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Haunt the Future

When You’ve Seen The Ages That I’ve Seen (The Idiot’s Lantern)

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In the original version the Wire was to steadily move up
Maslow’s Hierarchy until, in the climax, it shouted “lacking
in opportunities to express my creativity” instead of just
“hungry.”

It’s May 27th, 2006. Oh look. Gnarls Barkley. What a shock. Busta Rhymes, Rihanna, Red Hot Chili Peppers, LL Cool J, and Shayne Ward also chart. In news, Montenegro has voted for independence from Serbia, and scientists have confirmed that HIV originated among Cameroonian chimpanzees.

Anyone hoping to be enlivened from a slow week by a fresh episode of Doctor Who would have found themselves at least somewhat perplexed by The Idiot’s Lantern. As has been noticed by more people than I care to count, The Idiot’s Lantern does not quite work. This is mostly not interesting – it tends to go loud when it should go quiet and vice versa. Eddie Connolly is portrayed as a straight villain from the get-go when too much of the plot revolves on sympathy for him – there needed to be scenes where he’s given an underlying dignity as a man struggling to keep a family going. Gatiss’s decision to avoid the title “The One-Eyed Monster” is, of course, as unforgivable as it is completely understandable. And if we’re being perfectly honest, it is ever so slightly possible David Tennant does not wear a bouffant well. But these are small reasons and uninteresting to anyone not heavily invested in writing as a craft. Which is to say that I could go on about them for ages, but that I don’t want to unless they say something substantive about the evolution of the show as well.

So let’s move on to the interesting way that The Idiot’s Lantern fails – the fact that the script is actually harmed by David Tennant, or, more accurately, by the fact that it’s not written for him. There’s a very fundamental difference in how Tennant and Eccleston play the part, and this difference requires some attention in writing. In short, Tennant plays the role with a narrower range of tones that he can take, but with a lot of very deliberate turns and reversals within those tones, whereas Eccleston tends to flit about manically and respond in ways that are very slightly off from the expected tone. And in this script that causes two problems.

The first is in what I already noted – the story’s poor decisions on when to go loud or quiet. Tennant’s Doctor is, from the start, designed to not have a lot of gradiations in angry. No second chances and all. But even as an actor, this is true – Tennant does shouty and angry the way he does shouty and angry. He doesn’t have a setting for “kinda shouty and angry.” So where Eccleston finds new ways for the Doctor to be angry, Tennant continually goes back to one terribly effective way of doing the Doctor incandescent with rage. This is fine, but it means that the Doctor’s anger has to be deployed much more carefully than with his predecessor.…

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“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”: A Taste of Armageddon

, 14

Jimmy wants big boom.

What’s most immediately interesting, to start with, is that we seem to have encountered a temporal event of our own and skipped several episodes. The Federation was established in “Arena”, and Starfleet way back in “Court Martial” but we haven’t seen much of either of them since and it didn’t seem to alter the status quo of the show in any meaningful way. The Enterprise still putted about on routine patrol for the most part. “The Alternative Factor” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday” gave us some sweeping, dramatic shakeups, but both of those seemed like special exceptions: Not quite narrative collapses, but definitely temporary crises in the way things worked. Still, nothing we didn’t really think we wouldn’t come back from. The only indication things might be changing at all was in, ironically enough, Gene Roddenberry’s own “The Return of the Archons”. In “A Taste of Armageddon”, however, the Federation now has the full name of the United Federation of Planets (implying a structure larger than just Earth and its colonies) and the Enterprise is now escorting its ambassadors on a mission to open up friendly negotiations with civilizations around the galaxy (confirming it). This is, to understate things considerably, a rather immense shift in standard operating procedure for Star Trek.

A cursory glance at the credits reveals this to be not completely unprecedented or unexpected, as this is the second script from Gene Coon, who, recall, penned “Arena” himself as well. This one is also credited to a Robert Hamner, but, aside from an interesting note that he is listed as the creator of the police procedural S.W.A.T., I can’t find a lot of biographical information on him and not having seen that show personally I’m somewhat at a loss to talk about his positionality and interests as a writer. But Coon is a known quantity to us by now, and as his name shows up twice, as both the co-writer of the episode and the current showrunner, it’s probably safe to attribute an at least not-insignificant amount of the ethics here to him. And besides this makes sense as “A Taste of Armageddon” is very much the evolution of the territory we first found ourselves in with “Arena”.

