Eruditorum Press

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“…a uniquely portable magic.”: Metamorphosis

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Love is possible.

The obvious way to open this post would be with some cheekily prescient call-forward to Star Trek First Contact, the consensus-second-best Star Trek movie, in which Zefram Cochrane (who is introduced here) plays a significant role. However, that essay is going to be wild and crazy enough without having to deal with baggage from “Metamorphosis” on top of it all, so let’s leave the future to the future for now.

“Metamorphosis” is a significant improvement over last episode, which is typically the case when Gene Coon is writing. What’s more interesting, however, is that this is very much Gene Coon for the second season: Building off of themes he introduced in “The Devil in the Dark” and clearly noticing the show’s landscape has been permanently altered in the wake of the bombshell that was “Catspaw”, “Metamorphosis” is the first clear, concrete step forward Star Trek has taken since, well, Coon’s last episode. It’s not perfect, not even the best script we’ve seen from Coon so far, and the particular kind of faults it has mean it’s ultimately less than successful, but this is still very much the sort of sign we should be looking for from Star Trek at the start of its second consecutive year on the air.

Charmingly, Coon’s next step from burning the show to the ground and challenging it to justify its existence and prove it’s capable of behaving in a peaceful, constructive manner is to give it an incredibly straightforward and intimate love story. Not a fake romance plot, like Nurse Chapel swooning over Doctor Korby just long enough to provide necessary drama in a floundering episode or when Kirk shacks up with any of his Desilu-mandated girls-of-the-week, but a real, actual love story between two people that takes a serious, mature look at what that concept is, how it’s expressed and how its interpreted. The Companion loves the stranded Zefram Cochrane, but is only capable of displaying her affection by keeping him alive and providing for him. But that’s not the kind of companionship he really needs, which prompts her to similarly maroon Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the commissioner. Cochrane can’t see this as love, because The Companion is not a being like himself, and when he finds out the truth he recoils in horror. And, in an actually lovely speech from Kirk, without doubt one of his most memorable scenes in the show so far, he points out to both of them that true love can’t be one-sided and that two people must be joined as equals for it to exist.

This speech is a watershed from Kirk, and his depiction in this episode is crucial to continuing his extradiegetic challenge given to him by Coon in “Arena” to grow and mature Star Trek. Much like in “the Devil in the Dark”, Kirk starts out angry and frenzied, even considering destroying The Companion if it means freeing the trapped shuttlecraft. But he is reminded by McCoy, in one of his best and, frankly, most welcome lines to date that “perhaps being a soldier for so long” has caused Kirk to forget he’s “also trained as a diplomat”.…

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Saturday Waffling (July 27th, 2013)

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Hello everyone. It’s one of those weeks where I constantly want to work on something other than what I am, and I find myself spoiled for choice – Last War in Albion’s coming along, but probably not quite ready for Thursday (we’ll see though). I have a bit of a fiction project that hasn’t died yet, which is unusual for my fiction projects, as they usually last under 48 hours, and this just crossed 48. Plus, of course, all the revisions ever, which didn’t get anywhere this week, because it’s a blog week. (Just finished Small Worlds, Countrycide and Greeks Bearing Gifts to write over the weekend.)

And we’re just in that obnoxious part of summer where it feels like it’s gone on a bit too long and like it’s high time for fall. Or maybe that’s just my reduced summer paycheck talking. I don’t know. At least it hasn’t been too extravagantly hot the last few days – we actually had the windows open instead of the air conditioning yesterday.

So, what are you trying to get done before the end of summer? For me it’s the Baker and Hartnell revisions, and will be a tight thing. But tell me about your goals – what deadlines are you chasing? What are you doing with your August?…

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Outside the Government: Day One

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I’m somebody’s fetish.

It’s still October 22nd. Stupid double bills. In any case, Day One.

Thing one about Day One is all the sex. Torchwood gets a fair amount of stick for being an “adult” show in a childish and superficial way – that is, to be obsessed with sex and violence. On the one hand, Day One rather supports that claim by having the first thing Torchwood does once it sets up its premise by fighting the sex alien. On the other hand, the episode manages to have its cake and eat it too with that absolutely marvelous sequence of Carys walking through the streets assailed by all the images of sex around her. Which is to say, yes, Torchwood is flagrantly about sex on a regular basis, but this isn’t entirely unreasonable given the apparent centrality of sex to our day-to-day lives. And while sex may be frustratingly inescapable, it’s also, if we’re being honest, a topic that is poorly served by the bulk of television, which handles sex very badly if at all.

