Eruditorum Press

Some sort of samizdat wind effect

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 60 (The Second Coming, Casanova, Honey to the Bee)

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So here we are. New website. I would have launched it right with Rose, but, well, it was easier to throw the switch on the weekend. So yes, this is now properly just “my website,” with TARDIS Eruditorum as its primary but not exclusive feature. These posts will still go up reliably in the morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with other content filling in as the spirit moves me, so to speak. You can also tour the various pages up above for status updates on various projects, links to buy all sorts of stuff, and the like. Welcome, and thanks to the lovely Anna Wiggins for getting this thing set up. If it falls on your head and causes serious injury, sue her, not me.

And, of course, this is the last post before Rose. Though the way the Kickstarter is going, I expect that any moment now the Rose post will be going up as a backer-exclusive update there. And it’s very much a calm before the storm thing – the low key post before Wednesday’s storm. Last bits of groundwork for the new series. Several points that are tentative and may need refinement. I’m categorizing it as a Pop Between Realities, but we could just as easily call it Notes Towards a Study of the New Series. Or just a discussion of the period of anticipation and lead-up to the new series.

One of the things that jumps out most in Russell T Davies’s early interviews about Doctor Who is his continual focus on the series’ engagement with the tabloid press. It’s easy to pretend this is some sort of landmark moment, but it’s not really at all – John Nathan-Turner was an inveterate tabloid-stoker who carefully and meticulously maintained the series’ public profile by, for instance, letting slip that perhaps the Doctor was going to regenerate into being a woman, or using the hoax title The Doctor’s Wife to try to smoke out someone leaking production information (and, of course, get a wave of publicity to boot). In this regard, Nathan-Turner’s newfound legacy as tabloid-certified paedo (as opposed to actual one) fall somewhere in the grey area between irony and inevitability.

This leaves anyone who wants to, perhaps, criticize Davies for stunt-casting Billie Piper or Catherine Tate on any sort of “purity of the series” grounds in an unfortunate bind. They are hard-pressed to contrast it unfavorably with the Nathan-Turner era, since in that regard Davies’s only sin was actually getting the viewing figures Nathan-Turner dreamed of. One could suggest that the Hinchcliffe and Letts eras were above such stunts, and you’d be more or less correct, but that direction ignores the fact that the nature of British television in that era meant that a merely reasonably popular program like Doctor Who was such a central cultural experience that it didn’t need to go out of its way to connect to other parts of British culture any more than Marmite and the Shipping Forecast did.

But there’s still something jarring about it coming off the wilderness years – the sense that Doctor Who is suddenly catering to The Sun fits bewilderingly poorly with Sometime Never… and Zagreus coming out.…

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Outside The Government 9 (This Town Will Never Let Us Go)

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If you missed yesterday’s mini-post, I’m releasing Wednesday’s entry on Rose (over 13k and as good as I hoped it would be) as a backer-exclusive update on Kickstarter if we reach $10k there. So if you want to see it early, please consider our wide variety of inexpensive reward tiers. Also, if you’ve never bought any of my books, I’ve got a new reward tier that gets you all the existing ones in ebook form for $5 less than they usually cost. Plus you can pre-order the Logopolis book via Kickstarter. It’s all right over here.


So here we are. A spinoff of a spinoff. Doctor Who’s own planet Dust – the furthest extension of its narrative reach. The single most remote object that can possibly be called Doctor Who. Faction Paradox. Its effect on the world is vanishingly small. It could be wiped from history, completely removed from Doctor Who’s warp and weft, and the observable effects would be exactly zero. Faction Paradox has had no visible influence on Doctor Who, or, for that matter, on much of anything save perhaps itself. Its writers are marginal, its ideas arcane, and, notably, even Lawrence Miles hasn’t bothered to write for it in years.

The Faction, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way. Authorized ghosts, given free license to operate in the shadow of the greater text, Faction Paradox has never been more at home. This is their nature – the parodic, mocking reflection of the established order of things. The idea of Faction Paradox as a monster hit of mainstream culture isn’t just ludicrous on the face of it – because really, who would want to read this crap – it’s wrong. That’s not what Faction Paradox is designed to do. They’re designed to lurk in the shadows. Even here, in the book named after them, they do not appear as such. It’s never quite clear who, in the story, actually is Faction Paradox. All three main characters might be Faction Paradox agents. None of them might be. Faction Paradox is too obscure and marginal even for the most marginal thing in Doctor Who history.

