Eruditorum Press

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 68 (The Catherine Tate Show)

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There’s a decision we have to make going into The Runaway Bride, which is, in effect, the same decision we make about The Web of Fear – namely whether or not we’re going to treat the episode as extra important because it includes a character who was brought back later in a retooled and far more popular form. Grudgingly following the precedent of The Web of Fear, we should at least acknowledge it, while simultaneously explaining why this is transparently not the way the episode was read in 2006. Still, there’s a question worth squaring away up front: why is it that a comedian known for playing a variety of grotesques came to be what is, by a significant chunk of audience, the greatest companion of the new series?

First we should understand Catherine Tate herself. Or perhaps more accurately, we should understand David Tennant, as it is very specifically his Doctor that Donna ends up being a spectacularly good companion for. It is difficult, if not impossible to imagine Donna pairing well with Matt Smith’s kinetic and physical performance, nor with Eccleston’s often brooding portrayal. (Although arguably she’s exactly what Paul McGann always needed, and by arguably I mean “is Lucie Miller bovvered?”) It is something about the interaction of Donna with Ten specifically – or, more broadly, given that they’ve also produced compelling turns at both sketch comedy and Shakespeare, about the interaction of Catherine Tate and David Tennant.

We have previously discussed the way in which Tennant’s performance is based on a visible density of decisions. That is to say, when Tennant plays a part, his approach is usually to pack every scene and every line development with as many moments where he makes a visible decision, particularly a decision to change what he’s doing, as possible. The result is a very mannered performance, though not at all in a bad way. When one is watching David Tennant, however, one is always aware that one is watching a performance. There’s not a sense of Tennant trying to maintain an illusionary unity between actor and character. His performances are based profoundly on the longstanding British acting tradition in which the point is not the authenticity of the character but the business of communicating information to the audience.

Another way of putting all of this is that Tennant’s performance is not entirely dissimilar to a comedic performance, with particular similarity to comics who develop characters. A third way is that Tennant is, as actors go, an extremely cerebral one. He’s the sort of actor who says, with all seriousness, that as a child he had his parents explain what television actors were, and him immediately realizing that was what he wanted to do, and furthermore saying that he understood “the difference between the fantasy and reality of that, and that making it even more exciting.” He’s profoundly analytic in his approach.

All of which is to say that, quite separate from the question of which of his costars is the most skilled actor, on the basic level of technique, Catherine Tate was obviously a natural fit for him.…

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“Does anybody remember LAUGHTER?”: I, Mudd

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Fuck it. I quit.

“I, Mudd” sees Star Trek circling the tower for another week. This is strange, because everything about it seems to have the making of something quite interesting, if not perhaps actually good. It’s the return of Harry Mudd which, while not exactly an advisable decision, means Roger C. Carmel has the distinction of playing the only reoccurring character in the Original Series not a member of the Enterprise crew, and I suppose if one were looking for former foils to bring back, Mudd was probably the least disastrous option to go with and he’s at least a very memorable personality. It’s also the first work we get to look at by future Animated Series co-showrunner and inaugural story editor for Star Trek: The Next Generation Dave Gerrold, who collaborated with Gene Coon on an uncredited rewrite of Stephen Kandal’s original treatment due to how impressed the team was with his work on his debut script (which we take a look at next time).

Furthermore, this episode marks one of the first occasions Star Trek attempts to do an overt comedy, or at least a story where the comedic elements are meant to be in the forefront: Previous episodes were humourous and had funny bits in them, but this is the first time the show seems to be going out of its way to try to be funny. The keywords to note here are, naturally “attempts” and “tries”, because “I, Mudd” is an absolute spectacle of magnificent failure. First of all, it is a casserole made of repurposed ingredients left over from “The Cage”, “Mudd’s Women”, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “The Return of the Archons”, “Metamorphosis” and “The Changeling”, and the end result is precisely as terrible as you would expect a story with that pedigree to be. The entire plot can be sufficiently explained, without leaving out any important details, simply by stating that if there was a major element in any of those episodes, “I, Mudd” has it too but is even more heavy-handed about it. Likewise, if there was a mistake those episodes made, “I, Mudd” will make it all the more frequently.

