Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Outside the Government: Warriors of Kudlak

, 27

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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“Excuse me, can you help me? I’m a spy.”: The Enterprise Incident

, 14

“Legendary Space Encounter”, by Randy Asplund

“The Enterprise Incident” is arguably one of the most iconic episodes of the original Star Trek, or at least this season. “Iconic”, however, is not necessarily a synonym for “good”. While decent and a godsend compared to what the show has been hurling out since the beginning of the season, I’m not especially inclined to call “The Enterprise Incident” one of the all-time greatest stories from this show, especially coming off of the streak of home runs that was the latter John Meredyth Lucas tenure. This episode is, however, perfectly serviceable, better than the last two stories by light years and further evidence of what a tremendous asset D.C. Fontana was to Star Trek.

The circumstances behind Fontana’s resignation as script editor are somewhat hazy. The official story is that she was too overwhelmed by her day-to-day duties and wanted the opportunity to freelance for other shows, but the somewhat caged and guarded way she tends to recount this (along with the rather exasperated tone she often takes on when describing her time associated with the franchise) leads me to believe there’s likely a bit more than that at play. Whatever the reasoning though, “The Enterprise Incident” is Fontana’s first Star Trek contribution as a freelancer, a position she’ll hold for the remainder of the Original Series, and also her final contribution to the Original Series under her actual name. And right away, it’s very clear the impact her absence has had on the show’s overall production: “The Enterprise Incident” was extensively “edited” by Gene Roddenberry (even though that shouldn’t technically be his job anymore) as well as (I presume) Arthur Singer. As a result, what we get here is in many ways D.C. Fontana-lite: Even “Friday’s Child” wasn’t monkeyed around with to quite the same extent this story was, and this had an almost quantitatively net negative effect on the final product.

Fontana’s original draft was partially inspired by the 1968 “Pueblo Incident”, where North Korean forces captured and detained a United States Navy cruiser for over a year on charges of espionage, hence the title. This would make “The Enterprise Incident” arguably the first Star Trek episode to explore a current and topical sociopolitical issue (previous episodes, namely things like “A Taste of Armageddon”, “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “A Private Little War” made halfhearted stabs at this, but were almost always held back by the show’s apparent desire to remain somewhat safe and apolitical) were it not for two issues: Firstly, Roddenberry’s and Singer’s “improvements”, among a great deal many other things, helped to obfuscate this significantly. Secondly however, “Journey to Babel” proved that, if nothing else, Fontana is a master at blending complex political world building plots with intimate stories about characters, and would prefer to lean in this direction if given the opportunity. “The Enterprise Incident” builds off of this, using the backdrop of a high-stakes espionage mission to further explore Kirk and Spock as well as the sense of loyalty and devotion the Enterprise crew shares amongst themselves.…

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The Cut

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On ‘The Space Museum’

Recently, while tracking some hits this blog received, I discovered a new Doctor Who podcast called Pex Lives.  It’s great stuff, well worth listening to… and I’m not just saying that because the guys who make it – Kevin Burns and James Murphy – kindly linked to me and mentioned me in one of the episodes.  Their third and latest podcast is just out, and centres upon ‘The Krotons’.  Their second podcast is about ‘The Space Museum’ and they delve into the piece with lots of wit (in both senses of the word) alongside anarchism, Tolstoy, progress and political change.  Not many Who podcasts touch on stuff like this.  My favourite quote: “we’re both ambivalent about violent revolution”.  (For the record, so am I.)   It also helps that they both have likeable voices.  Kevin sounds like Terry Gilliam (i.e. he has one of those American voices that sounds as though it is filtered through a permanent grin of enthusiasm) and James sounds like a gigantic, sentient, wryly raised eyebrow that has somehow gained the ability to talk with the voice of a hip-hop DJ.  Even so, I kept on wanting to interrupt them… which I mean as a compliment.  So I made some notes instead, and they turned into this:

1. Freeze Frame

The Doctor, Vicki, Barbara and Ian spend episode one wandering around the museum unseen and unheard, unable to interact with events and apparently seeing glimpses of their own future, culminating in their encountering themselves as exhibits. The explanation for this is that they’ve “jumped a time track” and arrived before their arrival, so to speak. Vicki ponders what this means in a speech that, as the Pexcasters remark, is as poetic as it is scientifically meaningless:

Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, also has dimensions of its own.

