Philip Sandifer: Writer

The problem of Susan.

It’s September 15^th, 2012. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Let Me Love You,” with Pink, Public Enemy, and Fun also charting. In news, an attack on the American embassy in Libya results in the death of the US Ambassador, among others. Andy Murray wins the US Open. Also, I turn thirty. How ghastly.

While on television, A Town Called Mercy. It is easy to find fault with this story. This does not, however, make it any less worth doing. First and most simply is, of course, Susan, the trans mare. This marks the second time Toby Whithouse has completely fucked up trans representation (the first being his gobsmackingly transphobic bit of dialogue for Jack in Greeks Bearing Gifts over on Torchwood). One can certainly argue that Susan was not actually trans, and indeed, I am forced to do so, but let’s be clear that I am doing so only because the alternative is to have the Doctor misgendering someone, and no. One might argue that the intent was good, although I think you run aground pretty quickly when you realize that thus far all trans representation on Doctor Who has been for the purpose of jokes, which is actually pretty much the opposite of good intentions no matter how much you state it. It’s past fucking time we have a trans character on Doctor Who, played sincerely and sympathetically. Ugh.

Moving on, then, we get to more substantive issues. When looking at the allocation of episodes in this mini-season, the Moffat bookends seemed likely to be good, the Chibnall episodes seemed solidly unpromising, and then you had Toby Whithouse in the middle. Whithouse is an interesting writer - his three previous stories were good. His Torchwood script was at least well-crafted, which is one of the nicest sentences you can write that begin with the words “his Torchwood script.” Being Human is fabulous. He’s probably one of the more interesting possibilities for next showrunner, in that he’s got the basic ability to write in a bunch of different tones and to change things up within an episode. He can do scary, tragic, and funny in the same forty-five minutes, he’s got experience on big dramas. I’m really interested to see The Game when it drops, which, curiously, seems like it will be in the US before the UK. And so this looked quite promising.

But with A Town Called Mercy we see one of his basic virtues as a Doctor Who writer turn unexpectedly to vice. One of the things Whithouse has always been very good at is what we might call high-theme writing - the sort of thing that, in Doctor Who, came out of Paul Cornell’s early 90s embrace of Neil Gaiman’s “tell don’t show” approach, where you make sure whatever big statement about Doctor Who you want to make is actually delivered, as dialogue, within the text. This has been characteristic of the new series, and is actively reinforced with the famed “tone meetings” in which all the different departments are put on the same page about what the story is doing and then turned loose to contribute actively to the storytelling. Doctor Who’s embrace of a pop music structure, with each episode excitedly shouting “here’s what we’re doing this week!” is perfect for high-theme approaches. And Whithouse is very, very good at this. His episodes know what they’re about, and say so.

With The God Complex, this was already starting to feel slightly out of step with what the program was doing, but that was covered for by Nick Hurran’s superlative direction. But by this point in the program we’ve very much moved past that. It’s in a large sense what the “the Doctor has deleted himself from every database in the universe” plot point is about. It’s not that the Doctor has gotten too big, but rather that the degree to which he is a known quantity diminishes him. The idea that you can look the Doctor up and get an explanation or, as Dinosaurs on a Spaceship proposed and rejected, a price suggests that the Doctor is a singular and known quantity. But starting with Season Seven, and kicking into overdrive thereafter, the series begins to move away from that.

Instead it starts… well, the default term is something like “making the Doctor mysterious again,” but we should stress that this is not in some Cartmel Masterplan “far more than just another Time Lord” sense. Rather, it’s about narrative grammar. One of the truisms of Season Seven is that the storytelling speeds up a lot, but a fair part of this effect is generated not by actually going any faster, but by starting and stopping the story in slightly unusual places, or by limiting or eliminating sequences in which the Doctor’s emotional reaction to things drives the plot. It’s not about keeping the Doctor out of the story for large swaths of things, but rather about not letting the emotional beats of the story parallel the Doctor’s emotional arc. This feels accelerated simply because the distance it puts between the viewer and the Doctor makes it feel like there are gaps in the story - like things are being skipped.

Which means that Whithouse’s story, in hindsight, comes at precisely the wrong moment - a story that’s loudly and emphatically done in the very style Doctor Who is abandoning. On top of that, there’s a worrisome sense that Whithouse only has one angle he knows how to take on the Doctor, which is the post-Time War angst Doctor. Which is fine, but again, something that’s by this point receding into the past for Doctor Who. Indeed, if you want to be vicious, you can read Day of the Doctor as Moffat going “oh for god’s sake, let’s just never have a story like A Town Called Mercy again.” So here the concept is that the Doctor is paralleled with Josef Mengele, only effective. But the well of “the Doctor has done things as terrible as any villain” has long since started to run dry, and the fact that Kahler-Jex is such an absolute cipher doesn’t help. The script tries to paper it over with the line about how “it would be so much simpler if I was just one thing,” and this is a perfectly fair point when made at human beings, but equally, there’s a perfectly reasonable response to be made, which is that, yes, it would be, because it would mean you could actually have been coherently and effectively characterized in the course of a forty-five minute story instead of just bouncing back and forth between two extremes.

Is Whithouse capable of more? He may well be, and I certainly would be interested in seeing him back. Frankly, he’s at a point in his career where an evolution in style is due. Once again, I admit my intense curiosity for The Game. But for this story, he’s in a rut, such that when we get to the big loud theme-as-text moment, the Doctor’s throwing Kahler-Jex over the town line to be killed and talking about his mercy, it’s as clanging and hollow as a bell. This isn’t helped by being the moment where Karen Gillan most obviously goes on complete autopilot. That Arthur Darvill is relatively disinterested throughout this episode is largely understandable, given that the script gives him essentially nothing whatsoever to do, but Gillan has a huge chunk of the drama that she has to anchor, and she doesn’t bother to show up. The only person who seems to be enjoying himself is Matt Smith, and even he’s stuck doing things he’s done before.

This also gets at the other big structural flaw of the story, which is that everything after Isaac’s death turns out to be setup for the exact situation that Isaac averted, only with the tiny difference that the Gunslinger gets off the hook. Isaac sacrifices himself to keep Kahler-Jex from committing suicide at more or less the halfway point of the episode. Twenty minutes later… Kahler-Jex resolves the situation by committing suicide. The heroic suicide is a lame enough trope, but to set it up and then prevent it just so your story has a second half, then end it with something so similar to what you rejected is careless. It makes the script feel like it’s as much on autopilot as the actors.

And yet for all of this, it feels as though the biggest problem with A Town Called Mercy is simply that it’s in Season Seven. This would be acceptable, at least, in any other season. Indeed, pretty much every other season has at least one story that basically does what this story does, complete with an arc about the Doctor nearly succumbing to the desire to mete out divine justice and finally taking a higher route. In most cases, it works pretty well. Sometimes it’s a season highlight. Rarely is it a turkey. But it’s been done, and here it reaches a familiar point in Doctor Who - the moment where what had been working perfectly well suddenly and abruptly dries up and feels tedious and dull.

The problem, and here, as we’re going to be stuck doing throughout Season Seven, we have to reach past the end of TARDIS Eruditorum a bit, in this case the old approach has run out of road before a new approach has quite managed to establish itself. The experiments with narrative acceleration will yield some new techniques, but they don’t quite work on their own. And the pulling back on the Doctor’s familiarity is difficult in the third season of a given lead actor. So we fall into a bit of a gap here - one where the past is clearly ready to be buried, but the future hasn’t emerged yet.

If anything, what’s surprising is that the past has stuck around for so long. This is, under the hood, basically a Russell T Davies story. The only other time an old approach has hung around quite this long after creative changes is the appearance of The Hand of Fear in Philip Hinchcliffe’s third and final season, and that’s very much a testament to the long arm of the Pertwee era. And fair enough - the reinvention of the show under Russell T Davies is the sort of thing you’d expect to have similar reach. But in this case, unlike the Hinchcliffe era, the new approach hasn’t actually come together yet. There hasn’t been a big, iconic “this is what we do now” story for the new approach. Arguably, there’s not going to be until 2014, although ultimately I’d disagree with that and pick out a couple of stories in 2013. And all of this is complicated by Steven Moffat himself making huge leaps in his storytelling that require going through a rough patch before suddenly emerging at the end of 2013/beginning of 2014 with the astonishing Time of the Doctor/His Last Vow.

But none of that helps this story, which sits, stranded, as clear endpoint of a particular way of doing things. This is the last time the series will try to get away with a high-theme story about the boundless and infinite pain of being the last of the Time Lords. It’s the last time it’s going to dabble so obviously in “the hero and the villain are just mirrors of each other.” It’s the last time, to be somewhat sharper and more directly implicate Toby Whithouse, that it’s going to feel like a post-Alan Moore reboot of Doctor Who. (And here the Pop Between Realities on The Fades becomes apropos as well.) This is, in some ways, the longest aesthetic project of Doctor Who. It’s been trying to accomplish this sort of story since Remembrance of the Daleks. Here, it finally stops, realizing that it’s accomplished it in as many ways as it is possible to accomplish such a thing. Twenty-three years of one particular stylistic and aesthetic approach comes to an end here. Which is an astonishingly long run. Notably, it’s nearly as many years as it took to get to Remembrance of the Daleks in the first place. Given this, the fact that we can finally say we’re done seems almost… merciful.

Last War in Albion will now be running on Wednesdays, with TARDIS Eruditorum moved to Mondays and Fridays for the remainder of its run.

This is the seventeenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It's available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” opens with one of the more famous passages ever written by Moore, which proclaims that “this is an IMAGINARY STORY (Which may never happen, but then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good. It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the great miracles long since performed,” it explains, and proceeds to tease much of the plot of the subsequent two issues, before concluding that the story “begins in a quiet midwestern town, one summer afternoon in the quiet midwestern future. Away in the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky… but no: it’s only a bird, only a plane. Superman died ten years ago...

"This is an IMAGINARY Story... Aren't they all?" - Alan Moore, Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow

Figure 499: The first issue of John Byrne's
Superman reboot carried an ad for Alan
Moore's Swamp Thing run on its cover.

It is worth highlighting the degree to which this is, within the context of 1986 DC Comics, actually controversial. Certainly John Byrne, who was inheriting the Superman books after this, did not like it, complaining years later about how he cannot hear the phrase “imaginary story” “without a snide and ennui soaked voice whispering in my ear ‘but aren’t they all?’” Indeed, he suggests that Moore’s preface to the story “goes most deeply to the root” of “the many things that can be seen to have gone wrong with American superhero comics.” His reason for this remarkable claim is that “when we ask ‘Aren’t they all?’ we are looking behind the curtain. We are seeing that the Emperor has no clothes.” While Byrne’s concern about the prospect of readers looking behind the curtain at that particular moment is wholly understandable, given that what they’d see was Byrne taking the job of an acclaimed thirty year veteran of the industry who had just been unceremoniously fired, it stands in marked and, more to the point, ideologically grounded contrast with Alan Moore, who noted that when he first got into comics at the age of seven he “was probably preoccupied with the characters themselves. I wanted to know what Batman was doing this month. Around about the time when I reached the age of say twelve, perhaps a lot earlier, I became more interested in what the artists and writers were doing that month,” a viewpoint that marks, for Moore at least, an active and conscious interest in the exact artifice of comics that Byrne wants to sweep under the rug (at least when talking about comics aimed at people who are not fairly young children, which, it is fair to say, few comics in the age of the direct market were).

Figure 500: Jimmy Olsen is killed by the
Brainiac-animated corpse of Lex Luthor.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Curt Swan
and Kurt Schaffenberger, from Action Comics
#583, 1986)

“Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” is, as one might expect given Moore’s approach, very much invested in the narrative game that it is playing. It has two almost entirely contradictory jobs to do, and it does this by being actively concerned with the gap between them. On the one hand, it is self-consciously an epic tale of Superman’s last and final battle, where “his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in the snowblind wastes beneath the Northern Lights,” in which “all the things he had were taken from him save for one.” On the other, it’s a disposable “imaginary story” that everybody reading knows is just marking time before the big John Byrne reboot comes in next month, and that there is no actual finality to it. And so Moore makes the story about the very impossibility of it, starting the story with a journalist interviewing Lois Lane (now Elliot) about Superman’s now decade-old death. By foregrounding that fact at the start, Moore seems to fly in the face of the story’s lack of genuine finality. But because of the peculiar circumstances of the comic, serving as the last comic before a reboot that isn’t going to pick up where Moore’s story leaves off, but is rather going to declare that Moore’s story and every previous Superman story are no longer part of the Superman canon, Moore instead seems to be taking a sort of grim advantage of the situation. Since nothing he does is going to “count,” so to speak, Moore can do any terrible things he wants. And so the comic is in many ways an unrelentingly grim parade in which all of Superman’s great villains come back, deadlier than ever before, and wreck untold havoc.

Figure 501: Lex Luthor kills Superman in the imaginary
story "The Death of Superman!" (Written by Jerry Siegel,
art by Curt Swan and George Klein, from Superman #149,
1961)

But, of course, given the existence of decades of imaginary stories, this isn’t actually a new sort of power. It’s not even the first time Superman died, with Jerry Siegel and Curt Swan having written an imaginary story doing that all the way back in 1961. As much as Moore may play at the idea that his story is different because the Byrne reboot is imminent, this is ultimately a trick on Moore’s part. The key fact is the nature of the story’s grim parade. As with much of Moore’s work in American superhero comics, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” is based on playing with existing concepts. This was, after all, the point of requesting Curt Swan for art chores: to make the story look like the decades of Superman stories in which its characters were developed. Moore doesn’t just tell a grim and apocalyptic story, in other words: he tells a grim and apocalyptic story that is unmistakably a Superman story. Indeed, the story is almost gratuitously a Superman story, positively relishing in getting every single major Superman villain and supporting character into the plot somewhere. Even Superman notices this; the story’s climax comes when he realizes that there’s one villain who hasn’t appeared yet, and that this villain must therefore be responsible for everything that’s happened.

Figure 502: Alan Moore tasked Curt Swan with drawing
a creature that his captions described as indescribable.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Curt Swan and Kurt
Schaffenberger, from Action Comics #583, 1986)

All of this exists to set up the real question Moore is examining with the story, which is what it means to try to craft an epic and apocalyptic narrative out of Superman in particular. And it is here that Moore pulls his great trick, ultimately opting to reject premise. The story’s main plot ends with Superman being forced to kill Mr. Mxyzptlk, the five-dimensional imp he realizes is behind all of this. (Mxyzptlk’s motive is one of the most charmingly pointless imaginable - after two thousand years of being a mischievous imp, he’s grown bored and decided to spend two millennia being evil instead.) Wracked with guilt, Superman proclaims that “nobody has the right to kill. Not Mxyzptlk, not you, not Superman… especially not Superman!” And so he opts to walk into the chamber of his Fortress of Solitude where he keeps the Gold Kryptonite, which will permanently strip him of his powers, and then, apparently to walk out into the frozen wastes to die.

Figure 503: The last Superman story defers its ending.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Kurt Schaffenberger, from
Action Comics #583, 1986)

At this point the story returns to its frame narrative of the interview with Lois, who politely shows the journalist the door, leaving Lois, her husband Jordan, and their infant child Jonathan alone. They talk, with Jordan telling stories of work today. “Old Dan Hodge brought in some snapshots of his grandchildren,” he says, “and we’re working on this old ’48 Buick at the moment, trying to get her working. She’s beautiful.” Pressed by Lois on a criticism of Superman that he’d voiced earlier in the story, Jordan claims that “he was overrated, and too wrapped up in himself. He thought the world couldn’t get along without him.” But as he claims this, the image focuses on Jonathan playing with the bucket of charcoal for the fire, picking up a chunk and holding it and finally, dropping a diamond back into the bucket. Lois, meanwhile, suggests that they might sit in “bed with a bottle of wine. And after that, I figure we just live happily ever after. Sound good to you?” And so the comic closes with Jordan standing at their door, closing it towards the reader, and winking at them, answering simply, “Lois, my love… what do you think?” In other words, far from being an apocalyptic story with a downbeat ending, the story is in fact about how Superman earned a retirement to where he got to do the things he really loves, which is to say, to be an ordinary man working in an auto shop. The story does not mark the end of Superman at all - clearly their son is going to grow up to be a superhero in his own right. The story both serves as the finale for an entire era of Superman comics and as a demonstration that this finale is completely and utterly unnecessary.

First and foremost, then, this story is a love letter on Moore’s part to Superman comics and, more broadly, to DC. But the context of the love letter is both revealing and important. However good Moore’s story is, it only exists because DC was at the time actively seeking to jettison all of the past stories Moore is drawing on in favor of a single, unified, and self-consistent account of Superman and, ideally, everything else within DC. Moore is, in other words, ostentatiously winning the battle when the larger war has already been won by Byrne and people who agree with his aesthetics. Moore’s full-throated celebration of Superman only gets to exist in an elegiac context, as the flexibility and playfulness with which Moore could craft his story was precisely what the Crisis-mandated reboot was designed to excise from the character, and indeed, what Crisis existed to try to excise from the company as a whole. Indeed, not two years later, Moore himself would break ties with DC.

Figure 504: Many Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-ins connected only via
panels like this, in which the sky is red. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #46, 1985)

Moore’s other engagement with Crisis on Infinite Earths came, as mentioned, in the pages of Swamp Thing. This came about as a consequence of a change to the nature of the American comics industry that is worth remarking upon: the crossover. Since Crisis on Infinite Earths was designed to impact every comic being published by DC, it was assumed that everyone buying any DC comics would buy it. And to this end, virtually every comic DC published ran at least one issue that, at least superficially, tied into the larger story. (It is worth emphasizing the word “superficially” here - Crisis on Infinite Earths also led to fandom coining the term “red skies crossover” to describe several of the crossovers, which consisted of perfectly ordinary issues of their respective comics in which, in one panel, someone would remark on how the sky was red and ominous, perhaps as if some crisis were coming, before getting on with whatever they were doing.) For Swamp Thing, this was issue #46, entitled “Revelations.” The timeline of this crossover is, however, vexed, and more to the point, vexed in a way that highlights the logistical problems underlying Crisis on Infinite Earths. “Revelations” features a sequence in which Swamp Thing visits the Monitor’s satellite. This is the same context in which Swamp Thing appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths #5, released in May of 1985, the same month as the second part of Moore’s underwater vampire story. But “Revelations” did not come out until December of 1985, actually making it out two full weeks after Crisis on Infinite Earths wrapped up.

