Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

“Dust to dust”: All Our Yesterdays

, 9

“I knew it was a bad idea to install that survival mod.”

“All Our Yesterdays” is the second, and final, submission by Jean Lisette Aroeste, whose previous credit was “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”. It’s also the final official fan submission in Star Trek for awhile, the last in the Original Series not to mention the second to last episode in the Original Series overall. Suffice to say, there is a distinctly funereal air about the general proceedings, which isn’t at all helped by how stupendously uninspiring this episode is.

It is, however, significantly more coherent than the previous episode made out of an Aroeste script at least. While on a mission to ensure the planetary civilization of Sarpeidon evacuates in time to avoid the imminent supernova that will engulf their solar system in three hours (how exactly Starfleet was planning to evacuate an entire planet in three hours is not explained), the Enterprise finds the planet now entirely free of inhabited life. Beaming down, Kirk, Spock and McCoy find themselves in a gigantic library curated by an enigmatic man named Mr. Atoz, who runs the installation all by himself with the aid of his many duplicates (how the Enterprise failed to pick up Atoz’s life signs is similarly unexplained). As the landing party peruses the discs that archive Sarpeidon’s history Kirk hears a scream from outside and goes through a doorway to investigate, only to find himself on a city street in what appears to be England in the 17th Century. Spock and McCoy follow, but find themselves in a frozen arctic landscape from Sarpeidon’s ice age. Spock and McCoy are rescued by a woman named Zarabeth, who confirms that the purpose of the library was to tie into a time portal, which allows people to travel back in time to any period in Sarpeidon’s history, and that the planet’s entire populace must have done so to avoid the supernova.

Reading this episode becomes pretty straightforward once you realise Aroeste was the librarian at UCLA. “All Our Yesterdays” seems quite overtly about the idea that books in a library can transport you to other places and times, especially in Aroeste’s original brief, which had a lot more time travel shenanigans. Entitled “A Handful of Dust”, Aroeste’s original story featured Spock and McCoy trapped in a desert suffering from heat stroke before encountering a band of mutant humanoids. Kirk ended up in a period reminiscent of Barbary Coast-era San Francisco where he encounters another time traveller, who helps him return to the library and rescue Spock and McCoy. Kirk and his fellow time traveller destroy the portal and escape just in time to watch everything crumble to dust in their hands.

Once again this is an instance of an episode that was considerably monkeyed around with and for which the original submission seems considerably more interesting, so I’m going to be talking primarily about that. But first, a few major things changed between “A Handful of Dust” and “All Our Yesterdays”.…

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“I know it sounds mad,” says Martha, “but when the Doctor became human, he took the alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It’s not really a watch, it just looks like a watch.”

“And ‘alien’ means ‘not from abroad’, I take it,” enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.

“The man you call John Smith… he was born on another world.”

“A different species.”

“Yeah.”

Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she’s not having any of this nonsense.

“Then tell me,” she presses, “in this fairy tale, who are you?”

“Just a friend. I’m not… I mean, you haven’t got a rival, as much as I might… Just his friend.”

“And human, I take it?”

She humouring the deranged girl.  As John said earlier, it must be culture shock.  Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher… an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.

“Human,” confirms Martha, “Don’t worry. And more than that: I just don’t follow him around. I’m training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine.”

This is too much.  Aliens… that’s one thing.  But this?  Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation.  This is more than just silly, this is… indecent.

“Well that certainly is nonsense,” she snaps, “Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour.”

Martha stops.

“Oh, do you think?”  She holds up her hand.  “Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row….” she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, “Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal.”

She is as irritated as Joan.  The two face each other across a chasm.

“You read that in a book,” says Joan weakly.

“Yes,” snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, “to pass my exams!”

I have issues with this story.  There’s the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start.  Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire.  The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England.  Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something).  It shows most directly in the Doctor’s donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as ‘respect for the fallen’ and ‘help for heroes’ and all that dishonest guff.  It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he’s on the right side, the side of assumptions that ‘we’ supposedly all agree on. …

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“I have in my hand a piece of paper,” says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, “which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!”

The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.

“When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year…” Stevens begins.

“It were a shame, that was!” heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.

“No, my friends,” says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, “we must not be bitter. We must face the facts.”

Note the ‘we’; the most abused word in political discourse.  As in ‘we’re all in this together’.

