Philip Sandifer: Writer

Sorry to those of you who are already annoyed about how much I'm delaying ending this thing. You can always stop reading and end it now - I won't mind. But I've always put on the brakes at the end of an era, slowing down and relishing the opportunity to make a definitive statement. The end of the blog, unsurprisingly, is going to be like that but even moreso. The last entry will go up February 9th. It's scheduled through, I know what I'm doing with it, we're doing the ending of TARDIS Eruditorum with deliberation and knowledge, and it's not going to be much more self-indulgent than the end of Sandman.

But first, we're going to go through these BBC America specials done, one a month in 2013, to lead up to the 50th Anniversary. Mostly because it's an opportunity to look at how Doctor Who itself gave an official self-history at the same moment as we wrap up our history of it. These will generally be short entries. But they're worth doing, as part of the end of the ritual.

These are basically clip shows with talking heads and a generic narrator to link up the talking heads. In practice, this one is narrated by David Tennant and Steven Moffat, who do most of the heavy lifting of actually explaining the Hartnell era. They slot into their respective roles quite well. Tennant enjoys giving the sort of official factual fan history, dutifully trotting out the basic descriptions and acting as the sort of head teacher and guide. He's good at it, providing your basic factual history.

What's more interesting is Moffat's role. Moffat, as executive producer, now, as he's put it, doesn't get to have opinions about Doctor Who anymore. But here he's called on not only to have opinions, but to contribute to a narrative of how Doctor Who has always been brilliant - a narrative that we know full well he doesn't actually subscribe to, because he's too much the critically-minded professional to forgive things like The Web Planet.

The magic of this, though, is that he handles this challenge not by doing what one suspects Russell T Davies usually did to arrive at his "it's all marvelous" policy and simply lying through his teeth, but by actually identifying small bits that he thinks work well. The result enlivens this considerably, because you have Moffat picking up on small and odd details that he loves - for instance, he gives a quite enthused account of how The Daleks is satisfying because it's not actually building the Daleks to return, and so they have their own self-contained concept, which makes them work better. One suspects that this is more or less the only thing he likes about the Daleks, along with the Dalek reveal and the first cliffhanger. But it's a compelling case, and actually looks at The Daleks as a weird historical artifact. His accounts of why Barbara works and of the Doctor's declaration that he's going to fight the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth are similarly magnificently chosen details.

And this, in many ways, captures what's genuinely nice about this take on Hartnell, which is that it doesn't just do An Unearthly Child and The Daleks, but instead actually looks at the way in which the Hartnell era is its own thing. Indeed, the first few minutes of the program are spent freely admitting that the Hartnell era looks very weird today. And it focuses on things that aren't part of the usual narrative - it even gives a peek at The Gunfighters, albeit one that consists of John Barrowman doing a ludicrously performative account of how ridiculous it is followed by (in the episode's most sublime shot) Caro Skinner giving a very dignified and professional assessment of how striking the episode is that is blatantly based on the single publicity still someone showed her immediately before she gave her answer. But a vision of the Hartnell era that accepts The Gunfighters as something to celebrate, even if only for its insanity, still feels like progress. Certainly it's better than the Bentham orthodoxy, even if it's still clearly reacting to it.

More frustrating is what it leaves out, which is basically Vicki, i.e. the actual most popular bit of the era in terms of being watched by people. The Ian/Barbara/Vicki team is the iconic Hartnell cast - the one that made up the center of the era and that got the best ratings. Instead it focuses on the creation of the series and the modernizing of it right before it was handed off to Troughton. The result is that the Hartnell era never quite gets to be itself. It's treated only in terms of how it contributes to the rest of Doctor Who's history. It's treated with love and appreciation, but less for what it did and more for what it set up.

It's still a better treatment of the era than the sort of historicized distance with which it's been treated in past attempts. One at least gets the sense that the Hartnell era was something, and the idea that people might enjoy watching it on its own merits feels like it's actually being taken seriously, which is genuinely satisfying. It's probably the best account of the Hartnell era by a BBC-authorized source to date, in that it gives a sense of weirdness and quality, which are, in practice, the two defining characteristics of the era. But there's still a frustrating sense of omission here - a sense that the true weirdness of the era isn't allowed to thrive.

Well. It's been a while since we've waffled, hasn't it? I suppose that means I should give a sort of update on work. I'm most of the way through the next Last War in Albion chapter, and hoping to finish that in the next week or two. After that, the Secret Doctor Who Project will become my main focus until that's done.

As for books, the Logopolis book is through the first round of copyediting, and I'm sitting down with those edits imminently. After that, I'll start the Davison/Baker book.

So, what've you been up to?

It's not surprising that the Troughton era is, in effect, reduced to a celebration of Troughton's acting, and for the most part, this is a dramatic improvement over the standard narrative prior to this. It is, like the Hartnell era, still entirely about leading up to the present day - the main hook for Troughton is that Matt Smith based his performance on him. This is put up front and trumpeted. So celebrating Troughton for his acting is necessarily about glorifying the present.

All the same, it's not wrong. And it's worth contrasting with the previous official narrative of the Troughton era, in which Season Five was the high point of it because it had all the monsters. Sure, the Ice Warriors get center stage for a bit in what is, in hindsight, blatantly just a teaser for Cold War (with Moffat reflecting that we never see the actual Ice Warriors), but the previous take on the Troughton era where he was the clownish Doctor and it was good because it had Yeti isn't even alluded to.

Instead we focus on Troughton's acting, which is fitting, because it really is extraordinary, in a way that holds up today. He's astonishingly subtle and meticulous. He always was. And Tennant's statement that every Doctor is really just doing variations on Troughton now is absolutely true. And it's a triumphant moment to see Troughton himself get the credit for that, because he genuinely deserves it. He invented the part of the Doctor as we know it today.

The problem, if you think it's a problem, is that there's nothing to replace the celebration of the monsters. The Troughton era becomes almost entirely about glorifying Troughton's performance. Of course, this isn't entirely unfair. The era played the base under siege card too many times, and didn't do enough brilliant and weird stuff. It's not that the bases under siege were bad, but the mix was off on the era. And, of course, there's the problem of what survives in the archives (or possibly of what Phil Morris has turned over) that makes it tricky to valorize any particular part of the Troughton era except for Season Six, which is the toughest to glamorize in many ways.

Not that they don't give it a good try with an impassioned defense of Zoe that, watching it, also feels overdue. Moffat speaks with genuine conviction of the way in which Zoe was a triumph for young female audiences because she was made so competent, and it's true. She may have gotten gratuitous catsuit ass shots, but she was a bolder character than the show had tried with the female companion since Susan petered out.

(Also hilarious is John Barrowman's account of being excited to see Jamie debut and enthusiastically telling his mother there was a Scotsman on Doctor Who, since he would have been doing that from inside the womb.)

But for all of this, there is something frustrating about where the narrative focus ends up. The selected story for showing after this special was Tomb of the Cybermen, because of course it was. It really is hard to complain too much - for all the story's faults, and they are numerous, it does have some good visuals. Perhaps more to the point, it's pretty solidly acted. The script's naff and the casting's a bit racist, but everyone is trying on the day, and that really does help. Moffat admits to some of the faults in his introduction (though, of course, not the racism), and, look, I recognize I'm being a grumpy old man about Tomb of the Cybermen.

It's just that The Mind Robber was the right length too. And that's the thing. The official narrative is at least getting the high point of the Troughton era right, which is to say, Troughton himself. But the top-line executive summary required by a half-hour special can't really encompass the fact that Troughton's material was uneven, and so goes for the simplest triumph it has instead of emphasizing the weirdness. It's a better Troughton era than "the monster era" lets it be. But it's not allowed to be quite as good as the Troughton era itself was.

This is the twenty-first 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 sixth 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 left as an exercise for the reader.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Following his story of Swamp Thing laying ecological siege to Gotham City, Alan Moore killed him. Again.

"I love the way science SOUNDS. I love the ideas for their art. There’s a crazy beauty about a theory of dimensional structure that assembles itself into a snowflake, or the idea that reality is a two-dimensional plane of information and the 3-D universe is a hologrammatic side-effect. And that’s how I write science fiction. I use the sound of the ideas and then make it all up. And then it all comes true anyway." - Warren Ellis

Figure 535: The steady pan out from
Gotham towards the planet on which
Swamp Thing has landed. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by Rich Veitch, Alfredo
Alcala, and John Totleben, from Swamp
Thing #55, 1986)

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.” At which point the steady pan out finally arrives, galaxies away, at a crater on an alien planet. With a “sklitch! pwack scluc kwilp thap pletch,” a figure emerges, stark blue and made of alien vegetation, but nevertheless, clearly the Swamp Thing.

This marks the beginning of Moore’s final arc on Swamp Thing - a nine issue story about Swamp Thing’s return to Earth. By this point, as Moore puts it, “I’d done nearly all my original ideas on the book, all the ones that Steve and John had contributed to, all the ones I’d subsequently come up with - I’d pretty much done everything that I’d wanted with the character.” The final arc, then, was designed as “this big space storyline” where “I’d get all of my science-fiction Swamp Thing ideas out of my system.” Moore did not even write all nine issues, with both Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch (who Moore had by this point tipped as his successor on the book) chipping in fill-in stories. Bissette’s, in Swamp Thing #59, exists mainly to heap further indignities upon Abby at the hands of Anton Arcane, while Veitch’s slots in between Moore’s final space-based story and the issue in which Swamp Thing finally returns to Earth, giving Swamp Thing an adventure with Jack Kirby’s New Gods.

Figure 536: John Constantine, unbidden, appears to Swamp
Thing to serve as the snake in his garden. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp
Thing #56, 1986)

Moore’s ideas for sci-fi based Swamp Thing stories broadly fit into two categories: experimental stories that extended the psychedelic approach that characterized much of Moore’s Swamp Thing work, and stories that let Moore play with DC properties he’d been a fan of in his youth. The first issue of the arc, in Swamp Thing #56, fits into the former category. Entitled “My Blue Heaven,” the story features Swamp Thing on a planet teeming with plants and insect life, but with no intelligent life whatsoever. In total isolation, Swamp Thing explores the world, contemplating the vast blue landscape and the different shades: “the color of African skin… of shadow on snow… of a jay’s throat… the color of saxophones at dusk… of orbiting police lights smeared across tenement windows… of a flame’s intestines… of the faint tracery of veins beneath the ghost flesh of her forearm’s underside… of loneliness… of melancholy.” He experiments with different types of bodies, growing a body with air sacs that can float across the landscape, and growing a second body with which he can play chess (although every game ends in stalemate). Eventually he grows a doppelgänger of Abby, and an entire duplicate of Houma over which he can serve as demiurge. But within his soulless vegetable city he finds a version of John Constantine (who appears “at the corner table” of the Houma diner “alone in the concealing shadows,” a description that echoes Moore’s first encounter with Constantine in a sandwich shop), who points out to him that he is merely talking to himself. Unable now not to see the artifice of his creation, Swamp Thing flies into a rage and dismantles his world and finally flees, without knowing if there is anywhere he can possibly land, concluding that death is preferable to this isolated hell.

In many ways this echoes Moore’s third issue of Swamp Thing, “Swamped,” in which Swamp Thing nearly loses himself in the green as he reels from the revelation that he is not in fact Alec Holland. As in “Swamped,” Swamp Thing encounters a wealth of phantasms and mirrors of his past life, nearly losing his identity in the face of them. But whereas in “Swamped” Swamp Thing is ultimately happy to surrender himself to the green, finding it a place where he can at last be at peace and be happy, in “Another Blue World” his memory of and love for Abby renders the equivalent solitude unbearable, a testament to the breadth of change the character has undergone in the thirty-five issues since “Swamped.”

Figure 537: Swamp Thing and Adam Strange realize they
share a home planet. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick
Veitch and Alfredo Alcala, from Swamp Thing #58, 1986)

Having completed his meditations, Swamp Thing proceeds to jump through a series of other alien worlds, which Moore uses to explore the possible intersections between Swamp Thing and science fiction as it exists in DC’s line of comics. First is a two-issue story featuring Adam Strange, a present day human created by Julius Schwartz and most associated with the 1950s/60s sci-fi anthology series Mystery in Space (from which Moore derives the title of the arc’s first issue), who occasionally traveled from Earth to the alien planet of Rann via the Rannian’s “Zeta Beam” and had space adventures in a Buck Rogers/John Carter tradition. Moore matches up Strange with another set of DC aliens, the Thanagarians, who discovered a substance called Nth metal that defies gravity, and used it to dress up in hawk costumes, which provided the Silver Age origin story for Hawkman. The story is a fairly standard bit of space opera that is pretty clearly little more than an excuse for Moore to play with yet another corner of DC’s history that he’d enjoyed as a child (Strange’s run in Mystery in Space ran from 1959-65, or from the ages of six to twelve for Moore, while Thanagar first appeared in 1961, and the Silver Age Hawkman got his own series in 1964).

Figure 538: John Totleben's experimental
artwork for Swamp Thing #60. (Written
by Alan Moore, 1987)

After the Bissette-penned fill-in issue, Moore continued with an issue titled after a David Bowie song, “Loving the Alien,” that served as an opportunity for John Totleben to engage in a more experimental art style than he’d previously been able to, and let Moore stretch into one of the most avant garde plots he’d written. The issue is constructed entirely in splash pages, with no dialogue to speak of. Instead the story is narrated by a mysterious alien entity, part flesh, part machine, floating in space and seeking a mate. Only Totleben’s art, drawn as a series of psychedelic collages often featuring only the vaguest implication of Swamp Thing’s figure, makes it clear who the “ghost” that haunts the narrator’s insides is. Moore’s narration, meanwhile, is an extended exercise in writing from a profoundly alien perspective. “How shall I say it,” the narrator writes. “How to describe the effect this last bare fact worked in me? He was of my flesh. I was melted by the implications. Yes… yes, that is it! ‘Melted.’ Not for my body, that was not melted, save for the unchanging magma, boiling ceaselessly around my nuclear core. Not my body, but rather my mind; my psychostructure; my self. My self is what melted. All the precisely indexed data, sucked greedily from the computer systems of a thousand doomed alien vessels; all my art and science and neurosynthesis; the logarithms and sines; the very formula of what I am… melted,” in a strange and slightly disorienting account of what is, in effect, the alien creature falling in love with Swamp Thing when he attempts to incarnate out of the plant matter that is the alien. The story is in most regards an interesting experiment as opposed to an entirely successful one, but nevertheless demonstrates Moore continuing to be aggressively experimental and to push himself even as he was bringing his time on Swamp Thing to a close.