To revisit one question there, who would want to read this crap? Well, the answer, in practical fact, isn’t Doctor Who fans. At least not in any substantial body of them. Faction Paradox gives every appearance of being just barely profitable enough to publish, bouncing among several small presses over the years. It’s compelling enough to keep gong, in no small part because it’s obvious that many of the people working within it are absolutely fascinated by it, but its readership is tiny. I mean, I outsell Faction Paradox. Coming up with potential readerships is perhaps easier – reading This Town Will Never Let Us Go almost constantly reminds one of Grant Morrison. More than anything actually published under the Doctor Who name, up to and including Morrison’s Doctor Who work, this is the Doctor Who-related piece one can hand to a fan of The Invisibles and say “here, you’ll like this.”…

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Apropos of Nothing

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What’s really interesting about Hide and The Rings of Akhaten is the consequence of Neil Cross being brought into Doctor Who. It tells us that Moffat was watching Luther, and that the shows were cross-polinating. Doctor Who and Luther, of course, currently share a tradition of being meaty character parts. The appeal is that they’re big, broad, theatrical parts that give the actor a solid platform on which to build a definitive performance. Then they go on to get character parts as villains in American co-productions, and that’s how they make the real money. See also David Tennant as Barty Crouch, Christopher Eccleston as every movie part he’s played recently, et cetera. Except it didn’t really work for Tennant – his movies never took off – and he’s come back for another round of television where he’s bankable; Broadchurch. (Is it good? Should I watch it?)

So, Doctor Who’s a chameleon of a show. That’s its Raison d’etre under Moffat; it will jump around and imitate all sorts of things in a schizoid fashion. And one of the biggest things Doctor Who has never really intersected with is the Prime Suspect style of show. Long stories where you know the villain and state of play at the start of it, and the pleasure is in watching the lead actor work through it. And where that very open perspective is contrasted with an emotional drama. So we have a story in which the mystery plot is one in which we watch the main character come to a conclusion we already know, but the emotional plot is one where we and the main character move along together. Luther is similar, but with a clever twist in the form of Alice Morgan, who plays the Irene Adler sort of role of simultaneously being a villain and a romantic interest. And so every episode (for the first season at least) the crime plot unfolds completely open whereas the emotional plot plays dangerously closed.

The open approach is a structure that works trickily with Doctor Who, because it needs some equivalent of a crime. And Doctor Who doesn’t quite do crimes. (Nor does Sherlock, apparently – Series 2 has exactly zero episodes about Sherlock solving a crime.) Typically it’s only possible to do that sort of open storytelling with a baroque alien invasion plot. So, for instance, in The Bells of Saint John we know who the bad guys are and what they’re doing, but we build a mystery around why, since their plan is horribly over-elaborate. But it’s hard to build an emotional plot around that, since having the Doctor fall in love with the femme fatale is just jarring and a bad idea. (Unless it’s the Master.)

All of which is just to say that this is, structurally, how to understand the River Song story. It’s an attempt to find a way to the Luther plot structure in Doctor Who. So instead of a crime we have a time-wime. But we and the Doctor still both know who did it: River Song.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 19 (Scream of the Shalka)

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The list of proper “alternate Doctors” is relatively small: you’ve got Cushing, of course – the alternate Doctor who has actually impacted culture in any meaningful sense. You’ve got the Curse of Fatal Death set of Doctors, but they were never actually meant to be taken as seriously as they are. And you’ve got Trevor Martin, but since he was in a 1974 stage play that nobody knew much about until 2008 when Big Finish did an audio adaptation, he’s pretty firmly purely a trivia answer.

