Ritualized Mythology: The Dead Speak Aboard Babylon 5 Neil Gaiman’s episode of Babylon 5, “Day of the Dead,” has been published in annotated script form by DreamHaven Books. In itself, this is unusual for a freelance contribution to a TV series, and the publication enables Gaiman to highlight exactly what he was responsible for, and what was amended, tweaked, or written by show runner Joe Straczynski. In one sense, this demystifies the collective production practices of television, but at the same time it enables attributions of authorship to be made. Gaiman notes that it was Straczynski who added in the episode’s mysterious, prophetic message for Sheridan: “The original draft of the script said “Joe— give me a message for here.” And he did.”27Rather than depicting the show runner’s addition—premised on textual control over ongoing story arcs— as an imposition, Gaiman discursively frames it as an invitation on his own part. Rather than representing his authorial position as hemmed in, then, or as secondary in relation to Straczynski, Gaiman consistently emphasises his authorial agency.
Elsewhere, Gaiman has recounted having to pitch his Babylon 5 story idea, receiving approval first from Straczynski and then the show’s producers. Again this process is represented as one which enabled Gaiman’s creativity rather than imposing the TV industry’s need for an outline.28 Despite this discourse of enabled authorship that downplays the “limited textual power” of a freelance contributor to an unfolding text,29 Gaiman’s Babylon 5 script works in a series of ways that can be read as selfreflexively incorporating the position of the hired hand. Firstly, Gaiman is contributing here to a series with a carefully protected coherence in terms of its “hyperdiegetic” continuity—something which meant that the show could be positioned and validated by SF fans as “novelistic.”30 As such, there were relatively few diegetic gaps that Gaiman could explore without impacting on Babylon 5’s ongoing arc, but his script nevertheless proved to be adept at exploiting a specific series of present absences, or textual implications, within what Reynolds would call “structural continuity.” Gaiman rewarded fan loyalty, and played to longer-term fan knowledge, by temporarily bringing back a range of deceased characters—servant of the Shadows, Mr. Morden; Londo’s former lover Adira; and the soldier, Dodger, who had propositioned Garibaldi.
This device allowed Gaiman to offer fan service without conflicting with the show’s seriality, since he purposefully used characters who had been written out, playing on both fans’ and lead characters’ memories of these figures. Sharing the typical work practices of a “tie-in writer,” Gaiman acknowledges that he drew on fan knowledge during his research for the episode, observing: “The Shoggren were my tip of the hat to my friend John Sjogren, who played the part of my ‘As a rabid Babylon 5fan—is this cool?’ tester from the beginning.”31 Gaps within continuity used by Gaiman are thus the present absences of deceased characters, given voice again for one episode only. Where other gaps might form part of Straczynski’s intended arc,32 characters firmly belonging to the show’s past can be safely returned to for one-shot “special appearances.”
Gaiman also reworks Babylon 5’s format to permit a more fantasyoriented tale; the return of the dead remains a mystery and is not explained in scientific or (techno-babble-oriented) science-fictional terms. This temporary retooling of the show’s hyperdiegesis is achieved by setting a ritualised boundary to the event; part of Babylon 5 is sold to the Brakiri race for just a few hours. Jan Johnson-Smith has argued that the station Babylon 5 acts as a post-modern confusion of spatial coordinates, seeming to be mapped (blue sector, red sector, etc.) but actually never clearly being linked together as a series of diegetic spaces.34 Following this theme, Johnson-Smith reads “Day of the Dead” as a further symptom of such spatial confusion:
In “Day of the Dead,” a whole sector of the station goes missing. Bought by the Brakiri Ambassador for a set period of time, it becomes a physical and spiritual part of the Brakiri homeworld, cut off from the rest of the station from Brakiri dusk until dawn... Babylon 5 has sets with which we become familiar... but their actual location and the corridors linking them are a mystery.35
However, I would argue that Gaiman’s narrative device— displacing a section of Babylon 5—does more than recap post-modern thematics. “Day of the Dead” is careful to emphasise that the Brakiri will not be satisfied with “renting” space on Babylon 5. Part of the station must become theirs, being owned by them outright for the period of their ritual. Bounded in space and time, certain sleeping quarters are literally demarcated within a Brakiri line, and only until planetary sunrise on the Brakiri homeworld. Gaiman’s Brakiri therefore stand-in textually for the freelance writer’s extra-textual position. Not content with borrowing or “renting” characters just for the duration of one script, Gaiman wants to make part of Babylon 5 “his” within the bounded confines of one episode. The Brakiri ritual thus reflexively incorporates the situation of the freelance writer contributing to an unfolding text, a text that will otherwise be read by fans as the property of “the Great Maker” (the God-like term accorded to Straczynski):
Many fans perform the role of follower of the Great Maker, asking him specific information [online and at conventions] about Babylon 5. He presumably answers with the authority of one who knows... [fans’ questions] would normally circulate within fandom. The competing answers among fans would constitute the only critical discourse on the Babylon 5. Straczynski, however, apparently answers nearly every question asked by fans. His answer[s]... silence... apparent inconsistency.36
As a freelance scriptwriter, Gaiman’s authorship is subordinated to that of the “Great Maker” and his assumed authority over the show’s hyperdiegesis. “Day of the Dead” effectively dramatizes Gaiman’s structural position within the show’s production. It represents a shift in the narrative rules of Babylon 5, and a temporary change in ownership over the station (the Brakiri taking charge just as Gaiman assumes temporary ownership of characters). Both of these are, though, knowingly bounded as rituals fixed in space and time, meaning that Babylon 5 reverts to its standard ontology at planetary sunrise, and its standard continuity at episode’s end. The episode even visually demarcates its ritually transformed zone of meaning (and zone of authorship) through the distinctive use of red lighting and CGI distortion effects.
