Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

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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Saturday Waffling (July 20th, 2013)

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Have still not quite finished the Tom Baker essays, mostly because I realized I’d forgotten to do the commissioned essays from the Kickstarter, so those ate some week. One more, I think. /checks the Kickstarter again. Ah. Bugger. Two more. Oh well.

TG, back on the self-publishing post, left a wonderfully helpful and interesting comment about self-publishing and libraries. It was a perspective I hadn’t really seen, so I’m reposting it here:

First, these can be taken to apply to larger public library systems. Some of this may not apply to smaller districts–especially those are severely underfunded.  

Follow all of Phil’s advice above. Think of libraries like bookstores–you’re competing for space with the output of the established publishers. And despite the long-predicted death of print, there are a lot of great books coming out every year. Even in a library people aren’t going to pick up your book if it looks amateurish. Especially when it’s sitting on display next to the latest release from Harcourt or McSweeney’s. We are only going to buy what we think will check out.  

For fiction writers, you’re best off sticking with your local/regional libraries. Despite what a publicist might tell you, there’s little point in mailing off copies of your book to libraries around the country. The only self-published novels I’m going to even look at are from local authors. Besides wanting to support our local writing community, it’s also an effective way of narrowing down what we consider.  

For non-fiction–if it’s a memoir or very regionally-focused, the same as above. For niche subjects such as in-depth analysis of Doctor Who or MLP–those sorts of things we’re interested in. The best way to get it to our attention is get it into a trusted review source. Your best bet is Kirkus– they review indie/self-published books and are closely read by librarians. Publishers Weekly also has a “Select” program you can submit your books to for possible coverage and review.  

You don’t need to give us a copy of your book. (And if you do, don’t expect it back.) If we want your book in our collection, we will buy it. Librarians support authors! Promotional materials are sufficient. Just do your research and try to send it to the right person or department. When in doubt, send it to “Acquisitions.” Also research the collection–are there other materials like or related to your book? For example– does the library have Doctor Who on DVD? Is it just the new series or do they have the old episodes, too?
Research suggests that libraries help drive book sales. Getting your book into a library exposes it to a large, diverse population of readers. It’s worth the extra trouble to try. 

Finally, Last War in Albion. We’ve hit the end of the first chapter, and of the essays I’ve prepared. I’ve started work on Chapter 2, but it’s not quite ready to go up Thursday, though once it starts I intend to keep Last War in Albion as a weekly feature.…

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Outside the Government 13 (Totally Doctor Who)

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The consensus, for reasons thoroughly intelligible to basically everybody, is to pretend this doesn’t exist. Every other Doctor Who spinoff is celebrated. This… was difficult to even find a copy of. I have hunted down some freakishly obscure things in the course of my blogging career, and while this was in no way the hardest, it was still a lot harder than an entire television series based on Doctor Who that came out in the last decade seems like it should be. Similarly, what was the last time anyone mentioned this series? Clayton Hickman’s actually kind of marvelous turn as one of the judges on the “Companion Academy” feature comes up occasionally, and it’s the answer to the trivia question “why in the name of God does The Infinite Quest exist” (but more on that next season), but other than that the phrase “Totally Doctor Who” goes blissfully unmentioned.

So much so that I should probably discuss what it is. Totally Doctor Who was a CBBC… Christ, I actually probably have to describe that too. OK, so, launched in 2005, CBBC is a digital channel where the BBC now dumps most of their children’s programming. It is for the most part accurately described as a dumping ground, and ironically just spun its previous biggest hit Tracy Beaker Returns off into a show actually called The Dumping Ground, but in 2006 it became the destination for Doctor Who’s first spinoff, Totally Doctor Who. Totally Doctor Who was, in essence, a half-hour Blue Peter-style children’s magazine program about Doctor Who. Combining some regular features like “Companion Academy” (a reality competition to find the best would-be companion among a bunch of kids) and the absolutely mind-wrenchingly badly named “Who-Ru” trivia game with interviews and behind the scenes features, it’s…

Really, really bad. There are moments of entertainment to be had here – watching Noel Clarke attempt to be remotely convincing as he claims that the Doctor Who t-shirt he’s giving someone is his prized possession and not something he was handed just before he walked on stage. The dead-eyed stares with which former Blue Peter presenter Liz Barker and future one Barney Harwood present their appallingly badly scripted hosting. The entertaining conceit that the “bigger on the inside” filing cabinet that is recessed into a half-height wall such that it appears far shorter than any filing cabinet actually is might actually fool someone.