This does not, however, adequately describe the uncanny, surreal experience that is watching “I, Mudd” within the context of the episodes around it or, actually, any previous Star Trek episodes. This is an attempt at comedy in the most broad-strokes fashion, packed to brimming with pratfalls, one-liners, zingers and characters so programmatic they wouldn’t look out of place in a cartoon. William Shatner, who is actually quite good at broad-strokes comedy and is served well by it in turn, is very much in his element again here, and the way he deftly alternates between the blusteringly indignant straight man and merry prankster narrative roles is as fine an acting trick as anything he’s done: He plays it on a spectrum, so that his mode shifts don’t feel jarring within the context of the action. Shatner’s conception of comedy is very much born of his theatrical performativity, and this is going to be an extremely important theme to monitor throughout the rest of his association with Star Trek, as it’s pretty much crucial to understanding his continued place within it.…

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A Not-Review-Blog of Many Colours

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Today is the last day you can get the Storybundle deal. 

The Twin Dilemma: The most jarring gap in quality in Doctor Who’s history. The most colossal lapse of judgment in Doctor Who’s history. A story that had everything riding on it that just completely blew it. Every single thing about this story is a bad idea. It’s outright impossible to figure out what they were thinking. On top of that, you have the Doctor and Peri in a creepy domestic violence/Stockholm syndrome scene. No wonder the series was cancelled. 1/10

Attack of the Cybermen: As I have noted before, there is nothing more damning about this era than the fact that when Eric Saward and Ian Levine argue over who wrote this story, they each try to take credit for it instead of just blaming the other. An ugly mess of fanwank that doesn’t make sense in the context of previous stories and isn’t remotely interesting in its own context, papered over with violence as garrish as Colin Baker’s coat. Horrid. 1/10

Vengeance on Varos: It’s easy to confuse “best of the Colin Baker era” with “actually one of the best Doctor Who stories.” This is merely the former – a competent and at times very clever story that is nevertheless hobbled by many of the bugbears that plague the rest of this era. The TARDIS scenes in the first episode are intolerable, the action is slow to get going, it’s never quite clear if the satire is as wide-ranging as it has to be to forgive several elements, and several scenes, most notoriously the acid bath scene, are horrifically misjudged. Yes, it’s a very clever and prescient media satire, but it’s also Colin Baker-era doctor Who, with all the disaster that entails. Still, 8/10

Mark of the Rani: The Master becomes a complete self-parody, the Rani starts there, and Pip and Jane never have the wit to be self-parody, instead writing an unfathomably inept and awful script. There’s nothing good to say here – like all the other Pip and Jane scripts, this is actively painful to watch in a way that nothing else in Doctor Who quite manages to hit. I’m trying to think of an upside to this story, and I cannot remember one for the life of me. 1/10

The Two Doctors: Maybe it is Robert Holmes at his angriest, as Rob Shearman wittily suggests in About Time. There’s a case for it being bitter satire that makes Vengeance on Varos look fluffy, certainly. But this is still a mess. The 45 minute format means that a six-parter cannot just have one or two bad and slow episodes – instead the flab is distributed throughout, and this story never gets going. And if you don’t buy that this is a vicious satire then it’s just… ugly. Let’s pretend it’s the vicious satire we hope and then just take lots of points off for the bad structure and call it a 5/10.

Much of what is awful in the Colin Baker era is at least fascinatingly awful – a slow motion car crash you cannot look away from.…

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Damp Little Ideas

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Phwoar, look at the imperialist symbolism on that!

That bit in ‘The Empty Child’ when the Doctor talks about the “damp little island” standing alone against Hitler… when I first saw that I hurled a coat-hanger I happened to be holding at my television.

Okay, so: patriotism as progressive, yeah?  “Don’t forget the Welfare State” or whatever he says.

Hmm.  You will unsurprised to learn that I have doubts.

