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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 75 (Hamlet)

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It’s a time-honored strategy. A skilled actor defined by one major role does some “challenging” work on a serious project to show that they’re flexible in anticipation of moving to a more serious and major level of their career. In the UK, the practice often involves a run in theater. For David Tennant, who had extensive theater experience anyway, it was the natural move – use the gap year opened in the production to do some high profile bit of theater.
Meanwhile, the Royal Shakespeare Company was in a position that could only be described as “in dire need of a hit.” The decision to terminate its relationship with the Barbican Centre in 2002 had left it with a vastly diminished presence in London, which, as it turned out, was not necessarily a great thing for a theater company, especially given that its Stratford-upon-Avon facilities were, at the same time, undergoing a lengthy renovation. The result was several years where the Company hemorrhaged money.
The two were natural partners, in other words. Tennant allowed them to have a high-profile production with a celebrity actor that would amount to a license to print money, and Tennant had a nice, high profile “respectable” role to use as he attempted to transform his post-Doctor Who career into, ideally, something American. And so we got the 2008 production of Hamlet in which Tennant pairs with Patrick Stewart, mostly running in Stratford. Adding respectability to the affair (on Tennant’s end) was him being a good RSC citizen and taking up a production of Love’s Labour Lost alongside Hamlet that, for a variety of reasons, was not treated as nearly as big a deal. 
For all that this makes perfect sense on paper, it was in some ways an awkward marriage. The RSC was in many ways unprepared to handle the sheer popularity that it had, and found itself trying to avoid looking too much like a populist circus, grumpily banning audience members from asking for anything other than RSC memorabilia to be signed and generally acting as though they were a bit annoyed that a bunch of sci-fi fans were giving them piles of money for what rapidly became the summer’s hottest theater ticket. And things got decidedly awkward towards the end of 2008/beginning of 2009 when Tennant suffered a back injury requiring surgery and ruling him out of the bulk of the London run of the play. 
But that this was such a controversy as to get repeated news coverage, and that a theater ticket in Stratford would be the hottest ticket of the summer speaks volumes about just how popular Doctor Who was at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009. Not only is Stratford a hundred miles and a two-hour train ride outside of London, it’s simply not a very big town – its population of 25,000 is smaller than that of Newtown, Connecticut, meaning that anyone wanting to see the production had to travel to a town with little else to do but tour a few museums and churches specifically for it.
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“Is green, yes.”: Bem

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This out-of-context screencap is more entertaining than the whole episode.

“Bem” is the final “official” contribution to Star Trek by Dave Gerrold, though his presence and influence is going to be felt on the franchise for years to come (most notably during the first third of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season, when he was on staff). From what I gather, it seems to have the reputation for being one of the better remembered and most admired episodes of The Animated Series, although Gerrold and D.C. Fontana do seem to go back and forth a bit on what their actual takeaway on it was.

So naturally I don’t think it works in the slightest.

The story concerns the Enterprise taking on an attache by the name of Ari bn Bem, representing the planet Pandro. Bem is acting as an independent observer judging the Enterprise crew to determine whether or not the Federation is worthy of establishing formal diplomatic relations with his people. Though he sat out the previous six missions, Bem insists on being allowed to accompany the landing party on a dangerous reconnaissance mission to investigate uncontacted aboriginal people on Delta Theta III. Beaming down, it soon becomes apparent that Bem has ulterior motives, as he clandestinely replaces Kirk and Spock’s phasers and communicators with forgeries and then runs off, getting captured by the natives in the process. Pursuing Bem, Kirk and Spock end up captured themselves, where Bem reveals to them that, as a colony organism, he could have divided into discrete parts and escaped at any time, but allowed himself to be captured to firstly study the native population from within, but also to see how Kirk and Spock would respond, disapproving of their repeated attempts to resolve the situation with force.

