A review of Torchwood: Children of Earth

It goes without saying, doesn’t it? I’ll say it anyway: major spoilers. As I write this, only the first episode has aired in the USA, but this covers the full five eps.

1. Children of Earth

Earth’s children [1]

[1.1] I just rewatched, in one long jag, all five eps of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which comprises season 3 of the show. I laughed. I cried. I shook my fist at the screen because something happened that I really, really did not like at all. (More about that under the cut.) If you liked seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, all I can say is, it won’t prepare you for season 3, because the stakes are higher and the themes are darker: children, love, commitment, duty, honor. This is the program that had something real to say, in season 2 in particular, about life and death, but T:COE takes the promise of the first two seasons to a whole new level.

[1.2] Season 3 of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, aired in the UK on 5 consecutive days from July 6 to July 10, 2009. It began airing on July 20 on BBC America, and it will be available on DVD on July 28. (Why, yes, I have preordered my DVD from Amazon!) The plot, in a nutshell, is thus: Aliens announce, by seizing control of and speaking through all the children in the world at once, that they are coming. They want something—something to do with our children. And it not going to be good.

Why the ending of Life on Mars US fails

My previous post on LOM US is here.

1. Life on Mars US finale

[1.1] Several months after the April 1, 2009, finale of the US version of Life on Mars, I have finally gotten around to finishing out the season. Although I am a big fan of the UK version, the US version didn’t really catch me, and after the first midseason story arc wrapped up, I didn’t prioritize watching it—and I became even less concerned when I learned that the show had been canceled.

[1.2] Thus I didn’t watch the finale in a timely manner, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. Yet out of a sense of obligation, coupled with a friend writing and saying, “OMG, what did you think of the LOM US finale?”, I finally sat down to view it, after, perhaps shockingly, remaining totally spoiler-free. And oh my. The ending…sucked. I actually spoke to the screen: “No!” I screamed, rendered incoherent with betrayal. “You…you…you idiots! I cannot believe you did that!”

[1.3] Let me say it again: I cannot believe they did that. It would have been better if the entire team had died in a blaze of glory on Gauda Prime. Now that’s a series ending!

[1.4] After the jump, I’ll tell you exactly why I think the finale for the US version of Life on Mars betrayed the entire setup of the series. Obviously there are major spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

What to watch in British SF/F TV

1. British TV

[1.1] At the SFRA 2009 meeting the weekend of June 11, I was on a panel moderated by my fearless coeditor, Craig Jacobsen, about what to watch for SF TV. The panel was quite large, so Craig held us to a strict 2-minute time limit. He asked us to prepare remarks about which shows were must-watch shows, and why. Here, I present my choices and briefly explain what I find interesting and worthy about the shows.

[1.2] Because I am particularly interested in British TV, I staked out this area as my own, leaving the usual suspects—Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Heroes—to others. But during our panel’s conversation, I was able to articulate why I had specifically earmarked certain shows as being of interest. Sadly, it wasn’t because of the shows’ uniform excellence: some are virtually unwatchable. Rather, what I found interesting had to do with intersections of these texts with other texts. This makes sense. I am, after all, interested in shared worlds and fan artifacts, and these pro texts feel like fan works: derivative crack that says something about the originary text.

[1.3] After the jump is my roundup of fun-to-think-about shows (if not fun-to-watch shows, unless you like things that are so bad, they’re good). Several haven’t aired in the United States yet. I discuss the following: Demons, Spooks Code 9, Merlin, Ashes to Ashes, and Primeval. And I briefly mention the Doctor Who franchise: Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures.

Fandom research methods

Madeline Ashby has started a blog that aims to round up details about research going on in fandom. Interested in seeing what sorts of questionnaires researchers are using? Wondering whether someone else already taken that great idea and started a project? Fandom Research wants to be the go-to place to answer these questions. It’s early days yet for the site, but the more people who contribute, the more useful the site will be.

