Eruditorum Press

That is not dead which can eternally hit the snooze button

Outside the Government: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith

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It’s November 17th, 2008. The X-Factor finalists remain at number one, but are unseated by Beyonce for the second week of this story. Killers, Girls Aloud, Britney Spears, and Leona Lewis also chart. In news, the financial crisis rumbles on with another bailout of AIG, an IMF bailout of Iceland, and a request for a bailout for the US auto industry. President-elect Obama announces a Treasury team including Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, and Gordon Brown reveals plans to increase the income tax. 
While on television, it’s The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. Not surprisingly for a Gareth Roberts script, there’s a lot to like here. For one thing, he manages to make the frequently frustrating “morality of changing history” plot work. This is a tricky thing to do well – as we’ve previously observed, the “changing history is wrong” plot runs into significant trouble due to the fact that all morality surrounding it is necessarily invented wholesale for the plot, as the actual nature of changing history is unknown to us. The result is that it usually turns into either a story about the experienced time traveller and the newbie one and how the newbie one needs to stop rocking the boat and accept the rules (yuck) or one about arrogance and hubris.
The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith fits firmly into the latter category. Indeed, so firm is its fit that it proceeds through the arrogance plot with a calm meticulousness. The story really is one about temptation, with Sarah Jane not so much making a foolish decision to change the past but rather making a series of small decisions, each time edging a little bit closer to the big one, but never without a rationalization and a sensible justification. It’s a quite nuanced portrayal of how a good person can make a supremely, stunningly bad decision – another case of The Sarah Jane Adventures being made with a sort of meticulous care and precision.
It also manages to avoid any sort of ontological ethics of time travel. Sarah Jane saving her parents is a bad idea because the Trickster has set up a trap that destroys the world if she does that. Absent the Trickster, she probably could have gotten away with it and had it be fine. The problem isn’t that Sarah Jane does something that “violates the Laws of Time” or some similar nonsense. It’s that she does something risky when she knows it’s probably a trap, and it blows up in her face. That keeps the time travel ethics in the realm of the concrete.
Yes, there are complaints. The time travel actually doesn’t quite make sense – the initial setup of infant Sarah Jane being abandoned by her parents is a result of Sarah Jane’s actions in the story, which ties it up in a neat loop of the sort that time travel stories often go for. But if the ending situation is what always happened, where does the alternate timeline in which the Trickster reigns supreme come from?
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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie’s Tale

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Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It’s Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie’s Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie’s Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it’s had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie’s Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie’s Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie’s Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie’s Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don’t like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What’s the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It’s an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person.…

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An Unearthly Book Launch

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Slightly later than initially predicted, the revised and expanded version of the first TARDIS Eruditorum book, covering the William Hartnell era, is available for purchase.

If you bought a copy of the book via the Kickstarter, the wheels are already turning. If you have an unsigned copy, I will be shipping it directly from the print on demand company to you. If you have a signed copy, it’ll be a bit slower, as I have to ship to me and then to you. Details are in a Kickstarter update I sent out last night.

If you have not already bought a copy, you can do so here.

US Kindle, US Print
UK Kindle, UK Print
Smashwords (For ereaders other than Kindle)

All editions and formats give me the same royalty, so feel free to pick whatever format is most convenient or likeable for you. It should be showing up in the Barnes and Noble and Apple stores shortly.

If you already have the first edition, here’s the case for why you might want the second. For one thing, it actually has essays on every single Hartnell story now, instead of missing The Massacre. Plus, it’s no longer riddled with typos, and the already quite good cover art has been replaced by another faux-period masterpiece by James Taylor, who describes his process here, meaning this volume matches the other ones. Or, actually, it doesn’t match them at all, but fails to match them in complex and aesthetically pleasing ways.

