Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

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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Outside the Government: Countrycide

, 45

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.…

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“But what about sex?” Amok Time

, 6

“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.…

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Sunday Pancaking (August 4th, 2013)

68

As promised your open thread to rail about how Doctor Who is basically over now that they’ve cast… well, whoever it is they’ve cast.

Personally, and I’m writing this ages before it’s actually announced (in fact, I’m going to be avoiding this thread for the first few hours while I wait to get to see it), I’m just terribly excited. It’s Doctor Who that exists after the end of TARDIS Eruditorum! I’ll get to watch this Doctor and not have to talk about it on the Internet for years if I don’t want to! I mean, I’ll probably still talk about it on the Internet because I’m me, but I don’t actually have to! I can just shut up and watch Doctor Who. It’s unfathomably novel to me.

EDIT: He’ll do nicely, yes.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 3rd, 2013)

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Yes, there will be a Sunday Pancacking going up at the appropriate time. Until then…

Jed Blue’s My Little Po-Mo Kickstarter is just shy of a stretch goal as the days run out, and might be worth a few bucks.

Andrew Hickey’s California Dreaming Kickstarter is also past goal but with stretch goals available, and worth checking out.

And finally, Neil Perryman is threatening to make his wife watch all of Blake’s 7. You can help make that one happen over at The Adventures of the Wife and Blake – it’s still a few hundred quid short of goal.

And, of course, a new Doctor tomorrow. Until then, read any good books? I’ve just finished Warren Ellis’s Dead Pig Collector, which is pleasantly depraved. And though it’s been out for ages, I did think The Ocean at the End of the Lane was absolutely marvelous, and the best book Gaiman has written since American Gods. Anything else fun and out recently?…

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Outside the Government: Small Worlds

, 21

Dance Magic Dance, O Human Child…

It’s November 12th, 2006. Westlife are at number one with “The Rose,” with U2 & Green Day, Beyonce, Girls Aloud, and Madonna also charting. In news, Democrats regain control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1994, and three men are convicted of racially motivated murder in the 2004 death of Kriss Donald in Glasgow, a case notable because Donald was white and his killers were of Pakistani descent.

A reminder, then, that the question of alien worlds and wondrous others contains an at times brutal dimension. This is always the unsettling possibility of the “other world.” What if it simply does not want us? What if we are wholly extraneous to its wonders, the relationship completely one-sided? What if we are just raw matter, like trees or meat, granted no value save what we can be transformed into? This is the horror at the heart of Sapphire and Steel, a show whose cosmology was deliberately incomprehensible so that all that could be interpreted was the basic fact of something scary and the outline of its narrative rules.

It’s difficult to think of any decision taken in setting up the first season of Torchwood quite as sound as getting Peter J. Hammond to contribute an episode. Still an active television writer, but mostly better known for his crime and mystery output (he contributed two episodes of Midsomer Murders the same year as this), Torchwood was the perfect fit for him – the shell of a cop show wrapped around the supernatural horror he used to write to such effect. True to form, he strips the underlying metaphor of Torchwood down to one of its most basic forms – the cultural original of the “wondrous space alongside the mundane one,” namely the Land of Fairy.

The value of using the basic form is that much of the narrative is pre-existing. As long as nothing is inconsistent with the basic high concept tagline of “evil fairies” the story can hang together without much explanation – which is basically the trick Sapphire and Steel used. This means that the fairies do not have to be evil fairies in any sort of conscious or motivated sense. It’s sufficient that they look like they belong to the broad category of evil fairies. In practice what we have is something far more unnerving – indifferent fairies. Fairies who simply do not care about us or our world, and who are best understood as features of nature, not as an “other civilization.”

So the fairies are presented as creatures from the dawn of time – as an unfathomable order of things that only Jack can truly understand, and that only because of the weird span of his life. Even given this his understanding is choppy – it consists mainly of having been alive enough to have had his world intersect the Land of Fairy before. Jack’s description of them is at once evocative and vague: “something you can only half see like a glimpse, like something out of the corner of your eye with a touch of myth, a touch of the spirit world, a touch of reality, all jumbled together.…

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“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”: Who Mourns for Adonais?

, 14

“Yet fire does not destroy, it carbonizes, and this remains transformation and metamorphosis.”

I have had it with Star Trek‘s hatred of women. No. More than that. I have had it with Star Trek.

I’m sorry, that’s it. No more apologies. No more attempts at redemptive readings. No more emphasizing the oversignified positives. This is the fourth episode in a row I’ve had to deal with blatant, ghastly, retrograde misogyny in this show and this is the worst week yet. Anyone who can remotely consider Star Trek progressive in feminist areas quite frankly hasn’t watched it. Period. That’s the only way I can see glancing over the second trivialized brutal rape scene of an infantilized woman in as many years. This is all the more infuriating as “Who Mourns for Adonais?” actually has one or two interesting things worth talking about, but absolutely everything else is dwarfed and subsumed by the big, glaring bit of rape apologia the episode tosses at us in its climax, so we have to address that before we can even think about other discussion topics. Remember back in “The Enemy Within” where I said Star Trek had become broken and irredeemable? Well, guess what: It still is.

