The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Doctor Who: Empire of Death by Scott Handcock

Book #163 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Empire of Death by Scott Handcock

I enjoyed author Scott Handcock’s novelization of the recent Doctor Who episode 73 yards, but it turns out that when he has weaker material to work with, the output is correspondingly worse. (And let’s not let him off the hook entirely there either, since he did serve as the script editor for the television series when these stories all aired.) This volume, for instance, adapts the two-part finale of Ncuti Gatwa’s first season as the Fifteenth Doctor, The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death, and what was anticlimactic and confusing about that adventure on the screen isn’t rendered any more satisfying on the page.

The basic premise is fine for the franchise and genre — the time-traveling hero and his young companion are investigating the mystery of a woman they keep seeing in their journeys as well as Ruby’s own unknown origin, only to stumble into the scheme of an ancient enemy bent on revenge — but that villain’s motives and personality aren’t really explored at much length. The gamble instead remains that audiences will be awed to recognize the name from the Classic era of the show, and yet even if we do, the individual’s fundamental nature has changed so significantly since then that there’s minimal actual continuity involved. At the end the threat is dispatched in a fairly arbitrary way, another curiosity is set up for the future, and the teenage heroine reunites with her birth mother in time for an emotional quasi-earned quasi-farewell with the Doctor.

I tend to view these projects as redo attempts, presumably to be read by people who already know the TV versions and are looking for additional details or improved storytelling to enhance their understanding and appreciation of the original. Unfortunately I’ve found little of that here, which might have helped distract from the inherited weaknesses of the piece. Whereas some such adaptations have fleshed out their worlds with greater character insights or plot-hole-smoothing, this title is content to merely add back in a few elements that were cut for budget reasons. So yes, we technically now get a brief early appearance of the Zarbi from the First Doctor serial The Web Planet, but that’s hardly enough to save the ensuing misfire from itself.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

Book #162 of 2025:

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

A harrowingly propulsive rush through the trenches of World War I, full of sickening visceral images of war in service to a bizarre speculative twist: the presence on the battlefield of a literal angel screaming in agony, whom our protagonist, unaware of her identity, has been sent to either silence or retrieve. And that’s the sort of cadence deployed by author Daniel Kraus to deliver this tale, which takes the form of one long unbroken sentence as the staccato bursts of its unending clauses pound steadily away at our remaining nerves.

(“…and Bagger runs, oh shit, and with his arms over the woman, his legs have to do all the work, oh shit, tendon-stretching strides, heels planted into muddy marsh, warped metal, mushy organs, crackling bones, oh shit, and he sees at his periphery the red starbursts of Jerry’s grenades and feels the hawkwind of the resulting shock waves, shit shit, feels fallen men claw at his shins, desperate for water, desperate for a bullet, hands that are really only rogue weeds, oh shit,

and he scrambles arcs around craters he can see and splashes through craters he can’t, shit shit, while Arno’s noises grow increasingly distant as the kid keeps stopping to shoot, oh shit, and all Bagger thinks is how he’s never checked his ammo, why would he, he never shoots any, but cartridges bloat in wet weather, his Springfield might blow up in Arno’s hands, shit shit shit,

and there, fifty yards off, is the long, toothless grin of the Allied trench, a shade darker than the sackcloth day, only first here’s a dead soldier propped against an oak stump, facing the Hun trench like a spectator, a bullet caught between his front teeth, the guts in his lap still wispy with steam, and Bagger thinks this is why they call U.S. soldiers doughboys, you slit them open and their guts roll out like dough,

and Bagger looks at the dough too long, his right boot clips the corpse’s knee, and that’s it, his adrenalized dexterity is disrupted, he’s spun, the battlefield a carousel of yellow gun blasts, his legs cycling too fast, can’t extend his arms for balance, he’s a runaway wheel, not falling, not yet falling, not quite falling…”)

As the hero and his squadmates bicker and quarrel throughout their mission, they find that their angelic visitor has a way of bringing out everyone’s worst impulses in their push to seize and claim her for their own — especially as she never looks the same from man to man, taking on the appearance of some girl or woman from his past whom he longs to hold and protect. Together with the other minor miracles she can perform, it’s a wonder that does little to stem the surrounding horrors and inevitably yields greater harm.

The overall effect is a real trip, and an altogether bleak look at humanity’s ugly penchant for violence as filtered by the male-dominated sphere of warfare in that era. The historical setting is exquisitely rendered by the stylistic prose, and while the soldier characters within it might feel more like archetypes than full individuals, they serve the purpose of the narrative well and help sell the plausibility of the fantastical premise. Between this 2025 title and the writer’s earlier Whalefall — a radically different and yet equally haunting exploration of self-destructive masculinity — Kraus is quickly becoming a must-read for me.

