Snazz, Moore’s Early and Middle Future Shocks)

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This is the seventh 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: (Alan Moore’s accidental plagiarism of Norman Spinrad was one of two lifts he’s discussed from his 2000 AD days, the other being the second Abelard Snazz story, Snazz being a genius whose plans inevitably turn out terribly…

“I had actually had plans. We had just sort of opened up very, very preliminary negotiations to find out if Gorey would be interested in illustrating it. And the day I finished it, he died. I mean literally. I finished it and the news was that Edward Gorey died.” -Neil Gaiman, on Coraline

Snazz exists to satirize over-elaborate top-down thinking, but it’s important to note that Snazz is merely a consultant working for the government – a government that never once pipes up to say “wouldn’t just decommissioning the robot cops make more sense,” or “why don’t we reprogram the buggers so they don’t arrest people for wearing ugly ties,” just as, in “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain” Hoolio Moolabar never steps in to say “erm, why don’t we just go get the car instead of betting every penny we have with the doorman.” Snazz, in other words, is not so much a villain as a parodic version of a particular societal tendency that allows people like him to function in the first place. Moore, reflecting on Snazz, rejects the idea that Snazz works because he’s “a symbol of irresponsible science run amok, a sort of boffo Frankenstein,” noting that “anybody who can bring about the downfall of entire civilizations armed only with good intentions can’t be all bad,” and that “he is nowhere near as irredeemably stupid as the people who listen to him.” 
Figure 232: The sublime pinnacle of creative
ecstasy. (From “The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows
Out,” written by Alan Moore, art by Paul Neary,
in 2000 AD #254, 1982)
This tendency is reinforced by the later Snazz stories, which focus less on the preposterous schemes Snazz comes up with and more on the sorts of places Snazz ends up. By the time of the fourth Abelard Snazz story in January of 1982, Moore was putting Snazz in increasingly weird situations. That story, “Halfway to Paradise,” has Snazz acting as an image consultant to a variety of gods [including a lisping Thoth whose name, it is thus implied, might actually be pronounced the same as “sauce”], and the next story, two months later, features him building giant robot tennis players for a bunch of parodic Californians under the title “The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows Out.”
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three

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[previously] It is here, then, we have to turn to Jack’s sexuality. One of the most enduring discussions about Jack is the way in which his sexuality evolves over the course of the series, as he goes from a pansexual action hero to, steadily, an almost exclusively gay male figure – indeed, Barrowman, in at least one interview, describes the character as a gay man. This transition is understandably significant to a large number of people, and there’s a really nasty strand of bisexual erasure that quietly goes on as Jack becomes increasingly normative and less prone to stories like his bizarre story in Boom Town involving fifteen naked people and a monster with tusks. But this ignores the degree to which Jack is more broadly a queer figure – that is, a figure who in some fashion rejects heteronormative reproductive futurism. That his queerness steadily converges on being a gay man is perhaps revealing as to exactly what sort of queer figure he is, but in many ways what is most important about Jack is the fact that he represents an ideology other than, to quote another Davies script, “grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it.” 
But this challenge does not come exclusively from Jack’s sexuality. It also, as we can see by looking at it in terms of reproductive futurism, comes from Jack’s immortality. Jack is queer because his life rejects the entire structure of the world in which those things happen. Jack is a character for whom hedonism has no consequence, and who does not face the prospect of death, and so has no reason to fetishize an imagined future given that he’ll be stuck living in the actual one. So much so that when he does engage in reproductive futurism and has a child, that relationship is impossibly strained.
This, of course, brings us around to Alice. Alice is not what you would call a well-developed character. She suffers from a smattering of difficulties – the “oh look, a key event in Jack’s past we’ve never mentioned before but that is crucial to the plot” twist is one that essentially never works well, and it must be noted that Children of Earth relies upon it twice, neither time with particular success. The first at least provides a necessary plot hook – even though the actual revelation of what Jack was up to in 1965 is a bit muted (with Ianto and Gwen basically going “well that was rather crap of you” and moving on), it’s necessary to provide the killer opening episode hook of nuking the Hub. But the second, the existence of Alice, feels downright contrived. Alice has very little to do in most episodes – she manages to spend about three episodes getting kidnapped, although her “whack the soldier with a cutting board and steal his gun” scene is magnificent. She has few traits other than “she is Jack’s daughter and doesn’t get on with him.”
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“It’s showtime!”: Year Four # 4

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If any television show were to take four months to get off the ground, chances are likely that it wouldn’t see out its first season. That is an unacceptably long time to force an audience to wait for something to actually get good.

Thankfully for absolutely everyone, Star Trek: Year Four is not a television show.

