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“From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”: Plato’s Stepchildren

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“You’ll have to get your entertainment someplace else.”

“Plato’s Stepchildren” is utterly unwatchable, critically important and incredibly easy to talk about all at the same time.

Leonard Nimoy has said the majority of the third season was “embarrassing” for him, and nowhere is that clearer than here. This is one of the most excruciatingly painful and humiliating episodes to watch of the entire franchise. It is also one of the most popular and important, and it’s not at all difficult to see why. It is straightforwardly a reiteration of a number of the themes the show has been grappling with dating back to the Gene Coon era with very little new to say about them, but it’s also the most concise and blunt about them the show will ever be. Actually, I’m not certain the franchise is ever this blatant about these ideas and concepts ever again. “Plato’s Stepchildren” doesn’t quite work: It almost does, but it’s messy and sloppy and needed to go one little step further to really sell what I think it was attempting to drive home. Nonetheless, it had a measurably, provably positive effect on world culture, and that alone unquestionably seals its legacy.

A bit like Star Trek itself then.

Put most basically, “Plato’s Stepchildren” concerns a group of extraterrestrial settlers who lived on Earth during the time of Ancient Greece and were inspired by Plato make the utopian republic he imagined a reality. When settling on a new planet, they discovered that eating the native fruit, mixed with their endocrine systems, gave them massively powerful psychokinetic abilities, through which they perfected the use of their minds and intellects…while regarding anyone else as so inferior and beneath them to be not even worthy of the most basic amount of respect and dignity. Aside from being utterly without compassion and empathy, they’re also ruthlessly sadistic: Luring the Enterprise to their planet under false pretenses, the Platonians, as they have come to call themselves, capture the crew and turn them into human (and Vulcan) marionettes to be subject to their every capricious whim.

Obviously, “Plato’s Stepchildren” is not treading any new ground here. It is once again conceptually extremely similar to many previous episodes, most notably “The Cage”, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (it even recycles the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” speech), “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and “Bread and Circuses”. The difference here is in execution: As a standalone piece of television, “Plato’s Stepchildren” seems to come up extremely wanting when compared to some of those episodes: It’s not as poetic and doesn’t feel as fresh as “Where No Man Has Gone Before” did, and it’s nowhere near as boldly creative as “Bread and Circuses”, at least the Gene Coon part, as that episode managed to effortlessly equate the Roman Empire, the larger Hellenistic tradition, the Gladiatorial spectacle, television and the general state of United States culture circa 1967 in a grand, sweeping condemnation of Westernism. That said though, “Plato’s Stepchildren” doesn’t have Gene Roddenberry to come in and screw all that up with one of the most morally bankrupt and reprehensible denouements in TV history, and in the process drive away his show’s biggest creative force.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 26th, 2013)

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I am on vacation, which is (I assume) quite lovely. I say “I assume” because I’m queuing this up as part of my commitment to not actually doing any work on my vacation, which is a novel concept that I feel like experimenting with. (Spoiler: I’m going to fail, since I’m checking the proof copy of A Golden Thread and still actually have to write Tuesday’s post because I’m an idiot and forgot)

In the spirit of my not doing any work, I encourage you to come up with interesting conversations all on your own, without any prompt on my part, thus giving me entertaining things to read on my phone while I nervously attempt to deal with the fact that I’m outside and there’s sunlight, which is not the sort of situation I am generally well-suited to.
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Love & People

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This paving slab thing really seems to bother some people. 

Some of it seems to be just good, old-fashioned prudery.  Personally, I don’t have a problem with kids hearing an oblique fellatio joke.  Think about the dreadful things we’re happy for them to watch (they were still watching Hannah Montana when ‘Love & Monsters’ aired, for example).  By contrast, a mild joke about consensual sex between people who love each other seems quite nice.  Besides, we turn off the TV in disgust because there’s a joke about sex and then the kids go to school and spend all day giggling about bottoms and willies.  I know I did.

