Eruditorum Press

You have always been one of us

There Never Was a Golden Age (Army of Ghosts/Doomsday)

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Whatever you think of this facial expression, just remember –
it’s a photo of David Tennant watching the 50th Anniversary
Special in 3-D.

It’s July 1st, 2006. Nelly Furtado is still consuming men at the top of the charts. Shakira and Wyclef Jean unseat her a week later with their ode to the veracity of hips. The Pussycat Dolls, Pink, and Muse also chart, the latter with “Supermassive Black Hole,” which is both apropos for this story and later used as background music for the opening scene of The Rebel Flesh. In news, England beat Ecuador 1-0, moving into the quarter finals. Three members of the Tongan royal family die in a car crash in California. Internet usage overtakes the television as the primary leisure time activity of young British people, and a wealth of mess flares up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But let’s go back to July 1st itself, at about 5:00 in the afternoon, as England play Portugal in the World Cup Quarterfinal. England’s eternally frustrating great hope, Wayne Rooney, is sent off at the hour mark for maybe stomping on Ricardo Carvalho’s crotch more than is entirely appropriate within the Laws of the Game. The game ends 0-0 after extra time and, as ever, England go out humiliatingly on penalties.

This squad is by convention deemed a “golden generation” – a particularly fine crop of players who were supposed to be the team that could finally return the World Cup to England after forty years of inspired mediocrity. Instead… inspired mediocrity. The final tournament for David Beckham, who slouches off to Los Angeles a year later. As for the audience, those who don’t turn off their televisions in disgust are treated to the information that Rose Tyler, Billie Piper’s great everywoman, so accessible and loveable that her presence renders even that shit old sci-fi series Doctor Who watchable, has died.

Russell T Davies himself could not have dreamed up a better run of television drama – the ego blow of England’s golden generation flopping ignobly to pathetic defeat is followed up promptly by the long elegy for Rose Tyler. But within Army of Ghosts is a larger issue – that of Britain’s golden age, smothered idly in its crib in Tennant’s debut. We should note the terms on which Britain’s supposed golden age unfolds. The Christmas Invasion tells us that Jackie Tyler is “eighteen quid a week better off,” while Doomsday establishes Pete’s World’s “Golden Age” as “a world of peace” after the defeat of the Cybermen. This is, inevitably, a material golden age, defined by apparent social progress. But lurking unsubtly behind the concept is the idea of making Britain great again.

Davies will become progressively blunter about this as the series unfolds, steadily converting the latter portion of his run into an increasingly adamant attack on New Labour. It is a fact not often remarked upon that Tony Blair is almost as large a cartoon villain to a particular flavor of the political left as Margaret Thatcher was.…

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“Watch…your future’s end.”: The City on the Edge of Forever

, 10

“I am my own beginning. And my own ending.”

“So. You’ve found the courage to speak to me face to face at last, have you? I must congratulate you on finally discovering your spine, however some thinkers far wiser than I might say there exists a very thin line between courage and stupidity.”

“I’ve not come for bravado-filled threats, I’ve come in the hope that together we might be able to negotiate an end to all of this. The damage can be repaired.”

“You people never fail to disappoint me, though your unwavering stubbornness is to be commended, I suppose. Have you nothing more or better to say to me than that?”

“Withdraw your troops from the 22nd Century. The damage can be repaired, and I’d hoped to make you remember the fundamental importance and worth of the Temporal Accords.”

“Please spare me your impassioned appeal to regulations and rules of order. I’ve lived far, far too long and much too hard to be swayed by your vapid platitudes, Agent.”

“Your quarrel isn’t with these people in this time! It’s with us!”

“Isn’t it? Tell me, do you know why my ships didn’t blow you out of the stars on sight? Because I wanted to show you this. This is what your people did on Earth in 1930, A.D. I want you to take a good, long look at it and try to defend or explain away your actions. Here. Now. To my face.”

“This…ceaseless hatred and violence…It is alien to us. And repugnant. We must depart this plane; the pain has become simply too great for us to bear any longer.”

“A philosophy of pacifism is only practical if you’re not living under oppression. It has been so very long: Do you remember what it feels like to be imprisoned? Trapped? Walked over? Used? Violated? We all know what the future means: Cycles of making and unmaking repeating themselves forever. We walk in eternity, you and I. But we are also stewards of it.”