OK. I have quite a few issues with this setup already, and that’s the briefest summary I could manage. First of all, as someone with a background in anthropology this entire premise rankles me. The ethics of “uncontacted” cultures is a sticky proposition to begin with, and the ever-present headache that is Star Trek’s Prime Directive makes it worse. There’s always a kind of paternalism (and, frankly, racism) present in the assumption that indigenous peoples, especially indigenous peoples who are “uncontacted”, are some kind of living time capsule from humanity’s prehistory. You can’t tell anything objectively about human history (well, you can’t really tell anything objectively, but that’s another matter entirely), and certainly not through ethnography. All that gets you is a not-always-clear outsider’s perspective of how a culture operates *in the present day*. Furthermore, it’s more than a little patronizing and naive to assume that all so-called “uncontacted” people are too childlike and stupid to at least guess some kind of an outside world exists.

None of this is helped by every single person in the episode acting like a complete idiot. Kirk and Spock are in full-on colonialist mode here again, stressing the importance of this mission to “classify” the aboriginal people of Delta Theta III, like the good Lamarckists they are.…

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The Comedian Is Dead (The Last War in Albion Part 28: Alan Moore’s Earliest 2000 AD Work)

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This is the fourth 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: 2000 AD built its reputation on the back of popular series like Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters, Rogue Trooper, and ABC Warriors. In his time working on the magazine, Alan Moore wrote for these properties only occasionally…

“Jeez, y’know, that felt good. There don’t seem to be so many laughs around these days.”
“Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen #1

Moore’s Rogue Trooper work is altogether more somber affair. The first, “Pray for War,” tells of Gunnar having to kill another soldier who calls himself “Pray for War” because, as he says,“war is the best thing that ever happened to me” and “combat is what makes me happy,” ending with Rogue reassuring Gunnar that “you only killed part of him – the ugly part. The war killed any humanity left in him long ago.” The second, “First of the Few,” involves Rogue finding one of the abandoned prototypes of the Genetic Infrantrymen, who he allows the mercy of death, actively declining to lead his consciousness into his gun or helmet. Both are straightforward anti-war stories; “First of the Few” describes the hellish world of Nu Earth, “the ultimate monument to war. The land is scorched bare and the air is a poisonous soup,” Moore writes with obvious relish, crafting a dour and pleasureless war story that subverts the genre. 

Figure 210: Hammerstein’s somber reflections over the grave
of a Martian animal (2000 AD Annual ’85, 1984)
Moore is even more somber in his ABC Warriors story, “Red Planet Blues,” which has Hammerstein investigating a problem on Mars. The problem turns out to be that the planet still has life on it, and the solution of the humans that hire Hammerstein is to simply burn the weeds in which the lifeforms live. Hammerstein reflects at the end that “we burned the whole undergrowth and we only found one dead Martian animal. I figure even that was a fluke.” Nevertheless, Hammerstein opts to bury the animal, admitting that he’s “getting old” and “getting soft.” The story ends as a haunting dirge about the nature of colonial genocide, as Hammerstein warns the dead alien that “the humans are coming, and soon all your tribe will lie as still as you. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s their planet now.” 
Figure 211: A classic twist ending page from
the first installment of Tharg’s Future Shocks
(From “King of the World,” in 2000 AD #25,
written by Steve Moore, art by Blasquez, 1977)
But while Moore dabbled with these characters, the bulk of his 2000 AD work was either on the three strips he created – Skizz, D.R.
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The Wank Delusion

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Sexist image alert.

Dom Kelly brought this to my attention, with his pithier comment: “*vomits*”

Okay, let’s examine this in what some might say was far too much detail.

Reason is sexy because one conventionally ‘attractive’ woman reads books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al, and throws away a Bible.  In the nude.

