Alan the Alien's Log guide
There is little or no virtue, either aesthetic or intellectual, in the series Alan the Alien’s Log. Described as a ‘curiously baffling version of the Clangers’, it comprises 10 seasons of 15 episodes, now with a prequel series, presenting a text and an image and in so doing representing some canonical science fiction film or TV episode, very often incorporating some basic misunderstanding of plot or purpose.
But if one wished, briefly and forlornly, to try to find some virtue then asking five questions might sometimes seem helpful.
Is Alan a character or an actor and does he know the difference?
Has anyone involved with the series the faintest understanding of, or sympathy with, Russell’s Theory of Types?
What would be the difference between making an intelligent post modern joke about a cultural item and saying something pointlessly obscure but at the same time also quite stupid about it?
Do the scriptwriters have an unseemly love of the comma?
Is anyone laughing?
This is a brief ‘episode’ guide to the Alan the Alien’s Log blog, setting out the various homages.
https://alan-the-alien.blogspot.com/
Seasons
Abbreviations
Since Star Trek is the inspiration for many episodes, its series are abbreviated.
ST-TOS = Star Trek: The original series
ST-TNG = Star Trek: The next generation
ST-DSN = Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
ST-VOY = Star Trek: Voyager
ST-ENT = Star Trek: Enterprise
ST-DIS = Star Trek: Discovery
ST-SNW = Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
ST-LD = Star Trek: Lower Decks
1.1
An allusion to the ensemble acting in all the Star Trek series but especially ST-TNG. Tediously, it’s the interplay of the characters, rather than the sci-fi plots, that is supposed to be appealing. Alan does away with all that just as Anais Nin says she was asked to do away with plot and sentiment in favour of hard grinding porn.
1.2
Simple slapstick humour.
1.3
Pleasure Planet Risa is the most mentioned ‘pleasure planet’ in ST-TNG and ST-DSN. Odd that there is more than one! There is an uneasy tension between the wholesomeness of Star Trek and the quasi-brothel status of Risa.
1.4
Simple slapstick humour and an allusion to the strange sandwich board signs in London to the World of Golf shop.
1.5
Simple slapstick humour.
1.6
The first reference to the ST-TNG’s Borg and their unwittingly ironic slogan.
1.7
Simple slapstick humour.
1.8
A pastiche of the ST-TNG episode ‘Phantasms’ in which replacement parts bought from Thanatos VII do indeed infect the ship with alien bugs removed by an inter-phasic pulse. Thanatos = Freud’s death instinct, too, obvs.
1.9
A reference to the universal problem of time travel plots in sci-fi. Even Captain Janeway realises that time travel plots are stupid.
KIM: Wait a second. If I sent a message from the future and changed the past, then that future would no longer exist, right? So, how could I have sent the message in the first place? Am I making any sense?
JANEWAY: My advice in making sense of temporal paradoxes is simple. Don't even try.
1.10
The very cheap-to-make but excellent time travel film Primer.
1.11
The background is from David Lynch’s series Twin Peaks recent sequel. Alan’s disquiet reflects a Kantian question: is any explanation required of the apparent harmony of the conceptual resources of rational enquirers and the the structure of the objective world? The suggestion here is of the possibility of a world where rational inquiry cannot get a grip.
1.12
‘Sirius Cybernetic Corporation’ is from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
1.13
The time travel film Primer, again, in which it seems – though it is far from clear – that time travel devices are taken through time using other time travel devices.
1.14
Species 8472 and fluidic space are both from the ST-VOY episode ‘Scorpion’. There is a certain vulgarity to Species 8472. Even compared to the Borg, they are thugs.
1.15
The confusion of the central character (Picard) and tending of a vineyard are both from the final double episode of ST-TNG.
2.1
‘Internal dampeners’ are often mentioned in ST-TNG though no one seems to turn them off for fun. Alan spends most of his time alone and we can only assume that such games help pass the time.
2.2
‘Jeffries tubes’ are much crawled though, often when being pursued, in ST-TNG. I’m not sure anyone believed they’d really need naming at the start but then they are mentioned in pretty much every episode.
2.3
Brexit-related slapstick.
2.4
An allusion to Doctor Who’s TARDIS.
2.5
40 Eridani A, B, and C are in the Vulcan star system in the Star Trek universe.
2.6
The Crystalline Entity was a particularly stupid enemy in ST-TNG. The ‘marmite stain’ is an allusion to the witless death of Tasha Yar by the tar pit resembling creature Armus in ‘Skin of Evil’. I assume the budget had run out. That never happens with Alan.
2.7
One of the innovations of ST-TNG is that the saucer can separate from the body of the ship. This was presented as a great idea but it is seldom actually used as it slows down the action in any episode in which it is deployed, always with faux solemnity.
2.8
To be honest, a filler.
2.9
The Officer Exchange Program is a feature of ST-TNG lore including Riker’s posting to a Klingon ship in ‘A Matter of Honor’. It is never happy.
2.10
13 is the number of regenerations of the Doctor in the series Doctor Who as the first female actor took the lead.
2.11
There is a long-standing philosophical debate as to whether personal identity would survive teleportation. Parfit is a famous philosopher of identity. Although a terrible actor, Colm Meaney somehow grows on one. There’s a charm in the way he is obviously out of his depth which is reflected in the plot-fact that he is always outranked by any passing 12 year old, or pet dog, with a posher accent. That said, the shaving brush here gives him a run for his money.
2.12
The phrase ‘parallel time continuums’ and plot outline comes from the James Follett radio play The Doppelganger Machine. Quark runs a bar in ST-DSN.
2.13
Captain Philippa Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou dies early in ST-DIS.
2.14
In ST-DIS there is a new propulsion system used involving a giant space tardigrade following inter-stellar spores. Really?! What were they taking?
2.15
A recreation of the climactic scene at the end of Season 2 of The Expanse. Actually, rather moving.
3.1
In ST-DIS, the spore drive is indeed burnt out after making multiple jumps for some specious plot purpose.
3.2
The idea that a Vulcan can disguise themself merely by obscuring the ears is widespread in ST including the film ST-IV and the episode ST-ENT ‘Carbon Creek’. It would be nice to think that there was a growing ironic self-consciousness in how it is portrayed. I think there was in Carbon Creek.
3.3
The Delphic Expanse region of space is reconfigured by mysterious spheres collectively responsible for the web of spatial anomalies in ST-ENT season 3. Not such an awful season as there wasn’t much time travel (the last resort of a scoundrel). But did any of us really care about the death of Trip’s sister? Or Trip’s death, come to that? Too similar in voice and manner to George W Bush, perhaps? If only Trip had said that something was ‘Weird shit’, like Bush’s transforming moment.
3.4
A recreation of the death of Spock at the end of the film Wrath of Khan but with no one to hear his final words. Did we believe that Spock was really dead? I don’t think I did.
3.5
Risa’s weather control system was sabotaged by the New Essentialists aided by Worf in ST-DSN ‘Let he who is without sin’. No neutral viewer can think Worf anything other than an idiot and it’s far from clear why he isn’t thrown in the brig multiple times. He is a prig, isn't he?
