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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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Sensor Scan: William Shatner in the 1970s

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Modern genre fiction actors are superstars. They’re today’s teen idols, appearing in multi-billion dollar film and television projects and have their name and face instantly splattered across the Internet the moment their franchise sees the merest inkling of popular success. Typecasting too is far less of a problem now then it used to be: Nowadays up-and-coming genre stars go out of their way to nurture a cult of personality as soon as they start to become famous, and take care to ensure each marquee role they play is a slightly different twist on their iconic public persona from the start: Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, plays a version of Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek Into Darkness that can succinctly be described as “Evil Sherlock” even though he is self-evidently capable of a vast and diverse acting range. Likewise, there’s not a whole lot of difference between Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins, his John Watson and his Arthur Dent, which was already an exaggerated and caricatured version of the character he played in The Office. This isn’t so much a criticism as it is an observation that in contemporary genre fiction, typecasting is something that’s acknowledged and accounted for from the beginning

It wasn’t always like this.

It’s not like the cast of Star Trek were ever really not famous. The series was always afforded a primetime slot in its original run: Even in the third season when it was shunted into the Friday Night Death Slot, at least it was in the primetime part of the Friday Night Death Slot. Star Trek was a marquee show for NBC, and all the accounts I could find dating to the 1960s indicate it was a series that was considerably recognisable and well-known. At the very least, you don’t get to record novelty albums or appear on variety shows if you’re not doing at least somewhat well for yourself (and certainly this also would seem to indicate there’s always been some sort of teen idol appeal within genre fiction). But the flip side of this is that if you became famous for genre fiction in the 20th century…well, there was a good chance that’s all you were ever going to be famous for. And, sadly, perhaps the archetypical example of this phenomenon is what happened to the Star Trek cast, who universally struggled to find work throughout the 1970s, forever becoming associated with the roles they played for three years on the starship Enterprise. No matter how rough the cancellation of the Original Series was for Trekkers, the fact is it was infinitely worse for the cast and crew. And arguably few had it as bad as William Shatner.

Shatner’s bad luck started a few months before the end of Star Trek when his wife Gloria Rand divorced him. While things like this are of course complicated and involve many different factors and variables, Shatner himself has expressed suspicion that this might have had something to do with his character bedding a different woman every week on a popular primetime science fiction show.…

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Fit to Lead the Life of a Dog (Planet of the Ood)

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If you missed it on Monday, the fourth TARDIS Eruditorum book, covering the first part of Tom Baker’s tenure as the Doctor, is now out. Thank you for supporting the blog.


It doesn’t taste anything like chicken!
It’s April 19th, 2008. Estelle remain at number one, and the only new entry into the charts at all is September with “Cry For You.” Chris Brown, who violently beat his partner, is also still in the charts. In news, Delta and Northwest agree to merge to become the world’s biggest airline, and Silvio Berlusconi starts his third stint as Prime Minister of Italy. 
On television, meanwhile, we have Planet of the Ood. It’s interesting that this is the second consecutive story to have a direct shout-out to the Hartnell era. But where The Fires of Pompeii was just a moment of arch-fannishness (albeit the most rawly fannish in-joke the series had produced to date, serving as it does no narrative function whatsoever), Planet of the Ood’s invocation of The Sensorites is a deliberate reference confirming something Davies had floated on Doctor Who Confidential when the Ood debuted. Davies, in other words, actively wants the Ood to be read in light of an obscure monster from a terribly unloved story in Doctor Who’s first season.
The Sensorites is an odd duck of a story. It suffers even more than most 1960s stories from its languid pacing, and to a modern eye seems terribly cliche. But it is in practice a story that is cliche because of how often it’s been imitated. Indeed, upon reflection it is the story that introduces the idea that the alien can be a sense of wonder instead of terror, as what appear to be terrible monsters at first are steadily revealed to be gentle, kindly, and even timid creatures. (Note how this is paralleled closely with Susan’s awed description of her homeworld – it’s not a side detail, it’s the entire point of The Sensorites)
This is useful background for Planet of the Ood, which begins by pretending to be a story about monsters and ends somewhere almost entirely different. At first we are led to believe that the story is as it was in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit – a story about the Ood being taken over to go bad in some fashion. The iconography of the episode encourages this, with the problem afflicting the Ood being that their eyes turn red and they start killing things. Under standard Doctor Who iconography, this means possession, especially given that this is historically what the Ood are for.
So the story appears straightforward. And yet even from the start it’s clear that there’s going to be some sort of comeuppance for the evil corporation. For one thing, there’s an evil corporation, and standard Doctor Who logic draws conclusions from putting an evil corporation in the first act. More broadly, the Ood are a pointedly unanswered question. The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit raised the possibility that there was more to them than appeared, but also never quite rocked the boat. 
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Robook Launch

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Planet of the Ood will be covered on Tuesday.

