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The Real Problem With Stories (The Last War in Albion Part 10: Starblazer, Aristotle)

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This is the final installment of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of Chapters One and Two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. Barring a deadline catastrophe, Chapter Three will begin next week.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s action-packed work for Starblazer evoked both the legacy of pulp magazines and the steady rise in popularity of the “fantastic” genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including superheroes. This, in turn, raised the question of genre fusion, and what genre means in the first place…
“She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman #6
So in the late 1970s, as this tide began in film with things like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, major filmmakers in the genre like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott were inspired by the pulp fiction of their childhoods – 1950s America for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and late 40s/early 50s Britain for Ridley Scott. All of this took place in the context of other historical shifts, of course, but it was the trend that Moore and Morrison were swept up in, and, eventually, came to find themselves appearing to steer. Film and serialized print, after all, had always been bedfellows. Film adapted popular serialized print stories and genres – the films that were popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were still action-adventure stories derived from the pulps, but they were war stories and westerns that lacked sci-fi/fantasy elements.
Figure 77: The more or less realist Luck of the Legion shared space in
Eagle with the sci-fi adventures of Dan Dare.
But the lines between these pulp genres often blur, much as the line between superheroes and the pulps blurs. Starblazer was the sci-fi/fantasy sister title to the straight war digest Commando, also published by DC Thomson. The American comics industry of the 40s-60s had superheroes, but also had westerns, crime comics, horror, and other genres. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote sci-fi when he did the Barsoom stories, but more straight adventure when he did Tarzan. Grant Morrison can feature a noirish private eye in what is essentially a Flash Gordon story. Eagle ran Dan Dare alongside stories of the French Foreign Legion. Adventure stories taken from the pulps have always been a subset of film, and sci-fi/fantasy has always been a subset of adventure stories. It is both crucial and obvious to point out that the pulps and film are, however, very different media. Further, it is important to point out that they have very different narrative forms. 
Figure 78: Ancient Greece has numerous subtle treatments
in comics, the bulk of which are impeccably researched.
This is best explained in terms of ancient Greece.
Virtually all thought about narrative structure is a reaction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and, to a lesser extent, his Rhetoric.
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There’s Another Way: Throw Away Your Guns (The Family of Blood)

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Harry Lloyd watches the Red Wedding episode and realizes
Viserys got off easy.
I’ll Explain Later
Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry. Original post.
——
It’s May of 26th, 1995 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z Oasis debuts at number one with “Some Might Say Umbrella.” They remain get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week all story. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Maroon 5, Akon, Snow Patrol, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad Booty Luv also chart.
In the news, the Cutty Sark caught fire while under repairs in Greenwich, in what was believed (but not proven) to be an act of arson. The Crown Prosecution Service decides to charge Andrei Lugovoi for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. AC Milan defeat Liverpool in the UEFA Champions League final. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approves a bill funding the Iraq Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and Afghanistan wars, with progressives failing to get a timetable for withdrawal included, while the Supreme Court issues its ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which declares that one cannot sue for discriminatory pay disparity if the initial decision was made more than 180 days ago. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, dissenting, makes the rare decision to read her dissent from the bench, and the Court’s holding is consciously reversed in 2009 by Congress. A has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March. attempt to lift the commercial moratorium on whaling fails, not that this stops them from whaling, since they just claim that it’s “scientific research.” And Scotland Yard determines that Bob Woolmer died of a heart attack and was not, as some suspected, murdered.
 
While in books on television, Human Nature/The Family of Blood. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie.
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Die Maschinenmensch: The Ultimate Computer

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“Oh, it’s the end of the Earth!”

