Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 49

To The Future

With the publication of my essay on Ill Wind Part 4 and my Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Reading Guide (which just went up earlier today here, in case you missed it), Vaka Rangi has officially left the TNG/DS9 period.

I said it before (in the Species essay), but this means my positionality is gone from Star Trek more or less for good. And I'll be honest, when I was first planning Vaka Rangi in 2013, my initial plans for the project were *limited* to this 1987-1994 (and a bit after) period. I had no intention of covering the Original Series, the Animated Series, the movies, Voyager, the Dominion War or anything else. That I've managed to stretch the project out for this long still quite frankly amazes me. The fact of the matter is I really don't have many more places to go with Star Trek. With Ill Wind, I've basically said all I wanted to say. I did what I set out to do.

I do have some stuff to say about Enterprise and I'm working on the early stages of a rough outline of an angle for the Voyager and Dominion Wars years that will lead into that (and in fact a portion of the book I'm currently editing was intended to set that up)...But it's far from ready, and I'm far from confidant I've got a strong enough handle on the material and how I want to convey it such that the final product would be anything resembling coherent or erudite. Vaka Rangi from here on out would basically be an entirely different project from what it was up to today, so I need time to work out how to manage that transition in a vaguely elegant way.

Ill Wind may not be the last thing I ever write about Star Trek, but it will probably be the last for a *very* long time.

I'm deep into the planning and pre-production process of my next large-scale blog project that will succeed Vaka Rangi, and trust me, it's every bit as overreaching and overambitious as this has been. I'm really excited to start work on this, such that it's distracting me from day-to-day work, and I can't wait to share it all with you. The problem is...I have to wait, and so will you, because I have to physically *go* somewhere to do fieldwork for this, and I won't be able to do that until April 2018. So the project has to wait for at least another 11-12 months.

Permanent Saturday will continue, and so will Hyrule Haeresis (but there's only three more entries of that left, so I'm pacing them out), and in the meantime, I still have a YouTube channel about video games, and I'm going to use this time to focus on building and nurturing that. My first two videos are on Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo by Cyan Worlds, and a commentary track on the same. Not *every* video is going to be an hour and a half long (I actually want to shoot for about 30 minutes an episode), but as there's not much to Spelunx when compared to modern games I figured I'd show everything in one go.

Tomorrow night, probably around 7 or 8 PM EDT (though there will be a notification on YouTube when we go live), I'll be doing a livestream on the channel with Ben Knaak on Elder Kings, a fanmade modification of Crusader Kings II that turns the setting into Tamriel from The Elder Scrolls. Ben and I have podcasted about The Elder Scrolls two times before, so, if you have time and are interested, you may want to give those a re-listen. After that, I've got a bunch more cool stuff planned for the channel, including the start of an analytical project that will probably take almost as long for me to set up as Vaka Rangi.

Speaking of video games...It's E3 season again. I know I said I wasn't going to be doing any more game journalism stuff after the disasterous Nintendo Switch reveal, but...Well, I've had a bit of a turnaround on the console (though I'm not sold yet), if for no other reason than I turned out to be completely wrong about its sales prospects (though the GameCube did really well at launch and the WIi didn't, so, remember, anything can happen). I guess I'm just poor. Regardless, I'm curious to see what Bethesda Softworks and Koei-Tecmo are doing next, and if Square-Enix will continue to do dumb shit that screws over everyone who comes in contact with them. So expect one or two E3 essays from me, but ONLY on Bethesda and Nintendo.

And on top of that, I'm still writing books. I'm currently editing and revising Vaka Rangi Volume 2, which I plan to have out this September. Volume 3 is pegged for a 2018 release. I also have a whole other book I need to somehow work in writing, editing and publishing somewhere in there too, and I'm still not sure how or what I'm doing with that (it's not part of the VR series, but it's tangentially related to it). I'll clarify things a bit in September, but for now, I'll say Vaka Rangi has been consolidated from six books down to three, with a potential fourth to be determined at a later date.

Also some minor housecleaning. I became aware awhile back that, due to Dropbox basically deciding to be obnoxious, a few *very* old Vaka Rangi essays have been rendered inaccessible. This was because for a few select stories, I decided to be weird and use a format other than a blog editor: Namely, Twine and the .pdf format. I'd hosted them through Dropbox, but my account got made private because of reasons and I no longer have the software or the computer it was on anyway. I sort of ignored the problem up 'till now, but I couldn't after today because my Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode guide links to "Symbiosis", which was a part of my second "Temporal Incursion" Twine game.

I've reuploaded the affected files to a public folder on Google Drive (that would be the TOS Temporal Incursion Twine game, the "Memory of Past Tribbles" script fic and the TNG Temporal Incursion Twine game) and redirected the links on the Eruditorum Press versions of those posts to their new locations. I didn't do that on the original posts on my old blog because...Well, because I assume you're all following me over here now. I mean, if you're not...I appreciate the loyalty, but sometimes we just have to move on.

Google Drive is weird about the HTML the Twine games are saved in and wants to open them with its in-built text editor, so you may have to download the files and manually open them in your browser to get the intended effect, though that *should* still work. And hey, if worst comes to worst, well...The first Temporal Incursion game and "The Memory of Past Tribbles" are both in Vaka Rangi Volume 1. And TNG Season 1 will come in due time. Those versions are way better anyway.

That's about all for now. I do also still have a Patreon-It's mostly for the YouTube channel, but it helps me out big time other places too, especially when it comes to stuff like this next blog project. Making it be everything I'd love for it to be is going to require a *ton* of logistical planning and resources. Thanks again for all your continued support-It means a lot to me, and I hope to see you on the other side.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Reading Guide

Longtime Vaka Rangi readers may remember that I have a small tradition of making episode guide/reading list posts whenever I finish covering Big Eras of the project. The hypothetical situation is that someone who is new to the show and yet for some reason *doesn't* want to marathon binge-watch it as is the standard way of consuming TV these days could theoretically be interested in my recommendations for the best stories so as to emphasize the cream of the crop while avoiding filler and missteps. Each entry has a link to my essay on the story for those who might want to revisit them.

I first did something like this when, following a joke Kevin Burns made to me about Futurama, I was challenged to find "20 Good Episodes" of the Original Star Trek. TOS fans will likely be annoyed as there's probably more episodes from that show one could recommend (and I *still* would have chosen different episodes after publishing Vaka Rangi Volume 1), but I wanted to limit myself to 20 following the conceit of the game so I was far harsher in my choices than I might otherwise have been. I didn't do a list post for the Animated Series, but really, you're pretty much good with anything on that show that wasn't written by Margaret Armen.

After I finished Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1, I did another post to drive home my argument that the inagural year was very unfairly maligned and in truth had a robust crop of stories that deserve anyone's attention. That post also has a list of my picks for the best episodes from the Dirty Pair TV series, as I had recently finished watching it for the first time and was about to start on the Original Dirty Pair OVA Series.

The Dirty Pair franchise itself got what in many ways is the prototype of the post you are about to read today: A master post of all my favourite stories I'd experienced so far, with links to where you could get your hands on copies of your own. It's not linked from Eruditorum Press, but it's still archived at my old blog. The links to my essays on all these old posts do link back to the old site, but all of my essays are archived right here too and can be read by searching or following the tags. It's a bit dated now (especially the webstore links, though Dirty Pair should still all be on YouTube), but my picks are still pretty much the ones I'd pick today.

And so now, having come to the end of a long and winding road revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it's time to give this phase of the project the same dues. Listed below, for your reading pleasure (or perhaps displeasure), are what I consider to be the best Star Trek stories between 1987 and 1996, including TV episodes and comic books. Each episode title links back to the EP version of my essay on that story, with the disclaimer that these are not the final versions of these pieces. Any and all are subject to change and revision as I work on editing and compiling the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine books over the course of the next year. If you want the true Vaka Rangi Star Trek experience, these are the stories to track down.

A few observations...

TNG Season 1 is better than Seasons 2, 3 and 4. Almost combined. It is also better than Season 5, though just by a couple episodes. Season 5 itself is way better than I thought it was when I was rewatching it, probably because I was just coming off of...
TNG Season 4. Which is, as I strongly suspected, the single worst year in the show's run. Seasons 2 and 3 are better by virtue of one story apiece. Season 2 looks unfairly bad by comparison in the list because I didn't include any comics that year. But it's still kinda bad.
TNG Season 6/DS9 Season 1 and TNG Season 7/DS9 Season 2 are the joint best years in either show's history. Even without including DS9's episodes, TNG Season 6 and 7 would still be that show's clear pinnacle. Season 6/1 comes across as slightly stronger and 7/2 comes across slightly weaker, mostly because I shunted that year's crop of comics into the next section and DS9 has more opportunites to screw up.
"Season 7B/2B", my obtuse self-indulgence thought experiment that imagines an entire third joint TNG/DS9 season comprised entirely of comic books, is better than any single television season except its two direct antecedents.

Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are both available on your favourite streaming sites last time I checked, but fans who want a little bit more are enthusiastically encouraged to check out the Complete Series of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray. That's available on Amazon here, though the separate UK version might be a cheaper import depending on where you live, and it's region free to boot. For me in the US, it's rather striking difference of $113 versus $60, though that doesn't take shipping into account (and I already have the single season releases as, you know, I blogged about them), and Canadian fans are apparently stuck with a bit less of a deal at $140 versus $130.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is on DVD, but it has a very poor transfer and I'd wait to see what gets announced in 2018 for its 25th Anniversary.

The comics are, unfortunately and predictably, the hardest to track down. There was a terrific DVD-ROM collection of every pre-IDW Star Trek comic ever released by Git Corp in 2009 (which is where I first read many of these wonderful stories), but it seems to be out of print and very rare now. All I can say is keep your eyes peeled and that I wish you the best of luck.

With all that said, I present to you the Vaka Rangi curated Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

 

1987-1988

 

“Encounter at Farpoint”
“Haven”
“Where No One Has Gone Before”
“The Last Outpost”
“Lonely Among Us”
“The Battle”
“Too Short a Season”
“The Big Goodbye”
“Datalore”*
“11001001”
“Home Soil”
“Coming of Age”
“Heart of Glory”
“The Arsenal of Freedom”
“Symbiosis”
“We'll Always Have Paris”
“Conspiracy”
“The Neutral Zone”
“Spirit in the Sky!”
“Q Factor”
“Q's Day”
“Q Affects”

 

1988-1989

 

“Where Silence Has Lease”
“Elementary, Dear Data”
“Loud As A Whisper”
“A Matter Of Honor”
“Contagion”
“The Royale”
“Time Squared”
“Q Who”
“Peak Performance”

 

1989-1990

 

“The Bonding”
“Booby Trap”
“The Vengeance Factor”
“The Hunted”
“Yesterday's Enterprise”
“Sins of the Father”
“Tin Man”
“Transfigurations”
“The Best of Both Worlds”
“The Gift”
“The Pay Off!”
“The Noise of Justice”
“The Impostor”
“Whoever Fights Monsters”

 

1990-1991

 

“The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”
“Remember Me”
“Data's Day”
“The Wounded”
“Devil's Due”
“Night Terrors”
“Half a Life”
“Redemption”
“The Lesson”
The Star Lost Part 1: “The Flight of the Albert Einstein”
The Star Lost Part 2: “Mourning Star”
The Star Lost Part 3: “Trapped”
The Star Lost Part 4: “The Barrier”
The Star Lost Part 5: “Homecoming”
“Thin Ice”

 

1991-1992

 

“Redemption II”
“Darmok”
“Ensign Ro”
“Silicon Avatar”
“Unification I”
“Unification II”
“A Matter of Time”
“Hero Worship”
“Conundrum”
“Power Play”
“Cause and Effect”
“The Next Phase”
“The Inner Light”
“Time's Arrow”
“Bridges”
“Bone of Contention”
“Separation Anxiety”
“Second Chances!”
“Strange Bedfellows”
“Restoration”

 

1992-1993

 

“Time's Arrow, Part II”
“Realm of Fear”
“Schisms”
“A Fistful of Datas”
“Chain of Command, Part I”
“Chain of Command, Part II”
“Emissary”
“A Man Alone” (or “Past Prologue”)
“Past Prologue” (or “A Man Alone”)
“Ship in a Bottle”
“Aquiel”
“Face of the Enemy”
“Dax”
“The Passenger”
“The Nagus”
“Starship Mine”
“Vortex”
“Battle Lines”
“The Chase”
“The Storyteller”
“Frame of Mind”
“Progress”
“If Wishes Were Horses”
“The Forsaken”
“Dramatis Personae”
“Duet”
“Timescape”
“In the Hands of the Prophets”
“Descent”
The Worst of Both Worlds Part 1: “The Bludgeonings of Chance”
The Worst of Both Worlds Part 2: “The Belly of the Beast”
The Worst of Both Worlds Part 3: “The Armies of the Night”
The Worst of Both Worlds Part 4: “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”
“Old Wounds”
“Pickpocket”

 

1993-1994

 

“Descent, Part II”
“The Homecoming”
“The Circle”
“The Siege”
“Gambit, Part I”
“Gambit, Part II”
“Phantasms”
“Melora”
“Dark Page”
“Rules of Acquisition”
“Necessary Evil”
“Second Sight”
“Inheritance”
“Parallels”
“Armageddon Game”
“Sub Rosa”
“Shadowplay”
“Masks”
“Playing God”
“Eye of the Beholder”
“Profit and Loss”
“Firstborn”
“The Wire”
“Crossover”
“Emergence”
“All Good Things...”
“Tribunal”

 

1994-1996

 

“Companionship”
“Of Two Minds”
“Bodies of Evidence”
“Requiem”
“Requiem II”
Hearts and Minds Part 1: “For the Glory of the Empire”
Hearts and Minds Part 2: “On the Edge of Armageddon”
Hearts and Minds Part 3: “Into The Abyss”
Hearts and Minds Part 4: “Masters of War”
“A Matter of Conscience...”
“The Deceivers”
“The Truth Elusive”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 1: “Prophets and Losses”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 2: “The Wormhole Trap!”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 3: “Encounter with The Othersiders!”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 4: “The Enemy Unseen”
“Blood & Honor”
“Terok Nor”
Ill Wind Part 1
Ill Wind Part 2
Ill Wind Part 3
Ill Wind Part 4

 
*Only if this is your first watchthrough, as it's essential setup for “Silicon Avatar” and “Descent”. Because otherwise this is a straightforwardly dreadful episode.

The Proverbs of Hell 11/39: Rôti

RÔTI: Roast, specifically roasted game birds, but in this case likely a straightforward case of “and now we arrive at the big centerpiece courses.”

HANNIBAL: Someone who already doubts their own identity can be more susceptible to manipulation.Dr. Gideon is a psychopath. Psychopaths are narcissists. They rarely doubt who they are.

DR. CHILTON: Tried to appeal to his narcissism.

HANNIBAL: By convincing him he was the Chesapeake Ripper.

DR. CHILTON: If only I had been more curious: about the common mind.

HANNIBAL: I have no interest in understanding sheep. Only eating them.

One of Hannibal’s more bluntly callous secret confessions. Its unusual viciousness is probably explained by his understandable frustration at having to relate in any way, shape, or form to Chilton. Also interesting is the selection of animals for the metaphor - a departure from the show’s default choice of pigs that flags the particular disdain with which Hannibal holds Chilton.

DR. CHILTON: I thought psychic driving would have been more effective in breaking down his personality.

HANNIBAL: Psychic driving fails because its methods are too obvious. You were trying too hard, Fredrick. If force is used, the subject will only surrender temporarily.

Hannibal is, of course, obliquely discussing his own efforts to make Will Graham believe himself to be a killer. Of course, it’s not as though Hannibal isn’t using force, after all - he literally killed a man to ensure Will’s diagnosis would remain secret. Hannibal’s real point is, as ever, aesthetic - Chilton’s approach was clumsy, heavy-handed, and, most damningly, lacking in elegance.

There’s an odd structure to the episodes from “Trou Normand” through “Releves.” “Rôti” seems to want to follow up directly from “Trou Normand,” flashing back to the totem pole as a metonym for all the murders Will has been looking at, while putting Georgia Madden off to the side. Then “Releves” will pick up the Georgia Madden case, as though it would prefer to follow up on it. Was there a change in episode order? If so, other than the disjuncts, it’s a sensible one that results in Will’s psyche disintegrating further with each episode, but there’s an odd sense of cycling through several parallel stories of Will’s collapse.

Given that the script for “Buffet Froid” compares Will’s misdrawn clock to Dali, it’s fitting that this episode should go with the amusing image of a melting digital clock. Although on the whole the focus on imagery of rushing water for Will’s delusions is slightly odd given that he’s running a fever. Presumably it’s meant as an extension of the frequent motif of Will awakening drenched in sweat, but there’s a clear contrast between last week’s “set his mind on fire” and this week’s flooding. The easiest reconciliation: Will’s delusions are in fact a respite from his illness - he hallucinates water as a means of calming his body down. This is clever, but doesn’t really work.

DR. CHILTON: I can’t take responsibility for your actions, Dr. Gideon.

DR. GIDEON: Sure can. It’s why I’m suing you. Had me thinking I was someone else, now I don’t know what to think.

DR. CHILTON: Dr. Gideon, you told me you were the Chesapeake Ripper.

DR. GIDEON: No, Dr. Chilton, you told me I was the Chesapeake Ripper. And that’s what I’m going to tell everyone.

DR. CHILTON: See you in court.