If she really is stuck in the slab (and we can’t be sure of this, given that Elton is an unreliable narrator and we never see Ursula’s slab-embedded face from the POV of his video camera), there’s no reason to suppose that the Doctor didn’t ask her if it was what she wanted.  Why assume that he’d force it on her?

There is something potentially disturbing about a woman being so utterly in a man’s power… but Elton doesn’t read like an abuser.  Of course, the problem is that he can abuse her if he wants because of her extreme physical vulnerability.  This seems at least as pertinent as the gender issues in this episode.

There is, of course, no reason why a ‘disabled’ person can’t have a happy, fulfilling life.  They can and do… at least when they’re not reliant on ATOS for access to basic human dignity. 

I’m making the link between Slab-Ursula and ‘disability’ despite the fact that she connects with this complex social phenomenon in very broad, Fantasy terms.  Aside from the origins of her ‘disability’, she represents near total immobility, which is not unheard-of in the real world but which is unrepresentative of the huge matrix of different ‘disabilities’.  She could, if read too closely as ‘disabled’, be considered offensive as a representation because of her extreme helplessness.  Taken that way, she could tie in with the perception of ‘disabled’ people as like objects lacking agency.  Pity dehumanizes the pitied; that’s why common humanity and solidarity are infinitely preferable.

I think a major bit of the unease over this scene – and the joke in particular – is actually submerged anxiety about sex between ‘disabled’ and ‘able-bodied’ people.  The conscious worry is perhaps over abuse… but abuse is not peculiar to relationships involving the ‘disabled’.  Of course, there is a horribly high level of abuse of the disabled, but abuse is, by definition, not about consensual sex between loving partners.  The idea that Elton and Slab-Ursula’s relations might be inherently abusive probably stems from that very perception of the ‘disabled’ as weak and helpless, semi-people, in need of protection.  The object without agency, as above.  Like kids.  (Children in our society are too often seen as passive receptacles.)  For an adult, there can be no such thing as consensual sex with a child (which is true).  Ergo, for an ‘able-bodied’ person, there can be no such thing as consensual sex with a ‘disabled’ person (which is not true). …

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Outside the Government: To the Last Man

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It’s January 30th, 2008. Basshunter remains at number one, with the underchart being basically unchanged. Kelly Rowland is added to it. That’s about it. In news, the longest running magazine in Australia, The Bulletin, ceases publication. In the US, Obama handily wins the South Carolina primary, opening a handy lead in delegates over Hillary Clinton. And in the UK, virtually nothing whatsoever happens. (The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions resigns. That’s what you’ve got.)

On television, Torchwood’s second season rumbles merrily on with Helen Raynor’s To the Last Man. It’s an odd thing that Torchwood takes the initial three episodes of its first season as quite so much of a template for its second season. Nevertheless, that is what we have here – an episode focused on reintroducing the team, an episode focused on Gwen bonding with an alien victim, and a ghost story by Helen Raynor. This time the focus of the ghost story is Tosh, not Owen, but nevertheless, the pattern is remarkably consistent.

But where Ghost Machine was an odd and oblique number with a structure that continually twisted out of shape, To the Last Man works with straightforward linearity, moving from its initial premise to its inevitable conclusion with a placid efficiency. This is not, in this case, a bad thing. To the Last Man picks a reasonably potent set of images such that it’s direct path from start to finish is tragic rather than predictable. Save a slight pacing glitch at the end (Tosh having to project into Tommy’s mind feels like using an extra scene to do what should have been done earlier), this marches along towards a satisfyingly doomful end.

