Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

Outside the Government: They Keep Killing Suzie

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The real tragedy is, it’s a better logo.

It’s December 3rd, 2006. Take That are at number one with “Patience,” just ahead of “Smack That” by Akon and Eminem. Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Emma Bunton, and Muse are also charting. In news, Michael Grade, by now BBC Chairman, is poached by ITV. The British government declines to extend copyright protection from 50 years to 95, though the EU eventually took care of it for them in 2011. Clive Goodman pleads guilty of conspiring to hack the phones of Princes William and Harry, and Augusto Pinochet has the heart attack that kills him.

Speaking of death, with They Keep Killing Suzie Torchwood finally comes to what, in hindsight, was always its theme. All of the wondrous spaces we’ve been exploring over the preceding seven hours turn out to be metaphors for the big one: the realm of the dead. This is not, strictly speaking, surprising or complicated. The argument that the wondrous cultural spaces that Torchwood has been playing with – ones we’ve already seen are deeply entwined with the larger British culture – are metaphors for death. The spirit world is in many ways the archetypal wondrous space – the one that all other wondrous spaces are just echoes and reflections of.

Jacques Derrida, who I don’t think I’ve annoyed you all by discussing yet, suggests that one of the key aspects of writing is its battle against death. Writing preserves the idea of the speaker after the moment of death, albeit in an altered form that is not so much the speaker as a haunting ghost of them. Similar ideas abound in media studies – Friedrich Kittler has, in his landmark Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the lovely declaration that “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.” The idea permeates so many different sorts of books and movies as to be inescapable; it’s also the underlying fantasy of detective fiction, which Torchwood owes a huge debt to. Solving the mystery is a way of communicating with the deceased – receiving one final message from them.

And Torchwood, in particular, was always going to be about death. It had to be. The basic conceit of its lead character necessitated it. You can’t do a show whose central mystery is “why can’t Jack die” without having death become something of a major theme. You certainly can’t after combining the premise with a first episode about a glove that brings people back from the dead. The show committed itself to being about death from its first episode, a fact that continues to have profound implications right up until the last episode.

Given all of this, Torchwood’s actual take on death has to be one of the most striking things about it. In a show where everything has a wondrous dimension, where the world is vast and full of mysteries, and where some notion of the soul is clearly bought into on a fundamental level, we have a depiction of death that is frighteningly simple: when you die, you’re dead.…

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“Monsters are real”: Wolf in the Fold

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“I am Nazgaar of the Spirit World…”

Oh goodie, more violence against women. Just another Wednesday then?

At least there’s a vaguely defensible reason for it this time, given that “Wolf in the Fold” borrows its basic structure from slasher movies, which is somewhat befitting the third of three Star Trek episodes penned by Psycho author Robert Bloch. Indeed, this story is once again a straightforward whole plot lift, this time of Bloch’s own famous short story “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper”, which posited the titular ripper had somehow managed to attain immortality through his crimes. This episode changes him to an ageless non-corporeal life-form who feeds on fear and death, but the basic premise and themes remain the same. “Wolf in the Fold” thus becomes a very competent and professional execution of this kind of horror story, as one would expect with a writer of Bloch’s calbre behind it. That said, I have to twist my own knife a bit here: Merely being in the slasher genre (or proto-slasher, depending on whether or not one wishes to name Psycho the ur example of its kind) does not, of course, excuse the violence towards women. This one’s better then Bloch’s previous effort in this regard, but really not by a whole lot and he doesn’t make a good case for himself when he opens in an exotic dance parlour clearly designed to cater to straight men, starts picking off women and then gives Spock dialog about how Redjack naturally preys on women because they’re more predisposed to extreme fear and terror and are thus more vulnerable then men.

