“This act is the dawn of the Mythic…”: The Magicks of Megas-Tu
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| And this is where our story begins. And so it continues. |
There are very few Star Trek episodes you could point to and identify as moments where everything about the franchise simply changed, mostly because there are very few actual moments like that anywhere. History does not divide neatly into clean, compartmentalized bits: It’s a constantly unfolding tapestry of intersecting lives and events.
“The Magicks of Megas-Tu” is one of those moments. Magick is real.
In the time of the First Ancestors, when the world was new, there was a Spark at the beginning of All Things: A barely-formed thought that dared dream. The Dream the Dreamer Dreamt was the mortal plane, the idea that things continued and shaped themselves as they would. In this Dream, divinity existed within and between each individual. And this was a very dangerous idea.
Conventional cosmological wisdom holds that the further away we can look into space, the further back in time we see. This is because the speed of light is a constant, thus the light we observe from a fixed location has taken us an equal amount of time to reach us as the distance it is away from us. Thus, the furthest, most distant objects are by definition the oldest. This is the line of thought Captain Kirk muses on as the Enterprise travels to the centre of the galaxy, supposedly the region of space closest to the origin point of cosmic history.
Star Trek fan lore perports that the entire franchise takes place within the boundaries of the Milky Way Galaxy, with very few excursions beyond (the events depicted in “By Any Other Name” and the two “…Have Gone Before” stories are the most frequently cited: “Beyond the Farthest Star” is typically not accounted for in this accounts). Even Star Trek Voyager, as removed as it is from 24th century politics, still only takes place at the other end of the galaxy, not somewhere outside it. The Star Trek universe, then this version of events holds, encompasses only the “known space” of the Milky Way Galaxy.
There is a certain line of thinking within cosmology that the universe simply could not have come into being out of nothing during the Big Bang, as the idea of something spontaneously emerging from nothing is simply incomprehensible. A more helpful thesis, this account goes, is that the Big Bang is the dividing point between two universes, and that universes exist in a constant, repeating cycle of expansion and contraction.
The Enterprise and her crew approach the center of the galaxy. The closer they get, the more and more the laws of physics seem to break down. All the ship’s systems cease to function.
Current quantum physics theory posits there are at least eleven dimensions of space-time. This hypothesis is a response to a kind of particle behaviour known as “quantum tunneling”, where particles appear to disappear from one location and reappear in another. The theory goes they’re not phasing in and out of existence, but travelling in higher dimensions that humans cannot measure.…
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 49.5: Farscape
Logan Locksley helps fill in a needed gap.
The year is 1996. It’s a leap year. As usual for a year on Earth, all sorts of things are happening. Independence Day, Twister, and Mission: Impossible are among the highest grossing films of the year. Musical hits include Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something, Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, and Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic. In other news, a chess computer called Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov for the first time, the Nintendo 64 console is released, and France performs the last atomic bomb test.
On May 27, the Doctor Who TV movie starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor airs in the UK. The film fails to result in a new American co-produced series for several reasons, but mostly because it isn’t a very good movie. It kind of sucks, to be honest.
Hey there. I am, quite obviously, not Phil Sandifer. I’m not nearly as eloquent or erudite (am I using that word right? [Other than applying it to me, yes. – Phil]) as Mr. Sandifer, but I heard he was looking for someone to write a guest post and I jumped at the chance. He has graciously accepted me as a guest writer, and here I am. My name is Logan Locksley, and I’m here to talk about Farscape.
When were we? 1996. After the dismal Eighth Doctor TV movie, some other things happen, and 1996 comes to an end. Let’s fast-forward.
The year is 1999. Once again, all kinds of stuff happens. But we’re only concerned with one minor event. On November 29, a strange but endearing science fiction series called Farscape airs its first episode in the UK. Noted for its emotional poignancy, complex stories, and irreverent humor (as well as the use of puppets from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop), Farscape generates a relatively small but fiercely loyal fanbase.
Again, let’s fast-forward.
