Eruditorum Press

Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 34 (Press Gang, Doctorin’ the TARDIS)

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In 1989 Doctor Who ended and Steven Moffat’s writing career began. This latter event provides a bookend for Doctor Who’s 25th season, propped up on the other end by The KLF/The JAMs/The Timelords hitting number one with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” all of its explorations of the program’s history suspended arbitrarily between these two events.

1989 is a conceptual oddity for me – a year zero in every sense of the term. It is the first year I have any associations with – the first one in which I was aware of the calendar as a force unto itself. There is no visible reason for this. It was the end of first grade and the beginning of second, and in that regard a transition from something of an idyllic year in my childhood to something rougher and more uncertain. But those are school years – a calendar that my life has always been well attuned to, but a separate one from the calendar. I am aware that 1989 existed, that it is the first year I have any memory of as a year, but it is an empty signifier, carrying weight but no content.

I was too young to grasp the nature of the fall of Communism, although it is in some ways difficult to imagine that I was completely insulated from them. We learn our eschatologies young, and they are always imminent. A shift in the nature of the end of the world such as the winding down of the Cold War would have been noticed, if not understood. But I remember the end of the year, at my grandparents’ house outside of Dallas, realizing that the calendar marked something significant this time.

I was unaware that less than a month earlier Doctor Who had ended. Or, for that matter, that twenty-six years earlier it had begun. Still, my grandparents’ house carries some significance in this regard. Their PBS station was showing Doctor Who late, and my first copies of the Colin Baker and early Sylvester McCoy stories came from them. The first time I ever watched Doctor Who transmitting, on a television screen, was Time and the Rani (oh well) at their house. I read the novelization of Survival there. Their local Blockbuster had videos of stories I’d never seen – it was where I first watched The Web Planet and The Mind Robber. More broadly, on long and somewhat boring summers there I would get books on tape out of their local library, marathoning Douglas Adams books. There’s a beautiful, formal neatness to the association I have between this place and 1989, marred only by the fact that it is a complete reconstruction after the fact.

But that’s my paternal grandparents all over. Living as they did in Texas they were always the side of the family I felt some distance from. It was my mother’s side of the family – largely my grandmother’s, specifically – that I knew. New York Italians. My maternal grandfather was Irish, though his family was an absent presence – he’d had to leave home very young because of the intense poverty he grew up in, and I never got to know any of his relatives well.…

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Rewrite History, Not One Line (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

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I’m happy. Hope you’re happy too.

On Sunday, July 8th, 2012, I finally ended my childhood. It was January 4th, 1989. Kylie and Jason were at number one – that being Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, of course – with “Especially For You.” The three weeks previous had been “Mistletoe and Wine” by Cliff Richard. Erasure, U2, and Phil Collins also charted. The album charts were dominated by Now That’s What I Call Music 13, a collection notable for putting Duran Duran and Transvision in direct debate on consecutive tracks and then concluding the dialectic with The Human League’s “Love Is All That Matters,” a sequencing that I assume somebody had quite a bit of fun with.

In real news, Lyndon LaRouche, perpetual US Presidential candidate/huckster and source of some delightful early Wikipedia drama (Seriously, his followers actually stalked me to a Wikipedia meet-up once. It was fantastic.), was convicted of mail fraud. Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland. And two days prior to the story in question’s airing thirty-five people were killed in a three-train collision in Clapham.

While on television was The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. It’s not the last Doctor Who story I’d never seen – that was Warrior’s Gate. But past Warrior’s Gate were scattered stories I’d only seen once, nearly twenty years ago, or ones that I had seen in the sense of “they were on a television while I was in the room, but I got distracted after five minutes and stopped paying attention.” The latter describes The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, a story I’ve liked the idea of for years, but somehow never got around to paying attention to. And so it is functionally the last new piece of classic Doctor Who to me – the last unchecked box of my favorite era of the series.

Of course, twenty-nine isn’t the worst age for childhood to end at. There’s a case to be made that I’m past due. And another still that one never ends it – that one’s life is circumscribed forever by the ghosts and echoes of childhood, the ever-expanding vista of the adult world mapped endlessly in fractal geometries within the private nations of our childhood homes. The latter case is, in the end, the one I’m more interested in.

As narratives pre-ordained to reach their appointed conclusion go, my childhood is apparently solid. There are few better places to end it than The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, itself a story about the slow and declining aftermath of youthful idealism. Stephen Wyatt, who shares the crown of “Cartmel-era writers with an axe to grind” with Ben Aaronovich, is taking dead aim at 60s idealism here: a bunch of “weirdos” (as the local businesswoman insists) with names like Flowerchild and Peacepipe have sold out, gotten themselves some evil corporate sponsors, and are recreationally killing people.