I am pleased and indeed thrilled to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years in print and digital release. 
You can get it at the following locations.
Over the next couple of weeks it will appear in other ebook stores like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple, though if you have e-readers of that sort, I advise buying from Smashwords. Previous volumes, including the soon to be out of print first edition of the Hartnell book, are available from all of the same sites.
This book collects the TARDIS Eruditorum entries covering the first three of Tom Baker’s seven years in Doctor Who, from Robot through The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And so it includes:
  • Revised and expanded versions of every relevant essay.
  • Three book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on Managra, Corpse Marker, and The Valley of Death.
  • A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities entry on Shadows.
  • Book-exclusive essays on the nature of the Master, the TARDIS language circuits, matter transmats, how Genesis of the Daleks altered history, and the true history of the conspiracy.
  • Yet another brilliant cover by James Taylor, who discusses his process here.
  • Impeccable copyediting by Chris O’Leary.
  • Exactly four hundred and seventy instances of the letter Q.
If you do enjoy James’s phenomenal cover, mugs and t-shirts based on the design are for sale in the Eruditorum Press store. 
On Saturday, I asked what people were thankful for. I’m thankful for a lot of things, but one of the things I’m most thankful for is the community of readers that has formed around this blog, and that are unflaggingly and stunningly generous in their support. Every time I do one of these book launches I usually have a big spiel about this, but I’ll keep it short and sweet this time: writing is my job. If you enjoy my work, taking opportunities to support it by buying stuff is what keeps me able to do it. 
I expect the second edition of the Hartnell book to be available in early January. The second Tom Baker book will probably be in late summer of 2014. The Logopolis book will be slightly before that. 
Thank you everybody. This has been a heck of a month. 
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Myriad Universes: James Blish and Bantam Star Trek

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Nowadays, fandom-at-large tends to balk at the idea of a version of a Star Trek episode existing in another medium. It’s inconceivable to many in an age of Netflix, BitTorrent and Blu-ray season box sets to think that the televised story might not be the most memorable and recognisable version of it. But, in an era when television was still just starting to shed its reputation for being disposable entertainment and before commonly available home video recording technology, the only way for fans to archive their favourite episode were from their translation and recreation into other media.

Thus, the concept of the television novelization is a particularly historical, and historically significant, aspect of media studies inexorably dated to this era, and largely this era alone: Indeed, the 1970s are essentially the last point in the history of TV where novelizations play a significant role: The first Betamax VCRs came out in 1975 with VHS coming the next year, and by 1978 both types of devices were mass-production, at which point the age of the novelization was for all intents and purposes over. Which is perhaps fitting for our purposes, as the Bantam Books series of Star Trek novelizations by James Blish is a strange beast even by novelization standards. Like its parent show, Blish’s novelizations oftentimes felt like a leftover relic from a previous age, and their peak and subsequent decline in the early-to-mid 1970s in many way mirrors the twists and turns of Star Trek itself during this period.

The choice of James Blish to take on adapting Star Trek for mass-market paperback is at once curious and also somewhat telling. Blish was already an accomplished science fiction author and had been publishing stories decades before he began his association with the franchise. He was also, as you might perhaps expect, firmly and resolutely in the Golden Age tradition: Blish’s background was in biology and after training at Rutgers and Columbia University, he became a medtech in the army during World War II. Afterwards, he became chief science editor for Pfizer. Before that, he was a member of the Futurians who were in fact not, as I initially suspected, the time travellers from the far future who sent a mutated King Ghidorah to fight Super Godzilla in Tokyo in 1991, but were actually a group of sci-fi fans-turned writers who got their start in the Greater New York Science Fiction Club. Outside of Star Trek, Blish is most known for his Cities in Flight series, which depicts a future where anti-aging drugs and antigravity devices are commonplace, and space travel has progressed to the point where entire cities can be propelled through the stars on their own volition, and his “Pantropy Trilogy” of short stories, exploring how humans might be biologically augmented to survive in extraterrestrial environments, thus removing the need for planetary terraforming.

At first glance then Blish appears to be possibly the most bog-standard Golden Age-style science fiction writer we’ve seen since Isaac Asimov. His biography does, in fact, seem to paint him as almost stereotypically so: If one were to come up with a list of qualities that might comprise a model Golden Age writer, well, Blish ticks pretty much all of the boxes.…

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Saturday Waffling (November 30th, 2013)

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Hello all.

The Tom Baker 1 book is all finished, and will be launching imminently. Hartnell v2 is still on schedule. And that’s me releasing way too many books in a short period done with.

