Eruditorum Press

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Knock Knock Review

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I’ve said before that my basic standard for Doctor Who at this point is “show me something I haven’t seen before.” It doesn’t have to be huge. Punch a racist, fail to explore some interesting ideas about indigenous species, it’s fine. I just want some sense of freshness and innovation. By that standard, then, Knock Knock is a complete and utter bust. Which feels at least slightly unfair, since it’s a perfectly well-made and (mostly) well-written episode, but if I wanted drab competency without even a trace of original thought I’d watch a Chris Chibnall show.

Actually, the snark about Chibnall is slightly unfair, because the culprit in Knock Knock’s abject blandness is pretty obvious: this is 100% down to the malign influence of Blink. And not just in the sense that it’s literally the same house, but in the fact that it’s a house in the first place. Once upon a time, when Doctor Who wanted to be scary it would, you know, do some scary stuff. Monsters stalking the Blitz. Weird Satanic horror on an alien world. Evil tourist busses. Or, frankly, any number of scary ideas from the classic series, only a handful of which were ever “haunted house.”

And then came Blink, and suddenly the standard shifted. This is the fourth straight-up unreconstructed haunted house in a decade. And that’s not even counting stuff like The Eleventh Hour, Silence in the Library, or The Day of the Moon, which are all rooted in the logic of the haunted house. And yes, those are all conspicuously Moffat episodes, as was Blink. This is unmistakably his rut that we’re stuck in. But his episodes, at least, tend to accomplish my basic desire by mashing up the haunted house style of horror with something else. This, on the other hand, is just a spooky house with the same twist as The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. There’s a bit in Doctor Who Magazine that talks about making this the “ultimate haunted house,” but it’s hard to see where that was done.

What’s weird is that it’s not even like the haunted house has been paying that impressive dividends since Blink. Sure, Hide was decent, but it was burnished by the fact that the back half of Series 7 was curiously devoid of classics. Night Terrors was crap. And yet somehow, in the wake of Blink, the haunted house has become a Doctor Who standard to be reiterated regularly. And there’s no real reason that should be. I mean, the other obvious Moffat-era defaults, out of control technology and monsters that aren’t actually malevolent, are at least interesting points that feel relevant to the present historical moment. The haunted house, on the other hand, just feels like a tired attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle while apparently completely misunderstanding what was actually interesting about Blink. It doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say in and of itself. I have little doubt there is an interesting haunted house to do in 2017, but if there were four really interesting haunted houses across all of television in the last decade that’d be a surprisingly big decade for haunted houses.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 6/39: Entrée

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ENTRÉE: With the episode titles in French, this does not carry the English meaning of “main course” per se, but rather refers to a transitional course between fish and meat dishes. In truth the meaning is double, flagging this episode’s status as a transitional one in the season and its status as the first one since “Aperitif” to be focused entirely on the arc plot.

“Entrée” is long on Silence of the Lambs parallels, although unlike with elements drawn from Red Dragon, the show does not actually have the rights to the book and so can’t take and repurpose dialogue per se. Instead it tinkers with the iconography (to the point of exactly matching the uniform designs of the film), doing things akin to how Budish interpolated Francis Dolarhyde. To wit, Gideon’s ploy here closely mirrors Hannibal’s escape at the end of Silence of the Lambs.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m always a little nervous going into one of these places. Afraid they’ll never let me out again.

JACK CRAWFORD: Don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you here.

WILL GRAHAM: Not today.

Gee, I wonder what the end of season twist is going to be?

DR. CHILTON: Ah, yes. That thing you do. You are quite the topic of conversation in psychiatric circles.

WILL GRAHAM: Am I?

DR. CHILTON: A unique cocktail of personality disorders and neuroses that makes you a highly skilled profiler.

JACK CRAWFORD: Graham isn’t here to be analyzed.

DR. CHILTON: Perhaps he should be.