What I’m terming ritualized mythology means contributing to an unfolding text’s “structural continuity”—where other creatives have overall or discursive authority—by deliberately and self-reflexively making temporary, bounded and hence ritualistic changes to an otherwise coherent hyperdiegesis. The Brakiri section of Babylon 5 becomes, for just one episode, a space outside typical realism (even by the standards of SF TV), also shifting closer to Gaiman-esque fantasy or dream logic. By contrast, Gaiman’s landmark contribution to Batman’s unfolding text, in Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, situates itself very differently in relation to Batman’s mythological dimensions.
Indeterminate Mythology: The Batman Says Goodbye Although Parkin groups together a range of unfolding texts, I would argue that the hyperdiegesis of Babylon 5is relatively coherent, having been planned “novelistically” by its showrunner. By contrast, Batman and Doctor Who have far less hyperdiegetic consistency. Who is “rickety”37 or “flexible, even on the fundamentals of the show’s mythology.”38 And the Batman likewise
reveals an impulse toward fragmentation. Since his creation in 1939, numerous editors, writers, artists, directors, scriptwriters, performers and licensed manufacturers have “authored” the Batman... the Batman has no primary urtext... but has rather existed in a plethora of equally valid texts constantly appearing over [many decades].39
Unlike his contribution to Babylon 5, then, Gaiman is positioned very differently as a freelance contributor to the Batman mythos. There is far less sense of having to ritualistically draw a line around his work, distinguishing it as a temporary, bounded sector within someone else’s narrative universe. And there is no absolute or clear “urtext” to fit into, though
there are evidently still specific “rules” of Batman’s mythology.39 Another difference is that in this instance, Gaiman directly represents himself as a producer-fan:
Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? An Introduction, or a Love Letter... I love Batman. There are other characters I like. There may be other characters I like better. And there are characters I invented, and I love all of them like children. But I loved, and still love Batman, unshakeably, unquestioningly, as one loves a parent. He was the first. He’s always been there.41
More than merely expressing fannish love for Batman, here Gaiman inverts the binary of valorised “single-authored” work versus devalued, commercial “franchise” labour. In his familial simile, Batman is given creative and affective primacy: he is the generative “parent” in contrast to Gaiman’s own created characters who are figured as “children.” With Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?Gaiman was tasked with punctuating Batman’s existence by writing “the last Batman story:”
Batman had survived many eras, and would, undoubtedly, survive many more. If I were going to tell the last Batman story it would have to be something that would survive Batman’s current death or disappearance, something that would still be the last Batman story in twenty years, or a hundred. ...In my head, the story was simply called Batman: The End, but the first time DC Comics’ people talked about it, they described it as “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” and the title sort of stuck.42
Gaiman’s authorial persona43 has been strongly linked to his work on The Sandman comic book series, leading academics such as Henry Jenkins to note that “Vertigo ...made its reputation as the place where DC does everything but superheroes. That’s where someone like Neil Gaiman rules supreme (and he would clearly be in the bidding for best contemporary comics writer if I excluded the superhero modifier).”44 It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Gaiman inter-textually cites his own ending to the Sandman story in his Batman “ending.” Sandman: The Wake involved the mourning of Dream, one of the Endless, who is ultimately reborn in a mythic cycle of renewal.45 And what Gaiman conceptualised as Batman: The End echoes this, featuring the mourning of Batman, and concluding with the character’s rebirth and cyclical return to the beginning of his life. The Sandman Companion suggests that Sandman: The Wake “book-ended the whole series. The very first line of Sandman, at the top of page 1 in Preludes and Nocturnes, is: “Wake up, sir. We’re here.” Similarly, issue 72 closes the series down with “you woke up.”46 Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? resonates with this classical structuring of myth as a “circuitous quest,”47 or as “an eternally recursive system in which endings are relativized and beginnings insubstantial.”48 Knowing that Batman will enter into a new narrative “iteration”49 after this tale,50 Gaiman avoids his “last” story being immediately superseded by relativizing Batman’s end. At the same time, this (in)conclusive move creates new inter-textual links between Gaiman’s Batman and the Sandman—links that had already been present, as for example in Batman’s cameo in The Wake,51 and in the use of white-on-black speech balloons for both characters in Gaiman’s work.52 Batman’s “wake” also playfully cites the Endless when Gaiman concludes his Batman#686 strip with an unknown narrator (later identified as Bruce Wayne’s mother) pointing out, “I don’t think death is a person, Bruce.”53
When summing up The Wake in an afterword, Gaiman suggests that “I have always been bad at goodbyes. In many ways, that’s what these stories are about: the process of saying goodbye. ...The Ten Volumes of Sandman, of which this is the last, comprise a story about stories.”54 The exact same words could be taken to sum up Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? just as well. This too features a series of goodbyes as Batman embraces his fate, and what proves to be his rebirth: “Goodnight house. Goodnight, batcave. ...Goodnight, batmobile. Goodnight, Alfred. ...Goodnight, Bat-signal... Goodbye.”55
