Eruditorum Press

A magical ritual to pay our rent

I Borrowed Them From The Hospital (Smith and Jones)

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The Doctor learns first-hand what Daft Punk mean by “get
lucky.”

It’s March 31st, 2007. At last, the great leap forward. The Proclaimers with Brian Potter and Andy Pipkin are at number one with “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles,” presumably much to David Tennant’s delight. Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani (and Akon), Fray, Sugababes vs Girls Aloud, Take That, and Fergie (with Ludacris) also chart. In news, the iPhone was announced, Jade Goody got embroiled in the racism controversy that was briefly what she was best known for, and actually not much more happened.

On television it’s Smith and Jones. On one level, this is a straightforward bit of television. It has a job to do, and it gets on with it. That job is to properly relaunch Doctor Who without Rose Tyler, and to introduce Martha Jones. This is done in the context of a story that is clever enough to provide some solid images and moments, but nevertheless firmly in the realm of what feels like traditional Doctor Who. (Though it’s worth talking briefly about those solid images and moments – Davies apparently spent a lot of effort on doing the best running through corridors sequence to date, and on portraying proper panic for the first time. I mention this because it’s such an utterly idiosyncratic pair of things to focus on, especially in an episode that already has so much heavy lifting to do, and seems to me to speak volumes about how Davies works as a creative figure.)

At the heart of all of this is the idea of Martha, which is, of course, also at the heart of one of  Doctor Who’s great Problem Seasons. We talked back in The Runaway Bride about how the major split within the Davies era is Rose and Donna. Certainly this appears to be true in terms of the British public, and, for that matter, within the Davies era itself – it’s telling that Martha is the only Davies-era companion to, in The End of Time, get squared away alongside another companion, and that she’s separated from the Big Two at the end. Martha, in most regards, seems the forgotten companion – the one that didn’t quite work. That’s not to say she doesn’t have her fans and admirers, nor that those fans are wrong. But they are swimming against the tide, and the show itself contributes to that tide.

There are many reasons for Martha’s falling short. For one thing, she’s hobbled from her first appearance by virtue of the fact that the show defines her as Not-Rose. There’s not really a way back from this within the confines of what the show can do. Nor, however, was there necessarily a way to avoid it. The importance of Rose Tyler within the show’s cultural mythology is hard to overstate. Her absence was necessarily part of the story, and this was unavoidable. This is not, to be clear, some judgment about Rose as a companion – rather it’s a judgment about the cultural narrative of Doctor Who, which relaunched in 2005 in a high profile version headlined by Billie Piper as the new companion.…

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“Entertain us…Or die!”: The Gamesters of Triskelion

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“Ah! Loana the Fair One approaches!”

If “A Private Little War” was bad on account of being a slapdash parade of Star Trek‘s signature reactionary concepts and a general catastrophe on all counts, this one is bad because it’s just a hollow recitation of the tropes the series has accrued over the years. “The Gamesters of Triskelion” is a very promising candidate for most generic and uninspired episode of the Original Series ever.

Having spent the year on a quality roller coaster that wildly alternated between moments of iconic brilliance and spectacular ethical cratering, Star Trek finally decides to just give up and go through the motions. There is a profound sense of apathy throughout this entire production: The basic plot is a defanged and watered down rehash of “Bread and Circuses” with a critique of slavery, gambling and maybe boxing thrown in for good measure, none of which are themes the episode is particularly interested in engaging with in any meaningful way. And really, is “Slavery is bad” a statement that the supposedly ever-socially conscious Star Trek honestly needed to engage with in 1968? This is cheating: Giving the illusion you’re saying something relevant and important while really just clinging to safe, hollow platitudes.

Aside from that, we have another of Kirk’s cold-blooded, manipulative seduction with a painfully superficial “What Is Love?” overtone. This is capped off with a scene that could be chartiably read as the first concrete example of Star Trek describing its world as a utopia, except in practice it actually plays out more like a celebration of modernist teleology of the sort the show’s been hampered with all season. Also, the scene in question feels like a knockoff version of Kirk’s conversations with Edith Keeler about stars in “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Then we have some more top graduates from the William Ware Theiss school of laughably sexist costume design, because I guess it was time for some more of those. Uhura gets raped for literally no reason that makes any sense from the perspective of the plot or the episode’s internal narrative logic except for “we apparently needed one to increase dramatic tension”, so that’s charming. The entire story is an absolutely tedious series of pulpish captures and escapes that were dated writing crutches ten years before this was made, and I’d call the pacing glacial if I was convinced “The Gamesters of Triskelion” actually had pacing. Furthermore, Spock and McCoy are written so stock they no longer seem like programmatic, formulaic characters but parodies of programmatic, formulaic characters (and Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley respond in kind).