Figure 505: Alan Moore's take on the
apocalypse of Crisis on Infinite Earths
was altogether more psychological
and horrific than Crisis itself. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette
and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing
#46, 1985)

In many ways, however, Crisis on Infinite Earths is just a backdrop for “Revelations.” Moore has Swamp Thing travel around the world to see what it’s like in the face of the apocalypse, leading to a two-page spread in which he sees “horrors and marvels” that “could not be counted,” allowing Moore to offer descriptions like “a jackboxer from the Manhattan saltbogs of Soto had managed to bring down a young ichthyosaurus with his whorpoon, but the alligators were closing in fast,” and “a woman with a pulpy orange growth upon her shoulder stumble unwittingly into a field of water hyacinths. As they parted and she sank into the water beneath, the growth opened its mouth and began to bellow,” and “there was laughter and weeping and somebody was screaming for somebody else to hold their hand, please, please, just hold their hand…” None of these images have any corollary within Crisis in Infinite Earths - they don’t refer to specific scenes in the way that Swamp Thing’s appearance on the Monitor’s satellite do. Rather, they’re flavor: attempts to depict what it’s like to witness the end of the world.

But the tie-in to Crisis on Infinite Earths consumes only the first of five issues about the end of the world, and it would be a mistake to treat the apocalypse depicted as coextensive with Crisis. Rather, Moore’s story piggybacks upon that apocalypse, casting his apocalypse as an echo of the larger one. As Constantine explains within the narrative, “this sort of physical destruction is bound to cause temporary disturbances on the psychic plane. Our problem is that there are people who anticipated the disturbance and plan to take advantage of it.” For Swamp Thing’s part, he experiences it as “the whimpering that people made deep in their souls. He heard the bedlam of a mass mind faced with extinction.” Within Moore’s later cosmology this would seem to suggest an apocalypse within Ideaspace, although it’s important to note that the conflict is presented as taking place in the DC Universe’s Ideaspace, which is at best a tiny subset of Ideaspace proper.

Much of Moore’s work on Swamp Thing has engaged with this precise point. Moore explicitly sought to use Swamp Thing to engage with “the reality of American horror.” In his view, “what frightens people these days is not the idea of a werewolf jumping out at them, it’s the idea of a nuclear war.” In truth, Moore’s engagement with the apocalypse went beyond mere nuclear war (which he never touched on directly in Swamp Thing, although it was a substantial theme elsewhere in Moore’s DC work), and to the larger idea of the human capacity to destroy their own habitation in a number of ways, an image that ties in with the larger ecological themes of Swamp Thing.

Figure 506: The Brujeriá's awful ritual.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing #48, 1986)

So Moore’s apocalypse is framed, ultimately, as a conceptual apocalypse - as a nightmarish consequence of the very idea of the apocalypse and of the way in which the horrors Moore has been engaging with throughout his run on Swamp Thing loom over the culture. But this conceptual apocalypse is still grounded in specific ideas. The Brujería, the South American cult that Moore has unleashing this apocalypse, is described as having “existed for centuries in the forests of Patagonia, at the southernmost tip of South America.” They are, in other words, positioned at the root of the Americas as a whole. The “darkness at the heart of this continent” that Moore spent the entire “American Gothic” arc presenting, in other words, finds its most fundamental expression here - a dark and twisted cult lying at the deepest base of the entire land. (That this fits into the same tradition of demonizing and exoticizing indigenous American populations that Moore perpetuated in “The Curse” is, of course, a deeply frustrating failure on Moore’s part.) It is in this regard worth noting that the Brujería’s scheme is in many ways an echo of Moore’s own plotting. “Using their influence,” Constantine explains, “they’ve forced the dark stuff to the surface, all over the world. I only showed you the trouble spots I thought you could learn from.” These trouble spots, of course, constitute the “American Gothic” arc, a point hammered home by Bissette and Totleben’s art, which recaps these threats. “Each incident,” Constantine continues, “has increased the general belief in the paranormal by degrees, until the whole psychic atmosphere is like a balloon ripe for bursting.” In other words, the Brujería have created a bunch of typical horror stories in order to create an atmosphere of tension. This tacitly allies the Brujería with Moore, who, as a writer, has been enacting this exact plan: a series of traditional horror stories serving as a prelude to an eventual apocalypse.

Figure 507: The bird flies, the pearl in its mouth. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from Swamp Thing
#48, 1986)

And at long last, we're back. As ever, in ranked order, best of the week at the end, with the caveat that I liked everything enough to pay money for it. And I just trimmed my pull account by 25%, so that means I like everything that little bit more. Or that it's nearly finished. Would have picked up AXIS #3, but ended up not actually picking my own books up today, and forgot to ask Jill to grab it from the rack. I bet I wouldn't have liked it, though. I didn't like the first two.

The Amazing Spider-Man #8

I've not been loving this title since it came back, and it almost got cut, but I'll give it at least through Spider-Verse. So, six more issues, apparently. This at least has Ms. Marvel in it, which improves anything.

The Unwritten Apocalypse #10

As I have often said, I am sure this will all ready very nicely as a collected edition, much like the same team's run on Lucifer did. There too, I bought the comic for years after I no longer had the faintest clue what the fuck was going on, but read it all in the end and enjoyed it. Here, I even sort of can remember the plot issue to issue, so it must be even better, right?

The Multiversity: The Just #1

The long-awaited return of Bloodwynd. Past that, this is a fun little romp through a particular corner of DC's history, but I admit, I found myself looking forward to the ending - this felt like it moved rather slowly. More broadly, Multiversity isn't quite fitting together for me yet. Though at this stage, neither was Seven Soldiers, so the jury's still out. But thus far... this feels a bit flat.

Stumptown #2

Not a ton of movement in this one - we spend most of it rejecting what is, to my mind, a fairly uninspiring theory anyway, namely that of European soccer hooliganism coming to America. I like the cross-team rivalry PI dynamic, though, and I trust Rucka. A slow second issue isn't a major problem. And even when slow, this book is a lot of fun.

Lazarus #12

An issue of characterization between major plot swings, held up somewhat by the fact that Malcolm is playing his cards so close to the chest that it's impossible to actually know what's going on. We're in a passive role watching puzzle pieces slot into place, which is fine, but I doubt can be sustained over an entire arc. We'll see, I suppose, bot whether Rucka tries to, and whether it works.

Avengers #37

So, we know this is building to Secret Wars, which is almost disappointing, inasmuch as it means it's not building towards the end of a story. But two months into this timejump, Hickman is spinning the plates well. The inherent mystery about what goes in the gap between these books and the present-day of Marvel works well. I like the twist with Sue Storm. All in all, this is quite solid. Much like Lazarus, it's an exercise in watching puzzle pieces slot into place. Unlike Lazarus, there's punching.

The Wicked + The Divine #5

Ah.

There's a lot to be written here. But I'm strangely tempted not to write any of it. There's a twist-here.
It's a good one, and not what I expected, but clearly better than what I expected. Gillen takes the less obvious route, and it's surely going to be more interesting for it.

Much of what this book is and how it means to be has been held back for this issue. It's very much a first act, and not just a first arc. Or, to fit more in the book's milieu, the opening song at a concert. As a song, it started very strong, it's ending very strong, and the middle's kicked some ass too.

So with this, we finally start to see what sort of book this is going to be. And the answer is... well. Hm. It has, I think, the most interesting conception of the devil I've seen in some time. It has something very interesting to say about what it means to make art, and it's holding off on saying it in a way that's genuinely suspenseful. It has beautiful characterization.

I'm being terribly vague. I should give at least one spoiler. Here:

"I'm the Devil herself. I never expected forgiveness" is, I suspect, the most beautiful lie that Lucifer has ever told.

The first five issues of this are out in trade paperback next month. $10. Called The Faust Act.

You should buy it. If you like "the sort of stuff we like here," you should really buy it. It's a major comics work. It's important It's very good. I'm very, very in love.

It's basically what watching this feels like.

It’s September 22^nd, 2012. Script is at number one, with Ne-Yo, Pink, Flo Rida, and Fun also charting. In news, Dale Cregan kills two police officers and is arrested, and the NHL begins a player lockout. While on television, it’s Chris Chibnall’s second effort for Season Seven, The Power of Three.

The Power of Three has its faults, most of them seemingly fairly broad, and few of them actually the objections usually raised. Yes, the villain is a bit rubbish, but that’s largely the point. This isn’t actually a story about alien invasion, it’s a story about the Ponds. It’s the first time we really start to see the narrative acceleration of Season Seven used with some purpose and deliberateness - the resolution of the plot is sped through because it’s not actually the part of the story that matters. The beats are all there, they’re just not given room to breathe. Really, the only two solid criticisms are that “the year of the slow invasion, when the Doctor came to stay” is rather badly undermined by him going away for the bulk of the year, and the closing monologue, with its painfully ham-fisted integration of the title, is absolutely wretched.

But on the whole, we have a story where the oddness of the previous three finally starts to be justified. I mean, in its own way it was in Asylum of the Daleks, which was at least a generative and productive hot mess. This is a simpler thing, though - a story that uses the sped up narrative to fit unusual things in the margins of a Doctor Who story. It’s not, obviously, the first time we’ve played in the margins of Doctor Who stories - that’s what Love and Monsters and Blink were for. But it’s the first time we’ve done it without largely removing the Doctor Who story from focus. Instead of looking at a Doctor Who adventure an odd angle, we’ve got a Doctor Who adventure playing out at an odd speed, so that we get to put the emphasis on different parts. However stuttering the execution, in hindsight, this is the first time they actually show us where this is all going, creatively.

More interesting, however, is the title. Under the fan nomenclature that sprung up around the new series, The Power of Three refers clearly not just to the numerical operation of “cubing” a number, nor just to the Doctor-Amy-Rory triad, but to the iteration of the Doctor played by Jon Pertwee from 1970-74. And true enough, Three looms large over this entire story. As he looms large over any “invasion of Earth” story, that being the format that defines his tenure. This is somewhat odd if one stops to think about it for too long - over his five years and twenty-four stories, only Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos, and Planet of the Spiders are actually alien invasions as such. But much like the phrase “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” the legacy of Three is distinct from the actual twenty-four stories that make up his tenure.

Certainly The Power of Three is invested in trying to reconstruct the infrastructure of the early seventies, with a standing guest cast to be put into service for earth-based adventures. Implicit in this is the continual link to the present day - something that was at least briefly questions in the process of designing Clara, where there were a few months in which she was named Beryl and was going to be the Victorian version we see in The Snowmen. (This was very early on - prior to casting Coleman.) But ultimately, that idea was rejected, and the assumption that we absolutely must have a character from present-day Earth remains a default axiom of the series. And likewise, because the series must exist in contact with the present day, the present day must always be one of the major settings of the series.

Part of this is simply the growing aggregate of what the series has been in the past, which in turn defines what it will be in the future. The truth is that for an enormously successful period of its history, Doctor Who was tethered to the present day, and unleashing scary things, whether proper alien invasions or not, into contemporary settings was one of its basic functions. That cannot be pried out of Doctor Who, regardless of how much one likes the trick. (And I’m not a huge fan - looking at my rankings of stories, contemporary Earth ones are very poorly represented in the upper places, and when I do like contemporary Earth stories, they tend to be small affairs.)

And yet it seems strange that this must be accomplished with the same military organization the Doctor worked with in the 1970s, under the command of the daughter of the primary character associated with that organization, with her history being plucked consciously and explicitly from an obscure 90s tie-in video. It’s not that such fetishization of the past is unusual, and sure, if any character is going to get a second generation replacement it’s the Brigadier, but it’s curious that the present is the only place in which the series feels the need to lay down roots like this. Especially given that the effect is in part to create a sense of distance. The UNIT stories were famously only sort of set in the present day, with a sizable contingent of fans being absolutely dead certain that they took place in the 1980s. This is a weak reading, as I’ve argued elsewhere, but it’s persistence highlights a strange tendency inherent in UNIT and the big alien invasions, which is to make it difficult to believe Doctor Who to take place in our own world.

Now, on one level, this is hardly a problem. After all, it doesn’t. The TARDIS is made up, much like Robin Hood. The Zygons never lurked beneath Loch Ness. The last time you tripped over nothing was not, in fact, a rotting Silence corpse. But on the other, there is a difference in how “our world with things you don’t know about” and “not our world” read. Up until The War Machines, it was possible to read Doctor Who as taking place in a world identical to ours - to believe that, if you panned the camera steadily from Totters Lane to our own houses, you would find us, staring at our television screens, perfectly represented in the Doctor Who universe. After, this became impossible. Occasional retcons and lampshadings have attempted to reassert this, but a double negation is not the same as never having been rejected in the first place. The show has taken repeated steps to push us out of its fiction.

And Three represents the zenith of this. An extended period in which Doctor Who loudly shouted that it is not set in our world. In some ways, this, and not the fact that sometimes the Doctor’s allies are soldiers, is the most straightforwardly objectionable aspect of the era, which I’ve always presented as something of a problem. And it clearly is. Of the first four Doctors - that is, the ones who played the part during the relatively uninterrupted period in which Doctor Who was consistently adjacent to the beating heart of British culture and identity - Three is unique in having never really been used as the model for later ones. The default position of all Doctors is Four. Whenever the Doctor gets a bit crankier and mysterious, it’s a reversion to One. Whenever he gets impish and mercurial, it’s Two. But nobody ever goes for Three. Not even Capaldi, for all the similarity in facial structure and coat lining. Three, for all his popularity and success, was apparently a dead end.

And yet he still has his power. And this comes from the very root of Three’s era: the fact that it pushes the viewer out of the world. Because, of course, this creates a lack within the narrative. If it is not our world, if we do not exist in it, then we are free to project ourselves into it. If we can pan from Totter’s Lane to our doorsteps and find ourselves fully represented within the narrative, then all we can do is wait passively for the TARDIS to arrive in our living room. But if we would not find ourselves anywhere within the world of the Doctor then we have an altogether different power, which is the ability to create ourselves. Here we return to the particulars of negation. What is important is that Three rejects us - that is, that it actively establishes a difference between the screen-world and our world. It’s not a matter of declaring the world of Doctor Who to not be our world, but a continual active pushing against the viewer - of telling use we don’t exist in their world, even as it leaves innumerable gaps for us to squirm through.

In this regard the weirdness of Three as a character makes sense. Because his role is to create a barrier that we cannot pass through, he’s the one Doctor who must be almost completely static. The reason for this, though, is that he instead pushes the mercurial nature of the role out to everything else. It’s the classic trick of emboitment - by serving as a rigid box of paternal charm, he is capable of ensnaring the entire world within his fundamentally mad nature. This is why Three can never quite be repeated: because his central trick is to swap the basic paradigm of inside and outside, so that the world becomes mad and mercurial around him. So in lieu of ever reiterating him, the show reiterates the world that existed around him, sustaining the glorious tension that causes us to go poking around the requisite portals to faerie.

And this, more than anything, is what The Power of Three ultimately explores. It embodies the basic tension of Three by having the Doctor simultaneously be drawn into the world and pushed out of it. The Doctor does not belong in the everyday world of the Ponds. That world necessarily resists him. But equally, he cannot exit it. Because, of course, he has the one thing Three himself lacked: the TARDIS. The magical box that is the portal to faerie. This is another essential part of why Three worked in the early seventies and cannot now - because in the absence of a magical box, the Doctor and the television itself filled the role. But this was only possible because it coincided with a conspicuous technological leap in televisual technology - with the fact that the television was now in color, and was thus ostentatious and visible in a way that it had not previously been.

Now we are back to the standard paradigm, employed when the television has become invisible again, if indeed it’s even a television at all and not some other screen. Doctor Who is decoupled from its medium, and instead has to function on its conceptual merits alone. And so the Doctor returns to his now-standard role as the point of contact between the two worlds. He cannot exist in “our world” or “not our world” entirely, because his entire purpose is to demonstrate that these are not rigid categories in the first place.

And so we get the central magic trick of The Power of Three, which is that a story that is seemingly about the Ponds and their double lives is in fact about the means by which they can have two lives in the first place. It was never a story about these characters, but about the fact that there exists something on the other side of their lives. This is, after all, the only thing a first face can ever be: the first face you’ve ever looked away from. This is the real power of Three - as a set of signifiers that are at once iconic and rejected, he becomes the enduring symbol of the show moving forward.

Review forthcoming.

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A commissioned essay for Assad Khaishgi.

Since Doctor Who first hit upon the idea of doing stories set in the present day, a fundamental aspect of its mythology has been the question of how civil authorities might respond to the bizarre events that take place in the Doctor’s wake. The most enduring answer to this question is UNIT, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, formerly the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce - a military organization specifically focused on unexplained events, particularly aliens. This, in turn, is most iconically connected to the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor was at one point a full-time employee of UNIT living on Earth, and throughout his tenure treated UNIT headquarters as a sort of home base on Earth to which he would regularly return. But while this is the most iconic iteration of UNIT and thus of officially sanctioned responses to alien threats, it is not the only version of either, and must be taken in a larger context.

At first, the governmental response to crises was imagined to be ad hoc. Part of this can be explained by the fact that the first two present day crises - The War Machines and The Faceless Ones - took place on the same day. The government simply responds to them to the extent that they find out about them, and they are treated as, in effect, freak occurrences. Where this begins to shift is The Web of Fear, which also introduces the character with whom UNIT is most associated: the Brigadier. Well, sort of. As we said back at the time, The Web of Fear is clearly not trying to introduce a major new character, nor for that matter an official and consistent answer to how the government will handle alien attacks. Instead, it assembles a military crew straight out of a bunch of standard war movies, and then drops a character named Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in as a commander midway through. Lethbridge-Stewart is notable as a relatively realistic, sensible military commander - quite unlike the cliches he’s generally surrounded by. He’s an effective officer put in impossible circumstances, and he acquits himself well considering.

On his second appearance, however, in the next year’s The Invasion, Lethbridge-Stewart has seen a promotion to Brigadier, and is now in charge of UNIT. This constituted a major shift in his character. Where before he was a reasonably straightforward military character who got dumped into a strange situation, now he was the person designed to lead a human response to the unknown. This still required being imperfect, not least because the entire point is to have the Doctor be the person who gets things right, but he’s nevertheless a character who is designed for the purpose of doing extraordinary things. This is, in and of itself, a major shift. The first three big “a threat to contemporary Earth” stories are all based around the idea that this is out of the ordinary. But from The Invasion on, threats to contemporary Earth are sufficiently common that there are standard responses to them.

This is crucial to understanding the definitive UNIT period, namely the Pertwee era. Because the real role that UNIT played in the early seventies was specifically as a television military. They’re no longer a sincere effort to answer the question of what the government’s response to aliens would be. Instead, they’re a standard guest cast on a television show. And like much of the Pertwee era they’re a bit camp, perhaps more Dad’s Army than Doomwatch. They’re firmly part of the ridiculous world of Doctor Who, and not our world’s attempt to react to Doctor Who smashing into it. In some ways this is best demonstrated by the one earth-based story they’re not in, The Sea Devils, where their absence allows Malcolm Hulke to do a very different sort of earth-based story with much more character drama. When UNIT was around, any greedy, selfish, or otherwise bad-acting humans had to be pushed off to other agencies, so that UNIT could remain more or less straightforwardly the good guys.

