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Wicked.

Outside the Government: The Lost Boy

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It’s November 12th, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “Bleeding Love,” where she remains for the next week as well. Alicia Keys, Westlife, Britney Spears, and Timbaland also chart, as well as Kylie Minogue, as part of her comeback after battling cancer. But really, what’s that got to do with anything? In news, discussions to form a government of Belgium reach a record hundred and fiftieth day. Large scale student protests break out in Venezuela over a referendum to give Hugo Chavez more power. Benazir Bhutto spends a day under house arrest, Barry Bonds is indicted for perjury, and nobody else with an alliterative B name does anything that would allow me to complete this joke.

While on television, season one of The Sarah Jane Adventures wraps up with The Lost Boy. The Lost Boy is a standard issue season finale for Doctor Who in this period. The premises of the series unravel; everything that can possibly go wrong does, followed by several more things going wrong, and it ends with a big action set piece resolved by what people widely and wrongly refer to as a deus ex machina. (In this case, it’s much more of a machina ex machina.) Unlike the last two attempts at one – End of Days and Last of the Time Lords – The Lost Boy largely comes off.

The basic mechanics of The Sarah Jane Adventures as it understands itself in its first season are on full display here. At its heart, this is a story about adoption. Its central anxiety is a familiar one for any adopted child – the nature of the birth parents. Luke goes through the nightmare scenario here – his apparent birth parents show up to take him away, and they really don’t love him. (I mean, not only do they lock him in a room, but it’s a room covered in Chelsea merchandise.)

This gets paralleled in the Alan/Maria story, as Alan has to figure out how to be a father to a very different sort of daughter than he expected. Throughout the story, in other words, we have a struggle to make families work. Not to form them, but to get them to work. And to get them to work in two specific and common cases of slightly non-standard families. Sarah Jane has to show that she’s legitimately Luke’s mother, and Alan has to show that he can serve as the sole parent for Maria (a point hammered home by Chrissie showing up to be useless bordering on malevolent). In both cases, parents have to demonstrate that they deserve their role as parents. But in typical Sarah Jane Adventures style, this is not the occasion for an overwrought meditation on family.

Indeed, the plot takes pains to avoid any sort of realist setting. The sequence where Luke is taken from Sarah Jane adheres to no real-world logic to speak of. Particularly visible is the fact that nobody seems to think that there’s anything suspicious about Sarah Jane having Luke until it becomes clear that Luke has no memory of anything about his supposed life as Ashley.…

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“…a mere apendix.”: Spock’s Brain

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The newspaper reads “Spock gets 2-year prison term“.

“Spock’s Brain” needs no introduction. It is infamously terrible. Universally regarded as the single worst episode of the Original Series by those for whom “The Omega Glory” is too niche a pick. Every aspect of this story is iconic for all the wrong reasons: It’s just as memorable as something like “Arena”, albeit for being as bad as the former episode is good. And, to add insult to injury, it went out as the season premier for the fans’ hard-won third year of Star Trek, a move which has to go down as one of the biggest, most grandiose middle-finger salutes to a television audience in the history of broadcast.

I thought it was OK.

Now, I hasten to add “Spock’s Brain” isn’t good by any means either. Is it campy and cheesy? Oh, please. This is Roger Corman levels of lowballing it. Is it sexist? For sure: It’s a story involving a tyrannical matriarchal society of incompetent, childlike women who torment their male underlings with mixed signals-Of bloody course it’s sexist. It’s borderline racist too, with characters throwing around words like “primitive” and “apish” on a regular basis and Kirk’s ultimate resolution to the problems of the Sigma Draconians is to encourage them to follow a “natural” course of social evolution and learn how to think for themselves. It’s just “The Apple” all over again. And, as is par for the course for this season, there are logic lapses and exposition holes everywhere and the plot actually completely falls apart if you think too hard about it. (Although really it all boils down to “alien space women need Spock’s brain to control the computer in charge of running their library and central heating system”, which is arguably straightforward enough. Trust me: I watch 1980s Scooby-Doo. I’ve seen stuff that makes far less sense than this.)

