Queers Dig Time Lords (Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas, eds)
Sorry to throw two book reviews at you in a week, but, well, there were two books to review this week. Next week I’ll use the off-day posts for angry polemics or something.
Mad Norwegian was kind enough to offer me a review copy of their upcoming Queers Dig Time Lords. Which is lovely of them. Lovelier, however, is the fact that they actually made the book good.
I mean, it’s not like it was a huge risk. Mad Norwegian are probably the best publishers of Doctor Who-related material going right now. Their “As dig Bs” series is consistently and rightly acclaimed. I met several of the folks involved in the original book in the line, Chicks Dig Time Lords, at DePaul, and they were all wonderful. Perspectives on geek culture from people outside the normative band of what fans look like.
But this one is more important than that. I mean, I don’t normally want to go for what I’ve heard memorably described as the Oppression Olympics whereby we try to figure out which repressed group has it worse. And in this case, I still don’t want to. But nevertheless… well, let’s just look at a quick list, shall we?
John Nathan-Turner, Matthew Waterhouse, Ian Levine, Gary Downie, Peter Grimwade, Gareth Roberts, Russell T Davies, John Barrowman, Gary Russell, Paul Magrs, Mark Gatiss, Phil Collinson. It’s not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination. I’m 100% certain there are major figures not on it. It’s just a list of prominent Doctor Who figures who I know off the top of my head are gay. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Which is to say that there’s a particular reason this book matters. Because gay Doctor Who fandom was and is a real thing. The reasons for this are not simple, but are at least articulable. Paul Magrs has a fantastic essay leading off this volume that does it – basically, between the lack of overt sexual desire on the part of the Doctor and the high camp of the series, it became very, very easy to perform a queer reading of it in which the Doctor is closeted. And many did. But note also that there’s no coherent approach or vision of Doctor Who across that list: it’s next to impossible to imagine any opinion on Doctor Who shared by Ian Levine, Gareth Roberts, and Mark Gatiss. Gay fandom is not some monolithic bloc of approaches. It’s just very large, and has been around for decades now, albeit without any real acknowledgement from the series.
This is one of the very important things about The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances – it marks the point where that closet is finally detonated. And detonated in an explicitly queer way – the episode goes out of its way to confirm that the Doctor is not just a straight bloke. Whatever one might think about having a sexualized Doctor, it has to be understood: there’s a huge, huge group of fans who put a lot of effort into the program for whom the Doctor’s final “who with” is the cathartic endpoint of decades of marginalization.…
The Impossible Dream of a Thousand Alchemists (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances)
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| Ouch. |
It’s May 21st, 2005. Akon remains at number one for the week, though the next week Oasis takes it with “Lyla.” The Black Eyed Peas, The Gorillaz, Jennifer Lopez, and Kelly Osbourne also chart, the latter with the surprisingly non-awful “One Word.” Since the last story George Galloway, recently elected as an MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, testified in front of the US Senate over the Oil-for-Food program. On the 21st itself Arsenal celebrates the Glazer takeover of Manchester United by beating them on penalties in the FA Cup final, the first time that cup was determined by penalties.
Penalties, of course, mean that the final ran long, which nearly led to it crashing into Doctor Who, which had been moved forward half an hour to accommodate Eurovision (it was Greece with “My Number One”), and the result led to The Empty Child getting pummelled in the ratings. Actually, the entire tail end of the first season slumped in the ratings, without even a bump for the season finale. But The Empty Child, though not the series low, bore the brunt of it, becoming the only Doctor Who episode of the first three seasons to fall out of the top twenty.
These days, of course, we know it as a classic and the high point of the first series. Everyone knows that. Even still, there’s something odd about its popularity. The watershed moment for it was probably its winning of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award, although its triumph in the Doctor Who Magazine season poll has to be taken as meaningful. But we should highlight how strange it is that the episodes won the Hugo given that they hadn’t even been screened in the US, which dominates the Hugos (which are presented at Worldcon, an international con that is nevertheless typically held in America). And there’s something indicatively weird about the nominations, where Doctor Who got three nominations, none of them for Russell T Davies’s episodes (which admittedly also, save for the finale, lined the bottom of the Doctor Who Magazine poll).