It is now 2002. In September, the Sci-Fi Channel opts to withdraw its funding of Farscape’s fifth season, cancelling the series just before Season 4 begins airing. Fans are angry and disappointed, and the cancellation receives considerable notice by news media. Mere hours after star Ben Browder and producer Brian Henson announce the cancellation during an online chat with fans, a campaign to “Save Farscape” has begun.
On March 10, 2003 “Bad Timing” airs in the UK. Farscape’s final episode ends on a truly bizarre, totally Farscapean cliffhanger, leaving many fans more than a little angry and confused. The fan campaign continues.
Fast forward to 2004. Thanks in large part to the massive “Save Farscape” fan campaign, several financial backers have given their support to Brian Henson. On October 17 and 18, a two-part miniseries called Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars airs in the US. The Peacekeeper Wars resolves the cliffhanger ending of “Bad Timing” and wraps up several unresolved plot threads.
For obvious reasons, 2004 is remembered as a noteworthy year for ‘Scapers. (Star Trek has Trekkies, Farscape has ‘Scapers.)
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 73: Final Crisis
Andrew Hickey writes on Final Crisis. His book on fifty years of Doctor Who, Fifty Stories for Fifty Years, is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, and, for print editions, Lulu. You’ll also probably enjoy the interview he just did with me for Mindless Ones.
Narrative Collapse
“There was a cosmic war. And the powers of evil won. And I know how this sounds, but they’re here among us now. I was kinda hoping you might be able to help me put some kind of team together.”
Grant Morrison, at the time Final Crisis was being released, said (in a now-deleted blog post, so I can’t quote it directly) that Final Crisis was clearly tapping into the same zeitgeist as Doctor Who, because of the number of superficial similarities between his story and The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. He may even have believed it. But Final Crisis rather conclusively missed the zeitgeist at least as far as its intended audience were concerned.
Both Final Crisis and The Stolen Earth were inspired by the comic-book tradition of the crossover, where you get characters from many different series, all of which ostensibly take place in the same fictional universe, to come together to face a threat too big for any one of them. In fact both were inspired specifically by one such crossover, the crossover by which all other crossovers in comics are judged, 1985’s Crisis On Infinite Earths, by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Len Wein, Jerry Ordway and others.
That story was designed to clear up a DC multiverse which, according to geeks, had become “too complicated”, because of a plethora of different universes containing different versions of DC’s characters. The fact that this could be comprehended in seconds by any eight-year-old child reading the comics – “Oh, Old Superman and Flash With A Hat are from Earth-2, and Proper Superman and Proper Flash are from Earth-1, OK” – didn’t stop it from being an incessant source of worry for any reader who thought that Marvel’s self-consistent universe (a result of all Marvel’s main characters being the creation of three men – Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and, especially, Jack Kirby) was something that their main rivals should emulate.
And so, over the course of a year, came a comic which, however misguided its aim, was truly huge in scope. Its story involved a threat that destroyed a literally infinite number of earths, and saw the remaining five earths merged into one, and the whole of their history rewritten, so that where there had been an infinite multiverse there had now only ever been one universe. It also saw the deaths of beloved characters like Supergirl and The Flash (both of them got better).
It was a war in time, sparked initially by the actions of the oldest race of beings in the universe, the immortal godlike beings who claim the authority to police the universe, and who live at the centre of it. But it soon turned into a war between an absolute evil and a corrupted, broken, good, that ended with the whole of history being rewritte, and only a handful remembering that it had ever been different.
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“I wanna be big!”: The Infinite Vulcan
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| “I give you…SPOCK!” |
“The Infinite Vulcan” is Walter Koenig’s sole contribution to the Animated Series, and if absolutely nothing else it’s solid evidence Star Trek’s cast by in large tends to have a good idea about what the franchise’s virtues are, whether or not other creative figures do. Koenig was actually working on this script as early as the end of the Original Series, and it was one of those things that D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry thought would be a great idea to dig up as soon as the new show took off, just like “More Tribbles, More Troubles”.
