Eruditorum Press

No nationalism but Terry Nationalism

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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Sunday Pancaking (June 2nd, 2013)

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Right. Another seven day week then, I suppose.

So, first of all, let’s all discuss and freak out over the regeneration news, shall we? Since everyone’s going to do fantasy casting, let’s go ahead and do the requisite open thread in which we all speculate over who they’ll cast. But why make this blog like every other speculation thread? So let’s put up a constraint: no white male choices. Women and minorities only.

Second, because everyone is going to ask, yes, this does change the plan for the blog’s endgame. There’s no point in getting four entries into the Twelfth Doctor before ending the blog – it’s just a rubbish endpoint. So instead, barring major plot twists, Matt Smith’s regeneration story will be the final post of TARDIS Eruditorum. Obviously there’s a high chance of me going back and doing the Twelfth Doctor at some point, but equally obvious, I’m not going to make any firm plans on that right now.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 1st, 2013)

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Well, that’s another week over and done with, so it’s time for the open thread. It was a blog-writing week for me, which is always a busy one – at the moment I’m about a thousand words into The Christmas Invasion, which will post not this Monday but next, with one more post to do over the weekend. I’m also in the midst of some housekeeping on the blog, and failing spectacularly not to have large swaths of my time eaten by laying groundwork for the British Comics Project, which in no way needs to be done now, but which seems to want to be played with, so, you know, obey the muse.

Actually, one of these days I should start talking about what I have planned for that project, which secretly has a real name now instead of “the British Comics Project” and a bunch of cool ideas on structure and scope. And nothing resembling a way it will ever turn into neat and orderly books that people will want to buy. So I’ll probably have to figure out some other way of funding that. (Current candidate: write myself about a month-wide buffer and offer cheap monthly subscriptions to read a month ahead instead of at the public blog pace.) 
Currently I plan to let that run alongside the last month or two of TARDIS Eruditorum, which probably has a bit more than a year left to run. So it probably is too early to start revealing much of anything.
So let’s turn the question around – what creative projects are you working on?
One of you I know the answer for. Josh Marsfelder has been getting underway with Vaka Rangi. Josh is one of my longest standing readers, and I’ve been nagging him to do an episode-by-episode blog of Star Trek for ages, mainly because I want to read one and will never get around to writing one. If TARDIS Eruditorum is a history of the utopian possibilities of the particularly British image of eccentric spaces and portals to faerie, Vaka Rangi is a history of the utopian possibilities and problems of the American image of the frontier. It’s intelligent, often scathing, and one of the most exciting blogs I’ve seen start recently. Go get in while catching up is still a quick job.
In the mean time, what are the rest of you up to creatively?
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 61 (Big Brother)

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I could never have written this post as well as Richard Jones, and so I asked them to step in for a guest post. This is one of the best decisions I have made in the course of this project.

 
In 2009 everyone was hard at work writing blog articles in anticipation of ‘The End of Time’, the grand finale to Doctor Who’s Davies era. io9’s contribution took an interesting approach, offering a list of the errors the production ran the risk of making.
“Though there’s absolutely no denying Davies has successfully forged a massive popular (and, to a slightly lesser extent, critical) success with his revival of Doctor Who,” wrote Alasdair Wilkins, “I’m sorry to say that I’m still not entirely convinced he’s all that good at writing episodes of Doctor Who.” Yet hope remained. Perhaps Davies could learn from the mistakes the article identified and seize this last chance to convince? A key point on this syllabus of errors was the way Davies’ Big Climactic Epics interacted with pop culture. The article made it clear that it didn’t “have anything against Richard Dawkins having a cameo on Doctor Who” but that it’s “kind of a shame that Christopher Eccleston’s final appearance will forever be linked to Big Brother.”
For Wilkins, timelessness and obtrusiveness were what made Dawkins okay and Davina not, but for some who find Big Brother’s role in the 2005 finale to be a thing of shame there may be a few more cultural value judgements weighing down. Many fans have a lot invested in the idea that Doctor Who is one sort of television and Big Brother is another. For them to be occupying the same space so brazenly is a challenge. This is the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration story. This will be in lists. This grants “a Dalek plot involving Big Brother” the same eternally iconic status as “falling off a big telescope.” What are we supposed to do with this?
The BBC have on three occasions obtained the rights to broadcast shows using the Big Brother format. Two of them made it very clear how they felt about it. Extras was tediously and hypocritically anti, while Celebrity Big Brother was so uncritical that it found itself reabsorbed as an enduring stand of Big Brother, the fact that it was once a strand of Comic Relief quietly forgotten. If the very thought of Big Brother makes you angry then you’re going to get on fine with Extras and have no truck with Celebrity Big Brother. But what are you supposed to make of ‘Bad Wolf’?
It feels like it should be a showdown. The ratings demolition of ITV’s Celebrity Wrestling is such a part of the 2005 season’s industry mythology that it almost feels like that’s the arc here. Scripted Family Drama returns to a broadcasting landscape dominated by Reality TV! Scripted Family Drama casts down the Wrestley Champion sent by Reality TV to oppose it! Scripted Family Drama arrives at the Castle of Reality TV to do final battle with Big Brother, UNHOLY SIRE OF THE DARK POWER THAT HOLDS THE LAND IN THRALL!
…

