Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

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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A Sweater Vest of Reviews

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Time and the Rani: For all its faults, and there are very many of those, and they are very obvious, already the process of improvement is beginning. Having Kate O’Mara impersonate her is the closest anyone has come to date to getting Mel to work. The direction here really is impressive – leaps and bounds beyond Season 22’s flatness. The writing is shambolic, but we know they’re working on it, and in fleeting spots you can see Cartmel’s influence starting to poke through. It’s abysmal, but it’s also the first step in a real road of improvement. I gave Ultimate Foe a 2/10, so by virtue of the fact that it’s getting better, 3/10

Paradise Towers: It really is quite marvelous, requiring no excuses that we haven’t gotten used to making for other stories. It’s JG Ballard done as children’s panto – something only Doctor Who could ever do. If you don’t want children’s panto JG Ballard then there is something a bit wrong with you. The plot comes a little unglued in the fourth episode, but on the whole this is lovely and funny and human in a way Doctor Who hadn’t been for years at this point. Absolutely marvelous. 8/10

Delta and the Bannermen: Sloppy and undisciplined in places, but with a manic glee and a desire to do new and innovative things that still feels like a drink of cool water after the preceding few years. Right down to the fact that the title is a pun on new wave music, this feels alive and present and like everybody involved is interested in what this specific story has to say instead of in making Doctor Who for Doctor Who’s sake. Yes, it doesn’t quite come together, but it also never leaves you staring at the screen wondering what they were thinking. 7/10

Dragonfire: There’s a school of thought that says the “real” McCoy era starts with Ace, and that thus treats this story as where things start to turn around. Rubbish. There’s no standard by which this isn’t inferior to the two stories that came before it, and the Ace we have here is not the character who shows up to such effect in the next story. What we have here are some good ideas spoiled by poor directorial choices. Where Delta and the Bannermen was an attempt at a serious script elevated by the decision to treat it as a comedy, this is a funny script killed dead by dour excess. Not a disaster by any means, but pedestrian. 5/10

Remembrance of the Daleks: What is there to say? The best Dalek story of the classic series, the best story up to this point in the classic series, a story so radical that it changed how people did Doctor Who forever. Would there have been a new series if the show had been cancelled before this? I’m not sure there would have been… 10/10

The Happiness Patrol: Good lord this is a nice piece of television. Yes, it’s transparently political, but this was late 80s Britain, when the country’s great cultural exports were politically angry music and politically angry comics.…

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Outside the Government: Captain Jack Harkness

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Hello Sailor.

It’s January 1st, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” while Iron Maiden, Take That, Girls Aloud, Gwen Stefani, and Chris Cornell also chart. Since Christmas, Gerald Ford died. The UK paid off its last World War II debts to the United States and Canada, although it still has a few bits from the Napoleonic Wars and a rather large amount from World War I. And, of course, Saddam Hussein was executed. Also, it’s International Heliophysical Year. Aw yeah!

On television we have a triple-header – two episodes of Torchwood and the hour long premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures all on the same day. Since we’ve been on a Torchwood kick, I’ll sort those two out first, and then we’ll do Sarah Jane on Friday. First, then, is Captain Jack Harkness, notably the only episode of Torchwood to earn a Hugo nomination, although, inevitably, it lost to Blink. This is, in many ways, not surprising. Captain Jack Harkness is an “issues” story that was well-timed. The beginning of 2007 was more or less peak time for a high profile television show to do a gay romance. And Torchwood did it well by not making a big deal of that aspect except inasmuch as Original Jack’s public embrace of Our Jack amounted to a public coming out and acceptance of his sexuality. Even still, there’s no reaction to it except a puzzled “what’s he doing” from one of Original Jack’s men. The episode is in no way about the fact that it’s the “gay men” episode, a quiet confidence that such an episode doesn’t need to be a Very Special Episode that’s about the glories of its own existence.

There is, of course, a reasoned objection to be had here, which is that it is maybe just a little too optimistic to think that 1941 was a time in which a captain in the US Air Force could publicly snog another man and get away with it, even to the extent of flying a fatal mission the next day. But this is an odd sort of objection that requires that we treat Torchwood as the sort of show in which real history is displayed. We’ll discuss this more next week when we get to The Shakespeare Code, but suffice it to say that there is little in Doctor Who that suggests that this sort of romantic view of history would be avoided. It’s obvious wish fulfillment, sure, but it’s not an unreasonable wish, and the little details elsewhere like remembering to depict Tosh’s difficulties as an Asian woman in 1941 give needed reassurance that the production team knows what rules they’re bending.