[Content warning for racism, ableism, suicide, and rape.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 21

TV #51 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 21

Another bifurcated season of Doctor Who that I wish I could separate into its weaker and stronger parts — although here it’s particularly unfortunate that the former installments bookend the latter.

The middle of this run delivers a fine span from RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS through PLANET OF FIRE and then THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI, which sees the Fifth Doctor lose sequentially his companions Tegan, Kamelion, and Turlough, and ultimately his own life. Of these, the first is probably the most powerful, coming as it does with the Australian stewardess’s earned objection over the death and destruction that the team has regularly encountered on their travels. Like Martha Jones on the rebooted show, she chooses to leave the narrative on her own terms, and there’s a definite quiet dignity in that. Meanwhile Kamelion’s exit is marred by the fact that he’s existed offscreen in the TARDIS and completely unmentioned ever since his introduction a season ago — an issue partly due to production problems with the robot model, but which could have been addressed more neatly via occasional dialogue or by using his established shapeshifting powers to portray him with a human actor instead. Turlough’s departure is likewise weakened by how little we’ve gotten to know about his backstory in advance before it suddenly becomes relevant here. These serials still work, to be clear, but the effects feel somewhat compromised in execution due to their minimal continuity ties.

As for ANDROZANI, it’s easily the best regeneration plot that the Classic series ever delivered, as well as an overall franchise highlight. Cynical, furious, and righteously bitter, it’s everything that I wish Peter Davison’s era could have been all along. There’s again the matter of insufficient lead-in material, as the Doctor heroically sacrificing himself to save a person he (and the audience) just met isn’t quite as emotional as if he were doing the same for a longstanding friend, but otherwise, it’s an exceptional piece of storytelling.

Unfortunately, it’s followed by one of the worst — a 2009 Doctor Who Magazine fan poll of the then-200 televised stories literally found ANDROZANI the highest-rated and THE TWIN DILEMMA the lowest — which would prove sadly emblematic of the Sixth Doctor years ahead. If we’re being charitable, Colin Baker’s incoming Doctor was theoretically meant to have an arc like Peter Capaldi’s later one, of having his caustic arrogance softened over time. But that intended evolution didn’t really translate to the screen, and is hugely miscalibrated in his initial appearance at the end of this season, wherein he’s so out of control that he repeatedly tries to murder his companion! It’s no surprise the audiences never warmed to his incarnation after that.

The beginning of the season before RESURRECTION isn’t so bad, but it’s not as uniformly great as the aforementioned build to the big cast turnover, either. I like the short two-parter THE AWAKENING, but FRONTIOS and especially WARRIORS OF THE DEEP aren’t anything to write home about. Offscreen, this is where the campaign to cancel Doctor Who started picking up steam, and while the program would last another five seasons and go out on a relative high note in the Seventh Doctor’s era, we’re firmly in the home stretch now.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
THE TWIN DILEMMA (21×23 – 21×26)
WARRIORS OF THE DEEP (21×1 – 21×4)

★★★☆☆
FRONTIOS (12×7 – 21×10)

★★★★☆
RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS (21×11 – 21×14)
THE AWAKENING (21×5 – 21×6)
PLANET OF FIRE (21×15 – 21×18)

★★★★★
THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI (21×19 – 21×22)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)

Movie #16 of 2025:

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)

“Movie” is probably a bit of a misnomer here, as this title wasn’t initially intended to constitute a standalone feature at all. Instead it would be merely the first installment of a new Babylon 5 series pitched as an anthology of smaller-scale stories, in contrast to the original program’s heavily-serialized arcs. Unfortunately creator J. Michael Straczynski reportedly wasn’t happy with the finished version, and so made the decision to cancel the planned line after this release.

And that’s a shame, because I think it’s actually pretty strong for what it is! Admittedly, this is Babylon 5 on an extremely-low budget: the effects are kept to a minimum, and most of the scenes are set in small rooms with a minimal cast, utilizing only around seven actors in total. It has a bit of a stageplay feel as a result, or perhaps an older television style like The Twilight Zone.