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“But I remember his words as though they were yesterday.”: Balance of Terror

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“I’ve just seen it happen too many times.”

Finally.

After weeks of stumbling half-starts, frustratingly retrograde moves and absolutely awe-inducing spectacles of catastrophic, system-wide failure, we at last have the very first episode of Star Trek that can be unambiguously called an absolute masterpiece. “Balance of Terror” is an unmitigated triumph on all accounts and is exactly what the series needed to make up for the misfires of the past few episodes. In a bit of actually lovely irony, this still doesn’t save this incarnation of the show. Not only does it not save it, it gives even stronger evidence that it should be killed off and retooled as quickly as possible: Far from redeeming the Star Trek we’ve been watching since “The Corbomite Maneuver”, everything that makes “Balance of Terror” work as well as it does is something that decisively proves Gene Roddenberry’s original version of Star Trek is completely unworkable. We’re nine episodes in and we already have the show’s definitive deconstruction.

“Balance of Terror” is almost the inverse of “The Corbomite Maneuver”: While that episode went out of its way to glorify militaristic bravado and the chain of command, this one shows us in stark, terrible detail the tragic consequences of this way of thinking at a very intimate, personal level. Where Balok was an unseen Other throughout the majority of “The Corbomite Maneuver” before being revealed as friendly baby Clint Howard at the last minute, half of “Balance of Terror” is dedicated to the Romulan crew. We get to know each and every person on the Bird-of-Prey personally, especially Mark Lenard’s commander, and their tired, beaten down and world-weary demeanor bleakly, and all too well, foreshadows their ultimate fate.

Ah yes, the Romulans. A reveal so historic it threatens to overshadow the rest of the episode (though perhaps not as much so as that of the Klingons will to their debut episode later in the season). As one of the pre-eminent alien cultures in Star Trek, it would be beneficial to spend some time talking about them, although in this sentence I’ve already touched on the first important thing about them: The Romulans are a culture, and that’s a significant milestone for the series. Up ’til now, aliens in Star Trek have been portrayed as blunt metaphors for the show’s moral-of-the-week: The Talosians are an extension of the Platonic cave theme of “The Cage”, Gary Mitchell was absolute power incarnate, Charlie Evans embodies the troubles of puberty and Salt Vampire was…a Salt Vampire. Or a buffalo. “The Man Trap” wasn’t especially clear about that. Anyway, if they weren’t straight metaphors, they were Deus Ex Machina: The Thasians exist primarily to provide a convenient way to get Charlie Evans off the Enterprise so he wouldn’t blow it up. We don’t get any sense of what their culture or lifestyle is. Balok is just an Other for Kirk to practice his manly command skills with, albeit one who happens to be friendly We get no idea of what the First Federation is like, though the design of the Fesarius is certainly imaginative.…

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Shockingly, The Daily Mail Is Evil

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Some of you may have had the “luck” of seeing the media shitstorm whipped up around Intellect Books’s forthcoming anthology Doctor Who and Race, edited by Lindy Orthia. If not, it’s exactly what you’d expect; the Daily Mail got a copy and decided to run a typical Daily Mail article in which the bizarre leftist intellectual attack on an upstanding British tradition is exposed to reveal the menace of the… whatever, really. (Obviously the Daily Mail likes Doctor Who today, since attacking academics is more important than making the BBC look bad. They can always go back to hating Doctor Who later, after all.)