But is “Spock’s Brain” the single worst episode of Star Trek, or at least the Original Series? Oh, Prophets no. It’s not even the worst episode of the season that we’ve see so far. As far as terrible Star Trek episodes go, it’s eminently watchable for a number of reasons, and in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s probably the most watchable bad episode of Star Trek that there is. There’s a certain entertainment factor in how charmingly lowbrow it is. Furthermore, “Spock’s Brain” is one of the most interesting episodes of the show to talk about, if not actually watch, and frankly, given a choice between this and another test of endurance like “The Paradise Syndrome” or “And The Children Shall Lead” I’ll go with the Morgs and Eymorgs every time. So I mean yes it’s bad, but not really in a way that would seem to justify the amount of vitriol it gets from mainline fandom. Unpacking how “Spock’s Brain” got quite the reputation it did is a worthy field of study, and we’ll return to it in a bit, but first let’s try and answer the most obvious question: Why does this episode even exist?…

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The Obligatory Returned-Episodes Post

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Hurrah, etc.

As Lawrence Miles says, there’s no point trying act all cool at a time like this.  It’s great news and I’m very happy about it.  Sincerely.  You’d have to be a miserablist of a more perverse and determined stamp than I not to be as pleased as punch.

Of course, I could whinge about some things.

And will.

This blog has a USP after all.

I could, for instance, mention the way Nigeria – where the episodes were found – has suddenly swung briefly onto the mental radars of people who, until a few days ago, probably had only a dim idea that it existed at all.  It’s ironic because, at more or less the time when those missing episodes were made, the Wilson government was helping the corrupt Nigerian military dictatorship crush Biafra.  Britain continued arming the junta for years, despite government denials.  The regime was engaged in a longstanding war against the Ogoni people – one of the forgotten persecuted peoples in the world.  Shell’s exploitation of oil reserves in their region has had untold environmental and human costs, making the Niger Delta one of the most petroleum-impacted regions on Earth.  In 1995, the Nigerian government – utterly in thrall to and bound up with Shell – began a campaign of ruthless repression against the growing anti-Shell protest movement.  The ‘Ogoni Nine’, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were arrested and executed, causing a (brief) international outcry.  Nigeria achieved formal democracy in 1999 but the corrupt government still wages war against the living standards and rights of the Nigerian people in the service of international oil profits.  Indeed, as in so many places, this war is a condition of IMF debt relief and loans.  The American government occasionally declares itself troubled by the rigged elections and violence in Nigeria, but Nigeria supplies them with large amounts of oil – the country is up there with Saudi Arabia when it comes to oil exports – so they never do anything beyond the pious declarations.  The crippling economic situation in Nigeria, with a huge portion of the population living in slums, is the root cause of ongoing ethnic and religious violence.  Even the BBC is capable of making the connection between the violence and the poverty rate (above 60% and rising).  Boko Haram, an Islamic fundamentalist group responsible for many attacks – including this last month – are based in the predominantly Muslim north-east, hardest hit by poverty.  Go figure.

But they also had ‘The Enemy of the World’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ on a shelf somewhere, so I guess its swings and roundabouts, yeah?

Back in what I like to call my TARDIS Whingeorium, I could also mention the relative importance given by some to the release of these old episodes and the wanton sell-off of Royal Mail, which was announced on the same day and which constitutes a swindle on the taxpayer to the tune of millions, possibly billions… with much of the benefit available only to huge international ‘sovereign wealth funds‘. …

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Nearly Silent

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Simon Schama gets a huge slab of BBC money and airtime to obfuscate the truth in the service of Apartheid state Israel, taking official Israeli lies as the basis of his ‘case’.  See here. 

Simon Schama, thinking profound thoughts about history ‘n’ stuff.

Licence-fee money well spent there. 