At the center of this was the Brigadier. Like the Doctor, he’s, after an ill-judged and slightly rough start, a firmly heroic character, generally relied upon to be the one sane man in a world of lunatics. And UNIT was, in effect, his squad. Yes, he had supervisors he butted heads with periodically, but they were all defined by not really getting UNIT or the nature of the threats they faced. The Brigadier was the highest ranked person who actually understood that the Earth was regularly invaded by aliens. The effect, as discussed in the previous essay, was to distance the world of Doctor Who from our world, so that aliens did not so much invade the viewer’s world as they did the Brigadier’s.

And so Doctor Who found itself in an interesting position. On the one hand, UNIT filled the necessary role of having a standing explanation for how the various alien schemes the series would present, both in the Pertwee era and later, were dealt with by governmental authorities. On the other, UNIT was very clearly an extension of one specific character. And so it is unsurprising that when that character departed following Terror of the Zygons in 1975, the nature of UNIT rapidly shifted. It made two further appearances in The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom, but without the Brigadier to anchor it, it became a generic military outfit that the Doctor happened to have connections with, devoid of any meaningful character. Tellingly, in the next story to be heavily set in present-day Britain, The Hand of Fear, UNIT isn’t called in, and yet the whole thing plays out basically the same way The Seeds of Doom does.

And that’s basically it for UNIT for a bit. The next time the Doctor actually directly engages with any sort of official government response to something is in Time Flight, where UNIT sits in the background - they’re not called in, but are instead just checked with. There’s also a suggestion that UNIT might be a subdivision of something called “Department C19.” The particulars of this aren’t clear, but it’s clear that there’s been some sort of reorganization - the Doctor directs people to call “Sir John Sudbury,” and merely to give his regards to Lethbridge-Stewart. This is, of course, appropriate for early Thatcher - reorganizing the government’s response to alien threats with a vague goal of increasing “efficiency” or some other bland term is exactly the sort of thing that would have happened in 1982. And this is further reinforced in 1983 when we see the Brigadier retired to become a maths teacher, unattached to UNIT, and further suggesting that UNIT has been merged into some other organization. In any case, they’re seemingly off the stage - something that exists in name only, but that has no direct impact on anything in the series.

This distancing from UNIT is reversed in 1989, however, when the Brigadier is brought back again in Ben Aaronovich’s Battlefield. Here UNIT is reimagined with an emphasis on the United Nations part of it. UNIT, especially in the novelization of the story, is portrayed as an international organization - a pleasantly utopian view that fits with the anti-nuclear weapons message of the story. The Brigadier is present, but his role is clearly to symbolically hand off the organization to a new generation and a new vision, allowing us to view this diversity-heavy vision of international cooperation as the rightful heir to the Brigadier’s 1970s heroism.

The problem, at least for UNIT, is that the Brigadier survives Battlefield, which means that the organization’s intrinsic tie to his specific character persists. And sure enough, in the new series, whenever UNIT shows up there’s some sort of explanation, whether at the time or later, about how the Brigadier is tied up in Peru. In his absence, UNIT becomes a relatively faceless and nondescript organization - they’re essentially the brand of soldiers who show up in Doctor Who stories, but no effort is made to have a standing cast. Indeed, the Davies era focuses more on making sure its newscasters are the same across seasons than it does in making UNIT anything other than a particular set of costuming decisions for when they need soldiers.

That’s not to say, however, that there’s no thought put into the larger question of the official response to alien threats. It’s just that all of this gets pushed over to Torchwood, Russell T Davies’s own quasi-UNIT. In many ways, this is a more sensible approach. Torchwood is a quasi-secret agency, famously “outside the government, beyond the police,” which has enough official jurisdiction to investigate, but not so much that they actually find themselves frequently tangled up in red tape (at least, not before they get themselves very tangled in Children of Earth). It’s worth noting that, after their introduction in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Torchwood is effectively reduced to a single team centered around one heroic figure, John Barrowman’s Captain Jack Harkness, who exists in the same tradition of square-jawed camp that both Pertwee’s Doctor and Courtney’s Brigadier hailed from. Yes, it’s full of gratuitous sex and violence, but it nevertheless clearly a conscious and deliberate modernization of the old dynamic of UNIT, fine-tuned for the present day.

By the end of Torchwood, however, the organization is in tatters and, worse, American, which left a gap in the question of what exists to interface between the Doctor and the need to have civil authorities respond to a given present-day crisis. And so in Season Seven a new look UNIT is debuted, headed by Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart, the daughter of the Brigadier. With only two stories to date for this new UNIT, it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions. Redgrave’s performance, in particular, is odd - she seems to prefer playing Kate as someone who is weighted down in part by her family legacy, which is a strange decision (albeit one set up in Downtime, the 90s fan film in which her character debuts, played there by Beverley Cressman) that puts her character at a slight remove from proceedings. But the secondary character of Osgood, played by Ingrid Oliver, is tremendously promising.

This new UNIT is clearly intended to serve as a standing support cast again. But it’s also clear that the standing support cast is only there for certain size tasks. UNIT doesn’t appear in The Caretaker or Flatline, and it doesn’t appear to be UNIT coordinating the response in In the Forest of the Night. (Indeed, the Doctor seems to consciously decline to call them in The Caretaker.) Instead they’re designed to show up in stories where they are specifically thematically required (such as The Bells of Saint John, where their cameo nicely ties into the revelation that it's the Great Intelligence behind all of this). So in Day of the Doctor they are there to provide a link to Doctor Who’s heritage and history, while in Dark Water/Death in Heaven one can probably safely assume that they’ll be there to develop the “soldier” theme across Season Eight.

But in this regard, it’s also worth pointing out that the Moffat era has developed a similar UNIT-like supporting cast in the form of the Paternoster Gang. The only issue is that the Paternoster Gang doesn’t exist to handle alien invasions in the present day, but rather in Victorian London. Despite this, they fulfill much the same function of UNIT - to the point of being an organization that extends out of one particular memorable character, in this particular case Madame Vastra.

All of this reflects a fundamental shift in the program. At this point, it’s done so many alien invasions that the question of how the civil authorities will respond is easily answered with “however the writer finds it convenient.” UNIT has become what its prevalence in the Pertwee era always meant it would be - a piece of Doctor Who’s legacy, firmly a part of its world and not ours. And so, when it’s helpful to have a standing cast of characters who carry resonances with the show’s past, they exist. When other solutions make more sense, they’re used. What originated as a solution to “how do we start doing present day stories in a show that was initially defined so that the present day was the one place it couldn’t go” has instead become one part of the show’s history, as the initial question has vanished to where it doesn’t even make sense to ask.

And so in the end we return to more or less where we started - the fact that UNIT, and the entire tradition it represents, is in reality simply an outgrowth of the iconic character of the Brigadier. Because in many ways, the show got it right, if not quite the very first time, at least among the first times they tried thinking about the question of what sort of government response to alien invasions you’d need. And for Doctor Who, what you need is an ever so slightly camp square-jawed hero who embodies the British self-mythology of keeping calm no matter how outrageous the circumstances. And in this regard, it’s worth pointing out that the Brigadier is the one human character ever to be honored by a name that is in fact a title and a definite article - that is, the one human character to be named like the Doctor. Once you have him, everything else is just variations on the theme.

Abigail Brady would like to talk to you about Welcome to Night Vale.

Have you listened to Welcome to Night Vale? It’s a podcast. That doesn’t explain it. Podcasts are usually chat shows - Night Vale is a dramatic presentation, in the form of a talk radio show, presented by a chap we eventually find out is called Cecil Palmer (played by Cecil Baldwin). It is set in a small desert town called Night Vale, a place where every conspiracy theory is openly acknowledged to be true. I tried to condense it to a two-word pitch the other day, and the best I could come up with with was “Innsmouth FM”. A four-word pitch would be “Innsmouth FM. With jokes.” Mind, they distance themselves from Lovecraft, pointing at plenty of other contemporaneous weird fiction authors, who are less massive racists, as influences. As a writer, what I admire most about it is its ability to change tones so rapidly and yet so completely, between the comedy and the horror, without either undermining the other. It has a highly enthusiastic and growing fanbase, gained through word-of-mouth rather than any marketing-led push. A lot of it is that it it’s an ideal fit for tumblr’s combination of humour and politics. But it still seems pretty amazing for it to go from nothing to a small media franchise just through personal recommendations. Even more amazing for this to happen in a format - the audio drama - that is new to most of the listeners. It really is that good.

I asked several people who attended the October London shows how exactly they go into Night Vale, and nobody could really remember. I mean, I can’t even really remember how I got into it. My only hard date is that I nominated episodes for the 2014 Hugo Awards, so that’s certainly by the end of January 2014. Night Vale fandom this time wasn’t organised enough to get an episode on the ballot. “The Sandstorm” (a two-parter with a season-finale feel that I didn’t think to put down) picked up 30 nominations, only eight fewer than “The Name of the Doctor”. Maybe next year the second anniversary episode, “Old Oak Doors”, will make it through. Guys, let's remember that, yeah?

“Old Oak Doors” was exceptional, and not just in its the way it used its status as a season finale to kick you in as more teeth than Buffy’s “Becoming” did. It was a two-parter, at the end of the second year of the podcast, it was recorded live in New York in June 2014. And I have to confess, I found that... it didn’t entirely work recorded? Particularly the bits where it is obvious Cecil or someone is doing something funny on stage, but we don’t get the joke because we can’t see him but we have to listen to the crowd laugh anyway. Night Vale live is a different thing to the podcast. Podcasts are typically a solitary listening experience. How you engage with the material is entirely up to you. If you want to treat NightVale as purely horrific, without seeing the funny side, without laughing at the jokes, you can. If there aren’t any bits you see as serious, you can laugh all the way through. In an audience it’s much more difficult to interpret it like that. If people are laughing, then it’s supposed to be funny material. If people aren’t laughing, then, well, maybe it is supposed to be funny and it failed. But more likely, it’s one of the spooky bits and you should shush during it. A lot of that depends upon delivery and tone (Meg’s “today’s proverb” is an instant crowd-shutter-upper), but I saw the same show on two consecutive nights, and the audience reacted to it differently.

So, coming out of that show on the 20th, what do we think? Universal excitement, obviously. It's not so much a play as a gig by a band we really like. They didn't play many of the radio hits - there was no Intern Dana, no Khoshekh, and very sadly, no Carlos (not in person, anyway). But we're here, right, we are fans. And we're not just any fans but we are the fans from the first London date. The one that sold out first in all of Europe. The one that several groups of people I know were at, because several of my friends had filled their boots with Night Vale tickets and tried to get rid of them. The one where I couldn't possibly catch up with everyone I knew was going, let alone everyone I bumped into. It was an exceptionally good night, and Cecil tweeted about it, not in a “I bet you say that to all the audiences” way, but in a properly superlative way that means he might just mean it.

Holy moly London! That was without a doubt the most amazing audience @NightValeRadio has ever had. Thank you so much for all the love!
— Cecil Baldwin (@CecilBaldwinIII) October 20, 2014

Apparently the audince's applause broke the sound limit license for the Union Chapel tonight.... 110 decibels of applause, baby!
— Cecil Baldwin (@CecilBaldwinIII) October 20, 2014

“The Librarian”, which they've been touring since January, is a fairly standard-format show, compared to “Old Oak Doors”, and “The Debate”. We set up a crisis in the first segment, we go away to jokes and spooky bits, we have a guest appearance or two (this is an addition to the setup - for maybe half a year the only on-air voice was Cecil himself), we cut back to the main event a couple of times, and then on the last of these the crisis worsens and we go to the weather. (The weather is a song.) When we get back from the weather Cecil fills us in on how the crisis has been resolved. That’s the default setup for a Night Vale episode. That’s how you’d write a Night Vale spec script. It’s a very modular show. The version I saw had, apart from Pamela Winchell, Deb, an Intern, (on the 21st) Louie Blascoe, Michelle Nguyen. Dublin lacked Michelle and Pamela. The Internet tells me that “The Librarian” has also seen appearances by Tamika Flynn, Carlos, The Faceless Old Woman, Steve Carlsberg, and Molly Quinn, although not necessarily at the same time.

But normal in form is not normal in content. The early horoscopes section certainly violated the literal fourth wall, as Cecil starts pointing at individual audience members, and it stops being a twisted live theatrical reading and turns into geek panto. This bit was the first where the contrast between the audiences became apparent. The crowd on the Tuesday took a bit of warming up before they were whooping loudly at particular star signs and getting Cecil to focus his attention on them. Monday’s lot, they were right there already, drunk on anticipation and beer.

This was a practice run for the main set piece, which I shall be deliberately vague about, which used the audience and the theatre space in a pretty astonishing you-had-to-be-there-way.

They asked people not to record video, and I dutifully didn’t, but a bit of me hopes that someone did. Partly because of the ever changing nature of the show - the Louie Blascoe bit appeared to be making its debut on the 21st, for example, but because the version they'll tape in New York in January 2015 will be playing to the listeners, and for this show, the thing that made it magic for me was the connections we formed. In the queue, partly, but Cecil’s body language, seeing him silence a hall with just a finger and a change in tone; and hiding under your seat while keeping half an eye on the rest of the audience to check they are doing the same thing (they were).

This interactivity is the ultimate form of what was already a very tight feedback loop. I wouldn't want to speculate about how much buffer they have, but it would certainly be feasible for them to not have any, for each episode to be recorded after the release of the last. There aren't many dramatic media like that - some sitcoms, perhaps, and some webcomics. You can see the show evolve from its early days. Every so often I make a new person listen to the first episode, "Pilot", just to try end hook them, and I don't think it's very represntative of the show now. That first episode is a piece of performance poetry, tight, but not what it will become. The chief thing they got right was the casting. The casting and the setting. And the medium.

Audio is perfect for Night Vale. You can do so many rug pulls. The very conceit of this show is one - that Librarians in Night Vale are strange horrific insectoid beasts, is one. "Condos", which was their previous touring show, does another, as it turns out that means something very different in Night Vale. They are forever subverting our mental imagery. You couldn't do that on telly or film, you can't retcon in the weird by suddenly revealing that there had never been any books in town. You couldn't do it in comics, either. You could perhaps do it in prose.

They are writing a novel. I'll be reading it, obviously. What I am most interested about it right now is not what the plot will be or whether it will be canon, but what sort of narrative voice it will be. Night Vale episodes are structured as broadcasts. Will the novel take the approach that most Night Vale fanfics I've seen use, of just writing third person narrative following a mixed cast around? I sort of hope not. I'd love to see it be an epistolary novel mostly in the voice of Carlos. Or something radically experimental that I would have a hope of thinking of because Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are geniuses.

If you get a chance to go to this show, do it. They'll retire it after New York and replace it with another, and after then you'll have missed your chance to meet Amanda. And listening to us lot meet Amanda don't be quite the same.

This is the eighteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It's available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore paid off a year of eschatological foreshadowing with the unleashing of the primordial spirit of evil itself in a bizarre South American death ritual conducted by the Brujería, who represent the blackness at the heart of America.

"We all woke up, the day after the world ended, and we still had to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads. Life goes on, y'know?" - Alan Moore, Promethea

Figure 508: Judith's transformation is a triumph of
psychedelic body horror. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #48, 1986)

The unleashing of this horror, in “A Murder of Crows,” in Swamp Thing #48, comes when one of Constantine’s allies, Judith, betrays him to the Brujería and agrees to serve as their messenger. This involves a ritual in which Judith vomits out her intestines and allows her body to shrivel until only her severed but still talking head remains. The Brujería then place a black pearl in her mouth, at which point her head steadily transforms into a bird, a process that is laboriously and disturbingly described, at which point the bird is released to summon the nameless dark power by delivering a pearl held in its mouth to a distant destination. Although this transformation is presented as a physical corruption ripe with body horror, the fact that it is brought about via Judith ingesting an unnamed root places it in the larger thematic tradition of psychedelic plants within Moore’s Swamp Thing. It is, in other words, inexorably linked with the bad trip - the negative, monstrous aspect of the spiritual plane.

Figure 509: Swamp Thing meets his ancestors in the
Parliament of Trees. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Stan
Woch and Ron Randall, from Swamp Thing #47, 1986)

But the summoning of this dark power is the third issue of the arc. The second, coming between it and the Crisis tie-in, presents a second, equally important aspect of this setup. In it, before journeying to the Brujería’s cave, Constantine takes Swamp Thing to the Parliament of Trees, also located in South America, in this case at the source of the River Tefé in the Amazon. Here Moore pays off the idea introduced in “Abandoned Houses,” revealing the resting place of all the past plant elementals of the world and allowing Swamp Thing to seek communion with them. In yet another sequence of psychedelia, Swamp Thing allows his mind to meld with that of the parliament, where he asks the “eternal trees” about the coming apocalypse, asking “how to use my power to its best advantage.” The Parliament recoils, saying, “power? Power is not the thing. To be calm within oneself, that is the way of the wood.” When Swamp Thing expresses doubt, saying that he has “seen much that is evil… it preys upon my mind. I wonder if nature can be just to allow such things,” the Parliament further rebukes him, telling him that “flesh doubts. Wood knows. If you wish to understand evil, you must understandt he bark, the roots, the worms of the earth. That is the wisdom of an Erl-King. Aphid eats leaf. Ladybug eats aphid. Soil absorbs dead ladybug. Plant feeds upon soil. Is aphid evil? Is ladybug evil? Is soil evil? Where is the evil in all the wood?” And with that, Swamp Thing is cast out of the Parliament, much to his horror.

Taken together, these issues mirror the basic structure of “Windfall,” with “The Parliament of Trees” serving as Sandy’s half of the story and “A Murder of Crows” serving as Milo’s. These two aspects of the spiritual experience are, at least superficially, being pitted against each other, and yet in the Parliament’s answer there is already the setup for this debate’s inevitable resolution. This resolution occupies the final two issues of the arc, including the oversized Swamp Thing #50.

Figure 510: Marv Wolfman became the second
writer to tackle John Constantine. (Art by
George Perez and Mike DeCarlo, from Crisis
on Infinite Earths #4, 1985. Composite of two
pages.)

These issues, perhaps surprisingly, return the focus to the larger DC Universe. With the Brujería’s messenger released, Constantine is forced to drop to plan B - preparing to battle the entity they’ve summoned once it arrives. This involves Constantine and Swamp Thing parting ways again to handle parallel tasks. Constantine, for his part, begins meeting with various mystical figures within the DC Universe: Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Baron Winters, John B. Wentworth and Howard Purcell’s Golden Age creation Sargon the Sorcerer, a character created for Action Comics #1 by Fred Guardineer called Zatara, along with his Gardner Fox/Murphey Anderson-created daughter (and Justice League member) Zatanna, the pre-Superman Siegel and Shuster creation Doctor Occult (who shows up uninvited), and finally Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani’s Steve Dayton, “the world’s fifth richest man,” who created a helmet to increase his mental powers and who goes by the name of Mento. This latter character’s inclusion was foreshadowed back in Crisis on Infinite Earths #4, where Constantine meets with him in a more or less contextless eight-panel scene wedged between a scene with Batgirl and Supergirl and one in which Pariah, a character created for Crisis, witnessing more earths dying (which is most of what he does in the story), an appearance that was followed up on by an equally cryptic sequence in Swamp Thing #44 (“Bogeymen”). Swamp Thing, on the other hand, connects back with the various characters he met back in “Down Among the Dead Men” in order to confront the being on the spiritual plane.