“The Ultimate Computer” is another somewhat deceiving story. It has a great deal of things all going on all at once and is indeed good in many of the ways people often say it’s good. But there’s a secondary tier of ideas this episode is also working with for which it doesn’t tend to get the credit I think it probably should, and it’s very indicative of the way Star Trek is always in some sense pushing against itself. On the other hand, “The Ultimate Computer” doesn’t quite work either: Not all of the concepts it’s trying to convey come across as well as they perhaps could have, and the script has an unfortunate tendency to contradict itself. I’d definitely say it’s a good baseline target for the show to have been shooting for this season though. However, the one problem with that is that we’re a month away from the end of the filming block for this year: It has the bad luck to end up being compared to “A Piece of the Action” and “Patterns of Force” (a comparison in which it is found wanting) and, just like those episodes, we probably could have stood to see “The Ultimate Computer” about ten weeks ago.

The original pitch for “The Ultimate Computer” came from a mathematician named Laurence N. Wolfe, who wrote it around his passionate interest in the titular devices. However, D.C. Fontana found the script he submitted to be basically unworkable, as it was almost entirely about the story of Doctor Daystrom and the M-5, to the point the Enterprise crew was barely in it. Indeed, the simple explanation for why the episode as aired is in some sense disjointed is because Fontana rewrote it so heavily: There are very much two stories going on here, and they actually probably didn’t belong in the same script. Let’s start with the most obvious reading of “The Ultimate Computer”, and what I’m presuming to be the original pitch: The concept of a computer so sophisticated and humanlike it can actually replace people, and what would drive a person to create such a device in the first place. As we’ve talked about before in regards to the mid- to late- 1960s context in which these episodes were being made, one of the larger sources of malaise at the time was the fear that the rapid increase in both the power and awareness of computers in the immediate postwar age, as well as the move towards mechanizing the workforce that helped usher in what can be called the post-industrial era in late-stage capitalist Westernism (a theme we’ll be returning to a little later on) would eventually dehumanize society. This, combined with a distrust of unchecked logic and bureaucracy, a healthy fear of Stalinism and good old fashioned Red Scare thought poisoning paranoia that defined the Cold War led to many lamenting what they saw as the erosion of “traditional” “American” “values” such as individuality, loyalty and personal achievement.…

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I Have Been Waiting For This Pathetically Cheap Excuse For A Review Blog Since I Started Doing Them

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The TV Movie: Nine years before Russell T Davies revives Doctor Who by taking the standards of American genre television and doing them all cleverly and well we had this, which does the exact same thing only takes all the standards and makes them thunderingly obvious and poorly. Fox was going to either take this to series, or commission another season of Sliders. There’s no honest way to say they made the wrong choice. It’s not really that there’s anything too awful about it. It’s just that there’s nothing that elevates it above the common and the base. Doctor Who becomes just another sci-fi franchise. 4/10…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 25 (Made of Steel)

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After its initial release by Gareth Roberts, which was marked by a strange ambiguity of audience, the Quick Reads set of Doctor Who books settled into a more familiar pattern recognizable as one of the most basic and longstanding tactics in writing a line of Doctor Who books ever: just hire Terrance Dicks to do it. This is, in many ways, impossible to object to. Whatever one might think of various moments in Dicks’s later career, the basic charm of having him write a Tenth Doctor book is irresistible.

We’ve never really talked about the sheer scope of Terrance Dicks’s contributions to Doctor Who. Strictly in television terms, he came on as script editor in the 1960s, while Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. He coauthored Troughton’s regeneration story, The War Games, script edited the entirety of the Pertwee era (and thus in practice wrote several stories when things went terribly wrong), wrote three Tom Baker stories including Baker’s debut, and co-authored a four with Robert Holmes, and wrote The Five Doctors. This alone makes him one of the most longstanding writers of Doctor Who – the range of his contributions rivals Terry Nation and Robert Holmes, and all told he contributed to thirty-five of the hundred and fifty-four classic series stories. Which is to say that if you watch a classic Doctor Who story, there’s nearly a one in four chance Terrance Dicks worked on it.