It’s worth thinking a little bit about the nature of “alternate Doctors” in this regard. Our pool of three noteworthy interests contains exactly zero that were ever intended by anyone as a serious alternative to Doctor Who. Cushing’s Doctor existed only to provide a platform upon which Dalek thrills could be built. The Curse of Fatal Death was, as noted, a joke, though for all its quality it turned out to be not nearly as funny as fans taking it seriously as a plot to kill off Doctor Who by burning through the remaining regenerations, a viewpoint that is fascinating in its utter wrongness. And Trevor Martin was a disposable product to handle the fact that Jon Pertwee didn’t want to do the show. None of these are “alternate” Doctors, as that suggests some sort of fully functional alternate history in which they are Doctor Who, and none of them could possibly support that. They’re trivia answers.

Which brings us to Scream of the Shalka. On the one hand it’s clearly a trivia answer – the hardest answer to “name the three contexts in which Richard E Grant has appeared in Doctor Who.” On the other, we have to remember that this was a completely sincere attempt at rebooting Doctor Who, intended as such a big deal that Davies cited his guilt over killing off the project as part of why he hired Cornell to write Father’s Day. (That and Cornell being bloody good, of course.) Richard E Grant was announced as the official Ninth Doctor, and the plan was that this would spin off into a proper series of Doctor Who. It’s just that before it actually came out it got completely pre-empted by Russell T Davies, and so Grant became an alternate Doctor by default.

And so the first and most obvious question to ask about Scream of the Shalka is whether it ever could have worked. Is this in fact the first properly “alternate” Doctor – an alternate launching point into forty years of new adventures, as Cornell breathlessly hyped it before the bottom dropped out. Certainly much of the familiar scaffolding is there: we have a post-traumatic Doctor with a new status quo following some hazily defined event. The Master Robot ruefully seeking redemption is charming, not least because Derek Jacobi is a national treasure who’s having an absolute blast. The villain is solid, which is impressive, as there was an awful lot else to launch in this story and doing a mediocre villain that’s just a placeholder against which the Doctor gets to define himself is a pretty standard response to that problem.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 41 (The Gallifrey Chronicles)

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Good morning everyone. Some orders of business before the post. First of all, the Kickstarter continues to be blowing me away. As I mentioned over the weekend, I was needing more stretch goal ideas. T. Hartwell had the winning idea: an art book version of the Logopolis entry formatted to look like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Read about it here, and consider contributing. The costs for ebook and print editions are the same there as they will be on Amazon, so if you’re even going to buy the Hartnell second edition when it comes out, go ahead. There’s also some new rewards to check out.

Second, if you missed it, I got invited to join Mac Rogers as a panelist on Slate’s Doctor Who recaps for this season, and got to discuss Hide with him this week. Given that the episode had what some are immodestly calling a shout-out to this blog (I remain silent but terribly amused), this was perhaps an auspicious omen. Certainly I had fun, and if you want a preview of some of my thoughts on the Moffat era it’s probably a good read. That’s up over here.

Let’s talk nightmare briefs, shall we? Here’s a corker: you need to wrap up the Eighth Doctor Adventures because the Eighth Doctor is no longer the incumbent. Accordingly we need to fix this whole mess we’ve made of destroying Gallifrey because, well, everyone knew that had to be cleaned up before it got handed off lest there be some massive disjunct between the Gallifreyless Eighth Doctor era and the Gallifreyful Ninth Doctor era. Of course, it’s possible the television series is going to go down as one of the most epic failures of modern television and the series is going to go crawling back to the novels, so however you wrap it up, it should probably not foreclose anything. Oh, and your book is actually going to come out a few months after the new series starts.

The list of people you can call to get this nightmare brief settled is, historically, very short. Peter Grimwade was good at this sort of stuff. Ben Aaronovitch had his moments, and also, for that matter, had Battlefield. Pip and Jane Baker, for all their faults, really only wrote as many stories as they did because they could handle assignments from hell. In books, of course, Kate Orman and Jon Blum lived for this sort of stuff. And then there was Lance Parkin. Lance Parkin, who so loves nightmare briefs that he tends to create them for himself. And who had closed out the previous book line, thus making for a neat piece of symmetry.

