The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Doctor Who, season 2

TV #29 of 2025:

Doctor Who, season 2

The Whoniverse is in a weird place right now. Back in 2022, the BBC struck a deal with Disney to co-produce 26 new episodes of the long-running British franchise, after which the parties would reassess the viability of the brand going forward. And now it appears we’ve reached the end of that particular rope: three specials with David Tennant’s surprise Fourteenth Doctor, two Christmas specials and two eight-episode seasons with Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteen, and an upcoming five-episode UNIT spinoff miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, which arrives at an especially baffling time when the fate of the main hero and the core series are so up in the air.

Which is to say, there have been no signs of any forthcoming Doctor Who renewal, and the smart money seems to be that the show is heading for another cancellation hiatus like the one that befell the Classic series in 1989. I don’t want to parse who’s to blame for what behind the scenes, but the final moments of this season feel particularly tacked-on as though in a desperate bid for attention. Is [SPOILER] really [SPOILER]? A cliffhanger like that is just begging to be picked up and resolved, right? Right?

(Honestly not, in my opinion. I much prefer the dignified exit given to the last Classic TV Doctor, Sylvester McCoy’s Seven, who went out like he was leaving any other adventure and was implied to be carrying on having more of them offscreen — as indeed he did in a subsequent booming canon of novels and comics and beyond. That Gatwa, the show’s first Black lead, isn’t awarded the same chance to have his incarnation live on as the incumbent hero into the likely next wilderness era feels both shortsighted and cruel.)

But let’s set the talk of the program’s uncertain future aside. Here and now, how does “season 2” stack up?

Still not great, I have to say. For all the marketing insistence that the Disney+ stage would be a refresh for the series to welcome new viewers — as the renumbering of seasons would suggest — this second iteration is even more bogged down in pointless minutia from the show’s deep past. If you didn’t like last year’s use of Sutekh, a Classic villain brought back with no real buildup and a radically different characterization, I can’t imagine you’re going to love when this run does the same thing with two other such figures. At least the long-awaited return of Carole Ann Ford as Susan — one of the First Doctor’s original companions from the 1960s and his granddaughter, whom he promised he’d see again someday — is more emotionally meaningful, though plotwise it’s ultimately just a cameo vision that might be setting up something more substantial for later on. Or not! Who knows.

This season also introduces a new companion, Belinda Chandra, which ticks off one final milestone achievement: the first time in Doctor Who history that no one in the primary cast is white. Her character is initially promising in pushing against the Time Lord protagonist — she just wants to get home, like Fifth Doctor companion Tegan Jovanka from the 80s — but by the end of things, her entire personality and background have been rewritten and her arc reduced to a sexist mess. It’s sort of emblematic of the season as a whole, actually, with episodes that all evince some clear potential yet seem to unravel in the execution. Only 2×2 “Lux” stands out in my mind as a distinct gem of the year.

It takes a lot to get me to dislike Doctor Who, and for all the wasted opportunity here, I still enjoy enough of what we’re presented to award it a passing grade of three-out-of-five stars overall. But Gatwa’s version of the Doctor deserved stronger material than this, and it’s a shame how it increasingly looks like he’ll never get it.

[Content warning for gun violence, genocide, ableism, eugenics, racism, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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/lesserjoke
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Movie Review: Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998)

Movie #6 of 2025:

Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998)

Produced in the run-up to the fifth and final season of the TV show, which would soon be airing on a new network, this Babylon 5 film seems partially aimed at attracting new viewers to the sci-fi franchise. It’s a presentation via flashback of certain events in the original series backstory, most of which had already been established in dialogue over the course of the previous four years. There’s still some enjoyment for returning fans in finally seeing those moments play out for real, but a lot of it feels perfunctory — and more than a little credulity-straining in terms of which characters knew one another and were apparently involved with pivotal negotiations and stratagems back then. I think the ending would likely come across as anticlimactic too, for any audiences who really are tuning in for the first time here.