The unsubtlety of the foreshadowing is cleverly obscured by the unsubtle reiteration of the point that Will is himself “crazy” (inasmuch as the show takes that word seriously) as Chilton eyes him hungrily as a potential patient. This is, of course, one of the characteristic techniques of the show: achieving subtlety through overlapping complete lacks of subtlety.

It’s also worth noting, however, how decisively quickly the fact that Chilton is a complete shitheel is established. Much of this is down to the clever timing here – Chilton is, if not right about Will, at least not wrong about him, but this comes so early in Will’s mental deterioration and is presented with such guileless opportunism that the thing it most directly sets up is not “Will is unstable” but rather “Chilton is the worst.”

While Will’s previous involvement with the Chesapeake Ripper case is vague, it gives every appearance of somehow never having involved imagining himself committing one of the Ripper’s crimes. Either way, this is the closest we’ve ever actually seen him come to imagining himself committing one of Hannibal’s, even if in reality he’s imagining himself committing a crime by someone imagining himself to be Hannibal. It is unsurprisingly visceral, given this.

JACK CRAWFORD: Sorry to pull you out of class. There’s nothing wrong. I don’t want to make you nervous.

MIRIAM LASS: I’m not nervous. Curious.

JACK CRAWFORD: Your instructors tell me you’re in the top ten percent.

MIRIAM LASS: Top five, sir.

Without actually using any of the dialogue, this scene reiterates the basic beats of the first meeting between Jack Crawford and Clarice Starling, setting Miriam up as a mirror of the character.…

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Wrong With Authority, Ep 4 (The Wolf of Wall Street & The Big Short)

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Hello, just a heads up from me today about the existence of the fourth episode of Wrong With Authority, the podcast about movies about history, hosted (in turns) by myself, Kit Power, James Murphy, and Daniel Harper.

As I say, episode 4 is up, and you can download both parts of it here and here, or go to the blog page, here.

This episode is Kit’s, and its about The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short.  It’s so long it had to be split into two.  This happened not only because these movies gave us a lot to talk about but because we had recurrent recording problems, which forced us to record in three blocks, which ironically meant we ended up with more content that we would’ve done otherwise.

As much as it was a nightmare to make, especially for Kit, I think we ended up with something to be proud of (again, especially Kit).

We are considering the future shape of WWA, but we also feel that the kinds of people who want to listen to the four of us talk about this stuff probably

a) want us to go the whole hog rather than skimp, and

b) are probably the kinds of people – like us – who are fine with long podcasts.

I’d really appreciate people giving us a try if they haven’t already. 

If you don’t fancy listening to us talk about Wolf of Wall Street and Big Short you can try any of our previous episodes, such as

The one about Jack the Ripper movies Murder by Decree and From Hell,

The one about eccentric mathematician movies A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game,

or

The one about horror cinema directors and their monsters Shadow of the Vampire and Gods and Monsters.

There’s also our unofficial pilot, the thing that led to WWA in the first place, our two-part Shabcast about Oliver Stone’s JFK and Nixon.

 …

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Flight Simulator: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Crossroads of Time (SEGA Genesis, Super NES)

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While both official and unofficial video games based on Star Trek: The Next Generation were quick to release upon or soon after the show’s premier in 1987 and have been in no short supply over the years (my inability to play almost all of them when they were current notwithstanding), that wasn’t the case for sister show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It took a good two and half years after “Emissary” before Commander Sisko and Co. started getting representations in video game form, and when it finally happened it happened a weird way.

Without rehashing the whole history of the video game medium again, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the earliest Star Trek: The Next Generation video games were fanmade or otherwise small-scale affairs for DOS and similar personal computers of the mid-to-late 1980s. The first proper “mainstream” Next Generation game I was aware of (at least, the first on a video game console) didn’t land until 1993 on the Game Boy. There is a very good reason for this, of course: It wasn’t until 1993 that it was eminently clear Star Trek: The Next Generation was a pop culture juggernaut that deserved more recognition than it was getting from tie-ins. 1991 might even have been a more on-point date, but Paramount was slow to capitalize on this and took their time getting their marketing gears in action and doubling down on quality control and brand uniformity. By the time all was said and done of course Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was out, but it didn’t get a companion release.

