The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: The Punisher: One Last Kill (2026)

Movie #23 of 2026:

The Punisher: One Last Kill (2026)

Somehow actor Jon Bernthal convinced Disney to greenlight two different passion projects for him to cowrite and star in this month, taking established characters he’d played for years in an ensemble and delivering an hour-length special about each of them in turn. Neither the Gary episode of The Bear nor this MCU feature are great — suggesting it’s perhaps the writing as much as the acting that renders the roles so memorable — but this one is at least a thrilling action piece built around a brutal extended fight scene through an entire New York City apartment complex.

People online have been comparing this picture to the John Wick movies, but I haven’t seen those, so I’ll instead say that it’s like The Warriors, just with less fun coordinated costume theming and way more violence and gore. The threadbare plot involves our returning antihero Frank Castle, presumably after his cameos on Daredevil: Born Again season one (which followed the Netflix run of Daredevil and his own The Punisher spinoff) and before his upcoming appearance in the next Spider-Man movie this summer. We find him here at the end of his rope, having finally completed his long mission of executing everyone who could possibly have been connected to his family’s murders, and now seriously considering killing himself as well. When he doesn’t, a new villain emerges and tells him she’s set a bounty on his head that will soon alert every lowlife thug in the area — newly given over to lawless rioting in the wake of Frank taking out the mob bosses who previously ran it — to his location. He’s still in a stupor of depression and PTSD at this point, but he wakes up in time once the goons start running wild in his building.

And then he proceeds to do his thing, which is both as exciting and as morally dubious as ever, inviting us to cheer for a protagonist who kills with ruthless efficiency and no hint of mercy or anything like due process. The Punisher is a highly skilled former Marine, and he basically mows through his adversaries, whose only advantages are their numbers and their weapons. (Amusingly, he brings very little into this long encounter, opting to instead keep picking up the dropped guns of his victims and other nearby tools like he’s some kind of video game avatar.) We don’t get much insight into his emotional state or his relationships, though Karen Page, his dead wife and children, and his old friend Curtis appear as brief hallucinations. Otherwise I’m not sure he speaks to anyone except himself during this whole ordeal, which is an interesting stylistic choice but rather tends to flatten him as a character.

I treat standalone specials like these as films for review purposes, but this one might have been better if it were lengthy enough to merit actual theatrical release. An additional act at the beginning or end, for instance, showing Castle forming meaningful connections with the neighbors he’s nominally protecting, could have significantly helped us understand where Bernthal sees him at this stage of his story. (I’m not even positive this is supposed to be what the vigilante is up to over the events of Born Again season 2, although I do believe that that’s the intent.) As is, One Last Kill is around the size of one of his regular TV episodes, yet totally isolated from that ongoing context or any serialized arcs. It makes for a decent shoot-em-up spectacle, but nothing remarkable besides.

[Content warning for violence against animals.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

Book #72 of 2026:

Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #5)

[Obligatory.]

I have mixed opinions about this fifth Nero Wolfe story. On the one hand, I feel like the series is at least incrementally improving, and author Rex Stout has really settled into the sardonic tone of his narrator Archie Goodwin, who serves as an assistant and public face for the brilliant but agoraphobic consulting detective. As in the previous volumes, the relationship between the two men — and specifically how the wisecracking employee enjoys needling his boss to get a rise out of him — is probably the strongest part, while the mechanics of the mystery leave something to be desired. In the big reveal speech that’s typical of the genre, Wolfe again shares clues that he learned because he had a hunch and sent an agent to investigate for him, but which were never disclosed to the reader until that point.

The bigger problem with this piece, however, is the incredible amount of racism throughout. Anti-Black slurs abound, and although there’s a suggestion that the New York protagonists are less prejudiced than the white West Virginia yokels they find themselves among, they do nothing to push back against the many bigoted things that they overhear. Several characters don convincing blackface, including the latest murderer, who wants to throw blame onto someone in the resort waitstaff. The hero himself also makes joking observations about various people’s ethnicities, the setting being a convention of some of the top chefs from around the world, which along with his persistent sexism is not exactly the most endearing quality.

I realize the book was written in 1938 and must be understood in the context of that era, but it’s still a lot for a modern audience to have to wade through. And since I’ve seen multiple lists holding this up as one of the writer’s best, I think this is as good a time as any for me to step away from his works for now.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Return to Mars by Ben Bova

Book #71 of 2026:

Return to Mars by Ben Bova

A largely pointless rehash of a sequel. I really enjoyed Ben Bova’s novel Mars in his loose Grand Tour saga of early space exploration, but there’s little that this second visit to the red planet accomplishes that wasn’t done better in the first. You also need to strain your credulity to accept that the returning protagonist would get to be on the limited-size crew again, to say nothing of how much he mansplains about it to his extremely qualified new colleagues, who presumably have studied up for the experience themselves.

The primary difference this time is that Jamie is butting heads with a rival “alpha male,” who among other annoying behaviors keeps making racist comments about our half-Navajo hero. He’s there to represent the business interests funding the expedition — in contrast to the multinational compact that launched the last one — and there’s a lot of abstract talk about whether the Martian desert ever could or should be turned into a profitable tourist destination. The two men squabble over their common love interest too, although since the romance from the previous book apparently didn’t survive long back on Earth, it’s hard to feel particularly invested in its photocopied replacement as an element of this story.