Another piece of symmetry appears on the cover. This is the third Eighth Doctor Adventure to feature the Seal of Rassilon on the cover, the previous two having been The Eight Doctors and Interference Book One. This is an odd trilogy, to say the least, but one that manages to capture the overall arc of the Eighth Doctor Adventures surprisingly well, from their beginnings as crushing disappointments to their flare of promise in the middle through to their awkward but not entirely lacking in quality latter days.…

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Stretch Goal Ideas

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I may as well ask this here as well as on the Kickstarter.

We’re doing very well, and chewing through the second set of stretch goals at an alarming rate. I added one more commentary track – the TV Movie – but I’m going to need more stretch goals. Possibly a lot of stretch goals, as I keep chewing through them faster than I expect.

I’m kind of at a loss for ideas. This Kickstarter is doing far, far better than I’d really ever imagined. Really, I keep trying to scale the size of my imagination up to deal with the level of support you guys show me and this project, and I just can’t keep up with you.

But this is not the time for gushing about my fans and readers. This is the time for asking if anyone has any good ideas for stretch goals that the project might embrace in the future. I’d rather not commit to more audio commentaries until I know how they go, how downloaded they are, et cetera.

So. Any ideas?…

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In The Wild And The Wind (Sometime Never…)

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Thanks to everyone again on the Kickstarter. This has… been humbling.

It is entirely possible that Sometime Never… contains the single dumbest retcon in all of Doctor Who. Given the competition for the title, this is no mean feat. But Justin Richards is up to the task, answering for all of the negative four people who were really interested in what the Doctor’s origins were in the new post-Time Lord universe. We’ll get to the particulars of this revelation in a few paragraphs and deal with the sort of awe-inspiringly pathetic flop that it makes when it arrives, but for now let’s take a step back and look at the score, as it were.

This is technically not a Time Can Be Rewritten post. Actually, we’ve been suspended oddly in limbo since The Creed of the Kromon in that regard, having done an extended jaunt through the Big Finish audios and their Eighth Doctor endgame and then wandered over to do the comics and some Pop Between Realities. So we’re still in the same month of The Creed of the Kromon. Why did we wait so long before circling back to the exact same month? Mainly because the finale of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, which we’ll do on Monday, actually is a Time Can Be Rewritten, as it came out after Rose, and so I decided to anchor the tail end of the Eighth Doctor Adventures there. (Of course, we’ve still another full week of entries between The Gallifrey Chronicles and Rose, but that’s mainly me on a “form follows content” kick of wanting the wilderness years to end not with a bang but with a weirdly extended whimper.)

So this is very much the Eighth Doctor Adventures in the same position Zagreus was in – doing a big story about their own mythology that was designed when that mythology was still a credible contender for “proper Doctor Who” and then released into a world where all hope of legitimacy that it had was already gone. In this regard there’s almost nothing Sometime Never… could possibly have done that would have been adequate. There’s just no way to do a big revelatory story about the nature of the Eighth Doctor Adventures and have it matter anymore as of January 2004.

And so we should have some sympathy in reading Sometime Never…, as it’s a book that doesn’t have an era. This is always a problem with the wilderness years, given how much they were pre-empted by the new series, but as with Zagreus we here have a work that never enjoyed any time in which it wasn’t pre-empted by the future. There was never a period where its revelations could have worked, and thus discussing them is almost tragic.

On the other hand, even if there had been an era where the basic conceit of this book could have worked, it’s difficult to see how this particular iteration of that conceit could have. So, OK. Here’s the score. It turns out that all this time Sabbath has been an agent of the Council of Eight, who want to become Lords of Time and the like.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 59 (Harry Potter)

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Let’s start with a quick update on the Kickstarter for the second edition of the Hartnell book. Short form: it’s doing amazingly. We’re well over goal, and working our way through stretch goals at a pleasant clip. Right now the stretch goals are commentary tracks for specific episodes. So let’s talk about that.

I’ve been musing off and on about whether there’s a sequel to be had in terms of TARDIS Eruditorum. And in terms of the blog, no, there isn’t. I’m not going to have much more to write on Doctor Who when I’m done. I mean, I’ll come back at the end of every season or so and do a catch-up, but it’s not like I’ve developed bold new interpretations of The Web Planet since 2011. But there’s always been a dimension the blog hasn’t been great at doing: the visuals and storytelling of episodes. Simply put, that’s stuff that’s easiest to talk about when you have clips in front of you. And while I’ve occasionally done video blogs (Here’s a random example) that talk about this, it’s just not what the blog is best at. It’s the wrong medium.

