Eruditorum Press

An entryist coup for your subconscious

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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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Coffee (LOST)

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“Artists should not be trusted. If an artist is not deceitful
every so often in the cause of his art, then he is a poor artist.”
— Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
LOST was quite possibly one of the biggest shows to hit television in the last decade. More remarkable was the fact that it was ostensibly “cult television” and yet it still hit it big in the mainstream. It was never the highest rated show on television, but it was in the American top-20 for most of its six-year run, it was the most recorded TV show at the time, and it was also an international sensation. It garnered 55 Emmy nominations (the American equivalent of BAFTAs) winning 11; many critics once called one of the greatest shows ever made.
As far as this blog is concerned, we shouldn’t be surprised. Like Doctor Who, LOST provided a means by which disparate genres could be smashed together. Doctor Who has the TARDIS; LOST had The Island. A place for people who were metaphorically lost in their lives, it allowed all kinds of different stories to play out. One week The Fugitive would be running about helping people and all the while trying to evade the law. Next week there might be a medical drama, followed by a comedy, a family drama, a love story, a con game, or a tragedy. This all got mixed in with the adventure of exploring a mysterious Island, populated by ghosts, time travel, an Island god, and a Smoke Monster for good measure. It hit the sweet spot of soap tropes and “genre” mythology.
Today its reputation is far different, and it’s impossible to go back and watch it again without keeping this in mind. The finale (as was the case for most of its final season) was largely panned, and it isn’t unusual to find it on a critic’s “10 worst” list of some sort or another. People expected answers that were never delivered; new but less compelling characters came to the forefront; the show veered into iconography better found in a greeting card penned by Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Which really begs the question: What the hell happened?
~~~ whooosh ~~~
KATE: We have to go back for him.
CHARLIE: Go back? There? Kate, there’s a certain
gargantuan quality about this thing.
(1×01: Pilot, Part 1)
~~~ whooosh ~~~
It’s August 15th, 2005. Oasis is poised to hit number one, with McFly, Babyshambles, Iron Maiden, and British Whale all charting. Americans are killing Iraqis, but Indonesia signs a peace treaty with the Free Aceh Movement, so there’s that. India celebrates its 60th Independence Day. Helios Airways Flight 522 crashes near Athens, killing 121.
While on Netflix, it’s Disc One of Season One of LOST. I inhale it quicker than Bill Clinton can suck down a cigar. Yes, I’m late, almost a year late to the LOST party (it premiered on September 22nd, the Fall Equinox of 2004) but it won’t take me long to go back and get caught up.
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Sensor Scan: Space Oddity

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First of all, let me say I am without question the least qualified person in the world to be talking about David Bowie. I’m as familiar with him and his career as the next person I suppose, but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself any kind of expert. There are people who have spent their entire lives following David Bowie and to whom his music is as formative and important as, well, Star Trek is to me I guess.

That said there’s simply no getting out of writing about “Space Oddity”. It’s an irreducible part of the cultural zeitgeist of mid-to-late 1969 and having it released not a month after the original Star Trek was canceled (for real this time) is about as revealing as it’s possible for an amateur scholar of media history to hope for. However, I’m also not going to pretend I have anything remotely resembling original insight to offer about something this iconic: I’ll just link you to this piece by Chris O’Leary out of Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which is pretty much the definitive take on “Space Oddity”, and just humbly ask for your patience as I toss out some random assorted thoughts about what this all might have to do with Star Trek and the state of science fiction at the end of the 1960s.

While “Space Oddity” has been rightfully read to be about a lot of different things, one of the most reoccurring motifs I notice in the song is, essentially, Bowie eulogizing the Space Age. Far from the Golden Age archetype of the bold, heroic space explorer, Major Tom is a soft-spoken, reserved fellow and his spaceflight is a gigantic publicity spectacle: It feels like the events of the song are being broadcast on national radio, and Ground Control even straight-up asks him what brand of shirts he’s wearing so they can squeeze an advertisement into the live coverage. This would of course tie into the general countercultural belief at the time that the Apollo programme (don’t forget Apollo 11 touched down that same summer) was in truth a giant PR stunt for the US government instead of an actual scientific expedition (which, sadly, sort of turned out to be the case).

And, although I’m not keen to draw direct causal links between the Apollo missions and the change in science fiction (or Star Trek, for that matter) there was a cultural shift that this speaks to. Whatever Apollo 11 actually was, one thing it proved pretty decisively is that when it came to outer space, science fact didn’t really look like science fiction. Whether or not you think it’s a problem for Star Trek that the Apollo missions proved the Moon was essentially a hunk of rock and dust (which I don’t think it is: To me the Moon has always remained a beautifully stark, hauntingly evocative alien landscape: With the exception of the mushroom bit, Georges Méliès largely got it right, though Hergé was closer) the fact the space mission itself was troublingly bound up in Cold War politics, capitalist pandering and militaristic bicep flexing surely would be-It’s hard to keep your sense of wonder about the universe with all that going on, especially when you and your friends are being relentlessly persecuted by the very people asking you to love NASA and the astronauts.…

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Believing the Victim

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A week or two ago there was a bit of a to-do within American comics fandom when Brian Wood, a prominent writer often praised for his commitment to feminism and his well-written female characters, was accused of sexual harassment by Tess Fowler, an illustrator and artist. This has been the occasion for a lot of hand-wringing about the chronic problem of harassment at conventions, which mostly seems to consist of people making blog posts about how this is a serious issue. There’s very little sense of what can be done.

