Eruditorum Press

Fucking around and finding out is a valid epistemology

Morning Album Reviews: Thatcher Week

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Over on the Patreon, I have been running a weekly Morning Album Reviews column for almost a year now. It is not focused on new music, or even on a particular genre or style–just whatever 7 records El curates for me that week. I won’t know what they are before she plays them for me, as the column’s name implies, in the mornings to wake me up. It started it’s life as a lark over on Bluesky, and blossomed out into what it is now–it’s a real study in accidentally taking something much more seriously than you’d intended.

Here’s a normal review, to give you a sense of the project:

10/25 Halsey’s 2024 The Great Impersonator

With their often messy sound, distinctive voice, and pristine pop instincts, Halsey has been a favorite of mine since Hopeless Fountain Kingdom in 2017. But more than that, they are just relentlessly interesting: No two of their records have been doing the same thing within the wide genre of pop, and this one takes that instinct to new heights—a sensible move for the artist after 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, their record about pregnancy and motherhood as body horror, produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It saw them drifting farther away than ever from the standard pop record formula to critic’s delight, and fan’s dismay.

In the years between starting If I Can’t Have Love and now, Halsey had their son, broke up with his father, got dropped by their record label, and got diagnosed with a couple of chronic illnesses that had been hiding in the cracks of their busy life. It’s been a time, to say the least, and it’s no wonder they’re thinking about the self as an artistic construct.

They are an artist who has always been defined by change, and driven by it. When describing this album for Apple Music, they talk about that: “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.” The Great Impersonator is a direct exploration of that idea.

In the lead-up to release, over on Instagram, Halsey did a countdown for 18 days: one for each song, with photographs of themself re-creating other artist’s photos, linking each song to it’s inspiration. Some are more straightforward: You can hear the bluesy PJ Harvey vocal dripping off of “Dog Years,” but might need to squint to find the Dolly in “Hometown.”

“Step right up,” the record announcement goes, “Witness the uncanny ability of a woman who can become anyone, anything your heart desires,” but that’s all part of the illusion. This record is more a love letter to the things that built Halsey as a pop artist than it is a spectacle of lack of the self, with their usual veiled confessional lyrical turns and polish.

…

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11:27 in Sokvabekkr

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Stop playing with me ‘fore I turn you to a song. – Kendrick Lamar

Ever since Monday there’s been this Draugr following me around. Weirdest thing. 

OK, look, let’s say up front, this is a petty footnote. “Exiting the Draugr Castle” is a major work on my part—a big swing essay tackling important topics. This is some bullshit—an update to enliven the holiday weekends of the sort of people who check Eruditorum Press on a holiday weekend. 

The essay went over about how I expected. Good number of people who are still cool with me, more who aren’t. Landing slightly more punitive than I’d hoped—caught some Facebook blocks from people I’d honestly expected more empathy from. But like I said, you don’t write an essay like that unless you’re ready to lose friends over it. The good news is that nobody’s played “collective guilt” and taken it out on Penn or something. 

Except, like I said, this one fuckin’ Draugr. And the funny thing is, he’s the one I hemmed and hawed on including, cause I was less sure I thought he deserved it than some. Needn’t have worried, turns out. Cause the Quisling went on an absolute unfriending spree, dropping not only Penn but a swath of other friends of mine, and also managing to blow up his local community in the process. Must have been something I said.

Thing is, some of those blocks I caught seem to have been in response to him accusing me of “all but doxing” him. And as that’s lie worthy of Tyr himself, I think it’s time for one last ray of disinfecting sunlight. 

So, here’s the thing he’s pissed at me for—a Bluesky post I made where I included these two screenshots.

Now, as you can see I went through and blacked out everyone’s names there except, of course, David Carron’s. I labeled the two people who had been characters in Draugr Castle, and left their Facebook icons, which I suppose means that if you really wanted to go scavenging around Facebook you could probably find them, but come on. That’s not fucking doxxing. For one thing, I’d already identified the Quisling as Associate President of the Troth. In what is probably not a surprise to you, the Troth’s website will readily inform you who its current Associate President is. Anyone who was terribly interested who the Quisling was could have figured it out from the original essay, which has been read by 2500 people at this point, and had a far easier time than they would reverse engineering his Facebook icon from a screenshot.

