Eruditorum Press

Less organic intellectuals than morbid symptoms

Outside the Government: A Day in the Death

, 30

It’s February 27th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Kylie Minogue, Adele, Nickelback, Rihanna, and Kelly Rowland also charting. In news, the British Government officially nationalizes the failing Northern Rock bank, Tottenham Hotspur defeat Chelsea in the Carling Cup final, and Pakistan, in an attempt to censor the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, blocked access to YouTube and, in doing so, inadvertently took the site down worldwide.

On television, Torchwood, broadly speaking, improves. It would be overstating things to suggest that A Day in the Death works. It doesn’t. But it fails in an interesting way more evocative of Season One than of the banal mediocrities of Series Two. Whatever else might be said of it, A Day in the Death is trying to do something interesting and new. It’s an intimate character piece that focuses tightly on Owen and works to give us his perspective on his new status quo as an animated corpse. It’s a story that works hard to stay on the human level.

There are problems. Maggie is perhaps a bit overdone – losing her husband is probably sufficient reason for her to be up on a rooftop contemplating suicide without needing to add the bathos-inducing wedding day car crash. The ending is mawkish. Owen’s overall plot still doesn’t really do anything; it’s not a functional lens on any aspect of human experience. There’s some stuff that’s vaguely evocative of people putting their lives together after an extreme trauma, particularly one leaving them with permanent disabilities, but the metaphor never quite crystalizes. There’s too much focus on the imagery of death, and particularly on Torchwood’s usually more interesting “there’s nothing” image, and it distracts from the plot being about anything other than its own science fiction conceit. It’s not that science fiction only works when exploring understandable and familiar spaces; that’s the opposite of true. But it is that science fiction that’s just about coming up with weird concepts isn’t very interesting. Yes, something odd is happening to Owen, but there’s no metaphoric depth to it, not even here, in the episode that focuses on it.

But there are real strengths. Richard Briers does a phenomenal amount with his brief appearance, although it lacks some of the intensity of his previous appearance within Doctor Who. The bizarre alien artifact that serves as the story’s MacGuffin is, in fact, just a pretty alien artifact that emits beautiful light displays. It’s completely harmless; it wasn’t keeping Henry alive, and it wasn’t a bomb. This is a wonderful plot beat of the sort that Torchwood (and for that matter Doctor Who) doesn’t do often enough; one in which the world of the alien is actually the wondrous thing it’s usually advertised as being instead of just a source of unimaginable horror. And while it seems strange to mention it, Martha works quite well here. She’s a minor character and her departure scene is shoehorned in in a fashion that’s utterly extraneous to the plot, but she actually has something to do here that both extends sensibly from her character and fits into the story such that she doesn’t need to be knocked out of the plot at the two-thirds mark by some contrivance.…

Continue Reading

“All the greatest men are maniacs.”: Whom Gods Destroy

, 7

“A cat may look at a king…”

“Whom Gods Destroy” is famously bad. It is also famously unapologetically repetitive, reiterating the exact same plot of the first season episode “Dagger of the Mind” down to reusing the same chair prop that was central to that episode’s climax. It is also, like the vast majority of third season episodes, riddled with plot holes, logic lapses and inconsistent characterization: In terms of basic narrative structure and coherence, it’s once again a mess. “Whom Gods Destroy” seems to be a particular bugbear for Leonard Nimoy, who spent the entire week writing memos and complaints about it to anyone who would listen including, but not limited to, Fred Freiberger and Douglas C. Cramer, the Paramount Studios production executive.

While the laziness and sloppiness are painfully apparent, I’m not especially inclined to tear into them here for a few reasons. One, exasperating as it is, this is not really unusual for this season, and really I’d go so far as to say it’s standard operating procedure for the show at this point. Secondly, even if it hadn’t been officially stated yet, it’s pretty clear Star Trek‘s time is just about up. We’ve had our bonus year, and the show has about two months left before it’s put to bed for good. It’s rather pointless to get too worked up about structural problems now. While it’s possible we might get one or two late-stage minor classics along the lines of “Wink of an Eye” or “That Which Survives” in the remaining stories (I have little to no recollection of the next batch of episodes except for the really blatantly obvious ones), the show is for all practical purposes done and we’re just killing time before the inevitable sits in. This run of episodes is the word death of the Original Series.