3.6
An allusion to criticism of the tone of ST-DIS and the mirror universe character of Captain Lorca played by Jason Isaacs. The idea that Ally McBeal / Calista Flockhart might sing songs from the bridge refers to her narrative-universe-violating guesting on LA Law. That made no sense! No more could Doctor Who appear on the bridge of the Enterprise. A pity that Alan’s scriptwriters do not seem to have learnt this obvious fact. In this episode, Alan plays Jason Isaacs playing Lorca. He carries this off with aplomb.
3.7
Protectorate soldier and Envoy Takeshi Kovacs is a character in the series Altered Carbon in which consciousnesses can be transferred between bodies, known as ‘sleeves’. It is a mark of shame that Alan’s script writers didn’t do more with this fine series.
3.8
In the remake of Lost in Space, a child actor of too obvious cute looks plays a central character who befriends a robot. The audience is left to assume that the myth of specialness of the 12 year old character is fully explained by a homoerotic bond with an older robot. It never seemed other than a bit pervy to me.
3.9
This found building at an art gallery looks a little like the ship in the Alien prequel film Prometheus.
3.10
The cantina scene is surely one of the most annoying aspects of Star Wars films. The people. The noise. Note that the bar-keep really has a pigtail. He did that to himself and smiles while he works! Idiot. Sadly the camera cannot capture, from this angle, the fully justified look of visceral loathing on Alan’s face.
3.11
The plot of the film Arrival in a nutshell. I’m rather proud of this one.
3.12
The plot of the film Predestination in which it turns out that all the characters are the same person. Woops. Sorry if you hadn’t seen it.
3.13-14
The most annoying character in Star Wars. We all forgive this single act of murder. This is one of the episodes where the question ‘Is Alan character or actor?’ might feel pressing.
3.15
The Borg destroy the Starfleet fleet at space location Wolf 359 near Earth from where Admiral Hanson gives Picard the quoted warning. Alan’s saucer would have had more of a chance. Later (6.15), it turns out that Alan was actually present causing this unpleasantness.
4.1
The hammy text is taken from a website plot summary of the first episode of season 2 of ST-DIS.
4.2
A recurring character in season 2 of ST-DIS is Captain Phillipa Georgiou’s mirror universe counter-part. The lack of detailed knowledge of counterparts’ lives is never addressed. Typically, everyone in the mirror universe wears vaguely S&M clothing and behaves badly. So unlike the home-life of our own dear Queen!
4.3-4
In the ST-DIS episode ‘The Red Angel’, Burnam is put in deliberate danger to capture the Red Angel, which they believe to be her mother who will thus attempt to rescue Burnam. It is obviously ludicrous that there is no other way of getting her mother’s attention in the future! A letter?
4.5
The plot of ST-TNG ‘Starship Mine’, including Picard’s saddle about which much fuss is made. The background is the recent photograph of a black hole. Woopi Goldberg’s acting is astonishingly bad throughout ST-TNG though the parallel episode of ST-TNG is mercifully free of her.
4.6
The ridiculous solution to the problem that nothing that has happened in ST-DIS is referred to in ST-TOS. Also: the shower scene ‘all a dream’ resetting of the plot in Dallas.
4.7
An allusion to a plot arc in Seth McFarlane’s The Orville. Elsewhere, he does a fine Kermit impression. It is hard to say whether The Orville is a surprising good homage to Star Trek or whether the sometime serious plots coupled with fart gags makes for an awful mess.
The text of this episode commits multiple crimes against a Russellian Theory of Types type discipline.
“With long-standing fellow cast members Whoopi Goldberg and Michelle Yeoh…” With reference to Star Trek, Whoopi Goldberg and Michelle Yeoh are genuine extra-series actors playing in-series characters. Since Alan is with them, it seems that he is the actor who plays ‘Alan’ in the series Alan the Alien. But hang on, Whoopi Goldberg and Michelle Yeoh are played by Archie and Podge: “(here played by Archie and Podge)”. This suggests that the real Alan (alongside Archie and Podge) is playing Alan in a fiction about the making of a sci-fi series in which he plays Alan, the character in that sci fi fiction.
“Alan watches the rival series The Orville on another channel and realises that it, too, had an ‘AI attempting to destroy all sentient life’ plot but managed to dispatch it in two trim episodes in contrast with the heavy weather his own show had made of the idea.” This seems to be back in the middle world where The Orville is a genuine rival to Alan’s own sci fi series (Alan the Alien) and The Orville has shared a plot line and done it better than Alan’s sci fi series. But, of course, we all know that Alan’s sci fi series is really a pastiche in this case of Star Trek Discovery. So, we are back out at the outer layer, too.
“What’s more, their captain isn’t even a professional spaceship captain at all: he makes his money as a sometime comic but mainly wise-cracking voice-over artist for ‘Kermit the Frog’.” Well, no. Their captain is a character and is, in that fictional world, a professional captain. His actor is a professional comic and sometime imitator of Kermit. But Alan’s clear resentment implies that he, Alan, thinks that the actor who plays a space captain ought also to be a space captain because Alan is.
At every level, Alan is Alan the Alien.
4.8
The very dark – literally – almost black and white episode of Game of Thrones. Even drawing the curtains in my living room, I couldn’t really see what was going on.
4.9
An allusion to ST-DSN episodes ‘In Purgatory’s Shadow’ and ‘By Inferno’s Light’ in which various characters including the claustrophobic supposed tailor Garek, as well as General Martok, are held captive by the Dominion. We all like Garek! Pity that Alan has never been able to deploy an actor to play his personal florist.
4.10
General Martok, rescued in ST-DSN episode ‘By Inferno’s Light’, becomes a Klingon leader. In the ST-TNG and ST-DSN universe, the Klingon’s obsession with killing people is regarded as a loveable eccentricity. Bless!
4.11
Jem’Hadar First Ikat’ika is a Dominion soldier in ST-DSN episodes ‘In Purgatory’s Shadow’ and ‘By Inferno’s Light’. Alan’s script writers are a little unfair here as, actually, the Jem’Hadar are pretty unfazed by anything.
4.12
A scene for scene recreation of the fight between Worf and the First in ST-DSN ‘By Inferno’s Light’ at the end of which the First refuses to kill Worf and is thus, predictably presumably to him too, shot dead. Alan’s script writers seem to have misremembered the Wim Wenders’ film Kings of the Road. The agonising slow poop scene takes place on sand not snow. Apparently, it was the result of the actor Rüdiger Vogler being unable to do yet another shot of the intended peeing scene and Wenders daringly asking for this alternative, though not expecting to get it.
4.13
An allusion to Captain Pike’s vision of his future disfigurement and paralysis in ST-DIS. The phrase ‘beep beep machine’ is from on-set chat in the ST-TOS pilot: ‘The Cage’. It’s quite a moving scene and I think we’ve captured that here too. Who wants our tubby chum to be disfigured by weirdly still moving radiation burns and paralysed?
4.14
The actor who plays the character Peggy Woolley in the radio series The Archers described this letter while on Desert Island Discs. No one in the Star Trek universe even pretends to understand temporal mechanics. See the quote from Janeway.