It’s somewhat baffling that this profoundly awkward infodump of a scene was favored instead of making all of this clear in the Chilton/Hannibal scene at the episode’s opening. Lack of adherence to realistic criminal procedure is in no way a reasonable objection to make about Hannibal, but the contrivance of Chilton getting to confront Gideon when he’s on his way to testify against him is a weird move when the sole point of the scene is exposition.

JACK CRAWFORD: Does Abel Gideon still believe he’s the Chesapeake Ripper?

WILL GRAHAM: Abel Gideon’s having a difference of opinion regarding who he is.

A delightful account of Gideon’s mental state, but more to the point a delightful evolution of the character. “Fake Chesapeake Ripper played by Eddie Izzard” is, on the whole, already a solidly inventive concept, but this subsequent version (who ends up being far more of a factor in the show) of a killer motivated primarily by the fact that he no longer knows who he is serves as a succinct demonstration of the power of Hannibal’s approach - it’s a rich and evocative idea that would have a hard time emerging out of anything other than the hallucinatory hall of mirrors that is Hannibal.

The sudden profusion of antlers calls back to a deleted line from the “the house is like a boat at sea” scene in “Œuf,” itself moved from “Potage,” in which Will responds to Hannibal’s description of his “mentality as grotesque but useful” by describing it as “like a chair made of antlers,” this exchange itself being a rephrasing of a bit in Red Dragon. Without it, the consistent iconography of antlers becomes purely a metonym for Hannibal’s representation as a stag, which makes this scene come off as a kind of weird and directionless hallucination.

WILL GRAHAM: A thicket of antlers. All I heard was my heart dim but fast, like footsteps fleeing into silence.

As usual, the rule of thumb “if it’s a weird simile, it’s probably from Thomas Harris” applies; “footsteps fleeing into silence” comes from a description of Dolarhyde imagining killing a family.

ALANA BLOOM: What do you think will happen if Gideon finds the Ripper?

WILL GRAHAM: The Chesapeake Ripper will kill him. He took credit for his work. Ripper would consider that rude.

A rare wrong guess from Will. The big error is thinking about this in terms of rudeness - taking credit for his work is a more fundamental problem than that, bordering on existential crisis. Whatever contempt Hannibal may hold Gideon in - and it’s on the whole less than Will imagines - he is a figure whose need to be eaten by Hannibal exceeds that generated by mere rudeness.

But Will’s larger error - assuming that Hannibal will kill Gideon - emerges from a far more understandable place, namely his failure to anticipate his own involvement in these events.

The “Columbian necktie,” which is not actually physically possible, is a particularly cruel choice of imitations of Hannibal’s work. It retains the basic aesthetic, mocking the “talking cure” of psychiatry in an appropriately carnal way, But its formulaic nature, borrowing a murder method from the urban mythology of Latin American drug wars, makes it the murder tableau equivalent of the mass market knockoff.

FREDDIE LOUNDS: Aren’t you the Chesapeake Ripper?

DR. GIDEON: I admit I’m confused on that one but please don’t patronize me.

FREDDIE LOUNDS: I’m sorry.

DR. GIDEON: It’s like remembering something from your childhood and wondering if it really happened to you or if it happened to someone else. And then sadly realizing it was just some picture you saw in a book.

Gideon illustrates the simultaneous fragility and centrality of memory. It is in practice as vulnerable to deception as he suggests - false and inaccurate memories abound, and getting someone to remember things that never happened is far from difficult, although gets trickier when those things are multiple murders involving elaborate tableaus. On the other hand, memory is central to the sense of self and of identity.

FREDDIE LOUNDS: You’re waiting for the Chesapeake Ripper to come back here.

DR. GIDEON: Let’s hope he gets the invitation. There’s one thing we know about your writing, he’s an avid fan.

“Fan” is a departure from the script, where it’s “reader,” and is mostly the better line. I got a Tumblr question a while back about why Hannibal never eats Freddie, and while most of that is down to logistics and the particulars of when it would and wouldn’t cast suspicion on him (he basically can’t afford to through most of Season One and has no opportunity to in Seas on Three, for instance), this accounts for another part of it. In spite of himself (and it’s surely in spite of himself), Hannibal enjoys Freddie. Even the Devil’s got a problematic fave.

WILL GRAHAM: Abel Gideon didn’t kill this man. The Chesapeake Ripper did.

JACK CRAWFORD: The Chesapeake Ripper is copying his own copy cat?

ALANA BLOOM: You said the Chesapeake Ripper would want to kill Gideon for taking credit for his work.

WILL GRAHAM: Gideon’s not alone anymore. The Ripper won’t risk exposure. So he’s telling us how to catch him. (to Jack) Actually, he’s telling you. (pause) Where was the last place you saw a severed arm, Jack?

The rich symbolic mixture of the show visibly deepens here as murders are successfully used as a backchannel communication with the FBI, although the real charm of the scene is Jack’s comparative slowness to get the message.

JACK CRAWFORD: You seem over-whelmed. You’ve got to take care of yourself, Will.

WILL GRAHAM: Build up my resistance?

JACK CRAWFORD: Just don’t let yourself go. As much as you can, let the rest of it go. You take too much of this with you.

WILL GRAHAM: It’s hard to shake off what’s already under your skin.

The conflict between Jack’s ruthlessness and his genuine compassion has devolved into something of an idiot plot, in which Jack is simultaneously oblivious to the signs of Will’s deepening breakdown and boorishly overconfident in his flippant advice to Will.

One of the moments least explicable by non-supernatural means. Hannibal led Will here, yes, but he’s not present and doesn’t even have any knowledge of events. Nevertheless, in Will’s fevered hallucination (which of course may itself be the product of Hannibal’s supernatural manipulations) Hannibal’s avatar arrives to lead him to Gideon, effectively using Will to summon Gideon to his presence.

And so begins the grand tradition of horrifically mutilating Dr. Chilton once a season. This is easily the best one, if only for Gideon’s delightful description of the resulting tableau as a “gift basket.”

HANNIBAL: He’s had a mild seizure.

DR. GIDEON: That doesn’t seem to bother you.

HANNIBAL: I said it was mild.

It’s difficult to actually argue that the comedic aspects of Hannibal are overlooked given how many critics delight in pointing it out, but the fact remains that Hannibal’s deadpan reaction here is really funny.

HANNIBAL: A terrible thing to have your identity taken from you.

DR. GIDEON” I’m taking it back one piece at a time. You should see the pieces I got out of my psychiatrist.

HANNIBAL: Alana Bloom was one of your psychiatrists, too. Is that right?

DR. GIDEON: Yes. Dr. Bloom.

HANNIBAL: I can tell you where to find her.

Hannibal passes up the opportunity to kill Gideon in favor of the opportunity to further deepen his hold over Will. Sure, he’s also arguably using Will as a weapon and hoping he’ll kill Gideon, but that’s not what he most wants, at least in terms of Gideon. But - and I imagine this is to his mild surprise - at the end of the day he cares more about his elaborate project with Will than he does about killing a man who’s insulted his work.

DR. GIDEON: If I kill her like he would kill her, I wonder if I could understand him better.

It’s one of the most fundamental questions of the series, of course. But the answer would seem to be no - imitation is not understanding in Hannibal. Note that Will’s understanding of Hannibal ultimately comes through the exact opposite method from what Gideon proposes. He does not commit the murders, but is led to believe that he has. Gideon, on the other hand, now firmly knows that he is not the Chesapeake Ripper, but hopes that by committing the murders he might in some sense become him.

JACK CRAWFORD: Even with a 105 degree fever, Will brought Gideon down. He’s going to be fine. I told you. Will always comes back to being Will.

HANNIBAL: Will’s sense of self has not been constant or even continuous. How he thinks of what he does is becoming less and less evident. I would recommend you suspend his license to carry firearms.

JACK CRAWFORD: Are you having a difference of opinion about who Will is?

Jack’s preposterous optimism regarding Will now extends to disregarding Hannibal’s advice. This is probably laying it on a bit thicker than necessary for what’s coming.

HANNIBAL: I see his madness, and I want to contain it. Like an oil spill.

BEDELIA: Oil is valuable. What value does Will Graham's madness have for you?

Bedelia misses the correct angle here, focusing on value. The more revealing aspect of an oil spill is the beautiful sprawl of color it forms on the water’s surface. Hannibal wishes to contain it to observe its beauty.

BEDELIA: He's still your patient, Hannibal. When it comes to Will Graham, if your impulse is to step forward, force yourself to take a step back.

HANNIBAL: And just watch him lose his mind?

BEDELIA: Sometimes all we can do is watch.

Bedelia’s own pathology makes its clearest appearance here, as she tacitly endorses Hannibal’s instincts towards sadistic experimentation on Will. As we will eventually discover, this is because she shares that instinct.