However, I think that “time”, as used here, really refers to narrative, particularly TV narrative. One of those inner dimensions of narrative is, of course, metaphor. So when Vicki uses the word “time” metaphorically to refer to TV narrative (hereafter TVN), and thus says that narrative has dimensions of its own, she identifies one of those dimensions by using it.

But let’s look at the moment when the ‘time track’ is ‘jumped’. This happens at the very beginning of part one, which is also a reprise of the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Crusade’.  This cliffhanger was a sudden and uncanny ‘freezing’ of the characters.  The Doctor & Co. are still frozen in their medieval duds at the beginning of ‘Space Museum’.  They then unfreeze in their regular clothes (Ian in suave catalogue menswear, Vicki in teenybopper pop-socks, Barbara in her oh-so-practical cardigan, and the Doctor in his usual quasi-Edwardian proto-Adam Adamant gear). The Doctor, upon being questioned about this by the baffled Ian, says that the answer is “time and relativity, dear boy”.

This ‘jump’ occurs at the junction of two stories, one ending and the other starting.  At the start of the new TVN, the characters are still, so to speak, stuck at the end of the last TVN. …

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You Did Ask For More Political/Current Events Posts

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It’s funny where the line ends up being drawn and where we decide that things are truly outrageous. Let’s face it, most of the people who howled with fury at the willingness of Brazil to slash social services and jack up public transportation fees are the sort of lefty intellectuals who are unlikely to watch the World Cup in the first place. Or are the sort of leftists who rage fearsomely on Facebook and then bugger off and watch the football anyway.

And this is how these things work. World Cups. Olympics. They’re all the same basic principle – shift the infrastructure costs aggressively onto the public sector, and then private concerns take all the profits. Why, one might reasonably ask, would anybody sign up for such a rotten deal?

The clue comes in FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s plea in the wake of this summer’s protests against the World Cup’s precursor tournament, the Confederations Cup. “I can understand that people are not happy,” he said, “but they should not use football to make their demands heard.” The obvious response to this is, of course, “why not?” And this gets into the sick heart of these sorts of celebrations.

It’s an interesting fact that FIFA rules declare that football must be entirely above politics. Any sort of political meddling in the administration of national football teams results, in theory, in the expulsion of the national team from all competitions. It’s not entirely clear how that works in the case of a country like North Korea, where it is outright inconceivable that there’s no political interference with football or, for that matter, with anything else. (I mean, this is the country that asserted that its Supreme Leader was relaying advice to the manager via a hidden phone link.)

And anyway, the idea that politics and football aren’t intertwined is ridiculous on the face of it. When public money is a key part of how your business is conducted, you can’t be separate from politics. No, what’s key is that football is invulnerable to politics; that the political concerns of any given country cannot be allowed to affect football at all. Football is holy and all encompassing. Its official policy is that it’s more important than anything else. Hence the breathtaking arrogance of suggesting that people shouldn’t bring it into their protests. After all, don’t they realize football is far more important than silly little things like whether they can afford to eat?

So why would anyone sign up to it? Because there are benefits to the invulnerable absolutism of sports. You get to, as the UK did for the 2012 Olympics (essentially indistinguishable from the World Cup), normalize the imposition of martial law in your largest city and put missile batteries on top of residential buildings. Or Brazil’s use of the World Cup to drive tanks around its slums to aggressively clean them up. Not all the slums, of course – just the ones tourists might see.