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There is sometimes an unwarranted elision of the idea of ‘patriotism’ with the idea of ‘loving one’s home’.  This is an elision that many left-wingers have been guilty of, from Orwell to Billy Bragg.  But it confuses distinct concepts.  Moreover, it acquiesces in the ideological project of confusing these concepts, a project of immense utility to ruling classes going back to the very birth of the state.  Patriotism isn’t just a cynical scheme of the rulers… though it is  that, amongst other things.  The point here is that it is an ideological construction and a form of social practice which cannot be simplistically overlaid upon personal affection for one’s origins and surroundings.

I love London.  In order to get sentimentally misty-eyed about this, I’d have to forget that the city is a concentrated site of racial discrimination, police repression, social cleansing, centralised state bureaucracy, drastic inequality; that it’s the hub of the organisation and enforcement (physical and ideological) of a neoliberal and neo-imperialist power, strewn with monuments to one of the most savagely aggressive colonial empires in modern history.  And on and on and on.

The love of one’s home is one thing.  ‘Patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’ are both, finally, ideological notions mapped-onto it.  They both immediately elide the flexible and contextual concept of ‘home’ with the political category of ‘country’.  Even the term ‘homeland’ starts to do this.  We should never let ourselves become deaf to the shades of meaning imported by extra syllables. 

The idea that patriotism can be a ‘way in’ to a larger feeling of social involvement is similarly dubious.  To the extent that patriotism makes the individual feel connected to something larger than him-or-herself, the connection is a masochistic one.  It is the sublimation of oneself into a dominating framework, not the integration of oneself into a genuinely collective endeavour, whatever the rhetoric.

Besides, this sublime idea of ecstatic sublimation is not only unduly R/romantic, but is also so vague, and so applicable as a description of so many varied and mutually-exclusive things, that it loses all substantive content. It can refer to mysticism, chauvinism, trade union activity, identity politics, family, etc.  Richard Dawkins feels ‘part of something greater than himself’; so does the Pope.  For the idea of personal integration into wider structures to be meaningful, it must be individuated… whereupon we start to see patriotism as a distinct phenomenon, quite separate from, say, social work or progressive activism.  The mooted connection collapses.

Ideas of ‘national community’ are largely ideological constructions which artificially smooth-out hugely contradictory social arrangements riddled with class antagonisms. The idea that ‘the nation’ is a space where we can work for ‘the public good’ is similarly panglossian.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 67 (About Time)

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I went back and forth over whether to run this as an Eruditorum post or as a side post. Ultimately, I wanted to put it in before we started talking about The Runaway Bride, so it got an Eruditorum slot. Nevertheless, this is a book review of About Time Volume Seven, out on September 10th from Mad Norwegian Press, who were kind enough to give me a preview copy, which I spent two days doing nothing but reading. The short form is that it’s brilliant and you should buy it. The long form actually makes sense to describe in context of the series’ history, because About Time occupies a particular and important place in that history.

About Time is a fascinating example of a book series swallowed by history. It started and premiered before the announcement of the new series, and continued over the course of the series’ development. You can watch, reading it, as the new series exerts its gravity and changes the project out from under Miles and Wood, so that what the books are changes over the course of the series. Given that the series was released out of order, starting with Volumes Three through Five, doubling back for One and Two, and then finally concluding with the Wood-only Volume Six and Wood’s solo rewrite of Volume Three, this gives an interesting sense of things. What started as an attempt to do the most thorough episode guide ever took on an oddly elegiac feel, becoming something more like an attempt to make the definitive statement of what Doctor Who was prior to the new series, before the cultural gravity of the new series erased the ability to see it. In doing so, it went from being a very long guidebook to being the definitive account of it.

Let’s be clear: if you like TARDIS Eruditorum and have never read any of About Time, get thee to Amazon. About Time is indispensable. It’s not that TARDIS Eruditorum wouldn’t exist without it – in fact, if I’d known it existed when I decided to start the blog I’d probably have been intimidated out of starting it, because you’d have to be mad to look at About Time and say “yeah, I just think there’s more to say.” But discovering it a few entries into the Hartnell era was perfect, even if I do have a nagging sense that my Season One coverage is forever compromised by the fact that all the essays started absent the context of About Time. Because About Time got to what I was doing first. It’s an attempt to explain all of Doctor Who – everything about it. Which meant I got the wonderfully easy job of just sitting back and responding to it.

