Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Outside the Government: Dead Man Walking

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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.…

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

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“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.…

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“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.”…

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“Look, all I do is take a little from people who have too much and then I spread it around a bit.  I help to keep the economy in balance.”

“But if that piece of jethryk is so valuable, why don’t you just sell it?  Then you’d have plenty to give to those who need it.”

“Oh, I don’t think its worth that much.”

But why doesn’t he think it’s “worth that much”?  His whole plan is predicated upon the idea that the Graff will want to buy Ribos because it possesses a rich seam of, in the Graff’s words, “the rarest and most valuable mineral in the galaxy”!

There’s only one explanation.  Differing conceptions of value.

The Graff wants the jethryk because he can sell it and buy ships, soldiers, weapons, etc (ie for its exchange value).  The Doctor and Romana want the jethryk because it’s also the first segment of the Key to Time (ie it has an intrinsic use value).  Garron wants it because its a means to an end.  He could sell it and live off the proceeds… but then he’d die of boredom, and someone like the Graff would have the use of it.  And Garron wants to keep using it.  Like the Doctor, he thinks of it as a use value, not a commodity.

It’s part of his con game, you see.  It’s how he snares men like the Graff.  It’s how he runs rings around them, fools them, bilks them, makes them look like the prannies he thinks they are.  This is a poor boy from Hackney Wick.  This is how he gets his revenge on the big shots.  This is how he brings them down to his level.

For all his flaws, he’s a leveller.…

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Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall’s office.  He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony.  It can end their labour problems, their economic problems… all their problems.

“It can do many things,” agrees the Doctor, “but what it does best is exterminate human beings!  It destroys them… without pity…”

He continues.  And the machine speaks too.

“I – AM – YOUR – SER-VANT,” it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection.  It says this again and again and again.

The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.

The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it’s a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.

The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.

Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it’s the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen’s orders.

It turns to Bragen.

It has a question.  The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen’s own, the social-Darwinist that embraces the idea of the racial struggle for survival against all other competing races… has a question for Bragen.  For humanity.

“WHY – DO – HU-MAN – BE-INGS – KILL – HU-MAN – BE-INGS?”

 Good question.  One of the few genuinely good questions asked by anyone in this story.

Bragen, of course, cannot answer.

He has no idea.

(UPDATED 21/11/13) …

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An Unused Can of Monster’s Cat Food (The Last War in Albion Part 16: Maxwell the Magic Cat, The Stars My Degradation)

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This is the sixth of seven installments of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest works included not only his underground-inflected Roscoe Moscow, but Maxwell the Magic Cat, his attempt at a newspaper strip featuring a talking animal. What started as a children’s comic (at least in the editor’s mind) steadily drifted into something altogether stranger…
I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl. – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Figure 123: A late Maxwell the Magic Cat strip that plays with the formal
constraints of the comic medium (Alan Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1986) Click
to expand.

Before long any resemblance between Maxwell the Magic Cat and a children’s comic was gone, and eventually the Northants Post conceded the point and moved the strip off the children’s page entirely. It’s not that the strip was ever child-unfriendly as such, though after a few months it becomes hard to imagine any child particularly enjoying the jokes about pairing red wine with fish or Robert Mitchum. By the time Moore got to tins of cat food sitting on death row and the tragic end of Liver Chunks in Oyster Sauce any pretense that the strip was aimed at children was firmly out the window. Instead Moore turned the strip into a general gag-a-week strip that wandered through any number of interests: politics, complex formal play with the structure of the comics medium, bleak existential jokes (a captured mouse asks Maxwell what happens after death, and Maxwell describes cat heaven.The mouse admits that this doesn’t sound that bad, and asks where mice go when they die. “Oh, they go to cat heaven as well.”), and, of course, wonderfully dreadful puns. (Maxwell 4 page 30 for formally complex strip)

Figure 124: Alan Moore’s acerbic commentary on the Falklands War (Alan
Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1982)

By and large, this worked. Moore’s intensely structural approach lends itself well to comedy. This is something that even a cursory examination of interviews with him reveals: he is a terribly funny man. Even when Moore is working with a bit of a shaggy dog punchline he frames it in a precisely worked set of comic beats.

