Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

“Just think what some zoo will pay for you!”: The Eye of the Beholder

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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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“We must not let it happen again.” The Slaver Weapon

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Take note: This is what a sci-fi planet should look like.

Like so many other stories like it, “The Slaver Weapon” is a not-actually-terribly-good episode that still manages to set in motion events that will change everything we thought we knew about the world of Star Trek and call into question the franchise’s closest-held tenets and ideals.

It has an interesting pedigree though. We’ve heard a few hints and clues about the Kzinti and some hostilities with them before, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen them: An aggressive race of catlike people who have persistently attacked settlements, who make war to eat those they defeat in battle and who are so misogynistic they’ve literally bred intelligence out of their women. They are a frighteningly unlikable adversary for this series, and if they don’t sound like typical Star Trek villains that’s probably because they’re not, in point of fact, from Star Trek at all. The Kzinti actually hail from the self-contained Known Universe, encompassing the collected work of noted science fiction author Larry Niven, and this episode is actually a straight translation of his short story “The Soft Weapon” for Star Trek. The reason it’s here is because D.C. Fontana was a huge fan of Niven’s and personally requested he contribute something for the Animated Series. The two approached Gene Roddenberry with the idea, and while it was thought many of Niven’s pitches were too violent for the show, Roddenberry eventually suggested adapting “The Soft Weapon”.

As a result there’s not a whole lot to say about the episode as aired, because it straightforwardly, literally *is* “The Soft Weapon”, only with the names changed. An interesting consequence of this is that the episode features exclusively Sulu, Uhura and Spock in starring roles, standing in for the original story’s protagonists (a human couple and a vegetarian alien scientists named Nessus), and thus none of the other regulars appear. This sadly doesn’t help the episode much though, because while it’s nice to see Sulu and Uhura get really meaty roles again, it’s painfully clear “The Soft Weapon” had a rather blatant Pulp structure, so we get to see many riveting scenes of our heroes getting captured by Kzinti pirates, escaping said Kzinti pirates and being recaptured about ten seconds later. And of course, the female character has to be abducted and held for ransom.

There are, however, two main aspects of this episode that remain quite provocative. The first is, of course, the Kzinti: Despite being canon expatriates, the fact remains having a concept as shocking as the Kzinti here does change the game rather decisively for Star Trek. Trying to weld established Star Trek mythos with Niven’s Known Universe has some really bizarre consequences that, thanks to a happy accident, wind up adding a lot more nuance to our franchise. The biggest bomb comes about when you try and reconcile the supposedly pacifistic and utopian Federation with the nasty history of the Earth-Kzin Wars: The implication of this episode then becomes that at some point prior to the foundation of the modern Federation, Earth and its allies were engaged in a series of horrific and consecutive wars where they absolutely decimated the Kzinti armies.…

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Coming Imminently

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I had, in fact, expected to be doing a book launch post today, but it’s slightly delayed due to idiosyncrasy. So instead, we’ll just shamelessly tease.

And while we’re teasing, I began what I’m, for now, calling Secret Project. Actually, no, I like Warren Ellis’s method lately of just assigning codenames to projects he can’t talk about yet. So we’ll call this project Butterscotch. Here’s a paragraph of Butterscotch with roughly 80% of the words removed. Butterscotch will be finished and unveiled in 2014.
Shortly commissioned science television. Amis attention days spearheaded Michael BBC, types interest try conclusion literary, really families special suggested subject variety report six months starts evening program Juke calls appealing adults existing timeslot. program staff department.

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Outside the Government: The Last Sontaran

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It’s September 29th, 2008. Kings of Leon are at number one with “Sex on Fire,” with Rihanna’s “Disturbia,” Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” and songs by Pussycat Dolls, Sugababes, and Faith Hill also charting. In the last three months the world has gone barking mad. Over the course of September what has come to be called the global financial crisis or the great recession broke out properly, with John McCain essentially torpedoing his already dubious Presidential campaign with a vacillating and erratic response. At this particular moment in time the world is an unusually scary place – a sense of unease hanging over everything in a way that has only occasionally gripped it in the past history of the program. 
It is, in other words, a complex and downright interesting time into which The Sarah Jane Adventures launches its second season, and its first story, The Last Sonataran, is fittingly busy. It’s reintroducing the cast, as a second season opener should do, while simultaneously showcasing a Big Name Monster (as any monster inherited from Doctor Who is) and dealing with writing out the central character of the first season (along with two supporting characters). This is accompanied by a familiar problem of stories with a lot to do, which is that any notion of thematic unity drops out. At the end of the day, there isn’t a clear reason why the Sontarans have anything to do with Maria moving to America. There’s no way you’re going to make a solid connection there. So instead you have a big, flashy episode with lots of discrete parts that at least don’t clash.
So instead of a thematic unity we get a unity based around anticipation. The role of the Sontarans, or, rather of the Sontaran, since this is a return to the idea that they have characters instead of being a race of interchangeable monsters, is in many ways to allow the story to work from shorthand. It’s a big Doctor Who monster that doesn’t need any additional introduction or explanation. Accordingly, the story has time to focus on the added weight of writing Maria Jackson out while still getting to have a big first episode with a suitably major villain to kick off the season. And that lets the story take an easy shape – a remote radio telescope, a monster, and lots of corridors to run through. There’s little to set up here, and the expectations come almost automatically.
And the biggest expectation, which comes in almost from the start, is that the Sontaran is going to have to to be whacked in the probic vent. The weakness was stressed so heavily in The Sontaran Stratagem, and, more to the point, it’s a very children’s television weakness in the first place. Though not originally designed in that milieu, to a modern audience it’s self-evidently a piece of video game logic. The probic vent is a classic example of the little weak spot you target on the heavily armored enemy to damage them.
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“Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.”: The Ambergris Element

