Eruditorum Press

July 2, 2018

You Were Expecting Someone Else: Big Bang Generation

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, you were expecting someone else 21

Books like this always pose something of a problem for the project. On the one hand, a book like this, in which Peter Capaldi’s Doctor goes on an adventure with Bernice Summerfield, is irresistible to a project like this. Once I discovered it existed there was literally never a point where I considered not covering it. The new series intersecting with the Wilderness Years at the point where it’s about to come as close to niche interest as it has been allowed to. The possibilities are vast. Except, of course, for the other hand, which is that it’s by Gary Russell. I ranted a bit in the Blood Cell entry about the inexplicable failure of spinoff media to move beyond the same handful of names who have been around since the Wilderness Years, many of them firmly among the B-list of that era. But Gary Russell takes this to another level, or rather several of them. For one thing, he’s been around far longer than the Wilderness Years, having been a prominent figure in Doctor Who at least since his 1984 Doctor Who Magazine review that described Warriors of the Deep as, and I quote, “a flawless story.” While this can probably be chalked up to the magazine’s official editorial policy of “please Mr. Nathan-Turner can we have some more,” it also proves a distressing augury of his own talents. His novels tend to ostentatiously fill high profile gaps—he’s written Liz Shaw’s departure, Mel’s first appearance, and Colin Baker’s regeneration—but to have little ambition for doing so beyond ticking the relevant boxes, and generally a few more to boot.

And so it’s helpful to begin with what could be interesting about Big Bang Generation, figuring that we’ll move on to what it actually does afterwards. One possibility, of course, is to contrast her with the character she almost certainly partially inspired, River Song. This option, admittedly, was not available to Russell and its foreclosure is in fact why this book exists—he’d pitched a Twelve/River novel but been shot down by Moffat, who had his own plans in this regard and suggested Benny as an alternative. The book still alludes to the similarities between the characters, but detailed exploration is left to Big Finish, who will surely get there some day.

Another plan would be what I alluded to above, exploring the Wilderness Years’ liminal status and generally celebrating the weird gap in Doctor Who. This has merit, in that the Wilderness Years had room to do things that the popularity and legitimacy of the new series denies it, but the new series is, as mentioned, about to go into a kind of weird niche moment. And it would just be nice to have a nice little monument to the trappings of the Wilderness Years. Russell even comes close to this at one point, with a flashback montage of companions that consists of Benny, Clara, Amy, Rory, River, Wilf, Donna, Martha, Captain Jack, Mickey, Rose, Cinder, Molly O’Sullivan, tamsin drew, Lucie Miller, Cr’izz, Charley, Samson and Gemma Griffin, Mary Shelley, Grace Holloway, Ace, Hex, Mel, and Evelyn Smythe.…

June 25, 2018

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, pop between realities 47

I’m not going to faff about pretending the justification for this involves Peter Harness’s chances of someday showrunning Doctor Who. I mean, I’d obviously love if that happened, but I don’t expect it (or think that we’re in a place to talk about who should succeed Chibnall yet anyway). No, the reason I’m picking this as our stopover reality between Last Christmas and the start of Series Nine is more idiosyncratic: having declared Harness’s debut the best Doctor Who story ever, I feel obliged to keep a bit of track of his work.

Anyway, this provides an interesting counterpoint to The Game. Like that series, it is an attempted breakout series that didn’t quite work out. It was announced at about the same time as The Game, and went into production two months later. And like The Game, it lingered around not being released for a curiously long time. Its fate wasn’t quite ignominious—instead of getting pre-empted by BBC America and then demoted to BBC Two, it stayed on BBC One but got burned off over the summer—but it was still visibly allowed to fail. To some extent, the same reason applies for both series, which is that they were commissioned in the latter days of Ben Cohen’s time as BBC One controller and then inherited by his successor who deprioritized them in favor of things she commissioned—a fate suffered by countless films and series at countless companies.

But The Game was also a legitimate turkey, whereas Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a fantastic, high-quality adaptation of the sort that the BBC is renowned for. It’s not flawless—it’s a back-loaded series whose last couple episodes are brilliant but whose first two are dominated by patient scene-setting, a problem that explains how it burnt off two of its four-and-a-half million viewers after the frist episode. But it’s solid at its worst and brilliant at its best, and spends more time being the latter than the former. Where The Game disappeared into oblivion, this has maintained a perfectly respectable afterlife on streaming services and was more to the point well-reviewed even at the time.