Of course, there certainly wasn’t a *complete* dearth of merchandise before 1993. The Playmates Toys line launched in 1992, and its quality and speed make a good case for it being the definitive Star Trek: The Next Generation tie-in. And yet even so, it is fundamentally bizarre that they should be the ones to self-publish the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine video game: Crossroads of Time on the SEGA Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Let me make something perfectly clear for those of you who are not versed in the history of the video game industry: A toy company spontaneously deciding to start a video game publishing house is not a normal thing. Sure, it’s happened before-Bandai-Namco is still around, but Namco was, you know, an actual game developer. Mattel and Coleco both made halfhearted stabs at competing with the Atari 2600 in the early 80s, but the current status of those companies gives you an idea of how well that worked out for them. The one notable exception is, of course, Nintendo, who, for a good 70+ years or so was known almost exclusively for their hanafuda playing cards until then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to aggressively expanded into other markets, namely video games.

(It is also perhaps interesting to note how Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first games went straight to DOS, while Deep Space Nine‘s went straight to home consoles. I think that says something about where the presumed audience was at that point in time.)…

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Thin Ice Review

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My god Sarah Dollard is good. I’ve said before that a really important aspect of the Capaldi era is the way that Moffat has found a new generation of writers. And while I’ll be gutted if Mathieson or Harness don’t make the jump to the Chibnall era, it’s increasingly Dollard who’s my real canary in the coal mine for the Chibnall era. If she’s on the list of writers, I’ll breathe a little easier. If she’s not, well, it suddenly becomes a lot harder to muster any optimism. This was fantastic – the first story to rise to the self-evidently ludicrous task of writing post-Brexit/post-Trump Doctor Who.

Where to start, I suppose, is with the place Smile fell most frustratingly short: the characterization of Bill. Thin Ice was shot in the next production block after Smile, so would have had virtually as little to go on with the character as Cottrell-Boyce did. And yet in her hands Bill feels like a character. Dollard’s basic approach to this is at once obvious and effective: she builds out around the fact that Bill is black. Obviously there’s a comparison to The Shakespeare Code to be made here, right down to the major beats – the companion frets about slavery, expresses “step on a butterfly” concerns, and eventually it’s established that, actually, no, the past wasn’t white. Obviously Dollard pushes all of these beats further, which you’d have to when recycling the same jokes more than a decade later, but that expansion is the difference between a throwaway “we’d better acknowledge Martha’s black before hurriedly assuring everybody we don’t need to worry about that” to something that’s actually used to define Bill’s perspective on events.

There is of course a thin line between this and just saying I like the episode because of its politics. And to be fair, I do like the episode because of its politics. I mean, the Doctor literally sucker punches a racist. Of course I like it. Shit, I suspect even Jack is going to turn out to like it. Yes, most of its overtly political statements are very right-on and generic ones that are easily traced to common social justice rhetoric on Twitter. But Smile’s politics were just as generic. The difference, and the reason this works as opposed to just being a confused mess, isn’t just that the politics are good, it’s that they’re coherent. This is a story where all the ideas are actually pointing the same way. The story is about exploitation, and so Bill talks about slavery, points out the erasure of black people from history, and confronts a racist shitlord. Where Smile spent most of its time having no idea what it wanted to be, taking up and discarding ideas willy nilly, Thin Ice knows exactly what it wants to do.

Admittedly what it wants to do is still not something of reckless ambition. We’ve seen this before and no doubt will see it again. It’s completing the “companion’s first three stories” arc with textbook precision, which means that this is the one where some friction arises between them and gets resolved.…

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The Anti-Potter, Part 2: Jeremy Corbyn and the Billionaire’s Authorthority

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Should Jeremy Corbyn somehow manage to win the United Kingdom’s General Election on 8th June, J. K. Rowling will be forced to take a principled stand against his rule.  Which will presumably mean that she’ll go and sulk in a tent for several months.  After all, she’s been vocal, even vociferous, in her opposition to his leadership of the Labour Party since before it started.