The Lie of the Land Review

Let’s start with the mid-episode twist, i.e. the point where any hope that Toby Whithouse was going to do anything other than Whithouse all over the damn floor died. At this precise moment, a ton of threads that have been going on for a while are converging. Most immediately, we’re doing the trailered regeneration. We’re also at the climax of the trailered “the Doctor has joined the monks and Bill stands against him” plot, which is the hook this episode was previewed on since the initial Radio Times summaries. And, of course, we’re at the halfway point of the climax of the ballyhooed “Monk Trilogy,” resolving fully three weeks of storytelling. What do we get, then? A scene in which a room full of people literally cracks up that we fell for any of it.

It’s not, obviously, that I mind narrative substitution. I mean, I coined the phrase and all. But the substitution has to actually mean something instead of just being an empty placeholder. The point of narrative substitution is that the second narrative critiques the first one. It’s not just chucking out a plot because you’re bored with it and laughing at the audience for being so naive as to think you might actually have something to say.

And I mean, it’s not as though the Doctor apparently being with the bad guys that have brainwashed the world was a hugely interesting plot as opposed to a hackneyed genre TV standard, but it was something. For a brief moment, just after we learned Missy was in it, it even looked like it might tip into interesting. Bill and Missy teaming up to fight the Doctor? That’s a story worth telling. But even the hackneyed standard of “evil Doctor” would have been something. Hell, even a 1984 knockoff so banal it can’t be bothered to do more than substitute “memory crime” for “thoughtcrime” would have been something. A world whose history has been completely reshaped by the Monks could have been at least interesting. And the script clearly knows that, with its aggressively on-point lines about historical warnings of fascism and fake news. But the one scene that grapples with any of this consists of the Doctor spouting obviously wrong defenses of totalitarian order and Bill making non sequitur replies cribbed from fifty-four years of liberal moralizing in Doctor Who. It doesn’t even try - Bill’s defense of free will is literally just “you made me write a paper about it.”

But OK. At least the episode we’re substituting is Missy. Even Toby Whithouse can’t fuck up “team up with Missy to save the world,” can he? Ha. Of course he can! Sure, Moffat can’t have expected Whithouse to do anything interesting with “Missy tries to turn good,” not least because even Moffat can’t possibly be going to do anything other than the obvious “but she fails” with the concept because the odds of him breaking the concept of the Master in his last year on the program are nil. And the last scene, in which Missy goes through the contentless “oh woe I feel remorse” story beat confirms that Toby Whithouse is exactly not who you go to for interesting takes on morality.

But for me the real stunner is wasting Missy on pointing out to the Doctor the single most obvious genre-standard way to defeat the Monks possible, namely killing Bill. (OK, leaving her brain dead, which is at least a mildly macabre twist, but still.) The idea that somehow everybody had to resort to asking Missy for help in order to get to a conclusion that Pete Tyler could figure out on his own is… well, I mean, it’s what you’d expect at this point: stupid, lazy, and banal. (And if Missy knew about the Monks, are we thus meant to believe the Doctor, after saying he needed her help at the end of Extremis, failed to actually talk to her and get this information?) Its moral weight is Missy making Gordon Tipple eyes while complaining that it’s sentimental for the Doctor not to want to kill Bill. It’s tempting to suggest that this half-assed trolley problem is so boring even Toby Whithouse knows better than to write it, but honestly, at this point it’s hard to give him that much credit.

No, instead it’s time to blow the monks up with love. Which is a charming joke when positioned at the end of a Gareth Roberts story about Craig Owens. As the resolution for a three episode arc, however, it’s… oh, fuck it. Why even bother pointing it out? Let’s just note that it consists of a single image of a woman we’ve never seen deliver a single line of dialogue appearing again and again over some technobabble. Or better yet, let’s note that the actual focus of the scene where Bill’s love for her mother saves the world is the Doctor, who gets to carp about how he saved the world by giving her all those photos while his hero music plays.

And again, just like this could have been any number of stories that it briefly flirted with being, you can absolutely do a story about how Bill’s love for her mother saves the world. But you have to actually have the story be about that. You can’t just use Bill’s imaginary conversations to do the exposition at the beginning and then pretend this constitutes emotional investment. Actually show us the conversations, with the actress playing her mother getting to reply and ask questions. Frame the story as Bill telling her mother what happened after the fact. Do something that makes this woman who’s supposedly so inspiring that the entire human race rises up and overthrows its oppressors actually feel like anything more than an empty signifier of “emotional investment.”

Instead we get a story that literally has contempt for the audience. It’s Pip and Jane Baker without the terrible dialogue. Although “Caliente. That’s Spanish for hot.” frankly wouldn’t be out of place in a Pip and Jane script. So hey, let’s give Toby Whithouse credit - at least he went out of his way to make us glad Chris Chibnall beat him out for showrunner by reminding us of the only other time Chris Chibnall has come off well in a comparison.

The catch-all list of stupid and undercooked bits of the episode. Any one of these is an excusable bit of “shhh, don’t think about the plot too much.” On aggregate, in a script this shambolically disinterested in having a point, they become recognizable as the sort of meat and matter of why this is such a piece of crap. Anyway: There’s not actually an explanation of the Doctor’s ruse, which there really should be given that it involves him encouraging people to turn their family members in for hard labor. Nardole gets a line of dialogue which literally amounts to “the monks made the signal untrackable, but I used this to track it?” A Monk looks straight at Bill then lets her board the boat - did they just forget the one person who can stop them? Actually, let’s just table the handling of the Monks til next bullet point. The Doctor actively solicits Bill to come find him in order to find out if the Monks sent her. Whithouse still can’t get past “last of the Time Lords” despite it blatantly no longer being true. There’s the whole to-do emphasizing the statues to set up the bit where the Doctor credits them with how the Monks could control the entire world with just Bill, but this has nothing to do with the resolution, and also only raises the question of how they controlled people before they got the statues up, none of which would have been a problem if the script hadn’t asserted out of nowhere that Bill wouldn’t be enough to control the world. There’s no suggestion of a biological component to the psychic link, and yet it’s passed down through the bloodline. The Doctor pointing at a pyramid on a map and saying “cathedral.” More or less everything about the tape recorders. The episode can’t seem to decide whether trying to hack the broadcast erases your brain or corrupts you. "Everyone forgets the Monks" doesn't really play after they've killed tons of people and sent others to labor camps. I think that just about does it.
It’s telling that the Monks don’t get a single line of dialogue in this episode: Whithouse has completely failed to bother with following up on the previous two episodes in any direct way - the Missy scene is essentially the only one in which it matters how they invaded last week. There’s no reference back to the idea of them simulating planets to understand how to invade them. (Their simulations apparently just missed the vault?) More than that, “psychic link to delude everyone about world history” and “simulates world history to figure out how to invade” seem like fundamentally different ideas. There’s two distinct versions of “the world is an illusion” in play over this trilogy, and there’s nothing that actually connects them to one another. The result is that the Monks end up not actually being an idea so much as a cool costume retained for three unrelated monsters. It’s hard to imagine them ever coming back simply because it’s hard to actually describe what they do.
The declaration that Missy has adventures of her own and that her life doesn’t revolve around the Doctor is great. But the idea that Missy is liberating planets through cavalier and murderous ways simply doesn’t fit her character. The correct line in response to asking how she defeated them was her blinking confusedly and explaining that she’d been helping them.
Apropos of nothing, the “return of Susan” theory’s been starved for evidence over the last four weeks, hasn’t it?
If nothing else, moving from writing about David Icke to this was kinda funny.
US viewers got the last episode of Class, for which I wrote basically the same review I did here.
I did the cheeky thing where I didn’t actually say who the guest was for the Pyramid at the End of the World podcast, but for anyone who didn’t check it out, it’s actually an interview with Peter Harness. Surprise!
Thursday, meanwhile, Kit Gonzo will be the one who gets the enviable treat of helping me find an hour of stuff to say about this.
At least I’m reasonably excited about Gatiss’s episode. Victorian explorers versus Ice Warriors on Mars is a decent idea that Gatiss is actually suited to.

Ranking

Extremis
Oxygen
Thin Ice
The Pyramid at the End of the World
The Pilot
Smile
Knock Knock
The Lie of the Land

The Corbynite Manoeuvre

Okay, first let me apologise for the paucity of long-form written pieces here at Shabgraff lately.  Normal service will (hopefully) be resumed fairly soon, or a proper announcement of some new normal will have to be made.

Next, let me remind you all of the existence of two new(ish) podcasts featuring me. 

There’s a new episode of Oi! Spaceman, in which I join Shana and Daniel to – for reasons that now elude me – talk about ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’. HERE.

And there’s a bonus mini-episode of Wrong With Authority, featuring myself in conversation with Daniel about the 2007 David Fincher movie Zodiac. HERE.

We may do more of these (comparatively) short extra episodes in future, with just a couple of us chatting about a movie outside our main sequence.  We’ve decided to call them Footnotes.  Because we’re just so damn cute.

