The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 16

TV #3 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 16

Ambitious in concept but significantly less impressive in execution, unfortunately. This 1978-1979 season of Doctor Who introduces two major elements: the incoming companion Romana played (for now) by Mary Tamm, and a larger plot arc focused on a powerful artifact called the Key to Time. The former is a new sort of character for the show, a co-lead who as a fellow Time Lord is intentionally positioned as the Doctor’s putative equal, rather than another junior assistant, friend, or travelmate. In practice, however, she’s not so radically different from her predecessors — a situation which led to the actress exiting the role after just this one season and the next one starting with her having already regenerated into somebody else offscreen.

As for the linking narrative, which was likewise a bit of a novelty for the time, it sadly doesn’t amount to much either. It’s introduced grandly enough as an assignment from a godlike being calling himself the White Guardian, who instructs the Doctor to assemble the six segments of the device to prevent the universe from falling into chaos (an abstract notion that’s never quite defined for us in any real concrete terms). But as it plays out, the serials that follow are basically traditional Who stories with a random macguffin stuck on at the end, somewhat like The Keys of Marinus all the way back in season 1. The overall conclusion to the storyline is rather weak too, with the evil Black Guardian posing as his opposite and asking our hero to hand over the pieces he’s now assembled. Instead, the Doctor sees through the disguise and scatters them back across time and space, apparently undoing all his hard work of collecting them in the first place. Was the villain the one who sent him on the mission initially? How does the actual White Guardian feel about not receiving his completed item? Are there any consequences for the protagonist not doing what he was told? The script isn’t remotely interested in answering those questions or giving us any kind of closure there.

Setting the fetch quest aside, the episodes this season are largely fine but unremarkable. Romana I, the Fourth Doctor, and K-9 Mark II are a fun team of clever rivals always seeking to upstage one another, and the program generally uses them well. The low budgets are definitely beginning to show, however, especially when the story ideas are so thin on the ground. It’s not that the creativity isn’t there, but promising concepts like android dopplegangers, a time loop to stop an interplanetary war, and a mechanical planet that crushes smaller worlds inside it for resources simply aren’t developed enough to stick out as particularly memorable. Only one adventure this year really grabs my attention with its surprising degree of anticolonial anger, but if Doctor Who has proved anything by this point, it’s that the franchise offers a wide umbrella that can encompass many sorts of permutations like that. I just wish this latest iteration were stronger throughout, much as I begrudgingly admire the effort.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
THE ARMAGEDDON FACTOR (16×21 – 16×26)

★★★☆☆
THE PIRATE PLANET (16×5 – 16×8)
THE STONES OF BLOOD (16×9 – 16×12)
THE RIBOS OPERATION (16×1 – 16×4)
THE ANDROIDS OF TARA (16×13 – 16×16)

★★★★☆
THE POWER OF KROLL (16×17 – 16×20)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

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

TV Review: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, season 1

TV #2 of 2025:

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, season 1

Call it popcorn entertainment if you want, but this show absolutely nails its Star Wars children’s adventure vibe. The franchise has never really done anything like this before, give or take the old Ewok movies, but the mashup of the traditional science-fiction trappings with the rollicking energy of a suburban 80s Amblin feature turns out to be a pretty winning combination.

The Goonies with its own pirate treasure hunt is the most obvious point of comparison, with the late director Richard Donner even getting a sly call-out in the name of Captain Rennod — read it backwards — but the series overall understands its genre and its swashbuckling predecessors well, including other character names like Silvo* in a Long John Silver kind of role and the droid SM-33 as a bit like Captain Hook’s second-in-command Mr. Smee. Now, are kids liable to catch these references? Perhaps not. But it’s a good sign of how the writers have approached the material, resulting in intelligent fare that the whole family can enjoy, rather than mindless children’s programming or lazy nostalgia bait.

Plotwise, four students stumble across a buried spaceship in the woods and accidentally reactivate its systems, rocketing away from their home planet with no clear way to return and interested pirates hot on their trail. There’s not really a puzzle-box mystery here, but we soon discover that nobody in the wider galaxy has ever heard of their world as a real place, just a legendary repository of riches. The young protagonists are likewise unaware of outside happenings like the recent Rebellion against the Empire, which helps the story feel like a complete standalone. We don’t even get Carson Teva as the requisite X-Wing pilot in this New Republic / Mandalorian era, which again suggests a piece that’s meant to stay largely independent of such connections.