Well… it might not be a tent.  She’s a billionaire, remember.  This is something that people seem to forget, at least in effect.  But I imagine sulking would form a large part of it, even if it took place in very comfortable surroundings.  And snarking on Twitter.  That would be a big part of it too.  She’s done a lot of that about Corbyn already.  She has tweeted and retweeted truckloads of declarations of his unelectability, his incompetence, etc.  She piled on in the fake ‘Labour anti-semitism’ row, in which a handful of incidents – ranging from the piffling to the wantonly misconstrued to the fabricated – were talked up by the media into the chimera of a Labour Party stuffed with raging Jew-haters, with Corbyn as either Anti-Semite-in-Chief (Ken Livingstone presumably being his deputy) or as a passive permitter of all the internal Labour Party kristallnachts.  (This is all the more reprehensible, by the way, because there is evidence that anti-semitism is on the rise out in the real world.  But, surprisingly enough, it’s mostly not coming from Left-wing people who have issues with Israel.)

This isn’t to say that Corbyn is perfect.  I’m not here going to elaborate a full position on Corbyn.  If I did, I’d have many complaints to make.  But let’s just state something: when Labour loses on 8th June, the largest single factor will be Corbyn’s unpopularity, which is largely a media artifact.  I mean, you don’t have to especially admire Jeremy Corbyn to realise that when this manifestly sincere man is widely considered less competent, likeable, and trustworthy than Theresa fucking May – a woman he routinely trounces during PMQs; a woman so blatantly machiavellian that she does the Skeletor laugh, on camera, in the House of Commons – something funny is going on somewhere.

Of course, one expects the Right-wing press in Britain (which is almost all of it) to vilify the Labour leader, and especially to vilify Corbyn, a man with a long-history of principled socialist activism and campaigning.  The British Right-wing press thought Ed Miliband was a Marxist.  To them, Corbyn must look like an absolute lunatic.  Seriously, this is what they think.  Anyone who departs so far (which, by the way, is nowhere near far enough for me) from the Westminster consensus (i.e. the dogma of neoliberalism) must simply look, to them, like a twisted nutcase.  But the fact is, he looks like a twisted nutcase to most of the ostensibly Left-leaning British press, i.e. the Guardian, the Independent, and some magazines… well, just the New Statesman, if we’re honest.  (The Indy’s claim to be on this list is really just down to the fact that they have one or two left-leaning columnists.)…

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Permanent Saturday: Axis Mundi

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In Garfield, everything has a voice, or has the potential to have one. Birds, mice, spiders and household appliances (not to mention cats and dogs) all have readable internal dialogue. Everything has a soul. Everything is a potential spiritual agent. Naturally it’s only the animals, plants and objects who display regular awareness of this fact, because Garfield is about Western modernity and we as humans have forgotten such things in our society. Recall, however, that it is us as the audience who have privileged access to the thoughts and concerns of these creatures even as the humans in the strip do not. There’s hope for us yet.

(Of course, the strip goes back on forth about this depending on what makes the better joke on that day. If you are still looking for the laws of physics underlining the “Garfield universe” you are manifestly missing the point of this series and are approaching it utterly the wrong way.)

This level of awareness comes, however, at the price of extremely heightened empathy. Those who feel deeply their connection to the myriad other souls in nature may also find their feelings of suffering and loss to be magnified as well. Especially in the West and Westernized cultures, where collective institutionalized violence and depersonalization have become so normalized. Garfield himself expressed concern over this in a strip decades ago: Jon once asked him “Wouldn’t it be great if these walls could talk? Imagine the stories they could tell”. To which Garfield responded (for our benefit, of course, not Jon’s) “Every time a light bulb burned out it would be like a death in the family”. Hearing the voices of others compels you to listen, and to treat the speakers with the same respect and personhood you would wish for yourself.

