Eruditorum Press

Fashionably late capitalism

You Were Expecting Someone Else 26 (I, Davros)

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A commissioned essay for David Allen.
For all that the new series takes pains to avoid making declarations about “canon” that might clash with the classic series or the spinoff material, things got surprisingly close with Journey’s End, which, in an earlier draft, contained a flashback sequence that gave a capsule origin story of Davros. All fairly standard stuff – a shot of the one time he was ever on the surface of Skaro, him swearing to ensure the survival of his people, Davros horribly injured and screaming, and then a nice monologue about how “I became a victim myself. Perhaps it was necessary. To inspire me… Can you imagine? I had one idea! An idea that has never stopped. Rolling out across the centuries. I have slept, and woken, and died, and every time I open my eyes there they are. My Daleks. Outlasting eternity. And all from one man.”
It’s a lovely little monologue – the “outlasting eternity” line is a cute little throwback to the Doctor’s description of humanity in The Ark in Space, only inverting that into an act of singular, mad vision as opposed to a collective indomitability. It fits nicely with the larger metaphoric space of Journey’s End, and the decision to frame the Daleks as an idea – that is, as a narrative concept – is wonderful. It also, apparently dragged during the read-through and required a bunch of FX shots, and so got cut before filming. It’s always something. 
Had this sequence not been deleted, however, the result would have been a rare moment of contradicting what had come before, as back in 2006 Big Finish released a quartet of audios called I, Davros that offered a different and contradictory origin for him. Actually, the contradiction isn’t that jarring – the big one hinges on whether or not Davros has only seen the surface of Skaro once or not. The real difference is that Big Finish did four hours and forty minutes of audio about Davros’s origins whereas Russell T Davies wrote and cut about a sixty second flashback. They’re very different things.
But they both speak to an underlying concern about Davros, which is the need to approach him from the opposite direction. In practice Davros is a back formation of the Daleks. Terry Nation considered the question of what the Daleks’ origin might be and created Davros in their image. His physical appearance is derived straightforwardly from Ray Cusick’s iconic design of the Daleks. His basic concept and iconography as a Joseph Mengele figure comes from the Daleks’ existing Nazi Germany imagery. Everything about him comes from the Daleks, designed as a retconned origin for them. 
And so any attempt to provide an origin for Davros that leads to the Daleks is necessarily something of an odd process. It can never be an entirely satisfying narrative simply because the narrative is self-evidently false. It has the same problems as telling the true and complete story of the Doctor leaving Gallifrey – the reality of the narrative is that it was designed to function without that story, and thus that the addition to the story is fundamentally inessential.
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“purr purr”: More Tribbles, More Troubles

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The absolute pinnacle of limited animation.

Making a sequel to an Original Series episode is a self-evidently obvious thing for the Animated Series to be doing. Doubly so when the episode in question is “The Trouble with Tribbles”.

I don’t think there’s any disputing the fact “The Trouble with Tribbles” was the moment at which Star Trek secured its immortality. It’s pretty much the definition of “iconic” and an absolutely perfect bit of television. No questions asked. In fact, perhaps the most damning evidence the season three team simply didn’t understand Star Trek is to be found in Fred Freiberger saying “The Trouble with Tribbles” was too silly a thing for the show to be doing. But that said there’s danger in revisiting a story like this: There’s a significant risk that, in doing so, the sequel will inevitably cheapen the original’s impact and retroactively damage its reputation. Sequels simply are not as good as their source material, and I’m comfortable making that a firm declaration. There are rare exceptions of course and serialized, episodic stories are another matter entirely, but as a general rule that’s frankly the way it is.

Things look pretty bad for “More Troubles, More Tribbles” then. However, this is no ordinary sequel: For one, Dave Gerrold is writing again (and mercifully back in what’s familiar and comfortable territory for him this time) and then there’s the matter of this being planned for the third season of the Original Series. “More Troubles, More Tribbles” was not meant as a cheap cash-in on the popularity and legacy of the Original Series’ most beloved episode for the low-budget animated spinoff, it was a follow-up the original writer wanted to write, and for the “proper”, “grown-up” show to boot. Gerrold was one of the first people D.C. Fontana called when the Animated Series was greenlit and, as the two had become friends, basically told him “and the first thing you’re doing is writing that Tribble episode you wanted for the third season”. And so it was.