And without the bending of rules you don’t have an episode like this. Because this isn’t just “Captain Jack falls in love with a man in the past,” but rather “Captain Jack falls in love with his own erased history,” a concept that is, in many ways, actively set up and worked towards over the course of the first season of Torchwood.…

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“ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?”: Bread and Circuses

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“May Auri-El’s light guide your way.”

At last, we’ve come to the series finale of the original Star Trek.

At least when the end came, it came quickly. In one of the franchise’s saddest twists, “Bread and Circuses” is the epilogue to the story of Star Trek grasping immortality last week and proves once and for all the Original Series really had nowhere to go after “The Trouble with Tribbles”. As the only episode co-written by both Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon (and serving as a send-off to the latter’s tenure as showrunner) it’s a tight summation and echo of all the series’ motifs, and while it brings closure to the show in style, the last, desperate grab for glory “Bread and Circuses” represents is ultimately futile: While it’s ironically one of the best episodes of the season, and one of the tightest, most creative productions in the entire series in terms of both writing and cinematography, the writing is on the wall. There’s one more episode to go, but even a cursory knowledge of what that one was supposed to be should make it abundantly clear what Star Trek‘s future prospects look like.

Frustratingly, “Bread and Circuses” is genuinely exciting and clever: It’s a scathing condemnation of life in the mid-20th Century United States penned by people unfortunate enough to witness some of the more particularly excessive aspects of it. The indictment of the late-stage capitalist, Modernist West and its careless ecological destruction, self-absorbed egotism, short-sighted ecological carelessness, insensitivity to brutal violence general cynicism and society built around spectacle and artifice remains frighteningly relevant and one of the strongest statements Star Trek ever made on the issue. Furthermore, we now have the circa-1968 United States being just about explicitly called Rome and, as before, comparisons are made between Starfleet officers and Roman legionaries, with the most obvious being the Proconsul’s growing admiration for and respect of Kirk and his quip to him that he’d “make a good Roman”. However, perhaps because we’ve now had “Mirror, Mirror”, there’s no longer any ambiguity about how our heroes stack up: Coon and Roddenberry (though I suspect this is mostly Coon) are firmly on the side of Kirk and the Enterprise crew and this story is about them proving that while they may have the makings of imperialists and have a conflict-ridden, imperialist history (as Spock points out on a number of occasions) they are manifestly not imperialists.

The way they go about this is, interestingly, the Prime Directive. This is the other major episode this season to deal with it and, unlike “The Apple”, it’s portrayed as being unambiguously a good thing: Taking the oath of the Prime Directive is shown to be a solemn responsibility and that Starfleet officers would rather die than break it, which really just makes “The Apple” look even more ridiculous than it already did. Although, there’s a bit more nuance to the Prime Directive debate here than there usually is-Merik is portrayed as being in the wrong for violating it, but he’s shown to have been coerced into doing so by the Empire.…

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Darwinia

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Here are a few of the fortunes I devised during my first week as a writer of fortunes at Trang’s Fortune Cookies Ltd:

YOU ARE CURRENTLY BALD.  THIS IS A MISTAKE.
 
OBEY THE WISDOM OF THE FROG.  HE KNOWS.

LOOK NOT TO THE RIGHT NOR TO THE LEFT BUT SIMPLY DO.

 
KEEP IT SIMPLE.  COMPLEXITY KILLS.
 
HAPPY THE MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF CHEESE.
 
STARSKY AND HUTCH, I SUMMON YOU.

I LOVE YOUR EARS, MY LITTLE FRIEND.

 
ABUSE ANTS.
 

Mr Trang speaks no English, but he pops his head round my office door every day and expresses his benevolent interest in my work by means of gestures and facial expressions.  I show him my work book.  I concoct something in the region of 500 fortunes a day.  More, on a good day.  Mr Trang cannot read them but he casts his eyes over my work politely.  He smiles and nods encouragingly.  Sometimes he bows and mimes applause.  I smile back, bow in return and mime modest shrugs.  This appears to please him and he leaves.