Within that framework, we get two sequential storylines that are each fairly successful at pitching their little sci-fi morality plays. On the Babylon 5 station itself, Elizabeth Lochley and a visiting priest confront a man who appears to be possessed by a genuine demon, which wants to be exorcised out of its host body. On a typical genre show like Star Trek or Doctor Who there would be some fundamentally ‘rational’ explanation eventually revealed behind the phenomenon, but here it’s played straight and we have to just accept the demonic as an element of the B5 canon now. Instead the twist is that the forces of hell are indeed bound on earth, and are scheming to find a way to escape their prison and travel the stars.

Then we cut to John Sheridan, who receives a prophetic dream visit from the technomage Galen informing him that the young Centauri noble he’s escorting will one day lead an attack to devastate the human homeworld unless our protagonist agrees to help kill him in cold blood now before he can. The script isn’t shy about identifying this as the old would-you-kill-baby-Hitler hypothetical, but it’s an interesting engagement with the idea that ultimately finds a satisfyingly heroic resolution.

The seams are there if you look for them, and the whole thing does sit weirdly as a part of this particular franchise. (One of the funnier aspects is that no mention is made of the global plague that was still raging when the spinoff Crusade was canceled, which has apparently somehow been resolved offscreen. But in my mind at least that’s balanced by the touching tribute to the characters G’Kar and Dr. Franklin, whose performers had both recently passed away.) It’s certainly possible that I wouldn’t like this nearly as much if similar shoestring productions had followed in sequence, but for what we’ve got, I’m calling it a win.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Jason Bourne (2016)

Movie #15 of 2025:

Jason Bourne (2016)

The first Bourne sequel, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, opens with its ex-assassin hero off the grid somewhere overseas, minding his own business until his former employers kill a woman that he’s close with, thereby bringing him back into the game and on the hunt for answers to a wider government conspiracy around his origins as an operative. With a few tweaks, that’s the same basic formula that’s followed again here, in what’s so far the latest installment of this globe-trotting shakycam spy series.

So yes, the action and the plot both feel somewhat rote by this point, and yes, it’s understandable but still a bit silly that there’s no mention of Jeremy Renner’s super-soldier adventures that happened offscreen in The Bourne Legacy (2012) during Matt Damon’s nine-year break from the series. And sure, it’s even more absurd to think that there are further levels of the Treadstone coverup that wouldn’t have come out earlier, like how apparently Bourne’s father was the program’s original architect and was then killed by his own forces to motivate his son to join up.

On the surface, of course, these cycles have to perpetuate in order for the producers to keep making the movies and giving Jason something to do. (For all the talk of well-meaning agents wanting to ‘bring him in,’ there’s no way he works as a character reintegrated into the system and taking orders from the establishment hierarchy — or as someone who finally does know everything about his past and all the puppet-masters who strung him along.) In the process, though, these films have created a deeply cynical subtext in which the U.S. intelligence apparatus just keeps training new black-ops killers at the command of an endless chain of corrupt officials, no matter how many classified files Bourne or his compatriots find and release to the public. I won’t say it’s unrealistic, but it’s arguably more interesting than the main storyline here.

At least Tommy Lee Jones makes for a nice new villain, as an opponent with personal stakes who earns a final face-to-face showdown with the protagonist. This round’s henchman asset has a grudge too — he was captured and tortured after the last leak, which he blames Bourne for — which offers their violent scenes together a little more texture. And then there’s Alicia Vikander and her distracting attempt at an American accent, playing the good cop to their bad ones as she fills the old Julia Stiles / Joan Allen role of the resident female sympathizer within the macho-posturing CIA*. (Nicky herself, unfortunately, is the one who gets fridged at the beginning of the film, in a subplot that allows the script to clarify its viewpoint that regardless of the sins they uncover, Edward Snowden-style leakers are unpatriotic weirdos only out for their own glory.)

Our taciturn lead ultimately gets to the bottom of all that, learns a few things, and crashes some more cars as he dodges the somehow-less-trained generation of spooks after him. There’s room for rumination on how the character isn’t getting any younger — would the agency even want to put him back in the field at this point? — but that’s mostly confined to close-up shots of a battered face that’s decidedly not as fresh as when he first woke up with no memories back in The Bourne Identity (2002). Nevertheless, he proves able to neutralize the current threat against him and walk away again, more or less intact.

Is this the end of Jason Bourne (the franchise and the character)? Never say never in Hollywood, especially in our modern era of legacyquels and whatnot. A loose spinoff TV show aired for a season in 2019, and as recently as August 2025 NBCUniversal renewed their license from the Robert Ludlum estate for a reported nine-figure deal, which surely implies they plan to do something further with it, Matt Damon’s increasing age to the contrary. But for now, let’s let Bourne stride off into the shadows where he’s spent the past decade, keeping his head down until someone else at his old workplace makes the mistake of poking him again. Cue the Moby soundtrack, one last time.