On the other hand, the writers, directors, and cast have all honed their craft with experience, and so I’ll concede that this is a stronger and more confident production than the initial television pilot movie The Gathering. A prequel like this isn’t a bad creative impulse, either, although most shows would do so within the space of a single regular episode (as B5 had done before too, some footage of which is even reused for this occasion). I’d probably recommend the piece if you had tried getting into Babylon 5 the normal way and been put off by it, but otherwise it’s pretty far from essential.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, season 1

TV #28 of 2025:

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, season 1

This 2004 miniseries, airing a couple years after the premature cancellation of the regular Farscape TV show, reminds me a lot of the movie Serenity (2005) and its relation to Firefly. Like that film, it aims to offer a stronger conclusion to the ongoing storyline that birthed it than was initially feasible, resolve a few other open threads, and still tell a self-contained adventure that would be approachable and enjoyable for new audiences.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it manages to accomplish any of those tasks nearly as well as the comparable big-screen Joss Whedon feature. Partly that’s due to the hand this production starts with: the Peacekeeper-Scarran conflict, though a major backdrop of the later seasons of Farscape, was never an issue that seemingly had to be wrapped up in order for our protagonists to feel fulfilled. Instead the big cliffhanger at the end of season 4 was the sudden death of two of that number, albeit in a sci-fi manner that suggested a reversal would somehow be possible. I can understand fans clamoring to see that beat play out, but it’s not very dramatically interesting or surprising as delivered here. (The cast members in question are front and center on the poster, after all.) And sure enough, neither that development nor the outbreak of actual war prove especially urgent as the story unfolds.

All that’s left, beyond checking a few boxes like a belated explanation of why Aeryn’s people resemble humans, is to finally deal with the theoretical wormhole weapon everyone’s obsessed with and deliver some goodbyes to our familiar characters. Those both more or less get achieved, although a few of the peripheral figures suffer from the shortened screentime and there isn’t room for many old guest favorites from the television run to make a reappearance. Again, quite like Serenity — right down to one shocking death in each instance that is properly affective.

But would this work for viewers who hadn’t seen everything that came before? Not really, in my opinion! It’s a condensed version of the season 5 that never was, and its strongest moments are built on the investment we have in the winding journey to get to this point. That makes it a better sendoff than the original program’s finale, but still not a stone-cold classic or anything.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Revolution by John Peel

Book #88 of 2025:

Revolution by John Peel (2099 #4)

This middle-grade sci-fi series stalls out a bit here, though I’m hoping the final two volumes are able to recapture the original momentum and fun. (It’s been a quarter-century since my last read, so none of this is particularly clear in my memory.) The subplot with the heavy-handed riot police on Mars is probably the most interesting, which is a problem when that corner of the narrative remains so disconnected from everything else. Otherwise the characters mostly spend this installment regrouping and making plans for the future, which isn’t the most entertaining sort of fiction.

Still, it’s a quick enough book overall, and I’m picking up on some likely Babylon 5 influences that obviously went over my head as a kid, so that’s neat to see. But proto-Orphan Black continues to be the primary vibe, which leaves me hopeful that we’ll get more scenes of the clones interacting with each other soon.

Side note: no idea what’s happening with the cover here, since the story is about three 14-year-old boys with genius programming skills, not an army of flying soldiers. I suspect the artist wasn’t given much of a summary to work with.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, and eugenics.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Never Flinch by Stephen King

Book #87 of 2025:

Never Flinch by Stephen King (Holly Gibney #4)

In the afterword to this new novel, author Stephen King acknowledges that it was difficult to write before saying that he’s “happy enough” with the final version. That’s largely how I feel as a reader, too. This is pretty far from the writer at his best, and in fact, a lot of it plays out as him repeating some of his previous work — not only the earlier Holly Gibney and Bill Hodges detective stories, but also shades of Insomnia with its extremist attack on a feminist rally. The most original element here is an alcoholic serial killer’s comparison of his two compulsions, a sharp characterization that’s presumably rooted in King’s own admitted struggles with addiction.

Structurally, the book is all over the place. We’re following two murderers whose paths eventually happen to cross, but that entanglement occurs so late in the text that their separate plots seem fairly coincidental. One is a religious zealot stalking a liberal activist, although her politics are so vaguely defined that it’s hard to understand the bigot’s anger at her as a specific target, while the other is embarking on a somewhat goofy mission to kill twelve random people in protest of a jury who convicted an innocent man. (He leaves names of the jurors in his victims’ hands, apparently to try guilting them into suicide.) The latter takes a ton of risks in his opportunistic murders, which fits with his nature as an addict but makes it frustrating that the various investigators aren’t able to capitalize on his missteps to easily track him down. They don’t even look into how he knew the identities of the anonymous jury, which should be an obvious first step!