This would seem impressive were it not for the Target novelizations, a range to which he contributed a staggering sixty-four books, including novels for all of the first six Doctors. These books in many ways form his real legacy – they’re the reason he’s affectionately known as “Uncle Tewwance” among fandom. Dicks is responsible for a vast number of terribly important novelizations: Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, for instance, which kicked off the Target line, and a variety of classic missing stories like Doctor Who and the The Abominable Snowmen and Doctor Who and the The Web of Fear. He novelized An Unearthly Child, Genesis of the Daleks, and a host of other stories. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this – it wasn’t until the 1990s that home video became the easiest way to watch past stories. For decades the Target novelizations were the enduring versions of Doctor Who. They were the only way that anybody could revisit past stories. And the default Target style was Terrance Dicks.

This was not a style defined by flash, or by complex, intricate prose. Dicks’s writing is the very definition of functional, and he demonstrates why that word is straightforwardly a virtue. He can sketch a character quickly, knows how to build excitement, has a decent ear for dialogue, and keeps the plot moving. One rarely stops and drinks in the brilliance of Dicks’s writing, but the reasons for this are simple: one rarely stops with Dicks. It’s not that he doesn’t have an ear for a good phrase – his opening sentences are fantastic, and he’s got a knack for memorable descriptions, even if he does, occasionally, overuse one to the point of mild comedy.…

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“EVIL ALIEN NAZIS!”: Patterns of Force

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“This, uh, isn’t what it looks like, guys…”

If there’s a surer, more immediate sign of the quality of something other than being banned by national governments, I can’t think of it.

“Patterns of Force” was one of the handful of Star Trek episodes initially blocked from airing in certain markets outside the United States for a time. In this case, the country was Germany, which refused to show it for, well, rather obvious reasons as far as banning television shows go. And this is a shame, because Germans would probably have really enjoyed “Patterns of Force”: It’s the most flagrantly anti-authoritarian the show’s been since “Mirror, Mirror”, and in fact this one’s even more blatant and upfront about its message (which is actually a good thing in this case) and a more than capable bit of television to boot. It’s yet another cracking mini-classic of an episode, and I’m genuinely surprised at how many of them there are at this point in the season. In fact the last few weeks may have turned my opinion on the second season around a little bit, as I know two out of the next three episodes are quite good and the one that isn’t is largely irrelevant: This no longer feels like the show that was throwing out garbage like “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and “A Private Little War” on a regular basis, which makes it all the more ironic the show’s still facing cancellation at this point.

“Patterns of Force” itself is somewhat deceiving, as at first glance it looks like the most irritatingly pulpish thing ever. Kirk and Spock beam down to a planet that turns out to be ruled by quite literal space Nazis. What follows is a straightforward series of captures and escapes that’s about as dynamic and exciting as it sounds. However, “Patterns of Force” is nothing if not proof positive plot structure is ultimately superficial and meaningless when you get talented actors delivering tight, well-written lines about gripping and interesting ideas. I actually found myself forgetting I was watching a story this stock because what it’s actually trying to say was compelling enough. Dig a little into the episode’s production history though, and, once again, the reasons start to become clear: The original story outline, dating to the first season, and the first few drafts of the teleplay were penned by Paul Schneider, who I maintain is one of the greatest writers and most unsung heroes of the Original Series. Schneider was behind “Balance of Terror”, which I still think is basically perfect, and one of the only people to recognise Star Trek‘s strengths came out of its theatrical heritage.

Although this is a very promising start, Schneider wasn’t the sole writer of this episode. John Meredyth Lucas picked up his draft late in the second season and retooled it into the script for the episode that made it to air (and, as tragically befits Star Trek at this point in time, Schneider went uncredited). I’m not entirely clear on how much of the finished product is Lucas’ and how much is Schneider’s, but what I can say for sure is that “Patterns of Force” shows them both at the absolute top of their game.…

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Saturday Waffling (September 14th, 2013)

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It’s finally dawned on me that since I cannot actually finish the book before November, hurrying through the last few Hartnell essays instead of getting Chapter 3 of Last War in Albion together is really dumb. So I’ve been working on that, and it’s coming along well. So well that I’m going to keep this brief and get back to writing about Maxwell the Magic Cat, because I am a sick and depraved person and actually think that’s a fun way to spend a Friday evening.

