Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

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

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“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

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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

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“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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