“You are not of Organia, but you are like us. We should like to speak with you about this further.”

“Shh, now. In time.”

“The City on the Edge of Forever” is also rather infamously the center of an extremely messy legal dispute between writer Harlan Ellison and the then-members of the Star Trek production team. There seem to be two versions of events here and, unfortunately, in neither of them does Gene Roddenberry come out looking good. The first account, which is supported by Bob Justman and Herb Solow in Inside Star Trek and even Ellison’s own book on the subject says that the original draft (which was delivered late) featured an Enterprise crewman named Beckwith who was a drug dealer. After murdering a fellow crewmember who threatened to turn him in, he was sentenced to death on the planet the ship was in orbit of, which in this draft was inhabited by an ancient race of time observers called The Guardians and who maintained a Time Vortex.…

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Awe & Slaughter

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As expected, having been posthumously put on trial for his own murder, Trayvon Martin has been found guilty.  He committed the heinous crime of being black and in possession of a hoodie, armed with fizzy drinks and sweets, walking round George Zimmerman’s neighbourhood.  What else could Zimmerman do, given that (in his words) “these fucking punks” “always get away”?

Also, how long before Law & Order does a storyline based on Trayvon Martin, in which they bravely confront the issues and break PC taboos by depicting him as a junkie gangbanger, his family’s lawyers as slimey liars, any professional black activist involved as a cynical demagogue and all black protestors as unreasoning, flailing idiots who assume racism without evidence and who frustrate the good faith efforts of the police and DAs office? Just like in all their other ‘race’ episodes that they’ve ever done ever.

(Edited for clarification on one point, and to add a subject label.)…

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Saturday Waffling (July 13th, 2013)

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“Hello faithful readers,” says the man who has listened to maybe a few too many Russell T Davies commentary tracks recently.

I’ve been writing the last handful of bonus essays for the Tom Baker book, but I feel like it needs one, maybe two more of those bonus essays not actually on stories that I write for the books. Stuff like the UNIT dating or “How Does the TARDIS Work” essays from past books. I’ve got one on the very obvious topic of what, if anything, Genesis of the Daleks changes about Dalek history, and an end-of-book “Now My Doctor” essay, but I feel like I need at least one more.
The book’s on the first three Tom Baker seasons – Robot to Talons of Weng-Chiang. Ideal topics are things I didn’t cover particularly in the entries and things that would benefit from a bit of a wonkish approach. Ideas and requests in comments, and a hat tip in the book if I use your suggestion. 
Speaking of suggestions, have you ever thought, “you know, TARDIS Eruditorum is absolutely great, but it would really be a lot better if only it were about My Little Pony?” Thankfully, if you haven’t, Jed Blue has, and has been blogging the hell out of Friendship is Magic over at My Little Po-Mo. I admit freely to not having gotten around to watching Friendship is Magic yet, despite the cheery adamance with which Web Kobold Anna Wiggins has hyped the series. This, however, has not proven any barrier to enjoying Jed’s marvelous work, and I admit to having made a noise not entirely unlike a squeal of delight when I discovered that a My Little Pony blog overtly modeled on my work existed.
In any case, Jed’s Kickstarting a book version of My Little Po-Mo over here. He’s a good bloke and deserves to have this come together, and I hope you’ll go kick him $10 or $20. If nothing else, it’s clear that Friendship is Magic is a tremendously important show in the development of popular culture, and Jed’s doing bang-up work with it. 
And if you’ve got a bit of cash left after that, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I thought Alan Moore’s Kickstarter was pretty cool. If you’ve not seen the first two of the five “Jimmy’s End” films, they’re basically Alan Moore writing David Lynch movies, a phrase that should parse as “shut up and take my money” to more than a few of my readers. But it’s at goal now and doesn’t strictly speaking need your support, whereas Jed’s only a couple hundred bucks short of goal and a nice push from you lot would be more than enough to bring him over the line.
…

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She Carried the Evil Inside Her (Fear Her)

84

Suck it, Redgrave

It’s June 24th, 2006. Nelly Furtado is at number one with “Maneater.” Shakira and Wyclef Jean, Bon Jovi, and Pink are also in the charts. In news, ummm… the United States celebrates Go Skateboarding Day. This is a real thing. I just looked it up. It’s a boring week, yes. England earn a 2-2 draw against Sweden in their last and largely irrelevant group game, setting them up for a clash with Ecuador the day after this story airs.