*This has already gone long enough and I don’t really want to unpack the gender dynamics at greater length, so instead I’ll just direct you to this queer reading here.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig

Book #161 of 2025:

One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig (The Shepherd King #1)

I’m digging the sinister vibes here, along with the general premise of a heroine with the voice of an ancient monster secretly living in her head, a la Vespertine or Venom. Even better is the fact that, although this is a romantasy title, the young woman’s love interest is not that centuries-old creature giving her its caustically sardonic advice, but instead a regular person closer to her own age and species.

Still, that other human is a little bland for my taste, and the dynamic between the two seems predicated on instant physical attraction alone, which isn’t my favorite sort of trope. (Say what you will about the Fourth Wing books, but that couple has serious emotional chemistry by comparison!) I also have issues with the magic and further details around the worldbuilding, which never quite coheres together into a believable fleshed-out system for me. That’s a problem when the plot largely concerns the protagonist keeping secrets from her new allies and tripping over a few predictable twists while they gather the right enchanted maguffins for whatever reason.

Overall I’d say the series concept is good enough for me to carry on with the sequel, but I’m not blown away by the execution of this initial volume.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 3

TV #50 of 2025:

The Sopranos, season 3

I’ve long heard that episode 3×11 “Pine Barrens” is one of the best individual hours that this show ever produced, and having finally now seen the Fargo-esque caper for myself, I can’t really argue with that designation. Unfortunately, however, the season around it is kind of a dud. The biggest plotline, for example, involves Tony facing a loose-cannon underling who’s chafing at being passed over for promotion, and although Joe Pantoliano is fun in that role, it’s hard not to feel like we saw the exact same thing with Richie last year (and echoes of it again here with Jackie Jr.). Another major development concerns the protagonist starting a new extramarital affair with a damaged woman, which is similarly only a minor spin on a previous story. And while his daughter going off to college and finding romance at least offers more of an original arc, it also proves that this program was even more influential than I realized — as successor dramas like The Good Wife or The Americans would likewise struggle to provide engaging material for their own child actors as they aged.

This is moreover the first season to be filmed in the wake of actress Nancy Marchand passing, which leaves an obvious hole in the regular cast dynamics. Creator David Chase’s intent was always to depict a toxic mother-son relationship (modeled off his own experiences), and theoretically that could shift to explore the complicated feelings that linger after someone’s abuser dies with so much still left unsaid. But in order to get there, 3×2 “Proshai, Livushka” deploys dodgy CGI effects and generic cutting-room dialogue to give Livia Soprano one final scene, which absolutely does not work. In my opinion it would have been better storytelling and more respectful to the dead if the writers had just had her character die suddenly offscreen without all that.

Another frustrating choice is to have Dr. Melfi get raped in the parking garage outside her office in 3×4 “Employee of the Month.” The idea here is to present a neat little morality play: the therapist knows she has a violent criminal for a patient whom she could turn loose on her assailant for street justice / revenge, and though she’s tempted, she ultimately decides not to get her hands dirty that way. But that premise is already far afield from what we’ve been led to expect from this series, like when David on Six Feet Under is psychologically tormented for an episode by a gun-wielding hitchhiker. In both cases it’s a random attack that feels like it violates the rules of the narrative around it, not to mention substituting a cheap shorthand of traumatic assault for character development.

Mostly, though, this all seems like yesterday’s news. And I get it! Thematically, these characters are all stuck in their repeating patterns, like Christopher and Paulie wandering endlessly through the bleak South Jersey wilderness. Dr. Melfi even points out that Tony’s attraction to women like Gloria lets him reenact his old maternal conflicts, which I suppose is reasonable enough. But you can only underscore such cycles so many times before the text starts seeming redundant and reductive, and The Sopranos is well past that point for me. I’m ready for bigger risks and more forward plot movement, please.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, drug abuse, racism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Jaws of Jakku by Cavan Scott

Book #160 of 2025:

Star Wars: The Jaws of Jakku by Cavan Scott

I picked up this audiobook-only Star Wars title in the hopes that its premise — following Rey, Finn, and BB-8 on a soul-searching mission back to the young woman’s homeworld after the events of The Last Jedi — would help smooth the transition between that film and The Rise of Skywalker. Unfortunately, the story instead turns out to be pretty generic filler content of the Disney+ Tales of the Whatever variety, telling us little about the characters or this stage of their respective journeys. The most interesting thing that happens isn’t the heroine gaining a degree more control over her Force powers, but rather the droid temporarily getting overwritten by a virus that causes him to turn on his friends.