The plot is one of the stranger ones we’ve seen so far in the Animated Series, and that’s counting the one about the giant space-cloud-cow that eats solar systems that the Enterprise tries to give indigestion. While exploring an uncharted planet, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Sulu discover a civilization of hyper-intelligent sentient plants called Phylosians. While they at first seem friendly, reviving Sulu after a chance encounter with local toxins, it is soon revealed they have ulterior motives as they kidnap Spock at the behest of their “Master”, a fifty foot tall clone of a former Eugenics Warlord by the name of Stavos Keniclius 5. Keniclius is determined to forcibly impose peace on a what he considers a galaxy in turmoil, and in Spock’s mastery of Vulcan logic and human emotion and intuition he sees the perfect model by which to base his new society, so he steals his brain and makes a fifty foot tall clone of him to help rebuild the Phylosians’ space fleet.
A…controversial episode, to say the least, I definitely think “The Infinite Vulcan” is working through some very interesting ideas. Just like last week, the Animated Series is picking up abandoned ideas from the Original Series (and ones that it was a mistake to abandon in my opinion) and trying to take them further. However, also like last week, “The Infinite Vulcan” is held back by a lot of missteps that make it feel less then effective, and there’s a general sense of “been there, done that” about the proceedings. In this case, the closest analog is naturally “Patterns of Force”, which shares this episode’s attitude towards liberal authority and top-down pacifism. Keniclius is depicted as being very much in the wrong for taking up the mantle of imposing peace throughout the galaxy, and the episode’s best moment comes when Kirk essentially asks him why he thinks he has the right to do that. The problem is, this time the script completely fails to offer any kind of solution or alternative. The whole point of “Patterns of Force” was denouncing what Kirk comes right out and calls “the leader principle”. Anyone who aspires to a position of power by definition thinks they know better than everyone else, and that’s wrong.
But “The Infinite Vulcan” doesn’t come anywhere close to following up on this. Instead, Kirk’s debate with Keniclius (and later Kaiju!Spock) flounders around a lot and doesn’t seem to have any actual premise aside from “what you’ve done to Spock is mean and bad” and eventually ends up at “Keniclius is out of touch and doesn’t realise the Federation already has peace”…which is basically the opposite of the point of “Patterns of Force”.…
The No Man
Well, I watched ‘The Snowmen’.
It started badly, with the loner as unhealthy future villain. Watch out for the loners everybody – they’re scary.
It briefly picked up with a rather good new title sequence.
Then we got into the mystery section, which was okay. I have serious issues with the idea that the Doctor is now mates with a Silurian and a Sontaran. Both races should hate his guts, the Silurians with good reason. He’s repeatedly failed to do anything but posture some platitudes for these Palestinians of the Who-world. And then either sit by while his mates kill them, or kill them himself. And the Sontarans don’t work as comedy pratts. I remember when they were satirical deconstructions of literal-mindedness and militarism, compared archly to medieval chivalric hypocrisy. Now they’re straight men.
But some of the jokes were funnyish, even if they did rely on the idea that it’s okay to mock people for being short, looking odd, etc.
The spiral staircase was nice.
But then… Look, it’s now clear that this show has no ambition to be anything more than put-down comedy and sentimentality, interspersed with stuff about how awesomely wonderful the Doctor is… despite the fact that he’s now a prattling, petulant, sulky, self-pitying idiot.
Fatuous tear-jerkery. Manipulative, hollow gunk which instructs the viewer to feel certain things on command. No sense of history or politics at all, beyond some nonsequiturs about “Victorian values” which connected to nothing. And we have to get preached at about how wonderful it is to love your kids and cry. The most banal and bland moralising posing as inspirational and uplifting profundity. The most cynical arm-twisting of the feelings, posing as moving drama.
And then… “the only force in the world capable of conquering evil… the tears of a whole family on Christmas Eve”. I just don’t know where to start. I literally felt sick. It’s like inhaling Steven Moffat’s farts after he’s spent 48 hours doing nothing but reading the insides of greetings cards and masturbating in front of a mirror.
And am I to understand that the Great Intelligence began as a lonely child’s imaginary friend? You know, I have no problem with continuity being rewritten… but rewritten as explanations, couched in terms of cloying sentimentality, when there was no need for explanations in the first place?
