Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

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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Ship’s Log, Supplemental Bonus: “…maybe 20 good ones.”

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So Monday we finally start Star Trek: The Animated Series and the next phase of the franchise. This means today is sort of our last opportunity to talk about the Original Series as the incumbent form of Star Trek (although even then it’s not quite cut-and-dry as I make it seem, which we’ll talk more about tomorrow) and, given that, I thought I’d use this space to very briefly sum up my thoughts and recommendations concerning the 1964-1969 series.

Under my post on “The Apple”, frequent commenter and blog friend Flex quoted a Futurama episode where Fry, when talking about the Original Star Trek says something along the lines of how the show had “79 episodes…and maybe 20 good ones”. Back then, Flex mused as to whether we’d even be able to meet that tally on Vaka Rangi.

I took that as a challenge.

More recently, under the “Turnabout Intruder” post, 5tephe wondered if I could put up my revised list of recommended episodes: I mentioned coming up with such a thing for my Trek neophyte sister when talking about “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” and made an offhand remark on how I’d’ve chosen different episodes after doing this project. 5tephe quite reasonably thought this might be a good resource for other people who are trying to get into this historically significant but notoriously sticky and problematic series.

So this is for Flex, 5tephe, my sister and I suppose anyone else who might get some use of it. It’s a list of twenty episodes of the original Star Trek that I feel showcase the series at its strongest and that most clearly reflect its best virtues. I tried to pick six from each season, although that still doesn’t divide evenly so I gave more weight to some eras than others, but not unjustly I feel. There were a few other episodes I thought were solid, if not particularly outstanding and I could have included them as well, but I really wanted to hit an even 20 here to keep with the theme I’d chosen for myself.

So with that, I hope you enjoy.

Pilots and Season 1 (1964-1967)

1. “Where No Man Has Gone Before”
2. “Balance of Terror”
3. “The Conscience of the King”
4. “Arena”
5. “The Alternative Factor”
6. “Tomorrow is Yesterday”
7. “The Devil in the Dark”

Season 2 (1967-1968)

8. “Amok Time”
9. “The Doomsday Machine”
10. “Mirror, Mirror”
11. “The Trouble with Tribbles”
12. “Journey to Babel”
13. “A Piece of the Action”
14. “Patterns of Force”
15. “The Ultimate Computer”

 Season 3 (1968-1969)

16. “Spectre of the Gun”
17. “The Empath”
18. “The Tholian Web”
19. “That Which Survives”
20. “The Cloud Minders”…

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Saturday Waffling (December 7th, 2013)

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So. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman.

I’ll confess up front that I haven’t seen her in anything. The only one of the Fast and the Furious films I saw was the first one, which was a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie of the sort Vin Diesel is very good at appearing in. My only memory of it is the bit where the car drives under a semi. I assume the subsequent movies are memorable in exactly the same ways.

Which is to point out what everybody with a brain and a keyboard already has, which is that there’s nothing in her resume that inspires confidence. This is not in and of itself a problem – Lynda Carter had a thin resume as well, and she was phenomenal in the part. Everybody has a big break.

And I’m not one of the people who’s intrinsically down on the movie because it’s a Zack Snyder film. I like Snyder, and think he’s largely misunderstood. I liked Man of Steel. The problem is that everything I liked about Man of Steel is also a reason why it’s a terrible cornerstone to try to build a big DC Universe franchise out of. I liked Man of Steel for being a cynical take on Superman that was the first well thought out response to Grant Morrison’s stuff to date. And I still think it was that.

And it’s the director of Sucker Punch doing Wonder Woman. And I think Sucker Punch is a flooringly brutal, angry feminist film that was criminally misunderstood. It’s one of my favorite movies of the last decade. And while I don’t imagine the director of Sucker Punch is going to make a straightforward and iconic Wonder Woman movie, there are many ways in which the prospect of a Wonder Woman movie from him just sounds phenomenally exciting. I want to see his take on Wonder Woman.

The thing is, that’s not what this is going to be. Wonder Woman seems to be in the movie as part of a commitment to establishing a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel’s. And Snyder’s the wrong guy to do that. He does angry deconstructions, where what you need here are the iconic, straightforward takes on characters carefully and well-executed. Man of Steel was, for me, a great Superman movie, but it’s an awful start to an ongoing Superman franchise. And I can’t help but fear Wonder Woman will end up in a similar position here. And given that she, unlike Batman and Superman, doesn’t have a history of coming back again and again in film, that’s worrisome, because as many have pointed out, this is probably the only chance we’ll get for ten or twenty year.s

But all of that has little to do with Gal Gadot, who is taking on a role with a lot of expectations. I hope she nails it. And while I have no reason to think she will, I also have no reason to think she won’t.