Torchwood is a mixed bag on this – as I noted, the sci-fi rape in Everything Changes is absolutely appalling. But this episode does quite well with a number of small but deft touches – having Carys’s phone conversation as she’s infected by the alien eventually play into the plot, for instance, or the quiet establishment of her home life. The scene where she confronts Eddie is a marvelous depiction of the real sorts of tangles of contemporary relationships, which don’t follow television’s usual unwavering lines of clear-cut boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s a step more complex than just having her go after an ex-boyfriend, and considerably more honest.

Equally, however, there is something willfully provocative about having your second episode feature the sex alien. Even though it is, all things being equal, a pretty good sex alien, it’s still visibly and tangibly a stunt. Then again, this is in many ways the same structure that Doctor Who used in 2005 – take the second episode and go as far in a given direction as it is possible to go. So, yes, Day One has the sex alien, but it has it for the simple reason that putting the sex alien in at the start means that you effectively settle the “how far will this show go” debate in one handy shot. You really can’t get away with calling Torchwood “shocking” in terms of content after this episode, which is a useful bit of armor for the series. It’s a technique akin to Paul Abbott’s decision to work both an assassination and a nude shot of Chloe Sevigny with a prosthetic penis into the first two minutes of his actually very good 2012 Hit & Miss – by getting all the prurient bits of its premise on the table immediately it prevents the show, in the long term, from being defined by those bits.

I could go on in this tone for a while yet, beginning a defense of Chris Chibnall as a writer, but there’s an underlying issue here I want to address, which is that Torchwood seems to require a level of defensiveness.…

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“Trick or Treat/Trick or Treat/Trick or Treat for Halloween”: Catspaw

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Little known fact: Back in the day they used to have Enterprise moon pendants.

Well, to start things off I’d like to say that coming off of Raumpatrouille Orion and The Prisoner it’s rather exasperating to tune in for the brand new season of Star Trek and see Captain Kirk stomp around the bridge in a huff and bluster about people failing to follow landing party procedure. It would have been very nice to be able to open this post with a hearty declaration that the show has finally turned a corner with the first story produced for the new year, especially with a premise as tantalizing as the one this episode has. But no, “Catspaw” is aggravatingly business as usual.

Which is really rather puzzling, because it has the makings of something incomparably bizarre and interesting to talk about. First of all, this episode has the single most bonkers pitch in the history of the franchise: It is literally a Star Trek holiday special. I’m not even kidding-The only reason “Catspaw” exists is because somebody, most likely at NBC, decided Star Trek really needed to have a Halloween special. So, we get fifty minutes of Kirk, Spock and McCoy wandering around a stereotypically spooky haunted castle with witches, skeletons, black cats and evil wizards. There are any number of reasonable, plausible reasons for this premise to go hilariously and catastrophically off the rails but, in a moment of genuine insight, Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon make the actually sane and sensible decision to give the story to the only person on staff remotely capable of taking this quite literal nightmare pitch and turning into something other than an unmitigated disaster: Robert Bloch.

Bloch only had one other Star Trek script to his name at this time: “What Are Little Girls Made Of”? early on in the first season, an episode that could charitably be described as not going quite according to plan. However, before we run to the hills screaming, it’s worth pointing out Bloch was actually an extremely respected and influential author, penning a little novel called Psycho, so perhaps the failings of the previous story can and should be laid once again at the feet of Gene Roddenberry, who decided he needed to rewrite the whole thing in the middle of primary filming. Thankfully Roddenberry seemed to see no need to do similar micromanaging here, so with “Catspaw” we get a better glimpse into the sorts of things Bloch is actually interested in talking about, which seems to be pretty clearly “horror”. Not just any kind of horror, though: The type of horror Bloch seems to fancy the most, especially when it comes to writing Star Trek, is descended from the works of US novelist H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was a prolific early 20th century writer with a particular interest in uniquely mystical and cosmic variety of psychological horror. In Lovecraft’s works, the universe is really the domain of vast, incomprehensible ancient monsters who exist so far above and beyond the realm of human comprehension that to even glimpse one or speak its name would drive a person to complete and inconsolable madness.…

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For Amusement Only, Really

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Some writers have embarrassing juvenilia. I have that too, actually, but mostly I have embarrassing academia. The death of Douglas Engelbart a bit ago struck me a bit because his “mother of all demos” was a fairly sizable topic within my dissertation, which, of course, nobody will ever see because it’s a dissertation and nobody ever sees those, and revising it into a book is not really a priority given my estrangement from academia.

Accordingly, I’m serializing it here on a “whenever I’m hard up for content” schedule. I make no guarantees of its readability, quality, or entertainment value. Indulge me. It took a long period of my life and it seems like it should have some sort of a home.