“Whom Gods Destroy” isn’t even all that bad given the standards of the 1968-1969 year. It manages to on the whole avoid being as incensing as “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Paradise Syndrome” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, though it does have a few ethical issues of its own. And, while it’s not as much of a B-movie pleasure as “Spock’s Brain”, there are certainly parts that are genuinely entertaining in a way only the most gloriously trashy science fiction can be. Indeed, though “Whom Gods Destroy” is certainly nowhere near as thought provoking as “The Tholian Web”, “Plato’s Stepchildren” or “Wink of an Eye”, it does actually manage to occasionally drunkenly stumble into one or two genuinely captivating concepts. What we have here is probably Star Trek’s first Curate’s Egg: It’s a disaster, but parts of this disaster are quite excellent.

Let’s square away the obvious issue right away. “Whom Gods Destroy” is literally a retelling of “Dagger of the Mind”, and a shitty one at that. This time the story follows the almost cartoonishly stereotypical plot of having the inmate running the asylum have a Napoleon complex, on which I’ll have more to say a little later.…

Continue Reading

44

, , , , , 0

In a prison cell on Skaro, the Doctor and Jamie watch as Maxtible is paid by the Daleks for services rendered. 

“The secret you promised me!” he demands.

Maxtible is a wealthy, propertied, Victorian gentleman who thinks of everything in terms of business transactions.  His charity to Waterfield and his daughter has given him – Maxtible – proprietory rights to use them as he wishes, as servant and collateral.  His pact with the Daleks is a “partnership”.  He is providing a service in return for payment.  His payment is to be a secret that he has been pursuing fanatically, at the expense of anyone who gets in his way.

“The secret of transmuted metal,” confirms the Black Dalek.

A series of formulae flash up on a screen.  For all the talk of “atomic weight” and “specific gravity”, the details are occult.  But the transmutation is achieved.

“Gold!” cries Maxtible, “Iron into gold!  I told you it was possible!  They’ve kept their promise!  It’s true, it’s true!  They have!”

He thinks he has completed the alchemist’s project… but that project was about harnessing purity and immutability in the hope of returning humanity to its nature before the fall.  In aiding the Daleks, Maxtible has done the reverse of this: he has helped harness ‘the human factor’ in the service of utterly fallen things.

In any case, his lust for gold is nothing to do with purity.  It is the general obsession of any Victorian gentleman.  It’s the basis of Victorian society.  The secret he obsesses over is the secret of capital.  The seemingly magical ability of capitalist production to create wealth from nowhere, from commodities that come out worth more than the raw materials that went into them.  From dross comes gold – straight into the gentleman’s pockets.

This is the basis of all Victorian gothic: the occult and occluded nature of profit, of capital accumulation.

The real secret, the thing occluded, is ‘the human factor’.  Human work, or ‘species-being’, alienated from humans and appearing to Maxtible in the form of Daleks, in the form of alien machines that drain humanity and substitute their own essence… which is what happens to him immediately after he is paid for his services.

His real payment is to be given ‘the Dalek factor’.  To be made into an occult, gothic thing.  A Victorian zombie.…

Continue Reading

45

, , , , , 2

In a bunker filled with stacks and stacks of munitions shells, Millington is demonstrating his secret weapon.  He breaks a capsule inside a sealed glass box.  Green fog pours out.  The doves inside slowly choke to death. 

“Just think what a bomb full could do to Dresden.  Or Moscow,” says Millington.  “It could mean the end of the war,” he says perfunctorily.  The old, eternal justification.  

But Millington isn’t trying to end a war.  He’s trying to start a new one.  In his twisted mind, the final battle of Norse mythology has become entwined with the final battle between his way of life and the “revolution” that Sorin believes in.

(Just like Churchill, who asked his generals to come up with a plan for a surprise attack on the USSR, using German troops, after Allied victory over the Nazis.  Learning of the American success with the atomic bomb he grew even bolder, saying “We can tell the Russians if they insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Sevastopol”.)

Millington’s green fog, harvested from a well of ancient evil beneath the ground, has been sealed inside the Ultima Machine, which Millington will allow the Russians to steal.

“And Whitehall thinks the Russians will be stupid enough to let you detonate one of those things inside the Kremlin?” asks the Doctor.