“Coal is a dying industry,” asserts Stevens.

The miners shout “Rubbish! Rubbish!”

When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish.  Mining was always subsidised.  

“Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!”  So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people’s jobs.  “I have it here in black and white!”

There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots.  The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob – a trope that goes back a long way.

“Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!”  The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.

In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene.  Miners were powerful and militant in 1973.  They were unionised and they were winning.  They weren’t sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.

In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient.  By the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in ’74 (the year after this story was broadcast).  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.

And when Stevens says “oil is the future” he’s only telling part of the truth.  The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure.  Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc.  This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism… which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973.…

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1/2.*/”£5/8£-&'(?)WEX*zz (The Last War in Albion Part 19: Abslom Daak, Pressbutton and Laser Eraser)

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This is the second 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. 

“Oh, and by the way, Pedro Henry is really Steve – HEY!! Leave it out, you! This is my typewriter! My typ1/2.*/”£5/8£-&'(?)WEX*zz” – Warren Ellis, fan letter to Warrior, 1983


PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s closest friend over the course of the War is Steve Moore, to whom he is not related. Steve Moore is a long-time comics professional who started in 1968, and bounced around the British comics industry in both an editorial and creative capacity. By 1979 he’d settled in as the writer of backup features, and, later, the main feature in Marvel UK’s new Doctor Who Weekly, where he would create one of his more enduring creations…

Figure 144: Abslom Daak makes a solemn vow. (Steve Moore
and Steve Dillon in Doctor Who Weekly #20, 1980)

The most significant of Steve Moore’s backup strips were a pair of stories introducing the character Abslom Daak. Daak’s first appearance was in Doctor Who Weekly #17 in a strip illustrated by Steve Dillon and titled simply Abslom Daak… Dalek-Killer. It opens with Daak being convicted of “murder, pillage, piracy, massacre, and other crimes too horrible to bring to the public attention” and being sentenced to his choice of “death by vaporisation or exile D-K.” Daak’s response is that “vaporisation doesn’t hurt,” and so he is teleported to a planet occupied by Daleks to kill as many as he can before they inevitably kill him. Thus do Daak and his chain-sword plunge to the Dalek-occupied world of Mazam, where Daak meets Taiyin and rescues her from Daleks. The story consists of Daak repeatedly trying to engage in suicidal assaults against the Daleks, openly wanting to die, and Taiyin steadily falling in love with him and trying to save him from his self-destructive impulses. Daak remains an over the top hero throughout; he wise-cracking, violent, lightly misogynistic, and virtually unkillable. The story ends with one of the handful of Daleks Daak has not murdered killing
Taiyin just as she admits her love for Daak. With her dying breath she tells him to live his life, leading him to scream his promise to “kill every damned, stinking Dalek in the galaxy!”

Daak’s story picks up about two months later in Moore’s Star Tigers, the first installment of which speaks volumes about how pleased Marvel UK was with Daak’s first appearance.
…

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The Doctor has refused Enlightenment.  Turlough is nonchalantly (rather too nonchalantly) picking at his fingernails when the White Guardian offers him a share.

“It’s a diamond,” he says, staring at the massive, glowing crystal, “The size!  It could buy a galaxy. I can have that?”

The White Guardian tells him he can.

“I would point out,” interjects the Black Guardian, “that under the terms of our agreement, it is mine… unless, of course, you wish to surrender something else in its place. The Doctor is in your debt for his life. Give me the Doctor, and you can have this,” he indicates the crystal, “the TARDIS, whatever you wish.”

Turlough is evidently extremely tempted.  He has to struggle with himself.  When he shoves it towards the Black Guardian, it couldn’t be more obvious that he is angry and disappointed with the choice he feels have has to make.

“Here,” he shouts petulantly, burying his face, “take it!”

Even so, he does make that choice.

The Black Guardian bursts into flames and vanishes, gurgling and screaming.

“Light destroys the dark,” comments the White Guardian.  “I think you will find your contract terminated,” he tells Turlough.

Turlough takes a smaller crystal from his trouser pocket.  It’s the one the Black Guardian gave him to seal their bargain.  It has turned back, charred by the same flames that consumed the Black Guardian.  Turlough drops it.

“I never wanted the agreement in the first place,” he mutters.

Tegan is sceptical.

