Eruditorum Press

We’re not on the blockchain, but we are blocked by Gareth Roberts

Blog Association

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I’ve never been a Trekkie, but I’ve seen enough of the franchise over the years to make me think I could talk about it with some familiarity, hence this post from a while ago.  It started out as an outgrowth of something about the Cybermen and the Borg that I’m still tinkering with.  I stand by a lot of what I wrote, but I’m preparing to have to revise some of my views because of the arrival of a truly excellent new blog called Vaka Rangi, written by my online friend (and frequent Shabgraff commenter) Josh Marsfelder.  He describes the blog as

an attempt at a critical history of utopian futurism in televised science fiction, particularly science fiction involving voyaging starships, from a specific perspective and using the Star Trek franchise as a “guiding text”

I’m posting this not simply to get you to check out this blog (which you should utterly do, if the subject interests you) but also to address a remark I made in my own essay on Trek.  This remark:

it’s astounding that apparently intelligent people can tout Star Trek as a great example of progressivism in popular culture

Well, there you go.  My tendency to slip into that ghastly denunciatory tone so common on the left.  Yeurch.  As I say, there’s now a blog by a demonstrably intelligent person (as if I’m an arbiter of that!) who will, I think, argue that Trek is (or at least becomes) an example of progressivism in popular culture.  He’s currently working his way through the original series and is frequently taking it to task for all sorts of horrible attitudes… but a journey of a billion miles would probably have to begin with a few missteps.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 8, 2013)

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So, first of all, I’m running a contest, because I’ve never run a contest before and it sounds fun. The prize will be Volumes 1-3 of TARDIS Eruditorum (Volume 1 in its first edition state, obviously, as that’s the one that exists) in ebook format.

Entering is simple – you just come up with the best possible title for a Doctor Who story in the format The _____ of the _____. Post in comments. You can go for funny or sincere, and any sort of story – judging criteria will strictly be what catches my fancy.

One interesting note, though – collaboration is encouraged; you can win just as well by tinkering with someone else’s suggestion. And if a tinkered version of your suggestion wins, both you and the tinkerer will win the prize. So if someone suggested the (actually quite rubbish) title The Terror of the Giraffes, and you came along and said, “actually, I think that would be much better as The Horror of the Giraffes” then, if I agreed, both you AND the person who came up with The Terror of the Giraffes would win a set of ebooks. You thus lose nothing at all by having people tinker with your titles. You may also tinker with other tinkerings as desired.

Limit of two initial entries. Entries based on tinkering other entries are currently unlimited, though if someone annoys me I’ll change that rule.

I’ll post the winners on Tuesday, along with other favorites. Second of all, then, I have an idea.

Virtually everyone writing with advice for writers these days makes much of the fact that the market is changing and blah blah blah. I imagine the same is true for other creative pursuits. But there’s very little information on the pragmatic reality of being a professional writer – what sort of markets and forms people’s “real money” comes from, and just, broadly speaking, information on the working conditions of writers. I can find a few individual discussions – authors here or there who go into detail on their royalty statements – but the market is so idiosyncratic that a few datapoints aren’t useful.

And what I really can’t find are questions like, for instance, do writers tend to make their money by getting small royalty checks off multiple books that add up, do they live entirely off new releases, do they get one hit that keeps them going for a long time, or what? And how does it work for other media?

So I wanted to just set up a nice, informal survey in the hopes that I can get a bunch of answers and compile them into something that paints a decent picture of how working creators make their money. To that end, if you are a professional creator and don’t mind shooting me an e-mail with the answers to a few questions, please do.

Let’s define professional creator subjectively – if a significant portion of your household income comes from your creative work, you qualify.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 62 (Battlestar Galactica)

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“What about the United States” is, of course, a terribly weird move to make right now. After all, by the time The Christmas Invasion, which we’ll deal with on Monday, aired in the UK, exactly zero episodes of the new series had aired in the United States. Indeed, the airing of Series One in the US coincided with much of the airing of Series Two in the UK. The show’s US popularity lagged the UK by a quite massive margin. So for the most part the question of Doctor Who in America will be tabled until Matt Smith and BBC America, who do, shall we say, rather a better job with the show.

Still, let’s talk about its initial American context on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Sci-Fi Channel is one of the most unfortunate ideas in television history. It was launched as a cable channel in the early 90s, when cable was expanding and everybody thought cult television was actually a way to make money. (A year before The X-Files, then.) Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. Sci-Fi Channel’s original plan of running old cult series acquired cheap never quite took off, and their forays into original programming were, for the most part, similarly unsuccessful. On the occasions they created good programs – Farscape, for instance, which actually ran after Doctor Who Confidential on BBC Three – they usually ran into the problem that good cult-style science fiction was expensive to create and drew too small an audience to be worth it, which is where most science fiction of this sort falls down. Farscape was good, intelligent, funny, and never attracted ratings high enough for a marginal cable channel like Sci-Fi to produce it.