Figure 539: Swamp Thing accidentally incarnates as a
grotesque assemblage of other people's bodies. (From
Swamp Thing #61, 1987)

The final portion of the outer space arc comes in Swamp Thing #61, a story called “All Flesh is Grass.” On one level this story is another excuse for Moore to play with a personal favorite concept within DC. But on another, it is an attempt to invert the premise of Swamp Thing and find a new way to do horror stories with it. This is not insignificant. Depending on the particulars of one’s definition, it is possible to argue that the last time Moore actually wrote a horror story in Swamp Thing was “A Murder of Crows,” all the way back in Swamp Thing #48. Certainly it has not been the dominant mode for the title to work in for some time. But in “All Flesh is Grass,” Moore finds a genuinely new way to present a horror story. The premise of “All Flesh is Grass” is that Swamp Thing finally makes it to the planet suggested by Adam Strange at the end of that story, J586, where it might be possible to fix Swamp Thing’s ability to communicate with plants so that he can talk to the Earth again. Unfortunately, as he materializes on J586, he realizes too late that all of the plant life on the planet is in fact sentient, and that he has built his body and consciousness out of thousands of living people, all of whose consciousnesses collide with his own, pulling him under and driving him hopelessly mad. Veitch depicts the scene in a nightmarish double page spread in which Swamp Thing’s hands are visibly formed out of screaming and horrified alien faces, while Moore narrates the psychological distress of the people trapped within Swamp Thing’s body. “The horror swiped blindly, gestured inarticulately, nothing but amok. In each hand a polite and well-mannered family clenched into a fist of bitterness and recrimination. The horror ran, palms damp with angry tears, fingers quarrelling.”

Rescuing J586 from Swamp Thing’s rampage is Medphyl, the sector’s representative to the Green Lantern Corps. The Green Lantern Corps extend out of the Silver Age revamp of the Green Lantern away from being based on iconography of orientalist adventure and towards an expansive concept in which Green Lantern is just one of a vast organization of what are in effect intergalactic police, each patrolling a sector of space emerging conically out of the planet Oa, at the center of the universe, where the Green Lantern Corps is headquartered. Moore had long been fond of the concept, and his Order of the Black Sun back in his aborted 4-D War storyline for Doctor Who Monthly was, by his own admission, him nicking the concept on the assumption that he would never actually get a chance to write a Green Lantern story of his own.

This was, obviously, an incorrect assumption. Indeed, “All Flesh is Grass” is not even the only opportunity Moore had to write Green Lantern stories. During his time at DC, he had the opportunity to write a trio of short stories featuring the characters. These stories in many ways resemble DC Universe versions of his Future Shocks for 2000 AD - all are short stories featuring twist endings.

Figure 540: Mogo revealed. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Dave Gibbons, from Green Lantern #188, 1985)

The first, “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize,” pairs Moore with Dave Gibbons for a story about a Green Lantern named Mogo and why he doesn’t attend meetings of the Green Lantern Corps. It feature Bolphunga the Unrelenting, who is said to have “possessed the strength of a Denebian Dozerbull, the endurance of a Lalotian Lava-Limpet, and the intelligence of a bed of kelp.” Bolphunga decides that he will destroy the feared and powerful Green Lantern known as Mogo, landing upon the planet on which Mogo is known to arrive. Over the course of three pages Bolphunga searches for Mogo, but finds nothing save for a series of vast and carefully cut clearings. Eventually, mapping the planet, he realizes the awful truth: that the clearings form the insignia of the Green Lanterns, and that Mogo is not in fact a being upon the planet but is in fact a sentient planet, which in turn explains why Mogo never shows up at meetings: “his gravity field, you see. It would pull Oa apart.”

Figure 541: Rot Lop Fan joins the F-Sharp Bell Corps.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Bill Willingham and Terry
Austin, from Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3,
1987)

A similar sense of wit pervades Moore’s third Green Lantern story, “In Blackest Night.” In this story, a Green Lantern named Katma Tui must explain to the Guardians how she was unable to find a Green Lantern to serve “in the black and lightless void known as the Obsidian Deeps.” The problem, Katma explains is that the being she found, Rot Lop Fan, was unable to understand the idea of a Green Lantern, since, residing in the Obsidian Deeps, he has no ability to comprehend the concepts of color or light. And so Katma Tui is forced to translate the concept, replacing the idea of a lantern with a bell, and the color green with the tone F-Sharp, which Rot Lop Fan finds particularly “soothing and restful.” And so instead of the Green Lanterns’ traditional oath, Rot Lop Fan proclaims that “In loudest din or hush profound / my ears catch evil’s slightest sound / let those who toll out evil’s knell / beware my power: The F-Sharp Bell!” And so, she explains to the Guardians, “I did appoint a worthy protector to the Obsidian Deeps… however I’m not sure if he qualifies as a member of the Green Lantern Corps, for in truth he’s never even heard of us!”

You know the drill. Worst to best, but everything something I paid money for.

Annihilator #3

This isn't really working for me. It feels like the sort of default setting of Grant Morrison - like it's the statistical average of his other work. The sci-fi sections feel like Morrison doing self-parody, which, to be fair, they might well deliberately be, but with the real-world sections feeling a bit flat, this is just feeling like a mess to me.

Fables #146

Four to go, yes?

The Amazing Spider-Man #10

Here the basic operational problem of the Spider-Verse crossover becomes clear, which is that your storytelling gets really muddy when essentially every character is in the same costume. I also find my basic not-much-liking Superior Spider-Man to be a problem here, and the sequence that amounts to "here's where all the other books spin off from this" is painful. Hoping this finds its keel quickly, as I loved the start.

Guardians of the Galaxy #21

All the typical problems of the first issue of a Bendis arc, namely that the entire issue is spent slowly walking up to the stated premise of the arc. The last splash is brilliant, though.

New Avengers #26

Love the Doctor Doom stuff, but found Tony kind of fruitless here. His ranting arrogance at the end is nice, I suppose, if you get off on "Tony Stark is an arrogant, selfish bastard," but I don't. I like "Tony Stark is flawed but self-evidently one of the good guys," and find the entire amoral Tony thing to just not be my cup of tea. If you like it, you'll probably like this.

Loki: Agent of Axis #8

Much as I don't like Axis, I have to admit that inverting Loki is an absolutely genius premise, and Ewing does some lovely work in changing the underlying tone of the book. The mock heroic stuff is great, and Verity really jumps out as a character here. Good stuff, though I admit, knowing that this two-parter is going to be followed by a Kid Loki story makes me ever so slightly restless about it.

Avengers #38

I adore Cyclops here. I can't wait for X-Men to catch up to this status quo. I love who the Avengers are here - it's such a deliciously weird team. And it ends with an army of Shang-Chis. This is basically what comics exist for, no?

Daredevil #10

This Purple Man story was probably an issue too long on the whole, but the end here, and especially the comic equivalent to a post-credit scene is absolutely brilliant. In general, on this book, I'm a bit torn between feeling like Waid is kinda played out on Daredevil and the sad knowledge that whoever follows him is just going to Frank Miller all over the rug.

Uncanny X-Men #28

Bendis has a good premise here, and the good sense to keep the focus on it. The decision to properly have Cyclops get off the mat and start being awesome is a good one - you can see from here to Avengers #38 here, and it's a lovely line of sight. I really hoped, following Gillen's X-Men run, that someone would have the guts to do a Cyclops Is Right comic. Here it is, and I'm all for it.

Moon Knight #9

When I saw this in my pulls, I thought "man, why didn't I make that one of the titles I dropped?" So glad I didn't, because this really, really impressed me. The twist that unfurls here is just masterful - what looks like a very generic and predictable sort of comic in one absolutely brilliant idea becomes another one entirely. This is better than any of Ellis's issues. Absolutely brilliant, and it would be my pick of the week most weeks. Except...

The Multiversity: Pax Americana

Every once in a while, a highly anticipated comic steps up. We've known Pax Americana was coming for years. Morrison's response to Watchmen. A comic with an impossibly high bar to clear, and one that's only gotten higher as Moore and Morrison's sniping at each other became more and more active. And yet here we are, and it's... a reasonable comic. A skillful emulation of Watchmen's storytelling techniques, with enough sly jokes to keep it impish, enough clever ideas to keep it honest, and, perhaps most importantly, an honest enough assessment of what Watchmen had to say. Morrison pushes it to mild self parody without actually going so far as to suggest that Watchmen wasn't good. And then it suggests that all of this is, for better or for worse, a bit limited and, dare I say it, hermetic. Which has always been a fair critique of Watchmen.

On top of that, it's just very good. It's well-done. Quitely's art is superb, the eight/sixteen panel grid suiting him well. Morrison's writing is sharp. It's dense and chewy and a damn fine comic.

The Pertwee era, and I can vouch for this having written for it, presents a major challenge in providing a history of Doctor Who, simply because it doesn't fit with any of it. For 60% of it, the premise of the series is out of place. The Doctor is portrayed, inevitably, as a reaction against the previous Doctor, but the previous Doctor is the template for every single Doctor after Pertwee. It's got an awful lot of military action-hero stuff that's kind of weird for the program. It's an odd experiment that has really survived as a sort of limit case for what Doctor Who can be.

This is, ultimately, what The Doctors Revisited does. Pertwee is admitted up front as an oddity, and then studied and explained in half an hour. Moffat is on hand to explain why Jo Grant, Liz Shaw, the Brigadier, and the Master worked, and in three out of four cases it's "the actor playing the part." And an expanded field of celebrity guests are on hand to talk about the impact of it, reaffirming that this wasn't just an odd era of Doctor Who, it was a major part of the popular consciousness.

It's not particularly flashy - of the first three episodes, it's the one making the simplest case. Both Hartnell and Troughton were defined in terms of how they anticipated the present. Pertwee is simply explained as it was. But it's a persuasive case. Manning, Courtney, and Delgado really were fantastic actors. As was Pertwee, although he gets somewhat short shrift in his own special. The clips and sequences they pick are compelling early 70s television, or, perhaps more accurately, look reasonably like a modern sense of what compelling early 70s television would look like.

If there's an objection to be had - and I'm not entirely convinced there is - it's in the choice of stories to air after it, which is Spearhead From Space. But this objection is rather churlish. Unlike Tomb of the Cybermen, it's not really that you wish they'd picked a better story, or that they'd had a better story available to pick. Spearhead From Space is absolutely brilliant. And as Moffat enthusiastically points out in his introduction to it, it's gloriously weird in a very Doctor Who sort of way. It's a fantastic choice of Pertwee stories to show in 2013.

No, the problem is that you almost wish they'd picked a crappier one. The realization that the Pertwee era doesn't quite fit into any coherent narrative of Doctor Who's history has led to a genuinely unfortunate squeamishness about it. And so we get a very weird sort and not entirely accurate message out of this program. Yes, the Pertwee era had some real strengths, and yes, it was massively popular television, but the stuff that was popular doesn't much look like Spearhead From Space.

Am I saying they should have inflicted The Claws of Axos upon an unsuspecting population? Well, yes, because that's some of the most fun you can have with a Doctor Who DVD there, since The Claws of Axos is wall-to-wall "what the fuck" in a way that very few things that aren't The Web Planet are. But more realistically, I'm saying I wish they'd done Terror of the Autons, or Carnival of Monsters, if they were willing to admit that Pertwee went into space, which they don't actually ever do.

Instead we get the explanation of why the era doesn't fit, followed by a story that simultaneously encapsulates how it does fit while highlighting the essential differences. Which isn't untrue, but misses the opportunity to say "no, really, this was what was popular and beloved in 1973." The complete absence of Carnival of Monsters is actually worth stressing, since for years this was the BBC's preferred Pertwee story, and since it is in point of fact brilliant. It shows off so many of the best parts of what Doctor Who in the 1970s was. Yes, it's missing UNIT, but so is most of the Pertwee era, in truth.

It's understandable why the Pertwee era is a problem for writing histories of Doctor Who. But there's a squeamishness and an urge to apologize for it that's taken root as a result of that difficulty, and that's unfortunate. It's strange - it's one of my least favorite eras of Doctor Who, and this is unrelentingly praiseful of it, and yet I'm left with the inescapable sense that it was far too hard on the era all the same.

It's all been a bit V for Vendetta for me lately, though I'm actually through most of the stuff about the comic and tying up some loose ends. I think the shape of this chapter is interesting. One of the places where there really was a big creative decision to make was where to put the climax to Book One. What's the Number One Iconic Alan Moore work pre-Watchmen? Where do you put the emphasis and let him have his moment of victory before anyone else really comes into the story? And I picked Swamp Thing, which I think was sound. The other two candidates are, ultimately, hampered by resolving well after Watchmen. So this chapter is doing a lot of the de-escalating necessary. It feels kind of like a Game of Thrones finale - the episode that's after the big one. It's a nice pace and tone to be working in. Two more after it before we're done with Book One. Book Two terrifies me.

Except of course today was basically just wall to wall Smash Bros. Or will be. I've hardly been touching my video games, actually - so let's waffle on. Interesting stuff of the current generation? Or in the evergreen PC/mobile sphere? Just don't make it about ethics in video game journalism.

Well, something had to knock Doctor Who off its Hugo perch. And after competing in long form for its first season, Game of Thrones seems to have cemented itself as the Hugo frontrunner with back-to-back victories over Doctor Who in 2012 and 2013. 2012 was perhaps understandable: It wasn’t an extraordinary year for Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones did have “Blackwater,” which was a stunningly good Peter Dinklage vehicle of an episode. Even in 2013, you can possibly criticize the strategy of having Doctor Who go in with Day of the Doctor, Name of the Doctor, An Adventure in Time and Space, and The Five-ish Doctors as possibly weaker than the strategy of just chucking “The Rains of Castamere” up.

But “The Rains of Castamere” is also an episode worth looking at because it gets at the way in which much of the talk about what makes Game of Thrones good is desperately silly. Because essentially all “The Rains of Castamere” has to recommend it is that it has a lot of really shocking character deaths in it. This is, to be fair, part of the show’s brand. Its first big, iconic cultural moment was the killing of Ned Stark, Sean Bean’s character, late in the first season after having previously presented him as the show’s main character (which, to be fair, he was up until his decapitation). And this is, if we’re being honest, one of the great deaths in television history.

But the reason that it worked wasn’t that it was a shock death. Shock deaths are, frankly, overused on television. What worked so well about killing Ned Stark was that it, in one shot, altered the status quo for every other character in the show. It was a plot twist that actually changed things. Which you can’t really say about the famed Red Wedding of “The Rains of Castamere,” which butchers a significant chunk of the cast, but which mostly has the effect of either preventing things that would be been interesting from happening (destroying any possibility of Tyrion and Sansa coming to understand each other, keeping Arya wandering around) or terminating plotlines that weren’t really working that well anyway (Robb and Catelyn). It was, frankly, a cheap move, and for my money, one of the weaker episodes of the third season.

So if not its body count, what is so good about Game of Thrones? It’s tempting to say a word I’m usually quite down on: worldbuilding. But instead I’ll go with “structure.” Game of Thrones is the most lusciously structured show on television. Under the hood, it is almost ostentatious in its simplicity: it’s epic fantasy structured as a soap opera, using the same basic trick of Doctor Who whereby you sell the sense of the epic with one or two tremendously expensive effects shots per episode, thus covering the fact that every other scene is just two British actors sitting in a room talking.

But where the show really sparkles is in its use of editing and structure within an episode. The overall progression of the plot is demonstrably that of a soap opera - every episode has big moments for one or two plots and then several scenes that incrementally advance a selection of the remainder, with characters moving on and off stage as needed. This poses something of a difficulty in terms of structuring individual episodes, however. The scope of Game of Thrones quickly spirals to where there’s simply too much going on for episodes to have straightforward A and B plots. Occasionally a single storyline might dominate an episode, but other times episodes will draw their titles from single five or ten minute scenes. This means that an episode doesn’t get to have a plot, as such.