On the subject of podcasts, there are some great Shabcasts coming up, including another Drunken Whocast (which seems to be genuinely becoming a new regular thing) and a fantastic chat between myself and Sam Keeper of Storming the Ivory Tower on Star Wars, Rogue One, etc.  We talked about, amongst other things, fans who say destroying the Death Star was bad because the economy, or something.  As if on cue, someone then wrote an online article arguing that Offred in The Hamdmaid’s Tale doesn’t have it that bad.  Ho hum.  Watch this space, as someone or other used to say.

I’d also like to thank everyone who donates to my Patreon.  It is a genuine source of amazement to me that anyone is prepared to pay even small amounts of money to help me produce my nonsense articles and podcasts, but they do… and god love the poor fools.  I'm not ashamed of asking for contributions, but I cant help ruefully reflecting on the fact that waiters in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution started demanding an end to tipping as a degrading custom.

*

Now, a word on more current politics.  If you’re in the UK, for god’s sake vote Labour. I don't expect them to win, but the better their showing, the stronger it makes their position, and the more there is to build on in the future.  Jeremy Corbyn will lose, but if he can lose well, that alone will be worth having, a poke in the eye to a media and political establishment that has concertedly undermined him and pooh-poohed him from day one, and - by extention - the people he represents.  If he stays on as leader even in the face of a defeat, as I expect and hope he will, then the closer-run the election, the better.  Corbyn was, as I have always said, always a gamble and a long game.  But what else have we meaningfully got, other than yet another surrender?  And what have we got to lose?

Is Corbyn's Labour perfect?  Far from it.  Deeper ideological issues aside, I'm still furious about the manifesto's acceptance that free movement will have to end.  And there are other things like that.  But Labour are the only party committed to trying to make Brexit something other than a catastrophe for working people.  Indeed, Corbyn's longstanding opposition to the EU as a neoliberal institution offers at least some hope of a left-version of Brexit... which is conceivably doable and worth having.

The LibDems hold out the false hope of avoiding Brexit (and believe me, I know the allure of that siren song) but all their promises depend upon us forgetting 2010. 

Is Corbyn's Labour a radical alternative?  No.  In real terms, the 2017 Labour manifesto represents nothing more than a diluted form of basic, moderate social democracy. But again, a return to even basic, moderate social democracy would, surely, be worth having.  Imagine a government committed to reversing the creeping privatisation of the NHS, reversing the privatisation swindle in other industries, reversing the vandalism done to our school system, ending the economic policies that have failed to achieve their own stated goals while ruthlessly widening inequality and deeping human suffering, staying out of the very foreign wars and clandestine shenanigans that generate tragedies like Manchester...

Seriously, in a sane society, the scandal of the government's and establishment's entanglement with jihadis, springing from the ruins our rulers helped make of Libya, and their continued complicity with the Saudi dictatorship, would bring down the government automatically.

Jeremy Corbyn said in 2003, as he joined millions - myself included - marching against his own party's criminal plans to invade Iraq: "It will set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression and the misery of future generations.”  Just add this to a lifetime of being on the right side of this argument.  Compare and contrast with Theresa May's record of supporting and launching pointless, vicious, counter-productive Western imperialism.

Moreover, a Labour movement is really the only hope we have.  A revival of solidarity and struggle amongst the working class.  And that can only be strengthened by a left-wing Labour Party that isn't just losing badly all the time.  A loss this time will still be a loss, but a strong loss could be the springboard for other, better things to come.

Labour in government is often weak, cowardly, and treacherous.  But an unreliable friend is preferable to the guy in blue who's kicking you, or his mate in yellow who isn't kicking you either but who is standing to one side, watching, filming it on his camera phone, and feeling self-righteous about not actually joining in.

Seriously.  I don’t care how disillusioned you are, how disdainful, how discouraged.  I’m all of those things too, plus I’m intellectually committed to an anti-reformist variety of socialism, but I’m going to vote Labour.  Moreover, I’m going to vote Labour with – for the first time in my life – some species of spring in my step.  For the first time in my life I will be able to walk out of a polling station not feeling dirty, compromised, and miserable.  For the first time in my life I will be able to put my cross in the box with some degree of enthusiasm.  For the first time in my life I will be able to vote for a party led by someone who, for all his faults, generally manages to treat me like a grown-up.  I will be able to feel like I have actually voted for a party I actively want to win, not just one I least want to lose.  Because there’s a Labour Party to vote for that, I think, genuinely represents some kind of alternative - imperfect and mild though it be - to just yet more of more of the same old wretched shit.

That's all for now, comrades.

 

Eruditorum Presscast: The Pyramid at the End of the World

The podcast for The Pyramid at the End of the World is up for your listening enjoyment. You can download it here.

Myriad Universes: Ill Wind Part Four

The Mestral is stunned, but not for long.

Rav implores that he only wants her “safe” (which the Mestral quite aptly reads as “tame”). He claims he's trying to protect her from the factions trying to assassinate and usurp her. But the Mestral sees right though his ploy-He's working for one of the other factions, and they're trying to use her own feelings of love and loyalty to cloud her judgment. And she can play the same game: Having directly threatened her, Rav must be arrested and tried, and the only way for him to escape sentence is to kill her. Which she knows he won't do, because he loves her.

The Mestral covertly opens an audio channel to the Enterprise, and, by cleverly rephrasing an exposition recap into a challenge (“You used that phaser on Venant, Rav, but you won't use it on me...So you may as well put it away”), she manipulates Rav into revealing his plan to the Enterprise crew. He knows he can't shoot her and that she won't back down, so he and his co-conspirators are planning to kidnap her and bring her back to Eldalis where she'll be “mentally reprogrammed”, brainwashed into becoming more placid and obedient. Captain Picard is appalled, and immediately has Doctor Crusher, Commander Riker, Data and a security team beam over to the Mestral's ship to intervene. The transporter chiefs warn the solar flares will cause problems, but they'll do their best. On the yacht, the Mestral declare she'll die before she becomes “a cherished puppet with a lover's hands on the strings”. Another struggle ensues and it looks like this time Rav might get the upper hand, but then Commander Riker beams in and takes him into custody.

The problem now is that the solar flare activity has picked up enough it's impossible to transport back to the Enterprise, so Will and Data are going to have to sail out themselves. Rav offers to help pilot, but, as Will pointedly snaps “I'm a little short on blind trust at the moment. You sit down where I can see you and stay away from the controls”. Data begins to start the emergency backup engine, but Rav says it's broken. Will muses “How would you know? Unless, of course you had something to do with it”. Will and Data are going to have to do it the old fashioned way, but thankfully Captain Picard is an expert and offers to talk them through what they have to do. Just then, the Mestral's support tender arrives, but Worf observes it's curiously well-armed. He, Captain Picard and Commander Riker all come to the same conclusion at once: This is the getaway vehicle for Rav and his co-conspirators, timed to arrive just when the star would be flaring such that transporters would be inoperable. Knowing the yachts are so small and fragile they couldn't survive even one hit, Captain Picard puts the Enterprise between the tender and the sailboat and prepares for battle, while Commander Riker does his best to get out of the way.

Annoyingly, the yacht is having issues with its sails. The sheets won't retract properly, and both Data and Captain Picard realise this is the work of those very crystalline mast struts the Mestral was worried about in issue 1. If they can't collapse the sails, the stellar wind will rip the struts clear off of the ship, which would cause a hull breach. Captain Picard tells Data to work at changing the frequency of the crystalline structure in alternate bursts, while the Enterprise prepares to meet the armed tender, which is making another pass. As the Enterprise and the tender volley fire, the impromptu yachtsmen hear a disquieting groan throughout the hull, an indication the struts are about to fail. The Enterprise manages to disable the tender's port nacelle, and while they can still run under impulse, they won't be going far. The Enterprise crew has more pressing matters to attend to, and the transporter room manages to pull everyone out of the shuddering lightship at the very last second.

The transporter chiefs say that's the last time anyone will be able to use the transporter until the solar flares die down, and right now the opposite seems to be happening. The security team arrests Rav, and the Mestral requests to be alone with him for a while. Will and Data leave them and head to the bridge, where the crew watches the star is go absolutely crazy. Strangely though, it doesn't appear to be going nova, and just then Deanna jumps in: She's figured it out. Something is “Waking up”. Something in the star itself. As the stellar radiation peaks, the Enterprise moves to bring all the other yachts into the safety of its shields while, as if on cue, something massive undulates and emerges from the core of the star: A titanic, winged beast of pure energy (as Diane Duane's captions aptly state “Even here...There be Dragons”) that grants a passing glance to the starship Enterprise and all aboard her before departing the galactic plane. The Mestral puts it best when she says “It's been a fascinating day. We think we know everything the universe has waiting for us, and then something like this happens”.