It’s worth noting that even though science fiction is broadly popular, there’s virtually none of it that’s done in the old cult model anymore. Anyone pitching a high-budget science fiction action-adventure serial aimed squarely at males 18-35 is going to be laughed out of the room. Seriously, is there even a single show that works that way anymore? I’m pretty sure they’ve all adopted some version of the high emotional content/soap opera plotting approach now. (The last arguable survivor I can think of, Warehouse 13, is slated for demolition next year, and is hardly primarily a male audience anyway. Maybe Arrow? I’ve not bothered to watch.) And accordingly, the Sci-Fi Channel, these days rebranded as the non-committal and more trademarkable SyFy, steadily became a shockingly low rent channel known for deliberate pieces of cheese like Sharktopus, more ghost hunting than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of professional wrestling. (A parenthetical on this, as it may well be an entirely US thing – professional wrestling is not actually a sport but a simulated one in which results are pre-determined and stuntmen perform fake wrestling matches according to long-running plotlines. Basically, it’s a gobsmackingly homoerotic soap opera that pretends to be a sports competition. So like the Premier League, only with more match-fixing.)…

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“Listen to it…The sound of children playing…”: Miri

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That’s not right!

OK, let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: “Miri” is pretty terrible. Its central concept, while interesting, is basic and stretched far too thin, it’s padded to the point whole dialog exchanges and entire scenes are repeated almost verbatim, its pacing is excruciating, it has behind-the-scenes problems that will culminate in Grace Lee Whitney getting fired and it has a someone who looks like a 15-year old falling in love with Captain Kirk (even if she does turn out to be over 300) and as a result this is an episode nobody is especially fond of. In spite of all that, however, it *is* a landmark moment in the history of Star Trek, because this is the first episode overseen by new producer and showrunner-in-all-but-name Gene Coon.

Coon is one of the great unsung heroes of Star Trek and probably the most criminally marginalized person in the entire history of the franchise. Coon’s influence on Star Trek, or at least the Star Trek everyone likes to pretend existed, cannot be overstated: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if there’s something you remember liking about the Original Series that didn’t evolve in some way from “The Cage”, chances are it was Coon’s idea. The fact of the matter is the lion’s share of the utopianism and progressive idealism Star Trek is so frequently praised for comes not from Gene Roddenberry, but from Gene Coon. I don’t want to completely dismiss Roddenberry, mind: He and Coon seemed to generally work well together and one of Roddenberry’s virtues was his willingness to listen to every idea and piece of constructive criticism people gave him. Granted, he was more likely than not to go ahead and do whatever the hell he wanted anyway, but he’d at least listen to you. However, the problems come when people, especially Coon, would give Roddenberry particularly good ideas that caused him to see things in a totally new way and then Roddenberry would then turn around and claim it was his idea all along. This will prove to be a troublingly reoccurring motif.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is Coon’s first episode and I’d like to take some time to try and tease out a little of how his style contrasts with Roddenberry’s. Unfortunately, Coon is given a right turkey of a story to work with here so the show isn’t doing him any favours right from the start, but even so there are signs things might just be starting to change. For one, this is the first time the Enterprise seems to be doing something other than running errands or law enforcement: It’s not entirely clear what it was up to before receiving the distress signal, but the crew were clearly not on another mission beforehand. And on top of that, the whole teaser and first few scenes are absolute corkers: The Enterprise stumbles upon a planet that is inexplicably an exact clone of Earth and, once the away team beams down, it seems dead except for a group of disturbingly feral children who seem to haunt the town, always hidden just out of sight and chanting in warped versions of playground games.…

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Blogrolling: Pushing Ahead of the Dame

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I am, of course, terribly biased. Chris O’Leary is doing the copyediting on the first Tom Baker book, has written a guest post for me, and is solidly a friend. But, look, I like to think I have taste in my friends. In any case, Chris just shared some of the opening chapters of the book version of his blog with me, and they’re fabulous, so I thought I’d go do a “everyone should go read this” post on his blog.

The word “psychochronography” is one I invented, but the concept of talking about a larger swath of history through obsessive coverage of one idiosyncratic route through that history is longstanding. Which is to say that what Chris is doing over at Pushing Ahead of the Dame, his song-by-song analysis of the work of David Bowie, is firmly in the spirit of psychochronography.