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“…part of your wooooooooooooooorld…“

Some episodes I have a really hard time building a post around. It’s not that they’re especially terrible, it’s just there’s not a lot of content there for me to really grab hold of or find new and interesting things to say about them. Thankfully, Margaret Armen wrote this one so that won’t be the case here.

And I really wanted to like this one too. When I was planning this project I did a cursory scan of all the episodes I hadn’t seen or didn’t remember all that well, and this one looked fascinating. The Enterprise is conducting research on a planet that’s almost entirely ocean due to persistent underground tremors causing the continents to fall into the sea. The crew hope they information they gain will be helpful in providing aid to other planets with similar geological activity. One of the things I love most about science fiction is its ability to depict wondrous and fantastic spectacles of worlds that exist far out in the deepest realms of outer space. It goes back to things like Georges Méliès, the hauntingly evocative spacescapes dreamed up by the Golden Age science fiction artists and the fist glimpses we saw of the Lunar surface from the Apollo missions. Few things stir my imagination quite like a well-done bit of space art. Indeed one reason, if not *the* primary reason, I don’t despise Star Trek is how fantastic Star Trek: The Next Generation and early Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were at evoking this kind of imagery: The visual design alone is enough to get our minds racing to imagine what life in the sort of world those shows depicts must be like. And animation is a medium essentially custom-tailored for precisely this.

One of my greatest loves, obviously, given the way I’ve structured this project, is the ocean. When I was young one of the things I thought I might grow up to be was some kind of oceanographer or ocean explorer. I developed my love of the ocean and my love of outer space roughly at the same time, I suppose because both seemed like universes unto themselves and we knew next to nothing about either. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense given the Polynesian belief in the intertwined world, with the realms of the Earth, Sea and Sky all interconnected. Many variations of the Polynesian creation myth even claim that the world was created out of the sea, and often that the world exists within a giant clam shell in the middle of an even larger cosmic ocean.

At one point, I naively fancied myself some kind of professional astronomer and was involved in a project to detect extrasolar planets. It was my unspoken hope that at some point I’d be able to see a planet like the one described in this episode: One comprised almost entirely of ocean. I’ve also long had a fascination with Neptune in our own solar system: Although it’s named after a Western sea god, Neptune is in fact a gas giant and even though it’s thus more properly described as a planet made entirely out of sky, I still think it would be an incredible sight to visit a place like that.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 4th, 2014)

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Normal blog service will be restored Monday as TARDIS Eruditorum starts in on the second season of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

I have the cover art for the print version of the Hartnell Second Edition, and am engaging in final checks there. Sometime next week, probably? I should probably wait until I have a day I can spend dealing with the logistics of fulfilling all the Kickstarter pledges. Then it’s on to starting revisions on Volume Five: Tom Baker and the Williams Era, the Logopolis book, Volume Six: Peter Davison and Colin Baker, and a Secret Project, which should form my 2014 output.

While we wait for Monday, then, Sherlock. How did people like The Empty Hearse? And, for later in the weekend, how did people like The Sign of Three?…

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Outside the Government 15: Newtons Sleep

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Unnoun unwrites an unpost about Faction Paradox.