Plus there’s new content. Lots of new content. The essay on Galaxy Four has, as you might expect, been totally rewritten to address the fact that some of it exists now. Plus there are eleven brand-new essays exclusive to this volume, in fact. You’ll get:

  • Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: It Happened Here – Serving as an introduction to the early 1960s in Britain and the lingering post-War British culture, this one looks at the landmark cult film It Happened Here.
  • Time Can Be Rewritten: The Masters of Luxor – A look at the Anthony Coburn script that was scrapped in favor of a potboiler by Terry Nation featuring some shrieky robot mutant things called Daleks.
  • Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Dan Dare – An overview of the pulp sci-fi comics that inspired Terry Nation and defined a large portion of British science fiction prior to Doctor Who.
  • You Were Expecting Someone Else: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks – the first-ever Doctor Who novelization, by David Whitaker. 
  • You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Polystyle Strips – learn about Dr. Who’s other grandchildren
Plus an all-new section called Coda: Before the Beginning, looking at stories set before An Unearthly Child. This section contains two essays from the first edition alongside looks at Marc Platt’s Auld Mortality, Nigel Robinson’s Hunters of Earth, Rob Shearman’s Deadline, the unaired pilot episode of Doctor Who, and Mark Gatiss’s An Adventure in Space and Time.
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Outside the Government: Mark of the Berserker

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It’s November 3rd, 2008. The X Factor finalists are at number one with “Hero,” which lasts the entirety of this story. Beyonce, Kanye West, Girls Aloud, Britney Spears, and Pink also chart. In news, the US Treasury Department starts spending money bailing out banks, Viswanathan Anand retains the World Chess Championship, and Lewsi Hamilton wins the Forumula One Championship. Barack Obama is elected President, while Lindsay Roy is elected MP for Glenrothes. And €750 million of cocaine is seized off the coast of Ireland, or, for comparison, fourteen times the annual net income of HMV.
On television, as opposed to drugs, it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures again. Although The Sarah Jane Adventures has been consistently between watchable and rather good, it has not previously punched dramatically above its own weight. It has been a perfectly serviceable children’s show, generally protected by the absurd ethos that things made for kids don’t have to be as good as things made for adults. But it has never served up an episode of such quality that it can be called a classic of some sort. It is not a show that has a Midnight, a Human Nature/Family of Blood, a The Girl in the Fireplace, a Dalek, or even, for that matter, a Small Worlds or an Out of Time. It has been a show of remarkable consistency, both for good and for ill. With The Mark of the Berserker, however, that changes. The Mark of the Berserker is a phenomenal hour of television – a story that, on its own merits, ranks among the best of the Russell T Davies era. 
We have noted before that fear makes for powerful children’s television. It’s just as true for children as for adults that stories and art are where we grapple with demons we cannot face in reality. But even the best children’s television that we’ve had cause to look at makes the larger world scary. It has traded on statues and children’s games, or on monsters and shadows. But here we get something more material – a story based around the horror of an absent or abusive parent. 
That is, after all, what The Mark of the Berserker is about. It’s about introducing Clyde’s family, namely his single mother, and then introducing his absent father as a figure of fear and horror. And it really doesn’t shy away from that. Indeed, it repeatedly goes further than one might expect. Clyde’s father becomes genuinely scary as he realizes that he has the power to force people to do whatever he wants, and the increasing starkness of his abuse is unnerving in a way a Weeping Angel can never possibly be. It’s not just the ordering Clyde to forget Luke and Rani, nor even to forget how his father left him, but the moment when Paul orders Clyde to forget his mother entirely. Equally horrifying are the little side bits – Paul making Rani’s father do pushups forever is disturbing despite, on the surface, fitting perfectly into a harmless children’s program.
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“Though all men be equally frail before the world…”: The Jihad

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http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x16/thejihad_146.JPG
Oh, had I a golden thread/And needle so fine/I’d weave a magic strand/Of rainbow design

This episode was written by Stephen Kandel, better known for the Harry Mudd trilogy and, would you believe it, it turns out he did have a good Star Trek story to tell after all. More than good, in fact: “The Jihad” is properly excellent and closes out the Animated Series’ first season on one of the show’s high notes.