I’ve also just had a fascinating conversation on the charming moral grey areas of piracy. Which brings us to our discussion topic for the weekend – where are your moral lines on when it is or isn’t ethical to pirate media? When there’s no legal and in-print edition? When you’re researching something and just need to check a reference? Whenever you want to? Never? Tell me, dear readers.…

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Ha Ha! He Got It Wrong On The First Line! (42)

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Sparkle with me.

It’s May 19th, 2007. McFly are at number one with “Baby’s Coming Back/Transylvania.” Akon, Linkin Park, the Manic Street Preachers, and Scootch, the latter with “Flying the Flag (For You),” their suitably disastrous entry in Eurovision 2007, which also explains why we have two weeks of news to cover. The Kerguelen Plateau, a sunken island off of Antarctica that used to be a part of India, is discovered. So is the largest supernova ever. Tony Blair announces that he’ll step down in June, finally clearing the way for Gordon Brown. Nicolas Sarkozy becomes President of France. And Chelsea defeat Manchester United 1-0 in the FA Cup final, the first game played in the new Wembley Stadium.

On television, meanwhile, 42. On one level, this is the most straightforwardly sensible matching of brief and writer imaginable. Take the writer who did the big action scripts of Torchwood and match him with the pastiche of a big dumb American action show. And on the other, there’s a level on which this script falls agonizingly short of its promise.

For all the hate Chibnall gets, his Doctor Who work on the whole isn’t all that bad. The Power of Three is marvelous until the ending. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is exactly what an episode with that title should be. The Silurian two-parter flounders, yes, but that’s actually the only time he turns in a story that just doesn’t quite work on a storytelling level. Because 42 does exactly what it sets out to do – it’s an efficient action piece that pulls off the actually fairly difficult “real time” structure. It hangs together logically, sets up its conclusion well at the start, and while it has a few ideas that deserve to euphemistically be called bizarre when what we really mean is “mind-wrenchingly illogical,” this is Doctor Who, and if it doesn’t do a sequence of doors sealed by an evil pub quiz then really, what show will?

And there are moments of the story that are quite good. Putting the Doctor through this sort of wringer is absolutely marvelous – his screaming and saying that he’s scared is  genuinely unsettling in a way the series hasn’t really managed since Sutekh’s dominating of Tom Baker. Martha’s attempt to make a last call to her mother, where they talk at cross purposes, is wonderfully heartbreaking. “Burn with me” isn’t quite “are you my mummy,” but you can still properly freak someone out with it.

Most obviously, of course, it’s directed by Graham Harper, so we get a ton of interesting camera angles and well-executed visuals. The scene of the Doctor and Martha staring out the windows at each other as the escape pod separates is an absolutely phenomenally shot scene. “The Doctor and the companion get separated” is one of the absolute oldest and most bog-standard tricks in Doctor Who, and under Davies there’s been a particular focus on stressing the physical distance between them (The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, Gridlock, and, of course, Doomsday), but the shot of them physically receding from each other, watching each other drift away, and trying desperately to communicate across the silent void is absolutely breathtaking.…

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“Let’s try it once more, with feeling”: Return to Tomorrow

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Morph Ball acquired.

This is an episode I really, really wanted to like but the whole thing sort of left me feeling unsatisfied at the end. Mind, this is after I had to remind myself what it actually was: “Return to Tomorrow” is unfortunately one of the episodes that I’ve always tended to get mixed up with a bunch of other episodes, namely “The Return of the Archons”, “This Side of Paradise”, “The Way to Eden” and “The Paradise Syndrome”. Basically, Star Trek has far too many episodes with the words “Return”, “Eden”, “Paradise” and “Tomorrow” in the title, and this isn’t even getting at my old bugbear the show keeps loving to fall back on: Bland, lazy Garden of Eden and Book of Genesis pastiches. By The Prophets even “The Cage” had an “Adam and Eve” plot, and this one has the nerve to not only drag that up again, but throw Erich von Däniken into the mix and imply Sargon’s people were the inspiration for those myths. Almost five years into Star Trek I can flatly and confidently claim I am beyond sick and tired of Adam and Eve by now.