Beyond that, it’s flecked with character moments. Tosh would use Tommy as a surrogate for an actual relationship. And Tommy’s bewildered disappointment at the things Tosh doesn’t pursue in her life stings just right. Better yet is Owen’s genuinely concern for Tosh, and the way in which it pays off longer standing character bits. Those who have seen the series know exactly why Owen is the one warning Tosh about the dangers of time-displaced love affairs. Even a somewhat lightweight scene, such as Tommy’s railing against the stupidity of continuing war as we cut to a news broadcast about Iraq is quietly elevated. The cliched bashing of the “war to end all wars” descriptor of World War I, which is usually employed because it’s the most lazily straightforward way to criticize militarism imaginable, is enlivened immeasurably by the tiny detail of Tommy describing World War II as “three weeks later.”

Indeed, Tommy in general is a particularly deft example of the man out of time. The decision not to emphasize Tommy’s anachronistic nature is a sound one. He largely understands the world around him. He takes on an interesting role within the world, able to make meaningful statements about it precisely because he’s seen snapshots of it over the course of nearly a century. 2008 is a peculiarly good time for a World War I story, coming right as the last of the veterans were swallowed up by the past, such that what we have with this story is one of someone whose sense of our history exceeds that of anyone save for Jack himself.…

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“THERE WILL BE NO BATTLE HERE!”: Day of the Dove

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“Promenade across the floor/Sashay right on out the door…”

In the 1980s and 1990s Galoob produced a line of miniature models called Micro Machines. They were mostly replicas of different automobiles, but Galoob also produced tie-in sets of Micro Machines for a number of different licensed works. Merchandise is typically seen by those of a leftist persuasion as a primary symptom of crass capitalist frivolity and indulgence, and while I’m not largely inclined to disagree in the general sense, I do believe there are enough positive effects to glean out of the phenomenon to justify its existence, and ultimately it’s intrinsically linked with the concept of Soda Pop Art and thus an important facet of Western culture.

But my qualified defense of merchandise will have to wait for a later date. The reason I bring it up now is that there were in fact Star Trek themed Micro Machine sets, and I happened to have a few of them. each set was patterned after a different incarnation of the franchise and typically featured three different ships, the implication being these were the most notable and important vehicles. The Original Series set featured the Enterprise, of course, but also a Romulan Bird-of-Prey and a Klingon D7 battle cruiser. On the back of the box there were some basic overview specs, probably taken from Mike Okuda’s Star Trek Encyclopedia. There was also a note that indicated which episode the ship was from. Now obviously most of these ships appeared in a great deal more than one episode, so Galoob picked the episode they must have figured was the ship’s most iconic appearance. For the Bird-of-Prey they understandably picked “Balance of Terror” (if for no other reason than that’s the only episode unique footage of the model was shot for), but for the D7 they picked “Day of the Dove”.

This is another of the most iconic episodes of the Original Series, becoming memorable enough to warrant a considerable number of sequels and references in future incarnations of Star Trek. This, combined with the generally very positive reception amongst fans makes “Day of the Dove” in many ways the definitive Klingon episode of the Original Series. It’s not difficult to see why it’s garnered this reputation: This is the first time we see Klingons behaving in a manner that’s somewhat consistent with their later depiction, as a proud culture of warriors that values honour and courage. Kang throws out Klingon proverbs and phrases on a reliably regular basis, many of which served as the inspiration for future explorations of Klingon philosophy, and even carried through wholecloth into future series. Kang is also played with impeccable force and prowess by Michael Ansara: He’s without doubt one of the most memorable antagonists the show’s seen, Klingon or otherwise, or at least the one who it’s the easiest to see why the fans would be drawn to him: He has a charm and charisma absent from several previous Klingons (although I still prefer William Campbell’s delightfully camped-up Captain Koloth in “The Trouble with Tribbles” personally).…

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I Don’t Have to Have a Cat Die in Order to Produce a Good Work (The Last War in Albion Part 15: Alan Moore’s Pre-Professional Work, Children’s Comics, Maxwell the Magic Cat)

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This is the fifth 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. 

