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http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/when-less-plot-is-more-play-loves-labours-lost-vs-pericles-prince-of-tyre-2/

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Today I will take on the unsurprising thesis that Love’s Labour’s Lost is a better play than Pericles Prince of Tyre. The very fact that thesis does not surprise us is itself important, since it means we all agree a play about royal heroes, alluring princesses, evil kings, loyal nobles, dastardly assassins, incest, famine, shipwreck, infanticide, pirates, slavery, prostitution, and divine intervention is less exciting than one about some people flirting for two hours to no particular end.

The simple conclusion that it’s a bad idea to pack too much plot into a 20,000 word story (on the short end for a modern novella), but by digging deeper I hope we can look, both at plot, and at the many things which aren’t plot that make up the length of a play or story, and how those other components can make a giant epic spanning five kingdoms and two decades less gripping than Love’s Labour’s Lost, which I choose for comparison because it is not merely a story about nothing, but, in many ways, a story about less than nothing.

Few of us have had the privilege of seeing Pericles Prince of Tyre, because rare is the brave theater company that dares put it on.  It isn’t canonical enough to draw crowds like Hamlet or Macbeth, especially since we now agree Shakespeare only wrote the second half, and the rest was probably by one George Wilkins, an inkeeper, pamphleteer, pimp and criminal whom I would call infamous except that infamy requires that people have still heard of you. Pericles is also rarely put on because the staging is tricky, requiring multiple sea voyages as well as multiple kingdoms, which can get expensive or require elaborate lighting tricks and physical acting if a troop can’t manage a full set change for every fleeting scene.  And the play requires the protagonist to age twenty years over the course, and nowadays it’s hard to muster the time or funds to do old age makeup good enough to satisfy audiences spoiled by the latex, computers and budgets of Hollywood. We have many more opportunities to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, which not only has some of Shakespeare’s best and most elaborate witty language, but can be performed with a single prop bush. (See also why, even though Thornton Wilder won Pulitzers for both Our Town and Skin of Our Teeth, you will have many more chances in your lifetime to see Our Town. Staging requirements of Our Town: four chairs.  Staging requirements for Skin of Our Teeth: furnished suburban home, overhead projector system, dinosaur, woolly mammoth, large glacier which enters and destroys the set.)

Staging the storm scene in a Public Theater production of Pericles

But the other enemy of Pericles is its own plot, which is partly the fault of the ancient and medieval sources it is based on, but only partly.  I want to pause here to say that I love Pericles Prince of Tyre, and have rushed to see it every chance I get.  It’s a rollicking wild ride, and if I say silly or unkind things about it here, it is the kind of affectionate teasing reserved for things we love, and consonant with the fact that these plays are comedies and (despite whatever stuffy 19th century literary critics might say) they’re supposed to be funny.

Let us first compare the plot summaries of our two plays (SPOILER ALERT):

Pericles, the young ruler of the ancient Mediterranean city-state of Tyre (in Lebanon) sails to Antioch, seeking the hand of its famously beautiful princess. Her father has pledged to marry her to whoever solves a difficult riddle, but suitors who fail are executed. Pericles solves the riddle, and its solution reveals that the king and his daughter are committing incest (which would be a great twist if it hadn’t been spoiled by the prologue). Disgusted and afraid of the evil king, Pericles flees, and the evil king sends an assassin to kill him to keep the incest a secret (Cue audience: “If you wanted to keep the incest a secret why did you put it in the riddle in the first place?”)  Not daring to return home, Pericles journeys to the (randomly-selected) land of Tarsus, and saves its people from a famine with his huge loads of grain (Why did he have all this grain with him?), earning the eternal gratitude of its king and queen.  With the assassin still on his heels, he sets out again but is shipwrecked, and washes up on a beach in the distant land of Pentapolis with nothing but his armor (which is miraculously found by fishermen). By bizarre coincidence, that very day the king is about to celebrate his nubile daughter’s birthday with a joust (What century is this supposed to be again? Something BC?), and the mysterious stranger wins the tournament, the princess’s heart, and, after revealing his noble pedigree, the king’s blessing. Back in Tyre, Pericles has been gone so long that his people try to make his steward become king, but the faithful steward struggles to make them await Pericles’ return. Meanwhile off-stage the evil incestuous king and princess of Antioch are incinerated by lightning. And now that it is safe to return home, Pericles sets sail with his pregnant queen, but she goes into labor during a terrible storm, bearing a daughter named Marina, but dying in the process. Distraught, Pericles lands in Tarsus again, then sails home leaving his infant daughter in Tarsus to be cared for by its king and queen (the eternally grateful ones, from the famine) who have just had a daughter of their own, so will raise the two princesses together. Meanwhile the coffin with the corpse of Pericles’ dead wife washes up in the unrelated and distant land of Ephesus, where she is revived by an impossibly skilled physician.  Convinced that she will never find Pericles or her child again, she becomes a priestess of Diana.

Here ends the first half of Pericles Prince of Tyre.  I want to pause here to digest. We have met five kingdoms: Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis and Ephesus.  We also have four separate princesses going on, in only an hour’s worth of action. (Think of how many films Disney produced before they even resorted to having two princesses at once!) We have had moral lessons: good people of Tarsus being rescued from famine, the incestuous King and Princess of Antioch incinerated by wrathful gods. And we have had fate’s cruelty/whimsy in the storms and shipwrecks, and the armor and not-quite-dead queen being washed ashore. Taking stock of what plot threads remain: we lost the villainous King of Antioch—who might have been main villain material—and Pericles is safely at home, so our remaining threads are few: the stranded queen, the infant daughter, and the audience’s confidence that our hero Pericles is the type which heavy-handed Fate will continue to throw things at.

Detail from John Boydell engraving of Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1852

Now let’s check out what plot we have in an equivalent first hour of Love’s Labour’s Lost:

King Ferdinand of Navarre vows to spend three years on a course of vaguely-defined “study” while avoiding all contact with women. On the very day that the handsome unmarried king forces his three handsome unmarried courtiers to take this vow along with him, the beautiful unmarried Princess of France turns up with three beautiful unmarried Ladies in Waiting to demand the disputed territory of Aquitaine (a plot thread Shakespeare drops faster than an off-stage incestuous princess can say: “Look, Dad, lightning!”). The ladies already have crushes on these famous gentlemen, and the four men instantly fall in love with the corresponding ladies, all in the correct pairs (no love triangles or hexagons here). But alas!—these men will be oathbreakers if they woo these ladies, so they are wracked by forbidden longing. Meanwhile the ladies tease them mercilessly. After some agonizing and many puns, the king and his three companions all catch each other writing love sonnets, and decide together to break their oaths and woo the four french ladies. (Accompanying these lords and ladies are a Spaniard, a page, a wench, a rustic man, and a witty Frenchman, none of whom has any particular goal beyond flirting.  Also around are a constable, a schoolmaster and a parish priest; “they fight crime,” where crime in this kingdom is defined as flirting.)

Pausing at the midpoint, the comparative simplicity is obvious: two kingdoms instead of five, four ladies again but with one straightforward origin, no travel sequences.  There is—compared to storm, famine and incest—nothing going on.  In fact, there is nothing going on in a literal sense.  The only thing that ever stood between our characters and the happy “everyone gets married” comedy ending is the men deciding to avoid women, and the solution is the men changing their minds. There is no villain, no crisis, no impediment, no unrequited love, disguise or mistaken identity, not even a misunderstanding.  Nothing is going on. Yet the audience has spent the last hour laughing until we ached.

What just happened?

The answer comes when we outline the plays differently, not in terms of plot, but in terms of the different components which make up the structure of a pre-modern European comedy. And for this we must travel back in time to the classical world (when Pericles is vaguely maybe supposed to be set?). To that end, I present to you one of the leading candidates for “Oldest Joke in the World.”(This is meant to be an interruption, insertable into any scene where a character hears a piece of news, so just pick an arbitrary spot in the most recent book you were reading and imagine this addition.)

A messenger bursts in, and gasps out between panting breaths that he has incredibly important, exciting, amazing, earth-shattering news. The other characters rise in excitement and beg to hear the news.  Oh, but the messenger is too breathless! The journey was so long! So hard! Up hill both ways over jagged rocks and blasted heaths—he gasps this out between exaggerated breaths.  They ask again: what’s the news?  Oh, but he’s too thirsty!  Parched from the beating sun, the desert sands, exhausted from scaling mountains, leaping fences, crossing tightropes, wrestling tigers, battling bandits, daring death.  They bring him [insert beverage] and he guzzles it loudly and elaborately, spraying it everywhere, demanding a second flagon, a third, panting out more details of his journey—misty mountains, wild horses, wicked viziers—and repeating again how staggeringly, world-changingly, epoch-makingly important this news is. The characters become increasingly annoyed: asking, coaxing, begging, bribing, demanding, shouting, threatening.  Mad with frustration they may even attack the messenger, shaking him, dumping a drink over his head, finally tackling him to squeeze the news out, so the whole scene degenerates into wild physical comedy. If the troop is good, the laughter has been side-splitting for at least six minutes before we finally hear the news.

This “messenger gag” is possibly better characterized as a “bit of business” in the stage sense rather than a “joke.”  It dates back to the earliest records of classical comedy in Greece and Rome, in which context we call it the “running slave” bit, since in ancient comedy messengers were usually slaves.  And it kept being funny for two millennia.  Modern audiences are most likely to have seen it in Henry IV part II, when Pistol comes to tell Falstaff that Henry IV is dead, a perfect example because the audience already knows the news, so we are just enjoying watching the torment as Pistol refuses and refuses and refuses to actually deliver the message. A dry performance of the Messenger Gag is dry, but a good one can be the highlight of an Act.  It is precisely the sort of comic business which Pericles Prince of Tyre could have had many times (“Prince Pericles, news about the King of Antioch!” “What? What is it?!” “Oh, but I’m so thirsty, I swam all the way from Italy to Troy while fleeing a possessed hippocampus!”). But Pericles didn’t have room for comic bits like this—it was too busy having plot.

Pericles receives dramatic news in a scroll, because, with three princesses to go, there isn’t time for a messenger scene. (Photo from a West Valley College production of Pericles.)

Bits of “business”—classic gags like eating in a silly way, or a person in disguise in drag constantly almost getting exposed—are still central in a lot of modern comic scenes, from Monty Python to the movie Willow, but in classical and Renaissance comedy they were even more core.  Commedia dell’Arte—in effect the most ubiquitous form of comedy in Shakespeare’s age and a huge influence on his audience as much as on him—relied on stock, improvised bits called lazzi.  These would interrupt the plot action with long sequences such as “a character tries and fails to climb a ladder” or “a character in disguise pretends to be a nobleman” or “a character eats noodles” and a veteran improviser could make the act of eating squelchy, squirty, tangly noodles a hilarious one.  There are documents reporting one Italian player working in France who supposedly once kept an audience rolling in the isles for twenty minutes with the single lazzo of sitting in a squeaky chair and mistaking its noises for someone sneaking up behind him, so freezing every time it squeaked to try to listen to where the intruder was, thus trapping himself in the chair.  Lazzi were sometimes spontaneous additions by the players, but often planned.  The scripts that survive for Commedia dell’Arte plays are usually not really scripts in the Shakespearean sense, since they rarely spell out any dialog. Instead they provide a skeleton of events onto which lazzi can be appended, as in this example (translation from Mel Gordon’s Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte, 1983, p. 51):

PANTALOON says (in a stage whisper) that his creditors, especially Truffaldino, insist on being paid; that the extension of credit expires that day, etc.
TRUFFALDINO (scene of demanding payment).
BRIGHELLA finds a way of getting rid of him.
PANTALOON and BRIGHELLA remain.
TARTAGLIA comes to the window and listens.
BRIGHELLA espies him. He and PANTALOON pretend to be very wealthy.
TARTAGLIA comes down into the street. He goes through the ‘business’ of begging for alms from PANTALOON. In the end they agree to a marriage between TARTAGLIA’s daughter and PANTALOON’s son.
TRUFFALDINO again demands his money.
BRIGHELLA makes believe that PANTALOON gives it to him. He does this three times, and then all three go out.

The script above is all we have for half an Act, not a scene but an entire Act. That means it filled at least a half hour. With the example of the messenger bit in mind, it is easy to envision how a good comedy team can make many laughs (and many minutes) of moments like “scene of demanding payment” or “He and Pantaloon pretend to be very wealthy.” And since these Lazzi are often physical comedy, more non-dialog action than dialog, we know they happened in scripted comedies as well.  When Henry IV and Plautus’s Aphitryon do the messenger gag they don’t write down “Messenger arrives winded and strings out the scene with long gasps and funny breathing,” they know the comic troop will recognize the messenger gag and add it.

So, as we have reconstructed them, all stages of classical and Renaissance comedy contained lots of lazzi-like physical and often improvised comedy for which the script was a skeleton and launch pad. This humor is invisible when you read the text plain, and is why the comedies are so much funnier live than read, at least in productions which have escaped the unfortunate 19th century trend of insisting that “high culture” like Shakespeare can’t be funny, and that the clown parts should be read (and performed) as dead serious social commentary. Interruptions for dance, music and song were also (we now believe) common, and Shakespeare’s scripts specify many points at which talk would have stopped for a song, as in the post-joust banquet dance in Pericles or the point in Love’s Labour’s Lost when the love-struck Spaniard asks his page to sing to cheer him up (and modern troops struggle to maintain interest through the repetitive song in French, in an age of recorded music, when the audience no longer sees theater as a rare opportunity to hear instruments, ooh instruments!).

Now, reviewing the first halves of our two plays again, we see a critical difference: Pericles is so full of plot it has no room for lazzi.  Even though the text is actually slightly shorter, every single scene is either dramatic action, characters summarizing past dramatic action, or characters lamenting or planning new dramatic action.  Non-dialog sequences would have been filled with the storm, and the mock combat. Famine and assassins do not give good openings for squeaky chairs and slurpy noodles. Meanwhile, the “nothing” that is going on in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a beautifully crafted skeleton designed for the addition of lazzi and comparable bits of comic “business.”  Viewed from the plot perspective it’s Pericles where lots is going on and Love’s Labour’s Lost nothing, but if you instead summarize the comic business, the structural elements of a comic play, it’s Pericles where nothing is happening, while Love’s Labour’s Lost is packed with business of the best sort.

Let us take, for example, the midpoint scene which is the climax of many productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost—Act IV scene III, in which the four ridiculous gentlemen will at last decide to break their silly oath. Instead of anything straightforward, Shakespeare crafts a triple-nested eavesdropping scene, the eavesdropper being a theater trick as old as the messenger gag, and more versatile since it works in comedy and tragedy alike. Here Biron—the wittiest lord—overhears the King confessing his love. Then Longaville enters and confesses his love while both Biron and the King eavesdrop.  Last Dumain enters and confesses his love while all three eavesdrop. Then Longaville reveals himself and chides Dumain for oathbreaking, the King then chides Longaville for hypocritically chiding Dumain, then Biron chides all three for their hypocrisy, and last a letter arrives revealing Biron’s love (sent by our anti-flirtation crimefighting team!). United in love and hypocrisy, the four finally “resolve to woo these girls of France.”

The gentlemen hide from each other on alternate sides of the same column. (Photo from a Southwest Shakespeare Company production of LLL)

The dialog sparkles, but what truly makes the scene soar is the opportunity for ridiculous antics as one, then two, then three men try to hide themselves behind more and more implausible cover on an increasingly crowded stage. Every production has its own creative options: hide up a tree, up a ladder, under a desk, behind an urn, behind an audience member, curl up imitating a rock in pantomime… the options are as endless as the troops ingenuity.  The king says when he enters “I have been closely shrouded in this bush!” but even that opens infinite opportunities: an unreasonably small shrub, a small potted desk fern, a twig…

In addition to hiding they can move about, try to avoid each other, making more ridiculous gestures and actions as they try desperately to be quiet. The text says that the king drops his love letter on the ground: in what hilarious attempting-to-be-silent way will he try to retrieve it before Longaville finds it?