The rhetoric here is exactly what you’d expect.…

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Outside the Government: Eye of the Gorgon

, 16

It’s October 1st, 2007. The fact that Sugababes are at number one is definitely relevant now, and they remain there all story. Feist, Kanye West, Mark Ronson and Amy Wimehouse, and Shayne Ward also chart. In news, Gordon Brown decides against calling an early election, and Larry Craig is not allowed to withdraw his guilty plea for soliciting sex in a Minnesota bathroom, but declines to resign from the Senate anyway. One of my favorite things about Wikipedia is that someone has posted a photo of the bathroom in question, so that if you’re ever in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, you can visit. It’s the one between Royal Zero Shoe Shine and Talie.

On television, meanwhile, Eye of the Gorgon. In many ways Eye of the Gorgon is puzzling. Certainly it does not fit into anything one would on the surface expect from The Sarah Jane Adventures. After two stories that are at their heart based around the day-to-day lives of people who are ostensibly like the audience, we get one that is grounded almost entirely in other sorts of narrative. In the broad strokes, this is not particularly unusual. The Sarah Jane Adventures’s parent show, after all, regularly reaches for genres that are in no way intrinsic to what might be called normative British childhood experience. Nobody has ever fretted about whether or not a spaceship that’s going to fall into the sun in forty-two minutes is too far removed from the experiences of British children. Sure, there’s Davies’s Fear of a Zog Planet, but the fear there is a lack of connection to any human experience. Typically, for Davies, an obvious connection to an existing popular genre is sufficient to solve the problem of having a way into the premise of a story.

And there is an existing genre here. Evil nuns on a quiet country estate (which is what Lavender Lawns looks like, even if it is in practice a nursing home) is a standard enough horror trope. It’s not hard to imagine the basic setup of a bunch of nuns worshipping a Gorgon in secret serving as the premise of an episode of Ace of Wands or The Tomorrow People. Or, for that matter, as the premise of some Season Thirteen story of 70s Doctor Who. Indeed, coming so soon on the heels of Blink, it’s hard not to see the use of the Gorgon as an expansion on that idea of making the act of watching a source of fear. Eye of the Gorgon is ultimately not just a story in which a 70s-style threat recurs, but one where the threat feels as though it comes out of the deeper fabric of what Doctor Who is. It’s not a recurring monster so much as a monster that just makes sense in Doctor Who: of course there are things that just looking at is fatal.

So it’s not the setting or premise that’s unusual as such. What’s unusual is simply that this isn’t the sort of show The Sarah Jane Adventures initially appeared to be.…

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“Put up a parking lot”: The Paradise Syndrome

, 9

“There seems to be a reoccurring reference to a ‘World-Eater’…”

Somewhere around the point one begins musing “you know, maybe ‘Elaan of Troyius’ wasn’t so bad after all”, one gets the sense there are worryingly fundamental underlying problems with “The Paradise Syndrome”.

It is wretched. Somewhat amazingly, it manages to tell a story about the concept of an idyllic lifestyle without invoking the godforsaken Garden of Eden again. This does not make it any less wretched. It is unabashedly racist, because it is noble savages again, and this time the show just drops all pretense and flat-out calls them literally “American Indians” so there’s absolutely no doubt about who and what it’s horrifically stereotyping and misrepresenting. Aside from “The Apple” (which this is almost as bad as) this was the episode I most dreaded having to rewatch: A story about a Kirk rendered amnesiac by a von Dänikenesque obelisk who becomes the messianic spiritual leader of a village of Space Native Americans, and lives for months married to a doting priestess who is promptly stoned to death along with their unborn son is my idea of just about the worst possible way to spend an evening.

My expectations were not disappointed.