Thoughts?…

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All The Years I’ve Been Taking Care Of You (The Doctor’s Daughter)

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Shooty daughter thing
It’s May 10th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake are at number one. Pendulum, Flo Rida, and Usher also chart. In news, the Federal Reserve notes that banks are increasing standards on loans as the subprime mortgage crisis gathers steam. Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach of Ireland, resigns after nearly eleven years as head of government, and Dmitry Medvedev becomes President of Russia. Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton in the North Carolina Primary, leading Tim Russert to declare that it is clear who is going to win, and turning Clinton’s campaign into a strange sort of zombie, which, to be fair, anyone who was looking at the numbers realized was true months ago. 
Commemorating her stubbornness, Doctor Who airs The Doctor’s Daughter. The definition of insanity, or, at least, the one trotted out for rhetorical purposes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In Davies’s defense, he does not actually repeat the exact same stretch of episodes four through seven as he did in Season Three; he goes to Gareth Roberts instead of Chris Chibnall. Nevertheless, it’s tough to see why Davies decided to go with a Helen Raynor monster two-parter followed by a Stephen Greenhorn script for the second season in a row. And unsurprisingly, it works about as well as it did the first time, which is to say not really at all. 
The Doctor’s Daughter is interesting in part because it’s the most sci-fi story the new series has done in some time. This is a story that hinges on an entirely sci-fi riddle based purely on the interplay of imaginary concepts. One has to not only follow the good old “science concepts become mythology through generations of oral folklore” premise from stuff like The Face of Evil, one has to get the secondary realization that all of this has happened in a week. These are not hugely difficult and advanced concepts, to be sure – I doubt a significant portion of the audience was confused – but it’s still focused on sci-fi concepts in a way the new series rarely is. Certainly it’s difficult to think of another Davies-era story that works like this.
In many ways it’s a throwback to the classic series, although it’s tough to pin down a specific bit of the series. The aesthetics of the story are all very Saward-era – lots of military people shooting lots of stuff and the Doctor thrown in the middle of it. But under the hood this is the sort of thing you’d find in the Williams era – a morality play framed around the interplay of sci-fi concepts – something like Underworld or The Pirate Planet. In terms of those concepts, it feels most like Christopher Bidmead, albeit not in his “let’s play with mathematics” phase of Logopolis and Castrovalva, but rather in terms of the stuff he oversaw like Full Circle, or his later Frontios. But even this is part of an older tradition going back to stuff like The Web Planet and The Space Museum where the story is structured around answering the question “what are the rules of this world?”
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Sensor Scan: Space Ritual

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There’s a certain set of expectations that are put in place when you put on a record with a title like Space Ritual. These are further heightened when you glance at album artwork like that, which has got to be one of the most gorgeously mind-warping bits of sleeve design I’ve ever seen. So suffice to say I guess I expected that whatever this album was going to sound like it simply had to be some kind of consciousness-elevating, perspective shifting head trip. What I experienced was not quite what I anticipated, but an experience Space Ritual certainly is.

Music is one of the hardest things for me to write about, and it aggravates me no end. Probably nothing resonates with me as powerfully as music does, but it evokes such a complex tapestry of emotions, moods and imagery for me I often find myself unable to translate my feelings into anything resembling coherent language. I’m no musicologist or music critic and maybe that has something to do with it, but either way, no place do I feel the torment of Avital Ronell’s ethereal phantom dictator than when I try to say something intelligent about music. I always end up feeling like the protagonist of William Shatner’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, haplessly and fruitlessly trying to describe enlightenment to someone who didn’t experience it firsthand. I’m also once again handicapped by the fact I’m writing about a group of artists I’m not especially familiar with and feel woefully underqualified to actually talk about.

But even so there are a fair amount of interesting things I was able to notice about Hawkwind’s Space Ritual even given my limited experience with the band that slot the album very nicely into the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Hawkwind, firstly, are a UK-based rock outfit who combine elements of Psychedelia, acid rock and prog rock and who are usually credited as the originators of space rock, which fuses all of these disparate sounds together through an interest in science fiction motifs. While this isn’t the kind of space rock I’m familiar with (which uses a lot more electronic instruments, distortion and overdubbing) it is quite an apt description of what Hawkwind sound like. With their heady themes and incredibly skilled guitar shredding, Hawkwind are also seen as the intermediate step between the Hippies of the Long 1960s and the Punks of the Long 1980s. They were also one of the most laudably workmanlike bands of their time, regularly doing one show every three days and once playing five consecutive nights for free outside, not at, the Isle of Wright Festival. Space Ritual itself isn’t an album in the traditional sense: It’s a double-disc live album chronicling a night from Hawkwind’s 1972-3 tour to support their Doremi Fasol Latido album. However, like so many great live albums, Space Ritual holds together perfectly on its own to the point it more than overshadows the records it’s ostensibly trying to support.

That Space Ritual is a recording of a concert is key to grasping its impact, as it really does feel like this kind of music is meant to be shared with a live audience.…

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Mandela

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Mandela was unquestionably a great man. But he was great because he was once a fierce fighter against oppression, not because he was a saint with a nice line in inspirational aphorisms. He was also a flawed human being whose party, under his leadership, capitulated to capitalism, embraced neoliberalism and perpetuated drastic economic inequality. Let’s mourn the passing of a fighter against racial discrimination, who endured decades of suffering (on a level that I can’t even conceptualise, let alone imagine myself tolerating) for his principles. But let’s not lose ourselves in lachrymose sentimentality and forget the real history of post-Apartheid South Africa.

