Outside In Walks With Fire

I had planned to write extensively about the released and writing of Outside In Walks With Fire, ATB Publishing's tribute to Twin Peaks, which I have an article in. I failed to mark the book's release, so I'm posting about it now.

More details about my article soon. Outside In Walks With Fire is out now and available here.

The Many Deaths of Janeway

With the demise of Eaglemoss and the subsequent disappearance of its website, I'm going to start posting my articles for them here. As many of the articles were written to coincide with the dates of particular anniversaries, I'll try to keep to those dates, but the evergreen ones I'll try to post on here regularly.

Here's the first: 

STAR TREK: THE MANY DEATHS OF JANEWAY
How many times has Janeway 'died'?
(Originally written for Hero Collector, published 18 April 2019

David Black adds up the many times the Voyager captain has met – and survived – her end.

Captain Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager is a woman of great achievements. She has travelled across the Delta Quadrant, made first contact with dozens of new species and hyper-evolved into a salamander. One of the most amazing things about her time aboard Voyager is how often she died and how little it affected her career. Let us count the ways...

Death #1

Time And Again

Cause of Death: Polaric explosion.

While investigating a planet that is the site of a polaric explosion, Janeway and Paris are drawn back in time to the day before the explosion. During a search for evidence of Janeway, Kes, using her newly discovered telepathic abilities, says “She was here. This is where she died.”

Janeway realises the attempts by the Voyager crew to rescue them from the future are the cause of the explosion and prevents her own rescue, which prevents the explosion and therefore she never visits the planet and this renders that timeline redundant.

Death #2

Deadlock

Cause of Death: Explosion when Voyager self-destructs.

As a result of a journey through a plasma drift to avoid a Vidiian ship, all the matter on Voyager is duplicated, including its captain and crew. However, the antimatter remains unaffected and with two ships drawing on it, supplies quickly run low. One duplicate Voyager is badly damaged and suffers losses, the other seems largely unaffected. The undamaged Voyager is boarded by the Vidiians and its Janeway sets her ship to self-destruct and is killed in the resulting explosion and freeing the other to continue the journey home.

Death #3

Coda

Cause of Death: Strangulation

Janeway and Chakotay are on a mission in a shuttle when electrical interference forces them to crash on a planet. The captain sustains critical injuries in a shuttle crash, but Chakotay revives her with CPR. They are captured by the Vidiians and Janeway is strangled by a Vidiian in a cave.

Death #4
Coda

Cause of Death: Shuttle explosion

Janeway and Chakotay find themselves back aboard the shuttlecraft in space and suspect a time loop, when they are again attacked by the Vidiians. They are both killed when the Vidiians destroy their shuttle.

Death #5

Coda

Cause of Death: Asphyxiation

Again, the captain and her first officer are in the shuttle en route to their mission. When the Vidiians show up again, they return to Voyager. Janeway has contracted the Vidiian phage and unable to find a cure, the Doctor uncharacteristically euthanises her with a neural toxin.

Death #6

Coda

Cause of Death: Massive cerebro-vascular collapse

Once more, Janeway finds herself on board the shuttle, but only briefly. She has an out-of-body experience as she watches Chakotay perform CPR on her prone form. He is unsuccessful. Janeway wanders Voyager’s corridors like a ghost, while her crew search for her and eventually give up looking. She attends her own memorial. An alien, masquerading as her father’s ghost, is inhabiting her cerebral cortex, attempting to convince her to relinquish her life willingly, but she fights back, denies him sustenance and awakes on the planet.

Death #7

Before & After

Cause of Death: console explosion to the face

An elderly Kes in a state of temporal flux finds herself jumping back in time to earlier points in her life. At one point, she jumps back to the beginning of the “Year of Hell” (see below) and witnesses a Chroniton torpedo hit that causes a bridge console to explode killing both Janeway and Torres. However, what we see here is merely one possible future.

Death #8

Worst Case Scenario

Cause of Death: Phaser malfunction

A holographic tactical-training program concerning a potential Maquis mutiny takes on a life of its own. Tuvok’s program was rewritten by Seska before she left the ship, including a malfunctioning phaser rifle that kills the hologram of Captain Janeway.

Death #9

Year of Hell, Part II

Cause of Death: Explosion

After 257 days of Hell, that have left Voyager beyond repair and the crew forced to abandon ship. Janeway singlehandedly pilots what is left of Voyager during a battle with the Krenim Time Ship. With the weapons unavailable, she rams the other vessel, and the resulting explosion completely destroys it. The captain goes down with the ship. A shockwave erases the Krenim ship and the timeline it created from history.

