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“I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman…”: The Lorelei Signal

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Uhura and Chapel decide to quit the Enterprise and form an alt rock outfit.

For the fourth episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, D.C. Fontana and her team brings back Original Series veteran Margaret Armen for the first of two contributions to the new show. “The Lorelei Signal” concerns a planet of women with hypnotic powers over men who, in the manner of Sirens (or really, the Rhine Maidens from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen) lure starships to their world so they can drain the life force of their male crewmembers in order to remain eternally young and beautiful.

There is nothing in the above paragraph that evokes hope, inspiration, wonderousness or anything that embodies goodness or joy.

Margaret Armen is the single worst writer of the original Star Trek. At least Gene Roddenberry started to redeem himself a bit at the end with “Turnabout Intruder”, “Assignment: Earth” wasn’t entirely unwatchable and there were some good bits in the part of the first season he oversaw. Armen, however, is some kind of Dark Mirror of D.C. Fontana: She’s the only other woman writer to contribute more than two scripts during this period, and she regularly struggles with issues of representation such that it overshadows every other aspect of her work. Both “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome” are serious contenders for the title of worst Star Trek story ever, or at least worst in the Original Series just on structural terms. That’s not even getting into her aforementioned terrible track record on representation: The depiction of Native Americans in the latter episode was absolutely inexcusable. The only thing remotely positive she’s been associated with was “The Cloud Minders”, which was already far from perfect, and she still only wrote the teleplay in that case and was working off a Dave Gerrold/Oliver Crawford joint venture.

Of all the writers to bring back, I cannot begin to fathom why Armen was anywhere near the top of the list. She’s not even the second-best or second most-experienced woman writer we’ve seen so far, if that’s what the team was going for: I can’t come up with a single conceivable reason not to give Shari Lewis, Judy Burns, Joyce Muskat or even Jean Lisette Aroeste a couple more shots before bringing Margaret Armen back. But maybe I’m being too harsh on her: Perhaps freed from the constraints of the Original Series and with D.C. Fontana’s help Armen is going to be allowed to blossom here. Except no, forget that, because “The Lorelei Signal” is another crateringly awful disaster. The key twist is that the women hypnotize and suck the life out of the men because they’re trapped on a planet that causes rapid aging while giving women inexplicable and ill-defined powers over men. So obviously this was the only course of action available to them. Also, they feel their immortal lives are shallow and meaningless because while they have eternal youth they’re rendered unable to bear children. If I didn’t know better I’d swear this drivel was dreamed up by the the most defiantly and proudly retrograde misogynistic scumball man to ever haunt Hollywood.…

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Saturday Waffling (December 14th, 2013)

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Again I shall be brief, for it is late and I am tired.

So let’s take our speculative guesses on Time of the Doctor. What do we think is going to happen there? How do the photos and teases that have come out fit together? Why is there a wooden Cyberman? (That last one may just be me, but it’s certainly the one I’m most curious about.)

See you all Monday.…

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So I Hit Him. What Would You Do? (The Last War in Albion Part 22: Alan Moore’s Feuds, Star Wars, Joseph Campbell)

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This is the fifth 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. 

“So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as “the soul.” So I hit him. What would you do?” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore wrote some clever comics about Doctor Who, including the beginning of an abandoned epic involving a war unfolding non-chronologically such that the first attack precedes the incident that sparked the war…

Figure 163: Alan Moore’s reputation for fights is often a part of more
caricatured depictions of him.
Moore was, apparently, intending to further flesh out his idea of a non-chronological war further, but circumstances intervened. Instead left the title along with Steve Moore, who had worked extensively on a plot outline for a third Abslom Daak story only to discover that the editor, Alan McKenzie, had already begun writing a story with the characters. Angered by this, Steve Moore abruptly quit the main title and was replaced by Steve Parkhouse, and Alan Moore followed suit in what Steve Moore has referred to as “a wonderful gesture of support that was remarkable for someone at that early a stage in their career.” While it’s true that Moore, who had not come close to establishing himself as a writer, took a genuine professional risk in quitting, the fact that he did so early in his career is the only remarkable thing here. It is, in fact, the first of many such gestures in his career. Moore has, within comics, become almost as famous for his tendency to get into professional feuds as he has for his comics work. Indeed, Moore’s capacity for umbrage is ultimately one of the primary casus belli of the War. 
It is worth, then, looking at this first dispute in order to better understand the nature of Moore’s umbrage. First of all, this dispute is interesting in that there is no way to frame it as being over a slight to Moore himself.
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“Whatever I see, I shall devour!”: One Of Our Planets Is Missing