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Moore’s earliest professional work was in a style heavily indebted to the American underground comix scene. But this scene influenced him on more than just a stylistic level – the movement’s fondness for iconoclasm and a locally produced, self-published mode of production appealed to Moore too, and in fact described the environment in which he worked prior to selling Roscoe Moscow to Sounds…

“I don’t have to have a cat die in order to produce a good work.” – Grant Morrison, 2013 interview


Figure 114: Alan Moore, under his Curt Vile pseudonym, did
a set of humorous cartoons for Marvel UK’s 1979 Frantic
Winter Special.
In many ways the most obvious precedent for Roscoe Moscow from this earlier period is the series of eleven comics he did for the Back Street Bugle, an alternative newspaper out of Oxford, entitled St. Pancras Panda. Conceptually, St. Pancras Panda is a straightforward parody of Michael Bond and Peggy Fortnum’s Paddington Bear, although, like Roscoe Moscow, the parody does not bother staying narrowly focused, and the strip is instead an opportunity for Moore to cram in a wealth of gags, allusions, and parodies of institutional power. Stylistically, like Roscoe Moscow, it’s a straightforward imitation of the underground comix scene. More broadly, if Roscoe Moscow is Moore visibly working out the stylistic and storytelling skills that define his later work, St. Pancras Panda is Moore working out the skills he’d need to start Roscoe Moscow. It is, in every regard, a slightly more primitive version of the strip – the art is scratcher, the storytelling is less clear, the jokes are less sharp. But it demonstrates that the underground comix style affected for Roscoe Moscow was not just a one-time thing selected for a specific job. To some extent it may be a matter of basic convenience – Moore is endlessly self-deprecating about his artistic skills, claiming that “I was barely capable of drawing even simple objects in a way by which they might be recognized… I wasn’t really sure how many ribs people had or where the muscles were in the arms and legs.” This is, as is characteristic for Moore, an overstatement, but it is the case that Moore is not a first rate artist.
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Maximum Utility

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The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. 

– Franco Moretti

People often compare the Borg, the cyborg gestalt from the Star Trek franchise, to Doctor Who‘s Cybermen.  Both races were conceived as humanoids physically augmented with technology, hence a certain superficial visual resemblance, particularly between the Borg and the earliest Cybermen, from 1966’s ‘The Tenth Planet’… which has just been released on DVD, if you want some way for this post to be halfway relevant to anything.

Borg
Cyberman

But the Cybermen were written by various different writers, under different conditions, with different levels of interest and different levels of knowledge of past depictions, over the course of nearly five decades.  The Borg, by contrast, were written by a small number of tightly associated people, under the aegis of a carefully controlled franchise, over the course of just under 15 years.  The two ‘races’ differ markedly in the circumstances of their production and in cultural profile.  As noted, the Borg’s various appearances weren’t separated by the same kinds of time-lags, and weren’t a product of the same kind of radical turnover/variety of ‘authors’.  Also, the Borg’s concentration in time, and their near-immediate claiming of a significant and visible role in global 90s narrative culture (owing to their success and the global success of Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs), gave them a prominent position within a concentrated historical moment: the 1990s.  The Cybermen, by contrast, disappeared from television during that same historical moment, and before that they had only enjoyed a smaller cultural spotlight in one country – Britain – during the late 1960s.  By 2006, when the Cybermen tried to reclaim their place in culture, and went on to be more globally recognisable than they’d ever been before (owing to the international success of 21st Century Who), the historical moment of the Borg was long over.

Even so, the similarity of the Cybermen and the Borg is real, and rests upon kindred incoherent anxieties about capitalism.

1.

There’s a real incoherence at the heart of the Cybermen.  They are definitely communistic monsters, expressing a ‘Soviet-version’ of the associations between the loss of individuality and collectivism.  They seek the total upgrade of the universe, working towards a chilly utopian telos lacking any inequality or freedom.  But they are also deeply corporate monsters.  They merged or allied themselves with International Electromatics in ‘The Invasion’.  IE was an expression of capitalist standardisation and mass production.  Everything they make is the same, from their disposable radios to their CEO’s offices.  This is explicitly linked to capitalist production and business practices, and is implicitly linked with the uniformity of the Cybermen.