Today I contributed a guest post entitled Fandom research methods that discusses, among other things, AOIR’s ethics guide, which is the de facto guide for people working on research in human subjects via the Internet in the social sciences. While writing it, I was reminded that the impetus of many guidelines is to prevent the subjects of study from harm, and to ensure that they understand exactly what will be done with the responses they provide.

“Verbotene Liebe,” soap operas, fansubbing, and YouTube

1. Introduction

[1.1] Fansubs—fans who subtitle TV shows, DVDs, anime, and other visual texts, as a labor of love, for other members of their community—are mostly associated with anime, but fansubs translate all kinds of texts, be they the latest episode of Lost for release in China or a Japanese-language anime series subtitled in English. Although the legality of this activity is questionable, the work of fansubbers serves to promote a media source that many viewers would not otherwise have had access to. Early fansubbed anime in particular permitted this art form to get a toehold in the American market [1]. Their transformative work makes the text explicable and available. Without fansubbing, it’s virtually impossible to access the text. The language barrier means that some mediation is required to permit understanding.

[1.2] Although I was peripherally aware of the fansub phenomenon, I’m not a big fan of anime, and so I thought little about it—until I discovered Ollian. Ollian (also known as Chrolli), or the Oliver/Christian homosexual relationship on German soap opera Verbotene Liebe (VL; Forbidden Love, 1995– ), is made explicable for me and all the other fans by a kind fansubber who creates Ollian clips and uploads them to YouTube. The fansubber cuts together a day’s worth of soap opera plot, focusing only on Christian and Oliver and excising all else. The condensed plots, which are usually about 7 to 9 minutes long and which are sorted by air date, are available two ways: in the original German, and subtitled in English [2]. I have found the subtitled versions absolutely riveting and have spent many happy hours clicking through the carefully ordered, dated clips to advance the narrative.

Female fan culture and intellectual property

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be presenting at the the Sixth Annual IP/Gender Conference, “Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property,” held in collaboration with American University’s Center for Social Media, at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, DC. The conference runs Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24. More information about the conference is available here.

My topic is “Intellectual Property, Transformation, and Academic Journals,” and I’ll be talking about how Transformative Works and Cultures deals with intellectual property in terms of the copyright the journal uses and the way the journal handles things like embedded videos, screenshots, and photographs. TWC bucks many established trends in the publishing industry, from our insistence on open access to our Web-only presentation, and I’ll be talking about why that is important and interesting—not only for access in the field of media studies, but also as a way to shake off the print-first mind-set so prevalent in the publishing industry.

Registration information is available here.

The evening of April 23 begins the conference, with a showing of multimedia works by conference attendees. On April 24, there will be a full day of presentations and discussions. Here is the listing of those presenting:

Ann Bartow, University of South Carolina | Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College | Casey Fiesler, Vanderbilt University | Melissa Tatum, University of Arizona | Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa |Tisha Turk, University of Minnesota | Ann Shalleck, Washington College of Law | Laura Murray, Queen’s University | Jordan Gilbertson, University of La Verne, College of Law| Karen Hellekson, Transformative Works and Cultures | Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law | Kristina Busse, University of South Alabama | Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley | Zahr Said Stauffer, University of Virginia School of Law

Fan studies 101

This originally appeared in SFRA Review No. 287 (Winter 2009) as part of the “101″ series, which seeks to provide a broad contextual overview to various fields of interest to SF scholars. The complete issue is available for download here.