This message is overlaid on a strange dreamscape of images. The quarry planet is perfectly, gorgeously wrong for the circus setting, a fact that Wyatt’s script is happy to play on, reveling in the image of a lone creepy circus out in the wasteland.…

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Cybermen, Even! (Silver Nemesis)

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But… Bella! We sparkle way more than Edward!

It’s November 23rd, 1988. Robin Beck remains at number one with “First Time,” a situation resolved two weeks later when Cliff Richard unseats her with “Mistletoe and Wine.” Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Rick Astley, and Salt-N-Pepa also chart.

In real news, Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan. The number of HIV positive people in the UK is pegged by a government report at 50,000, and it’s estimated that by 1992 as many as 17,000 people may die of the disease. Health Minister Edwina Currie causes a massive crash in egg sales through a carelessly worded claim about salmonella. The last shipbuilding facilities around Sunderland close. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuts.

While on television, Doctor Who attempts to provide MST3K with material. Silver Nemesis is the weakest of the eleven Cartmel-shaped stories: a messy and smoldering wreck of ill-defined ideas and unconfident execution. But this fact is in and of itself interesting and worth expanding on, simply because it is in many ways the only artifact of its kind: a really bad McCoy story that has no excuses based on the idea that the era was still coming together and figuring out what it was doing. This was made in between The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Happiness Patrol. It has no excuses. And so it’s the one point where we can meaningfully ask: what does bad Sylvester McCoy mean?

It’s easy to mistake the Cartmel era as being good because of its ideas. This is because the Cartmel era does, in fact, have some really good ideas. In this regard Silver Nemesis is in grand company. At the heart of the story is the Nemesis statue. Although it more colloquially refers to a general case of an archenemy, in mythological terms Nemesis is a primal force of retribution – the thing that balances the scales in reaction to one’s hubris. Astronomically, it refers to the idea that the sun has a twin star that has collapsed into a dwarf star, lurking unseen in the Oort cloud and causing mass extinctions according to a pre-ordained twenty-six million year cycle.

The statue Nemesis, on the other hand, travels in a quarter-century cycle in its disasters, bringing instead of extinctions various historical calamities. As About Time points out, this is hopeless – there’s no twenty-five year cycle of historical tragedies to build out from here. But the nature of this cyclic disaster is tied here to the history of the program, both extending out of its imagined past (more ancient Time Lords secrets) and tied to its debut. (This is perhaps tempting fate – changing a twenty-six million year cycle to a twenty-five year cycle is almost too apt given what happens for the program’s twenty-sixth anniversary.)

Nemesis, in other words, stalks the program as its dark other. And hey, look who’s back to accompany her: the program’s dark mirror images of humanity. For all that the story gets flak for the supposed reasoning here (“It’s the silver anniversary of Doctor Who and the Cybermen are silver, so why not add them?”)…

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Monkey Business

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On ‘Ghost Light’.

Let’s leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions – light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive – which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let’s leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let’s leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions… all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition.  You want an example?  How about the use of the word “wicked”, which – with wonderful irony – appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak.  It’s the last word of the story – the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series.  And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child… but, by Ace’s usage, and by his own sly wink, he’s giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let’s look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the ‘final’ stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it’s about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don’t understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It’s about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there’s some truth in the above, there’s also a lot more to it than that.

I don’t think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people’s ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top… and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of ‘rungs’ which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male… but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That’s why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It’s his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it’s his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.…

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Put Life Into Anything Made of Plastic (The Happiness Patrol)

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You have to understand, the World Wide Web had only existed for a year. Even for an early adopter household like mine, with two parents both of whom had their own computers with modems and ability to dial in to the campus network and use the VAX, the fact of the matter is that the availability of information in the fall of 1992 was thin in ways that it’s difficult to really comprehend today. And my house, in terms of Doctor Who, was stuck in 1985. The Colin Baker era definitely existed, but my parents had, as I’ve mentioned before, hated it and stopped watching. I had Doctor Who: A Celebration as my only major reference source on the series.

I didn’t know, in other words, that the series had been cancelled, or how many post-Colin Baker Doctors there were, if any. And when, on the bookshelf of Target novelizations, I happened upon The Happiness Patrol, I had little context for it beyond the knowledge that the man in the white hat was not a Doctor I had seen before, nor was the logo familiar to me. For the first time since approaching the series without any context, in other words, I found myself approaching a Doctor Who story without the benefit of historicization. The book was, after all, just two-and-a-half years old. The McCoy era was only three years past.

