Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

Outside the Government: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

, 22

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

, 6

“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)

, 17

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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Glug, Glug, Glug (Voyage of the Damned)

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What’s this “I wear a bow tie now” crap?

It’s December 25th, 2007. Leon Jackson is at number one with “When You Believe.” Leona Lewis, Take That, Girls Aloud, Timbaland, and, inevitably, the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl also chart. Since The Sarah Jane Adventures wrapped its first season, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link opened, and Nick Clegg won the leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

On television, it’s Voyage of the Damned. Here is the most important thing to realize about Voyage of the Damned: It has Kylie Minogue in it.

There’s a level on which there’s not much more to say. By design. If ever there’s been an episode of Doctor Who built around its guest star, it’s this one. Which is interesting on several levels; for one thing, the episode’s concept predates casting Minogue by some margin. Davies was planning on a big disaster movie for the Christmas special, got word that Kylie Minogue was interested, pitched her the episode, and ended up having her on board, at which point he actually started writing the script.

It’s impossible to overstate how big a get Minogue was. Voyage of the Damned was part of her post-cancer comeback – her proper comeback album, X, dropped a month before, and its lead single, “2 Hearts,” charted the same week that The Lost Boy wrapped. On top of that, you know, she’s Kylie Minogue. She’s one of the biggest stars in the UK. This is not, to be clear, a measurement of popularity – indeed, X has sold, in total, roughly 4% as many copies as people who watched Voyage of the Damned, and even “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” only sold a bit north of a million copies. But trying to understand Kylie Minogue entirely as a commercial force is fundamentally misunderstanding her. Kylie Minogue is famous, which is a different and entirely more interesting moment. Kylie Minogue isn’t a singer, or an actress; rather, she’s someone who lives in the tabloids. She’s not famous for being famous, but nevertheless, her fame is at this point her defining characteristic.

Nevertheless, she’s almost inevitable. Will Baker, her visual stylist, was a known fan who snuck Cybermen imagery into one of her tours, and staged an entertainingly cheeky photo of her asleep with a copy of Lloyd Rose’s Camera Obscura sitting beside her. These links, tenuous as they may be, combined with the fact that the gay fandom of the wilderness years was now running the show meant that Minogue was always the extremely famous person most likely to do a big Doctor Who appearance. Plus she, apparently, was a casual fan from her childhood in Australia (that would probably make her a Letts/Hinchcliffe era gal), and was, in any case, game.

She is not, of course, the first famous person to be cast in the new series. That honor goes to Billie Piper, who similarly came to Doctor Who from the tabloids. Indeed, it’s difficult to look at Billie Piper’s music career as anything other than serving some time as a lesser version of Kylie Minogue.…

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“The Beast Within”: Is There In Truth No Beauty?

, 5

A Mr. “Noonien Singh” called. He wants his line back.

Star Trek has made me feel a lot of things over the years: Warmth, pride, comfort, joy. Of course lately it’s been mostly white-hot anger and frustration, but that kind of comes with the territory. One thing I don’t think it’s ever made me feel before now though is utter confusion. For the first time, I may have found an episode of Star Trek I didn’t actually get.

I don’t think this is entirely my fault, however: “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” is just about the single most scattered and schizoid production I have ever seen. What should be a very straightforward parable about inner beauty vs. outer beauty becomes a disassociated mess of random, half-baked ideas and concepts and I’m not even sure the actors realised they were on the same show with each other, let alone gelled with the production team. More than any episode we’ve seen so far, this one conclusively demonstrates, if there was any lingering doubt, that nobody involved in making this show is on the same page anymore. This is the most crystal-clear example of people talking past each other I have ever seen.