Security escorts Rav to the brig.

In the observation lounge, Data gives the crew and the Mestral a briefing as to his theories regarding the star dragon. He hypothesizes that it is a member of an extragalactic species that transitions from a matter-based stage of life to an energy-based one by metamorphosing within stars as they undergo fusion reaction. After Captain Picard prompts that one creature implies more, Data says there must have been at least six in their area of space: The six other flare stars of which GC 2006 is one. As GC 2006 was the only blue flare star and all the others are red, Data suggest the creatures who incubated within them hatched a long time ago. Deanna, who had sensed the creature's presence before anyone else, says she could tell it was sentient, but not on a level any of them could relate to. Commander Riker adds that it was more interested in the Enterprise then its occupants, and Data builds on this by saying the Enterprise's warp drive combined with Denanna's empathic powers may have caused the being to awaken.

Deanna calls it “beautiful” with a warm mind that “felt like an open fire”.

As the crew disperses, Captain Picard asks the Mestral if she will continue the race, as her yacht will be repaired by the next leg. She says she will not, and that this will be her final race. Echoing her words from earlier, she has no “spares” for her crew, or for Rav. Captain Picard says he honours her choice, but the Mestral snaps “Don't bother. There's no great virtue in it”. She regrets that had she made this decision earlier, two of her people might not have died, the lives of others would not have been threatened and she wouldn't have destroyed “the only relationship that mattered” to her. Captain Picard counters that experience is always of value, no matter when one attains it.

The Mestral quotes a saying from her people. “It's an ill wind that blows no one some good”, referring to the star dragon everyone had the privilege to bear witness to. Captain Picard comments on the synchromysticism of it all, for if the Mestral had not participated in this race the Enterprise would not have been assigned to oversee it and no starship might have come here for years. The Mestral muses on “the eternal symmetries”: “Something born...something dies”. She then asks Jean-Luc if he'd consider picking up yachting again after he retires from Starfleet. He says he might, but that if so, it wouldn't be for a very long time. Quoting Byron again, the Mestral says she will return to her planet and dedicate her life to her work from now on. She invites Captain Picard to come visit some day, and her star has “a fair wind”. And even if she won't ride it, he's welcome to.

Diane Duane's captions recite Lord Byron's “So, We'll Go No More A-Roving”, as the Mestral leaves to return home. Captain Picard watches the racers move on through the windows of the observation lounge, as we pan out to see the Enterprise adrift amongst the stars once more, basked in the light of the star dragon departing for parts unknown.

Why do we travel?

For the Ancient Navigators, the voyage was a matter of spirituality and practicality both. The sea was their country, and knowing it was a matter of survival and subsistence. In times of need, they could reach out to neighbouring islanders for help, or set off to find other islands of their own to settle on. Navigators would come from across the Pacific to the sacred Taputapuatea marae at Raiatea, the centre of the Polynesian world, to share with each other the wayfinding guild's secrets and their theories about the mythogeneaosophical origins of the universe. And they were bold explorers, using their mindfulness of nature to discover new lands and make friendly contact with other peoples far across the world ocean.

For others, in particular Indo-Europeans, travel has historically been connected with conquest. The great “explorers” of Western lore were military commanders who sought out new lands to conquer and subjugate in order to expand the boundaries of their empires, and to rape and pillage for their own personal glory. Some imperialists, like Chinggis Khan and Hideyoshi Toyotomi, justify their expansionist compulsions with the language of peace: Peace and harmony can only be attained through the extinguishing of dissent and total subservience to a benevolently enlightened central figure. In Western terms, a Philosopher King. In other terms, fascism.

For those caught under the boot of such explorers, travel becomes a means of escape, and of resistance. In the United States, we venerate the Golden Age of Piracy in the 1700s because, while frequently violent and rapacious outlaws, pirates still crafted a way of life out of sticking it to contemporary society that was oftentimes more egalitarian and offered more opportunities to those would would live in oppression by living within the law. US culture's deep-seated programmatic individualist libertarianism and fundamental hollow artifice allows us to gloss over the more unpalatable aspects of history in order to fabricate an entirely fictitious romantic Golden Age that better suits our egoistic sensibilities. Deep down, we all want to shed all inhibitions and operate on pure, Naked hedonism.

In some of the oldest surviving Indo-European myth cycles, however, travel is instead code for spiritual enlightenment. Celtic “voyage stories” were tales of journeys to an Otherworld, often situated on an island in the ocean far to the west. The hero would discover a path to the Otherworld, and either return to the mortal plane with newfound knowledge, or alternatively fall victim to a morality play about not heeding the advice of the Otherworld inhabitants and attempting to reconstruct their prior life. In Celtic and Germanic tales, the sacred waters leading to the Otherworld imparted wisdom, while Greek and southern Eurasian versions have water washing away grief, guilt and memory.

Thanks to recent discoveries in the freshly transmuted field of comparative mythology, we now know that certain myths and stories common to a variety of human cultures in wildly disparate parts of the world can all trace their lineage back to a handful of ur-myths that have been with human migrants since before they left parts of Africa in the Paleolithic period. One such myth is that of the Dragon: Giant, magnificent serpentine creatures who protect enchanted waters and guard the secrets to enlightened wisdom, for snakes, who shed their skin and are forever “reborn”, are seen to symbolize immortality. So why would there not be Dragons out here among the stars, when the heavens, the Earth and the seas have always been so intertwined? The Ancient Navigators knew as much, which is why the voyaging canoe was the microcosm of the universe and why the sky and the sea always have some relationship with each other. Even Western scientists say “We are all made of Star Stuff”, and it must be so because the stars, burning with the inextinguishable fires of creative life energy, are our ancestresses and Heavenly Mothers: They who give birth to all in the universe.

Or rebirth.

Nothing ever truly dies, in the way we in the West are inclined to think it does. Even the stars are constantly changing form, transitioning from one form to the next. Eternal Becoming. “Death” is merely the transition period between one form to the next. We are all born of the Universe, and to the Universe we are all destined to return. Here within this stellar nursery is also a cocoon. This is not evolution, teleological or otherwise, but metamorphosis. Transformation. Reawakening.

Rebirth.

There is nothing that is not sacred, because all of Nature is sacred. Answers can always be observed in the inner workings of the Universe as seen by calm and patient eyes. We do not get to “choose” our path in life in accordance with our wants and desires. Such infelicities are the work of the mind and the ego, and lead us to self-delusions about the False “I”. Our path is our calling, and that is something we each must find within each of our own shared spirits. It must be discovered. But we can be guided to it if we only listen to what the Universe is telling us. It Waits. It has always waited, just waiting for us to find it within ourselves.

The Proverbs of Hell 10/39: Buffet Froid

BUFFET FROID: Literally “cold buffet,” referring specifically to a charcuterie platter of thin-sliced meats. In this context, a joke about Georgia Madden’s shredding skin.

It goes without saying that there is a strange unreality here, but this is presented very differently from how Hannibal usually proceeds. It’s never before had to conjure a disposable POV character just to kill her off a few minutes later. Part of this is the peculiarities of Georgia Madden - she’s unsuitable to be a POV character herself, and there’s only one other choice. But a more basic reason is that this is the opening of a horror movie, with Madden being positioned as something that comes at the show from an odd angle She doesn’t quite belong in this series. Unlike with “Œuf,” a previous case of a killer of the week who’s not quite right for Hannibal, this is something the show is at least conscious of  this time.

Timeline of events.

May 2013: “Buffet Froid” airs.
July 2013: Steven Moffat casts Lars Mikkelsen, brother of Mads Mikkelsen, in “His Last Vow”
February 2014: Moffat writes “Listen,” featuring a monster that grabs your ankle from under the bed.

I leave you to your own conclusions.

HANNIBAL: We both know the unreality of taking a life, of people who die when we have no other choice. We know in those moments they’re not flesh, but light and air and color.

WILL GRAHAM: Isn’t that what it is to be alive.

Hannibal’s line here is a characteristically interesting blend of deceit and honesty. His account of people becoming “light and air and color” is quite untethered to the handful of instances of actual necessity in which Hannibal has killed someone, and for that matter an unusual description for Hannibal, whose victims are pointedly never “not flesh.” Some explanation is offered by the source, which is unsurprisingly the Thomas Harris novels, where a similar account is given by Francis Dolarhyde, who describes killing this way while projecting this assessment onto Hannibal. Its repurposing into a half life with which Hannibal ensnares Will into mutual aesthetic appreciation is clever.

The misdrawn clocks are one of the defining images of the latter part of the first season - an immediately arresting image that communicates wrongness and sinister intent without actually having anything overtly horrifying about them. In this regard they are much like the trypophobic food designs, the cluster of numbers and vast expanse of white space both communicating a sense that this is not right even beyond the contextual horror of Hannibal’s manipulations, which are suddenly revealed to be far more advanced than the audience had realized. Note, of course, the consistent feature of Will’s breakdown: the decoherence of time.