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There’s a bizarre subgenre of Star Trek stories that ape Fantastic Voyage…

The title “One Of Our Planets Is Missing” sort of lets you know right from the start what kind of story you’re in for. There’s a giant space cloud going around literally eating planets which the Enterprise crew notices when, in fact, one of their planets happens to go missing. It’s at once the kind of delightfully mental science fiction concept that can really only be done justice to through animation, but also a plot that’s simple and straightforward enough to convey in twenty minutes.

We haven’t talked much yet about the difference in runtimes between Animated Series and Original Series episodes. A necessary consequence of changing from a primetime drama to a Saturday Morning Cartoon Show is that the episodes went from being fifty minutes each in the 1960s to only being twenty minutes each on the 1970s. This is largely to Star Trek’s benefit: One of the biggest problems with the pulp style of pacing and structure the Original Series so often lapsed into is that it’s essentially built around padding. The average pulp action serial plot is nothing more than a series of increasingly tedious captures and escapes occasionally broken up with an implausible, ridiculous and unnecessarily gratuitous fight scene. And indeed, it’s a model of storytelling Gene Roddenberry was quite a fan of, even judging only by “The Omega Glory” and “The Savage Curtain”. What this means is that, stretched to fifty minutes, this kind of plot grows tiring and irritating extremely quickly. However, now that Star Trek is a cartoon, it doesn’t have the luxury to indulge itself like that anymore: Twenty minutes is just enough time to set up the basic plot, lay out the boundaries of the conflict and than do something about it before the credits role again.

Which is exactly what we get in “One Of Our Planets Is Missing”. The titular planetary misplacement occurs, we get to see some funky looking space cloud that eats things and then there’s a rapid-fire bit of exposition about how it exhibits traits of unicellular organisms and grazing animals and oh, by the way, it’s currently on a direct course to a planet inhabited by millions of people so we’d probably best figure out a way to stop that. Then the Enterprise itself gets engulfed and partially digested, so oh bugger. With that taken care of, the episode gets to focus on the actual interesting bits, which involve the Enterprise crew making continuous observations about the creature and debating amongst themselves what the best course of action to take is. Nobody has to get kidnapped and we don’t have to introduce some left-field plot element three-quarters of the way through: It’s just the distilled essence of a Star Trek space adventure. The episode doesn’t quite pick up on all the intricacies afforded by its new model yet (there’s a wee bit too much technobabble even for my tastes) but honestly? In the scheme of things I’ve complained about so far?…

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There Should Have Been Another Way (Midnight)

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Such a heavenly way to die
I completely forgot to do the images for the next Last War in Albion before 4am, so I’m running that Friday and this today.
It’s June 14th, 2008. Mint Royale are at number one with “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Sara Bareilles, Duffy, Rihanna, and Ne-Yo also charting. In news, Euro 2008 is unfolding in Austria and Switzerland without England’s involvement. Apple introduces the iPhone 3G. The US Supreme Court decides Boumediene v. Bush, which ruled that foreign terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay could offer habeas corpus petitions in US courts. And massive floods break out in Iowa.
While on television, it’s Midnight. There is a school of thought that, not unreasonably, views Midnight as the greatest script Russell T Davies ever wrote for Doctor Who. It is not that this view is inaccurate so much as that it is a claim that often has a wealth of unseen premises. To be sure, Midnight is very good – a blend of creepiness and furious cynicism with real bite. But often the praise for it seems to tacitly be criticism of, well, essentially every other Davies episode. Midnight has few jokes, an ending that’s the polar opposite of “the power of love,” and, more broadly, is clearly Davies writing to push himself and get out of some of his ordinary tropes. In other words, it’s seemingly a Davies script for people who don’t like Davies scripts.
It is true that there is something strange about Midnight. Reading The Writer’s Tale, one gets the feeling that it’s an almost hallucinatory experience. According to the dates in The Writer’s Tale, on September 27th, 2007 Davies determined that the planned script for what was then episode eight of Season Four (it got moved late in production) wasn’t working out. On October 5th, after finishing rewrites to the Sontaran two-parter, Davies tells Cook that he’s thinking of writing it, though he frets about the time he has to do it in. Five days later, on Wednesday the 10th, he mentions to Cook the basic outline of it – everyone trapped in a bus (to save money) and a monster on the outside that possesses a woman (to be called Sky) who begins repeating people. What appeals to him, it seems, is both the creepiness and the fact that it would be technically difficult to shoot but very cheap – he speaks of “all that production-tension creeping onto the screen,” and about it being a story where the Doctor loses his speech. But he also admits that he has no idea how it ends. 
That Saturday he clears the weekend to work on it, with the goal of starting production on Monday if the script works out. The weekend is a buzz of e-mails between them in which Davies describes the intensity of writing it. He tells Cook about the difficulty of juggling eight person scenes, and says that his “brain is bleeding,” but less than ten hours later It’s “buzzing” and he’s having trouble keeping all his ideas in check.
…