Instead each episode becomes an exercise in sketching the shape of the fictional world. An episode of Game of Thrones is a portrait of Westeros - a declaration of what the world looks like today. The show builds to this over the course of, in effect, its entire first season, beginning with the portrayal of one event in one castle and then splitting the characters up and sending them towards the various corners of the world so that, by advancing their individual plots, the show gradually shows more and more of that world.

The meat of an episode is thus largely about the transitions between scenes and the symbolic resonances they set up. Let’s take a specific example - “Walk of Punishment,” the episode that aired on April 14th, 2013, one day after Cold War, with which it shared the services of Tobias Menzies as Edmure Tully/Lieutenant Stepashin. The episode has fourteen scenes, and almost all of them have clear thematic transitions between them, with several conspiring to make larger points about the plot.

The episode opens with a Robb Stark scene that ends with Robb talking about how well Tywin Lannister is doing in the War. That prompts a cut to a Tywin scene, in which Jaime is discussed. Sure enough, Jaime is the focus of the third scene. But after this things get more symbolic. That scene features Jaime warning Brienne that when they get to camp she’s going to be raped, and advising her to let them rape her because otherwise they’ll kill her, and admitting that if he were in her position, he’d force them to do just that, which is why he’s glad he’s not a woman. The fourth scene then jumps to Arya as a not-quite-a-prisoner of the Brotherhood Without Banners. In other words, we move between two scenes of captured female warriors - an equation that gets paid off nearly two full seasons later when Arya and Brienne’s stories actually coincide.

The next few transitions are among female characters: the fifth scene features Catelyn Stark, Arya’s mother, followed by one featuring Talisa, Robb’s wife. This is followed in turn by Jon Snow, Robb’s supposed half-brother. Which makes for a series of scenes that move around Robb, leaving him as a sort of visible absence. Again, this thematic storytelling serves a larger role: Robb is ultimately not really a presence in his own right, but a marker for the absence of his father. Ultimately the story doesn’t cohere around him, and instead he’s slowly making his way to the Red Wedding. By moving around his absence, the show is quietly revealing the real shape of its world.

The Jon Snow scene does another transition along the axis of “mention a character, cut to the character,” going to Jeor Mormont, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch (at least until he gets stabbed to death next episode), arriving at Craster’s Keep, where Craster jealously keeps women as property and sacrifices his male children to the White Walkers. Craster’s is, unsurprisingly, depicted as the most miserable place imaginable, and Craster talks of serving the true gods, giving a sense of almost Lovecraftian horror to the White Walkers.

This leads to a transition whose substance is only clear in hindsight - to Theon, captured by (at this point) unknown forces, and seemingly being set free by a character we’ll eventually learn is Ramsay Snow, bastard son of Roose Bolton. It is only in light of these facts that the transition makes sense. The Boltons are an ancient house that trace their lineage back to the First Men, and are longstanding rivals of the Starks known for flaying their enemies alive. This sort of grotesque cruelty quietly reflects Craster’s actions, expanding our sense of the White Walkers to become a sort of fundamental rot setting into the North - an expanded definition of winter.

The next transition hinges entirely on this symbolic resonance, as it jumps to Stannis and Melisandre, the latter of whom is talking about going on a journey to find men with king’s blood who can be used as sacrifices to gain power for Stannis. This is an interesting transition - on one level it follows the theme established at Craster’s of sacrifice and barbarism. But it moves from the White Walkers threatening from the north to a barbarism that comes in from the east, and from a god of ice to a god of fire. Tacitly, then, the extremes of the two physical ends of the world are thematically linked in this regard.

This in turn allows for a transition to Danerys’s arc, since now we’re in the territory of Essos. That scene ends with an exchange regarding the oft-heard phrase “valar morghulis,” which means “all men must die,” with Daenerys noting to Missandei that “we are not men,” which sets up a transition back to Tyrion via the image of a prostitute.

The remaining two scenes are less well thematically linked: another Theon scene, and the resolution of the Jaime/Brienne plot. But this is, at least, sufficient to demonstrate how the show works. And it is worth pointing out specifically that this is linked closely to the show’s status as an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novels, which are downright pathological in their attentiveness to detail about the setting and the sense of structure. It is hardly being spoiler-heavy to point out that a story that has dragons on one side of the world and horrific ice monsters on another is headed to a fairly inevitable resolution. And it’s telling that one of the first questions Martin asked Weiss and Benioff when they pitched the television series was the identity of Jon Snow’s mother, a fact that’s not revealed in the books, but a structurally inevitable consequence of the fact that Daenerys is one of the story’s starting characters despite not initially seeming a part of the family whose sundering begins events.

But this understanding of Game of Thrones requires that we look at it as more than simply a narrative about characters. Like The Ribos Operation, the world of Game of Thrones moves according to recurring symbolic logic, with the same oppositions and themes playing out on large and small levels. (A favorite theme is moving between the games and backstabbing of the lords to the material misery inflicted upon the peasants, for instance.) Nobody is just a character with personality traits, nor, to be fair, just an empty piece of symbolism. Instead character and symbolism are so intertwined as to be indistinguishable from one another, and the story is built up out of the incredible density of resonance and implication that this constructs.

In other words, Game of Thrones and Doctor Who are, in 2013, engaged in the same basic sort of storytelling, only with Game of Thrones taking the approach of showing one setting in extravagant detail instead of showing a multitude of settings in brief sketches. But the basic approach and the buildup of dense symbolism is largely the same. The difference is that Game of Thrones offers a much higher level of reliability in this. Both it and Doctor Who produced the same number of episodes in 2013, and while one might fairly and accurately claim that Day of the Doctor was better than “The Rains of Castamere,” the truth is that Game of Thrones was the more steadfast show, turning up week after week with consistent dense quality while Doctor Who was busy fluctuating between Hide and Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.

So in many regards, the Hugos got it wrong twice: first in saying that Doctor Who deserved four nominations to Game of Thrones’s one, and then in saying that Game of Thrones had the better single episode. And yet on the whole, it got it right. In 2012 and 2013, Doctor Who wasn’t driving the conversation of what sci-fi/fantasy television could do. Game of Thrones had honed its toolset to something more inventive, more effective, and, most weeks, more interesting, making the “metafiction as default” approach of Moffat’s writing into a lean and efficient machine for spinning out an increasingly sweeping story without ever losing the heart of character drama that drives it.

Of course, looking at the long history of times we’ve done this dance, we can also phrase this in another way, which is that Game of Thrones put Doctor Who back in the position from which many of its most interesting moments emerge: a show with something to prove that has to respond to the larger culture around it. And while much of what makes Game of Thrones work is specific to its weird and heady mix of a hyper-detailed fantasy novel, its soap opera structure, and its Ribosian sense of scale, the challenge of elevating the formal and conceptual complexity that’s characterized Moffat’s work so far to a system of ruthlessly efficient quality is now very much open.

This is the twenty-second 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 sixth 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 left as an exercise for the reader.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore's last Swamp Thing arc involved a series of sci-fi stories, including one featuring the Green Lantern Corps, a DC property Moore had played with in a trio of short stories as well.

"In the darkest part of the swamp, he pauses. A monstrous black bird flaps overhead, momentarily eclipsing the sun. LaBostrie feels his skin crall and moves on. Below, in the green tank of swamp water, something stirs. And rises." - Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, Swamp Thing

Figure 542: The concepts Alan Moore and
Kevin O'Neill created for "Tygers" would
eventually become a central part of the DC
Universe in the form of the Red Lantern Corps.

But it is in most regards the second of his three Green Lantern stories that is most interesting. One of two collaborations he did with Kevin O’Neill while at DC, the story, entitled “Tygers,” tells of the death of Abin Sur, the predecessor to Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern for Earth’s sector of space. The story is notable for several reasons. For one, it is the story that Moore was referring to in later interviews where he accused DC of “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of night.” The story responsible for provoking that comment was a 2009 Green Lantern-based crossover written by Geoff Johns, which actually owes relatively little to “Tygers” save for featuring further characters from the alien planet on which it is set, although it is true that an extended prophecy given within “Tygers” has been extensively mined by both Johns and other writers for story concepts.

Figure 543: The horrific Qull of the
Five Inversions. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Kevin O'Neill, from
"Tygers," in Tales of the Green Lantern
Corps Annual #2, 1986)

For another, as its title suggests, the story owes a considerable debt to William Blake. The bulk of this debt is subtle - no actual Blakean concepts or images appear within the story, and although Kevin O’Neill draws a number of memorably grotesque and bizarre horrors in the story, his style in “Tygers” is far from a straightforward imitation of Blake, nor even an homage. O’Neill’s art is nevertheless striking, and in many ways he comes closer to Blake by doing his own strange and visionary style instead of an imitation. The shambling creature Qull of the Five Inversions, whose prophecies ultimately lure Abin Sur to his demise, is an astonishingly gruesome and monstrous figure who, though he has no obvious counterpart in Blake’s art or mythology, bristles with an unsettling power that few other artists can match.

Figure 544: Donald Ault's name is
invoked. (Written by Alan Moore,
lettering by John Costanza, from
"Tygers," in Tales of the Green
Lantern Corps Annual #2, 1986)

In a happily generative coincidence, the name of planet upon which Abin Sur is so fatally tempted, Ysmault, is, upon its first mention, split across two lines by letterer John Costanza, causing it to become hyphenated as “Ysm-Ault,” a spacing which reveals the hidden word “Ault,” which is the surname of Donald Ault, a prominent American scholar specializing both in William Blake and in the comics of Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks. Ault’s most famous work at the time was his 1974 text Visionary Physics, which argues that Newton is not just a convenient bogeyman that Blake famously rails against when he rejects “single vision & Newtons sleep,” and that it is more proper to consider Blake’s work as an elaborate response to Newton, whose system Blake views as “providing a usurpation of and substitution for the very vision he himself is trying to communicate.”

Figure 545: Newton was a frequently invoked nemesis
in the work of William Blake. (Newton, 1804-05)

Ault traces the evolution of Blake’s engagement with Newton, from its earliest form in The Book of Urizen, in which the demonic figure of reason, Urizen, is described via what Ault describes as “several obviously Newtonian concepts: the ‘void,’ “all-repelling,’ ‘this abominable void,’ ‘this soul-shudd’dring vacuum,’ ‘measurement,’ ‘dark revolving,’ ‘globes of attraction,’” as well as “several more obscure allusions, such as ‘the rolling of wheels / As of swelling seas,’ referring to Newton’s reduction of the motions of the tides to the motions of revolving planets,” to a later model in which Newton and Urizen are equated with Satan, who “has tricked fallen man” into subscribing to their system, which Blake recognizes as having a sinister but potent appeal to the Imagination. Blake’s response rejects the very idea of systems, instead dividing experience into “symbolic ‘States’ which preserve the integrity of the individual identity yet which ‘abolish’ systems.” These states bear more than a passing resemblance to the momentary assemblages described by Deleuze and Guattari - states of being that are, in Blake, defined by the passage among the various realms of his cosmology (Beulah, Golgonooza, Ulro, the Vegetable Earth, et cetera), all existing within the larger sense of Eternity, in which all these contrary states exist simultaneously and, perhaps, rhizomatically.

This evolution of Blake’s response is also visible in his treatment of the possibility of a decisive overthrowing of Urizen, from Los’s failed attempt to bind him in The Book of Urizen to Blake’s ultimate rejection of Orc and the charismatic revolution he augurs in America a Prophecy. Both, ultimately, merely offer new systems that purport to replace the Newtonian one, but that ultimately only reiterate the flawed fixity of Newtons sleep. Instead Blake embrace an altogether more variable and strange system. A similar move takes place in Moore’s final two issues of Swamp Thing, in which he returns to the questions of eschatology and revolution that he explored in the issues between Swamp Thing’s second and third deaths.

Figure 546: Swamp Thing returns to
Abby. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala, from
Swamp Thing #63, 1987)

These final two issues return to the dualistic structure that has recurred in Moore’s Swamp Thing since “Windfall.” The first, titled, in Moore’s typical elliptical fashion, “Loose Ends (Reprise),” alternates between a tour of several of the secondary characters from throughout Moore’s run, checking in on Matt Cable and Wallace Monroe, as well as looking at Abby, Chester, and Liz, and on Swamp Thing’s vengeful return as he hunts down and takes grotesque vengeance on those responsible for his most recent death. The issue ends with Swamp Thing finally returning to Abby, leading into Moore’s final issue, “Return of the Good Gumbo.”

Where “Loose Ends (Reprise)” focuses on Swamp Thing as an essentially wrathful figure, with the character almost entirely absent from the issue, appearing only in his chakra-based spirit form in a two-page spread early on in the issue prior to his final page reunion with Abby, “Return of the Good Gumbo” offers an entirely more merciful figure. The issue is framed by a description of Gene LaBostrie, a man in Louisiana village who punts across the swamp, musing on how “it is as if the spirit has departed from this land. The children cry and give no explanation. Prematurely aged by spanish moss the trees stand sulking, waiting for a word of reconciliation no one can pronounce. Each day’s sun seems less willing to begin its labored, struggling ascent towards the shadeless pinacles of noon, less eager to drive back the ebb-tide night across the swamps and turn their mirror-ribboned streams to chrome.” This monologue’s call for some lost spirit is tacitly answered by the next page, a literal splash page of a bird landing in the water in front of Abby and Swamp Thing reclining beneath a tree and besides the story’s title.

Figure 547: The reunion of Swamp Thing and Abby is
portrayed in a sort of bayou-pastoral style. (Written by
Alan Moore, from Swamp Thing #64, 1987)

Throughout the issue, Swamp Thing muses on the question left broadly unanswered by the Gotham City triptych. “Am I not a god,” he asks. “I could touch all the world with gorgeous wilderness as I touched Gotham. Could transform this planet to a sphere of colors, perfumes, and full bellies. Anything.” Abby, meanwhile, talks of her time working with Chester in an ecological activist group, but bemoans the slow progress. “There was talk about dumping waste here, but we kicked up, so they abandoned the idea. Uh, well, that is, they dumped it someplace else,” she admits. “Sometimes,” she muses, “I think for us to really help the environment, we’d need a different world.” The observation causes an awkward silence, broken when Swamp Thing grows a tuber for her to eat and they make love for the first time since his return.

Figure 548: Moore gets one last round of
psychedelic vegetable sex in. (Written by
Alan Moore, from Swamp Thing #64, 1987)

This lovemaking is depicted in a return to the iconography of “Rite of Spring,” which flows into a sequence in which Swamp Thing sits awake next to her and continues musing over the question of whether to save the world by overthrowing it. He thinks over the death of Alec Holland that gave him birth, and thinks about the Parliment of Trees, “a dynasty spanning the eons, reaching back to times before mankind, whose only record now is etched on sheets of coal, far underground. A dynasty of gods.” Pages recount the epochs of life on Earth, as Swamp Thing wonders why his predecessors did not simply keep the precambrian eden clean of animals, or why in the silurian age they “never made this world a cool piscean paradise, nor when the fish with legs boiled up from the devonian mud did they impose reptilian utopia.” And each eon is shown to have its plant elemental, a vegetable creature befitting the fauna of the age, from fish to dinosaur, until at last there is a panel of Swamp Thing standing and watching the sun rise.