I came to work at Trang’s after losing my job at the Ministry of Insects.  I was doing quite well at the Ministry.  I’d only been there five months and had already been promoted to Under Secretary For Grasshoppers.  I had my career path mapped out.  I would ascend to helm the Grasshoppers Department and then I would rise to a mid-level position in the related field of Locusts.  Once leadership of Locusts was mine, as it surely would be once I had ousted that fool Ormstead, I would deal directly with the other Heads of Department for the various bureaux in the Agricultural Pests Division.  I would establish a power base amongst Pests and clamber up the greasy pole until I was in a position to become the Pests Oversecretary.  The current Pests Oversecretary, Himmelfarb, would be hard to nobble, but I was confident I would find a way.  From there it would be only a short step sideways to any one of several possible paths.  I could choose which path I wanted to take based upon circumstances at the time.  I might continue to rise in Insects, via a route through the large and complex Flies Department.  I saw potential openings in Trichoptera and Megaloptera.  Progress through this area of the Ministry would be slower but would have the advantage of giving me more experience, which might be an issue that would come up later on.  Or I might jump sideways to the smaller but infinitely more prestigious Ministry of Arachnids.  Or I might even be able to jump over spiders and go straight to Marine Arthropods, depending on Tinkerman’s attitude to me.  I found Tinkerman enigmatic, with his cold eyes and his monotonous voice and his habit of breaking things slowly and deliberately.  Chairs.  Desk tidies.  Books.  Paperclips.  Anything that happened to be in front of him, he dismantled and left in pieces.  I wasn’t sure he disliked me, however.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 24th, 2013)

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Just finished off the week’s blogging, setting me up for nine straight days of mucking about with books. If all goes well Hartnell v2 will be almost wrapped up at the end of it, barring the essays that are about things coming out in November. Six to write, which is a little ambitious for nine days when doing the reading/listening for them is counted as part of the time, but it’s not impossible.

The next bunch of paragraphs are about Last War in Albion. But for the sizable chunk of readers who are only in it for Doctor Who stuff, there’s a Doctor Who question at the very end of the post you can skip to.

Last War in Albion continues to be very fun. If you haven’t grabbed the ebook of Chapters 1 and 2, please do consider doing so to support the project. I suppose I should talk briefly about some of my plans there. At the moment I’m planning on running it on Thursdays for remainder of TARDIS Eruditorum. After this set of five entries it’ll go to Chapter Three, which is about Alan Moore’s earliest work. After that we finally get to stuff that isn’t spectacularly obscure, at which point hopefully people will read it.

Obviously, as I’ve said, the format of Last War in Albion is a bit challenging. I stand by my reasons for writing it the way I am – I think I absolutely had to get away from the “episode guide” structure of TARDIS Eruditorum, for one thing. For another, Last War in Albion is about the implications of the comics it covers as much as it’s about what’s in them. The notion of the War is a conscious nod to Faction Paradox, and particularly The Book of the War. Part of the point, in other words, is how hard the War is to pin down.

I recognize, of course, that this makes some aspects of it tougher to follow. I’ve tried to smooth that out a bit in Chapter Two – I’m being a bit less ostentatiously aggressive in where I cut the chapters, and, since the idea of serializing the story this way is in part modeled on comics, I’ve nicked the idea of a recap page. The real problem, though, is figuring out how to make money off of it. Because this is a job, and I need to do that.

As I said, the ebook singles are one idea. And they’re an important one – just getting Last War in Albion to provide a steady month-in/month-out income stream would be a big deal. So, again, please think about grabbing them on the basic logic that kicking me $1.50 or so every 10,000 words or so is something that helps keep the project running. So again, please do think about buying it. Here it is on Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords.