(At the same time, the Easter Eggs are there for the spotting: a Star Tours ride vehicle floating near the space station that the heroes visit, an opening sequence reminiscent of Vader’s original entrance from A New Hope, and so on. There’s even a holographic display that looks a lot like the one from the Star Wars Holiday Special, which…. bless this production team for pulling into the proper canon. No notes.)

But although it may feint that way a few times, there’s no big twist* or plot to be theorizing about beyond the kids returning home, those lingering oddities surrounding their planet, and whatever the resident scoundrel played by Jude Law has up his sleeve. It’s simply fun, with a well-developed cast of youngsters who are both endearing and believably impulsive, and it delivers some striking disability representation in one particularly memorable scene. I don’t know whether we’re getting another season, or where the storyline would go if we did, but I’ve had a blast with the first year of this title. And overall, I’d say I’m very pleased that Star Wars as a brand is proving malleable enough to do both this and the darker work on Andor or The Acolyte so well.

*While a minor issue, Jod’s multiple names — Jod Na Nawood, Captain Silvo, and Crimson Jack — never really get explained or resolve into anything meaningful. It’s a needlessly confusing detail. I’ve also heard from viewers who were convinced that there *were* big mysteries like secret identities to speculate about, and though I never felt that way myself, I can see how the construction of the season could feed that sort of frenzy in the fandom. (Why don’t we get to see Rennod’s face? Why don’t we learn more about the Supervisor before the finale, when all the people on At Attin apparently share that knowledge already? Etc.) As a whole, I’d still call this the strongest Star Wars show besides Andor, but those rougher elements do tend to stick out a bit once you notice them.

[Content warning for gun violence and slavery.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

Book #7 of 2025:

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow #2)

An excellent follow-up to author Xiran Jay Zhao’s smash hit Iron Widow, a YA feminist sci-fi reimagining of China’s 7th-century Empress Regent Wu Zetian. Although it doesn’t carry the same gleeful fury or as many giant mecha action sequences as the original novel, this sequel finds the protagonist in another precarious position, having to reign over the new society whose leaders she successfully toppled before. I feel basic for leaping to a Hunger Games comparison here, but both series do ultimately turn on questions of how governments forged from revolutionary violence can avoid terrorizing their subjects unduly, whilst carrying out the reformist agenda their supporters demand and stamping out the final embers of suspected loyalty to the old regime throughout the population. Plus there’s a love triangle!

It’s that last trope that gives me the most pause. One of the great things about the previous book was that it took the possibility of a tired romantic rivalry and instead refreshingly pivoted to the heroine and both men finding comfort in a queer polyamorous triad together. But now, one partner is absent for much of the story, and the empress is thrown in with a third suitor in lieu of spending time with the remaining member of her polycule. This plot effectively recreates the triangle all over again, with the newcomer on one side growing closer to the young ruler while the scribe Gao Yizhi is heavily sidelined on the other. The ending rehabilitates this element to some degree, but it feels disappointingly conventional along Gale and Peeta lines until then.

I’d draw a parallel to Red Rising and some of Brandon Sanderson’s work too, particularly his Mistborn and Skyward sagas. Like the characters in those, Zetian learns in this volume that there are fundamental ideas about her world that are no more than lies spread to control the powerless, and that the universe is actually far bigger and stranger than the immediate conflict she’s been so focused on winning. Thus in addition to figuring out how to rule justly over her new empire below, she must also recalibrate her thinking to take in and begin confronting the greater threats that were previously beyond her horizon.

It’s a good read overall! Slower and heavier on the politics than some readers might want — and the leftist critiques of capitalism sometimes feel a bit direct for a theoretically different planet like this — and I’m not wholly satisfied with the treatment of either disability or gender. On the former topic, the main character’s handicap from her family’s cruel foot-binding practice is healed by a miraculous surgery that she doesn’t even consent to, and on the latter, she goes along with a prisoner’s castration under the logic that his anatomy doesn’t make him a man anyway. On reflection I suppose such matters do help characterize her and her associates as naive and imperfect, but they mostly seem like they could have benefited from more space in the narrative to unpack and consider.