Right…

1.  It is assumed that this picture – i.e. the person in it – represents ‘sexiness’.  But the whole concept of what is sexy is subjective – far more so than is admitted by consumerist media culture, to which this image owes its entire idea of sexiness.  The image is catering for only one idea of what is sexually alluring: the idea of the straight, cis-het male.  He’s probably assumed to be white as well.  The image, including the person in it, is arranged for the gaze of this intensely privileged group.  This is ‘reason’?

2.  Because one sexy person is an atheist, that doesn’t make Atheism itself sexy.  Systems of thought, ideological doctrines, persuasions of belief, scientific theories and hypotheses… in short: ideas… are not open to judgement based on the perceived sexiness of the people that hold and/or espouse them.  Ideas are to be judged on their quality, consistency, persuasiveness, empirical backing etc.  Otherwise, there’s not much point separating them from purely aesthetic categories.

3.  Beliefs can be held by people of widely divergent levels of attractiveness.  China Mieville is a Marxist.  So was Diego Rivera.  Do a Google Image search if you don’t know what that means.*

4.  People’s level of attractiveness changes.  Engels was pretty dashing when he was a young man.  He became a crusty, wrinkly old fart with a straggly beard.  Was Marxism sexy when he was young and hot, but stop being sexy when he got a paunch and a big beard (assuming that you don’t think paunches and big beards are sexy – which would mean you’re not Ke$ha).

5.  What does it mean to call an idea ‘sexy’ anyway?  Even the idea ‘let’s have sex now! is only sexy when proposed at the appropriate time and place, by someone you’d like to have sex with. 

6.  It’s difficult to see how Atheism could be said to be sexy.  It might possibly be propounded and espoused by sexy people, but that still doesn’t make the ideas themselves sexy. I personally find Helen Mirren in Excalibur so sexy it almost hurts to look at the screen, but if she suddenly started reading the works of Robert Ingersoll, that wouldn’t make the works of Robert Ingersoll sexy.  At best, if the process were repeated often enough, I might develop a Pavlovian fetish for the works of Robert Ingersoll… but we have now long passed the breaking point of this analogy.

7.  God is Not Great and the other books of the ‘New Atheists’ were not, generally, written by conventionally sexy people.  Hitchens was a bloated, nicotine-stained, red-faced, bug-eyed blowhard with questionable personal hygiene.  Dawkins resembles a vicar from an Agatha Christie book, crossed with ageing bird of prey and a Gerald Scarfe caricature of Bernard Ingham. …

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Outside The Government 16: The Matt Smith Announcement

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On January 3rd, 2009, Matt Smith was unveiled as David Tennant’s successor in a television special on BBC One. 
Hindsight, if it ever bothers to look at these relatively ephemeral documents in the first place, will surely view this as the rough draft of the Peter Capaldi announcement. In every regard, that is a refinement of this – pacier, more variety, and more of a sense of what it wanted to be. This, on the other hand, is presented as a special episode of Doctor Who Confidential, and gives the overwhelming sense of being cobbled together so that there was something more impressive than a press release. 
The bulk of the thirty-five minutes are given over to yet another history of the Doctors, with all the differences in emphasis you’d expect. Colin Baker gets about three sentences, clearly still retaining his status as the Doctor it’s OK to dump on. Indeed, everything here is very much the official history as of the Davies/Moffat era, which is basically the official history that existed before with a few nips and tucks. Tom Baker is given a decently technical analysis by Davies, Moffat, and Tennant, who combine to offer up a reading of why he was good. Pertwee gets re-evaluated a bit by Moffat, and Davies clears up the details of the Hartnell era a bit. There are the trademark musical montages that define Doctor Who Confidential in all its wonder and frustration. 
Indeed, if anything the nature of this announcement as an episode of Doctor Who Confidential speaks volumes about the way in which the show thinks of itself at this point. The announcement of a new Doctor is big news that goes out on BBC One, but under the banner of the BBC Three “auxiliary material for the hardcore” show speaks volumes about exactly what Doctor Who still was – the property that had unexpectedly come back and become a hit. The underlying anxiety that fueled every second of Rose, and indeed of the first season (even if only in production) is still there. Nobody’s quite willing to just come out and bombastically declare “here is your major cultural news of the day” and then drop the mic. Instead we get a potted documentary about the nature of the role that means that more time is spent justifying why we should care about the new Doctor than anything else.
It’s possible to read this as another part of the Davies era’s arrogance – as Davies thinking it’s a big deal that the show would move on after him. But it is. Up to 2009, the show really was a freakish revival spearheaded by one creative genius who did the impossible. The fact of it continuing with a complete changeover of creative personnel was, in point of fact, a huge risk despite the fact that historically the show had done it loads of times. Nobody knew if this would work. We do know now, and we know in a way that makes 2009 look strange.
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“…strictly neutral in this matter as you well know…”: The Pirates of Orion

