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Outside the Government: Combat

, 14

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

, 7

“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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Your Mom is a Review Blog

22

Castrovalva: The back half is marvelous, but the front half is mispaced as the show tries to grapple with its strange new airing schedule. This marks the beginning of “post-regeneration stories are about the absence of the Doctor through post-regeneration confusion” trope, which was largely disastrous. Ainley’s Master becomes a joke as of this story. Still, there are lovely bits shining through the overall lack of working, and it’s impressive for the strained circumstances of its creation. 7/10

Four to Doomsday: One of the most jarring drops in quality ever – after the Bidmead era so convincingly provided a new style for Doctor Who, this suddenly becomes tedious, predictable, and no fun. Bidmead drained the humor of the Williams era and replaced it with wonder. This drains the wonder and replaces it with boredom. Absolutely dreadful. 2/10

Kinda: Like Warrior’s Gate and Logopolis, a story that delights in showing off new frontiers in what Doctor Who can do. This time it’s done with a slick confidence and focus that Davison’s first season otherwise completely lacks. The only complaint is the giant snake, and really, this is Doctor Who. 10/10

The Visitation: Not as bad as it could be, and its reputation isn’t helped by knowledge of what’s to come from Saward. This is basically harmless. Derivative and a dumb runaround, yes, but that happens. The biggest problem is the decision to only have one supporting character – a disastrous structural decision that should have been fixed in editing. Why they’d then hire this writer as the editor is a mystery, but that’s not this story’s fault as such. 4/10

Black Orchid: Novel, but plagued by the fundamental structural difficulties of a two-parter aired over two days and the fact that Terrance Dudley is not actually a very good writer. Was much better when it was called The Unicorn and the Wasp and written by Gareth Roberts. 5/10

Earthshock: At the root of it, the problem is that Doctor Who is not actually very good at doing big action films. Still, it has its moments – the Cybermen reveal is lovely, as is Beryl Reid. The death of Adric is completely mishandled on screen, the plot doesn’t quite hang together, and, again, the show that just screwed up a giant snake should maybe be a little more hesitant about a massive action set piece. As good as “Doctor Who does space marines” can be, which isn’t actually very. 6/10

Time-Flight: Horrible and unwatchable, except for the fleeting moments where it’s suddenly charming and terribly clever. Somewhere in here was a brilliant story, and every once in a while you can see it trying to get out from under… um… this. As all-time lows of Doctor Who go, this is one of the more watchable ones. 3/10

The Arc of Infinity: This is how we decide to begin the big 20th anniversary; with a story only Ian Levine could love. Gallifrey is treated as familiar and known, the plot twists are contrived and either insane or predictable, and the whole thing depends on us remembering a villain that hasn’t been mentioned in a decade.…

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Outside the Government: Out of Time

, 14

Have I done the “wrong image” joke recently? I can never
remember.

It’s December 17th, 2006. Take That remain at number one. Cliff Richard stalls at number two with his attempted Christmas number one “21st Century Christmas,” while Gwen Stefani, Chris Cornell, P. Diddy, and Lazy Town also chart, as do the Pogues and Kristy MacColl with their now annual chart run of “Fairytale of New York.” In news, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller announces that she will step down from her position at the head of MI-5. Time Magazine proclaims you to be the person of the year. And Ban Ki-moon is officially sworn in as the United Nations Secretary-General.

Torchwood is a series I first watched with my ex-wife, while we were in the earlier stages of our relationship. She lived in upstate New York and I lived in Florida, but she moved down to be with me after a few months of distance relationship and, for her, a frustrating grad school experience she was not happy with. We would pirate the episodes as soon as they aired and watch them on our laptops, syncing them and then talking in AOL Instant Messenger about the episode as we watched. They were our long distance dates on weeks we couldn’t make the travel back and forth from New York to Florida work. (We were very good at a cheap set of flights from Albany to Gainesville) 

On television, Out of Time. Returning to the approach of “see what kind of range Torchwood has as a concept” (which is, on the whole, the most endearing aspect of Torchwood’s staggeringly inconsistent first season – the fact that at least some of that inconsistency is the product of a genuine desire not to be a predictable television show), Out of Time presents Torchwood doing a triptych of people out of time, structured primarily as a love story with two parallel storylines to add depth and nuance.

