Eruditorum Press

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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

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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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Saturday Waffling: February 8th, 2014

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First off, some news and a request. Next weekend, at the Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, Paul Cornell is doing a reading of This Point of Singularity, aka my essay on The Three Doctors. It’ll be on Friday night at 11:30, and is on the schedule and everything. If you happen to be going to the convention, I would be really, outrageously, ecstatically happy if you could snag me a recording of this event. It doesn’t have to be super-nice – anything where the audio is intelligible will suit me fine. It’s just, you know, author who was a vivid part of my childhood reading one of my essays at the largest Doctor Who convention in the country and all. And I kind of want to hear it. So yes, if you can help, please let me know in comments. Very appreciative and whatnot. 

Which brings us to our discussion topic for the week: conventions. What are your fondest convention memories?
For my part, I’m going to go with Dragon Con 2012 and the Monday morning Sylvester McCoy panel getting cancelled at the last moment and replaced with Sylvester McCoy and Patricia Quinn doing live commentary for the first two episodes of Dragonfire, making them pleasant for the first time in history. 
Though the gender-swapped Link and Navi cosplay at the same con in which Link was leading her shirtless Navi around on a leash with “no you listen” scrawled on his chest is actually something of a contender as well.
Though, you know. I’m going to have that topped without even going to the convention in question in a week.
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I Must Protect This Bag of Meat (The Last War in Albion Part 30: Plagiarism and Abelard Snazz)

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This is the fifth 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 work for 2000 AD quickly led to a spate of extremely good stories, including “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde” (a title Moore inadvertently nicked from Norman Spinrad
“Robots couldn’t really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? ‘Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn’t possibly plug in the charger all on my own.’ Shut the fuck up.” – Warren Ellis


Figure 225: The Golden Horde, also known as the Ulus of
Jochi, spanned a large portion of both Europe and Asia in the
13th century.

The story ends with Cornelius attempting to ride off on the horse of the last Khan of the Golden Horde, which is said to have “waddled forward a few steps, puked, and died.” And that’s basically that. That this apparently inadvertent coincidence of titles should take place around a Jerry Cornelius story written by someone other than Michael Moorcock, given that one of the most superficially obvious conflagrations in the War centers on Grant Morrison’s Gideon Stargrave character and the degree to which it and his larger work are or are not rip-offs of Moorcock’s work. Essentially no plot elements coincide between Spinrad and Moore’s stories. And yet there is a thematic kinship between them. Both are ruminations on the nature of violence that hinge on an over the top display of violence that is revealed to be fundamentally hollow. The end effect is to highlight the impressive diversity of potential in storytelling. Two writers with relatively similar ideas – a rumination on the banality of violence featuring the iconography of the Mongol hordes – ended up in profoundly different places. Even the similarity of title is wholly understandable – there really was a 13th century Mongol Khanate known as the Golden Horde, and it’s hardly surprising that two separate writers working with Mongol iconography riffed on the same famous and poetic name from history.

Figure 226: In more ways than one, this is not the original
Snazz story. (From 2000 AD #209, 1981)

This was, however, not always the case for Moore’s Future Shocks. Two months before “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde” Moore penned “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain,” his second story featuring Abelard Snazz. Unlike “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde,” which Moore was content to have reprinted in the Shocking Futures collection with a self-deprecating note in the introduction, Moore asked for “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain” not to be reprinted alongside the other five Abelard Snazz tales in the Twisted Times collection because, as he puts it, “some while after the sequel was published, I reread a story by the incandescent R.A.

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“Sooner or later you’re gonna have to choose whose side you’re on.”: Year Four # 2

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An obvious thing for a series like Star Trek: Year Four to do would be to take some of Star Trek‘s familiar motifs and refine them a bit. It doesn’t necessarily have to “update” them for “a modern audience” because that’s such an overused and cliched expression, but it can sometimes be helpful to give a little nod to the fact that, say, this series is being written in 2007 instead on 1969. And, with its second issue, Year Four does pretty much that: This story is very much like what I’d expect Star Trek in 2007 to look like.