Along those lines, this is the first episode where the criticisms of William Shatner’s acting start to get the appearance of having any semblance of merit. Shatner’s style of performance has always been defined by a kind of subtle overstatement that is descended from the classical theatrical style of acting where, instead of trying to get their mental state to match that of the characters and portray it as realistically as possible, actors instead directly convey information to the audience through visual and auditory cues.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 31st, 2013)

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Right. The work update. The Baker book is all drafted, I’ve got the first round of edits back on Wonder Woman, and as predicted, I didn’t quite finish up the Hartnell stuff. (It’ll definitely get finished next revisions week, but I allocated some time to the next Last War in Albion chapter, where I just had a stunning bit of luck involving some bibliographic research lining up Maxwell the Magic Cat strips with Moore’s Swamp Thing run.)

I’m literally writing three things at once right now, counting this post, so am going to commit the most shameless act of blogger laziness ever.
This is Lettie Hempstock, our newly acquired six-month-old cat. Lettie is mostly blind, and has decided that curling up on my desk is a favorite evening passtime. Occasionally she climbs around my head and purrs a lot.
This is Coraline Jones, Lettie’s entirely blind sister. She also likes climbing on my desk, though she is more prone to decide to savagely attack my hands while I’m typing. She is equally prone to crawling around my head and purring.
This is Krypto. It’s a fairly old photo of him, hence the snow, but it is also my favorite photo of him, and unlike the cats I haven’t been obsessively photographing him to show him off on Facebook.  He is largely undisturbed by the recent arrival of two visually-impared lunatics who think his tail is a fun toy.
As the new season of American television gears up, is there anything people are watching or excited about? Besides a new Joss Whedon show, I mean.
…

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The Worm That Cloned

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‘Airlock’ is quite a find, as it turns out.  There are some very interesting, unexpected things in it.  Not least, an honest-to-goodness flashback sequence (in dumbshow apart from a voiceover), filmed in first-person POV!  This is the sort of stylistic flourish that old-fashioned Who usually didn’t bother with.  It ain’t Kubrick, but it’s unusually ambitious by the standards of the time.  Also, Stephanie Bidmead – a Shakespearean actress – plays Maaga in a far more physically expressive way than the audios might lead one to believe.  She delivers great swathes of her dialogue – which is ostensibly directed to her fellow Drahvins – direct to the audience, staring into the camera.  Nothing like that was seen (apart from Tom’s occasional bouts) until Morgus… and even that was an accident.

Of course, charming and fascinating as it is, the story remains hopeless.  The Drahvins are a near-perfect illustration of mainstream 60s attitudes towards ‘the woman question’.  Contemptuous, we-know-better-dear, patronising smugness at the sheer unworkable, extremist silliness of ‘women’s lib’.

The race of evil alien feminists are marked out from other baddies of the era by their towering stupidity and shambolic incompetence.  Despite being ostensibly emotionless clones (drained of all proper female responses) they are hysterical and irrational.  They even have a rubbish old ship that (natch) they don’t know how to fix.  (Tsch, lady drivers!)  Their solution is to find the nearest males (be they Time Lords or pompous alien wallruses) and, in their ditzy confusion, attack them while also petulantly demanding their help.  In return, the males must simply consent to be robbed and abandoned.  Really, this would be the favourite Doctor Who episode of any MRA tosspot (consult this acute and hilarious site if you don’t know what an MRA is).

There is a strain of cut-price Brave New World-style sneering at ‘Test Tube Modernity’.  The flailing Drahvin gynococracy or matriarchy (note: their bosstrix is called Maaaaaaaaga) is steeped in the ostensible horrors of cloning.  This meshes directly with the terrified emasculation fantasy lurking beneath the surface of the story’s conception of female independence.  They produce a few males (coyly referring to “as many as we need”… ahem) and then cull the rest like excess badgers.

I’m actually surprised Steven Moffat doesn’t like this more.…

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Outside the Government: Invasion of the Bane

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No, no, it’s just that, you know, your profile picture made you
look… and, I mean, this isn’t a criticism, but… less tentacular.