I’m in the midst of the first properly gonzo thing I’ve done in quite a while, so am going to keep this short. In the spirit of the recent American holiday, then, what are you thankful for?…

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He Sets Fire To Rome (The Fires of Pompeii)

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“What? No. Don’t cast him. He’d make an awful Doctor. He
looks like a murderous cab driver for God’s sake.”
It’s April 12th, 2008. Estelle is at number one with “American Boy.” Sam Sparro, Kooks, Mariah Carey, Madonna and Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown (a domestic abuser) also chart. In news, Mark Penn resigns from the Clinton campaign, which is interesting mostly because he resigned for reasons other than gross incompetence. London does (depending on your perspective) a rubbish or great job hosting part of the Olympic torch run, as an anti-China protester manages to briefly snatch the torch. It goes similarly well in Paris, where the torch is actually extinguished by authorities. Then, in San Francisco, the torch and runner briefly disappear entirely before being run along a different route where nobody knows to watch or protest it.
Speaking of fire and the classical world, The Fires of Pompeii. First of all, before we go at all into this story, let’s agree to set aside The Waters of Mars. Everything here is obviously going to come up again in that post. But we did a fine job of shutting up about The Deadly Assassin while we worked our way through earlier versions of Time Lord history, and an equally fine job of ignoring The War Games until the time came, so let’s do the same here and take this story entirely on its own terms. Let’s also note that this was written prior to Day of the Doctor and makes no effort to understand the Time War in the context of that episode.
Similarly, when it comes to Peter Capaldi, let’s note that it’s sad that such a great actor blows his opportunity to be on Doctor Who in what is by and large an underwritten bit part. Given that the new series tends not to recycle actors, it’s borderline tragic that we’re not going to get to see him again after this. Also, one of the actresses playing the Sibylline Sisters is quite good, and wasted in the part. A pity, through and through.
It is no secret that I am not, by and large, a fan of stories that treat the alteration of history as a moral dilemma. I’ve discussed my reasons for this before, but the long and short of it is that it’s an entirely fake moral dilemma. Because altering history is at present completely impossible, there are no principles on which to hang an ethical debate about it. It’s as hollow an ethical debate as whether or not it’s acceptable to use grozzlebarks in order to banderflinch. Which is to say that any supposed ethical principles involved are, in fact, purely the invention of the writer. It’s an ethical debate without substance – one in which the writer picks the outcome they want and then creates some technobabble to explain why that’s the ethical position.
Except it’s worse than that, because the position taken is inevitably that changing history is wrong. And so the only sort of message that one can take away from these stories is that things must remain the way they are, often because of the incomprehensible explanations of the People Who Are In Charge Of These Things.
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Flight Simulator: The Star Trek Text Video Game

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The Star Trek Text Video Game

In one of my other lives I moonlight as a video game journalist. Now, when I say that I mean I write largely gonzo stream-of-consciousness mytho-symbolic reactions to video games from twenty-seven years ago, which is admittedly what you’d probably expect from me. The point being video games have been an incredibly important part of my life for a very long time. So much so that I’m far more comfortable associating with and relating to video games then I am to pretty much any other kind of creative expression with the exception of music, and this influences the approach I take to media studies and just media consumption in general. It’s also why I find it…not so much disquieting as ironically curious that my biggest project to date is a sprawling overview of a franchise most known for its film and television work. On the whole, I don’t work well with scripted drama. I feel I’ve never been able to truly appreciate it the way most people do and that I keep coming at it from weird angles. In that sense my long relationship with Star Trek and the scant few other non-game or -music works I hold dear to me is almost a fluke.

But Star Trek itself has a very important relationship with video games that goes back almost as long as video games do. The idea of a licensed video game is an interesting one: For this kind of game to be successful it has to be beholden to both the standards of good game design and fealty to its source material. It’s a very thin line to walk and too far in either direction all but guarantees failure, if not commercially or critically definitely aesthetically. My own history with Star Trek is also quite bound up with my history with video games: Some of the first games I ever played were Star Trek ones, and it’s been a minor life goal of mine to find that one elusive Star Trek game that both works as a game and fits with my conception of what Star Trek should be like (and given the way so many licensed games turn out and the fact not even most televised Star Trek holds to what I think Star Trek should be like, you can probably tell what a fruitless endeavour this is). But even so, there have been a number of Star Trek video games that have proved to be both historically and personally significant, and this series looks at some of them.

