The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Creed III (2023)

Movie #15 of 2026:

Creed III (2023)

Can you make a Rocky movie without Rocky Balboa? This latest release in the saga proves that you can, although his absence in the final act is rather conspicuous. Before that, our newer hero Adonis Creed spends most of the picture in retirement, rendering it more plausible that the Italian Stallion could be somewhere offscreen enjoying his own golden years. In the end Donny inevitably goes back into training and returns to the ring, however, at which point it becomes distracting to notice that his familiar coach, mentor, and uncle figure is nowhere to be found. I know that Sylvester Stallone has said he’s done playing the role, but if these films are going to keep getting produced anyway, there really needs to be some dialogue establishing why his character isn’t involved anymore.

That element aside, this is another winner. It pulls heavily from Rocky III (1982) and Rocky V (1990) for its plot, in that the champ has listened to his sore and aging body to step down and focus on his family and other matters (including his child getting bullied at school). He’s approached by an up-and-comer who craves his own shot at the glory, and once things fall apart between them, he challenges that foe to try and reclaim his lost heavyweight champion title.

Strengthening that story are the specific details of the relationship here, along with a powerful performance from Jonathan Majors. His Diamond Damian was the protagonist’s childhood best friend, who’s recently been released from decades in prison and wants to restart his dormant boxing career. He plays on Adonis’s sympathies and manipulates events to encourage him to set up an underdog fight for him against the reigning victor, which he wins by using dirty moves like elbow strikes that the referees somehow don’t see. Upon knocking out his opponent, he reveals his true colors and how he resents his ‘brother’ for abandoning him to the criminal justice system. His goading grows so severe that Creed agrees to a climactic showdown, much like how Rocky could always be persuaded to pick up the gloves again back in his day.

After all that buildup the ending feels a bit underwhelming, besides some interesting directing choices from star Michael B. Jordan. What’s different about the boxer’s training regimen and tactical decisions in the moment that allow him to succeed? The script doesn’t tell us. It’s all just generic sports prattle about determination and heart and whatnot, which isn’t the most inspiring message despite the usual rousing soundtrack. In the end the bad guy goes down and the good guy gets the belt, and none of it is terrible enough to detract from the earlier strengths of the piece. But I don’t know if there’s any need for further sequels at this point, either.

[Content warning for gang violence, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Doctor Who: Frida Kahlo and the Skull Children by Sophie McKenzie

Book #48 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Frida Kahlo and the Skull Children by Sophie McKenzie (Icons #1)

Doctor Who as a franchise has a long history of introducing its alien time-traveler to historical celebrities of Earth, dating all the way back to the Marco Polo serial of its very first season in 1964. This newer range of licensed novellas continues that trend, beginning with this 2024 release in which the Thirteenth Doctor meets the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Interestingly, author Sophie McKenzie writes her subject not in the prime of her artistic career, but rather as a teenage girl, still recovering from a vehicle accident that left her with agonizing chronic pain. She’s young and unsure what she wants to do with the rest of her life, which the Doctor is careful not to spoil for her despite obviously recognizing the name. This is an element of Kahlo’s story that I was personally unfamiliar with, but it’s treated honestly and gives greater pathos to her role as de facto companion for the tale, especially when she’s tempted to give up her mortal human existence for a painfree digital simulation.

The plot getting to that point isn’t anything unusual for the series — energy beings have landed in 1920s Mexico City and taken over the bodies of local schoolchildren to explore what it’s like to be corporeal, hence the later virtual reality that the Time Lord devises to house them instead — but it’s delivered solidly enough. Perhaps because our normal protagonist is travelling by herself for once, she doesn’t offer the usual didactic explanation of why her new acquaintance is important, which I could see confusing readers who don’t already know about her. On the other hand, those of us who do might well wonder whether transcended artificial intelligences are really the best choice of extraterrestrial visitor for this particular era and guest star! The one possible axis of connection between them and her is that these entities are nonbinary, and yet the future artist’s identity as a queer woman isn’t referenced at all.

Ultimately it’s fine, particularly for its length, but I think a lot more could have been done with the basic premise here.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker

Book #47 of 2026:

The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker (The Prince of Nothing #1)

I know that I read this fantasy novel around when it came out back in 2004, but I couldn’t remember anything about it and I don’t think I ever got to any of the sequels. Revisiting it now, the piece strikes me as both grimdark and very epic in scope, neither of which are my favorite modes of storytelling. It reminds me a fair bit of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, which I abandoned after the first installment, so fans of that series might find this one more up their alley. There’s also a slight resemblance to Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, which I like better but is still overly ambitious for my tastes, juggling so many characters and factions and geopolitical conflicts that it perpetually risks losing sight of individual motivations and personal arcs. So far, that seems to be a problem for The Prince of Nothing, too.