4.15
A recreation of the entry of the black hole in the film Interstellar. Kip Thorne – some sort of scientist, they say – was a science adviser on that aspect of the film. Despite that, it is obvious bollocks. Hence we suspect he was really Mudd, the shady salesman responsible for the tribble infestation in the original Star Trek. Here, the black hole is represented in the traditional way as a weight on a 2D sheet. The observation that the show had ‘gone a bit mental recently’ was a valuable insight gleaned through an informal focus group in Newcastle.
5.1
A recreation of the post black hole scenes in the film Interstellar in which the central character reappears somehow behind a bookshelf in his daughter’s room back at home and manipulates the second hand of a watch. A model space ship is knocked to the floor. Why anyone thought this a good film is beyond me. The moral seems to be it’s ok to trash the planet as there are loads of others… but oh there are not! So much worse than Gravity! Note that Alan has avoided Gravity. Angels fearing to tread.
5.2
The final scene of the film Silent Running with the additional ST-TNG reference to Risa. In the film, only one robot remains by this point. But it is not much more obvious than here why the ship has to be abandoned. The soundtrack really is cloying, sadly. A good scene destroyed in the original and much improved here by Alan’s better acting.
5.3
The holodeck is another innovation of ST-TNG (by contrast with ST-TOS) and ST-DSN. Tenbury Wells as a private detective is an allusion to the way that Data plays Sherlock Holmes in holodeck recreations in ST-TNG and unwittingly creates Moriarty as a suitable opponent who in turns tries to escape the holodeck. ST-TNG episodes ‘Elementary Dear Data’ and ‘Ship in a Bottle’. There’s no denying that Data is supremely irritating and Moriarty only a little less. Hence the whole thing is here redeemed by the charming processed-meat obsessed Tenbury Wells.
5.4
In the series Another Life, Katee Sackhoff plays Niko Breckinridge. But she came to notice playing Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace in the 2004-2009 remake of the series Battlestar Galactica in which the Starbuck figure was female having been male in the original cheesy 1970s version.
5.5
A recreation of the central fight scene – with an alien dinosaur-like creature – during which Picard is teleported away, against his will, and thus leading to the eventual death of the other space captain, in the ST-TNG episode ‘Darmok’. The key idea of the episode is the metaphorical nature of the language used. Possibly the best ever episode of ST-TNG.
5.6
The climactic end of the first act of the film 2001 but with the monolith’s role misunderstood to be instilling violence rather than tool-bearing intelligence. Oh well.
5.7
An allusion to the chest-burster scene in the film Alien. The drama of that scene was in part because until that point things had been, as here, charming.
5.8
The idea that there is a speed limit to a particular region of space created by the ‘protomolecule’ is a key plot idea in season 3 of The Expanse. In retrospect, it seems a bit stupid.
5.9
By contrast with the more ‘naturalistic’ politics and plot lines of ST-TNG, ST-TOS had a more fairy tale-like world in which there might be eccentric villains. The name the 'Think Tank' was given by Captain Janeway to a small group of morally dubious but intelligent aliens of different species, one of whom was played by the actor who also played George Constanza in Seinfeld (ST-VOY 5.19).
5.10
The text is a combination of the Wikipedia entry on the film 2001 and Kubrick’s own words. As Derrida says, the text deconstructs itself.
5.11
The 1964 Flash Gordon TV series had a fine retro-futurist visual style.
5.12
The David Tennant instantiation of Doctor Who ‘died’ after saving a character played by Bernard Cribbins. SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion), successor to SMERSH (Smyert Shpionam) is a James Bond enemy organisation. The idea of firing first is an allusion as to whether Hans Solo ‘fired first’ in the cantina scene in Star Wars as first shown but later re-edited by George Lucas to remove this.
5.13
Moriarty tries to escape the holodeck in ST-TNG episode ‘Ship in a Bottle’. Some commentators have pointed out that in the second image, the saucer – being real – should not be shown on the screen alongside Tenbury Wells. But in ‘Ship in a Bottle’ the seeming ship and fellow crew members are also virtual, not real, programmed by Moriarty.
5.14
The initial text is from the voice-over narration of an advert for 21.co.uk, an online casino, in which a man wearing a dinner suit is shown in closeup. It was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority in 2017. Bizarrely, Riker, Worf, Troi, Geordi, Dr Crusher and Data often play poker together (usually any four) in ST-TNG with Data acting as dealer and wearing an appropriate shade.
5.15
This is all from the series finale of ‘Logopolis’, the seventh and final serial of season 18 of classic Doctor Who. Tom Baker's fourth Doctor dies falling from a radio telescope having been lured there by the Master and regenerates when the white clad Watcher approaches and merges with him to yield the fifth Doctor. The Tardis' cloister bell, not that we knew there was one, had chimed earlier in the serial to warn of impending doom.
6.1
Alien obvs. Alan has already covered the chest-burster scene in 5.7.
6.2
All the weapons listed are mentioned in the various Star Trek franchises. Although it is often said that the Federation isn't supposed to be all about being military, it tends that way. The show aired on St David's Day. Popty Ping was last seen playing the monster in the Darmok tribute episode 5.5.
6.3
The description of locations in Solaris may reflect the fact that the script editor last saw it having drunk a considerable amount of the 4 gallon polypin of beer he had stolen from a garden party in Cambridge and still had with him, unnoticed he assumed, in the theatre.
6.4
The Voyager probe was the pretext for the first Star Trek film, of course, repurposed by alien intelligence by a race of living machines. There's an interesting contrast in the technological sophistication of a modern phone.
6.5
The film Videodrome has not aged as well as Alan’s recreation may suggest. Here, Alan's bachelor pad has taken on an unusual 1950's vibe.
6.6
All anyone remembers of ‘Gilbey’ from the Flip Side of Dominic Hide is the hat and the terrible theme song. Tenbury Wells is playing an astonishingly young Denis Lawson. Back in those days, Peter Firth was an Adonis.
6.7
During the C-19 lock-down it might be expected that Alan’s studio would resort to bottle episodes and in fact clip shows. There really was a clip show from ST-TNG almost called ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ in which Riker tried to trace a venereal disease. I think.
6.8
Tarkovsky's Stalker obvs. A found prop helps capture the tension in the original film in the unwillingness of the characters to enter the Room that has been their quest.
6.9-6.10
John Carpenter’s majestic version of The Thing, which starts with a Thing-dog from the Norwegian science station up the road and has the key spider head scene in which the line: ‘You've got to be fucking kidding’ is clearly a meta-narrative commentary expressing the audience's felt response to Carpenter.
6.11
Although Star Wars itself is an awful, silly franchise, some fans have found Alan’s predicament moving. One said: “Love Alan’s quest and its doubtful results (being adopted and not knowing anything of my biological ancestry, this really does make me laugh out loud)!”
6.12
Ursula le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness concerns a species of hominids living on Planet Gethen who are ambisexual, adopting a gender only for brief periods. They are visited by an Earth-based human representative of a federation of planets who struggles to ‘sell’ them membership of it.