“You believe him because he gave up Enlightenment for your sake,” she tells the Doctor.

“You’re missing the point,” the Doctor says, “Enlightenment was not the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice.”

Well, isn’t that twee.

Except that it’s a bit more grounded that it sounds.

Listen to the words everyone’s been using.  Diamond.  Buy.  Terms.  Agreement.  Contract.  Mine.  Debt.  This is the language of trade, of commerce, of business, of employment, of property, of value and wealth and commodification.  Turlough has been desperately trying to wriggle out of a contract, a job.  He was basically coerced into it and given a misleading description of what it entailed.  He responded by slacking off, dragging his feet, working to rule, fobbing off the boss with endless excuses.  The boss got sick of this and tried to sack him.  Then, Turlough was presented with an opportunity to take up an altogether more alluring contract.  This time, it was a straightforward deal: a dirty great jewel of immense value (Turlough immediately conceives of it in monetary terms) in exchange for a crude hit.  No illusions.  No lies.  Just kill this guy you know to be pretty decent in return for a big pay-off.

He started the story leaning over a chessboard, moving pieces around, deciding which pawn to sacrifice in the cause of winning the game.  He ends the story leaning over a table, staring at a prize, given the option to pick it up in exchange for sacrificing one piece.   And he can’t do it.

This refers to more than just Good vs.…

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“Is there anything the servants can get you Doctor?” asks Edward Grove over the deep, low tolling of the clock.  “It is such fun giving them little chores to do!” he chortles, using the voice of the butler, Mr Shaughnessy.

“No thank you,” says the Doctor icily.

“Very well,” says Edward, vocally turning to the servants, “You may leave, all of you.  Return to your duties.  I shall chime if I need anything.”

The clock is central to the organisation of time in capitalist society.  It regulates work.  Since work is life, it regulates life.  The chiming of the clock, like the jangling of the bell, is a summons to the servant, just as the factory worker must clock in and clock out at the right times.  The industrial revolution fundamentally changed how people perceived time, not only by drastically changing how long it took to do certain things, but also by subjecting the workforce to new schedules.  The organisation of labour in capitalist production centres also made time seem repetitious, on a permanent loop.  The same set tasks, over and over again, for hour after hour.  The clock is a heavily freighted symbol in any discussion of class.  The class war will centre upon the organisation and reorganisation of time.  Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours play – this was a demand of the workers’ union struggle… though, of course, this is a gendered issue.  For women, both integrated into the workforce and expected to perform unpaid domestic labour, it was always something of a joke.  In the life of a domestic servant, especially a female domestic servant, the idea of time separated from the demands of ‘the household’ was almost an oxymoron.

“No doubt I’ll need another death at some point,” says Edward, “when I’m feeling hungry.  I’ll let you know which one of you I’ll choose nearer the time.”

They thank him.  It is part of the sick joke of it all, this obligatory gratitude.

“You do need death, don’t you,” observes the Doctor.

Edward is a sentient house.  He is The Household (also the workplace, to servants) come alive.  He’s a haunting that has become a mind, inhabiting a building.  He was created by the constant looping and re-looping of a paradox.  The Doctor has realised that the paradox which forms the foundation of his structure was created by a death.  He now needs to feed on the deaths of his servants, the workers trapped inside the paradox.  They each take a turn dying for him every time his two hour span replays itself.  For them, even being murdered has become a chore, a duty, part of their employment.  A task to be performed for the master, upon orders, and upon a fixed schedule.

Edward insists that he is alive, but the Doctor dismisses this.  Edward isn’t a person, he is a pile of bricks and mortar, a loop of hours, a schedule.  He’s an era.  Well, he’s the Edwardian era.  He’s a system that has come alive. …

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Wow.  Single figures.  Okay, time for some fun.

“I’m asking you to help yourselves,” says the Doctor. 

Revolution isn’t about everyone suddenly becoming altruistic and angelic.  It is, as Marx saw it, “the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority“.

“Nothing will change round here unless you change it,” says the Doctor.  Here is ‘freedom and necessity‘.  It must be done, but they can choose to do it or not to do it.

“What will we do with two guns against all those guards?” asks Veet.

“You can’t do anything, but there are fifty million people in this city. Think how the guards will react to that number.”