But what Pushing Ahead of the Dame does isn’t to trace the arcs of history, at least not primarily. There certainly is a sense of history as you move over the thirty years the blog has covered at this point, but it’s not a blog about the history. Instead what Pushing Ahead of the Dame offers is a portrait of how a creative mind evolves over time.

A large part of this is picking the right creative mind. David Bowie, as it happens, is perfect. Few people are going to straight-facedly claim that Bowie is the greatest songwriter or musician of his era – of any of his eras, really. Equally, few are going to deny that he’s one of the biggest of most of them. And nobody is going to deny that there’s an absolutely shockingly large number of eras David Bowie belongs to.

Bowie, at his core, is motivated primarily by a desire to be a pop/rock star. He wants to write and record hit music. As it happens, he’s terribly good at this, and so an ongoing study of his creative progress amounts to a look at how a pragmatic and talented mind responds to new influences. In some eras the answer is “by figuring them out just before they hit big and riding the wave.” In other eras the answer is “spectacularly poorly.”

Either way, the result is in many ways a musical version of Doctor Who – a musician who absorbs influence after influence and attempts to make his version of them. But again, instead of tracing the history of the influences, Pushing Ahead of the Dame traces the material process of engaging with them: how songs come together, change over the years, and, more broadly, how they fit together into the development of albums.

What is perhaps most interesting is that I’m not a particularly big David Bowie fan. I mean, I’ve, you know, heard a fair amount of it and can identify most of the major David Bowie songs, but I’m nothing like a die-hard fan. But the blog still reliably works, and not just because he scrupulously links to YouTube versions of the tracks at the top of every entry.…

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Outside the Government 10 (Doctor Who Confidential)

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Let’s start with the end – the first season finale of Doctor Who Confidential, which culminates in a celebratory montage of the Ninth Doctor year arranged to Snow Patrol’s “Run.” To anyone with a passing familiarity with fan culture this, and a wave of similar montages across the preceding six-and-a-half hours of television is immediately identifiable as a vid, or fanvid. We could go down quite a rabbit hole here, but suffice it to say that fanvids are fan-made music videos that set clips of one or more films/television series to popular music. Many of these are just unabashed lovefests – four minutes of squee set to a Coldplay track. Others present new perspectives on the original text. Slash perspectives are of course common, as are reworkings to create new POV characters and other sorts of narrative commentaries.

There is, of course, nothing hugely innovative about this sort of thing. If we want to treat the end of Doctor Who Confidential as a fanvid then we have to allow the precedent to go back decades at the least. Putting the complete lack of effort into researching it that I want to, I can off-hand go back to the series finale of Seinfeld as having done a celebratory montage set to pop music. If we allow for sports programming to count then professional equivalents of fanvids are made to fill time on schedules on a regular basis.

Nevertheless, it sets the tone for Doctor Who Confidential. We should pause here to note that making a fanvid is bloody hard, doubly so if you insist on a measure of quality in the end result. Syncing events well to the music, getting the events selected to form a narrative, having clips long enough to be recognizable and intelligible but short enough to remain punchy and varied – these are hard things to do. And while there are no shortage of crappy vidders in the world, there are also ones who routinely demonstrate that they’re as good at editing as the professionals.

Which is, to a large extent, what Doctor Who Confidential is about: demonstrating the artistry involved in Doctor Who. Which is by no means inconsiderable. The vastness of the paratext surrounding the first six series of Doctor Who, across Doctor Who Magazine, Doctor Who Confidential, and DVD commentary tracks (every episode of the Davies era has a commentary track on the DVD sets, and after Series One every episode has a second commentary track available as a BBC Radio 4 Podcast) mean that Doctor Who in the Davies era is documented with a level of detail that is mind-wrenching. And one of the things that really comes out as a product of all of this is that an absolutely staggering amount of thought goes into a given episode of Doctor Who.

This is something that presents a critical complexity. One of the frequent debates about my readings and views on Doctor Who is the eternal question of whether I’m “reading too much into” things.…

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“We have an incredible ability to make people less than us”: Dagger of the Mind

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Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor! What do I look like, a cat burglar?

We began in a zoo and we end in an insane asylum.

While certainly not a finale in any traditional sense, “Dagger of the Mind” is an ending of sorts, being the last episode of Star Trek produced solely by Gene Roddenberry, who decided to essentially step down as showrunner after this episode was filmed. Contrary to popular belief, Roddenberry was only ever significantly involved in operating and managing Star Trek for these first eleven episodes. He was never really put in this exact position again, and his influence on all subsequent Star Trek is somewhat dialed back. This doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that he’s not relevant to future Star Trek-He very much is, but the role he plays is a different one than that of a hands-on, day-to-day showrunner. Starting next episode, Roddenberry will slip into the part he’s actually far more comfortable in: An honourary executive producer who supervises things from a distance and vets ideas. From here on out, the actual creative decisions are on the whole made by other people; Roddenberry preferring to only get actively involved occasionally and veto things every once in awhile as he sees fit.