…

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Outside the Government: Reset

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It’s… still February 13th, 2008. Torchwood has rejiggered its schedule slightly, showing next week’s Torchwood a week early on BBC Three immediately following the BBC Two broadcast. This has an interesting effect, as it moves the first airing of the show away from its main airing. Torchwood is still treated as a BBC Two show. But it now has a “for the fans” transmission a week early. It, in effect, makes Torchwood the opposite of event television.

Which is funny, because Reset is, in practice, an event episode. First and foremost, of course, is its ending, which features the shock death of Owen Harper. Although the contours of this are questionable since, again, once this goes out on BBC Two it’s immediately resolved by “Dead Man Walking” showing on BBC Three. (This seems to have basically worked, in fact – 849k of the 3.8m people who watched Adam tuned into Reset on BBC Three. The next week, one million of Reset’s 3.2m viewers went for Dead Man Walking. The total ratings, however, remained about level, making this a curious experiment.) But the other big event is that this is the first of three Torchwood episodes in which Martha Jones makes a guest appearance.

Bringing Martha Jones back is tricky business, to say the least. She has to be brought back, of course. The world of the new series forces that on you. Because companions never really leave and we get them bound into their home lives, returning them to their home lives isn’t a departure. This isn’t a complaint, though it does force a sort of ludicrous escalation of stakes on companion departure episodes as writers try to find bold new ways of stranding someone so that the Doctor can never see them again. The move towards companions who have lives outside the TARDIS is, on balance, a good thing, in that it allows companions who are more than just plot functions. Even the classic series had basically moved to that by the end, with Ace’s disconnection from her life on Earth becoming a factor of Ace actively wanting to get away fro her life, as opposed to just an incidental and unacknowledged fact.

This really is important. Because plot-wise, the companion’s job is fairly straightforward. They’re supposed to act in a particular way within the narrative. In that regard they’re fairly interchangeable. Most basic plots would work with any companion. Nothing about what Jo Grant does is that noticeably different from what Mel or Rose or even Romana would do in a similar situation. Yes, the flavor of it would change – the dialogue changes, and some of the mechanisms by which characters accomplish things change, but the basic shape they fill in a plot is the same. Which leads to a sort of diminishing returns – all you can do with them is switch the iconography around. A knife-wielding savage! A bossy Australian stewardess! Bonnie Langford!

By giving companions lives outside the TARDIS you get the ability to do different sorts of stories – ones in which who the companions are matters.…

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“They’re dead…They’re all dead…”: That Which Survives

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“Monkey in the middle!”

“That Which Survives” opens promising to be one of the most creative and exciting episodes since “The Alternative Factor”, and that it doesn’t quite maintain that momentum for the whole of its fifty minutes is almost beside the point. We’re still in the curious mystical territory the show’s been exploring off and on since “The Tholian Web”, and here Kirk even uses the phrase “ghost planet” to describe an astrogeological impossibility: A planet too young to develop life and an atmosphere, yet which clearly has both. As the landing party is about to beam down, the transport sequence is interrupted by a woman who suddenly materializes, imploring them not to go down, killing the transporter chief in the process. She’s too late to stop the landing party, however, but as Kirk tries to contact the Enterprise Sulu informs him it’s simply not there anymore and that they’re stranded. Back on the ship, we learn the Enterprise has somehow been instantaneously flung to the other end of the galaxy.

So once again we’ve stumbled into a region of space where weird and inexplicable things happen. This time though, the closest analog seems not to be pagan mythology but supernatural horror movies: The mystery woman materializes every once in awhile to a specific crewmember, both on the planet and aboard the Enterprise. Puzzlingly declaring she is “for” them and that she knows everything about them, she gains their trust enough so she can touch them, at which point she explodes every cell in their body simultaneously. The mystery woman is a slasher villain then, and “That Which Survives” works a bit like an old haunted house movie, where travellers have to seek shelter in a dark and foreboding mansion. But it’s also a survival movie, as Kirk, Sulu and McCoy are forced to search for food and water as they’re now cut off from the Enterprise and are unsure if they’ll ever be able to leave. And, in a cruel twist of fate, it seems like the planet they’ve found themselves on has neither.