Figure 511: Zatara bursts into flames, his top hat sickly and
hilariously unaffected. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve
Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing
#50, 1986)

The oversized Swamp Thing #50, which also served as Steve Bissette’s final issue as the book’s primary penciller, finally offers this confrontation, with a series of supernatural beings attempting to defeat the summoned being and failing before Swamp Thing finally saves the day. While this is going on, Constantine and his allies watch via Mento’s psychic powers, narrating events and, as Constantine explains it, channeling their magical energies to help Swamp Thing and his allies, which results in the incineration of both Sargon and Zatara due to psychic backlash from the blackness. The confrontation itself consists of four characters fighting their way to the gigantic shadow at that is the nameless entity, where they are grabbed and forcibly drawn into it to confront it.

Figure 512: Doctor Fate fails to appease the
horrible darkness. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing #50, 1986)

These confrontations are depicted as sequences in which the characters float in an immense blackness, which addresses them in turn, asking each a question. They in turn answer and, as the shadow finds their answers unacceptable, are cast out. First is Etrigan, to whom the shadow explains, “before light, I was; enldess, without name or need of name. Then light came. Witnessing its otherness, I suffered my first knowledge of self, and all contentment fled. Tell me, little thing. Tell me what I am.” Etrigan, for his part, explains that the darkness is “evil, absence of god’s light, his shadow-partner, locked in endless fight.” But the shadow is unimpressed, claiming all Etrigan has taught it is fatalism and inevitability, and that these are not what it needs. Next is Doctor Fate, a Golden Age magical character, who, when asked, “Little Thing, what is evil,” replies that “evil is a quagmire of ignorance that would drag us back as we climb towards the immortal light. A vile, wretched thing, to be scraped from the sandals like dromedary soil.” Again, the shadow is unimpressed, saying that Doctor Fate has only taught it contempt and casting him out. At last comes the Spectre, who, asked the same question as Doctor Fate, proclaims that “evil exists only to be avenged, so that others may see what ruin comes of opposing that great voice, and cleave more wholly to its will, fearing its retribution,” to which the shadow says that the Spectre has taught it only vengeance and casts him out. At this point it appears that all hope is lost, and even the Phantom Stranger seems to give up. But Constantine, for his part, demands to know what Swamp Thing is doing, shouting that “this is what I prepared him for!” Swamp Thing, for his part, walks willingly into the blackness.

Figure 513: Swamp Thing willingly enters the darkness to
confront the hideous beast. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben, from Swamp
Thing #50, 1986)

Here, then, Moore sets the stage for his larger philosophical confrontation. Having identified a fundamental rot within this new continent in which his tales are to be unleashed, he has now brought an apocalyptic force to devour it. More than that, he has lent this final judgment a moral rightness. To Doctor Fate’s contempt, it quite reasonably asks, “am I so low, then, and is he you serve so high that there can be no possibility of respect between us?” And to the Spectre’s suggestion that evil exists only to be punished, it asks, “what of the tortured eons I endured, unable to broach this maddening brilliance and quiet the pain it woke in me? Do they not demand retribution?” In this final question, the darkness brings up a fundamental and previously unspoken aspect of Moore’s story. The darkness is, by this point, being portrayed as the nothing in which God created light, an event that has tortured it with knowledge of self ever since. This has parallels in the basic idea of an American darkness and of the Brujería. The depiction of them as existing in the furthest reach of the continent raises the question of what exists in the rest of the continent. The answer, of course, is the product of European colonialism, which led to the overthrow and oppression of the indigenous population to which the Brujería belong. This colonialism is mirrored in the darkness’s pain at being invaded by light, and the angry vengeance that it comes to demand serves as a metaphor for the oppressed and subaltern indigenous populations. The darkness is not evil, in this analogy, but rather a righteous demand for justice on the part of the deeply aggrieved, with the European light being the true villain of the piece.

Figure 514: Swamp Thing discusses the nature
of evil with its embodiment. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and
John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #50, 1986)

And yet having engineered this conflict carefully over the course of more than a year of comics, at the final moment Moore opts to avert it. Swamp Thing, when faced with the darkness’s question about the nature of evil, at first reflects on the evil he witnessed during the “American Gothic” arc: “its cruelty… the randomness with which it ravages… innocent… and guilty alike.” But then he comes to the council given by the Parliament of Trees, admitting that he did not understand their answer. “And yet,” he says, “they spoke of aphids eating leaves, bugs eating aphids, themselves finally devoured by the soil, feeding the foliage. They asked where evil dwelled within this cycle and told me to look to the soil. The black soil is rich in foul decay… yet glorious life springs from it. But however dazzling the flourishes of life, in the end, all decays to the same black humus… Perhaps evil,” he finally concludes “is the humus formed by virtue’s decay… and perhaps… perhaps it is from that dark, sinister loam that virtue grows strongest?” This answer, at last, is satisfactory to the darkness, which allows Swamp Thing to leave freely while it reflects upon what he has said, and then finally confronts the light, depicted as a double page spread of two massive hands reaching towards each other. The scene is narrated by Dayton, who is driven hopelessly mad by the experience and left unable to describe it. Instead Moore offers only the cryptic words of the Phantom Stranger, who says that “the light and shade are still everywhere around us… only the conflict between them has altered,” later musing that “in the heart of darkness, a flower blossoms, etching the shadows with its promise of hope… in the fields of light, an adder coils, and the radiant tranquility is lent savor by its sinister presence. Right and wrong, black and white, good and evil… all my existence I have looked from one to the other, fully embracing neither one… never before have I understood how much they depend upon each other.”

Figure 515: (Art by Eddie Campbell, from Snakes and Ladders, 2001)

Within this ending there is a kernel of interesting observation that Moore, in his usual obliquely unchanging manner, would return to in his later career when, for example, he had Promethea muse that “if Qlippoths are husks left when good departs, does that mean evil isn’t a real thing, in itself? It’s just an absence of good, like dark’s an absence of light?”, or when, in Snakes and Ladders, he writes that “the profane and sacred are both one, and that the salt of the earth and its scum are struck from the same coin, and in our lowest depths, the worst abyss of us, there is a light.” There are, to be sure, profound implications to this sort of thing - it’s an insight not unlike that of Blake when he wrote that “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason, Evil is the active springing from energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Figure 516: The inscrutable resolution to Alan Moore's first apocalypse.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing #50, 1986)

And yet for all of this, there is something frustratingly hollow about the resolution. There is no describable change effected by Moore’s resolution. Good and evil are said to have the same relationship as ever, although the Phantom Stranger concedes that perhaps “a different light has been cast upon their relationship.” But within the confines of DC’s superhero line, in which the comic is tacitly grounded, this seems set to mean little. A “no-score draw,” as Constantine describes the outcome, inherently favors the side that had power at the outset - that is, the light that has banished the darkness to a point depicted as “a chaotic inferno with neither land nor sky” beyond the edges of reality itself. DC Comics and its multitude of superhero franchises will continue to embrace “good,” and by extension to embrace the status quo. The light will always retain its tacit allegiance with entrenched power structures, and the darkness will never have its vengeance for the light’s invasion of it.

Figure 517: The Peacemaker, whose death
was to be made into a mystery by Alan Moore.

The fundamentally conservative nature of this ending is stressed by the issue’s final page, which returns to Cain and Abel. Abel reflects upon the situation, noting that “nearly all our stories revolve around good struggling against evil… darkness against light… what will become of the stories? Without that ancient conflict to fall back on, what will they be about?” Cain’s answer, of course, is to shove his brother off a cliff to his death with a wisecrack about how he’s “sure we’ll think of something,” a moment that reiterates the complete lack of change offered by this resolution. This is not, as Moore would later write in Promethea, a conceptual apocalypse with the real possibility of transforming the world. Rather, it’s a damp squib - a whimpering end of the world wholly devoid of bang.

As ever, ranked from least enjoyed to most, with everything being a book I was willing to spend money on.

All-New X-Men #33

The original X-Men touring the Ultimate Universe is proving a bit sloppy. Too many characters split up into too many storylines emphasizes one of Bendis's weak spots, which is that an issue can pass without a sense that much has happened. Split that over four plots and you run into issues where not a lot actually does happen. A promising cliffhanger, but aren't they all?

The Massive #28

The six-part structure of the final arc turns out to be at least slightly artificial, with this very much being the start of a new three-part arc. But I suspect calling it a six-part arc was wise, as there's a real flagging in the momentum here. This is not unusual for this book, which has always disappointed a bit. Not bad, but I'm not going to miss this much when it's over.

Guardians of the Galaxy #20

Hm? Oh. Yes. This plot. The death of Richard Ryder, and all that. It wraps up pretty well. I'm not sure it was three issues of story, and certainly not sure it was worth pausing the actual Guardians for three months, but fair enough. It wasn't half bad. Glad to be moving on though.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #4

I admit, this threw me for a bit of a loop, just because I'd gotten used to done-in-ones, and really wasn't expecting a multipart story, which in turn made the pacing feel weird throughout. Rereading it, it's a nice setup for a story. Alice, in particular, gets some excellent material here, as she and the Doctor come into a subtle sort of conflict. This fits into Eleven's overall story arc quite well, and into the way the nature of the companion has evolved over the Moffat era. Good fun, this. Still highly recommended.

Wonder Woman #35

And so the Azzarello run ends. The rest of the New 52 did away with this book's ability to actually define a new generation's Wonder Woman, but it soldiered on and at least provided an interesting vision of her that was consistently one of the few books in the New 52's first three years capable of being interesting. Here it ends, with some nice callbacks to Marston and the book's legacy. There's even talk of submission. There's little to be excited about in the next phase of Wonder Woman. This, at least, was a book you could be proud of. Good for it.

Saga #24

Is it possible to write a bad comic with a Lying Cat splash page? No. It probably is not. I should really archive binge this in the gap months to actually get up to speed on the plots and characters, because it's self-evidently an absolutely brilliant comic. Apparently there's a nice oversized hardcover of the first eighteen issues coming out. Lovely Christmas present, that.

Uber #19

The stuff this book is doing with war comics is absolutely fascinating. Body horror bleeds into depictions of the basic cruelty of war, which bleeds in turn into discussions of racism. It's not a book you feel happy about, but it's one of the best and most important comics being published right now, and I'll keep banging the drum for it.

Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues, a general badass, and my wife.

In case you missed the boom, Call the Midwife is a BBC period drama about a group of midwives servicing London’s East End in the 1950s, originally based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth. It is the newest big show to hit UK television with ratings roughly matching those of Sherlock and Downton Abbey and surpassing Doctor Who itself. Call the Midwife was also featured in 2013’s Comedy Relief sketch (partnering with Doctor Who in this endeavor) and has Paul McGann’s brother, Stephen McGann as a prominent character in their series. UK TV ends up being a bit incestuous.

Medical shows are a hard sell to those who work in the medical field. Much in the same way those in the tech field often cannot help but point out the inconsistencies and illogical moments when tech appears in TV or cinema, those of us in the medical field see the problems others can safely ignore. Even “reality” medical shows fall afoul of this issue, I remember yelling at a Mystery Diagnosis episode that “there is dumbing the facts down for the laypeople and then there is outright lying to them!”

But this is a problem that Call the Midwife sidesteps so well. Because the medicine is very rarely, if ever, the focus of the episode. With the emphasis shifted, they only have to include as many medical facts as they see fit. We never get a long and convoluted explanation of what is going on or why things are stressful, we get just enough to see the broad shapes of the situation and are led to conclusions about the situation by the players reactions to it. They stay vague enough to avoid getting things significantly wrong (though I feel I should disclaim all this by mentioning I am very much NOT a maternity nurse, there may be errors I do not pick up on). This era is also just out of step enough with the present that, unless there are glaring “no, that cannot possibly make sense if they’ve got brains in their heads,” I may not necessarily notice the errors. These are all things I appreciate enormously. It is so nice to be able to watch a medical show without the nurse brain picking apart every little detail.

So what’s the focus of Call the Midwife if it’s not the medicine? Well, it’s the people of course. And not in the schmaltzy, soapy Grey’s Anatomy sense. It’s what I adore about Call the Midwife, it’s the key to how they do convey how stressful situations are. It’s never the stress of watching numbers trend down or hearing alarms blaring, it is watching the people who are in the trenches give each other knowing and mildly terrified looks, gritting their teeth and getting through it. It is watching these women get their patients and each other through heart-wrenching, soul-crushing and nightmare-inducing situations. It is about them going home and getting on with their lives after.

And here we get to what, to my mind, makes this show so good. This is a show about a group of women who walk into people’s homes and see the most intimate parts of their lives. It is about walking into strangers’ lives and seeing the absolute best and worst of them. It is about being pulled intimately into the worlds of others and watching them face incredible challenges, about watching some soar with grace and dignity while others are crushed, made small and petty. It is about caring for each and every one of them regardless of their challenges and reactions to them. And it is about having a life beyond the nearly all-consuming task of caring for the people around them.

That’s one of the clever things about having the midwives quarters in Nonnatus House, in having them live where they work. Because any nurse will tell you, one of the hardest parts of our job is leaving work at work. We are terrible at self care, both in attending to our own health and it ensuring that we have lives beyond our work. Having the midwives live at Nonnatus House gives them an insulated little microcosm in which they always have people who can relate to them (hey, hey, an easy in to the storytelling) but also makes it demonstrably harder to have a life outside of the work. It keeps the women mired in the work which, again, helps the storyteller. It is why Chummy needed to get her own home when she had her own family and why Jenny’s departure from Nonnatus House coincides with her departure from the story.

And, let me be clear, that is what nursing is like. Sometimes it takes a physical departure or a tangible break from a situation or unit or hospital before you can leave a situation behind. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. The lives of strangers become more important to you than your own self-care. If we are not careful, it becomes toxic. Call the Midwife is about women who do it well. And this is what I love about this show. It discusses the torment and joy of being a nurse in a very real sense. I love the science, I love the medicine, but that’s not what nursing is about. It is about the people we care for, it is about making horrible situations, if not good, at least better.

And you can never escape the grip of your job. Just yesterday, I had a conversation I wished I’d never have to have with someone I know and one I know I will have over and over again. My upstairs neighbor, one of the sweetest people I have ever met, has recurrent colon cancer. She had to tap out after three out of five months of chemo because she just couldn’t do it anymore and any oncologist will tell you stopping treatment early is no longer a curative gameplan. I went up to see her and give her a hug before work. She accepted it then quickly ushered me away saying “you have to go get ready to help people like me.” I still want to cry. Of course, I told her if she needed anything at all she could call me. I never wanted to be her nurse. I never wanted to be the nurse for my family members or friends. But I will over and over again. Because, Nonnatus House or no, nursing becomes your world. For better or for worse, your life becomes entirely about the people around you.

Which brings us to Rory. Because this is the tradition and the lifestyle that gave rise to Rory Williams, the last centurion. Like anyone else who has slogged through the best and the worst of people, Rory’s identity as a nurse informs everything he does. His work on a coma ward, watching over his patients and waiting for signs of life, made him uniquely prepared to watch over the Pandorica and wait for nearly two millennia for his wife to emerge.

It isn’t until Rory guards the Pandorica that he embraces his role as nurse to the Doctor’s… well, doctor. Prior to becoming “the last centurion,” he is still unsure, still hesitant, still the third wheel to Amy and the Doctor. Amy’s Choice, in which Rory’s “dream” of becoming a doctor, must necessarily come before his role as a nurse is solidified. The episode-long dick-measuring contest only make sense if Rory and the Doctor are measured on the same scale. We see moments of Rory-as-nurse, small instances, caring for Mack in Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, pointing out that the Doctor is calling back the bad things in The Eleventh Hour. He is the novice nurse, learning the ropes, figuring out his place in the scene.

And then we get to the Big Bang and we see Rory as nurse, as the sort of nurse described above. One who will, to the detriment of his own health and safety and well-being, will ensure the health and safety and well-being of people around him. He’s not just being human here, he is being the caregiver. Without the convenience of Nonnatus House to frame the terse story of caring, we instead have the Pandorica.

And, the fact is, the Doctor needs a nurse. Someone who hears the grand, sweeping statements and proclamations and thinks about the practicalities and the people involved. He needs someone who is patient and caring and kind. He needs someone who complains “it is always my turn” when ensuring people adjust to the bizarre reality that is the TARDIS and yet does it every time. He needs someone who will grit his teeth, do what needs to be done and get through it. It’s little wonder that Rory is the one in the Impossible Astronaut who gives voice to what has to happen next. It is the job of doctors to make grand statements, it is the job of nurses to keep reality in sight, for better or worse.

Because without a nurse, without a caregiver, we have the sort of Doctor who is okay with removing the autonomy of others. See how Donna’s story ended. The Doctor, in Journey’s End, essentially ignores a DNR/DNI order. That is the reality of what happened with Donna. The very point of the Doctor/Donna metacrisis is that she knows. She understands everything. She understands what is happening to her and why it is happening and, with that full knowledge, makes a choice. But the Doctor’s choices completely wipe any autonomy from Donna in determining her own quality of life. It is a type of violation that I have come to think of, in my own practice, as medical rape.

One of the most striking things about my reaction to the scene is how frightfully typical of doctors this is. There is still this attitude among a lot of the MDs that every death is a failure. So they push. They spin. They present information in ways that give them the opportunity to try again. They make people feel guilty for wanting to forgo treatment and remain comfortable for as long as possible. It is the role of nurses to ensure that the patients’ voices and wishes are heard.

That’s what this comes down to. It was Donna’s mind and her choice. She knew, she understood what it meant to continue on with the Human/Time Lord Biological Metacrisis and the DoctorDonna. She felt her quality of life was better, that she was better having done the things she had while traveling with him and was unwilling to lose all of that. Even if it meant her mind burning. But that would have been a failure for the Doctor. The first proper companion death since Adric. And he couldn’t stand for that. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand what she was doing, she did. She absolutely understood everything. That was the point. He just couldn’t standby and let her make that choice so he took it from her. Forced her to live a life that she considered less fulfilling. Indefinitely. With no memory of what she could have had. Which I suppose is a small mercy, at least she didn’t live in misery and regret.