Best bit, on the wall:

“I want to say, nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say that shouldn’t have happened, the wall shouldn’t have happened. Before the wall happened, hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks; after the wall happened very, very few….”

Actually, since the start of the wall, over 4,000 Palestinians have died… but they obviously don’t come into the category of ‘people’ for Professor Schama, no more than the Haitian slaves who didn’t get mentioned in his massive book on the French Revolution.

He continues:

“In some senses, if you don’t live in Israel — I don’t live in Israel — you are morally obliged to be nearly silent.”

So shouldn’t that mean that Professor Schama should be “nearly silent” about it?  No, of course not.  He means that people who disapprove of the wall should be “nearly silent”.  That’s the viewpoint that is invalid if it comes from a non-Israeli.  Fascinating how clever people can talk circular, babyish drivel and think it profundity… while being totally unconscious of how they themselves are broadcasting – in this case literally – their own moral hypocrisy.

Or maybe Schama’s programme constituted ‘near silence’… it was, after all, of little substance. 

If only the Palestinians were allowed to be as “nearly silent” on the ‘objective’ BBC as the Zionists.   …

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Saturday Waffling (October 12th, 2013)

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Right, then. Since we’ve all had some time to watch them… what did you all think of Enemy of the World and Web of Fear?

Enemy, for me, was as much of a treat as I’d hoped. The ending is a bit more rushed than I’d realized from the reconstruction, but it is on the whole a piece of wonderful subtlety and nuance, and it keeps the plot moving well. Troughton is better than I’d imagined – the little tip-offs when he’s playing the Doctor impersonating Salamander are fantastic. In particular, the start of Episode Two is just so wonderful – all the little flicks of the eyes and small Doctor-like gestures that bubble up under the improvised and hurried impersonation.

And the plot is, in fact, really good. The underground bunker twist is very smooth – smoother than I’d thought, really. There are enough tip-offs that Salamander has some secret way of controlling volcanos. When you actually see the extended volcano sequence in Episode Two, the bunker ends up feeling much fairer. And the elaborate visual sequence of getting down there, in which the rules of the records room are set up, calls much more attention to it.

I hadn’t really appreciated how consistently suspicious Giles Kent was through the whole story. Benik is even more unnervingly sadistic than I’d imagined. Barry Letts’s direction is fantastic, balancing action shots with intimate close-ups. Really, virtually everything about this story came out at the high end of what I’d imagined, with Troughton absolutely blowing me away. Absolutely wonderful – such an complete joy. It’s really an incredible experience to have hyped the story this much for myself and then to have it absolutely nail and surpass my expectations. I don’t really have much to say beyond what I already have said; this really is an absolutely amazing piece of work.

The Web of Fear, on the other hand… I was never one of the major boosters of The Web of Fear, although I did always assume that it was the most competently done of the Season Five bases under siege. I’m less confident of that now. Indeed, I think that’s actively wrong – The Ice Warriors beats the pants off this.

In The Enemy of the World, everything left ambiguous from the audio broke in the story’s favor. The action sequences in the first episode really were quite good. Most things that looked like plot holes were filled. With The Web of Fear some things break in the story’s favor… but others decidedly don’t.

Episode Three still being missing hurts it a lot. The first two episodes are very padded, and Episode Three is the point where the story actually picks up decently. With that as a reconstruction, it’s not until Episode Four that the story gathers any sort of momentum, and that’s squandered in a time-wasting Episode Five in which the Doctor plays with screwdrivers for the entire episode.

The Arnold revelation is worse than expected, which is unfortunate.…

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Outside the Government: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?

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It’s October 29th, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “Bleeding Love,” and remains so for both weeks of this story. Take That, Westlife, Britney Spears, and Oasis also chart. So that’s depressing. In news, substantial wildfires break out in California, the UK announces that it will begin requiring passports for Irish people wanting to visit the UK, and a strike breaks out among American screenwriters, effectively ending television production for the 2007-08 season.