On a mission of cultural exchange to Viden, a planetary society organised entirely around television under the tyrannical rule of two competing monolithic networks, Kirk is suddenly thrust into the global spotlight after a public altercation with a network executive who shot and killed an eighteen-year-old actor in cold blood when he tried to to quit the sitcom he was starring in. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are arrested by Viden authorities (but not until after their faces are plastered all over the news, as the anchors sensationalize the incident to garner ratings) and try to effect escape, but instead wind up on The Doctor Marv Show, a daytime talk show ostensibly about solving people’s personal problems where the host seems more interested in drumming up gossip he can use as a bit of cross-promotion with the tabloids. Because of their new celebrity status, the only way the crew can return to the Enterprise is to sign a legally binding contract selling one of the networks, the Trilateral Broadcasting Company, a TV show starring themselves, where either beach of contract or low ratings is an offense punishable by death.

This is one of those stories that gets me so excited I can’t even think straight. It is utter, utter genius on every single level: The conception, the visual symbolism in the framing of scenes, the general execution, the writing, the ramifications it holds for and the impact it has on the larger Star Trek franchise and universe-It’s all absolutely brilliant. Even the artwork takes a noticeable uptick in quality from what we’ve come to expect from Year Four. The art here looks considerably more realistic and representationalist than what’s been the norm for this series and, perhaps fittingly for a book about television that’s part of a series that wants to be read as the lost fourth season for a TV show, there are a lot of moments in this story that feel like what we would call creative editing and cinematography were this an actual TV episode, but for which I can’t think of an appropriate sequential art analog. The best for me comes right after Kirk, Spock and McCoy find themselves on The Doctor Marv Show, where the titular TV doctor says “…And we’re going to find out what these three friends like about each other and what drives them crazy-Right after this.” and the action immediately cuts to a different scene starting at the top of the next page. It’s a masterful bit of layout and I can totally see it leading into an actual commercial break on the show.

Television logic is ubiquitous throughout this story. The first half of the book is a delightful parade of shows-within-shows: We start out with a straightforward and typical Star Trek plot as the landing party arrives on a planet whose monoculture is built around one gimmick, Kirk gets in trouble by defying the planet’s customs and authority and then gets himself and the rest of the party tossed in the clink.…

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Q&A

8

Sometimes I get random questions through certain means. Here are several of them, and answers. (Sorry for the late post – Blogger error.)

What are your most valuable Doctor Who related possessions in terms of (a) monetary value, and (b) sentimental value?

No idea on A. I know at one point it was a copy of So Vile a Sin, but I’ve not checked the secondary market on that in ages, and I don’t collect for monetary value anyway, so it’s not even something I’d know off-hand.

Sentimentally, my sister gave me a framed picture of herself beside the Earl’s Court Police Box with an inscription reading “come along, Pond.”

Woody Allen?

I think the opening of Dylan Farrow’s piece, in which she asks “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” before transitioning into her story, is a piece of brilliant, brutal writing that makes me have no desire to answer the question.

As always, I believe the victim. And while there are moments of sublime genius in his career, there’s nothing in it that makes me the slightest bit troubled in just believing the victim and deciding I have no interest in him.

Have you read the Sirens of Titan? After reading it I’d say it was a huge influence on both Steven Moffat and Douglas Adams.

For like three years I picked up Sirens of Titan at any book sale I went to. Because I kept forgetting I owned it – I would just scoop up Vonnegut books (many of which I never finished, but oh well), and kept forgetting that was one I already owned, until I had like five copies. Which was ridiculous, and I promptly proceeded to find excuses to give the book to people, usually by telling exactly this story.

And then I overshot and gave away my fifth copy, and haven’t owned it since, and so have never actually read it.

When you write a Pop Between Realities entry on a television series, how much of said series do you typically watch to prepare?

It depends, really. The sort of standard approach is first episode or two and 1-3 later episodes, plus considerable use of secondary sources to make sure there’s no big changes I’m missing. For The Thick of It it was, I think, the first three episodes plus one from each subsequent season.

How do you feel about the truism that every good story has the main character go through some kind of change?

I think that almost any sentence beginning “every good story” is false. Waiting for Godot, for obvious reasons, strikes me as an obvious example of falsehood. Though even there, there’s a clear character arc, even if the movement is consciously infinitesimal in size.

Which is to say, as good a piece of universalizing advice as exists.

What would a potential narrative collapse in football look like?

Oh, thank you. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to link this.