Kandell had been a regular writer on Mission: Impossible during the original era of Star Trek, and that’s sort of what this episode feels like a little bit: A Mission: Impossible story. Kirk and Spock are called to a summit held by the Vedala, the oldest known spacefaring civilization. The Vedala have assembled a crack team of specialists from around the galaxy to partake in a top-secret mission to prevent an interstellar war. Aside from Kirk and Spock, there’s Lara, a ranger and tracker from a planet where humans remained hunter-gatherers, Sord, a reptilian warrior, Em/3/Green, a nervous lockpicking expert who resembles a kind of insect (and voiced by Dave Gerrold no less: Gerrold has something of a habit for getting people to write him into Star Trek episodes) and Tcharr, hereditary prince of the birdlike Skorr, who is the primary reason for the team-up.

The Vedala have gathered the team together to track down The Soul of the Skorr, an ancient artefact that literally holds the soul of the Skorr’s great prophet Alar, who was made immortal upon death by being bound into an energy web and whose life force keeps peace among his disciples and their descendents. The Soul has gone missing, and Tcharr fears that should word of its theft become public, the Skorr will return to their warlike roots and declare a holy war on the galaxy. Thankfully, the Vedala have traced it to the “Mad Planet”, a lifeless rock constantly tearing itself to pieces due to constant earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, blizzards, tsunamis and gravity shifts. On the way, the task force will have to contend with the harsh unforgiving and ever-changing landscape of the Mad Planet while learning to trust and respect each other in order to work together as a team.

There is so much going on right from the outset here it’s difficult to keep track of. “The Jihad” is simply overstuffed with fascinating ideas and concepts it’s hard for me to even figure out where to begin, and I couldn’t be happier: This is a picture perfect example of taking the potential of science fiction television, and in particular animated science fiction television, resolutely rising to the challenge and just running with it. I’ve never seen a Star Trek episode quite like this one before and I’m actually not sure I’m going to see another like it again. I suppose a good place to start would be the team itself: This is a truly creative and inspired bit of creature design. For the first time in awhile, it feels like the Animated Series team is really taking full advantage of their medium and showing us visuals they really couldn’t have pulled off through live action.…

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Saturday Waffling

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Well, I imagine come Sunday this will become the “let’s discuss the Sherlock finale” thread. But since we need something until then, and about a dozen people have brought it up to me already, I suppose we may as well chat about the big Alan Moore interview that dropped on Thursday, complete with screeching broadsides against Grant Morrison and several other people.

Here it is, if you’ve not read it. If you have… thoughts?

I’d offer a comment, but it’s already reached 80,000 words in length and I’ve only gotten up to talking about Alan Moore’s short stories for 2000 AD, so I think I’ll go to bed and finish it off in 2017 or so.…

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Outside the Government: Secrets of the Stars

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It’s October 20th, 2008. Pink is at number one with “So What,” a situation that lasts a week before Girls Aloud take over with “The Promise.” with Snow Patrol, Leon Jackson, Geraldine, Katy Perry, Kanye West, and the Saturdays also charting. In news, Colin Powell offers Barack Obama his endorsement for the Presidency, the New York City Council decides to allow Michael Bloomberg a third term, and Ted Stevens is found guilty of seven counts of fraud, a conviction that basically costs him his Senate seat before being overturned. That being the most American-centric news roundup I think this blog has ever done, we should also note that the episode of The Russell Brand Show in which Brand and Jonathan Ross place obscene prank phone calls to Andrew Sachs aired two days before this story. 
This story being Secrets of the Stars. Let’s start with the obvious point, which is that even by the standards of Doctor Who’s long history of ignoring anything that might inadvertently be mistaken as scientific reason or plausibility, this episode does not make a bit of sense. It hinges on the idea that astrology is real, not because of our universe (where it can’t be, as we’re reassured repeatedly), but because it’s the science of that popular repository of magical stuff that needs a quasi-scientific explanation, the universe before ours. Where it is apparently thus the science of Abaddon. And the Beast. And probably some other stuff. 
It is worth pausing a moment in order to attempt to wrap our heads around that, if only so that we may savor the strange feeling of our heads failing to gain any traction whatsoever and slowly sliding off to form gibbering, uncomprehending piles of head at the base of this plot point. Astrology’s central tenet is that the positions of astronomical bodies has causal effects on phenomena in the real world. This is already a dodgy proposition, given that astrology is based not so much on the positions of astronomical bodies in any absolute space but on their positions in relation to the observation point of Earth. The central concept of astrology, used prominently in Secrets of the Stars, is the zodiac – a chain of constellations that conveniently line up so that the sun moves through them over the course of a year. But when we say “the sun moves through them” what we mean is that from the vantage point of the Earth as it travels around the sun, the sun appears in the sky in positions corresponding to those constellations.
It is also worth remembering something we’ve discussed previously, which is that a constellation is not an astronomical phenomenon but a perceptual one. Constellations are not formations of stars in real space, but coincidences in which stars from wildly different places line up into a geometrical configuration that was aesthetically pleasing to some ancient astronomers. The constellation of Taurus, for instance, is comprised of stars ranging from thirty light years away to hundreds of light years way, with no influence on each other or interactions other than happening to appear in about the same place if you look from Earth.
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“Just think what some zoo will pay for you!”: The Eye of the Beholder

