Eruditorum Press

Some sort of samizdat wind effect

Smile Review

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It’s hard to avoid the “damn with faint praise” opening of “well it’s better than In the Forest of the Night.” In a whole bunch of very obvious ways, after all, it is. The balance between the ridiculous and the dramatic is better struck. Cottrell-Boyce sets himself the non-trivial Ark in Space challenge of spending half the episode with nothing but the TARDIS crew wandering around an alien setting figuring out the rules, and he generally rises to the challenge. And there’s a sense that he’s figured out what the program can and can’t do well, and so is avoiding pitfalls like relying almost entirely on child actors or an outlandish visual spectacle that’s ultimately going to amount to throwing some traffic lights in the middle of a Welsh forest and pretending it’s good enough.

The “damn with faint praise” aspect, however, comes from the fact that you can’t actually put the bar much higher than “oh, hey, Cottrell-Boyce avoided fucking up this time.” The script still never soars. Worse, as with In the Forest of the Night, the moments where it tries to soar are generally its weak points. The script has an awkward habit of leering in and insisting that you find it clever, and these bits don’t often correspond to when it’s being clever. The repetition of the “skeleton crew” joke twice in rapid succession and the thickly laid on “can’t you call the police” line are the two most obvious examples. But equally frustrating are the things it doesn’t unpack – the declaration that the Vardies are a form of sentient life isn’t set up nearly well enough, and more broadly the resolution is full of ideas that are actually worth exploring, but that the script has left no time to explore because it wanted to be an ostentatious two-hander for a while.

Another way of looking at this, then, is that Cottrell-Boyce has retreated emphatically to Doctor Who standards. We’ve seen this story before, varyingly as New Earth, Planet of the Ood, Silence in the Library, The Girl Who Waited, and probably a few others I can’t be bothered to think of. And fine, we’ve clearly seen next week’s before as well, but Sarah Dollard can at least be trusted to find new angles on things. Cottrell-Boyce, on the other hand, ends up using the Doctor Who standards to carry the weight that his actual scripting can’t.

The most straightforwardly clear of these standards, of course, is the “new companion sees the future for the first time” template. And this is the clear point of spending more than half the episode as a two-hander – to give Bill a nice long stretch of time to settle in and define herself in the companion role. In this regard, Cottrell-Boyce has been given a rough brief. The last time another writer was handed a new companion’s second story it was Neil Cross doing The Rings of Akhaten, which actually shot quite late in the Series 7 block.…

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Little Window

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You were supposed to be getting another Shabcast – with another great guest – this week, but life had other plans.  So, having staked everything on that, I am left without an essay to post.  So you’ll have to make do with the third chapter of one of the novels I’m currently occasionally writing.  Here are chapters one and two.  My Patreon sponsors saw an earlier draft of this chapter ages ago (under a different title).  And if that doesn’t make you salivate with an irresistible desire to give me money, I don’t know what will.

 

There were times when Iza envied Ria.  Ria didn’t have spiders in her hair, or webs plastered across her face. She didn’t have dust falling into her eyes. She wasn’t losing the skin on her elbows and palms. Her fingernails weren’t splintering as they dug into brickwork. She didn’t have to hold on for dear life. She wasn’t alive. Iza felt guilty thinking this, but thought it all the same.

“This is amazing,” said Ria.  For once, she didn’t sound sarcastic or cynical.

There was no room for Ria in the dark behind the walls. But she was there. She had followed Iza into the vertical passageway.  Iza could hear Ria’s voice. It was as if she was behind her.  But behind Iza there were just cold bricks, bare but for the filth of time and darkness. Iza had her back pressed against them.  There was nowhere for Ria to be. Even so, Ria’s voice came from behind her. This was an old trick, of course. Sometimes, in the old days, Ria had spoken to Iza from inside bathroom cabinets, or toilet cisterns, or shopping bags.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” asked Ria.

She spoke aloud. There was, of course, no need for her to keep her voice down.

“I only found out about it after the last time you… left,” whispered Iza. She felt Ria scrutinising her.  She felt guilty, despite the fact that she was telling the truth.