6.13
This is more or less the plot to The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Gort, the enormous blind robot (who wore curious pants), though nuclear war, rather than C-19, is the unnecessary risk criticised from space.
6.14
The Incredible Shrinking Man featured a final fight with a spider in which nail scissors and sowing equipment played a role. Alan may not be right about how it was filmed.
6.15
A scarily accurate recreation of the ST-TNG episode 'The best of both worlds' in which Riker's job is under threat from the ambitious newcomer Shelby and it seems that killing Picard is a neat plot solution for how the show can continue with both Riker and Shelby. There had been much amazement in the UK press that Patrick Stewart had signed a contract committing himself to seven series - perhaps in contrast to our own Blake's 7 almost immediately losing the titular Blake to the RSC - but one character had already left Star Trek and so it seemed entirely possible.
7.1
A recreation of the gist of ST-TNG ‘The best of both worlds’ Part 2, restoring the status quo of Alan's crew and leading to the mysterious immediate departure of Shelby, never to be seen again. The phrase 'politely interested in the dainties of a well-filled larder' is from the Hobbit.
7.2
The setting for the Alien prequel film Prometheus. The mealworms are really hammerpedes though, strangely, with Alan's single eye, suggesting some biological prior connection/contamination.
7.3
It is not clear what the relation is between this aggressive alien and the Deacon and the Xenomorphs in the Prometheus prequel and the Alien(s) films.
7.4
An obvious reference to the fact that the Doctor’s TARDIS is bigger on the inside than outside. It is possible, however, that previous - to Type 40 - models such as the Type 18 lacked this feature. Ask a nerd.
7.5
The viewing room on the ship in Danny Boyle’s film Sunshine is protected by some sort of shield. (Danny Boyle choreographed the London Olympics opening ceremony in which it seemed that the Queen parachuted from a helicopter.) The film, in a bizarre error of taste and judgement, introduces a prowling superman psycho in the form of the captain of the previous ship: Icarus I.
7.6
The idea that, in the future, there is no longer easy access to dilithium is a premise of series 3 of ST-DIS in which, apparently, most of it suddenly blew up in ‘The Burn’. Re the underpinnings of Alan’s propulsion system, the question of what is narratively plausible is a big one for sc-fi. I take it that time travel plots - see elsewhere in Alan - make narrative sense even though they don't really make sense. (Narrative sense is thus apparent sense not real sense: seeming so rather than being so.) Like Wittgenstein's attitude to how we could react to the discovery of an inconsistency in mathematics, we could simply choose to ignore the problem. No sci-fi propulsion system is plausible but the beginnings of an account can be more narratively satisfying than a bald invocation of mystery. We like to hear of some mechanism no matter that it does not finally make much sense. But Putnam’s point about the basic explanatory power of a square peg not fitting into a round hole rather than needing augmentation via an excursion into microphysics also applies. Everyone agrees that mitochondria do not add anything to an explanation of the Force.
7.7
‘Doctor Who and the Green Death’ is set down a mine in Wales. Its special effects do not reward a repeat viewing on a free trial of BritBox after 40 years.
7.8
There is some dispute among the experts about how a TARDIS is powered. On one account, there is a collapsing black hole in every one, balanced in an ‘eye of harmony’. On another, there is only one such eye of harmony on Gallifrey. It is interesting that Alan’s show has decided the teleportation is not slave to the ship but initiated by the away team itself and hence requires this enormous power source. Let us hope they never leave it behind by mistake!
7.9
An homage to the ST-DSN episode (5:10 Rapture) in which Sisco is taken over by his powers as Emissary [to the worm-hole aliens] of the People and gifted with foreknowledge including of the next katterpod harvest. Alan’s finding his childish conkers trophy echoes Sisko finding B’hala, Bajor’s legendary lost city, through a mystic vision.
7.10
Alan has selected a too close copy of the time machine in the 1960 film version of the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine. Although not strictly steam punk, the film had a delightful respect for what a Victorian time machine would look like: basically a bath chair, whatever one of those is. I doubt anyone will have missed that the two larger books just behind Alan are Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
7.11
The ‘let’s kill Hitler’ theme is a tricky one for any time travel sci-fi film to deal with. But for any non-fictional likely victim, we all know the endpoint, outside Philip Roth novels. Who knows how much people will remember the feelings we all had at 10pm November 4th 2020. This episode was a note pushed into a bottle from the desperate desert island of that Sliding Doors timepoint by the script writer while in the midst of a serious week-long depressive episode. ‘Powerful Kramler’ is one of the many delights of the Nabokov master work: Pale Fire, the best ever work of PoMo (including everything written by that wanker JD). Being in a ‘manly state’ is a treat still held in reserve for viewers of Alan the Alien’s Log prior to agreement from the studio lawyers. (In fact, it is present in 8.10.)
7.11B
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/08/the-other-four-seasons-trump-team-holds-press-conference-at-suburban-garden-centre
7.12
ST-VOY never got the hang of the fact that the Doctor is a programme. The way his identity conditions were regarded seemed always to assume that he was a token - a running of the programme - not a type: the program itself. Poor Alan has made the same mistake here. Alan’s EMH looks rather like a mashup of the ST-VOY version and Alan himself. Where there would be a Starfleet logo on the EMH’s tunic it may seem that Alan has insisted, instead, on a very similar ‘A’.
7.12B
Aside from the connection to Gillian McKeith, most of this is a garbled version of what Mark Hogarth, a Cambridge University philosopher of physics, put in place by way of Covid precautions: taping his covid-positive daughter behind a sheet and in effect making her accommodation into a fume cupboard with fans. He later replicated this for himself, also putting his dog Filth out of reach. ‘Taking it on the chin’ was the phrase idiot Johnson used early in the pandemic.
7.13
Planet Dagobah is the setting for the Star Wars scene in which Yoda raises Luke’s submerged X-Wing through the power of the Force, made possible by Luke not killing him on landing.
7.14
The plot of the original Planet of the Apes is sadistic: much castration, forced lobotomy, murder and taxidermy stuffing. Unlike Alan's free albeit forced choice, here, Charlton Heston's character is shot in the throat and thus cannot speak and hence hence manifest intelligence.
There is significant blurring of levels in the script as Alan's thoughts move from reflections on scripts and narrative worlds to worries that his actual friend - TW who has been both character and actor so far - is now dead within the narrative world. Ho hum. Clumsy.
7.15
Possibly the most famous final scene of a science fiction film ever. Here, Sophie effortlessly plays both the horse and the female companion of the original film.
8.1
As well as regular series/seasons, there is often a Christmas special in the new (2005-) version of Doctor Who. However, the first Christmas special was in fact the episode ‘The feast of Steven’, the seventh of 13 episodes comprising the series ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ starring the first Doctor: William Hartnell. Bizarrely, he broke the fourth wall: delivering the line “Oh, and incidentally, a happy Christmas to all of you at home” to camera.