At first glance this episode would seem to be about the juxtaposition of the Enterprise crew and the world of Federation diplomats. Ambassador Fox is depicted first as just as much of an obstructive bureaucrat as Commissioner Ferris in “The Galileo Seven” and he frequently butts heads with Kirk, and later Scott, in a rote safety of the mission vs. safety of the ship debate that’s already become a stock and hackneyed Star Trek plot. It’s Fox’s bizarre fixation on opening relations with the Eminians at all costs that puts the lives of everyone on the ship in grave jeopardy, leads to Kirk’s away team being captured and thrusts everyone headfirst into the EminianXVendikan war. Following the logic the show has established up to this point, it would seem sensible to read the episode’s central conflict as one between distant officials in fancy suits and the soldiers on the front lines who know the reality of living day to day on the edge.…

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Man of Steel: A Redemptive Reading

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I’ll put my premise in the first sentence: Man of Steel is a scathing deconstruction of Superman and particularly of Grant Morrison. The second sentence will warn about spoilers for Man of Steel and, for that matter, for Sucker Punch.

Let’s start with the Watchmen movie, since it wasn’t very good. Because the thing is, as many bad things as there are about it, it at least tried very, very hard to be a Watchmen movie. It’s clear Zach Snyder wanted to film the movie version of Watchmen, and just failed, largely because you can’t make a movie version of Watchmen.

Notably, he moved on to Sucker Punch, a film that is about pretending to offer one kind of pleasure only to suddenly turn on a dime and become a blisteringly angry critique of that pleasure. It starts by being about sexualizing badass women who are horribly scarred, and then ends by being about the importance of giving survivors the agency to tell their own stories. It’s a glorious inversion of the male gaze. After all, the act of gazing that the film is most focused on is the one the film repeatedly elides. Whenever the narrative comes to a moment where Babydoll begins her erotic dance it switches realities to an over the top action sequence. We’re repeatedly given the wrong kind of pornography, and then we cut back to close-ups of the post-orgasmic bliss on the faces of the men who have seen what our pornography of violence was standing in for. So the male gaze is being complicated and critiqued from the get-go.

Similarly, I think it’s telling that the final sequence openly admits that Babydoll is not designed to function like a real person. Everything in the film is working towards that voiceover and its call for allowing survivors to tell their own stories. That’s the eponymous sucker punch.

If the movie fails – and I’m at least willing to grant that a movie that spectacularly misread has failed in part – it is because we are too trained to take pleasure in the violence-as-sex pornography that the film attacks such that the point when it turns ugly simply isn’t upsetting enough. Though I think the scene where Blondie and Amber are killed is quite upsetting, and consciously so – it’s the scene where Blue really becomes properly unhinged, and he’s genuinely scary in it. And the violence is allowed to be shocking and fast, in marked contrast to the excessive slow-motion used for the pornographic violence. But it perhaps doesn’t go quite far enough in turning on the audience and making them suffer for having enjoyed the film. (And note that there’s no more “fun” violence after that.)

Still, this is clearly what the film is trying to do the entire time. It is carefully constructed to turn ugly and then, finally, show a viable alternative to what it critiques. The worst that I think you can say about it is that the turn could have been crueler and more effective.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 24 (I Am A Dalek)

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The Quickreads initiative was one of those feelgood things New Labour was great at. Taking off from Wold Book Day, an earlier New Labour creation in which kids were given coupons to take a pound off the price of any book alongside the launch of books conveniently priced at just that, Quickreads was ostensibly focused on adult illiteracy and low literacy. The idea that was that major writers would write short, accessible books that would sell for cheap to adults who might not ordinarily read.

Doctor Who’s inclusion in this is thus a bit odd. The basic shape of the Quickreads format, after all, has ample precedent in Doctor Who: 128 pages, accessible, we’re basically just talking about Target novelizations here. But those are not exactly what you’d call aimed at adults. That the next two Quickreads releases hired Terrance Dicks at least seems to speak volumes about where they’re going, but at the start of the series you instead have a textbook case of Doctor Who striking an odd tone as it attempts to compromise among several audiences and goals.

It makes sense that the Quickreads books, for Doctor Who, would settle efficiently into being children’s literature with an adult audience a la the Harry Potter books or Philip Pullman’s work. The problem is that it makes sense in a large part because that’s what Doctor Who has already done. Not only in its previous book series – this is, after all, exactly what the New Series Adventures have been doing with their bizarre decision to up the price and lower the grade level of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. And more to the point, it’s what the new series itself has been doing.

