The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Pull to Open: 1962-1963: The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who by Paul Hayes

Book #20 of 2025:

Pull to Open: 1962-1963: The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who by Paul Hayes

A probably definitive overview of the creation of what would eventually become the BBC’s flagship science-fiction program Doctor Who, well before it had secured that reputation by longevity and popular acclaim. Although author Paul Hayes has conducted no new interviews for this work (published for the sixtieth anniversary of the series in 2023, when many of the principal figures would admittedly be unavailable), he’s exhaustively combed through the historical record, from old production memos and contemporaneous news articles to later memoirs and interview responses, all to produce this fairly cohesive account of the two years in the title.

It’s a somewhat arbitrary timespan. The idea for Doctor Who grew steadily over many creative sessions with various contributors, but the earliest concrete seeds appear to date to 1963. By setting his purview to cover the previous year as well, Hayes is able to share more of the background industry landscape of the era, as well as a few preliminary reports the studio had produced exploring the concept of sci-fi on television in general, which may or may not have been incorporated by the team later working on Who. In many areas like this, there’s no smoking gun of clear evidence regarding some specific piece of involvement; with human memory being fallible and many papers of the time not preserved, sometimes even the producers themselves disagree about who was responsible for what.

On the opposite end of the book’s designated period, the show famously premiered on November 23rd, 1963, with a slight delay due to overrun coverage of the recent JFK assassination. The writer again fudges a little to extend his window through the following month as well, presumably to include more details about the Daleks, those popular villains which were introduced in the second serial to air. But he stops long before any notion of regeneration or other changes to the cast or story format had been developed, leaving a curiously staid impression of a media property that by now is best known for its capacity to update and reinvent itself on a regular basis.

Regardless, it’s an interesting look at the topic of how certain elements gradually took shape — and false starts were discarded — as the first scripts were written, and a nice reminder of how many now-iconic pieces of the franchise like the TARDIS arrival sound were there from basically the beginning. We also get treated to lessons on outside British history and culture and mini-biographies of some of the key players both on and off the screen, although this of course necessitates going back even further than 1962. All things considered I wouldn’t classify this as any sort of must-read for fans, but it’s certainly been informative.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Sex Education, season 3

TV #6 of 2025:

Sex Education, season 3

I do love when a season of television has a distinct, contained storyline bracketing it. In conversation with someone else who’s seen the program, you could succinctly refer to this year of Sex Education as the one where Hope takes over Moordale, in a way that you couldn’t really do for either of the previous two seasons. (The Netflix art / marketing department, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. The poster obviously should have been a group shot of the students looking alternately sullen or resolute in their new school uniforms, with a tagline like “Change is coming. So are they.” Not whatever this bizarre botany textbook page is, with no significant connection to either the series or this specific run of it.)

Because yes, there’s a new head teacher on campus, and the increasingly restrictive policies that she introduces form the major thrust of season 3 before finally reaching a climax near the end. Various subplots weave in and out of that, and the whole thing is pretty delightful with the show’s usual grasp of character, offbeat humor, and charming candor about all facets of human sexuality. That also comes with the typical interpersonal drama, but most of the former petty antagonists like Adam and his dad have been sanded down and presented more sympathetically over time to where we can easily root for them at this point. Otis, our original leading man, is considerably nicer now than he had been last year too, not to mention further reduced to just one figure among the growing ensemble. All great writing choices, in my opinion.

The series still veers down some strange alleys from time to time — I don’t think Eric’s actions in Nigeria are remotely well-justified by what we know about him — and I do miss the days of Otis and Maeve’s initial sex clinic, which led to more cohesive episodic plots. But overall, this is a welcome step back in the right direction.

[Content warning for sexual assault, post-traumatic stress, domestic abuse, racism, sexism, transphobia, scatalogical humor, childbirth, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? by Crystal Smith Paul

Book #19 of 2025:

Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? by Crystal Smith Paul

I’m convinced there’s a stronger story buried somewhere in this authorial debut — the tale of a Black woman whose biracial daughter passes as white to eventually become a big Hollywood film star — but unfortunately, the version presented on the page isn’t especially effective. The novel has a tendency to tell when it should show, and the split timeline does more harm than good, as the sections set in the present day are far less compelling than those set in the Jim Crow past. The modern characters seem pretty thinly-developed by comparison, and their half of the plot doesn’t have any pressing stakes or reasons for readers to stay invested. (The three sisters don’t know why their elderly neighbor left them her estate in her will, but since they’re all millionaire celebrities anyway, it’s hard to feel interested in the mystery or summon much concern over what might happen after that. The relationships are shallow too, particularly those theoretically crucial ones between the girls and the late Kitty Karr, which we don’t even get to see in flashbacks.)

