Excuses, excuses…
Things have been weird for me lately. In a bad way. Personal stuff. Worries. Health issues. Melancholia. And other obsessions, plans, dreams… including a recurring one that I really should’ve abandoned by now… but haven’t. In short: no time (and not much inclination) to blog. The promised Skulltopus post on ‘Image of the Fendahl’ is stalled, swollen to vast and unruly size, stuck at an impasse, erupting out of the Skulltopus category into all sorts of other genres (appropriately enough). Bear with me, Reading Few. I will rally.…
Saturday Waffling (May 11th, 2013)
I liked that open thread last weekend. Let’s do it again.
So, Nightmare in Silver, obviously, once it airs. There’s been a fan theory going around in comments that the episodes are linearly representing classic series Doctors in some fashion, starting with the Susan reference in The Rings of Akhaten and continuing through to Tegan in The Crimson Horror. I would like to point out that if this theory is to hold for this week then we should be invoking Attack of the Cybermen. So I’m expecting a pointless continuity runaround, personally.
I’ve also started in on a personal project to create an edition of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts of the form I want to read, namely one that preserves the illustrations and format but swaps out Blake’s handwriting for more modern, readable typesetting. It involves learning lots of Photoshop tricks, but is actually coming along reasonably well, though may be of interest only to me. That said, I’m increasingly annoyed at bogus copyright claims on digital images of Blake’s stuff such that I’m sorely tempted to spend a weekend knocking up cheap paperback and ebook editions of things that are otherwise not available in decent quality.
And that’s my week and weekend. How are you all?
A Mixture of Ozone and Sulphur (Aliens of London/World War III)
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| But Mummy, I thought the television screens were in their stomachs. And that they didn’t kill people for fun. |
It’s April 16th, 2005. That Tony Christie song is still at number one, with Will Smith, 50 Cent, Mariah Carey, and a variety of Elvis songs also charting. In news, Prince Charles marries Camilla Parker Bowles, Pope Benedict XVI was elected, and, most significantly, on the day World War III aired, YouTube’s first video, of co-founder Jawed Karim talking about elephants and how cool their long trunks are, was uploaded.
While on television, as mentioned, the first two-parter of the new series, Aliens of London/World War III. This is, if we’re being honest, probably the story most responsible for the wave of people who advocate skipping Eccleston’s tenure when getting into the series. Aliens of London/World War III is a profoundly awkward story, and the first point where the new series appears to falter. There’s a lot to say about the quality of the story, but I actually don’t really want to get into issues like quality on the new series for a while, so I’m mostly going to punt on that. Suffice it to say that any discussion of Aliens of London/World War III and its quality needs to first come up with at least some general theory of the opening two-parter, since in practice whatever this story’s flaws may be it was used as the template for the first two-parter of every subsequent Russell T Davies-era series, was recycled as the second two-parter for Series Five, and persisted in one-part form in Series Seven as The Power of Three. And that however dumb the farting aliens may be, they were deemed worthy of not just one but two comebacks. So we’ll deal with the basic question of why stories like this persist in Doctor Who on one of this story’s many descendants.
I also do want to briefly point out that this, more than anything else in the first series, is where you can really see that they’re still working on being good at making Doctor Who. There are mistakes here that are just down to still figuring out the format. Davies falls into an extremely lazy cliffhanger in the tradition of the classic series’ lamest: ones where a danger is spuriously invented and discarded after an episode’s worth of time. The mechanics of cliffhangers and two-parters are things that the new series keeps working on through to the present series, in which Moffat seemingly just gives up on them in despair. But before giving up on them he and Davies eventually developed the realization that you couldn’t just have a cliffhanger, you had to find a way to start the second half in a very different place than where the first half left off. And, on a very basic level, there’s the fact that the “next time” trailer comes before the credits, a wretched decision that got reversed for the very next two-parter. (As it stands it completely blunts the impact of the cliffhanger, which, given that it’s a soft cliffhanger to begin with, is deeply unfortunate.)…
Blogrolling: Adventures with the Wife in Space
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.…
You Were Expecting Someone Else 20 (The Book of the World)
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| 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.…
The DePaul Thing
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.
Attacked By This Little Man (The Unquiet Dead)
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| 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.…
Tygers & Horses
“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.…
Saturday Waffling (May 4, 2013)
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?…