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“A world sinks thus; and yon majestic Heaven/Shines not the less for that one vanish’d star!”: The Immunity Syndrome

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Sometimes you really do have to go with the obvious screenshot.

Well, here’s something I wasn’t at all expecting. Given how Star Trek has been seriously underperforming the last few weeks as well as the fact the series has been steadily but noticeably running out of steam since midway through the season I fully anticipated that the episode about the Giant Space Amoeba would be another silly runaround, especially as my memory of it consisted mostly of some agonizing debate over Spock taking on a suicide mission from which it was eminently clear he was going to come back, as well as of the aforementioned Giant Space Amoeba. I was totally prepared to glibly take the piss out of this one as another example of Star Trek‘s inevitable march towards cancellation.

It turns out the memory does in fact cheat, and I’m thankful it does in this case because “The Immunity Syndrome” is actually properly excellent.

In some ways the episode “The Immunity Syndrome” is most immediately comparable with is “The Doomsday Machine”, from which it inherits its thriller structure. Once again, we have a tense countdown to destruction that is narrowly averted at the last possible second and which keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout the entire story. Perhaps as a result, this is a laudably tight and exciting production, and, like its predecessor, a sterling example of what an “average” (to use a potentially loaded term) episode of Star Trek in its second season ought to look like. However it’s a great deal more than that: In this regard (and uncannily so given “A Private Little War” is still relatively fresh in the memory) “The Immunity Syndrome” may actually be closer to “The Alternative Factor”, because the threat posed by the Giant Space Amoeba for almost the entire runtime of the episode is an honest-to-goodness narrative collapse.

We’ve come perilously close to narrative collapse a number of times in Star Trek so far: “The Alternative Factor” is, naturally, the most obvious example, but as I mentioned in its corresponding post, “The Menagerie” at least flirted with the iconography of collapse, though thanks to a combination of the approach of the early Gene Coon era and Gene Roddenberry’s general writerly incompetence that’s not quite what we got. “The Immunity Syndrome”, however, is the closest we’ve gotten yet, and while it ultimately stops just short of becoming one, for the vast majority of the episode it seems like it just might go all the way. The telltale sign comes in the very first act, when the Enterprise discovers the aptly named Zone of Darkness, which immediately begins to sap the life force of both the ship and its crew. Within the zone, there is no starlight, either because it’s been blocked by something or all the stars have simply gone out. Now a lot of calamitous things can happen on Star Trek: The show threatens the destruction of the ship or the death of crewmembers on a seemingly weekly basis.…

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Believe in the Stars (The Last War in Albion Part 8: Starblazer, the Pulps)

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This is the third 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: Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde came to an ignoble end in 1981, but in many ways what was most unusual was that it existed at all, given that superheroes were not particularly popular within British comics, where you were likely to find a wider variety of comics… 

“Believe in the stars.” – Alan Moore, Dodgem Logic #4, 2010
The superhero is thus best used to describe a type of pulp hero story that emerged out of 1930s American comic books. Not all superheroes have their origins in comic books, but enough do that it is a reasonably entertaining game to identify ones who first appeared in another medium, particularly ones that have any degree of popularity today. They are defined primarily by a visual intensity and a sense of heritage tracing back to Action Comics #1. And they are worth fighting over because pulp heroes of that sort are a large part of contemporary culture, and have come to almost completely dominate the American comic book industry, in which large swaths of the War are fought. 
Figure 58: Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future traded on
the fantastic and brightly colored art of Frank
Hampson (From Eagle v3 #12, 1952)
But the War starts in Britain and remains, in the end, fought in Albion. And in British comics culture superheroes never gained the absolute dominance over the comics industry that they did in America. In British comics the first massively popular instance of highly visual pulp storytelling was Eagle, an anthology comic featuring stories in several genres headlined by the colourful adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, and, crucially, dating to 1950, not 1938. And 1950 was squarely in the dead period of superhero comics between their World War II popularity and their Silver Age revivals. This meant that the British comics industry had several years in which to develop its own styles of highly visual pulp storytelling without any influence from American superheroes. 
Figure 59: All-Star Superman #1 cropped
to digest size.