This is something we talked about with both Aliens of London/World War III and Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel – that every Davies season does a similar story as its first two-parter, and perhaps more to the point every Davies season’s first two-parter is harshly criticized by a large chunk of fandom. There is an extent to which this can simply be described as missing the point: these two-part stories are the entries in the seasons most overtly geared towards children. They exist to be big romps full of action set pieces aimed, roughly speaking, at ten year olds. They’re the price we pay for Father’s Day and The Girl in the Fireplace – stories that are equally unapologetically targeted at the sort of mature adult audience who obsessively watches a children’s show and writes a blog about it.

What constitutes children’s television? We’ve talked about a lot of children’s television over the years in this blog, some of it very good. The best ones we’ve talked about have typically sparkled because they push things just a little too far, presenting a world just a bit darker and more menacing than it feels like children’s television should. Children of the Stones is probably the iconic example out of things we’ve talked about, although Knights of God or, for that matter, Dark Season would do just fine.…

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“You Will Be Assimilated”: The Return of the Archons

, 8

Kirk sees no reason why he can’t have both a frock *and* a gun.

Let’s take care of the obvious first, shall we? We’ve got Gene Roddenberry writing again this week. By this point we should know what this means: Terrible pacing, ham-fisted, confused ethics, a disturbingly capricious attitude towards the personhood of women, screamingly vast logic lapses and a truly amazing ability to craft a cartoonish 16-ton safe of a moral and somehow still manage to miss the point entirely. With that squared away, let’s take a look at the less obvious: “The Return of the Archons” is final, conclusive evidence Roddenberry’s original concept of Star Trek wasn’t a utopia and is the first appearance of the Prime Directive (and thus also the first deconstruction of the Prime Directive).

The Prime Directive is a very interesting concept unique to Star Trek, and by this I mean I don’t like it very much. I never have: Traditionally doing a Prime Directive story is the quickest way short of doing an “evil clone frames the hero” plot or having a woman strut onto the bridge in a miniskirt to get me to shut the TV off. On the surface, it sounds like a self-evidently Good Thing, as it prohibits Starfleet officers from interfering in the natural development of a society (although here it’s framed more in terms of a vague opposition to “noninterference” of any sort). In fact, at conventions or in interviews Roddenberry (or those attempting to speak for him) would tout the Prime Directive as a key indication of the Federation’s evolved, idealistic society, typically framing it in opposition to Western colonialism or the cargo cult myth. This is of course hilarious, as every single Prime Directive story throughout the entirety of Star Trek is either about how demonstrably, measurably worse off the local people are by the crew’s adherence to it or how they just go ahead and flagrantly violate it anyway because they know better. Anthropologically speaking, however, it’s a nightmare, and given my prior experience in that field it causes me no shortage of headaches.

That said I don’t want to spend too much time on the Prime Directive here as, aside from this being the first mention of it, it doesn’t play an enormous role in the ethics debate of the week and there are two episodes coming up in the second season which are in many ways the definitive Prime Directive stories, so it seems something of a waste to use up all my critique of it in this post. What’s more interesting about how it’s used in “The Return of the Archons” is that it’s explicitly framed as a mirror of Landru’s “Prime Directive” to preserve The Body at all costs. As it’s Landru’s fixation on this basic order that results in the Beta III colony becoming “soulless”, in the words of Spock, it could be argued Roddenberry is trying to tell us blind adherence to orders is a Bad Thing and people need to think for themselves and make decisions on a case-by-case basis, and furthermore, that he’s now become perfectly willing to point the finger as much at his own people as he is at others.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 29th, 2013)

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Hello all.

Jill and I just got back from Man of Steel, which we both enjoyed, making us seemingly the only people to have done so. That said, there was dinner, and there may have been some wine with dinner, and I may or may not be seeing more Blogger windows right now than is entirely appropriate for the number I have open on my screen. So let’s keep this brief.

I’ll probably write up some detailed thoughts on Man of Steel this weekend, and if it comes out at all well run it on Tuesday. In the meantime, what movies and television over the next few months are you looking forward to? Or art in general. Yes. Let’s go with that this week. What coming attractions in the world of art excite you, and why are you so eager for them?…

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Corners of the Universe (Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel)

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The sofa is, in fact, of reasonable comfort.

