Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

My Thoughts on the Missing Episode Finds

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Just wanted to note that my thoughts on the missing episode finds are up on Bleeding Cool. I’ll post a rewritten version of the blog posts for Galaxy Four and The Underwater Menace once the episodes become fully available to the public and I can review them.

And while I’m putting a high profile post at the top of my blog while it’s probably about to experience heavy traffic, let me say welcome to any incoming Bleeders. If you like what you see here, please do note that the book version of my Hartnell columns, including considerable bonus material not up on the website, is available from Amazon.

Those of you interested in comic books – which I imagine is most anyone coming from Bleeding Cool – may also be interested in my proposed Wonder Woman book, which is currently seeking funding over at Kickstarter.…

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Playing Pat-a-Cake With The Wall (Underworld)

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The Doctor enjoys the wonders of things he can’t
arbitrarily walk through.

It’s January 7th, 1978. Wings remain at number one with “Mull of Kintyre,” and, as mentioned, stay there for the whole story. Bonnie Tyler, Donna Summer and The Bee Gees also chart. So that’s not entirely exciting.

Since Doctor Who went on its Christmas break, the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect in the United States, changing American copyright law to be based on the life of the author instead of the date of publication. A referendum in Chile supported Augusto Pinochet’s policies, which is a less impressive electoral feat than it sounds given Pinochet’s overt fondness for the mass slaughter of his political opponents. And the United States returned the Holy Crown of Hungary to Hungary, having been keeping it safe in Fort Knox since World War II.

While during this story, riots erupt in Nicaragua after the assassination of a leading critic of the government. Rose Dugdale and Eddie Gallagher become the first people to marry in prison in the Republic of Ireland. And speaking of Ireland, the European Court of Human Rights acquits the United Kingdom of torturing prisoners in Northern Ireland, but does find that they mistreated prisoners.

While on television, it’s one of the great punching bags of Doctor Who: Underworld. A story that I could simply and cavalierly lay into for a myriad of faults and get absolutely no comments from anybody suggesting that I was being too hard on the story or being unfair. This is the one Tom Baker story to slot in the bottom ten on the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll. Lawrence Miles declares it the worst story of the 1970s. It’s crap. it’s garbage. I kinda liked it.

I mean, it wasn’t good by any measure, but it’s not even the worst Baker and Martin script of Season Fifteen, little yet the worst Doctor Who story of the 1970s. (I’m not through the 1970s yet, but I’m pretty sure The Monster of Peladon is the single worst.) For the most part, on this story at least, Tat Wood’s review in About Time is spot on – there’s nothing bad that you can say about this that can’t also be said about The Time Monster, and unlike The Time Monster there are at least some valid production reasons for why their backs were so up against the wall.

Star Wars was a mixed blessing for Doctor Who. This is an altogether more positive interpretation than most people would give you. The more common view would have to be that Star Wars was a disaster for Doctor Who because Doctor Who could never hope to match its effects and so looked cheap and silly after Star Wars. This, at least, is clearly nonsense – The Invisible Enemy looked cheap and silly just fine on its own.

All of which said… Underworld is horrendously cheap and silly. Amusingly, one aspect of the story manages to simultaneously be the most appallingly cheap looking and the part of the story that served as a road map for future stories, which is the CSO work.…

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Skulltopus 3: Yes, We Have No Macra

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If any monster in the history of Who was ever a gothic, hauntological thing embodying the ‘return of the repressed’, it was the Macra.

All the ostentatious happiness of the Colony is there to cover unease.  They know there’s something wrong, otherwise why deny it so desperately?  Why would the Colony go to such lengths to contain and silence Medok unless he was speaking the unspeakable truth that everybody else wants to deny?  The Macra haunt the Colony, scuttling around at night, hiding in the shadows, unseen then glimpsed and then disappearing.  They haunt the people, who all know about them (even down to having a name for them) but claim to disbelieve in them.  They represent repressed knowledge that is insisting upon being remembered.  This is pure gothic.