And the whole first half of the story is so formidable too: Doctor Miranda Jones, one of the most powerful telepaths in the galaxy is escorting an ambassador to a race of people whose physical form is so incomprehensible the mere sight of one causes humans to go mad, yet who also supposedly have the most beautiful thoughts of any being. From the moment of her introduction, Jones becomes a powerful presence, as the first person to greet Spock with the Vulcan hand salute who isn’t a Vulcan or otherwise related to him. This leads into a delightful contrast with the characters’ behaviour towards one another, as there’s a hint of professional jealousy between Jones and Spock, who was also offered the position of emissary to the ambassador. This all builds to what is in my opinion frankly one of the single best scenes in the franchise so far, where Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Doctor Jones and her companion Larry Marvick size each other up over a formal dinner. Doctor Jones accuses Spock of wearing his IDIC pin (a famous symbol of the Vulcans both in and out of the Star Trek universe, which makes its first appearance here) in an attempt to intimidate her and flaunt his superior qualifications, while McCoy wonders why anyone would want to dedicate their life to working with someone who could potentially drive them insane. Kirk and Spock then accuse McCoy of holding to the very Greek (and very Western) idea that what is beautiful must by definition by good, and Kirk goes on to admit an appreciation for beauty is one of the last vestigial traces of humanity’s past they have yet to cast off, firmly and explicitly establishing, for the very first time in the history of the franchise, that the world of Star Trek is meant to be an expressly idealistic and utopian one.…

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(Non-)Review Blog of the Daleks

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The Eight Doctors: Occasionally people accuse me of blaming the TV Movie for killing Doctor Who. Nonsense. This is the book to blame – a turgid mess that insults its audience. Readers were understandably disappointed at the idea of taking the license away from Virgin, who had been brilliant, and restarting the book lines as explicitly less mature and intelligent. This book confirmed everyone’s worst fears – that BBC Books had no clue what they were doing. The Virgin line recovered from a bad start because it was all we had. But the BBC Books line consciously killed off something good and replaced it with something that, at first glance, looked awful. It never recovered. 1/10

Vampire Science: Quite marvelous, actually. Its only flaw is that nobody really picked up on this wonderfully daft characterization of the Eighth Doctor, and that this wasn’t taken as a template for how to do the Eighth Doctor as a contrast to the Seventh. Instead it was one of a handful of isolated moments of quality in the line’s early days. Alas. 9/10

Business Unusual: Dreadful. A pointless pile of fanwank, with the added misery of being fanwank about Russell’s previous fanwank. A story that was in no way crying out to be told, and another early nail in the coffin of the BBC Books line. Also one of several attempts to fix Colin Baker’s Doctor that don’t actually improve the character meaningfully. The pointless inclusion oft he Brigadier gives away just how banal and obsessed with ticking the boxes this book is. 2/10

War of the Daleks: Interesting purely as the straw that broke the camel’ back and led a sizable chunk of fandom to just say “no, that’s not canon, and I don’t care,” regardless of whether or not they otherwise accepted the books as canon. It’s not hard to see why this turgid piece of crap inspired such a revolt. What stands out is not merely that it’s bad, but that it’s mean-spirited, seeking to piss on other stories for no reason other than to spite them and the people that like them. Horrifying. 1/10

The Roundheads: Ah, Gatiss. A bit of fluffy nostalgia. Harmless, and with a better characterization of Troughton’s Doctor than a lot of books, but ultimately a pointless exercise in nostalgia for its own sake that demonstrates why the historicals wound down as a genre. Difficult to have any real feelings about one way or another. 5/10

Alien Bodies: Ah, yes. That’s the book we all thought Miles was capable of writing. Brilliant, intriguing, at times maddening, but always fascinating and gripping. Miles was infamously hard to work with, and it’s thus not hard to understand why he didn’t get to drive the EDAs, but on the strength of this book, it’s difficult to see why anyone messed with his vision for the line, as it’s absolutely riveting. In the end this, along with Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War, Human Nature, and The Scarlet Empress are the absolute must-reads of the wilderness years, without which you cannot quite understand the history of how the show developed from Survival to Rose.…

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