Figure 549: Swamp Thing decides against
divinity. (Written by Alan Moore, from
Swamp Thing #64, 1987)

“Is this,” he asks, “what it means to be a God? To know, and never do? To watch the world wind by, and in its windings find content? If I should feed the world, heal all the wounds man’s smoldering industries have made, what would he do? Would he renounce the wealth his sawmills bring, step gently on the flowers instead, and pluck each apple with respect for this abundant world in all its providence? No. He would pump more poisons, build more mines, safe in the knowledge that I stood on hand to mend the biosphere, endlessly covering the scars he could now endlessly inflict.” And so he yields, averting wrath and revolution. Instead he goes deep into the swamp and builds from trees and flowers a home for him and Abby to retire to. Declaring her his princess, he summons a lily pad to serve as a raft, and they sail out to their new home together, arms entwined. They say there farewells to Liz and Chester, who are ecstatic for their friends. Swamp Thing embraces Liz, seeing her for the first time in many issues, and gently reassures her as she continues her healing from the traumas inflicted upon her. And with that they walk out into the swamp, together, as Chester and Liz hold hands and face the future.

Figure 550: Alan More waves goodbye to Swamp Thing and the reader.
(From Swamp Thing #64, 1987)

From there the scene cuts to the sleazebag photographer whose images of Abby and Swamp Thing led to so much trouble, as he tries to get Gene LaBostrie to tell him where the Swamp Thing can be found. LeBostrie feigns to not speak English, “spreads his hands in mined apology, then shoves his craft out” to guide him home. “Do they think money’s everything,” LaBostrie muses. “The only yardstick that life’s quality is measured by? Yes, yes they do, and that is why they are so very poor.” And as he thinks this, he catches sight of Swamp Thing, a shadow in the grass, waving at him, and LaBostrie, drawn to look like Alan Moore himself, waves a final farewell to the character upon which he made his reputation in America, and upon five years of comics that would prove to change the world forever.

And that is it. No fiery retribution, for all Moore’s obvious rage. Whatever darkness sits within the heart of this new world, Moore opts to let it remain there, perhaps in the hope that it will, as Swamp Thing suggested, breed some greater virtue. There is no fury of Orc - no red flames melting the heavens nor plagues creeping upon burning winds. Whatever apocalypse Moore might have envisioned and considered, in Swamp Thing at least, he in the end declines to bring it down upon America, even symbolically. Instead there is what Moore describes as “a kind of ‘happy ever after’ ending” where “Swamp Thing and Abigail just go and grow themselves a fairy-tale household in the swamp and, as far as I’m concerned, they live happily ever after.” And so on the final page of Moore’s run Gene LaBostrie, and in turn Moore, returns home, “walks down his village street and lets the laughing children tease him, grabbing at his trailing coat. In every garden cabbages and onions grow so big and succulent a man might cry. The cooking smells and fiddle strains are tangled in the summer air, both equally as sweet. Good god is in his heaven. Good gumbo’s in the pot. LaBostrie moves his black-fringed lips in something very like a prayer: ‘Laissez les bontemps rouler.’ Please. For us. For all of us… Laissez les bontemps rouler.”

And with that, Moore brought his longest engagement with American comics to a polite and benedictive end: a prayer for peace.

There is no sense in which this prayer was answered.

Moore’s final issue Swamp Thing came out in June of 1987, one month before the famously delayed Watchmen #12. One month later, Grant Morrison, who had spent the preceding two years steadily building a comics career by almost perfectly duplicating the steps of an early-career Alan Moore, took on his first ongoing assignment for 2000 AD, a conscious response to Moore’s work and an overt effort to rewrite the territory that Moore had just established; less than a year after that he would make his own leap to America as part of a brazen attempt on DC’s part to copy the success they'd enjoyed with Moore on Swamp Thing. Moore, on the other hand, would do two further projects with DC before acrimoniously parting ways with them: a Batman story with Brian Bolland, and the concluding third of V for Vendetta, a project rescued from the wreckage that was Warrior. This comic, a bracing adventure story about the violent overthrow of the government by an anarchist terrorist, is exactly the unsparing howl of rage against the systems of the world that Swamp Thing ultimately declines to be. [continued]

From worst to best, but I paid for everything.

The Massive #29

One of those comics that leaves you going "really? That's it?" Which is impressive for a comic featuring the apocalypse, and yet Brian Wood nevertheless makes it feel a bit underwhelming. I aspire, in the future, not to waste two and a half years of my life and $105 on comics this not good.

ODY-C #1

Not my thing, but if it is your thing, very good. Some lovely psychedelia and epic sci-fi, it's all terribly pretty, and the opening octuple splash with two fold-out timelines and maps manage to out-Multiversity Multiversity and out-Hickman Hickman in one shot. Really, this is a fabulous comic that's just not my cup of tea. If psychedelic sci-fi epics sound like yours, do check it out.

New Avengers #27

One of those Hickman comics that relies on the idea that the reader has remembered the mythology he's been building up. I don't, so, you know, oh well. The knowledge that the answer to all of these questions are in some fashion "Secret Wars" is a bit of a non-starter. But mostly... eh.

Stumptown #3

One that's going to have to be reread when it's finished for me, as I've definitely lost all sense of who most of the characters are. It looks very good, and has Rucka's usual sense of characterization, at least in the bits that are self-contained enough to be understandable entirely from this issue, but this is definitely the comic I want to vote "most in need of a recap page and character guide" this week.

The Unwritten Apocalypse #11

I believe that this is the penultimate issue of this. In any case, it's a lovely issue, building to a great cliffhanger and going through some nice paces to get there. Really, really looking forward to the "it's all done" reread of this series.

Trees #7

Another series kicking into high gear, with a sense of things happening, if not of things converging. A bit puzzled by the decision to not bother with location captions, but if Ellis wants that level of attentiveness, he's a writer who's entitled to it, frankly. In any case, things happen. Is interesting.

Lazarus #13

Not only are things heating up, I feel like I understand them without having to reread a ton of past issues. There's no recap page, but pertinent information is given through dialogue reminders, and there's solid character work - I love the poker game amongst the Lazari, in particular. Not a jumping on point, but a solid reminder of why this is one of my favorite series going.

The totally gibberish computer code that is occasionally superimposed
over things is by far my favorite part of this episode.

It’s March 30^th, 2013. I’m in a hotel in Clarion Pennsylvania with my wife, at the halfway point of a drive from Chicago to Connecticut. This is the trip back from our honeymoon, which was a tour of top restaurants in Chicago. We’ve had some of the best food of our lives over the last week, which is making the shitty Applebee’s takeout nachos just that little bit more disappointing. It’s not helping Doctor Who much either, which we’re watching on a laptop having pirated it in a Panera’s. The honeymoon was about as impromptu as all of this: we wanted to check out a restaurant called Next in Chicago, which does three menus a year, each very tightly around a theme. Their theme that spring was The Hunt, and it was all game meats and preservation techniques and the coolest thing ever, and we were thinking about a winter wedding, and were basically going as inspiration. So we added a few other fine dining restaurants and made a nice vacation out of it. You may have noticed the hitch in the chronology already, so to speak - we quietly eloped to secure me health insurance, and then ended up deciding to save on the wedding and just declare it all done, the result of which was to, frankly, get a far better wedding dinner than any bulk caterer is going to give you for, ironically, not actually all that much more a head.

So let’s see, that means I had the Pertwee book coming out, and yeah, I did the last few edits in the hotel. Exchanged e-mails with Mac Rogers and got set up to do the Slate review thing for Hide. No idea what was in the charts, because despite four days of 6-8 hour drives in a single week I mostly just listened to Paul McGann audios because those were what was coming up in Eruditorum. Last War in Albion wasn’t even started. It feels like ages ago.

Strangely, so does this episode. I thought it was crap on transmission, although as I said, circumstances. I quite liked it on this pass, but I liked it very much as a thing that felt over. As the past of the series. I watched it last night after dinner with my wife, on the big TV in the bedroom, with one of the cats curled up on my chest, and it felt like a nice thing to watch before bed, and now she’s at work and I’m writing it up and I have a bunch of interesting things I want to say about it. I remember it both ways - in Clarion and last night. Like time’s been rewritten, which I suppose is what becoming history is.

The Capaldi era starts here, in a sense, though we didn’t know it at the time. So does Clara, though we had no idea what that meant and wouldn’t really all season even though we’re told. That’s the funny thing about this episode, in hindsight. It’s so very March 30^th, 2013. It felt dated the moment it aired, a big post-Olympics James Bond pastiche with a daft bit of pseudo-cyberpunk at its premise. Gremlins in the wi-fi indeed. But in hindsight it feels almost beautifully calibrated to its moment. Already it looks to 2013 what killer plastic shop dummies in hindsight look to 1970. Its calling out Twitter is reasonably timely, and actually a good gag, but it’s juxtaposed with its strange list of social networks called out as Clara takes photos of everybody. I’m open to being corrected on the dialogue, but I’m fairly sure the last one on the list is Habbo, as in Habbo Hotel. Certainly Bebo is still there from The Eleventh Hour, which is funny given that Bebo went offline less than six months after this aired. This is the most beautifully idiosyncratic list of social networks ever. This is so gloriously and unabashedly a fifty-year-old man’s idea of what it is the teenagers are up to these days.

As with most of Doctor Who, that historicization makes the spiky bits show up in sharper relief. The grotesquery of Ms. Kizlet’s fate stands out as a moment of proper brilliance now. Elsewhere, there’s a joke about the riots that feels jarring, we don’t usually think of Doctor Who as being quite this invested in the immediate culture, and certainly not as prone to making light of touchy subjects. It’s a terribly bleak joke, and bleak in the way that Robert Holmes is usually bleak. The more visible cynicism comes in the fact that the megacorporations that hack into our webcams and watch us really are predatory monsters trying to kill us. That the riots were just cover for alien activity is almost obvious given that assumption.

To his credit, Jack Graham got this almost immediately when he tackled this story in his absolutely brilliant “50” countdown, at number seventeen - the only Moffat-era story he proves able to tolerate enough to do. And he’s right - what really jumps out about this story is how utterly cynical the plot is. The Shard is a beautiful setting in this regard, quietly nicking the uncanny effect The War Machines had at the time and updating it for 2013. But that “the abattoir is not a contradiction, no one loves cattle more than Burger King” speech is just so brilliant. Especially in the context of what comes after - of the realization that this is the beginning of Moffat really letting that cynic off its leash to do things like His Last Vow and Dark Water.

This immediately makes it easier to forgive the story’s missteps, which do exist. This is the caveat that really applies to all of the back part of Season Seven, which is an extended exercise in not fucking up too badly that is, in everyone’s eyes, undermined by fucking up at least once, though opinions differ on precisely where. In hindsight this was probably inevitable. Between fannish frustration at the decreased episode orders for 2012 and 2013 and the pressure of the 50^th Anniversary bearing down on the program, the degree to which this season was doomed to be overshadowed by its future seems almost inevitable in hindsight. It’s easy to read too much into the Doctor Who Magzazine rankings, but it’s telling that Day of the Doctor won its 50^th anniversary poll while the remainder of the season came in, from best to worst, in 40^th, 83^rd, 119^th, 120^th, 132^nd, 201st, 203rd, and 233^rd. Put another way, in terms of fan opinion this season was not unlike one that went Castrovalva, The Space Museum, The War Machines, The God Complex, The Gunfighters, Marco Polo, The Armageddon Factor, The Brain of Morbius. The thing is, that sounds like a perfectly pleasant Doctor Who marathon. And so, mostly, is this.

It is probably this (and The Rings of Akhaten) that most benefit from the change in focus. They are, of course, the episodes most concerned with establishing Clara as a character, and it’s telling how much of that actually gets done here. At the time the lack of any actual development on the Impossible Girl arc grated. With all pressure of that arc removed and this episode one that more people are going to come to after Deep Breath than before, it feels like a solid introduction into a character who’s been given phenomenal growth since then. On one level, she starts out as an iteration of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Some of this, it has to be said, is simply down to Jenna Coleman, whose neoteny is significant. The term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” got quickly oversignified, to the point where its coiner has disowned it, but like this episode, it makes sense in a historical moment. Nathan Rabin coined the term in 2007, a year before Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things To Me,” the essay that brought us the concept of mansplaining. Both are terms whose imprecision has bloated them to where they’ve lost much of the power they had, but that power was genuine, and came out of the way in which both essays put words to a peculiarity of how popular culture is experienced by women.

Regardless of the degree to which the MPDG can be rigorously defined, Clara as initially presented is certainly adjacent to it, if only because of the fact that she’s a terribly cute twenty-something involved in a story in which the Doctor goes from brooding depression to loving life again by solving her mystery, which comes awfully close to Rabin’s original statement that “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Because she led with her mysteries, this was the cultural space she began in.

But knowing that she does grow out of it highlights the ways in which it never really applied to her. Perhaps most obviously, in the ways in which it turns out that she understood the Doctor better than he does her. Her calling the TARDIS the Doctor’s snogbox is slyly apt in a way that gets developed significantly by the regeneration into Peter Capaldi. The fact that she makes the Doctor come back the next day turns out to be a much bigger move than it first appeared, and one that speaks to her unique relationship with the Doctor. The fact that she’s not immediately taken by him turns out to be tremendously deft characterization. And her status as a quasi-governess becomes significant characterization about who she is and what she’s good at professionally.

Much of this, in turn, hinges on a quiet transformation in how Matt Smith is used. The departure of the Ponds and resolution of the core business of the River Song arc was, in hindsight, the end of the period where the Doctor had emotional arcs that carried him through the season. His arc for the tail end of Season Seven is an arc in which nothing happens. For seven episodes, he continues to find out that Clara is a perfectly ordinary woman. It’s not until The Name of the Doctor that we get a story in which he can be accurately described as the protagonist. The Eleventh Doctor becomes a performance here as opposed to a character.

In many ways the result is some of Smith’s best work. With the story something that happens around him, he’s satisfyingly liberated. It’s easy to see why he decided to leave, but equally, it’s because he’s mastered the character. There’s nothing left to do with him. This is a victory lap, and an enjoyable one to see, but it’s also tangibly the start of a retirement tour for this version of the Doctor. And again, this plays up the sense of the story as something improved with hindsight.

What’s surprising is how much The Bells of Saint John seems to know all of this. This is the story that makes the most out of the decision to bring back Great Intelligence and play it as a sort of joke villain based on Gareth Roberts’s terribly clever suggestion that the villain of The Lodger should be Meglos, and that the Doctor shouldn’t remember who he is either. Because this is a backwards-looking story - a remake of The Web of Fear and The War Machines. It’s telling that UNIT only shows up at the end, as the endpoint of this sort of story, allowing the imagery to function as its equivalents did in the 1960s.

Indeed, it’s not unfair to suggest that this story is the product of Moffat seeing The Web of Fear and deciding that he was going to do something that would work as well over forty years later as it did. I suspect he succeeded, but that it’ll be a long time before people appreciate the degree to which he did. In some ways, one almost wishes the fate of The Web of Fear on it: one suspects that nobody watching this for a few decades and everyone reducing it to a list of trivia facts about recurring characters would make its surprises and barbs stand out in the sharp relief they deserve. For now, being history will have to do for it.