Even if it isn’t strung out at great length, Biron hiding gives the actor the opportunity to perform the lazzo of climbing a ladder in a silly way, and in productions like the Globe’s (highly recommended!) it can be quick but still highlight enough to make the audience burst into applause.  Twice. And the rest of the first half of Love’s Labour’s Lost is full of similar opportunities. The comic potential is actually enhanced by the fact that nothing is happening, since we know it doesn’t matter if our attention strays from the “plot” to a secondary character wriggling about in the background.

“What!” you may object, “but Love’s Labour’s Lost has some of Shakespeare’s most gorgeous and elaborate sonnets, puns and puzzle-box-tight language!  How can you say we aren’t supposed to be paying attention to it?!” It does, and it’s true, and much of the humor in Love’s Labour’s Lost comes from its quick, intricate jabs and brilliant application of the word Honorificabilitudinitatibus (which has a leg up on Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious because it’s a real word!).  Yet the heart of the play is how Shakespeare allows for the symbiosis of excellent dialog with excellent opportunities for comic business, and if you doubt that then watch the Globe production and then the BBC Shakespeare Collection version (performed in traditional dry style with minimal improv) and count how many times you laugh.

It is important to acknowledge, in this comparison, that Pericles Prince of Tyre is a comedy in a different sense from Love’s Labour’s Lost.  If Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy like Plautus, intended to make us laugh, Pericles is a comedy like Dante, intended to show us a moral story with a happy ending, where fate punishes the wicked and virtue carries the good people forward through trials to their just reward. The adventures and moral lessons Pericles packs into the first half aim to be exciting (and instructive) in themselves, and the lack of space for lazzi type improvisation is intentional. Intentional, yet not necessarily successful, since the jam-packed opening section is so indeed dramatic, but not as dramatic as a full-on drama, largely because there is so much so fast that it’s hard for the audience to grab on to any given piece.  The story is trying hard to show that Fate is complex, rewarding vice and virtue in ways we can’t understand until the end, but the events feel so (intentionally) arbitrary that, even in a very good production, they have trouble feeling real.  As a friend said when we watched it together: “Pericles has too many things. None of them matter.”  While harsh, that is the feeling I tend to have while watching Pericles: detachment from the importance of any given event. This is not inherent in stories about the overheavy hand of fate—think of Candide—but it is a strongly present feeling even in very good presentations of Pericles Prince of Tyre.  Meanwhile Love’s Labour’s Lost has nothing going on, so the audience can revel in the pure art.

Returning to our plots, both plays undergo massive changes at the midpoint.

Detail from “Marina singing before Pericles” by John Stothard, 1825

Here Pericles changes authors and becomes real Shakespeare, and we can feel it instantly. Plot summary, part 2:

Princess Marina has become the most beautiful and outstanding maiden Tarsus, so the other princess (heiress of the kingdom) is totally ignored.  Jealous, the queen who raised both girls orders a servant to murder Marina. Waffling because of her virtue and persuasiveness, the assassin is interrupted by the famous Spanish pirate Valdes! (What century is this again?) who carries Marina off into slavery. Pericles returns to Tarsus (why now after almost twenty years?) to reclaim Marina, but is told that she died. Meanwhile, Marina is sold to a brothel in Mytilene (kingdom #5) where the pimps expect big profits, but she is so virtuous (and dedicated to her chastity) that she keeps persuading prospective customers to repent and swear off going to brothels forever. She pulls this on their most important customer, Lysimachus, the governor  of Mytilene, who is impressed and tries to help her (by giving her money, not by rescuing her from the brothel). The pimps decide the only way to break Marina’s spirit is to rape her, but she persuades them to instead let her set up as a schoolmistress teaching music, literature, handicrafts and other virtuous arts, and giving the profits to the pimps. Some time later, a ship brings Pericles to Mytilene (why?), but he has gone mad with grief and just sits, refusing to speak to anyone. Governor Lysimachus brings Marina to cheer up the mysterious stranger, and she tells him her backstory (which she hasn’t told to anyone in Mytilene?) and he realizes she is his daughter. The reunion cures his madness and all are happy, and Lysimachus and Marina decide to wed. Then Pericles has a vision in which the goddess Diana tells him to go to her temple at Ephesus (archaeologist recommended!) where the long lost queen is found, the family reunited, and the gods are much praised for rewarding virtue.

Shakespeare’s hand is not just in the beauty of the dialog. The plot has also decelerated, making space for humor as well as for deeper drama. We also see Shakespeare’s hand in the sudden return of more classical theatrical elements. Shakespeare knew his Plautus as well as any classicist, and the second half of Pericles parodies and critiques one of the most ubiquitous and implausible aspects of classical comedy: the inexplicably virgin prostitute. Those who have seen Plautus or Terence (or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) know this bit: the long lost daughter of Nobleman X has been sold into slavery and is in a brothel conveniently next to the home of Aristocratic Youth Y, who falls in love with the beautiful courtesan. Hilarity ensues culminating in their marriage, enabled by the revelation that she is (A) freeborn, (B) noble, and (C) still a virgin despite having been in a brothel for many years?!  Plautus gives no explanation, and it gets less plausible the more research we do on the history of slavery and sexuality in antiquity (good sources here and here). Shakespeare and his audiences, who have sat through Plautus and possibly even Terence thanks to Renaissance humanist enthusiasm, are aware of how ancient playwrights willfully ignore this issue, so Shakespeare takes up the familiar trope and ornaments it. Just as his eavesdropping scene is triple-nested, his implausibly virginal courtesan is a font of speeches about piety, nobility and chastity, which, depending on the director, can feel like an incredibly powerful female voice, or be presented as over-the-top satire, either of which is powerful, and extra powerful for audiences familiar with this cliché. The deus ex machina ending of Diana’s vision also works, and defuses some of the implausibility of earlier sections by having the gods be as heavy handed in solving Pericles’ woes as they were in shaping them, and does its best to transform the play’s implausible mountain of events from a bug into a feature.  It works. And here and there Shakespeare throws in bits where one could insert lazzi type improvisation; played very, very carefully even the wrestling between the girl and the pimp in the attempted rape scene can be turned into physical comedy which helps defuse the threat of sexual violence and set the modern audience at ease.

But let’s see how well this stands up against what Love’s Labour’s Lost has to offer. What do you say, gentlemen? Ready yet to woo these girls of France?

From Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of LLL

It is at the crux, after Act IV, that Shakespeare makes his most brilliant move: he lowers the stakes. The lovers are all successfully in love. The only impediment between everyone and a happy ending filled with weddings was the king’s silly oath, which he has resolved to break. The tension is over. If there was nothing going on in the first half of the play, that nothing has been resolved. There is now less than nothing going on. Even the most vacuous skeleton of plot has neatly wrapped up by the middle of the play. Shakespeare cracks his knuckles. He will now keep us in our seats another hour while literally nothing happens.  (It feels worth mentioning that at this point I went to my DVD to check one detail in the next scene, and ended up watching through to the end because Shakespeare is just that good at writing nothing!)

I cannot supply a plot summary here. There is no plot. In first scene loooooong scene, packed with bad Latin, grammar jokes and insult games, the only “plot” is that the “fantastical Spaniard” asks the priest and schoolmaster to help him improvise some kind of show to entertain the princess. That isn’t a plot, it’s killing time by having actors discuss how they’re going to come up with a way to kill more time! There’s even a character who watches silently through the whole thing, serving only as someone others make incomprehensible puns at, so at the end when they comment “Thou hast spoken no word all this while,” he can reply deadpan, “Nor understood none neither, sir.” It’s a hilarious moment (and a great example of how silent observer characters can be hilarious on stage but invisible in text), but, still, nothing happened in that scene! Nothing! In the next scene the four gentlemen come to woo the ladies while dressed up as Russians for no reason! We don’t even get a scene of them coming up with this idea and explaining why, Shakespeare just plunges in knowing we will be absolutely delighted to see the king and lords being teased mercilessly while they fail utterly at passing for ridiculous Russians! (The girls disguise themselves too, just for giggles).

What next? The men take off come back not in disguise and get mocked some more. Then things seem to be starting to happen, but interrupt each other so nothing can. The other characters interrupt the mocking with their diversion: a terrible play about the Nine Worthies, which the gentlemen interrupt all the time by mocking it. Then the interruptions of the play-within-a-play time-killer are themselves interrupted when the rustic man accuses the Spaniard out of nowhere of having gotten the wench pregnant, and what looks like it might be a duel, or a fist fight, or at least a brawl of some kind degenerates into wild interruptions and hooliganism without even a coherent fight. Every production of Love’s Labour’s Lost adds different comic “business” to these scenes, from song and dance (as in Brannaugh’s, above) to brawling and food fights (as in the Globe), to whatever this is:

Bryce Pinkham in Public Theater production of LLL

The audience is rolling in the isles.  And then the comedy comes to a screeching halt when a messenger arrives to tell the princess that her father, the King of France, is dead. The mirth stops. All the interruptions are interrupted by the intrusion of the first thing which has happened all play which one could normally call “plot,” the death of a king. Except it’s the wrong plot, the wrong thing for a plotless comedy, and the theatrical whiplash is stunning. Shakespeare has not only made us sit here an hour watching characters kill time by talking about killing time, he has made us angry when something did actually happen. We protest: “Will, you jerk! We don’t want plot; we want our nothing back!” And for the first time we realize how much we really were enjoying a play about less than nothing.

Shakespeare sticks hard to his betrayal of the comedy contract. We will have no wedding at the end. Instead, in a twist of jarring reasonableness, the ladies say they will not trust the vows of lifelong love made by oathbreaking suitors who just met them yesterday, and demand that the men take on difficult tasks for a year and then return if they still love them after that. It’s powerful, it’s sincere, it’s a deep jab at the entire genre by criticizing rash love at first sight as unreliable and unsustainable (pro tip for Juliet), and by twisting the usual power dynamic of lady and suitor by making the marriages not about dowry and politics (like real Renaissance weddings) nor about rash love (like comedy weddings), but about proving the possibility of serious, sustained relationships.

But while he betrays all the plot elements of the play—much as he has been doing the whole time by having no plot, and then less plot—Shakespeare still sticks to the structural promise of the play, that it will provide an ongoing framework for improvisation and extra entertainment. Most summaries say the play “ends” when the news arrives and the women tell their suitors to seek them again in a year, but after that the silly Spaniard returns to deliver—in the midst of grief and tested love—the immortal line: “Will you hear the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo? It should have followed in the end of our show.” And on this little hook, Shakespeare hangs one last crowd-pleaser, a nice finale song, which is an allegory about how time-tempered love is more reliable than rash quick love, but is also a satisfaction to the little voice in the back of the viewer’s mind which has been whining, “I want my vacuous entertainment back!” And, irrelevant as it feels in text, the song is a pleasing, almost soothing finale in a performance, by massaging away the sense of betrayal while preserving all the strength of the comedy meta-commentary Shakespeare has just achieved.

Here are some of those Russian disguises, to make you feel better. (Photo from an Atlanta Shakespeare Company production of LLL)

Structure, rather than line-by-line success, is what I hoped to get at in this rather unfair comparison between one of Shakespeare’s best-written and most popular plays and one that is half neglected, and also only half his. As I tried to demonstrate in my dips into Plautus and Commedia dell’ Arte, “Plot” is only one way of outlining the components that fill up a story’s word count, or scene count. We talk a lot about character arcs or plot threads, but, just like a rock that looks like a face from one side but something else from another, so sometimes what is going on at the heart of a scene might be completely orthogonal to any plot event you can describe in it: an eavesdropping scene, a moral lesson, a man making us love watching him come down a ladder. A message can be delivered in a single sentence or an endless scene.

In these plays, the incestuous King of Antioch and the distant King of France both die suddenly off-stage, a traditional shortcut and often (though not always) a sign of bad writing. And both deaths serve, from a plot perspective, to make the connected character return home, Pericles in one case and the French Princess in the other. But both are also the death of a structural thread. The death of the King of Antioch is the death of Pericles’ entire motivation for traveling, and in many ways the death of the audience’s willingness to accept that this journey makes any sense, so everything thereafter happens for no particular reason. It is the death of credibility, and the transition to the absurd. The death of the King of France is the opposite, since everything until that point had happened for no particular reason. It is the death of the entire comic contract, the whole promise of the play, except for finale music to give the audience one last smile. Both deaths, in a plot synopsis, feel the same, but if we rotate our angle and outline, not by plot, but by scene, by hook, by lazzo, by narrative promise, the new outline is just as valuable.

This is not unfamiliar; we do this kind of analysis every time we see a familiar tale like Sleeping Beauty retold to be five hundred words in one adaptation and five hundred thousand in another. Plays are a particularly easy demonstration of this since so much of their content is invisible in the script (from silent eavesdroppers to physical comedy), challenging us to compare the skeleton of a Commedia script which can pack a half hour scene into 100 words to something as wordy as Shakespeare. But I hope this whole comparison will help us remind ourselves that we can compare apples to oranges, can compare Love’s Labour’s Lost to Pericles Prince of Tyre, the plotless with the over-plotted, and that exciting insights await when twist things around and compare them sideways, structure to structure instead of plot to plot.

Shakespeare would have me finish on a song, but hopefully we can modernize and finish on a comment thread.

This article was originally published June 17, 2015 as part of our ongoing Shakespeare on Tor.com series.

Ada Palmer is an historian, who studies primarily the Renaissance, Italy, and the history of philosophy, heresy and freethought. She also studies manga, anime and Japanese pop culture, and has consulted for numerous anime/manga publishers. She writes the blog ExUrbe.com, and composes SF & Mythology-themed music for the a cappella group Sassafrass. Her first novel is forthcoming from Tor in 2015.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/star-trek-the-original-series-rewatch-mirror-mirror/

http://www.tor.com/?p=200244

“Mirror, Mirror”
Written by Jerome Bixby
Directed by Marc Daniels
Season 2, Episode 10
Production episode 60339
Original air date: October 6, 1967
Stardate: unknown

Captain’s log. Kirk is leading a landing party that includes McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura to negotiate with the Halkan Council over mining rights—which the Halkans are refusing. The Halkans have a history of total peace, and they cannot risk the Federation using the dilithium crystals to take even one life, as that would violate their ethics. Tharn, the head of the council, points out that they could take the dilithium by force, and Kirk smiles and says they won’t, and that he should consider that.

A nasty ion storm is buffeting the Enterprise in orbit, and Kirk orders the landing party beamed back and a course set to clear the storm. However, something goes wrong with the transport, and the landing party find themselves in the transporter room of a much different Enterprise. Everyone’s uniform is different, there’s a logo with a sword through an image of the Earth all over the place, four security guards stand at the transporter room door, and Spock has a Vandyke beard. Everyone gives Kirk a very formal salute upon their materialization.

Spock asks for a status update, and Kirk neutrally says, “No change.” So Spock calls the bridge and orders Sulu to start phaser barrage on Halkan cities. Spock then disciplines Kyle for not operating the transporter properly, said discipline involving an agonizer, which personnel keep on their belts, and cause great pain when applied.

Kyle also reports that there was a power spike in the transporter like nothing he’d ever seen. Kirk snatches on that and says that McCoy had best examine all four of them in case there are any ill effects.

Once they’re safely in sickbay, they can talk openly, with Kirk having been saluted endlessly in the corridors en route. McCoy is appalled at sickbay, as everything is all rearranged and messed up—but the spot on the table where he spilled acid has the exact same acid stain on it. They go over what happened—they all remember briefly materializing in their own Enterprise at first, then fading and appearing in this parallel universe. They hypothesize that the alternate landing party was beaming up at the same time and they were exchanged—which means that their counterparts must be on their Enterprise.

