Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED! (War of the Daleks)

71

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped The Bodysnatchers and Genocide, which languish in the forties of the seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures unloved and unhated. We’ll be doing that a lot. War of the Daleks is the last of the books commissioned under Nuala Buffini (actually, this and Legacy of the Daleks apparently came in at the same time), and is absolutely loathed. It has… um… Daleks in it. And a very, very infamous retcon, which I talk about in enough detail below as to not be worth outlining here. It’s 66th out of 73. Lars Pearson says that the retcon in question “will skewer you in pitchfork-like fashion,” while at the time Dave Owen calls it an “unambitious tribute… rendered in hackneyed prose that should not have survived editing.” Ouch. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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It’s October of 1997. Elton John is at number one with “Something About The Way You Look/Candle in the Wind ’97.” This gets at one of the news stories we’ll talk about in a moment, and raises the question of what could possibly unseat a cathartic tribute to Princess Diana from the charts. Answer: The Spice Girls, with “Spice Up Your Life.” The Backstreet Boys, Oasis, Will Smith, Janet Jackson, Aqua, and Chumbawumba also chart, the latter with an unabashed and straightforward execution of The Manual. In news, since we last checked in Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Princess Diana died, causing everyone in America to be inexplicably upset, Scotland voted to create its own parliament, as did Wales, and Mother Theresa died too. While during this month, the Grey Lady goes color, and the BBC gets a new logo.

In books, meanwhile, War of the Daleks. That War of the Daleks is a mind-wrenchingly awful book at least mostly goes without saying. Still, since this blog is written for a non-specialist audience, we may as well rehearse its flaws. First among them is the simple fact that Peel is not a great writer. He never has been. And so with a book in which he’s stuck with an ambiguously characterized Doctor and a new companion he makes a harder swing to Generic Doctor than any previous book. Peel’s Generic Doctor is apparently Pertwee, with Sam defaulting smoothly to Jo Grant. But this masks the larger problem, which is that Peel is spectacularly uninterested in any of these newfangled ideas that have been cluttering Doctor Who up for the last ten years and just wants to do good old-fashioned adventure stories.

As a result War of the Daleks is overtly and consciously an imitation of Terry Nation’s style. The Doctor gives generic moral lessons of the most banal sort, mostly about following orders and duty and various other things. Peel is fascinated by the divisions of Dalek society and by describing Dalek weaponry and various special Daleks in detail, and more or less uninterested in stitching together an actual plot. On top of that, the plot he has is riddled with holes. To take only one example, in chapter seven Davros is informed that there are still Daleks loyal to him on Skaro, and treats this as good news.…

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One Morning You Awake, And Your Humanity Is a Dream (Vampire Science)

24

I’ll Explain Later

Vampire Science, the second Eighth Doctor Adventure, does Vampires in San Francisco, and is pretty straightforward in that regard. It’s by Kate Orman, now joined by soon-to-be husband Jon Blum, who will co-author three of Orman’s four Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s reasonably popular. Dave Owen calls it “a far more intellectually rewarding read than The Eighth Doctors, which is perhaps understatement. Lars Pearson calls it “a playful – if sometimes overly sappy – story.” Overqualifications aside, it’s the twelfth most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, and one of only five from the first twenty books to end up in the top half of that list. (For whoever was asking, the lowest-ranked is The Infinity Race.) DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s July of 1997. Puff Daddy and a bunch of other people remain at number one with “I’ll Be Missing You.” Two weeks later Oasis unseat them with “D’you Know What I Mean?,” only to have Puff Daddy take it back a week later.  No Doubt, Hanson, Verve, Sheryl Crow, R. Kelly, and Coolio also chart. God, that brings back memories. None of them are good. In happier news, the Pet Shop Boys also chart in there, and Radiohead does quite well for themselves on the album charts with OK Computer. In news, the month opens with the UK handing Hong Kong over to China. The drug fen-phen, a dieting drug, turns out to, erm, kill people. Andrew Cunanan shoots and kills Gianni Versace, and scientists announce DNA analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton supporting the “out of Africa” theory of human evolution.

