Eruditorum Press

Cuck the police

Blogrolling: Adventures with the Wife in Space

17

I’ve been terrible, over the years of this blog, about linking other blogs – I am for whatever reason not hugely fond of blogrolls on the sidebar of blogs. But I figure since I’m trying to find content on something more like a five to six post-per-week schedule, some talking about other great blogs on Teh Interwebs is a good plan.

And since it was one of the first blogs to give TARDIS Eruditorum a prominent link and is wrapping up, making it a sort of now-or-never thing, I figured I’d start with the well-loved Adventures With the Wife in Space. Which I assume most of you have heard of and already read, but hey, maybe my readership isn’t just a subset of theirs and this is actually news to someone.

The premise is pretty straightforward: Neil Perryman, as fannish a Doctor Who fan as ever did fan, marathons Doctor Who with his thoroughly not-a-Doctor-Who-fan wife. They banter, he writes up the banter, and everyone enjoys it. It’s a pretty reliable blog structure, as comic double acts are wont to be. (Indeed, when I get around to the commentary tracks I’ll be employing Jill to something like this effect.)

But what’s really interesting is the way the blog illuminates Doctor Who. One of the problems we reliably face in talking about Doctor Who is that, well, all of us who are willing to talk elaborately about Doctor Who are fans. Whereas Doctor Who, for most of its life, is widely consumed by people who are not dedicated fans. And while we know very well what we think of The Curse of Peladon or Snakedance and all the major perspectives, all of the perspectives we know are fan perspectives.

It’s not as though Sue is representative of all everyhuman perspectives. That’s not the point or the value. Rather, it’s that Sue offers a genuinely fresh take on Doctor Who. We get to see someone watch Doctor Who fresh and judge it more or less without the influence of fandom. Or, rather, in dialogue with fandom, which is faithfully represented by Neil, who reliably sums up the fan consensus so that Sue can dismiss it as idiotic. Which, actually, it usually is.

The blog is, in other words, not sufficient. It doesn’t solve the problem of our blindness towards the perspectives of people who are not dedicated fans. But it gives us a look we’ve never really seen at Doctor Who before and starts to break down the barrier. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, it’s terribly, terribly funny.

And has, as I said, just wrapped, meaning that if you want to do a big archive dive now’s your chance.…

Continue Reading

You Were Expecting Someone Else 20 (The Book of the World)

, 138

Well, it’s almost the right cover.

The Book of the World was, in essence, Lawrence Miles showing off that he could write a good Doctor Who script for the modern series. He put it up on the web for a week before taking it down, but you can still track down copies with only a little bit of dedication because nothing vanishes from the Internet. The script  actually dates to late 2007, making it a Tennant-era concern, and it wasn’t actually released until just before Silence in the Library, so actually is virtually a Moffat-era concern. But, to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to keep Lawrence Miles around as a theme that long. He’s a wilderness era theme, and the nature of his point here applies just as well as it would closer to the time of composition. Better, in many ways, as The Book of the World is very much an attempt at showing how Lawrence Miles would have rebooted the series, and holding that discussion back until 2007/2008 would have seemed strange. The script’s concerns are very much 2005 sorts of concerns, wherever it came from.

So in the wake of Lawrence Miles’s last moment of any major significance to the course and direction of Doctor Who, let’s look at him as a whole. One of his most steadfast assertions, which carries through virtually everything he says about or in Doctor Who – and even if I’ve not covered it all, I’ve read virtually all of it – is that he is not a science fiction person. This claim must come off strangely to anybody who is not Lawrence Miles, since reading his material it’s self-evident that he is, in fact, a science fiction person. Surely only a science fiction person would ever come up with the premise of Alien Bodies, in which a time traveller discovers that his own body’s “biodata” is being used as a weapon in a futuristic war. I mean, it sounds like something only a sci-fi person could ever come up with.

Certainly his fanbase is overwhelmingly comprised of sci-fi people. I mean, this goes without saying, yes? Someone whose writing credits exist entirely in spin-off media of a sci-fi show, and, at times, spin-offs of those spin-offs, and who is buried neck deep in the cult television paratext is clearly and self-evidently a sci-fi person, right? Well, sort of right.