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“…of a mingled yarn”: Yesteryear

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Godzilla vs. Spock was one of the lesser-known Godzilla films of this period…

“Yesteryear” is pure D.C. Fontana.

When returning from a mission of research into Federation history through the Guardian of Forever, Kirk is stunned to find out nobody on the Enterprise seems to recognise Spock, and that he himself doesn’t recognise the person the crew is calling the ship’s first officer: The Andorian Commander Thelin. A brief scan of the ship’s record banks indicates that Sarek and Amanda, Spock’s parents, divorced about twenty years ago after the death of their only son, Spock. This is of course, patently untrue as Spock is sitting at the table as the computer relays this information. The computer goes on to say that Amanda was later killed herself in a shuttlecraft accident. Reasoning that history has somehow been changed by their presence in the past, Kirk and Spock return to the planet and Spock recalls that the date he is said to have died is the same day he remembers being saved by his cousin Selek from an attacking wild animal. After being pressed by Kirk, Spock recalls that actually, now that he thinks about it, Selek looked an awful lot like him.

Before we go any further, I want to talk a little about the temporal mechanics in this story, as they’re fascinatingly not the norm for time travel stories. The crucial detail is in how the Guardian of Forever works: It exists at the vortex point where every timeline in the universe converges and, as a result, endlessly broadcasts a record of every possible time stream. We can interact with it by leaping through it at the appropriate moment. What happened was that while Kirk and Spock were in the past, Vulcan’s own history was being broadcast at the same time. Because Spock saved his own life and he was in a different time stream when the moment he was supposed to save himself was playing, he missed the crucial moment. But he doesn’t erase himself from history, to the contrary: He turns both himself and Kirk into historical orphans by jumping each other’s time streams. In other words, the Guardian of Forever works like a television set.

Although this was hinted at a bit in “The City on the Edge of Forever”, it’s extremely clear in “Yesteryear”. The different time streams are easily comparable to television stations, and the slow, methodical cycling through them all is very much like someone sitting down and turning the dial on their set. The Guardian even looks like an old-style tube TV in this episode. This is altogether fitting in the context of the position Star Trek is now in: The Original Series is now more popular than it’s ever been and is enjoying runaway cult success in perpetual, neverending syndicated reruns. Meanwhile, along comes the Animated Series attempting to make a decisive claim for what the future of the franchise should look like, and there’s already a considerable amount of ambivalence about the project.…

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River, You Know My Name (The Husbands of River Song)

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as Professor River Song.

It’s December 25th, 2015. The Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir are at number one with “A Bridge Over You,” a 2013 song pushed to number one in protest of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s efforts to extend the hours of junior doctors. Justin Bieber, who supported the campaign, is in number two, three, and five, while Adele is at number four, a complete lack of any shift in the charts since Hell Bent. One Direction, Coldplay, and Stormzy also chart. In news, the Paris Accord on climate change is agreed upon, while Kellingley Colliery, Britain’s last deep coal mine, closes. Donald Trump calls for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, and Martin Shkreli is revealed to have been the purchaser of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and arrested on securities fraud charges.