The Doctor made this decision about him, as all doctors do. (And worse, Davies let him, never offering any sort of criticism or question that the Doctor might have erred.) About what he could accomplish, about who he could save, about how much loss he could handle. It should never have been about him. There was another, more important player in this decision whose voice was silenced through selfishness. It was a voice which may have been heard through the intervention of a nurse.

There is a reason that the Doctor chose his name. He wants to help, he wants to heal but he so often forgets that the people he wants to help and heal have opinions and thoughts of their own. He is the Doctor, Time Lord from Gallifrey, why would anyone doubt his judgement? Why would anyone doubt the judgement of someone with a medical degree? Because it is their life and their choice. That is what a nurse does for you. That is what Rory does. After dreaming of being a doctor, the worst thing Rory can imagine is turning into the Doctor.

Which is such a dramatic change from Rory’s “dream” of being a doctor in Amy’s Choice. Because Rory has worked with doctors, he has worked in a hospital, he knows that acting like a doctor is remarkably similar to acting like the Doctor. And, of course he dreamed of being a doctor. No boy growing up dreams of being a nurse. That’s for girls, for people preparing to be mothers, for the natural caregivers. The men need to make the big decisions so the women can carry out their orders.

In this regard, it’s worth looking at another show that floats around Doctor Who’s general orbit, Supernatural - a show that, perhaps improbably and counter-intuitively, has often been paired with Doctor Who and Sherlock in a meta-fandom known as “Superwholock.” I started watching Supernatural when it was wrapping the first season and I loved it. I reveled in what appeared to be reversal of the male gaze paired with mythic storytelling that I loved. And while the show does have some cheeky, clever and subversive moments and themes regarding gender, it is so preoccupied with reaffirming the masculinity of the cast that a consist subtext is the chanting of “no-homo” (notably, it is profoundly fucked up that the response is “no-homo” and not “no-incest”). Though, in this, viewers have promptly ignored despite the reiterations of both cast and crew.

And there are clever subversions of “typical” masculinity. We have the hyper-masculine man’s man, Dean who is overwhelmingly the emotional brother. Time after time, we get close ups of Dean wiping away manly tears. Despite Sam being the “nerdy” brother, it is again Dean who, time after time, drops references to Star Trek, Star Wars or other canonically “nerdy” interests. And then we have Crowley who “regains” his emotions only when he becomes less demonic. The show literally demonizes typical masculinity.

But it it the same show that flat out denies that most of its fan base is female. We see this in the season 5 episode “The Real Ghostbusters” which parodies a real life Supernatural convention in which the attending fan base comprised of a large number of typically geeky, neckbeardy men with a few (one, in this case) rabid female fans who were explicitly fans of shipping. Despite this nod to the real fandom, the episode ignores the fact that the majority of actual viewers are female.

It is a show that ruthlessly queerbaits a significant portion of its fan base. Lines from the series include (between Dean and the male-protrayed angel Castiel) “Cas, not for nothing, but the last time someone looked at me like that…I got laid” and “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” Despite the clear queerbaiting, this is a divisive issue among the fans of the show, causing outright alienation from the fandom for some and the cast, Jensen Ackles in particular, is uncomfortable enough with this train of thought to actively shut down questions from fans regarding possible relationships.

It is a show that frequently and ruthlessly shoves its female characters into refrigerators. The final two episodes of season 8 were an extended FridgeFest, most of the surviving females (few enough as it was) were picked off one by one. The express intent of this FridgeFest was to convince the brothers to agree to a deal as all of the people they have ever saved are killed. The survivors of this cull included the token saved female (Sheriff Jodi Mills), Felicia Day and Meg, the demon. Who died the next episode.

The appeal, for me, what the mythos but also that masculinity with a twist. As the show progresses, while I still enjoy watching it, I am becoming more and more aware of the problematic beats that undermine the good bits. That masculinity with a twist is exactly what is so well represented with Rory. A masculinity that is markedly not in line with a doctor’s role of barking orders, insensitive comments and callous decisions.

Instead, the masculinity presented by Rory is actually very in line with the attitude behind Call the Midwife. You do what you do because you have to, you take care of the people around you because they are your responsibility as much as you are theirs. The hallmark of the masculinity Rory represents can be found in The Girl Who Waited. While the Doctor’s instinct (again, so doctorish) is to withhold information to lead Amy and Rory to a conclusion, Rory’s inclination is to give her all of the information he has so that she can make an educated and thought out decision about her life. And he is going to support her in any way. The sort of masculinity we see in Rory is so informed by his history as a nurse in that his goal is always to support those around him to be the best they can be. Always.

It is in subtle contrast to the type of masculinity seen in the Doctor (which is, again, masculinity with a twist). In contrast to what we see in shows like Supernatural, in which the immediate male reaction to situations is violence to protect others (which is occasionally interrogated in Supernatural, I will give them that credit), the Doctor’s immediate reaction is to figure out what the hell is going on and make bad decisions so that others don’t have to. Sometimes, he reacts to new things with wonder and hope like in Kill the Moon or even in the early stages of Flatline. But sometimes terrible decisions need to be made and, in order to protect those he cares for (and the Doctor does care so much) he makes those decisions for them. Which can be an immensely problematic attitude, as we see in the case of Donna.

In the end, this caretaking is the pinnacle of masculinity in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Look at Danny Pink. Danny Pink who doesn’t particularly like that his girlfriend runs off to have adventures in space and time with a man who regularly pushes her to her limits. Danny Pink who, despite his qualms, only asks Clara to be honest and open with him. Danny Pink who, even upon finding out that Clara has been lying to him for weeks about traveling with the Doctor doesn't shout or get angry or expect an immediate answer, he gives her time and space to think, simply asking for an honest answer. Danny Pink who is curious, bewildered and enchanted by a situation still remembers that his curiosity is not the priority, those around him are. Danny Pink who recognizes that there are wonders here.

And of course, this is not Moffat’s first foray into examining the concept of masculinity, who has been interrogating traditional masculinity ever since the character of Spike back in Press Gang, most obviously in his withering portrayal of himself in Joking Apart, the first of many brilliant but unthinkingly cruel men he would write. Nor is this a new train for Doctor Who whose challenge of stereotypical male roles is part of what made it so attractive to gay men. The typical “male” aggression has little place in exploring the universe, one needs to be thoughtful and curious and kind. It is this slightly twisted masculinity that is vaulted by Doctor Who.

TLDR: If you want a real man, get a nurse.

The review of Dark Water will be up as soon as I post it. If you'd like to be notified when it goes up, it's still not too late to back these reviews on Patreon.

Oh shit oh shit I need a new caption joke.

It’s April 24^th, 2010. Usher and will.i.am are at number one with “OMG,” with Lady Gaga, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the worst ecological disasters in history, and Standard & Poor’s downgrades Greece’s credit rating, worsening the Euro crisis. Also, flights resume following the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, and we reach the last few days before the UK general election.

While on television, the first-filmed episode of the Moffat era. In the history of Doctor Who, there are two standard tricks that people have come up with to smooth the transition for a new Doctor. The first originates in 1966 with The Power of the Daleks, when Patrick Troughton’s debut was consciously and deliberately overshadowed by the return of the Daleks. Basically, you use existing characters as guest stars to lighten the load a bit on your main actor while he beds in. Variations were used in Spearhead from Space, Robot,Time and the Rani, The Christmas Invasion, and Deep Breath. The other, only ever executed once, but terribly clever all the same, is to film the first few stories out of order so that the new Doctor’s debut sees the actor self-assured and with a more developed take on their character, creating a strong impression so that the audience will subconsciously fill in the gaps when subsequently shown the earlier performances. It was used in Castrovalva. Moffat, faced with the change of the entire lead cast and most of the production team, made the sensible decision to do both, filming The Eleventh Hour as Smith’s fifth episode, and using this two-parter, featuring big iconic returning monsters and a major returning guest star, to let everyone bed in.

On broadcast, this worked well. As we already discussed, The Eleventh Hour is the one Moffat episode even his detractors tend to embrace, making the exact big splash and statement it was supposed to. And this slotted into the season order nicely, feeling like a big turning point and an event, as opposed to like a production team desperately trying to get up to speed. In hindsight, a number of gaps are present, of which Matt Smith’s hair is only the most obvious. Many are subtle and along those lines - the decision not to pare back Alex Kingston’s makeup once she’s in camouflage, for instance, was a sensible one from a realist perspective (why would she redo her makeup, after all), but it smothers Kingston’s performance.

But others are larger. Moffat is eventually going to develop a much more nuanced sense of what can be handwaved away and what needs explanation, but here he several times gets bogged down doing exposition about things that could be handled intuitively, while missing key bits of setup. The fact that the gravity globe is never explained in episode one makes what would actually have been a quite cool cliffhanger into a bit of a “blink and you miss it” moment. The reintroduction of the crack is great in terms of subverting the expected Davies-style “codeword” season arc, but its a conceptual mess, becoming a weird vent of “time energy” that works like all the other energy spilling out in this story only not. Perhaps most significantly, he falls into what, since a conversation with Rob Shearman, I’ve thought of as the Paradise Towers trap, in which you have a story that’s structured around an ascent and traversal of space, but that doesn’t emphasize the physical layout of that space enough. You don’t realize they’ve been climbing to the primary flight deck the whole time until you actually get there, which undercuts the story’s central gag of River’s “you might want to find something to hold onto” being the end solution, such that the whole story is actually about gravity and falling.

The result is a messy episode held together by the fact that Alex Kingston and Karen Gillan take to their roles like fish to water, and the fact that there are some fantastic Weeping Angel menace scenes. Smith actually has an extremely rough time in places, in particularly poorly managing the transition to anger and frustration. In many ways, as with any marriage, the central question of the Doctor and River’s relationship is how they handle their inevitable fights, but Smith isn’t getting the gradiations right yet. (It’s worth comparing this to Angels Take Manhattan, where the plot really is about the Doctor and River having a fight, and where both Smith and Moffat have a much better handle on how to manage this.) Which was the point, of course, and it’s hardly a flaw that the strings are visible once you know what the magic trick is.

In many ways, then, the more interesting angle to take is to look at the ways in which much of the Moffat era emerges fully formed here. For one thing, right from the start, Moffat is engaged in his most fundamental innovation as showrunner, which is a transformation of the show’s visual logic. Under Davies, the camera was strictly there to document - there were occasional uses of good old fashioned monster-vision, but broadly speaking what you saw on screen was an objective view of what was happening. Throughout Moffat’s tenure, though, that stops being true. And the central turning point is the Weeping Angels, who span the two eras. Under Davies, as we discussed, they obeyed an unstated rule, which is that they couldn’t move when the viewer was looking at them either. In other words, the camera was quietly an active participant in Blink.

But these two episodes expand on that dramatically. Instead of simply being monsters who the camera can see too, they become something altogether more sinister - something that is, for my money, the single scariest idea that Doctor Who has ever presented. First, of course, is the idea that the image of an Angel is itself an Angel. This is creepy, but in many ways a restatement of the basic premise of the Angels. It’s introduced to us with an Angel on a television screen - that is, with the Angels as they’d previously appeared. Ultimately, the Angel that attacks Amy only does so according to the rules stated in Blink, only with the mild twist that Amy is put in the position of the audience, with a Weeping Angel on television that moves whenever she’s not looking at it. But the idea that the image of an Angel is itself an Angel was always baked into the premise - both in the sense that the Angels were only ever fictional constructs of television and in the sense that images of Angels were bound by the same rules due to the gaze of the audience. And sure enough, this sequence is ultimately governed by the logic of Blink. That story was largely about the nature of television as a medium, and so the idea that the Weeping Angels can be defeated via a medial glitch - by pausing during a moment when they’re not on-screen - makes perfect sense.

Then we get the second twist - that Angels can attack you via the eyes. This is trickier, but makes sense both in a literal sense (if the image of an Angel is itself an Angel then the image on your retina counts) and in a symbolic one. If we can affect the Angels via our gaze then it makes sense that their gaze should be dangerous. But it also begins to rend the veil between the screen and the audience. Our gaze becomes something that can be interacted with. And this sets up the wonderfully creepy moment in the climax where the audience’s gaze unexpectedly stops working and the Angels begin to move on screen. We become helpless to impact the screen right as the companion is at their greatest peril. (In this regard, the thematic weight of River unexpectedly swooping in with a better solution is significant.)

But all of this is secondary to the quietly implied horror of the Angel’s origin story. This is never quite stated explicitly, but the broad strokes are clear enough. The fact that an image of an Angel is itself an Angel, and that Angels can attack from within your mind makes it clear where the Angels came from: their own idea. “What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us? When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us. The time of Angels.” In other words, the idea of the Weeping Angels took over the Aplans and converted them all into Angels.

Moffat has form in this regard - most notably with his Twitter microfiction that read, “the worm became an idea, which hid itself in words, until it could climb, devouring all, through the eye of the reader of this tweet.” And, more broadly, it’s completely consistent with his aesthetic of horror elsewhere. Consider the ending of Blink, where he goes out of his way to render all the statues of the world scary. Or, of course, the Silence, monsters who are never so scary as when you’ve never seen one. Moffat’s favorite sort of horror is concepts that cannot be escaped simply by not watching anymore.

This is what’s key about the Weeping Angels after this point - the fact that they’re fictional is no longer a useful defense against them. They are just as terrifying if they are imaginary. Indeed, they are even more terrifying. If they were real you’d only have to worry about statues. When they’re imaginary you have no protection whatsoever. They are monsters that defy the act of comfort. All efforts at reassurance fall flat, or, worse, reiterate the problem. “It’s just a dream.” “There’s no such thing as Weeping Angels.” “It’s only your imagination.”

But this also serves as a sort of structural mission statement for the entire Moffat era, and serves as the main delineation between his Doctor Who and Davies’s. Under Davies, monsters might have thematic resonance or be extrapolated out of real-world problems, but they’re still characters in stories. But for Moffat, monsters, and indeed the entire show are explicitly works of fiction. (This is, notably, also the story where the tried and true “that’s a fairytale” “aren’t we all” exchange comes up.) It would be going too far to suggest that Moffat is a conscious devotee of the Alan Moore-style “art and magic are synonyms” philosophy, but his work is clearly in the same vein, if not the same conscious metaphysics. Moffat’s work is invested in its own fictionality. Suspension of disbelief isn’t even a meaningful concept for a story like this - your disbelief is irrelevant. The ideas have power unto themselves, and are interacted with directly.

In this regard, then, we have the most overtly alchemic approach to Doctor Who ever. One of the central premises of alchemy is that the distinction between symbol and object is not absolute. This is central to how Moffat’s Doctor Who works. Because the show is consciously aware of its status as a collection of images and narrative, there’s a straightforwardness to it. If you’re trying to engage with the show on a level that doesn’t acknowledge the fictionality of all of it and the way in which narrative expectations are built up and subverted, you’re already doomed. From this point on, the show is always metafictional.

Other stories will fully sketch out the implications of this - indeed, arguably they already have in The Beast Below, which hinges on its symbolic parallels to contemporary Britain. This is not the story in which Moffat makes his grand statement on the fictionality of Doctor Who and what it can be used for. But it is the story where he makes it unambiguous how things work now - how, within the narrative, the idea of a thing and the thing itself are no longer distinguishable. It’s a new way of doing television, and certainly a new way of doing Doctor Who. But as we’ll see over the remaining ten months or so of TARDIS Eruditorum (barring any major changes of plans, we should get to Time of the Doctor at the very start of February 2015), it’s an immensely potent approach that lets Doctor Who do genuinely new things. In effect, Moffat has casually reinvented the series in his first week on the job. Good start, you’ve got to say.

Pushing Last War in Albion until tomorrow - was just about to image it up when this crossed my desk, and I want to deal with it.

So, in the wake of Dark Water, the site usvsth3m ran a piece entitled "16 sexually confusing feelings that Doctor Who fans have had since The Mistress revealed her secret." It's a fun piece that reveals the pathetically blinkered attitudes of a lot of Doctor Who fans for what they are, which is to say the attitudes of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic assholes. It's a sobering reminder of the at times appalling attitudes of orthodox and longstanding fandom, and was absolutely something worth doing. And to their credit, they played nice and clipped usernames, thus avoiding publicly naming and shaming people for their actions, not that publicly naming and shaming the person who said that they felt "as though something sacred has been violated" because the Master was a woman now would have been in the least bit unreasonable.

Which is probably why the forum tried to demand that the site take the article down and banned the writer over it on the supposed grounds that they're a "private" forum and that one needs permission of people to quote their posts off-site. Like the entirely sensible people they are, usvsth3m aren't backing down in the least, and more power to them.

But let's be clear here. GallifreyBase's claim that they're a "private" forum is absolutely ludicrous given that they have open registration and nearly 80,000 members, which is to say, about the entire population of Bath. The forum is private in the same way that the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium is private, except that Yankee Stadium only has a capacity of about 52,000.

What this amounts to is the largest single community of Doctor Who fans declaring that they have the right to have their views go uncommented on and unreported on. It amounts to a declaration that scholarly research and ethnography on Doctor Who fandom is forbidden. It amounts to a declaration that journalists can't cover Doctor Who fandom. It is a morally indefensible position that actively aims to have a chilling effect on entirely legitimate topics of media research and journalism.

I'm sure that many of you are members of GallifreyBase. If so, please use their Contact Us form to tell them your views on their efforts to stifle freedom of speech.

And seriously, check out usvsth3m. They're a lovely mixture of fun "wants to go viral" content and leftist politics. And really, in a war between a cesspit embodying the worst aspects of Doctor Who fandom and a site with an interactive "Slap Michael Gove" game there's only one side you can possibly be on.

Back tomorrow with the start of our coverage of the fantastic "Swamp Thing attacks Gotham City" arc.

As ever, from least favorite to favorite, with everything being something I willingly paid money for.

AXIS #4

I've been getting this out of spite, out of a general commitment to know what's going on with Marvel, but after the miserable slog that was Original Sin, this, another overly serious take on "what if heroes WEREN'T HEROIC ANYMORE," is just a bridge too far. I'll pick up number nine, but this "heroes are villains and villains are heroes and the Avengers and X-Men are going to war again" baloney is just too much.

Miracleman #13

I was commenting on Tumblr that increasingly, it's difficult to straight-facedly recommend many of the classics of 80s comics to people who didn't grow up with them. This is no exception - it's still brilliant, and you can see so many of the roots of what Alan Moore and his successors would go on to do in it, but everything here has been done better eventually, even if only by Moore himself. At $4.99 for sixteen pages, it remains impossible to straight-facedly recommend.

Chew #44

In some ways this is an improvement for Chew, a series I'm reading in a sort of vigorous demonstration of the sunk costs fallacy. It's narrowly survived so many culls of my pull list. It's trying to do something interesting here, and I have hope that part of that being interesting is doing something more interesting than the pile of generic shock deaths it's pretending to be here. But right now, it's still just hope.

