Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

“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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Saturday Waffling (July 6th, 2013)

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First off, I’ve fixed the poor quality image in Thursday’s installation of The Last War in Albion. This is in no way an excuse to link that entry because a lot of people missed it due to the whole US federal holiday thing. Two more installments of that are queued up before it takes a break for a bit. I continue to really enjoy it. Readership numbers suggest you may or may not be enjoying it. We may have to talk about that.

Second off, it’s really, horribly hot. Sufficiently so that we’re butting up against the operational capacity of the air conditioners I own. I do not want to write. I do not want to think, or move, or be alive. I want to find a nice chest freezer and curl up in it until October or so.

So this is our discussion topic for the weekend. July: why should I even bother?…

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Carry On Screaming

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Trigger warning / Spoiler Warning

Just watched Peter Strickland’s amazing film Berberian Sound Studio.  It stars Toby Jones as Gilderoy, a repressed (or is he just normal for his home context?) British foley artist and sound mixer hired by Italian filmmakers to create sound effects for a satanic exploitation flick.

Berberian Sound Studio is a study of male fear and hatred of women.

The horror movie that we hear (never see) being made is about the undead revenge of women who were tortured and killed as witches.  The slimey director spouts pretentious bullshit about how his film is an important social document, intended to honestly portray and condemn the abuse of such women, to recognise their suffering, etc… yet his film rests upon the assumption that the women who were accused of witchcraft were, in fact, witches.  Otherwise, how could they come back from the dead in satanic rituals?

The torture – involving, at one crucial point, a red hot poker being inserted into a woman’s vagina – is shown lovingly on screen… though, as I say, we (that is, the viewers of Berberian Sound Studio) don’t see it.  Gilderoy sees it though.  He sees it again and again and again.  He has to wait until the crucial moment to come round on a loop so he can drop fat into a frypan, thus creating the appropriate sizzling sound.  He has to rip the stalks from radishes to simulate the sound of hanks of hair being ripped from women’s scalps by the priests.  The film is comic in the way it shows the sound studio repeatedly ringing with the sounds of the hammering, stabbing and general abuse of various vegetables… yet, the comedy decays as we see the mangled fruit and veg decaying in buckets.

Like the tomato soup that gets splattered all over Gilderoy’s face as he uses a blender to simulate the sound of a woman being carved up with a chainsaw, the rotting cabbages and melons make us think of mutilated human flesh, dehumanized by abuse and then dumped like rubbish.  Gilderoy, who spends his normal working life in the UK making gentle documentaries about nature rambling, has never imagined such horrors.

In the studio he is surrounded by women who are working for the men in charge of the picture.  It is quite disconcerting to see the women co-operating (if reluctantly, in the probably vain hope of being paid one day) in the production of such a blatantly misogynistic film.  The men, needless to say, are unconscious of any such irony… with the possible exception of Gilderoy, who never manages to raise much resistance despite his qualms.  The only woman who seemed uncowed by the relentless male dominance in the studio is the surly secretary Elena, whose legs and bum Gilderoy furtively stares at when following her down a corridor.  Part of his transformation is when he learns to be rude and dismissive towards her. 

Silvia (one of the voice actresses dubbing the dialogue, hired for her ability to scream) is being sexually harassed by the same director who claims to be making an important meditation on the victims of witchcraft trials. …

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In A World of Antimatter (The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit)

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Chap with the horns there, five… no, I didn’t think so.

It’s June 3rd, 2006. Gnarls Barkley is at number one, but is finally unseated a week later by Sandi Thom’s “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair).” Primal Scream, Daz Sampson, Ronan Keating and Kate Rusby, Nelly Furtado, and Pink also chart. In news, Ken Loach wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, John Snow resigns as US Treasury Secretary due to his intense lack of knowledge, and the Pirate Bay gets shut down, as happens from time to time. The federal government determined that New York City has no national monuments or icons, and the World Cup kicks off in Germany, with England playing their first game, a 1-0 victory over Paraguay  four hours prior to the transmission of The Satan Pit.

The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit is an odd story, held in considerable esteem by a certain segment of fandom (more about whom on Monday) largely because it feels so traditional. You can list the Doctor Who classics this pilfers – it’s a majestic blend of Pyramids of Mars, Inferno, The Three Doctors, The Daemons, and just about any base under siege ever. For any fan who’d been sitting around for fourteen months complaining bitterly that Doctor Who wasn’t like Doctor Who, this was a revelation. Notably, even its emotional content is toned down – a couple scenes of the Doctor and Rose talking about what they’ll do now that they’re trapped in this time and place in the first episode, and a pair of muted lines in the second are the only places that those pesky emotions creep in.

Under the surface – a concept that is surely more important here than in most episodes – there’s rather more anxiety about this than the story lets on. It may be constructed out of bibs and bobs of classic Doctor Who stories, but there’s an appreciable anxiety about this. It’s notably not until the Doctor is being lowered into the pit that we get a chain of references to past stories, and his declaration that the Time Lords invented black holes comes only after the plot has been resolved. The story is, to those who recognize the elements, the most classic series indebted one we’ve seen, in many ways much more so even than School Reunion, which brought the classic series back to alter it heavily. And yet even here there’s a sense of tentativeness about the classic series.