The earlier sequences carry more potential, though it’s ultimately squandered as well. Racial passing is a big complicated topic, and the book is at its best in interrogating that action and the cost it winds up placing on families divided by the color line — including the subsequent decision of white-passing women to have children or not, as there’s no guarantee that traits like darker skin which skipped one generation won’t reappear in the next. But the writing isn’t up to the task of fleshing out the historical setting, or of plotting the work in a sensible manner. We start in 2017 soon after Kitty’s death, before jumping to the 1930s and the early life of a maid who has a child by rape from her employers’ son. That girl grows up looking white, but it isn’t until a third of the way through the text that she moves west and changes her name to Kitty, a reveal that’s easy to predict yet simultaneously unclear if it’s supposed to be or not. As written, there’s nothing overtly connecting the two bifurcated strands until that point. A similar apparent twist occurs at the three-quarter mark to finally justify the time spent in the twenty-first century, which doesn’t offer nearly enough remaining space to properly unpack it and deal with the implications.

I had hoped that this title would resemble the works of Taylor Jenkins Reid, whose fictional creations generally manage to sing with realism and get me to care about their personal problems despite all their wealth and fame. Author Crystal Smith Paul approaches that level of immersion at certain moments with the older heroine and her mother, but the overall effect is considerably less impressive.

[Content warning for disordered eating, alcohol abuse including drunk driving, domestic abuse, and racism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doomsday by John Peel

Book #18 of 2025:

Doomsday by John Peel (2099 #1)

A neat teen sci-fi thriller that I can just vaguely remember reading in my youth. Since the series was written in 1999 and set a century later, I thought it would be entertaining to revisit now that we’re a quarter of the way there, to see where author John Peel was maybe on the right track.

And for the most part, I think he did a pretty good job! Way before the advent of smartphones, he was predicting news drones, an always-online media landscape accessible by wearable tech, and the use of holographic telepresence to virtually attend work, school, vacation destinations, and social gatherings. (In some ways, it’s a scaled-down version of Pixel’s futuristic homeworld in the same writer’s Diadem novels.) The only element that really rings false to me is the visual aspect of the computer programs that the various hackers deploy; they’re built to look and act like literal dragons and dogs and worms and so on, which is such an unnecessary design step that the whole thing feels a bit silly. But Peel totally nails the vulnerabilities of a global digital ecosystem to such creations — wiping out bank records, causing planes to malfunction and drop out of the sky, and so on — even if he doesn’t know to use modern terminology like the Internet of Things to describe them.

But anyway, we obviously shouldn’t judge a fictional work like this on its predictive power, when that was never supposed to be the point of it. Luckily it’s a solid story too, and a great launch to the wider premise, following four individuals as a catastrophic virus gets unleashed upon the world amid an Orphan Black-like cloning conspiracy. There’s Tristan, a 14-year-old who discovers he’s adopted and has no apparent genetic relatives anywhere in the available databases. There’s Devon, the kid who shares his appearance and DNA but is also the sociopath who created the doomsday weapon at the behest of his mysterious handlers. There’s Shimoda, a police inspector trying to find the culprit, and there’s Genia, a streetwise girl two years older than the boys who gets caught up in the conflict while running an advanced virtual pickpocketing scheme.

The plot is a little disjointed and aimless at first, but as events lead those characters to cross paths, it locks in and becomes considerably stronger. And even early on, the throwaway worldbuilding details are worth the price of admission alone. (Who knew that Leonardo DiCaprio would direct the beloved 2032 masterpiece I, Clinton? There’s still time for this one to come true!) Overall it’s a quick fun read that has me excited to continue rediscovering the remaining volumes ahead.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Book #17 of 2025:

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A simply excellent piece of science-fiction. I enjoyed the majority of this novel immensely, only to be blown away all over again by how the ending elevated it further. That’s an easy five stars, in my opinion.