See, there’s a holy war brewing, and various people are either caught up directly in that effort or else lurking about on the periphery of the map. There are rival schools of magic involved in the intrigues, certain members of whom are plagued with prophetic visions from millennia ago concerning an ancient evil that’s secretly begun to reemerge. There are nominal protagonists whose precise goals are totally opaque to us, and there’s the requisite grittiness of rape and incest and torture and gore, presumably to prove this a serious drama and not some children’s fairy tale. There are two heroines among the crowd of men, but each is a sex worker subjected to significant abuse.

On the basic level of craft, this is not a bad work. The prose is dynamic, the worldbuilding is at least a step beyond generic medieval, and the plot is competently delivered, despite its slow pace and excessively large ensemble. But not a lot happens even by the end, rendering all this — true to its title — essentially just a lengthy prelude to whatever follows next in the saga. And so once again, I believe this is where I’ll be leaving it.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: 12 Monkeys, season 4

TV #15 of 2026:

12 Monkeys, season 4

I’ve been iffy on this Syfy series all along, but I’m happy to report that it saved the best for last. Despite all the open threads and sudden twists that have brought us this far, the closing season builds to a satisfying climax and conclusion that manages to send the story off in style. This show has always loved its grandfather / predestination paradoxes, and it leans even further into that impulse here, with its time-traveling heroes frantically revisiting moments from their own past to either set those exact events in motion or else skulk around the edges so as to not risk upsetting established history. (The writing still never quite conveys to what extent the timeline is malleable or not, but I guess it’s no worse than the Terminator movies or Doctor Who in that way.)

And hey, any ending for a long-running TV program is a good excuse to bring back the greatest hits and fan favorites, assuming the plot and the necessary actor availability can stretch that far. A time-travel narrative is the perfect vehicle for that sort of celebration, and it’s a real thrill to see just who and what the writers can justify incorporating into the final hours of their tale. One or two absences do unfortunately stand out, and the episodic fetch quests can be a bit silly on reflection, but overall it’s an impressive testament to the long and winding journey these characters have been on — not to mention a whole lot of fun to watch.

Would I ever sit through the entire thing again? I’m not sure. But I can at least recommend it with the promise that the high points are worth the lows, which I wouldn’t have necessarily committed to before now.

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

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 4 > 1 > 3 > 2

Book Review: Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora edited by Michael A. Burstein

Book #46 of 2026:

Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora edited by Michael A. Burstein

[Note: The cover of this book gives the subtitle as “Stories from the World’s Oldest Diaspora,” while the title page and listings online have it as “Science Fiction from…” instead.]

This 2023 Kickstarter-funded volume presents 16 new stories from Jewish authors imagining situations that might face the members of our common religious community in the decades or centuries to come. Some are bleak, including the opening entry “Shema” by Samantha Katz and the closing tale “The Last Chosen” by Jordan King-Lacroix, which each revolve around a single remaining Jew after some unspecified genocide. Others depict thriving populations facing familiar pressures of antisemitism in strange new locales, like Harry Turtledove’s “One Must Imagine” on a Martian outpost or Robert Greenberger’s “Legend Born” in an overcrowded colony-world refugee camp. Meanwhile my favorites tend to be those that find unexpected would-be converts that our practices would need to change in order to accommodate: inquisitive alien lifeforms in “Matzah Ball Soup for the Vershluggin Soul” by Randee Dawn, “The Ascent” by S. I. Rosenbaum and Abraham Josephine Riesman, and “The Aliens of Chelm: An Origin Story” by Valerie Estelle Frankel, and emergent artificial intelligences in Barbara Krasnoff’s “Baby Golem,” Leah Cypess’s “Frummer House,” and Shane Tourtellotte’s “The Kuiper Gemara.”

As with most such collections, the quality varies considerably from work to work. (I absolutely loathe “Mission Divergence” by E. M. Ben Shaul about an updated Iron Dome system for Israel, which is both poorly written / edited and rather insufferable in its uncritical full-throated Zionism.) Still, I really appreciate the overarching aim here of carving out a dedicated space for Judaism in a genre that often assumes minority faiths or even religion altogether will fall by the wayside as humanity marches on, and I think the results could be enjoyed by any sort of reader. This isn’t the first project to approach sci-fi through a specifically Jewish lens — the introduction highlights a few predecessors, all the way back to the similarly-focused Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1974 — but it’s certainly a welcome continuation of that trend.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Last One Out by Jane Harper

Book #45 of 2026:

Last One Out by Jane Harper

Australian author Jane Harper typically excels at depicting the outback settings of her novels, but I don’t feel quite as struck by the location of this one, which takes place in a dying small town. The dynamic there is interesting, with a local mining company slowly but inexorably buying up everyone else’s property, but it’s all somewhat bloodless in execution. We don’t meet anyone who actually works for the mine, for instance, and while there are a few mysteries — most notably the fate of the heroine’s college-aged son, who vanished without a trace five years ago — there’s no sense of present danger or stakes at all.