I have maintained myself as an incidental character in this story since the late Pertwee era. This is, in part, why. Because here we get, as David Tennant puts it, my Doctor. The first one I learned about through experience, watching stories I hadn’t read summaries of. The one I grew up with. And Happiness Patrol, or at least its novel, was my first look into that era. We’re not long from catching up, chronologically, with my own experience of the show. I’ve long said I’d stop this blog when I lose the benefit of history. Here, though, I lose the benefit of double history, exiting the realm of things I’ve only known as historicized events and entering the realm of things I lived once. I myself am history. Or, in terms from Wednesday’s post, I myself am a fixed and certain part of the narrative. To excavate Doctor Who past this point is to excavate myself.

Personal archeology is always a dodgy process. There’s no way around it – at the age of ten I missed large swaths of The Happiness Patrol. I didn’t even have a solid idea who Ace was, little yet that Helen A was a Margaret Thatcher parody. For the most part it looked like standard and unambitious dystopia: a world where everyone is forced to be happy turning out to be an evil place seemed a relatively heavy-handed idea meant to teach me some sort of moral lesson. And yet there was something about it that crackled with the forbidden. Something about it that I was missing, but could tell that I was missing.…

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I Won’t Explain Its Secrets To You, And Its Philosophy of Movement (Remembrance of the Daleks)

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You… cheater!

It’s October 5th, 1988. U2 are at number one with “Desire,” unseated a week later by Whitney Houston with “One Moment in Time.” This lasts for two weeks before Enya takes over with “Orinoco Flow,” a song that holds Kylie Minogue out of #1. Erasure, Bobby McFerrin, Milli Vanilli, Rick Astley, Phil Collins, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. Since Dragonfire The KLF has also charted, under the name The Timelords, with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” but we’ll deal with it next Pop Between Realities entry.

In real news, first to catch up, Perl was created by Larry Wall, perestroika began in the USSR, and Canadian Celine Dion won the Eurovision contest for Switzerland. And the Local Government Act became law, including Section 28, more about which on Friday. While during this story, Ian Paisley denounces Pope John Paul II as the antichrist while he addresses the European Parliament, bits of Spycatcher are finally published in the media, Michael Dukakis spectacularly flubs a question about capital punishment in a US Presidential debate, and the UK government bans interviews with IRA members, which the BBC deals with by hiring actors to play IRA members and read actual IRA members’ interview quotes.

While on television, at long last, it’s Remembrance of the Daleks. The first unambiguous, widely recognized classic of Doctor Who since Caves of Androzani. A tentpole of Doctor Who history. And in all likelihood, the Doctor Who story I’ve seen the most times – although The Curse of Fenric is quite a contender as well. I won’t pretend that I have anything resembling impartiality here. I love Remembrance of the Daleks. It’s one of the stories that is simply and straightforwardly why I am a Doctor Who fan.

But where to start with it? The beginning, one imagines – that is, after all, where it starts. One of the most obvious things about Remembrance of the Daleks is the way in which it returns to the iconography of An Unearthly Child to tell its story. On paper, of course, this sounds like unbearable fanwank. But this obscures the way in which the story works. Yes, it’s packed to the gills with references to the past. But they’re just that – references. There are no real ways in which this story relies on knowledge of An Unearthly Child beyond the twin facts that it’s the first Doctor Who story and it’s being referenced repeatedly by this story. Having seen An Unearthly Child is helpful only in catching the specific references.

But equally, this isn’t the sort of empty wink of Attack of the Cybermen either. There the references to An Unearthly Child were wholly extraneous – little more than an easter egg that the show was inexplicably self-congratulatory over. Here, however, it’s crucial that An Unearthly Child is being referenced, but only inasmuch as it is a major part of Doctor Who’s mythology. What matters here is that we have returned to the beginning of the series. The important thing is the symbolism of this return, not the plot mechanics as such.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 33 (Marvelman)

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I always knew there would be an Alan Moore entry around here. I wasn’t completely certain where – it could have gone at the start of the Cartmel era, but it was always probably going to go right here, before the “canonical” Cartmel era begins. No, the hard question was what I was going to pick. I mean, one of these years I’m going to get around to doing the book I want to write on Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Which means I really don’t want to do a general “Alan Moore” post here. Which left me having to choose among The Ballad of Halo Jones (which Cartmel apparently handed to anyone coming on to write for Doctor Who), V for Vendetta (for the anarchism), Swamp Thing, or perhaps Watchmen (for their revampings of past characters). All would be perfectly reasonable choices for the time period. But Halo Jones felt too close to the 2000 AD post I’d already done. V for Vendetta felt too oversignified and not quite relevant enough to Doctor Who. Swamp Thing and Watchmen felt too American.