While on television, Moffat’s final episode. I mean, yes, there are fourteen others. But never mind about all of that. Moffat has said that when he wrote this he didn’t know if he’d be back. I once heard an idea—I’m pretty sure it was Douglas Hofstadter’s originally, though Chris O’Leary uses the same image to talk about “Ashes to Ashes”—of writing a book that in fact ends in its middle somewhere, so as to remove the sense of coming to the end provided by the actual physical book. There are several things suggested for what to do with the excess pages, scaling up from leaving them blank to actually constructing a book that can go on for some time after it has reached its ending.

I would suggest that the Moffat/Capaldi era is something like that. It ends with The Husbands of River Song; the remaining fourteen episodes, good and bad (and there are several in each basket), are in a fundamental sense unnecessary. It is not that Moffat stayed too long—nothing about Series 10 is such a dramatic falling off from the mad and imperious glory days of Series 9 as to justify that claim.  It is simply that the actual ending is here. 

In this regard, two elements present themselves as inevitable in hindsight. The first is River Song herself. Having already had her first appearance serve as the beginning of the Moffat era eighteen months before the end of the Davies era, her appearance here provides a symmetry as convoluted as her timeline, and as effective to boot. The Name of the Doctor was never an entirely satisfying denouement to River’s story, in part because it was just never entirely satisfying period, but also because both the idea that River’s fate in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead was unfixable (as opposed to inviolate) and the idea that the trip to the Singing Towers could be squared away in a three minute farce released as a DVD extra are wholly untenable. 

Ultimately it is the latter that Moffat opts to revise, which is probably the better choice, since it works as a final story for River (and indeed requires that anyone else who wants to use her going forward has to go to some pretty extreme lengths to do so), whereas effectively resurrecting her would be something of a white elephant for Chibnall.…

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One Year Later

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Nearly one year on, these are the things I remember.

Going to my favorite breakfast restaurant the next morning and sitting next to a loudmouth man who talked about how he didn’t even want to have Christmas anymore, but who, as he paid for his meal, tried to get the waitress to stop by his car dealership.
The town piling up all the toys people donated in the basement of the town hall and letting kids just pick freely from them. After Chirstmas they still had so many that they had to make expensive plans to get rid of the absurd mass of toys that people donated with no thought whatsoever as to whether they were comforting anyone but themselves.
The woman who set up an ad hoc memorial consisting of little Christmas trees, which she described as having “pink lights for the girl angels and blue lights for the boy angels,” and my bafflement both at the fact that gender essentialism is somehow necessary after death and that the six adults got red lights.
The day it took an hour to drive the mile from my house to the comic shop because of the traffic around the church, not from people going to one of the funerals, but from news vans parked across the street filming people at the funeral.
The numbing awkwardness of meeting a bunch of Jill’s family for the first time at a family Christmas party two days after, and having a half-dozen identical conversations, all of which begin with someone I’ve just met asking where in Connecticut we live, and which end precisely one sentence later.
How it was too soon to talk about the politics of gun control right up until the impetus to actually do anything had passed.
Reading an article in Salon that offered a deconstructive take on the name of the bar Nancy Lanza frequented – My Place – viewing it as the epitome of American capitalist culture. My Place added a bar no more than a decade ago, and anyone local knows it as one of the main local pizza places; I first ate there over twenty years ago.
The signs some presumably well-meaning people put up suggesting that everything is God’s plan, and how I wanted to just drive out at 2am and tear them all down, along with the brightly colored signs comforting the town made by kids who had never been there and hung from every telephone pole, and all the other mawkish, brightly colored shit that consisted of nothing more than hollow platitudes trying to advance the sickening lie that there is anything OK about a world where one morning twenty first graders can be gunned down in their classroom. 
…

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Tact and Finesse (The Unicorn and the Wasp)