Kirk sends Scotty to engineering to trash the phaser coupling and blame it on the ion storm, then figure out how to get them back home. He also sends Uhura to the bridge to go over Kirk’s communiqués from Starfleet Command and find out what his orders are and what his options are.

Uhura arrives on the bridge, which gets her a lascivious look from Sulu—who’s wearing security red rather than command gold, and who also has a scar on the left side of his face. Sulu wanders over to Uhura’s console to hit on her (starting with “Still no interest, Uhura?” so at least she’s spared having to pretend to reciprocate), which only ends when Kirk walks on the bridge, saluted by everyone. Uhura informs him that communications suffered no storm damage, and sotto voce she adds that Kirk’s only option is to eliminate the Halkans if they won’t cooperate.

Kirk then sits in his command chair, which is much comfier than his usual. Sulu announces that phasers are ready to fire on primary target, but Kirk orders Sulu to stand by. Unfortunately, Scotty can’t inspect the phaser controls without authorization from security, which, of course, Scotty can’t get.

After Scotty reports to the bridge that there’s no damage, Kirk stalls by asking Uhura to contact the Halkan Council to talk to them again. Spock finds this odd, as they have already refused the Empire and must be punished. But Kirk insists.

This version of Tharn is far more haggard, and Kirk gives him twelve hours to change his mind. He then orders phasers shut down and announces that he’ll be in his quarters, and has Uhura order McCoy and Scotty to meet him there (Uhura gives him a “can I come with you?” look and Kirk gives a “there’s no way to justify taking you off the bridge” look back). Spock points out that Kirk’s bizarre behavior will have to be reported, which Kirk assuredly says Spock is at liberty to do.

While Kirk is giving orders, Chekov pushes two buttons on his console and joins Kirk in the turbolift. When they arrive on deck 5, Kirk is ambushed. Chekov plans to assassinate him, thus allowing everyone else to move up in rank. But Wilson, one of Chekov’s pet thugs, attacks Chekov instead, allowing Kirk to get the upper hand. By the time Kirk’s own pet thugs arrive, Chekov’s other two henchmen are dead and Chekov is unconscious. Wilson wants to work for Kirk, figuring that, while Chekov offered to make him a chief, Kirk could make him an officer. Kirk agrees to employ Wilson, then socks him in the jaw so he doesn’t get too uppity.

Kirk meets McCoy and Scotty at his quarters. McCoy reports that two of his staff were betting on how long it would take an injured crewperson to pass out from the pain of his injuries. Scotty says the technology, at least, is basically the same, even if the people aren’t.

Kirk turns on the computer, which, instead of saying, “Working” in a pleasant female voice, says, “Ready” in a harsh male voice. After securing this computer session, to be accessible only by him or Scotty, he confirms that the mix of ion storm and transporter could result in a switch between parallel universes. The computer records the procedure for artificially re-creating those conditions and Scotty looks it over.

While he does so, McCoy muses on what kind of people they are. Kirk asks for “his” service record, learns that this Kirk took command by assassinating Pike and his first actions involved exterminating entire populations. Kirk cuts it off before it can go past his first two missions as captain.

Scotty can do it, although he’ll need help, and McCoy is volunteered to be his assistant. The only issue is that the transfer of power will show up on Sulu’s security board, so he’ll need to be distracted.

Meanwhile, back in the mainline universe, two security guards throw Kirk into the brig, where McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura already are. The foursome are rather confused by their changed uniforms, the weird behavior of everyone, and Spock’s lack of a beard. Spock finds the other Kirk’s offers of money and power to be fascinating and wanders off, leaving a confused, shouting Kirk behind in custody.

Back on the I.S.S. Enterprise, Spock—trailed by a Vulcan bodyguard—talks to Kirk. He says he’s pleased that Chekov’s assassination attempt failed, as he has no desire for command—he prefers the simpler duties of science officer, plus he’s less of a target where he is now. Chekov himself is in the agony booth being tortured. As they walk through the corridors—Kirk’s own bodyguard walking alongside Spock’s—they discuss the Halkan situation, and Kirk’s odd behavior.

Scotty and McCoy go to engineering—a hypo of McCoy’s getting them past the security guard—while Kirk goes to his quarters to find a woman in his bed. This is Lieutenant Marlena Moreau, who works in the chemistry lab, and is also the Captain’s Woman. She wonders what he has planned, since sparing the Halkans is out of character, and she’s also surprised that he was caught off-guard by Chekov.

Spock then informs Kirk that he received a private message from Starfleet Command. He is violating regulations by informing Kirk of its contents: if Kirk hasn’t completed his mission by planetary dawn, Spock is to kill Kirk and take over as captain.

Moreau is impressed with Spock’s loyalty, especially since he’ll die for it. She activates the Tantalus Field, and Kirk soon learns that it’s a weapon that Kirk plundered from an alien laboratory that can make anyone simply disappear. She focuses the device on Spock and offers to kill him, but Kirk stops her.

After she departs, Kirk calls Scotty, saying they have a three-hour deadline, but Scotty informs him that it’s only half-an-hour because the initial exchange increased the field density between universes. Once it gets too big, they’ll never be able to switch back. In ten minutes, he’ll be ready, and Uhura will need to distract Sulu.

Spock detects a high level of computer activity in engineering, but when he queries the computer, it tells him that it’s voice-locked to Kirk and Scotty only. Spock’s computer then detects Sulu performing a security sweep on Spock’s communications, and the first officer angrily asks why he’s doing that. Sulu explains that he also detected the unusual computer activity—and he also can guess what Spock’s secret orders are. They verbally fence for a bit, Spock making it clear that his Vulcan operatives will avenge his death, which makes Sulu more than a little apprehensive.

Moreau comes back, having changed into a sexy dress. Apparently, Kirk and Moreau’s relationship has grown stale, but Kirk’s charisma impresses her. However, when he excuses himself to go help Scotty with his sabotage, she assumes the relationship is over. But when he kisses her, it’s with significant passion, and Moreau realizes that this isn’t the Kirk she knows—he’s showing mercy. He also makes it clear that she’s the Captain’s Woman until he says she isn’t.

Then he heads to the transporter room. She goes to the Tantalus Field and trains it on Kirk.

Scotty signals Uhura to distract Sulu. She does so, giving in to his seduction long enough for his smooching her to keep him from noticing the alarm on his board. Once that’s done, she slaps him, saying she changed her mind again, and pulling a knife on him when he protests. She leaves the bridge and heads to sickbay. Scotty and McCoy do their part to transfer power, but Kirk’s accepting of the transfer in the transporter room is interrupted by Spock. He leads Kirk to sickbay at phaserpoint—the intent was to question McCoy, since he’s probably more susceptible to his interrogation techniques than Kirk, but he sees the whole landing party present. A fight ensues, and it takes all four of them to take Spock down.

Scotty is ready to head to the transporter room, as they don’t have much time, but McCoy insists on treating Spock, as the head trauma they inflicted on him could kill him. Then they’re interrupted by Sulu and four of his guards. His plan is to assassinate Kirk and Spock both, setting it up so that it looks like they killed each other, leaving Sulu himself in command.

However, Moreau has been watching this all on the Tantalus Field, and she uses it to eliminate Sulu’s henchmen. Kirk himself takes Sulu out.

McCoy insists on treating Spock, so Kirk, Scotty, and Uhura go ahead to the transporter room. They find Moreau there. Kirk thanks her for saving their lives, and she asks that they take her with them in return. But they can’t, the transporter is only calibrated for four. She insists on going with her phaser, but then Uhura disarms her.

The power cuts out, but that turned out to be a delaying tactic on Spock’s part. He woke up and mind-melded with McCoy, so he knows everything now. He wants his captain back, so he’ll operate the transporter. They only have a couple of minutes, but Kirk takes that time to plead with Spock. The empire will inevitably be overthrown, which Spock says will happen in two and a half centuries. So why support an empire that’s doomed to failure? Kirk encourages Spock to change that prediction, to bring about a better galaxy.

Spock says he’ll consider it, particularly after Kirk tells him about the Tantalus Field.

The exchange works, and the landing party finally makes it home. Spock explains that he saw through their counterparts far more quickly because it was easier for the U.S.S. Enterprise crew, as civilized folk, to pretend to be barbarians than it was for the I.S.S. Enterprise crew, as barbarians, to pretend to be civilized.

Kirk also meets the mainline version of Moreau, and it’s only a little awkward and creepy.

Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, ion storm + transporter = universe switching because science! And to avoid any further attempts to explain things, everything’s kept theoretical, and when we get to the part where the computer says it knows how to re-create the exchange, it’s put on a tape and Scotty reads it off-camera—we know Jerome Bixby doesn’t have a good scientific explanation for what happened, so he contrives to keep himself from having to come up with a bad one.

Fascinating. The alternate Spock is basically exactly the same as the mainline one—a bit nastier, and he views profit as a virtue, but not overwhelmingly different. Well, except for the beard, anyhow…

I’m a doctor not an escalator. When Scotty recruits him to help with his rerouting of the warp power to the transporter, McCoy says, “I’m a doctor, not an engineer.” Scotty’s rejoinder: “Now you’re an engineer.”

 Ahead warp one, aye. The alternate Sulu is also security chief, has what looks like a dueling scar, and is pretty good at his job. He only loses in the end because of the Tantalus Field.

Hailing frequencies open. At first, Uhura is all afraid and scared and confused because she’s just a girrrrrrl, but later she plays Sulu like a two-dollar banjo and disarms Moreau quickly and efficiently.

I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty works a miracle to get the transporter to do what needs to be done, because he’s just that awesome. 

It’s a Russian invention. The alternate Chekov gets ballsy and tries to assassinate Kirk after he doesn’t follow proper procedure. It’s the action of a dumb kid getting ahead of himself and he pays for it by being put in the agony booth.

Go put on a red shirt. Most of the noncoms on the I.S.S. Enterprise serve as henchmen for the officers, though two of Chekov’s henchmen are killed by a third. Sulu, of course, has the whole security detail at his disposal, but four of his dudes are wiped by the Tantalus Field.

No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Women in the MU’s Starfleet often advance, or at least improve their position, by attaching themselves to men. Moreau is the most obvious example, but when she thinks Kirk has rejected her, she mentions a commander who’s interested in taking her on. Sulu obviously wants Uhura to be his woman, but she doesn’t seem to be interested. 

Channel open. “May I point out that I had an opportunity to observe your counterparts here quite closely. They were brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous—in every way, splendid examples of homo sapiens, the very flower of humanity. I found them quite refreshing.”

“I’m not sure, but I think we’ve been insulted.”

“I’m sure.”

Spock insulting humanity, Kirk wondering if he should take offense, and McCoy confirming it.

Welcome aboard. Vic Perrin, having previously done the voices of the Metron in “Arena” and Nomad in “The Changeling,” steps in front of the camera this time, playing both iterations of Tharn. Barbara Luna plays both versions of Moreau, Garth Pillsbury and Pete Kellett play hench-thugs on the I.S.S. Enterprise, and recurring regulars James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and John Winston all do double duty as both versions of their characters.

Trivial matters: This is the first of four scripts by Jerome Bixby, who loosely based it on his 1953 short story “One Way Street,” which appeared in Amazing Stories.

This episode was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1968. It lost to “The City on the Edge of Forever.” It was Bixby’s second straight year with a Hugo nomination in that category: he was nominated the year before for the movie Fantastic Voyage, for which he wrote the story. (He also lost that one to a Trek episode, “The Menagerie.”)

We are introduced here to the Mirror Universe. On screen, we saw the MU again on the DS9 episodes “Crossover,” “Through the Looking Glass,” “Shattered Mirror,” “Resurrection,” and “The Emperor’s New Cloak,” which served as sequels to “Mirror, Mirror,” and on the Enterprise two-parter “In a Mirror, Darkly,” which served as a prequel.

In addition, the MU has been seen in tons of tie-in fiction. In particular, DC, Marvel, and IDW all did direct tie-ins to this episode in comic book form. DC’s was in the “New Frontiers” storyline in issues #9-16 of their first monthly series, by Mike W. Barr, Tom Sutton, & Ricardo Villagran (later collected in the trade paperback The Mirror Universe Saga), which revisits the MU in the movie era. Marvel did a one-shot called Star Trek: Mirror Mirror by Tom DeFalco, Mark Bagley, & Larry Mahlstedt, which picked up on the I.S.S. Enterprise right after this episode’s conclusion. IDW’s Mirror Images miniseries was a prequel, showing how Kirk took command of the I.S.S. Enterprise.

In addition, several novels have picked up the MU, among them Diane Duane’s Dark Mirror, Susan Wright’s Dark Passions, David Mack’s The Sorrows of Empire and Rise Like Lions, the “Shatnerverse” novels by William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, as well as short novels and short stories in the anthologies Glass Empires, Obsidian Alliances, and Shards and Shadows. (Your humble rewatcher made two contributions, the Voyager short novel The Mirror-Scaled Serpent in Obsidian Alliances and the short story “Family Matters” in Shards and Shadows.) Novels in the post-finale DS9 and Stargazer series have also visited the MU.

Spock having a Vandyke beard would take root in popular culture as a method of showing that someone is really their evil counterpart.

The computer reports that Kirk took command of the I.S.S. Enterprise after assassinating Christopher Pike, who was established as Kirk’s immediate predecessor in charge of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the mainline timeline in “The Menagerie.”

The final scene with Kirk and Moreau was used as the basis for the final 23rd-century scene in DS9‘s “Trials and Tribble-ations,” showing Sisko getting Kirk’s autograph, using greenscreen technology to put Sisko in Moreau’s place.

The alternate Sulu wears red, as he’s also security chief, which means that George Takei is the first speaking character to wear all three uniform colors—he wore blue in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and gold the rest of the time.

McCoy mentions spilling acid “a year ago” in sickbay, which your humble rewatcher dramatized in The Brave and the Bold Book 1.

To boldly go. “Captain Kirk, I shall consider it.” The iconic evil-counterpart episode, the gold standard to which they’re all held, and even though it’s been beaten to death and overdone everywhere in the science fiction landscape from a serious treatment in Doctor Who to a humorous one in the short-lived comedy SF show Quark to the seemingly endless returns to the MU on DS9, this episode still remains compelling viewing.

The episode is a perfect storm of good acting, good writing, and good directing. Marc Daniels does expert work, aided by some superb costuming and set design work, in creating an Enterprise that is at once exactly the same yet completely different. The constant motif of the empire logo is particularly effective, as is something as simple as a raised back on the command chair to show how much more of a hedonist Kirk is.

Most everyone plays their part well, from Shatner’s bellowing of “Let me go!” and his smarmy attempts to bribe Spock on the U.S.S. Enterprise, while his performance on the I.S.S. Enterprise while pretending to be his counterpart is nuanced and impressive. Nichelle Nichols is much more effective when Uhura’s allowed to be a strong character instead of a whimpering damsel—she’s the latter for the episode’s first half, but once she reports to the bridge, she starts actually acting like a professional. George Takei makes his Sulu magnificently evil (the scar is kinda redundant), which is more than can be said for Walter Koenig, whose gloating over Kirk before he fails to assassinate him is mostly just sad. On the other hand, nobody does a scream of agony better than Walter Koenig, and it gets quite a workout in the agony booth scene…

But the most interesting performance is Leonard Nimoy’s because, even though Kirk plays it for laughs at the end, bearded Spock really isn’t that different from our Spock, and it’s kind of scary. Then again, for all that he’s a sex symbol and the most popular character in the franchise, Spock is also, for the most part, kind of a jerk. He’s condescending, he’s sarcastic, he’s dismissive, he’s sexist—it doesn’t require much change for him to be a good fit for the MU, when you get right down to it…

Warp factor rating: 10

Next week: “The Deadly Years”

Keith R.A. DeCandido had an up-and-down 2015, but it ended well, and is looking forward to a most excellent 2016. Happy new year, everyone!

