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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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Outside the Government: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

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It’s January 16th, 2008. Basshunter are at number one with “Now You’re Gone,” with Rihanna, Nickelback, Britney Spears, Timbaland, and Take That also charting. In news, two days after Voyage of the Damned aired Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, bringing her political comeback to a rather decisive halt. A less successful assassination attempt against the president of the Maldives is stopped by a Boy Scout. Barack Obama pulls off a decisive win in the Iowa caucus, meaning that Hillary Clinton, widely expected to be the nominee, suddenly had a formidable challenger. He went on to narrowly lose the New Hampshire primary, meaning that the story would go on for absolutely bloody ages. And Spain decides not to add lyrics to its national anthem.

While on television, Torchwood returns with its second season premiere, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Even before we get to the episode itself, there’s things to talk about, like the fact that this is airing on BBC Two. Regardless of what one might say about the quality of Torchwood’s first season, and there are certainly things to say, it was enough of a success to get promoted from BBC Three. Broadly speaking, this meant that Torchwood became, in its second season, a bigger, more popular show, although this gets complicated about halfway through the run when it started running previews of episodes a week early on BBC Three, a situation almost identical to how the first season worked, where it ran repeats of episodes later on BBC Two. But this was still presented as a BBC Two show, reflecting a higher profile. This also had something of a tangible benefit for Torchwood, in that it was now no longer a slightly seedy post-watershed show on BBC Three. It could still push boundaries, but it couldn’t revel in doing so in quite the same way. It had to just be an adult sci-fi show instead of frolicking about giggling about what it could get away with. By and large, this helped it.

Which brings us to the actual episode. The most interesting aspect of it, obviously, is the kiss. It is possibly the most flagrant moment of fanservice in the history of television. More to the point, it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. It is James Marsters snogging John Barrowman.

I suppose it’s worth rehearsing the cultural context here, obvious as it may seem. James Marster’s signature role is as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There he played the rougish villain turned good guy, with a British accent that, while rubbish, was at least better than usual for trans-Atlantic accent imitations. Spike, as a character, evolved steadily over the season due largely to Marsters piloting him to being a fan favorite. He went from being a recurring villain in the second season to coming back as a half-hero regular in the fourth. After which the gravity of passionate Buffy/Spike shippers (I believe “Spuffy” was the preferred portmanteau) led to a proper romance plot, followed by Spike questing to regain his soul so he could become a proper good guy.…

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Lua-o-Milu: The Tholian Web

, 4

“Well, shit.”

For a season so thin on actual quality, there are an intriguing number of truly iconic moments and scenes from Star Trek‘s final year: It’s difficult to forget images like the Melkotians from “Spectre of the Gun”, the half-moon cookie aliens from “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, the cloud of anger and the commandeering of the Enterprise in “Day of the Dove”, the asteroid spaceship from (not to mention the title of) “For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky”, the Kirk/Uhura kiss in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, the cloud city from “The Cloud Minders”, Ro-Spock from “Spock’s Brain” and everything about “The Empath” (that last one may just be me, but I’ll fight for it to the end).

Then there’s “The Tholian Web”, which is just about made of iconic moments.

Right from the start we have what amounts to a ghost starship, which is a concept so fundamentally and basically wrong the Enterprise‘s own sensors refuse to accept it’s there. Beaming aboard, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov find the entire crew dead, apparently at their own hands. While it’s never explicitly stated this time, the Defiant bears all the symptoms of what could be called a dead starship, and when those show up it’s usually the sign something very big and very serious is about to go down. Indeed, the Defiant takes this theme to the next level: If a starship can die, a starship can become a ghost as well, and it can also haunt. And this is very clearly what the interspatial rift is: It’s a haunted region of space where weird, unexpected and incomprehensible things happen. This was even more blatant in Judy Burns’ original script, which also featured cosmic spirits manifesting in space and fading in and out of existence onboard the Enterprise. However, as Gene Roddenberry didn’t like the supernatural and had specified as much in his writer’s guide for Star Trek, this plot point was altered somewhat in the produced episode.