But… they’re also a bit Weird, in the sense of the ‘Weird fiction’ of early 20th century horror (something I’ve discussed in previous Skulltopus posts).  William Hope Hodgson, one of the greatest Weird writers, used giant crabs a lot in his peculiar and deeply unsettling maritime tales.  As previous noted, the author China Miéville has written that the Weird (at least classic, ‘haute Weird’ of the late 19th-early 20th century) was an attempt to express the meaningless and unrecognisable, and that it thus stands in “non-dialectical superposition” to the gothic (or  the ‘hauntological’), which is about the buried secret, the thing we recognise but refuse, that which we know but wish (need) to deny.  The tentacled thing is the quintessential Weird monster type… a type unprecedented in Western fantastic fiction before the Weird.  But Hodgson’s tentacled things co-exist with giant crabs.  I’m not sure how precedented giant crabs were in the Western uncanny.  Certainly, people in the West had seen crabs before… but then, as Miéville acknowledges, they’d seen tentacled things too.  It’s not about unfamiliarity so much as literary unprecedentedness, as an absence of semiotic baggage and any tradition of previous meanings.  In any case, whereas the haunting thing is frightening because we recognise it, and recognise that it means something, the Weird thing is frightening because it is something meaningless and incomprehensible, stalking us for no reason that we can ken.

The Macra are TV monsters from 1967… and this is very different to literary monsters in 1917… but that’s a minefield I’ll try to traverse in another post.  But, shunting that massive problem to one side just for now, the Macra genuinely do seem to me to be Weird, but also to be hauntological.  They haunt because, as noted, they are recognised and not recognised, seen and denied, fled from because of the repressed knowledge that they represent.  On the other hand, they are not spectral or phantasmic, for all their elusiveness.  They’re giant crabs for heaven’s sake.  Or are they?

Because here’s the really strange thing: the Macra don’t really seem to be giant crabs at all!  The original titles of this story were ‘The Spidermen’ and ‘The Insect-Men’.  The characters in the story are uncertain what the Macra are, even – especially – when they see them. …

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 21 (Star Wars)

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I never drank the Kool-Aid here. I mean, Star Wars was fine. I enjoyed the movies when I watched them – probably third grade? But the fact that I have to ask the question shows pretty clearly the extent to which this was not a rabbit hole I fell down. I attentively rented the entire trilogy from my local grocery store (ah, the 90s), if only to finally suss out the difference between it and Star Trek, watched them, and was later very puzzled by people who fell in love with them. I still find them terribly overrated, and the continual grating of my ambivalence against people who do love Star Wars has pretty much worn me down to active dislike of the franchise. So, you know. We’re doing this because we have to, not because I’m jumping for joy at the entry. Or maybe because I’m secretly a bitter misanthrope who delights in the wave of comments that this will inevitably generate.


Still, regardless of my feelings, there’s no arguing with the film’s historical importance. There is a clear line that can be drawn across the history of science fiction, splitting it into “before Star Wars” and “after Star Wars.” Doubly so if the science fiction is in a visual medium. So for Doctor Who, there’s a huge difference in how The Sun Makers, the last story to air before Star Wars opened in the UK, was watched, and how Friday’s story, Underworld, the first to air after it. And we can’t not talk about it.

But knowing that Star Wars was transformative is not equivalent to understanding why. Let’s first set aside the question of innovation. Whether or not Star Wars was, in fact, innovative in terms of what it does with science fiction (I don’t think it particularly was), there’s really no way to argue that Star Wars didn’t mark a huge turning point in how science fiction was seen by the broader culture. It’s clearly not that Star Wars was when science fiction broke into the mainstream – there are far too many successful sci-fi movies from previous decades to take that claim seriously. But Star Wars is the tipping point in a transition between two modes of science fiction that we’ve been talking about since nearly two seasons ago. And for those who have been keeping track, that means that Star Wars is, in the broader culture, the point where Doctor Who’s view of science fiction becomes the dominant one. So that’s interesting.