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/religious-relics-of-temple-of-doom/

http://www.tor.com/?p=190552

The main Indiana Jones trilogy is essentially a conversion narrative in which the hero never converts… which is a little strange. Why bother with that narrative if you’re not going to fulfill it? Indy also exists in a universe where all the religions are seemingly true, based on the very real powers each movie’s main artifact displays. Here is the second of three (lengthy!) posts exploring the weird religious universe that the first three Indiana Jones films create.

In my last installment, I tackled Raiders of the Lost Ark’s big relic, the Ark of the Covenant, and hopefully avoided getting zapped by the wrath of Yahweh. Now I’m inflating an improbable life raft and diving straight into the Hinduism of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! I’m going to look at the ways the film uses real-life artifacts, and try my best not to talk about chilled monkey brains. I mean, come on, movie.

Temple of Doom immediately disorients us, as we hear “Anything Goes” being sung in Mandarin by a white woman with a Middle American accent—but more importantly, the film is set two years before the action in Raiders. We’re dealing with a younger Indy, and the film wastes no time in showing us our rakishly dapper hero in a white suit that is as metaphysically far from his professorial tweeds as Club Obi Wan is from Marshall College. The opening gambit adventure involves a Shanghai gangster named Lao Che, a giant diamond called The Peacock’s Eye, and the ashes of Nurhachi, First Emperor of Manchu Dynasty:

In this opening we glancingly see that Indy is just as knowledgeable about Chinese history and artifacts as the Western ones he found in Raiders. While it’s believable that a kid raised by a religious father (which Indy was, which I’ll talk about in tomorrow’s post on Last Crusade) would be able to rattle off the Hebrew Bible’s account of the Ark, it’s a little less believable that one archaeologist would be comfortable with the variety of histories and cultures that Indy seems to know. (An academic Mary Sue, perhaps?)

This younger Indy has friends all over the world who are willing to follow him into adventure, as is evidenced by the introduction of the doomed waiter and Short Round. He is also obviously more callow in this adventure than he is a few years later when he pursues the Ark. While Lao Che treats the urn with reverence and awe, Indy doesn’t seem to care even a little about the remains of the Emperor—he just wants his diamond. He also doesn’t care whether Willie Scott lives or dies, which, granted, they only just met, but it’s still problematic that he’s threatening her with cutlery. As the adventure continues, however, the film becomes a more serious fight between darkness and light. You remember how I said in the last post that Indy starts out as a jerkface? After he, Willie, and Short Round crash in the wilds of India, he has his first onscreen brush with the supernatural, and it does change him, as we’ll see…but it doesn’t convert him.

Temple of Doom, or Saivism for Westerners!

Now I should start by saying I am by no means an expert on Hinduism. As I tended to focus on Western religion, and my specific studies were in American Religious history, the development of saivism, the worship of Shiva, is about 8,000 miles outside my wheelhouse. But, here goes. The Purana Linga speaks of Shiva, the supreme god, as “signless, without color, taste or smell, beyond word and touch, without quality, changeless, motionless.” However, in order to allow Shiva’s worshipers to concentrate on something during prayer, his followers had to make him at least slightly manifest in the world. So they turned to linga:

Linga are conical stones, usually with three lines carved or painted into them. This one is part of a shine in the Kalimaam Temple of Bangalore, India. By using linga as a focal point, a worshiper can represent the god and the act of creation itself with one simple symbol. The Purana Shiva describes the deity stepping into the world from a pillar—or lingam—of fire, as proof that he is the strongest of the gods. The linga can simultaneously recall that moment, and represent active creative energy bursting into the universe, with Shiva Himself seen as an inexhaustible font of life.

Linga can also be seen, easily, as dicks. That’s how the Victorians saw them, as British repression clashed with Hindu culture in India. This is alluded to in Temple of Doom—set before World War II and the subsequent Indian uprisings that finally loosened Britain’s grasp on the world—as we learn that the big spiritual Maguffin of the film are the Sankara stones (linga) which are intricately tied to the fertility of the village.

The movie itself has a strange push and pull between respect for the Hindi culture and blatant racism. The stones themselves and the villagers, are treated well both by the film and by Indy, and it’s more in the garish excesses of the state dinner and the Thuggee cult ceremonies that the film fetishizes its Indian setting. And about those Thuggees… the Thuggee cult was historically a thieves’ guild, essentially, and had far more in common with, say, the Italian mafia than a religious cult. Thugs (The Hindi word means “thief” or “deceiver”) would infiltrate caravans, murder travelers, and make off with whatever valuables they could carry. Sometimes they’d take the children of the travellers to raise them as Thugs as well. A member could pass his position down to his son, and families spent generations within the Thug family. And about the Kali, heart-ripping part of this story? The Thugs sometimes claimed to be acolytes of Kali, but it wasn’t a requirement, and they certainly didn’t see themselves as an evil cult wrangling for world domination. And, maybe most important: Kali is not an “evil goddess.” She’s the goddess of change, one of the consorts of Shiva, and while she may be fearsome in appearance she’s not a demon in the Western sense of that word. She’s not out to get you, spiritually speaking. In fact, she’s beloved by some sects of Hinduism, being seen as a fierce, protective Mother to her devotees. She is also darkness itself:

Dancing mad with joy,
Come, Mother, come!
For Terror is Thy name,
Death is in Thy breath,
And every shaking step
Destroys a world for e’er.
Thou “Time”, the All-Destroyer!
Come, O Mother, come!
Who dares misery love,
And hug the form of Death,
Dance in Destruction’s dance,
To him the Mother comes.

Indy seems to come into the story with strong knowledge of Shiva, and of the Sankara Stones. (While it’s believable that an old-school archaeologist who walks the line of pure treasure hunter would at least know of the Stones, it still stretches credibility that he’s an expert in Hinduism, and as fluent in Hindi as he seems to be.) He believes the Stones can lead to “fortune and glory” and seems to view the Sankara quest in the same way he must have viewed Nurhachi’s Urn—as a path to money. (We get no indication that this younger Indy thinks artifacts belong in a museum, and we’ve already seen his willingness to make black market trades.) While he is respectful to the village elder who says, “We prayed to Shiva to help us. It was Shiva who made you fall from the sky…” he privately scoffs at the idea when Shorty asks about it, referring to it as a “ghost story.” Once he realizes he’s dealing with a Thuggee cult, however, he seems to take things more seriously. But even this is a purely materialistic fear—the cultists scare him, not their religion. When he embarks on his main adventure to discover the Thuggee ceremony, he first finds an inscription saying “Follow in the footsteps of Shiva, do not betray his truth.” “Shiva’s truth” is never defined, however, and Indy doesn’t take the time to ponder it. This proves problematic.

So, long story short: Indy wanders onto a leftover Goonies set and finds three Sankara Stones. Indy takes Sankara Stones. Sankara Stones light up like E.T.’s tummy when they’re near each other. Everyone is captured by Mola Raam, the cult leader, who holds a young Prince under his sway. Indy is forced to drink blood and undergo “the black sleep of Kali”…but only after learning that the kidnapped children are digging for the last two Sankara Stones. Lots of heart-ripping and Kali-Maaaa-ing ensues. Everyone escapes. Willie reveals that she’s capable of knocking a man out with one punch only after she’s let Indy and (like, ten-year-old) Short Round do all the fighting. The gender politics in this adventure are problematic.

Anyway, we also learn Mola Ram’s nefarious plot: “The British in India will be slaughtered. Then we will overrun the Moslems. Then the Hebrew god will fall. Then the Christian god will be cast down and forgotten. Soon Kali Ma will rule the world!”

None of this works. While there have been many, often violent, clashes between Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam in India, Hinduism has never been a proselytizing-type faith. This implies that Kali Ma doesn’t want to rule the world. I mean, she’s been around for a lonnnnng time, if she wanted to take over she would have done it by now. Plus, Mola Ram betrays not only Shiva but his basic lack of religion knowledge in this film: Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, Mola. You’ve just said the same thing three times, you redundant son of a bitch! I realize that reviving an ancient blood cult takes a lot of time, but do your homework.

Cut to rope bridge.

Now, remember that problematic moment I mentioned before? When Indy just sort of accepted the idea of “Shiva’s Truth”? Once we’re at the rope bridge this all comes to a confusing head. Indy confronts Mola Ram, and yells, “Prepare to meet Kali…IN HELL!” which, while an admittedly GREAT thing to say to a villain, makes no sense. What does Indy, a secular, pre-Ark, Western academic, mean by “Hell”? And what possible bearing could his idea have on a practicing Hindu? “Hell” in Hinduism is a realm called Naraka, and it’s usually temporary, similar to the Catholic concept of Purgatory. And while we’re on the topic, Mola will not be facing Kali there, he’ll be facing Yama, the God of Death. So Indy has just told Mola Ram “Prepare to meet [Incorrect God] in a temporary place of punishment where your soul will be readied for rebirth!”

Then it gets worse. A few minutes later, he accuses Mola Ram of “betraying” Shiva. Indy is obviously in the moral right, since Mola Ram is enslaving children, which no aspect of Hinduism would ever condone. However, he might be misunderstanding the gods. Shiva and Kali, in a certain way, are one and the same. They are complementary aspects of creation—energy and pure consciousness, not two separate, anthropomorphic entities. Only by working together can energy (“Shiva”) and pure consciousness (“Kali”) create life. Indy might be assuming that by betraying Shiva, Mola Ram would face the Fearsome Consort Aspect to pay for his crimes? But he’s still treating Shiva and Kali (neither of whom, let me remind you, preside over hell) as separate gods, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the religion.

LEAH! I hear you screaming. THIS IS UNSPEAKABLY PEDANTIC AND FOR THE LOVE OF WHICHEVER GOD YOU PREFER, WHAT IS THE POINT???

Well, here’s the point: we’ve just gone over how confused Indy is about basic aspects of Hinduism. So how is it that when he invokes Shiva, the stones begin to glow? They burn Mola Ram (they’ve never burned Indy, even when they glowed before) which causes him to fall from the bridge. Clearly someone is pissed at him. More interesting to me is this: why is the extremely Western Indy capable of wielding the stones against a follower of Kali? Since there isn’t really heresy in Hinduism, in the sense that there is in Christianity or Judaism, what does “betraying Shiva” entail? What does Indy mean by those words? And how can this non-believer recite a few Sanskrit phrases to activate the Stones and use them as weapons?

After they all return to the village and the Stone is replaced in its shrine, the elder smiles at Indy, “Now you can see the miracle of the rock.” Indy replies, “Yes, I understand its power now.” But…what? So has Indy converted to Saivism? He seems to think the rock itself has power, but that really isn’t the point? Dr. Jones, you apparently live in a universe where both the God of the Hebrews and Shiva have the power to manifest in icons and defeat their enemies. This is significant.

So, rather than the straight ahead conversion narrative of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we get an action movie version of The Darjeeling Limited. A Westerner learns to be a little more spiritually open after some rough times in India, but he doesn’t commit to his journey enough to truly change his life. If we want to take the film’s chronology at face value, the Indy we meet in Raiders is nearly as cynical as the one we meet in Temple, despite having already encountered a religious relic that can exert power against evil. The only shift is that in his two later adventures the only “glory” he seems to seek is as an archaeologist, and while Marcus pays him, he’s far more invested in the idea of historical artifacts having safe homes in museums. (Perhaps this is a shift back to the idealism of his youth, which we see in the opening of Last Crusade?) However all of his adventures, East or West, opening gambit or main event, have on thing in common: Indy is only interested in the icons as historical finds, not as religious artifacts. Now, for the next film he leaves India for the Middle East, and tracks down one of the Biggest Kahuna of Christian lore—will the conversion narrative work this time?

Leah Schnelbach would almost be willing to go through the Kali MAAA ritual. How cool would it be to see your own heart? Come chant at her on Twitter!

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/short-fiction-spotlight-the-best-american-science-fiction-and-fantasy-2015-edited-by-john-joseph-adams-and-joe-hill-part-2/

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Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Last time around we looked at the first half of the intriguing new Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy collection, helmed by John Joseph Adams as series editor and Joe Hill as guest editor—and this week, I’d like to round that out with the last ten stories in the 2015 edition.

Three of these last ten pieces are from mainstream publications (two from The New Yorker and one from McSweeney’s), while the rest are from various anthologies and magazines published in-genre. The Kelly Link story also appeared in her recent collection, Get in Trouble; I had read it first there. None of them had I previously written about in this column, unlike a couple in the first half of the collection.

While most of the stories in the 2015 edition have been of middle-length, “Windows” by Susan Palwick is brief: it has one concept, one emotional framework to lushly illustrate—and it does that well. The protagonist’s concept of using up her family’s luck, capped off with the witness of the other prisoners and visitors when she shows her incarcerated son her daughter’s birthday message, is evocative. This one, as they say, hits right in the feels.

The next piece, “The Thing About Shapes to Come” by Adam-Troy Castro, is weird enough to balance out some of the intensity of “Windows”—though it’s also about family, and children, and loss. I admit I had some trouble staying stuck to the story, because the idea seemed so bizarre and such attention was lavished on it, but I was glad for the payoff at the end. The cube welcoming her mother in was a nice closing scene, offering no answers in a story with no answers; it’s something I appreciate from time to time, and in this case, wasn’t frustrating.

“We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller is deals with boys becoming men in the foster care system in the near-future: a story to do with love and loss as well, those big human narrative arcs, but with a distinctly youthful touch. (If I were quantifying it, I’d say it falls right on that “new adult” genre cusp that’s gotten such attention lately.) I thought the protagonist’s speech issues and the emotional conflict of his lover—who betrays him, but clearly not without personal cost—were handled deftly, as well.

I was more on the fence about “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever” by Daniel H. Wilson than “Windows.” Both manipulate the readers’ sense of emotional investment and loss to pack a heavy hit at the end; however, I found this one treaded a little too close to having the seams showing. There’s a fine line to walk between provoking the reader’s investment and letting them see you doing it, and this story teeters on the edge. The part I appreciated most was the protagonist’s attempt to quantify the failure of his relationship with his wife, juxtaposed with the care he has for his daughter. The inevitable end-of-the-world via slow black hole consumption was interesting, but somehow didn’t quite do it for me.

The only story I flatly didn’t care for, though, was “Skullpocket” by Nathan Ballingrud—though I can see where this might be more of a reader’s issue than a story issue. I found it to be too carnivalesque and over-the-top in its grotesquerie. It was exhausting to read and the pacing felt off-kilter. Ballingrud is a writer I often quite adore, but this piece wasn’t at all satisfying for me. A deeper fan of horror, though, might potentially get a lot from it; I’m not that reader.

I did, though, love “I Can See Right Through You” by Kelly Link. Combining ghost story tropes with contemporary media fandom, it follows a realistically broken protagonist who needs to get himself together and can’t quite seem to manage it. The treatment of relationships, guilt, and persona are all spot-on. Link’s prose is also sharp and clean. It’s a story I was glad to re-read when I saw it here. I’d certainly count it among the best of the bunch; it’s very deeply human, with all of our less flattering bits on display, and engaging because of that.

The next piece, “The Empties” by Jess Row, is another from a mainstream publication, this one an exploration of a post-disaster America. (The characters themselves debate whether it’s post-apocalyptic or dystopian, to the conclusion that it’s neither—there’s no story left to have that kind of designation.) The prose is solid and the rumination on the act of writing or recording narratives is the center of attention in a way I definitely appreciate. It’s a slow piece, more a portrait than a moving-parts-plot yarn, and it works well. The ending is rather dystopian in approach, though.

“The One They Took Before” by Kelly Sandoval moves us to another story of after-effects: this time, of a woman who was let go from faerie and is trying to convince herself not to go back. Treating the loss of faerie as something like PTSD is clever, and Sandoval does a good job illustrating the manner of trouble it causes in the protagonist’s life: the teetering edge of desire and fear, loss and healing. In the end, her decision to be there for someone else when they escape it believable—though the choice is also convincingly difficult.