But they are just one idea, and this seems like a good idea to at least talk about some of the other things I’d like to do.…

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I Happened To Be Wearing This Old Thing (The Runaway Bride)

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One wonders why she was fooled. After all, everyone
knows that spiders are from Mars.
It’s Christmas, 2006. So we’ve made it a whole day forward since Combat. There hasn’t really been any news, and the charts remain the same. On television, it’s an actual Doctor Who episode.
A side effect of Torchwood is that it increases the sense of time between the Doomsday and The Runaway Bride when compared to The Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion. Actually, some of that is just the ludicrously compressed cultural timeframe of the first season. The point where bet shops opened odds on what Bad Wolf was overlapped with the release of The Gallifrey Chronicles, and both came long after the announcement of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. The Christmas Invasion feels as much like the culmination of Series One as it does the start of Series Two. It’s much harder to say that about The Runaway Bride, in part because it feels like nearly a season’s worth of television has happened since the end of Doomsday. 
In hindsight, of course, this feels like the debut of Donna Noble, companion extraordinaire. As we said last time, this is true in exactly the same way that The Web of Fear introduces the Brigadier, which is to say, not really at all. Catherine Tate isn’t playing a prospective companion here, she’s playing a part that’s written to fit in seamlessly on The Catherine Tate Show, but that happens to not actually be one of her own creations. The point of The Runaway Bride is simply to mash up “a Catherine Tate character” with the Doctor for an hour. Whereas the Donna of Season Four is all about running away from being this character and giving Tate the fully rounded character she should have gotten the first time around.
Put another way, you can see why, when Catherine Tate’s casting in Season Four was announced, the consensus reaction in fandom was that Russell had finally gone completely mad. (Although the fact that we were coming off Last of the Time Lords didn’t help with that.) Because in this story she’s pitched as the annoying comedy sidekick, and is allowed to give voice to everybody in the (sizable) Christmas audience who thinks Doctor Who is complete rubbish. Needless to say, this makes her abrasive to fans even as it causes the episode to work perfectly well for the large casual audience the series acquires for Christmas. (For all I point them out, the problems with Donna in The Runaway Bride are narrow and have to do with the ending not quite coming off – most of the buildup is actually quite lovely. As entertaining screen-filler, the Doctor trapped in a Catherine Tate sketch is lovely. Davies just had no good way to resolve the thing.)
The thing is, there’s no point in the series’ history where the “oh God, do we have to watch Doctor Who” audience would have been culturally more on the run.
…

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Warriors in the Vale of Entuthon-Benython (The Last War in Albion Part 6: Captain Clyde and Scotland)

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Greetings, faithful readers! As part of an effort to figure out how to make The Last War in Albion something I can fit in as part of a professional career, I’m trying an experiment. This is the first post of Chapter Two, focusing on Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde and his work in Starblazer. Chapter Two will be running weekly until September 19th. But the entirety of Chapter Two – all five posts – is already for sale as a digital single (albeit without its images, for a variety of reasons). It’s $2.99 on Amazon (and comparably priced for the UK) and $1.99 on Smashwords. The lower price is due to Amazon having quirks about royalties and my wanting all sales channels to be equal amounts of money for me – I discovered these quirks too late to do anything about it this time, but in the future will try to find some little bit of bonus content for the Amazon version to provide some vague sense of moral balance in the world. The digital single for Chapter Two also includes Chapter One as a bonus. So this time the price gets you about 20,000 words of content, though future editions will probably be about half that at the same price.


This is one of several ideas I have for how to make a profit off of The Last War in Albion, and so this is not some “pay money or I’ll terminate the project” thing. But equally, if none of the ideas to get this to be a source of income work out it’s ultimately not a project I’ll be able to devote much time to. So, you know, buying the digital single of this and future chapters is an effective way of helping make sure this project remains viable.

Right now this is an experiment, and the cover art is thus rudimentary. If it goes even remotely well I’ll get some proper cover art and probably make some other bits of fine-tuning for future chapters, and this will be a thing that happens every five or six entries. If it only sells two copies then we’ll sigh and never speak of this again. But for now, if you’re enjoying the project, please pick up the digital single of Chapters One and Two, and keep buying future singles as they come out. It is, I hope, a small and reasonable price to pay to help give work like this the support it needs to happen.

Either way, as ever, thanks for reading. – Philosophizin’ Phil Sandifer

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: The time is 1979. Grant Morrison, a 17-year-old Scotsman, has begun to write and draw comics for the short-lived but well-meaning attempt at an adult comics magazine Near Myths. These comics, like Near Myths itself, are heavily indebted to the literary new wave movement in science fiction and fantasy, a movement that was spearheaded, in the UK, by writers like J.G.…

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