This is, of course, ridiculous as a goal. Doctor Who is far too big to be pinned down into a single explanation. Which is, of course, part of the conceit of About Time, which immerses itself so deeply in the minute particulars of Doctor Who as to willfully lose all sense of Doctor Who as a singular object.…

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“Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young”: The Deadly Years

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DeForest Kelley gives us a sneak preview of his next big project.

OK, it’s pretty terrible.

Yeah, “The Deadly Years” kinda sucks. Unfortunately from my perspective, it’s bad in ways that are obvious and not especially interesting to talk about. It’s blatantly ageist, going into a rather frightening level of detail about how funny doddering senile old people are and how they’re of no use to anyone and need to get out of the way to make room for younger, more virile people. Trying to redeem this as a tragic story about the effects of growing old is, in my opinion, putting more thought into the premise than the people responsible for it did: If it’s sad, it’s only sad in a “we need to take the car keys away from grandma and put her in a home” sort of way not a “the way we treat the elderly in our society is monstrous” sort of way.

On the other hand, trying to read this as a statement about youth culture vs. hegemony also runs into problems I feel, as there simply doesn’t seem to be any real support for that reading, especially given as it’s our heroes who are afflicted, and the script seems on the whole more interested in bemoaning the physical effects of age and the *idea* of youthfulness, not so much youth *culture*, and eventually gives us a glib, tacked-on handwave of a conclusion about “the right man” (and of course it has to be a man) in command of a situation, but that’s about as effective as any of Star Trek‘s denouements are (read: not in the slightest).

It is also full of the expected casual sexism. The first Yeoman-of-the-Week promptly dies midway through the episode for plot convenience, though McCoy tosses out something that sounds suspiciously like “she lost the will to live” (yes, I know it was supposed to be her metabolism. No, that doesn’t count). Janet Wallace is very clearly only there to be Kirk’s Desilu-mandated Love Interest for this episode, most of her dialog is recycled wholesale and verbatim from other such characters from previous episodes and she’s only invested in the plot because she still has a crush on Kirk (to the point the other characters actually comment on this, so minor points for the show’s growing awareness of its own tropes, I suppose). At least her expertise in endocrinology contributes to the final resolution, but McCoy obviously would have gotten there eventually, and in time, without her help. It’s also unfortunate Wallace’s actor, Sarah Marshall delivers, well, kind of a crap performance. She’s about the most stilted and monotone guest star we’ve seen on the show yet.

In fact, this is a changeable week for the actors in general. William Shatner plays Old!Kirk as basically Mr. Magoo, James Doohan just does “tired” and is barely in this episode anyway while Walter Koenig and George Takei give likable and multifaceted turns as Chekov and Sulu whenever they get the chance, but they’re always good at this.…

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Saturday Waffling: August 17th, 2013

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Work continues apace. I’ve got Last War in Albion up and running, and it’ll roll out again on Thursday with the start of Chapter 2. I’m going straight into working on Chapter 3 so there will be less of a gap there. I’ve tinkered the format in a few subtle ways that I hope will boost readability without sacrificing what I’m trying to achieve with the structure of the project. This one has narrative theory, the pulps, superheroes, and the remainder of Grant Morrison’s early work. Only one more chapter after that before we get to things anyone has ever heard of!