8.2
It is a remarkable fact that most of the monsters / villains in TV sci-fi are the right size to seem scary. The opposite idea is deployed in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”
8.3
In a delightful nod to meta-textuality, Captain Saru (ST-DIS 3.8) really does debate the right words to adopt as his personal catch phrase reflecting in the fiction a debate that will also have taken place in the script writers’ room. The Latin ‘hoc age’ is the motto of the script writer's grammar school. It means: do this!
8.4
The Mandalorian’s key selling point appears to be the cuteness of a ‘baby Yoda’ Grogu. ‘Stavru’ here echoes that and ‘Stavros’, the creator of the Daleks.
8.5
It is striking how a murderous Mirror Universe Emperor Philippa Georgiou has been domesticated into a loveable eccentric by the time of her departure in series 3 (ST-DIS) through a portal opened up by the Guardians of Forever. The scene is meant to echo the seated Guardian (with a door), the Guardian's ST-DIS portal and the original version of the portal in ST-TOS.
8.6
The Weeping Angels in the episode ‘Blink’ are perhaps the most intellectually satisfying Doctor Who monsters.
8.7
‘Seeds of Doom’, the 1976 Tom Baker era Doctor Who, introduces the Krynoid as an interstellar seed-based vegetable monster. The first two episodes are remarkably similar to John Carpenter’s The Thing.
‘Younglings’ is the terrible word from Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.
‘How can he make them die?’ echoes a question from Withnail and I concerning a stolen live chicken.
8.8
Although the idea of ‘The Burn’ retrospectively justified the craziness of the spore drive in ST-DIS, the final explanation of its cause is even more unsatisfying than Alan’s slight tweak. No sprouts were harmed in the original, however.
8.9
The actual name of the Star Trek animated series is Star Trek: Below Decks and hence Alan has misunderstood the genre. Alan Hudson is a reference to Angus Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs, played by the Scottish actor Gordon Jackson.
8.10
A reference to the strange unmentioned but clearly homoerotic bathroom scene in Top Gun.
8.11
The Martian includes the fine phrase: to science the shit out of.
8.12
An opportunistic script based on the presence of crucifixes made for Easter by local church communities. The script runs together orc-pits from Tolkien, the clone army from Star Wars and the Romulans from Star Trek.
8.13
In George Lucas’ THX 1138 the torture porn scene is in fact hologrammatic 3D rather than very two dimensional Attic black figure art (cf Greek pottery 550BC). Alan’s scene uses one of the film poster images (depicting a later scene) instead of recreating the actual torture porn scene from during the film.
8.14
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one character, in a fugue-like state, forms the shape of the key mountain in reality the Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Alan's team has augmented this unconscious modelling to take in the space craft too, though, despite that, it seems that Alan has not grasped the significance of his own creation.
8.15
In Star Trek: TNG ‘Time's Arrow’, Data’s head is found having been severed from his body (which is not found) in a cave on Earth 500 years previously. Being android, its re-attachment, for it, 500 years later makes perfect sense. TW may not be so happy with Alan’s solution.
Season 9 Poster
This excellent poster by Karen Mitchell may not be evidence that Season 9 will actually be very ecological, more’s the pity. The idea that Alan may be stranded on Earth is an echo of Jon Pertwee’s initial series of Doctor Who in which the Doctor was mainly earthbound and working for UNIT, apparently to bring production costs down.
9.1
The Day the Earth Caught Fire. The bath or sink on the left references an earlier scene in which teenagers riot by wasting water as the Earth’s temperature rises and water is rationed. The scene recreated here comes at the very end of the film though, in the original, the reporter wanders an empty London waiting the result of the fresh nuclear explosions rather than having to provide them himself. The original (generally a black and white film) is filmed with a gold filter. ‘Atomics’ is the term of art in Dune.
9.2
Jon Pertwee’s Doctor got to drive around in a mock vintage kit car ‘Bessie’ as compensation for the viewer, perhaps, of not using the TARDIS.
9.3
Already, Season 9 of Alan the Alien’s Log has been described by one critic and renowned representative of the French New Wave as a “curiously baffling version of the Clangers”. The studio took this as the high praise it was obviously meant to be and rushed out 9.3. But the following is an attempt to render everything in the episode clear.
In the 1987 film Robocop (dir. Paul Verhoeven), things don’t end well for Kinney! Having been asked to threaten the police robot with a gun, he is brutally killed by it when it gets out of control. It is actually a meeting rather than a boozey shindig but the chaos into which it depends hints at the latter.
The Saucer’s meat tenderiser stands in as a weapon in many episodes of Alan carrying both a sense of amateurishness - no fancy ray guns for Alan! - and also likely gore. (In one episode (7.1) there is mention of ‘close quarters work’ with the meat tenderiser and the Saucer’s apple corer on sleeping members of the Borg.)
Although not strictly about an ecological collapse (the theme of this season of Alan...), an atmosphere of such collapse lurks in the background of the film, indicated by a meta-fictional advertisement within the film for a motorcar oil style sunblock to cope with the loss of the ozone layer. Innocent times!
The phrase ‘cancer of crime [in Detroit]’ comes from the film itself. Coincidentally, over the next 20 years from Robocop’s release, civic structures did collapse in the real Detroit. Surbiton is merely a spurious comic contrast with Detroit.
‘Synthetic’ is one name for androids in the Alien prequel film Prometheus (both directed by Ridley Scott), though we are informed in Prometheus that the preferred name is ‘artificial person’) and features in the book, radio series and film Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In the idea of a ‘synthetic lap dancer’, there is an echo of the ‘basic pleasure model’ android from the film Blade Runner. ‘Pleasure Plant Risa’ is the most famous of the quasi-brothel planets in wholesome Gene Roddenberry’s narrative universe.
‘That weekend of such initial romantic promise’ suggests the rarity of such promise in poor Alan’s life but also hints - via the word ‘initial’ - that it went terribly wrong. Not surprising if the synthetic in question looked like the robot here!
‘BOJO 209’ echoes the original name (ED 209) and the current UK PM's nickname and his likely approach to robot policing were he offered the chance.
The shadows are used to suggest Kinney’s large fear of the actually rather small BOJO 209. They also evoke the play of shadows in Plato’s ‘Allegory of the cave’.
9.4
The first of two John Wyndham episodes. In The Kraken Wakes, there is a notable absence of actual contact with the mainly invisible alien enemy except in the gruesome ‘sea tank’ scene an island called Escondida: one of the most horrific episodes in modern science fiction. Alan’s version is relocated to Padstow to allow the banality of his failure to save his colleagues via a selfish attempt to book in at Rick Stein’s restaurant.
9.5
It proved too hard to photograph the flying and zapping death virtual carousel from Logan’s Run. And in any case, the original makes no sense. No one ever ‘renews’ and yet everyone pretends there is no problem. Alan’s version is both more obviously a carousel and at least honest.
9.6
The Day of the Triffids, obvs.
9.7
The Core. A truly abysmal film whose plot is as described here. The Earth's core has stopped rotating because of a rash experiment by Stanley Tucci’s character and a team bores to its centre in a machine made of ‘unobtainium’ losing characters sequentially. Awful!