Hello all. Finished the V for Vendetta chapter, and am mostly through the next round of Logopolis revisions, though I'll probably typeset the bugger before I send it back to Jane so she can check pagination, and that feels like an impossibly large task right now, though that may be because it's 3:30 in the morning and I'm cold and tired.

Still trying to figure out what on Earth I'm going to use this blog for once TARDIS Eruditorum wraps. I mean, Last War in Albion, obviously. And the episode commentaries I owe from the Kickstarter. And the commissioned essays, I suppose. The trouble is, I'm really not eager to take on another massive project, but I also do want to keep up regular blogging. And I'm not sure how best to reconcile those. Maybe some shorter blog series.

Right. Discussion for the week. Hm.

Well, December's waiting for us on Monday. What are you looking forward to in the last month of 2014?

I am a leaf on the wind.

It’s April 6^th, 2013. PJ and Duncan are at number one with “Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble,” which, on the face of it, looks like one of those inexplicable things that happens to the UK charts occasionally. I’m sure Tom Ewing will have fun with it when the time comes. Also charting are Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Nelly, Pink, and Macklemore. In news, and recalling that we haven’t actually covered a lot of that recently given the approach taken for The Bells of Saint John, the world visibly failed to end in 2012, although there was an impressive meteor strike over Chelyabinsk in February. Benedict XVI resigned as pope, and was replaced by Francis. Chris Huhne resigned from the House of Commons after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice over a speeding ticket, same-sex marriage was legalized in England and Wales, and, apparently, Illinois banned the sale of shark fins.

Television, meanwhile, brings the much-maligned The Rings of Akhaten. As with The Bells of Saint John before it, this is an episode where it is slightly surprising how, after less than two years, it already feels like a part of history. Certainly the bizarre ninth-from-bottom finish in the Doctor Who Magazine 50^th anniversary poll feels like as much of a historical aberration as the first place finish for Day of the Doctor. Certainly one imagines this story will always have its detractors, as it belongs to the tradition of Doctor Who as children’s science fantasy that houses such “silly” stories as Kill the Moon and The Space Museum, which is, really, a better comparison than anyone gives this credit for being. Put another way, it’s unabashedly The Sensorites for a more sentimental age, and there are some people for whom that’s always going to be the same sort of challenge “children’s panto J.G. Ballard” is.

More than any other Moffat-era story, more even than his puzzle boxes and narrative substitutions, more than the disjointed and at times dysfunctional River Song arc, this is the episode where the original experience of watching it cannot be recaptured. Everything about this episode is stuff that vanishes into the Impossible Girl arc. This is the one most obscured by it. In hindsight, we know its solution: everything prior to The Name of the Doctor is in fact the origin story of a companion who does something particularly impressive one day to save the Doctor. What we see is actually what we get.

In that regard, it’s significant how much The Rings of Akhaten is Clara-centric. This isn’t a Doctor-lite story, but it might as well be. Almost all of the big moments go to Clara - the Doctor’s only real victory in the entire thing is his convincing Mary Gejelh, although he kind of steps on Clara’s victory in the end (in a way that serves as a metonym for the entire story, really). Instead the focus remains on Clara, who spends just as much of this “being the Doctor” as she does in Flatline. There, as here, the Doctor’s mostly around to explain the plot and wave the sonic screwdriver at things. This is a story that, in a very classical sense, involves learning the rules of a world and then figuring out a clever trick within the rules, and it’s Clara who figures out the trick, employing her own origin story to savvy effect.

It’s a story, in other words, that hinges entirely on who Clara is, hence its culmination in her, quite reasonably and appropriately, demanding the Doctor treat her as a person in her own right instead of as the Impossible Girl mystery. He lies and says he will, and the audience is mostly expected to fall for it. But as with The Bells of Saint John, this is really a disguise for the actual central cleverness of Clara, which is that she picks up on the idea developed in late Pond-era Doctor Who, which is to say, earlier this season, of companions who don’t live on the TARDIS.

What’s weird about Clara, though, is that she’s not so much defined by her life outside the TARDIS as she is defined by the fact that she is the sort of person who would insist on maintaining a life outside the TARDIS. The actual details of her outside life are sketchy and largely fungible. The family she’s staying with in Season Seven vanishes without further mention after The Name of the Doctor, and she has a completely new job and new life come The Day of the Doctor. They casually recast her father the next story, and come Into the Dalek her entire personal life has suddenly shifted to be about her job, until finally her grandmother from The Time of the Doctor pops up again in Dark Water. This is almost as weirdly convoluted an outside life as Tegan Jovanka’s.

So what we have is an episode that mostly hinges on Jenna Coleman’s performance. Notably, she’s had the opportunity to evolve it substantially before having to do these episodes that define her character: not only were Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen shot prior to this and The Bells of Saint John, so were Cold War, Hide, Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, and The Crimson Horror. It’s worth noting that three of those four don’t really require her to play anything about her plot arc at all, and that ultimately, neither do Asylum of the Daleks or The Snowmen, since she’s playing distinct characters in each of them. The result is that she gets a lot of leeway to simply define her performance in terms of how she chooses to approach doing Doctor Who Companion stuff, and she uses that to build a very flexible character, then goes back and starts to explore what makes Clara that flexible.

This also has the effect of making her the most mercurial companion since Josephine Grant. Like Jo, she in many ways ends up being the Manic Pixie Dream Doctor, which is a concept that works surprisingly well. Coleman’s basic way into Clara is always to play her as the storybook heroine. She is the sort of character who seems to spend most of her life listlessly waiting for a Joseph Campbell plot structure to happen along. This could also be said of Amy Pond, but the Ponds were always built the other way around. Amy was a particular twist on the storybook heroine, defined by the twelve year gap caused by the Doctor’s failure to come back for her properly. Clara is never so defined by her origin story, however - instead she’s generally defined by where she’s going, a point emphasized in her 101 Places to See book.

(It’s worth inserting a comment about the Impossible Girl arc, which is that the one regret I have about the disordered posting of River Song stories is that The Name of the Doctor post does not say what I will wish it did when I get there. The use of Clara in subsequent stories, and the way in which her friendship with the Doctor develops highlights in hindsight the way in which that story is a passing of the torch from River to Clara. It’s the story that really completes the conceptual transformation of the show from what it was in Season Seven to what it turns out to have been, and by writing that post prior even to Time and the Doctor I really missed the opportunity to talk about that. For these things we have book versions.)

And so when considering this story’s poor reception, it’s perhaps also worth recalling that The Power of the Daleks got a middling reception with a lot of skepticism over this new Patrick Troughton fellow. Relatedly, in the lead-up to Season Eight, Moffat compared the Coleman/Smith pairing to Sarah Jane Smith being paired with the Third Doctor, saying that she didn’t really come into her own until Tom Baker arrived, which is true enough. But it’s also worth noting that, for all the faults of Season Eleven, Lis Sladen is never one of them. In both cases, however, it’s fair to say that it took more than one season for an actor’s deftness to become apparent. Watched after Season Eight, even before Last Christmas, which, especially if it does turn out to be Clara’s departure story, has a significant chance of forcing us to reevaluate her character, this looks much subtler and more interesting than it did at the time.

Nevertheless, the backbone of this story is and always will be a certain aesthetic of sentiment. It is as close as Doctor Who ever comes to being overt fantasy. Its central metaphor involves using handwavy stuff about psychic energy to explain what is blatantly magic. There’s something a bit Star Wars about it, particularly in its (genuinely impressive) excess of alien costumes, although it is a real bit of fun to figure out what old alien costumes they redressed. (The Hath are all particularly obvious.) But it’s not the Star Wars that people romanticize - it’s the Star Wars that has Ewoks and the Christmas Special. One has to be willing to accept the “this is what we’re doing this week” approach of this episode, and, to a larger extent, this “movie poster” season. That said, if one accepts this episode’s terms, it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

But if we accept that basic logic, there’s another aspect of this story that we have to consider the deliberateness of - one we’ve already alluded to. The Doctor’s behavior towards Clara in this episode starts to tip over into being properly disturbing. It’s not that it’s unjustifiable - he has numerous sound reasons to be suspicious of Clara and to think that she might be some sort of nefarious trap laid for him, and, to be fair, in point of fact she turns out to be, albeit unwittingly and not for any reasons having to do with Asylum of the Daleks or The Snowmen. But there becomes something slightly mean about him as he chooses to lie to her at the end of the episode, declining to reveal why he stalked her past and showed up at her mother’s funeral. Which is indeed creepy, in a kind of Twilight way.

This really does seem deliberate, not least because of the way the final shot of Smith closing the TARDIS door is played, which really does give a sense of slight nefariousness to it. As does the invocation of Susan, and the quiet parallel of the Doctor and the sun that this implicitly makes. (A fitting theme, given the Problem of Susan. One almost would think Neil Cross reads my blog.) And this gets paid off later - indeed, in terms of the shooting schedule it’s already been paid off. One can fairly accuse the Impossible Girl arc of being something created to work better on DVD than on transmission, but equally, it does work on DVD. Well, on Netflix. Who uses DVD anymore?

But this makes two stories in a row that have had an eye toward history’s retrospective. And as with The Bells of Saint John, I envy my circa-2054 successor who gets to look at this story with the lens of history that it so clearly deserves. The story cries for some clever cracked mirror reinterpretation that links the evil sun, the patriarchy, and the Doctor’s fifty year history, preferably in light of some 30s story that finally brings back Susan with a new regeneration. Already there’s been too much history to pretend that it’s April 6^th, 2013. At least in terms of The Rings of Akhaten, that seems unquestionably a good thing.

This is the first of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore's work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen 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 a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore did some underground-style work for Sounds, a newspaper strip called Maxwell the Magic Cat, some work for Marvel UK on Doctor Who and Star Wars comics, numerous Future Shocks and Time Twisters for 2000 AD, the continuing serials Skizz and D.R. & Quinch for the same magazine, a run on Captain Britain for Marvel UK, and broke out in the United States working on Swamp Thing for DC Comics. Concurrently with all of that, he wrote a serial called V for Vendetta in the British quasi-monthly anthology Warrior...

"Please. For us. For all of us... Laissez les bontemps rouler."-Alan Moore, Swamp Thing

Figure 551: The chillingly prescient
image of widespread CCTV cameras
in London. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from "The Villain"
in Warrior #1, 1982)

From its first installment, back in 1982, amidst Moore’s earliest works, V for Vendetta crackles with mad gusto. The first page brazenly sets a scene with all the fascist gusto of 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd, only with none of the broad comedic satire that characterized that strip. Instead it is an all too familiar near-future world, recognizably just a few of history’s happenstances removed from the world of its readers. It is a few months shy of sixteen years in the future, with an unsettlingly phrased radio broadcast identified as the “Voice of Fate.” The language is plastic and stilted, quietly evoking Moore and Lloyd’s previous collaboration on a story for Doctor Who featuring the evil plastic alien Autons: it is “the fifth of the eleventh, nineteen-ninety-seven,” a declaration that is followed by a bizarrely precise weather forecast promising that “the weather will be fine until 12:07 A.M. when a shower will commence lasting until 1:30 A.M.” Note the care with which Moore sets up the unsettling nature of this - the first number is weirdly over-specific, whereas the second is a nice, round number like one would expect from a weather forecast. This broadcast is contrasted with David Lloyd’s starkly monochromatic art, which begins with a soaring skyline before cutting to a mass of people heading home in wide shot. A third panel focuses on a detail from the image, a CCTV camera pointed at the street, a sign proclaiming, “FOR YOUR PROTECTION.”

Figure 552: The spartan squalor of Evey's apartment.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from "The
Villain" in Warrior #1, 1982)

From this introduction, the art and voiceover both take a turn for the dark. The Voice of Fate says that “the Brixton and Streatham areas are quarantine zones as of today,” as militaristic men patrol a jet-black street in an equally jet-black car, their authoritarian uniforms pillars of light within the film noir abyss. “Productivity reports from Herefordshire indicate a possible end to meat rationing starting from mid-February 1998,” and note the contrast to the date earlier on the page, while a scared-looking girl applies make-up. The productivity reports are, it is instantly obvious, bullshit. There is no chance of meat rationing ending in February of 1998, and the crap apartment of the unnamed female hammers home the point that this is a world that’s in just sixteen years gone to complete shit. Immediately a Moore devotee gets the sense of Roxy from Moore’s later Skizz - the squalid and resignedly accepted life of poverty’s misery, far worse in this world than the slice-of-life Birmingham of 1983.

Figure 553: The semiotically dense first glimpse of the Shadow Gallery.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from "The Villain" in Warrior
#1, 1982)

The page’s last panel is a wide shot of a man approaching a mirror, seen from behind, and too far from the mirror for his face to be visible. He is bisected by shadow, half-white, half-black, himself a figure bisecting the psychedelic Rorschach Blot of a carpet. The mirror is a bulb-lit vanity clearly from an actor’s dressing room. Atop it are a wig and mask. The walls of the room are plastered with posters for classic films, but with a clear cinephile’s selection. The horror super-cast of Basil Rathbone teaming up to kill the Boris Karloff’s monstrous but sympathetic Frankenstein (his last turn in the part), who tragically obeys only the villainous and psychotic blacksmith Ygor (played by Béla Lugosi) sits next to a poster for the decade-later James Cagney vehicle White Heat, in which Cagney scintillates as a mad gangster. Next to them is a poster for the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue, also starring Lugosi as a marvelously mad scientist. A bookshelf on the opposite side of the room contains four books with visible titles: Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Karl Marx’s Capital, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The captions continue, talking about a police raid upon “what is believed to be a major terrorist ring,” adding another layer to this rich collage of ostentatious villainy both glamorous and monstrous, white and black as the page itself.

Figure 554: Evey and V are juxtaposed as the first chapter's titlecard is
displayed. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from Warrior #1,
1982)

The scene continues upon the second page, with the unnamed female and the male both getting dressed, the man pulling on gloves and grinning alabaster mask, then standing revealed before the mirror, all theatrical flourish, wide cloak and dramatic hat. To his right, a close-up of the poster for White Heat, the caption - the sign-off of the radio broadcast - obscures some of the poster, so that it reads simply “Jimmy … in his New Hit from Warner Bros.” Below it, a second placard, all 30s cabaret lettering, proclaims: “Chapter One / THE VILLAIN.” The lefthand adjacent panel features the young girl, her face an alabaster mask of worry as she checks her makeup one last time, implicit but unacknowledged plural to the chapter’s title.

Figure 555: The scene shift in the final three panels of page two is
emphasized with a shift towards panels dominated by blacks, in contrast
with Figure 554. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from "The
Villain" in Warrior #1, 1982)

As he is working within the British tradition of short chapters from which he found liberation in DC’s twenty-two page periodicals, Moore opts to split the page between this and a second scene, a transition Lloyd emphasizes by leaving the top two rows of panels dominated by whites, and the bottom two anchored by blacks. A man smokes a pipe and stands against the corner of a brick building. Moore indulges in one of V for Vendetta’s handful of non-diegetic narrative captions, laying out a moral thesis statement on which to pin this entire procession of lurid and uncensored mischief. “Parliament’s cold shadow,” Moore writes in familiar iambs, “falls on Westminster Bridge and she shivers. There was power here once, power that decided the destiny of millions. Her transactions, her decisions, are insignificant. They affect no one… except her.” The third person feminine pronoun refers to the woman seen applying makeup. “Mister,” she asks, Zelda Estrella lettering the dialogue box smaller than the text of the captions. “…Uh…would…would you like to…uh…” she stammers, awkward and pathetic, “sleep with me or anything? … I mean… uh… for money?” she finishes, meekly and awkwardly, confirming the narration’s assessment of her insignificance.