I also make no guarantees that parts of it are not abandoned mid-revision, or that the citations are not in the odd markup language used by the citation manager software I used when writing it. In any case, hopefully someone will be entertained by this. It is, of course, academic writing, with all of the associated stylistic tics and occasional dryness. 

CHAPTER 1
THE DEMO AND THE PROBLEM OF PROGRESS

On August 6, 1991, at 3:31 PM, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) made a post to the alt.hypertext newsgroup responding to a seemingly innocuous question by Nari Kannan, who asked if there was any development towards “hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of information.”  In his response, Berners-Lee described a project he was working on that would do just this by creating a protocol, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), via which hypertext files could be requested and returned by servers on the then-nascent Internet, complete with links that would, if followed, use HTTP to request files from other servers (Berners-Lee). The project was called WorldWideWeb, and this Usenet post marked its public debut.
This historical moment poses something of a problem for a media theorist. What, role does or did this moment play in terms of the World Wide Web as it is today? On the one hand, from a historical perspective, it is factually the case that Tim Berners-Lee created key parts of the basic technology that underlies the World Wide Web. On the other hand, the development of the Web does not slot so easily into a sort of “great man” theory, and there is a degree to which the centrality of this single event to the history of the Web belongs more to myth than history.[1]Associated with this dualism is a significant problem: on the one hand, there are clearly a set of events in the history of any medium that are historically significant in its establishment as a functional piece of technology.
…

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Outside the Government: Everything Changes

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David, you have to try this. I call it standing in the rain looking
dramatic. xoxo, John

It’s October 22nd, 2006. My Chemical Romance are at number one with “Welcome to the Black Parade,” with Scissor Sisters, Girls Aloud, P. Diddy, and Meat Loaf also charting. Since the Battle of Canary Wharf, Twitter launched, a war broke out between Israel and Lebanon, and North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test. While in the week before this story, the US actually gets around to confirming that North Korea had a nuclear weapons test, and the Iraq war keeps going badly.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts with Everything Changes. That Everything Changes tacks fairly straightforwardly to the approved Joseph Campbell playbook for origin stories is perhaps unsurprising. It is, after all, how you do these things, and no matter how popular Doctor Who is as a program, it would have been borderline suicidal to launch Torchwood with an episode that relied on the assumption that everybody knew who Jack was and what Torchwood did. And so we get an episode that, for most of its runtime, is a structural mirror of Rose: girl is witness to strange goings-on, investigates, and after a couple of tries is finally initiated into the mysteries of an already familiar series premise.

Like Rose, then, the premise of Torchwood lurks in the background of the episode. Much of the audience spends much of the episode knowing more than Gwen does about the show’s premise, and being introduced to it anyway. Captain Jack and Torchwood are both known quantities. Except that they’re not. Torchwood Three seems miles away from the slick corporate excess of Torchwood One, and, perhaps more importantly, Torchwood are clearly meant to be the heroes of this show, whereas just a few months earlier they were solidly villainous.

In this regard the outsider perspective is an odd barrier, in that Gwen asks what are, for the audience, mainly the wrong questions. The audience doesn’t need Torchwood explained so much as they need the relationship between this Torchwood and the Canary Warf operation from Army of Ghosts explained, but Gwen, as a genuine neophyte, doesn’t know to ask that question. Similarly, the question really isn’t who Jack is and where he came from, nor even why he’s immortal (the answer clearly being “some bit of technobabble involving Rose’s resurrection of him), it’s “how did he get to Earth in the present day and what’s he doing running Torchwood,” both questions that Gwen, not having seen The Parting of the Ways, fails to ask.

Which is perhaps the most interesting thing about Everything Changes. Structurally, at least, it hums along at a brisk and followable pace. The Campbell-style call to adventure narrative is so shopworn that it manages to obscure the questions the audience comes to the program asking. We know so much about how this episode works and enough about Jack and Torchwood that we think we have all of its twists figured out ahead of time.…

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Sensor Scan: The Prisoner

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Let’s get this straight right from the start: Entire analytical projects can, have been, and should be written about Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein’s The Prisoner. It’s rightly regarded as one of the single greatest and most influential, and most oversignified, television series of all time. Given I don’t even regard the entirety of Vaka Rangi, which tackles just about every filmed moment of Star Trek and then some, as a definitive authoritative reading of the Star Trek franchise, there is absolutely no way I can be expected to come up with some comprehensive interpretation of something like The Prisoner in one blog post. That said, this is still one of the most iconic parts of the televisual landscape of 1967-8 (not to mention a show that was a massive source of inspiration for at least one future creative figure) so there’s no getting away from me saying something about it.