Also, on the subject of the Clara mystery… who cares? I mean, how can one get interested in the solution to a riddle when you know that the solution will be ‘some bit of sci-fi handwaving’. The interest in the best Doctor Who always used to be ‘what does this mean?‘. ‘The Snowmen’ tells you what it means (ie ‘be nice to your kids, being a loner is bad for you, Victorian Values are BAD… whatever they are, and the Doctor is amazing’. Profound stuff like that.) The interest supposedly now lies in what everyone is feeling (which usually turns out to be something like ‘Sad’ or ‘Happy’ about completely inhuman and unrelateable experiences) and ‘how will Moffat cleverly resolve this bit of apparently inescapable plot trickery?’.…
Saturday Waffling (December 21, 2013)
I’ve just gotten the last set of edits back on the Hartnell book – I’ll get ebook versions out by Christmas, with print following in January some time. (James got me the ebook cover already, but since it was Christmas time I then gave him an extra lump of coal and told him he could spend an hour or two with his family. Don’t worry – I’ve still not let him see sunlight.)
Roughly the next two weeks of TARDIS Eruditorum are going to be guest posts because I thought I’d experiment with taking a few days off. Frankly, given the lineup of writers I have filling in, you’re not going to miss me at all and will in fact be slightly disappointed when I return in 2014 with The Last Sontaran. The Last War in Albion will continue as usual.
Next week’s posting schedule is going to be further exotic. Eruditorum will be running on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday to make room for a Wednesday French Toasting to discuss Time of the Doctor. Saturday will be given over to Last War in Albion. And Thursday will be a slightly belated Christmas present to everyone.
Speaking of Christmas, and of the holidays in general, what are everyone’s plans for Yule, Christmas, New Year’s, and any other holidays you may celebrate in the next week or two?
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These Two Strands Together (The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End)
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| Detonate… the disco bomb! |
It’s June 28th, 2008. Coldplay are at number one with “Viva la Vida,” which lasts a week before Ne-Yo’s “Closer” unseats it. Sara Bareilles, Rihanna, Busta Rhymes with Linkin Park, and Jordin Sparks with violent abuser Chris Bown also chart. In news, Bill Gates finishes his full time work at Microsoft, the US Supreme Court rules that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms and that the Exxon Valdez damages were excessive, and Spain wins Euro 2008, beginning their rather long winning streak of major international tournaments.
While on television, the biggest thing is, in fact, Doctor Who. So let’s start with Journey’s End, as it is in many ways the centerpiece of the Russell T Davies era. There are two narratives of the Davies era – in one the show peaks with Rose’s departure in Doomsday. This is the view offered by Tat Wood in About Time. But Doomsday, for all its supposed cultural cache, pulled in 8.2 million viewers and was the 8th most watched program on television that week. Impressive, but beaten out by Rise of the Cybermen, which got 9.2 million and finished 6th. Doomsday was only the fifth most watched episode of its season. Journey’s End, meanwhile, pulled in a mind-wrenching 10.6 million viewers – the most a non-Christmas Special episode of Doctor Who had pulled in since Rose, which can hardly be called a normal episode. It’s the only time in the new series that a season finale bested the premiere in ratings. And it pulled off something that Doctor Who had never done in its entire history: it was the number one program on television that week. “Ah,” a certain line of argument goes, “but ratings don’t indicate how much people liked it.” This is true. For that we need to turn to the episode’s unfathomably high 91% AI score.
From empirical data, at least, this is the zenith of Doctor Who’s cultural capital. It’s also part of a larger cultural narrative of the transition from Davies to Moffat, a cultural event that includes Tennant’s Hamlet performance being the hot theater ticket of the year, the massive success of The Next Doctor, the Matt Smith announcement, and, finally, the massive event that was The End of Time. Doctor Who may have exited its imperial phase after Doomsday, but its moment of greatest success – the moment where it was the biggest it had ever been – was this.
What jumps out, then, is the self-confidence of it. There’s always been an “everything plus the kitchen sink” feel to Davies’s finales as they each scramble to be bigger than the last one, but the sheer and sweeping scope of this one is still impressive. A three-show crossover with five companions listed in the opening credits that also features Luke, K-9, Mr. Smith, Gwen, Ianto, Jackie, Mickey, Wilf, Sylvia, Francine, as well as loads of Daleks and Davros.