See, the real point Miles is making when he says he’s not a sci-fi person and Doctor Who isn’t a sci-fi show is that in his view Doctor Who is a fantasy show in the tradition of magical realism. Which, again, he’s not wrong. The logic of Doctor Who is, as we’ve said before, really a traditional British one of eccentric spaces and portals to other worlds that has as many roots in Alice in Wonderland and Chronicles of Narnia as it does in, say, Quatermass. That’s not the only tradition Doctor Who comes out of, of course – it also owes a lot to the tradition of literary science fiction that the BBC was invested in.…

Continue Reading

The DePaul Thing

145

Right, I promised you all some notes on how the DePaul colloquium went last weekend.

I sadly only ended up catching half of the panels due to being behind on work, the lack of a scheduled lunch hour, and the fact that during one I got to make a choice between going to the panel or chatting to Rob Shearman, and I picked the latter. But some broad observations based on three panels (two of which I was on).

  • I’ve never wanted to end the blog with The End of Time before this weekend. I’m not going to, but my God, the level of fan hatred directed at the series as it stands right now is sickening. And overstated. The number of people who blithely declare that “forty-five minute episodes don’t work” is just bewildering to me. I mean, I’m not going to pretend that Moffat is flawless, but to hear people talk you’d think he was producing Timelash week in and week out. It’s really kind of depressing.
  • The fan/academic divide remains irritatingly persistent. There were a lot of unabashed fan presenters who just wanted to geek out about Doctor Who, and there were a lot of people who held to the traditional academic conference model of “I will read a paper out loud that is twice the length of the speaking slot I was told to fit a paper into.” The two did not always communicate edifyingly. 
  • Despite these complaints there remains a lot of really wonderful work going on regarding Doctor Who. Ashley Hinck is doing some marvelously interesting stuff with the intersections of fandom and social justice work. Derek Kompare does some lovely gritty technical analysis of Doctor Who. And people like Lynne M. Thomas and the rest of the people who created the (quite rightly) Hugo-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords anthology or the frabjous folks behind the Verity! podcast bring fresh perspectives to things. (I was absolutely thrilled to hear an extended analysis of Romana’s footwear – one that implied that there was an entire iceberg of further analysis on this point to come.) One of the things I’m going to really enjoy in a year or so when I’m done with TARDIS Eruditorum is being in a position to soak in more Doctor Who fandom.
  • Rob Shearman is a wonderfully gracious and funny man. If you’ve not looked at the fiction collections Big Finish have put out of his stuff, I really recommend them. I snagged Love Songs For The Shy and Cynical at the conference, but seriously, if you’re only familiar with his Doctor Who work, you owe it to yourself to check out his wider body of material.
  • I also need to thank Rob for the once-in-a-lifetime experience of walking into a restaurant and having someone whose work you’ve admired for nearly a decade bound up to you and tell you that he’s a huge fan. I, of course, repaid him by torturing him with the knowledge that I was in the midst of writing up Dalek.
…

Continue Reading

Attacked By This Little Man (The Unquiet Dead)

118

What do you mean they’re monsters? They’re blue! I
thought monsters were all green. Or yellow.

It’s April 9th, 2005. Tony Christie is still at number one, helpfully illustrating the problem of these paragraphs when the stories are weekly. Elvis is in there too, with, actually, a different song. You’ve also got Mariah Carey, Kylie, and Will Smith. Albums have New Order’s Waiting for the Sirens’ Call and Queens of the Stone Age’s Lullabies to Paralyze in the top ten as well. News-wise, in the last week Tony Blair called for a general election on May 5th, John Paul II was buried, and Eric Rudolph agreed to plead guilty to the 1996 Olympic Park bombing. While the day this story airs, Prince Charles marries Camilla Parker Bowles.

And on television it’s The Unquiet Dead. There’s a lot to discuss about this episode. Unfortunately, there’s also a huge controversy hanging over it that serves as an elephant in the room. It’s going to dominate comments, I suspect, and, more to the point, would dominate comments whether I talked about it or not. So let’s just get on with it, shall we?