This story, of course, is Fear Her, the consensus worst story of the Russell T Davies era (and, I suspect, worst story of the new series were a thorough poll to be run today – I can’t think of any Moffat stories with enough sheer volume of hatred to overcome it). As ever, I don’t find the issue of why it’s bad supremely interesting. The short form is that the story was rushed and misconceived. Stephen Fry’s planned script for the second season had to be abandoned late in the process, so they grabbed Matthew Graham’s planned Series Three script off the reserve pile and put it into production quickly. Graham, for his part, appears to have had a crappy brief – he was told to do Yeti-on-the-loo style local terror with a target audience of seven-year-olds. To say that this is an awkward combination is an understatement, and virtually everything that’s wrong with the story can be traced to the basic inability to decide whether it’s a scary story or a naff cheap one for the kids, and the fact that these are a particularly bad pair of stools to fall between.

But two specific aspects of this tension are worth remarking upon. The first is Murray Gold, or, more accurately, his music. It’s become the populist choice to criticize Murray Gold’s Doctor Who scores in general. I’m not entirely sympathetic to this line of argument, but it’s not incoherent wibbling spat into the void either. Those that dislike Gold’s music usually point to two related problems. The first is that they are simply mixed too loud and too omnipresently. This is probably true, but not actually Murray Gold’s department, as he doesn’t do the final sound mixes for episodes. Still, Gold’s music is particularly prone to becoming overpowering because of the other complaint usually leveled against it, which is that it’s heavy-handed. This is also not inaccurate – Gold’s music exists largely to inform the audience how they should be feeling, and it is usually a bit unrelenting in the pursuit of that. This means that when it’s put a bit high in the mix the effect is more overwhelming even than the usual tendency towards volume over all else within sound mixing these days.

As I said, in the general case, at least, I am hard pressed to find much to complain about in Golds’s music. It’s blatant, but this is not necessarily a vice. One of the things that characterizes the new series is its relentlessly fast pace.…

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“Work for peace at any price, except the price of liberty.”: Errand of Mercy

, 7

“Tell me, Jim: Why do you fight?”

“Errand of Mercy” is the moment where all the themes and motifs Gene Coon has been working with since the beginning of his tenure finally coalesce into a cohesive, articulate message. It’s a stinging indictment of what Star Trek is at this point, but what saves it from the nihilism of “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Space Seed” is that it’s paired with a slightly more hopeful outlook gleaned from the other scripts Coon is the sole author of. It’s not perfect, even by the standards the show’s laid out for itself by this point, but it’s a sufficiently effective statement of where the show is placing its ethics now. Also, it’s the debut of the Klingon Empire, which is somewhat self-evidently important, so I guess I’d better deal with that.

There are few things more immediately recognisable as undeniably Star Trek than the Klingons. In terms of ubiquity within the pop consciousness, they’re on par with Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise. They’re so well-known and beloved that fans who own replica Klingon uniforms, headpieces and weapons and speak Klingonese fluently are seen to be as quintessentially Star Trek as it’s possible to get, and none of these things are even going to be a part of the franchise until 1989 at the absolute earliest. Even the Federation and Starfleet don’t quite have this level of memorability and iconic status. In fact, the Klingons are so entrenched in people’s ideas of what Star Trek is about there’s only one other thing in the entirety of the franchise that can claim to have anywhere remotely near their level of cultural capital and that’s the Klingons’ own mortal enemies.Why might this be? Part of this has to be the fact the Klingons are the Original Series’ only recurring antagonists. Although they only actually appear in seven episodes out of the show’s 79 episode run, they do appear more frequently than any other alien race. Certainly the fact they get brought back and heavily retooled to become a lovable culture of proud, honourable (sometimes comically so) warriors in both the original movie series and the Rick Berman era also must have something to do with it, but there remains, after all, a reason they come back in the first place.