(For what it’s worth, I also used to confuse “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “The Alternative Factor” and “Requiem for Methuselah” a lot, but interestingly not with “Return to Tomorrow” even though this one also deals with androids. Hopefully now that I’m doing this project I’ll be able to keep all these episodes straight for once.)

But, once I figured out what precisely I was watching, that is, the episode I knew as “the one with the hyper-evolved humanoids, the talking soul gem balls and the first appearance of Diana Muldaur in Star Trek” I was genuinely excited because I remember it having some interesting ideas and really classic scenes. As it turns out, while “Return to Tomorrow” does in fact have all those things, it’s somewhat less than successful at bringing them all together. This in itself is worth commenting on, though: I’ve seen just about every episode of Star Trek up to now as either a complete triumph or a crateringly awful disaster, especially this season. There’s been very little in-between these two extremes in my experience, but with “Return to Tomorrow” we get something else entirely: This isn’t even middling filler, this is a great episode brought down by a small handful of nevertheless fairly noticeable missteps whose potential greatness is still very self-evident.

This becomes clear very early on, as the teaser sets us up for something epic: The Enterprise is out exploring beyond the furthest point where any Starfleet vessel has ever explored when a booming voice comes out of nowhere, takes control of the ship’s systems and, seemingly knowing everything about the crew, requests the ship enter into orbit around a dead Class M planet while declaring that he himself is dead, and all of humanity will die too if they don’t help him. The first act, where it’s revealed Sargon’s people are a race of unfathomably evolved beings of pure thought who were once humanlike, but who destroyed their species in their own hubris and who now require temporary humanoid form to bring themselves back to life, is good enough to get us thinking about themes like the death of gods and the inherent connection between gods and humans through the unique factor of individual human experience, and it didn’t even have to rape anybody.…

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Wiping Moscow From The Face of the Earth Would Be Fine (The Last War in Albion Part 9: Starblazer, the Pulps, Russian Structuralism)

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This is the fourth of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of chapters one and two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s contributions to Starblazer consisted of action-packed adventure stories that always came back with the editorial note “more space combat.” This style of writing owes much to the cheap populist fiction of the American pulps and British penny dreadfuls, which favored a dynamic and breathless prose style… 
“Wiping Moscow from the face of the earth would be fine.” – Warren Ellis recounting editorial guidance from Hasbro, 2008
Indeed, the absence of this hypnotic prose in favor of banal action set pieces provides at least part of the explanation for why the John Carter film was so singularly unable to replicate the narrative magic of its source text. Their text was a sort of verbal spectacle, doing the same thing to language that Siegel and Shuster did for the comics page. 
Figure 68: “The thing was about the size of a Shetland pony,
but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except
that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp
tusks.” – Edgar Rice Burroughs, describing a calot in A
Princess of Mars (image from John Carter, 2012)
But the chief engine of the narrative was the cliffhanger. A story’s job was to be exciting for a certain number of words, then to end on a big cliffhanger so the reader would want to see what happens next week. Their cryptic introductions serve as replacements for the lead-ins from previous installments, and the stories quickly get into their own distinctive rhythms. Chapter Four of A Princess of Mars ends with the revelation of a creature described as “about the size of a Shetland pony, but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp tusks.” The chapter then leaves off, more questions than answers.
Figure 69: Cover of the tenth issue of Eagle,
featuring a page of Dan Dare: Pilot of the
Future (Frank Hampson, 1950)
This structure survived the pulps’ gradual evolution into comics. In the UK the successors were things like The Beano and The Dandy, but also titles like Eagle, Marcus Morris’s 1950 comics magazine headlined by two brightly coloured pages of Frank Hampson and his studio’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dan Dare is one of the most iconic figures in British comics, and will appear several times in the course of the War. A square-jawed pilot meant to evoke the heroism of the RAF in the still-vividly remembered Battle of Britain, Dan Dare fought the villainous Treens, coded blatantly as space Nazis and led by the fiendish Mekon. Dare was in the tradition of action heroes like Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond’s 1930s newspaper comic.
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