I was one of the peer reviewers for the anthology, and while it would be inappropriate for me to offer a full review of the book, not least because I saw an older draft of it, I am in a position that virtually nobody else commenting on this kerfuffle is in that I’ve actually read the thing, as opposed to just the Daily Mail article. So after checking with Ms. Orthia that opening my mouth would be OK, I figured I’d weigh in.

First of all, absolutely every story on this is a retread of the original Daily Mail story, which if you really want to read you can find here, but be sure to swab your monitor down after. To be fair, pissing off the Daily Mail is the very definition of picking the right enemies, and I’m frankly jealous of Ms. Orthia for pulling it off. So the bulk of this should surprise exactly nobody. Still, let’s make a few observations. First of all, let’s note that the two essays singled out in the Daily Mail article are, in fact, the first two in the book. It’s not even clear the Mail received the entire book – the first ten percent of it would be sufficient to write the takedown they mustered. So actually, maybe I actually am the only person in this kerfuffle who’s read the book.

The Daily Mail’s screed objects to two essays, both in the first four of the book. The first, by the blogger Fire Fly, is admittedly problematic. In fact, at least in the version I read, I found it a terribly weak essay that systematically overstated its claims. It’s a reworking of a blog post, and it reads like one – a polemical screed of the sort that’s perfectly sensible as a discussion-starting bomb lobbing on the Internet. As the opening chapter in a pop-academic anthology presumably aimed in part at Doctor Who fans, it’s a… poor choice, and one that absolutely everybody should have expected to cause exactly this reaction.

But crucially, it’s one essay, and the only one that’s anywhere near so polemical. The other essay criticized, Amit Gupta’s look at the use of cricket as a signifier in the Davison era, is utterly tame, and it’s almost funny to see the Daily Mail lay into it. It is, in effect, a primer on the status of cricket as a cultural signifier in the early Thatcher years, and something it is nearly impossible to work up any meaningful objection to.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 23 (Only Human)

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When the writers for the first series of Doctor Who were announced, they were a fairly sensible lot. It was, by and large, a particular social circle of Doctor Who fans who entered television writing in the years immediately following the series’ cancellation. All had written either for Virgin or Big Finish, and they were all only one or two degrees of separation from each other in terms of being close friends or colleagues. They reflected, in other words, a particular generation of Doctor Who creators. For the most part they were of the Virgin generation, although, as noted, all but Moffat and Davies himself had written for Big Finish as well (and Moffat had been invited to write for Big Finish, but declined because he didn’t want to write past Doctors). But for the most part they represented the writers on the good half of the Wilderness Years, and their departure as the major creative figures in Doctor Who coincided with the post-TV Movie decline.

Given all of this, there was a name whose absence from the first series writing credits stuck out a bit: Gareth Roberts. He was, after all, one of the acclaimed figures of the Virgin years, had a number of high profile Big Finish audios, many with regular co-conspirator Clayton Hickman, and, more to the point, had worked with Davies previously on Springhill and had scads of television credits to his name. But for whatever reason he wasn’t. He’s said in interviews that this saddened him, and that he took on writing Only Human for the New Series Adventures line in part to show that he should have been asked to contribute.

The first thing we should say, then, is that it worked. Roberts wrote a raft of auxiliary material for the second season, including the interactive Attack of the Graske and the prequel TARDISodes, before managing the feat of getting tapped for a script in five consecutive production years of Doctor Who – a streak only equalled (not surpassed) by Russell T Davies himself. If Only Human was his audition piece, it was massively, phenomenally successful.