While in books, Vampire Science. The BBC Books line was, as the current idiom goes, a bit of an omnishambles at launch. So the only sensible way into Vampire Science is in light of that mess. In a period as hazily documented as the BBC Books era some care is necessary in any authorial criticism. Nevertheless, tea leaves exist and I politely welcome anyone with more information to correct me here, especially since I know several figures with personal involvement read the blog. Orman and Blum thank the writers of the next two Eighth Doctor Adventures, Paul Leonard and Mark Morris, for their collaboration in developing the tone and approach of the Eighth Doctor. Conspicuously absent from this list is Terrance Dicks. Separately, in his notes on The Dying Days, Parkin mentions having wanted to incorporate references to The Eight Doctors but being unable to, but does incorporate a reference to Vampire Science. Taken together, these facts suggest that The Eight Doctors was written more or less in isolation, with Dicks not meaningfully participating in the larger development of the line beyond the obligatory and perfunctory introduction of Sam.

This run of three books in which real attempts at making the Eighth Doctor work as a character and concept are bounded on the other end by War of the Daleks, which we’ll deal with on Monday. Like what The Eight Doctors seems to be, War of the Daleks was essentially put into the line fait accompli along with Legacy of the Daleks.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 50 (Neverwhere)

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For all that the TV Movie was a staggering aesthetic failure, it’s telling that so many people in the UK watched it. Yes, nobody actually liked it, but in a way that’s preferable from the perspective of someone who wants something resembling Doctor Who to come back on television and under the name “Doctor Who.” There is, in the wake of the TV movie, at least a clear mandate for Doctor Who’s return. The details on what that return should look like beyond “not like a generic piece of American cult television” were hazy, but it was at least clear that people wanted something Doctor Whoish on their television screens. Jonathan Creek, as we saw, did a good job of feeling like what Doctor Who would feel like if the BBC put some effort into it, but in many ways it is therefore Neverwhere that is more interesting, being as it demonstrates what mid-to-late 90s Doctor Who would look like if the BBC completely half-assed it.

It’s tempting to say that the answer is “not very good,” but saying that requires a slightly strange misreading of history. It’s true that there are many things that are deeply wrong with Neverwhere and that the series disappeared more or less without a trace initially. But one has to take a step back and look at this within the larger arc of Neil Gaiman’s career in order to quite understand what’s going on here. The first thing to realize is that in 1996, Neil Gaiman wasn’t Neil Gaiman yet. His career consisted of some time as a journalist/freelancer followed by considerable success in US comics. His lone novel was Good Omens, co-authored with Terry Pratchett. He was not even a star writer in the UK, little yet in the US. So his doing a fantasy series for BBC2 was a substantive increase in his profile. He wasn’t a novelist doing television – he was a jobbing writer who bounced around media. And in 1996, at least, Lenny Henry’s co-creator credit on the series undoubtedly carried more weight than Gaiman’s name.

On the other hand, Neverwhere was clearly the beginning of Gaiman’s breakout. The US release of his novelization of it and, a few years later, the text from his illustrated novel for DC Comics, Stardust, paved the way for his big debut with American Gods, the novel that firmly lodged him as a major writer. So whatever the inadequacies of the television version, Neverwhere is clearly seminal – the first real step in Neil Gaiman going from a writer who’s influential to a writer who is absolutely huge.

All of which said, there are some inadequacies to the television version. Put simply, and this is hardly an unusual criticism, Neverwhere looks kind of rubbish. It was set to be shot on video and then “filmized,” but the filmization was abandoned after it had already been shot. This means that it looks like it was shot on video, which is generally taken to be synonymous with looking cheap.…

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Shabby Efforts

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I’m sometimes rather startled to realise just how much Doctor Who I’ve missed.