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“…I thought we weren’t playing cowboys anymore.”

“The Pirates of Orion” is one of the best character pieces in the Animated Series and builds nicely on established Star Trek lore without feeling either slavish or repetitive, but most of all it fits neatly into the pattern we’ve been crafting for the franchise over the past few posts.

The Enterprise is en route to a dedication ceremony on Deneb V while recovering from an outbreak of choriocytosis, a particularly virulent respiratory disease that prevents red blood cells from transporting oxygen. Just when the crew thinks the plague is under control, Spock suddenly collapses on the bridge. After rushing him to sickbay, McCoy informs Kirk that Vulcan physiology is similar enough to that of humans to make him susceptible, but different enough that it becomes far more serious, and that Spock will die in three days unless the crew can get their hands on some strobolin, the only known antidote. Realising the nearest source of the vaccine is four days away from the Enterprise‘s position, Kirk calls the starship Potemkin and freighter Huron for help in forming a brigade line. However, on its way to the Enterprise, the Huron is attacked by the titular Orion pirates, acting outside the declared neutrality of their government, who hijack the ship and steal its cargo. It now falls to Kirk to track down the Orions and reclaim the cargo without provoking a diplomatic incident.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Orion Syndicate since “Journey to Babel”, but it’s the first time we’ve seen it focused on to this extent. Even so, however, “The Pirates of Orion” keeps its space opera overtones and world building somewhat in check: The Orions act in a manner totally consistent with their previous appearance, down to the mention of how any Orion ship is duty-bound to self-destruct and its crew commit suicide should their mission fail in such a way that it puts their government’s neutrality at risk. Just like in “Journey to Babel” though, and decidedly unlike some of their later appearances, infodumps about Orion society are not actually the focal point of the entire episode. Though the space adventure stuff isn’t quite less important than the character drama here as they’re at least about equal, there’s still an appreciable balance between the two. Furthermore, this episode firmly establishes the Orion Syndicate as one of the proper, top tier antagonists for the Federation and the Enterprise crew, so when they reappear a few years later in Star Fleet Battles and when the video game based on that universe gets named after them, it’s all but expected.

Which is all good, because “The Pirates of Orion” itself is neither the most original, creative or inspiring space pirate story ever told. I was consistently hoping throughout this episode that Kirk would be forced into negotiations with the Orions to get the vaccine and that we’d eventually get to see Kirk break treaty and regulations to save Spock’s life.…

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How Puzzles Work

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So, Mystery Hunt is over. I typically post a wrap-up about it somewhere – I used to do it on LiveJournal, where there was once an active Mystery Hunt community, but that’s semi-dead, and I’ve not really found what you could call an obvious replacement. So I’ll do it here, for a somewhat odder audience.

