Eruditorum Press

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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)

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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

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“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)

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“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)

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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

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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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This Continues To Not Be A Review Blog

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But equally, this continues to be a really effective way of handling a need for Tuesday content. God, what am I going to do after next week when I’m out of Last War in Albion to run? (Write more Last War in Albion, probably. The five entries I’m running now were some of the most fun I’ve had writing in the last year.)

Spearhead From Space: Fun, and with some great images, but a story we’ve largely allowed the VHS/DVD/omnibus versions of to replace the episodic structure. Watched as episodes one notices that the new Doctor doesn’t “debut” as such until well past the halfway mark, leaving Nicholas Courtney to hold down the fort. And only the mannequin scene provides us the Autons we know and love. A well-shot and reasonably fun story, but little more. 7/10

The Silurians: By most accounts a mispaced buildup with a fantastic final episode, it is in fact a subtle and lively buildup with a disaster of a final episode the implications of which have to be ignored because otherwise the Doctor becomes the willing employee of the casually genocidal. But this is splitting hairs – either way, it doesn’t quite work despite the good bits. 6/10

Ambassadors of Death: Whitaker and Hulke are both fantastic writers, and there’s more Whitaker in this story than people give it credit for. Unique among the UNIT stories in that it’s fundamentally hopeful and based on a sense of wonder, the thing the series most loses in this season and, really, the Pertwee era at large. A myriad of wonderful visual images, and John Abineri and Ronald Allen anchor it with two of the best guest performances the series ever had. A few decisions jar in relation to the rest of the series, but on their own merits hold up fine. (The bread van and the teleporting) Unlike any other Pertwee story – marvelous. 9/10.

Inferno: Not a bad story, but simply not the classic it’s believed to be. The parallel universe sequence is one of the most hackneyed ways of extending a story imaginable, and it amounts to the “we’re running out of ideas, let’s give all the actors different parts” runaround most series do midway through their third season. To see the Pertwee era doing it in its fourth story is an ill omen. With the added indignity that once back from the parallel universe in a blur of narrative momentum Pertwee has to spend most of the last episode modeling his death pose. Yes, Courtney and John are fabulous, but can anyone actually identify how the parallel universe plot impacts the resolution at all? I’d like it more if everyone else would agree to like it less. In reality, fairly average. 5/10

Terror of the Autons: The series is pulling itself apart at the seams as it tries to decide if it’s a gaudy, glam rock spectacle or a serious-minded action adventure show. But in the course of that comes this, a story where the contrasts between the two approaches end up balancing perfectly to produce something quite remarkable.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 65 (Fandom Redux)

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This will be review for some people, but the blog’s picked up a fair number of new readers since hitting the new series, and some recap is thus in order. But let’s talk about orthodox Doctor Who fandom, shall we?

T-Zero in Doctor Who fandom is May of 1976, which is when the BBC officially recognized the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) as the official fan group, succeeding the Doctor Who Fan Club, which had been around since the 1960s. From DWAS came the first wave of pro-fans: David J. Howe, Jeremy Bentham, and John Peel are the most recognizable names. And many of them became instrumental in the meticulous documentation of Doctor Who. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke turned to them for The Making of Doctor Who, and most of the early reference books to the series came out of their work.

The thing is, their tastes in Doctor Who were… idiosyncratic. DWAS president Jan Vincent-Rudzki wrote one of the most legendary reviews of a Doctor Who story ever as he tore into The Deadly Assassin for its numerous supposed violations of past continuity. The irony, in hindsight, being that The Deadly Assassin was sufficiently good that it obliterated most of the faltering prior continuity about the Time Lords and became the standard piece of continuity, making Rudzki’s tone of outrage more than slightly farcical. Later highlights included John Peel declaring in all seriousness that City of Death, one of the most beloved Doctor Who stories ever, with a script largely by Douglas Adams, was “pure farce” with characters “so stupid as to be unbelievable,” and described it as “continual buffoonery.” Fandom was particularly history focused (it’s notable that Peel ended his review with “Come back, Pat Troughton, all is forgiven…”), and viewed the present day of the series as a falling off from some great ideal in the past.

Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, the BBC took fandom seriously. The changing nature of television in the late 70s/early 80s meant that Doctor Who’s family-friendly Saturday teatime slot was dying, and it got moved to a schedule befitting a soap opera in an attempt to create a male version of a soap targeted to its existing obsessive fans. John Nathan-Turner made the savvy in theory if misguided in practice decision to actively court fandom, revamping the Doctor Who Weekly comic magazine into a professional quality version of DWAS fanzines TARDIS and The Celestial Toyroom. Results were mixed – audience research techniques were too primitive in the late 70s/early 80s to realize that fandom was not in fact coextensive with “people who watched Doctor Who,” and despite basically having the right idea Nathan-Turner and his production team proved inadequate to the task of creating what was, for the early 80s, essentially an entirely new model of television.

The thing is, fandom wasn’t representative of the whole audience, nor even of the whole audience of dedicated fans. Gareth Roberts has written of his profound alienation from DWAS upon getting his first issues of their newsletter, which savaged the series as it existed in the late 70s because, as he puts it, “they believed that Doctor Who should be more like something called ‘the Barry Letts era’, whatever that was.…

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“One morn a Peri at the gate/Of Eden stood disconsolate”: This Side of Paradise

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Oh, I give up.

“This Side of Paradise” is a story about how dangerous idealized societies are. It’s also about how the pursuit of simple, communal living and an exploration of love are inhuman temptations and how it’s far better and more proper to focus on duty, responsibility, modernist, technoscientific notions of progress and suffering. At its best it’s a crass indictment of collectivist lifestyles as being “lazy”, “stagnant” and “counterproductive” and at its worst it’s the exact same goddamn story as “The Return of the Archons” from three bloody weeks ago. It’s also written by the same guy who penned “The Corbomite Maneuver”.

So yeah heads up there’s no way in hell there was ever the remotest chance of me liking this one. Just so I get it all out in the open right away: I think “This Side of Paradise” is utterly immoral and I have no intention whatsoever of mustering up a redemptive reading for it. I’ve also just about lost patience completely with this season, as this is the fourth story in a row with a rock-bottom cynical, nihilistic and actually downright mean-spirited attitude about it and at this point the series is genuinely teetering on the edge of invalidating itself and self-destruction. Thankfully, by the grace of some divine cosmic miracle I have something to talk about in this post aside from the unbelievably depressing and infuriating plot.

Firstly, there’s a second name on this script apart from Jerry Sohl (or rather his pseudonym Nathan Butler), the aforementioned writer who previously made me want to suplex my TV set with “The Corbomite Maneuver”. That name would be D.C. Fontana, who slips into her familiar Star Trek role with this episode. Fontana is one of the single most important creative figures in Trek history, story editing the lion’s share of the Original Series before becoming the joint showrunner of the Animated Series with Dave Gerrold and continuing to contribute scripts to the franchise as late as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is actually the third time we’ve seen Fontana’s name in the credits, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to explore her impact on the series in any meaningful way. She wrote the teleplay for “Charlie X”, but that was mostly a Gene Roddenberry effort, and she also wrote “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, but I decided to use my essay on that episode to play with temporal mechanics instead. Which actually turned out to be fortuitous, because not only is this really the best time to introduce Fontana as it’s where she first becomes story editor, it also spares me actually having talk about “This Side of Paradise”.

Fontana heavily retooled Sohl’s original contribution, apparently at the behest of Roddenberry, who is said to have told her “if you can rewrite this script, you can be my story editor”. He must have liked the job she did, as she was promptly hired for the position as soon as the story went out. Fontana’s alterations do undoubtedly improve the episode: She has the plants scattered all over the colony instead of being in one easily-avoidable cave as Sohl had written them and she also takes the love story with Leila, originally intended for Sulu, and gives it to Spock instead, which allows Leonard Nimoy to explore his character in a way he hasn’t really been able to since “The Naked Time”.…

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