It’s May 13th, 2006. Yep. Gnarls Barkley. Whole story. Beatfreakz, with a cover of “Somebody’s Watching Me,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shayne Ward, Pet Shop Boys, and Snow Patrol also chart. In news, a bus driver in Dublin snaps and begins driving his bus through the streets in a rampage that kills one and injures thirteen more, including five police officers. Arsenal F.C. play their final game at Highbury, Apple Computer wins a trademark suit against Apple Corps, and Ruth Kelley, Minister for local Government and Opus Dei member, declines to elaborate on whether she considers homosexuality a sin. Sony unveils the PS3, the NSA is reported as operating a massive phone surveillance operation, the President talks about how he wants to close Guantanamo Bay and pursue immigration reform… wait, am I still in historical news?  Liverpool win something. (Yep. Still in historical news.) Oh! And Lordi win Eurovision!

This latter event is actually worth discussing. One of the primary themes of this blog has been the peculiarities of the relationship between the mainstream and the marginal in British culture. The Eurovision Song Contest illustrates a peculiar special feature of this, albeit on a scale larger than just the UK. Eurovision is aggressively mainstream. Yet somehow its embrace of the aggressive mainstream ends up being the weirdest thing imaginable. Or, at least, usually. Eurovision is infamously a bunch of terribly trashy and over the top performances bookended by a couple smaller ones in which a terribly earnest singer sings a terribly earnest song. And usually one of those wins. Usually.

But in 2006, somewhat improbably, a Finnish hard rock band that does all of their performances in elaborate monster makeup won with “Hard Rock Hallelujah,” their lead singer wearing a gloriously ill-advised cheap plastic hat with the Finnish flag on it. It was one of the most charmingly offbeat moments of mass popularity ever achieved – something that visibly comes from miles outside of anything that would conventionally be called the mainstream, and yet  winning a massive pan-European popular vote competition. The television of acceptance, as Richard put it back in the Big Brother post.

As we’ve noted, Doctor Who has itself become the television of acceptance, with the previously marginal backwater of anorak cult television becoming, very abruptly, the most popular thing on television – so abruptly, in fact, that it hadn’t even finished being anorak cult television by the time it had reinvented itself again. Its somewhat checkered past was almost instantly rehabilitated as the idiosyncratic history of a beloved cultural icon. And so a structure that everybody recognized implicitly was imposed on the series – so much so that it didn’t need to be announced as such. The Cybermen would return in Series Two, the Master in Series Three. Everyone knew in their bones this was how it played out, and the return of the Cybermen was announced in Doctor Who Magazine #357, the same issue that ran the previews for the last three episodes of Series One to no surprise whatsoever.…

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“Everything is as it should be”: Tomorrow is Yesterday

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Current theory points to the Enterprise being responsible for medieval Earth legends about the Skyships of Magonia.

The following is an excerpt from the archives of the United Federation of Planets Temporal Integrity Commission. It appears to be a fragment of an introductory text for prospective Agents educating them on proper temporal mechanics and etiquette.

It is common knowledge the the United Federation of Planets of our time requires all Starfleet officers to observe strict adherence to the Temporal Prime Directive. As its name would suggest, this directive is an extension of the earlier Prime Directive, which was a policy of nonintervention with the natural development of cultures less developed then ours. The logical outgrowth of this core premise, the Temporal Prime Directive clearly states that interference with historical events is strictly forbidden, and the current timeline must be upheld at all costs. In our age of freely available and accessible time travel, the preservation of the sequence of events leading inevitably to this glorious present is of paramount importance. Under no circumstances will any time travel event that could jeopardize or even nullify the possibility of this particular future coming to pass be tolerated, and the stewardship of our timeline can only be seen as our primary responsibility as Starfleet officers.

Once time travel technology became commonplace in all the civilized cultures of the galaxy, an interstellar pact was signed between all the major political powers mutually agreeing to prohibit the use of that technology for any purpose other than pure, untainted scientific research. Furthermore, the agreement outlines explicit guidelines, instructions and procedures on how time travel can be undertaken safely, rationally and virtuously without contaminating or endangering the timestreams that lead to our reality. The ratification of this treaty and related documents, which collectively became known as the Temporal Accords, remains the fundamental guiding tenet of Federation and Starfleet policy to this day. Although most governing bodies freely accepted the new terms, many more did not, and broke off their Federation alliances, feeling that temporal mechanics should be used to change the past for self-centered and misguided notions of “personal improvement”. Such temporal incursions are the greatest threat to our safety and sovereignty, and it is the sworn duty of all temporal agents to track down and repair the damage caused by such incursions, and ideally preventing them from occurring in the first place whenever possible.