And I knew that when I posted the essay. I, in fact, put a lot of thought into exactly how identifiable people were. I wrote it so that anyone in the community could trivially solve the roman a clef for most of the main figures, but so that readers from outside the community would not. The only two exceptions were David Carron, because fuck him, and the Quisling, because it was impossible.…

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Freelance Subversion: Time Bandits

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With Life of Brian out of the way, Terry Gilliam had partially unshackled himself from Monty Python. He was unable to bring his masterpiece Brazil to the big screen, but he was free to focus on his own movies. He’ll come back to Python in 1983 for The Meaning of Life, which is the movie most influenced by the Pythons’ solo careers, but from now on, he’ll be an artist in his own right rather than just the Monty Python cartoonist. Gilliam is Python’s Peter Gabriel, the member who goes off and does weird, antagonistic art for an audience who knows his new stuff better than his Python work (granted, he splits Peter Gabriel duties with the equally wayward John Cleese). When he does return to Python, it’s like an old novelist reuniting with his college buddies. He doesn’t have a Spamalot moment, infusing one of his old hits with some new clever, fun bits. From this point on, Terry Gilliam is a forward-looking director.

At least in theory. Gilliam can’t stop himself from co-writing a movie with Michael Palin. And it’s hard to blame him. Aside from being a notoriously lovely chap, Palin is Python’s second best writer. Time Bandits benefits enormously from Palin’s influence. It’s consistent in character, theme, plot, and tone, an enormous leap in quality from Jabberwocky. While Time Bandits explores a lot of the same ideas as Jabberwocky, it feels more like a movie you can show your kids for fun than one you’d show them as punishment. For the first time, Gilliam directs a classic on his own terms, rather than splitting duties with Terry Jones (like in Holy Grail), or feeling like he’s putting a demo reel on the big screen (Jabberwocky).

Time Bandits has an all-timer of a premise (a step up from Jabberwocky, which only narrowly has a premise). Kevin, a young boy in the English suburbs, is whisked away from his miserable life by six dwarfs who are fleeing their boss — who is God  — after stealing a map that allows them to travel time and space. Unlike the Doctor who stole a Tardis and ran away, the dwarfs aren’t interested in seeing the wonders of the universe. They don’t even know the history of the universe they helped create — Napoleon and Agamemnon are unfamiliar names to them. The dwarfs only want to rob the whole universe blind. The cosmos is their Treasure Island — damn the safety of the young boy in their care.

Like its predecessor, Time Bandits scoffs at the idea of heroes. Kevin, ostensibly a fairy tale hero, is more interested in his books and violence than human suffering (as poor Shelley Duvall and Michael Palin find out). The dwarfs are mostly sociopathic upstart criminals. Ian Holm’s Napoleon is too busy giggling at violent puppet shows to accept Castiliogne’s surrender. Robin Hood (who of course is John Cleese) is a phony leading a gang of gratuitously violent Merry Men.…

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Capitalism and the Protestant Reformation

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To say that the protestant Reformation is an expression of the rise of capitalism is not to say that you have capitalist Protestantism on one side, feudal Catholicism on the other.  Protestantism did not (usually) express the ideology of capitalism in a direct way.  It did not enjoy exclusive support from the rising bourgeoisie.  Catholicism did not exclusively express the old ideology of feudalism, or take its support exclusively from old feudal ruling classes and their hangers on.

There’s some truth to that picture, but only at the extremes (where, as Bakunin said, we see things more clearly).  Calvin’s Doctrine of the Elect is almost suspiciously perfect in how it provides a justificatory ideology for capitalism.  (We shall be coming back to this in later parts of the M.R. James series, for which this post is a kind of parenthetical theoretical bookmark.)

Overall, however, that wasn’t how it worked.  Catholicism, in many ways, embraced rising commodification, despite being as based in the power of landed property as any feudal aristocracy.  Rothbard and Hayek claimed to see prefigurations of their own libertarian free market ideology in the writings of the Salamancan scholastics (this is still an idea that libertarians are obsessed with).  Protestantism caught fire partly because it expressed popular disillusion with the very marketisation of religion – the selling of indulgences, the buying of private masses and prayers, the profitability of episcopal sees, etc – that was increasingly seen in the Catholic Church.