Perhaps more to the point, it is television that actually feels like it belongs to the 2010s. Although clearly rooted in the angst of two white men, it’s deeply interested in women and minorities. The series consistently focuses on the way in which the people who most often pay the cost of the feud between Strange and Norrell are those on the margins of society, most obviously Lady Pole, Arabella, Stephen, all of whom become prisoners of faerie because of the two magicians’ actions. Its resolution reiterates this point, declaring Strange and Norrell to be essentially irrelevant and focusing instead on those characters and a couple members of the poor and working class.

There are limits to this approach; it’s still anchored by the titular magicians. It fleshes out the people in the margins, but they remain marginal. Yes, there is a measure of historical accuracy to this—white men dominated the 18^th century.…

June 20, 2018

E3 2018 Highlights

Forest of Illusions Bethesda, Bethesda Softworks, E3, E3 2018, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch 2

I was away travelling during E3 week this year and thus was only able to follow it secondhand. I’m busy processing my trip (and frankly wishing I was still on it) and getting over yet another horrific summer cold, but here are a few thoughts on the stuff that jumped out at me from what I caught of this year’s expo. As usual, I’m focusing on Bethesda and Nintendo as I’m no longer passionate enough about the industry on the whole to expend the time, space and effort it would take to follow all the other companies.

It was a somewhat quiet year for Bethesda and Nintendo, with not a lot of new announcements and much spotlighting of games that had been announced prior to E3, *leaked* prior to E3 or that had been open secrets that were all but confirmed already. Which is fine by me frankly: After a massively successful launch and a year of doing nothing by skyrocketing in popularity, the Switch has made it a *very* expensive few months for me (at last count the system has *over 700 games* already! I don’t own all of them, but enough that I feel it) and I have other things I need to spend my time and money on other than video games. So, I actually really appreciate the breather. But even so, there was some exciting stuff.

I suppose I should lead with the big news right off the bat, even though none of this is really “news”. The talk of the show was *of course* Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Switch. Indeed, Nintendo were so confident in it being the showstopper they basically didn’t talk about anything else, and bloody Smash took up over a half an hour of Nintendo’s presentation. And, much to my chagrin, they were probably right. That the Switch is getting a Super Smash Bros. should be a surprise to absolutely no-one, especially as it was announced in a Direct back in April. Slightly more interestingly is the notion that Ultimate is going to live up to its name and include basically everyone and everything that has ever been in a Smash Bros. game before, and that this may well be the final game in the series. To this end, the developers have made a point to include fan “requested” (read “demanded”) characters like Daisy and Ridley. So, if you every wanted to play as a space dragon unimaginatively named after a film director who directed the film his series is openly ripping off and who is most famous for being a woman’s primary abuser in a story all about abusing her and triggering her post-traumatic stress disorder, now’s your chance!

If I sound cynical and negative about this game, well, it’s because I am. I’m sure Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be a great game and I do plan to get it at some point, but I am beyond sick of this series and its fandom. I have very fond and tender memories of the original Super Smash Bros.

…

June 18, 2018

Red Bicycle When You Were Twelve (Last Christmas)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 44

I have a cat with chronic upper respiratory issues, and about once a day she just starts sneezing really hard and snots all over her face.

It’s December 25^th, 2014. X-Factor winner Ben Haenow is at number one with “Something I Need,” with Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, Take That, One Direction, Taylor Swift, and Ed Sheeran also charting, the latter with “Thinking Out Loud,” which has been clanking about the charts since before Deep Breath, cracking the top ten in the same week as Flatline, and not leaving it since. In news since the Brigadier returned from the dead as a Cyberman, the US resumed normal relations between the US and Cuba, while riots broke out in Ferguson after Darren Brown was not indicted. In the country we actually care about, meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon becameFirst Minister of Scotland, while her predecessor Alex Salmond announced that he’ll stand for parliament, and the Church of England allowed women to be appointed as bishops and Libby Lane became the first person to do so.