It is still New Year’s Day. Actually, we’ve moved backwards in time a few hours for Invasion of the Bane, the debut of The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is often called the pilot, which, in fact, it wasn’t – a pilot is an episode shot as a demo so that a full series can be considered. The first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was already commissioned when this got shot, and it was, in reality, a New Year’s special for a series that hadn’t actually aired its first episode yet.

It’s worth rehearsing the development of the show, though it’s well documented enough. The BBC, following the success of Doctor Who, went a bit spin-off mad, commissioning Totally Doctor Who and Torchwood, then moving on to wanting a children’s drama featuring a teenaged Doctor on Gallifrey and, briefly, considering a set of annual specials under the name Rose Tyler: Defender of the Earth. The latter idea was quickly abandoned in the name of peace and sanity, The former, meanwhile, seems to have gotten about as far as Davies and Gardner laughing uproariously and then ordering some people killed.

Once the appropriate heads had been affixed to the appropriate pikes, Davies sent word back to the BBC that while he would not be doing Young Doctor Who, he was eager to do a children’s series focusing on Sarah Jane Smith, who he’d just successfully brought back in School Reunion. Because Davies was at one of those points in one’s career where he was invincible and allowed to do whatever he wanted, his plan to appeal to the youth of Britain with a show about a middle aged woman from 70s television was, in a rare burst of good sense from an entertainment industry that would usually respond to this much like Davies did to Young Doctor Who, enthusiastically approved.

There is an underlying tension here, and it’s one that never quite disappears from The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, it’s television aimed at people who were not actually alive when Doctor Who was originally on the air. On the other, more than any other show in the Doctor Who family The Sarah Jane Adventures is concerned with the material past of Doctor Who. I don’t just mean this in the sense that it features Sarah Jane, returns of three other 70s characters, and bunches of other moments that are overtly and consciously nostalgic for the past. (Really, it’s a wonder the Silurians and Sontarans didn’t make their returns in The Sarah Jane Adventures)

No, what’s really and oddly nostalgic about The Sarah Jane Adventures is that the show is set up to work like classic series Doctor Who, complete with half-hour episodes and cliffhangers. And even though Invasion of the Bane is an hourlong special, it’s still given the most familiar setup imaginable: exciting new technological object, mysterious goings-on, aliens are behind it and turn out to be evil.…

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“War. What is it good for?”: A Private Little War

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“I’m sorry, I seem to have gotten lost and wound up on some other show.”

Well, the one good thing to say about it is that we can now be certain about who to blame for “The City on the Edge of Forever”.

Yikes this one is a mess. “A Private Little War” should have been interesting, being the second episode written by Don Ingalls. As the writer of “The Alternative Factor”, an episode I thought was positively delightful, giddily clever and a highlight of the first season, his follow-up effort for the more experimental second season should have been a fascinating watch, if not a minor classic. However, following a comprehensive rewrite from Gene Roddenberry, the story’s Vietnam-inspired anti-war subtext became Vietnam-inspired pro-war text in one of the ugliest and clunkiest transformations I’ve ever seen an episode undertake. The end result is a catastrophically imperialist and bigoted and right up there with “The Apple” as one of the single worst things Star Trek ever produced, and this one doesn’t even hold together as a cohesive bit of narrative structure. Ingalls was so offended by this he took his name off the script and used the pseudonym “Jud Crucis”, which is wordplay on the phrase “Jesus Crucified”. So that sounds promising.

I mean really, what more is there to say? Kirk discovers the Klingons feeding advanced weapons technology to a peaceful, idyllic group of childlike natives for…some reason, and his solution is to feed the other side weapons to preserve the “Balance of Power” and, just for good measure, explicitly stating this was the only way humanity survived the proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is just about the exact same tack the show attempted back in “Friday’s Child”, and I obviously owe D.C. Fontana an apology because it’s now perfectly clear whose fault that bit of ethical bankruptcy was. We also once again have that interminable Book of Genesis Garden of Eden drivel which I’m at this point genuinely sick to death of seeing the show roll out over and over again. This time it’s shown to be a tragedy, though a necessary one to introduce serpents into the garden (as opposed to “The Apple” which just considered this to be natural part of societal development), but this isn’t adding any nuance to this stock, overused plot or providing a sufficiently fresh angle that would justify going over it yet again. Maybe Roddenberry should have just gone into Bible Studies instead of becoming a TV writer.