“It’s crazy talk,” says Goudry, “Rebellion? No one would support you.”  Capitalist realism.

“Given the chance to breathe clean air for a few hours, they might. Have you thought of that?”

The Company pumps a chemical fug into the air that makes people anxious and weak.  That’s how it works on Pluto.  Here we call it ideology, or hegemony.

The Doctor and Bisham discuss ways of knocking out the gas pumps.

“I was a B grade in Main Control,” says Mandrell, “The Doctor’s right. It could work.”

Until now, nobody has been more cynical.  But Mandrell has, in a sense, just been given the chance to breathe clean air.

The Doctor isn’t stinting on the revolutionary optimism.  He suggests taking over main control.  Mandrell thinks it could be done.

“What have we got to lose?” he asks.

“Only your claims,” says the Doctor.

Everyone is quite impressed by this.  It’s a sign of the times that we, the audience, are evidently expected to recognise and relish the reference.  The Doctor knows full well what he’s saying – and he’s not just punning.  Workers don’t usually have to wear chains these days, but they still have nothing compared to the Companies of this world.  They have their ‘claims’ of course – claims upon democracy and human rights, etc… But the Company never gives refunds unless forced to, so the workers’ ‘claims’ are essentially the same as ‘nothing’.

“Anything’s worth trying,” says Cordo, a man who was trying to kill himself that morning, but who is now frantic with revolutionary confidence, “If only we could win. Just think, if we could beat the Company!”

“There’s no ‘if’ about it, Cordo,” says the Doctor, “We will.”

There’s ‘the actuality of the revolution‘ for you.

Robert Holmes is often called a cynic… but he was at least as much a romantic.  This story is a full-on romantic political drama of revolution.  The cynical and self-seeking drop-outs turn strike-leaders.  The cowed and suicidally-miserable worker is transformed by revolution until he’s a whooping, gung-ho, gun-toting freedom fighter.  (Revolution changes people even as they change society – one reason why waiting until we’ve all changed ourselves for the better is functionally the same as accepting the status quo.  You change yourself by changing society, and vice versa.)  The workers collectively overthrow capitalism and set up a workers’ state in about a day. …

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“We waited here in the dark space,” booms the Dalek Emperor, “damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured.”

So, In Russell’s rewrite of ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward’s script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite.  Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the ‘dregs’… which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows.  The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale.  Because the Daleks have become TV producers.  They’ve become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link.  They’ve become the bosses of reality TV.  They’ve become Simon Cowell.  (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)

Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell’s omniscient totalitarian leader; he’s now the eternal, ever-watching viewer.  He’s us.  Just like the Daleks are now us.

“So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead,” says the Doctor.

Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.

“That makes them half human,” mutters Rose… as always, she is straight to the quick.

“Those words are blasphemy!” bellows the Dalek Emperor.

The Daleks chant in unison…

“Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!”

“Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?” asks the Doctor.

“I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!”

The Daleks chant in unison…

“Worship him!  Worship him!  Worship him!”

Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the ‘War on Terror’, two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists.  The world is in the middle of an apparent ‘clash of civilisations’, with religion as the supposed organising logic.  But are these new fundamentalist Daleks – ‘Fundamentaleks’ – supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda?  Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders?  Both?  Two sides of the same coin?

To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.

They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition.  The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness.  The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right.  The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors.  Society has become “a charnel house” in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles. …

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 72 (Being Human)

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Well, look, the pilot was in 2008. So we’re only a little ahead of ourselves. And it’s worth exploring now simply because Being Human is a show that reveals a lot about what television became in the wake of Doctor Who. Because in many ways Being Human is the first significant post-Doctor Who show. It’s had its imitators, as we saw back when we looked at Primeval and Robin Hood, but those were just that: attempts to discern the underlying formula of Doctor Who and replicate it. With Being Human we have something else – a show that on the one hand clearly exists only because of Doctor Who and on the other is clearly not a Doctor Who clone by any measure.

The premise of the show is simple and cheeky: a vampire (Mitchell), a werewolf (George), and a ghost (Annie) attempt to live together and maintain a semblance of a normal life. They routinely fail spectacularly, getting embroiled in supernatural goings-on – vampires trying to take over the world in the first and third seasons, and human supernatural hunters in the second. It’s good – it started, as mentioned, with a 2008 pilot, and then kicked off properly in 2009 and ran for five seasons. But we’ll cover it here, because it’s not really a show that had an influence on Doctor Who going forward: it’s one that, by its existence, demonstrates the influence Doctor Who was having.