And Gaiman’s producer-fan “love letter” to the Batman is also a “story about stories.” It accommodates “divergent expressions” of the character by allowing for “ambiguous constructions” of meaning and continuity.56 Different characters such as Selina Kyle and Alfred the “gentleman’s gentleman”57 recount conflicting narratives about Batman’s death, contradicting one another and externally conflicting with established iterations of—albeit already fragmented—continuity. Gaiman makes no attempt to resolve continuity fragments into newfound coherence, something which I would argue Grant Morrison’s Batman does attempt, by psychologizing and thus reclaiming disavowed continuity elements such as Bat-mite, the Bat Radia, and the Zur En Arrh Batman into a new Bat-ontology. Instead, Gaiman allows all of Batman’s history to co-exist, implying that “mutually exclusive metaphysics... stand in relief in the same way a text like Batman: The Killing Joke suspends Batman’s fictional continuity.”58 Joe Chill can be both dead, and attending the very “end” of Batman’s tale; Alfred can be the Joker, yet this development can simultaneously be dismissed as “impossible.”
This strategy for engagement with an unfolding text can be termed indeterminate mythology; unlike Gaiman’s carefully bounded and ritualized take on Babylon 5, this producer-fan re-interpretation instead emphasizes and promotes the free play, and the never-ending cycle, of retellings. Gaiman blurs together his fandom and his professional authorship59 by positioning Batman as inter-textually enmeshed with The Sandman, while also valorising the “constant renewal” of an unfolding text.60 As Laurence Coupe has argued, “‘[i]ntertextuality’ is not the problem but the solution” to inspiring new activations of mythological meaning.61 Gaiman intertextually adds “another layer of continuity”62 by audaciously transforming Alfred into the Joker, and by near-magically transforming the Bat-signal into a midwife’s hands as Bruce Wayne is born. This new layer co-exists with Batman’s fragmented continuity; it’s neither clearly “in” continuity nor obviously “out of continuity” as an “Elseworlds”type story. In fact, Gaiman deconstructs the very notion of presenting a coherent tale that cleanly “fits” continuity, or which steps to one side, by configuring Batman’s hyperdiegesis as indeterminate: the life of the Batman is dream-like, capable of holding together contradictions. Or it is an eternal recurrence, always being relived, and always being retold by its protagonists, as well as by fans and producer-fans.
I have contrasted Gaiman’s approach to Batman against Grant Morrison’s in this instance, suggesting that the former refutes a precise ontology for the character’s mythology, whereas the latter seeks to piece together disparate continuities, and different eras of Batman’s real-world history, into a newly psychologised jigsaw. This approach to an unfolding text—seeking to shape new coherence out of hyperdiegetic fragments—can be characterised as synthetic mythology, and I will illustrate how Gaiman deploys this mode in his producer-fan work on Doctor Who, despite eschewing it in Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
Synthetic Mythology: The TARDIS Says Goodbye… and Hello
Just as he has para-textually stressed Batman fandom in his work with the character, Gaiman has also testified to a lifelong Doctor Who fandom in forewords,63 interviews,64 and on his blog. It is thus Gaiman’s fan status that is offered up as the motivation and the key context for his contributions to these unfolding texts.65Pretransmission publicity for “The Doctor’s Wife” noted of the episode that “it’ll be one the fans will love. It’s a real love letter to the fans.”66If Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? is a “love letter,” then so too is Gaiman’s contribution to Who, marking out his authorship of unfolding texts as recurrently linked to fan service, and to giving fans something they’ll appreciate as an outstanding manipulation of mythology. Gaiman’s Doctor Who fan affect and knowledge are articulated here with his professional creativity:
I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away. And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the inside than they are out on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are bigger on the inside
than they are on the outside, as well ...[T]he shape of reality— the way I perceive the world—exists only because of Doctor Who. Specifically, from The War Games, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swansong.67
Batman is granted a primacy and a generative status, and Doctor Who is similarly described as defining Gaiman’s imaginative sense of the real; the TV series is positioned as underpinning his own later work as a fantasy novelist.68 Once more inverting hierarchies of “original” and “franchise” fiction, Gaiman blurs fandom and professional identity in the way that M.J. Clarke suggests is characteristic of “tie-in” writers (and hired contributors to unfolding texts). Clarke points out the need to “eliminate anything that may overlap with previous or upcoming [TV] episodes” when tie-in pitches are considered.69 Gaiman’s situation reverses this scenario: his initial TV episode idea was apparently amended as a result of being too similar to a tie-in novel.70 He then refocused on the notion of exploring the TARDIS:
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