There are occasional moments of actual quality, in which you can see how well a children’s program about the making of Doctor Who could have worked, although to be honest it’s fairly rare that Doctor Who Confidential doesn’t seem like it could do the job better. David Tennant actually does quite well with his appearance. He has the decency to show up on Totally Doctor Who for an interview and treat it like a perfectly ordinary chat show, answering questions sent in by kids as perfectly ordinary interview questions worthy of thought and attention. In other words, he makes the completely accurate judgment that the best way to handle talking about Doctor Who for kids is to handle it the same as talking about Doctor Who for anyone else.…

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Sensor Scan: Raumpatrouille Orion

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Raumpatrouille Orion

In September of 1966 the landscape of pop culture changed forever with the debut of a groundbreaking new science fiction television show that would singlehandedly transform how the genre was thought of. Blending elements of pulp and Golden Age sci-fi with a critical deconstructive eye and unique fascination with the trappings of soap operas, this show dared us to follow the adventures of a ragtag group of Space Air Force pilots in a utopian future setting where nationalism had been abolished as they set out to explore the universe beyond the realm of human knowledge and experience. I am, of course, speaking about the legendary Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion.

Every once in awhile you stumble upon something so unbelievably serendipitous it really does force you to stop and muse for a time on synchronicity and the effect reoccurring patterns of time and place have on human beings. There is literally no other way to explain how two groups of people on opposite ends of the planet came up with two superficially identical science fiction shows in the exact same month other than a simultaneous tapping of the shared cultural zeitgeist. It’s perhaps tempting to expect the West German production filmed in stark black-and-white on sets made out of kitchen appliances and scrap metal to be an almost hilariously shameless ripoff of the bright, flashy, big budget Technicolor Hollywood spectacle airing on major network television, were we to conveniently forget that Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion (hereafter Raumpatrouille Orion or simply Raumpatrouille) was filmed at the exact same time as Star Trek‘s first season and premiered within days of it. Germans wouldn’t be introduced to Star Trek until 1972, and most people on the other side of the Atlantic to this day have no idea Raumpatrouille Orion exists. And that’s a true shame, because, to be blunt, Raumpatrouille Orion is unabashedly superior on almost every single level. This show is everything Star Trek should have been in its first season.

The most immediately obvious thing Raumpatrouille just absolutely nails is its setting. While the world of Star Trek retroactively becomes an idealized or utopian society thanks to the large-scale fan reconceptualization of the Original Series in the 1970s, a reading which is bolstered by the influence of Star Trek Phase II and Star Trek: The Next Generation (which were, of course, written in the wake of this re-evaluation), the world of Raumpatrouille actually explicitly is one. In lieu of Captain Kirk’s famous “Space…The Final Frontier” monologue that opens every Star Trek episode starting midway through the first season, Raumpatrouille Orion gives us this declaration, equally famous in German science fiction circles, at the opening of each of its stories:

“What may sound like a fairy tale today may be tomorrow’s reality. This is a fairy tale from the day after tomorrow: There are no more nations. There is only mankind and its colonies in space. People have settled on faraway stars.

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Not Born So Much As Ground Like Pigment From His Times (The Last War in Albion Part 5: Luther Arkwright and William Blake)

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“Not born so such as ground like pigment from his times”

– Alan Moore, Angel Passage, 2001
[previously] The text becomes a cut-up invocation that puts Burroughs to shame, describing how “in the garden of Gethesemene Kali becomes Miranda take this my ankh the egyptian sign of life renounce the ways of violence Luther the tabla beat faster the star changes to a distant Balalaika Siberian winds howl” against a backdrop of copulating demons drawn in sinewy shadow.” This is all, however, too late to have influenced Morrison’s work directly – The Adventures of Luther Arkwright #6 contains only material prepared after Near Myths. Rather this demonstrates the extent to which Morrison’s early strips firmly belong in an existent literary and artistic tradition. 
Figure 30: Grant Morrison spending
five minutes scribbling Luther Arkwright
for Valkyrie Press in 1989