Figure 556: The thin,
cruel smile of the
Fingerman Evey foolishly
attempts to proposition.
(Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from "
The Villain" in Warrior #1,
1982)

The third page opens with a reverse shot of the man she’s tried to pick up, smiling thinly and proclaiming her efforts “the clumsiest bit of propositioning I’ve ever heard.” He suggests that she’s not been doing this long, and she confirms, wincing that “I must be really terrible” as “it’s my first night.” She’s got a job, she explains, but it doesn’t pay enough, and she really needs the money - a familiar litany of working class misery, in other words. “I’m sixteen,” she insists, heartbreakingly. “I know what I’m doing.” The man points out that she does not, in fact, reaching into his trench coat and pulling out a badge, and explaining that “if you did you wouldn’t have picked a vice detail on stakeout.”

Figure 557: Evey's terrified vulnerability is contrasted
with Norsefire's fascist vision of strength. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from "The Villain" in
Warrior #1, 1982)

With this, his colleagues step from the shadows, revealing five men being employed to take in one harmless would-be prostitute, and the “Fingerman” (as the woman calls him) explains that prostitution is “a Class-H offence. That means we get to decide what happens to you. That’s our perogative.” The woman begs them not to kill her, her letters becoming small and meek again, framing the propaganda poster of whatever sick regime this is, its slogan stamped “STRENGTH THROUGH PURITY PURITY THROUGH FAITH.” She pleads that she’ll “do anything you want,” but the pigs explain how this will actually work to her: “You’ve got it all wrong, miss. You’ll do anything we want and then we’ll kill you. That’s our perogative,” he repeats, by way of explanation, and Lloyd draws a narrow-panneled close-up of her wide-eyed, tear-stained face on the verge of rape, in the style of Frank Miller’s beautifully sliced rectangles of noir in Daredevil.

Figure 558: Lloyd cuts from a close-up on Evey's terrified face to the
reveal of V, lighting stressing his moral ambiguity. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by David Lloyd, from "The Villain" in Warrior #1, 1982)

He then goes out to a wider panel in which the cloaked figure, unseen since the title card, stands, again cast half in brilliant white and half in printer’s shadow, and begins to speak his rhyme: “The multiplying villainies of nature do swarm upon him,” he proclaims, beginning to quote an account of Macbeth’s valor in combat from the first act of Shakespeare’s play, while one of the Fingermen begins the question, “who the hell…,” a note on which the page ends, marking the halfway point of the installment.

Figure 559: V rushes towards Evey. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from "The Villain" in Warrior #1, 1982)

The fourth page opens with a scene of chaos - the masked man advances forward, continuing his monologue from Macbeth, while the Fingermen attempt to block his path and speculate as to his identity, suggesting that he’s “some kinda retard got out of a hospital,” and warn him that he’s “in trouble, chum. Big trouble.. This woman is a criminal. We’re police officers. She’s wanted for interrogation, so keep your…,” but before the man can finish his sentence, the nature of the scene shifts out from under him. The second row of panels begins with a panel of a man holding a detached hand, staring at it as he completes the thought from the preceding panel: “hands off?” The masked man is gone from the panel, his cloak billowing behind him, showing that he’s already moved on from this scene. The next panel shows where - the detached hand is still visible in the top left of the panel, but the image is dominated by the masked man, shown from behind, cloak still furling out behind him as he charges towards the girl. The cloak fills most of the frame, and it is impossible to tell exactly what he’s doing, but the expression of agony on one of the Fingermen’s faces and the way in which the other one seems to have been thrown backwards suggests violence. “Disdaining fortune with his brandished steel, which smoked with bloody execution, like Valour’s minion carved out his passage till he faced the slave,” the masked man continues to narrate as he reaches the girl, who stares at him, meekly saying “oh” in the smallest of letters. The masked man faces to the right, implicitly completing the motion implied by his rushing out of shot at the first panel in the sequence. Having reached her, he turns to the Fingermen, firing off tear gas and disappearing amidst their confusion.

Figure 560: A man explodes. (Written by Alan Moore, art
by David Lloyd, from "The Villain" in Warrior #1, 1982)

It is this confusion that opens the fifth page, as the man holding the detached hand asks, “I got his hand. What shall I do with his…” Once again, he does not get to finish the thought, this time due to the hand’s unexpected and fatal detonation. “Oh Jesus,” one of the two surviving Fingermen says in horror, trying to figure out how his steadfast and reliable gig as a beat cop for a fascist authority has unexpectedly turned into a massacre at the hands of a ridiculously dressed man quoting Shakespeare. “We’ve got to find him,” the other says firmly, “or the Head will have our guts.” But the mysterious figure has already exited the scene - in the six panels of the Fingermen reacting to his attack, he is visible in only one, where they are shown in a long shot from above and behind, while in the foreground the man’s boots and cape are visible, depicted in pure and unadulterated black.

Figure 561: V gives a
surprisingly thorough and
accurate explanation of
himself. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by David Lloyd,
from "The Villain" in Warrior
#1, 1982)

It is not until the page’s third row of panels that the masked man makes a full return, sitting on a roof top with the girl he’s just saved from a grisly death, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben visible across the Thames in the background. “You… you rescued me!” she exclaims, “like in a story! I don’t believe it. Wh-who are you?” The man’s reply is given in a panel consisting of a close-up of his masked face, his eyes further shrouded by the shadow of his hat brim. “Me?” he asks. “I’m the king of the twentieth century. I’m the bogeyman. The villain. The black sheep of the family,” he continues, drawing a tacit link with the accoutrements initially seen in what might either be described as his lair or his dressing room and their common thread of embracing ostentatious villainy and discarded radicalism, whether generally socially acceptable as with Utopia, totally socially unacceptable, as with Mein Kampf, or in a trickier space in between as with Capital. Understandably puzzled by his overtly cryptic answer, the girl asks what he’s doing hanging around Westminster at night, to which the man explains that “tonight is special. Tonight is a celebration. A grand opening. Were you never taught the rhyme,” he asks.

From worst to best, with everything being something I like enough to pay for.

Gotham Academy #3

I admit, I'm thinking of dropping this. Three issues in, and each one I've wanted to enjoy more than I do. The characters aren't standing out for me, the plots aren't grabbing me, and this is settling in as a book I like the idea of rather more than I actually like paying for. One or two more, and I may sit down and reread them as a chunk to see if the characters get better defined for me before I do, but I'm finding disappointment growing here.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #5

It's a very good week to put this second from bottom, let me say. Interesting, good character work here. Good stuff here, and a story that really did benefit from the extra issue to breathe. And I'm really curious about the rapidly inflating TARDIS crew, not least because the book remains so focused on Alice Obiefune as the secondary lead, making Arc and Jones odd sort of side characters. Is this the best Doctor Who comic ever? I think it might be.

Chew #45

This came in strong this week. After playing at a mass of ugly deaths last week, this one goes in a surprising direction, with a kind of beautifully shocking last page twist that feels, to me, exactly as mean as it should be. I'm really finding myself to be into this book at the moment, which is quite nice.

Uber #20

A bit of a slow issue for Uber. The rapidly spiralling sense of world in Uber occasionally makes for tough going, and this is, for me, an example. Much of this issue consists of events that were made basically inevitable by past issues, so that it feels slightly glacial. Gillen knows how to mash the "disturbing as fuck" button hard enough to cover the gaps, and the use of Mengele is very, very savvy. And then the end is smart and clever and interesting. I love this book, even on the off months.

Angela: Asgard's Assassin #1

So, Kieron Gillen does an Asgardian take on Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons. I was a bit leery of this one, simply because it's such an odd property to put Gillen on, and the co-author vaguely suggests that this could be one of those "have a major writer half-involved in the first arc and then wander off" books that Marvel pulls occasionally. The structure here is really sharp and interesting, though, with Gillen writing the present-day section, and Marguerite Bennett doing the flashback in the middle. Good first issue. Worth checking out.

Crossed +One Hundred #1

A deliciously slow, methodical start to this comic, of the sort that every writer wishes they could do, but really only Alan Moore working for Avatar could get away with. It does the thing that many annoying first issues do of simply introducing the book's premise. But this is Alan Moore, and the book's premise is a beautifully layered slab of theme. Moore has said that Steve Moore's death galvanized him into doing more work, and one suspects this is the sort of thing that comes from that. It's using a lot of the tricks of classic 2000 AD - a sci-fi future that's not just visibly but overly rooted in the present (the characters use an idiosyncratic and invented dialogue in which phrases like AFAWK and "answer your ask"), but with the freedom of both pacing and content that Avatar offers. It's far too early to know if this is a Major Work of Moore's or not, but it's genuinely thrilling to have twenty-four pages of new Alan Moore out, especially with the knowledge that there's more coming next month.

"Sorry, sorry, I'll sing 'Rio' instead."

It’s April 13^th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one, with Pink, Justin Timberlake, Nelly, Bruno Mars, and Bastille also charting. In news, things are mostly sleepy. There’s a beautiful entry on the Wikipedia list of historical events reading “Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley decides to tax the rain,” which apparently really just means that there’s a new tax on homes to help fund preservation efforts of the Chesapeake. The entire Paris Brown silliness happens, which probably speaks volumes about the tenor of UK culture right about then, though what it says is certainly open to interpretation. And Margaret Thatcher dies a few days before this, which had the sort of cultural impact you’d expect given what she came to represent in popular culture.

On television, Doctor Who proves a bit too prescient, launching its 80s themed story in the wake of all of this. I’m sure there’s a reading that’s long on synchronicity to be made here, but I feel like 2014 isn’t the time to make it. Let’s instead focus on what this story is doing, because I do think that’s interesting in this case. On paper, the pairing of Gatiss and Mackinnon seems like it should be perfect in every regard except for quality. Both are people one describes with the backhanded compliment “workmanlike.” Gatiss’s scripts are, as we’ve by now thoroughly established, long on nostalgic recreations of things that worked in the past. Mackinnon, who we’ve not really talked about at great length, is a functional director with a weakness for colored lighting. Taken together, one expects a bog standard episode of Doctor Who, which is not strictly speaking an inaccurate way of describing Cold War.

Since a running theme so far in our coverage of Season 7B has been its early historicization, it’s perhaps worth looking at Mackinnon’s contributions to Season Eight, since he directed 25% of it, and it gives a better sense of what he’s capable of than The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and The Power of Three. His episodes are generally quite good - Listen is a very credible pick for season’s best. I was critical of the direction of Time Heist, and I stand by the claim that its attempt to mask its use of the same corridor through rapid changes of lighting color was a weakness in an episode without any major strengths. But even Listen is a functional job in which Mackinnon’s main job is to make the five settings feel distinct so that the episode is easy to follow. And Flatline is smart and efficient, much like its script. One can argue that this makes him as good as his material, but the other way of looking at that is that he can reliably get his teeth into the structure of a story and sell the big moments.

Similarly, Gatiss has approached this particular bit of unabashed nostalgia with a sort of steely determinism. The production circumstances are, in this case, revealing. Moffat initially took the view that bringing back the Ice Warriors was a bad idea. This is not an unreasonable assessment, given that they are a bunch of green lizards from Mars named the Ice Warriors. And thus the script looks like an attempt to convince a skeptical audience that this is worth doing in the first place. But notably, that audience is Steven Moffat, not some paranoid conception of the general public. And so the case is delivered with a certain degree of persuasiveness that broadly similar stories sometimes lack.

Given this, the Gatiss/Mackinnon pairing ends up having their major flaw counterbalanced. With both of them, the biggest problem is that they stop with their first idea. But in this case, the most obvious ideas are generally pretty good. What are the things that have worked about the Ice Warriors? They’ve got a good voice, they’re fun in shadowy close quarters, and they’re not always bad guys. The episode is designed around all three. The base under siege is translated to the Cold War that it always represented anyway. Dim flashing lights and wide angel lenses give a good visual aesthetic. Raiding the cast of Game of Thrones was inevitable, and it’s worth noting that they hired Gatiss for a small part the next year. And, of course, there’s the Ice Warrior outside of its armor, which is one of the most obvious twists you can do, and yet nevertheless a good one that meshes well with all the other choices.

Another way of putting this is that, as with The Unquiet Dead, Gatiss is picking on good material. Much of 2013 (and New Year’s Day of 2014) makes somewhat more sense if you know that The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear were recovered, simply because it explains why the Troughton era was on everyone’s mind. Cold War is tangibly a clinical dissection of why those stories worked. He keeps the focus on two things Doctor Who can reliably do well: spooky corridors and above average British actors having moral debates. And he keeps the pace up with some decent gags and a good instinct for how to balance lampshading the plot holes and reveling in a line like “My world is dead but now there will be a second red planet. Red with the blood of humanity!”

Notably, though, where Moffat responded to The Web of Fear by nicking an obscure recurring villain and a mood, Gatiss took equally from Enemy of the World and David Whitaker, recalling that when Doctor Who works best is when it attempts to do serious drama with slightly ludicrous stakes. Big green lizard men are going to blow up the world, so let’s have an urgent debate about violence as a cycle. The result is something that, it has to be admitted, understands why stories like this were so common in 1968 and hits the highlights efficiently. This is a configuration of ideas and themes that has proven to be able to withstand doing multiple times. As a result, it is perfect for Gatiss.

In a sense, the other real influence is Robert Holmes, who was always a specialist at taking a premise and running through its most obvious configurations and set pieces. This skill is at the heart of the Gatiss/Mackinnon collaboration and why it is such a good pairing. Cold War is written as an exercise in ticking the boxes of “what makes a good Ice Warriors story,” and Mackinnon is at his best when given a list of big scenes to accomplish.

Credit also has to be given to Andy Pryor, who does well with the three Russians. Liam Cunningham brings a Nicholas Courtneyesque twinkle to the commanding officer, Tobias Menzies is perfectly willing to just be as hated as the part calls for, and David Warner is one of those Philip Madoc bits of Doctor Who casting: never the wrong move. Gatiss’s script is mindful that forty-five minute episodes do best by rapidly pairing off actors in a “variations on a theme” approach as opposed to slowly exploring a character’s change of heart, and so all three, along with Nicholas Briggs, who’s called upon to once again come up with a way to act in monster voice, and the two regulars have to be on form.