I’ve also got a few more of the extra essays for the books. Baker is still one off from done, though I might get him finished off this weekend, but Hartnell had two and will get a third. Three is a little slow for a week on those, but again, Last War in Albion was added in here. Next week… no Torchwood, actually. 
Meanwhile, the Storybundle offer heads into its final few days. To recap, for a price of your own choosing you get four nonfiction books on Doctor Who, including TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton. If you pay more than $10, you get two more books, one of which is The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, which features some of my favorite posts from the history of the blog along with a few paragraphs of introductions about them. It’s a slender little thing, but it was fun to knock together, and while I may recycle it into something else, it won’t be available again in 2013. 
If I can put a small plea in, I’m still doing adjuncting on the side to bring in a little bit of extra money, and at the last second one of my courses was pulled and given to a full time faculty member whose class had gotten cancelled for lack of enrollment, which means my pay for the rest of the year just took a five thousand dollar hit. It’s seriously not a big deal – we’ve got the Kickstarter money as a nice cushion if there’s any sort of crisis, and have a comfortable living wage, but it’s still just a little stressful to suddenly lose a bunch of money you’d been budgeting on.
Which is to say that I do make money off the Storybundle deal, and if you don’t mind having the tip jar shaken, this is my job and this is a chance to support my work and get some neat bonuses along with. (And I’ve got We talked last week about Dalek I Love You and Dining with the Doctor, leaving Barry Letts’s memoir Who and Me and Earl Green’s Vworp!

The latter of these is a pretty straightforward reference manual. It’s got a good account of the plot of every story up through The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, a reasonable selection of facts, and reviews no more idiosyncratic than anyone else’s, mine included.
…

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Outside the Government: Combat

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Fight off the lethargy
Don’t go quietly

It’s Christmas Eve, 2006. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” with Girls Aloud, Booty Luv, and Chris Cornell also charting, alongside the Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll and Cliff Richard with attempts at Christmas success. In news, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons resume. The Home Office floats the exciting idea of having foreign nationals carry ID cards linked to their fingerprints, and a feud between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan worsens as Uzbekistan doubles the price at which it will sell natural gas to Kyrgyzstan.

While on television we begin one of the most remarkable runs of Doctor Who related content ever. Combat airs on Christmas Eve, the day before The Runaway Bride. A week after that, oddly on a Monday instead of a Sunday, comes both Invasion of the Bane and the final two episodes of Torchwood’s first season, meaning that over the course of nine days fully five hours of Doctor Who-related material aired.

Of these, Combat has to be the oddest fit, being a spectacularly ill match for Christmas. This seems like an artifact of the decision to start with a two hour premiere – had Day One aired a week later then Out of Time, an episode that’s explicitly set around Christmastime, would have been the one to end up on Christmas Eve, which makes, on the whole, a lot more sense than Torchwood’s take on Fight Club, which is more or less what Combat is.

In her absolutely splendid novel Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson has a character ask whether a given book counts as eastern literature. In reply, Vikram the Vampire says, “There is a very simple test. Is it about bored, tired people having sex?” When the character confirms that the book does, Vikram proclaims it western literature. It’s terribly clever, but omits a key subgenre: bored, tired people being terribly violent. This is, after all, a veritable cliche of contemporary literature – angry and soul-dead men who can only find any sort of meaning or fulfillment in fighting one another. It’s the Chuck Palahniuk/Bret Easton Ellis school of thought.

In literature, where novels of that style work – and it’s worth noting that both Palahniuk and Easton Ellis have far more tricks up their sleeve than this theme – it’s usually based around a complex tonal structure – the literally fractured personality of the narrator and Tyler Durden, or the tense ambiguity of whether Patrick Bateman’s crimes are real or fantasies. What’s interesting isn’t actually moping around about how existentially bleak the lives of capitalism’s lesser nobility is, it’s the jagged edge between that banality and a world in which existential bleakness actually makes any sense.

At first glance, then, it appears that Combat misses the mark. The key problem is that Owen ultimately succumbs to the existential bleakness, having his moment of true masculinity as he faces down the Weevil, but being saved from death at the last second by Captain Jack.…

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“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”: Mirror, Mirror

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“Remind me to re-evaluate my ‘Casual Friday’ policy.”

Absolutely brilliant, this one is.

Once again, Star Trek takes a hard swerve from one of its worst episodes ever to one of its best. “Mirror, Mirror” is just about flawless: I always knew it was good, but it’s actually better than I remember, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Between this and “The Apple” we have, and I’m not exaggerating, two polar opposite philosophical viewpoints being expressed. Probably nowhere else have I seen a television show put stories 180 degrees away from each other one after another. “Mirror, Mirror” honestly does not feel like it’s part of the same show as “The Apple”, it’s that far removed from it. The most minor of nitpicks hold it back from absolute perfection, although I will confess I’m saying this in part so I don’t have to totally reconceptualize the post I have lined up for the episode I want to call the second season’s high water mark. Either way though, “Mirror, Mirror” is the bold and clear statement we’ve been waiting for all year, and it not only just about singlehandedly saves Star Trek from the scrap heap, it finally gives it the moral, ethical and political backbone that will make the franchise a legend.