No, the one I had to pick, in the end, was Marvelman. Or Miracleman, if you must – that was, admittedly, how the tail end of the comic was published due to some rights issues. But really, the heck with those rights issues, especially since they’re all anyone ever talks about – both the renaming from Marvelman to Miracleman and, more substantively, the legal cases that have surrounded the character for twenty years now preventing anyone from  finishing the series.

But that’s not what’s interesting about the series for our purposes. For our purposes it’s more interesting to note that both Alan Moore’s Marvelman run and Doctor Who wrapped up the same month in 1989. That while Moore’s Marvelman run began earlier – he came onto the character in 1982 years – this is, nevertheless, the closest equivalent to Cartmel-era Doctor Who in Alan Moore’s oeuvre. Both are cases of taking a largely discredited sci-fi institution of the past and getting it to work in the 1980s. Marvelman is a bit older – his original run was 1954-63 – but both come out of post-war utopianism of one sort or another.

But more than that, and here I’ll briefly delve into the rights issue I suppose, there’s an obscurity to it. Alan Moore and Doctor Who are both, in 2012, recognized as grand British institutions, albeit strange ones. But the Cartmel era, well-regarded as it is, remains an obscure stretch of Doctor Who in many ways. I’ve not perused detailed figures, but between home releases on VHS and DVD and platforms like Netflix it would not surprise me if something like Curse of Fenric had been seen by more people looking to understand Doctor Who’s past than who saw it on first transmission – something that is tremendously unlikely to be true of the hits of the Pertwee or Tom Baker years, for instance.

Marvelman, meanwhile, is the most obscure of the consensus Alan Moore 1980s masterpieces.…

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1987’s Just the Isle of Wight (Dragonfire)

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Yes, Mel. You’re going to go to a farm. Where you can run.

It’s November 23rd, 1987. T’Pau’s “China In Your Hand” is at number one for the whole of this story, with The Proclaimers, Rick Astley, Whitesnake, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, and Paul McCartney also charting. Lower charts also include REM, ABC, Run DMC, The Bee Gees (with ESP), Sinitta (with GTO), and GOSH, with the wrong number of letters, but with both Bonnie Langford and Sylvester McCoy among the celebrities on the chorus.

In real news, Typhoon Nina strikes the Philippines, killing over a thousand. South African Airways flight 295 crashes the day before Korean Air Flight 858 is blown up by North Korean, each killing over a hundred. Thatcher’s government abandons free eye tests. And apparently acid house begins in the UK, beginning the so-called Second Summer of Love.

While on television, Dragonfire. On paper the elements here look as promising as the last two stories: a planet where all the characters are named after film theorists, a story that amounts to “con man versus vampire,” and the introduction of Ace. In theory we ought to have a belter. Instead we have a story that exemplifies “the whole is less than the sum of the parts.”

The crux of the problem is that the parts here simply don’t quite cohere. There’s a great idea lurking around under the surface of this one, but unlike in Paradise Towers and Delta and the Bannermen (where the brilliance is actually right there, just so unlike anything we’d seen from Doctor Who recently that it was easy to fail to look for it), it stays under the surface and never breaks out into a moment of sublimity.

The horde of film theorists is a good starting point. Yes, indeed, it’s terribly clever. But there’s not really a reason for it except to go with the large number of film references lurking about elsewhere in this story. But why are they here? What is the point beyond a demonstration of the author’s erudition? I have nothing against erudition our ostentatious displays thereof, but there seems to be a contingent that wants to praise this story simply because Ian Briggs had an Intro to Film text handy.

What there isn’t is any reason why a given film theorist should perform the role in the story they do. So we’re left with a pile of film theorists in general, unable to carve out much more than the observation that Kane’s guards are all film theorists. But this is oddly supported by the story itself when the Doctor attempts to distract a guard with a discussion of philosophy and ends up getting pulled into a detailed conversation when the guard asks him about “the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of the auxiliary performance codes.”