This is the episode that Lawrence Miles, in the course of his blog about Doctor Who, absolutely ripped to shreds. He ripped it to shreds in a high profile way that created breathtaking backlash against him. And the crux of his argument is a solid one. Basically, he objects to the script’s handling of the Gelth, and specifically to the way in which, after the Doctor has made a terribly moving speech shouting down Rose’s complaint that it’s just not right for the Gelth to ride around in human corpses, the Gelth are shown to be evil after all, thus undermining all the great stuff the Doctor said about a different morality being valid. And, you know, Miles has a point. It’s a really good speech on the Doctor’s part, and it kind of sucks that the episode undermines it. Conceptually, at least, the episode would have been much stronger if it had managed to keep the Gelth as an apparent threat through more of the story only to reveal them as poor asylum seekers at the end.

But Miles takes the episode to real task, viewing this as a betrayal of what Doctor Who is and being as bad as an imagined “American TV show made in the late ’60s, which claimed that dark-skinned aliens weren’t quite smart enough to run their own society and thus shouldn’t be allowed a vote.” It’s a damning critique, and one that we have to take seriously, especially because, let’s face it, I’ve not exactly been Mark Gatiss’s biggest fan thus far. I do think his scripts tend towards an unfortunately reactionary tone, and that he’s one of the weaker regular writers. So, you know. There’s all that.

Trouble is, Miles is wrong here. Or, at least, insufficiently right. This is going to require some narrative theory, I’m afraid, because underlying this debate are some really old debates in literary theory.…

Continue Reading

Tygers & Horses

, , , , , , 0

“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” said William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and on lots of European walls in the 60s, and under the cover of an Eighth Doctor Adventure by Kate Orman.

I disagree.  I think you need the horses of instruction just as much as you need the tygers of wrath.  The thing about the tygers is that they chase you.  The thing about the horses is that you have to chase them.  If you’ve got a horse ahead of you and a tyger behind… well, that’s not comfortable, but it’s the better way round.  It gives you both a strong impetus and a goal.

Of course, horses can be wild and tygers can be calm.

I’ll stop there.  All analogies can be pushed to breaking point.  Even the ones invented by geniuses.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (May 4, 2013)

111

I dunno, we’ll see how this goes as a new feature. But let’s try a Saturday open thread, shall we? A “kick our feet up and talk about whatever for the weekend” sort of thing.

We’ll also make it the discussion thread for The Crimson Horror when it comes up. Going in, I’m torn on expectations. On the one hand, Gatiss. On the other hand, Gatiss’s last two scripts (Baskerville and Cold War) have been solid. On a third hand, Diana Rigg playing an over the top Doctor Who villain, which might well make all other arguments invalid.

And, of course, there’s Gatiss’s odd curse when it comes to inadvertent reactionary tendencies. Last time he wrote an inadvertent paean to mutually assured destruction that managed to sync with Thatcher’s death. This time Diana Rigg says stupid things about feminism just in time for his episode. I almost start to feel sorry for him.

Plus, of course, the extra suspense question: how much will I have to hurriedly rewrite Monday’s Unquiet Dead post after watching The Crimson Horror?

I’m writing this actually slightly earlier in the week, since I’m traveling Friday for that DePaul Doctor Who thing. Which I’ll try to write up impressions from and get up sometime next week.

And related to nothing even remotely covered by this blog in the course of normal service, has anyone ever had rillettes? Jill and I are going to a lovely place that we went to last time we were on Chicago for vacation, and are positively giddy over the prospect of getting to have the salmon rillettes we had last time again. Seriously. We’ve been talking about these rillettes for a week now. We’re horrible. If this blog becomes a food blog with an unhealthy obsession with rillettes next week, you’ve now been warned. Rillettes Eruditorum: A Psychochronography of Shredded Meat.

So, what’ve you got planned for the weekend?…

Continue Reading

Somehow We’ve Materialized, For A Split Second Of Time (The End Of The World)

89

I have a budget now. Budgets are cool.

Hello. There are some new reward tiers at the Kickstarter that may tempt you.

It’s April 2nd, 2005. Tony Christie is at number one with “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo,” which features the Abzorbaloff. 50 Cent, Elvis Pressley, Will Smith, Gwen Stefani and Eve, Natalie Imbruglia, and Nelly with Tim McGraw also chart. Christie also has the top album, while The Killers and Green Day also make that chart.

Since last week, a sizable earthquake took place off the coast of Sumatra. Robert Mugabe held “free and fair” elections, which he proceeded to win by an implausible margin. And on the day this story airs, Pope John Paul II dies. Also, in all of this, it’s announced that Christopher Eccleston will be departing the series, leading absolutely everybody to conclude that David Tennant would obviously be taking over (although that wasn’t formally announced until the day Aliens of London aired). But today, on television, it’s The End of the World.