Newtons Sleep is the only Faction Paradox book published by Random Static. It’s available to download as a free e-book, but please donate to help them out!
It’s 1666 A.D. A spittle’s-worth of dark humour has responded to the drawing power of matter and impacted with a young man’s head; the struggle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living
It’s January 12th 2008 C.E. A small printing company has just released a book as part of a bizarre sci-fi series supposedly about a Time Traveling Voodoo cult. The bizarre sci-fi series is the true successor to the legacy of that cultural giant Doctor Who.
It’s 1807. 1802 actually, but close enough for our purposes. Major hit songs of the year include Ludwig van Beethoven’s Mass in C, the ballet Hélène and Paris, the operas Joseph and La Vestale, and Thomas Moore’s publication of Irish Melodies. Again, actually it’s 1802. So replace those with Beethoven’s Second Symphony, the opera Urania, and Franz Kommer’s Concerto for 2 Clarinets in E flat major, Op. 35. Sorry. I don’t have many sources other than Wikipedia. Phil was kinda lucky with that one. 1807 was pretty good for music. 1802 sucked. While in non-musical news, Napoleon makes an attack on Russia, Aaron Burr is acquitted of conspiracy, the England/Argentina soccer rivalry has pre-season friendly as Britain mounts a disastrous attack on Buenos Aires, and Robert Fulton launches his first American steamboat. And I tried looking up other stuff in 1802 and couldn’t find any in the five minutes it took to write this bit. Sorry.
While in London, William Blake abandons his masterpiece actually he’s just sent a letter to his friend Thomas Butt. Heh. Butt.
Meanwhile, in the time between this story and the last, (or, at least, the last one we’ve so far covered,) there’s been a bit of a scuffle primarily in the Middle East, one in which the United States and United Kingdomand royal sympathies – so often clothed as though of a part with gentle living and good government – conceal the actions of those true and monstrous traitors who have suckled their love of slavery from the teat of theShe-Wolf. All Earthly affairs thus lightly conceal the true conflict that shapes the cosmos, and all occurrences are as portents of the divine, or of the damned.
It’s November 15th 2013. A 30-something Faction Paradox fan has just been asked to help a friend she’s never met in person with an emergency by writing a guest post for his blog that she’s grown obsessed with.
It is March 26th 2005. Despite what anyone else will tell you, a terrible calamity has occurred. The impossible dream of a thousand alchemists has been snatched away, smothered in the crib. An imposter has laid claim to the mantle of Material Social Progress forcing the true heir to the throne into hiding Yet as the divine recedes, it seems also terribly closer.
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“’We are the only path.’”: The Time Trap

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I’d like to remind everyone this scene was animated. By Filmation.

“Entrapment” is the key word here, on multiple levels.

While exploring a region of space known as the Delta Triangle, where starships have been reputed to go missing for eons, the Enterprise comes under attack by the Klingon battlecruiser Klothos, captained by the crew’s old enemy Commander Kor. Suddenly, the Klothos vanishes into nothingness: Suspecting a trap, the Enterprise immediately warps to its last know position and follows it in before the commander of the Klothos‘ sister ship can press war crime charges. Both crews find themselves in a starless void where starships from centuries of spaceflight history aimlessly drift about. Kirk and Kor are then transported to a gigantic council chamber, where representatives of the crews from all the other ships welcome them to a world they call Elysia, a pocket universe where time does not exist that they have transformed into an ideal society where everyone relies on and respects everyone else, because there’s no way to escape. The Elysians also warn Kirk and Kor that violence is strictly prohibited, and that they will be held responsible for the violent actions of any of their crewmembers by being frozen forever in a stasis field.

Elysium, naturally, is the most interesting thing on display here, though deceptively so: It’s an effective and memorable concept on a number of different levels. Though writer Joyce Perry originally only came up with the idea of a Sargasso Sea-type area of space that Kirk and Kor would be forced to work together to escape from (which is in fact what ends up happening here: The Enterprise and the Klothos can only escape by combining their warp cores into a kind of Super Warp Drive), the actual final product is wonderfully oversignified. Firstly of course, Elysia is not only compared to the Sargasso Sea in the script, but to the nearby and contiguous Bermuda Triangle as well, and both very explicitly so. In Forteana, triangles, or to be more precise triangular regions of physical space, have always held special significance as areas that act as a kind of lightning rod for strange and unexplained activity. The Bermuda Triangle and its disappearing ships and aircraft is the most famous of course, though equally worthy of note, yet lesser-known, such places include my personal favourites, the Bridgewater Triangle in Southern Massachusetts and the Bennington Triangle surrounding Mount Glastenbury in my own home state of Vermont, the latter of which was also chronicled in an episode of William Shatner’s as-of-this-writing current Discovery Channel docudrama series Weird or What?.

But even the famous Triangle is a bastion of a truly fascinating sort of weirdness that doesn’t always show up in the stereotypical pop culture accounts of it. The Bermuda Triangle isn’t just a place where ships vanish into thin air, it’s a place where blatantly unnerving and otherworldly things are said to happen. Arguably the best-known (or at least one of the best-known) of the Bermuda Triangle incidents is the case of Flight 19, a bombing squadron that, while flying through the aforementioned area on a practice run, suddenly began to experience widespread instrument malfunction while its crew suffered from extreme and immediate onset confusion and disorientation.…

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