There’s also the somewhat troubling matter that Star Trek has already shown itself to be bigger than the slasher genre, and in the Gene Roddenberry era no less. The very first episode to air, “The Man Trap”, was a complete rejection of this kind of story: Janice Rand and Sulu are shot like nameless slaughter victims, but their big scene involves them eating lunch and talking about plants. Salt Vampire is shot like a slasher villain, but is really a starving animal. Honestly, going from “The Man Trap” to “Wolf in the Fold” is kind of a step back for the show, especially given the former’s strength was in making all of its characters feel like likeable, complete people while the latter treats women as helpless passive objects. Sadly though, we should probably expect that given Star Trek‘s aggravating lack of internal consistency and general self-awareness. That all said though, I don’t want to completely go “Who Mourns for Adonais?” on Bloch, mostly because I really, really don’t have the energy, but also because Bloch, despite his failings, and he does have several, remains one of the good guys. Anybody who gave us voodoo and alchemy in “Catspaw” clearly has hidden depths and is someone worth taking the time to engage with, and “Wolf in the Fold” is a similarly intriguing magickal door if one looks at it a certain way.

The obvious thing to talk about would be Redjack: An ancient being of pure evil who has existed since the dawn of time and thrives on fear, terror and death.…

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No, I don’t kip

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Godfrey Bloom, UKIP member of the European Parliament (there’s a dialectical proposition if ever I heard one), has said how unhappy he is about so much foreign aid going to “Bongo Bongo Land”.

He has subsequently expressed regret over the remark.  As always, with the British, the crime is in getting caught.

Godfrey Bloom, MEP (UKIP): racist pillock

But he shouldn’t regret saying “Bongo Bongo Land”.  He really shouldn’t.  That was at least honest, even if it did sound like the kind of thing Richie from Bottom used to say.  It was a sincere little window into the real heart of UKIP’s tweedy fascism.

What Bloom should regret is being a fucking racist pillock.…

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The Death of Marguerite-Charlotte David

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If you missed it on Tuesday, the Patrick Troughton volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is part of Storybundle’s new Doctor Who-themed bundle of ebooks. You can set your own price to get it, Barry Letts’s Who and Me, Nick Griffiths’s Dalek I Loved You, and Chris-Rachel Oseland’s Dining with the Doctor. Paying over $10 also gets you Earl Green’s VWORP! and The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, a collection of this blog’s best posts with short introductions exclusive to the volume. The Best Of book is exclusive to Storybundle, and I have no plans to offer it for sale again this year. Head over to Storybundle to check it out. It’s a terribly neat deal. Meanwhile, a bit of flash fiction I scraped up off the bottom of my hard drive:

Marguerite-Charlotte David’s dress sublimates into the guttural crackle of mid-90s Japanese noise music. The shimmer of her dress curls in the informational fire consuming her, the crackle of the fire becoming a kaleidoscopic backbeat, its combusting edges measured precisely as they decay to form the outline of the resulting waveform. Her dress peels off her breasts, which, constructed out of imagination instead of memory, lack the mottling of digitized oil paint. They are instead porcelain polished with the damp shine of hardcore pornography, oil posing as sweat.

Ultradave14 has been caught out – he’s using junk data, a cache of some archive or another preserved during the final hours of the mycosis, after the mushroom cloud had finally noticed the gap in its original preservation plan. He’d gone packrat when the archives got closed out, grabbing an almost random assortment of texts and images that, predictably, he’s done next to nothing with. He’d never even looked at the painting enough to formulate a detailed imaginary layer, and when he was forced to fill in Marguerite-Charlotte’s breasts he had nothing prepared, and so subbed in something on what was, in hindsight, rather embarrassing instinct.

His sex partner, who identifies as Izu in this interaction, makes her displeasure known, quickly shredding the breasts into a stuttering Eurotrash pop jungle beat that’s emasculating in its groove. She’s only in it for the sake of making new kinds of sound, picked him because early 19th century neoclassical French painting was material she’d not mulched before. She’s running hundreds of these at once, taking memories and force-converting them to sound. The overwhelming majority will be crap, but that’s not the point of the operation. The point is the fleeting moments of truly new forms of noise.