JACK CRAWFORD: You contaminated the crime scene.

WILL GRAHAM: I thought I was responsible for it.

JACK CRAWFORD: You thought you killed that woman?

WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes with what I do --

JACK CRAWFORD: What you do is take whatever evidence there is and extrapolate. You reconstruct the thinking of a killer, not think you are a killer.

WILL GRAHAM: I got lost in the reconstruction. Just for a second. Just a blink.

Jack’s attempt to decree how Will actually engages with crime scenes is at once naive and clumsy in its wishful thinking, both to a greater degree than we might expect from Jack. But the episode’s high stakes execution of the Todorovian fantastic is notable, especially for the way in which each side of the tightrope is itself balanced between madness and the supernatural. As Will’s breakdown gets pushed towards an actual medical explanation, we get a killer with the most overtly supernatural-seeming pathology to date. More than that, each side of the tightrope is itself a Todorovian ambiguity - Will’s encephalitis could well have a supernatural cause, just as Georgia could have a medically diagnosable condition. The fractal nature of this tension, of course, serves to highlight the show’s underlying rejection of the madness/supernatural binary.

WILL GRAHAM: Thought the reason you have me seeing Dr. Lecter and not an FBI psychiatrist is so my mental wellbeing stays unofficial.

JACK CRAWFORD: Have I broken you?

WILL GRAHAM: Do you have anybody that does this better unbroken than I do broken?

JACK CRAWFORD: Fear makes you rude, Will.

In which Hannibal’s manipulations have an unexpected and, to his eyes, entirely counterproductive side effect. Although one imagines that Hannibal would not find Will’s demonstration of the limitations of Jack’s concern quite so rude as Jack’s exploitation of Will.

WILL GRAHAM: There’s a grandiosity in the violence I imagined that feels more real than what I know is true.

HANNIBAL: What do you know to be true?

WILL GRAHAM: I know I didn’t kill her. Couldn’t have. But I remember cutting into her. I remember watching her die.

HANNIBAL: You must overcome these delusions that are disguising your reality.

Grandiosity is by its nature more real than mere knowledge, at least within the context of Hannibal. Which neatly begs the question of exactly what Hannibal considers to be the disguising delusions here. Certainly he proceeds to blur the line actively, swerving from this into a question about Georgia’s “savage delusions” and then back to Will, purposely collapsing the distinction between Will and the people he empathizes with. Note Will’s account a few lines later: “I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked through me, past me. Like I was a stranger.”

DR. SUTCLIFFE: What does encephalitis smell like?

HANNIBAL: It has heat. A fevered sweetness.

Fictional counterfactuals are generally a mug’s game best left to incompetent high school English assignments. Fiction, being the product of authorial design, rarely supports the thought experiment of “what if things had gone differently” with anything other than the erosion of dramatic unity. All of which said, the question of where Will and Hannibal’s friendship would have gone if he’d had a less appetizing disease is, if not interesting, at least funny.

HANNIBAL: It’s so rare to be able to study the psychological effect of this type of malady on a person’s mind.

DR. SUTCLIFFE: More rare still to study the neurological effects.

HANNIBAL: A doctor has to weigh the ultimate benefit of scientific study. Even in these times, we know so little about the brain. There are great discoveries to be made.

Hannibal, of course, does not give a fuck about these discoveries, and in fact Sutcliffe’s acquiescence to his manipulation for what is, in his opinion, such a vulgar motive is likely at least part of why Hannibal decides to murder him. Still, Hannibal clearly wants to allow Will’s illness to play out further, presumably because hiding encephalitis from Will is an easier lift than constantly dosing him with psilocybin.

HANNIBAL: The problem Will has is too many mirror neurons. Our heads are filled with them when we’re children. Supposed to help us socialize and melt away. But Will held onto his, which makes knowing who he is a challenge. He’s always reflecting those around him.

JACK CRAWFORD: It’s a mild form of echopraxia.

HANNIBAL: When you take him to a crime scene, Jack, the very air has screams smeared on it. In those places, he doesn’t just reflect, he absorbs.

Echopraxia is the contentless repetition of speech and movements, this line being one of the few surviving references to the originally intended character trait that Will would pick up the speech patterns of whoever he was talking to. Mirror neurons are an actual hot concept in neuroscience, though exactly what they do is still up in the air. The idea that they provide a biological basis for empathy, however, is a fairly mainstream theory.

These flirtations with actual scientific explanations, of course, are juxtaposed with a quote from Thomas Harris in the form of “the very air has screams smeared on it” so as not to let things get too grounded in reality.

HANNIBAL: Have you considered Cotard’s syndrome? It’s a rare delusional disorder in which a person believes he or she is dead.

The medically grounded explanation for Georgia’s condition is tacitly shared with the film Synecdoche, New York, where the main character’s name is Cotard. I have never written about that film, alas.

HANNIBAL: For Iberico, only a few pigs are selected each year. But is the pig, once fattened and slaughtered and air cured, superior to any other pig, or is it simply a matter of reputation preceding product?

DR. SUTCLIFFE: Irrelevant. If the meat-eater believes it’s superior, belief determines value.

HANNIBAL: A case of psychology overriding neurology.

DR. SUTCLIFFE We know how Iberico chooses his pigs. How did you choose yours?

HANNIBAL: Are you referring to Will Graham?

It’s an important clarification.

Sutcliffe’s answer is straightforwardly wrong, both in the sense that Iberico ham is simply unlike any other ham in that way that any real artist’s work is unlike any other artist’s (I’ve had it, in fact, at the Office in Chicago, one of the most exquisitely memorable dining experiences I have ever had, though as with this the crucial third factor of the chef rears its head), and in the sense that it is clearly not the answer that Hannibal is looking for.

HANNIBAL: Will Graham has a remarkably vivid imagination. Beautiful. Pure empathy. Nothing he can’t understand and that terrifies him.

DR. SUTCLIFFE: So you set his mind on fire.

HANNIBAL: Imagination is an interesting accelerant for a fever.

Hannibal’s statement here, on the surface, only makes sense if you reverse it. The fundamental nature of his experiment is to use Will’s encephalitis to explore the furthest reaches of his empathy. But Hannibal also seeks to accelerate a fever - to expose Will to some sort of transformative experience via his imaginative faculties.

Sutcliffe’s phrasing, on the other hand, appears to blame Hannibal for the encephalitis itself, as opposed to merely for the consequences of his sadistic experiments with the illness.

It’s less flashy than some of Hannibal’s conceits, but having everyone in the doctor’s office brutally murdered by some sort of monster while you’re in an MRI tube is a properly good bit of horror.

WILL GRAHAM: I see you, Georgia. Think of who you are. It’s midnight. You’re in Wolf Trap, Virginia. Your name is Georgia Madchen. You are not alone. We’re here together.

GEORGIA: Am I alive...?

A well-done and tidy emotional beat, as Will, in spite of his own decohering reality, is able to provide an anchor for Georgia specifically because he can empathize with her, even using the same grounding technique that Hannibal is manipulating him with.

(An in-joke for Bryan Fuller fans, Georgia Madden is played by Ellen Muth, who previously starred as Georgia Lass in Dead Like Me.)

The first appearance of Hannibal’s murder suit (he doesn’t use it when killing the medical examiner in “Sorbet”), which, layered over his immaculately tailored three-piece suit, is a consistently hilarious visual image. This sequence also highlights a feature of Fuller’s specific conception of Hannibal, which is that he is a creature of whim as opposed to of meticulous plan. He’s killing Sutcliffe primarily as a precaution (as evidenced by his decision to do it as a forgery), and, when confronted by Georgia herself in the act simply hands her the murder weapon and walks off, a smooth and graceful improvisation.

The Pyramid at the End of the World Review

A recurrent and to my mind fascinating theme of Peter Harness’s Doctor Who work has been its distinct hostility to democracy. Kill the Moon hinges on the flagrant disregard of the expressed wishes of humanity, while the Zygon two-parter ultimately endorses the existence of unelected guardians who lie to people in order to keep them under control. I should stress, if it’s not obvious, that my fondness for this is not straightforwardly a quasi-neoreactionary rejection of democracy or endorsement of dictatorship - rather it is specifically the extent to which the episodes themselves seem conflicted on this. It’s a bit of grit that complicates the show’s default ethos of liberal centrism - something that extends naturally out of its embrace of rebelliousness and dissent, but that the show usually avoids having to look at head-on.

So it’s not especially a surprise that Harness, writing in the heat of 2016, turns in a script that is more explicitly about the terrible decisions that humanity makes than ever before. This time there is no undemocratic savior to be had. Indeed, there’s not a savior of any kind - the bad decision is taken and the bad guys win. The Doctor’s scheme to stop them is basically for naught. For the most part it’s an even bigger defeat for the Doctor than Extremis was, and is certainly the most bluntly pessimistic thing Harness has written for the show.