Holly Gibney and her friends Jerome, Barbara, and Izzy are back as those protagonists, although the piece is basically standalone and probably works fine if you haven’t read their prior adventures. It’s also an entirely mundane crime thriller up until a stinger in the epilogue, which I continue to think is an odd approach for a series, alternating between the existence of the supernatural or not.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t complain about the treatment of gender in this tale. King is pro-choice and an outspoken Trump critic, but he’s also a 77-year-old with some rather regressive attitudes and knowledge gaps. Thus he has his political mouthpiece here repeatedly crow about how no men have ever had an abortion — ignoring the reality of transgender men, some of whom have indeed undergone that procedure — and his secondary villain turns out to have Dissociative Identity Disorder and a genderfluid presentation, sometimes manifesting and dressing as his late twin sister. It’s problematic to say the least, especially in a work with no other meaningful queer themes or characters, and it strikes me as the sort of unwelcome throwback a competent editor should have vetoed.

Still, King is compulsively readable as usual, and I’d say the title is his typical page-turner overall. But I’ve never loved Holly Gibney myself, and I’d personally be okay if he retired the heroine and her world at this point.

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

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, season 1

TV #27 of 2025:

Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, season 1

“This is solid but unremarkable Star Wars for the most part, and although it isn’t the worst of the franchise, it never comes close to justifying its existence.” That’s what I said in my review of last year’s Tales of the Empire cartoon anthology, though it also could have applied to 2022’s Tales of the Jedi. And here, sure enough, we get more of the same. (In fact, these shows could all easily have been subsequent seasons of one common series; it’s not as though the separate names really demarcate different focuses for the stories within.)

This time we’ve again got two main arcs: a coda for Asajj Ventress, showing what the Sith woman did after renouncing her evil ways and returning back to life, and an origin story / High Noon riff for the bounty hunter gangster Cad Bane. The latter is slightly more interesting than the former, and neither is awful beyond the inherent poor comparison of being released in the middle of Andor’s incredible second season. Still, this is an eminently skippable celebration of a couple glup shittos through and through.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt

Book #86 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt (Virgin New Adventures #5)

The first four books in this sequel series to Classic Doctor Who formed a loose quartet, and this next one purportedly starts a new trilogy. It’s pretty standalone, however, and ultimately one of those stories that I think works better in theory than in actual practice. The basic premise is that the Seventh Doctor’s TARDIS collides with an experimental time-craft from ancient Gallifreyan history, an era shrouded in mystery even for him, and the resulting disaster strands all the passengers from both ships on a strange and desolate alien world. In fact, it’s a setting that somehow coexists alongside its own past and future, and so the characters keep bumping into their older or younger selves and doing things to change the timeline accordingly.

It’s mindbending but not particularly satisfying, especially on the heels of Timewyrm: Revelation, which offered a similar bizarre adventure for the Time Lord and his companion Ace. The most effective parts are probably the worldbuilding elements that author Marc Platt shades in around the edges and would later return to for his infamous novel Lungbarrow: we learn for instance that the hero’s people are grown in looms rather than born naturally, and we see the legendary Rassilon first coming to power accompanied by a figure called only the Other. That early look at Gallifrey is a treat for longtime fans, but it occupies too few of the pages here to justify the interminable main plot, which largely consists of the protagonists running around a decaying city ad-nauseum. So much more could have been done with such a promising sci-fi concept.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Reservation Dogs, season 1

TV #26 of 2025:

Reservation Dogs, season 1

A fresh and very funny slice-of-life dramedy about a group of teenage friends in the Muscogee Nation of rural Oklahoma. This program feels like a revelation with its magical realist touches and nearly all Indigenous talent both on and off the screen, and the humor resultantly carries a ton of well-observed specificity even for a non-Native outsider like me.

The storytelling is a little looser than I would prefer, and I could see myself liking the show less in subsequent seasons if a stronger plot doesn’t ultimately develop. But eight half-hour episodes isn’t a ton of space for a series to establish itself within, and this one is clearly more interested in introducing us to the characters and their community than pushing anyone or anything forward just yet. (Without spoilers, the one exception in the finale seems like a development that will swiftly get walked back.)

Still, the kids are reeling from a recent loss, trying to raise money to leave for California in an ingenious variety of illegal but relatively harmless ways, and being hassled by a more serious gang of peers who view them as competition. That’s enough to scaffold this first year, at least.