And so I want to at least experiment with another way to go through the series: commentary tracks that can be played alongside episodes such that I can talk about the stories in terms of how they’re put together and what their storytelling says. And right now the Kickstarter has moved on to funding some experiments with that.

So far we’ve unlocked commentary tracks for The Rescue, The Ark in Space, Paradise Towers, and The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. Next on deck are Kinda, The Mind Robber, and The Three Doctors. All told I have ten stories up for grabs. And what I’ll do is record commentaries on them over the next few months and post them for free.

If the commentaries are good and people like them we’ll continue in this vein, going out of order and posting commentaries on episodes. Eventually it’ll switch to a model where the latest one is free and the archive costs $.99 a story or so, bur that’s in the future.

So if you haven’t contributed to the Kickstarter yet and are interested in exploring possible futures for the blog and my Doctor Who criticism, please head on over and pledge. I’ve just added some new rewards, and there are plenty of shiny things to be had among the low-price rewards as well. Every bit helps. You can donate over here.

Meanwhile, today’s entry: Harry Potter.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle, so to speak. What almost everybody who comments on Harry Potter gets out of the way very early on is that there is not actually very much in it that is original. They’re straightforward instances of classic British children’s literature. The closest thing to innovation they can be said to have is that they perform a genre collision of the school story genre with fantasy, but this isn’t even new: off the top of my head Jill Murphy did basically the same setup in 1974 with The Worst Witch, and Mary Stewart had something along the same lines in 1969 with The Little Broomstick.…

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Kickstarter Stretch Goals

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Update #3:

So. Um. This Kickstarter has gone a bit better than I was planning on. So much so that I’ve already made it into some advanced stretch goals I was planning on debuting later this week. More about this on Wednesday with the next post, including the sorts of things I expect I’ll talk about, but the short form is this: I’m considering that one of the post-Eruditorum projects I might take on will be recording DVD-style commentaries on episodes where I can talk about the camerawork and visual storytelling and other stuff that doesn’t work as well in blog form. And if the Kickstarter keeps going, that’ll be what I look at.

The previous post, most of it quasi-osbolete in that we already hit all of the stretch goals discussed, is below.

And here’s the Kickstarter if you want to join the fun.

Original post:

First off, today’s regular post is below. That said:

Holy crap, you guys.

So, um, I wasn’t exactly planning on waking up to a funded project. So I didn’t have stretch goals entirely worked out. So, um, here was my vague plan – for the first bit of stretch I was thinking of adding extra essays into the book. More books, audios, or Pop Between Realities. I’m thinking a total of five – one at each $200 tier up to $2000.

But I need suggestions. So, to recap, in the existing book are: Kim Newman’s Time and Relative, Steve Lyons’s The Witch Hunters, Andy Lane’s Empire of Glass, and Simon Guerrier’s Guardian of the Solar System. Plus, of course, the ones we did on the blog: Campaign, The Time Travellers, The Plotters, and The Man in the Velvet Mask.

In the new edition we’ll add Marc Platt’s Auld Mortality, the John and Gillian comics, the first Destiny of the Doctor audio, and A Big Hand for the Doctor. But now I need more things to add. So, make nominations in comments please – good audios and books to discuss, and why you think they’d make good inclusions. I’ll update this post throughout the day with leading candidates, and get a set of stretch goals up this evening.

When and if we chew through these I have a second wave of stretch goals in mind. But I don’t think I want to tip my hand on that quite yet. Suffice it to say that they’re something completely new for this project, and if they go well could spin off into an entire sequel to the project.

The Kickstarter is over here if you want to contribute. And thank you all, very much, for what you already have contributed.

Update #1: The current front-running posts are:

  • A Pop Between Realities on Dan Dare
  • A Pop Between Realities on It Happened Here
  • Rob Shearman’s Deadline
  • Masters of Luxor
Other possibilities, none of which are yet likely to unseat one of those four, but any of which could become number five are Birth of a Renegade, Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman, and The Meeting.
…

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