Rather, what we see is a very slow and gradual breakdown of feudal economic stability, and the slow accumulation of wealth and power in new and rising sectors, as a result of rising forms of trade and production, which leads to the growth of increasingly wealthy and powerful middle classes, to political controversy and struggle between classes, and thus to centuries of instability and of ideological squabbling over how to make sense of the mixed-up world.  A huge part of the instability is caused by the mixture of capitalist and feudal methods.  Increasingly marketised, feudal society found its production methods lagging behind its consumption and investment needs.  Exacerbated by the insatiable appetites of ruling classes for both conquest and luxury, this was the root cause of multiple interlocking crises which rocked the world of the late middle ages, only accelerating the instability which further accelerated the economic reconstruction.  At the ideological level, both Catholicism and Protestantism are trying to understand the instability and reconstruction.  They come to be the two great camps in the realignments and renegotiations of religious ideology because of two material expressions of the rising bourgeois system: the revolutions in communication and in government.

A glib answer to the question ‘Why does Protestantism happen?’ would be ‘the printing press’.  But this begs the question: why does the printing press happen?  It is both cause and result of the development of technical processes, the slow build-up of new technologies within feudalism, and thus of the growth of literate publics who want to read.  This rise of literacy and political involvement is an expression of class struggle, itself partly stemming from – and reciprocally causing – the growth of new classes as a result of that slow accumulation of change. …

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Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts)

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Screenshot of a dictionary definition of "flyting" resembling the album art for Kendrick Lamar's "euphoria" single. David Carron

Think I won’t drop the location? I still got PTSD. – Kendrick Lamar

ᚠ. Establishing Shot of a Cow Licking the World into Being

Funny story: I just spent five years being a heathen.

It ended poorly. There was a dispute, I set a red line, and it got crossed. And since one’s honor is the only thing in this world that one truly owns, I’m not a heathen anymore. But since one of the fundamental privileges of being a professional essay writer is that absolutely any terrible experience you have can be refined into material, I figured I’d write about the five years where I was.

ᚢ. What’s a Transsexual Menace Like You Doing in a Religion Like This?

So I was in a sex club in North Carolina, and I saw this cute girl wearing a Mjolnir pendant. And what struck me about it was that it was a dainty Mjolnir pendant, which wasn’t something I’d ever seen before, so I chatted her up. One thing followed another, including the cute girl turning out to be a hot boy, me turning out to be a cute girl, and the two of us getting married, until in August of 2019 I found myself pulling up the trail to a campground in Pennsylvania to spend five days in the woods with a bunch of heathens at East Coast Thing, the second largest heathen event in the country.

This was to any extent uncomfortable for me. I wasn’t not heathen. I’d long described myself as having the protection of Loki. Way back in college a friend of mine—who ended up becoming a minister for like a decade—knocked on my dorm room door and told me that she’d found a sort of weird spirit around, and it seemed to be mine, and suggested it might be Loki. And after my life really just started to bounce from improbability to improbability, with weird careening plot twists like crashing out of academia after spending a decade in higher education and then making it as a professional Doctor Who blogger, “the protection of Loki” ended up being a pretty good shorthand for the question of “how the fuck do you manage to live this sort of charmed existence, you absolute weirdo?”

But I didn’t work with the larger Norse/Germanic pantheon. Heck, I didn’t even really work with Loki—I just graciously accepted his protection. Mostly I worked with Ahania, a minor figure in William Blake’s personal mythology, in a self-conscious homage to Alan Moore’s famous decision to worship a glove puppet. That had started to change with my marriage to Penn as we entwined our magical practices, but we’d only been married a couple of months and that was still in its early stages.

But the real reason I was nervous was the same basic reason the daintiness of Penn’s Mjolnir surprised me, which was just… the fucking viking of it all. The faith attracts a type, and it’s one where you’re not exactly surprised there’s a nazi problem.…

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Freelance Subversion: Jabberwocky

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Part 1 of a look at the movies of Terry Gilliam. 