And, of course, we have the irksome problem of Moffat lurking. Because let’s be honest, this is Doctor Who by the current showrunner, and there’s no way that the gravity of “let’s analyze the series as it is now” can be avoided entirely, especially four days after a season finale. But what’s interesting is less comparing this to Moffat’s future time on the series and more to his past. Because this is in no way the pair of episodes that anyone expected Moffat to turn in. He may be known as the master of horror in Doctor Who, but that’s not at all what his past career pointed to. He was a sitcom writer who’d had a successful children’s show way back (and Press Gang played into him getting Doctor Who as much as Century Falls did for Davies).
More to the point, the reason Davies hired him for these two episodes wasn’t to do creepy horror.…
Sensor Scan: Lost in Space
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| Lost in Space |
If we’re going to try to piece together the climate Star Trek was entering in the mid-1960s and the way it might have first been received, it would be beneficial to spend some time talking about its closest contemporary TV cousin. Star Trek was but one of many science fiction shows on the air during this period, but the one it’s most frequently compared with is Lost in Space. There are a number of very good reasons for this: One, the two shows ran nearly concurrently, with their premiers and finales less than a year apart and two, both were voyaging starship shows loosely based around going to a new place every week and stumbling into adventure. Also, from a mid-1960s US perspective, Lost in Space would have been seen as “the other big space show” as while there were quite a few shows built in the adventure sci-fi model a great deal of them were German or British productions and would remain unknown to US audiences for decades.
The flipside of this is that for a long time Star Trek fans had a history of speaking derisively about Lost in Space, typically holding it up as the chief representative of an older, sillier, and campier method of doing TV sci-fi that Star Trek‘s emphasis on Hard Science thankfully swept away. And superficially at least the two shows do in fact seem strikingly different: While the Enterprise crew is often, and rather erroneously in my opinion, referred to as a family, the crew of the Jupiter 2 literally is one: Expedition commander Dr. John Robinson bundled his wife and children up into a flying saucer and departed an overpopulated Earth in an attempt to colonize a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. This leads into the next point of contrast: While the Enterprise‘s mission is supposedly to Seek Out New Life And New Civilizations (though recall we haven’t actually heard those words spoken yet), the Robinsons want basically the exact opposite: To find a habitable planet, settle down and start life anew.
It should be rather obvious by now that the premise of Lost in Space is lifted pretty much wholesale from the novel The Swiss Family Robinson, just updated for the Space Age. Indeed it’s not even the first work to do The Swiss Family Robinson In Space: That would be the Gold Key comic series The Space Family Robinson. The ramifications of this are interesting though; having just sort of panned “The Cage” for not being Vaka Rangi and for serving as proof positive Star Trek isn’t quite what it’s remembered as or thought of as being about, it’s tempting to say Lost in Space is much closer to that concept and call it a show ahead of its time. Here we have a family setting out on a voyage purely for migratory and population concerns looking to find a new home for themselves. This would, on the surface at least, seem like a straightforward translation of Polynesian navigation philosophy to the Space Age.…
S. Alexander Reed – Assimilate
Let’s start with the disclosures. Alex is a dear friend and colleague – my coauthor on the upcoming book on Flood, in fact. I’ve known him for over a decade; he was in my wedding party. I’m in the acknowledgments of this book. My friendship with him is one of those that is more an ongoing serialized conversation. We see each other a couple times a year and the conversation calmly picks up with litanies of things we’ve each squirreled away in the corners of our brains with mental notes to tell each other.
Alex is appallingly tall and prone to exaggeration. He is one of those people who monopolizes the available talent pool. He’s a ferociously insightful and well-read critic, an adept rock star, a phenomenal conversationalist, and damnably handsome to boot. Working with him on the Flood book consisted of a workflow in which I banged out obscene amounts of verbiage in a short time and he painstakingly worked it over and added to it until it was actually a good book.
Beyond that, my intellectual debt to him is so massive as to be impossible to fully account for. The list of things and ideas he introduced me to is simply massive. He is one of those influences so fundamental that to attempt to encapsulate it in some list of things he introduced me to feels desperately inadequate. And reading Assimilate is thus a terribly strange experience for me – a blur of past conversations where I realize these ideas were being worked out. I hit a passage on Guy Debord and remember vividly the conversation picking him up from the airport where I excitedly told him that he needed to read Society of the Spectacle. I nod along enthusiastically at his descriptions of 1970s England unable to begin to tell what bits are where talking to him influenced me, what bits are the other way around, and what bits are just us conversing into separate Word documents. And there’s nothing like a way to tell.