For the most part, this works. Certainly it’s something I’m glad the series did. But as with Oxygen, there’s a grimness to it that keeps it from ever quite being fun. There are moments of humor, to be sure, and it’s difficult to seriously suggest that an episode marching towards an ending like this while also situating itself as the middle part of a trilogy that starts with Extremis would be very frock. But there’s a nagging frustration - a sense that “geopolitical thriller” is not the Doctor Who subgenre that Harness was best pigeonholed into. I mean, I can see why it happened - many of the best bits of both Kill the Moon and the Zygon story were the overtly political bits. But what made those stories really sing was the juxtaposition between the snarling politics and the baroque ridiculousness. Here, lacking a fundamental part of the equation, Harness is… well, still fantastic, to be clear, but not at the ecstatic heights of the last two seasons. Which, to be fair, you can thus far say about Series 10, which is starting to shape up a lot like the back half of Series 7: no disasters, but no stone cold classics either.  

And of course, we should be clear: this is an absolutely bonkers political thriller. Which is to say, it’s still clearly Doctor Who, and not just because of touches like the corpse monks or the “strands of history” plastic tubing. The Doctor Whoness of it comes as much from what isn’t there, like even a vague account of why the Russian, American, and Chinese militaries are in close proximity in a foreign country or where the hell the entire rest of the chain of command is. This is the iconography of a political thriller, sure, but only in a purely formal sense. 

No, the actual driving structure of the episode is the three surrenders, which mark the actual clear set of efforts to resolve the situation. Conceptually, this is great - especially as related to the notion of consent. It takes the baseline theme of “why do people vote for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” and builds on it. On a superficial level, this weakens the politics slightly, in that the easy and accurate answer to the question is fear, which is ruled out when the Secretary General is disintegrated. But this serves to sharpen the overall critique. Yes, sometimes we vote Leopard Eating out of fear or out of some sense of tactics. But the really ugly horror - the awful truth at the heart of it - is that we do it out of love. It’s easy, looking at ardent Leave voters or the #maga crowd, to frame the choice in terms of economic anxiety, or to talk about how voters are lied to and distracted by cynical attempts to play on racism. And sure, yes, that absolutely happens. But for the most part, this obscures the fact that there are people who just love the idea of Donald Trump. The apocalyptic shitstorm unfolding outside our browser windows is something people want.

This, however, brings us to the one thing about the episode that feels to me like a concrete problem, and why, despite enjoying it a great deal, it’s going to be the first Peter Harness script to not top the ratings: the decision to have the bad ending be entirely Bill’s fault. It’s not that I particularly mind her reasoning - and I greatly appreciate the explicit acknowledgment that her logic is that the Doctor will be able to win the world back so that this isn’t just “the companion is an idiot” story. But “more than just that” is the best you can do with that resolution, which is one that doesn’t particularly feed into the thematic structure. I mean, sure, yes, even good people are susceptible to bad causes, but every effort was made to have us think of the Secretary General and the soldiers as good people too. (Well, every effort short of actually characterizing them, but that’s not the point.) It’s an arbitrary resolution that jars with the episode that had come before.

Which is a pity, because that underlying episode structure is great. The sense of growing dread provided by the lab scenes, which are clearly flagged as “the thing that will end the world” is artful. It’s got multiple great twists and casually elegant concepts, some central to what it’s doing, some deployed with charming casualness. The intercut “previously”/Bill and Penny’s date opening is brilliant. It didn’t quite sweep me into the breathless reverie that Kill the Moon and the Zygon two-parter did, but that’s straightforwardly the only standard by which this can be said not to have worked. If, as it sounds like is the case, Chibnall spurns Moffat’s stable of new writers for the program, all three of them went out on worthy notes that raise the question of the writer of The Hungry Earth/In Cold Blood and Dinosaurs in a Spaceship would want to do that.

This is the most crowded title card in series history, and either the joint longest, second longest, or third longest title, depending on whether you count spaces and which title you prefer for a Hartnell-era story (or indeed whether a title that never appears on screen counts at all). 
When grousing about the lack of strong thematic unity, it’s difficult not to wonder about the cowriting credit, especially given Moffat’s public apology to Harness for not letting him finish the script on his own. I don’t have any special insight into this - for the most part the script felt more like Harness to me than like Moffat, but Moffat has pretty consistently been a pretty invisible hand in his cowrites. But one assumes that Moffat would have done the lion’s share of tying it to Extremis and The Lie of the Land, in which case the Bill resolution would be his, providing at least some explanation of why it doesn’t quite fit the rest of the script. But I do wonder what Harness’s original structure was.
One explanation of the ending that’s utterly unsatisfying from any perspective other than my own is that it’s simply an inversion of Kill the Moon, in which the companion makes the wrong choice instead of the right one, and thus brings Harness’s triptych of stories to a nice and symmetrical ending. And there’s something to that - for all that Bill’s choice was wrong, it was the choice that sustained the narrative of Doctor Who, and its negative consequences shouldn’t take much more than 45 minutes to sort out. Though man, if only the Doctor had bothered to explain regeneration to her back in Knock Knock.
I’m willing to say with some conviction that making “the Doctor doesn’t want to tell Bill” the primary drama of the Doctor being blind was a mistake.
An obvious thread of interpretation that I’ve only started to wrap my head around is based around the wording of “consent.” This could go a lot of ways. On one level, it’s tempting to read it in the same way as the abortion metaphor in Kill the Moon, which is to say as an accidental implication that probably would have been caught if the writer and executive producers weren’t all men. And yet the equation of consent with love and explicit line “fear is not consent” seem at first glance to make it a pretty robust metaphor for sexual consent. If so, however, any metaphor is going to go far better with a BDSM/kink-inflected reading of “consent” than a rape-based one.
But, of course (and this applies to my primary gripe about the episode), Harness’s scripts have never yielded to straightforward allegorical readings, and an attempt to have this episode be a doctrinal political statement in the way that Oxygen and Thin Ice were is going to fail. Harness’s starting point has always been things that trouble him, as opposed to things that he believes. Which is to say that the thematic questions are firmly features, not bugs.
Unsurprisingly the doomsday clock image got a smile out of me, whether or not it’s a Watchmen reference (and I’ve no particular reason to think it is.)
The best detail of the episode: the Monks’ pyramid-shaped monitor.
Speaking of the monitor, I’m glad that Harness’s usual focus on mediation and the act of watching was in play. Also that Capaldi got an address to camera. Pity nobody argued frantically over whether to push a button.
For the Americans, my review of the penultimate episode of Class, in which you can watch as something just snaps in my ability to tolerate the show.
Podcast on Thursday. See you then. (Well, also on Tuesday for some Proverbs of Hell, but you know.) 

Ranking

Extremis
Oxygen
Thin Ice
The Pyramid at the End of the World
The Pilot
Smile
Knock Knock

Shabcast 33 - the NHS, the Tories, the Republicans, and the US Health System

Hello there... bit of a serious Shabcast this time, though there are some laughs along the way. 

Download here.

(EDIT: I forgot to say that I'm joined by James - who really knows about this stuff - and Daniel - who really knows about this stuff in America.)

This episode was prompted by the 'Dementia Tax' story, and became about the crisis in the NHS generally, and also about the horrors of the American system.  It was recorded before the 'Dementia Tax' story developed (with Theresa May's humiliating kindasorta u-turn) and also before the attack in Manchester, so it's a bit of a relic... but even so, these are live issues, and a lot of what we say hasn't gone out of date.  The NHS is still in crisis, and its still the Tories' fault, but also still tracks back to New Labour.  And the American system is still awful, and the few improvements made by Obama may still be about to be destroyed, and we in the UK are still headed in that privatised, profit-driven direction.

I'd appreciate people sharing this about, for propaganda/electioneering purposes.  You never know, it might help a bit.

The audio sample at the start is from this video, which I'd also suggest sharing around.

And here are the links (promised in the show) to the information about the 30,000 excess deaths in 2015 owing to NHS underfunding (I was going to link to the study itself but that doesn't seem to be possible):

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/17/health-cuts-most-likely-cause-major-rise-mortality-study-claims

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-analysis-links-excess-deaths-health.html

And I ask a simple question: if its terrorism to set off a bomb in a concert, killing 22 people (and it undoubtedly is), then what do you call knowingly and deliberately underfunding a health service that people depend on for their survival, needlessly causing 30,000 extra deaths?  For reasons grounded in political ideology?

On a slightly lighter note, here's a link to the podcast about Bill O'Reilly's book that Daniel mentions... unless I cut that bit out, I don't remember at this point.  Good podcast anyway.

*

EDIT: Here's something Kit wrote, which acts as a companion (an equal one) to this Shabcast:

http://kitpowerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/uk-general-election-2-dementia-tax-u.html?spref=tw