The story takes its time in revealing the full stakes of the situation, but the basics are gripping right from the start: a protagonist waking up alone and confused in a strange sterile environment. He’s initially completely amnesiac, but his memory returns over the course of the tale, and it isn’t long before we learn he’s the last survivor of a desperate space mission trying to combat a global crisis involving the exponential waning of heat and light from the sun. The flashbacks continue sporadically as he remembers more and more, though the only big mystery hanging over the past is one that our hero doesn’t seem especially concerned with in the present — how exactly he, a junior high science teacher, became one of the small elite crew of international astronauts to earn a spot on the ship. Mostly those passages detailing the project’s origins are another excuse for author Andy Weir to show off his background research, walking us through the various problems and their ingenious solutions in an entertaining Michael Crichton fashion as the eventual launch window approaches.

If you’ve read this writer’s debut book The Martian (or seen the largely faithful movie adaptation), the basic rhythms of the plot here will be familiar: one man, far from earth, scrambling to apply his scientific know-how to survive under extraordinary conditions. The larger goal to save all life back home adds considerable weight to the equation, as does a certain first contact scenario that ultimately develops. It’s overall a sentimental hopepunk ode to the human spirit and the power of our species to triumph over adversity, and I’ve loved it to pieces. “Goodbye, friend Rocky” indeed.

[Content warning for discussion of gun violence, drug overdose, and suicide.]

★★★★★

Book Review: The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North

Book #16 of 2025:

The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #3)

Easily the best installment of its trilogy, and not only for finally dealing with the most exciting sequence of the plot, when the wayward king Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and defeats the perfidious rivals for his wife’s hand. It also features what I’d call the finest writing, as delivered to us by Athena, the latest Greek goddess to take up the mantle of storyteller. She manages to be both blunt and wry in that role, purporting to relate the true events that the myths have embellished whilst still acknowledging her own motive in interfering with the mortal drama to guarantee that the bards of the future will remember her name.

The combination makes for a great narrator, with some surprisingly radical politics. “No poets sing the songs of slaves,” muses the deity at one point. “It would be extraordinarily dangerous to give voices to the less-than-people of this world, lest it turn out they were people after all.” Elsewhere: “Such thoughts should raise uncomfortable questions about the value of kings and queens. (Very few monarchs have these thoughts, and thus do their dynasties die.)” And of course: “For though they were not sung, it was the mothers, the daughters and the wives who kept the world turning, the fires lit, the lights burning.”

Yes, this is another feminist reclamation project, retelling the traditional story through the lens of the participants whose identities would presumably have been marginalized in one way or another by poets like Homer. Women, children, and slaves have more of a voice here, and the novel specifically focuses on the lived experiences of Penelope, effectively widowed and holding her husband’s reign together in his absence for twenty long years, merely for him to then show up and shatter her careful equilibrium. I love the detail that she and her returning lover barely know one another anymore, and that each in fact considers having the other one executed to simplify the question of power. Although the heroine ultimately accepts him back and assists him in dispatching their household’s enemies, it’s a far cry from the patient and loyal helpmeet that she’s usually presented as. She also speaks up for the handmaidens that he murders, bitterly noting how they served the island kingdom honorably in quiet ways while he as its supposed ruler was nowhere to be found.

As with the first two volumes, this book is stronger the closer it sticks to the inherited structure of The Odyssey, and somewhat weaker when author Claire North invents brand-new material to fill in the resulting gaps. That epic poem ends with a perfunctory abbreviated battle, for instance, and revisiting it at greater length here, after the main action has already concluded, does tend to drag on a bit. I likewise have ultimate mixed feelings about the inclusion of the new character Kenemon in this series as a sympathetic presence among the suitors — his not-quite-romance with Penelope has generally been well-rendered, but there’s a sense as she ushers him away before the slaughter in this title of the writer pulling her punches, rather than leaning into the tragedy that he’s heretofore represented. Such qualms hold me back from my highest critical rating, but overall, I do really enjoy what North has crafted here and how it stands in conversation with its forerunner texts.