Which is to say that this is in no way a detached critical book review. This is unapologetic fanboying of the highest order. Because if there is someone I most consider a fellow traveler in terms of critical approach, it is S. Alexander Reed. And with Assimilate there finally exists a proper monument demonstrating what I truly and unhesitatingly believe to be one of the greatest creative and critical minds in the world today.
Oddly, if irrelevantly, the topic is not one I am by any measure passionate about. Like most people, the prospect of epically long songs consisting of little more than grinding machinery and featureless noise is not my idea of fun listening. On the other hand, there exist subjects that are somewhat more fun to read about than to experience, and industrial music, like the Pertwee era, is perhaps a prime example. It is as easy to not want to listen to Throbbing Gristle’s “Very Friendly,” which is eighteen minutes of grinding and narration about the Moors murders.
…
You Were Expecting Someone Else 21 (The Monsters Inside)
The Monsters Inside is one of the first three books in what is unofficially called the New Series Adventures, although even that name seems, in hindsight, ever so slightly wrong. The name derives from the two other BBC Books lines that existed in 2005, the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the former of which we covered from January through April, and the latter of which we looked at alongside each of the past doctors. And the name picks up on this, implying as it does that the New Series Adventures are going to exist alongside the other two lines.In hindsight this is rubbish. Neither the Eighth Doctor Adventures nor the Past Doctor Adventures were going to survive the year. We knew that about the Eighth Doctor Adventures, actually, but as of May, when this came out alongisde The Clockwise Man and Winner Takes All to launch the New Series Adventures, the theory was that the Past Doctor Adventures were going to keep running indefinitely, with the Eighth Doctor range being folded into it. Indeed, in May the Eighth Doctor Range hadn’t actually quite wrapped yet, with The Gallifrey Chronicles coming out the next month, alongside Eccleston’s regeneration.
All of which is to say that while to the mainstream Doctor Who was a titanic hit that was coming back for a second season and was set to be one of the BBC’s crown jewels, to fans May of 2005 was a bewildering period in which there were in fact three incumbent Doctors, the Paul McGann era having yet to resolve, the Eccleston era ongoing, and the Tennant era announced. And the question of what the auxiliary merchandise for the series would be like was still very much an open one.
Because there were, in fact, a lot of ways the merchandise could go. It could, of course, target fans. That was what Doctor Who merchandise had been doing since the 1980s, after all. That’s why the Doctor Who Cookbook and $125 Doctor Who stained glass windows made for selling in America as pledge awards for PBS existed – because adult fans could be trusted to buy this crap. And certainly this type of merchandise still exists, as apparently there are people who want to spend fifty pounds for a box set of the Pandorica chair and a River Song action figure. Or, for that matter, thirty pounds for a Winston Churchill action figure bundled with a Dalek with tea tray accessory. (And that’s just the new series. You can also, these days, spend thirty-five quid for action figures of Peri and Sil from Vengeance on Varos)
A reasonable person might have expected this to be how all of the new series merchandise would work: high end collectors items for the undiscerning Doctor Who fan with an excess of disposable income. This was basically how the novels had worked in the wilderness years, with Virgin and then BBC Books pumping out two books every month in what was actually the biggest flood of new Doctor Who material in the series’ history, especially once Big Finish got in on the act with audios.…
Star Trek Is…: The Cage
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| Rare Playmates Cage-era “Innerspace” toy prototype. |
“The Cage” occupies a strange space within Star Trek lore: As a pilot created by Gene Roddenberry and those closest to him to demonstrate to NBC what they envisioned Star Trek to be all about, but one that never actually aired on television, it is at once the progenitor of the entire franchise and also the only part of it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the series’ canon. “The Cage” is a very strange specimen indeed then: It’s not quite Star Trek, at least not the Star Trek that fans would come to recognise and love years later, but, by virtue of it being a pilot designed to embody the show’s core values and themes made before executive compromises changed the tone of the series, it is in many ways the purest Star Trek of all.
The one individual irreducibly linked to “The Cage”, what it is and what it does, far more so than in anything else bearing the Star Trek name, is Gene Roddenberry. Over the years mainline fandom has all but deified Roddenberry, and people tend to hold him up as a figurehead for everything they want Star Trek to embody and strive for (particularly so in the years immediately following his death in 1991 and the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005). This is also not helped by muddy and at times completely contradictory historical accounts of key moments in Star Trek history and Roddenberry’s own biographical details perpetuated by what can frankly best be described as rampant hearsay and cult of personality. As a result, it can be hard to actually get a solid critical handle on who Roddenberry was, what the extent of his contribution to Star Trek was and what exactly he wanted it to be.
