The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Fringe, season 5

TV #6 of 2022:

Fringe, season 5

A very strange season, and a very strange ending to Fringe. Following up on the flash-forward episode “Letters of Transit” from the previous year, this final run finds the team frozen in amber for two decades, then thawed out to fight the invading Observers who have meanwhile taken over the planet. It’s a time jump of two sorts, actually — in addition to the world and some supporting characters moving dramatically on, our protagonists have lived through another four years that we didn’t get to see before they went on ice. And now here they are, no longer investigating mad-science crimes against a backdrop of uneasy relations with a parallel universe, but rather helping the resistance movement in a futuristic guerilla war and scrambling to reconstruct a half-forgotten plan to defeat the enemy altogether.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this isn’t Fringe, but it’s Fringe in the way a film like The Wrath of Khan is still a part of Star Trek: TOS. The plot rhythms and concerns are all different, and even though the developing storyline revisits plenty of earlier cases, these loving callbacks take on completely altered significance here. But that’s Fringe too in a sense, testing the borders of everything in a perpetual Ship of Theseus experiment. If people can alter their biology, their personal timelines, and the very laws of physics on this program, then sure, let’s let the writers put the show itself through this ultimate transformation.

The transition into a sequel is admittedly bumpy. There’s a lot of new information to throw at us early on, and for a while, the setting feels a bit generically dystopian and the mission a maguffin-filled fetch quest. But it settles into itself as it goes along, clarifying into a story of loss and the appropriate human responses to that. What do we turn ourselves into next, when who and what we love is ripped away? Do the glimmering potentials of technology represent an opportunity for us to surpass our limitations with applied ingenuity, or an empty temptation that risks sacrificing our core?

Peter and Olivia explore opposite answers to those questions, and the central tension of the endgame rests less on how the good guys will win the day, and more on whether you can save humanity at large whilst abandoning your own. Walter’s wrestling with an echo of that too, torn between the arrogant genius he once was and the lighter yet addled spirit he’s become since. Only Astrid remains underserved as a protagonist, a shameful state of affairs given how she’s been present for all 100 episodes as well. (There’s an obnoxious running joke this season about Walter getting her name wrong in a variety of unlikely ways, and the late reveal that he must have been doing it intentionally out of playful affection doesn’t make it any less racist.)

Ultimately this is not my favorite iteration of Fringe, and I really miss Lincoln and the rest of the folks on the other side, who appear for just a quick cameo here. But it’s strong in and of itself, and a fine sendoff to the entire enterprise.

[Content warning for torture, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 4 > 5 > 1

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: Reaper of Souls by Rena Barron

Book #13 of 2022:

Reaper of Souls by Rena Barron (Kingdom of Souls #2)

This #ownvoices YA fantasy novel — unrelated to the Diablo III expansion that amusingly shares its name — picks up soon after 2019’s Kingdom of Souls leaves off, with its protagonist newly empowered in the Orisha magic she never thought would be hers. Unfortunately, the explosive ending of that first book has shattered the knotty family dynamics that helped render it so interesting, and this sequel takes a little while to rebuild its narrative engine. In the end I’m rounding up to a four-star rating on the strength of another great climax where everything comes together, but this story stays a bit aimless for longer than I’d prefer.

Some of the new concerns will seem familiar to genre readers, such as the love interest whose own form of sorcery repels the heroine and may be warping him into something demonic, or the ancient creature trying to make a human teen recognize that she’s his reincarnated soulmate and agree to be with him once more. Yet author Rena Barron generally keeps these tropes feeling fresh, like when she paints that latter case as an unwanted imposition and not the star-crossed romance that many writers would depict. It all adds up to a fine continuation of the overall plot, with big twists of disguised identities and life after apparent death straight out of a spy movie. The tale closes stronger than it starts, and finds me eagerly awaiting the next volume again.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #12 of 2022:

The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #1)

While I think the first trilogy of this fantasy saga remains its most thematically brilliant segment, and the second neatly integrates a new co-protagonist for a different perspective and set of psychological issues to work through, I have a great fondness for how thoroughly author Stephen R. Donaldson has revisited the setting for this final outing. Narratively, the threat of the Sunbane in round two seems to appear out of nowhere — requiring a response yet very much feeling like a sequel to any original concerns — but in the Last Chronicles, the history of the Land has a palpable weight and texture upon the present. Delayed effects of prior developments are coming home to roost, and after 21 years away from the series, the writer has a keen eye for picking apart those implications and unraveling tidy resolutions from before, only to ultimately bind them up tighter again.