So here’s a suggestion: by default, we should believe the victims. On a basic, human, personal level, if someone makes an accusation of abuse, assault, or harassment, we should believe them.

Here’s what happens instead. Fowler’s account of what happened was, inevitably, picked over by large swaths of the male-dominated comics fandom who were eager to minimize the severity of what Wood did or to find a way to blame her for it. All of this is accompanied by lots of skepticism, usually with phrases like that Wood is “innocent until proven guilty” or that it’s “his word against hers.”

It’s not, of course. Fowler noted that she had several people who had e-mailed her with similar experiences. I’ve seen at least one person come forward with a similar allegation against Wood. There’s a pattern of behavior on Brian Wood’s part that’s disturbing, to say the least.

But never mind the specifics. Let’s look at some of the usual canards that get brought out around this point in the discussion, just in the abstract case. Because this isn’t really about Brian Wood. “Innocent until proven guilty,” for instance. Which is an important principle… in criminal law. It’s there because the standards by which the state can declare that someone ought be locked up in prison really should be high. If we are, as a society, going to sanction violence against people then we need to have serious safeguards. And one of them is that we wait until there’s proof in a court of law, beyond a reasonable doubt, of guilt.

But that’s not the standard that should apply to everyday interactions. If a guy at a comics convention offers to take you up to his room and you know that three people have reported that he’s sexually harassed them or assaulted them, you’re not unreasonable for deciding that you don’t want to go up there. Even if he’s never been “proven” guilty. And you’re not unreasonable for thinking that if someone knows that the guy chatting you up has a litany of accusations against him they should probably warn you about it.

Similarly, the “his word against hers” line. Yes, it is. But once you have an accusation of assault or harassment, the person being accused has a pretty obvious reason to deny it regardless of what actually happened. Whereas the victim… doesn’t really. I mean, yes, false accusations happen occasionally. But they’re very, very rare – much rarer than the rate at which sexual assault and harassment take place.…

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The Size of the Mouth and the Size of the Brain (Partners in Crime)

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DEMIURGE! (This has to be the most obscure caption
I’ve done in ages.)

It’s April 5th, 2008. As you might imagine, very little has changed. We’ve just calmly plowed from the end of Torchwood Season Two into Doctor Who’s fourth season, specifically Partners in Crime.

Partners in Crime stands out as one of the most structural pieces Davies has ever done. Davies, on the commentary track, describes the story as in part a work of petulance on his part. Given that everyone expected he’d do a darker story to help change the perception of Donna from The Runaway Bride, he decided to turn towards comedy more thoroughly than he had in the past. And yet in all of this what jumps out is that Catherine Tate doesn’t do any comedy bits until her “mime at the Doctor” sequence when they finally meet. She’s in a comedy, yes, but she’s playing it straight the entire time.
This, more than anything, constitutes the reinvention of the character. Had Davies taken the obvious route of just throwing Donna into something dark and serious (i.e. either of the next two stories) he would have ended up with a functional character, but at the expense of having any reason to give the role to Catherine Tate. You don’t cast Catherine Tate for the latest iteration of generic companion. So Donna needs to retain the frisson of wrongness that animated The Runaway Bride. There the joke was that David Tennant was stuck with a character off of The Catherine Tate Show, and this was not a narrative he was well-suited to. 
But a comedy sketch character can barely be stretched over an hour (Davies, quite sensibly, gives her an emotional arc so that she grows at the end). To do it over a season would be suicide – a fact so self-evident that even Doctor Who fans realized it and panicked when Tate was announced as the new companion. And so Donna had to be moved away from being a sketch character while still finding a way to retain the fact that she was an unusual choice as a companion.
Hence the structure, where we get an overtly comedic episode in which Catherine Tate gets exactly two comedy bits, only one of which – the one at the very end of the episode – involves her playing a Catherine Tate Show character. This provides a sort of halfway house for Donna as a character – she retains the genre colliding aspects she was first created with, but doesn’t actually have to be that character full-time in the narrative. 
Instead, Donna is built up as a sorrowful character. The key sequence comes when she all but watches a woman die, then goes back to her mother’s where she’s berated and belittled for a scene (done gorgeously in time lapse, with Donna sitting wearily at a table, never moving as the scene cuts forward on her mother’s diatribe), and then goes to talk to her grandfather who is supportive but inescapably sad.
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“I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.”: Turnabout Intruder

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Yes, this is Kirk and Spock. Yes, they’re holding hands. Fanfic writers, start your pencils.

There’s a sense of poetic justice in having Star Trek go out on an episode that names “the Enterprise family” just as it threatens to destroy it because it doesn’t respect women.