The second-to-last story, “The Relive Box” by T. C. Boyle, is one I didn’t care for as much as I might have. It feels dated and stale; the ideas here aren’t something fresh to me, or to most sf readers, and the execution isn’t doing much to make them feel intriguing again. I was moderately interested to see another story of a father raising his daughter after a seemingly-callous unsatisfied wife left him. However, this story doesn’t do as much with that as I’d like, either. The sharpest part is the exploration of that college-age love he relives, but overall, I wasn’t won over.

The closing piece, “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” by A. Merc Rustad, is about an asexual woman in a complex relationship with a gay man; she is both in love with and wants to be a robot, as a sort of metaphor—or not—for being a better put together human. There are some queer poly dynamics that are interesting here, as well as the protagonist’s effort to seek help for her depression; it did feel a little shallow on the character front, but I can forgive that due to the relatively short length and broad idea it’s working with.

Overall, I thought this was a highly promising first installment in a different sort of best-of series. While I love the closely curated series edited across the genre—Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Guran, and so on—there is something to be said about having a dual system with a blind end. It definitely gives a different and seemingly broader perspective on the type of work that’s appearing under the “sf” umbrella around the literary sphere.

I look forward to seeing what comes through with the guest editor for 2016, certainly.

Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. She can be found on Twitter or her website.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/sleeps-with-monsters-books-to-look-forward-to-in-the-first-half-of-2016/

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2016. Hell, 2016. How is it coming up 2016 already? I’d only just got used to it being 2015. Now I’m going to have to get used to a whole new year.

But in compensation for none of us being as young as we used to be, there are new and interesting-sounding books coming out in the next six months. So many, in fact, that I can’t keep track of them. I’m sure I’m missing plenty, but here are a few I’m looking forward to in advance.

January offers us Charlie Jane Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky, a debut SF novel from an already-acclaimed writer of short fiction. Truthwitch by Susan Dennard bids fair to be an interesting YA epic fantasy. There must be other things as well – what else comes out in January? Seriously, tell me, because I’ve managed to miss pretty much everything but the UK release of Louisa Hall’s Speak.

February brings us an interesting selection. Joanna Max Brodsky’s debut The Immortals sounds like an interesting mix of Greek legend and modern noir. Lee Kelly’s second novel, A Criminal Magic, looks set to mix Prohibition Washington DC and magical hijinks. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen gives us Dowager Countess Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan and Admiral Oliver Jole in an exploration of how to start one’s life anew, how to learn to live for oneself, when one has lived several decades already. Patricia McKillip bids fair to return to excellent form with Kingfisher, and Jacey Bedford offers us magic, ghosts, and piracy in Winterwood.

But what of March? It’s a busy month for Seanan McGuire, with Chaos Choreography, the new InCryptid novel out from DAW, and Every Heart A Doorway from Tor.com Publishing. Mishell Baker’s debut Borderline begins a new urban fantasy series set in Hollywood and Fairyland. Elizabeth Bonesteel’s debut The Cold Between is the start of a new space opera series of murder and conspiracy. Mercy Thompson returns in Patricia Briggs’ Fire Touched. And award-winning author Sofia Samatar brings us a completely new novel in The Winged Histories.

In April, we’ll see the new solo novel from Sarah Rees Brennan, Tell The Wind And Fire, as well as Jodi Meadows’ sequel to The Orphan Queen, The Mirror King. Faith Hunter’s newest Jane Yellowrock novel, Shadow Rites, hits the shelves, Marie Brennan gives us another Lady Isabella Trent novel of natural history, travel, and dragons with In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and C.J. Cherryh’s long-running Foreigner series continues in the much-anticipated Visitor.

May brings us the several-times delayed Company Town by Madeline Ashby, which comes to us now out of Tor instead of Angry Robot, and hopefully won’t be delayed again. Claire North follows up her well-received Touch with The Sudden Appearance of Hope, while Ada Palmer’s hotly-anticipated debut SF novel Too Like The Lightning hits the shelves.

And then we’re at June, and halfway through the year. Genevieve Valentine follows up near-future-thriller Persona with Icon. Kat Howard makes her novel-length solo debut with fairy-tale-inspired Roses and Rot. Laura Lam’s False Hearts promises conspiracy and crime and murder, while Jo Walton’s Necessity, third in the series that began with The Just City, gives us the philosopher-kings of the future.

And these are just the novels I know about to look forward to. What are you guys looking forward to? And why?

Liz Bourke is a cranky person who reads books and other things. She has recently completed a doctoral dissertation in Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. Find her at her blog. Or her Twitter.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/fiction-affliction-january-releases-in-science-fiction-5/

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Earth’s in trouble, and if the daily news doesn’t convince you, check out this month’s twenty science fiction titles. Look for new titles from, among others, Eric Flint (The Ring of Fire), Michael Cobley (Humanity’s Fire), Marcus Sakey (Brilliance Saga), Jay Allan (Far Stars Trilogy)—and an anthology imagining all kinds of close encounters of the worst kind in Worst Contact.

Fiction Affliction details releases in science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and “genre-benders.” Keep track of them all here. Note: All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher.

WEEK ONE

1635: A Parcel of Rogues (The Ring of Fire #20)—Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis (January 5, Baen)

When the diplomatic embassy from the United States of Europe was freed from the Tower of London during the Baltic War, most of its members returned to the continent. Some remained behind in Britain: Oliver Cromwell and a few companions, including the sharpshooter Julie Sims, her Scot husband Alex Mackay, and Cromwell’s Irish-American watchdog Darryl McCarthy. The chief minister, Richard Boyle, brings over from Ireland a crew of cutthroats to track down and capture the escapees. The hunt passes into Scotland, where the conflict between Cromwell and his companions and their would-be captors becomes embroiled in Scotland’s politics. The time Darryl McCarthy spends fighting alongside Cromwell forces him against his will to admire and respect the man. It’s a Gordian knot until Julie Sims brings out her rifle. A safe distance isn’t what you think it is. Not after the American angel of death spreads her wings.

Dark Victory: A Novel of the Alien Resistance—Brendan DuBois (January 5, Baen)

Young Adult. Sixteen-year-old Randy Knox has the usual problems of a teenage boy. Randy also has other demands on his time, as a sergeant in the N.H. National Guard fighting the invading Creepers. On his twelfth birthday, he enlisted in the Army to carry on the fight. Endless war is all he knows. The current President of the United States has announced that scattered remnants of the Air Force have destroyed the Creeper’s Orbital Base, ensuring victory over the alien invaders. Randy is assigned a new mission: to escort a secret representative from the Governor of New Hampshire to the nation’s capital, to meet with the President. A fellow teen soldier, Serena Coulson and her mute younger brother Buddy, are assigned to join Randy. Randy tries to protect his charges from rampaging Creepers and criminal humans. Randy learns that all of his skills in combating aliens may not be enough to survive the dark conspiracies of his fellow humans.

Starbound (Lightship Chronicles #2)—Dave Bara (January 5, DAW)

The Lightship H.M.S. IMPULSE is gone, sacrificed while defeating First Empire ships the fragile new galactic alliance had hoped it would never see again. For Peter Cochrane, serving as third officer aboard his world’s flagship, H.M.S STARBOUND is a dream that’s finally come true. Tasked with investigating a mysterious space station in a newly re-discovered star system, Peter and STARBOUND face a terrible attack. The wounds of that battle may heal with time, but the war is far from over as the First Empire returns, aided by new traitors from within the Union itself.

Unforgettable—Eric James Stone (January 5, Baen)

In the near future, a fluke of quantum mechanics renders Nat Morgan utterly forgettable. No one can remember he exists for more than a minute after he’s gone. It’s a useful ability for his career as a CIA agent, even if he has to keep reminding his boss that he exists. Nat’s attempt to steal a quantum chip prototype is thwarted when a former FSB agent, Yelena Semyonova, attempts to steal the same technology for the Russion mob. Along with a brilliant Iranian physicist who wants to defect, Nat and Yelena must work together to stop a ruthless billionaire from finishing a quantum supercomputer that will literally control the fate of the world.

Worst Contact—edited by Hank Davis (January 5, Baen)

Anthology. Ever since H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, science fiction writers have speculated on what the first contact might be like. From attacking invaders to wise and benevolent visitors who are ready to solve all our problems for us, from horror stories to hilarious satire, with all the stops in between, including plenty of tales in which the aliens are the ones who wish they’d stayed at home and never come across Earth and its inhabitants. With stories by such science fiction masters as Poul Anderson, David Drake, William Tenn, Sarah A. Hoyt, Tony Daniel, and more, this is a collection filled with chills, thrills, and laughter, all reporting on what happens when First Contact turns into Worst Contact.

WEEK TWO

Ancestral Machines (Humanity’s Fire #4)—Michael Cobley (January 12, Orbit)

It was named Bringer of Battles, three hundred worlds orbiting a single artificial star, three hundred battlefields where different species vie for mastery and triumph. It is a cage where war is a game, brutal, savage and sudden. In this arena, all must bend the knee to the Lords of Permutation and the ancient sentient weapons with which they have merged. Or suffer indescribable agonies. Trapped in this draconian crucible of death, Brannan Pyke, captain and smuggler, must fight his way to freedom. Because in the Bringer of Battles, the game of war is played to the death and beyond.

Destroyer (Rewinder #2)—Brett Battles (January 12, 47North)

With the whole of human history altered, Denny Younger may be the last rewinder in existence, and the last person on earth with a chaser unit capable of time travel. While caring for his ailing sister, Denny must discover a way to recharge his device before he’s left with no defense against a past that wants him dead. Before long, Denny notices a mysterious stranger following him, keeping tabs on Denny, his family, and his friends. Is Denny just paranoid? Or maybe he isn’t alone in this new reality after all. When his chaser is stolen and his girlfriend is kidnapped, Denny risks everything to get both of them back. Launched into a high-stakes chase that spans continents and millennia, Denny’s responsibility to save our future isn’t over yet. It will take all of his cunning to stop a threat capable of steering the fate of the human race into disaster.

Skinner Luce—Patricia Sarrafian Ward (January 12, Talos)

All around us lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs. Servs are aliens, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them. Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and adopted by humans. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she longs to maintain. When the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she’ll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she’s made for herself.

Written in Fire (Brilliance Saga #3)—Marcus Sakey (January 12, Thomas & Mercer)

For thirty years humanity struggled to cope with the brilliants, the 1 percent of people born with remarkable gifts. For thirty years we tried to avoid a devastating civil war. We failed. The White House is a smoking ruin. Madison Square Garden is an internment camp. In Wyoming, an armed militia of thousands marches toward a final, apocalyptic battle. Nick Cooper has spent his life fighting for his children and his country. Now, as the world staggers on the edge of ruin, he must risk everything he loves to face his oldest enemy, a brilliant terrorist so driven by his ideals that he will sacrifice humanity’s future to achieve them.

WEEK THREE

Concentr8—William Sutcliffe (January 19, Bloomsbury USA Childrens)

Young Adult. In a not-so-distant future London, riots have become the norm. But when the government suddenly stops distributing Concentr8, a behavioral modification “miracle” drug akin to Ritalin, the city’s residents rise up fiercer than they ever have before. Amidst the chaos, five teens pick a man seemingly at random and chain him up as a hostage in a warehouse. Blaze is their leader, and Troy has always been his quiet sidekick, the only person he has ever trusted. But even Troy didn’t see this coming, and as their story unfolds over six tense days, one thing is clear, none of them will ever be the same again. (U.S. Release)

Falcone Strike (Angel in the Whirlwind #2)—Christopher G. Nuttall (January 19, 47North)

Now a celebrated war hero, Captain Kat Falcone is back at the helm of HMS Lightning, and up against near-impossible odds. After an ill-timed outburst almost ends her career, Kat is handed command of a deep-strike mission into enemy space. The objective is to gather intelligence and distract the hostile Theocracy while the Commonwealth prepares its counteroffensive. The chances for success are slim, and for survival even slimmer. Armed with a fleet of outdated starships, a few loyal officers, and a skeleton crew of refugees, Kat knows the Royal Navy expects her to fail. Failure almost certainly means death, or worse, as the Theocracy does not treat prisoners kindly. Pitted against the defenses of her old nemesis Admiral Junayd, there is no room for error. With a spy hidden aboard her ship, Kat will need more than her wits to survive.

Funeral Games (Far Stars Trilogy #3)—Jay Allan (January 19, HarperVoyager)

The Far Stars stands on the edge of a precipice. The forces of Governor Vos have surged forth, conquering worlds and imposing the emperor’s brutal rule over millions. Only one thing stands in the way of total victory: Marshal Augustin Lucerne’s newly created confederation. Vos has a simple plan: assassinate the marshal and manipulate his generals to fight over his legacy. Another threat lurks, Arkarin Blackhawk. The smuggler and mercenary has been the marshal’s ally, working in the shadows and unraveling Vos’s plans. Blackhawk’s past is a dark and dangerous one, and if he is put at the helm of the confederation armies, the brutal imperial general he once was may rise again. If Blackhawk survives, and can come to grips with the horror within him, he just might be able to save the Far Stars from the iron hand of the empire.

Patchwerk—David Tallerman (January 19, Tor.com)

Novella; Digital. Fleeing the city of New York on the TransContinental atmospheric transport vehicle, Dran Florrian is traveling with Palimpsest, the ultimate proof of a lifetime of scientific theorizing. When a rogue organization attempts to steal the device, however, Dran takes drastic action. But his invention threatens to destroy the very fabric of this and all other possible universes, unless Dran, or someone very much like him, can shut down the machine and reverse the process.

The Capture (The Prey #2)—Tom Isbell (January 19, HarperTeen)

Young Adult. Every night it was the same: dreaming of those Less Thans shackled in the bunker beneath the tennis court. It was why we had to get back to Camp Liberty. Why we had to free those Less Thans. Book, Hope, and Cat cannot live with themselves, they cannot settle into a new free life knowing the rest of their fellow Less Thans and Sisters are still imprisoned. The teens must retrace their steps to save the others, destroy the compound, and thwart the evil plans of the Republic. With new enemies lurking, deranged Crazies and ominous Skull People among them, the group must put their fate in the hands of unexpected allies, including the woman with the long black hair and Miranda, the daughter of the Skull People’s Chief Justice, who is drawn to Book. The teens they must ask themselves what they’re willing to do to free their friends, for the path back is filled with even more danger as motives are questioned and relationships tested.

The Isle (The Ward #2)—Jordana Frankel (January 19, Katherine Tegen Books)

Young Adult. The Ward is in trouble, its streets filled with seawater after a devastating flood and its impoverished inhabitants suffering from a deadly disease called the Blight. Ren has discovered a cure, miraculous spring water, administering it to her sick sister, Aven. When Aven is kidnapped by Governor Voss, the malevolent dictator of the United Metro Isles (UMI), Ren must go on a dangerous mission to save her sister, again. The mysterious healing water is the only source of freshwater throughout the entire UMI. An ancient order, the Tètai, has been guarding the magical water for hundreds of years. They will kill to protect it. With the Ward in desperate need of freshwater and wracked by disease, and deadly enemies at every turn, the sisters face a dangerous journey, marred by secrets and horrifying truths, to save their friends and neighbors.

The Sons of Sora (The Earthborn Trilogy #3)—Paul Tassi (January 19, Talos)

Noah, an orphan from Earth’s last days, is now nearly a man and a leader to the young enclave of Earthborn who reside on Sora. When the tranquility of their settlement is shattered by an assassination attempt, Noah turns to his younger brother Erik, Lucas and Asha’s only child by blood, for aid. Their journey takes them to the remnants of a dead planet, an outlaw-infested space station, and back to Sora, whose inhabitants are bracing for a showdown with the Xalans. They find themselves facing a new evil: the omnipotent Archon, who is controlling the whole of the Xalan horde, and his bloodthirsty lieutenant, the Black Corsair, who has a taste for brutality. The Archon, so-called God of the Shadows, has unearthed knowledge that could wipe both Sorans and humans from existence. The descendants of the Earthborn must uncover the true nature of the Archon and the Xalans before he burns everything they know and love to ashes.