This is the scenario the first panel sets the audience up for. Garfield stands over the tree stump, implied to be of the same tree he is frequently seen climbing, wondering what happened to it. Garfield and this tree have a relationship which, like his relationship with the dog next door, is humoursly likened to a human nine-to-five punchclock job. Garfield climbs the tree and goes next door to get barked at by the dog because that’s what he “does”, in the modern definition of the word: When we ask what a person “does”, we’re really asking how they sell their labour because of how ubiquitous capitalism has become to Westernism. So the joke in those situations is pointing out the absurdity of the way we schedule our lives in Western modernity by showing how silly it is when other animals and plants, who are no less “natural” than humans are at their core, engage in the same behaviour. It’s grafting a Western capitalist kind of relationship onto a fundamentally innate, intimate natural one.

But that’s all tangential, because that’s not what this joke is about. It is, however necessary context for Garfield’s reaction in the first panel. There’s a quote in one of the last episodes of the UK version of The Office where Martin Freeman’s character muses about how ironically poignant office coworker relationships are: We work our lives away every day, and, as a result, we get to know the people we work with far better than we do the friends and family we *choose* to spend time with, simply because of the clockwork regularity with which we see them, and the sheer scope of how long that time truly is.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 5/39: Coquilles

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COQUILLES: Coquilles are shells, referring either to shellfish like oysters or to casseroles served in a shell-shaped dish. The poetic meaning would involve something about how people are just shells for the higher angelic spirit within. The crass (and likely intended) meaning is a visual pun based on what happens when you flay wings off of someone’s back.

POLICE OFFICER: Do you have a history of sleepwalking, Mr. Graham?

WILL GRAHAM: I’m not even sure I’m awake now.

The best interpretation of this line, of course, is that even Will has noticed the weird way in which the sky moves at the wrong speed and fucking stags keep showing up, and has come to realize he lives his life in a strange and murderous dreamscape. Either way, though, he’s right.

HANNIBAL: I’d argue good old-fashioned post traumatic stress. Jack Crawford has gotten your hands very dirty.

WILL GRAHAM: Wasn’t forced back into the field.

HANNIBAL: I wouldn’t say forced. Manipulated would be the word I’d choose.

Manipulation is a vital yet inchoate topic in Hannibal, and this line sets up much, both about the next episode and about Jack. Later in the episode, as Jack tells Will that he’d feel guilty about all the murders he didn’t help stop if he returned to teaching (a statement designed in part to ensure he would), the blunt reality that Jack is an exceedingly manipulative man. This does not mean that his genial and reasonable persona is a facade – he is legitimately a good person who seeks to make the world a better place by preventing murders. But his goodness is ruthless, and he does not question it, which can and does prove tragic for those pulled along in its wake.

JACK CRAWFORD: Mr. and Mrs. Anderson according to the register. Mutilated, displayed. Thought it might be the Chesapeake Ripper but no surgical trophies were taken.

This marks the first mention of the Chesapeake Ripper, setting up “Entrée,” where that plot finally begins in earnest. This is a somewhat odd decision – this plot starts up early enough to have clearly been in mind all along, and yet it’s curiously and conspicuously absent from the initial setup, in ways that, through the first four episodes, actively fail to make sense. The biggest of these, of course, is a matter of narrative necessity – Will can’t make the obvious connection between the copycat killer and the Chesapeake Ripper because the end-of-season plot hinges on him not noticing it. Nevertheless, the fact that Will has clearly been consulted on this case at some point seems like something that should have come up in his early conversations with Jack.

JACK CRAWFORD: Who’s mocking who here?

WILL GRAHAM: He’s not mocking them. He’s transforming them.

Budish’s killings are a tacit mirror of Francis Dolarhyde’s, with the person being transformed through the acquisition of wings being the victim instead of the killer. Notably, where Dolarhyde seeks to transform into a demonic figure, Budish transforms his victims into angels, furthering the sense of him occupying the negative space around the absent (and as of yet unmentionable) Dolarhyde.…

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