But even so enough of this remains in “The Tholian Web”, and the episode we get is still extremely eery and atmospheric. What clinches it is when the Enterprise is attacked by Commander Loskene and the Defiant fades out of normal spacetime. Kirk had stayed behind when the initial landing party was forced to return as the transporter was only able to beam back three at a time, thus becoming trapped onboard the departing Defiant, and is declared dead by Spock. From this point onward, Kirk becomes a ghost himself, and he haunts the remainder of the episode on a number of levels. First, his absence understandably causes great strain on the crew, particularly Spock and McCoy. Without Kirk to mediate between them, their normally quasi-friendly banter becomes openly hostile, each clearly resenting the other’s presence. This could be interpreted as evidence of the old reading of Star Trek that posits Kirk, Spock and McCoy represent the tension and interaction of the id, ego and superego, but I still disagree with that pretty vehemently.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 19th, 2013)

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Well that was a bit of a week.

I’ve a vacation at the end of the month, which I’m trying, in one of those doomed quest sorts of things one endeavors to do occasionally, not to spend most of working, on the logic that maybe I should try taking more than a single day off in a row for the first time since March. I hear all the cool kids do it. So in any case, it’s been a lot of getting ahead on the blog so that becomes possible.

Wonder Woman should be out imminently – I just need to do the layout, and to get the final cover design settled with James. Unfortunately, there’s been a snafu there – I gave the Kickstarter money to a family member to hold in an interest bearing account while I wrote the book, so I didn’t accidentally dip into it. Said family member just informed me they would not be returning it to me. So that’s a problem. (To be clear, this is just the Wonder Woman Kickstarter money – the Hartnell v2 money is safe in my own hands.) Not a huge problem – it just means the book is suddenly a financial risk for me where before it had already turned a nice little profit. I’m fine, this isn’t some “help the blogger keep his home” appeal or anything, but equally, if you’re on the fence about buying it, I’ll be thankful.

So, loads of work and frustration. Marvelous. Still, only one more Eruditorum entry to get written up, and then I can go play with other stuff and kind of relax for a week or two, which holy God do I need.

So, I’ve been thinking about Pop Between Realities posts, as the clock runs out on the blog. (I mean, there’s still loads to go, but less than a year at this point, I’m sure.) I’ve got the schedule locked through the end of the Davies era, but I’ve penciled in very little for the Matt Smith era. What stuff from roughly the present day feels like it should be covered alongside Doctor Who? What do you consider its current cultural context? What’s it in conversation with over the course of the Moffat years?…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 71 (Skins)

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One of the most consistently entertaining aspects of Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook’s consistently entertaining The Writer’s Tale is the two writers’ continual enthusiasm for Channel 4’s Skins. Davies went so far as to write fanmail to Skins creator Bryan Elsley. It’s all terribly endearing.

It’s also telling, because other than its manifest lack of aliens, Skins is striving for the same general cultural space as Torchwood. Which is already a bit of an odd observation, in that it puts Torchwood in the same general space a straightforward inspiration for Skins, Queer as Folk. But let’s put that outside of the equation for a moment, at least, and look at the similarities between Skins and Torchwood, as they’re non-obvious.

Skins, after all, is a teen drama, although not a straightforward one, in that it brazenly contains loads of adult content. Sex, nudity, and drugs abound in Skins; indeed, if you were to try to come up with a television show to piss off Mary Whitehouse, the only thing you’d want to do differently is to make it before she died. And yet its concerns are so visibly adolescent. This is a show about teenage lives and teenage concerns that takes great pains to stress its authenticity and the degree to which it mirrors the lives of real British teenagers. Being neither British, a teenager, nor in fact real, I have little to say on its authenticity. Nevertheless, let’s take at face value the basic claim here, which is that Skins is television that’s aimed at a generation of teenagers.

That Skins should do this while being so self-consciously “adult” speaks volumes about the degree to which the “adult” label is not really about target audiences in any meaningful sense. “Adult” really doesn’t mean much more than “going to get OFCOM complaints.” And indeed, for all that Torchwood’s high concept tagline is “Doctor Who for grownups,” this was never really its point. It’s Doctor Who for teenagers. Which was always a significant part of the new series’s targeting, hence the careful nicking from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and a host of other American shows aimed at that market.

In this regard, Torchwood is best understood as the new series of Doctor Who with most of the influences of things other than American television for teenagers stripped away. There’s an open question in how that differs from just imitating American television for teenagers, but that’s neither here nor there. It at least gives us an understanding of what Torchwood is supposed to be. Equally, however, most of what Torchwood takes from those American shows is a plot structure: a team of basically stock characters investigates paranormal events weekly over a light soap background.