We Are the Ants—Shaun David Hutchinson (January 19, Simon Pulse)

Henry Denton doesn’t know why the aliens chose to abduct him when he was thirteen, and he doesn’t know why they continue to steal him from his bed and take him aboard their ship. He doesn’t know why the world is going to end or why the aliens have offered him the opportunity to avert the impending disaster by pressing a big red button. They’ve only given him 144 days to make up his mind. Since the suicide of his boyfriend, Jesse, Henry has been adrift. He’s become estranged from his best friend, started hooking up with his sworn enemy. As far as Henry is concerned, a world without Jesse is a world he isn’t sure is worth saving. Until he meets Diego Vega, an artist with a secret past who forces Henry to question his beliefs, his place in the universe, and whether any of it really matters. Before Henry can save the world, he’s got to figure out how to save himself, and the aliens haven’t given him a button for that.

Will to Survive (The Rule of Three #3)—Eric Walters (January 19, Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR)

Young Adult. Adam has killed again. It had to be done, part of him knows that, but murder changes a person. It can certainly change a teenager who’s already grown up too quickly, too harshly, in the wake of the catastrophic global blackout five months ago. In the name of safety and survival, Adam and his neighbors have turned their middle American suburban neighborhood into a fortress, defending against countless enemies. But what’s lurking in the dark is a greater danger than ever before: somebody who wants to destroy the neighborhood and Adam at any cost. Soon, the hunted will have to become the hunter, and Adam hates himself for what he will have to do. Because sometimes even the dark is not cover enough for things that would never happen in the light.

WEEK FOUR

7 Sykos—Marsheila Rockwell and Jeff Mariotte (January 26, HarperVoyager Impulse)

Digital. Phoenix is one of the most populated cities in America, but not for long. With a mysterious sickness spreading through the streets, two things are becoming very clear: there’s no cure, and it doesn’t necessarily kill you. Instead, the so-called “Infecteds” have become a living plague, killing and eating everyone they come into contact with. Chaos is spreading, and no one is safe. No one, that is, except for a group of psychos. Somehow unaffected by the disease, and with promises of clemency for their monstrous pasts, a group of seven is sent downtown to hopefully find the cause of the disease, and therefore a cure. But when the asylum is the size of a city, it no longer matters who is running things. Not when everyone is running for their lives.

All the Birds in the Sky—Charlie Jane Anders (January 26, Tor)

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn’t expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. The development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one’s peers and families. Now they’re both adults, living in San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who’s working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s every-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them is determined to bring them together, to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

Suzanne Johnson is the author of the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series, and writes paranormal and suspense as Susannah Sandlin. You can find Suzanne on Facebook and on her website.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/29/alike-in-dignity-romeo-and-juliet-2/

http://www.tor.com/?p=200450

 People always talk about Romeo and Juliet as if it’s a romance, as if it’s a great passionate play, the greatest love story of all time. Seen that way, I’ve always found it a little disappointing. There’s certainly a romance in it, but it’s actually much more a play about a feud between families. What’s most interesting to me is the way that the whole thing is set up like a comedy, where you can safely expect a happy ending, the lovers reunited and their families reconciled, only to see Shakespeare pull the rug from under you. Only King Lear does more of a switch, where it looks as if even the terrible events can be patched up, and then surprises us with worse.

Romeo and Juliet is truly a tragedy, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy where everyone is undone by their tragic flaw. And we’re informed of this at the beginning, so we know what we are headed for, and still, as the story goes on we want it to end differently. I like Romeo and Juliet for the narrative dissonance, and of course as always with Shakespeare, the beautiful language.

Modern audiences who have come to see a famous love story are often a bit taken aback at the beginning. Shakespeare explains it all in the prologue—this is the story of a stupid feud between two houses, and a pair of star-crossed lovers who get caught up in it, and immediately we’re into insults and swordfighting. The Montagues and the Capulets are both noble families of Verona, at feud with each other. While it’s very important to make the emotional balance of the play work that they are, as the first line states, “alike in dignity,” sometimes they’re too alike in other ways. You do want to be able to tell Montagues and Capulets apart. But Shakespeare makes them very similar, and certainly doesn’t expect us to take sides, to favor one family over the other. If we suspect the text of taking a position it’s “A plague on both your houses!”

We’re given no reason for the feud—it’s long forgotten and buried under a million lesser thumb-bites and petty swordfights in alleys. It’s like the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in Florence—yes, originally there was an insult, and there are underlying lines of vague political allegiance, but the important thing is whose retainer said he was going to push the other side into the wall. It’s stupid, and the bickering and drawn swords that open the play is all on this level, and no wonder the Prince is sick of it. It’s a feud, and it’s established up front as real and dangerous, and also petty and with one side as bad as the other.

Actual Renaissance Italy had feuds, and no doubt it had young people falling in love too. But the Italy imagined by Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights was something different to the original audience—it’s both real and distant, half-known about and half-imagined, not quite a fairytale world but not quite solid either. Italians in plays were always stabbing and poisoning, and double-crossing, and plotting, and falling in love. Italy wasn’t a country, in Shakespeare’s day, it was a patchwork of city states with dukes and princes and kings. If Shakespeare used real Venice and Verona or made up Illyria, it didn’t matter. The audience doesn’t need to know a thing about Mantua except that you can go to an apothecary and buy poison, but it would be a different play if it were set in Coventry and Romeo were exiled to Leicester. Italy had this status for Shakespeare partly because it was the most wonderful place in Europe at the time, not just full of art and treasure but also the revived heritage of antiquity. The models for plays were classical, and secular plays were revived in Italy first, new plays were first written and performed there, before they spread elsewhere in Europe. So Italy in a way owned drama, audiences were used to Italian names and Italian settings. Shakespeare drew from all sorts of traditions, including the very English mumming plays, but both the real Italy and the dramatic one had a hold on his imagination.

Romeo and Juliet is often done in other settings, modern or otherwise. I didn’t realise why this never worked for me until I was once lucky enough to see a live stage science fiction version. The text wasn’t changed at all, but the whole thing was done in a Fuller Dome, lots of it climbing around in the struts, especially the balcony scene. The Capulets were humanoid aliens with distinctive clothing and body language. The alchemist was a weird three headed ostrichoid alien. When Romeo asks “Was that my father that went hence so fast?” we hear a spaceship zoom overhead. It was great. It was also the first version of Romeo and Juliet I’d ever seen where they’d changed the setting and it had worked. The planet of Verona contained a Prince, assorted aliens, and two households, one alien, one human, but both alike in dignity.

That’s the key to Romeo and Juliet, stated right there in the first line, and all the versions I’d seen that tried to change the setting had foundered on that. This story of two lovesick teenagers and their tragic end only works when the feuding households they come from really are equal with nothing to choose between them, whether in Shakespeare’s imaginary Renaissance Italy or on another planet. You can quite easily make The Tempest into a play about colonization, but that really doesn’t work for Romeo and Juliet—the whole thing only works if the families really are equal.

The other wonderful thing in the SF version was the Capulets’ body language. They wore shiny jumpsuits, and when at rest they rotated their hands over their knees. When the nurse is teasing Juliet about Romeo and says “his leg excels all men’s” she imitates this gesture, and it’s adorable. This tiny bit of physical byplay, in a play I saw once twenty years ago, became part of my definition of what makes the play great.

The original audience would not have been as sympathetic to the lovers as we are. Shakespeare’s pretty positive about romantic love, for his period, but marriage was really supposed to be an economic relationship much more than a romantic one. Shakespeare largely avoids the adultery, cuckoldry and bed hopping that so many other period dramas find hilarious. He’s reasonably in favour of love in marriage. But his audience wouldn’t necessarily have been, and he goes out of his way to get their sympathy. The modern audience, finding any other kind of marriage horrific, needs much less of this. The first thing, almost always changed in modern productions, is how young Juliet is—not quite fourteen. This is meant to excuse her silliness. Then it’s well established early on that Romeo’s tragic flaw is a propensity to fall in love, and to let romantic love go to his head. We see this the first time we see him, mooning over Rosaline, He’s in love with being in love, the woman is just a prop. But once we get to the actual love scenes, Shakespeare goes all out to get everyone on the side of the lovers, the beautiful speeches, the whole weight of language. And it works. Even when I was twelve and delighted to see the play start with a swordfight instead of kissy stuff, I was entirely won over by the end.

My favourite character is Mercutio, then and now. Mercutio is fun and sensible, he has all the best lines, and he speaks them lightly. He teases Romeo for his idiocy. His main characteristic is how lightly he takes everything. He also has an amazing death-scene, he makes a pun when he is dying—“ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man.” And it is from Mercutio’s death that the tragic dominoes of the end start lining up. Mercutio’s death lead’s to Romeo killing Tybalt, which leads to Romeo’s exile, and then the fake death of Juliet, followed by the real deaths of both lovers.

The timing of their suicides and separate death speeches is wonderful, as is the fact that Romeo dies with the woman’s weapon, poison, while Juliet uses a sword. You could almost forget how contrived it is that Romeo hasn’t had the message that Juliet was only faking death. There’s never a dry eye in the house.

But this isn’t the end—this isn’t a play about them but the feud. The actual end follows their deaths and is the reconciliation of the families, brought about by the death as it could have been, we are told, by nothing else. I don’t know if anyone finds it any compensation, I never have.

This article was originally published April 20, 2015 as part of our ongoing Shakespeare on Tor.com series.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published a collection of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections and ten novels, including the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. Her most recent book is The Just City. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/28/beyond-muppet-good-and-evil-the-dark-crystal/

http://www.tor.com/?p=200317

The Dark Crystal debuted in 1982, wedged somewhat oddly between The Great Muppet Caper and the premiere of Fraggle Rock in the Great Muppet Time Line. In terms of Jim Henson’s career, placing the film chronologically is easy; figuring out how it fits into his development as an artist is a bit more complicated. The project that eventually became The Dark Crystal actually began several years earlier when Henson fell madly in love with the work of fantasy illustrator Brian Froud; they became friends, and Froud began collaborating with Henson and Frank Oz. With the help of David Odell, a former staff writer for The Muppet Show, they eventually produced the first live-action film to feature no human actors, only puppets and animatronic creatures.

The film was groundbreaking in many ways, and yet it was not considered a financial success upon release, and is often described as something of a “near classic” even by its fans. I’ve always harbored mixed feelings toward The Dark Crystal; even as a kid, I remember having the sense that there were so many aspects of the movie that worked…but somehow all those amazing parts never seemed to come together, in the end. And so, for the first time in years, I decided to take another look.

The basic plot of The Dark Crystal centers around Jen, who believes himself to be the last of the peaceful Gelflings; Jen looks a bit like an elf and acts a lot like a hobbit as he’s ripped from his comfort zone and sent upon the quest to fulfill his destiny. He’s fairly brave, but also clueless, and has a tendency to whine about not knowing what he’s doing. The audience knows the score, however, thanks to the helpful narration that opens the movie—a thousand years ago, everything was great until the titular Crystal cracked, and two new races appeared. The corrupt and evil Skeksis took over, while the wise and gentle Mystics went off to practice their “natural wizardry” in a delightfully mellow commune far from the buzz-harshing Skeksi empire.

The movie begins with the simultaneous deaths of the Skeksi emperor and his counterpart among the Mystics, who has raised the orphaned Jen. On his deathbed, Jen’s beloved Master reveals that the young Gelfling is destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy, find the missing shard and heal the Crystal before the planet’s three suns align in the sky—otherwise, the world will descend into eternal darkness. Confused and doubtful, Jen resigns himself to his fate and sets out on his journey….

So far, so good, right? I will say that the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie seem even darker and more violent than I’d remembered—how many family movies kick things off with two deathbed scenes, followed immediately by a brutal battle for power between rival Skeksis? Featuring giant axes, and a lot of shrieking. It’s intense. So, maybe this isn’t a movie for the faint of heart, but at least we know where the story’s going, and we can settle in for a classic quest narrative….

Unfortunately, during the first two thirds of the movie, tagging along on Jen’s journey means slogging through A LOT of exposition, a good deal of which seems unnecessary thanks to the opening narration. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind if Jen were less of a milquetoast, but in Muppet terms, he’s kind of like an emo Kermit the Frog, if Kermit were robbed of any detectable sense of humor or gumption, wringing his hands and kvetching (or whatever the Gelfling equivalent of kvetching is), from one scene to the next. Luckily, he soon encounters a couple of far more interesting characters in the form of Aughra, the scholar who supplies him with the missing crystal shard, and Kira, a fellow Gelfling.

Aughra, it must be said, is pretty amazing. She’s vaguely terrifying, brilliant, no-nonsense, and fearless in the face of the Skeksis and their huge, crustacean-like henchman (hench-creatures?), the Garthim. Plus, her observatory is one of the most magnificent set pieces in a film brimming with magnificent visuals—it’s absolutely breathtaking. I remember being slightly scared of Aughra as a little kid, but also really liking her, and I stand by that reaction; she’s a bit of a benevolent bully, but Jen desperately needs a bit of bullying to send him on his way.

After Aughra is attacked and captured by the Skeksis, Jen is lost again until he meets up with Kira. A much more dynamic character than Jen, Kira is savvier, more adventurous and self-reliant. The movie also makes a point of playing up the fact that she’s a female, which is interesting given the asexual appearance of most of the other creatures in the movie: Kira uses her wings to carry Jen to safety in one scene, much to Jen’s surprise: “Wings! I don’t have wings!” he exclaims; “Of course not,” Kira answers, “You’re a boy.” Kira is fearless and committed to the quest; she’s everything that Jen is not, in other words, and only through her eventual sacrifice is he able to finally reach the Crystal and do what needs to be done. The gender politics of the film are certainly interesting… and while it would be nice if The Dark Crystal offered interesting gender politics AND a genuinely interesting protagonist, at least the supporting characters are ready, able, and willing to steal the show.

For all my own kvetching, as I mentioned in the beginning, what this movie does well, it does spectacularly well. Henson and Froud managed to create amazingly detailed, lush, gorgeous settings and populate those settings with creatures that look like nothing on earth—utterly fantastic, but also somehow believable. When designing the various characters and concept art, Froud avoided modeling his creatures after existing, real-world animals, so what we see on the screen is essentially his imagination brought to life through the skill and technical innovations of Oz and Henson.

Even if the movie had been completely silent (or had featured a constructed language, as Henson had originally planned for the Skeksis’ scenes), the film would still rank as a major milestone, even in a career as brilliant as Jim Henson’s. As a narrative, it might have a few flaws, but as work of fantasy art and a triumph of puppetry, animatronics, and the sheer force of talent and imagination, there’s no denying the power of The Dark Crystal.

This article was originally published November 16, 2011 as part of our Muppet Week series.

Bridget McGovern really needs to share this early deleted scene in which Frank Oz performs the voice of Aughra. You haven’t really lived until you’ve heard the voice of Fozzie, Bert, Yoda and Evil Grover casually discussing the coming apocalypse. Either I need a drink, or Aughra needs an exorcism. Probably both.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/28/the-comedy-of-errors-and-doppelganger-stories-when-finding-your-missing-piece-means-finding-yourself/

http://www.tor.com/?p=200295

Scholars seem to have written off William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors as neither particularly deep nor memorable. It lacks the striking characters (like Hamlet, or Viola) or shocking plot developments (as in Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet) of other classics. At first glance, its central conflict of mistaken identities seems merely like the kind of sitcom-style plot that could be resolved if everyone just calmed down and said their full names.

And yet, these seemingly comical hijinks represent a deep-seated, universal horror linked to loss of identity. Don’t be fooled: Shakespeare got dark with The Comedy of Errors, introducing the kind of doppelgänger mindfuck story that has been replicated and reimagined through modern SFF TV series like Battlestar Galactica and Orphan Black.