“Who Mourns for Adonais?” is “Space Seed” except Greek-flavoured. Once again we have a female humanities scholar, this time an anthropologist because Star Trek hates me, personally, swayed by an overwhelming, dominant male presence who betrays the crew because according to this dross women are fickle, capricious and mysterious. It’s just the stakes have been raised as we now have a man claiming to be a god instead of a dictator. At least Kirk doesn’t belittle her field and her entire gender this time around, not that his acceptance counts for much anymore, although Doctor McCoy’s comments more than fill the gap Kirk leaves in this regard. And, for that matter, at least Khan didn’t flat out explicitly rape Marla McGivers, though, which Apollo quite clearly does to Carolyn Palamas in the climax to this episode. When you have made Khan Noonien Singh look benevolent and restrained something has gone very wrong. This time it’s even worse than it was with Janice Rand in “The Enemy Within”, because as horrible as that was, that was still only *attempted* rape. This is a full-on rape scene with the camera leeringly focused on Apollo’s godlike dominance over Palamas and her pained, tortured, helpless expression. Furthermore, it’s a scene about tearing her down, breaking her, invalidating her, mocking her agency, degrading her and dehumanizing her, just as all rape truly is: Right before the rape, she had finally stood up to Apollo and began acting like an anthropologist for the first time in the episode, and she’s utterly destroyed as a person for doing work she presumably loved doing.

And the worst part? The actual, very worst part? The show doesn’t have one single problem with this. This episode was originally supposed to end with McCoy revealing to Kirk that Palamas was pregnant by Apollo and joking about how his sickbay is not designed to deliver the children of gods.…

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The Slow-Motion Lynching of Chelsea Manning

39

First published on August 1st, 2013, following Manning’s conviction. Rewritten throughout on August 22nd in light of Manning’s sentencing and public coming out.

The news that the person called Bradley Manning in the bulk of media stories over the past few years is more correctly called “Chelsea” was, to say the least, surprising to those of us who followed the case closely. We had, for the most part, thought she preferred “Breanna.” Other than this detail, however, the  “sudden” revelation that Manning was a trans woman was neither sudden nor a revelation. In fact, understanding anything about this case without that information is essentially impossible. The sole reason that Chelsea Manning is going to spend the next thirty-five years in prison is that she is transgender. For this reason, she was and is being systematically psychologically tortured by the US Army with the express consent of the civilian government. And the sole reason for any of this is that it’s easier to publicly lynch a trans woman than it is to address the criminal deficiencies of the US Military in the course of the now ostensibly concluded Iraq War.

Let us then review the facts. Well before she leaked classified information to the public, Manning openly identified in multiple conversations as experiencing Gender Identity Disorder. Manning actively maintained a female persona named Breanna. Manning dressed in female clothing. And Manning visibly experienced severe psychological distress stemming from these facts. All of this can be summarized succinctly: Manning actively took on a female identity, and did so long before the events she’s ostensibly going to prison for.

A brief word on those events. For the purposes of this discussion, at least, let us going to set aside the question of whether Manning’s leaks were correct or moral. (For the record, I think they were, but this is mostly beside the point.) Instead let us take as read that the military itself would have preferred that Manning not give a mass of classified documents to Wikileaks. Certainly it has seemed terribly upset about it since it has happened. But if, in fact, this was something they did not want to happen, their behavior prior to it actually happening is almost completely impossible to explain.

There can be few places in American society more rawly hostile to a trans woman than the military. There are no easy ways to reject the identity that one has held for two decades. Transitioning is an often brutal and lonely process, and that’s for the people lucky enough to be able to afford it. Even with trans-friendly health insurance the costs of a surgical transition can easily reach $20k. And trans-friendly health insurance is the invisible pink unicorn of the American healthcare system. Indeed, adequate support in general is essentially unheard of for trans people – I can count on zero hands the number of trans people I have met to have been given access to adequate mental health resources, hormone therapies, surgical options, and a support network of family and friends.…

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Outside the Government: Cyberwoman

, 49

It’s. Not. Funny.

It’s November 5th, 2006, memorably enough. Fedde Le Grand are at number one with “Put Your Hands Up For Detroit,” while Beyonce, McFly, and U2 & Green Day also chart. In news since the last episode, severe flooding breaks out in Ethiopia, and Ted Haggard resigns as head of the National Association of Evangelicals due to his fondness for crystal meth and rent boys. Because who doesn’t.