Since “Dagger of the Mind” arguably marks the end of Roddenberry’s “purest” version of Star Trek (though I maintain the core work is and always will be nothing more and nothing less than “The Cage”) it seems appropriate to use this post to look back on what, exactly, the Roddenberry Star Trek actually is. I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to piece that together in the preceding essays, but this seems like the appropriate place to try and summarise and draw some conclusions. And it’s fitting, as “Dagger of the Mind” is also one of the better executions of this structure: It doesn’t redeem it, of course, at least not as a standalone text, (some combination of “The Corbomite Maneuver”, “Mudd’s Women”, “The Enemy Within” and “Balance of Terror” has collectively shown that to be impossible) and it has unique problems all of its own, but it has a solid core concept worth engaging with.

Let’s start with the plot first though, or rather the “moral”: Every Roddenberry-produced episode of Star Trek has had some explicitly didactic lesson it’s trying to teach. “Dagger of the Mind” wasn’t penned by Roddenberry himself, nor was it even a script Roddenberry took off someone else and completely rewrote in their name without telling them, but it does have one and it’s an interesting one. Moving closer to the more complex areas travelled by “Balance of Terror” and away from overly simplistic things like “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “we must control our emotions”, “Dagger of the Mind” takes a surprisingly candid, at least for the time, look at mental health facilities. Though the debate over ethical treatment of the mentally ill wasn’t as open in 1966 as it is today, One Flew Over The Cukoo’s Nest had already been published earlier in the decade so there must have been some.…

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This is Not a Review Blog

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That’s something I say on a regular basis – that what I do here isn’t primarily to discuss what Doctor Who stories are good or bad, but to discuss what’s interesting about them and to tell a story out of them. And that’s very important to understanding the blog.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions, and since Gallifrey Base is running weekly mini-forums going over the history of Doctor Who a few years at a time, I’ve been entertaining myself by actually bashing out short reviews of individual stories. So I figure why not compile them here. So in honor of my moving from cleaning up the Hinchcliffe era entries to making another pass over the Hartnell stuff, here’s my short reviews and ratings for the Hartnell era.

An Unearthly Child: Fairly marvelous. The caveman bits get unfairly slagged off because they stop being fundamental bits of the series mythology, but only because they’re fundamental bits of the mythology of a series that never got followed up on. The show that’s about the sheer terror of the TARDIS and the untrustworthiness of the Doctor isn’t one that would have run for fifty years, but it’s a damn sight better than most of the rest of Season One. 7/10

The Daleks: The first cliffhanger, and the shot where the camera pulls away from the TARDIS crew to reveal a room full of incomprehensible things. We have now exhausted the good parts of The Daleks. But holy GOD those two are good parts. 3/10

The Edge of Destruction: One of two stories in the first season that outright work. Its worldview is very strange – it feels more 1960s than anything else in the first two seasons save maybe The Space Museum – but it creates a fascinating collage of classic science fiction and surrealism. David Whitaker remains one of my absolute favorite Doctor Who writers. This is just a wonderful piece of television. 8/10

Marco Polo: I complain about the pacing on most of the first season, but this one takes the cake – seven episodes of meandering in search of a plot structure. This is in the period where the show was a serial that would spin its wheels fruitlessly for a random number of weeks before moving on to a new premise. By the standards of Saturday teatime entertainment merely tolerable. By the standards of something to watch voluntarily fifty years later, a car crash. 2/10

The Keys of Marinus: Unwatchable – everything that’s wrong with a Terry Nation script at one time. 1/10

The Aztecs: Hard to believe this was by the writer of Marco Polo. Everything that story gets wrong, this one gets right – it’s immaculately structured, and with so many dramatic character beats. Along with The Edge of Destruction, the two stories from the first year that really, unequivocally work. 9/10

The Sensorites: The pacing is, as with most of the first season, shot to hell. But the moments of pure charm really stand out.…

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I Wasn’t The One Holding a Gun (Bad Wolf)/A Fighting Hand (Parting of the Ways)

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This entry should appear as two columns. If it is appearing incorrectly or unreadably, a simplified version is here, but does not provide the intended reading experience and is not recommended. Thanks to Anna Wiggins for formatting assistance.