The recent explosion on the Internet of fanlike activity has given fans and fan studies a higher profile. When journalists and media studies scholars speak about fans engaging on the Internet, high school students spending their time on FanFiction.net, or fans of soap operas gathering at an online forum to discuss their favorite plotlines, they are engaging in fan studies, even if they don’t seem to know it. Web 2.0—that is, an interactive, networked Web, not a static, read-only Web—lends itself well to visible fan participation, and thanks to an explosion of copyright-ignoring, music-downloading, remix-happy Gen N–ers, interactivity of fans within and outside communities has generated a lot of journalism and scholarship. Fan studies as a field is still scrambling to catch up. It’s done relevant work on fan-created works and fan communities over the years that is being ignored by current scholars, and those in other fields who tangentially run across fans seem unaware that an entire body of scholarship already exists to study fans and fan artifacts. In a parallel activity, women-dominated, old-style active fans and their contributions are now in the process of being erased by studies of (male) online fandom, although recuperative work is underway to write histories of these fans and preserve their artworks.

Is there Life on Mars?

Warning: Major spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Life on Mars (US)

[1.1] The burning question on everyone’s lips is: is the US version of Life on Mars better than the original UK version? Ah, you ask such difficult questions.

To the axis mundi

Introduction

On Saturday, March 22, Karen Hellekson and Craig Jacobsen were the hosts for a special lunchtime presentation held at ICFA-29 in Orlando, Florida, entitled “To the Axis Mundi: ICFA in the Pull of the Magic Kingdom.” The hour-long PowerPoint presentation was the first in an ongoing project we’re calling DWORPF: Disney World Ongoing Research Project in the Fantastic. We plan follow-up presentations in the future.

We visited the Magic Kingdom on Tuesday and took about 280 pictures between us. Even these were not enough. In addition to the images below, we found a few on the Internet, mostly of attractions that we were unable to photograph, such as the interior of sets, and of attractions that exist only virtually, such as little green CGI monsters. We were at the park from the time of its opening at 9 a.m. to the time of its closing at about 1 a.m., after which we had an entirely new kind of adventure: that of lost taxi driver desperately trying to pretend he knows where he’s going.

Note: There are many images behind the cut. It may take a while for the full page to load. Because the large images were sucking down the bandwidth to an amazing degree and my Photobucket account was complaining, I have provided 300p previews, plus a link for you to click on to view the beautiful full-size version. If you can’t view the big images, it’s because Photobucket shut me down again. Sorry! Sorry!

Fandom Wank and history

At ICFA-29, I presented a paper entitled “Fandom Wank and History.” Here’s its abstract. The same basic information has been accepted for publication in an edited volume about community and online tools. I plan to expand the essay greatly by adding in a discussion of The Ms.Scribe Story to illustrate how blog-based historical texts are generated with the benefit of time and hindsight.

Abstract: Fandom Wank and history

Historical discourse is firmly situated in the realm of the trace: a document, be it a bill of sale or the registry of a wedding, provides unmistakable proof that an event occurred, and historians study such traces to construct a narrative document based (one hopes) in fact. As the realm of res gestae (things done), history’s rhetorical activity is one of telling the truth. However, the Internet muddies this historical trace by permitting deliberate rewriting and obfuscation: blog posts can be rewritten; Web sites can be taken down; online comments can be edited.

One site that dramatically illustrates the possibility of this activity in the realm of fandom is Fandom Wank, a blog-based online community that exists solely to describe—and mock—fandom blowups. Descriptions of altered traces abound: offending entries edited, entire blogs deleted, entries locked or deleted, comments disabled. Yet next to these descriptions of altered traces may sit proof of the original text: damning screen shots, IP address traces, links to archived Web pages. The wank I used to illustrate my paper, chosen because it was recent, because it has sensational elements, and because it illustrated all my points, is called How NOT to Date a Celebrity.

Fandom Wank foregrounds the activity of fans who use blogs to collaboratively write a kind of history of an event as it happens by tracking elements of the trace even as the trace is being erased and literally rewritten, thus constructing a new form of historical writing, with its own rules of acceptable proof of the trace. I argue that fan blogs discussing current events in fan culture are actually historical writings that are imbued with community-specific meaning. The point of such an activity is to create a collaborative text that brings together relevant traces, documentation, and testimony in an effort to construct a persuasive document.