Gotham Academy #2

This is currently a triumph of style over substance for me, but it's such a complete triumph of style that I'm going to stick with it in the hopes that it fulfills the brilliance of its premise soon. It's a book one so wants to see succeed, but it's still not quite.

The Amazing Spider-Man #9

This was very much why I stuck through eight very generic issues of this. It's clever and fun and bold, and feels like it's determined to be a brilliant Spider-Man story that will be remembered for decades. Whether the future history of superhero comics means that a 2014 Spider-Man comic is, as a cultural object, capable of being remembered for decades is uncertain, but it's everything one could reasonably want out of a Spider-Man comic.

If you were expecting comics reviews today, they went up last night.

This is the nineteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fifth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore's apocalypse in Swamp Thing was a strangely muted affair, not so much ending the world, or even substantially altering it, as engaging in a semi-graceful climbdown from the eschatological rush.

"I feel that I have become an essential part of some incomprehensible biological process. The house is an organism hungry for madness. It is the maze that dreams." - Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum

It is not fair, however, to frame this as a failing on Moore’s part. For all that he was rapidly becoming the golden boy of DC Comics, Moore was never going to be allowed to fundamentally and irrevocably alter the nature of the DC Universe, and he was certainly not naive enough to think otherwise. He had, after all, by this point, already had his plans for a story called Who Killed the Peacemaker? This story would provide sweeping and transformative take on some obscure superheroes that DC acquired when it bought out the failing Charlton Comics in 1983, vetoed by DC on the grounds that it would render the characters unusable, resulting in the proposal being reworked as Watchmen with original characters that could be cordoned off from DC continuity, with the first issue coming out the month after Swamp Thing #50. The idea that he was going to get away with destroying heaven and letting the primordial darkness reign once more was unlikely to have seriously crossed his mind.

Figure 518: Swamp Thing #51 marked
a change of direction for the series,
with Swamp Thing seeking to rescue
Abby from prison.

Indeed, his next story arc, a three-issue tale that brings Swamp Thing into conflict with Batman, is largely about reiterating this precise point. It is easy and tempting to draw a dividing line between Swamp Thing #50 and the story that commences with Swamp Thing #51. DC does exactly that in the collected editions of Moore’s Swamp Thing, ending the fourth volume, A Murder of Crows, with issue #50, and commencing the fifth, Earth to Earth, with #51. And there is a marked shift in tone between the apocalyptic battle on the shores of hell itself that takes place in issue #50 and the much smaller scale story of Swamp Thing attempting to rescue an imprisoned Abby that follows it. But the two stories are considerably more enmeshed than they appeared. In many ways, it makes more sense to look at the entire run from “Growth Patterns” back in Swamp Thing #37 to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in Swamp Thing #53 as a single seventeen-issue arc that runs from the return of Swamp Thing following the second time Moore killed him to the character’s third death under Moore.

Figure 519: Swamp Thing discovers
what could possibly anger him now.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick
Veitch and Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp
Thing #51, 1986)

In this reading, the turning point in the arc is the transition from the “American Gothic” storyline to the apocalyptic one, with the three-issue Batman story serving as a thematic reprise of the apocalypse. Certainly the Batman story overtly responds to the apocalypse plot, with Swamp Thing laying siege to Gotham City after discovering that Abby has been arrested there. Swamp Thing’s anger is framed as a rage in which he loses sight of the council from the Parliament of Trees that he just employed to save the entirety of creation. As he discovers what’s happened to Abby, the captions repeat the Parliament’s advice: “Power is not the thing. To be calm within oneself, that is the way of the wood. Power tempts anger, and anger is like wildfire. Avoid it,” the caption says, as the Swamp Thing howls with rage. “Out in the swamp,” the narration continues, “the monster raged and trampled, and roared his lover’s name, and promised war,” having just a few pages earlier mused to John Constantine that “the war is over. I am home at last. What could possibly anger me now?” And so Swamp Thing’s attack on Gotham is framed as an echo of the war just fought and, perhaps more importantly, as an enactment of the alternative to the sense of universal harmony envisioned by the ending of Swamp Thing #50.

Figure 520: Howard Fleck, a sleazy photographer,
non-consensually takes pictures of Abby while
she's undressing, an event that will have vast
ramifications. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Stan Woch and Ron Randall, from Swamp Thing
#47, 1986)

Beyond that, the Batman arc has its seeds in the apocalypse arc, specifically a subplot of issues #47 and #48. Swamp Thing #47 (“The Parliament of Trees”) is bookended by scenes in which a sleazy photographer sells photos he took of Abby and Swamp Thing kissing (which he obtained after beginning to secretly photograph Abby undressing) to a local newspaper. The next issue, in which the Brujería transform Judith into a bird, ends with a series of panels in which Judith, now a crow, flies outwards from the page, eventually filling the entire panel with black as Constantine narrates the fact that “the bird’s flown and the message is on its way, and the bad luck will take us all. Each and every one of us, all on a one-way losing streak.” The next two panels, however, proceed to zoom out, first to swirls of black on a white background, which are revealed in the final panel to be Abby’s hair. This then leads to the issue’s actual cliffhanger, which is not the Brujería’s release of the crow but rather Abby’s arrest as a sex offender due to the newspaper photos. “You been out in the swamps shackin’ up with something that ain’t even human,” the cops explain as they take her away. “And now we got the whole story in black and white. Although from where I’m standin’,” the cop goes on, “it’s mostly black,” a comment that coincides with the end of another sequence of panels zooming in on the newspaper headline closer and closer, until the black print on the white page overwhelms the panel, resulting in a solid black panel akin to that produced by Judith’s flight two pages earlier.

Figure 521: Selections of the abuse and
harassment Abby receives when her
relationship with Swamp Thing is made
public. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick
Veitch and Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp
Thing #51, 1986)

This parallelism frames Abby’s arrest both as the consequence of the Brujería’s successful ritual and as an expression of the same darkness. Or, more accurately, it frames the nature of Abby’s arrest - sexual puritanism - as an expression of the same darkness. The precise nature of the metaphor is perhaps slightly elusive, however. On the surface the crime for which Abby is arrested parallels miscegenation laws. The moment where Abby’s lawyer suggests that she claim that she was “forced into a repulsive relationship by this monster” certainly does invoke the age-old stereotypes whereby relationships between black men and white women in the American south were portrayed as necessarily being rape, often resulting in vigilante murders - a history explored, albeit clumsily, in the two-part zombie story in the “American Gothic” arc. But given the larger context of Moore’s career and the fact that interracial relationships, although still severely stigmatized, were not really pressing news issues in 1986, it seems equally likely, if not moreso, that the incident is meant to invoke the legal persecution of homosexuality, that being an issue Moore was a passionate activist about throughout the 1980s. This latter reading is supported by the specific nature of the charge - Abby is “being charged under those laws of this state usually reserved for people who have carnal relationships with farm animals” - and by a scene in Swamp Thing #51 that depicts selections from the harassment that Abby is subjected to while she waits for trial (harassment that causes her to flee to Gotham, where she’s arrested, provoking Swamp Thing’s siege). One notes that the writer has been praying for Abby, but says that “you have lay down with a beast, and you are an abomination in his sight,” phrasing that invokes Leviticus 18:22, which (in many translations) famously uses the word “abomination” to describe same sex relations. Another reads: “Deer slut, What is the matter you cannot get a reel man so you have intercourse with anything it is to bad your husband is in a comma he wood wup yur ass you are an ugly pig,” phrasing that invokes the harassment of lesbians, particularly in its threat of male “corrective” violence.

Figure 522: Batman makes a persuasive point about sexual
freedom. (Written by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from
Swamp Thing #53, 1986)

Regardless of what specific metaphor is chosen for this, however, the larger point - that Abby is imprisoned as part of a crackdown against sexual freedom - is clear. This is as fundamental an evil as exists within the ethics of Moore’s Swamp Thing, amounting as it does to a complete rejection of all the truths revealed in “Rite of Spring.” And Moore goes to lengths to establish that in this regard, at least, Swamp Thing is wholly justified, making sure that Batman ultimately sides with Swamp Thing, claiming angrily that the refusal to release Abby constitutes an insistence “on the letter of the law over love and justice,” and challenging Gotham’s mayor when he protests that “we can’t make exceptions to the law,” suggesting that he “start rounding up all the other non-human beings who may be having relationships outside their species,” suggesting that he should “arrest Hawkman and Metamorpho… and there’s also Starfire, from the Titans. Her race evolved from cats, I believe… the Martian Manhunter, obviously. Captain Atom… and then of course there’s what’s-his-name… the one who lives in Metropolis.” In making this appeal, Batman tacitly positions the entire DC Universe, down to Superman himself, as being on the side of sexual freedom, firmly positioning Swamp Thing’s fury as a righteous anger.

Figure 523: Swamp Thing bursts into the
courtroom out of a rose that Abby had been
holding. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick
Veitch and Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp Thing
#52, 1986)

But what is in many ways more interesting than the nature of what drives Swamp Thing to forget the Parliament of Trees’ words and to go to war is the nature of the warfare he wages. After erupting into the Gotham City Courthouse out of a rose that Abby was handed by a supporter on the way in, he gives them an hour to release her, proclaiming, “I have tolerated your species for long enough. Your cruelty and your greed and your insufferable arrogance… you blight the soil and poison the rivers. You raze the vegetation till you cannot even feed your own kind, and then you boast of man’s triumph over nature. Fools, if nature were to shrug or raise an eyebrow ten you should all be gone. I want my wife. You have one hour.” And when, after an hour, Abby is not returned to him, he unleashes the full extent of his power upon the city, instantly allowing all of the suppressed foliage to erupt. “The sidewalks begin to bleed emerald. Moss dribbles up the sheer sides of glass towers and the ghettos are burning with orchids. Stalled cars, ugly with buckled wings and broken antennae, become monuments of fabulous and surreal beauty in seconds. Spewing from choked drains and gratings, Eden comes to the city.”

Figure 524: Gotham City as a savage eden under Swamp
Thing's control. (Written by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben,
from Swamp Thing #53, 1986)

The phrasing on this last sentence - that this new jungle of Gotham is “Eden” - reveals an important ideological point. Although the story remains emphatic that Swamp Thing’s siege of Gotham is an instance of him wrongly succumbing to the temptation of power, it is altogether more subtle on the nature of Gotham City under Swamp Thing’s brief reign. The imagery of the third issue of the story is bold and, in its own way, as apocalyptic as anything from the preceding storyline. “In Coventry the residents’ protection group creep through an overgrown department store bristling with guns and tension. In the cosmetics department an escaped tiger treads carefully through the spilled lipsticks,” one description of the city goes, while another describes “the topsoil of the park where lean cats stalk fruit-fattened birds and drunkards fall in love amongst the nectarines.” But on balance this overgrown Gotham is portrayed as a sort of paradise - within a day there are pilgrims coming to the city, and 15% of the population has apparently decided that they prefer this new Gotham. Swamp Thing’s psychedelic tubers are shown to be sprouting throughout the city, giving the many residents an opportunity for psychedelic enlightenment. “The city,” Swamp Thing muses, “is changed into a thing of subtle marvels. Across the street, children pick pure white lillies from the awning of a sex cinema, and play at weddings, parading silently between the silent trees. Wine dribbles from a phone booth crammed with grapes, and the mouths of subways breathe a rare, delicate perfume.” Swamp Thing quickly acquires supporters, who are also given voice. A teacher talks about how her class studied the way rain forests produce oxygen, and “how they’ll all be gone within forty years. One kid asked ‘what will we breathe then?’ I couldn’t answer him. That’s why I’m behind the Swamp Man,” while others say that “he nices up the area and he’s got the administration sweating blood.” Those opposing Swamp Thing, meanwhile, are portrayed as dunces and fools - the mayor, notably, makes reference to Ronald Reagan’s famously daft claim that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” a moment that makes it abundantly clear where Moore’s sympathies lie in the matter.

Figure 525: Swamp Thing gives Batman a thrashing. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #53,
1986)

Inevitably, of course, the status quo is maintained. Moore wasn’t going to be allowed to level one of the DC Universe’s major cities and replace it with a post-scarcity utopia any more than he was going to be allowed to destroy heaven. Ultimately Batman succeeds in persuading the mayor to free Abby, and Swamp Thing relents. The world returns to normal. Nevertheless, the nature of Swamp Thing’s siege is unnerving. It is notable that Swamp Thing ultimately completely defeats Batman. Batman makes an attempt to forcibly stop Swamp Thing early in issue #53, but Swamp Thing trivially repels him, suddenly creating an army of bodies and physically beating Batman after Batman attacks him with defoliant. Batman goes to the mayor and demands he release Abby because there are, as he puts it, “no other options. That thing out there is very nearly a god. It can crush us.” The degree of power that this outcome gives to Swamp Thing is remarkable. The entire concept of Batman is that he figures out ways to defeat all manner of threats. That he cannot come up with any way of defeating Swamp Thing thus gives the nature of Swamp Thing’s overgrown Batman an unnerving power. Swamp Thing appears to possess the power to fundamentally change the nature of the world, and demonstrates him doing it. Given the way in which this story is a tacit extension of the previous apocalypse, it is tempting to read this as an illustration of the new relationship between good and evil. And in a sense it is - Commissioner Gordon describes the overgrown Gotham as a “savage Eden,” and it is clear it is a world with no shortage of serpents; he also describes it as a “green hell.”

Figure 526: Hieronymus Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights."
An interactive high-resolution photograph of the painting is available here.

This ambivalence is reflected in the title of this last issue, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is drawn from a triptych painted in the late 15^th/early 16^th century by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting consists of three distinct panels, following the general convention of the form in that era and moving from a depiction of the Garden of Eden in the leftmost panel and the Last Judgment in the right. The first panel depicts God presenting Eve to Adam, which flows smoothly into the largest panel, the center one, continuing the skyline across the gap so as to give a sense of this image emerging directly from the first one. This center panel depicts the titular garden as a scene of vast, libidinous excess. Nude figures embrace within a transparent globe that is itself the fruit of a plant, birds the size of people frolic in the stream, vast phallic and yonnic towers emerge out of the lake, there are men with heads of fruit, and men riding fantastic beasts, all spilling out across the panel in an overwhelming, breathtaking spectacle of man and nature in seeming harmony. [continued]

One of my favorite moments in About Time, a book series I don’t get to talk about much anymore having long since gotten ahead of them, is in its critique of The Sensorites, a story that is wrongly, if understandably, unloved. Miles and Wood open by saying, “Opinion is divided over this: the common reaction is ‘why?’, but the correct answer is ‘awww… bless’.” Which pretty much sums up not only The Sensorites but Wizards vs Aliens, a strong contender for the single most heartwarming origin story of any television series ever.

Following the death of Lis Sladen, Russell T Davies didn’t want the Sarah Jane Adventures production team to be out of work. He also didn’t want the BBC to abandon production of children’s drama. And so he came up with a suitably high concept series that he could oversee from a distance (much as he had Sarah Jane Adventures), this time while caring for his partner, whose diagnosis with a brain tumor led to Davies’s abandonment of his “break out in America” plan.

It is, to be fair, a good premise. The start of the first episode, which begins with a standard sort of “pagans chanting in a stone circle” thing, goes far enough to confirm that magic is real, then drops a spaceship onto the stone circle and has the wizards abducted by aliens who triumphantly proclaim that they have come for Earth’s magic, is a triumph of mashing up genres. Really, the entire idea is long on cleverness - what’s basically a Harry Potter knockoff gets invaded by what are basically the default setting of Doctor Who aliens. The tropes of each, unsurprisingly, prove good fits for one another. Davies is well aware that the types of stories you can tell with fantasy and science fiction are basically the same, and is slyly taking advantage of the supposed distinctions between the two iconographies to make a decent playground.

And it does. It’s a clever hook, and while Davies’s suggestion that it could run for ten years is almost certainly over-optimistic, it’s not a huge surprise that this is currently on its third season. It fills the same role that The Sarah Jane Adventures did of providing good, classic, and well-made children’s television. It’s got much of the same commitment to diversity, making the extremely good decision to have Benny, the nerd character, be played by a black man. Although to be honest, its commitment to diversity is visibly weaker than that of The Sarah Jane Adventures. There’s no equivalent character to Maria or Rani, and instead we’re generally using the two boys setup of Merlin, only with clear analogues of Clyde and Luke in the leads.

But on the whole, this is a loving and full-throated homage to the classic tradition of British children’s television. And, in turn, a celebration of the classic tradition of British children’s literature, which, fair enough. If you’re making a list of things the UK can legitimately have a sense of national pride in, its legacy of children’s fiction is absolutely something that should be on that list. The trouble is, that’s all it is. Yes, the UK has a glorious history of children’s television that includes Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People, Thunderbirds are Go, Children of the Stones, Box of Delights, Tripods, and a host of other really great stuff.

But all Wizards vs Aliens wants to do is ape it. It does it well, with nods to various shows and some great casting, most obviously the decision to have Brian Blessed provide the voice of the alien king, which he does with the exact aplomb that you’d expect, and which is a frankly wonderful connection to the show’s heritage. There’s really nothing you can point at with Wizards vs Aliens and say “well that’s kinda crap.” It’s just that there’s also nothing you can really get that excited over.

Because the thing about Children of the Stones or Box of Delights or Doctor Who is that they were brave. They weren’t trying to be the heirs to anything - they were just trying to be good, innovative television. And at their best, they tried to push and unsettle the viewers. Which is something Wizards vs Aliens never really feels like it does. It feels like it was made by committee, albeit a very good committee. Its goals are to hold the line for the entire history of British children’s drama. And so it never really tries to be surprising or transgressive. That’s not its remit. It’s just trying to be the pieces of its premise, correctly organized. Every part of it is just bibs and bobs of other shows, cut down to their component parts and welded together. As a collage, it’s impressive.

But as children’s television?

It’s not that this sort of nostalgia can’t work. The Sarah Jane Adventures did a brilliant job with this sort of nostalgia. But it had Lis Sladen. It had a material connection to its nostalgia. And more importantly, it had a material connection to the present. It was about bridging the gap between generations. And Wizards vs Aliens lacks that. It just has fairly generic children’s television tropes being performed without insight and irony. The fact that one of its second season stories, The Thirteenth Floor, was a repurposed Sarah Jane Adventures script where you can tell exactly what everybody’s original character was going to be speaks volumes: this isn’t a show that’s even trying to be anything new or clever.

And that’s where it runs aground. Because it was doing this in the wake of Asylum of the Daleks and The Angels Take Manhattan - two episodes of television aimed at children that were brave, that trusted the audience’s intelligence, and that felt vibrantly fresh. And in comparison, remade Sarah Jane Adventures scripts are just feeble. Wizards vs Aliens feels like vegetables in comparison - the stuff grownups want you to like. It’s perfectly entertaining, but it’s hard to imagine many people for whom this is their favorite show.