Some assorted thoughts then. First, for those who might not be intimately familiar with The Prisoner, it’s a seventeen episode (though apparently only seven were actually intended and are considered by the creators to be part of the overall story arc) miniseries aired during the 1967-8 season on the British channel ITV that was a rather-more-than-spiritual successor to Patrick McGoohan’s previous series Danger Man, in which he starred as secret agent John Drake. The Prisoner follows a nameless agent, played by McGoohan and largely assumed to be Drake himself, who, after resigning from the service, is kidnapped and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal retirement community. The rest of the series follows the agent, who is never named but who is referred to as Number Six in keeping with the Village’s convention of assigning its residents numbers, as he refuses to acclimate and constantly tries to escape his captors. Number Six’s captors, spearheaded by Number Two (a position filled by a revolving door of individuals) and his superior, the mysterious, unseen Number One, launch a campaign to systematically break Six and discern why he resigned so abruptly.

This summary, of course, does the show no justice because one of its biggest signatures is its overt focus on psychedelic and 1960s counterculture themes, best exemplified by its avant garde cinematography and editing and conspicuous usage of jarring, unsettling and downright bizarre imagery. There is a willfully dreamlike and disjointed approach to structure here: The show goes out of its way to muddle its viewers just as much as The Village tries to psychologically manipulate Number Six and frequently violates its own internal logic just to show that no rules or conventions are above reproach (there is infamously an entire episode where the show suddenly and inexplicably becomes a western, complete with unique intro and closing credits sequences). Although this is possibly the most celebrated part of The Prisoner‘s legacy and contribution to TV, it’s also the part that’s most easily misunderstood. First of all, expecting the show’s abject weirdness to be some kind of overly complicated way of obfuscating “The Truth” and trying to use it to discern some kind of secret, hidden meaning or revelation (like the popular fan theory the show’s credits are designed to give away the ending, and thus the show’s “point”, with the exchange “Who is Number One?”…

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Oblique Strategies For Causing Social Revolutions

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A sketch written mostly for my own entertainment, and to see what happened if I wrote with a relatively constrained form on a one hour sprint.

Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency
A sure shot, really. If nothing else the abuse we’re heaping on the planet seems sure to cause social revolution. We’ve effectively broken the food chain. We have huge amounts of the global economy invested in cities that will wash away in a bad storm, and bad storms are becoming increasingly frequent. The social order of the world is not going to remain unchanged in the face of that. Carrying on is, in fact, going to work.

Do the words need changing?
We may, after all, want to direct things. Perhaps we want “a revolution,” but odds are we have some of the details in mind. Given this, it’s useful to frame the question. Magicians call this a statement of intent. Yours may vary. Let’s suggest something fairly generic like a utilitarian model of social good. 

Accretion
Social revolution is a complex thing, not a discrete event. Major upheavals to the system come out of aggregate causes from initially diverse areas of society. It is perfectly imaginable that something you are already doing is contributing to a massive social change, whether passively as you blast increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere or actively as you participate in thriving artistic communities. As strategies go, “do what makes you happy” isn’t that bad.

Overtly resist change
Certainly a popular strategy, especially in terms of the close links between white heterosexual male power in the world and environmental devastation. The fact of the matter is that the economic right and the outright radical right (who in fact promote change, but frame it in the recapture of a fictitious past) do offer a viable model for complete social revolution.

Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate)
An increasingly viable avenue is the changing of the everyday in the expectation that political change will follow. Steubenville essentially functioned like this, though with dramatic blowback. The existence of dramatic blowback is interesting, however. The prospect of coverting what is de facto normal in the world into law is oddly terrifying to those who wield power in the world. This is what transparency and leaks do, after all – reveal the applications of human nature to the mechanisms of power. Proceed carefully, but embrace.

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
There is a critique of ideology that suggests its most destructive effects are on the level of language and thought. It is not the things that the society loudly and overtly forbids us to do, nor even things like “give peace a chance” that we reject out of hand, but the things that we do not ever think to do in the first place that are society’s most effective form of repression. In this regard we might consider that spiritual enlightenment is a form of social revolution inasmuch as the social only exists on the level of its interaction with individual consciousness.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 66 (Heroes)

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We could be watchable
(Just for one season)

At the other end of Series Two we discussed The Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who’s initial stablemate in US television. Then we discussed the way in which the cult model of television that dominated science fiction television throughout the wilderness years was in full retreat. From the perspective of this blog, of course, this is obvious – we’ve been tracking the inadequacies of cult television since cult television was invented, and have explicitly positioned Doctor Who as a show that moves beyond the limited scope of the cult ghetto. But it would be a mistake to suggest that the transformation of genre television was exclusively a UK phenomenon.