In 1977, the members of Monty Python are in a weird space between Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Michael Palin and Terry Jones have just made their successful first series of Ripping Yarns, while John Cleese is in between series of Fawlty Towers and in the process of divorcing Connie Booth. Eric Idle has done Rutland Weekend Television, is getting ready to do a Rutles movie, and has hosted Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, Graham Chapman, the Python who notoriously fared worst as a solo act (despite being the group’s best actor), is getting ready to write, produce, and star in a comedy film called The Odd Job which is so obscure that I’d never heard of it until I checked Wikipedia five minutes ago.

Meanwhile, Terry Gilliam attempts to start his solo directing career with Jabberwocky. Unfortunately for him, his first solo movie gets marketed in America as Monty Python’s Jabberwocky. Gene Siskel’s scathing review of Jabberwocky seizes on that aspect of the marketing when he declares the movie “suitable for those who like unfunny comedies.” Certainly if you watch Jabberwocky as a comedy, you’re going to have a miserable time. The jokes only make up about half the movie’s runtime, and many of them jut out awkwardly from the bits where the plot happens. Some of the jokes are very good — the scene where King Bruno promises his daughter the west tower only for the tower to immediately disintegrate is a knee-slapper. The whole ending is a very solid and incredibly bleak joke. But Gilliam didn’t do himself any favors by starting his solo career with another jokey medieval fantasy film featuring Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Neil Innes (nor does he ever seem to learn his lesson). Add some executive incompetence and bad marketing into the mix, and it’s remarkable that Terry Gilliam has directed 11 more movies since Jabberwocky.

But Gilliam has been a terminal contrarian his whole life. He’s not so much box office poison as a commercial suicide bomber. Starting his career with a bleak anti-comedy that makes Holy Grail look like a glamorous vision of the Middle Ages is just what we expect from him. Jabberwocky is an extremely grimy and bloody fairy tale with crepuscular lighting that could well have influenced David Lowery’s The Green Knight. The skeleton of many of Gilliam’s later movies are here. Jabberwocky looks at the same fables that Disney treated as escapist and goes “gee, wouldn’t you hate to live in this kind of story?”

The protagonist, a cooper’s son named Dennis (played by Michael Palin), lives in a time of knights and monsters, but he’s more interested in stocktaking than adventures. He spurns the beautiful Princess who falls in love with him for a fat girl who couldn’t care less if he got eviscerated by a Jabberwocky (spoiler warning: Gilliam’s gender politics will never improve). He becomes the story’s hero purely by accident, and when he gets the fairy tale happy ending, it’s a nightmare for him — the antithesis of the tedious middle-class life he really wants.…

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Ithaca a Saga

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The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front has sought the council of Sága in the form of a rune reading. We received the following prophecy in reply.

ᚨ (Ansuz)

Screaming, I take up the runes.
A river of language pours from my open mouth–
Alive, the words carve meaning into a frozen world.
A comfort to the wise, and a charge.
Speak;
Your story begins.

In the beginning, then, the word
That sparking leap of conjuration,
Meaning brought forth from dead earth.
The way we speak of kings, in tales of debt and thunder.
The myths and lore. The cunning men who tell it.

This much is known:
I drink with Odin in a sunken place where water flows.

Odin, who screamed forth the runes from which you read,
And learned a woman’s magic.
This is an old tale,
Old as glaciers, a saga written on the earth itself.

He died. He hung nine days upon a tree and died.
Whatever war he fought was lost,
Gungnir’s bite upon his side,
He hung, alone, and died. 

This much is known.

This is the magic of the word.
The way the very speaking of a thing creates it.
I say “the crossroads where he hangs”
And you can feel the chill,
Smell the rot and shit from off his body,
Hear the wind trace a lazy finger
Across his freezing chest, which draws an agonal breath
The likes of which there’s what, a handful left?

This much is known.
This is how the story ends.

Imagine it. The flaming eye sputtering out,
The last thing the gallows’ burden sees
My runes, just eight and three.
Among the spots of light that strobe across his dying eye,
He learns their secrets.

And then he screams.

Imagination fails here.
This is a pain beyond words.
A god is dying.
And then he isn’t.
A scream that grinds like ice,
And then escapes.