“Oh that’s the beauty of it,” says Millington, “we won’t detonate it.  They’ll do it themselves.  The machine will be programmed to self-destruct when it tries to decrypt a particular word.  And when the political climate is appropriate…” by this he means when there is peace… “then we will include the word in one of our cyphers.”

The Doctor asks what the word is.

“What else could it be Doctor?  Love.”

The word rings through the story.  Jean and Phyllis love men in uniform.  Ace says baby Audrey is lovely.  Wainwright so doubts God’s love for a nation that drops bombs on German children that he can hardly bear to say the word “love” in church.…

Continue Reading

Book Review: Magic Words

13

At this point the overlap between Lance Parkin’s interests and mine is downright unsettling. How am I ever going to get anywhere with my interests when I have to compete with someone as good as him? It’s not enough, apparently, that he be one of the best writers of Doctor Who auxiliary material and a damn fine scholar of the show, as evidenced by his marvelous volume of the Time Unincorporated series. He’s got to go write about Alan Moore as well. Actually, he’s on his second, having written a quite solid introduction to him for the Pocket Essentials series. But Magic Words is something else; a landmark, definitive tome that immediately establishes itself as one of the absolutely essential works for anybody interested in Alan Moore.

Before we get to any of that, however, let’s start with the fact that the book is absolutely gorgeous. This is a sumptuous, lush book. Its cover, a green-tinged photo of Moore staring out at the reader through the smoke of the almost certainly not tobacco cigarette in his hand, is augmented by a bellyband proclaiming the title. The edges of the pages are inked black, giving the exterior a sleek elegance. Inside is similarly well-designed, save for a frustrating decision to use a cod-comics lettering font for chapter headers. Still, it’s one of the nicest physical objects of a book I’ve laid hands on this year.
That bit of geekery aside, the book itself. It is, to be clear, a biography. It is not Gary Spencer Millidge’s (very excellent) Alan Moore: Storyteller, nor George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. The former is an overview of Moore’s work; the latter an extended interview. This, however, is an attempt to grapple with Alan Moore the man. This obviously involves a lot of looking at his work, but mainly in terms of how it explains his evolving career.
This is, to be sure, an interesting subject. Moore’s career, after all, is a fascinating litany of brilliance and idiosyncrasy. First of all, there’s the somewhat puzzling matter of him worshipping a snake puppet. Second, there’s the stark litany of fairly explosive feuds he’s had with various people. Third, there’s the fact that his life is simply full of idiosyncratic and extreme beliefs, positions, and courses of action, most of which are backed up by complex and nuanced explanations.
Complicating Parkin’s task is the fact that, up until the very end of the writing process, Moore wasn’t participating in the biography. Moore was shown what was at the time intended to be the final draft, and was impressed enough to both give a charming blurb (“In Magic Words Lance Parkin has crafted a biography that is insightful, scrupulously fair-minded and often very funny – a considerable achievement given its unrelentingly grim, unreasonable, and annoying subject. Belongs on the shelf of any halfway decent criminal profiler.”) and what Parkin has described as the most wonkish Alan Moore interview ever, as it consisted of no questions regarding well-trod subject matter, and instead consisting entirely of issues like sorting out Grant Morrison’s claim that Moore had written him a threatening letter in response to Morrison’s unsolicited submission of a Kid Marvelman script (Moore says it never happened, and Parkin backs the claim up with a Dez Skinn interview) and why Moore decided to do his ABC work as a work-for-hire such that he doesn’t own Tom Strong or Promethea (still unclear, actually, though I have my speculations for a few years from now). 
…

Continue Reading

46

, , , , , , , , 2

The committee want to know about Vorg and Shirna’s ‘ritual’. 

Shirna tries to explain.  “We’re entertainers.”  She does a little dance.  “Understand?”

Pletrac regards her, his face blank.

“No,” he says.

Vorg jumps in.

“Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse… nothing serious, nothing political.”

Who is he talking to?  The committee?  The BBC?  Us?

In any case, the commitee retire – scandalised – into secret session.

“Amusement is prohibited,” gabbles Kailk in cold panic, “it’s purposeless.”

“Zarb is considering lifting that restriction,” says Pletrac.  Zarb is their leader.  “The latest thinking is that the latest outbreak of violence among the functionaries is caused by lack of amusement.”