On television we have what is clearly designed to be one of the marquee stories of the first season, Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? The basic premise is a standard – an It’s a Wonderful Life number, only mostly staying in the world in which Sarah Jane has been removed instead of on Sarah Jane herself. This conceit is woven around a newly revealed secret origin for Sarah Jane, in which we find out that as a child she was unable to stop her friend Andrea from drowning while they snuck onto a pier during a school trip. Under the machinations of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ signature villain, the Trickster, this is reversed so that Andrea lives and Sarah Jane dies as a child, leading to a world in which only Maria knows what was supposed to happen and tries desperately to set things right.

First and foremost, then, this becomes a showcase for Yasmin Paige, who sparkles in it. Paige is in many ways the secret ingredient of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ first season, proving adept at both the plucky young female adventurer role and at selling real emotional content. She was in many ways the best thing about Eye of the Gorgon, and here she’s left with most of the first episode to anchor on her own, which she manages with aplomb. But in many ways more interesting is the second episode after Maria is similarly taken off the board (this time via a Graske, since the costume was presumably just lying around), leading to the rather charming spectacle of Alan having to save the day.

There are quibbles to be had, certainly. There may never be an entirely persuasive argument for the claim that Sarah Jane really needed a traumatic origin retconned into her life, or that the addition of a dead childhood friend she failed to save adds anything to the character. The central event here, Andrea’s death, doesn’t really fit with Sarah Jane as we know her. Secret tragedies don’t quite become Sarah Jane. It’s not that the actual idea is terribly off – it’s not. It’s just that in introducing it, the fact that Sarah Jane is really, at her core, a Doctor Who companion from 1974 introduced at a point when the female companion was being treated as a profoundly interchangeable part, and elevated to classic status more because of Elisabeth Sladen’s skill than because she was ever intricately conceived or full of nuance. Secret childhood traumas just aren’t things that fit organically with the sort of character she is.…

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“Seduction of the Innocent”: And The Children Shall Lead

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“Does it need saying?”

Bloody hell.

Every time I think this show has bottomed out the floor vanishes from beneath my feet. I haven’t been as angry at Star Trek as I was while watching “And The Children Shall Lead” in quite awhile. This is execrable. This is the worst parts of every retrograde story this show has ever done distilled to their core essences. This is “Omega Glory” standards. Actually, no, not even: “And The Children Shall Lead” starts as a third-rate retread of “Miri” and then dovetails into one of the most bald-facedly reactionary and youth-hating things I’ve ever seen, and it’s another sloppy, incoherent and cack-handed production on top of that. This isn’t just as bad as the show has ever been it’s worse.

Well, where to begin? How about with the absolutely bleeding obvious? Kirk, Spock and McCoy discover a Federation colony where all the adults have died out leaving only their children behind, who are suspiciously unnerved by the mass deaths. When they beam back aboard the Enterprise, it’s revealed the children are part of some scary and mysterious cult with strange language and unfamiliar customs built around worship of a “friendly angel” whom it is further revealed is actually another Alien Entity of Pure Evil who has enslaved the children. The being then orders them to commandeer the ship in an attempt to convert more brainwashed slaves for his army, with which he intends to take over the galaxy. In the end, the alien is dispatched by Kirk convincing the children adults always have their best interests at heart and can always be trusted, and demonstrating the Gorgon (which is apparently the alien’s name, as Kirk refers to it as such even though at no point in the episode did he ever learn this) requires faith and obedience to live, without which he is revealed as the evil (and, naturally, horrifically disfigured) being he truly is.