“I didn’t leave,” said Ria, “You sent me away.  Remember?”

“If I did, I didn’t mean it,” hissed Iza.

She almost told Ria how many times she’d wished for her. Again, she wanted to ask Ria where she’d been, and why she’d stayed away for so long.  But this didn’t seem like the time and place.

“We’re here,” whispered Iza.

They’d reached the top.

 

The cavity ran down the entire height of the house on the right side. It was only just big enough for Iza to squeeze into. Every time she did it, it was a tighter fit. She supposed that was good. She didn’t want to be small forever. But it meant that one day she’d be too big to get in.  Too big to make any more secret visits to the top floor of the house.  If when that happened… would that mean she’d never see her mother again?

Iza, with Ria somewhere near her, stared into Mary Park’s top floor apartment.…

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Eruditorum Presscast: The Pilot

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Right! So apparently we’re doing podcasts after all! Thanks to everyone who backed the Patreon and made this happen. That link there where it says “backed the Patreon” is a link to the Patreon, btw, and you can click it and give me even more money. 

Anyway, I’m joined this week by our very own Jane Campbell to talk about “The Pilot.” That link is to the podcast. You know, if you were confused.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Sting Operation

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I’ve said before I’m no expert on comic books. I know I’ve spent basically the whole back half of this book talking almost exclusively about Star Trek comics, but Star Trek was an exception for me, like it was in a lot of other ways. My knowledge of the history of the medium and its important events and figures is functional at best, but, like a lot of people I should imagine, I did use to read them every now and again. Now I never read a ton of comics (at least, not US comics), but neither was Star Trek the only thing I followed in four colours at the time. I never read superhero comics (though I was aware of the characters from other media), but aside from Star Trek I did have a few books I kept an eye out for at the newsstand whenever I’d go shopping with my family. Probably unsurprisingly, they were all licensed titles: Archie Comics’ Scooby-Doo series, Gladstone Publishing’s reprints of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories, and a monthly book from DC Comics published under the Warner Brothers name based on Looney Tunes.

Being that I was first getting into Cartoon Network in the summer of 1995, I was spending a fair amount of time exploring the archives of the Golden Age of Animation, and from this period I have to say that it was the Warner Brothers stuff that most interested me. I was and still am a huge fan of Disney’s Renaissance Age output (…at least on TV), but I have to admit their “Classic” stuff always left me feeling more than a bit…bored and annoyed (with the notable exception of Alice in Wonderland, depending on where you peg the end of the Golden Age being, which is naturally the one Disney movie everyone but me hates, except, apparently Japan). Looney Tunes, on the other hand, was energetic, anarchic, creative and exciting. I had a couple of VHS tapes with some select shorts on them beforehand, mostly Bugs Bunny and mostly a mixed bag, to be honest. But Cartoon Network gave me access to a whole lot more content than I’d ever had anywhere else before, so I eagerly used the opportunity to catch up on my animation history by way of the 1990s version of archive binging.

One of the things Looney Tunes was of course known for was its frequent parodies of then-current pop culture. Bugs Bunny would frequently mingle with representatives of famous celebrities of the time for example, and just as frequently impersonate them. There was also a famous short entitled You Ought to Be in Pictures from the earlier days of Warner Brothers animation that posited Porky Pig and Daffy Duck were actual actors employed at the WB studios and was an early example of blending live action with animation (a tactic, ironically enough, Walt Disney had hoped to use in his various abortive attempts to make an Alice in Wonderland movie prior to 1951).…

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The Proverbs of Hell 4/39: Œuf

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ŒEUF: One of the least nuanced titles (and indeed episodes) of the show, œuf simply means eggs, a straightforward reference to the episode’s themes of family and parentage.

WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes at night, I leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I look back from a distance, the house is like a boat at sea. It’s really the only time I feel safe.

