Eruditorum Press

Some sort of samizdat wind effect

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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Saturday Waffling (November 23rd, 2013)

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Let’s talk about Jack Graham, writer of Shabogan Grafitti, who has just wrapped up his 50 post countdown of Marxist readings of Doctor Who scenes across the years. Cheeky, passionate, insightful, and altogether wonderful, it has been, for my money, the best part of the 50th Anniversary so far.

Read them all, but if you must have highlights, 3, 4, 15, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32, 37, 47, and 49.

Seriously. I have not even been in the running for best Doctor Who blog this month, and it’s not just because I spent it stuck on sodding Torchwood. It’s because Jack has hit this one out of the park. Repeatedly. I’ve read each one with a hint of jealousy, wishing I’d written them. He’s just about the most vibrant voice in Doctor Who blogging these days, and this has been an absolute masterstroke by him. Unless there’s something on TV you really want to watch, there’s no better way to spend your time today than reading these.

Wait, is there something on TV today?

Edit: Oh, hey, yes, there was. Thoughts?…

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What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.

1

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard.  She walks into a Police Box.  She’s in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut.  The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible.  We have “discovered television”.  We can put huge buildings inside small boxes.  We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole.  The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids – the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces – can be made visual.

Doctor Who‘s very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production.  So much so that living on that limit became its raison d’etre.  Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done.  And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next.  As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘The Space Museum’ pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking… and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show – which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production – crunch up against an allegory about empire.  This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room.  The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production.  Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told.  The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I’ll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works.  The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It’s fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history.  It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from ‘historicals’ and into SF.  Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian.  And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children’s literature upon which the show is so reliant.  In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures.  Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.

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The Doctor picks up a sharp rock.  Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it.  The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool.  Given that this story is about ‘cavemen’ who are dying out because they’ve forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.…

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“Go on, tell them,” says Jacko to Sean. 

“Tell them what? I’ll tell them nothing. They’re not people like us, they’re just a bunch of sardines.”

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

“You heard me,” jeers Sean, “Cold-blooded fishes. You haven’t got a drop of good red blood in your body.”

They don’t like that either.  They’ve been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it’s implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don’t make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

“A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!” Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say… Sean’s Irish, hence his “gift of the gab” (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

“All right, all right, all right,” laughs Sean, “Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?”

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he’s like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff’s regime.  He hasn’t been surgically mutilated, but he’s been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and… oh look, I’m reiterating.)

“Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?” asks Sean rhetorically, “It can’t be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That’s why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You’re men, aren’t you? Well, start the blockade right now!”

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people’s expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won’t attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people’s underwater strike is indescribable.  And that’s good.  It must be seen to be believed… and by that I don’t mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that’s good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It’s a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially. …

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“Not so much of that oatmeal, girl,” says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, “It’s only pikemen we’re feeding, not horses.”

They’re in Irongron’s castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest.  Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron’s stew.

“Don’t the guards on the gate get stew?” she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor’s knock-out potion.

“What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They’ll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet.”

So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.

“I’m not afraid of men. They don’t own the world.”

Well, they kind-of do… but Sarah isn’t discussing actual property relations.  She’s talking about the way the world should work, with no one group ‘owning’ it.

“Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?” she demands.

“What else should we do?” asks Meg.

“Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you’re tired of working for them like slaves.”

“We are slaves,” says Meg.

Wow.  No mincing words there.

“Then you should set yourselves free,” says Sarah.

None there either.

“Oh? And how should we do that?”

That’s a trickier question.  It always is.  But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.

“Don’t you want to be free?” she demands.  Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.

“Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl,” says Meg, “We have our place.”

You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.

“What subservient poppycock!  You’re still living in the Middle Ages!”

Yeah.  We are, in many ways.  We’re meant to laugh at this outburst, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re also meant to be on Sarah’s side.

There are all sorts of problems with this story.  Sarah is – at least in conception – a stereotypical ‘wimmin’s libber’, all touchiness and naivety.  The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we’re meant to think this is funny.  She’s made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement.  For instance, there’s the bit quoted above about the “lusty” guards… it’s obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy.  And so on.  Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism?  I’m not going to argue.

But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves –  and aware of the fact that she’s a slave – by saying “set yourselves free”.

It shines out amidst the crap.…

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