Dresden Codak? (This is not so much a question as an assignment.…

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

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[previously] It should, of course, be remembered that the character who makes this proposal, Denise Riley, is the same one who we’re told is going to succeed the Prime Minister following Bridget’s calm overthrow of him in the story’s conclusion. Which is to say that the problem really pointedly is not Frobisher but the system he represents. Ultimately, a woman who unquestioningly consented in ordering the covert and extrajudicial assassination of four British citizens helps make a person who actively advocated for culling the poor the next Prime Minister in the name of a man who helped orchestrate both plans. This is what passes for political victory – the replacement of the absolutely and unfathomably bad with the slightly differently absolutely and unfathomably bad.
In this regard, Children of Earth is something that Doctor Who, under Davies, only occasionally got to be: very, very angry. Davies lashed out occasionally – his embittered Iraq satire in Aliens of London/World War III and his delightfully bleak turn in Midnight stand out – but for the most part, under Davies, Doctor Who is a series about hope. Torchwood has always been allowed to be at least somewhat more cynical, but it’s not until Children of Earth that we see Davies pen something for within Doctor Who that is just unabashedly bitter and pessimistic. 
This is not uncharacteristic for Davies as such. A trawl through his earlier work reveals him to be a hopeless romantic, but he is also someone who has said more than once that his ideal vision of love is unrequited love, which speaks volumes as to the nature of his romanticism. For him, the romantic and optimistic is a howl in the dark – the one piece of meaning or hope that can be found in a desperately bleak world. In Doctor Who, at least, this is framed in terms of the fantastic nature of the show – the romance comes, often, not from the world but from a radical escape from it brought on by interaction with a completely barmy time traveller. 
So Children of Earth, in positioning itself in a somewhat aggressively normal environment, consciously steps away from the saving wonder of the fantastic. There’s only one alien and they don’t even bother with names or descriptions. We don’t even ever properly see them – they’re forever cloaked in fog. The aliens are little more than representatives of the unknown and unknowable – forces of nature to which people have to respond. 
Instead we get Gwen’s episode five monologue about why the Doctor doesn’t show up, with the suggestion that it is a judgment of humanity. This is clearly at least partially metaphoric – after all, it’s not as though the Doctor checks in to see how humanity is doing with an alien invasion before deciding if he’ll intervene. The point is rather much like that of Turn Left. Indeed, that story we suggested that the message “without the Doctor, Britain would become fascist” was a bit stretched.
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“ET phone home!”: Year Four # 3

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There’s reconstructionist, there’s nostalgic, and then there’s just plain retrograde. Guess which one we’re talking about this time.

While investigating the sudden radio silence from colony PH-11, the Enterprise landing party discovers every human inhabitant dead. However before they died, Spock points out the colonists had discovered an alien pod and Chekov notes their communication room had been destroyed before they went as well. Back on the ship, McCoy examines one of the deceased colonists and reveals he died of severe head trauma, as if his brain had been bombarded with too much information to process at one time. Kirk is called to the bridge, but discovers the ship has changed course as per an order everyone claims he gave, but he did not. Spock summons security to the bridge, claiming Kirk has been infected with a virus found on the planet, and has him arrested and brought to sickbay.

As he restrains Kirk to the operating table, McCoy orders Nurse Chapel to sedate Kirk, but, secretly agreeing with the captain, she slips him a scalpel instead. There’s then a brief fight scene as Kirk and Chapel try to regain control of the Enterprise, but it doesn’t last long and eventually they too become afflicted as it’s revealed the “virus” is actually a colony organism called the Ur who just wanted to return to their home planet, for some reason needed humanoid hosts in order to do this and would rather posses an entire starship than try to actually reach out and communicate with anybody first. Meanwhile, any hope we might have had to see some feminist redemption following on the heels of “Turnabout Intruder” by having Nurse Chapel save the day from a menacing alien invasion are swiftly dashed by teasing us with what could have been her defining character moment on the entire series and then shunting her back offstage the moment she starts to exhibit too much agency.

Yikes. This one isn’t quite Margaret Armen bad, but the fact she’s the first Original Series writer who came to mind whose work this story most reminds me of is a somewhat uncomfortable prospect. Before we even get into the premise, which I take massive issue with, let’s briefly note the basic writing structure, and namely how the plot and logic holes are absolutely gigantic. The whole concept of the Ur is simply dropped on us in the last few panels in the clunkiest of twist reveals, it’s never really explained how they actually work (my best guess is that they somehow travel or communicate through sound waves as the afflicted crew members are shown humming in unison and the colonists destroyed their radios, but nobody actually comes out and *says* that), nor is it ever made clear why the Enterprise crew survived and the PH-11 colonists died, save for a token hand-wave about “their minds not being ready”, which is confusing at best and demeaning at worst.

Then there’s the actual story. Far from feeling like something that could have been a fourth season episode, this feels like a first season pitch.…

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