As for the regulars, Jenna Coleman’s clearly arrived ahead of her character arc at the moment, but is clearly enjoying finding a new set of ways to do Doctor Who companion things each week. Her performance is the most obvious thing to have benefitted from a year’s distance, because in hindsight you can watch how she put together the character she played in Season Eight. Her decision to keep reinventing her take on “generic companion” (and it’s worth remembering that this was filmed well before The Snowmen, and ages before Bells of Saint John and The Rings of Akhaten) had the price of looking inconsistent in Season Seven, but it fit well with both the Impossible Girl arc and the “movie posters” idea, and ended up giving her a uniquely flexible character once the underlying consistency of the performance started to solidify and then get paid off in characterization. She pounces upon the little moments the script offers her, and even when they’re clearly built as somewhat forced “what haven’t we had a companion do yet” moments (“Sing Duran Duran!” “Actually not run off!”), she makes something of them. Her scenes with David Warner are delightful in this regard, and in some ways a template for the Twelfth Doctor era: Jenna Coleman and an older actor playing stock characters with a slight twist on them. In this regard, it’s telling that they’re the only place in the script where Gatiss is going past the most obvious idea.

Which in turn highlights the biggest problem. Jenna Coleman doesn’t spend this one with the Twelfth Doctor. She spends it with Matt Smith, who has a rough time with this one. He picks up once the peculiarities of his relationship with Clara start giving him new things to do, but with this as the only story of the eight to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Impossible Girl arc and shot as only his second story with Coleman, he’s in an awkward place where he’s clearly missing Gillan and Darvill, but doesn’t have anything to replace them with in his performance yet. The degree to which Cold War can also be read as an attempt to do Warriors of the Deep correctly is ironic, as Smith is reduced to the same sort of thing Davison had to do with bad scripts, which is to just emote desperately and ineffectually until the plot runs out. You can almost see the moment when he finally runs out of ideas in the climax. It’s a rare episode where he’s the weak link, and there really is the sense that he’s reached the end of what he can do with the character. Which, fair enough. It’s fitting that, of all the episodes in his third season, it should be the unabashed Troughton homage that demonstrates why his suggestion that three years in the part is about right holds so much merit.

As with all Gatiss stories, this comes perilously close to being a review blog. That is in some ways inevitable with Season 7B, and indeed worth doing again now, while the era is still relevant to the present of the show, but freed from the gnawing terror of “is it going to stick the landing in November?” The movie posters approach is explicitly putting this series in the realm of pop music. The concern becomes “what’s the big statement this week,” with a series of Doctor Who being an exercise in owning a chunk of culture for a few months. There’s a delicate balance to this, with every story having to make a case for itself in contrast with the ones around it while contributing to the greater idea of Doctor Who. Everything has the weight of a definitive statement. Reviewing feels natural in response.

But let’s try to avoid that in favor of another way of looking at this in the context of Doctor Who’s Fiftieth Year. This is one of the few stories in 2013 you can point to as a reason why Doctor Who has made it this far in the first place. Which isn’t just that the basic premise is good, but that the show has a strong back catalogue that justifies its existence at any given moment. You don’t get to fifty years without a back catalogue worth raiding. The fiftieth anniversary was rightly concerned about being careful to look forward as much as backwards, but it would have felt painfully incomplete without a story that unabashedly offered a greatest hits parade. (In some ways, the Duran Duran bits exemplify the approach taken.)

But if it is necessary to let this become a review blog, let’s make it unambiguous that this is a positive review. I have been harsh on several Gatiss stories, and I stand by that, but it’s also the case that Gatiss-bashing has become a shibboleth for certain fan ideologies to an extent that’s undeserved. This story demonstrates the worth of the skills Gatiss brings to the toolbox. If you’re going to do Doctor Who specifically, a half-century on, you really do have to justify it by showing that the old standards still have legs. In many ways, the biggest problem with those Gatiss stories that have gone awry is that he’s the only one who bothers to put in some effort in perfecting old standards, while directors and actors phone it in and figure that this is one of the filler episodes. Give Gatiss a director and a set of actors who are up for the same game of carefully curating the past for its best moments and showing why they were good, however, and you get stuff that the season would genuinely be weaker without.

So, next week you can all expect a review of The Game, a 70s-set spy series by Toby Whithouse, which is wrapping up a first run on BBC America despite being made by the BBC proper. That's supported by the Patreon, which is undergoing a bit of a transformation. It'll be funding that and the two Christmas posts (one on Last Christmas, one season wrap-up) this month. Next month, it'll fund something as of yet determined (I'm tempted to have it be Sherlock Season Three). And come February and beyond, it'll fund... whatever goes up on this site.

Ultimately, the nature of that is going to be up to a vote of the backers on Patreon, and the amount of it will be determined by how much the Patreon makes. If it makes a solid $400+ a week, thrice-weekly content of some sort remains very viable. If it makes less than that, we'll see. Last War in Albion will of course run at least once a week until the end of time, but other than that, it'll be the Patreon that determines what happens at this blog, and how often.

So, if you're interested in having a voice over what sorts of things I cover, backing the Patreon as it funds December and January's content and weighing in when I actually start framing those numbers and laying out options would be a good idea.

(Right now, the leading candidate in my mind is a Game of Thrones blog, relatively short run, going episode by episode. Other possibilities include the episode commentaries, should those prove popular. Or a book of some sort. Or video game writing. Or who knows.)

So, please consider backing the future of this blog on Patreon. More discussion there. And here, if you like.

You mean the episode isn't about taxidermy?

It’s April 20^th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one with “Need U (100 Percent,” with Nelly, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, and the Wizard of Oz Film Cast also charting. Wonder how that happened. In news, two bombs are detonated at the Boston Marathon, killing three people. One of the bombers is arrested a few days later - the other is killed in a police firefight. Everyone is far angrier about this than the explosion of a storage facility in Texas owned by the West Fertilizer Company, which killed fifteen people, and was due largely to corporate negligence and not angry teenagers. Weird how that works.

On television, meanwhile, we have Hide, which, within the context of Season Seven, begs to be read as the definitive haunted house story. But what does this mean? The haunted house, as a symbol, speaks of the decay of history. The haunted house is always a mansion: a monument to opulence and privilege. And yet it always marks the places where that privilege has rotted away and become twisted. This rot is, inevitably, caused by history: by some event that cannot be moved past. A haunting, in other words, is caused by a past event that is at once the end of a historical progression (inasmuch as all that can follow it is its own anguished reiteration) and nevertheless buried beneath the historical progression that happened anyway.

In a previous discussion of haunted houses, we identified the image of the lens - a geometric figure created by two arcs - as crucial to understanding history within Doctor Who. The haunted house, then, is a cracked lens - a figure created by one complete arc (history’s progress) and a broken arc (the traumatic event). Where the usual lens of history serves as a vision that entombs history between the twin poles of start and finish, the haunted house suggests a lack of completion - it suggests that history eventually peters out and collapses inward, becoming a festering wound.

And yet it also has to be noted that Caliburn House breaks the rules of haunted houses. There is, in fact, no historical trauma to be had. The ghost, far from being an object from the past, is in fact, a time traveller from the future. In this sense, the completed arc of the haunted house’s broken lens is in fact absent. But in another sense, the lens is still cracked - its just that the broken part is not the progress into the future, but the idea that events are rooted in the past. None of the causes of Caliburn House’s haunting have actually happened. There is no past moment to be stuck on. Indeed, nothing is stuck at all - the haunting is not a repeated trauma, but a single moment that plays out over the entirety of history. The definitive haunted house story, in other words, doesn’t actually have a haunted house in it.

Except that it does. Or, at least, it has a cracked lens, an image that appears within Hide in three senses. First, it appears literallyin the form of the gate between the two universes. Second, it appears in the form of the viewer’s gaze when they look upon the Crooked Man and his twisted form. And finally it exists in terms of the narrative’s structure, which does not quite have an ending, but which instead runs slightly past its ending, grafting on a quick extra adventure that it then suddenly cuts short without completely resolving. And so we have a haunted house story that contains no haunted houses as such, but that is instead itself a haunted house.

What, then, is its ghost? What haunts Hide? In a factual sense, the answer is Nigel Kneale, whose play The Stone Tape is an obvious inspiration for Hide. Indeed, in its original conception the story was to team the Doctor up with Bernard Quatermass, but this was dropped for copyright reasons, and Quatermass’s character became Professor Palmer instead. This would have been a strange mash-up. In many ways, Doctor Who has always been a response against Kneale. For Kneale, the universe is a fundamentally terrifying and malevolent place, with humanity a desperate and fragile flame in the furious dark. Doctor Who, on the other hand, sees the universe as a place of vast and essentially limitless wonder, with humanity existing as a vessel for experiencing that wonder.

Hide, clearly, wants to end up on the Doctor Who end of things. The fact that the quasi-Quatermass figure falls in love in a story that proclaims love to be the sole exception to the universal rule that everything ends speaks volumes. It doesn’t just reject Kneale’s worldview, it nicks his most iconic character and converts him to Doctor Who’s ideology. It’s beautifully cheeky in this regard.

And yet there’s still more to this - some underlying knot we’ve not yet unpicked. Love, we are told, is the sole thing that doesn’t end. And yet the rejection of endings - of the second point of history’s lens - is more associated with the haunted house. A haunting, after all, is itself the rejection of endings - of the idea that an event must simply happen and be over. A haunting is nothing save for an endless repetition. And so when the Doctor proclaims this to not be a ghost story but rather a love story, within the rules of the story itself, he’s not even made any sort of distinction.

But this sort of contradiction seems oddly essential to the story. Consider, after all, a supremely basic question: why is the story called Hide? Nobody hides within it, after all. Hiding is neither the solution nor the problem. The word “hide” appears once, late in the story, when the Doctor is addressing the unseen Crooked Man: “What do you want? To frighten me, I suppose, eh? Because that's what you do. You hide. You're the bogeyman under the bed, seeking whom you may devour.” But this is, ultimately, untrue. This is not what the Crooked Man does. It is not what the Crooked Man wants. The only other equivalent word to appear is “hidden,” which comes up earlier: “The most compassionate people you'll ever meet, empathics. And the loneliest. I mean, exposing themselves to all those hidden feelings, all that guilt, pain and sorrow and…” Certainly there hidden feelings in the story, or, at least, it’s not an absurd thing to bring up.

But this in many ways makes the title stranger. The fact that it exists in the imperative would, after all, suggest that the episode is endorsing hiding. And yet inasmuch as it’s about hiding, hiding would seem to be a negative thing. Just as the story is unable to quite reject the logic of a ghost story in favor of that of a love story, it is unable to actually speak out against hiding one’s feelings. One is reminded of the idea of haunting in a Derridean sense - of rejected meanings that endlessly lurk at the edges of speech, enabling deconstructive readings.

Which brings us to the big thing. Somewhat astonishingly, when this first aired and I was discussing it with Mac Rogers in the course of notching my first-ever byline for Slate, both he and I managed to completely miss the fact that the machine the Doctor builds is called a “psychochronograph.” This is, of course, the great ambiguous shout-out to TARDIS Eruditorum. I mean, it’s probably just a coincidence. Certainly just a coincidence. Really, the odds that a random episode of Doctor Who included a deliberate nod to my blog are essentially nil.

And yet the structure of it is so utterly compelling. A circle of clocks that serves to amplify psychic powers. It is difficult not to recall Evil of the Daleks and its time machine of mirrors and static electricity, that worked on the premise that you could repel an image out of a mirror and into reality. In both cases, we seem to have a technology of symbols - something that is magic, not in the lazy sense with which things in genre fiction that are not easily explained with pseudoscience are often called magic, but in the sense of working according to the actual logic of magic, whereby representation and object are inexorably, fundamentally linked.

But perhaps more importantly, if this story is going to be haunted by the irreducibility of ghosts and by its inability to reject hiding, why shouldn’t it also be haunted by me? It makes sense, after all. TARDIS Eruditorum has always, by dint of its inspiration, been tacitly allied with Moffat-era Doctor Who. It exists because I had something of an excess of fandom for Season Five, and has been written entirely under the Moffat era. That has always influenced its sense of what Doctor Who is. And so it’s almost inevitable that once it got far enough into the Moffat era it would find itself lurking at the edges. Indeed, one can readily construct an analogy between this blog’s relationship with Doctor Who and Hide. This blog exists in the future from all the Doctor Who it covers, and yet reaches back and haunts the entire thing.

From this perspective, however, the Moffat era comes to complete our lens, anchoring Doctor Who between two points: An Unearthly Child and the Moffat era. Grandfather Teleology strikes again. Hide, in this respect, becomes the epitome of Doctor Who - the most absolute and basic representation of what TARDIS Eruditorum views the program as being. This is not quite a bad thing. It is, after all, quite a good episode. But it’s a strangely simple thing. There’s not much to it - a sequence of twists and reveals such that the entire episode and haunted house turn out to be a puzzle box, collapsable into a single explanation. It’s capable, even entertaining, but strangely singular.

No. Better to break the lens. Given the choice between the shattered glass of history left to rot and the idea that we could ever be contained in a single, definitive identity? The cracked lens, every time. In that regard, then, Hide is the epitome of what we do here, not because it encapsulates it, but because it serves as the break - as the crack. As the strange point of singularity that warps the view, so that we may pick up Doctor Who and peer through it. This is, after all, the point of psychochronography. To reorder history. To give us an alternative perspective on the story of how we got to be like this. Psychochronography is a cracked lens.

And this, perhaps, is the truth of the story’s title. The thing that is secretly hiding within this story. It’s in the truth of how the house works, and how it has always worked. It’s not haunted by the past, but by the future - the unknown resolution that will spider backwards through the glass of history, skewing and warping all previous visions. It’s haunted by all the things we do not know we are the history of. In this regard, it’s worth again looking at Ghost Light, from which we got the idea of the lens, and recalling that what disrupted the absolute fixity of the mad god’s history was the possibility of imaginary and impossible creatures. And perhaps also recalling the adage from The Mind Robber. “When someone writes about an incident after it's happened, that is history. But when the writing comes first, that's fiction.” Or, to put it another way, all imagination is the future.

Which brings us at last to this notion of definitive takes on things, seemingly so central to this, the Movie Posters season, and the vital thing we ought realize about the notion of the definitive: the sole reason to have a definitive take on something, in the end, is so that you can do a weird variation on it later. That’s the point of the definitive, when it comes to Doctor Who. No, more than that. That’s the point of Doctor Who: to be a cracked lens with which to look on definitive things.

This is the second of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore's work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen 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 a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore's first five pages of V for Vendetta ended with the title character and the young girl Evey atop a roof, conversing...

"We would look out of the window every morning to make sure the bitch hadn't put Daleks on the streets yet." - Warren Ellis, on Margaret Thatcher

Figure 562: The explosion of the Houses of Parliament. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from "The Villain" in Warrior
#1, 1982)

This leaves only Moore’s sixth and most audacious page. It opens with an extreme close-up on the man, so that only one slit eye of his mask and its painted black curl of an eyebrow is visible. He intones the aforementioned rhyme: “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason,” he continues, and at once, at for any of the readership for whom the mere shape and visual of his outfit and mask was not sufficient to identify the character he is playing, he stands revealed as a man dressed in a Guy Fawkes costume. As he provides the final three iambs of his rhyme, “should ever be forgot,” the tacit promise of this costume is suddenly and triumphantly realized. The panel displays the man from behind, so that the audience looks over his shoulder towards the Houses of Parliament, which are in the midst of exploding. The remains of what was once the clock tower burst outwards, black fragments shattering against the white background of the explosion, the circles of the clock faces still implied in the negative space of the devastation. This is followed by another extremely narrow panel, showing the girl’s shocked reaction with a close-up of one bulging eye - notably the left one, where the man’s eye two panels earlier was the right, implicitly constructing a completed face framing the destruction of London’s single most iconic landmark. “The Houses of Parliament,” the girl exclaims. “Did you do that?”