On top of that, any goodwill the episode stocked up thanks to the introduction of the really quite excellent Doctor M’Binga is quickly squandered by returning to the “Errand of Mercy” tactic of browning up the white actor portraying its Klingon adversary, something every Klingon episode in between had managed to avoid doing. Additionally, having Chekov, Scotty and Uhura freely contribute their opinions and analysis in the first bridge scene, and than having the script incapacitate Spock in order to explore Kirk and McCoy’s relationship, are both brilliant moves except for the fact Roddenberry doesn’t have Kirk listen to any of them and instead has him just go around winning arguments by shouting louder then the person he’s debating against.…

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Humanitarian Intervention

5

TW

Okay, so there’s a house.  Inside, an abusive husband is in the process of beating up his wife and kids.

“We’ve got to do something” says a concerned passer-by outside.

“I agree,” says a liberal onlooker.

“Right,” says the concerned passer-by, “wait here a mo…”

The concerned passer-by reappears in a suspiciously short amount of time with a fleet of bulldozers armed with wrecking balls, some petrol in a jerry can and a box of matches.  The bulldozers set about demolishing the house while the concerned passer-by sets light to it. 

Once all is quiet, the concerned passer-by and his mates raid the smoking ruins of the house for all the valuables that are still in one piece and unscorched, treading over the burned corpses of the wife and children as they go.  They strike a deal with the husband (it turns out they are old mates of his and actually sold him the knuckle-duster he was using to punch his wife).  In return for letting him live, he gives them his bank account details.  (He’s secretly quite pleased to be rid of the wife and kids.)

“Hmm,” says the liberal onlooker, “that didn’t go quite how I imagined.”

Two weeks later, the liberal onlooker is passing another house in which another abusive husband is beating up his wife and kids.

The same concerned passer-by as before appears next to him.

“We’ve got to do something,” says he.

“I agree,” says the liberal onlooker.

“Right,” says the concerned onlooker, “wait here a mo…”…

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Superhuman Effort to Keep Things The Way They Are (The Last War in Albion Part 7: Captain Clyde, Superheroes)

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This is the second of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: In 1979, Grant Morrison began writing and drawing Captain Clyde for The Govan Press, a small local paper of a district in Glasgow. The comic attempted to depict a quasi-realistic local superhero, named after the River Clyde upon which Glasgow sits, who, like Morrison, was just an unemployed Glaswegian trying to get by. Installments of Captain Clyde are extremely difficult to locate, but several strips are publicly available…
“A society where nothing can change because it takes superhuman effort to keep things the way they are.” – Warren Ellis, 1999

Figure 48: The goddess Elen offers Chris Melville superpowers
in an early installment of Captain Clyde (c. 1979)
The first strip appears to be from the earliest days of the strip – a plot that O’Donnell describes summarises as Melville being “offered the powers of Earth and Fire by the earth goddess Elen – If he could defeat her champion, Magna.” This, Morrison explains in response, is because of “an interest in ley lines and earth magic and all that pseudo mystical, hippy shit,” marking the first documented instance of Morrison’s fascination with magic and the occult. Morrison reiterates this in Supergods, using the story of his uncle giving him the Aleister Crowley/Frieda Harris Thoth Tarot for his nineteenth birthday, which got him into magic as a bridge between his discussion of Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men and his own Captain Clyde work. The anecdote culminates with him performing what he describes as “a traditional ritual” resulting in “a blazing, angelic lion 
Figure 49: Lady Frieda Harris’s design
for The Magus (aka The Magician) in
Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
head… growling out the words “I am neither North nor South.” The second strip at least somewhat continues on that theme, showing Captain Clyde collapsed at the center of a stone circle before being renewed by some mystical power. This strip does not seem to immediately follow from the first, as Melville is identified by the caption box as Captain Clyde, suggesting it is not the origin story. Instead it appears to illustrate a feature of Captain Clyde, who, as Morrison puts it, “periodically has to recharge his powers by drawing earth energy from standing stones and other sacred sites.” The interest in Scotland’s otherness and pagan roots reinforces the initial sense of Captain Clyde as a sort of dissident superhero strip – an attempt to recreate the concept from the outsider perspective of an unemployed Glaswegian. 
The other two strips are consecutive, and feature a battle between Captain Clyde and a villain named Quasar, who is described in Supergods as “a tweed-jacketed headmasterly villain” who turns into a “star-powered monster.” The chronology given in Supergods suggests this too is from the earlier portion of the strip, before its turn towards excess.
…

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Outside the Government: End of Days

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Grrr. Argh.