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It’s May 17th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake have been at number one for substantially more than “Four Minutes.” Usher, Coldplay, and Kylie Minogue also chart. In news, attempts to provide relief aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis drag on, largely due to reticence on the part of the government of Myanmar. California’s Supreme Court declares that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. And, on the same day as this story airs, Portsmouth FC defeat Cardiff City in the final of the FA Cup.
Also on television is The Unicorn and the Wasp. There is a simplicity to this story. It is, of course, a Gareth Roberts script, which means it is a giddy, often very funny celebration. Roberts is not the writer you hire for critical and ambivalent takes on a subject, and so what we get here is wall-to-wall glee about how wonderful Agatha Christie was.
There are of course unsettling problems with this. Christie was a reactionary bigot of the worst sort-  a fact that requires a complete whitewashing so that we can all revel in the Downtonesque  glamour of the period setting without having to feel problematic in the least. It’s on the one hand difficult to be too upset about this – the point of the story, after all, is to be a big, frothy Agatha Christie pastiche in which the final twist is that the killer is an alien. Deconstructing the Agatha Christie style is a valid move too, but it’s a fundamentally different move.
Instead the point is to be absolutely, giddily bonkers. This is a story that’s supposed to be funny and inventive. And it is. The Agatha Christie title jokes fly fast and furious, well beyond what’s even remotely required. (I remember, about a year after this aired, solving a puzzlehunt with an Agatha Christie themed puzzle in it based on titles, and laughing out loud solving it as I realized just how many of the titles were what I had previously taken as perfectly ordinary lines from this episode.)
So Agatha Christie becomes not a historical figure but a genre, which is, of course, how Doctor Who generally prefers its history anyway. Then, added to this, is a cheekily recursive joke in which the Agatha Christie genre gets Agatha Christie thrust into it as a character. Roberts, being Roberts, was always going to write this as a giddy celebration of fannish love, and so we get the double recursion whereby it’s an Agatha Christie mystery starring Agatha Christie in which the reason the story feels like it’s straight out of an Agatha Christie mystery is, in fact, because the characters have been reading Agatha Christie. It’s gobsmackingly meta. 
And so we get a story that, like any Agatha Christie story, is full of revelations. This is the standard structure of an Agatha Christie story – every character has some secret that causes them to act suspiciously. Typically the character who is the least obviously suspicious ends up being the murderer.
…

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“…as eternity is to time”: Beyond the Farthest Star

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“Whoa, guys. Just…Just seriously. Don’t drop acid before studying termite mounds.”

“Enterprise log, Captain James Kirk commanding. We are leaving that vast cloud of stars and planets which we call our galaxy. Behind us, Earth, Mars, Venus, even our Sun, are specks of dust. The question: What is out there in the black void beyond? Until now our mission has been that of space law regulation, contact with Earth colonies and investigation of alien life. But now, a new task: A probe out into where no man has gone before.”

The canonicity, and thus ultimate legacy, of Star Trek: The Animated Series has been a point of contention amongst fans and creative personnel since just about the day it premiered. While I’ve outlined my thoughts on Star Trek “canon” previously (in brief, I think it’s largely hogwash) it’s important to consider the general reception works like this attain, as doing so allows us to understand the ebb and flow of the overall work that is Star Trek over time.

If anything has the right to be called Star Trek though, it’s surely Star Trek: The Animated Series, isn’t it? It served as a reunion for almost the entire creative team from the Original Series, with the exception of Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Walter Koenig, John Meredyth Lucas and the Season Three team (The show couldn’t afford Koenig, Coon was, erm, dead, Roddenberry wasn’t interested, Lucas was busy on Insight and I really can’t say I miss Arthur Singer) and D.C Fontana herself personally spearheaded the project. Fontana stands behind the show to this day, firmly stating that her and her team always tried to make the best possible Star Trek they could under the circumstances, which I think is actually truer here than it was throughout the majority of the Original Series. In fact, Fontana considers Star Trek: The Animated Series the official fourth year of the Enterprise‘s famous five-year mission, and I’m not really one to disagree with D.C. Fontana.

But in spite of her convictions, Fontana’s claim has not only not gone unchallenged but it’s been largely ignored. Despite the occasional in-joke or reference in future series and the more relaxed attitude of places like the Memory Alpha wiki, Trekkers seem to have a very hard time accepting Star Trek: The Animated Series into their hearts. In the years and decades since it was made, there have been countless attempts to tell the story of those infamous “last two” years of the five-year mission, completely disregarding the existence of the Animated Series. There have been number of tie-in novels and comic books, not to mention the video games Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Trek: Judgment Rights and the as of this writing forthcoming fan production Star Trek Continues that all purport to tell the story The Animated Series has ostensibly already told.

This is highly unusual for Star Trek fans, who usually hang off of the words of creators as if they come down from On High.…

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