I mean, chronologially, the last actual TV episode I saw was ‘Night Terrors’.  I watched that ages after transmission, as part of a foolhardy attempt to catch up with the series (which I finally gave up watching upon transmission roundabout the time of ‘A Christmas Carol’, which I liked about as much as I like Ian Duncan Smith).  I was hoping that I’d either get my mind changed by the catch-up session – i.e. become persuaded that Who under Moffat isn’t just empty, bombastic, cynical, reactionary, sexist, culty drivel – or, alternatively, that my justified hatred of what I was seeing would give me something to furiously blog about.

As it turns out, my undignified little scrape with ‘Night Terrors’ (see here) put me off the project again.  Initially inclined to be soft on it, despite some nitpicks, I was soon convinced by commenters that it’s actually the story where the Doctor becomes David Cameron, lecturing the clueless working schlubs on how to solve their problems by being better parents.  Dispirited, I quit again.  So, I’ve not seen anything after ‘Night Terrors’.  And I feel just peachy about this, to be honest with you.

Besides having been driven away from the TV show, I was surprised to realise, as I was following Sandifer’s analysis of the Virgin New Adventures at his blog, how many of those I’d missed back in the day.  I always thought of myself as a follower of the line, but it seems I neglected to read a fair few of them.  Still, I was going through college and university at the time.  I had other things to read.  The menus of pizza restaurants, for example, and loan forms, and letters about my overdraft.

It’s the same with Big Finish.  I’ve heard, I suppose, about a fifth of their Who output – at most.  I guess I just haven’t tried hard enough. 

And as for the late-90s BBC novels line… well, I think I’ve read all the Lawrence Miles ones and all the Chris Boucher ones, but beyond that… I think I tried reading one by Justin Richards once.  It was called ‘The Burning’, as I recall.  It’s possible that my copy (with the first 12 pages lightly thumbed) may still be being used as a wedge under a table leg in a rather seedy set of student digs on the South coast.  I wouldn’t be surprised.

I actually suspect there are a lot of fans like me.  In this respect, anyway.  But the point I’m limping towards is this: there are lots of things that a sizeable number of Who fans know about that I simply don’t.  I don’t know what’s so bad about those John Peel Dalek novels, for instance.  Never read ’em.  Never will.  I also don’t know (not from personal experience anyway) what’s so bad about ‘The Eight Doctors’ by Terrance Dicks, though I know that it is generally considered to be absolutely awful.…

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My Dear Doctor, You Must Die (The Eight Doctors)

57

I’ll Explain Later

The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks, is the launch of the Eighth Doctor Adventures line. Instead of getting all the Doctors together as you might expect, it’s got an amnesiac Eighth Doctor going linearly through his previous incarnations to regain his memories, meeting them during 100,000 BC, The War Games, The Sea Devils, State of Decay, The Five Doctors, Trial of a Time Lord, and immediately prior to the TV Movie. Plus you’ve got the Master three times, Rassilon, Borusa, Flavia, and the solutions to any stray continuity errors Dicks was bothered by. Dave Owen calls it “overambitious, perhaps, but nevertheless immensely enjoyable.” In the same issue of Doctor Who Magazine he rates all the New Adventures and gives Human Nature a three out of ten. So, moving on to sane critics, Lars Pearson calls it a “clusterfish.” It is merely the third worst of the seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures, but it is the worst one we will cover with a rating of 46.2%. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s June of 1997. Hanson are at number one with “Mmmbop.” That lasts until the end of hte month, when Puff Daddy takes over with “I’ll Be Missing You.” Radiohead, the Rembrandts, the Cardigans, Bon Jovi, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Blur, and Echo and the Bunnymen also chart. In news, there was a month gap in which Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov and Tony Blair defeated John Major. In the month itself, Timothy McVeigh is convicted of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the House of Commons votes to ban handguns in response to the year-ago Dunblane Massacre. (The US should be so wise.) And the first Harry Potter book comes out. 
In books, meanwhile, The Eight Doctors. Oh dear.