The ‘functionaries’ are their slaves.  (Sadly, they are portrayed as rudimentary and stupid.)

The committee members are caught between two possible choices, both of them extremely attractive to any ruling class: stop the ‘functionaries’ thinking about anything but their function, or amuse the ‘functionaries’ and thus keep their mind off the fact that they are slaves.

So it turns out that amusement is pretty serious and political after all.

Meanwhile, inside Vorg’s silly, apolitical machine, white English imperialists complain about the idleness of the “madrasis”.

“Won’t have ’em on the plantation,” says Major Daley.…

Continue Reading

47

, , 0

TW

Stotz and Morgus are united in one last ditch attempt to turn this muddy, bloody clusterfuck into profit.  But Stotz hangs back. 

“Let’s get a couple of things straight,” he says to Morgus.  “An hour ago you were the boss.  Now that’s all changed.  Now you’re the same as me.  Just a man with a gun.”

“I, the same as you?” demands Morgus imperiously and incredulously, “I’m Morgus, I’m descended from the first colonists.” 

But his arrogance is either habit or bafflegab.  They both know this.  And they both know that Morgus needs Stotz to show him the way to Jek’s stockpile.  And they both know that more spectrox can be carried by two men than by one, working equally.  And they both know that, once this is done, they will be superfluous to each other.

“If we do happen to come out of this with any spectrox,” Stotz continues, “there’ll be none of that ‘four points for you, one point for me’ business.  This time we split it right down the middle.  Agreed?”

“Of course,” says Morgus.  So Stotz leads the way.  But they both know that soon, one of them will be dead.

This is the world they have made, and it is crashing down around their ears.  For Morgus, ‘four points for him, one point for the little guy’ is the definition of society.  One guy carries it, Morgus takes it; that’s how the world works.  Until now.  For Stotz, there’s a boss at every level.  Inside his gang, it’s him.  Higher up, it’s Morgus, or someone like him.  Until now.

As it happens, Jek will be the end of both of them… but this will only happen because he gives himself away by turning on a fan to keep a feverish, dying woman cool.  He once wanted her for her ‘beauty’.  It’s fairly clear that he intended, eventually, to rape her.  But, riddled with spectrox toxaemia, she’s not so desirable anymore.  Yet he wants her to stay alive.  For him, lonliness and narcissism and hate and self-pity have always been his ruling passions.  Until now. 

Of course, this is a tragedy, so it’s already too late for him.  And it’s only right that it should be because, just as much as Morgus and Stotz, he made the world that is now about to kill him.…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Dead Man Walking

, 8

It’s February 20th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” Goldfrapp, Kelly Rowland, H Two O, and Feeling also chart. In news, Kosovo declares independence from Serbia. Steve Fossett is declared legally dead. Toshiba abandons the HD DVD standard, leaving Sony’s Blu-Ray format as the preferred physical medium for high definition content, which would be great if digital distribution weren’t about to eat physical media alive. And Fidel Castro resigns the Presidency of Cuba.

On television, meanwhile, we have Dead Man Walking, the first episode featuring the reincarnated Owen. From the start, there is something odd and haphazard about this plot line. The nature of the plot was changed at the last minute – originally it was to be Ianto who would die and quasi-return. Similarly late in the game was the decision to kill Owen and Tosh in the season finale – they weren’t informed until a month or so before filming began on the episode. This is, in other words, not entirely well thought through, as evidenced by the kind of weird double death of Owen.

On the other hand, the basic contours of this plot are so very nearly bullet proof that it’s difficult to complain too much. From its first episode, with the resurrection glove and the revelation of Jack’s immortality, Torchwood has been a show about death. The way in which Dead Man Walking returns to these basic tenets of Torchwood gives it an odd power that other episodes this season have lacked. For the first time since Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang we have a story that only Torchwood could actually do.

The problem is that there’s still a significant muddiness to this. Yes, it’s a very Torchwood story, but giving the series a second quasi-immortal character is a strange decision. It’s difficult to read Owen as anything but a poor man’s Jack. Even the adventure this time feels like a knock-off. The incarnation of death itself feels like a weaker version of Abaddon from End of Days, right down to Owen’s eyes turning jet black and him chanting in incomprehensible languages, which is apparently a fixation for Matt Jones, who previously wrote basically the same thing in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, and which similarly evokes the “ancient evil coming out of the darkness” thread of those stories. Even the resolution – the immortal character allowing death to attack him and proving too strong – is essentially the same.