Pilger: http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/nelson-mandelas-greatness-may-be-assured-not-his-legacy

Klein: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/02/democracy-born-chains…

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A Map of Causality (The Last War in Albion Part 21: Alan Moore’s Doctor Who Comics)

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This is the third 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. 

“Increasingly observers describe the War as a shape rather than a secquence of events, a map of causality.” – Lawrence Miles, The Book of the War

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore was given his first straight writing job – backup comics for Doctor Who Weekly – on the recommendation of his friend Steve Moore. His first two stories were four-parters constructed of two-page chapters, but even in this early work hallmarks of Moore’s iconic style…
Figure 157: Sinister smiling figures stepping noiselessly
forward in Doctor Who Weekly #41 (Alan Moore and David
Lloyd, 1981)
What’s immediately interesting about Moore’s early Doctor Who work is that his second story is no less metered in its narrative, but that it has an entirely different tone. Where Black Legacy sticks mostly to iambic tone, Business as Usual goes for dactyls and trochees, as with the line, “NO one RAISED an EYEbrow when BLUNT inVESTed his CAPital in FOUNDing his OWN PLASTics COMPany. IT was JUST SOUND BUSiness.” Again, the meter is not strict, but it repeatedly puts the emphasis at the beginnings of phrases, favoring three-syllable feet with words like “capital” and “company.” These longer feet give the work a very different feel, as does the triple stressed syllable in “just sound business,” which draws considerable attention to that specific and seemingly mundane phrase, quietly exposing the underlying deception, namely that, far from being ordinary sound business, Blunt’s decision is in fact part and parcel of an alien invasion. Black Legacy feels clipped, and like it’s working in a more classical, epic sense, where Business as Usual sounds mundane and conversational. It’s slightly too wordy, resembling the obfuscatory language of stereotypical corporate jargon. Business as Usual also features, in places, highly alliterative phrasing such as “the sinister, smiling figure steps noiselessly forward. Behind, in the shadows, something stirs.” In twenty-three syllables Moore manages to get nine that feature an s sound. The effect fits perfectly into the milieu of sales and corporate branding that the larger story utilizes, highlighting its satirical bite. 
But for all the cleverness of these two stories and all that Moore learned from the two-page chapter structure, it is, in the end, a limitation. Business as Usual suffers badly from having to recap its basic premise every other page.
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The Mighty Warrior Sheltering Behind His Gun (The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky)

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How are you holding up? Because I’m a potato.
And one more time in case you missed it, the first Tom baker volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is now out. It’s nice, rectangular, and easy to wrap.
It’s April 26th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake are at number one with “4 Minutes,” which exceeds its titular expectations by some margin and stays at number one for both weeks of this story. Mariah Carey, September, Usher, Wiley, and Sam Sparro also chart. In news, a bit of a spat breaks out between Jimmy Carter and the Bush administration over whether anyone ever advised him not to meet with Hamas. Wesley Snipes goes to prison for tax evasion, Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, and Boris Johnson unseats Ken Livingstone to become Mayor of London. 
While on television we have The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky. Perhaps the first question to ask is why this is even a thing. Once the series had brought back the big three villains at the sensible rate of one a year, the issue of returning monsters necessarily became a bit silly. On the one hand, a returning monster is always good for a day or two of press coverage, which is why we have new look Silurians, Ice Warriors, and Zygons now. On the other, after the Master we’re essentially out of villains whose return would play a substantively mythic role within Doctor Who. (There is sort of one exception, but we’ll get to him.) Instead the return of monster become what it was under John Nathan-Turner – an exercise that exists entirely for the purposes of promotion. This is not a bad thing – Doctor Who’s job is to bring ratings, and free publicity of the sort a returning monster gets fuels that. But it means that returning monsters stop being understandable in terms of their legacy. Rise of the Cybermen demanded to be read in light of The Tenth Planet just as Dalek actively invoked The Power of the Daleks and Last of the Time Lord reveled in the icongraphy of the Pertwee era.
But if we try to compare the Sontarans of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky with the classic series we find ourselves altogether more frustrated. As Rob Shearman has noted, the Sontarans are not monsters in the generic sense, at least not in The Time Warrior. They’re a single character, Lynx, who’s defined in terms of the Doctor. Even on their return in The Sontaran Experiment, they’re still specifically focused on the individual, with a joke about how they’re a clone species being used to explain why they have the same actor playing a different Sontaran. It’s not until The Invasion of Time that they became monsters in a generic sense, and that was an act of sheer desperation by a production team that was in so far over their heads it wasn’t even funny. And then of course there’s Robert Holmes’s own witheringly pointless revival of them in The Two Doctors, where they finally settled into existing for no reason other than drawing a few headlines.
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