Nerd Evidence
Canon and continuity are not the point. Why not go ahead without precedents? After all, a foolish hobgoblin is the consistency of someone with a dictionary of quotations.
All the same…
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No, I don’t kip
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.
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| 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.…
The Death of Marguerite-Charlotte David
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.…
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.…
“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.…
Sorry to Post Twice
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.…
The Way We Live Now
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:
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| 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!!!!! …
Methinks The Review Blog Doth Protest Too Much
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.…
Outside the Government: Countrycide
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| Did you know that the New York Times Crossword Puzzle has something called the “breakfast test,” which declares that you can’t use any words in a crossword that would be upsetting to read over breakfast? This is one difference between the New York Times Crossword Puzzle and TARDIS Eruditorum. |
It’s November 19th, 2006. Akon and Eminem are at number one with “Smack That,” a subtle and nuanced look at contemporary sexual relations in much the way Day One isn’t. Justin Timberlake, Take That, Robbie Williams, and Westlife also chart. In news, around 98% of the population of South Ossetia votes for independence from Georgia. Nobody cares. Java is released under the GPL. Mitch McConnell becomes Republican leader in Congress, succeeding Bill Frist. Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, becomes Speaker of the House. The Playstation 3 comes out, Tony Blair describes Iraq as “pretty much a disaster,” and, the day this story airs, the Nintendo Wii comes out.
The story, of course, is Countrycide, which is widely beloved and popular and which nobody has anything bad to say about. Ah, no, you’re not going to buy that? Fine. Countrycide is Torchwood’s second effort at a big spectacle of a story. Much like Chris Chibnall’s previous contribution, Cyberwoman, it’s a straight action story, designed primarily to be thrilling. It’s not what you’d call an enormously complex concept. That said, it’s still at least somewhat clever in its approach – this is the first televised Doctor Who thing to feature no alien or supernatural intervention since Black Orchid nearly a quarter-century earlier.
No, “it’s not aliens, it’s humans, who are far worse than any aliens” is not exactly the most innovative twist in the history of Doctor Who. But it’s a solid one worth dusting off every once in a while, and the fact that Torchwood can take the “rational explanation behind seemingly irrational events” motif from Scooby Doo and make it into a piece of sickening horror is a fair justification for doing it. The ingredients of this are all familiar, but that’s writing for you. There’s a perfectly serviceable nexus of ideas underlying this story.
The problem is that the execution is a bit… well, but even here there’s a defense to be mustered. The story amounts to doing The Wicker Man for the modern day. We should pause and contextualize that. For all that The Wicker Man is treated as being primarily about pagan rites, mostly by geeky pagan types who are understandably eager to lay cultural claim to one of the best movies ever made, it is in fact not about the supernatural at all, but rather about the fear of the rural. The closest cousin to The Wicker Man is probably Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes, the latter remade in 2006 as part of a general and unfortunate trend in . It’s a story about the remote parts of the country and the bizarre things they get up to there.
So basically we have Torchwood trying to do horror in a particularly bad era of horror.…
“But what about sex?” Amok Time
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| “You know T’Pau, I’m starting to think you were right.” |
“Amok Time” is the price Star Trek pays for “Who Mourns for Adonais?”. This is the show’s shamefully repressed sexuality finally catching up with it. Miraculously, or perhaps simply because it’s impossible to spectacularly self-destruct in the same manner a second time, the show hits just about all the notes it needs to in this kind of scenario. “Amok Time” is without doubt another classic, perhaps not an unequivocal masterpiece, but definitely a landmark episode that sets the stage for a great deal of future great Star Trek.
The parallels here really couldn’t be any more perfect. Spock, who so desires to be distant, calculating and logical, is driven into an uncontrollable madness because of the very instincts and emotions he’s trying to bury and ignore. The Vulcans perceive their sexual drive as at once shameful taboo, but also as a deeply ancient and revered aspect of their cultural heritage, thus forcing them into a mating cycle which they can repress for awhile, but physiologically must acknowledge when the time comes, or else they will die. Given Spock is something of a central character and a microcosm for Star Trek and the numerous problems the series has in regards to gender roles, sexuality and women, even more overt and noticeable in the last few episodes, the analysis sort of writes itself here.
But to elaborate, and despite all the ancient and mysterious Vulcan ritualism of the koon-ut-kal-if-fee, the whole concept of Pon Farr is an extremely Western one. In my writeup of “Mudd’s Women” I talked about how sexuality is perceived in these societies cribbing a bit from (and probably misinterpreting) Michel Foucault. In brief, Western sexuality is intrinsically linked with the idea of taboo, because while the rise of modernism led to a net increase in sexual discourse, it was carefully fielded through “official channels”, most notably the Counter-Reformation-era Catholic church. As a result, sex is taboo but the taboo is also now sexy leading to the oxymoronic catch-22 that is responsible for pretty much all the repressive sexual tension Westerners live with. While sex wasn’t talked about as much in pre-modern societies, it was just a natural thing that happened. So, even though they weren’t living in sexually liberated golden ages of free love (as with most golden ages, this was a myth thought up after the fact by people nostalgic for a past that never existed in an attempt to cope with a present they didn’t know how to deal with), pre-modern people didn’t have to deal with quite the same problems modern people do.
And Pon Farr is very much a commentary on this, if not exactly diegetically then definitely extradiegetically. Sexuality is something that’s an integral part of what it means to be human(oid), and denying that is, if not actively suicidal, at the very least counterproductive and unhealthy. What’s really charming about “Amok Time” is how Spock is seen as being obstinate and, honestly, a bit childish for fervently trying to hide from his sexuality.…