The second thing we should say is that this is tragically unusual. Gareth Roberts is the only person to have written for both the New Series Adventures line and the television series. This fact means that the New Series Adventures are not able to function in one of the most obvious ways that they could function, which is as a sort of minor league where new talent can be cultivated. We talked with The Monsters Inside about the relative purposelessness of this line, and how it existed seemingly without an audience, for the relatively cynical reason of selling stuff to young Doctor Who fans, or, more accurately, their parents.

One thing that could alleviate that – and not just in the sense of “giving the line a non-cynical reason to exist” but in the sense of making it a line that people write non-cynically for – would be if it were meaningfully possible to go from writing for it to writing for the television series.…

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“Your emotions make you weak!”: The Naked Time

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Genies and Ladlemen, presenting the Kevin Thomas Riley Revue…

An argument could be made that “The Naked Time” is the first “proper” Star Trek episode, at least to a certain number of fans. It’s definitely the first truly memetic one: Everyone remembers Sulu fencing, Uhura’s “sorry, neither” line (which is, admittedly, brilliant) Nurse Chapel professing her love for Spock and Spock’s subsequent meltdown and Kirk’s “I’ll never lose you! Never!”. I’ve even read reports of Trekkers going full Rocky Horror Picture Show on this episode when it’s screened at conventions, hissing along with the PSI 2000 virus and cheering at appropriate intervals, although being a lonely shut-in who spends their time marathoning Star Trek and flailing desperately at a keyboard into the wee hours of the morning I wouldn’t have any hands-on experience with that.

This episode was also Bob Justman’s choice for the premier on the grounds that the reduced inhibitions brought upon by the disease would be a good introduction to the characters and their personalities. Justman has a point and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the thinking that went into making an unapologetic remake of “The Naked Time” the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation twenty years later. There are issues with Justman’s argument here I’ll look at a little later, but I do agree with him in the broader sense that the strength of “The Naked Time” is in the fact it’s an Actor Showcase Episode, which is a good thing to put near the beginning of a TV series. Before I get into that though, I want to square the plot away because, well, it has all the same problems every other Roddenberry-produced Star Trek episode does. It’s not as bad in this regard as something like “The Corbomite Maneuver”, “Charlie X” or “The Enemy Within” so I don’t need to go into the same level of detail as I did with those episodes, but it is worth mentioning if for no other reason then to point out how systemic a problem this has become for the show.

The PSI 2000 virus works by producing an effect similar to serious intoxication and strips the victim of all inhibitions. “The Naked Time” thinks this is absolutely disastrous. The Enterprise quite literally spirals out of control because the bridge crew can’t keep their heads about them (a plot point telegraphed in the bluntest, most obvious manner known to mankind by Scott in the briefing room in the first act). It’s clear the episode is treating this as another reiteration of the logic vs. emotions conflict, and given how upfront it’s being about its symbolism we should take this as the definitive statement of Star Trek‘s position on the matter, or at least that of Star Trek under Gene Roddenberry. While there was some room for debate when Spock touts the superiority of logic in something like “Where No Man Has Gone Before” or “The Corbomite Maneuver” because it’s Spock and we’re always meant to be at least a little suspicious of him, there’s really no other way to read the Enterprise screaming towards a fiery death because the crew can’t control their emotional desires.…

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Farewell to Academia

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At the end of my last class of the semester, one of my best students – one who, out of some tragically misguided instinct, actually took a class with me a second time because he enjoyed it – came up to tell me that he’d had a good semester but didn’t think he was going to re-enroll next semester. I asked why, and he explained that he had a job lined up in the family business and just couldn’t justify the loans.

Years of defending academia and the value of a college education reared up inside of me, ready to make an impassioned speech. I wanted to tell him not to. And… I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Because he was right. I could not in good conscience tell one of my best students that it was worth the loans. And in hindsight, that was the moment I decided I was well and truly done with academia.

I had been going to take one last stab at the job market this fall. With the Flood book done and maybe one or two more articles in process, and maybe even a book deal on an edited version of my dissertation. Just to answer the question, one last time, of whether I could make it in academia.