Our viewpoint figure here is the returning Linden Avery, who is wrenched from a decade of stability to find herself drawn back into that other world where she has access to daunting amounts of magical power and a physician’s deeply-felt duty of care to wield it justly. The earth heroine doesn’t believe she’ll escape alive this time, but she has come seeking her kidnapped adopted son and opposing Roger Covenant, the child of her former companion last glimpsed as an infant in Lord Foul’s Bane and now grown into a man of twisted spite. (As a young parent myself, this is an element I’m particularly curious to rediscover with fresh eyes, though it is mostly setup thus far.) Following her summoning, she is also caught up in the needs of her surroundings, moved to help the descendants of her old friends in that realm as they face the massing of apocalyptic forces and a ruling class of Haruchai who have mistakenly concluded that preventing the teaching of lore and spreading of legends will keep their ignorant subjects safe.

Although millennia have passed, the Land of this era hearkens back to a lot of what was beautiful about its initial introduction, like the majestic Ranyhyn horses that were absent during the depredations of the doctor’s earlier visit. Via those steeds, which have always had the gift of predicting when they’ll be called for and starting out far enough in advance to arrive then, this novel furthermore introduces proper time-travel — for now simply as a brief trip to a moment several centuries after the previous volume, but soon to encompass the full range of days that Donaldson has constructed across this continuity.

If this book falters, it’s in its immediate story, which doesn’t reach much of a conclusion to the threads it raises beyond a genuinely heartwarming redemption arc for the new character Stave. He and the rest of this cast, unfamiliar to Linden and us as the tale opens, grow truly dear as they journey together over these pages. I’ll grant that when you reduce the plot to its major events, it’s perhaps a bit heavy on the walking and talking, even by this author’s usual standards. But it nevertheless represents a rich return to a cherished fictional home and its philosophical arguments so unique to the genre, with plenty of intrigues planted for the titles ahead and a cliffhanger ending that would surely draw even the most recalcitrant of readers onward.

[Content warning for gun violence, self-harm, gore, and mention of rape.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Visions, season 1

TV #5 of 2022:

Star Wars: Visions, season 1

This anime series from last year is an anthology of short films (13-22 minutes each), from a variety of different Japanese production studios, with no particular plot or character links between episodes beyond a weird shared fixation on kyber crystals. It’s been getting some rave reviews, but I personally haven’t cared much for the experimental diversion away from Star Wars in its more usual form.

The creators have been given pretty substantial liberty to remix and reinterpret the canon, which could potentially be exciting but in practice simply reminds me again and again that none of this can be understood as taking place within the established continuity of the franchise. It’s not even a tangential spin-off like the Star Wars: From Another Point of View books or Marvel’s recent What If? show that’s designed to probe interesting hypotheticals to deepen an appreciation of the familiar either; with one exception these tales are set on unknown worlds with all-new casts. There are Jedi and Sith and an Empire by name, yet they are operating under rules so altered that you’d be hard-pressed to ever justify why.

The scant length cuts against the effectiveness of these pieces too, as even at their strongest they tend to feel like a simple proof-of-concept rather than a satisfyingly complete presentation. (Do you remember that Flash animation of Genryu’s Blade that went viral in the early 2000s? It’s basically a whole string of quick offerings like that, except with nominal trappings of lightsabers and such.)

Part of the problem is presumably that I’m not a big fan of this medium to begin with, and I will concede that the visuals here are generally quite striking. If you’ve been dying to see Star Wars rendered as an anime, this will probably scratch that itch! But as with the novels that retell the movies in faux-Shakespearean language, it just seems like a hollow gimmick in the end. Only “Tatooine Rhapsody” — the sole effort to incorporate any preexisting narrative framework or individuals, detailing a rock band’s encounters with Boba Fett and Jabba — and “T0-B1” — an Astro Boy riff about a droid who wants to learn the Force — really work for me; the others I’d call empty spectacle at best.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Hollow by Agatha Christie

Book #11 of 2022:

The Hollow by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #26)

Also published under the title Murder After Hours, this is one of the more fun Hercule Poirot mysteries, since so many of the suspects seem to have a clear motive for offing the murdered man, with convoluted romantic entanglements straight out of a Shakespearean comedy. Appearing in the vicinity of the crime scene at a remote country estate are the fellow’s wife, the woman he’s cheating on her with (but refusing to divorce her for), the man the girlfriend is in turn rebuffing while hung up on her adulterous beau, the childhood friend interested in him, and the resurfaced ex-lover from the dead man’s youth who’s angry he won’t leave the other women for her. Phew! Our diminutive detective is there as well, having been coincidentally — perhaps! — invited around for tea just in time to catch the victim’s dying words.