In this regard, turning the lens such that we look at Torchwood as a cousin of Skins is interesting. Particularly given what Skins is really good at, which is its small human moments. Indeed, in its first season Skins was subject to many of the same criticisms as Torchwood; it was gratuitous, characters were underdeveloped, and the whole thing was a bit trashy.…

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“…suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion”: The Empath

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“There’s no greater sacrifice than one’s self, and Joyce Muskat’s ‘The Empath’ proved that to SF fans worldwide.”

Science fiction aficionados of a certain age will probably remember Starlog: A fan magazine looking at sci-fi and other genre film and television works, often focusing on the perspective of writers, actors and the community fans built for themselves. Starlog actually began as essentially an unlicensed fanzine for Star Trek fan culture that broadened its scope to avoid legal troubles, which was interesting for me to read: It was always a bit curious to see Star Trek get such a focus in the magazine, although back then I just chalked it up to the massive amount of cultural capital and ubiquity the franchise had at the time I was reading it.

Starlog was really my primary entry into the world of science fiction culture. I never went to Star Trek conventions or anything like that (OK I think I did once, but it was so long ago I remember next to nothing about it), nor did I have a bunch of spin-off or reference books (well, at first I didn’t at any rate). Partly because of this, I never considered myself a massive Star Trek fan, let alone a massive genre fiction fan. Star Trek had certainly captured my imagination, but a large part of the reason why it was able to do that was because at the time it was wildly popular and when I talked to people about television, it was naturally one of the things that came up.

But Starlog gave comprehensive coverage to a wide spectrum of film and TV projects: Articles on the latest Star Trek and sci-fi shows were mixed in with, retrospectives on the live-action Batman and Spider-Man shows, cartoons, bits on action spy fiction, cowboy westerns and interviews with the writers of really obscurantist stuff like The Powers of Matthew Star. Looking back, the magazine was probably my introduction to a lot of shows, like Buck Rogers, Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (which probably directly led to my years-long belief Doctor Who was some kind of peculiarly and flamboyantly British version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and why Jon Pertwee remains one of my favourite Doctors). It was also my first, and for a very long time only, exposure to Star Trek: The Animated Series: Seeing gorgeously lush and evocative screenshots and cells from what seemed to be a Star Trek cartoon that continued the story of the Original Series was unfathomable to me at the time, and all I knew was that I needed to see a lot more of it and as soon as possible. But no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find anything more on it, so it remained a part of the franchise’s history forever ungraspable to me.

Starlog then was my window into what went into making these programmes and what allowed me to read the reflection of the people and positionalities involved in bringing them to life.…

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Uncontaminated by Effect and Consequence (The Last War in Albion Part 14: Obscenity and Alan Moore’s Juvenilia)

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This is the fourth 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. Seriously. It’s been a hell of a week, and I could use it.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest comics owed a large debt to the “underground comix” tradition pioneered by people like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. These comics featured what is at once a troubling and alluring visionary quality, looking at the world and saying things that seemed unthinkable before them, and reflecting the peculiar genius of their creators. 

“But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent.” – Alan Moore, Lost Girls

Figure 106: Spain’s grim depiction of the end of Stalin’s life
in Arcade #4 (Spain, 1975)

While the underground clearly appealed to Moore on an ideological level despite the ethical failings of its leading lights, it is also worth discussing the aesthetic appeal. The gratuitous excess of the underground in and of itself is an odd fit for someone as focused on intricate structure as Moore. The tone of his praise in “Too Avant Garde for the Mafia” is telling – when he praises artists, it’s for things like being “creatively self-conscious in his use of the medium,” and the moments he chooses to single out are things like the final images of a biography of Stalin: “The narrative caption boxes relate how, during his final years, Stalin would travel by car along highways built for his solitary personal use across Russia. Wherever he stopped along the way there would be a room waiting for him specially constructed so as to be an exact duplicate of his room in the Kremlin, right down to the book lying open on the bedside table,” Moore explains, going on to describe the way these captions work in considerable detail, saying that “while this is sinking in, we see three pictures, showing a simple side elevation of a sparsely furnished, neat-looking bedroom. Each picture is identical to the others except that they get progressively smaller.” He goes on to describe the impact, saying, “in effect, we get the impression of an endless series of identical rooms stretching away into the empty distance, proving an unnerving glimpse into the mind of someone who once controlled half of the world.” When he does praise an artist of excess like R.
…

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