This is also, I suppose, obvious – after all, ground zero for the new genre television was Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997 – an American show. Doctor Who follows in its footsteps and dutifully paid its debts to Buffy in School Reunion, and the influence will continue in Torchwood, particularly in its second season, which opens with the most mind-wrenching piece of fanservice ever filmed. But that describes only a particular type of genre television – generally fantasy/horror based, often with younger leads. There’s a second type of conventional genre television worth talking about. This second type of television actually got its start in 2004 with the debut of ABC’s Lost, but for a variety of reasons we’re going to postpone discussion of that particular series for a few months.

Broadly speaking, however, this second type of series is characterized by “five minutes in the future”-style sci-fi settings, large ensemble casts, and a focus on slowly unraveling mysteries. While Lost is certainly the template for the subgenre, for our purposes what’s most interesting at the moment is Heroes, a 2006-debuting NBC series about people developing superpowers. Tremendously popular in its first season (it competed for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Hugo award in 2008, but lost to the film version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust), Heroes declined rapidly over subsequent seasons, slouching to cancellation in its fourth season.

Dissecting what went wrong is not actually hard. The end of the fourth season – seventy-seven episodes in (which is to say, the equivalent of The Curse of the Black Spot for the new series) it still hadn’t gotten around to making the existence of superheroes public knowledge within its world, setting that up for its intended but never realized sixth chapter (a concept distinct from a season within Heroes). Given that its premise was in practice just a retread of things like J. Michael Straczynski’s comic series Rising Stars and Warren Ellis’s newUniversal, themselves just updating of Alan Moore’s seminal Marvelman run in the 1980s, it is difficult to come up with a good explanation for this. “What if superheroes existed in the real world” was not, in 2006, a new premise in any sense other than it not having been done on television, or, at least, not in a form anyone remembered.

Given this, the basic narrative conservatism of Heroes was a flaw.…

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Myriad Universes: The Planet Of No Return (Gold Key)

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One of the key points frequently brought up in fan discussions about the differences between Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who as large-scale science fiction franchises is that Star Trek supposedly has a hard and fast “canon”: A meticulously constructed and maintained Official History of stories that actually “happened” as opposed to ones that “don’t count”. For better or for worse, this is seen as a major point of contrast between the three franchises: Star Trek’s canon is supposedly absolute, whereas Star Wars’ is more fluid and the subject of much debate. Meanwhile, true Doctor Who fans will be quick to point out their show has no canon at all: Every single Doctor Who story that has ever been told both did and didn’t happen, depending on the perspective of the person making judgment calls about it.

I’ve never been especially fond of the idea of canon. Aside from the self-evidently rather silly notion of squabbling over which events did and didn’t happen in a fictional world, to me the concept grows out of a particularly exclusionary mindset and approach to genre fiction I pretty strongly disagree with. While the fundamental goal may be to pay respects to a work’s originator, and weigh their contributions to it accordingly, canon to me seems more typically used to lay down arbitrary and authoritarian rules as to who can and can’t contribute to a developing oeuvre. There’s a very good reason there’s no mythological canon: Myths and legends belong to an entire people and their whole existence is built around the expectation that stories and ideas will be shared and retold constantly, and that new ones will be continuously added to the pile. If Soda Pop Art is going to serve a similar role for Western cultures, building a big gate, locking the door and only giving a podium to the people already on the inside isn’t going to do anyone any good.

The first recorded use of the term “canon” (which is, of course, a word gleaned from Biblical studies) to refer to genre works is actually in a 1911 satirical essay by Ronald Knox, who was lampooning scholars interested in discerning a “historical Jesus” and sourcing the Synoptic Gospels by applying their methods to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (blog friend Andrew Hickey has more details in this excellent post). The problem is, as with most great satire, few actually got the joke and Sherlock Holmes fandom in fact latched onto the idea and attempted to construct a legitimate Sherlock Holmes Canon, which became no more and no less then every story Conan Doyle himself wrote, and set about trying to create a timeline to make it all fit together. It should go without saying this was expressly not Conan Doyle’s intention for his stories, which he turned out on a fairly regular schedule to keep up with massive demand for more Holmes mysteries and keep himself employed as a writer (his numerous attempts to either kill Holmes or end his adventures went over about as well as trying to kill off a massively popular franchise does today).…

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