Existential Crisis as Comedy

Like Romeo and Juliet with its Montagues versus Capulets, The Comedy of Errors is all about the deadly rivalry between Syracuse and Ephesus. At the start of the play, Syracusian trader Egeon is sentenced to death for trespassing in Ephesus, but he manages to get a stay of execution when he tells Duke Solinus his tragic tale. Years ago, a shipwreck separated Egeon, his son, and his servant, from Egeon’s wife, who also had a son and servant in tow.

These boys grew up in the two opposing lands, with both parents inexplicably naming both their sons Antipholus, and the servants Dromio. (It’s unclear whether this was a matter of “great minds think alike,” or each parent thought they had Twin #1, which would suck for Twin #2.) When Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse set out to find their brothers and didn’t return, Egeon went after them.

The primary action of the play, however, concerns Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse being continually mistaken for Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus—running into the Ephesians’ wives, relatives, business partners, courtesans, enemies, and other people in their daily lives.

A Western musical version at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2008. (Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson)

Like I said, lots of opportunity for mistaken identity, frustration, inconvenient romances… and existential crisis. In Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge, Rolf Soellner explains (emphasis mine),

Although The Comedy of Errors primarily exploits the outward possibilities and impossibilities of mistaken identities, it at least implies the danger of self-loss and depicts the joy of self-recovery. […] Antipholus’ search starts a chain reaction of errors, making the twin-masters and twin-servants doubt at times that they know who they are. The Comedy of Errors attains whatever thematic depth it has by the comic horror Shakespeare injected into the threatening loss of identities, and its happy finale comes about through a universal finding.

This collective fear is timeless, whether it’s caused by watching your way of life disappear in the face of societal/technological change; losing control over your existence; or discovering that someone else has usurped what makes you unique, and in doing so makes a better “you” than you ever did.

Many dismiss The Comedy of Errors as a mere rewrite of the Roman comedy The Menaechmi, which revolved around one set of twins getting mistaken for each other. However, it was actually incredibly savvy of Shakespeare to adapt this story for his contemporaries, masking this universal terror with superficial comedy and doubling down on the twins. The Shakespeare Theater Company at the Harman Center for the Arts examines how Shakespeare enhanced Plautus’ original framework (emphases mine):

This simple comedic device remains unchanged in Shakespeare’s adaptation. As in Menaechmi, the humor arises when one twin gains an identity he didn’t know he had, while the other loses the identity he thought he had. One receives credit for the other’s accomplishments, while the other receives blame for crimes he didn’t commit. Despite his similar use of the twins, however, Shakespeare is not content to leave the idea unadapted. Perhaps recognizing the ridiculousness of a plot based on mistaking twins for each other, he throws out realism and piles on the improbabilities. By introducing the twin Dromios, separated identical servants for the Antipholus twins, Shakespeare multiplies the possibilities for mistaken identity. Now an Antipholus can mistake as well as be mistaken. “A comedy would scarcely allow even the two Antipholi,” wrote the British poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “but farce dares add the two Dromios.”

After all, there are only five central conflicts in literature, one of which is man vs. self. But what happens when this self is an alternate version of you?

Cylons, Clones, and Learning You’re Not Unique

The 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot and Orphan Black tapped into Shakespeare’s savvy by centering their conflicts on man—or, more often, woman—vs. self: Whether we’re talking robots or clones, both series focus on the human feelings of individuals who are faced with the knowledge that separate, identical (yet still different) versions of themselves exist out in the universe. This identity crisis spurs various characters on to accept or reject the ideology that birthed them; to question their beliefs and alignments; to challenge their own morality and selfhood. These stories are especially relevant now, in an age where people’s identities are stolen and hacked thanks to the Internet. We’re scared of being erased or replaced, so we identify with characters who experience these fight-or-flight knee-jerk reactions upon meeting their doubles.

But how did these creators land on tackling this issue? In 2013, several years after BSG’s series finale, creator Ronald D. Moore admitted that the decision to change the Cylons from chrome-suited machines to flesh-and-blood enemies came from budget constraints: They didn’t have the funds to build countless robot suits, and CGI definitely wasn’t cheap. But then came inspiration, citing another famous sci-fi work tackling identity crises:

We had a bull session and somebody said why not go the Blade Runner route and make them look like human beings? My first response was like, “That’s lame.” I came around. I wondered, if they look like people and used to look like robots, what does that imply? The robots decided to evolve themselves to look like humans. Why would a robot decide that? Maybe they are evolving to what they see as their parents. Now we’re in interesting territory. Yeah, I said, let’s go that direction.

That brought about the simple but terrifying conceit presented at the start of every BSG episode:

Orphan Black was a decade in the making: Creators John Fawcett and Graeme Manson began with the visual of a woman watching her double jump in front of a train, but realized that their initial idea of a feature film wouldn’t be nearly enough time to explore the ramifications of that moment. Obviously BSG was a big influence, but so was the bleakness of AMC’s Breaking Bad. Plus, Fawcett told Collider, there was the allure of creating so many genetically-identical-but-different-in-every-other-way women… and then combining them in one scene:

Every time there are scenes with the clones, where Tatiana is playing multiple versions of herself, they’re always the scenes that you’re so fascinated by and drawn to. And it’s a massive part of what got me excited about the concept, in the first place.

Identity as Transaction, Gained and Lost

Poster by Scott McKowen

The threat of self-loss starts out small. In The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Syracuse (the protagonist, if we’re going to assign one) is at first amused to be herded to dinner by “his” wife, handed a necklace “he” supposedly commissioned, and other charming mistaken-identity moments. He and Dromio of Syracuse figure that it must be the work of witchcraft (which is apparently totally normal in Ephesus) and that they are caught up in some spell. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, they seem to say, following a distraught Adriana (who has to come beg her husband herself) to dinner.

But while Antipholus of Syracuse is at first along for the ride, Antipholus of Ephesus is the one who gets the shock of his life: Returning home for dinner, he learns that “he” is already there! And suddenly one man’s free dinner with a pretty lady (or rather, her prettier sister he’s smitten with) is another man’s identity usurped. At a loss for what to do, and sassed by “his” servant (actually Dromio of Syracuse, manning the gate), Antipholus of Ephesus is forced to leave his house and find comfort having dinner with a Courtesan.

The inciting action in Orphan Black isn’t even about clones and property—it’s identity theft. Grifter Sarah Manning sees a woman with her face step in front of a train, and then steals the purse and ID that woman left behind.

At first, her only goal is to keep up the charade of playing Elizabeth Childs long enough to drain the latter’s bank accounts before her body gets pried up off the tracks. This also includes sleeping with Beth’s live-in boyfriend, Paul. While he’s pleasantly surprised by the unusually aggressive sex, he chalks it up to an attitude change rather than anything out of the ordinary. (As Antipholus of Syracuse ponders at the end of Act III, after accepting the jewelry commissioned by his twin, “There’s no main is so vain / That would refuse so fair an offer’d chain.”)

For street-rat Sarah, this My Fair Lady-esque vacation from real life is mostly fun: She gets to wear expensive clothes, luxuriate in a giant flat, and be a police officer. But the fantasy begins to dissolve when Sarah learns that Beth’s suicidal tendencies were tied up in her suspension from the force for shooting a woman. Then another lookalike—German clone Katja Obinger—climbs into “Beth’s” car, begins to tell her about Project Leda, and gets shot dead by a sniper. The fun is officially over.

At first, Sarah is moving too quickly, trying to avoid being shot or found out, to fully digest the knowledge that multiple doppelgängers of her are walking around in the world. But it comes, and with it, the slow-dawning horror that she is not as unique as she (or any person) has been raised to believe. Still she clings to the belief that she and these other people are all octuplets or something medically plausible. But the truth does not come easily (from 1×03 “Variation Under Nature”):

Sarah: “Look, can you just tell me what the hell this is?”
Alison: “Don’t tell her anything!”
Cosima: “Short answer? No.”
Sarah: “How are we all related?”
Alison: “We’re not!”
Cosima: “Well, we are, by nature. She’s referring to nurture.”
Alison: “Just give us the briefcase that you got from the German.”
Sarah: “I’m not giving you shit ’til you give me some answers.”
Alison: “You don’t rate answers.”
Cosima: “Alison…”
Alison: “Fine! She wants in? We’re clones. We’re someone’s experiment and they’re killing us off. Is that helpful?”
Cosima: “Sorry. I wanted to float that whole clone thing a lot softer.”

Photo credit: Ruven Afanador for Entertainment Weekly

To her credit, Sarah gets used to this bizarre situation fairly quickly, seeing as their lives rely on her staying sharp. Yet she holds fast to her own identity. Used to having to fight for her own right to existence, she never gives an inch, to anyone. Consider this exchange with Paul (from 1×07 “Parts Developed in an Unusual Manner”), who basically goes from being Beth’s monitor to Sarah’s:

Paul: “There’s nine of you.”
Sarah: “No! There’s only one of me.”

And while no one could ever truly embody everything that makes Sarah unique, others have certainly tried. (More on that later.)

The biggest difference in comparing The Comedy of Errors to these TV series is that both sets of Antipholuses and Dromios already know that their doubles exist—they could be anywhere in the big wide world, sure, but hopefully alive. The Project Leda clones don’t have that luxury; each woman’s discovery of her clones comes as a fresh shock, with no warning. And while the inhabitants of the Twelve Colonies know that Cylons have taken on human form and can be anywhere, no one makes the mental leap to “They could look like me” because that would require accepting the notion of “I’m a Cylon.”

The Power of Passing

Battlestar Galactica’s human-looking Cylons seem to be split between those who know from the start that they are one of many (e.g., Number Eight, specifically Athena) and those “sleeper” agents who have been raised human (e.g., Number Eight, specifically Boomer). Ironically, over the course of the series, both Eights’ goals reverse: Athena, who initially helps the Cylon cause by seducing Karl “Helo” Agathon, falls in love and betrays her kind to join up with the humans. Boomer starts out as a pilot on Galactica, but after unknowingly sabotaging the ship and discovering her true nature, has an identity crisis that ultimately leads her to reunite with her fellow Cylons.

These two versions of the same person clash again and again, each disgusted at the other’s defection. They also impersonate one another; Athena pretends to be Boomer in order to sabotage Cylon ships, but the true horror comes in 4×17 “Someone to Watch Over Me”: Boomer convinces her former lover Galen Tyrol to free her from the brig before her trial, then passes herself off as Athena to kidnap the latter’s human/Cylon hybrid daughter Hera, and winds up seducing Helo. Although Boomer is doing all of this (even the sex) for the sake of the Cylon mission, it’s clear that she envies Athena her acceptance among the humans, and delights in punishing her.

There’s a heady power to successfully fooling everyone else. In fact, the only person who seems to be able to pick out Boomer from any other Eight is Athena herself. That makes it especially awful to watch the scene in 4×17 where Athena, bound and gagged in a closet, must watch Helo have sex with Boomer. The entire time, Boomer smirks at the helpless Athena, enjoying the fact that Helo can’t tell the difference between the two—which, of course, amplifies Athena’s paranoia about her own unique identity.

You see that same power when Sarah and her fellow clones disguise themselves as one another, though it’s usually to support rather than undermine. Alison is too drunk to face the neighbors she’s invited over for a house party? Cosima’s access is needed for something that she can’t be told about? Sarah’s slapping on red lipstick or fake dreadlocks to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

The clone swaps get even crazier in season 3: When Sarah is forced to play the part of uber-bitch (and fellow clone) Rachel Duncan to fool the corporation that actually created them, and then they demand to see Sarah Manning, Alison must return the favor. It’s an incredibly poor impersonation—her wearing a bad wig and shouting “Oi oi!” in an attempt to imitate Sarah’s cockney accent—that the Dyad Institute would see through if they had ever spent time with the Clone Club. But what they want to see in that moment is that particular clone, so they put aside any nagging doubts.

Sarah-as-Rachel interrogates Alison-as-Sarah. Clone swaps ftw!

All of these disguises (see more in this Clone Swap video) succeed because the people they intend to deceive—lovers, handlers, enemies—have already decided on who they will be seeing and never entertain the possibility of another. In the case of The Comedy of Errors, that easy acceptance is nearly the downfall of both Antipholuses. Over the course of the play, the constant piling-on of misunderstandings and comedic errors sap the power from both brothers, as each is thrust into a similar spiral in which he comes to doubt his very existence.

But if Antipholus of Syracuse stopped to think rationally, he would come up with the logical explanation, easy as that. After all, that’s why he came to Ephesus—to find his brother! But what started as a fresh quest is five years old, leaving him exhausted and disappointed. Less and less plausible is the possibility that he will be reunited with his twin, to the point that every bizarre interaction must find its explanation in a mix of superstition and prejudice. This supplemental commentary from the Utah Shakespeare Festival lays out Antipholus’ problem:

Antipholus of Syracuse is willing to accept any explanation but the true one, the one which should most appeal to him. He is unable to see what is obvious to the audience for three principal reasons: he believes his quest is futile, he carries around prejudices about the Ephesians, and most importantly, he has failed to grapple with his own identity as an identical twin.

The commentary goes on to explain that despite knowing he has a twin, Antipholus of Syracuse has never actually envisioned a world in which his twin exists—in which he could reasonably be mistaken for Antipholus of Ephesus. It’s played for laughs, but there are deeper issues of self-denial and self-sabotage.

Antipholus of Syracuse and Ephesus, from The Acting Company’s production. (Photo credit: Michal Daniel)

Finding Your Missing Piece

Sarah Manning and her sisters, and the Number Eights, have grappled with their identities as identical clones and robots. The operative word being grapple—implying a constant struggle. While they must initially accept that they were created to serve some other purpose, and must compartmentalize in order to get through the latest attack on their safety and control of their lives, it doesn’t mean that they’ve tidily worked through the personal crises that such knowledge induces.

But the saving grace is that, in doubting the validity of their own existences, they also discover their soulmates. Not Sarah’s handler Paul (who turns back to Dyad), or even Helo (though he and Athena reconcile). In reuniting with their copies, each woman locates a missing piece of herself.

These characters—the Antipholuses and Dromios, Project Leda’s clones, the Number Eights—are created as not-quite-whole, on a constant search for someone who reflects their own values back at them. It is only by seeing the literal road less traveled through a double with a different life, and inhabiting that alternate choice, that they can return to themselves, secure in their belief that though there are others who resemble them, they are still truly unique.

By adapting Plautus’ The Menaechmi and inserting a second set of twins, Shakespeare announced himself as an inventive playwright building on well-known stories. By covering a universal fear with slapstick comedy, he makes audiences laugh in the first take and shudder in later reads. Similarly, both Battlestar Galactica and Orphan Black have expounded on this iconic drama by changing the genders, upping the number of doppelgängers, and exploring what happens as they accept themselves and each other, and then unite against a larger threat.

Just as these series warn you not to underestimate the Cylons and clones, you would be remiss in writing off The Comedy of Errors as a superficial farce.

This article was originally published December 4, 2015 as part of our on-going Shakespeare on Tor.com series.

Natalie Zutter really did not expect that she would have this much to say about The Comedy of Errors, but is truly glad she chose to study this play. You can read more of her work on Twitter and elsewhere.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/28/the-religious-relics-of-raiders-of-the-lost-ark/

http://www.tor.com/?p=190547

Like many people born during our secular age, my primary religious instruction came from the media in general, and specifically, the best possible source: Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr. I learned that all religions are essentially equal, that practitioners of different faiths are all worthy of respect, and that God can melt the faces off of Nazis. It was seeing Last Crusade in middle school that first got me interested in studying religion academically.

Now, a few years and a small mountain of academic training later, I look back at the Indy movies and am struck by two weird things: The main Indy trilogy is essentially a conversion narrative in which the hero never converts…which is a little strange. But second (and maybe this is the reason he never converts?): he exists in a universe where all the religions are seemingly true, based on the very real powers each movie’s main artifact displays. I’m going to spend three (lengthy!) posts exploring the weird religious universe that the first three Indiana Jones films create.