While on television it’s Cyberwoman. Seemingly content with having set up its basic premises, Torchwood here unleashes a story that can only really be described as a gigantic piece of candy. This is the thrilling runaround with monsters, and offers no pretense that it might be anything else. This is, in and of itself, telling. Torchwood, in its first season, hews closer to the standard model of Doctor Who than was apparent at the time. All four of Russell T Davies’s seasons, as well as Moffat’s first one, follow a simple structure in their first three episodes of doing a story set in the present, a story in the past, and a story in the future. In fact, the structure goes one step further – the past/present/future trilogy is, in each of the first five seasons, followed up by a two-part monster runaround. This was, it turns out, part of Doctor Who’s formula.

What’s not usually remarked upon is that Torchwood, despite its lack of time travel, does the same thing. It moves from an episode focused on Gwen and her world to a fairly straightforward alien threat to a ghost story concerned with the past, and then does its big clanking monster story. And when you decide to treat Cyberwoman as self-consciously being Torchwood attempting to do its version of Rise of the Cybermen or Daleks in Manhattan, to pick the ones on either side of it, most of its excesses become altogether easier to understand. This is meant to be the big action set piece – Torchwood fighting a classic Doctor Who monster.

Clearly they thought better of it, at least to some extent – Torchwood never took on a monster pre-established in Doctor Who again. And yet it’s difficult to say that the exercise was entirely pointless. The truth is that the Cybermen actually work quite well here. Torchwood basically goes back to the principles of Dalek here: a lone and damaged monster locked in the basement of a secret facility housing alien artifacts. This, of course, has a different effect for the Cybermen, who had already appeared in four episodes of Doctor Who in 2006, than it did on the Daleks, unseen in any proper sense in seventeen years when Dalek aired. Dalek set the bar high for the Daleks, establishing that just one of them is a terrifying threat. But Cyberwoman comes after the bar has already been set low for the Cybermen, and indeed after they’ve already been established as the second choice rejects of the monster pool.

The result is that no matter how hard Cyberwoman tries to repeat the Dalek trick of “just one monster is terrifying,” it ends up doing a better job of making Torchwood look foolish than it does of making the Cybermen look terrifying.…

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“Wednesday’s child is full of woe/Thursday’s child has far to go”: Friday’s Child

, 5

What d’you think, Spock? I was thinking “Get Rid Of Slimy Klingons”.

D.C. Fontana has a rather unsettling habit of making my life extremely difficult.

She’s Star Trek’s first staff writer who is a woman and has written several of the most influential and groundbreaking episodes in the franchise, including two of my absolute, all-time favourites. Unfortunately, every single episode she’s been involved in I’ve looked so far in this project (save, debatably, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”) has been an infuriating, baldly reactionary disaster including, well, this one. In “Friday’s Child” we have, in no particular order, the Federation explicitly as the “good” empire to the Klingon’s “bad” empire, Kirk and Spock completely overturning the society and rules of an entire planetary culture pretty much for lulz, and, oh yeah, a pregnant woman, belittled and infantilized by just about every other character by being referred to as “the girl”, whom the show treats as both a comic relief and a burden because of her attempts to be headstrong and independent.

Let’s take a look at the most egregious and upsetting thing first: Not the imperialistic or Prime Directive issues; the show couldn’t give a toss about those here and neither should we until it decides to take another look at them. No, I’m instead talking about Eleen Akaar, because of fucking course I’m talking about Eleen Akaar. A proud, strong woman who doesn’t let any man touch her, yet who eagerly submits to Doctor McCoy when he proves his superior fortitude and asserts his dominance and authority over her, by, of all things slapping her and knowing more about labour and childbirth then her as well as every other woman in her society. This is so blatantly, obviously and stupefyingly misogynistic I’m actually speechless: There’s no reaction to that I can muster apart from stunned disbelief and disgust such that I actually feel dirty and personally hurt after watching this. Let’s try and move on as quickly as possible, lest this essay devolve into another screamy, infuriated diatribe a la “The Corbomite Maneuver” or “The Enemy Within”.

In an attempt to give Fontana some manner of credit and benefit of the doubt, because I truly find it almost impossible to believe a woman in her position could ever come up with something as hurtful and offensive as this, a large portion of the blame for the feminist nightmare of “Friday’s Child” should, both sadly and obviously, go to Gene Roddenberry. Had Fontana’s original draft gone into production, Eleen would have been depicted as an even stronger presence, explicit in revolt against the male supremacy of Capellan society, which believed women were mothers and homemakers and nothing else. The climax would have also seen her sacrificing the life of her child in order to preserve her own, which actually gels much better with Kirk’s line that Eleen “hates the unborn child she is carrying” and Eleen’s own dialog that in her culture, children belong expressly to the father (as well as the subtle implication early on that the only reason Akaar married Eleen was to give him a son in the first place).…

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