Stanley Tucci’s character constantly smokes cigarettes as though to suggest that there is something untrustworthy about him. It turns out that he was responsible for stopping the rotation of the Earth’s core. Alan’s studio has tied these two ideas together with the - albeit incoherent - idea that, in this case, pipe smoking might have played a more direct role in stopping the rotation.
9.8
It is a trope in the Star Trek universe that there are tedious celebration ceremonies after key victories or achievements. They never look any fun. Doctor Who has a particular problem in reusing the same actors, generally without offering any plot explanation. There is no evidence that Peter Capaldi is related even by marriage to a pocket sized elephant but it still seems plausible in virtue of other unlikely pairings between actors and between actors and famous people. The Star Trek mirror universe does indeed favour a BDSM vibe. TW here is wearing a similar uniform to the mirror universe version of Georgiou (see eg https://alan-the-alien.blogspot.com/2021/01/episode-85.html).
9.9
The Avengers film of the John Steed and Emma Peel rather than the Marvel variety. It is, nevertheless, deeply silly so Alan’s climate change motivated radical truncation is doubly motivated.The screen writer later disclaimed this nasty episode as a mere product of the mood altering drug - Venlafaxane - that he was taking at the time.
9.10
Before the film of The Road came out there was some discussion as to whether it was unfilmable. Alan’s attempt suggests that that might be right.
9.11
Fred Hoyle’s (unfilmed) novel The Black Cloud. A black cloud drifts into the solar system and shuts off heat access to the Earth for some months. It turns out to be intelligent and there are conversations between the Earth-bound and rather heroic (cf Hoyle the author?) scientists and it about the secrets of the universe. Fred Hoyle is famous for coining, in a radio interview, the phrase - intended to be a derogatory - ‘The Big Bang’. Even as compelling 3K background radiation evidence became available for the Big Bang theory, he favoured a steady state view. One of the Alan the Alien’s Log science advisers suggests that Hoyle ought to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the synthesis of heavy elements in stars. “Ground breaking and ground making.” In later life, he pressed more eccentric views such as that life was seeded to the Earth from space (cf a motivation for The Black Cloud?) and about Stonehenge and glaciation, which experts in those fields generally dismissed. He lived in one of the highest located houses in the Lake District at High Row and, before that, close to the parental home of one of Alan’s scriptwriters, round the corner from which Hoyle took a near life ending tumble, requiring mountain rescue shortly before his decline and death.
9.12
Soylent Green.
9.13
The third John Wyndham reference in this season. The Midwitch Cuckoos.
9.14
This is a reference to the as yet unfilmed Chinese sci-fi novel trilogy generally all called, after the first novel, The Three Body Problem. In the final novel, Death’s End, the Earth is destroyed by a technology that tips the 3D world into a 2D fragment.
9.15
‘Life out of balance’ is the subtitle of Koyaanisqatsi. Here, obviously, the heavy elephant is higher on the see-saw than Alan. The picture behind is taken from the less often used film poster. The main poster was traffic seen from above at night with streaks of red from the rear lights, here echoed by the fluorescent red.
9.15B
Hard to know what is going on here. But normally the post season picture is of a cast gathering with everyone present. Here it is just TW. And might the scene have an echo of Rousseau’s famous picture: The Dream?
TW entered the series (in Episode 5.3) as the name of a character on the holodeck: a detective, mirroring or echoing the holodeck Moriarty from ST-TNG (‘Elementary, dear Data’ and ‘Ship in a bottle’) who almost manages to free himself from his mere virtual reality or unreality to become a free-standing character in the ship (cf 5.13). TW seems to have succeeded in this by graduating from character to actor. Still there is a sense that Alan created TW.
Here, however, we see TW musing on Alan, or rather on ‘Alan’, as though naming the character not the actor. Throughout the series, Alan himself seems to slip from character to actor and back (eg Episode 4.7). And here it almost seems as though TW might merely have imagined the ‘fantastic’ Alan.
Perhaps also the words ‘shade’, ‘shadow’, ‘luminescent’ and even the surely mistaken identity of TW as some sort of ‘king’ (isn’t that a lion?) suggest, in this context, a particular homage.
(OK, OK, this is all rather an obvious play on Pale Fire, Nabakov’s master work, or rather on the literary critical debate about the right reading of that text (Shadean vs Kinbotean theories) which, itself, has echoes of debate about the ‘resolute reading’ of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophical. See also P1.1.)
Season 10 Poster
It has been rumoured that this is the final season because of a growing disquiet among cast, crew and script-writers. This striking poster seems to hint at a self-awareness of the unreality of Alan’s world and the impossibility of continuing as though all is well.
10.1
The key scene from The Matrix in which Morpheus offers Nemo a choice of blue or red pill to discover the nature of his predicament. (Frogs being green or red has changed the former colour here.)
In mythology, Morpheus was one of the sons of the god of sleep: Somnus.
It is perhaps significant that Alan plays the Morpheus role rather than Nemo, the obvious hero. Here it is TW who may come to understand the real nature of his situation, Alan supposedly already knows. But equally, perhaps Alan remains part of TW’s dream. Without wishing to labour it, this is rather the point of this season. See also 9.15B.
10.2
This episode, released on Halloween, channels John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Satan is a vat of swirling liquid worshipped by the Brotherhood of Sleep, though there is not, in fact, much sleep going on.
Alan’s narrative universe is, or approximates to, that of Star Trek-TNG. In such a universe, true spooky horror has no place. But Prince of Darkness offers a potential cross over. The swirling vat is both a natural phenomenon and also Satan. A scooby-gang is assembled to ‘science the shit’ (in The Martian’s phrase : see 8.11) out of what has been found in the crypt though the relevant science turns out also to include biblical textual analysis.
It is hard to avoid the worry that this meta-textual cross-over might reflect a cross-over at the ground level. Might the studio have accidentally let non-Gene Roddenberry evil into Alan’s evil-free narrative universe? See 10.13.
10.3
The 1970s Tom Baker era Doctor Who series, the Ark in Space. The ark’s cargo of sleeping people is being eaten alive by giant insects: the Wirrn.
10.4
This is a tribute to ST-TNG ‘Schisms’ in which some members of the crew of the Enterprise are transported to a parallel universe for bizarre radical surgery by non-linguistic (as far as we ever discover) clicking aliens. Alan here replicates Riker’s bravery in being transported across to face the scissor like implements (curving blade plus serrated blade) dimly remembered by a group of colleagues.
In the original, having asked the computer to replicate a tilted wooden table and been offered a perfectly normal albeit tilted table, they ask for it to be swapped for a metal one and are immediately given a bizarre and horrific metal surgical/torturer’s bed and no one blinks at the computer’s disturbing imagination.
10.5
The Passengers has rather an unpleasant stalker premiss but is otherwise pretty much as represented here with situationally coercive sex replacing Sudoku. Strangely, the doors in the film look very much like this found prop. ‘Electrosleep’ is the word for artificial sleep in the Six Million Dollar Man.
10.6
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Doppelgangers grow in pods and take on the form of humans who fall asleep near by. The film was almost called ‘Sleep No More’, the subtitle of this season of Alan the Alien’s Log.