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“The Unreal McCoy”: The Survivor
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| “Wait…Haven’t we done this already?” |
On the surface, there’s not a whole lot interesting going on with “The Survivor”. Answering a distress signal from a one-person starship, the Enterprise crew is thrilled to discover it’s registered to Federation philanthropist and hero Carter Winston, missing and presumed dead for five years. As it happens, Winston’s fiance is aboard the ship: Eager to resume the relationship she goes to meet him, only to have him break her heart by saying he’s not the same person he was when he proposed. It quickly turns out that Winston is quite literally not the same person anymore, as he is, in fact, a shapeshifting alien Romulan operative who goes on to assume the forms of Kirk and McCoy to divert the Enterprise into the Neutral Zone, giving the Romulans have a reason to justify impounding the ship so they can reverse engineer it. Similarities immediately appear between this episode, “The Enterprise Incident”, “The Man Trap” and any one of the million billion other evil twin stories Star Trek has done for the past decade.
And exasperation is a not entirely unwarranted reaction, as this is definitely one of the weakest Animated Series episodes we’ve seen yet. The evil duplicate plot is, predictably, stultifyingly boring, but thankfully the show doesn’t linger on it that long and the crew figures out what’s happening pretty quickly, so there’s a minor plus. I’d really appreciate it if this franchise never did one of these stories again, but I suppose if it must it’s nice to see it somewhat self-aware and willing to address some of the inherent flaws with this kind of plot. The Romulans are, of course, wrong: Sending in spies to clandestinely violate the peace treaty with the Federation is behaviour in keeping with Star Trek: The Next Generation-era Romulans, but not the Romulans as we see them at this point. Of course, nobody except D.C. Fontana and Paul Schneider have ever gotten the Romulans actually right, so that’s to be expected…Except for the fact one of those people is the current showrunner and therefore a person one would expect might have been in a position to catch this. Really, you could have replaced the Romulans with Klingons and the episode would have been just as effective, if not a bit more so: They’re generic baddies (and indeed the Romulan ships shown here are, in fact, Klingon).
Although that said the actual Romulan Commander we get to interact with (who astonishingly still doesn’t get a name: Seriously, say what you will about Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Romulans-they at least had the decency to name them) is terrific. His exchanges with Kirk are delightfully snarky and self-aware. My favourite exchange in the whole episode comes here, where the Enterprise is first surrounded by Romulan battlecruisers:
…ROMULAN COMMANDER [on viewscreen]: You appear to have a propensity for trespassing in the Neutral Zone, Captain Kirk.
KIRK: It was not deliberate, I assure you.
ROMULAN COMMANDER [on viewscreen]: It never is.
One is All (The Last War in Albion Part 23: Joseph Campbell, Alan Moore’s Star Wars Comics)
This is the sixth of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it.
The stories discussed in this installment and the next are currently in print as part of Dark Horse’s Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Volume 1.
The stories discussed in this installment and the next are currently in print as part of Dark Horse’s Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Volume 1.
“God is one and all. God is all. One is all. One perfect moment” – Alan Moore, Promethea #23
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| Figure 170: John Dee’s black scrying mirror, in which Edward Kelley received his vision of Babalon. |
Within Campbell, however, this event is paralleled by another immediately after, which Campbell calls Woman as the Temptress. After encountering the Goddess there comes a point where women “become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat,” for “no longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin.” This evokes the virgin/whore complex at the heart of many depictions of the sacred feminine, and captured chillingly in the revelation given to Edward Kelley while scrying in the seventh aethyr that drove him to abandon magic:
I am the daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour from my youth. For behold I am Understanding and science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They cover and desire me with infinite appetite; for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars and covered with the morning clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beast of the fields understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many symbols and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. For lo, I am loved of many, and I am a lover to many; and as many as come unto me as they should do, have entertainment.
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| Figure 171: Dion Fortune was a Welsh occultist and contemporary of Aleister Crowley’s. |
After this encounter with the sacred feminine, predictably, comes the (in Campbell’s eyes at least) more important encounter with the masculine divine, Atonement with the Father.
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