Following the ambiguities from before, concrete evidence of extinct intelligent life is eventually discovered, which is a neat development but ultimately not enough to save the work. Otherwise the main late action is an underbaked saboteur subplot, which plays like a mystery but without any clues to actually identify the culprit (or a motive beyond vague mental instability) ahead of the big reveal. It’s very Dan Brown, in the worst way.

I’m not sure I read much further into the wider series than this 1999 title when I was younger, and I hope the rest of the books prove to be more engaging. If not, I might have to board the escape pod from this venture somewhat sooner than expected.

[Content warning for mention of rape.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, season 2

TV #23 of 2026:

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, season 2

Definitely a more scattered year than the one before, which benefited from the dual throughlines of the heroine grappling with her new superpower and her father’s declining health to give it structure. This one by contrast is all over the place with mini-arcs and guest spots of characters who arrive for a few episodes and then depart again, from an annoying coworker (Harvey Guillén!) to Zoey’s sister-in-law’s artsy sister to a potential love interest neighbor and so forth. Our lead remains torn between two other men too, and so this season finds time to explore romances with each of them in turn. It’s also somewhat painfully a product of 2021, which entails occasional pivots to cover postpartum depression and racial injustice in the tech industry — important topics, to be sure, but not ones that a musical comedy about a quirky white lady who hears people’s thoughts as songs is necessarily well-equipped to handle.

Nevertheless, I’ve generally had fun with this follow-up, and it recovers better from the loss of Lauren Graham as the protagonist’s mentor / boss (who left to do a different show) than I feared it would. The penultimate episode is especially great for offering one of those flashback origin stories that a series can only do once it really knows its cast inside and out, with lots of clever ways to incorporate the folks who wouldn’t logically be around for day one at SPRQ Point. It’s endearingly silly, to the point where it has trouble sometimes balancing the serious mental health angles that it raises, but it ultimately earns its cheesy romcom ending.

And there’s still a feature-length Christmas special that aired after this! I don’t know that the program has any loose threads for the movie to resolve besides the random cliffhanger of the finale — which would have stood fine as an overall conclusion in my opinion — but even if it’s just an excuse to spend another couple hours in this world, I’m happy to watch it next.

[Content warning for drug abuse.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 25

TV #22 of 2026:

Classic Doctor Who, season 25

Few TV shows make it to 25 seasons, and Classic Who didn’t get much further than this, since ratings were falling and the very next year would prove to be its last, subsequent revivals and expanded media notwithstanding. It also doesn’t do a whole lot to celebrate the milestone on-screen, unless you count the tongue-in-cheek naming of THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY or the return of popular old villains the Daleks, Davros, and the Cybermen (each of whom had recurred as recently as season 22 anyway). Otherwise the only real celebratory callback is in REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS, which revisits the 1963 setting of the very first episode to somewhat mixed effect.

And look, I like the Seventh Doctor and Ace a lot. I even appreciate — in the abstract — the big ideas that new script editor Andrew Cartmel starts introducing here, which fans would rather grandiosely come to call the Cartmel Masterplan. But in practice, those oblique hints that the Doctor has a secret past that renders him more than just an ordinary Time Lord don’t amount to much across these or the remaining episodes. Though they’d add a nice sense of mystery to the Virgin New Adventures book series that would follow — and tenuously lay the groundwork for the recent Timeless Child arc — they represent more of an anticlimactic distraction than anything else for now.

It’s a subtle shift, but in this era of the program, the time-traveling protagonist becomes more of an enigmatic chessmaster. He’s not arriving to a strange situation and reacting to events there like usual; he’s instead more often already enmeshed in some elaborate scheme that he may or may not eventually explain to his faithful companion (and by extension, us). Yet although that’s a neat soft reboot of the character in theory, this initial execution unfortunately leaves me cold. Between the low budgets and some astonishingly shoddy directing work, the scripts generally carry a suggestion of potential that’s far from realized in the finished productions.

It is, nonetheless, an improvement over the Sixth Doctor years, and it’s a shame that it won’t get the proper room to figure itself out, as the final run would be even better yet. But I’d have to say this penultimate batch is more good than great, overall.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS (25×1 – 25×4)
THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY (25×11 – 25×14)
SILVER NEMESIS (25×8 – 25×10)

★★★★☆
THE HAPPINESS PATROL (25×5 – 25×7)

Overall season rating: ★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Movie #22 of 2026:

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Original creator James Cameron left the Terminator franchise after its second installment, which is also when the quality level significantly dropped. Theoretically, then, his triumphant return in this sixth picture — in which he serves as one of two producers and one of five men with ‘story by’ credits — should be another instant classic, right? Even more so for its bold decision to throw out everything from the films he didn’t work on and set this one as an immediate sequel to T2 instead. (Offscreen, you can handwave something about a multiverse or changing timelines or whatever, but the script does absolutely nothing to explain why this track is replacing T3 and beyond.) Unfortunately, however, it utterly fails to live up to the gauntlet that it throws for itself, which is such a frustrating turn of events that I ultimately have to say this last movie is the worst one yet, despite the internal logic holding up better than for some of its predecessors.