Some history. The question of what the first piece of science fiction was is one with a wealth of possible answers. On the other hand, the point where science fiction emerged as a distinct genre is rather easier to pin down – it happened in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories – the first pulp to be devoted entirely to science fiction. The first thing we should note about this, then, is that science fiction in its original form did not exist in its “hard” manifestation.
…

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Wrong With Authority (The Sun Makers)

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It’s Marlon Brando playing Professor X!

It’s November 26, 1977. ABBA remain at number one with “Name of the Game,” but are overtaken by Wings with “Mull of Kintyre,” a Paul McCartney-penned ode to Scotland that will manage a nine week run at #1 that will keep it in place through Christmas and, indeed, through the next story. Queen, the Bee Gees, and the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band also chart.

In real news, British Airways establishes regular Concorde service between New York and London. The International Fund for Agricultural Development is established at the UN. The President of the Central African Republic declares himself emperor, and in the US the cable channel Nickelodeon launches, albeit under its original name of Pinwheel, which would last about eighteen months before the channel relaunched as Nickelodeon.

While on television we have Robert Holmes, frequent genius and occasional cynical dick, penning his departure script. This was actually filmed prior to Image of the Fendahl, which was the script Holmes actually departed during, with Anthony Read picking up midway through. But in running order it serves to continue the spurious tradition Dicks cited of the outgoing script editor getting a script on or around his departure date. (Actually, as I noted at the time Dicks pulled the trick on Holmes, the tradition was kind of real. In practice, Dicks was the seventh regular script editor of Doctor Who, and four of his six predecessors got a writing credit in the story after they left.)

The Sun Makers is a bit of an odd duck. Much like The Horror of Fang Rock, it is a story that it is currently very much trendy to enjoy. But whereas Fang Rock is very much a rediscovered classic that everyone now appreciates, The Sun Makers serves as more of a shibboleth – a story used to determine whether someone is a trendy Doctor Who fan or simply a traditionalist spouting received wisdom. Real fans love this story as an overlooked classic.

Except, of course, the problem with trendy classics is that there quickly becomes the countertrend. Now that everyone knows to revere The Sun Makers as an inadvertent triumph for Robert Holmes, the trendy thing to do is to complain about it. The easiest way to do this is to be political about it, which is easy enough if you’re a leftist nut job like me. Because this story is overtly a political satire about the horrors of taxes. And if you, say, happen to live in a country where one of the two political parties is stringently opposed to any tax increases whatsoever even though the tax rates are at a near historic low and even though this is one of the two major reasons for a massive budget deficit… well, it’s just kind of hard to get excited about a story that rails against the evils of taxation.

This is not quite fair, though. First of all, a blanket position that taxes are always good is as ludicrous as the belief that cutting taxes is always a good idea.…

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The Surplus Population

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It’s getting near Christmas.  Christmas means Dickens.  Doctor Who has ‘done’ Dickens twice in recent years… on both occasions, the show has travestied Dickens’ most famous Christmas story A Christmas Carol.  Last year we were given that Moffat-penned obscenity that shared its title.  He transmuted the tale into a gleefully cynical celebration of hubris, casual sexism, complacency and hypocrisy.  But Moffat was following a trail already blazed.

Back in 2005, Mark Gatiss riffed on the same story (which is about a selfish man who is made to realise that he owes the world a debt, only to find himself transformed by that knowledge) and turned it into a parable about how helping the apparently needy is dangerous folly stemming from thoughtless guilt… because the apparently needy (even ‘foreign’ refugees, running from the devastating effects of a war they didn’t start) will probably want to swamp you and steal your world.

Once I’d realised (with help from others more immediately perceptive than myself) what ‘The Unquiet Dead’ was actually about, I became very critical of it.  However… as time passes… I begin to think I’ve been overly critical of Gatiss.  Perhaps even a tad unfair to him.