I mean, do I really need to spell it out? This couldn’t be more transparently an attack on the counterculture if Spock made some comment about how Earth was almost destroyed in the late-1960s by a group of misguided youths who were led astray by an Evil Alien Communist who told them to distrust the United States and protest the Vietnam War as evidence of historical precedence. The Gorgon is even dressed in a flowing, paisley gown and I’d say his design makes him look like a shoddy knock-off of something from the Doctor Who serial “The Mutants” except for the fact “The Mutants” wasn’t actually filmed until 1972, which leads me to believe Arthur Singer and writer Edward J. Lakso had some kind of right-wing time machine that could only be fueled by fear, hatred and the tears of children. I’m actually dumbfounded: I thought I’d have to wait until the 2010s and Internet culture to find an example of a show that held as much active contempt and loathing for its fanbase as this one does.…

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A Casual Fan’s Guide to Enemy of the World and Web of Fear

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The Enemy of the World


Context: This is from Patrick Troughton’s second season, and aired over December 1967/January 1968.  Troughton’s second season is known as the “monster” season, as six of its seven stories featured similar plots featuring various classic Doctor Who monsters. The Enemy of the World is the exception – nestled in the middle of the season, it has no monsters at all. Troughton is accompanied by two companions – Jamie, a Scotsman from 1746, and Victoria, from, appropriately enough, the Victorian era. In this era the companion roles were pretty well defined – Jamie was there to handle the action scenes (which Troughton’s Doctor rarely got involved in), and Victoria was there to put in grave peril.

It’s by David Whitaker, who was the script editor for the very beginning of Doctor Who, and who shaped the early direction of the show. In the Troughton era he turned in several scripts, including a pair of Dalek stories widely regarded as among the best things the series ever did. His later work focused admirably on prominent female characters – The Enemy of the World has two memorable ones that are well ahead of what the rest of the era does in terms of quality characters.

Premise: Instead of being a monster story like everything around it, The Enemy of the World is a James Bond pastiche. But the thing that really jumps out about it is that it features Patrick Troughton in two roles, both as the Doctor and as the villainous Salamander, who, by pure coincidence, looks exactly like the Doctor.

The premise is silly, but made worth it by Patrick Troughton, who is an absolutely amazing actor. (Legend has it that Matt Smith called Steven Moffat in the middle of the night upon first seeing a Troughton story, and proceeded to rave about how brilliant he was. Smith’s bow tie is an explicit homage to Troughton.) This was an opportunity to let Troughton cut loose and really show how good he was.

The story goes from being, in its initial setup, a fairly straightforward James Bond pastiche to becoming something steadily weirder. There’s an absolutely bonkers twist around the 2/3 mark, and it’s only one of many reversals.

What To Watch For: Troughton’s performance is going to be the big appeal here. Troughton was capable of incredible variety, and there should be lots to admire as he plays not only his two roles, but, at various points, each of his two roles impersonating the other. Expect lots of subtle nuances that separate the Doctor pretending to be Salamander from Salamander himself.

One thing, sadly, not to look out for is too much of Troughton on screen with himself. The Doctor and Salamander get one final confrontation, but the limits of 1960s television made staging more split screen scenes unfeasible. Despite that, keep an eye on the visuals – Barry Letts was an excellent director with a knack for action sequences (he went on to produce the Jon Pertwee era).…

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We’ve Unpicked The Thread Of The World (The Last War in Albion Part 13: Roscoe Moscow, Arcade, Madness)