So you have a vampire with an army of film theorists sending the Doctor and Glitz on a wild goose chase of generic adventure story cliches.…

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Have a Bonus Post (Alif the Unseen)

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You will, of course, forgive me for a digression. I’ve not done one in a while. But as this is the biggest and loudest platform I have, it seems the best one to do a meandering review. And since I’m being almost totally ineffectual at thinking (or more to the point writing) about things that aren’t this right now, I figure I may as well just write it, post it here, and call it a bonus post.

So, there’s a book that just came out: G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. And it’s the first book I’ve read in a while that has required a substantive reordering of my thoughts – one of those books that requires me, after reading it, to live in a slightly but substantively different world than the one I was previously living in.

The pithy description is “this is the book Neil Gaiman would write if he were an American-born convert to Islam who split her time between the US and Egypt.” And if you’re sold on it with that, you may want to just go buy it, read it, and come back, because the rest of this is a spoilerish discussion of why I think it’s a terribly important book. If you’re not sold, well, here’s a spoilerish discussion of why I think it’s a terribly important book, and maybe that will convince you.

So, obviously a big fascination for me is the interplay between the world of metaphors and material social reality. The secret of alchemy is material social progress and all. Wilson has been mining this vein for some time, and quite well. One of her starting premises – a solid enough one, I should think – is the standard post-colonial perspective that the Middle East has had its self-identity eaten by the west.

In some ways, then, it’s odd that she’s using her “western convert” status to write a western-style contemporary fantasy novel about these problems. Contemporary fantasy is a thoroughly straightforward genre these days. All neatly Campbell-structured and shop-worn. Create some clever juxtapositions of recognizable myths and contemporary tropes and you’re good to go. Play your cards right and you can get a decent movie or HBO series out of it. It’s not done to death, but it’s a very well-developed, well-defined western genre. And nobody is going to mistake Alif the Unseen as being anything other than an example of that genre.

But it’s not a straightforward one. At virtually every turn it finds ways of resisting itself. Rescuing the princess proves not so much pointless as facile. Using the magical powers gained by understanding of the hidden world is both impossible and disastrous. There’s even an absolutely hilarious embedding of Twilight within the book as an obvious author surrogate marries a vampire and has his half-jinn baby. But even here the book ducks and weaves around the cliche – the character quietly drops out of the narrative just before the climax.

This is, actually, instructive for a way in.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 29 (The Fires of Vulcan)

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My Google Analytics indicate that despite my being American a narrow majority of my readers these days are British, and so I’d like to wish you all a happy anniversary of the day you got rid of us idiots and got on with your lives.

That said, on to the meat of things. Of the several genres of Time Can Be Rewritten posts, this is, unfortunately, a member of my least favorite. It’s one of those posts where I take a much praised piece of Doctor Who that I put on the schedule largely on the recommendations of fandom at large, then sigh and ask fandom at large why it hates me and wants me to suffer. In this case it was some Gallifrey Base thread or another in which this was praised as a latter day classic of the pure historical and as being far better than Fires of Pompeii. Then, listening to it in the car on a long drive a week or so back, I paused it and asked my girlfriend if she wouldn’t mind looking on her phone to see who wrote it, as I’d not bothered to look closely at that when putting it on my iPod.

“Steve Lyons,” came the reply, and I sighed dejectedly.

Those who bought the Hartnell volume (and by the time this goes up the Troughton book should be in the hands of my copyeditor) may remember a rather scathing account of Lyons’s The Witch Hunters in that book. There my objection was largely to the book’s appalling tone deafness, particularly the final sequence in which the Doctor essentially defends the Salem Witch Trials on the grounds that it all worked out and is thus in some sense worth the price.

To some extent, then, The Fires of Vulcan marks an improvement in this. McCoy’s Doctor, at least, is one who is consistently portrayed with a ruthless detachment such that seeing him calmly accept that some unknown number of the people he and Mel have been interacting to died in the eruption of Pompeii. For all the famous weight of “you can’t rewrite history, not one line,” Hartnell’s Doctor only comes near this in The Massacre, and that seems to be framed with the Doctor as the unsympathetic one. But McCoy offers a Doctor capable of remaining sympathetic even as he’s chillingly alien in his morality. As a result, he can carry the emotional and moral heft of this story in a way that Hartnell’s Doctor can’t carry a similar one.

But wait a moment. What have we seen in McCoy so far that supports any of this? I mean, it’s one thing to apply these notions to McCoy’s Doctor down the road, but in a story ostensibly set immediately after Delta and the Bannermen there’s something more jarring about it. This isn’t the Doctor as he existed in Season 24. Obviously it’s an extension of him – McCoy’s Doctor does develop in this direction. But he’s not there in Season 24.…

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