While on television, nothing; an entire episode that writes itself off as a dream. So Moffat is continuing in the vein of cheeky arrogance, doing an episode that flagrantly commits one of the stereotypical “bad writing” twists. That this is the second time in his tenure an episode has resolved this way softens the brashness slightly, but Amy’s Choice tried to deflect from the glibness of its resolution with the simultaneous reveal of the Dream Lord’s true identity and by positioning itself as a serious-minded character piece, at least within the context of Doctor Who. Last Christmas, on the other hand, revels in its final twist, pulling an accelerating series of “it was all a dream!” reveals building up to the final episode-encompassing one so that there’s no way for the focus to go anywhere other than the ostentatious use of a cliche.

It’s dubious, however, whether any other approach could have possibly worked. We are steadily approaching the inevitable peak of Moffat’s ambition. With Last Christmas following so closely on Series Eight and being so distant from Series Nine, it functions much more as a second season finale than as a stand-alone or prelude. And with Moffat deciding to retain the same TARDIS team his only option was to keep the momentum and barrel into Christmas with the same energy that had suffused the back half of the season. Indeed, even Death in Heaven presented Last Christmas as its continuation, cutting into the credits to metatextually critique the episode as a resolution and promise a further installment of the Doctor and Clara’s story.

And so we get Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus. Like a Mummy on the Orient Express or the moon being an egg, this is an exquisitely well-balanced concept. It is oversignified to a precise degree that only Doctor Who can get away with—not quite so over the top as to be unmanageable, but sufficiently so that it feels appealingly audacious.…

June 14, 2018

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: The Game

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, pop between realities 42

It’s been a while since Toby Whithouse has entered our tale, and things have changed a lot since then. In the leadup to Twice Upon a Time Moffat joked that he’d had Whithouse write for every season, and the one time he didn’t he made him write two the next season. This is true, but obscures the fact that Whithouse contributed to the first half of the split Series Seven such that there were three full years between A Town Called Mercy and his next contribution. When A Town Called Mercy aired he still seemed like one of the most likely heirs apparent. There remain rumors that in the fuss about Moffat’s slower pace of production than Davies Whithouse had been offered the opportunity of stepping in as some sort of co-showrunner or to helm a single season, which he supposedly declined as the obviously poisoned chalice it was. And my past treatment of his work, going back to covering No Angels as a Pop Between Realities prior to School Reunion, has been rooted in the assumption that he’d probably get the job. Obviously that’s not what happened, though.

So what’s Whithouse been doing for two years? Well, that’s basically the problem. After a shortened fifth season of Being Human with none of the original cast in early 2013, Whithouse basically disappeared. His next project had been announced in November 2012 as a 1970s spy series to be called The Game, and it started shooting in August of 2013. At the time, this sounded like his big audition piece—the big BBC One drama with which he’d prove that he he could hack it in the big leagues. Instead, however, it got shuffled down the schedule, eventually making its debut on BBC America in Fall 2014, where it got next to no coverage and largely sunk like a stone. When it finally got a UK airing it was Spring 2015, and it had been demoted to BBC Two. Clearly it was a turkey, and Whithouse basically exited the conversation around possible next showrunners, not least because Chris Chibnall had made exactly the sort of splash with Broadchurch that Whithouse didn’t.

Let’s look at the show where Whithouse blew the mandate of heaven, then. The Game follows an elite MI-5 team as they investigate a seemingly massive Russian operation involving sleeper agents in the UK. You’ve got a pretty standard set of stock characters: Brian Cox is charming as MI-5 head “Daddy,” Paul Ritter is the poorly closeted gay high society type, Chloe Pirrie is the secretary who proves terribly competent and eventually becomes an agent in her own right, Victoria Hamilton is what in a more contemporary setting would be the profiler, Jonathan Aris is her autism-spectrum husband/audio specialist, Shaun Dooley is a cop assigned to MI-5, and Tom Hughes is the protagonist, Joe Lambe, who was blatantly cast on the principle of “cast me somebody who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch only a decade younger.”

The plot of the six episode series concerns the fact that there’s obviously a mole in the division.…

June 11, 2018

Oh, Brilliant! (Dark Water/Death in Heaven)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 42

Missy shows off her new Photographic Vanity Eliminator

It’s November 1^st, 2014. Meghan Trainor remains at number one before Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” unseats her. One Direction, Parra, Sam Smith, and Fuse ODG also chart. In news, Blaise Compaoré resigns as president of Burkina Faso, the IPCC repeats the fact that climate change is really bad, and Matthew Williams demonstrates his passionate Torchwood fandom by killing and eating a woman before being killed by a police taser. Also the US midterm elections happen, flipping the Senate back to Republican control and seeing a wealth of Republican governor elected.