Alan’s inwardly directed scepticism perhaps says more about him than the source material.
Qualia - the qualititative or phenomenal character of experience - form the basis of a criticism of functionalist accounts of the mind, which liken the mind to software running on the hardware of the brain. The intuitive objection runs that qualia are ‘nomological danglers’: their presence or absence cannot be captured in functional terms. On the assumption that it is simply obvious that we experience qualia then functionalism is an inadequate account of the mind. Alan’s musings suggest that it may not be obvious - to him at least - whether or not we experience qualia.
10.7
Blade Runner. The origami unicorn is here merely rendered into geometric Fimo.
As everyone now knows, after the re-insertion of a dream about a unicorn into later re-edited versions of the film, the fact that his colleague knows the contents of Deckard’s dreams - as Deckard knows Rachel’s, suggests the same explanation: that he is a replicant.
The ponderous initial summary, here, is meant to echo the line of dialogue: “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” In its clumsy way, that captures the main mystery Alan faces.
10.8
Inception. Here Spaceport disturbingly bends up over Alan via a David Hockney-style ‘joiner’ photographic collage while his spinner spins. Until just now, Alan believed that if it stops and falls over, he is not dreaming / in a dream. But, as Descartes pointed out, while it may seem impossible that one is dreaming now, dreaming that one is awake is commonplace and any wakeful test of waking may fallaciously seem to be passed when asleep. Alan clearly does not know about disjunctivism which denies the worrying inference here: while one will get things wrong when asleep, if awake one can know that fact.
10.9
Forbidden Planet. The original has not aged well. The characters seem obtuse and the sexual politics lamentable. Alan's homage tries to reflect what now seems the garish tone of Eastmancolor.
10.10
Dark City. The strange leather clad aliens end their experimentation on unknowing and probably unwilling subjects - to try to discover the nature of the soul - by stopping the manipulation of the subjects’ experiences and resetting of time. In the original, actor Ian Richardson declaims: Shut it down! Shut it down, forever! Alan is not the declaiming sort but surely it is what he intends?
The clock-like machine here has Alan’s face on it rather than the human original.
For TW, it seems that everything has been a sort of dream. The film is a fine illustration of Heideggerian throwness. It is less clear that a small elephant taped to a tin quite captures that.
10.11
Total Recall. The towel in the original also looks much more a turban than a towel.
10.12
Both Open Your Eyes and also Vanilla Sky (the latter a Hollywood remake of the former) were options. Alan chose the latter because of its better car and slightly more ambiguous ending.
10.13
It may be that Alan has found himself in the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. If so, this seems to be a in contravention of the rules of the narrative universe in which Alan the Alien’s Log has so far played out: very much the rational world of Star Trek TNG. The self-conscious suggestion in the script itself seems as plausible as any. The introduction of the dual aspect Satan in 10.2 - both the Evil One and a mere jar of swirling fluid subject to scientific explanation - may itself have opened the door for non-natural and spooky elements entering into Alan’s world. If so, narrative innovation in the script writers’ room has had dramatic effect on Alan’s life. As Wittgenstein helpfully said: ‘Theology as grammar’.
10.14
The BBC’s CBeebies ‘Night Garden’ is a modern recreation of William Burroughs’ sci-fi rich ‘Interzone’, itself inspired by the International Zone in Tangier whither Burroughs escaped after killing his wife. Like Interzone and The Naked Lunch, In the Night Garden is an apocalyptic and deeply pessimistic version of the science fiction vision, most unlike Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek optimism. This indicates to what desperation our tubby hero has been driven.
His aim at some sort of ersatz afterlife may have echoes of River Song’s mind living on uploaded into the computer of the Library in Doctor Who.
10.15
Like a clock striking 13, the final ever episode of Alan the Alien’s Log seems to cast doubt on everything that has gone before. Could it really be that not only, as the latter half of season 10 has suggested, Alan’s adventures are more dream than reality but that the entire world of Alan as actor, as well as character, his real life as well as on-screen friendship with his Number One Tenbury Wells and the other cast members is a fiction? Have we wasted our time on someone else’s mere fable?
Is it simply, as HP Lovecraft says, that in his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming?
Prequel poster
The best Star Trek prequel (of three, the others being ST-ENT and ST-DIS) is called ‘Strange New Worlds’. The title comes from the opening monologue of the ST–TOG. Kirk says:
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!
According to Wikipedia, one source of this passage is HP Lovecraft:
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
The named designers are apparently from the Dorothy L Sayers’ book Murder Must Advertise. They are not.
P1.1
The text from HP Lovecraft, set out in the exegesis for the Prequel Season poster above, is deployed in P1.1
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
That Alan deploys this shows that he thinks himself some kind of Joseph Campbell hero. Alan thinks himself a hero even if the context a drunken farewell suggests another view though, in the morning, he has some self-conscious inkling of this too.
The choice of text by the scriptwriters - though of course prefigured by Gene Roddenbury’s choice in the 1960s - suggests an interesting anticipation (because this is a prequel) of the end of season 10: that Alan’s adventures are all unreal, not just Season 10 as it teased: all are the dreams of Cthulhu, Lovecraft’s own Alan. This fate, this destiny, is there at the start, encoded even in the opening words familiar to everyone even before they come to Alan.
The idea that there might be a debate about how much of a body of work is unreal and even nonsensical (the script of the final episode - 10.15 - runs: ‘their adventures have come to seem dreamlike and to make no sense’) may have echoes of the ‘resolute reading’ of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But it may merely bespeak a kind of adolescent disbelief that this is all there is to it.
There has been some suggestion in the press that this exegesis website would benefit from its own exegesis website but perhaps that would be de trop.
P1.2
In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode 1, the crew travels to the planet Kiley (hence here, sort of, Minogue) 279, which is in a similar state to 21st century Earth and on the brink of civil war. The inhabitants have reverse-engineered a weapon from starship warp drives after witnessing the Discovery mission (in ST-DIS) in nearby space. The crew decides to break Starfleet's General Order 1 by interfering in the society to convince them not to use the weapon. General Order 1 is renamed the more familiar ‘Prime Directive’ thereafter.
That Alan does not ignore General Order 1 - unlike the ‘real’ Captain Pike - helps situate this moral universe. Alan is not the hero of his own adventures. He plays Pike badly.
P1.3
In the ST-TOS episode ‘The menagerie’ - reusing footage from the unaired Star Trek pilot - Captain Pike is shown disfigured and mutilated in a wheelchair. In ST-DIS, an earlier uninjured version of Pike has a premonition of his injury and disfigurement but even when give the chance to change this future still acts in such a way that will lead to it. In ST-SNW, Pike repeatedly sees unreal and illusory images of this future but bravely carries on. Alan’s script writers seem to have made these rather affecting premonition images tediously literal: a matter of décor.
‘Beep beep’ connects to the informal on-stage nickname of the wheelchair in that 1960s ST-TOS pilot, hints at Toad’s flawed enthusiasm for the road in The Wind in the Willows, but ultimately bespeaks an inadequate attempt to boost one’s spirits in the face of inevitable death and failure. Alan goes on before us all into that great and unsettling mystery, although with rather less sang-froid that Star Trek’s Captain Pike. Just a quiet, and actually even unspoken, ‘Beep beep!’.