Someone’s not a very efficienct typist.

In many ways, the alliance between Tobias Vaughn and the Cybermen is a business partnership, with the invasion a hostile takeover.  The partnership is possible because, in Vaughn’s ultra-streamlined corporate context, there is a synergy with the Cybermen. …

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Outside the Government: Sleeper

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It’s January 23rd, 2008. Basshunter, accompanied by DJ Mental Theo’s Bazzheadz, tops the charts with “Now You’re Gone.” Adele, Rihanna, Britney Spears, Nickelback, and Kanye West also chart. In news, a plane crashes at Heathrow, injuring thirteen people and delaying two hundred flights. Barack Obama manages to win more delegates in the Nevada caucuses despite actually narrowly losing the numerical vote, another sign of the degree to which his campaign was unnervingly well-organized. On the Republican side, Duncan Hunter drops out, a news event leading most people to realize for the first time that hew as running. Fred Thompson also withdraws, which is about equally interesting. And Heath Ledger dies, which is on the whole rather grimmer.
On television, Torchwood’s second season plods on with Sleeper. Here we get the rare episode of Torchwood that depends largely on its parent show for relevance. Taken on its own, Sleeper is, well, a bit sleepy. Its premise works, broadly speaking, but theres no particular sparkle to it, and it largely appears to be “Gwen cares passionately about someone who’s been caught up in alien malarkey,” a plot structure recognizable from large swaths of the first season. And this time the alien malarkey seems… well… a bit silly, really. Alien sleeper agents ready to wake up and embark on a frighteningly baroque scheme to use our own weapons against us as a means of taking over the planet? Really? Last year we had a sex alien, which, while not actually any mores sensible, is at least, you know, a sex alien. This is just ridiculous.
Except the thing is, Cell 114’s plan is bog standard. Invade the Earth via a baroque plan involving military installations and evil alien pseudo-humans? It’s the plot of Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, Terror of the Zygons, The Android Invasion, Aliens of London/World War Three and probably a few others that I’m leaving off the list. What we have here is a bog standard Doctor Who invasion, in other words, that never quite gets started. And in the time spent waiting for the big alien invasion to actually start – you know, the sort of plot that would usually involved the Doctor showing up – we instead get a human story about the people caught up in the wake of this alien invasion.
In this regard, we have the second consecutive story that has clearly thought through the point of being Torchwood. It’s a story designed to fit into the margins of Doctor Who and give them a human dimension. The basic mechanic of the series is well in place – Doctor Who is about exploring various narrative spaces, while Torchwood is about abutting them with human spaces. Not in the bland horror of Yeti-in-the-loo sense, but in a sense of ordinary lives deformed and deranged by the alien. 
In this regard it’s significant that the event that causes Beth’s life to turn upside down is an act of violence.
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“But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”: For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky

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You know, sometimes the picture just says it all.

This was an episode I never saw much of. I’d seen scraps of it here and there, but it was never a story I deliberately sought out to watch, for a number of reasons. First of all, I was just never as big a fan of the Original Series as I was its two immediate sequel shows and I wasn’t especially inclined to be a completionist about it. Also, from everything I’d seen of “For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky” told me it just wasn’t my kind of story. Not that it was bad, and indeed by all accounts it was a highlight of the third season, it’s just this kind of weighty tragedy is not really the way I enjoy spending my leisure time, even knowing it of course had to be undone at the end of the episode. But it seemed like a very well-regarded tear-jerker of a character study awash in a dreamlike sense of poetry, as anything with a title that breathtakingly pretentious damn well better be.

Yeah, no, it’s terrible.