While on television, Series Eight of Doctor Who takes its bow, finding itself ending in a strikingly different place to where it began. What started with a tentative classicism has steadily acquired a swagger and confidence unseen in years. There are a handful of periods in the series like this, where every trick works and every gamble pays off so that even a flawed experiment like In the Forest of the Night or The Chase comes off as sympathetic instead of as a faceplant. What is key about this is not merely quality—there are loads of good runs of stories—but rather a particular sort of bravery. This isn’t a run like the old Season Five, which spat out six rock solid but frustratingly interchangeable bases under siege on either side of its one actual masterpiece. Rather this is like the very tail end of the Hinchcliffe era, where the show dances giddily from the avant garde dreamscape of The Deadly Assassin to the mature SF Face of Evil to an Agatha Christie pastiche with robots before settling down for The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

Even on those terms, however, Dark Water/Death in Heaven stands out. Its first fifteen minutes are unprecedented in Doctor Who, and can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best material of any other show in the history of the medium. It starts at an eleven with Danny’s sudden death and then simply doesn’t let up until it finally offers the release of cutting to him in the afterlife. The volcano confrontation is a majestic payoff to the development that Clara has been given; it’s a scene that would be unimaginable with any other character, or even with Clara just six episodes earlier. The intensity and way in which both Clara and the Doctor escalate the situation is edge-of-the-seat stuff, not because there’s any real sense that Clara might forever seal the Doctor outside of the TARDIS but because the idea of the Doctor and the companion doing things like this to one another is constantly remaining unthinkable right up until the moment the words come out of their mouths. And the subsequent TARDIS scene, with its emotional denouement of “do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference,” is simply perfect. It’s probably the most intense fifteen minutes of television in Moffat’s career, and there’s not actually a single monster or indeed antagonist in the whole thing.…

June 10, 2018

An Unearthly Book Relaunch

Elizabeth Sandifer 19

Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the rerelease of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: William Hartnell after several months of being off-sale. This book contains edited and expanded versions of all of the Hartnell-era blogposts alongside nineteen book-exclusive essays on topics including Dan Dare comics, David Whitaker’s novelization of The Daleks, An Adventure in Space and Time, and a variety of novels and Big Finish audios.

The book is available at the following links.

Amazon US: Kindle, Paperback

Amazon UK: Kindle, Paperback

Smashwords (for non-Kindle e-readers)

If you’ve already purchased the book through Amazon or Smashwords you should be able to re-download it and have it immediately update to the new version. If you’ve already bought a paper copy, I regret that I cannot automatically update it for you. The contents of this edition and the previous one are substantially the same; the main difference is that my name is correct. There are two new essays, one on Big Finish’s The Beginning, the other on their First Doctor Adventures box set, but these are deliberately minor treats presented as plums for obsessive people who feel obliged to rebuy the book as opposed to incentives to get anyone to do so.

Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy in the past or who intends to buy one now. And especially thanks to James Taylor both for the cover and for the update to it.…

June 8, 2018

Considering the Reagan – Special German Edition

Jack Graham consider the reagan, podcast 1

Sorry about the dearth of content from me lately. I’ve been unwell. Capable of very little serious effort. I am very grateful for your patience, and especially the apparently inexhaustible patience of my dear friend Elizabeth.

Here are two recent episodes of Consider the Reagan, a strand of the Wrong With Authority podcast in which I and my friends James, Kit, and Daniel, comment on the 80s films – made during the Reagan years – which loomed large in our lives.

More of this sort of thing soon… because watching TV and being a smartass about it is about as much as I can manage right now.

Die Hard

Raiders of the Lost Ark

…

June 4, 2018

Control of Singularity (In the Forest of the Night)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 24

dat beach chair tho

It’s October 25^th, 2014. Ludvig van Beethoven has written Three Piano Trios, Op. 1, Joseph Haydn has written his 103rd and 104^th symphonies, and Antonio Salieri debuts his opera Palmyra. In news, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia dies, prompting David Cameron and Prince Charles to immediately fly to Saudi Arabia to pay their respects. Houthi forces seize the presidential palace in Yemen, leading to the resignation of the President. And in Marysville, Washington, a student with a handgun kills four people including a girl who had romantically rejected him. In another town where that sort of thing is all too familiar, a girl who doesn’t know she is one watches television, where a forest grows from nowhere.