Regardless, I have enjoyed this installment of what’s clearly no longer a duology, and I look forward to seeing what’s coming next after the inevitable betrayal(s) at the end of this one.

[Content warning for sexism, rape, forced pregnancy, domestic abuse, child sexual abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

Book #6 of 2025:

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

The nicest thing I can say about this 2023 contemporary fantasy novel is that it is a vastly superior execution of certain similar ideas from Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors, which was published the following year. I’m sure the resemblances are coincidental, but both stories happen to revolve around a variety of rare single-trick spellbooks and the secretive community of aficionados around the world who trade in them, one of whom is trying to amass the lot by force. You obviously don’t have to have read that unrelated 2024 title — heck, I wouldn’t even recommend it, as I gave it my lowest rating for a reason — but the comparison and contrast has been helpful for me as a reader to clarify what I like about this one as well as its unfortunate limits.

The first half starts out strong, introducing our three POV protagonists in alternating chapters. One young woman is an electrician on a tour of duty in Antarctica, where she’s just broken her dead father’s rule to never stay more than a year in the same place, lest their family’s supposed enemies magically track her down. The second heroine is her estranged half-sister in Vermont, navigating a fraught relationship with her mother and looking after the collection their dad entrusted to her, whose wards must be renewed every evening in person, preventing her from ever traveling far. Finally, the last figure we’re following is an overprotected British man, never allowed to leave the library where he works at writing new mystic texts, who gradually realizes that he’s effectively enslaved there by a relative who may not have his best interests at heart.

Those plots progress nicely on their own for a while before they begin to converge, but once they do, the whole enterprise grinds to a halt for me. Everything then becomes a tedious extended affair of trading explanatory exposition back and forth, with some romance shoehorned-in at the last minute that’s not especially interesting or convincing. We’re also treated to several instances of a character not being able to say what’s driving them because of a silencing spell, yet demanding that their associates somehow take their recommended course of action on blind trust anyway. So they do, and they save the day, and it’s all very pleasant and significantly more competent a story than that terrible Gareth Brown attempt. But at the end of the day, there’s nothing here that really makes me sit up and fall in love with it, either.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Sex Education, season 1

TV #1 of 2025:

Sex Education, season 1

Thankfully much stronger than the raunchy comedy I was half-expecting this series to be, although it certainly doesn’t shy away from its mature subject matter and offers some admittedly hilarious laughs along the way. The concept of a shy virgin with his own share of hangups channeling his sex therapist mother’s wisdom to become a sort of sexuality whisperer for his fellow British teens is inherently fun, and the relationship drama that underpins all that is a neat framework for the episodic cases he consults on at his unofficial school clinic. True, Otis is a bit of an entitled Nice Guy™️ in his unrequited(-ish) crush on Maeve, but the narrative generally seems to recognize that and not reward him for it. She’s also a pretty well-drawn character in her own right rather than simply a manic pixie love interest for him, with her self-sabotaging insecurity behind her bad girl act regularly the most interesting thing happening on the screen.

(In fact, she and Gillian Anderson as the protagonist’s mom are among the most developed characters overall — though the two of them never interact all season, and the show occasionally fumbles the Bechdel test from episode to episode. There are plenty of girls and women here, but they’re often siloed into storylines where their major contributions are defined solely by the male relations around them rather than by themselves or one another.)

And then there’s Eric, the hero’s gay best friend. Ncuti Gatwa is phenomenal in that role, so much more flamboyant than I’ve seen him be on Doctor Who, and I appreciate that he gets meaty plots of his own instead of only ever supporting his white costars. His dynamic with his dad is a particularly nice surprise, turning what could have been a boring bigotry trope into a man who genuinely loves but struggles to understand his son, and who worries (correctly!) that he’ll be hurt for living so loudly as himself. That’s the thread I’m most hoping to see more of in the seasons ahead.