But even so, there’s an inescapable sense of…sequel-ness about “More Tribbles, More Troubles”. The Enterprise is escorting two robot ships loaded with special quintotriticale grain (it’s like quadrotriticale, except quinto) to Sherman’s Planet (of course) and they have to be on the lookout for the Klingons (of course) who are rumoured to be testing a new super weapon. Eventually, they run into some: A Klingon battlecruiser is pursuing a Federation scout ship and relentlessly pummeling it with disruptor fire. As this is in violation of treaty, the Enterprise moves to intercept and Kirk demands a cease fire, which is soundly ignored. A couple more volleys of words and gunfire and the scout ship is destroyed (though not before Scotty manages to rescue the pilot and cargo) and the Enterprise gets whacked with the Klingon’s new weapon, a projected stasis field that immobilizes all higher level energy functions on a starship, but drains a massive amount of power from the user’s own ship. The pilot turns out to be Cyrano Jones (of course) carrying a cargo of Tribbles (of course) genetically engineered to not breed (of course).…

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Tis the Season and Whatnot

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Excerpts from a project I don’t actually have time for, but wish I did.

You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch


The webcomic XKCD once slyly pointed out that radio airplay of Christmas songs amounts to an extended nostalgia project for baby boomers, with the top twenty songs clustered neatly around the 1950s and 1960s. “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” is not among those top twenty, but is clearly part of the same trend, coming from the 1966 How The Grinch Stole Christmas television special.

It is difficult to account for its status in the Christmas canon on any grounds other than sheer nostalgia. Its only connection to Christmas is appearing in a holiday special. The lyrics don’t mention the holiday at all, instead just insulting the Grinch for six verses

Indeed, lyrically, the song seems almost anti-Christmas. It is a character piece meant to establish the main character of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when the entire point of the character is that he’s missing the holiday spirit entirely. But his overall character arc over the course of the special isn’t contained in the song.

More to the point, the overall point of the special is in many ways a split decision. Yes, the Grinch makes nice at the end, but the point of the special isn’t the eventual reconciliation, it’s the giddy thrill of the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The special asks us to revel in perversity with the thin justification that order is restored eventually.

And this carries through to the song. On the one hand, the song is a description of the villainous Grinch and his awful ways. But as much as the song condemns the Grinch, its pleasure is clearly in the perverse excesses of its invective. One central joke of the song is the way in which the final line steadily increases in size, from “you’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel,” which fits the actual musical phrase, up to “I wouldn’t touch you with with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole,” which humorously crams too many syllables into one note, all the way up to “your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots,” a description in which there are simply too many adjectives. (“Mangled up in,” in particular, exists only to sustain the phrase a little bit longer.)

This excess is, of course, quintessentially Seussian. But what is striking is not just the excess but the way in which it is overtly contrary to the supposed sense of the season. But the story of the redeemed curmudgeon has obvious history in Christmas – most obviously with Ebeneezer Scrooge. And while these stories are ostensibly about their main character’s redemption, they also show an important carnivalesque inversion of the usual order of things. Their presence deflates the gaudy artifice of Christmas.

The truth is, nobody in their right minds doesn’t want to punch the Whos in the face around the third “Dahoo Dores,” cloying little snots that they are.…

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Footstamping

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Rich, white, male kid.  Drunk driving.  Killed and maimed people.  Got off with probation because he suffers from “affluenza”.  Essentially, he couldn’t help doing it because he was too privileged to know better.

It’s so obvious, really, isn’t it?  Shouldn’t even need saying.  But.  Imagine a black person, a poor person, in the same position.  Would they be gently treated because society deprived them?  I’m not saying I want a 16 year old kid to be sent to one of those privatised totalitarian hellhole gulags that America calls ‘prisons’ for 20 years (though it would be a sharp lesson for him in what it feels like to be an ethnic minority, since those prisons are mostly stuffed with poor people, who are mostly people of colour).  I’m just pointing out the disparity.