The rest is lost,
Is just a whisper passed between a gallows pair
Who drink beneath the earth.
Even my name’s an ambiguity,
Derived perhaps from sight, perhaps from speech,
This gap the spring from which my magic flows.

The thing unsaid, or said in lies,
Made up, and then come true.
The text below the text, the hidden word,
The secret cloaked in paradox and metaphor.
This is the magic I taught him
There upon the gallows tree.

The raven tester paid me well.
Gave me a hall,
A sunken place where waters flow,
So radiant a glacier stopped
To drank it in, an ice age nib
That carved a rune into the earth,
A watery digit pointing to this spot.

What? You thought these were just streets you walked,
And not the corridors of thought?
That Ithaca was just a town above Cayuga’s waters
When so much treasure lays beneath its ground?
You ask for omens?
Why look, there’s Alex Haley’s roots,
And there a buried map of Sagan’s cosmos.
There’s Feynman stood beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud
And Courtney Love beneath her grief.…

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 2)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark.  Here is Part 1 of this essay.  It really is one continuous and continuing piece.

I had no heart to post this last week.  But that was last week.

 

4. Just what kind of Anglican churchman is Dr John Benwell Haynes?

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We will start with the most basic trait of the story’s main character: his name.  It is hard to believe that M.R. James used this name without referential intent, since it takes us right back into the heart of the early English Reformation.

Simon Haynes, sometimes Heynes, (c.1495-1552), was, writes Professor Alec Ryrie in The Gospel and Henry VIII – Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, “one of the most well connected evangelicals of the period.”

Simon Haynes attended Queens’ College, Cambridge; the same college where Erasmus studied during his time in England.  Erasmus would have been there at the same time as Haynes, so it seems likely they met.  Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a Protestant – he remained a Catholic and originally refused to take sides in the Luther / anti-Luther debate, eventually coming down against Luther – but his humanist critiques and satires paved the way for reformist, eventually Protestant ideas.  And it is difficult to argue that his 1516 publication of a translation of the New Testament into Latin and Greek had no influence on the Reformation, which began almost immediately afterwards.  1516 was the same year Erasmus left Queens’ College, and in which Haynes graduated and was made a fellow.  After taking holy orders, he continued to rise through the college positions, eventually becoming president (same thing as ‘master’ in most colleges).

In 1533, Haynes was one of the delegates to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s special court at Dunstable Priory, which was tasked with judging the arguments Henry VIII was putting forward for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  Unsurprisingly, Henry’s archbishop and his panel agreed with Henry’s position, and Cranmer declared the marriage annulled.  The following year, Haynes teamed up with Bishop John Skip (or Skypp) – chaplain of now-Queen Anne Boleyn – to preach against papal supremacy at Cambridge.  Haynes then served as an ambassador to France alongside Christopher Mount (or Mont), as an agent of evangelical reformer – and first architect of the English Reformation – Thomas Cromwell.  Their secret mission was to establish lines of communication with Martin Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, and possibly persuade him to come to England.  As Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Haynes attended the baptism of the baby who would later be crowned Edward VI and oversee the most ideologically and governmentally thoroughgoing phase of England’s Protestant Reformation.  In combination with the arch-persecutor of English Catholics (and future backslider) Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, Haynes accused Sir Thomas Wyatt (Ambassador to Spain, poet, and rumoured lover – or at least adorer – of Anne Boleyn) of unlawful contact with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole. …

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Like an Old Ruin (The Power of the Doctor)

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And so, at last, we come to the end of the Whittaker era of TARDIS Eruditorum. In the wake of recent events, I’d like to stop and offer a special and deep thanks to my Patreon backers, who allow me the security and flexibility to keep doing what I do in spite of everything. This is all absolutely terrifying and dismaying, but it would be infinitely more so without them. I’ve got a few things that’ll go up on the site over the next few weeks, and obviously Joy to the World at Christmas, but I’ll mostly be over there until Last War in Albion returns in 2025.

It’s October 23rd, 2022. Sam Smith and Kim Petras are at number one with “Unholy.” Beyonce, Lewis Capaldi, Stormzy, and Nicki Minaj also chart. In news… fuck, man, there’s been a lot. We’re two days out from the end of the Liz Truss vs Lettuce race. Let’s just leave it there and move on to the entry.