One of the more curious interpolations of Harris’s original novels, this comes from his 2000 introduction to Red Dragon in which he describes the circumstances of writing it, working in a small shotgun house in a cotton field while taking care of family in Mississippi. Fuller’s addition (this scene having been imported from the previous episode, where it originally preceded Hannibal and Abigail’s end-of-episode encounter) is that Will feels safe when he does this. This is curious – the security and isolation of his house as a boat in the sea coming only when he is outside of the boat, lost in the darkness of the vast sea. This suggests that safety, for Will, is a sort of dissociative state, only attainable when he is outside of himself.

WILL GRAHAM: I got so close to him. Sometimes I felt like we were doing the same things at various times of the day. Like I was eating or showering or sleeping at the same time he was.

HANNIBAL: Even after he was dead?

WILL GRAHAM: Even after he was dead.

HANNIBAL: Like you were becoming him.

WILL GRAHAM: I know who I am.

The use of “becoming” foreshadows Red Dragon, but the larger point here is the clarification as to why Will requires dissociation to feel safe: because the thing he is afraid of is himself. In other words, the surface bucolic tranquility of the image (and indeed of Will) is a feint – the point is the isolation that it provides Will, an isolation that can only be completed by removing himself from the equation as well.

WILL GRAHAM: Table has been set. Family dinner. I wasn’t invited. I take my seat at the empty plate. My seat. My place setting, next to Mrs. Turner. I am the guest of honor.

“Œuf” occupies a strange position in Hannibal. Fuller had the episode pulled from the running order, with “Coquilles” airing in its place and the arc-relevant scenes of “Œuf” being released online. The cited reason was the social climate following the Sandy Hook Massacre, but the episode’s resemblance to those events is at best oblique. Indeed, pulling it was in many regards odd, in that it’s the episode with by far the tamest actual murders in it. One suspects that the reasoning was at least partially prosaic – “Œuf” is something of the black sheep of Hannibal. It’s the only episode in which neither Fuller nor his main deputy on the show Stephen Lightfoot have a writing credit, and it is consistently a tonal mismatch with the series. At the heart of it is the logic of the murders themselves, which are rooted in a “true crime” psychology you’d expect to see on a dozen other crime-of-the-week shows, as opposed to in the phantasmagoria of excess that Hannibal actually trades in.…

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The Pilot Review

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I’ll confess, I went into this with no small amount of pessimism. It was hard (and still is, really) to imagine Moffat crafting a better way to go out than Series Nine. Sherlock felt so utterly tired and creatively spent that it became easy to fear that Moffat was simply done. The Return of Doctor Mysterio was neither here nor there. So it was easy to assume that we were already past the peak in terms of what I wanted out of Moffat writing Doctor Who. And with the sure to be frustrating Chibnall era looming, well, my excitement’s definitely short of 100%. None of that’s changed based on The Pilot. That’s not to say I didn’t like the episode or anything. It was fun; in no way a classic, but Moffat’s season-openers generally aren’t. It’s just a sort of necessary bit of context. My initial setting here is cautious engagement.

And perhaps more to the point, that feels like the mood. I’ve been thinking about the Capaldi stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum, which I reckon will happen in 2018, Patreon willing. And obviously, there’s a Pop Between Realities on Brexit and the awful Doctor Who-less shitstorm that was 2016. I don’t think there’s been as obvious a Pop Between Realities since Jekyll. Which implicitly asks the question “what does it mean to do Doctor Who in the age of Brexit and Trump,” which is of course an awful question in the same way that “what does it mean to do Doctor Who after 9/11” was, but it’s a real one that asks itself, stupid and trite as it is. And of course there’s never been an era of Doctor Who that’s up to that task any more than there was one that was up to any other vast cultural task one sets upon a fucking kid’s show, but it’s worth saying, all the same, that the fandom mood going into The Pilot was not exactly one that seemed to think Moffat was going to acquit himself particularly well in those terms.

Let’s start with the title, then, with all its contradictions. On the one hand, an overt promise of newness, actively flagging the episode as a jumping on point. On the other hand, the paratext of Doctor Who never drops out. The writer, lead actor, and probably both members of the supporting cast are all going away in twelve episodes and the show is getting a complete overhaul. It’s the beginning, but the moment has been prepared for.