The first thing that begs addressing is the Mirror Universe itself. From what I can gather, this episode is one of the earliest appearances of the idea of a “mirror” or “parallel” universe in mainstream pop fiction. While not the absolute first (at the very least Star Trek beat itself to its own punch with “The Alternative Factor” last year, but nobody except me likes to talk about “The Alternative Factor”) it’s arguably the most famous though, as the style of alternate reality Star Trek works with here becomes the model for an incalculable number of homages, parodies and imitators. However, what these followers (including, irritatingly, more than a few future Star Trek works to return to the Mirror Universe) crucially seem to miss about “Mirror, Mirror” is that the reality it postulates is manifestly *not* meant to be simply the one where everyone is bearded and evil. The Terran Empire is not the Evil!Federation, its instead very clearly meant to be a version of the Federation that’s largely the same as our own, except for the fact certain motifs and excesses have been been built on to alarming and dangerous degrees.

This is stressed and reiterated numerous times throughout the episode: Upon arriving on the ISS Enterprise for the first time, Kirk and McCoy observe that everything is largely where it should be, and Scotty says the ship is on a technical level identical to their own, and even the star groups are in their correct respective locations. But the real evidence comes from the characters themselves: While Chekov’s and Sulu’s counterparts are psychotically twisted and demented (with both Walter Koenig and George Takei very clearly relishing the opportunity to play against type-This is in many ways an actor showcase episode for them) the Mirror Spock, as well as the Mirror counterparts of the away team and (it’s implied) our version of Marlena Moreau, are obviously meant to be comparable.…

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The Third Way

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There is, in some quarters, an assumption about alternatives.  There is fannish continuity obsession on the one hand and, on the other hand, there is ‘the real story’ which tends to be to do with families and relationships.  To an extent, this is a straw man… but it sometimes exists, implicitly, even where it is abjured.  And it’s a false dichotomy.

There is a Third Way: the investigation of the relationship between the political implications of monster wars and the lives of ordinary people.

This is a Third Way that the classic series hardly ever engaged with.  In its own more ass-covery, fig-leafy way, this is something that the new series hardly ever engages with either.

Whereas the classic series concentrated on the monstrous, and then later upon the fan view of the monstrous, the new series tends to concentrate upon interpersonal relationships with monstrosity as a pretty backdrop.

The difference is that the classic series’ logic was pragmatic (i.e. we are making a show about monsters) whereas the new series’ logic is openly ideological (i.e. human family and romantic relationships are THE REAL STORY).  If you doubt that this is ideological, look at how it has been iterated again and again.  Look at ‘The Empty Child’, at ‘Father’s Day’, at ‘School Reunion’, at ‘Army of Ghosts / Doomsday’, at ‘Closing Time’, at ‘Night Terrors’.

Neither view is supportable but the former has at least the virtue of non-didacticism.  It’s a contrast to the aggressive apoliticism of so much of the new series, even when the new series dresses itself in the clothes of political engagement.

There is, fascinatingly, a similarity to the simplistic view of Blair as a villain.  It is the difference between a wishy-washy reformist liberal/leftyishism (“Blair has betrayed Labour”) and a faux-pragmatic panglossian acceptance (“he’s achieved modest things that were, realistically, all he could do”). 

There is a Third Way that is invisible to those leftists who complain either that he did what he could or that he didn’t do enough, precisely because it is based on the political relationship between personality and wider monstrosity. 

That, weirdly, is why the more RTD moved into an engagement with the problems of New Labour, the more he moved into an acceptance of its premises.  By the time of the uber-cynicism of ‘The Sound of Drums’ etc, he’d accepted that people are, essentially, horrible and Blair/Saxon is probably about what they deserve.…

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