“For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky” is “The Gamesters of Triskelion” for the third season. It is so awash in Star Trek cliches the show itself seems tired of them. It’s not even really possible to come up with a list of episodes this one cribs from, as it seems like it just stole from everything, but, off the top of my head I can maybe mention “The Return of the Archons”, “The Apple”, “By Any Other Name” and most obviously “The Paradise Syndrome”, from which this episode takes its basic plot about a member of the Enterprise crew abandoning Starfleet to live a simpler life married to a high priestess, not to mention a worrying majority of its set. None of this really fills one with boundless enthusiasm.

The one innovation this episode brings to a mountain of overplayed, hackneyed Star Trek standbys is the idea that the reason McCoy wants to retire to Yonada is because he’s suffering from a terminal illness. This isn’t something Star Trek had looked at before, probably for good reason. Imagining any of the previous creative teams attempting a plot like this is a somewhat frightening prospect, and as good as writers like Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana might have been, this isn’t really the sort of thing that’s in either one of their wheelhouses. Of course, this logically means we should expect *this* creative team to make an absolute hash of this, as they were both stupidly confidant enough to attempt this kind of episode in the first place and blissfully ignorant of the actual extent of their grasp to the point they could tie it to a story about an intergenerational asteroid starship. We would not be wrong to expect this as the finished product is in fact embarrassingly awful, but let’s briefly pause for a moment to remember that intimate character drama isn’t really all that unusual a thing for Star Trek to attempt.…

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Wikipedia Goes All-In on Transphobia

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(Previous post on this topic)

10/23: Update with recent developments added to the end of the post.

11/6: I have been banned from Wikipedia for the contents of this post. More information here.

We’ll start with the good news. After a second move discussion, Wikipedia has decided to move the article on Chelsea Manning back to her actual name instead of misgendering and misnaming her. This brings us to the bad news, which is essentially everything else, and in particular everything surrounding the arbitration committee case.   This case has led to the declaration that calling out transphobia on Wikipedia is unacceptable, that trans activists are disqualified from working on articles involving trans subjects, and that it’s more acceptable for people employed by the US military to covertly edit the Chelsea Manning article than it is for trans advocates to do so openly.

To recap, immediately after Chelsea Manning publicly came out and and announced her new name, Wikipedia updated and retitled its article on her. This set off a wave of controversy, resulting in the article being moved back to where it misnamed Manning and being locked there for thirty days. Those thirty days have now passed, and a second discussion over the topic resulted in overwhelming consensus to move the article back to its correct title.

A consequence of this, however, was that a request was filed with the arbitration committee – an elected body allowed to pass broad sanctions to settle disputes on Wikipedia, including banning editors. That process has also now concluded, and has concluded disastrously.

In order to understand the arbitration commitee’s decision, it is important to understand the culture of Wikipedia. In its determination to avoid creating any top-down editorial structure, Wikipedia has instead repeatedly embraced a system of rules designed to eliminate thought from the decision making process as much as possible. Hence the policy that all information must be sourced to reliable secondary sources, with little concern for the biases that this demand introduces (what sources get published is, after all, heavily impacted by degree to which publication can prove profitable, a wholly distinct concept from what is accurate or important) or to the number of fields like the humanities in which secondary sources are not dispassionate attempts to synthesize materials but attempts to advance partisan and novel takes on existing material.

The fantasy has always been that with the right set of rules the encyclopedia would write itself, with optimal versions of articles just coming to exist naturally as a consequence of the self-evident rules about citation and secondary sources. The reality has always been that instead of actually thinking critically about content decisions people just think critically about how to manipulate and play with the rules.

Since this is, most days of the week, a geek blog, I assume the analogy to tabletop role-playing games and the type of player known as a rules lawyer will make sense. If not, allow a brief digression. A rules lawyer is a type of player whose pleasure comes not from any accomplishment within the game, but instead from the manipulation and contortion of the rules.…

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