Which is, as it happens, terribly silly. Academia is not a meritocracy. It’s a lottery, in which the grand prize – a tenure track position – is dangled over the heads of everybody so that we agree to work for the appalling wages that adjunct faculty get. I’ll use numbers from the University of Akron, since I have them ready to hand: adjuncts make up 70% of the Univeristy of Akron faculty, and teach 62% of freshman and sophomore classes. They make up 15% of the faculty budget. The annual income for a lecturer teaching a 4/3 load – i.e. the equivalent of full time – is $20,038, which isn’t even $2000 more than the median income for fast food workers in Ohio.

Meanwhile, the odds on tenure track appointments are astonishingly grim. It’s not unusual for a job to get five hundred applicants. There were, last year, maybe two dozen jobs in my field. This is, to be clear, a change. Academia was not always dominated by part time labor. There has been an active decision at multiple universities to move away from full-time tenured faculty and towards cheaper adjuncts. There has been an active decision to expand PhD programs because PhD students provide extremely cheap labor. There has been an active decision to allow skyrocketing administrative salaries and increased bloat of administration while refusing to expand faculty. There’s been an active decision to favor MOOCs and other such solutions, often prepared by for-profit companies, for the sheer cheapness of them.

This creates a difficult dualism. On the one hand, the only way to describe the overall labor conditions of universities is “sickeningly abusive and corrupt.” On the other, the fact of the matter is that most faculty are pretty decent folks.…

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A Galactic Yo-Yo (Boom Town)

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So my choice is “or death?”

It’s June 4th, 2005. Crazy Frog is at number one with “Axel F.” Coldplay, Akon, Gorillaz, Oasis, and Gwen Stefani also chart, the latter with “Hollaback Girl,” one of the most wonderfully awful things ever recorded. In news, Vanity Fair reveals the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Geldof announces the Live 8 concert to coincide with July’s G8 summit, and Scottish Gaelic is given formal recognition in Scotland.

The recognition of Scottish Gaelic was part of a general trend under Blair’s New Labour government towards devolution of powers towards Scotland, Northern Ireland, and, most importantly for our purposes here, Wales. The creation of devolved legislatures and a new push for use of their native languages were only facets of a larger tendency towards national pride in the countries.

In Wales, at least, another facet was the expansion of the existent BBC Cymru Wales. The BBC always had a Wales-specific arm that offered regional programming, including Welsh-language programming, and did in-house drama productions like the BBC’s longest-running soap opera Pobol y Cwm. But with the rise of the Welsh National Assembly it became terribly politic to bolster drama production at regional facilities (in no small part because doing so gave the BBC a wider base of political support). And so BBC Cymru Wales was used to produce an increasing variety of English-language programming for broadcast outside of Wales.

This process coincided neatly with Julie Gardner getting headhunted from London Weekend Television in 2003 to become Head of Drama at BBC Wales. Gardner brought with her Russell T Davies’s Casanova project, which had been kicking around at LWT. Julie Gardner was the Verity Lambert of her day – a tremendously skilled television producer who combined a knack for getting along with just about everybody ever with an absolutely obsessive love of the medium. In particular she was a devoted fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a fact that gets put in every description like this out of the not entirely mistaken belief that Buffy was the model for the new series version of Doctor Who. (A statement that is certainly part of the story, but as we’ve seen over the past month, only part.)

Meanwhile, over at BBC One, Controller Lorraine Heggessey finally clawed the internal rights on Doctor Who back from BBC Worldwide, which was continuing to be spectacularly inept at making a film. She and BBC Head of Drama Jane Tranter approached Julie Gardner, seemingly out of a combination of a desire to put a high-profile drama in Cardiff and the knowledge that Gardner was already working with Russell T Davies on Casanova. Gardner was a tremendously hands-on Head of Drama on Doctor Who, serving as an executive producer and working closely with Davies. The two of them had tremendously shared taste in many things, Buffy included, and the result was that they largely adopted the US showrunner model where a head writer is also in the thick of day-to-day production and served as a primary auteur on the television series.…

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