All that said, however, one thing that’s worth noting about the Klingons in “Errand of Mercy” is that they really don’t seem like they’re actually cut out for the job: I’m not so much referring to the general execution of the characters here, although John Colicos’ intense performance as Commander Kor is pretty much the one memorable, or actually convincing, acting job amongst the Klingon cast, but in terms of their actual conception. Common lore claims Coon based the Klingon Empire on the Soviet Union, and while there is evidence of this (Kor’s comment to Kirk about how all Klingons are cogs and everyone is monitored primarily), D.C. Fontana asserts that Coon wrote it as more an amalgamation of all the worst traits he saw in the people he fought during World War II.…

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This Zen-Crazed Aerial Madman Just Won’t Take No For An Answer (The Last War in Albion Part 4: Michael Moorcock, Luther Arkwright)

, 42

“This Zen-crazed aerial madman just won’t take no for an answer”

-Grant Morrison, The Invisibles #18, 1996
[previously] The Cornelius books are characterized by large quantities of philosophical dialogue in amidst the action set pieces, which often fade towards the background. A few chapters after the yowling passenger Cornelius recalls a conversation where “a girl had once asked him, stroking the muscles of his stomach, ‘what do you achieve by the destruction of the odd library? There are so many. How much can one man do?’ ‘What he can,’ Cornelius had told her, rolling on her. ‘It’s History that’s caused all the trouble in the past.’” Moorcock has commented that the Cornelius books are populated by “characters who are aware of the psychological implications of their statements and actions. That is they are as aware of the unconscious as the conscious. In that sense it was a rejection of modernist techniques as found in Joyce, Woolf and so on. My view was that we had moved on from needing to make that sort of observation.” Instead Moorcock’s characters, as he describes it, “tend to anticipate one another’s statements and short-cut their own,” engaging in an endlessly anticipated and reiterated philosophical dialogue that plays out over the superficial frame of the heroic fantasy stories.
In this regard the Cornelius line can be thought of as the archetypal Moorcock work – the one that explores the way in which the same basic story structure that underpins all of the iterations of the Eternal Champion changes and shifts as the world around it does. The later Cornelius stories arbitrarily change the frame and rules of the story from chapter to chapter without particular explanation.
Figure 22: Barbarians and Mods juxtaposed in “Time is a
Four Letter Word,” from Near Myths #2, 1979 (Click images
to expand)
To suggest that it is possible that a fictional multiverse in which one primary character is a dandy action hero who lives in an eternally shifting world and another – the most prominent, in fact – is a sword and sorcery barbarian figure whose world blends in with the present day at times might have been an influence on the writer of the Gideon Stargrave stories or “Time is a Four Letter Word” seems almost too obvious to be worthwhile. Of course Moorcock was a major influence on Grant Morrison’s earliest comics work, and, more to the point, on much of his subsequent work.
The question of why Moorcock, who was after all usually perfectly happy to let others play with his fictional concepts, lashed out so angrily at Morrison for his Cornelius pastiche is interesting, but not entirely germane at this point in the war’s development. Suffice it to say that Morrison is quite justified in his exasperation when he points to his later works and asks “can anyone tell me from which Michael Moorcock novels Zenith and Animal Man were plagiarized,” but that it is equally clear that Morrison was influenced by the entire new wave literary tradition Moorcock came out of, and that it is in many ways very easy to draw direct links between Moorcock’s work and his. 
…

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A Role Model

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In an age when the suffocating omnipresence of the imperatives of neoliberalism has penetrated every single corner of culture – aggressively colonizing even the formely overlooked, underpoliced nooks and crannies where eccentricity and offbeatitude used to be free to spring up like hardy weed – and even the supposedly nerdy heroes have to be marketably thin, sexy and dressed in geek chic, it might do us all good to remember…

My.  Fucking.  Hero.…

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Their Little Groups (Love and Monsters)

189

I’ve got your animated version of Shada right here, baby.

It’s June 17th, 2006. Nelly Furtado is at number one with “Maneater,” with Pink, Infernal, Baddiel, Skinner, and the Lightning Seeds, and Tony Christie also charting, the latter two with World Cup-focused songs. Over at the World Cup we’re still in the group stage, but England, having won their second game, are through to the knockout stages, albeit with a game against Sweden to deal with first. Other news is slow – a steady dribble of horrors out of the Iraq War, which has its 2500th US casualty this week, and a video of a marine singing a song about murdering Iraqi civilians.