And so it happens that one of the earliest computer games distributed as part of a pack of games written in BASIC for early home computers happened to be based on the original Star Trek. What became The Star Trek Text Video Game was born out of an early jam session held by programmer Mike Mayfield and some of his high school friends in 1971, and was eventually ported to the HP-2000C when Hewlett-Packard asked Maynard for a version of it.…

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Dawn Transformed the Sky into an Abattoir (The Last War in Albion Part 20: Moores’ 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. 
“It would be equally irresponsible of me to instruct up-and-coming writers on how to write sickly extravagant captions like ‘Dawn transformed the sky into an abattoir’ or whatever.” – Alan Moore, Writing For Comics
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Steve Moore, Alan Moore’s closest friend and confidant over the course of the War, came to work on Marvel UK’s newly launched Doctor Who Weekly in 1979, where he created the character of Abslom Daak, a close cousin of the Axel Pressbutton character he co-created with Alan Moore and wrote for Warrior. In one issue of Warrior, Moore interviewed his own “Pedro Henry” pseudonym on how to write comics…
On one level this is the same sort of tightly structural approach that characterizes Alan Moore’s work. But on another, there’s a fundamentally different sort of focus. As Steve Moore puts it, “if Dez asks for six pages, you give him six… the same as some editors will ask you for a set number of frames… and if they say forty frames, they don’t mean thirty-nine or forty-one. If you turn up saying ‘Sorry, boss, I couldn’t fit it in so I’ve used four extra frames’ then that, quite simply, is bad writing.” This highlights the degree to which Steve Moore writes his comics as a professional concern, within the material realities of publishing. That’s certainly not to say that Alan Moore doesn’t, but there’s a clear difference between the sort of ruthless targeting of what the editor wants and the storytelling Alan Moore engages in. 
This perspective on Steve Moore’s work helps explain the odd tone of Laser Eraser and Pressbutton. Moore was tasked with a specific set of editorial concerns; revamp the old Abslom Daak strips into something for Warrior, using the comedy character of Axel Pressbutton. That the resulting script is a bit disjointed in many ways speaks to just how good Steve Moore was at giving editors what they want, no matter how strange. But it contrasts sharply with Alan Moore, who took his Marvelman revamp and his mandate to make a Night Raven clone and ran in unexpected directions with them that ended up far from the original concepts. 
Figure 151: Unsurprisingly, Selene made an appearance in Steve Moore’s
Doctor Who comics (Steve Moore and Dave Gibbons, Doctor Who
Monthly #50, 1981)
This sort of diligence also explains why when Mills and Wagner departed the lead strip after Doctor Who Weekly #34, during the pause in the midst of Star Tigers, Steve Moore was promptly promoted to replace them.
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Sensor Scan Bonus: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

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This is the second part of my reading of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in the context of Star Trek and the larger pop culture landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. You may wish to check out part one (covering the period of the show when it was actually known as Mysteries Five) first if you haven’t done so already, or even if you have just for a bit of a refresher. This part goes into more detail about the actual show and what I think the main characters represent. And, like the previous part, it’s a revised, remixed, expanded and otherwise tweaked version of a piece I wrote a year ago on one of my other blogs.

I’m not going to pull what Gene Roddenberry did with “Assignment: Earth” and pretend this isn’t a backdoor pilot for another project I’d really like to write someday. This is manifestly why it’s an overstuffed two-parter: I’m trying to condense my entire reading and thesis into one blog post when covering Scooby-Doo could well be a project of comparable size and scope to Vaka Rangi. However, the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is still one of the biggest cultural signifiers of 1969, so I’ve really no choice but to put this here. My apologies in advance. That being said, if you’re at all interested in hearing me talk more about Scooby-Doo (as if for some reason this ridiculous spiel wasn’t enough for you) or just want to discuss it further, please do let me know in the comments or anywhere else you’re able to get ahold of me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If there’s another pop culture franchise that’s meant as much to me and about which I have as many complex, conflicting emotions as Star Trek, I’m not at all ashamed to admit it has to be Scooby-Doo.

You find yourself on a dirt path. It’s an avenue lined with leafless trees on either side. The Moon is full, and the moonlight shining through the trees gives the gnarled landscape a transfixing, grotesque otherworldly beauty. In the distance there’s an old Victorian estate. Through the evening dusk, you can just make out that it seems completely abandoned, all save for one window that remains eerily lit. There’s a crack of thunder, and a flock of bats comes flying at you. There’s an almost legibly thick haze in the air, blurring the boundaries between night and day, between our world and the others. How far across the expanse does the dream extend? How long have you been here? Difficult to say. All you know is that you need to get to your next gig and your dog’s hungry in the backseat.


When last we left Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, we dubbed it the reanimated shell of a dead show we didn’t get to see forever haunted by the potential its predecessor hinted at. While in many ways this remains true, one of the most fascinating things about Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!…

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