Although time travel of any sort is discouraged if it can be avoided, Federation and Starfleet policy does acknowledge that the past holds merit from a scientific perspective. One of the reasons it is imperative that we do not change the past is that studying it both teaches and gives us perspective for how to live in the present. In this regard, a history of time travel is beneficial to help us better understand the moral and ethical ramifications of temporal mechanics, why Federation policy has evolved to the point it has and how best to handle a time travel situation should you happen to find yourself in one.…

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Mary Sticks to the Alleyways, Where the Light and Noise of the City is Screened Out A Little (The Last War in Albion Part 2: Near Myths, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs)

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“Mary sticks to the alleyways, where the light and noise of the city is screened out a little”

-Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan #8, 1998
Figure 12: “The Checkmate Man” features more marital
strife than high-concept assassination antics – Near
Myths #5, 1980 (Click to enlarge)
[previously] It is in some ways very much like the Gideon Stargrave stories and “Time is a Four Letter Word” – full of jumps across time and space and an ever-shifting universe. But where those stories focus on the action, “The Checkmate Man” takes an entirely different approach. The only part of it that could be described as an action scene takes place on the first page, and the remaining nine pages consist of Conrad, the eponymous assassin, reflecting on the stress and horror of his job. It’s a surprisingly intimate character piece, miles from Morrison’s other Near Myths work. There’s also a degree of thought that’s been put into the setting that isn’t present in Morrison’s other Near Myths work – a throwaway bit about attempting to prevent the Lincoln assassination only to have him die in an accident the next day speaks volumes about the world of “The Checkmate Man” and the way in which the CIA program he’s a part of only changes the world through death and destruction. The result is that the closing page, where Conrad realizes that all the George Orwell books have vanished from his bookshelf before forgetting that he even cares about it, is haunting in its scope, revealing the real effects of Conrad’s CIA-backed sanitization of history. 
While “The Checkmate Man,” which is, in fact, quite good, better foreshadows Morrison’s future career, it is also, oddly, the Near Myths story that Morrison has not meaningfully brought up in interviews. While he points to “Time is a Four Letter Word” as being “based around the simultaneity of time concept Alan Moore himself is so fond of these days” and returns to Stargrave in a number of ways, “The Checkmate Man” is, despite being the best of his Near Myths stories and the one that actually presents a credible case for the idea that Morrison was, in 1979/80, out ahead of the field, the one piece Morrison seems content to relegate to the status of juvenilia and trivia. It is, by all appearances, Gideon Stargrave who best captures the spirit of what Morrison was doing in Near Myths. And thus it is Gideon Stargrave that it is most important to contextualize in the larger comics scene of 1979. The Near Myths stories are, after all, a small rock in a larger formation, and it is at this point more helpful to establish some of the underlying conceptual strata. 
Figure 13: Gideon Stargrave makes a
surprise return in The Invisibles #17, 1996
Morrison has, in interviews, gone back and forth on what his inspirations for Gideon Stargrave. His most common claim is Michael Moorcock. In a 1997 interview he said, of his reuse of the character in The Invisibles, that “King Mob’s ‘Gideon Stargrave’ stories are direct quotes from the Michael Moorcock-inspired short stories I wrote obsessively when I was 17,” which is to say, his Near Myths contributions.
…

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A Town Without Context

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On ‘A Town Called Mercy’

The ends can justify the means, but there needs to be something which justifies the ends.

 – Trotsky

Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier.  His motive is to end a war which is killing his people.  But were his people the attackers or the attacked?  That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story.  It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant.  Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one… with the answer being, of course, “yes”.  But I’d argue that the wider social context of Jex’s actions (beyond just saying that ‘it was war’) is as important as it is obscure.

The notion – that war is, as Jex puts it, “a different world” in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy – is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism.  Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. “Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people… but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!”) or ignored (i.e. “Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!!  Why do they hate us???”) according to ideological needs and preferences.

Kryten would find it easier to get rid of the Apocalypse Boys
now that he’d been assimilated by the Borg.

‘A Town Called Mercy’ actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time).  Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling ‘Our Boys and Girls’, since it is assumed that they deserve ‘our’ support whatever they do).  ‘Mercy’, by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best.  Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations… and the omissions are interesting.

As I say, it’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things.  Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn – written during the Blitz – with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him.  The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, “is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”

Jex is, of course, serving his ‘country’, so to speak.  But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis?  To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian?  Or is the situation more complex than that?  Is it more like America vs Japan?  Two rival empires clashing.  One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.…

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