Don’t get me wrong, I still loathe ‘The Unquiet Dead’ (together with just about everything else Gatiss has ever done in his career, to be honest), but I think I’ve been on iffy ground when I’ve implied that his tale of gas sprites in Victorian Cardiff went against the spirit of Dickens.  Yes, ‘The Unquiet Dead’ directly contradicts the stated message of A Christmas Carol, and uses Dickens to do it, but Dickens himself did that too.

In response to the eruption of revolt against Britain’s unremittingly cynical, cruel and ferocious imperial domination of India (the event that the Victorians dubbed ‘The Indian Mutiny’) Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on a story called ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’.  It’s a classic imperialist text.  It is a fictional story about pirates and treacherous natives in Belize, but the story is unavoidably about India.  It makes the imperialists into the victims of the natives, as such texts always do.  It belittles a character who is probably meant to refer to Lord Canning (Governor of India during the revolt) who earned himself the contemptuous nickname of ‘Clemency Canning’ for daring to suggest that some discrimination should be used in reprisals, rather than the indiscriminate and bestial torture and mass slaughter actually employed by British troops.

“I wish I were Commander in Chief in India,” Dickens told a correspondent, “I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested… [he refers to massacres committed by the rebels… in response to British massacres that predated and dwarfed them] and raze it off the face of the Earth.”

We can take into account the fact that he was responding to very one-sided media coverage and government accounts.  Lord Palmerston had written a popular pamphlet in which he detailed atrocities of the rebels… needless to say he didn’t contextualise them with details of British imperial cynicism, ruthlessness, murder and torture.…

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Wearing a Bit Thin (Image of the Fendahl)

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I wonder if I could have slipped in the Ingrid Bower
version of Kronos or the Hosts from Voyage of the Damned
and had anybody fail to notice…

It’s October 29th, 1977. Baccara, a Spanish vocal duo that represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision contest with a song entitled “Parlez-vous français?,” are at number one with “Yes Sir I Can Boogie.” This moment of utter nationalistic confusion is short-lived, and ABBA take over with “Name of the Game” one week later and hold it through the end of this story. Rod Stewart, Queen, The Carpenters, The Bee Gees, and the Sex Pistols also chart. The latter also has their memorably titled “Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols” come out the day before the first episode of this story airs.

In other news, Harvey Milk is elected City Supervisor of San Francisco. Anwar Sadat visits Israel, while General Hugo Banzer, leader of the military government in Bolivia, moves the date for the transition back to a constitutional democracy up two years to 1978. (In practice this would go poorly when Banzer’s supporters attempted to steal the election.) And Greek archeologist Manolis Andronikos locates the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great.

While on television, Doctor Who spins its wheels. I’m not entirely convinced that the 1970s actually have a story less likely than this one to evoke strong opinions in people. Nobody loves it. Nobody hates it. It’s pretty much the third best story in the weakest season of the 70s, and that’s about what there is to say. Tat Wood’s defense of it in About Time amounts to “well it’s better than The Daemons,” which is true enough, but hardly inspiring. Lawrence Miles dislikes the tell-don’t-show style of the exposition. And most of the online reviews are masterpieces of the “a little good, a little bad” formula of reviews. And at 73rd place on the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll, it seems like “a little good, a little bad” is pretty much the default consensus.

Watching it, it’s easy enough to see why. Much like The Invisible Enemy, this is heavily Doctor Who by Numbers. Unlike The Invisible Enemy, though, it’s Chris Boucher writing, and he’s good enough to avoid massive embarrassment. Even still, of his three scripts for the series it’s very difficult to muster anything like an argument that this isn’t his weakest. Whereas The Face of Evil was a thrilling deconstruction of the entire series and The Robots of Death was a particularly adroit and complex genre piece that commented extensively on its parent genre, this is… a very good rewriting of Quatermass.