It’s a decent enough story about characters feeling haunted by the failures and traumas and unanswered questions of the past, which reminds me a bit of True Detective among other things. But such tales generally offer more action than this one, in which the protagonist isn’t particularly investigating anything and largely just wanders around looking at the remnants of her former life for a few hundred pages. The quiet devastation in that is well-rendered, but it’s not exactly the most thrilling read. And when the genre-mandated twist reveals finally do arrive, still without much excitement or threat, that’s not especially satisfying either.

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Tin Man, season 1

TV #14 of 2026:

Tin Man, season 1

This 2007 miniseries had been on my radar for a long while due to its great main cast, so I’m glad I finally tracked it down to watch it. (A quick note on that: the show is supposed to be three episodes of roughly 90 minutes each. A few platforms have it available as only two episodes of that length, and I saw people on Reddit saying they’re not just missing one; that’s a heavily trimmed-down version of the thing for some reason. I was ultimately able to find the originally-aired cut on Fawesome, which is a free streaming site I’d never even heard of before.)

As you can probably guess, this is a Wizard of Oz retelling of sorts, though a lot of its dystopian tweaks are pretty silly. Zooey Deschanel plays “D.G.”, our Kansas farmgirl, who travels through a magic tornado to a region of another world called the Outer Zone. (Get it?) There’s also a dose of Star Wars / Lord of the Rings monomyth in this, so she’s fleeing the armed soldiers who have interrupted her tranquil existence to send her on her hero’s journey to discover her hidden destiny, overthrow a despot, and save the day. Once on the other side she acquires the usual traveling companions, although I’m not sure why the tin man — here simply a slang term for a sheriff’s deputy, not a person made of metal — gets to be the title of the piece overall. My favorite spin on the familiar canon is that the reason the scarecrow figure is somewhat brainless is because the evil witch who rules the land has scrambled his memories to prevent him from using his genius inventions against her.

Our protagonist never mentions the similarities to the classic novel or film, which I assume means they don’t exist in her reality. On the other hand, she does later commune with the spirit of the real Dorothy Gale, who was apparently an ancestor of hers, which raises some unanswered questions about why their two stories parallel one another so closely.

Mostly, however, this is good family fun. The vibe reminds me a lot of The 10th Kingdom, another fantasy miniseries from around that time, and to a lesser extent the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993. The plot takes some bizarre turns and the budget feels a little threadbare throughout, but it’s definitely short enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Creed II (2018)

Movie #14 of 2026:

Creed II (2018)

Rocky IV (1985) was the low point of the original Rocky movies, but it ended up representing an important piece of the backstory for the spinoff Creed (2015). As such, I suppose it’s fitting that this next installment in the saga continues to draw from that source, this time bringing back Balboa’s old Russian opponent Ivan Drago, killer of the newer hero’s father Apollo. We learn now that he’s lived in shame ever since his defeat in that older film, but he has a son he’s raised to follow in his footsteps and avenge the family name.

It’s kind of an odd premise — the Italian Stallion is long retired from boxing, and he only met and started training Adonis Creed a few years ago, so who exactly was the young Viktor going to fight if Donny hadn’t burst onto the scene and won his father’s old heavyweight title? But setting such logic aside, it’s a decent hook with clear built-in stakes for both generations, which is just what the sequel needed to push the story forward. It also helps that the plot follows the rough shape of Rocky III (1982), in that the protagonist initially loses the bout to his surprise challenger and then has to spend the remaining runtime rebuilding himself and finding a new fighting style to try it again.

Although this is a sports series, I usually prefer the moments outside the ring, as the various contests can feel repetitive and offer unclear reasoning for who succeeds beyond some nebulous concept like determination or heart. This one does better than most in that regard, paying closer attention to the strategy Balboa devises for his protege in the climactic rematch and how Creed executes it from round to round. Meanwhile in the latter’s personal life, he proposes to his girlfriend Bianca and starts raising a baby daughter with her, while Rocky eventually reconciles with his own estranged son Robert, as played by Milo Ventimiglia reprising his role from Rocky Balboa (2006). Dolph Lundgren likewise returns to his old character Ivan (as does Brigitte Nielsen as his wife Ludmilla), and the scenes with him squaring off against Sylvester Stallone carry the tangible weight of the decades since their last encounter.