Which meant, in turn, that in 1979 Grant Morrison could submit a story to Starblazer, a comic that simply would not have ever existed in the late 70s American comic book industry. Starblazer debuted in April of 1979, and became a twice-monthly title in July of the same year. Its concept is simple – single issue sci-fi stories (later broadened to include fantasy as well) sold in what’s known as “digest” format. Measuring at 13.5 x 17.5 centimeters (or roughly 5 x 7 inches), digests were about the height of a mass market paperback, but slightly wider at the base – similar to the formats used for science fiction magazines like Galaxy and New Worlds, as well as to American “digest” comics, the most famous of which were Gold Key’s efforts.

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They’d Take Some Adapting (The Shakespeare Code)

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Come on. I dare you. Shout “Freebird.”

It’s April 7th, 2007. David Tennant remains very happy with the charts, or, at least, with the top of them. His feelings on Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Fray, Fergie, Take That, and Justin Timberlake are, to the best of my knowledge, undocumented. In news, Ukranian President Viktor Yushchenko dissolves parliament. The University of Florida unexpectedly wins the NCAA Basketball championship to the swelling pride of nobody whatsoever in Gainesville, Florida, a town that is known to bring trees down when it wins football. Three people are charged in the 2005 London bombings, and Iran releases fifteen British sailors captured back before Smith and Jones, proclaiming it a “gift.” And, the day this story airs, the 153rd University Boat Race takes place. Cambridge wins by one-and-a-half lengths.

While on television, The Shakespeare Code. Some time ago, I was having lunch with Jane, one of our regular commenters, and we were talking about the blog and the roles various commenters play within it. She mentioned Jack Graham and asked what role he played, and I, without a second thought, replied, “he’s the blog’s conscience.” Which is to say that Jack has a staggering 5,000 word piece on The Shakespeare Code that is the definitive account of it, and I’m humbly penning a brief follow-up sketch. Jack, for his part, savages The Shakespeare Code for what it’s not, which is to say, a story about traveling back and time and meeting Shakespeare. He is, of course, absolutely correct that this is not at all what the story is.

His dismissal of what the story actually is holds some water, and I’m certainly not going to be so foolish as to disagree with it, but equally, I’m not, in this case, as interested in the ethics of it as I am in the shape of it. Jack is ultimately making the same observation Tat Wood makes in About Time, which is that Doctor Who has moved to being about people in strange worlds to… ah, but here’s where things fog up. Whatever the ideological case for why this move represents the end of civilization as we know it, it’s not entirely clear what this new take on Doctor Who is.

Whatever it is, Gareth Roberts is surely the iconic example. Gareth Roberts is a writer with little interest in world-building. For Roberts, the point of Doctor Who is to provide cracked mirror reflections of middle class Britain. For him the pinnacle of the series is thus the Graham Williams era, where everything in the universe proved able to become Douglas Adams-esque banter. I said last week that Roberts only ever writes love letters, and this remains an important explanation for his writing. A Roberts script is only ever going to come out of a basic passion for its subject matter. This isn’t a problem – in fact, it’s what makes Roberts’s scripts so much fun. But it means that there’s not a desire to explore the pokey ends of concepts in the scripts.…

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“…is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?”: Obsession

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“What did you see, old man?”

“Obsession” is Moby-Dick for Star Trek again, so firstly all of the comments I made the last time we talked about this kind of story in “The Doomsday Machine” still apply. There is fundamentally not a whole lot to add to that (except for one issue I’ll discuss a little later). The primary problem is, as always, the idea of doing a blind vengeance story in a setting that’s supposedly more enlightened, idealistic and utopian. With Commodore Decker this worked, because we could get a character study about the tragic fall of someone consumed by a need for revenge without jeopardizing one of our own: Imagine, for a moment, that Decker’s role in “The Doomsday Machine” had been filled by Kirk, McCoy or Sulu: There’s no way the show could come back from that the next week, because the nature of serialized anthology television necessitates hitting the reset button in the last two minutes of every episode and doing that after that kind of intensely personal story would have been catastrophic. Furthermore, by essentially casting the Enterprise crew as Ishmael, this upholds the narrative reiteration structure that helped make the episode successful and also helped push the series towards the idealism it will soon become famous for.