For now, everything builds to a climax — pun intended — rather nicely with all the ongoing story arcs, whilst leaving open several lingering issues yet to be resolved. This feels like a program that easily could have ended after just the one year, so I’m very pleased that Netflix appears to have renewed it a few times instead.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, panic attacks, sexual assault, drug and alcohol abuse, homophobic / transphobic violence, racism, revenge porn, suicide, and stalking.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos

Book #5 of 2025:

From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This novel is pretty YA, in a way that I think I’m finally starting to outgrow as I approach my late-thirties. There are lots of flowery poetic descriptions of how the teenage protagonist feels about her newly-discovered love interest, for instance, although the two girls share nothing more physically intimate than a brief kiss near the end. Even the body horror is relatively tame — the strange curse afflicting Hannah may cause her to wake up with forehead horns one morning and a long tail the next, but the transformations aren’t painful or especially off-putting as they’d probably be in a work for more mature audiences.

I’m also a little disgruntled at how the story frames its very Jewish subject matter. The whole thing hinges on classic elements of mysticism from that tradition like sheddim and golems, but since the heroine’s mother ran away from her family at a young age and never told her children anything about her past, they are outsiders to Judaism themselves, forced to do quick research on things like sitting shiva or havdalah rather than having such knowledge and feelings of Jewish community naturally incorporated into their lives already. It’s of course #ownvoices author Rebecca Podos’s right to frame the narrative that way, and I’m sure it rings true to certain reader experiences, but it seems like a surrender to the tired idea that Jews are a category of Other that must always be carefully explained to the mainstream, and it chafes against me in an era when we’re getting so many brilliant titles that ground their Jewishness as the default instead.

At the same time: this is a sort of plot that I can’t recall ever seeing before, and I don’t want to undersell the point that nearly every major character is both Jewish and queer. (The cursed teen’s adopted brother is gay, the golem they encounter is genderless, etc.) I would have been blown away by this level of representation back when I was in high school myself, and that’s not something I can easily set aside just because the fantasy genre has thankfully expanded over the decades since then. And I appreciate too how the centuries-old supernatural being who claims a mortal child for his lover is categorically framed as a monster and a villain for that behavior, whereas the usual trope in Twilight or whatever would problematically position that kind of figure as a swoonworthy lothario. Now that’s a writing decision with some real teeth to it, and worth the extra half-star in my opinion.

[Content warning for pogroms and other historical antisemitism.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Jhegaala by Steven Brust

Book #4 of 2025:

Jhegaala by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #11)

There’s always been a noir element in the DNA of this fantasy sequence, but it’s rarely as overt as it is in this installment, which finds the ex-assassin Vladimir Taltos traveling in the East, far from the familiar Draegaran Empire. (For those reading his adventures in release order, we’ve gone back to the time in between #5 Phoenix and #6 Athyra, when he was still new to the fugitive lifestyle and the giant bounty on his head.)

He’s come to a small town there to track down some of his dead mother’s relatives that he never knew, out of idle curiosity and the need to lay low somewhere that his enemies wouldn’t think to look for him, but like any classic investigator, he soon find intrigues and murky allegiances he doesn’t have the necessary context to understand. No one believes that his innocent questions are just that, and their assumptions of his ulterior motives ignite the simmering local tensions in a few disastrous ways.

Over the course of the ensuing plot, our antihero gets bloodied, certain bystanders pay dearly, and the townsfolk eventually learn why Vlad was such a dangerous operator for his former employers. It’s a different sort of read for the series — the only entry not to feature even a single ‘elf’ on the page, for instance, though the reformed hitman interestingly feels as ill at ease among his own people as he ever did as a member of the diaspora back home — and it admittedly can seem somewhat aimless early on, before the protagonist has a greater purpose beyond investigating his family roots. But once that streak of stubborn justice is introduced to the story, he’s a man on a mission as the rural setting grows steadily more sinister around him. Overall it’s a nice character study of the figure at this stage of his life, and a great first look at his ancestral homeland.