Two months after Legend of the Sea Devils, while Penn and I are at a comics convention in North Carolina, I get the call that my father has had another stroke. The news meanders back and forth between bad and worse over six weeks until, at the end of August, he finally passes. I never go and see him, deciding that my week taking care of him in the spring is a better last memory than him stuck full of tubes, no longer even there enough to straightforwardly recognize the people around him. My mother doesn’t begrudge me this decision, recognizing, I think, that her and my sister’s need for hope is not compatible with my need to accept the inevitable and start processing it. A week later the Queen dies, and I turn forty.

Unsurprisingly, I crash into one of the worst and longest burnouts of my life and career. The handful of things I do write are stuff I’m proud of—a sprawling mystical poem called Ithaca a Saga (which I’m actually posting next week) and a blistering (affectionate) review of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, which, perversely, Penn and I listen to in the car on the way down to bury my father. But everything else just craters. The novel I’m writing dies on the page. The fourth volume of Last War in Albion stalls out completely (a lucky break in hindsight, but agonizing and humiliating at the time). Leaning into the midlife crisis vibe, I indulge in a complete wardrobe refresh, ditching nearly everything I own in favor of a futch-leaning aesthetic based primarily around jackets.

By the time the Chibnall era limps over the finish line I’m in New York to give a talk at NYU about Neoreaction a Basilisk. I get in shortly after this finishes airing, pulling out my phone as we check into the hotel to see if it’s Gatwa or Tennant. I don’t actually get around to watching until late that night, after we get back from a nice dinner with Christine.…

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The Myrka Takes Quite a Lot To Impress (Legend of the Sea Devils)

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It’s April 17th, 2022. Harry Styles is at number one with “As It Was.” Jack Harlow, Dave, and Cat Burns also chart. The biggest news since Eve of the Daleks is Russia invading Ukraine. The Gray report on Boris Johnson’s COVID parties emerges, and Boris Johnson is subsequently fined for his breaking of the law. Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, Microsoft buys Activision, and the state of Florida outlaws telling children gay people exist.

Somewhere in there I download and watch this. I don’t really remember that, though. What I remember is a few weeks earlier, on April 2nd, when the trailer drops. I’m in Connecticut again, called in to take care of my father while my mother and sister go to a family wedding. It was over a decade on from his stroke now, and he was just frail and couldn’t safely be alone that long. Penn and I loaded our computers into the back of the cars—Wacom tablet and all for Penn—and we unpacked in the old office where I used to log onto rec.arts.doctorwho via the VAX and spent a few days just working there and taking care of him. I wrote a bunch of the Big Numbers chapter of Last War in Albion, and Penn drew issue 3 of Britain a Prophecy—the scene with Queen Elizabeth.

I watched The Sea Devils itself in that house, on tapes he made off PBS. I can’t remember how that tape worked. I think The Sea Devils was the thing labeled on it, and then there were probably two or three unlabeled bonus features—something like the poorly tracked version of The Time Warrior, or one of the Peter Cushing movies, or part four and only part four of The Caves of Androzani. But it could have been the other way around. I don’t know. The room where I watched them has long since been gut renovated, turned into the apartment where I spent some time living with my wife while writing the chunk of the blog from late Tom Baker into the Wilderness Years. It was where I lived when the shooting happened. Penn stayed in that apartment once too, dogsitting for me with the abusive ex-boyfriend he these days describes as the transmasc equivalent of joining the army to get the girl beaten out of you.

It’s wonderful to spend time with my dad. I cook for him—I remember chicken parmesan and steak au poivre. We watch a movie every night—CODA, But I’m a Cheerleader, Knives Out, and Annihilation, in his ranking. We leave and vow that we should just do it again some time, to give my mother a break from the constant caregiving, because it’s just so nice to see him.

It turns out to be the last time I do.

Legend of the Sea Devils, meanwhile, turns out to be another iteration of the Chibnall era’s paranoid recreation of the Nathan-Turner era—an episode of television that can, rather astonishingly, be described as Warriors of the Deep done wrong.…

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