Within the context of this self-consciously late period reinvention the focus drifts naturally to Bill, who is the actual primary focus of this episode. Broadly speaking, she’s a solid creation. The companion who knows sci-fi tropes is one of those ideas that’s simultaneously obvious and never actually been done, and Moffat’s approach to it, whereby she knows tropes as opposed to making specific references, is a good way of keeping it from falling into most of the more blatant traps of the concept.…

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Shabcast 31 (Chatting ‘Species’ with Josh)

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Happy April 14th to you all.  The Shabcast is back once again (slightly more structured and sobre than last time), featuring the return of one of my favourite semi-regular guests, our very own Josh.  This episode is a tie-in with his last essay, and features the two of us chatting about Species (1995), perhaps the very definition of a movie that is really interesting despite being pretty bad.  Josh’s redemptive reading is fascinating, and we also ponder such imponderables as why people like Ben Kingsley and Forest Whitaker agreed to be in it, why cars explode when they crash in movies, and why this film goes out of its way to feature a scene where Natasha Henstridge stares bemusedly at a stuffed fox.  Plus there are the usual digressions.  H. R. Giger, dinosaurs, Captain Kirk, Avital Ronell, etc.

Download the episode here.  Beware spoilers and triggers.

Also, here are some links to things we mention:

Here is the Vimeo video comparing Species to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

And here‘s the (excellent) article about how and why Kirk is misremembered, by Erin Horáková at Strange Horizons.

 …

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Sensor Scan: Species

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1995 was a major turning point in my association with pop culture. It was the year my family first got satellite TV, and while this meant I finally had access to television besides three channels of varying degrees of snow for the first time ever, it also meant the end of my association with Star Trek for five years.

I’ve of course told this story a lot, but it bears repeating one more time. In the 80s and early 90s, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had an unusual direct-to-syndication deal, whereby they would be included as first-run series as part of a syndication package local affiliates of the major national networks could bid on to fill gaps in their programming schedule, which would otherwise include stuff like game shows or reruns of popular series from past decades. For those outside of the US, in this country our national networks have local regional partners for every municipal area, and while they all get the network’s primetime shows, stuff like local news and weather will be different station to station. Back in those days the syndicated shows were different too, which could lead to weird things, like, say Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine competing with each other (and sometimes even reruns of each other) because two different local affiliates for two different networks decided to air them both in the same timeslot. It…wasn’t always the best system, let’s say.

But even though I only had three channels, it never bothered me. I’ve never been a huge TV person (partly because of this), so I didn’t care. I had PBS, cartoon shows and Star Trek. What more could I possibly want? But all that changed in 1995 with our shiny new satellite dish. And while it was certainly exciting to have so many new channels to explore, it came with a serious price. In the mid-90s, the satellite provider my family used didn’t offer local channels, instead providing a generic national version of PBS and the networks with no regional content whatsoever. This included syndication, so that was the abrupt end of my association with Star Trek on television, I thought forever (while Star Trek Voyager was sold as an exclusive to UPN, Paramount’s ill-advised attempt to make a network to compete with ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX, UPN wasn’t included in our satellite package either until Voyager had ended. In fact, we didn’t get UPN until midway through Enterprise‘s first season).

This also means that 1995 is where I drop out of Vaka Rangi’s narrative, effectively for good. I’ll pop by to check in on Star Trek every so often over the next half-decade (usually with a somewhat baffled and concerned expression on my face) and it will always be something I default to saying I broadly like, but my fever for adventure At the Edge of the Final Frontier will be nowhere near this intense again. My passion will briefly return to flashpoint levels once TNN picks up Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns in 2000 and the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine DVD box sets are announced three years later, but I’ve already talked a lot about that in the Next Generation section.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 3/39: Potage

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POTAGE: A thick soup, and a rather striking shift in the heartiness of courses that would probably destabilize a meal coming before egg and oyster courses. In this case, it flags the fact that this is an episode concerned entirely with the larger arc as opposed to with a killer-of-the-week.