Nevertheless, we should be careful in trying to understand that hesitation. The first season was largely scrupulous about avoiding excessive references to the classic series. More to the point, it was Davies who was most prone to inserting continuity references, where other writers shied away from them out of fear that they would make the series insular. Which is to say that the idea that Davies had any anxiety personally on the subject of continuity references is, at best, strained.…

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“Marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet.”: Space Seed

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Shame I already used “I got your gun”.

I suspect if there’s one episode of the original Star Trek that my readers will expect me to come up with some mad, overblown stream-of-consciousness, recursive mess of a writeup for it would probably be this one. I hate to disappoint expectations, but that’s not going to be the case here. There was a fairly unbroken streak of episodes starting midway through the season that all seemed to call out for that kind of interpretation, hence a number of the last few blog posts have been in that style, and there’s at least one more coming up that will more likely than not warrant it as well, so my abandoning that structure is certainly not something to worry about for the short term. However, “Space Seed” calls for a different approach.

The elephant in the room is naturally that this episode provides the subject matter for the consensus-best Star Trek movie, which is at once a kind of revisit and reimagining of the events of “Space Seed” and also the debut of Nicholas Meyer’s unique, and much loved, interpretation of the franchise. Whether or not I feel Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is actually deserving of the kind of breathless worship it gets from mainline fandom or is worthy of the title of Best Trek Ever, let alone Perfect Cinematic Masterpiece, is something I’m not going to even begin to worry about until we reach 1982, which is still quite a long ways off from where we are now.

The more important thing to keep in mind for now is that Carey Wilber, who was the actual writer of this episode is not Nicholas Meyer, and this is really where we need to begin before we get anywhere near close to figuring out what this episode really is. Gene Coon has a secondary credit on the teleplay, but given this episode’s plot and general tone I’m going to assume he just did some cleanup work after the fact because, for reasons I’ll get into a bit later, “Space Seed” doesn’t feel like Coon’s material at all. Actually, I’ll just come out and tip my hand right away. I’m positive this is going to be a nuclear bomb of a claim to make and this is without doubt the entry that will turn away any longterm Star Trek fans who haven’t been driven off already, but this is my reaction and my blog and I get to say it: This episode is bad. Really bad.

Actually, I take back part of that last paragraph. This isn’t *bad* television: It’s as competently and professionally made as any of the strongest episodes of the series so far. In this regard, the incoherent structural jumble of something like “The Menagerie”, or especially “The Alternative Factor”, is much worse. But the thing is both of those episodes hinted at, or maybe accidentally hit on, deeper, more exciting concepts and wound up delightfully oversignified as a result.…

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This Dread World and the Rolling of Wheels (The Last War in Albion Part 3: William S. Burroughs, Michael Moorcock)

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“This dread world and the rolling of wheels” -William Blake, The Book of Urizen, 1794

Figure 17: The working class neighborhood of Northampton
Alan Moore grew up in was called The Boroughs
[previously] Burroughs provides no such easy access route, and is beloved less by the academic consensus than by generations of committed counterculture figures who, like Ballard and Moorcock, “weren’t so much influenced by him as inspired by him.” At times not so much a writer than a stunningly competent criminal, Burroughs effectively hit on the brilliant scheme of supporting a drug habit by writing about it. Famed for shooting his wife to death in an ill-advised drunken William Tell impression, Burroughs’s style is an obvious antecedent for Ballard’s harshly visceral lists in The Atrocity Exhibition. His masterpiece is Naked Lunch, an unstructured ramble of a book that was the subject of several landmark obscenity trials, all of which it won. It wanders from misadventure to misadventure, steadily dissolving reality into a paranoid dreamscape that seems to have been Burroughs’s drugfucked experience channeled onto the page, a world where “One Friday Fats siphoned himself into The Plaza, a transulcent-grey foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamprey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow black erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk,” a paragraph that exists as part of a sprawling multi-paragraph sentence with no end in sight.
Figure 18: Heroin
Burroughs transitioned this into a literary career such that a reasonable circle of admirers that improbably allowed him to live a heroin-addicted lifestyle until the ripe old age of 83, sustaining a pleasant existence in Lawrence, Kansas where he could have his drugs without the preying cityscape waiting to devour him. But his paranoia was not merely of the perverted rabbit hole of criminal culture that urban drug culture offered him. Rather, he feared the very technology of language, describing it as a “control machine” that was indistinguishable from his own addiction in its tyranny over his thought. This sort of paranoia struck a chord as the technological utopias of the post-World War II era fully gave way to a more unsettled pre-apocalyptic nightmare of nuclear war led human science to become what Iain M. Banks, vanguard of the post-new wave generation of science fiction in the UK, described in 1996 as an Outside Context Problem – something that “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” As science became dangerous so did science’s imaginative dimension.
Burroughs, like many figures within and without the war, was overtly an occultist, creating with British performance artist Brion Gysin the cut-up technique, in which written works are physically shredded into strips and remixed to produce new phrases, a practice Burroughs believed to have actual magical import, to the extent that he joined the chaos magic organization the Illuminates of Thanateros late in life. His parallelism with Grant Morrison’s later work is profound enough that it is tempting to suggest him as the real origin for Morrison’s Near Myths stories.
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