[Content warning for drug abuse, racism, and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Nightshade by Michael Connelly

Book #85 of 2025:

Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Detective Stilwell #1)

This 2025 release is the start of a new series for author Michael Connelly, although there are a few subtle indications throughout that it’s set in the same continuity as his long-running Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer titles. I’d be shocked if there aren’t crossover sequels planned somewhere down the line, but for now at least, it’s a clean entry point with an original setting and cast of characters.

Our protagonist is the lead detective assigned to a remote island off the coast of California, accessible only by ferry or private boat. He has a degree of authority there, but the posting was meant to be a punishment for his past actions while working on the mainland, which also got him a few enemies and the disdain of his superior officers back home. (The details are still somewhat vague by the end of this debut volume, as is the rest of the guy’s backstory — we aren’t even given his first name yet for some reason.) For returning readers, there are shades of both Harry Bosch and Renée Ballard here, who’ve likewise each chafed against department bureaucracy in their drive to find justice for the victims of violent crime. Stilwell is particularly like the former in going rogue near the novel’s end, embarking on a one-man rescue mission and shooting an unarmed kidnapper rather than following appropriate police guidelines. Whether the hero resorting to that sort of behavior constitutes unacceptable copaganda or not, it definitely closes off a potential branch of the ongoing investigation prematurely, which is a frustrating choice that cuts against his general characterization as a brilliant investigator.

As usual for this writer, there are a number of open cases that play off one another or else wind up directly related, from the body of a woman found buried at sea to a robbery at the local yacht club to a lurid animal mutilation that seems intended to boost tourism. These may have a distinctive flavoring due to the surrounding environment, but none of them are especially twisty or mindblowing in their solutions, and I’m not sure they add up to a spectacular beginning for the main character. Despite the change in outward trappings, this is the solid workmanlike quality you can generally expect of Connelly, yet unfortunately not one of his better stories overall.

[Content warning for threat of rape, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Book #84 of 2025:

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games #3)

The first two volumes in this trilogy shared a roughly similar structure: half a book of buildup to the latest deadly arena match, and then the heroine’s desperate bid for survival within it. This closing entry operates along the same general principles, except for the key difference that nominally, there are no more Hunger Games at this point. Instead, with open rebellion broken out and all of Panem at war, we get a dose of what it means for Katniss Everdeen to be a part of that revolutionary effort — and cynically used by its propaganda machine — followed by an abrupt pivot to her service as a frontline soldier infiltrating the Capitol. It’s not quite the familiar bloodsport from her time as a Tribute, but it reads as an intentional approximation of that, complete with devious traps from the enemy Gamemakers killing off her squadmates one by one.

The problem here, as with the Quarter Quell from the previous novel, is that that particular complication feels mandated by author Suzanne Collins or her editors, rather than representing a truly organic development in the story arc. It’s as though the publishing team thinks that any plot in this setting has to involve such immediate life-or-death stakes and the requisite twisted torture devices, and so duly guides things in that direction no matter what. That’s a baffling disservice to the writer’s own storytelling abilities, however, as invariably the worldbuilding, plots, and interpersonal drama are all more compelling earlier on, before the frantic peril portion of the tale.

Here, for instance, the novel’s primary strength lies in the main character’s steadily-dawning realization that the rebel forces who have recruited her for their cause may be no better than the very oppressors they’re opposing. That’s a devastating twist for the genre, and a sharp break from the saga’s pop culture predecessors like Harry Potter or Star Wars, which typically offer pretty stark battle lines of good versus evil. Our returning protagonist still has that moral clarity, of course, but it’s centered on individual people and their actions, not sheer tribalism. Thus she has room in her heart for sympathy towards relatively innocent Capitol residents like Cinna’s former assistants, and repugnance for her new allies who seem intent on using their tormentors’ wicked ways against them.

In the end, Katniss’s vision prevails, and we close with the suggestion that a kinder tomorrow for this dystopia is possible, rather than just swapping one brand of fascism for another in a continuing cycle of abuse. That’s a lovely idea, but it’s one that deserves to be explored at a greater length than can be achieved here. Between the battlefront heroics and the return of the cheesy YA love triangle, this volume unfortunately sags a bit on the way to its pastoral flash-forward conclusion — though at least it provides decent material for its superior film adaptations in the process.

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

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3