On top of that we still have Martha, although in this case she’s sidelined relatively early, and in such a way that she has a sensible function within the story. With Owen serving as the episode’s central mystery, he can’t very well do all the medical technobabble himself, which is a problem given that the mystery, in this case, is all medical technobabble. Having another doctor in place is useful, and Martha is one who can be imported without much explanation. Notably, once the story gets out of “explain the technobabble” and into the actual adventure at the hospital Martha is completely sidelined through what is pure plot contrivance, allowing the actual Torchwood cast to get on with it.…

Continue Reading

“Between good sense and good taste…”: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

, 14

“It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.”

Personally, I’ve never been drawn to the idea of casually “marathoning” a television show. The idea of spending days locked inside watching every single episode of some TV show sounds to me like some heretofore unknown circle of Dante’s Hell. I’ve never felt the need to be completionist about television because I’ve always understood the realities of day-to-day, ’round the clock production inevitably mean not every episode is going to be a classic, and I see no need to force myself to sit through obvious misfires in what’s supposed to be my downtime.

Now for a project like this I do, of course, have to watch every episode, or at least almost every episode, because the point here is to get a relatively comprehensive understanding of the history and evolution of Star Trek. But if I were to just watch this show casually, I’d have no hesitation to skip over huge swaths of it because frankly the idea of watching “The Paradise Syndrome”, “Elaan of Troyius” or “Space Seed” again is the antithesis of entertaining to me. My point being I was long under the perhaps mistaken assumption that other people might have a similar viewpoint to mine here, so whenever I’ve been asked by someone to introduce them to a show, I almost always give them a truncated episode list of recommendations instead of flopping a twelve-disc DVD box set on their table. I figure if a friend, who presumably shares at least some of my taste and habits, is asking my advice on Star Trek they’re not likely to find “A Private Little War” any more enjoyable or engaging than I did. So, when a few years back my sister wanted to get into the Original Series, of which she had no prior familiarity, I gave her a crash course on the show, and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” was the place I suggested she stop.

I hadn’t seen the Original Series in quite awhile when I made that list, and were I to do it again today I would have done a number of things differently: I’d have taken one or two episodes out and put a great deal more in (mostly from this season, interestingly enough), so apologies for that if you happen to be reading. I’m not sure if I would still have put the cutoff at this episode, because I have not, as of this writing, seen the last few episodes of the third season, though I at least feel I’d be justified in calling it quits here if I were so inclined (and yes, don’t worry, we’ll see the old lady all the way through “Turnabout Intruder” to port, no matter how painful it might be). “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” marks a number of endings and lasts of its own: It’s the last really iconic episode of the Original Series, mostly due to Bele and Lokai, though there’s something to be said about the art design on “The Cloud Minders”, I suppose.…

Continue Reading

48

, , , 0

“That is a Laserson Probe.  It can punch a fist-sized hole in six inch armourplate, or take the crystals from a snowflake one by one.”

A robot, a machine, a tool, a product, a technological commodity, rhapsodizes another machine, another tool, another product (complete with brand name), another commodity.  His rapture is focused upon the Laserson Probe’s capacity to do delicate work (analytical, interrogative of nature, violent in its own way) and also to wreak destruction.  It can be turned to both uses.  What a selling point.

Meanwhile, the eloquent robot’s fellows have turned away from running a ship which scours a desert (made of crystals) for minerals.  Now they are murdering their human owners and masters, one by one.  And yet their rampage is the idea, the (re)program, of a human; a man who has lost himself in his own id, his own narcissistic terror of our creations, our robots, our machines, our products, our technological commodities.  He has literally fetishised them… to the point where he dresses as one.  But has he really done anything terribly different to what his society has already done with its machines, tools, products, technological commodities?  It has brought them to life, made them in our image, made them speak and walk and think, and rule over us even when placid and obedient.  The walking dead.  The pure labour machines.  The zombies.  The slaves.  And so work – onboard mining ships – has become a luxury for humans, a perk of wealth and aristocracy.  One wonders what the less privileged do.  Starve, probably.

“Yes,” says the Doctor, “no handyman should be without one.”…

Continue Reading

«‹ 253 254 255 256 ›»