Death #10

Living Witness

Cause of Death: Unknown

Some seven centuries after his time aboard Voyager, the Doctor’s back-up module has been discovered by archaeologists. He is reactivated in the Museum of Kyrian Heritage. Accused of war crimes and the Doctor is forced to defend his crew’s reputation for their role in the conflict between the Kyrians and the Vaskans. Either way, after seven hundred years Janeway is presumably pushing up daisies. As the Doctor himself puts it “Somewhere, halfway across the galaxy, I hope, Captain Janeway is spinning in her grave!”

Death #11

Timeless

Cause of Death: injuries sustained in a crash landing

In an effort to get home quicker, Paris and Kim create a quantum slipstream drive. On its maiden flight, the Delta Flyer piloted Chakotay and Kim makes it all the way home, but Voyager is pushed out of the slipstream and crash lands on a frozen planet killing everyone aboard.

Fifteen years later, Chakotay and Kim return to the crash site to discover their dead crew mates, including the captain, frozen solid. With the help of the Doctor and Seven of Nine’s corpse they manage to send a different course correction back in time which collapses the slipstream and saves Voyager.

Death #12

Course: Oblivion

Cause of Death: Acute cellular degradation

Radiation from an enhanced warp drive employed by a bio-mimetic duplicate of Voyager causes a loss of cohesion. Captain Janeway’s duplicate dies on the bridge and her ship and crew are not far behind her. The real Kathryn Janeway is completely unaware of their sacrifice.

Death #13

Relativity

Cause of Death: Explosion

The USS Voyager is destroyed by a temporal disruptor while Janeway is on the bridge, however Seven of Nine and Janeway are recruited by a Starfleet ship from five hundred years in their future to prevent the device being planted in the first place. They successfully apprehend the saboteur and the events of this alternate timeline never come to pass.

Death #14

Barge of the Dead

Cause of Death: stab wound to the neck

The entire senior staff are massacred by a couple of Klingon warriors. Captain Janeway is cruelly, and dishonourably, cut down from behind whilst making a speech paying tribute to the achievements of the Klingon Empire. It’s all in B'Elanna's dream and so Janeway lives to fight another day.

Death #15

Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy

Cause of Death: console explosion

In the very next episode, another crewmember fantasises about Janeway’s death. It would be hard not to take that personally. The Doctor daydreams that he takes over control of the ship and to do that requires the captain to be out of the way. During one of his flights of fancy the Borg attack and one of the bridge consoles explodes killing Janeway, but once again it’s only a dream.

Death #16

Shattered

Cause of Death: Unknown

When a spatial rift causes time aboard to become fractured, Janeway and Chakotay meet by a Naomi Wildman and Icheb from an alternative future. They are told that they died seventeen years earlier, but they are given no details about how they met their demises. Janeway, Chakotay and their crew are reunited from across various time periods and successfully bring the ship back into sync. This renders the alternative timeline potentially null and void.

Death #17

Endgame

Cause of Death: neurolytic pathogen

Captain Janeway encounters an Admiral Janeway from 26 years into her personal future. The captain injects her future self with a neurolytic pathogen, with her permission, and the admiral allows herself to be assimilated by the Borg Queen. The pathogen infects the wider Borg Collective and they fail to prevent Voyager arriving home via a Borg transwarp hub out of the ashes of a Borg shipwreck. Captain Janeway gets her crew home early and that changes the timeline, so the future that Admiral Janeway came from may not come to pass.

There you have it, Janeway has cheated death on no less then 17 occasions. If you hope to learn from her example and you find yourself in a potentially fatal situation, ideally make sure it is an alternate future you that dies instead, or it’s a dream, or maybe reveal you were a hologram all along, then you’ll be fine.

- - -

I knew that Eaglemoss were releasing a bust of Captain Janeway, so I pitched this in the hope that they wanted an article to tie into it. 

Originally entitled The Many Deaths of Kathryn Janeway, my pitch read: Captain Janeway holds the record for being the character most often killed in all of Star Trek, no less than seventeen times. This article details each and every time she kicks the bucket and how she manages to carry on regardless.

At the time, I had completely forgotten that Harry Mudd had killed the crew of the USS Discovery in Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad no less than 56 times, and when I remembered, after this article was commissioned, I neglected to point it out to the editor.