The dialogue is pretty amusing too, even by author Agatha Christie’s usual droll standards. I’m a particular fan of this line, spoken about the possibility of the widow as a suspect: “If she did shoot John, she’s probably dreadfully sorry about it now. It’s bad enough for children to have a father who’s been murdered–but it will make it infinitely worse for them to have their mother hanged for it. Sometimes I don’t think you policemen think of these things.” It all reads as a bit of a lark — although see my note below — and the solution has a clever twist to it beyond the simple whodunnit. It’s the delight of finding a volume like this that reminds me why I’ve been going through the whole series in the first place.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, suicide attempt, and gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Proposal by K. A. Applegate

Book #10 of 2022:

The Proposal by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #35)

This is ghostwriter Jeffrey Zeuhlke’s second and final contribution to the Animorphs series, and I must say, I like it a lot less than his previous outing, #25 The Extreme. The best part is the focus on a crisis in narrator Marco’s mental health, and while the inciting incident isn’t especially major from a narrative perspective — just the fact that his not-actually-widowed father has begun dating again — the title eventually gets around to expressing the insight that it’s the cumulative weight of things crushing the boy, not this particular development by itself. I love the callout of stoic masculinity expectations, and how Cassie encourages the protagonist to open up and talk about his feelings with her or another teammate, since he can’t go to a proper counselor.

On the other hand, the manifestation of his trouble is in random outbursts of ordinarily-impossible hybrid morphs, which feels like a poor repeat of Rachel’s crocodile allergy from #12 The Reaction. There’s even the similar larger plot concern of a celebrity publicly endorsing the Yeerk cover organization The Sharing as the background mission of the day! Having the villains try and fail this same move now makes them seem pretty incompetent, and the heroes’ plan to bait the famous Controller into losing his cool in public, thereby causing his fans and sponsors to abandon him, is not exactly their finest moment of strategy either. Not to mention, this whole storyline is weaker for Marco’s morphing issue being a one-off deal that never comes up before or again, despite the stress that all of the kids are under. (And for the detail that it’s basically solved via a quick pep talk from Jake at the end, as well.)

The titular proposal is strange, too. At the start of this novel, we learn that Marco’s dad has been seeing his son’s math teacher for a few months — which seems like quite a conflict of interest, but alright — and then later he mentions that the pair of them “have been talking about getting married.” Two weeks after that, we’re at the wedding! That sort of accelerated timeline isn’t necessarily unbelievable, I guess, but it’s too fast to be satisfying in a work like this… and not a sign of a parent who seriously cares about his child’s stability, although the text isn’t remotely interested in exploring that angle. We could have had this romance with Ms. Robbinette develop slowly over multiple volumes, with the strain gradually building to a pressure point for her future stepson, but the matter is distractingly episodic and easy to ignore when it’s all forced into a single book.

The character dynamics and discussion of therapy save this from being a complete misfire. Ax and Marco are a reliable comedy duo, and they get plenty of fine moments here, including some fertile ground for shipping when there aren’t enough chairs at a banquet table and the human says, “It’s okay, we’re very good friends” and yanks the morphed Andalite down onto his lap. But the main action is somewhat tedious and poorly thought-out, and the cliffhanger ending suggests that this entire story exists as mere setup for Visser with the return of Marco’s mom ahead. Yet even in that context, the prelude could have been a lot stronger.

[Content warning for body horror, violence to animals, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong

Book #9 of 2022:

Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights #2)

I was on the fence between a three-star and four-star rating for the first volume of this YA duology, and since I rounded up then, I suppose I’ll go with the lower score for this sequel, which I haven’t enjoyed quite as much. The loose Romeo and Juliet retelling continues to distract more than inform an understanding of the characters and plot in my opinion, and a lot of the specific story beats feel like hollow repetitions of the previous novel. I’m also not a fan of how the workers rioting for higher wages and better working conditions are generally positioned in the narrative as a mindless mob of communist dupes, whose violence is somehow shocking to our gangster protagonists even in the face of their own steadily-rising body counts.