Is this sad? Certainly it’s worth mourning the British children’s drama, which, once Wizards vs Aliens ends, will be basically defunct as a genre. But it’s hard not to suspect that anybody who wants to bring it back is more invested in bringing back their childhoods than in improving the childhoods of actual children. Time and technology move on. It’s not like children aren’t still being entertained. It’s not even like they aren’t being entertained by smart, creative stuff. It’s just that a lot of it isn’t television drama shoved into scheduled blocks of children’s programming. The fact that British children's television is a grand tradition doesn't inherently justify simply mimicking that past.

As has always been the case, the best children’s media is challenging. It’s stuff that unnerves adults, or even alienates them entirely. It’s stuff that’s made to its own bold and idiosyncratic vision. And while Doctor Who, in late 2012, was clearly having some teething issues with its new bold and idiosyncratic vision, it had one, and it was compelling. It was something that felt like it could go interesting places. It was something that felt like it could still haunt you months or years later. It was, in other words, something that felt like the things that had previously warped generations of children.

Wizards vs Aliens didn’t do any of that. It never felt like it could go anywhere interesting. Everything that was good about it was that it existed in the first place, and once it did, there wasn’t anywhere else for it to go. And instead of feeling like things that had enchanted generations of children, it just looked like them. It was, in the end, visibly a bunch of grown-ups’ idea of what children’s entertainment should be.

Which, as the present day looms over the blog with an increasingly hungry smile, is perhaps an important thing to reiterate, as it’s something that’s not really gotten a ton of chance to come up while we’ve been covering the past. In every era, the stuff that’s mattered has been the stuff that was comparatively weird. Looking back at Doctor Who in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or even, at this point, the 00s, what stands out is increasingly the things that aren’t quite like anything else, and that don’t do what you expect. This is the joy of popular culture, and especially popular culture taken over time. The appeal to the here and now. The sense of pop. Of big statements and mad gambles and things that only make sense because of the week you happen to be doing them. In that regard, the Season Seven move towards “movie poster” episodes is apropos - an embrace of the need for something we haven’t seen before. Having spent nearly three years of my life working on Doctor Who criticism more days than not, it’s difficult to overstate how much I appreciate this - how much all I want out of a new episode of Doctor Who is “something I haven’t seen before.” And really, this was always the marker of good Doctor Who, and, more than that, of good television in general.

Thank you so much to the 171 people on Patreon who made these reviews possible. It's not been the easiest past two months, and this has been an absolutely huge help. Come Christmas, I'll be back with one more review, and a season wrap-up, and then a bit after that I'll have something or other about future uses of Patreon, as it's been rather lovely, frankly. So thank you very much. This has been a wonderful bit of fun.

Well here we are, for one last round before, you know, the next round. Twitter is a somewhat mixed reaction. GallifreyBase has 71.65% on 8-10, with 34.62% of those tens. Me? I loved it.

It’s ostentatious as hell. It builds on Moffat’s previous tricks in so many interesting ways. You can accurately describe it as “the Doctor Who version of His Last Vow” or as “Eric Saward done right,” it’s got the first companion departure to top Doomsday (Donna is disqualified for the horrific consent violation involved), and it manages an entirely different take on the phrase “tomb of the Cybermen” than the one we had last week. It frames that perfectly, with Clara and the Doctor having the exact inverse of the conversation Clara was trying to have with Danny at the beginning. It’s the Master as an evil River Song, while Clara plays out Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with Danny in River’s role. It’s as perfectly timed for Remembrance Sunday as Deep Breath was for the sunset. Clara applies the moral legitimacy she earned in Kill the Moon to the question of granting her boyfriend’s request for assisted suicide. The opening credits recycle the trick from the sixth episode of Jekyll. Clara’s an adult Linda. The fucking Brigadier. Moffat, a writer whose work is defined by narrative substitutions, plays it completely straight while doing weird inversions of everything else around him while telling a more or less straightforward point A to point B story over ninety minutes.

It works. There are plot holes. I identified several in the immediate aftermath. On a second pass, all of them have, at the very least, a line of dialogue. Yes, Missy’s entire reason for bringing the Doctor and Clara together and intervening in their timestreams to keep them together was that Clara would eventually lead the Doctor to try to rescue a loved one out of heaven. It’s a scheme by the Master, what did you expect, sanity? The Doctor probably could have commanded the army to self-destruct, but he recognized that Danny was the right person to do it. They’re not always satisfying payoffs, though for the most part, they’re as satisfying as they need to be for the amount the show built them up - if fans inflated the minor mysteries further, that’s their problem.

And when anything falters, it’s willing to get through on sheer bravado. Moffat returned to the two-parter on the back of Sherlock, and built one with a corker of a cliffhanger. He actually rejects his own usual advice of having to pick up the cliffhanger in a different place, instead just weighting the two halves, so Clara drops out earliest in Dark Water and then gets the cold open in Death in Heaven. Then he uses UNIT to change the pace a second time, and he’s off to the races with something that feels very different without any gimmicks, or, at least, without any of the gimmicks his detractors accuse him of relying on. It keeps moving at a thrilling speed. There’s no flab to this story - just a solid knowledge of what the major scenes actually are and a willingness to linger on them and trim the connective tissue.

It’s phenomenally good, and a worthy capstone to a season that has been a genuinely incredible piece of television. And it’s been a barnstorming success in practice. There are detractors, but most reviews have been positive, ratings have been high. AIs have been a smidgen weak, perhaps, but that’s maybe OK for a show that’s taking this many risks. Maybe the best television doesn’t get a 91 point AI.

Indeed, there would be something slightly disturbing if everybody liked this. It’s so willing and at times eager to be a difficult show. It acknowledges the costs and horrors of war in a very blunt, unflinching way. So many scenes are willing to be genuinely unsettling. Danny as a Cyberman is absolutely awful, in all the best ways. The parting between the Doctor and Clara is real and honest and comes out of both of their characters. Capaldi silently smashing the console is chillingly good. But all of this makes it an episode that’s trying to needle. Just like last week you’d have been disappointed if the BBC didn’t get some complaints, you kind of hope it does this week too. It seems like all our fallen soldiers as Cybermen on Remembrance Sunday ought to raise a few hackles and piss a few people off.

It’s difficult, in other words, for me not to be slightly ecstatic about this story.

I don’t like it as much as… Listen or Kill the Moon, certainly. That seems almost petty to say. I have nothing but 100% respect and love for everything it does, mostly, with one very big exception where I can even be persuaded that Moffat made the right choice, but it’s still a choice I don’t like, which is the death of Osgood. (I think it’s a waste. I get what it does for the episode, and I get that there has to be a real, brutal, awful death in a war, and I think the transition into Missy being an evil Mary Poppins is deliciously sick. I think Osgood was, as a character and as a set of things you could still do with her, worth more than her death gave to this story.) In the end, probably not as much as In the Forest of the Night, which I wanted to have a slightly bleaker ending than it did, and which, in hindsight, given these two episodes, it now does have a rather bleaker ending than it did, so that’ll teach me to make wishes.

But look, I absolutely adore it. Four top class, all-time classics in one season. Another… ooh, even if I want to be a harsh grader, I’ve got to say Mummy on the Orient Express, Deep Breath, The Caretaker, and, yeah, all right, Flatline were top class. Your weak three are Time Heist, Into the Dalek, and Robot of Sherwood. Holy crap that’s a good bottom three. I’m glad I opted for a ranked list system instead of scoring, because that would have ended up with as much grade inflation as a PhD program.

Wow. What an incredible season of television just happened. What an absolute event and thrill to have experienced.

Osgood could have been her Zygon duplicate. Or, and this might be the better idea, you could have Osgood’s character continue via her Zygon duplicate. Yes, Osgood died, yes, everyone feels awful about it, but look, here’s a good Zygon who defaults to Osgood’s form and shares her basic personality. It’s the next Strax, and Moffat should totally do it.
Speaking of Osgood, in a season with two ostentatious passes of the Bechdel test already, the fact that Dark Water/Death in Heaven only passes because of Osgood’s death scene, which again lampshades the test, is somewhat gloriously twisted.
The horror of what happens to Danny in this story really casts an odd pall on the Brigadier. Moffat has made it so that the character can appear indefinitely. You can always have a good Cyberman who’s the Brigadier. You could do a last Brigadier story set centuries in the future where the Brigadier, Handles-style, is finally dying, and Three stops by to say goodbye, because he always knew this was how it was going to end for his best friend. Or, you know, any number of stories that aren’t just the most depressing things ever. (Three is on his way back from Metebelis Three and is dying of radiation poisoning! It’s a great idea!) Or any number of other stories with the character. But equally, holy shit, how awful this must be for poor Alistair.
God, Moffat gets the Cybermen right. What’s impressive in both episodes is how much time he manages to spend not doing big, crashing armies of Cybermen. Instead he keeps them lurking horrors, as they were when they were at their best in the Troughton era.
And Missy, frankly, is brilliant. This is a contender for best-ever Cybermen story and is, I think, flat out the best-ever Master story. The use of Missy as a force of chaos and plot complication who blows in, makes things worse, and blows out again. Or, put another way, Moffat’s cracked that a Master story isn’t about “an evil version of the Doctor” it’s about the Doctor’s version of the Joker. She had one bad day, looked into the untempered schism, and now does things like try to give the Doctor an army to prove he’s just like her. (Also, I love that “the villain is a twisted mirror of the hero” is no longer a clever observation on narrative, but instead the villain’s aspiration. Post-Moore storytelling for the win.)
Implicit in this, and fascinating, is a critique, not so much of the Doctor, but of heroes. The Doctor is still absolutely the hero we need - an idiot with a box and a screwdriver who wanders by and tries to help. But the inherent unpleasantness of heroism is really highlighted here. Danny’s critique of the Doctor is given tremendous weight, especially when we see that, yes, all of the Doctor’s grand speeches really do wither away the moment he decides he needs to sacrifice someone. Heroes are necessary and terrifying all at once, but in the end, their problems don’t make them any less heroic.
Which brings us to the wonderful final scene, in which two good people who care deeply about each other lie to each other to avoid hurting each other, and end up parting ways as a result. A sort of “Gift of the Magi” ending, in which each of them hides their damage in the mistaken belief that they’re going to make the other happy. I said last week that the Doctor’s line about how betraying him doesn’t make any difference carried more depth of emotion than the entire Rose arc. Here I think we get this taken even further - a companion departure with so much more emotion to it than the increasingly played out Doomsday approach.
Right. Santa. OK. See you all in six weeks then.
Final Rankings Until I Decide To Rank Things Again:

Kill the Moon
Listen
In the Forest of the Night
Dark Water/Death in Heaven
Mummy on the Orient Express
Deep Breath
The Caretaker
Flatline
Time Heist
Into the Dalek
Robot of Sherwood

Abominable special effects.

It’s December 25^th, 2012. Justice Collective are at number one with “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” blocking the X-Factor winner from its traditional Christmas coronation by being a supergroup charity recording for Hillsborough charities, which is basically the sort of thing it’s impossible not to have go to number one. Rihanna, Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, and Psy also chart.

In the three months since the Angels took Manhattan, Barack Obama took a second term, Hurricane Sandy took out a large swath of the New York/New Jersey coast, and Disney took over the rights to Star Wars. Much more bleakly, the fact that Jimmy Saville was a horrific and serial pedophile who sexually abused hundreds of people came out. Also, Nadine Dorries is suspended from the Conservative Party because she decides to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! She was beaten by, among others, Colin Baker.

While on television, after our five-week dalliance with the Ponds, the future promised back in Asylum of the Daleks finally fails to arrive again. We’ll tackle the problems and brilliances of the Impossible Girl story over the next season, so there’s not really a rush, but it is worth noting that some of its weaknesses start to appear here. This is by design a false start - the new companion is seemingly introduced and then killed. Unlike inAsylum of the Daleks, this one was billed as the debut of Jenna Coleman. If you paid a lot of attention you could tell there was a ruse, but for the most part, it was a solid bait and switch. Certainly this was necessary for the Impossible Girl arc, not least because without it the headline was “the new companion is a Dalek” and not “the new companion keeps dying.”

The trouble is, the moment when Clara gets killed is the moment when a tremendously promising and interesting episode goes off the rails. Part of this is unrelated to the plot twist as such - the fact that “a family crying on Christmas Eve” as the only thing powerful enough to stop the snow is grotesquely unearned, for instance, has little to do with killing Clara as such. The real problem is simply that Clara’s death transforms The Snowmen from a relatively self-contained bit of Christmas fairy tale into a teaser for the next season. Which is, of course, always the problem (and brilliance) of the Impossible Girl arc - it constantly erases what’s actually there, replacing it with a mystery about what isn’t.

So let’s, in effect, simply clip off more or less everything between Clara’s fatal fall and the cemetery scene, allowing this episode to be a tremendously charming Christmas fairy tale with one of the best images in the history of the series in the form of that impossibly tall staircase ascending to the TARDIS on a cloud that closes with a quick teaser to get everyone back in March. The future will come along eventually anyway, so no need to talk about it now.

If we do this, the first thing that jumps out is the fact that it looks for all the world like we’re actually going to get a companion who’s not from contemporary Earth. And more to the point, it looks like it would work. (Thich also raises the notable point that Clara is developed enough here that it’s possible to believe her as the companion - there’s enough work put into fleshing out her world. My trait of choice is probably that she has a “secret voice” for the kids, which I think is brilliant.) This is not exactly a surprise to anyone who remembers the myriad of times it did work in the classic series, but it’s nevertheless worth pointing out. There are essentially two supposed problems to solve with non-contemporary companions, and Clara here seems to knock both off nicely.

The first is the way in which the contemporary show relies on the companion having a notion of home that they return to. You certainly could break this and start having companions with no lives outside the TARDIS again, but the fact of the matter is that it’s improved the show tremendously. A moderate recurring cast and a familiar location to return to are both effective tricks, and the presence of a larger life for companions makes them richer characters. But equally, you need a home that can be quickly sketched - the great trick of EastPowellStreet was that it painted a picture of a soap opera with only a few lines of dialogue. But the Victorian era is readily and instinctively familiar, or, at least, the television Victorian era is. Clara’s status as a barmaid/governess is lovely, but more importantly, makes swift, intuitive sense. The Paternoster Gang provides a sort of Victorian UNIT. You can sketch a Victorian world easily, and indeed, despite Moffat abandoning the idea of having the new companion actually be a Victorian governess, three of the next eleven episodes return to this setting. Indeed, between this and Into the Dalek, we actually see more of the Victorian era than we do Clara’s actual contemporary home.

The second is ostensibly trickier, namely the idea that the companion’s job is to serve as an audience identification figure. This is, as anyone who’s familiar with my views on narratology will already know, a tricky phrase at best. With the exception of, really, Season One and Season One, the audience doesn’t need much of an identification figure. At any point in its history where Doctor Who is a major cultural phenomenon, it doesn’t need someone to mediate it for the audience. Doctor Who is an identifiable format. Identifying with the Doctor is easy enough. Nor is the other usual meaning of “audience identification figure,” where the companion’s job is to ask the questions the viewer would ask altogether straightforward. For one thing, the supporting cast can do that just as well, and indeed, once the companion’s onto their third or fourth story, it makes more sense for the supporting cast to do the “ask the obvious questions” work, as the companion isn’t a newbie anymore.

A more accurate way to phrase it is that the companion’s job is to try the things that might occur to the audience. In the default setup of a Doctor Who story, the Doctor is the one who is likely to behave unpredictably and try something that doesn’t immediately make sense to the audience, while the companion is the one who does the things the audience might think to try. But what that really means is that the companion’s job isn’t to be an audience identification figure, but rather to be a fairly straightforward enactment of the tropes of adventure fiction. The companion isn’t there to do what the audience would do, but rather to do what the audience would expect based on the genre tropes. And since Victorian Clara is actually closer to the original source of those tropes than a contemporary Earth companion, that’s not particularly hard either. She behaves exactly like an adventure heroine does, and is portrayed as someone with an instinctive understanding of those tropes.

This is central to how the Impossible Girl arc works. The first thing we learn about Clara is that she’s very good at being a Doctor Who companion. Then we gradually learn what sort of person would be good at that. But since we’ve already seen Jenna Coleman play two other Doctor Who companions, we start unusually familiar with the ways in which she does companion stuff. This also being the stuff instinctively familiar with any companion, it plays its needed role of being much more obvious than anything else about her character, thus allowing the non-mystery to function. (Similarly essential is the fact that Clara is ultimately much more ordinary than her two exotic predecessors, which further serves to make her look smaller than she actually is.)

But we’re drifting off into the future again. Although that’s perhaps worthwhile for looking at the Paternoster Gang, who make their proper debut here. From the start, they are on one level a series of recurring gags. Especially when the “Madame Vastra Investigates” prequel is taken into account, Vastra and Jenny quickly become a running joke about shocking Victorians with lesbian marriage. (There’s a line of critique that views this as exploitative and as being about shock value, to which I’d point out that it’s never the fact of their relationship that’s used to shock, but the existence of same-sex marriage.) Strax debuts with the basic two jokes he’s always going to get, and there’s a strong case to be made that he actually never gets a scene as funny as the memory worm stuff again.

While this observation is true, the idea that it’s a critique does not inherently follow. The joke that Strax’s reaction to everything is to try to wage war on it is one-note, but this just sets it up to be one of those sketch comedy bits where you take the same basic joke and then get new material out of it by varying the circumstances in which it comes up. Yes, Strax misunderstands everything by assuming it’s a military engagement, but all this requires is giving him a decent variety of things to misunderstand. (In this regard the highlights of Strax are probably the two intros recorded for Day of the Doctor and Deep Breath’s cinematic screenings.) What’s more interesting is the joke that largely drops out of the Doctor being, frankly, kind of a complete jerk to Strax.

But perhaps the more important observation is that Madame Vastra is that she’s an enormously useful character. There are a handful of characters in the history of the show who have been successfully used to provide a maternal figure for the Doctor, and pretty much all of them have been brilliant. Of them, however, Vastra stands out due to the fact that she has a worldview that is alien both to the Doctor’s and to the audience’s makes her a particularly compelling one. The one word game (and especially Clara’s response of “words”) is absolutely brilliant, and the complexity involved in her comment that she helps the Doctor’s isolation but doesn’t approve of it is similarly wonderful. With Strax to provide a contrast and Jenny to serve a role not unlike that of the companion, the Paternoster Gang is an effective supporting cast, even if Strax’s role as comic relief is at times limiting.

And then of course there’s the Great Intelligence, used here more or less as a straight-up joke for the handful of people who will get it. (Which at the time would have been pretty small, given that both of his Troughton stories consisted of a single episode.) In some ways it weakens the episode, in that it follows the problems with killing Clara up with a sense that the episode was just a shaggy dog story. And it’s not entirely unfair to ask “why,” especially given that more or less everything distinctive is taken away from the Great Intelligence and he becomes just another kind of generic villain - a sort of ersatz Master played with delightful lack of irony by Richard E Grant. Of course I punched the air at the time, but it was very much a gag that worked best on broadcast. (Although the knowledge that Web of Fear had been found does make it a bit more sensible.)