This was the second article that I wrote for Hero Collector, but it was published third, possibly due to the release date of the bust. Oddly, this meant it appeared on the website just before Easter, which could have seemed a little controversial.

When I wrote this, it seemed pretty unlikely that we would ever see Janeway again, but the fortunes of the Star Trek franchise have changed significantly and now she has featuring been given a new lease of life in Star Trek: Prodigy, and could also return in Picard, Lower Decks or another as-yet-unannounced Star Trek series, therefore there could be another chance for her to die (and probably survive it) in her future...

Carruthers Ten Years On: September 2012

September 2012 was when I finally lost interest in the Carruthers blog. The Riddle Of The Sands came to its natural conclusion and I managed a couple of posts using photos that I took like in the old days: Snake Bake and Charge!, neither of which were particularly impressive. I clearly intended to do more and something got in the way.

Phil Reed

My friend, Phil Reed, is dead and the planet is poorer for it.

He was one of the wittiest people that I’ve ever encountered, so supportive of anything that I did and I can't quite believe that he's gone.

 We bonded over a mutual love of Red Dwarf and Alan Partridge. We never met in person, but emailed each other almost weekly. From thousands of miles apart, we plotted a podcast that neither of us knew how to record, an epistolary novel that we convinced ourselves already existed somewhere and a series of books about underrated art which failed to set Kickstarter alight. I was never disappointed when these things didn’t come to fruition, because there would always be another idea. Until now.

Phil was so modest and interested in people. He used his corner of the internet to review geeky independent publications and interviewed those striving to make their own work, alongside more mainstream fare. He was also incredibly talented, but please don’t just take my word for it. His website is a treasure trove of the best literary criticism that the internet has to offer.

We can all react to a piece of art, but far fewer of us can create another in response to it. Phil elevated criticism. When he wrote about Alf with the same integrity and intention as he did Breaking Bad. I initially thought it was a one off joke, but when he went on to write hundreds of articles about the alien puppet, each funnier than the last and far better than the source material, it became apparent that Phil didn’t just see Alf as a trivial TV footnote, but as a wasted opportunity.

Phil's articles would make you think. He always had an angle that I had never considered, even on a text that I was very familiar with. I didn't agree with him about Alien³, but I really had to think about why. His Fiction Into Film articles on film adaptations and those on the films of Wes Anderson are frankly peerless. He wrote extensively and enthusiastically about computer games that meant nothing to me and I was gratified when Triple Jump hired him to write for them on the subject.

I wrote a handful of articles for his website. I still owe him one about Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. The sense of guilt I feel about that is utterly pointless and yet punishing.

I proofread one of his novels. It was so good. It was an absolute pleasure and a privilege. I presume that the final text is languishing on a hard drive somewhere and I find myself thinking about John Kennedy Toole’s mother.

Over the years he had expressed an interest in coming to the UK, sometimes to visit, sometimes permanently. In recent weeks this had stepped up a gear and I had been researching visas. The reversal of Roe vs Wade had been a turning point for him and although I knew that the grass wasn’t really any greener here, I wanted to help him in any way I could. I knew he was fragile when we talked over zoom and I didn’t imagine he could outrun what was worrying him, but I confess that I thought if he was here the novelty might be a welcome distraction and arrogantly I thought I could help better in person.

 I’m trying to take solace from the fact that in some way this is what he wanted, but it’s much easier said than done. It’s fitting I suppose that someone who lived so much of his life online, would post his suicide note there, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read.

I will miss him. 

http://noiselesschatter.com/

Carruthers Ten Years On: August 2012

August 2012 on the Carruthers blog. In between The Riddle Of The Sands and the terrible tats, I began to make an effort once more. Even if I was only really reposting snarky notes and comedy posters.

Carruthers Ten Years On: July 2012

July 2012 on the Carruthers blog featured terrible tattoos and the text of The Riddle Of the Sands, but frankly not much in the way of content from me.

Carruthers Ten Years On: June 2012

June 2012 saw the Carruthers blog reach 1500 posts. Sherlock, quotes from the great and the good and posts on Buffy and Angel references were the order of the day. The Carruthers blog was something I sat down to 'write' in one sitting at this point. I used to get it out of the way at the end of the previous month, which probably shows how little I was enjoying by now.

On a lighter note, here's Mike sat on a duck.