Compare with the treatment of Glenn Broadnax.   Compare what happened to Zimmerman with what happened to Marissa Alexander (she is at least getting a new trial).

Things like that happen in their thousands every day.  I could fill up all the free memory Blogger has given me just describing, in the barest terms, things like that which happened in the last week.  And these are just anecdotes which illustrate the structural violence that underlies capitalism.

I’ve been told, on occasion, that my politics are “childish”.  I decide to take that as a compliment.  Look at what passes for serious, mature, adult opinion and then tell me that childish ideas don’t have anything to recommend them.  Besides, it’s true.  At the root of all my political engagement is a boiling fury at injustice.  That’s not a boast; it’s something I can’t help.  I read the news every day and ‘that’s not fair’ tolls in my brain again and again.  That’s the ultimate childish feeling: that rage at injustice, at unfairness, at double standards.  And it’s righteous.  When you’re a kid, you’re too young to have learned all the lessons of life that sophisticated adults take for granted: that the world isn’t fair and that’s just the way it is and there’s nothing you can do about it.  You’re still naive enough to think life could and should be fair, and to be overcome by anger when it flagrantly isn’t.  Like so many childish things, that gets beaten out of most of us, much to our detriment.  We could do worse than try to reconnect with that feeling that makes you want to stamp your feet and throw your toys around.

The great advantage of adulthood is that it brings the opportunity to focus that kind of anger at injustice in the right directions, away from oneself and one’s own thwarted whims, towards the people most ill-treated, towards the most egregious double standards.

Of course, I don’t always manage it.  I spend a lot of time on my own thwarted whims.  …

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Unpeople Undoing Unthings Untogether (Turn Left)

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What do you mean they cast the guy who mistook me for
a masseuse and wouldn’t go home? I’d have come back to the
series if they’d told me. 
It’s June 21st, 2008. Mint Royale are “Singin’ in the Rain” at number one, with Gabriella Cilmi, domestic abuser Chris Brown, and a will.i.am/Cheryl Cole duet also charting. In news, same sex marriage starts in California, while the UK ratifies the Treaty of Lisbon. And AIG ousts its CEO due to losses suffered in the subprime mortgage crisis, which is probably reasonable given that three months later the company went spectacularly bankrupt.
Given that context, Turn Left marks one of those uncanny moments where Doctor Who gets ahead of cultural trends. It’s also a funny little thing. In some ways it marks the point where the “Doctor Lite” episode becomes obsolete, as it finally plays out the most obvious Doctor Lite concept imaginable – what if the Doctor never existed. Or, in this case, what if he died two seasons ago. What results is one of the most bizarre mishmashes of concepts in the entire Davies era, or, in many ways, of any era.
There’s a fair case that it was not Davies’s best ever idea to decide that in the absence of the Doctor the UK would descend into fascism complete with labor camps for unwanted foreigners. The It Happened Here vibe of this is certainly interesting in its own right, and Davies will of course revisit all of these ideas with considerable aplomb in 2009, but there’s something off about it here. It’s not that a nuclear explosion eradicating London wouldn’t plausibly lead to exactly the sort of scenario we see here. Rather, it’s… well… Donna.
Because the real point of Turn Left – the dramatic arc that actually drives it – is Donna becoming a hero from a different direction than the one she actually took. Which means that Catherine Tate is back to playing a Catherine Tate Show character for most of the story. But there’s a subtle twist to her performance – one that Tate herself is more than equipped to handle. In The Runaway Bride Donna is a comedy character who, by the end of the story, becomes a reasonably well-realized character, albeit ultimately still a one-off. But here she’s Donna Noble, who has been the primary companion and co-lead in nine of the last ten episodes. Yes, she’s regressed to a pre-Doctor state, but that characterization can’t be undone by fiat. At this point, looking at her, we still see Donna Noble, not Catherine Tate.
This leads to a certain degree of perversity, particularly in the labor camps scene, as Donna chases after the truck demanding to know where it’s going when it’s perfectly clear to everybody else what’s going on. There’s a joke here that’s suddenly turned nasty; Donna Noble, who missed all the alien attacks prior to The Runaway Bride, now misses the establishment of concentration camps in Britain because she’s so comically thick.
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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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