In each case the central theme is, ultimately, death, or, at least, the past, which is essentially the same thing. On the one hand the past is inaccessible and dead – a place defined primarily by the fact that it cannot be returned to. And on the other the past is, we know, a place populated by people with, as the song goes, loves and hates and passions just like mine. This is the fundamental puzzle of death and the past – the fact that people and life goes on without us even as the world as we understand it cannot possibly do so.

I remember the big Christmas glut of episodes – a one week period with three Torchwoods, a Doctor Who, and a Sarah Jane Adventures. I remember divvying them up. I remember the different places I watched different episodes – some in my bedroom in Florida, others, once Christmas break started up, at my parents’ house in Connecticut. She moved to Florida midway through the season to pursue a different graduate program, but there was still a lot of distance to deal with as she’d have to go back to handle stuff in New York, or to visit family, and the whole season ended up being eaten by distance.…

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“The Devil You Know”: The Apple

, 13

“1-2-3…Hey! No fair Zerg rushing!”

“The Apple” was the episode of the Original Series that always stuck out in my mind as the one I unequivocally hated. Most of the time an episode being forgettable is a cause for concern when doing this kind of revisit and retrospective, but this is a case where the story made me so angry I never forgot it and I would constantly bring it up in discussions as Exhibit A for why I could never get into this show. It’s good to know some things remain constant and my tastes weren’t altogether unrefined all those many years ago.

“The Apple” is Biblically awful. That it’s not even the worst episode of the season should explain in no uncertain terms how bad things are for Star Trek right now. It is shockingly racist and imperialistic, with naive, simple, primitive people modeled on Pacific islanders in funny skin colours and outfits in a cargo cult setup being told how to live their lives by educated white people from space. It believes quite strongly in a teleological view of history and cultural development, where all societies have to follow a pre-determined and unwavering master narrative where Western cultures are seen as more advanced then non-Western cultures (despite the idyllic, childlike lifestyles they have), basically making this the Space Age White Man’s Burden, except that poem was at least well constructed. It is pop Christian, being a straight-up plot lift of the book of Genesis. It is unoriginally pop Christian, shamelessly recycling all the worst aspects of “The Return of the Archons” and “This Side of Paradise” and somehow managing to make both look better by comparison. It is also *textually* racist: Kirk and McCoy talk down to Spock throughout the entire episode, making fun of his green blood, logical mind and resemblance to Satan.

It is sexist, with yet another wistful, pouty yeoman fretting about needing someone to protect her (albeit one who at least gets to hold her own in a fight scene this time). It is proudly and boldly heteronormative, conflating love, procreative sex and heterosexual relationships. It has an appallingly lax attitude towards life and death, casually killing off enough redshirts to the point it makes jokes about Doctor Who‘s death toll look unwarranted and tasteless (well, at least perhaps even more so). Aside from being a bigot, Kirk is once again written as a gruff, shouty military commander having a psychological meltdown over regulations and taking it out on his crew. Chekov gets another grating “Russia is the greatest country in the universe” scene and is in full-on cartoonish stereotype mode. Even Spock, the most sympathetic person in this episode by virtue of voicing the self-evidently correct course of action (which the rest of the show helpfully belittles him for) is made to look like a complete idiot by getting carelessly and dumbly injured once an act. There is not a single likable character in this entire production. The pacing is sluggish which, combined with the excruciatingly terrible story, has the combined effect of making this feel like the longest fifty minutes ever put to film.…

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The Colour Foundation

, 3

More flash fiction.

Marcel Miedinger surveyed the system one last time before he disconnected. The dumbs were already active, weaving their own tagging system to correspond to the existing catalogue. Marcel watched the broad strokes of the semantic filing system get mapped out, but moved on as it all got a bit too big data for him. No intelligence was ever going to need to deal with the dumb catalogue anyway – it was just an underlying system to support the semantic labeling that the Colour Foundation had meticulously created.

There had been some debate right before the downsizing began over whether or not to maintain all four versions of the semantic catalogue, or just the most recent one. Marcel had, romantically, advocated for the full system. He prided himself on an old-fashioned streak that valued preservation. But in the end he was outvoted by a bloc of neo-modernists who wanted to ensure the immaculate design of the Colour Foundation’s final edition. He could have reopened the issue once the Foundation had shrunk to a skeleton crew, but he didn’t. In the end, he understood the impulse; he’d been an iconoclast once too.