This was an episode I always consciously avoided: Partially because I have sort of an instinctual reticence towards big emotional finales, and while “Turnabout Intruder” certainly isn’t that, it’s still very much the end of an era and I can sometimes have a hard time dealing with that: I guess its because I don’t like the idea of my stories having to end, or being forced to say goodbye to characters I’ve grown so accustomed to over the course of several years. I always needed to know there were more adventures, or at least the potential for more adventures.

That said, the biggest reason I avoided “Turnabout Intruder” was because it looked like utter crap. This episode is famously bad, and there are certainly no more ominous signs and portents on the last bow of the Original Series than the credit “Teleplay By Arthur Singer. Story By Gene Roddenberry”. So, I went into this episode absolutely dreading having to watch it. Happily, it turned out to not be nearly as bad as I expected-It’s certainly not the worst effort from either of its two co-writers.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s actually any good either.

Answering a distress signal from an archaeological excavation on Camus II, Kirk, Spock and McCoy encounter Kirk’s old lover, Doctor Janice Lester, now the head of the expedition, who is suffering from severe radiation poisoning. As Spock and McCoy go to investigate a cry for help further down the dig site, Lester and expresses resentment towards Kirk over the fact their relationship never worked out and her inability to fulfill her dream of becoming a starship captain as Starfleet prohibits women from holding command positions. Suddenly, Lester reveals her illness is a ruse and traps Kirk in an ancient consciousness transference device and transplants her life energy into his body, intending to command the Enterprise in his name…and then to kill him and her old body. This all happens in the teaser, mind you, and the entire remaining forty-eight minutes or so is dedicated towards watching Lester attempt to keep cover on the ship as her increasingly erratic behaviour starts alienating her from the rest of the crew, culminating in her attempting to execute the entire senior staff on mutiny charges.

“Turnabout Intruder” has, clearly, quite a number of rather significant issues. Let’s tackle the really obvious one straight off: This episode has serious gender problems. Getting cited as the premier example of reactionary sexism in Star Trek by the Star Trek fans themselves probably counts for something. This episode is typically seen as a slap in the face to feminists, and it’s absolutely easy to see why it has that reputation: Lester is a megalomaniacal, murderous woman who wants to usurp a man in a position of power and, once she gets there, she slowly starts to become unhinged and cracks under the pressure, eventually culminating in a massive meltdown (that Scotty even literally describes as “hysterical”), indicating she’s incapable of handling the duties and responsibilities such positions of leadership require.…

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Afterword

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Wow, letters in the title.  That feels so last month.

But, this being Doctor-Who-Boxing-Day, normal service has been resumed.  So, until I do my threatened anti-50, in which I count Doctor Who‘s political fails in minus numbers, we’re back to titles which utilise the alphabet.

I’m only half joking about the anti-50.  I had my doubts and worries all along about the whole concept of the anniversary countdown.  It seemed churlish to include bits of Doctor Who that I hate, of which there are plenty.  I mean, if you can’t be positive on the big birthday…  Besides, the whole concept of the Jubilee originates as an apocalyptic and insurrectionary notion in ancient Jewish resistance to Roman power, a carnival of the oppressed… so it’s supposed to be a radical celebration.  On the other hand, relentless positivity just isn’t what this blog does (as you’ll have noticed).  There’s plenty of writing out there (some of it very good) focusing solely on what’s great about the show.  From the standpoint of ‘social justice Who fandom’ (which, I’m delighted to learn from tumblr, is a thing), it makes no honest sense to just be panglossian about the series.  Anyone who has trudged through my whole countdown will have noticed that I increasingly allowed criticism to creep into the posts, as context.  But, ultimately, I came to praise the Doctor not to bury him.  And, while I stand by that, it always worried me a bit.

Another thing I regret about the 50 is the amount of stuff I had to leave out.  At several points during the project, I felt lost for ideas… then I would immediately find that I had too many ideas to fit into my diminishing numbers.  I ended up quite surprised by what I covered and what I didn’t cover.  I was totally going to do an entry for ‘The Krotons’, ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’, ‘Inferno’, ‘The Mutants’, ‘The Savages’, ‘Turn Left’, ‘The Next Doctor’, ‘The Ark in Space’, ‘The Face of Evil’, ‘The Brain of Morbius’, ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’, etc., etc., etc.  Somehow, they didn’t get in.  Somehow, I ended up talking about ‘The Underwater Menace’ rather than, say, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’.  Weird.  But I suppose that’s what happens when you commit yourself to a tight schedule in which you must, essentially, make up some (hopefully) passably coherent stuff, totally on the fly, two or three times a day.

This leads me to a clarification I desperately want to make: the countdown may be a list, but it definitely isn’t a ‘Top 50’.  It’s not a list of what I consider to be ‘the best’.  There is no hierarchy intended here at all, though I do consider some of the stories I wrote about to be superior to others.  Indeed, I repeatedly found myself writing about episodes that, on the whole, I don’t like, over episodes that I adore but which I had to sideline.  I’m broadly in sympathy with Lawrence Miles’ opinion, expressed in this much-misunderstood post, that ‘ranking’ lists are just not a worthwhile thing to do, and that Doctor Who really only makes sense in historical context. …

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