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

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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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Punishing Viewing

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Something I wrote a while ago, somewhat rewritten.  I’m re-posting it to mark the release of ‘The Mind of Evil’ on DVD.  In brief, being in colour doesn’t make it any better.

There is a very old idea about ‘human nature’, that we are born with certain social characteristics already implanted or programmed in our brains, usually inherited from our parents and ancestors. You will find this idea laced throughout the whole of modern Western culture. Ruffians and villains in Conan Doyle are often said to have “vile antecedents”. Oliver Twist is incapable of being a pickpocket because, despite being raised in a pauper’s orphanage, he is a middle class child displaced amongst the scum classes. Similarly (because J.K. Rowling is nothing if not studiedly unoriginal) Harry Potter is filled with love just like his late mum, despite being systematically emotionally and psychologically abused up to the age of 11.  I could go on at great length.

This conception of human nature (please take the quote marks as read whenever I use that phrase) is directly and inextricably linked to class, and to questions of social role, crime, etc. It is still claimed today that people end up in prison because they have inborn tendencies which lead them there. These days we use the language of genetics. Before genes, people used the language of blood. Before that, people used the language of the Bible. The medieval church claimed that drastic and dreadful social divisions were justified because people were born into one category or the other, based on their bloodline. They were the descendents of Cain or Seth, and thus carried the blood of a vile murderer or a goody-two-shoes. Of course, the idea that the peasants were peasants because they had murderer’s blood doesn’t account for the massive amount of warmongering and killing and torturing and executing done by the supposed descendents of Seth (i.e the Kings and Dukes and whathaveyou). Of course, even today a great deal of chin-scratching cogitation goes into deciding what genetic factors might be causing black urban gun crime… while nobody wonders if the carpet-bombing Prime Minister must have killer genes. And, as John Ball pointed out, if we’re all descended from Cain or Seth, that also means we’re all descended from (non-murdering) Adam and Eve… so how does that work?

As many thinkers have pointed out, being in prison isn’t necessarily a mark of violence or evil (or even, in many cases, actual criminality) so much as a mark of refusing to play your assigned social role. It starts in childhood, with kids medicated for personality disorders for such heinous sins as “disrespecting authority” etc. Also, prisons are a massive system of social control and punitive reinforcement. Vast numbers of people in the American prison system today (which increasingly resembles a kind of privatised system of gulags) are there for non-violent drug crimes. There are many examples of, for instance, disabled people sent away for life because they were caught with a few ounces of weed that they obtained to use personally as a palliative.…

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One Day, I Shall Come Back (The Girl in the Fireplace)

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as a candle.

It’s May 6th, 2006. Gnarls Barkley remains at number one, with Dirty Pretty Things, Snow Patrol, and Rihanna also charting. And that Mary J Blige/U2 thing is still about too. Albums include Bruce Springsteen’s album of Pete Seeger covers and a Massive Attack greatest hits. In the last week one of those remarkably half-assed steps to maybe sort of do something about the genocide in Darfur took place, accomplishing, as you’d expect, nothing. The government of China claimed to have perfected weather control and got into a row with the Catholic Church, though not about the weather. And the Labour Party under Tony Blair lost more than 200 council seats, coming in behind both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in local elections, resulting in a heavy cabinet reshuffle.

This latter thing is actually seemingly just a thing that happens when Moffat is around, as four years later he’ll see Gordon Brown brought down in the 2010 elections just weeks after his run on Doctor Who starts. So there’s a proper reason for everyone to hate Moffat: he makes Tories win things. Actually, hating Moffat for the future is a bit of an issue with this story, as so many tropes familiar from his later Doctor Who career make their first appearances here. What’s interesting, then, is that this once again doesn’t seem to have originally been conceived as a Moffat story in the sense that we now understand that phrase.

The brief given to Moffat was apparently one of Davies’s kitchen sink ones – he wanted clockwork aliens after reading about the mechanical Turk, and he wanted the Madame du Pompadour after encountering the character researching Casanova. So it went to Moffat. This makes sense – he’d had good luck with gas masks last time, so clocks seemed up his alley. And Madame du Pompadour was set up for more sex comedy, which was, after all, the brief he’d originally been given with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.

For the second time, however, Moffat defied expectations. Impressed with what Davies had done in the first season, Moffat apparently decided he wanted to do something like that and, instead of writing a sex comedy, wrote a fairy tale romance. Note how outside of the cold open the story is framed by the shot of the spaceship, winding silently in the night, the chimes of the music box whose key it physically resembles echoing through the silence as the final bit of the story’s riddle is revealed. Even the cold open starts with a variation of this shot – a matching shot of stars accompanied by a jaunty harpsichord  that pans down to Versailles instead of up to the space station, making the boxy palace of Versailles just another magic box in a story jam-packed with them.