Now he’d come to think of himself as an old man, whatever that concept referred to nowadays. Even today he kept track of the exterior world’s calendar. He knew he’d been around the sun two hundred and eleven times since he’d last seen it, making him two hundred and sixty-five all told. That was surely enough to be an old man by any definition, he told himself.

Suddenly, a raft of connections he had to the system went dark. Marcel started, old physiological processes kicking into action as though they’d been built for this. But the adrenaline faded quickly – it was routine. The dumbs had moved the ports allocated to the Colour Foundation so that they all went through the interface the Design Committee had created for the general public. Marcel had seen it a thousand times, but decided to connect in one more time – perhaps just for the novelty of being the first customer.

The interface was based around the sensation of an antechamber. It was not, by and large, a memory, nor even an assemblage of memories. This was reverse engineered – a set of manufactured sensations laid around the sensation of feeling your sensory input shift from being in a confined space to being in an open one. The original draft had what Marcel considered a somewhat childish sense paradox – the neurological sense of an open space combined with visual perceptions of a long corridor. Marcel had gone off on a lengthy lecture at that meeting, reminding everyone, or perhaps just himself, that accessibility was a moral principle of design.

He really could be a right old bore sometimes.

Still, he’d gotten it changed to the current open chamber, made entirely out of invented materials. This produced its own vertiginous sensation; the human mind never entirely adapts to completely artificial sensation, and an excess of it remained unsettling, though not, even he had to admit, in an entirely unpleasant way.…

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Outside the Government: Random Shoes

, 16

Not so much bovvered as… dead, really.

It’s December 10th, 2006. Booty Luv’s “Boogie 2nite” has slipped into a newly formed gap between Take That and “Smack That.” Gwen Stefani, Lazy Town, and Jamelia also chart. In news, Joseph Kabila is inaugurated as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kevin Rudd becomes leader of the Australian Labor Party, and Robert Gates is confirmed as United States Secretary of Defense. Also, Igor Smirnov wins the presidential election in Transnistria, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, which is generally considered not to be a country so much as a particularly ornery region of Moldova.

Random Shoes, on the other hand, is something of the forgotten man of the first season of Torchwood. Called Invisible Eugene until two weeks before it aired, and in fact still listed as that in the Radio Times, this is, quite frankly, the bit of the season where it becomes aggressively, painfully obvious that Torchwood proved a little too much to manage alongside Doctor Who and that things got dropped. It’s an astonishingly sloppily done episode.

Somewhere in here there’s a good idea. Doing Love and Monsters for Torchwood may or may not have actually been it, but even that feels at least vaguely admirable. Love and Monsters was, in many ways, the gem of Season Two, and an approach worth exploring again. But Torchwood is an odd venue for it. Love and Monsters is ultimately one of the most optimistic statements of Davies’s basically hedonistic theme. This theme is present in Torchwood – it’s reiterated in its darker way in They Keep Killing Suzie via Suzie’s “This is. Driving through the dark. All this stupid, tiny stuff” line. Indeed, it’s central to Torchwood, with its myriad of wondrous spaces alongside ordinary life pitched against the absolute oblivion of death. But Torchwood takes a rather darker view than Love and Monsters, to say the least, and the Love and Monsters approach doesn’t port over.

Mind you, Random Shoes basically gets that right by realizing that Eugene, unlike Elton, has to actually die at the end. The problem is that this happens a week after They Keep Killing Suzie, and thus the ascent into the heavens in a blaze of white light with a halo is… metaphysically incongruent, to say the least. A more thorough and accurate assessment would be that it plunges headlong into the bathetic – which, actually, the whole thing does starting roughly with when Eugene’s father breaks out into “Danny Boy” at the funeral. The result is a completely miscued ending that attempts to pull off a darker and more cynical ending than Love and Monsters and ends up with what is arguably the Russell T Davies era’s second most stunning moment of shooting for camp and ending up in “what the holy hell am I even watching.”

This is a big problem, though honestly, mucking up the ending after a good buildup is less of a problem than it might sound. There’s lots to really like about Random Shoes.…

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“I am error.”: The Changeling

, 4

“You’re too late. We’re everywhere.”