Her use of generic sound is the equivalent of throwing a drink in his face, and he knows it. He’s caught off-guard, remembering rejection at a middle school dance. He’d been terrified all dance to ask the object of his crush, hung to the wall, not realizing until three years later how much that made him come off as creepy, and that she’d have said yes if he’d only asked her an hour earlier. Before he can get a handle on the memory it’s bled into the datastream, and Izu has turned it into a four second hiss punctuated by staccato inserts of a wet, hollow squelching sound.…

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Outside the Government: Greeks Bearing Gifts

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Well that’s all a bit SHODAN.

It’s November 26th, 2006. “Smack That” has been unseated by Take That, with Emma Bunton, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and Girls Aloud also charting. In news, Michael Richards has his racist meltdown at a comedy club, and Alexander Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in London. Israel and Palestine declare a ceasefire over the Gaza Strip, and Augusto Pinochet accepts, in one of the greatest euphemistic hedges ever, “political” responsibility for everything that happened in Chile during his regime.

On television, meanwhile, we have Toby Whithouse’s second contribution to the world of Doctor Who, Greeks Bearing Gifts. Those who suspect Torchwood of largely being Joss Whedon’s Angel have their work cut out for them here. Technically the underlying plot here is actually nicked from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically the third season episode “Earshot,” as Angel only ever did a demon who could read your thoughts if you were singing, but that’s largely beside the point: this is still the most Whedonesque episode of Torchwood to date.

The basic premise of either of Joss Whedon’s fantasy shows is that the horror is always a metaphor for something personal – in Buffy either for an aspect of high school, college, or early adulthood, in Angel, whatever puts it a few years ahead of Buffy at the time. In this model whatever supernatural goings-on there may be in an episode, the point is really for the supernatural to illustrate character development. Phrased this way, for all that the supernatural investigation team of five people, three male, two female, led by a mysterious immortal with a dark past is not actually the most original concept Russell T Davies has ever come up with, Torchwood can actually be seen as a reasonable advance of the Angel format, in that it moves from the comparatively narrow structure of the supernatural as a metaphor for individual experience and towards a story about the psychic relationships of various cultural spaces.

Greeks Bearing Gifts, on the other hand, is a perfectly competent episode of Angel with the Torchwood cast. Its central piece of supernatural technology, the mind-reading pendant, is strictly there to provide a metaphoric representation of Tosh’s isolation and awkwardness. Her ability to know what other people are thinking becomes a metaphoric contrast to her own social ineptitude and inability to express herself to her colleagues. This is not, prima facie, a bad approach – Buffy and Angel were great shows, and Tosh needed a focus episode, making this sort of approach a more tempting match than it might have been. We might also note that they hired Toby Whithouse for it, he having already written the Buffy homage School Reunion for Doctor Who this year.

But it feels slender for a Torchwood episode. Interestingly, it’s not slender in the way of Cyberwoman or Countrycide, which had reasonably nuanced premises that were then wedded to high-octane action episodes. No, Greeks Bearing Gifts is slender conceptually, offering very little to talk about in its themes.…

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“The choice is with us still”: The Doomsday Machine

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The beginning of a proud tradition,

“The Doomsday Machine” is one of the episodes I most fondly remember from the Original Series. For me it was always a highlight of the second season: I enjoyed the tense, thriller-like pacing as the crew races against time to prevent the planet killer from destroying everything, I thought splitting the main cast up was a great way to play up the drama of the situation (though it’s been done before this season, I think it might be the most effective here) and I loved the fact Kirk, Scotty and the away team get the Constellation up and running by themselves and operate it all on their own. I also loved the design and concept of the planet killer itself, a big, scary automaton of destruction that the crew had to out-think and outmaneuver and I thought Commodore Decker’s tragic fall from grace was a particularly well-executed and memorable character moment. Naturally, it would seem few people agree with me as this seems to be one of the more contentious episodes of the year.