Let’s tackle the racism first, because “The Paradise Syndrome” is absolutely racist and it’s so transparent about this it’s almost refreshing in a way. Let’s once again turn to Daniel Leonard Bernardi, as this is his territory and he’s apparently becoming something of a fixture this season (and also because it saves me having to reiterate everything):

“‘The Paradise Syndrome” stereotypes Native-Americans as noble savages and whites as ‘normal’ and even divine […] Miramanee cannot figure out how to pull Kirk’s shirt off, as she cannot find any lacing. She is portrayed as simpleminded, not that bright. This is not the case with Kirk. Moments before, he has fashioned a lamp from an old piece of pottery and saved a boy by using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Despite his amnesia, he is shown as naturally superior […] When the Indians realize that Kirk is not a god, they stone both him and Miramanee (it’s the Indians who are violent in this version of the noble savage stereotype). Spock and McCoy eventually intervene, but only Kirk survives. In this take on a standard white/red miscegenation narrative, the native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn’t shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind.”

Just like before, we’ll use Bernardi’s analysis as a jumping-off point because, once again, he’s right as far as the basics go but he also seems to miss a great deal of nuances. I don’t want to go too hard on him as in many ways Bernardi was one of the first people to make note of Star Trek‘s more reactionary tendencies, but really: That “The Paradise Syndrome” treats Native Americans as simpleminded primitives is so laughably blatant and obvious it really doesn’t need to be commented on, at least not to the extent Bernardi does.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 5th, 2013)

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Have seen the first set of cover designs for the Wonder Woman book, now called A Golden Thread. James is, as ever, fantastic.

Those interested in James’s previous astonishing work will be interested to see Eruditorum Press’s new merchandise store, as promised in the Kickstarter. We’ve got both mugs and t-shirts based off of James’s absolutely gorgeous cover for the Patrick Troughton volume. Other volumes are forthcoming, when I stop working James to death with all these book covers. But for now, if you’ve wanted the Troughton cover to stare at you as you drink your morning tea or to rub up against your naked body throughout the day, you now have that power. Plus, you know, you cause both James and I to get money. In this case, I’ll beg on behalf of someone other than me – James does phenomenal work for way less than he’s worth. He doesn’t complain about this, and in fact stubbornly does things like contribute to my Kickstarter with his paychecks, but he deserves some recognition for the beautiful work he does. Go show the man how you love him.

So, I’m thinking about Tuesday content. Partially because I’m trying to figure out when I’m going to find the time to write some for this Tuesday, and partially because I’m trying to figure out what sort of content I should focus on. So. What sorts of Tuesday posts have you enjoyed? Are there topics (broadly considered) you’d like me to write about?

Right. Back to writing about Sarah Jane Adventures.…

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Outside the Government: Revenge of the Slitheen

, 24

It’s September 24th, 2007. Sean Kingston is at number one with “Beautiful Girls,” but is unseated a week later by Sugababes’s “About You Now,” a fact that only arguably counts in terms of this story. Shayne Ward, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Rihanna, and the Foo Fighters also chart. Since Last of the Time Lords, the last Harry Potter book came out. Dick Cheney is President of the United States for two-and-a-half hours, and spends the time penning a bizarrely self-serving letter about terrorism to his grandchildren. And Alberto Gonzales finally resigns, long after everyone had given up hoping. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown enjoys a momentary wave of popularity, but fails to have the good sense to hold an election, and manages to squander the lead within a few months. And the United States Episcopal Church agrees to back off on consecrating gay bishops or blessing same-sex marriages in an attempt to smooth over schisms in the Anglican Communion.

On television, meanwhile, we get the actual start of The Sarah Jane Adventures with Gareth Roberts’s Revenge of the Slitheen, which is more or less the episode you’d expect from that description. Roberts, as ever, is a precise writer who focuses on honing existing concepts to perfection. In this case it’s the Slitheen. Aliens of London/World War III was not a classic, less because of any specific flaw than a myriad of slightly off-kilter decisions. This led to the mistaken belief that the Slitheen didn’t work, and were just dumb farting aliens. It’s true that their original two-parter put two much emphasis on the fart jokes, just as the head-unzipping happened a few too many times to remain interesting (and had a profoundly annoying sound effect to boot). In fact, as Roberts demonstrates, the Slitheen are a marvelous concept that got slightly lost underneath the episode they appeared in.