I will admit it’s very tempting, given my areas of interests, the other projects I’m working on at the moment, and especially so soon after bidding farewell to Robert Bloch, to grab hold of Kirk’s line about faery changeling babies that gives this episode its title, run with it and come up with some delightfully overblown reading of this one within the context of the Otherworld and ancient heathen mythology. Sadly, however, the analogy doesn’t really work: Nomad doesn’t actually act much at all like a proper changeling, Star Trek doesn’t quite get a handle on the magickal doors between realms thing for another 25 years or so and when it eventually does this isn’t the primary story that will facilitate that transformation, certainly not when compared with something like “Catspaw” or “Metamorphosis” or even “Wolf in the Fold” or “The City on the Edge of Forever”.

However, Gene Roddenberry seemed to have a fixation on the story of a robot built by humans who goes away on a journey, experiences a profound transformation, attains great power and returns seeking its creator, reusing it a number of times over his career. It was the subject of a failed 1974 pilot for a prospective television series co-created with Gene Coon called The Questor Tapes and also served as the basic plot for “In Thy Image”, the pilot episode of Star Trek Phase II, which eventually underwent its own profound transformation into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Arguably, there is even a faint echo of this theme in the very earliest episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Data’s own creator and “point of origin” are a mystery to us. This then is the first draft of a story that is apparently very important to Roddenberry, so we should take a look at what he may have intended to say with it and what it might reveal about him as a writer and a thinker.

Me being me, I’m once again predisposed to snap back onto the magickal interpretation: The robot’s journey could be seen as a spiritual one, and the years spent travelling the expanses of outer space and acquiring power and knowledge might be seen as attaining a form of enlightenment. This might make the robot comparable to the original conception of the Cybermen in the Doctor Who serial “The Tenth Planet”, similar mechanics-enhanced life forms who went away on a long journey and returned enlightened. I’m not sure this reading holds though, because in every version of this story the robot is portrayed as extremely deficient in some areas, despite its massive power and intelligence, and its yearning to discover its creator seems at once a primary calling and a microcosm of its inability to gain a complete understanding of the universe and its place within it.

Perhaps something could be made out of how, in “The Changeling”, Nomad literally brings Scotty back from the dead, tying into the mythic reorientation that has played a part in several episodes this year.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 10th)

57

My God, work. This was a TARDIS Eruditorum week – still is, actually, as I’ve got one more post to write over the next two days. The stretch before this was the only all-Torchwood stretch, and was frankly grueling – entries that would finish at 1500 words and force me to look through them for space to pry open and fit more observations. (2000 words is less a preference for length and more a way of ensuring the density of coverage I like in given post.) Then back to revisions – I’m actually down to one on the Tom Baker book, and have now done two on the Hartnell book. I’ve unilaterally decided to alter the promised book, dumping Eoin Coilfer’s A Big Hand for the Doctor out of a general complete lack of any interest in talking about a bad book and put in an essay on the most obvious and important book that I never talked about at any length. A hat tip to whichever commenter first identifies it.

These extra essays are frustrating. Part of it is that there’s so many – a byproduct of the Kickstarter. Another part is that I have no commutes in my life, and so never have what I consider optimal time to listen to Big Finish stuff, and there’s a lot of audios on the list. Going to have to just knuckle down and do that, which isn’t punishment, but is still active reworking of my day. Plus many of them are just… hard in not entertaining ways. I’ve already decided book essays can make it to around 1500 because I just didn’t have much to say. I don’t want to just put in book reviews of random out of print 90s novels, and finding things to say about the period the book is about is often difficult. I regularly muse on the fact that if this essay had been a good idea, I’d have written it the first time through.

I’m quite liking the commissions, particularly the ones that pick Pop Between Realities stuff. I think I may go more in that direction starting with the Graham Williams book, leaning away from novels and audios and towards Pop Between Realities stuff and, perhaps, more commissions. I rather like commissions as a concept, and have been finding them very fun.

I had been hoping to plow through all my co-books on StoryBundle so I could talk about them this weekend. In one of those pleasant complications, however, right when I was set to start that a review copy of something else hit my inbox, and that something else was a book I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time. I’ll run a very big review in a week and change. Spoiler: there’s a gas mask on the cover.

In any case, I only got to poke at two titles in Storybundle – Nick Grifith’s Dalek I Loved You and Chris-Rachel Oseland’s Dining With The Doctor.

One thing that’s obvious about the Storybundle deal is that these are very different types of books.…

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