It is still, over a decade later, difficult to quite wrap one’s head around what went wrong. The TV Movie was awful and looked to have killed any chance of Doctor Who returning on television for the foreseeable future, yes. But most of us had merely allowed ourselves to be optimistic about that. It wasn’t as if anyone thought an American remake was a sure bet of success. Nobody could sincerely say they were surprised by its flaws, or that the series did not come back after it. For all its flaws, it wasn’t even the worst case scenario. Once word of the Leekley bible came out the merely terrible TV Movie started to look pretty good, and there remain those of us who are battle-hardened enough to allow ourselves to remember when the consensus rumor was that David Hasselhoff was going to be the Doctor. The TV Movie was positively merciful. It was merely disastrous. 

In context, The Eight Doctors felt far more glaringly wrong. We expected bad things from Fox. But this was Uncle Terrance himself come to deliver the killing blow. The man who had stepped in to show that the Virgin line had potential with Timewyrm: Exodus. A man about whom just about the worst thing that could be said was that Shakedown was a bit weak, but given that his brief there was to produce a novelization that wasn’t surprising.
…

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What’s in a Name?

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Why do some monsters have names while others don’t?

The best place to start may be with the Cybermen.  After all, they went from having names to not having names.  Moreover, they did it more or less within one particular story, ‘The Moonbase’ (if I remember rightly, they had names in the script but these were not mentioned on screen).

The first thing to mention is that this is the story in which they went from being threatening because they are emotionless and logical to being threatening because they’re one of those “terrible things” bred in those “corners of the universe” that “we” have to fight, when they were no longer fighting to save their planet but to steal ours, when they lost their human hands, when they started (so early!) saying things like “Clever, clever, clever!”, i.e. when they became overtly and deliberately evil.  But there has to be more to it than that.  After all, vampires keep their names.  Loss of humanity and the acquisition of evil intent are not enough to strip them of their names.

Moreover, the Cybermen are not the only Doctor Who monsters to lose their names.  There’s also the Daleks, who lost their names when they stopped being Kaleds (or Dals).

This loss of name is very important.  In the ‘Moonbase’ Cybermen, it seems more like the final stripping away of individual identity.  It works similarly for the Daleks as for the Cybermen, and has similar wider connotations when it comes to both these races.

(Notice, by the way, how blithely one talks about ‘races’ in this sci-fi context… a way of putting things that would be wholly unacceptable in Western liberal discourse nowadays if applied to, say, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians… which isn’t to say that the racialist patterns of thought don’t still pertain in the attitudes of many, just that they are not usually openly stateable anymore.  This is an example of an entire cultural discourse – in this case, that of racialism – taking refuge in a ‘pocket universe’ within culture once the wider culture has largely rejected and banished it, or at least talk of it.  The discourse of racialism hides out, in disguise, in the SF ‘Recycle Bin’ once it has been guiltily deleted from the cultural ‘Desktop’.  Sometimes such things even get deleted from the Recycle Bin but, as we know, they remain on the hard drive, waiting to be forensically recovered.) 

Veering back to the point… notice how the conversion of Lytton or Stengos into Cyberman or Dalek involves the loss of identity, thus the loss of name.  When Stengos sees his daughter, his first word is her name.  He remembers her name, and hence his own, which is what launches his psychological struggle against his Dalek conditioning.

The named/nameless distinction maps roughly onto the biological/robot-or-cyborg distinction, and both are really about individuality vs. the loss of individuality.  The Daleks and Cybermen act far more on a kind of groupthink than, say, the Silurians. …

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Vixens and Saxons

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Some disjointed thoughts about ‘The Time Warrior’.  Is it sexist?  Is Linx really a girl?  And what is the correct Socialist attitude to Irongron?