And yet if you are to look for obvious influences on Being Human you’d end up in the 90s looking at the wave of goth-inspired vampire stories in the wake of the Interview with a Vampire movie. The ur-text here is probably White Wolf Entertainment’s World of Darkness line of role-playing games, the flagship of which was Vampire: The Masquerade. This game was an important moment of cultural history in terms of the steady merger of the goth scene and geek culture (see also the Sylvester McCoy era), synthesizing as much classic vampire fiction as possible into a game set in a gothed up and sexy version of the then-present day. Indeed, there are many points where Being Human feels like someone dusting off their old World of Darkness campaign notes and turning them into a television series.

Its self-descriptor – gothic-punk – is an interesting phrase, both because of the strange ahistorical nature of it (goth is, after all, an aesthetic that derived from punk) and because it situated Vampire: The Masquerade in its more relevant tradition, namely the “____punk” tradition kicked off by cyberpunk. That is to say, grim stories with tortured and fairly violent antiheroes wearing mirror shades at night. Matching traditional horror fiction tropes up with it is one of those ideas that’s both reasonably clever and so dead obvious it hurts. And so despite being trapped in one of the grimiest corners of nerd culture, White Wolf ended up accurately calling how vampires were going to work from now on.

(Yes, huge swaths do go back to Anne Rice, but Rice is ultimately writing romantic vampires.…

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“History prefers legends to men.”: The Savage Curtain

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Seriously, you guys. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. You thought I was kidding.

“The Savage Curtain” marks the return of Gene Roddenberry to Star Trek as an actual creative figure for the first time since “The Omega Glory”, and it’s apparent pretty much right from the start. The whole teaser is made up of unrefined methodology porn, as the bridge crew mulls over conflicting sensor reports from the planet Excalbia, which the script attempts to convey by having Kirk, Spock, Sulu and Uhura shout random bits of starship operations procedure. Almost the entire first half plays out similarly: I feel like I’m watching “The Cage” all over again. Roddenberry genuinely seems to think it’s a good idea to devote lengthy chunks of his script to having his characters robotically quote regulations and jargon. This isn’t even technobabble, this is Roddenberry reveling in his show’s cod-military structure and pedigree. This isn’t writing, this is feeding an academy cadet training manual into a paper shredder placed over a bin full of old Star Trek scripts. We’re not even five minutes in and this is already the worst the show has been in months.

And then suddenly Flying Space Abraham Lincoln.

That’s not an exaggeration. Out of nowhere, a bad transition fade appears on the viewscreen, spiraling around and around before materializing into full-on Abraham Lincoln, sitting on the Lincoln Memorial to boot like it was Wan Hu’s mythical Rocket Chair, except powered by very poor 1960s visual effects. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. And look, I’m not one to ridicule weird and quirky ideas, especially in a speculative fiction show ostensibly designed expressly for the purpose of exploring them. I’m really not. Nor am I one to make fun of outdated VFX technology, especially on a show that’s been starved for funding all year. Honest. But come on. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. You look at him and just laugh. There’s no way not to, and even though over the course of the past five years on this show we’ve seen Alien Neanderthal Bigfoot, Actual Lizardmen, sentient lumps of silicon, animate balls of fluff, Poisonous Snow White Monkey Unicorns, a Giant Space Amoeba, Space Spriggans, Half Moon Cookie Aliens and a community of energy beings powered by Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse, I’m pretty much going to have to draw my line at Flying Space Abraham Lincoln.

Especially when he’s used to tell a painfully damp squib of a story. It turns out that Flying Space Abraham Lincoln has been either resurrected or conjured up out of Kirk’s thoughts (it’s not clear which), along with Surak, the founder of modern Vulcan philosophy, to side with Kirk and Spock in a deathmatch against history’s greatest villains, namely Genghis Khan, Kahless (the founder of Klingon society) and dictators Zora of Tiburon and Colonel Green (and yes, Genghis Khan and Kahless are made of concentrated racism. Did you have to ask?). None of these other characters, it should be noted, seemed to feel the need to make their presence known to the Enterprise by flying through space on rocket chairs.…

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