So. Love and Monsters. Perhaps it was just the wrong story for a kind of cynical week. Perhaps that’s the only reason this plummeted to a 76% AI rating – the joint lowest the series ever attained (it was tied with The End of the World) – it was the wrong story on the wrong week. And surely can’t have been helped by being the Doctor-light story. So there you go. If you want, any negative reception this story has ever attained can be explained away straightforwardly.

Still, it’s not the usual explanation. “Too silly” is the usual explanation, which is perhaps a bit harsh for a story in which just about everybody dies horribly. Certainly it’s misleading to just call this a silly story as though that explains everything about it. It’s a story with a tremendous amount of silliness in its early acts, but one where the point is the abandonment of the silliness. Or, more accurately, the point is that the silliness has teeth. One of the key things about Peter Kay’s rendition of the Abzorbaloff is that it remains an absolutely ludicrous monster. No effort is made to disguise the monster’s status as a Blue Peter contest winner, and Peter Kay just leans into it completely with a gratuitously over the top performance that would be a train wreck if it weren’t contrasted perfectly with his intensely mannered Victor Kennedy performance. The garishly inappropriate scene of the Abzorbaloff chasing Elton down the street is in many ways the point – the inappropriately broad comedy being used to the same effect as the pit last episode, as something that marks the monster as fundamentally alien and not of this world.

Another way of looking at it is that the Abzorbaloff is perfectly sized for Elton’s tiny little world, in which his only two passions in life are an irritatingly catchy ELO song and his friends at LINDA. I mean, sure, and probably some of the other stuff he mentions, but we know Elton. We know that he’s just an ordinary person with an ordinary life that isn’t worth forty-five minutes of television, or, at least, doesn’t seem to be. Wouldn’t be, in fact, if it weren’t for the fact that he exists in the orbit of the Doctor. Again, the episode is leaning into its narrative constraints.…

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“I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners.”: The Devil in the Dark

, 14

This is the weirdest orgy I’ve ever been to…

“The Devil in the Dark” is one of the most beloved episodes of the Original Series to fans and at the top of both William Shatner’s and Leonard Nimoy’s list of favourite episodes they worked on. It’s deservedly a classic Star Trek episode and undeniably a highlight of the season-While it might not quite unseat “Balance of Terror” as the year’s high-water mark, it’s certainly one of the best episodes the show’s put out yet and absolutely the sort of thing we needed after the last month, which was just about enough to suck the will to live from anyone.

The fundamental thing that makes “The Devil in the Dark” so successful is that it’s just about everything “The Man Trap” was trying to do except done right. Once again, we have an unknown, dangerous alien lurking in the shadows and picking people off one by one who turns out to be a highly sophisticated and unique being and an intellectual equal to the crew, but here the justification for the creature’s actions is far clearer and far more defensible. Also, delightfully, the solution Kirk, Spock and McCoy come to involves communication (in particular giving the voiceless party the ability to speak that it had been denied before), cooperation and the free exchange of ideas instead of blowing it to pieces. The one thing this episode doesn’t do that its predecessor was able to is mix and match and play with the tropes of multiple genres, but I think there’s a good reason for that: We’re at the opposite end of the season now, and “Star Trek” is an established genre itself. While “The Man Trap” was in hindsight prophetic for where the franchise eventually goes, at the time it was really just experimenting to try and get an early handle on what made this particular show unique. “The Devil in the Dark”, by contrast, is about taking what we might expect typical sci-fi plot, or indeed a typical Star Trek episode to be (and tellingly, an early, Gene Roddenberry-produced episode) and setting about subverting those expectations.

Fittingly, this is another Gene Coon script. Coon seems liberated and refreshed here, which is a more than welcome sight after the past few scripts his name’s appeared on. Perhaps in hindsight most of the cynicism of the past month can be laid at the feet of Robert Hamner and Carey Wilber, because, freed from the shackles of having to adapt their stories to a teleplay, Coon is right back in “Arena” territory: He’s still very critical of the way the show is operating, but he remains optimistic it can do more and better than what it’s been allowed to be so far. Quite noticeably, once the Enterprise crew shows up Kirk immediately begins running the operation like a strict military commander: He paces up and down and addresses his men in a lineup (and “men” is a very appropriate term as there are zero female characters in this episode, save the Horta), formulates attack strategies with Spock and sends strike forces into the tunnels to hunt down the enemy.…

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