In some ways the more interesting thing about the Great Intelligence is that the Doctor doesn’t immediately place him. It’s not that it’s particularly odd that someone wouldn’t remember something that was centuries ago for them. But given that The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear are both iconic classics, the fact that the Doctor doesn’t remember them is striking, in that it firmly establishes that his own sense of his history isn’t equivalent to his history as a television character. One wonders what other classics the Doctor’s lost track of.

But for all of this, I think the most interesting moment of the episode is one that’s both rarely commented on and future-looking, which is Clara’s snapping at the Doctor, “Oh, spoken like a man. You know, you're the same as all the rest. Sweet little Clara, works at the Rose And Crown, ideas above her station. Well, for your information, I'm not sweet on the inside, and I'm certainly not little.” What’s interesting here is, of course, that it is in many ways the key to the entire Impossible Girl arc. Clara tells the Doctor and us, point blank, that looking at appearances and going with initial assumptions about her is the wrong approach. For all that the arc ultimately hinges on a twist that isn’t guessable until it happens, the arc plays scrupulously fair. We’re told up front everything we need to know. And we faithfully miss it, just like we’re supposed to.

This is the twentienth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fifth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: As a coda to his extended arc about the apocalypse, Moore penned a tale in which Swamp Thing lays siege to Gotham City, causing vegetation to grow wild over the city. The final issue of this story, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," was named after a Hieronymous Bosch painting.

"[Anarchy has] become a kind of shorthand standing for the breakdown of society and order into screaming chaos; into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape populated by looters, berserkers, giants with leaking boats for feet and eggshells for a body." -Alan Moore, "Fear of a Black Flag"

Figure 527: Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden
of Earthly Delights, closed.

Figure 528: Eve's seductive pose in the left panel of The
Garden of Earthly Delights.

And yet the entire physical object that is The Garden of Earthly Delights cuts visibly against this interpretation. The actual physical triptych is a physically massive thing, more than seven feet tall and nearly thirteen feet wide, painted on a trio of solid oak panels that are hinged so that the left and right panel can close over the center panel, revealing a fourth image on the outer doors. The triptych itself is the size of one hundred and ninety-five comic book covers, such that one could spread every page of every issue of Swamp Thing that Moore wrote from “Loose Ends” through the end of the Etrigan arc over it and still have room for half of “The Burial.” And, of course, the entire visual pleasure of the piece is based on its sense of sprawling excess - on the incredible sense of detail and intricacy that the piece presents. Whatever Bosch’s intended meaning, a topic with centuries of criticism asserting motivatins ranging from political allegories about the gardens at the Palace of Coudenberg, to detailed symbolic readings based on Bosch’s supposed membership in heretical and occult sects, to prosaic readings that treat it as a wholly straightforward and direct piece of medieval religious art, the material object that is The Garden of Earthly Delights stubbornly insists on a pleasure of seductive and overwhelming wonder.

Figure 529: People cavort lasciviously in the middle panel
of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

This view of the piece is further reinforced by its exterior painting, a depiction of the Earth during its creation, specifically on the third day, after the creation of vegetation. The world exists as a vast and empty place, painted in a monochromatic grey-green that blends rock and plant together to where it is impossible to tell where one starts and the other leaves off. Encased within its crystalline globe, the world is silent. But in the upper left of the image sits God, overseeing the world’s creation. But within this image God is dwarfed by his creation, barely the size of a single tree or rock within it. It is the vacant earth and the beginnings of teeming life that grow within it that dominate the scene, even before man is placed within it in the first panel. This sense of a vast and teeming planet is present even in the first panel, where Adam and Eve are surrounded by wondrous beasts, birds wind their way through an ornately carved rock formation, and out of the waters of Eden rises an extravagant fountain with clear resemblance to the phallic towers of the second panel. And even in Eden, sex and death are present - throughout the panel the beasts feed upon each other’s flesh, and Eve’s posture as she is presented to Adam, thrusting chest and hips forward as she kneels before him, speaks volumes.

Figure 530: One of the many bizarre sights in the rightmost
panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Given the sense of vastness given to the earth and the life within it, the second panel of humanity and nature cavorting in harmony seems almost wholly inevitable. Indeed, it seems like the natural moral conclusion to what appears in the previous two images. The lushness of the material world is presented as being so vast as to exceed the scope of its creator. If this is so, what possible purpose could humanity have beyond surrendering their bodies to the world. In this reading, the final panel is not a consequence of the center panel, but an alternative - a fact highlighted by the breaking of the skyline that stretches over the first two panels. It is telling, after all, that the people being tormented in hell appear to be engaged in material pursuits: they are gamblers and musicians, and the nightmarish visions within hell come not from the natural world, but from human creation: knives, chamberpots, and musical instruments. It is only in hell that there is any depiction of civilization - a smoldering city that stretches out into the background, in marked contrast to the twisting towers of the Garden, which seem, like the transparent globes of fruit and the animal carapaces in which people burrow, to be as much products of nature as of man.

From this perspective, then, The Garden of Earthly Delights becomes a work not so much about rejecting materialism as it is about rejecting the trappings of human society in favor of the vast world of nature. It is, in other words, a piece that very closely parallels the plot of Moore’s own Gotham triptych, in which it is ultimately the assumed social order of Gotham that is rejected by Swamp Thing, in favor of a world in which humanity’s dominion over the world is rejected in favor of giving themselves over completely to the limitless pleasures the world offers. The “green hell” that Commissioner Gordon sees within this world is not just due to the its potential for savagery, but because, as in Bosch, it is the existence of the Garden of Earthly Delights that allows for all of the laws and systems of man to be rejected and thrown out into hell. (Were one feeling ambitious, one might even describe this as “a different light” being cast upon the relationship between good and evil.) As Moore summarized the point of the story in a later interview, “even though mankind can cover nature and smother the wilderness with a layer of concrete and cement, even though mankind can erect huge, powerful, and impressive-looking buildings, that underneath our feet, underneath the buried pipes and the buried cables, nature is still there. The wilderness is still there. And though man might boast of having conquered nature, that’s not the case, for if nature were to shrug or to merely raise its eyebrow, then we should all be gone.” The human systems of the world that populate and, perhaps more importantly, shape Bosch’s hell are, in the end, mere parasites sucking upon the unfathomable vastness of nature.

Figure 531: Further emphasizing the
parallels between Swamp Thing's attack
on Gotham and Woodrue's attack on
Lacroix, Swamp Thing encounters Woodrue
on his way into Gotham. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala,
from Swamp Thing #52, 1986)

But in all of this, there is still an edge of cruelty - a sense that there is something wrong with Swamp Thing’s ascendency. Perhaps it is merely the incoherent protests of civilized humans unwilling to face the truth that Swamp Thing reveals to be self evident, but it is also worth noting that Swamp Thing’s siege of Gotham mirrors the Floronic Man’s scheme in Moore’s first Swamp Thing arc. Where Woodrue took control of the plants of the world in order to destroy humanity, Swamp Thing does so to dictate the terms of a new equilibrium with humanity, thus tacitly answering his challenge to Woodrue at the end of Saga of the Swamp Thing #24. And like “Roots,” this is witnessed by a traditional superhero who is nevertheless powerless to stop it - in this case Batman, ironically the one major DC hero not present in the previous iteration. Nevertheless, there is a moral critique to be had here, and it is one that Moore threads throughout the story: the fact that he succumbed to the anger that is power’s temptation and in doing so betrayed the way of the wood. It is, in the end, the same crime committed by Woodrue - that of using power to accomplish your ends.

Figure 532: Swamp Thing dies. Again.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by John
Totleben, from Swamp Thing #53, 1986)

And so having transgressed, Swamp Thing is thusly punished; all of this plays out over the backdrop of Dwight Wicker, last seen all the way back in Moore’s first issue, and originating all the way back in the Pasko run, showing up in Gotham pursuing Swamp Thing for the murder of General Sunderland all the way back in “The Anatomy Lesson.” Wicker hires Lex Luthor to find a way to kill Swamp Thing, which he accomplishes by creating a device that will disrupt Swamp Thing’s ability to tune into the world’s vegetation, removing his ability to exit his body in the event of an attack. Utilizing a combination of this device and an abundance of napalm, Wicker assassinates Swamp Thing as he reunites with Abby outside the courthouse, having finally withdrawn from inhabiting the city itself and into a single, destroyable body.

By this point, of course, this has gotten to be something of a habit for Moore, a fact that highlights an important structural aspect of his run on Swamp Thing, which is that story elements recur. The Floronic Man’s attack on Lacroix is reiterated as Swamp Thing’s siege of Gotham, the parallel trips of “Windfall” repeat as “The Parliament of Trees” and “A Murder of Crows,” the apocalypse brought on by the Brujería. And, of course, this is now the third time that Moore has killed Swamp Thing. By this point the death of the lead character is recognizable not so much as a significant problem to the narrative as it is a transitional point. Swamp Thing’s first death in “Loose Ends” and “The Anatomy Lesson” served as the transition away from Pasko’s attempt to mimic the Wein/Wrightson stories of old and towards Moore’s psychedelia-tinged ecological horror. His second over the course of “The Nukeface Papers” and “Growth Patterns” marks the transition towards a much more expansive sense of what Swamp Thing’s powers are that move him away from just being a bipedal vegetable and towards his role as a functional deity. And so any savvy reader would, upon seeing Swamp Thing’s third death, assume that this marked yet another transitional point in Moore’s story.

Figure 533: Liz Tremayne, broken down
from Dennis's extensive psychological abuse.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick Veitch
and Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp Thing #54, 1986)

All the same, it would take two issues from the point where Swamp Thing dies to his next appearance, including the entirety of Swamp Thing #54, “The Flowers of Romance.” This issue reintroduces Liz Tremayne, a supporting character for much of Pasko’s run unseen since “Loose Ends” three years earlier. Liz has seemingly had a rough time of it, being psychologically abused by Dennis (a plot point set up all the way back in “Loose Ends”), who has convinced her that Sunderland is still hunting them and that everything poses a massive and terrible danger - so much so that at the start of the issue she spends forty minutes “sick with indecision” trying to decide if it is safe to plug in a television set while wearing rubber gloves and oven mitts to protect herself from electrocution, and only doing so because she is desperate for human contact after Dennis goes out for three days. Moore lingers on these scenes, allowing them to play out with a considerable and visceral horror that is unsettling in ways little else in Moore’s run, and certainly little else in horror comics is. In many ways the scenes, even though they do not actually contain any direct sexual violence, fall into the larger pattern of Moore’s depiction of rape, but there’s an edge and anger to them that goes beyond even that, finally paying off the myriad of depictions of abusive relationships Moore had been depicting in Swamp Thing since the beginning, including Abby and Matt’s. Moore had been building to this story for years, having talked as early as 1984 about it in response to a question about drawing on real-world, contemporary aspects of society to craft horror stories. “I’d tell you a contemporary horror story,” Moore replies, “but I’m going to use it as the Liz and Dennis storyline, and I don’t want to give too much away. However, it’s something that really happened to a cousin of mine. It’s about the destruction of one human being’s whole personality by another. That’s an example of human evil that, to me, is more frightening than any number of demons from hell.”

Figure 534: Swamp Thing's face
in implication. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Rick Veitch and
Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp Thing
#54, 1986)

Liz’s tentative steps towards independence in Dennis’s absence lead her to discover that Dennis had lied to her about Abby and Swamp Thing’s death, and causes her to seek out Abby, who has returned to Houma following Swamp Thing’s death. She is pursued, however, by Dennis, who ultimately chases Liz and Abby out into the swamp with a machine gun. Liz ultimately works her way around a flower-covered bog, which Dennis foolishly runs into, sinking underwater and water logging his gun. As he advances upon them, boasting about how he “waded through puddles wider than this in ‘Nam” and telling Abby that she “spoiled a beautiful romance, bitch, and I’m gonna club your brains right out.” But as he gloats a crocodile advances out of the swamp towards him, and ultimately he’s ripped apart by the animals, saving Liz and Abby. What is really significant, however, is the panel in which the crocodile makes its appearance, slowly emerging amidst the flowers, which spread across his snout so as to frame his red eyes and nose into a mirror of Swamp Thing’s iconic visage, thus tacitly admitting that Swamp Thing remains alive.

This is confirmed in the next issue, which focuses primarily on Abby’s attendance of a memorial service for Swamp Thing, and in which she comes to terms with her loss. At the end of the service a man comes up to her introducing himself as Boston Brand and explaining that he’s “checked out all the places he might have ended up,” and saying that as far as he can tell, Swamp Thing isn’t in any afterlife. The issue ends four pages of page-tall narrow panels zooming out from Abby leaving a rose upon Swamp Thing’s memorial, out to the city streets, and then the planet, and finally across the cosmos. As the captions narrate Abby’s final acceptance of her lover’s death, in which she misunderstands the words Deadman said to her. “Maybe a wino’s delusion is the best thing I have to cling to right now,” she thinks. “Perhaps when we die, there’s another world somewhere. Perhaps there’s a heaven so big it has room for someone like you. I hope so. I hope you’re there now. Goodbye, my love. Goodbye.” [continued]

I liked the "post this as soon as it's ready" approach last week, so I think I shall make it a regular thing. As ever, ranked from worst to best of the week, with everything being something I voluntarily paid money for...

Captain America #1

If not necessarily deliberately paid money for. This was picked up in a miscommunication (Jill did the comics run today, and mistook my request for Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1 as a request for Captain America #1 and The Mighty Avengers #1, which I submit as an illustration of the sheer number of stupid bars to entry for people who aren't obsessive about comics purchasing, because really, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to release two comics called Captain America #1 on the same fucking day). In any case, it's an action sequence with captions that are some of the most cliched "white person writing about black people" ever. It's heart's in the right place - the joke about America's prison system is wonderfully bleak. But it's... not good, and is in fact that other thing.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1

I'm sure this will be a lovely series once it's not tying into Axis, but right now it's exactly nothing I want out of a book called Captain America and the Mighty Avengers.

Captain Marvel #9

Wonderfully silly one-off space romp with gratuitous rhyming. Good fun. I still don't feel like I enjoy this book as much as I should, though - it often, as with this issue, feels competent without having any spark. The big cleverness here is the gratuitous rhyming, which is... forced, to say the least. Fun, but inessential.

Thor #2

This really should have been Thor #1, as it's charming. The use of thought bubbles to convey the new Thor's uncertainty and self-doubt is delightful, and there's some good characterization here. I'm still not sure about the "don't tell us who the main character is" hook, as it makes characterization for her trickier, but this was at least a good, fun Thor comic.

Wytches #2

I love what the book is doing, particularly with its transitions among scenes, but I find the obliqueness challenging. No recap page, no captions telling us what or where a scene is, and Jock's scratchy art makes it hard to know what's going on - it took me a couple tries to get that Sailor's father and uncle were different characters, which made the final scene a challenge. A cast page or a recap page or something would be nice - I completely forget what Lucy's deal is. But this remains a promising horror comic.

Spider-Verse #1

A collection of shorts. In general, the shorter the better - the one-page Hostess Fruitcakes pastiche and the two-page newspaper comic one were both particularly brilliant. Quite liked Skottie Young's as well. I continue to really be enjoying this Spider-Verse crossover, and I'm glad I snagged the silly tie-in anthology.

Batgirl #36

There's some awkwardness at the start - the book's post-Young Avengers social media aesthetic runs aground with some dodgy pseudo-computer stuff where finding a couple terabytes of storage to use is actually something that requires time and effort. The anime stuff feels like it might be trying too hard. I'm not sure I buy Black Canary turning into a complete bitch towards Babs. But strangely, none of this matters in the wake of this self-evidently being what a Batgirl comic should be, which is bright, young, and fun. It's Batgirl done right, and I'm terribly glad it exists, especially out of modern DC, where you'd frankly not expect it to.

Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man #7

Twists! Revelations! Excellent character bits! It's another issue of this comic, which continues to be one of the best things any comics publisher is putting out, basically. Next month promises to be a lot of explanations, so I assume, being a Bendis comic, it won't be anything like that, but hey, we'll see. This, in any case, is great, if very much an end-of-arc issue.

Silver Surfer #7

After six issues of not quite giving us the "Jack Kirby's Doctor Who" that the book's premise was based around, we finally get it, with a story that larks about with several done-in-two-pages mini-stories nestled throughout, including some gorgeous character beats. This is an absolute delight of an issue, self-contained, and worth checking out if "Jack Kirby's Doctor Who" is a thing that appeals to you, which, as you read my blog, I assume it is.

Also out today and better than any of these:

The Seventh Bride

Ostensibly an adult novel by Ursula Vernon, who wrote Digger, which remains one of my absolute favorite comic series, although this is under the pen name T. Kingfisher, which she uses when she's doing not-for-children stuff. This is in some ways unfair, as this is an absolutely lovely children's book, albeit in the same way that Children of the Stones is absolutely lovely children's television, which is to say, it's terribly dark and grim.

Well. Ish. It's still an Ursula Vernon book, which means its narrative voice and the basic character traits it values are a sort of calm and pragmatic midwestern politeness. So it's a dark and grim story full of sentences like "It made no sense to Rhea, but on the other hand, she was watching hedgehogs sing to the moon to summon a carpet of slugs, so clearly there was very little sense to be made of anything," or "Arguing about the value of livestock with a mad sorcerer did not seem like a good idea, however, even as angry as she was."

It has dark woods and evil sorcerers. And hedgehogs. Here it is on Amazon. You can get it many other places as well. It is very wonderful and charming, and I quite recommend it.

You're Fast Becoming Prey to Every Cliché-Ridden Convention in the American West (A Town Called Mercy)

An Imaginary Story (The Last War in Albion Part 67: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, The Apocalypse)

Comics Reviews (10/23/14)

Hai! (The Power of Three)

In the Forest of the Night Review

UNIT, a History

Welcome to Night Vale - "The Librarian" Review

The Day After The World Ended (The Last War in Albion Part 68: The Apocalypse)

Comics Reviews (October 30th, 2014)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 84 (Call the Midwife, Supernatural)

Dark Water Review

Don't Look Away (The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone)

Us vs Gallifreybase vs Th3m

Comics Reviews (The Fifth of November, 2014)

Some Incomprehensible Biological Process (The Last War in Albion Part 69: The Greening of Gotham)

Outside the Government 20: Wizards vs Aliens

Death in Heaven Review

A Little Bit of Nip in the Air (The Snowmen)

Giants With Leaking Boats For Feet (The Last War in Albion Part 70: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Third Death of Swamp Thing)

Comics Reviews (November 12th, 2014)