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http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x15/theeyeofthebeholder_056.JPG
Which of you is the one named “Mr. Snuffleupagus”?

“The Eye of the Beholder” concerns the Enterprise attempting to locate the crew of a research ship that went missing in the vicinity of Lactra VII. Beaming down to investigate, Kirk, Spock and McCoy discover three wildly different ecosystems positioned unnaturally adjacent to each other. Spock supposes that this planet might in fact be some kind of enormous zoo created by beings significantly more advanced then the Federation races, a supposition proven correct when giant telepathic slugs with trunks come, abduct the landing party and take them to a specially-crafted humanoid exhibit guarded by an unbreakable force field.

Somehow it feels like we’ve been here before.

This episode was written by David P. Harmon, who also wrote “The Deadly Years” and co-wrote “A Piece of the Action” with Gene Coon. However it’s pretty clear now that the latter story must have been primarily Coon because this episode is much more akin to the former. In other words, it’s another perfectly forgettable filler episode. And let’s be honest: “The Eye of the Beholder” is totally “The Cage” all over again. It doesn’t even try to distinguish itself from possibly the most famous episode of Star Trek ever, apart from having the zookeepers be the aforementioned giant telepathic slugs with trunks instead of Talosians.

Since Harmon apparently has no qualms about stooping so low as to recycle the plot wholesale from the very first episode of Star Trek I don’t feel bad about reusing a lot of my commentary from “The Deadly Years”. The concept of filler episodes (in the original “this-feels-like-an-off-week” sense and not the contemporary “I-have-to-wait-another-week-to-learn-more-about-my-Big-Damn-Character-Arc” sense) is a phenomenon somewhat unique to television, and United States television in particular, born as it is out of the necessity of making sure something makes it to air every week during the season. Flatly, sometimes you just need to crank something out to fill your episode quota. TV has always been one of the more visibly workmanlike of the creative mediums as a result, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it gives us as viewers and critics special access to the creative process that goes into making it that the allure of the Cinematic Artifice and Singular Vision usually makes it hard for us to notice in, say, movies.

However.

As wonderful as that may all be and as criminally overvalued as I do in fact find plot and character development to be, I still tend to find that US TV engages in filler episodes alarmingly more frequently than it perhaps needs to. This is because in the US, the annual television season traditionally runs nonstop from September to May except for a hiatus in November and December and demands a quota of about 25-30 episodes as a result. There’s only so many stories anyone can come up with for one setting in one sitting, and this means time, money and other resources get spread out over a huge swath of productions instead of being discreetly allocated to a small handful of them.…

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A Loud Smack Where The Spine Parted Company With The Skull (The Last War in Albion Part 26: Action and 2000 AD)

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This is the first 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: Shortly after getting his first work in Doctor Who Weekly, Alan Moore sold the first of several short stories he would write for IPC’s 2000 AD, an iconic sci-fi magazine created by Pat Mills and John Wagner, who got their start at IPC creating Battle Picture Weekly in 1975. 