WILL GRAHAM: I like you as a buffer. I also like the way you rattle Jack. He respects you too much to yell at you no matter how much he wants to.

ALANA BLOOM: And I take advantage of that.

For all the problems with her character (see next note), Alana is quickly established as intelligent and competent. But even here there’s a certain drabness to her effectiveness, which stems at best from authorial fiat and at worst because he’s unwilling to yell at a woman. And given Jack’s relationships with other female characters, at worst is more likely. As for Alanna taking advantage, well, it’s tough to identify when she does this as opposed to either going along with Jack or protesting ineffectually.

ALANA BLOOM: Brought you some clothes. Thought a change would feel good. I guessed your size. Anything you don’t want keep the tags on. I’ll return it. And I brought you some music, too.

ABIGAIL: Your music?

ALANA BLOOM: If there isn’t anything you like, I got a stack of iTunes gift cards. I’ve got a stack of gift cards. I don’t do well redeeming gift cards.

ABIGAIL: Probably says something about you.

ALANA BLOOM: Probably does.

But what? To some extent this question has no answer. Alanna is after allthe show’s great cipher, a character whose purpose is first to prevent the show from being a complete sausage festival (quite the job), and second to be whatever else the show happens to need. This sort of characterization gestures broadly to the motiveless quirkiness of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a role Caroline Dhavernas and Bryan Fuller had already explored and complicated more than a decade earlier in Wonderfalls. Hannibal, however, is not a place where pixies thrive, and these traits never quite add up to anything sensible. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: I don’t know how I’m going to feel about eating her after all this.

GARRET JACOB HOBBS: Eating her is honoring her. Otherwise it’s just murder.

The obvious reaction to this is the oft-giffed “cool motive, still murder” bit of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but that’s manifestly not the ethical system Hannibal means to be working under. This is played as a desperate justification, a point emphasized by the original script, which had Elise Nichols’s body visibly mounted on the wall in this scene, thus moving the revelation that Abigail knew what her father was up to forward by several episodes. But the scene also plays Abigail and her father’s relationship as one with real tenderness, affection, and love. As before, the show is taking the idea that his cannibalism is a means of honoring his victims utterly seriously. Garret Jacob Hobbs isn’t wrong to insist that what he does isn’t “just murder.” …

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Saturday Waffling (April 8, 2017)

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Just a heads up to everyone in case you’re just sort of sitting there going “oh, the Patreon always hits whatever goal Phil sets,” we’re currently only $1 over the threshold where I’ll be reviewing the next season of Doctor Who. And that’s because someone upped their pledge from $1 to $9 to ensure it would happen. Basically, what that means is that if anyone’s payment doesn’t go through at the end of the month, reviews will stop. Meanwhile, We’re a whopping $19 away from me doing podcasts for every episode, which is starting to look like it probably won’t. So this is a post, a week before the series starts, where I conspicuously link the Patreon in the hopes that you’ll go contribute.

I know that the world is awful and there are better things to spend money on than this site. And I’m honestly OK with not doing podcasts, or hell, not doing reviews. The idea of watching Moffat’s last season with the same intellectual privacy I watched his first has a real appeal. Equally, the podcasts were a blast last year and it just wouldn’t feel like a season of Doctor Who without it completely taking over the site, y’know? So I hope you can find a buck or two in your budget to toss towards the Patreon, because I’d like to do these things. But they take time, and there isn’t enough of that in my life at the moment.

In other news, work continues on both Neoreaction a Basilisk and Eruditorum Volume 7. The former will be out this summer, the latter hopefully this year. I’ll get back to Last War in Albion after Neoreaction a Basilisk is out the door, but that’s occupying my “write extra stuff” time. (Well, this month I’m just being naughty and writing the first chapter of my cyberpunk book because I haven’t had time to write something for myself in a year now and I deserve it.) 

Anyway. Thanks to everyone who does support the site, and who supports Jack and Josh in their endeavors. It’s a pleasure writing for you all. And if you do want Eruditorum Presscasts for Season Ten of Doctor Who, here’s that conspicuous Patreon Link again.

See you next Saturday, hopefully.…

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