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This is the third 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 stripMaxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form fromAmazon, 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: Alan Moore’s earliest comics work was heavily indebted to the aesthetic of the American underground comix scene, pioneered by artists like R Crumb. But the publication that was really close to Moore’s heart was Arcade, a 1970s anthology of underground artists edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffiths…
“There’s no going back. We’ve unpicked the thread of the world.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles #2
Figure 99: The sardonically bleak ending of R. Crumb’s
“That’s Life!” (R Crumb, 1975)
Arcade, in other words, was an ambitious publication.As Moore put it in his appreciation of the magazine, “Too Avant Garde for the Mafia” (the title comes from Griffiths’s reply to a letter Moore sent the magazine), “Arcade served as a rallying point for those cartoonists who were more concerned with their art than their bank balances,” although in the case of both Griffiths and Spiegelman (and for that matter Moore), it’s perhaps more accurate to say that they were concerned with the idea that the two might be interrelated. Nevertheless, Moore is wholly correct: Arcade was the venue for a wealth of impressive comics. Moore singles several out, not just by Crumb, but by second string underground artists like Spain Rodriguez, Justin Green, and Kim Deitch. But it is Moore’s praise of Crumb’s contributions to Arcade that is perhaps the most fascinating. Moore singles out a story in the third issue of Arcade entitled “That’s Life,” which tells the story of Tommy Grady, an obscure blues singer who recorded one record before being shot and killed in a barroom confrontation, then segues into a depiction of Crumb finding Grady’s lone record and plays it. As Moore describes it, “the last panel shows a crowd of rich white-American blues scholars smiling blissfully as Tommy Grady’s voice drifts around the elegant apartment: ‘Po-o boy, lo-ong way f’um home… Po-o boy lo-ong way f’um home…’ A lone caption reminds us of the title: ‘…And that’s life!’ Crumb at his manic-depressive zenith.”
Figure 100: Racist caricature persists even in R. Crumb’s less overtly
parodic material such as “That’s Life!” (R Crumb, 1975)
None of this is wrong as such. “That’s Life” is a well-worked story that builds skillfully to its bitter slap of a conclusion.
…

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Outside the Government: Warriors of Kudlak

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It’s October 15th, 2007. Sugababes remain at number one, with Britney Spears, Timbaland, Sean Kingston, and the Freemasons also charting. In news, James D. Watson, the discoverer of DNA who didn’t ever advocate for using LSD, apologizes for advocating scientific racism. J.K. Rowling announces that Dumbledore is gay, and Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan to reenter politics, a decision that ends poorly for her.

While on television, we have the odd duck of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures: Warriors of Kudlak. Indeed, it’s the odd duck of The Sarah Jane Adventures as a whole – the only time the series ever hired a writer who wasn’t steeped in Doctor Who material (although Phil Ford basically used SJA as a way into Doctor Who, his later career makes it hard to argue that he’s not well steeped). Phil Gladwin, the writer, is instead a fairly normative television writer – he’d worked on Grange Hill, The Bill, Casualty, and Holby City. On paper this should be fine – he’s got children’s telly experience and is a basically capable writer, so he should be able to turn out a basically capable script. And he does. Warriors of Kudlak is, in point of fact, a basically capable script.

There are high points. The decision to have Kudlak not actually be an outright villain saves the entire first season’s blushes; for a show about the wondrous things in the universe, it sure does fail spectacularly to show any of them. If any Doctor Who-related show needed to do the “the monsters aren’t actually monsters” story, it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures, and yet it doesn’t, making Kudlak’s late turn towards non-villainy a significant hedge. The detail of having a black girl among the “great laser tag players” kidnapped by Kudlak is one of the most significant and substantive moments of diversity casting the show engages in. It manages to not get the relationship between kids and video games completely wrong, which is impressive in general, and doubly so in a Russell T Davies show.

But all of these crumble under much further inspection. Kudlak isn’t a non-villainous monster. All we actually get is “the monsters are actually monsters, they’re just mildly more sympathetic than they initially appeared.” Beyond that, the setup for that twist is shambolic. Gladwin makes no move to hint that Kudlak might have noble intentions in the first episode. It’s shoe-horned into the second episode, effectively making the second episode one that’s working from a subtly different premise from the first. It’s one thing – and a very good thing – to have a cliffhanger or a twist that alters what the audience thinks they know about a story. It’s another to just lazily swap premises without setup.

And this is a larger problem with the story – the human henchman, for instance, drops out of the narrative completely once he’s done providing his not-actually-all-that-essential plot function of teleporting Sarah Jane and Maria up to the spaceship. Instead the whole thing feels like two distinct episodes, one of which exists to get to the cliffhanger (which comes several minutes too late in the episode – the henchman menacing Sarah Jane with a gun is much scarier than Kudlak), and the other one of which exists to get to the ending, but which are not actually intended to link together to tell a new story.…

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