The Anne Droid purifies a leaden contestant to gold.
We play the contest again, Mr. Whitaker.
It’s June 11th, 2005. Crazy Frog is at number one with “Axel F.” Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Gwen Stefani, the White Stripes, Akon, and the Gorillaz also chart, the latter with “Feel Good Inc.” News, fittingly, is a near-total blackout. Seriously – I can find next to nothing in the news for this week. It’s June 18th, 2005. Crazy Frog’s “Axel F” is at number one. U2, The Gorillaz, Jamiroquai, Foo Fighters, and the Black Eyed Peas also chart, the latter with “Don’t Phunk With My Heart.” The only real piece of news is John Sentamu becoming the first black Archbishop when appointed Archbishop of York.
I guess there’s The Guardian running a Pass Notes on the whole “Bad Wolf” idea, which technically happened after this episode, but which is ultimately more related to the episode called Bad Wolf than to the finale where that concept is revealed in full. (After all, following Bad Wolf the meaning of the phrase seems apparent – it’s a trap laid by the Daleks. It’s not until next episode that this gets complicated.) But its existence reflects the degree to which “in the news” in fact, this week, consisted of this episode itself. Doctor Who was the news, not just televisual background radiation, but a massive, central part of British television. What happened in Doctor Who was considered news. For anyone who had lived through the wilderness years the very idea is completely ridiculous. So, television then. For all that The Parting of the Ways is a grand bit of “event” television – an episode self-consciously crafted as a Moment, if you will, it remains the case that, ironically, this got the lowest ratings of the season. Its attempted event – the shock regeneration of Christopher Eccleston – flopped, revealed three months ahead of time in the papers such that this episode led to inevitable climax instead of the most giddily impish shock of all. It’s completely wrong to suggest that Parting of the Ways fizzled – it didn’t at all. But it’s also wrong to suggest that it’s the climactic moment of Doctor Who’s first series is, in a cultural sense, simply wrong. The climactic moment was Rose, with everything else just being the consequences of that success.
But it’s actually even stranger than it seems. It’s not just Doctor Who being a big deal – it’s the particular nature of what the deal was. “Bad Wolf,” after all, is as culty as cult can be – a bit of television designed only for obsessives. And not obsessives of the sort at whom Boom Town was aimed, but ones who are going to obsessively analyze episodes for fleeting lines and visuals.
…

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Rise of the Machines: What Are Little Girls Made Of?

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And here we have the blow-up doll division. They’re like collectibles; you’re supposed to find them all.

Only Star Trek would have the gall to do the exact same goddamn story twice in the same month.

Of course, me having to deal with “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” here is mostly my fault, a result of me deciding to follow the show roughly in production order. This episode was filmed after “Balance of Terror” but aired long before, the latter show being pushed several weeks back such that it aired with material produced under the next showrunner. Really though this actually fits: “Balance of Terror” has far more in common with that crop of episodes than it does with this one, which is pure Gene Roddenberry, down to him doing a last minute hectic rewrite that actually ran contiguous with filming as he felt the script was unworkable. Of course you know where this is going: We follow up the greatest episode in the entire Original Series with a third-rate rehash of every second-rate, half-baked concept the show’s done to date. Another logic versus emotions debate? Yup. An evil duplicate of Kirk who fools the crew? You got it. Theiss Titillation Theorem? This episode gives us the poster child! Sexism that ranges from the mild to the straight-up blunt? Of course. Loads and loads of Majel Barrett? Do you even have to ask?

We’re not quite back into “The Enemy Within” territory of awfulness with this one, though there are several moments that come close. No, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” just feels haggard, tired and spent, as if it’s just halfheartedly going through the motions and re-covering old ground, which you might recognise as decidedly not the most healthy position for a show to be in ten episodes into its first season. So, not only do we have Roddenberry writing again, we don’t even get Roddenberry at the top of his game. Delightful. One could argue I should go easy on this episode because of its tumultuous history: After all, Robert Bloch’s original story was by all accounts never any good to begin with. One would be mistaken in making that argument. Poor quality at the start is a sign you should rethink the way you field story pitches, not the cue to give it to Gene Roddenberry and force it through production. That said, regardless of whether or not this episode *should* have been made (it shouldn’t have), the fact remains it exists, I had to watch it and now I have to come up with something to say about it.

The only remotely interesting thing “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” adds to the very, very well-worn territory of logic debates and “what makes us human?” musings comes through what can only be described as drunkenly stumbling into personal identity theory. The core ethical debate of the episode is whether or not the androids actually are human. Korby seems to think that if the androids can “pass” as human that’s enough and in fact argues they are superior because they are infinitely reparable and have superhuman strength.…

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