Or, perhaps more accurately, what Star Trek made against the cultural and political backdrop of 2007 would look like. On a pit stop to Aarak 3, one of the Federation’s largest suppliers of Dilithium crystals in the galaxy, the Enterprise crew has the briefest of moments to reflect on how different the planet is since the Federation signed a mining agreement with the local government before they are attacked by a group of terrorists who try to blow the place up with a handheld explosive. The terrorists are part of a resistance group known as The Traditionalists, who feel Aarak’s alliance with the Federation is a betrayal of their culture’s fundamental beliefs, in particular the belief that Dilithium is a magickal substance and that in mining and selling it, the ruling classes are draining the planet’s spiritual essence. This leads to a minor Prime Directive debate, as while supporting the aristocracy to secure the Dilithium would constitute interfering, the Traditionalists hold that the Federation has already violated the Prime Directive by giving one side the technology needed to turn it into a mining superpower.

So there’s more to discuss in this story than there was last time, but let’s first address the two things that predictably made me upset right from the get-go. First of all, yes, it is exceedingly difficult for me not to immediately side with the Traditionalists. Stand-ins for an indigenous populace angry that their culture is being stripped away from them due to the encroachment of material and ideological Westernism? Yeah, sign me up. There’s no way I’m not going to be sympathetic to that. There’s also the little matter of the Dilithium crystals being sacred totems, which the story painfully glosses over. Spock makes a comment about how “there is nothing magical about a matter-antimatter reaction” that absolutely rubs me the wrong way, and no real effort is made to make up for this. Kirk stops Spock from being even more offensive and later there’s a scene where Scotty describes how “magical” it is to bring life to his engines, but that’s a cop-out, isn’t it? That’s the smarmy, substanceless Disney version of magic. That’s not spiritual and symbolic power, that’s something you put on a mass-market greeting card that you sell for $5 at a tourist kiosk.

I mean, Star Trek wasn’t always great at magick to be sure, especially early on. There were a frankly appalling number of stories where the Enterprise crew waltzed in to tell people how backwards, superstitious and primitive they were.…

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

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The Last War in Albion will run tomorrow – scheduling snafu meant I failed to get it imaged up in time. Though frankly, this is not as dissimilar as TARDIS Eruditorum sometimes is.
It’s July 6th, 2009. Cascada is at number one with “Evacuate the Dancefloor.” Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, La Roux, and Michael Jackson also chart, the latter with two songs, this being mainly due to him being dead. In news, since Planet of the Dead there’s been swine flu and protests in Iran over the almost certainly fraudulent reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While during the five days of this story, a coup d’etat takes place in Honduras, an earthquake takes place in China, and Al Franken is finally sworn in as a US Senator, wrapping up the 2008 elections that took place some eight months earlier. 

While on television, airing on five consecutive nights, is Torchwood: Children of Earth – the zenith of that series’ popularity, which means that it did about as well as poorly rated episodes of Doctor Who did. Nevertheless, it is something of a cultural milestone – Torchwood’s one stab at a big event. While its ratings weren’t quite as impressive as Doctor Who’s, all five episodes placed in the top twenty, and everything after the first got AI figures in the 90s. This is, in other words, hugely successful television.
To start, at least, the important thing to realize about Children of Earth is that it is very long. It’s nearly an hour longer than The War Games and five minutes longer than The Daleks’ Masterplan. Only if you are one of those very strange people who wants to count Trial of a Time Lord as a single story, or if you want to argue that Torchwood doesn’t count as Doctor Who, do you have an easy way to argue that Children of Earth is not the single longest televised story in Doctor Who’s history to date. 
This is all the more extraordinary given that it comes in an era where the narrative velocity has increased dramatically. The War Games and The Daleks’ Masterplan came from a highly serialized era of the show’s history in which things simply happened more slowly. Children of Earth, on the other hand, is medially dense piece of work that makes a habit of communicating information through all sorts of means – dialogue, acting, camera angles, sound design, et cetera. All of which is to say that there’s nothing quite like it in Doctor Who. The fact that it is intensely serialized, done as a straight shot, five episodes in five days single story gives it a narrative heft. It goes out of its way to demand to be treated as a single thing – even above and beyond most miniseries. Even the episode titles – the very simple “Day One” through “Day Five” – seem designed primarily to efface themselves, existing as parts of a whole.
This is not to say that it is not clearly constructed on an episode-by-episode basis.
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The aliens… They’re just so… alien

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J.K. Rowling recently reignited the Potterite shipping-wars by saying that she should never have coupled Ron with Hermione.