[Content warning for rape and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 3 > 1 > 2

TV Review: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 2

TV #5 of 2025:

Marvel’s The Punisher, season 2

This was the last piece of Netflix’s old Defendersverse (2015 – 2019) that I hadn’t seen before, both because I hadn’t felt very invested in the first season of the show and because at the time, the parent company seemed to be drawing a hard line and saying that no characters or plots from that canceled Marvel Television corner would ever connect with the wider MCU going forward. Of course, things in the media landscape change, and Daredevil and his nemesis Kingpin have now subsequently appeared in several Disney titles each (Spider-Man: No Way Home, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Echo for the former; Hawkeye and Echo for the latter), as well as the upcoming series Daredevil: Born Again. With Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle also due to make an appearance there, I figured I should finally get around to catching up on his latest adventures, though I doubt they’ll be especially relevant.

This season hasn’t blown me away, but it’s similar to the first in being sporadically effective, both in its gunfire-heavy action sequences and its central acting / character work. Bernthal is still magnetically soulful in a role that could seem pretty thin on paper, and he’s more than matched by the charismatic Ben Barnes as his treacherous returning enemy Billy Russo. I also like the basic idea we start with here, which is that the antihero called the Punisher is in a relatively stable place with his own affairs for once before getting involved as a Good Samaritan in somebody else’s problems. The skilled drifter stepping up to offer unexpected assistance is a classic trope for a reason, and it offers a nice change of pace from all Frank’s personal drama, at least initially.

As the story plays out, however, the unfinished business with Russo does get woven back in, and both sides of the bifurcated narrative wind up faltering. While Castle’s bond with the young hustler he helps is sweet — and refreshingly positioned as parental, rather than romantic — the stakes of her storyline don’t make much sense, with her powerful enemies amassing quite a body count all to stop her from sharing a photograph of two men chastely kissing. Meanwhile Billy escapes from captivity with no memory of who injured him, embarks on a new life of crime, and falls into a bizarrely under-developed romance with his therapist. Madani, Curtis, and Mahoney are all around again too, alternately chastising and abetting the increasingly bloodied protagonist as he proceeds to mow a path through the various villains and their henchmen.

There’s potential in a lot of these elements, but like Russo’s promised disfigurement being reduced to a few cosmetic scars on Barnes’s familiar handsome face, it usually falters in the end. The program never really decides how to feel about Frank’s brutal morality, for instance — at one point he’s in crisis because he thinks he killed a few innocents while shooting through a wall, but then he soon gets absolved of that when it turns out the victims were murdered ahead of time and merely staged in his line of fire. The writers aren’t interested in examining how he obviously still could have caused such casualties with his indiscriminate violence, let alone whether the people he actually intends to kill deserve the extrajudicial execution, and so the audience gets to enjoy the spectacle with an easy conscience. By the last scene of the finale, it seems like we’re supposed to be so firmly on his side that we’ll even cheer him gunning down a group of young minority gang members, in a frankly terrible closing image of the guy that belies any possible character growth.

But he was always better as a foil for heroes with a different code to run up against than as a lead in his own right, so I can’t fault the impulse to bring him back for the new Daredevil project on Disney+. And I’m amazed we got as many episodes of the Frank Castle show as we did, Bernthal’s great performance and the expected shoot-’em-up thrills notwithstanding.

[Content warning for sexual assault, racism, pedophilia, suicide, torture, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2

Book Review: Iorich by Steven Brust

Book #15 of 2025:

Iorich by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #12)

In many ways, this Vlad Taltos installment feels like a rehash of #10 Dzur, with the reformed hitman protagonist again lured back against his better judgment to the hometown where his enemies still have a price on his head, in order to sort out some conspiratorial political intrigue and save the friend who’s gotten caught up in all of it. This time it’s Aliera and not Cawti who’s under threat, as the Dragonlord has been jailed on trumped-up charges that she’s too stubborn / honorable to defend herself against, and so it’s up to Vlad to both hire a lawyer and do his usual business of stirring up various parties to see what shakes loose, all while dodging the assassins that his former employers keep sending his way.