The reasoning is simple enough. As with The Invisible Enemy before it, this is a story that’s trying to avoid ruffling any feathers. It’s in the horror mode that’s familiar to Doctor Who, but even this is largely defanged, with the violence actively kept off-screen. There are a few good scares, but for the most part this looks like what it is – a horror script that people are trying to tone down.…

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In the Year 5000, This Was Cutting Edge (The Invisible Enemy)

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It’s October 1, 1977. The late Elvis Presley remains at number one with “Way Down.” One week later he is unseated by David Soul with “Silver Lady,” which holds number one for the remaining three weeks. Yes, Rod Stewart, The Stranglers, and Meco also chart, the latter with a recording of the Star Wars theme, although that movie won’t premiere in the UK for another two months.

In real news, four Palestinians hijack a Lufthansa flight to Somalia to demand the release of members of the Red Army Faction. Five days later an unusually large number of Red Army Faction members commit suicide in prison in a manner that is not in the least bit suspicious and does not lead anyone to conclude that they were actually murdered. Pele retires from professional soccer, Queen Elizabeth II opens the Canadian Parliament, Anita Bryant is hit in the face with a pie by gay rights activists, and the Atari 2600 is released.

While on television we have The Invisible Enemy. There are some stories that nobody, ever, has identified as their favorite Doctor Who story, and The Invisible Enemy is a prime example of that species. It would be nice to insert a sentence beginning “It’s not that the story is bad, but” at this point, but there’s a major barrier to that – the story is bad. It’s bad in a way Doctor Who hasn’t really been in a long time. Really it hasn’t been since The Time Monster that we’ve had a story was bad in this specific fashion. Most of the same ingredients, in fact, are on display: a script from writers known to have some specific and severe weaknesses, a particularly egregious set of failures on the part of the design departments, and a handful of acting performances that make you wish they were merely forgettable.

But because the series has kept the basic quality level so high for so long – only The Monster of Peladon and The Android Invasion have really been full-out turkeys over the five seasons between The Time Monster and this – there’s something jarring about hitting The Invisible Enemy. Part of it is, perhaps, the fan’s knowledge that, far from being the freakish anomaly it appears to be when you reach it chronologically, this is the first of many stories over the next few years that are turkeys like this. 60% of the bottom ten stories and about 50% of the bottom quarter of stories in the Doctor Who Magazine Mihty 200 poll come from the Williams or Nathan-Turner eras of the classic series, whereas only eight of the top quarter do. Apres Croc Roches, le deluge. (Assuming Google Translate didn’t just screw me.) But more of it, I think, is just the sheer size of the gulf in quality between this and Talons of Weng-Chiang, which was the story made before it, or, for that matter, between this and Horror of Fang Rock. It’s difficult to believe that it’s the same people making it.…

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Balanced and Objective

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The BBC doing what it does best: “In Iran’s iconography of villainy, Britain holds a special place. The UK is seen as the mastermind behind the overthrow of previous Iranian governments. Conservative hardliners believe Britain has in its blood the desire to decide who rules Iran.”  Textbook stuff from James Reynolds “BBC Iran correspondent”.

Make it all a matter of opinion: “is seen as”.  Put it down to someone at the so-called ‘extreme’: “hardliners”.  Pathologise the unacceptable view, make it sound like childish paranoia, sneer at it under your hand: “Iran’s iconography of villainy”.

Fact is, if people in Iran feel that way about us, they are justified.  The British government, lead by Winston Churchill, were the original movers in the plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, because he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which funnelled oil profits out of Iran to Britain (in other words, he had the temerity to think that Iranians should benefit from Iranian resources).  Churchill put up the money.  The CIA took over the plot.  They hired mobsters and Nazi collaborators in Iran.  CIA agents started riots.  They started a coup which lead to the ascension of the Shah’s dictatorship and the reign of the SAVAK secret police, described by Amnesty as the worst human rights violators in the world.  Murder, terror, torture, tyranny.  But Western oil companies kept their revenue, so that’s okay (though the Americans elbowed Anglo-Persian – now BP – out somewhat in favour of an international consortium in which they had hegemony).