And anyway, I don’t have a huge amount to complain about – this was a well-run Hunt that I have very few issues with. So instead I figure I’ll point at a couple of puzzles I did a large amount of work on and enjoyed and try to give a sense for the general audience of what’s fun or interesting about these sorts of puzzles. Links are to puzzles. If you for some reason want to solve, you should probably do so without reading my comments, but my comments do not explain the solutions (which are linked in the upper-right hand corner)

Some basic overview – there are basically three things you do in a puzzle: the a-ha, the legwork, and the extraction. The a-ha is the moment when you figure out what the hell is going on in the puzzle. The legwork is when you solve all the clues, fill in all the boxes, identify all the pictures, and otherwise use your understanding to fill stuff in. And the extraction is when you figure out how what you’ve filled in turns into a short phrase or word.

To use the last puzzle I solved this year – one I solved only because one of my readers who also Hunts made a comment about a Simpsons/Doctor Who puzzle, which let me know that the half of the puzzle that was making no sense was Simpsons references – here’s how the basic steps work.

Here’s the puzzle.

The two a-has are realizing that every clue both references a Doctor and a Simpsons couch gag. This is lovely, if you solve a lot of puzzles. The couch gags can be tied to episodes, and the Doctors provide a set of numbers. What we’re probably going to do is what’s called indexing into the answer. So for that first clue, “My dad made us all dress up to look like the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album. He even got the rest of the town to be there, though that one old man with a wooden cane looked a bit out of place,” we have the couch gag from the episode “Bart after Dark,” and the First Doctor. So we take the first letter of BART AFTER DARK and get B out of that clue. And we similarly get letters for every other clue – so the one that mashes up the 8th Doctor with “The Great Money Caper” takes the T, because T is the 8th letter.

All that’s just legwork – identifying Doctor references and looking up couch gags.

Often a puzzle like this also requires sorting the answers somehow. (The usual name of this type of puzzle is an ISIS puzzle – Identify, Sort, Index, Solve.…

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So You’re My Replacements (The Next Doctor)

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What do you mean they’ve cast him? He’s, like, five years
old!
It’s Christmas, 2008. X Factor winner Alexandra Burke is at number one with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” narrowly beating Jeff Buckley’s version, which charted in an attempt to thwart The X Factor from taking the Christmas number one. The remainder of the charts are basically unchanged since earlier in the month, save for Geraldine’s “Once Upon a Christmas Song” and a different choice of Beyonce singles. In news, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat, 1400 people lose their jobs in Ireland due to a crisis caused by pork contaminated with dioxin, and Woolworths announces that it will be closing all of its stores. 
On television, meanwhile, it’s the fourth new series Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Next Doctor. It is difficult to list anything that’s especially awful about The Next Doctor. David Morrissey is a fine actor, and while he is shamelessly hamming here, it is a skilled execution of the style that is inappropriate neither for the part nor the occasion. Indeed, it is almost preferable to call his performance charcuterie – a distinction without any difference in meaning, but with considerable difference in implication. The plot moves along with reasonable efficiency. There are funny bits, there are moments of quality drama, and the whole thing is good fun. 
Why, then, does it feel so hollow? Even this is, perhaps, unfair. It’s hard to argue seriously that this is the nadir of the Davies era. Most people hate Planet of the Dead more, it seems. But for my money, and we’re getting ahead of ourselves slightly here, Planet of the Dead never purported to be anything other than a frothy romp written by Gareth Roberts. The Next Doctor, on the other hand, presented itself as altogether more significant.
The key step in this came on October 29th, two days after Secrets of the Stars wrapped, as David Tennant announced his departure from Doctor Who. This did not exactly surprise anybody – ever since the announcement that 2009 would consist of a run of specials instead of a full season of Doctor Who, the consensus speculation was that Tennant was leaving. Davies already played with this once with the regeneration cliffhanger of The Stolen Earth, and with the knowledge that Moffat was taking over the default assumption was that Tennant was leaving. But that was only true among the tiny portion of the audience who actually followed Doctor Who news closely. For the wider public, it was not until the 29th that the speculation over who the next Doctor would be properly ramped up.
Davies, of course, anticipated this fully, and designed The Next Doctor to played ludicrously with that speculation. And he succeeded wildly, with David Morrissey being the bookmaker’s favorite for the part. Almost anyone paying close attention assumed the truth – that Morrissey was being employed in a story distantly derived from Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman’s Colin Baker audio The One Doctor – but the general mood was nevertheless one highlighting this episode as significant and major.
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Myriad Universes: Alan Dean Foster and Ballantine Star Trek

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What’s the most immediately interesting about Alan Dean Foster’s Star Trek Logs novelizations of the Animated Series for Ballantine Books from my perspective is how neatly they fit into Star Trek’s own evolving and shifting position in culture during this period.