1.  Men Are From Earth, Sontarans Are From… umm… Saturn?  No, couldn’t be.  ‘Saturn’ is an anagram of ‘Rutans’ for a start…

‘The Time Warrior’ is the chronicle of a failed romance.  Irongron and Linx.  The odd couple.

Made for each other.

The initial attraction. The slowly dawning mutual realisation that they have much in common. They take turns helping each other out. Terms of affection pass between them: Linx is Irongron’s “brother” and will be his “general”. Physical intimacy follows, as Linx allows Irongron to see his face then almost takes his arm as they leave to deal with the android knight. Irongron gives Linx a familiar nickname (albeit a rather unkind one).  Then the inevitable falling out. Linx feels disappointed. He questions Irongron’s commitment. They squabble. There is a physical fight. Violence always changes a relationship irrevocably. An uneasy aftermath. Awkward attempts to rescue and preserve the friendship. “Thanks good toadface… er, good Linx”. Irongron helps the bound Linx in an act of residual solidarity. They stand face to face, close together, Irongron fascinated by Linx’s visage.  “I was struck down from behind,” says Linx, not wanting to lose face in front of Irongron, but also sounding almost as though he is pleading for sympathy and solidarity. Then there is the final drunken argument.  Linx is ready to move on but Irongron doesn’t like the idea of being dumped.  He does the dumping, he doesn’t have it done tohim.  “For the last time Linx,” says he, “let there be no more talk of leaving!”  But Linx makes it clear, his spaceboots were made for walking and that’s just what he’ll do.   Then, of course, the ultimate break.  Linx was going to leave and destroy all Irongron’s stuff in a final act of scorn.  The drunken, spurned Irongron tries one last time to delay the dumping.  He gets physical again.  Linx puts him down.

They were made for each other, but that itself is what makes their union impossible.  That and the inevitable social stigma against same-sex and different-species relationships (talk about a double standard!). 

Am I actually arguing for a gay subtext?  No, perhaps not.  But there is something unusually… well, ‘relationshippy’ about the way Irongron and Linx come together and then fall apart.  Linx even tries to get rid of Irongron’s friends, or at least to push them out of an inner circle which increasingly includes just him and Irongron.  Irongron, meanwhile, does a lot of tipsy complaining to his best mate about how unreasonable Linx is.

“My Sontaran doesn’t understand me.”

2.  Sexism and the Citadel

I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘The Time Warrior’ is actually fairly good on the issues of feminism and sexism (everything being very relative, of course).…

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Splendid Chap, All of Them (The Dying Days)

24

I’ll Explain Later

The Dying Days is the sixty-first and final Virgin New Adventure, and the only one to feature the Eighth Doctor. In it he teams up with Benny and the Brigadier and repels an Ice Warrior invasion in contemporary Britain. And may or may not get it on with Benny for good measure before leaving her to star in her own already covered novel line. Dave Owen says that Parkin makes writing Doctor Who “look deceptively easy,” and Lars Pearson calls it simply “sterling.” It is ranked as the fifth best New Adventure, which sounds very good, right between Lungbarrow and Original Sin, which doesn’t really. Its rating is 83.6%. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s April of 1997. The Chemical Brothers are at number one with “Block Rockin’ Beats.” That lasts a week before R. Kelly takes over with “I Believe I Can Fly,” which lasts all month. Don’t worry. We’ve got a closet all earmarked for him.  No Doubt, the Spice Girls, Depeche Mode, Blur, Suede, Orbital, Daft Punk, U2, and Robbie Williams also chart. 
In news, Turin Cathedral is damaged by fire. Virtually the entire village of Thalit is slaughtered by guerrillas in Algeria, one of three massacres in Algeria this month. Gene Roddenberry and Timothy Leary are buried together, or, perhaps more accurately, shot into space. Martin Bell declares that he’ll run to be the MP for Tatton (an election he’ll win). And we lead right into the general election, which, as we’re skipping May, we may as well spoil: Labour wins big.
In books, the much acclaimed but still rather puzzling The Dying Days. By most reasonable standards, Parkin bites off more than he can chew here. He’s simultaneously in the position of wrapping up the Virgin line, setting up the Benny line, responding to the TV Movie, functionally establishing a character for the Doctor, and on top of that gives himself the twin challenges of cramming in a huge number of intertextual references and of never having more than two Ice Warriors in a scene. Being as I feel like the blog could use a bit of whimsy after Wednesday, let’s start with this last and somewhat curious point.
The stated logic for only having two Ice Warriors in a scene is that it’s a rejoinder to Philip Segal’s claim that the reason the TV Movie didn’t have any monsters was that it would have been too expensive and they could only have afforded one costume. So Parkin set out to demonstrate that you could do an entire alien invasion with just two costumes. Several things about this are puzzling. First, of course, is Segal’s comment. Segal is, of course, a terribly unreliable source about the thinking behind the TV Movie, making bewildering claims like that you couldn’t imagine any other Doctor but McGann’s on a motorcycle, or, more bemusingly, claiming that the logo for the TV Movie didn’t evoke any previous era. This budget claim on monsters is probably similarly dismissible – some monster costumes surely could not have cost more than a shot involving a bunch of chickens running around a freeway at night, which was put in for no discernible reason whatsoever. 
…