Even still, for all that Morrison insists, admittedly with self-depricating panache, that he dismissed Talbot because “I was a punk, and I didn’t need things to be slick as long as they had conviction and personality,” the direct influence is compelling. Morrison’s artwork evolves over his time on Near Myths, adopting a heavier shadow and thicker line that owes a clear debt to Talbot (as well as to the squarer-jawed action style of then-DC Comics based superhero artist Neal Adams, discussions of whose work bookend the chapter of Supergods in which Talbot and Near Myths are discussed). Morrison’s final Near Myths story, “The Checkmate Man,” feels more like Luther Arkwright, both in its structure and style. Morrison’s copyright notice on the strip separates the script from the art, dating the script back to 1977, as though mindful of the similarities and wanting to make sure everybody knew he’d come up with it independently.

But the anxiety of influence is not particularly interesting in this case, as we’ve seen. Morrison’s work fits clearly into an overall tradition in which all of these things – dandy secret agents leaping among worlds and having psychedelic revelations – were downright common. What’s interesting is not the question of when Morrison became aware of Talbot’s work any more than it’s whether Ballard or Moorcock is the larger influence on Gideon Stargrave. There’s no reason not to believe Morrison when he says that Near Myths “introduced me to Bryan Talbot,” a statement that seems to consciously hedge against the possibility that “The Vatican Conspiracy” is, as Talbot alleges, plagiarized from the similarly named “The Papist Affair.” Given that Stargrave appears in issue #3 of Near Myths several months after Arkwright’s debut, it’s entirely possible that Morrison was self-consciously tweaking the comic’s head feature with a glitzed-up experimental parody of its abandoned first version. It would, after all, be a perfect reflection of Jerry Cornelius’s first story’s status as a rewrite of some early Elric yarns. Equally, however, it’s just possible that Morrison and Talbot individually hit what was obviously hanging in the air like cannabis smoke hung over social meetings in Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop.
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Outside the Government 12: The TARDISodes

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The “TARDISodes” were a set of online shorts promoting individual episodes of Series Two, written by Gareth Roberts. They were among the early experiments with “Internet versions of television” that were going on in the mid-aughts, which is to say done cheaply and mostly as an experiment. As befits mini-episodes, then, mini-entries, written in sequence, each one done without watching any of the subsequent TARDISodes so as to provide a micro-blog of the season.

New Earth: It’s a particularly big challenge to kick these off – how do you establish what a mini-episode should be like? How do you make them differ from the trailer? Roberts picks a savvy approach here – where the trailer is mainly about the visual concepts, here he lays out in thirty seconds the basic mystery of the story: how can this hospital cure any disease, and what’s its dirty secret? Notably, the mini-episode does not attempt to explain the premise of the story. It throws in cat nurses with no real context, clearly marking this as something for a more dedicated flavor of fan. Note also that the specific mystery teased is one of the first ones encountered – though only in one plot thread (this being one of the most traditional “split the Doctor and the companion up when they get to the planet and keep them apart until the end” episodes ever), thus being a significant tease but not a major spoiler.

Tooth and Claw: There’s a real challenge in keeping these from all being basically the same structure: here’s a world, oh no, there’s a monster. The decision to start with a meteor crash is thus a reasonably clever strategy to keep things lively. Also clever is the actual use of the werewolf in the final shot, especially given that Davies had to carefully count his werewolf shots and allowed for one to be used over here. The chase from the werewolf’s point of view suggests that we’re not going to actually see the monster, so the “money shot,” as it were, is cheeky. Try, on the other hand, to ignore the fact that the random Scottish werewolf bait looks for all the world like he tripped and fell out of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, unless it really happens to amuse you, in which case, don’t worry about it.

School Reunion: Again there’s a pleasant bit of focus here. The decision to hold Mickey back until the third one of these makes it a bit of a thing – it wasn’t clear prior to this that “real” cast members would be appearing in the TARDISodes. But equally, Mickey is a particularly interesting choice for this episode given that to anyone obsessive enough to watch the TARDISodes the real story was obviously Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, who aren’t even hinted at here. The teasing of Torchwood immediately after Tooth and Claw is similarly savvy, showing that there was real effort taken with these to make them tie in with the overall public narrative of the series.…

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