Sly has said in interviews that this would be his last time playing the part he originated back in Rocky (1976), and Creed III (2023) did indeed go on without him. That’s a major turning point for the franchise, but if this really is the end for the old boxer, at least it provides a strong sendoff that firmly anchors Michael B. Jordan as a compelling lead in his place.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The First Bright Thing by J. R. Dawson

Book #44 of 2026:

The First Bright Thing by J. R. Dawson

This novel has a lot of heart and a couple interesting ideas that unfortunately just don’t cohere together for me. The tone often feels like it was written with a middle-grade audience in mind, but it touches on some pretty heavy topics and includes a few scenes of graphic violence and gore that would likewise be a poor fit for many younger readers. On the other hand, the plot seems intended to pivot around a twist reveal at the 82% mark that’s so glaringly obvious as to be frankly insulting to an adult sensibility.

Spoilers ahead, but the story is told along two unfolding timelines, about ten years apart. In the present, a woman known only as “the Ringmaster” has the ability to teleport anywhere she imagines, which she uses to hide from “the Circus King,” whose gift is a sort of mind control that must be obeyed. Meanwhile in the past, two characters are falling in love: a man named Edward who can magically order anyone to do what he wants, and his partner Ruth who can instantly jump to any place in the world. Do you see where this is heading yet? Would it help if I mentioned that Edward’s last name is King? The belated confirmation is played like a grand cliffhanger revelation at the end of a chapter, though I can’t imagine any other possible reason for why we’d be following the flashback sequence if the two storylines weren’t going to end up connected in that way.

Clearly the cards should have been on the table all along, for one of the definite strengths of this piece is to engage with the idea of an abusive relationship through the safer lens of fantastical allegory, and the remaining space is too limited once that’s officially established in the text. As with certain enemy figures in the Graceling books or the show Jessica Jones, the villain’s power of command is both creepy and deeply traumatizing for his victims, as well as causing a steady erosion on his morality as he goes through life getting whatever he thinks to ask for. It’s privilege, and toxic entitlement, and gaslighting, and so many similarly sinister behaviors that one might find outside of fiction. So why pretend for so long that that isn’t what’s happening here?

Besides that conflict, our older heroine is navigating a distinctive point in history, midway between the First and Second World Wars. In fact, since she can travel in time as well as space, she’s aware of the larger trouble yet to come, and for a while is seeking a way to change events and prevent it. Theoretically this has further weight from her being #ownvoices Jewish and queer, although in my opinion that level of surface representation isn’t especially well-integrated into the work. The protagonist has a wife now — so did she ever truly love her ex? Did she have an awakening either before or after she left him? She mentions that doing her part to help fix the world is considered a mitzvah — but wouldn’t tikkun olam be a more precise concept to explore there? And so on.

It’s a shame, because I think there’s a great deal of squandered potential to this title. The found family vibes of radical acceptance are nice, if somewhat implausible for the era — multiple people use they/them pronouns without comment, for instance — and the setting is fun in an X-Men / Checquy Files / Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children kind of way, with a wide range of unusual talents on display for us. But such neat individual elements don’t add up to an enjoyable read overall when there’s so much frustrating dissonance in and around them.

[Content for racism, homophobia, antisemitism, alcoholism, gun violence, and suicide.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Homicide: Life on the Street, season 2

TV #13 of 2026:

Homicide: Life on the Street, season 2

A very short season at only four episodes, reportedly because NBC wasn’t confident the series had enough of an audience to justify making any more of it. (Contrary to those concerns, the show would ultimately last for another five standard-length seasons, followed by a capstone film conclusion.) The network also again meddled with the production order, airing what was intended to be the finale at the start to better capitalize off a high-profile appearance from guest star Robin Williams. He’s joined by Wilford Brimley and Julianna Margulies as other notable visiting actors this year, along with a preteen Jake Gyllenhaal in one of his earliest roles.

Otherwise, not much has changed from the debut run. Our returning Baltimore detectives continue investigating murders in their community, in a police procedural spin that goes deeper into the main cast of characters, rather than following through every step of their investigations. A lot of time is spent in the interrogation room, including an electrifying scene where Andre Braugher, disgusted by himself but doing what the bosses apparently want, convinces an innocent suspect to confess to killing his friend by needling him over getting the victim involved in gang life in the first place.

It’s good stuff, but way too brief. Still, three-and-a-half stars rounded up sounds about right.

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

★★★★☆