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Clinging to the Skin of this Tiny Little World (The TV Movie)

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I don’t like Mondays.

It’s May 14, 1996. (That is the date we’re going with in this post. You’ll understand.) Mariah Carey is at number one with “Always Be My Baby,” while Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Celine Dion, Coolio, Tracy Chapman, R. Kelly, and Whitney Houston also chart. As does Alanis Morissette with “Ironic,” which isn’t. Those are, of course, the US charts. The UK goes with George Michael in number one with “Fastlove,” with Gina G, Smashing Pumpkins, and Blur also in the charts. And, actually, both Liverpool FC and the Manchester United FA Squad dueling it out in the charts instead of the pitch. So that’s funny too.

In news, let’s go with the whole month of May, since we never did. ValuJet Flight 592 crashes in the Florida Everglades, killing 110. Thunderstorms and a tornado kill 600 in Bangladesh. The MV Bukoba sinks, killing a thousand. Eight die on Mount Everest in severe weather. Fifty-three die in a Sudanese jet crash. Outside of calamitous death, Benjamin Netanyahu is elected Prime Minister of Israel for the first time, the Supreme Court overturns a Colorado state law forbidding municipalities from protecting gay rights, and the Duke and Duchess of York divorce.

While on television… we have a problem. Or, at least, I do. This was always going to be an autobiographical post. I feel like I need to put that out front in it, before the analysis. I’ve known this post would be autobiographical since Planet of the Spiders. This entry was in part about the end point of a childhood love of Doctor Who: the moment where it came crashing down, becoming an old past love, on the shelf following Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, remembered with affection, but clearly and decisively left in the past. The weird British sci-fi show I was the only one who had heard of made a new movie for American television, my friends and tormenters watched it, and… it sucked. There was nothing to defend. People came up to me the next day and told me that they’d seen that Doctor Who thing I liked so much, and it sucked. And I couldn’t disagree. They had me dead to rights. The big, climactic return had happened, it was awful, the series keeled over and died again, and that was that. There was nothing left to do but walk away. And so there’s the lens of history. 1992 to 1996: my Doctor Who fandom. Which, of course, involves some reflection on the early days of my fandom, curling up in the corner of a fifth grade classroom in Newtown, Connecticut and reading Target novelizations.

And then the day before I was set to write this post some bastard murdered twenty children in my town.

It wasn’t my elementary school where twenty kids got murdered. I went to Head O’ Meadow school, on the other side of town. I know people who went to Sandy Hook, obviously. The town’s school system worked by having four separate elementary schools that merge together after into single middle and high schools.…

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