On the plus side, this remains an interesting historical fantasy take on 1920s Shanghai, fleshed out with the #ownvoices perspective of author Chloe Gong, who was born there at the turn of the following century. Readers who are particularly invested in the central ill-fated romance will likely appreciate how it evolves further here, with the young criminal exes irresistibly drawn to one another despite their family feud, their mutually-harmful past, and the city going up in flames all around them. I’m ultimately a little lukewarm on that element, but I could see this title (and its predecessor) landing with a sharper impact for a different audience.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, self-harm, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2

Movie Review: Encanto (2021)

Movie #5 of 2022:

Encanto (2021)

Disney’s 60th animated feature is a real breath of fresh air, breaking from the studio’s usual patterns in a few startlingly welcome ways. The heroine doesn’t just have two living parents: she has a whole household full of siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins too, a rowdy ensemble where everyone has their own magic powers and big personalities, including the casita itself. It feels straight out of a Diana Wynne Jones novel, right down to the protagonist with no special gift of her own who ends up having to save them all. There’s no hero’s journey, however; this is a domestic drama that barely crosses the boundaries of the home — although granted, that’s an enchanted space where the rooms are bigger on the inside and some of them Mirabel has never explored at all.

The Colombian setting, Latinx cast with a range of skin tones, and catchy Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack add further distinction to the film, but the best part may be the thematic focus on the intergenerational trauma of family secrets and overburdensome expectations. No one is an outright villain; they are simply people inadvertently hurting each other in their inability to recognize pain beyond their own, and the major threat of the building cracking apart and taking the enchantments with it is as neat a metaphor as you could want to get audiences of any age thinking about how this might relate to their own lives. The key to salvaging the Madrigal house is literally to shore up the foundations of trust that have eroded between its various occupants, letting each speak their truth and acknowledge one another’s in turn. Hatchets are buried, new leaves are turned over, and I’ve cried, unabashedly.

Disney could use more movies like this. Honestly, we all could.

★★★★★

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Movie #4 of 2022:

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Finally decided to rent this one, since I still hadn’t seen it and at this point it doesn’t seem as though it’ll ever make its way over to Disney+ with the rest of the MCU. It’s fun! The explosion-y climax goes on a bit long in my subjective opinion, and I like the humorous beginning a lot better than the more serious back half, but overall it’s another rousing adventure with the franchise’s youngest cinematic* hero. Although the title is a bit odd for a European school trip after the teenage webslinger has literally been to outer space in the Avengers movies already.

*My apologies to Cloak, Dagger, and the Runaway kids for excluding them on a technicality.

It’s easy to guess who the villain of the day will turn out to be, even if you don’t recognize the name from the comics, but I appreciate how that person’s exact motivation and methods nevertheless come as a surprise. The script is also pretty well thought-out, for instance showing us how the EDITH drones don’t have any safeguards in place to prevent killing civilians in a farcical early scene — there’s a danger, but we know Spidey’s not going to accidentally blow up a bus of friends with himself on it — so that the question doesn’t need to be addressed later when the technology inevitably falls into the wrong hands. (Now, the scheme to actually get that power from Peter is maybe a bit too simple to realistically work, but the film has a goofy breeziness to it that just about lets that skate by. Likewise how the protagonist just kinda recovers his offline Spider-Sense in time to get through the bad guy’s illusions without any particular effort or explanation.)

Anyway. This is not a tentpole feature by any means, and those plot holes stick out if you think about them too hard, but the personal stakes are significant enough for the story to matter, and the character dynamics evolve in some interesting ways. It’s always nice how Ned can be a comedic sidekick without anyone treating him as the butt of the jokes, and here he even gets a sweet romance with a popular classmate that’s only undercut by both parties being sort of weird folks in general. I’m more excited to (eventually) watch the multiverse-hopping sequel to this, but it’s a fine piece of entertainment in and of itself.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Eternals (2021)

Movie #3 of 2022:

Eternals (2021)

The very definition of a skippable MCU title. I suppose the visuals are striking, and the diversity of the cast is appreciated, but outside of Kumail Nanjiani’s quippy efforts, it’s altogether a dour film of people standing around proclaiming ominously (in between exchanging laser blasts and/or punches) with little of that familiar Marvel joy or apparent impact on the wider franchise continuity. This new group of immortal champions has been on earth all along, instructed only to fight their specific brand of monster rather than threats like Thanos or any of humanity’s own villains? Cool. They can keep doing that off-screen without us, much as the royal family of Inhumans can stay on the moon following their own ill-fated TV show.

Three stars because none of this is bad per se, it’s just sort of stiflingly generic. The ensemble is probably too big for this type of project, lacking enough specificity to distinguish the character personalities or lead us to care about the inevitable infighting and betrayals. It works in something like The Avengers where the heroes are returning from solo ventures with existing audience understanding and investment, but here they all seem somewhat interchangeable, to the significant detriment of the script’s effectiveness.

★★★☆☆