When we talked about James Blish, I mentioned that the choice of having him novelize the Original Series was indicative of Star Trek’s at-the-time tentative connection to Golden Age science fiction. While his novelizations seemed marketed to the Hard SF crowd (and certainly looked the part), there was always a lingering uncertainty that this was what Star Trek really was and that these were the sort of people it should be exclusively marketed towards. This was embodied in Blish himself though his paradoxical and counterintuitive connection with the sci-fi writers’ group the Futurians, who bizarrely seemed to think they could bring about a Trotskyist revolution by going through Pfizer and Boeing. Blish and the Futurians, like Star Trek itself, were compelled equally by both extremely right-wing and extremely left-wing forces.

Alan Dean Foster however, is a different breed of writer altogether. In fact, it could be argued he stands right at the precipice of the point where New Age science fiction, Forteana and fantasy meld into the blockbuster giant of a genre we’re familiar with today. Foster’s major sci-fi work, and probably what got him the gig in the first place, is the Humanx Collective, a constructed, self-contained universe of stories about a progressive representative democracy encompassing multiple planetary civilizations of which humanity is a member, so I wonder where we’ve heard that before. The primary difference between the Humanx Collective and the Federation, however, is that the former body is in many ways defined by its two founding members, humanity and the Thranx, an insectoid people, and this relationship is a symbiotic one. As a result, there’s a lot more cultural diffusion in Foster’s stories than in Star Trek, and this allows for a depiction of how cultures morph and grow over time as they interact with each other.

Foster’s also something of a message writer, and a lot of his stories have a very strong environmentalist bent to them. Unlike someone like Gene Roddenberry though (or André Franquin for that matter), Foster doesn’t tend to have his protagonists come sailing in to tell all the Bad Polluters what they’re doing wrong, but instead demonstrates how a lack of respect for nature will ultimately lead to the undoing of any people who foolishly make the mistake of selfishly exploiting their environment. Apart from just being a message I can’t find any fault with, this also puts Foster very firmly into the tradition and concerns of the environmental age, which is quite fitting for 1974 and 1975. What’s also great about Foster’s staunch environmentalism is how it demonstrates so effortlessly that science fiction, and in particular science fiction about space travel, can remain relevant without relying on being propaganda for massive state-sponsored displays of Cold War imperialism. It’s a closing argument for our “Space Oddity” concern that our stories of space travel are doomed to become relics of the 1950s.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 18th, 2014)

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I’m out of town for the weekend for my annual bit of intellectual masochism at MIT Mystery Hunt, and so am writing this several days in advance. For those who are unaware of this bizarre practice, it’s something in the range of 48-72 hours of tricky puzzles solved in pursuit of finding “the coin” and winning the spectacularly awful booby prize of your team having to write the next year’s Hunt. 

The puzzles generally do not bother with things like “instructions” or “any meaningful sign of what you’re supposed to do,” and instead you have to simply figure it out by discerning a pattern of some sort in whatever the puzzle is.
Here’s an example from two years ago that ought be in the wheelhouse of some of you. The answer to a given puzzle is always a word or phrase. I’d offer a prize to anyone getting it right, but given that the solution is linked in the upper right-hand corner, I can only offer my congratulations for your extreme skill at tasks with functionally no utility whatsoever.
Back Monday with some actual Doctor Who writing. Scandalous.
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