Now we and the Americans are once again gearing up to attack this country that we have already harmed so badly.  For the hegemony of the American empire and the desperate, clawing need of the tottering neoliberal system.  I don’t know what shenanigans have lead to our closure of the British Embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK… but you can be sure it’s got less to do with outrage at Iranian protestors and more to do with imperialist scheming.

And why?  Because Iran has a nuke program?  Well, maybe.  But why, precisely, are we allowed to have nukes, the Americans are allowed to have nukes (they’re the only people who’ve ever used them on another nation, remember) and Israel (a brutal, racist, apartheid state) is allowed to have nukes… but we mustn’t let barbarians like Iran have them… because they’d impinge on Western imperial domination.  Why are we the ones who can be trusted?  Because we’re the good guys.  We – the ones who nuked Hiroshima, organised that coup I was just talking about and have bankrolled the horrific treatment of the Palestinians – we are the civilised people.  This is the objective and balanced assumption underlying the BBC’s coverage.

Well, truth is not balanced or objective.…

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Side Trip: Paradise Dungeons (2)

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Hello once again, and welcome to the second sample chapter (the first chapter, if you missed it, is over here) of my proposed Wonder Woman project, Paradise Dungeons. Here we start to get at some of the intensely weird and deeply problematic stuff that makes Wonder Woman such a fascinating topic.

I’ve really loved writing both of these chapters, and really want to continue the project. But there are also limits to how much spec writing of one sort I can do. Simply put, there’s not a huge real book market for the sorts of things I do. People occasionally ask why I don’t shop TARDIS Eruditorum to a proper publisher, and the answer is simple – because nobody in their right minds is going to publish a ten volume set of Doctor Who criticism. Even Mad Norwegian caps out at six volumes. Paradise Dungeons is only shooting to be a one volume book, but it’s still a sprawling critical tome about the BDSM themes in Wonder Woman and their impact on feminism. I think it’s a great topic and I’m really excited to write it, but let’s face it – no publisher wants this book. (Please note – if you are a publisher and want this book, e-mail me.)

Which is to say, if you want to see more, head over to the project’s Kickstarter page and pledge some money. A $10 pledge gets you the book, and to be honest, I think that’s a pretty fair deal. And please, spread the word. Seriously. I need to start making some money off of this writing thing.

And we’ll be back again on Thursday with The Invisible Enemy. Oh dear.

Clay (1942)

The early years of any major comics character are always a bit unnerving to read. On the one hand, the early issues, almost inevitably, are where many of the iconic elements of the character are established, making them among the most influential and fundamental stories of the character. On the other hand, the nature of establishing the major tenets of what the character will be in turn means that over these stories, the character isn’t quite right yet. But with Wonder Woman all of this becomes even more complex because of how uncomfortable or inept many of the later creators are with the feminist and BDSM themes of the early days. The result is that the first year’s worth of Wonder Woman comics – the first twelve issues of Sensation Comics and the first two of Wonder Woman itself – are at once the purest and most complete statement of what the character is about and a sketchy, at times even clumsy, attempt at working out the character.

Let’s start with what is, to a modern reader, by far the most shocking aspect of these comics: Marston and Peter’s excessive fondness for extreme racial stereotypes. The horrifyingly racist depictions of the Japanese can at least be explained, if not excused, by the wartime climate. The minstrel-style black characters, stereotypical Mexicans, interchangeability of the deformed midget Japanese with all other East Asian nationalities, and villainous and treacherous Hawaiians, on the other hand, are much harder to explain without resorting to the uncomfortable but likely accurate truth that Marston and Peter held a host of racist prejudices and that their comics reflect these.…

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