I would probably call it all inoffensive and award this a baseline score of three-out-of-five stars, especially given the relatively short length of the piece, except the colloquial childishness of the excitable alien narrating the adventure proved rather irritating. Here’s how the second chapter begins, for example:

“Okay, so Rey wasn’t a Jedi yet. But she wanted to be! She wanted to be a Jedi so bad. But being a Jedi is hard. It takes years and years of practice and training. Legend has it that the original Jedi, the ones before the Empire, started training when they were kids. Like, really little kids. And Rey? Oh, she had a lot of catching up to do. So she worked hard on her lessons day and night, first with Master Skywalker and then with his sister, Princess Leia Organa. I know! An actual princess. And a general, to boot. Leia is kind of a big deal, out there in the stars…”

A whole book of that sort of tone (four hours on regular speed) was really too much for such a thin plot, so I’ll adjust my rating accordingly.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Book #159 of 2025:

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #1)

Tom Ripley, as depicted in this 1955 crime thriller, its four sequels, and their various screen adaptations, is a pretty great creation. He’s insecure and sociopathic, with author Patricia Highsmith painting him as almost pedestrian in his casual amorality and petty jealousies. He’s neither as smart nor as in control of his emotions as he’d like to think he is, and although his outbursts of violence can be shocking, the real surprise is in how quickly he starts fretting over the logistics of getting away with his impulsive actions. While many writers could tell the basic beats of this story with Ripley as the villain, it takes a true artist to force the audience to so neatly identify with his self-centered nihilism and to feel so dirtily complicit in his misdeeds and their elaborate coverups.

The plot is admittedly thin: our shady protagonist is approached in New York by the rich father of a distant acquaintance, who doesn’t realize he’s a low-level criminal scraping by on scamming people into paying him their supposed overdue tax fees. The son he barely remembers is lounging about in an Italian beach town on his family’s dime, so can Tom please go there and convince Dickie to return home? He’s of course happy to accept the free ticket, and to steadily ingratiate himself into the younger man’s carefree lifestyle upon his arrival. Things turn bloody when that chapter seems to be closing for him, and the rest of the novel finds the antihero scrambling to first impersonate the friend he’s now murdered and then defuse the suspicions of the local police.

When I read and reviewed this book back in 2018, I mentioned “some problematic queer-coding that implies a connection between Ripley’s ethical deviance and his ‘sissiness’ / potential sexual orientation.” This time through — perhaps influenced by the recent Netflix miniseries — I’m more sanguine about that element. Highsmith was known in her private life as a lesbian herself, and though her title figure denies it, he’s plainly not straight either, evincing both a fascination for male bodies and the sort of platonic masculinity he somehow can’t perform and a hatred of women and the idea of any conventional romance or sex with them. I no longer see the text as suggesting that that facet is a root cause of his dark nature, however, but rather that his repression has curdled into loathing and hollowed out the human core of him. Overall, it’s a nuanced depiction well-befitting this twisted midcentury character study.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green

Book #158 of 2025:

The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green (Nightside #8)

One of the blander adventures in this urban fantasy series, further hampered by a streak of sexism and unaddressed poor behavior from the protagonist. And look, I get that John Taylor is something of an antihero — the whole crux of this installment involves his one-off companion realizing in dawning horror that he’ll murder his enemies with no remorse when he has them at his mercy — but that sort of stark morality is at least quasi-defensible. It’s a lot harder for me to accept how he repeatedly cheats on his serious girlfriend by kissing this new character, who says he deserves to be with someone that can stand to touch him (Suzie having an established aversion to physical intimacy due to certain experiences in her past). In the end our detective hero rebuffs the newcomer, but only because the scarred bounty hunter is fine with all the killing and he feels that ‘monsters’ like the two of them deserve one another. No mention is made of how he’s been happily making out with the other woman regardless.

It’s problematic to say the least, and it’s particularly glaring due to not much else of interest happening throughout the novel. The local tabloid that gives the piece its title has hired the paranormal investigator to retrieve a supposed taped broadcast from the afterlife, but the plot doesn’t really build and ricochet in the way these books can do at their best. Instead the characters linearly chase one dead-end lead after another, with a smidgen of serialized development in the greater Nightside power struggle taking place on the margins. It’s altogether dull and nasty, rather than the typical clever fun that I come here for.

[Content warning for gun violence, fatphobia, incest, rape, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