I should mention up front that I am ignoring Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull — since it deals more with 1950s sci-fi-style alien artifacts, it doesn’t quite line up with the mystical relics of the previous three films. I’m also going to talk about the films in our chronology, not Indy’s, which is why I’m jumping into Raiders before Temple.

What’s a conversion narrative, you ask? Basically a person screws up a lot, but eventually has a realization that life, as they’re living it, is corrupt, and they make a drastic change to fix it. This narrative can be applied to any philosophy or exercise regime or diet plan, but when you deal with religion there’s usually a supernatural element – often a vision or voice, but sometimes just an emotional response. By his own account, Paul is a total jerkface until Jesus confronts him and tells him to cut out all the jerkfacedness (…I’m paraphrasing), while Augustine came to his conversion through studying Paul after a disembodied voice told him to do so. Both of Johnny Cash’s autobiographies detail years of drug abuse and tour dalliances, which he’s only able to leave behind after he becomes a more dedicated Christian. And all the versions of A Christmas Carol you’ve ever read or seen are conversion narratives in which Scrooge converts to “the spirit of Christmas” and lives his life differently after being visited by the ghosts.

The three Indiana Jones movies are similarly structured as conversion narratives. If we look at the films from Indy’s chronology, he starts as a jerkface (in Temple of Doom) and then has a series of supernatural experiences that really should change the way he looks at life and the universe. And yet, the narrative is thwarted, and he ends the series pretty much the same as how he started it—as a somewhat roguish and definitely secular adventurer.

I thought the best way to jump into the Indyverse is to look at some of the Indiana Jones knock-offs and homages that emerged after Raiders premiered in 1981. None of these films feel the need to give us treasure hunting with a side of theology, so why does Indy?

King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986) were two of the largest Indy-esque movies of the era. Even though they went back to the original “Lost World” novels of H. Rider Hagggard for source material, Cannon pictures added enough modern touches and snark that it made the films much friendlier to an audience of kids, and updated the setting from the 1880s to WWI, which obviously echoes Indy’s pre-WWII adventuring. In both films, the heroes are fairly straightforward treasure hunters, with maybe a side of “looking for a missing relative” thrown in. For the most part, they all just want to get rich, not fight Nazis or look for God. Romancing the Stone (1984) was initially dismissed as a modern Raiders knock-off, but was so successful it warranted a sequel, 1985’s Jewel of the Nile. Both films are purely about treasure hunting gone awry, with a side of romance.

Even the illustrated style of the posters emphasize this similarity, with one giant difference: Michael Douglas’ Jack T. Colton is described as a “reckless soldier of fortune” (read: illegal tropical bird dealer) swings into his poster on a vine. Richard Chamberlain’s bandoliered Allan Quatermain is searching for a treasure – note the giant pile of gold directly next to him. Indy looks like a devil-may-care adventurer here, but he’s also not hoarding gold, or sweeping a girl off her feet, because instead he’s standing protectively in front of the Ark.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Or, Melting Nazis

Now, to get everyone on the same page here’s a brief history of the Ark of the Covenant, pieced together from the Hebrew Bible, with some later scholarship added for context:

After the Hebrews escaped slavery in Egypt, God “dwelled” with them as they traveled across the desert. The form of God that manifested is called Shekhinah, and is the only feminine name used for the God of the Hebrews. (Some people take this to mean that this is a feminine counterpart to the Hebrew God, some people link the Shekhinah to the aspect of the Trinity that’s called The Holy Spirit, and Shekhinah makes an appearance in the Quran as the Sakīnah, and is used to mean “security” i.e.: the security that comes from having faith. Cue “The More you Know” rainbow.) Once Moses received the Ten Commandments, the Hebrews were faced with a basic problem: you’ve just been given these incredibly important rules from your God. Following them is hard enough, but how do you store them? You don’t want to, like, chip the Commandments, or accidentally put a coffee mug down on them and leave a ring. So they constructed the Ark, carried it with them, and according to lore conquered armies with the strength it gave them. Once they got to Jerusalem they gave it a permanent home in the First Temple, and it was kept in an interior room called Kodesh Hakodashim, or Holy of Holies. The powers of the Ark were mostly holding the FREAKING TEN COMMANDMENTS, but it apparently also zapped people for touching it. (A man named Uzzah died after trying to catch the Ark when a cow bumped into it, which is omnipotent dirty pool in my opinion.) At some point it was lost – either taken by Babylonian conquerors in the 580s BCE, or possibly saved and hidden along with some other icons to keep it safe from invaders. The important part, for our purposes, is that it was LOST.

After World War II, there was a flurry of books and movies detailing the atrocities of Nazis. Some of these were quite serious, like The Nuremberg Trials, while some were a little more fantastical, like all the stories about elderly SS officers hiding out in South America, and some were straight sci-fi like They Saved Hitler’s Brain! Part of this urge to catalog the Nazi’s evil was to dive into their supposed occult history. A book called The Morning of the Magicians popularized the theory that the roots of Nazism could be found in occult organizations like the Vril Society and Thule Society, and later works like The Occult Roots of Nazism provided fodder for dozens of History Channel documentaries about Nazis hunting mystical icons, which in turn inspired the movie Constantine, the Puppet Master series, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and a whole bunch of Hellboy arcs. Now there is a small grain of truth to all of these stories: there was an organization called the Ahnenerbe, whose stated purpose was to trace Aryan history, but whose true aim was to claim that Germans were responsible for everything good in the world. The group’s founder, Heinrich Himmler, actually had the occult obsession that was later credited to Hitler (der Fuhrer’s own religious beliefs are harder to pin down, since he often tailored his statements to ensure public approval), and threaded pagan symbolism into the organization of the SS. In addition to that, after the Third Reich “annexed” Austria in 1938, they had the Hofburg Spear moved to Nuremburg. The Spear, which is one of several spears across Europe claimed to be the Holy Lance, inspired a book called The Spear of Destiny by one Trevor Ravenscroft. Ravenscroft inspired the surname of…you guessed it, Abner and Marion Ravenwood.

Steven Spielberg took this strand of popular history and ran with it for the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

At the beginning of the film, Indy seems to be purely a treasure hunter. It’s only after he returns home that we learn that he’s slightly more altruistic, and was trying to get the Chachapoyan Fertility Idol for safekeeping in Marcus’ museum. (Of course, he’s still removing the idol from its home culture and context to put it on display for a probably upper-class white audience…but I’m leaving that alone for now.) He scoffs at the power of the idol and the gods behind it, and indeed the threats of the idol are just eons-old booby traps, constructed by humans to kill other humans. This sets a particular tone, as the idol is grabbed, tossed, and wielded with no reverence or respect by the western treasure hunters, but when the Hovitos see it they prostrate themselves. In the end it’s only a statue, and its power comes from the beliefs of those who consider it holy. (Now, if you look into the background of the idol, it was based on the theory that the Chachapoyan people were the descendants of Vikings, which was put forward by Nazi collaborator Jacques deMahieu. So Belloq’s interest in the idol actually falls in line with his other Nazi-funded esoterica projects.

After that opening gambit, we cut to Indy in the classroom, where he’s complaining that “local traditions and superstition” are a problem for archaeology, since laypeople will go treasure hunting and destroy historical sites in the process. While I can buy the white Ivy League historian scoffing at what he sees as primitive superstition – especially given that the “mystic powers” of the Hovitos’ idol proved to be booby traps, albeit sophisticated ones – when presented with a lead on the location of the Ark of the Covenant, he reacts with a singular mix of excitement and snark that shows he doesn’t have immediate respect for Judeo-Christian artifacts, either.

When the government stooges (one of them is Jek Porkins!) ask him about the Ark and the Staff of Ra, he outlines the history of the Ark for them. They claim that Hitler is “obsessed with the occult” but seem totally ignorant about the Ark and its history, with Indy even having to explain that it housed “the original Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mt. Horeb and smashed, if you believe in that sort of thing…” before asking “didn’t you guys ever go to Sunday School?”

After they exchange an embarrassed look, Dr. Jones goes on to say that the Ark may have been taken by the Egyptian Pharoah Shishak (maybe Shoshenq I?) in 980 BC(E), and that Tannis, the city that housed the Ark, was buried in a sandstorm. Spielberg uses stories from 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles to give the Ark some post-Temple closure, while skirting around the inconvenience of the Babylonians. It also brings us back to Egypt, which is a much more digestible ancient kingdom for U.S. movie audiences. All discussion of the Ark’s history stops there, though, and the ideas of its historical significance never really start in the first place. What the government guys want to know is: what does the Ark do? And why is this nefarious Adolf fellow so interested in it?

Indy, who has apparently memorized every page of the edition of the Bible that happens to be sitting in the empty classroom they’re using, opens the massive book up to an illustration of the Ark’s zappiness.

The Stooges are suitably impressed:

Stooge (horrified): Good God…
Marcus (slightly amused): Yes, that’s just what the Hebrews thought…
Other Stooge: What’s that?
Indy: Lightning. Fire. Power of God or…something…
Marcus: The army that carries the Ark before it is invincible.

Which, again, tell that to the Babylonians. But for the purposes of the movie, we’ve now just kicked into full STOP HITLER mode, and we don’t really slow down again until the end. Indy happily accepts the offer to go get the Ark, simply because he likes the idea of the artifact itself, and he hinges his agreement on the promise that Marcus will get the Ark for his museum. While the tone of the film shifts as Indy begins his search for the Lost Ark, Indy himself does not become a man on a religious quest, it’s just a race to get it before the Nazis can.

There is no discussion of the Ark as a religious artifact, no thought of the impact this find would have on Biblical studies, anti-Semitism, the rise of Nazism in Europe, people’s individual faith… nothing. Indy doesn’t call in a cavalcade of rabbis to help. It’s never considered that maybe a Judaic Studies program should be funding this mission. Frankly, I find this really weird. Obviously you don’t have time to stop for a lengthy theological conversation in the middle of an action movie, but still, some mention of…oh, wait, but the movie does do that. Sort of. When Indy worries about facing Marion for the first time in a decade, Marcus reacts with annoyance:

Brody: Marion’s the least of your worries right now, believe me, Indy.
Indiana: What do you mean?
Brody: Well, I mean that for nearly three thousand years man has been searching for the lost Ark. It’s not something to be taken lightly. No one knows its secrets. It’s like nothing you’ve ever gone after before.
Indiana: [laughing] Oh, Marcus. What are you trying to do, scare me? You sound like my mother. We’ve known each other for a long time. I don’t believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus. I’m going after a find of incredible historical significance, you’re talking about the boogie man.

So, here we are. They’re going after an artifact that is significant specifically because of its religious meaning, but Marcus’ attempt to reckon with that religious meaning is dismissed as hocus-pocus, and the Hebrew God is referred to as “the boogieman.” This is a boldly secular stance, both for a mid-1930s professor and for an early-1980s movie. This level of snark continues throughout the movie, and at first, the movie itself seems to support Indy’s mocking stance. The initial action mirrors the hunt for the idol at the beginning: booby traps, ancient Egyptian dioramas, roughly a billion snakes who live in a cave without a visible food source… it’s all more or less explainable. Indy and Sallah find the Ark, and they’re able to lift it and carry it around without any Uzzah-esque zappy times, so at first it seems that this is just another artifact from a long past age.

While Marcus, Sallah, and even Belloq all take the Ark seriously, Indy crashes through the quest like a fedora’d Labrador puppy, dragging Marion behind him. (Marion, meanwhile, seems predominately concerned with (a) her share of the money and (b) not getting tortured by Toht, and we never learn her feelings about the Ark itself.) Finally, the film itself weighs in on this. The camera tracks into a dark room on the Nazi ship, where the Ark has been stored in a be-swastikaed box… and we get to watch as the Ark burns the insignia off. This is something only the audience sees, as it’s the only scene in the film that doesn’t have any actors in it. In this moment, the Ark goes from being a relic of great historical significance to an actual character with agency. And it uses that agency to hate Nazis.

Finally, after all this build-up, Marion getting kidnapped, the Ark getting Ark-napped, Indy somehow surviving on a submerged submarine for an improbably long time, we get to the big scene where Indy confronts Belloq and the Nazis with a rocket launcher. We figure he’s going to rescue the ark from the evil-doers. But no! He takes aim at the Ark, and threatens to blow it up if Marion isn’t released. Belloq calls his bluff, and he backs down, only because he admits that he wants to see it opened, not because he thinks it has any intrinsic religious value. From this point on, Indy, like Marion, is utterly helpless. He is a captive just as she is, and the two of them are tied to a stake together to watch as Belloq claims his latest victory.

Here’s where it gets extra weird, and goes in a direction that most movie-goers were probably not expecting in 1981. Does Indy somehow break out and defeat his enemies? Does Marion use a combination of seductive wiles and fists to subdue a Nazi? No. All the old 1930s movie serial tropes are left by the wayside. One Nazi makes a passing reference to being uncomfortable with the Jewish ritual they were about to enact, but everyone else seems cool with it. Which makes no sense. But then Belloq, a French archaeologist who is employed by the Third Reich, and thus, presumably, not Jewish, comes out in full 6th Century BCE priestly garb.

Now here’s my question: where the hell was he keeping these historically accurate priestly robes? He has everything that Exodus 28 says a priest should wear: a pectoral, an ephod, a robe, an embroidered tunic, a turban and a belt. Was he just carrying all this stuff around with him? Was the breastplate packed under the dress he gave Marion? And more importantly: why does a French archaeologist, who is definitively not a priest of the line of Aaron, who has presumably not undertaken any of the ritual purification necessary, and who most likely does not believe in Yahweh in that highly specific Exodus-era way, think that his prayer will work? The prayer (said in Aramaic, because Belloq is one t-crossing, i-dotting bastard) is traditionally said in Temple when the Torah Ark is opened during services:

Not in human do I trust
And not on any child do I rely
In him [who] God is true
And whose Torah is true
In him will I trust
And to his name make precious praise.

Keep in mind he’s surrounded by vicious anti-Semites, who are all mostly on board with enacting a Hebrew ceremony to honor the artifact they’ve found, which, if it actually provides the direct line to God Belloq kept talking about, should immediately call into question the entire Nazi project, since it kind of means the descendants of the Hebrews are backing the correct horse, theologically speaking. No matter what happens, it won’t be in the Nazis’ favor, but they do it anyway. At first it seems the Ark is a dud, because it turns out to be full of sand.

But the sand turns out to have angry Hebrew ghosts in it, and within a few moments, they’re flying through the air, terrorizing everyone, and the Nazis all get zapped through the eyes and heart like so many Uzzahs.

All except Toht, Colonel Dietrich, and Belloq himself. Toht and Dietrich’s faces melt off, and Belloq’s head explodes, because the God of the Hebrews is apparently a Scanner.

Now here’s where it gets really, really interesting. Indy and Marion are saved from head-explodey-times by keeping their eyes closed, a demonstration of reverence in the face of the Ark’s power. But having just experienced this event, they still allow the Ark to go to Washington, rather than, say, dropping it into the ocean where no human hands could touch it again. Indy still believes that it should go to Marcus’ museum, and he still believes that humans should study its power. This seems…I don’t know… silly? Dumb? Catastrophically dumb?

Indy goes through this entire journey, which in most narratives would result in a conversion, but ends it by being pissed off at the government, and seemingly on a track to romantic bliss with Marion. He says “They don’t know what they’ve got there,” but there’s no indication that he really understands the Ark either. The audience, however, is allowed to both see the Ark at work, and watch as government agents tuck it away in the warehouse, clearly not understanding its power. This creates an interesting gap between us and Indy. Next, we’ll go forward into the past to look at Indy’s brush with Eastern mysticism in the prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Will he, like so many college sophomores before him, decide that the religions of India hold his true path?

Leah Schnelbach hates to admit it, but she totally would have looked into the Ark. Come yell at her to close her eyes on Twitter!