“The Cage” then really is the best place to talk about Roddenberry and his influence on Star Trek, because no matter what Star Trek is going to become over the next several decades it will never again be as closely tied to Roddenberry’s personal conception of it as it is here. There are several reasons for this, the most immediately obvious one being its aforementioned status as a pilot, but also the fact that even as of the early Original Series Gene Roddenberry had a lot of help and input in shaping the direction of Star Trek that he didn’t have as much of here. The fact he was willing to entertain and genuinely listen to everyone’s ideas for, and criticisms of, his project is telling, but so is the fact their influence has been all but effaced from the history of the franchise to the point Roddenberry is, implicitly at least, held up as the source of every single good idea the series ever had, which is simply and flatly not true. But there is a reason Majel Barrett called “The Cage” her favourite episode and “Pure Star Trek”, and anyone who is seriously interested in the history of the franchise and Gene Roddenberry’s “vision”, whatever that may turn out to be, really ought to study it.…
Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields
A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:
…we’re not being encouraged to think there’s something wrong with this person [River]: it’s the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:
River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.
It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.
http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html
I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it’s still excellent. Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable… depressing but irrefutable.
I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced). Personally, I’m coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren’t racists or sexists don’t need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things.
Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or ‘old Legohead’ as I always think of him) for putting this my way.…
Sunday Pancaking
Well, I’m not going to make a habit out of having two weekend threads, but my dialogue with Mac Rogers on The Name of the Doctor just went up on Slate, so that’s probably there and fun to read. Or at least there and fun to have written. Thanks again to Mac and the folks at Slate for letting me play.
So while I’m opening a second front in the “let’s all discuss Name of the Doctor” battle, I figure I’ll toss out two (completely unrelated) questions to my readers to see if anyone can help.
First, I’ve been searching for months now for any copy of Springhill, Russell T Davies’s two-season apocalyptic soap with writing by Gareth Roberts and Paul Cornell. This seems a complete wipeout – nobody is getting anywhere close. It’s a massive missing link in the history of Davies’s Doctor Who, and there’s barely any information about it out there.
Second, and thinking ahead instead of back, I’d like to do a post on Outpost Gallifrey sometime during Series Two. Ideally adjacent to Love and Monsters. Unfortunately, the forum is long since gone off the Internet. I don’t suppose that anyone, for some bewilderingly freakish reason, has an archive of the long lost forum, and specifically of the threads that sprung up around that episode? If so, you’re a bigger digital packrat than even I am, but please do get in touch.
In both cases e-mailing me is probably more sensible than discussing in comments.…
Saturday Waffling (May 18th, 2013)
EDIT: Just to be official and emphatic on it, spoilers are allowed in the thread here, and if you don’t want to be spoiled you probably want to be in a different thread.
So, I imagine the discussion on The Name of the Doctor that starts up in a few hours will be interesting. I actually have seen most of it already – through wholly legitimate means (I’m doing another thing for Slate – though actually, the episode never leaked to BitTorrent at all, contrary to rumors). I suspect the fault lines on it will roughly map those of the Moffat era in general – those who like his stuff will love it, those who hate it will probably hate it. For my money, it and The Snowmen are the two high points of the season. And when my further thoughts on it go up on Slate I’ll let you all know.
In other news, I’ve just discovered that The CW is doing a remake of The Tomorrow People. I’ve gone ahead and embedded the trailer and a clip from the first episode for your horrified entertainment. I’m not at all certain how you’d even begin to go about presenting The Tomorrow People to an American audience. You have to explain why it’s not just the X-Men, I suppose. And I doubt the original series’ answer – that it’s utterly, flamboyantly gay – is going to cut it for modern American network television. So I’m not sure what their Plan B is on that. So yes, that looks awful.
Finally, reader Dave Simmons dropped word of an Indiegogo campaign to save a local indie bookstore in St. Louis from closure due to a developer buying their (really quite gorgeous) Victorian Gothic Revival location so that they can tear it down and build a storage facility. Here’s the link for that. I’m terribly partial to indie bookstores even as I’m horrifically in bed with Amazon and thus with many of the things forcing them out of existence. So if you’re in the St. Louis area, please do consider kicking them a few bucks.
And now back to trying to finish catching up on this week. At the time of writing, just two more blog posts out of this stretch to write. God help me.…