It’s still New Year’s Day, essentially seconds after the close of Captain Jack Harkness, as Torchwood goes out with a two-hour finale event, running End of Days immediately after the preceding episode.

It’s very easy to take shots at End of Days, and some of them are even fair. It attempts to do an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink finale of the sort that Russell T Davies had already made standards elements of Doctor Who, only on a fraction of the budget, and it shows. “Weird things are falling through time all over the world” is a bigger concept than Torchwood can actually pull off, and all we actually get is an ornery Roman and some hazmat suits. It’s tempting to say that this is too big a concept for a one-hour slot, but that’s not really the problem – the problem is that Torchwood doesn’t have anything like the resources to show something this big. It’s trying to conjure a global threat in a show that has the budget, on a really good day, to have three guys in rubber masks lurching through the streets of Cardiff.

On top of that, the pacing wobbles considerably. Much of this is because it wants its third act twist of Abaddon rising up, which would probably have worked better if it had more than three minutes of screen time devoted to it, was remotely set up, and wasn’t a transparent knock-off of The Satan Pit. Instead most of this episode feels overcompressed, making things like the fact that Bilis doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense more obvious than they should be. It turns out that the gambit of “keep the plot moving fast enough that there’s no time to notice the holes” is a more delicate game than it seemed. (My favorite is the fact that they’ve apparently upgraded security to require the butler’s retina print since the last episode.)

And, of course, there’s the character motivation, which requires that Owen’s several-episode idiot plot spontaneously become virulently contagious such that everybody – not just a grief-stricken Gwen, but every single person in Torchwood besides Captain Jack – simultaneously abandoning all semblance of common sense and thinking “if only we were to do the exact same thing that’s already nearly destroyed the world, that would probably fix everything.” This makes the intra-Torchwood conflict scenes something rather short of compelling, and as that’s the central drama of the episode, well, again, there are problems.

All of which said.

Let’s start with Abaddon and his role as a knock-off of the Beast in The Satan Pit. The phrase “knock-off” may undersell this slightly – Abaddon, another name for the devil, is said to be “chained in rock” and “cast out before time,” which isn’t so much copying The Satan Pit as explicitly referencing it. So, OK, apparently Krop Tor was just imprisoning one of several gigantic horned death beasts from before time. But if the episode is going to demand to be read in light of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit then we may as well do so.…

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“It has been said that social occasions are only warfare concealed.”: Journey to Babel

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“If you want to know how to run a meeting, you consult ‘Rooster’s Rules of Order'”.

“Journey to Babel” is the most iconic and beloved of D.C. Fontana’s Star Trek scripts, and also apparently her favourite. It’s not difficult to see why, as its strengths are in the very things fans love most about Star Trek: Character development and world-building. I don’t personally consider it either her best work or my favourite thing she’ll ever contribute to the franchise (we have to wait for the second phase of her career for those), but it is certainly the best script of hers we’ve seen on the Original Series so far, and a convincing claim could be made it’s her best effort of the entire show.

Primarily, of course, “Journey to Babel” comes out of a vested interest in characters. Most obviously Spock, and, to be precise, his family history. Fontana took a few lines from previous episodes about Spock’s mother being human and a schoolteacher and his father being an ambassador and wrote a story designed to explore the triangular relationship and tension between them. Fontana was very interested in what kind of a human woman would willingly marry a Vulcan, what their half-human, half-Vulcan son would experience growing up and what effect this would have on the person he grew up to be. This is a fact that would be worthwhile to take note of, because it’s emblematic of a very particular approach to character development that I think Fontana is especially interested in, and it seems to define the way Star Trek among other kinds of television shows handles this. The way I see it, there are at least two major ways to go about characterization (naturally, there are more than this but to simplify things I’m just going to talk about what I find to be two basic categories different tacks and tactics can be more or less squeezed in to).

The first takes a character who has a specific worldview and personality borne out of a specific positionality and is predominantly interested in seeing how they respond to a given situation, be it widespread event, an interaction with another character or so on and so forth. The second is more interested in constructing a meticulous fictional biography of the character based on, among other things, throwaway lines in other episodes, and using that to construct a comprehensive profile and life history of this character as a person. To put it another way, the first approach can be summarised as “What is this character like and how do they react to the story of the week?” while the latter can be summarised as “Why does this character think the things they think and act the way they do?”. “Journey to Babel” is very much in the latter style, and I have a feeling this is the style D.C. Fontana prefers on the whole, at least at this stage in her career. It’s also the style that is most clearly identifiable with Star Trek.…

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