James Doohan seems to have considered this his favourite episode of the Original Series and said so at conventions on a number of occasions. Apparently, however, he was frequently met with eye-rolls and groans from the audience whenever he said so. D.C. Fontana as well has been quoted as saying this is the weakest episode of the series and her least favourite. I must say I’m at something at a loss to explain why: I always thought this episode was both a critical and fan favourite, and I really can’t see how Fontana can claim “The Doomsday Machine” is in any way worse than, say, “The Omega Glory” or indeed her own “Friday’s Child” and that’s just from this season alone. Expand your lens to the years that bookended season two and you’ve got “The Enemy Within”, “Mudd’s Women” and “Space Seed” to pick three particularly egregious examples of episodes that weigh down the first season considerably, not to mention, well, pretty much all of season three. Even the episode’s own cast isn’t completely on the same page: While the regulars are as fantastic as always (special notice being paid to William Shatner, James Doohan and Leonard Nimoy, who all deliver compellingly intense and colourful performances), William Windom, who played Decker, has gone on record a number of times to say he didn’t take Star Trek at all seriously because it was science fiction and played his role basically as a cartoon character in an attempt to mock it (ironically, Windom’s performance remains commendable and memorable, despite a few instances of obvious gurning).

What “The Doomsday Machine” seems like to me is a very simple, straightforward and more than sufficiently entertaining thriller. This is important to take note of, because this the first time Star Trek has actually done “straightforward” all year: “Catspaw” and “Amok Time” were by necessity bombshell game-changing episodes while “Metamorphosis” was Gene Coon’s reaction to this and the next step in his evolving vision for the series.…

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Sorry to Post Twice

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But the latest version of StoryBundle, a name-your-own price bundle of ebooks, just went up, and this edition is a Doctor Who themed bundle with either one or two of my books in it.

For any price you like above $3 you can get the Patrick Troughton volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, barry Letts’s autobiography Who and Me, Nick Griffiths’s Dalek I loved You (in its new 50th Anniversary edition), and Chris Rachel Oseland’s Dining with the Doctor, the second-ever Doctor Who-themed cookbook.

But if you pay $10 or more you get all four of those books as well as Earl Green’s VWORP!, a sizable romp through Doctor Who continuity, and The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, which collects some favorite posts from throughout the blog’s history with a few paragraphs of introduction for each post. The introductions are exclusive to this volume, and the volume is exclusive to this Storybundle – I’ve no plans to release the book through another channel at the moment, and won’t be looking at doing so until some time in 2014 at the absolute earliest.

It’s a lovely collection of books at a fantastic price, and even if you have the Troughton book (and I hope you do!), it’s worth picking up. Whereas if you’ve not tried one of the book versions of TARDIS Eruditorum, here’s an opportunity to try it along with some other great books.

Either way, the bundle is available over here, and will be up for the next two weeks. Please spread the word and consider buying a bundle for yourself.…

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The Way We Live Now

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Capaldi.  Wow.  I’d have put money on it being some new variation on the Tenant/Smith entity.  A young relative unknown with male model looks (one reason Moffat says he hired Smith is that he looked like someone who got photographed wearing pants for a living).  I admit, I’m astonished.  Capaldi is a genuinely great choice (if only I could believe he’s likely to get decent scripts to work with).

Of course, the Doctor is STILL not a woman or a person of colour… but I’m not ‘disappointed’ because I never expected that to happen.  Either written by Moffat would’ve been likely to end up as a blood-curdling, shaming disaster.  As one bizarre online comment has it, Moffat’s idea of a woman Doctor wouldn’t have pleased “internet anti-equality feminists” (whatever the bloody hell an ‘anti-equality feminist’ might be).

So it’s probably just as well that Moffat has – completely out of left-field – cast an older, male, white Scotsman. 

On the subject of online comment…  Facebook and Twitter are now plastered in remarks and memes in which fans sneer at all the (supposedly) weepy young fangirls who’re unimpressed with Capaldi because he’s not young and hot.

There’s a bit of me that sympathises with the derision, if I’m honest. These young whippersnappers are annoying (largely because they’re young and happy and I’m neither)… but the comment on this has immediately become venomously contemptuous and sneeringly sexist.  Because the focus is clearly on the silly, hormonal young wimmenz.