Among the things she apparently doesn’t regret putting into the world’s most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:

  • Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect ‘human’ notions of private property.
  • A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and ‘pickaninny’ speech patterns.
  • Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in ‘primitive’ tribes.

Lest it be thought that I’m singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately.  The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology.  Race pervades these genres as a category.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth is full of different ‘races’.  The world of Star Trek is full of different ‘races’.  The world of Doctor Who is full of different ‘races’.  Just think how often we are assailed with ‘races’ in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics.  The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth “a vicious, callous, warlike race” (my emphasis).  A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin.  And the ones I’ve mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream. 

Let’s look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931.

This is particularly interesting because the story is about ‘race-mixing’, expressing Lovecraft’s bigoted horror of ‘miscegenation’.  But he wasn’t writing in a vacuum.  He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries…  and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.

The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and ‘races’ as a social category (which is what ‘race’ is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it’s essentially meaningless).  To quote Richard Seymour:

Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines.

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Guest Post: Torchwood and Cardiff

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Steffan Alun writes on the subject of Torchwood and Cardiff…

It’s October 22nd, 2006.  I’ve been back in university for a few weeks, and I’ve just come back from a choir trip.  Some music is in the charts, but I don’t have to listen to it, because I’ve finally acquired a DAB radio, allowing me to listen to Radio 4 despite Aberystwyth’s unacceptable inability to find it on FM.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts, and I am extremely interested in the portrayal of Cardiff in this show.  Most of my old school friends went to Cardiff for uni, but the city is still reasonably unfamiliar to me.  I spend most of my visits in their rented accommodation, talking about Doctor Who.

Fast-foward to the present day, and I now spend most of my time on public transport thinking about comedy.  I am a standup comedian, a job which takes me all over the UK.  I’ve performed hundreds of gigs, but nearly a quarter of them have been in Cardiff.  It is, by now, a city I know incredibly well.  Thanks to the particular eccentricities of standup comedy, I can even tell you how high the ceilings are in over thirty venues.

Let’s quickly cover the history of Cardiff and Doctor Who so far.  Russell T Davies (like me, he’s from Swansea – in fact, we grew up on the same street, decades apart) has revived the show and made it a BBC superbrand.  That’s their word, not mine, but I quite like it.  Superbrand.  It’s fun to say.  The show is filmed in Cardiff, as part of the offer made to get Julie Gardner on board.  Julie Gardner is also from a part of Wales.  My parents never thought to tell me where she grew up, so let’s Occam’s Razor the question of where she’s from and assume that she, like Russell T Davies and Steffan H Alun, grew up on Lôn Cae Banc.  Anyway, the first new series of Doctor Who features two episodes set in Cardiff, one of which was filmed in Swansea.  Following so far?  Good.

What we have in Everything Changes, the first episode of Torchwood, is something that starts off looking like tedious Joseph Campbell nonsense, but ends up as a wonderful subversion.  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder … until the reality of the supernatural turns out to be so horrific that a woman whose job it is to research the supernatural takes her own life.  “The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man?”  No, the hero joins a team who research alien powers without the slightest intention to share these powers with anyone else.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.  You only need to know one of those reasons – specifically, that while Gwen slowly learns about Torchwood, the audience is slowly learning about Cardiff.  Most of the audience is familiar with the idea for Torchwood – I’d be amazed if many of the 2.8m viewers hadn’t seen any of the first two series of Doctor Who, and even more so if “secret organisation fighting aliens” was new to them.…

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