The look at the Dragaeran legal system is interesting, and author Steven Brust’s politics are as jaded as ever. (The ultimate convoluted scheme that the hero uncovers here involves — in part! — the arrest serving to distract attention from a recent incident where soldiers slaughtered unarmed protesters, which is being blamed on their commander’s drug use to pressure the government into making those stimulants illegal, so that the conspirators can corner the market on smuggling, and so on. If any of that strikes you as a spoiler, then you might just be new to this series, which regularly traffics in such plans that are so abstract as to be basically meaningless to the characters we actually care about.) It’s an entertaining read nonetheless, but ultimately too much of a retread of familiar elements from previous stories, without doing quite enough to push either the ex-Jhereg or his circumstances forward to whatever’s next.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch

Book #14 of 2025:

Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch

What a delight it is to reenter the world of Camorr, that medieval Venice-inspired city-state with its elaborate criminal underworld staking out rival gang territories along the canals. Author Scott Lynch has published a variety of shorter fiction in the years since his last Gentleman Bastard novel came out in 2013, but this title — released in two parts over the October 2024 and January 2025 issues of Grimdark Magazine — is the first to return to that fantasy series and its antiheroic lead, the too-clever-by-half Locke Lamora.

It’s a prequel, taking us back to when the protagonist was only thirteen and still learning his illegal trade under the watchful eyes of Father Chains, who has loaned the boy out to a different crew for the summer as a sort of temporary work placement. There he does menial tasks behind the bar at his new bosses’ gambling den and tries hard to stay out of trouble, which of course is never easy for either his temperament or the setting.

The descriptive details are immersive as always, and the story gradually focuses around one of the regulars at the establishment, an old sellsword who’s clearly circling an unhappy end. But he’s friendly with the teen hero in the meantime, and his ultimate fate proves an object lesson for the man that Locke is growing into.

An automatic three stars for the typical excellence of the familiar atmosphere alone, punched up further for the cruel sting of the ending. Ideally I would’ve liked to spend longer on the plot here, and especially to see more of certain other beloved characters, but this is overall a strong offering that makes me eager for the additional novellas that Lynch has announced are coming out soon.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

Movie #1 of 2025:

Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

This spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery had a complicated production history, beginning life as an intended sister series to that show and Strange New Worlds before getting derailed by COVID-19 delays and ultimately scaled back to the form of a TV movie with some potential room for a sequel at the end. It finds the character of former Emperor Philippa Georgiou, now returned to her own time (though not her original universe), as she’s recruited once more by Starfleet’s secretive intelligence branch for a dangerous special mission.

This is not the best use of that title concept, which was memoraby introduced on Deep Space Nine and then considerably defanged by Georgiou’s tenure on Discovery. As initially envisioned, Section 31 exists to do the black ops work of assassination and sabotage that Starfleet can’t officially condone but still sees as necessary to maintain order across the quadrant. It was a bleak undercutting of the noble principles that the rest of the franchise tends to espouse, and well fitting with DS9’s darker moral tone. On Discovery, that same organization became more of an open secret and a catch-all taskforce that works hand-in-hand with the regular officer class, their assignments no longer specifically of an otherwise illegal or immoral nature.

Unfortunately, it’s the latter characterization that prevails here, rendering this movie not an implicit critique of Trek militarized power but just a wacky adventure with a gang of misfits a la Suicide Squad or Marvel’s upcoming Thunderbolts*. Even more disappointingly, it’s a pretty uneven example of that genre, its team members not especially remarkable and its story logic often making absolutely zero sense upon reflection of which characters knew what when they made particular choices. The banter is amusing but sometimes noticeably out-of-place in the sci-fi setting, with modern expressions like “whatevs” and “friends with benefits” that I’m skeptical would still be around a few centuries from now.

The strongest parts are those depicting the antiheroine’s backstory in the mirrorverse Terran Empire, which offers its usual blend of dystopia and high camp without feeling like a simple retread of material we already know. But it’s too detached from the protagonist’s full past to be an effective character piece, totally eliding her experiences in the distant future, her impersonation of her prime counterpart, her other jobs for Section 31, and so on. It’s like the producers are pitching the project for an unfamiliar general audience, despite crafting a plot with fairly niche appeal and then dropping it on Paramount+ with minimal fanfare. Overall it’s a bit of a mess, although at least Michelle Yeoh still seems to be having fun with the role.

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

★★☆☆☆