[Content warning for child murder, torture, fatphobia, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: House of Odysseus by Claire North

Book #3 of 2025:

House of Odysseus by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #2)

Unfortunately not as gripping as the first book in the series, though just as committed to its feminist reclamation of Penelope’s traditional narrative. The problem here is that the previous volume already established her basic status quo keeping the suitors at bay near the end of her husband’s wanderings, and this sequel doesn’t have much additional story to tell within that space. Instead, we see a return from the queen’s cousins Orestes and Electra, the former now driven mad following his execution of their mother Clytemnestra. This version of their tale finds them again on Ithaca’s shores, this time pursued by their uncle Menelaus, who’s seeking confirmation of the rumors that his nephew is unfit to remain king.

That plot is largely author Claire North’s own invention, as is the precise way it unfolds. While Orestes is both wracked with guilt and afflicted by the usual divine Furies for his sin of spilling familial blood, his infirmity actually has a more proximate mortal cause: a poison that someone in his household has somehow been administering to him in secret. Thus the novel turns into a bit of a mystery affair, especially after one of the enslaved women serving the family is murdered as well.

The genre mashup is admirable, but it doesn’t wholly work for me. Nor does the substitution of the goddess Hera, our narrator before, with her rival and daughter-in-law Aphrodite. She’s a flightier character than the holy matriarch, and doesn’t seem to have as strong a conviction or stake in how events should play out on earth. As a result, her perspective feels less vital to the text, as though she were any generic omniscient storyteller rather than a specific figure with certain viewpoints and desires. The overall effect is a more muted production, although I’m interested enough in this take on the saga that I’ll still check out the next installment where the absent Odysseus finally returns home.

[Content warning for suicide, domestic abuse, rape, and child sexual abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Saint of the Bookstore by Victoria Goddard

Book #2 of 2025:

The Saint of the Bookstore by Victoria Goddard

A lovely midwinter interlude in the Greenwing & Dart series, taking place soon after #6 Plum Duff and following up on a certain momentous development from #4 Blackcurrant Fool. The protagonist is a new character, a sister from a religious order, who’s been sent to the rural village of Ragnor Bella to investigate and determine whether that earlier incident was a genuine miracle, an act of magic instead, or simply an elaborate hoax. There’s no real tension here — it would be a strange and spoilery book for someone to start with, and returning readers already know what the woman will discover — and either by coincidence or providence, she quickly meets up with Jemis Greenwing to make her inquiries.

A subplot in the novella concerns a lost little girl who stumbles into Jemis’s bookshop in the middle of a snowstorm, and how he warms and comforts her as the nun observes the pair. The stakes aren’t especially high, but given how the genre of the extended Nine Worlds saga leans towards cozy fantasy, that’s perhaps to be expected. Jemis soothes the child while author Victoria Goddard works a similar wonder on us, summoning that drowsy feeling of being snuggled safely inside on a cold winter’s night. It’s a neat effect and a rare chance to see the young hero from an outsider’s perspective, not to mention when he’s not in the midst of one of his typical madcap adventures with his friends. We even learn something that has implications for the regular ensemble dynamics going forward / on a reread, marking this title as rather more than just the random bonus feature it might appear to be.

Overall, a delight.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Art of ReBoot by David Roberts and Gavin Blair

Book #1 of 2025:

The Art of ReBoot by David Roberts and Gavin Blair

Inspired by the recent ReBoot: ReWind documentary, I decided to check out this art book from 2007 (via InterLibrary Loan — I had an eBay alert set up for a little while, but I never saw any used copies going for under $100). As promised, it’s a look back at the design work for ReBoot, the world’s first all-CGI television show, which originally ran from 1994 to 2001. This title has a few retrospective blurbs from the creators throughout, together with some totally unnecessary character summaries, but the main appeal for any fan would be the early concept drawings, especially those from the imaginative comic artist Brendan McCarthy.

At the same time, it’s far from an exhaustive collection — the documentarians in 2024 dug up quite a few pieces that aren’t included — and the tone is off-putting for material aimed partially at children: two instances of Mouse being called sexy, for instance, and an outdated racial term used to describe the inspiration behind Phong. Still, it’s been neat enough to read through these hundred pages to revisit the series this way at least once, even if I won’t be seeking out a copy for my own shelves.

★★★☆☆