“The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.” – Warren Ellis, Dead Pig Collector

Figure 190: The first issue of Pat Mills’s
controversial classic Action.
Battle Picture Weekly was an unambiguous success, much to the chagrin of Le Grand and the old guard (although this may have had as much to do with Pat Mills’s impressive pay package, which exceeded that of John Sanders, who hired him as it did with any actual creative differences). Appropriately, Mills and Wagner quickly found more work within IPC. Wagner was tapped to lead an only semi-successful revamp of Valiant, an old adventure magazine that was, despite Wagner’s efforts, merged into Battle in 1976. Mills, on the other hand, was tasked with creating another book that would go even further in the direction pioneered by Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly, to be called Action, and debuting in February of 1976.

British comics were by and large a working class medium, as Alan Moore has observed, but Action was unusual in targeting the working class population directly and fully indulging the working class, anti-authority attitudes of The Bootneck Boy. Its famed centerpiece was Hook Jaw, which was ostensibly a Jaws knockoff. Featuring a giant shark named, fittingly enough, Hook Jaw, the strip inverted the Jaws formula – where Spielberg reveled in keeping the shark off-screen for as long as possible and building up suspense, Hook Jaw puts the giant shark in the first panel, and proceeds to revel gratuitously in its violence. But for all the strip’s glorious violence, Mills was insistent that it be an “ecological” story in which Hook Jaw is the protagonist, who would take bloody vengeance against evil and corrupt humans on behalf of the untamed nature he represents. This was central to Action’s appeal and logic – it was not merely a comic about reveling against gratuitous violence, but one about reveling in gratuitous violence against authority figures. 
Figure 191: Hook Jaw was deliberately given the center
position in Action so that it could get color pages and use
ostentatious quantities of red ink.
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Outside the Government: The Day of the Clown

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It’s October 6th, 2008. Pink is at number one with “So What,” a state of affairs that continues through both weeks of this story. Kings of Leon, Rihanna, Kaiser Chiefs, Ne-Yo, Katy Perry, and the Pussycat Dolls also chart. In news, following the failure to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (more popularly known as TARP) the day that The Last Sontaran aired, the US House and Senate try again and get it passed this time. Steve Fossett’s body is found, and OJ Simpson is convicted of armed robbery. And on the day the last episode of this airs, Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics, for a variety of reasons, most of which, let’s be honest, come down to his repeated criticism of George W. Bush.
“This,” in the preceding sentence, refers to The Day of the Clown. It is, in many ways, a slender thing. Much of it is based on the simple though largely true fact that clowns are creepy. In many ways this marks a slight bridge too far for some of the underlying tricks of the series. The “Sarah Jane faces something that scares even her” trick is a good one, and, admirably, one the show has not overused thus far – Sarah Jane’s past has only really come into play once before, with Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane. Nevertheless, the idea that Odd Bob is particularly terrifying to her because of a clown doll that seemed to move one stormy night and that she can’t quite get over this is not, perhaps, the most effective job that Doctor Who et al have ever done in making a threat scary. (On the other hand, it makes the Fourth Doctor’s proposed Pierrot the Clown costume a relieving near-miss for her.)
And yet in many ways this might be for the best, because the real underlying threat in this story is one of the most thoroughly unnerving that Doctor Who (broadly construed) has ever tackled. The villain may be a clown framed wholly in terms of fairy tales like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, but the underlying explanation – that he’s a creature who feeds of fear and thus abducts children because there’s no fear greater than the mother of a stolen child – is absolutely chilling. I mean, the whole specifying the mother thing is horrible – does anyone really believe, to go back one story, that Chrissie would be more afraid than Alan if an evil clown had ever kidnapped Maria? But the basic idea of doing child abduction on a children’s show is terribly bold.
In that regard the clown, as a sort of generically creepy object, is a useful buffer. It puts the supposed horror at a slight remove, hiding it in an ostensibly greater fear. There’s an odd accuracy to this – the threat of child abduction is, in practice, largely a threat of concern to adults. To a child any child abductor might as well be an evil clown.
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