Viz:

Yeah, ‘cos that’s just what the Fourth Doctor symbolises: sneering at young women.

There’s also a YouTube video doing the rounds of a young woman, possibly a teenager (I can’t tell anymore; anyone under thirty looks like a foetus to me nowadays) reacting unhappily to the announcement that the new Doc will be an older, craggy fella.  Take a look at the comments below it.  I shouldn’t need to quote them.  They’re all too predictable.

As I say: misogynistic society + internet anonymity = ugly honesty.

Apart from anything else, this is rank hypocrisy. Just imagine the tantrums from the legions of sad, middle-aged fanboys if the new companion were an older, craggy actress rather than some perky young ingenue that they’d like to daydream about tupping.

Still, that’s sexism for you. The sense of entitlement on the part of the privileged is so ingrained that it isn’t even noticed, and any challenge to it as perceived as persecution or silliness.

On a related issue (well, it’s the same issue really), it seems Moffat took the opportunity of the Capaldi announcement to sneer at the idea of a woman Doctor.  He says, sarcastically, that he wants a man to play the Queen.

Well doesn’t that just say it all?

Firstly, Moff, why do you always, instinctively run to establishment authority figures?  You creep.

Secondly… OH YEAH ‘COS NO MEN HAVE EVER PLAYED WOMEN HAVE THEY!?!?!?!?!  I MEAN, IT’S NOT AS IF CROSS-DRESSING AND DRAG ARE INBUILT, AGE-OLD ASPECTS OF THE BRITISH THEATRICAL AND TELEVISUAL TRADITION!!!!! …

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Methinks The Review Blog Doth Protest Too Much

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Robot: If ever there was a story to excuse on the ground of production circumstances, it’s this – the outgoing production team produces a story introducing the new Doctor with no knowledge of where their successors are going, and so have to just pair Tom Baker with the previous era’s supporting cast and hope for the best. Terrance Dicks papers over the cracks with an Avengers script, and nobody screws up. It’ll do. 5/10

The Ark in Space: If you experienced the Hinchcliffe era as  a child, there’s a moment in your life when you realize that Noah’s “alien arm” is just bubble wrap that’s been painted green. What’s impressive is that this moment is not, generally, the first time you watch The Ark in Space, because the story itself is so completely confident in what it’s doing and so wonderfully creepy in its concepts that it just doesn’t matter. Doctor Who had never been quite like this before, and even today it holds up. One of the all-time classics. 10/10

The Sontaran Experiment: It’s over after two episodes and isn’t blatantly offensive in any regard. It doesn’t seem to be shooting for much more than that. An experiment in a literal sense, new production teams have had rockier shakedown cruises than this in the past. They, however, usually fail trying something ambitious, as opposed to something that’s interesting only if you’re interested in the history of television cameras. It fills the space between two good stories, which is fine, but it doesn’t try to do anything more, which is sad. 3/10

Genesis of the Daleks: Blimey. It’s an episode too long, yes, but it turns out Terry Nation had a good script in him. Or, at least, Robert Holmes could find one when he really put his mind to it. What else do you say? You can put this in front of someone today and they’ll have a reasonably good time. The essential genius of the Hinchcliffe era is rapidly coming into focus. It’s just wonderful. 9/10

Revenge of the Cybermen: Disappointing, but by no means indicative of a larger failing. The decision to let Gerry Davis write for the mid-70s probably made sense on paper. Robert Holmes doesn’t have time to fix the script, and it all goes a bit wrong as the story becomes a plodding mess. It’s a pity – you can see what a good version of this story would be, but it’s not what got made. 4/10

Terror of the Zygons: Delightful, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a slightly bitchy send-up of the previous era of the show, and thus a hair mean-spirited. But everyone involved seems to be having fun, and it’s tough to get too upset about it given that. Especially with so many classic bits to enjoy. 9/10

Planet of Evil: The very definition of flawed masterpiece – the ideas are all here, but Louis Marks tends to deliver slightly wooden scripts that don’t take advantage of them.…

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