In short, this is the problem “Obsession” is continuously grappling with. It’s doing Moby-Dick again, except this time with Kirk as Ahab. Aside from this being, ultimately, a bit lazy and more evidence Star Trek and other US TV shows really need fewer episodes a year in order to better vet their scripts (at least this one is actually somewhat coherent and isn’t a total write-off like the past few weeks have been), it risks breaking the tenuous solid ground the show’s carved out for itself in the wake of “Mirror, Mirror”, “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Journey to Babel” because now Star Trek is more indebted to idealism than it’s ever been before. It’s not fully in that camp yet, it will take the fans to actually put it there, but it is now self-evidently the kind of show that someone could conceivably and plausibly draw that reading from. Hell, even “The Gamesters of Triskelion” portrayed the world of the Federation as something positive and worth striving towards, even if it was appallingly modernist and teleological about it. “Obsession” now has to deal with the challenge of doing a mad vengeance story with a main character on an anthology show that’s started flirting with utopianism, which is something not even “The Doomsday Machine” had to worry about.

The success or failure of this was always going to hinge on how the script handled conflict, and to its credit “Obsession” at least doesn’t totally blow it-It handles the problem about as well as could have been expected of it. It helps greatly that Kirk’s turmoil isn’t just vengeance here but guilt and self-doubt about his hesitation when facing the Vampire Cloud eleven years prior and his inability to save the crew of the Farragut.…

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Something Rotten at the Sausage Factory: How Wikipedia Embraced Transphobia for Chelsea Manning

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There is something that you never, ever do to a transgender person: use their birth name. The reason here is simple – to call a transgender person by their birth name is to deny them the basic right to their identity. It is to claim for yourself the right to dictate who they are, over their own express wishes. It is to tell them that their transition is invalid – that they deserve instead to suffer from the genuine and real pain of gender dysphoria, and that this is preferable to ever allowing them to think that they might have the right to define for themselves the basic aspects of who they are. It is hate speech, plain and simple, as straightforwardly as using the worst racial or sexual slur you can think of.

This is not a matter of when hormone therapy has begun or surgery has taken place. Those are just procedures to reduce the material impact of gender dysphoria and make social transition less awkward and, frankly, less dangerous. The point where it becomes hate speech is the instant that a person has told you their preferred name and gender presentation.

On August 22nd, Chelsea Manning issued a public statement confirming the longstanding reports that she was transgender and asking that instead of using the name “Bradley Manning,” as media sources had been doing up to that point, people refer to her by the name of “Chelsea.” Almost immediately after this announcement the Wikipedia page for Manning was changed from being called “Bradley Manning” to “Chelsea Manning.” In the early hours of August 31st, following a week of discussion, the page was moved back.

This is the story of how the fifth largest website in the world came to actively embrace transphobia and hate speech.

Some disclosure. I am not an impartial observer. Nevertheless, this is a factual account based on the public record of Wikipedia talk pages and logs. Still, in the interests of disclosure, I involved myself in this debate in a minor role, advocating for the position you’d expect. This was my first substantial contribution to Wikipedia in several years, but I do have administrator rights on the project dating back to 2004, when I was a highly active editor. I am friendly with several of the persons involved, although have not met any except on the Internet. One person involved, Morwen, was a significant donor to my Kickstarter. I am not writing this piece on behalf of any of them, and in fact more than one person I am friendly with has expressed reservations over the piece, though not about its factual accuracy.

Morwen has a highly visible role in what happened, but not, ultimately, an important one; she was the editor who retitled (or, in Wikipedia parlance, moved) the page following Manning’s announcement on the Today show. To begin, at least, events consisted of jargon-heavy technical decisions based heavily on Wikipedia policy. These events may be somewhat opaque to outsiders, but it is nevertheless worth summarizing the exact events that led to the larger conflict.…

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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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