The single most important moment in The End of the World comes in a seemingly lightweight scene in which we see the robotic spiders scuttling down an air shaft. The camera is positioned at one end of the ducting, and the spiders are scuttling towards the camera. And one of them bumps into the camera. This, of course, is a joke about the supposed poor quality of special effects in classic Doctor Who, the joke being that the spiders are CGI monsters and thus cannot possibly jostle the camera except on purpose. So they’ve put in a deliberate “bad effect.” But perhaps more to the point is that they’ve selected a bad effect from within Doctor Who’s own history, namely the infamous scene from The Web Planet of a Zarbi plowing into the camera where they couldn’t do a retake because they simply didn’t have time in the studio that day.

I do not, I trust, have to go to the length of analysis demonstrated in Rose for every episode in order to show how the new series works. Episodes are made up of bibs and bobs of other television shows, characters from one type of show get shoved into another, and much of the drama is, at least partially, based on the question of what shows do or don’t hold power over the narrative. That’s the basic model for the new series – one that’s going to be used for practically every entry for the remainder of the blog. Likewise, I do not have to stress the way in which the invocations of things in particular places carries meaning. In an episode of television that is stitched up out of other television the particulars of what television you stitch into the lining of matter.

And The Web Planet is a spectacularly weird thing to evoke. The Web Planet is not what you would call a highly acclaimed episode. It got phenomenal ratings at the time, was novelized, and was quick out to VHS, and so it’s unmistakably a classic episode that loads of people have seen, but that’s not equivalent to a lot of people liking it.…

Continue Reading

Stories, Titles, and Kickstarter Updates

40

Someone asked me, and I found it an entertaining question, what I thought the most jarring mismatches in story quality vs title quality were. I noted, for instance, that The Ark in Space, Rose, and all of Power, Evil, and Remembrance of the of the Daleks set were spectacularly underwhelming names for great stories, as are City of Death and The Mind Robber, whereas Nightmare of Eden, Let’s Kill Hitler, and The Arc of Infinity are all rather lovely names with stories that really don’t come close (though really, what story could be good enough to be called Let’s Kill Hitler?)

But then I asked what I find the more interesting question: what stories most perfectly match their titles in quality. I suggested Delta and the Bannermen as one that, regardless of how much you like it, is almost exactly as good as its title suggests. Someone else went for Love and Monsters. You?

Also, there’s two new Kickstarter rewards – a sort of scaled down version of the “signed and numbered books” version and another high roller option. I’ve been finally watching Game of Thrones, about which I knew basically nothing, and doing short recaps on another social media venue, and have been quite enjoying that, and thought it might be fun to run a few short-run features on other media here, just to see what sorts of things are a good fit for me and attract interest.

So here’s your opportunity. Want me to write up the entirety of Firefly? Always wanted a systematic close-reading of that 1990s classic of Avengers crossover Operation Galactic Storm? (No. Nobody has ever wanted that.) Looking to see me go back to video game criticism and do Mass Effect? Itching for an overview of the films of Darren Aronofsky? These and any other topics can be yours for $200 over here. (Don’t feel like it has to be an object that breaks sensibly into four parts. You pick the topic, I’ll figure out how to get four posts out of it.) Only about $4000 to go before we get the William Blake book.

Back to writing Dalek with me. Well, actually, Rob Shearman already did that, so I’ll be going with writing About Dalek.…

Continue Reading

People Made of Smoke and Cities Made of Song (Rose)

186

HAI!

Musing on From Hell and its connections to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Alan Moore posited that in holistic detection “you wouldn’t just have to solve the crime, you’d have to solve the entire world that the crime happened in.” Brilliant. Slap out some business cards. El Sandifer: Holistic media critic. Get to work. Except this terrain is slippery. The distinction between world and crime becomes vague,until everything becomes a crime scene, ready for its evidence bag giftwrap and careful analysis. Still, in a world of crime scenes there must be kings. The random acts of vandalism, wall scrawl fiction for the anoraks huddling under the bridge, must in time add up to something. To the big one. The shocking crime in an otherwise nice neighborhood. “These things don’t happen here.” Of course they don’t. Ropey sci-fi programs that haven’t been popular since the 1970s don’t come back to be the biggest thing on television. That’s not how this works. And yet here’s the crime scene, splatters of anti-plastic everywhere. No point in getting all holistic now. This time we keep it simple. We just solve the crime. Tape off the scene, form a perimeter. Perform whatever banishings you feel appropriate. And then let’s get to work. Forty-four minutes and ten seconds of history, rounded by yellow caution tape. Go slow, be meticulous. What the hell happened here?