Figure 563: The artist signs his work. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David
Lloyd, from "The Villain" in Warrior #1, 1982)

“I did that,” the man replies simply. And as he does, the narrative captions return: “the rumble of the explosion has not yet died away as from far below comes the rattle of smaller reports. And suddenly the sky is alight with…” it trails off, and the trail of thought is continued by the girl, looking up joyfully at the sky and shouting, “fireworks! Real fireworks! Oh god, they’re so beautiful!” And they are - eleven cumshot explosions over the noir night, arranged in an eponymous V. The narration continues over a panel further subdivided into four narrow columns depicting Londoners staring at the spectacle. “And all over London,” it says, “windows are thrown open and faces lit with awe and wonder gaze at the omen scrawled in fire on the night.” A final panel shows the man and woman in silhouette. “There,” the man declares. “The overture is finished. Come. We must prepare for the first act.” “Me?? B-but… Oh. Okay,” the woman replies.” “It is precisely 12:07 A.M. It begins to rain,” the narration concludes. “To be continued,” reads the title card.

In just six pages, then, Moore introduces a dystopian future that is intensely grounded in the political reality of the time, introduces his two main characters, casts his lot with theatrical villains, and then blows up the Houses of Parliament. It is one of the most shocking and effective openings in comics, made even more impressive by the fact that the script was completed in July of 1981, at which point Moore’s published output consisted of Roscoe Moscow and the start of The Stars My Degradation for Sounds, two years worth of Maxwell the Magic Cat, a dozen short stories for 2000 AD, and some work in Doctor Who Weekly, none of which really suggested a writer capable of such an invigorating story.

Figure 564: Evey's father is physically modeled on Alan Moore's
good friend Steve Moore. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David
Lloyd, from "Victims" in Warrior #3, 1982)

Ultimately, two things contribute to the sense of radicalism. The first is how well-grounded in the present of 1982 Britain V for Vendetta’s dystopia is. The basic suggestion that Britain could be less than fifteen years from a fascist takeover is fundamentally unsettling. When, in the third installment, Moore finally reveals the backstory of Britain as the girl, Evey, tells the masked man V her life story, setting the date as just a decade in the future, in 1992. It is true that the details were quickly discredited - the V for Vendetta timeline assumes a Labour victory in the next General Election, with the fascist government rising to power because the (presumably) Foot government made good on an election promise to remove nuclear missiles from British soil, resulting in them being the only country to survive a 1988 nuclear war. And yet for all that the some of the details were off, V for Vendetta was surprisingly prescient, most famously in its depressingly accurate prediction that by 1997 the streets of Britain would be lined with surveillance cameras to capture the population’s every move. Similarly significant is the decision to ground Evey’s past in the material reality of 1982. Evey grew up on Shooter’s Hill, in the South of London, the home, of course, of Moore’s friend and colleague Steve Moore, to whom Evey’s father bares a marked resemblance in the photo Evey shows V. V alludes to “the recession of the eighties” as history, but it was of course a current event to the readership. The result of all of this is that the world of V for Vendetta is, while not the reader’s own, inextricably connected to it - a world the reader is obliged, within the narrative, to treat as a serious cultural possibility.

The second factor, then, is the unwavering way in which the narrative takes seriously the idea that in the face of such a world, violent terrorism might be a reasonable action. Over time, this became one of the primary themes of V for Vendetta, with the final chapter, published by DC Comics, focusing heavily on the moral legitimacy of violence as a tactic. But in the early installments it is difficult to have anything but sympathy for V and his titular vendetta. Certainly the first installment, for all that its title explicitly proclaims V to be the villain of the piece, is firmly on his side. The movie posters of films in which the most memorable character is a villainous raving lunatic that adorn his Shadow Gallery make this clear, as, more bluntly, does the fact that the alternative to V, as presented in that installment, is a bunch of would-be rapists with badges. The thrilling denouement, blowing up Big Ben, is provocative, but it is clearly something the reader is meant to find thrilling. And it is thrilling, simply because Moore identifies an argument that is both tremendously compelling and yet widely treated as “improper” to speak aloud, namely that blowing shit up is, on the whole, a perfectly reasonable response to Thatcherism.

Figure 565: Dick Turpin was an 18th century highwayman
whose adventures became staples of British popular fiction.

In this regard, as Moore is quick to admit, he is slotting into a grand British “tradition of making heroes out of criminals or people who in other centuries might have been regarded as terrorists.” Elsewhere, he notes that this tradition “goes back to Robin Hood, Charlie Peace, and Dick Turpin. All of these British criminals that actually are treated as heroes.” The sentiment, it’s clear, was shared by David Lloyd, whose suggestion it was to model the protagonist on Guy Fawkes, suggesting that this would “look really bizarre and it would give Guy Fawkes the image he’s deserved all these years. We shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov. 5^th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!” Moore, for his part, claims that, upon receiving this suggestion, “two things occurred to me. Firstly, Dave was obviously a lot less sane than I’d hitherto believed him to be, and secondly, this was the best idea I’d ever heard in my entire life.”

But Moore is also quick to point out, when asked whether V is a hero, that “we called the very first episode ‘The Villain’ because I thought there was an ambiguity there that I wanted to preserve,” and, when pushed in a 2012 interview, makes clear V’s violent tactics are “something I don’t sympathize with,” and that “of course” people should not actually go and blow up the Houses of Parliament, although he also notes that this is largely a plot point introduced in Book Three, and that the matter is left morally ambiguous prior to that point. That is not, however, to say that it isn’t addressed. Indeed, the ninth chapter of Book One is entitled “Violence,” and features as one of its central scenes Evey confronting V about the fact that he used her offer to help him to make her an accomplice to murder. V’s response is typically oblique - he points out that it was Evey who offered to help V, and cryptically quotes Thomas Pynchon’s V, but otherwise declines to engage with Evey’s moral dilemma. Evey, for her part, comes back to V later in the issue, and apologizes, admitting that she “was trying to get out of taking the blame,” but also emphatically declares that she won’t be involved in killing again, a vow V witnesses in utter silence.

Figure 566: Derek Almond abuses his wife. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd,
from "Violence" in Warrior #9, 1983)

But these two scenes are interspersed among several others also reflecting on the titular theme of the chapter. It opens with Eric Finch, the detective hunting V, going over autopsy results, beginning with a cold and clinical discussion of the physical manifestation of violence: “the wound’s been cleaned up a little, Eric,” Doctor Delia Surridge explains, “but you can see that it has a fairly ragged edge. So you’re right, it isn’t a knife wound. It looks like something’s been punched through the skin with incredible force.” Later, there is a scene between Derek Almond, the head of the Finger, and his wife Rose, which culminates in a scene of domestic violence as Derek hits Rose and screams at her that “I don’t have to take any of this crap from you! Not any of it!” And rounding out the issue is V finally coming for Dr. Surridge, who has been expecting him ever since Eric Finch gave her a rare rose that V had left at the scene of an earlier murder, and who has spent the issue remembering an image of a man, completely black in silhouette, framed by a massive fire behind him. When she realizes that V has come for her, she sits up in bed, and says, “it’s you isn’t it? You’ve come… you’ve come to kill me.” V confirms this, and Dr. Surridge breaks down, saying “Oh thank God. Thank God.”

Figure 567: Delia Surridge welcomes her imminent
death. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David
Lloyd, from "Violence" in Warrior #9, 1983)

And so Evey’s non-debate with V over the use of violence is positioned in the context of a relative diversity of instances of violence. There is no easy and straightforward moral conclusion to be drawn from all of these scenes. The incident between the Almonds is clearly horrific, but the clinical and detached description of the dead Fingerman’s wounds at the outset and the subtleties implicit in Delia’s joyful embrace of her imminent demise are altogether more ambiguous. They are certainly not things the reader is meant to look upon as straightforwardly pleasurable, but they are also not easily read as condemnations of the very idea of violence. Yes, Moore eventually arrives at the position that violence is categorically unacceptable, but crucially, this takes place years after the strip started, and after Moore and Lloyd have moved the comic from being published in the UK to being published in the US. It is not fair to call it an unexpected plot development, but it is fair to say that the strip could have developed in other directions.

Figure 568: Alan Moore's last use of caption boxes in V for Vendetta for anything
other than establishing settings was in the third installment. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by David Lloyd, from "Victims" in Warrior #3, 1982)

But this is true of V for Vendetta in a more general case as well. The strip was conceived and the script for the first installment written in 1981, while the final installment didn’t see print until 1989. Any project would drift and evolve over that sort of time period, even before one considers the degree to which Moore’s career evolved over those eight years. Certainly the strip gradually grows more stylistically confident over time. Moore and Lloyd determined at the outset that they would keep narration to a minimum and entirely eliminate sound effects and thought bubbles. But Moore, in the early chapters, still uses narration for key events. But gradually he manages to eliminate them entirely, using them for the last time in the fourth installment, where he narrates the effect changing the person who delivers the periodic “Voice of Fate” broadcasts has on the British population. After that, Moore finds ways to communicate information by giving the role of narration to specific characters. From the beginning of his career Moore displayed an instinctive understanding of the way in which words and images could be used to provide two parallel streams of information, but this skill takes a visible leap forward in the seventh installment of V for Vendetta, “Virtue Victorious,” published in November of 1982, where he runs narration from the corrupt Bishop of Westminster as he prays before engaging in sexual relations with someone he believes to be a fifteen year old girl, but who is in fact an undercover Evey sent by V. “Dear God, thous who has granted us reprieve from thy final judgement, thou who has provided us with that most terrible warning, help us to be worthy of thy mercy,” the bishop intones, while the art shows events from an entirely different scene as V kills the bishop’s guards and makes his way to his window.

Figure 569: Moore juxtaposes the Bishop's prayers
with V's attack. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
David Lloyd, from "Virtue Victorious" in Warrior
#7, 1982)

The effect is a common one in Moore’s repertoire, using the contrast between text and image to communicate things that neither can communicate on their own. But by November of 1982, the closest thing he had done to this sort of contrast was “The English/Phlondrutian Phrasebook” with Brendan McCarthy for 2000 AD, in which humorous sayings from a hypothetical tourist guidebook for an alien planet are juxtaposed with scenes from a nightmarish visit to said planet. But “Virtue Victorious” does not use its contrast for comedy, or, at least, not for any straightforward comedy, and the point is not the contrast between the bishop’s words and the images, but the way in which the two intersect and resemble each other. The bishop is praying for divine forgiveness for the child molestation he’s about to commit, but when he speaks of “the evil one who is surely come amongst us in this, the hour of our greatest trial,” the images of V fighting his way through the guards give clear double meaning to these words. [continued]

Worst to best, everything good enough to buy. Second Thursday post coming later in the day, btw - had hoped to have it ready by the usual 5am EST, but ended up having a more eventful Wednesday than I'd budgeted for.

Batgirl #37

Other than the kind of nasty transphobic streak, this is a marvelous issue. Pity about the kind of nasty transphobic streak, then. It's thoroughly sickening, and serves as an unpleasant reminder that underneath the hood, this is still a New 52-era DC comic, with all the thudding "comics for boys" that this implies. Strictly on storytelling, this would be higher on the list, but I just can't.

Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #1

Had this come out before Original Sin, it would have been a perfectly nice, fun, lightweight story, albeit one that in no way needed thirty-three pages to tell. (Frank Cho's a fine and dynamic artist, but the book is saturated with big panels to the point where they stop having any impact.) Unfortunately, it came out after Original Sin, and so is instead a painfully predictable lightweight story that in no way needed thirty-three pages to tell.

Uncanny X-Men Annual #1

Part one of a two-part story filling in an old mystery of how Eva Bell, a character I only vaguely have a handle on who is, aged several years in a time travel accident. Some predictable beats, though the "seven years later" jump is clever. But one does rather suspect, if only because it's how Bendis tends to work, that the second half of this is going to be the issue that carries the weight.

Avengers #39

A fine comic, although there's something very strange about Reed Richards giving advice on "making plans and the proper execution thereof" to someone who is currently being fostered by Doctor Doom.

Thor #3

I feel like Aaron's Thor run suffers occasionally from being unable or unwilling to quite make up its mind whether it wants to be epic or a bit wryly funny and personal. At its best, it's... wryly funny and personal, and the thought bubbles approach to the new Thor is marvelous - I absolutely adore her character. Still, I want answers and flesh, not mystery. Still, glad we're doing the inevitable Thor vs Thor next issue, if only so we can move on to the less inevitable stuff.

The Amazing Spider-Man #11

After a rough second installment, Spider-Verse gets back on track here. The relationship to the spin-offs is still a bit rough - I don't think I've ever read a crossover that feels quite this insistent on spending time selling me the auxiliary books. But there are moments of real charm and wit here, and three issues in the mythos of the crossover is starting to actually stick for me.

Supreme Blue Rose #5

I remain happy to be along for the ride on this deliciously strange bit of Warren Ellis comic. I'd wonder if it's any good, but it seems beside the point. It's unabashedly a particular aesthetic take on some stock ideas from both superhero comics and Warren Ellis - a comic that's content to be interesting. It is, and I love it.

Sex Criminals #9

Massively strong issue on its own merits, plus it has an absolutely beautifully gratuitous Wicked and the Divine porn parody in it. Amaterassu. Dear god. Seriously, though, yet another stunning issue here, with some great character work. This book's mixture of humor and honest looks at fucking and fucking up is truly wonderful.

Bitch Planet #1

It's going to be described as Orange is the New Black in space, and fine. That's a good hook. This is a better book - an unabashedly feminist, progressive comic that emphatically picks at scabs and starts fights. There's a lovely twist here, and some great tone-setting, and a book that's going to be worth watching. Get in on the ground floor. If nothing else, it's called Bitch Planet, and that's justification enough for buying it.

Wait in Here Please, Susan: The Doctors Revisited (William Hartnell)

Saturday Waffling (November 15th, 2014)

His Face, His Hair, Look at It: The Doctors Revisited (Patrick Troughton)

The 3-D Universe is a Hologrammatic Side-Effect (The Last War in Albion Part 71: Swamp Thing in Space)

Comics Reviews (11/19/14)

Duty Officer, Please: The Doctors Revisited (Jon Pertwee)

Saturday Waffling (November 22nd, 2014)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea Final (Game of Thrones)

LaBostrie Feels His Skin Crawl (The Last War in Albion Part 72: Tygers, The Return of the Good Gumbo)

Comics Reviews (November 26th, 2014)

My Mind Will Be Like That Of A Child (The Bells of Saint John)

Saturday Waffling (November 29th, 2014)

Burnt Orange (The Rings of Akhaten)

Laissez Les Bontemps Rouler (The Last War in Albion Part 73: The Villain)

Comics Reviews (12/3/14)

A Savage and Warlike Race (Cold War)

Saturday Waffling (December 6th, 2014)

A Dark Secret After The Candle is Out (Hide)

Daleks On The Streets (The Last War in Albion Part 74: Europe after the Reign)

Comics Reviews (12/10/14)