At their heart, what’s most interesting about the Slitheen is not the green bug-eyed monsters, but the scenes in which they are wearing their skinsuits, in which they’re playing authority figures that we know are wrong. They are in this regard that most basic of children’s television fodder: the authority figure that the children know is illegitimate, but that nobody else can see. It’s one of the most basic moves of children’s fiction, and one of the cleverest bits of Aliens of London/World War III was elevating this logic to the higher stakes setting of Downing Street.

Even this stays within the general margins of children’s entertainment, however. One of the cultural assumptions underlying the entire idea of childhood is the idea that children have a measure of special innocence and moral sense. And so the point isn’t just the revelation that New Labour’s march to the Iraq War was in fact carried out by alien psychopaths; it’s the fact that their villainy is so obvious that even a child can see it. (Not, to be clear, that only a child can see it – for all that Doctor Who takes children’s perspectives seriously, it never goes for that “children are magic” twaddle.)…

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“I’m spunky!”: Elaan of Troyius

, 8

“Wow, this is a really crap episode.” “I know. Let’s see what else is on.”

“Elaan of Troyius” is the first visible sign that things have gotten really bad for Star Trek. “Spectre of the Gun” may have raised suspicions a bit and, upon closer examination, it turned out to be Gene Coon in active revolt against the new status quo. This episode, by contrast, is evidence of how toxic the new status quo actually is.

First of all, it is catastrophically terrible. Star Trek has been reactionary on many an occasion before, but it hasn’t managed to be quite *this* reactionary since the Gene Roddenberry era. Elaan is flat-out the worst character we’ve seen in the Original Series so far: Not since Nona has there been a confluence of bigoted, xenophobic tropes of this magnitude, and Elaan makes Nona look downright progressive. I could explain why, but I really don’t have to because our old friend Daniel Leonard Bernardi had a few choice words to say about this episode:

“‘Elaan of Troyius’ brings into play stereotypes of the Asian female – the manipulative dragon lady and the submissive female slave. Elaan is both irrational and primitive. She throws temper tantrums, eats with her hands, and drinks from the bottle. Kirk tells her, ‘Nobody’s told you that you’re an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman’s body, an arrogant monster.’ Captain Kirk, the ‘white knight’ of Star Trek, articulates his and the Federation’s moral superiority and authority over the Asian-alien and her people through sexual conquest […] Indeed, it is only after the captain physically and sexually dominates her that she respects and eventually falls in love with him […] After giving in to Kirk’s power, Elaan, like the cunning and manipulative dragon lady of classical Hollywood cinema, returns the favor by capturing his heart. The Asian-alien’s tears contain a bio-chemical agent that, when touched by a man (even aliens like Kirk), forces him to fall deeply in love with her. After she manipulates Kirk into desiring her, Elaan becomes submissive, gentle, loyal, even willing to die with him, by his side, as the Klingons ruthlessly attack the Enterprise. It is at this point in the narrative that the other stereotype of the Asian female comes into play – that of the submissive Asian slave. In the end, Elaan does anything Captain Kirk requests, politely and adoringly obeying his demands and orders. Her dragon lady tactics were only used so that she could assume a position she truly desired: the submissive mistress of a white knight.”

Bernardi goes on like this, and, as is somewhat typical for him, he’s generally spot-on but in a narrow scope and with caveats. Ironically enough, Bernardi misses one of the biggest racist signifiers in the episode: While he’s right that Elaan draws upon Dragon Lady stereotypes, probably unfortunately in part due to her actor, France Nuyen, who is half-Vietnamese, the show is very clearly coding her as African too. Nuyen is dutifully browned up and her costume, hair style and facial makeup are all clearly modeled after stereotypical Ancient Egyptian imagery.…

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