A brief stab at showing the world – a perfectly ordinary thing for what we might charitably call “this sort of show.” The music swells, the camera accelerates, and we plunge breathless. (Already we are invoking old things – Doctor Who has begun an episode like this before.) We fall into the world, towards Britain, towards London, and then… into an alarm clock.

This is not where we’re supposed to be; drum and bass montage of Billie Piper, eponymous Rose, in a high speed run of fast cuts, going about her day. A banal shop-girl’s existence in the buzzing heart of London. Trafalgar Square, in amongst the swirl of double decker busses, what stands out is the aggressive willingness of the episode to date itself, from Rose’s trendy-almost-to-the-week overly pink bedroom to a Starbucks and an advertisement for The Lion King appearing in shot. It takes all of a minute for us to know Rose, to know her living situation, her well-meaning but slightly oafish boyfriend, her uninspiring job. We all know her. There’s not a viewer in Britain who does not know her after this sequence. Ten point eight million of them. More than anything else on television that week save four Corries and a pair of EastEnders. Eighteen percent of the country. In unison run smack into Rose Tyler, Sun-child of the popular culture.

And yet haunting this montage is a series of odd cuts and shot framings. A camera staying on for a second after Rose has left the shot, focusing on a lone mannequin, or a shot inexplicably framed so that a trio of mannequins are the focal point instead of Billie Piper.…

Continue Reading

New Kickstarter Stretch Goal, And a Thing in Chicago This Weekend (EDIT: Plus a Big Finish sale)

22

It’s time for this to become the
second best Doctor Who/Blake
crossover book ever published.

I know, I’d been going to shut up until Wednesday. But this is cool and I want to get the word out.

I’ve just opened a new stretch goal on Kickstarter – an ambitious one for if we can reach $15,000. A number that seemed unthinkable two weeks ago, but now seems ever so slightly possible. In the same vein as the Logopolis volume, a stand-alone version of my essay on The Three Doctors. You may remember that essay as the sprawling William Blake-style analysis of the story.

And so, of course, the book will be William Blake-style – an oversized, full colour book featuring, as its centerpiece, the Three Doctors essay done in the style of a Blake illuminated manuscript. It’ll also include some new explanatory essays, including one that actually explains the essay instead of that gently mocks the very idea of explaining it.

I’ve also opened up a new way to increase your rewards – the $10 TARDIS Eruditorum Starter Pack, in which you get all three existing volumes for $10, delivered as soon as the Kickstarter ends, and then, for good measure, get the revised Hartnell volume when it comes out. That’s available as a standalone pledge level, or can be added to any existing pledge for $10. So if you’ve not actually bought the books yet, here’s your opportunity to, in effect, buy two and get the third one for free.

You can give me your money here.

Also! I should have mentioned this much earlier, but this Saturday, May 4th, I’ll be appearing at a one-day colloquium at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. I’m on roundtable panels at 10am and 11am, but far more interesting people than I, namely Rob Shearman, will also be there, at one point giving a live commentary track on Dalek while I frantically rewrite my post on it.

The webpage for that event is here. If you’re in the area, I hope you can make it by and say hi. To Rob, of course.

EDIT: If any of the coverage of Big Finish during the Wilderness Years (or elsewhere) has intrigued you and you want to check it out, Big Finish is holding a 10% off sale on their entire stock for May 1st. Details are here.

I assure you, there’s stuff there worth spending money on. In particular check out any of Rob Shearman’s stuff, Marc Platt’s divine Spare Parts, the much-loved Doctor Who and the Pirates, the wonderful Companion Chronicle Find and Replace (featuring Jo Grant and Iris Wildthyme), and probably loads of other stuff people will point out in the comments as particularly good. (Josh Marsfelder, for instance, will tell you to buy Robophobia.)…

Continue Reading

«‹ 281 282 283 284 ›»