P1.4
In the ST-TOS episode ‘The arena’, Kirk has to fight a Gorn: a bipedal reptilian species clearly played by a person in a crude reptile suit. The Gorn appear in one mirror universe episode of ST-ENT looking rather better. ST-SNW has bravely decided to make them the most worrying enemy in the first series, as though to rival the other enemies listed in Alan’s episode but it seems that his designers did not quite understand the brief.
Might it even be that behind Alan’s fear lies nothing of great significance?
P1.5
The quotation from Spock is genuine from ST-SNW but echoes everything we know about Spock, who says in Star Trek IV that for finding the missing whales ‘simple logic will suffice’. Alan, sadly, is not Spock and, for ordinary folk, vigorous logic will never be enough, not even, it turns out, for dealing with a restaurant bill.
P1.6
Alan’s script writers do not appear to have learnt the lesson learnt in ST-TNG that ‘exocomps’, one of the worst props and special effects from that series, are not mere small flying robots but, albeit utterly implausibly, a new life form which thus should not be sent into dangerous conditions without their consent.
In ST-LD, in an unusual episode in which the main crew only appear at the end, an exocomp called ‘Peanut Hamper’ (a name chosen by itself supposedly as the best possible) turns out to be psychopathic and is eventually locked away in a special facility for megalomaniac AI. But even this treats the exocomp as an agent with rights.
‘Out vile jelly’ is the line spoken in King Lear as Gloucester is blinded. That Alan thinks it implies that he is subliminally aware that he is blinding a sentient entity.
P1.7
The Stone Tape was written as a BBC Christmas ghost story in 1972 but, unlike many of those, had a contemporary setting (though see also Stigma). It has a dual aspect of being both supernatural and natural in that the ghosts are imprinted in recordings or echoes in the rock material of an old building and the play is an implicit hymn to modern technology. Alan’s reconstruction captures the tall ceiling of the main set but crudely suggests a more standard image of a supernatural ghost and ‘literalises’ the metaphor of the title.
P1.8
The Man with X-Ray Eyes. The original film explores the psychological cost of being imbued with the sight or vision that enables the protagonist, Dr Xavier, to see literally to the heart of things. Just before the preacher’s speech, Xavier says:
“There are great darknesses, farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness, a light that glows and changes. And in the center of the universe, the eye that sees us all.”
Apparently Stephen King suggested that the film would have been better if, after the final gruesome self enucleation, Xavier had cried out that he could still see.
Prosaically, one might say that there is an echo of that in the way Paul Atreides can still see even when blinded by a ‘stone burner’ in the sequel to Frank Herbert’s Dune. Vision as more fundamental than a mere matter of having sensory organs. Alan lacks the faith to see whether this might be true of himself. He is no Paul Atreides, no messiah.
P1.9
Tenet. It is something of a mystery that Christoper Nolan could direct the thought-provoking Memento, Inception and even Tenet but also the abysmal Interstellar.
P1.10
This is based on the Ray Bradbury short story ‘A sound of thunder’. The blurred poster behind TW (playing the character of the tour guide Travis) says ‘Tyme Sefari, Inc. Sefaris tu any yeer en the past. Yu naim the animall. Wee taekyuthair. Yu shoot itt.’ indicating the change to spelling, as well as USA president, caused by the death of the butterfly back in prehistoric time. The text of the script is very nearly the actual final words of the story.
Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, “can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we – ” He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon. There was a sound of thunder.
The weapon of choice in an Alan episode is, of course, the Saucer’s meat tenderiser.
Although the idea of the effect of a butterfly post-dates its use to illustrate chaos theory, it remains seminal in time travel sci-fi.
The chronodrive attached to the Saucer, indicating that this is a time travel episode, was first introduced in Episode 1.9.
P1.11
La Jetée (directed by Chris Marker, one of the Left Bank film directors) is a 1962 half hour long French photo-roman science fiction film. It comprises a sequence of black and white still photographs with a spoken commentary and concerns a time travel experiment after a nuclear war. The film starts and finishes on the titular airport jetty or viewing platform. The figure closest to the camera looks very like Alan’s teddy bear from the season 7 trailer, suggesting that Alan’s realisation that a hatchling version of himself is also present on the jetty is true.
La Jetée inspired the similar time travel paradox film 12 Monkeys, directed by Terry Gilliam .
There is an irony in Alan’s dismissal of photo-roman which perhaps suggests that neither he nor his script writers have a full understanding of the nature of their own finished work, unless, perhaps, we are seeing merely still representations of a diachronic art form. It may be best not to enquire too closely into what, exactly, Alan the Alien’s Log really is.
P1.12
Within science fiction as a whole, the time travel genre seems to have particularly limited options. One big issue is dealing with the grandfather paradox while still having some sort of contingent jeopardy. (A safe solution removes all jeopardy; too much jeopardy is implausible with respect to the paradox.)
But a more prosaic issue is how to make each new instance of the machinery of time travel sufficiently novel. The writers of Hot Tub Time Machine pull off a coup de theatre in the utterly banal vehicle of time travel combined with their complete abandonment of the idea of making any of this plausible.
P1.13
In ‘Before the flood’, episode 9.4 of Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi’s Doctor explains, face to camera, the bootstrap paradox of time travel using the idea of a time traveller fan of Beethoven who travels back in time to meet his hero but can find no such composer. So he himself has Beethoven's scores, which he had brought for autographing, published - thus becoming, in effect, Beethoven - and time continues as before. The Doctor then asks: who put those notes and phrases together?
Alan’s script-writers seem to have forgotten that this was merely the explanation of a general principle that was to be exemplified in the exciting episode to follow, which included escaping the clutches of the scary Fisher King, not part of the action itself.
If ever Alan can confuse use and mention, he will!
P1.14
Van Gogh appears in two episodes of the Mat Smith season 5 of Doctor Who. In ‘Vincent and the Doctor’, the Doctor and Amy travel back in time, and to France, to meet Vincent Van Gogh and some humour attaches to their fan status. In ‘The Pandorica opens’ a hint of the jeopardy to come is shown in a short scene in which a distressed Van Gogh has painted a picture of the TARDIS exploding (which is indeed its fate in a universe that has later to be rewritten by the Doctor). Many copies of the BBC pastiche picture are available on the Web. Sadly, Alan’s props department seem to lack the necessary artistic skills so widely demonstrated by others.
The idea of ‘meddling with powers one cannot comprehend’ is lifted from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom but also reminds us of Obi-Wan Kanobi's line: ‘If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.’
P1.15
The recent Star Trek films avoid the issues of continuity that are solved in Star Trek Discovery merely by everyone solemnly promising never to mention any of the series happenings to Captain Kirk and co. by staging an early disaster resulting in both the destruction of Romulus, then Vulcan and the death of Kirk’s father on the USS Kelvin, changing the timeline. They do not, however, make the mistake of killing Kirk himself!
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