It’s 1795. Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars are at number one with “Uptown Funk.” Hozier, Ed Sheeran, Philip George, and Meghan Trainor also chart. In news, the Roman Catholic Church has beatified Pope Paul VI, while a man with a hatchet in New York City attacked two police officer. In Lambeth, William Blake, fresh off of the first printings of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience, goes for a walk. He happens upon an acorn, and plants it in the ground.

It is somewhere in late January or early February, 2015. Meghan Trainor continues to be all about that bass, while One Direction, Vampis, and Eminem also chart. In news, the US and UK governments ratify the Jay Treaty, a series of bread riots break out across Great Britain, culminating in King George being pelted with stones, and a meteor strikes a few yards from ploughman John Shipley in Wold Newton. The occupants of two carriages riding past have their genetic makeups shifted due to ionization, creating the extraordinary family trees of the Blakeney and Greystoke families, from which such luminaries as Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, and Doc Savage will arise. And a game between Ghana and Sierra Leone in the African Cup of Nations is abruptly cancelled due to an unexpected forest growing over the entire world.

In druidic traditions, the tree fixes the structure of the world, defining and connecting the spaces of the various planes. In this regard, it is allied with Omega—compare “Times upon times he divided, and measur’d / Space by space in his ninefold darkness” with the Nordic Ygdrassil, which provides the structure and ordering of the nine worlds. The tree is an agent of fixity and single vision; absolute, monolithic, and simply there—a fact. The acorn dropped by William Blake in 1795 persists three hundred and twenty years later, is the same thing, “a tiny little bit of 1795” emboited forever inside it. A tree is a time machine, but not like a TARDIS.

Deleuze and Guattari describe this phenomenon in their famous introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. The tree “the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book).…

May 30, 2018

Book Launch Redemption

Forest of Illusions Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek: The Next Generation 10

Vaka Rangi Volume 3: Star Trek: The Next Generation (Seasons 2-5) is now available! Or if it’s not yet, it will be presently.

This volume covers the years 1988-1992, framed (to borrow/paraphrase a bit from Jack) in terms of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Fall and Rise”. Although the young Star Trek had ended the 1987-88 television season a popular, critical and ratings success, Leonard Maizlish’s authoritarian micromanaging and Gene Roddenberry’s failure to properly communicate his ideas to his staff drove the creative team away in droves. Worse still, one of the worst Writer’s Guild Strikes of all time hit in 1988, absolutely crippling producer Maurice Hurley’s attempts to do his job for the entire year. But Hurley made enemies and mistakes of his own, and by the time the Writer’s Guild Strike finally lifted he was gone, and with him all remnants of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s original creative team. Come 1989 the entire studio had been completely turned over, and an incoming motley crew of veteran TV producers and ambitious young freelancers were faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of keeping Star Trek: The Next Generation not just on course, but above water.

And yet somehow, against all odds and in spite of week-to-week quality during this period that can be charitably described as changeable, Star Trek: The Next Generation only continued to grow in fame and popularity. Its 1990 season finale became a landmark in television history, it came back in the fall with its highest rated episode ever since its pilot and a year after that would host the 25th Anniversary of the entire Star Trek franchise. And then, rumours began to circulate that Star Trek: The Next Generation might even be getting a sister show.

This book attempts to tell a story about how this television miracle happened. Each chapter is a heavily revised and expanded version of a blog post that appeared as part of the original Vaka Rangi blog project, and in some cases whole essays have been rewritten from the ground up entirely. Every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s second, third, fourth and fifth seasons is examined in detail, as well as the motion picture Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. This book version also includes a new set of “Totemic Artefacts” essays on the AMT/ERTL Star Trek: The Next Generation model kits released between 1988 and 1991 and an essay on Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. Here’s some of what else you can look forward to inside:

Learn how The Borg came to be, and how the way they appeared in “Q Who” and “The Best of Both Worlds” was not the way they were originally intended to appear.
Learn the true meaning of the secret connection between Star Trek: The Next Generation and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and in particular that between Captain Picard and Princess Nausicaä.
Find out how the consensus-worst Star Trek movie ever once had the very real potential to be the best.

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