However, this is just half the story. “That Which Survives” is split between the landing party and the Enterprise at the other end of the galaxy trying to return to where it was. On the Enterprise, the episode plays out entirely differently-While the mystery woman still hunts people down, the challenge Spock, Scotty, Uhura and M’Benga face is an entirely different one: This part of the episode is straightforwardly a thriller in the mould of “The Doomsday Machine”, albeit with the inspired decision to put Spock at the centre and forcing him to react to everything. The crew soon discovers that in addition to throwing them across the galaxy, the mystery woman has somehow also sabotaged the ship’s warp drive. With the warp engines locked and accelerating at a rate beyond Scotty’s control and to a speed at which the Enterprise wasn’t designed to withstand, the crew has fifteen minutes to figure out what’s happened and correct it or the entire ship will blow up.…

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A Wondrous Book Launch

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The cover art is, as ever, by the fantastic
James Taylor, who talks about his process
over here. 

Last War in Albion will run on Saturday this week, in lieu of the usual waffling.

I am pleased to announce that A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman is at long last available from Eruditorum Press. It’s priced at $7.99 for the US ebook edition, with all other editions priced to give me the same royalty. You can buy it now at Amazon (Print, Kindle), Amazon UK (Print, Kindle), and Smashwords, which can provide you with ebook versions for any non-Kindle devices. It’s available in most other Amazon stores, and will be on Nook, iBooks, and Sony stores in a few weeks.

The book is a critical history of Wonder Woman, focusing primarily but not exclusively on her comic book appearances. It starts in 1941, as William Moulton Marston, a pop psychologist, creates a female superhero to advance his idiosyncratic goals about the relationship between men and women, through the days when she was more feminist than Gloria Steinem, and all the way to the present day, where the character is stuck in DC’s woeful New 52 relaunch, looking at every era of Wonder Woman in between.

It’s written to be understandable and interesting to audiences who have never read a Wonder Woman comic before, but has enough detail that even the most die-hard fan will learn a few things. It doesn’t just cover the canonical “major eras” like the Marston era and the Pérez era, but every era from 1941 on is there, in varying levels of detail.

Why, one might ask, a history of Wonder Woman? Because she’s simultaneously one of the most recognized figures in popular culture and one of the least well-understood. She’s a wildly popular character, and yet save for three seasons of television in the 1970s it’s hard to point to her iconic or beloved version. There are not stories like The Dark Knight Returns or The Death of Gwen Stacy that everyone points to as the iconic Wonder Woman story. There’s no movie version.

And yet she’s fascinating. Not just because she was designed as propaganda for Marston’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia, but because she’s spent over seventy years in continual publication by a company that has never seemed to understand the character. Where Batman and Superman feel easy to understand, Wonder Woman is strangely amorphous, resisting an easy definition. This has made her comics often frustrating, but rarely, if ever, boring. And because she is, by her nature, a symbol of feminism and of social justice, the highs and lows of her comics are often fascinating.

Inevitably, a book drifts over two years of being written and produced. When I envisioned the book, of course, it was called Paradise Dungeons, playing off of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island and the oft-remarked upon bondage components of Wonder Woman. But when I finished the book it wasn’t quite that book.…

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Gothic Marxism

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For Hallowe’en, here are some talks to enjoy.

Here‘s David McNally, talking about the ideas in his book Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, which I mentioned (and cribbed from shamelessly) in this recent post.

Here‘s Silvia Federici, talking about her book Caliban and the Witch, which links the witchhunt craze to the rise of capitalism.

And here‘s China Mieville, giving a Marxist view of Hallowe’en (which is more fun than it sounds).

Monsters of the world, unite!

 *

ADDITION 01/11/13:

I didn’t know this, but there’s a video of the China Mieville talk I linked to above:

…

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