This is in many ways the story’s most vaultedly ambitious aspect: the way in which the story is structured like a puzzle box and contains so many such structures within it, but how all of this puzzle box contains what is, at its heart, a fairy story.…

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“DARKSEID IS MY WILL!” The Alternative Factor

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Then Captain Kirk left the Enterprise and went back to the space that was not a space.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, genre fandom underwent something of a shift in the way it expressed itself, at least on the Internet. A new generation of fans-turned-critics sprang up, ushering in a new style of criticism that can loosely be described as the Internet Review Show. Centred mostly around the website network Channel Awesome, which itself grew out of both YouTube and YouTube’s copyright policies, these shows took concisely analytical and frequently equal parts extremely nostalgic and extremely negative, perspectives on science fiction and pop culture ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s, often using the analytical tools of film school. Two of the primary influences on Channel Awesome and similar sites were Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Agony Booth, both of which were known for their trademark style of sarcastically sending up assorted bits of genre fiction’s past.

Don’t you see? This is not Your ship. This is not Your crew. It’s changed, different: It’s already begun. It may be too late to undo the damage that has already been done, but You can set things right and prevent further harm from coming to Your universe. You see now the danger You are in? The natural order of things is at stake because of this! It’s not only this plane, but all of them! The Future, Our Future, Your Future is on the verge of nonexistence. You must put a stop to this here and now so the proper path of Things-To-Come may unfold as it is destined to. Find him, stop him, destroy him, whatever it takes! You must do it and do it immediately! The fate of Reality-As-We-Know-It is in Your hands!

The reason I bring all of this up is because one of the primary ways by which Star Trek fandom as we currently know it was able to take shape was through The Agony Booth’s text recaps of various episodes from across the franchise. The cancellation of Enterprise put Star Trek pretty clearly into the category of “the past”, and even in spite of J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzmann’s two blockbuster cinematic reboots, there is still a lingering sense in many corners of the fandom that Star Trek as a relevant, extant thing remains dead and buried. Therefore, it was sites like The Agony Booth and related web efforts (like SF Debris) and its descendants (like Channel Awesome and other sites like it) that helped usher in a reflexive and introspective period of self-examination in Star Trek fandom. The one problem is that, given their status as entertainment based on making fun of things, the consensus of places like this is going to be extremely negative, or at the very least they heavily emphasize the parts of the series they look at that are the easiest to lampoon.

Yes, I am He, the horrific and terrible monster who destroys civilizations and can make reality vanish in the blink of an eye.…

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This is Still Not a Review Blog

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But GallifreyBase finished off its Troughton stories and it’s a day off. Last War in Albion is back Thursday. For those just tuning in, TARDIS Eruditorum is not a review blog and what it says about a story is at times only obliquely related to its quality. It’s telling a story, and sometimes good stories have to have their flaws emphasized or bad ones have to be polished up a bit in order to make the story flow right. Which is to say that I’m often taking one of several critically defensible positions, and it may or may not be my favorite.

If I were to review Doctor Who stories, I’d say things like this:

Power of the Daleks: A story that is actually perfect. You could film this now and it would be gripping, which is probably why Rob Shearman did with Dalek. Everything – the writing, the characterization, the sheer unnervingness of the new Doctor – is absolutely on target and brilliant here. If you call this the greatest Doctor Who story ever then nobody is really in any place to argue with you. Track down a reconstruction – it’s good enough not to need images. But my God, how lovely would it be if we had this. 10/10.

The Highlanders: A strange little story that doesn’t work, but that pushes itself so far that this observation only barely matters. A demonstration that history and Troughton don’t quite mesh, or, at least, that history and the over the top Troughton they started with don’t quite mesh. And yet so much fun that it’s hard to complain. 5/10

The Underwater Menace: My God, fandom was in a u-turn once they had another part of this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story rise in reputation quite like this. And rightly so – what we had always assumed was a terribly naff runaround turns out to be the last gasp of Doctor Who as a portal to strangeness. The attention on Professor Zaroff has always distracted from how utterly weird the world of Atlantis is, and the end harkens back to the darkness of The Gunfighters or The Myth Makers, only more fittingly for this post-Power of the Daleks Doctor. Meanwhile, Troughton finds his legs when he learns to act Zaroff off the screen by underplaying the part instead of trying to ham it up opposite him, and in doing so finally cements the Doctor we all know. Not a masterpiece, but so much more than people thought. (Me, I always loved it for exactly what the second episode showed.) 7/10.

The Moonbase: It’s not that bases under siege are bad so much as that this is an attempt to redo The Tenth Planet, only in getting rid of that story’s obvious flaws it also gets rid of its manic genius and leaves something dreadfully banal. The Doctor’s speech about corners of the universe is great for clip shows, but paints a moral simplicity that’s contrary to everything that worked about the character in the past three stories.…

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