No, this plot isn’t really that incoherent, since it follows the same rough path that Cameron provided twice before: a robot from the future has been sent back to kill someone who will play an important role in the human opposition movement once the machines take power, and another agent from that time has come after to stop them. The enemy is no longer Skynet and its units are no longer technically Terminators, which is a harder creative choice to justify, but the biggest difference is that John Connor and his mother Sarah aren’t even the assassin’s targets. That’s because a) the protagonists’ victory at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day successfully prevented that specific dystopia entirely — again, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and its sequels notwithstanding — and b) one other T-800 was apparently around in the 1990s as backup, and in the first scene of this movie, it finally completes its mission to terminate John. That Terminator represents a bullet fired from a gun that has already ceased to exist, and the rest of the story is about another weapon altogether, raising the obvious question of just why we had to see the teenaged Connor murdered in front of us.

I’ve accused this series of being cynical before, but it doesn’t get much worse than bringing back the child star who survived against all odds in your universally beloved production — literally Edward Furlong’s young face again through CGI magic — and shooting him to death for no particular reason. All that his murder achieves, besides damaging audience investment even further, is to enrage the returning Linda Hamilton as his surviving parent and give her a personal grudge against his killer when they later reunite, that latest Arnold Schwarzenegger model having gone to ground after carrying out its orders and somehow spontaneously developed a conscience in the meantime.

It all leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but could be acceptable if what followed was a satisfying enough tale of this new robotic threat that arises in Skynet’s place. But it’s not! The action beats feel stale, the camera is often too shaky to be able to track characters and their positions effectively, and a few scenes are so dark that nothing can be seen clearly at all. If this were a complete reboot with no connections to the past, I might be inclined to rate it as highly as three-out-of-five stars, since Mackenzie Davis as an augmented human offers an interesting development and the focus on women and people of color is a legitimately welcome change. But given how poorly it bridges the old and the new domains as well, I don’t think I can honestly go higher than a two for this.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival by L. D. Lapinski

Book #70 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival by L. D. Lapinski (Icons #2)

This is one of the better Doctor Who historical celebrity stories, and definitely an improvement over the Thirteen / Frida Kahlo adventure that launched this recent novella series. Here instead it’s the Tenth Doctor meeting a young Charles Darwin — cover art to the contrary — on his famed 1830s voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, where the budding naturalist is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a group of Silurians, the intelligent species of humanoid reptiles whose existence is still a secret to humanity at this point.

The piece takes the rare but appreciated step of situating us in the Time Lord’s perspective rather than a companion or outsider’s, showing how he can sense the eddies of history and potential crises developing. He knows that Silurians will someday share the Earth openly with humans, for example, although the exact date remains in flux — a handy franchise excuse for continuity issues that might otherwise arise — just as he knows of the scientist’s future importance and that he’s not supposed to encounter the creatures here. (The one false note, unfortunately, is that the green-skinned people are native to this planet and era, not alien intruders — so if any rogue element is truly in danger of upsetting the proper order of things, it must be the Doctor himself, which goes unaddressed by the text.)

Still, this is a good match between guest figure and science-fiction angle, which this sort of plot doesn’t always manage to achieve. The real monster is tribalism and a distrust of differences that each side has to work to overcome, and that’s both a solid Whovian moral and a nice connection to the theory of evolution that Darwin will eventually produce. The protagonist’s particular manic conversational style is well-captured by author L. D. Lapinski too (and voice actor Jacob Dudman, reading the audiobook), and the whole exercise doesn’t overstay its welcome as such projects sometimes can. It’s a quick read, but a fun one.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: The Bear: Gary (2026)

Movie #21 of 2026:

The Bear: Gary (2026)

FX/Hulu randomly dropped this hour-length flashback episode of The Bear a few days ago with minimal fanfare, over a month in advance of the upcoming final season. That’s an odd choice that I don’t fully understand, and my personal interpretation is that it was probably originally planned as part of the previous run before getting cut, but with enough footage filmed that they were able to eventually circle back and finish it up after the fact. But given how it did air as a standalone feature, I’m choosing to review it critically as such, since that’s the framework I apply to things like the Doctor Who holiday specials already.

It’s largely a two-hander about Richie and Mikey — the former a main cast member and the latter dead by suicide when the primary series starts, but well-known to us at this point regardless. Their performers Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal wrote the script together as well, meaning that Bernthal somewhat hilariously has two franchise specials coming out in the space of a week, with the Punisher film he co-wrote and stars in arriving soon on Disney+ (presumably without Moss-Bachrach, unless he’s reprising his old Netflix role of Micro). This was before the restaurant got fancy, and the loose plot concerns the working-class friends taking a very slight road trip from their home in Chicago to the nearby Gary, Indiana in order to do a favor for their mob-connected uncle Jimmy, although the suggestion that this will be a Fargo-like crime drama is steadily deflated and neatly punctured at the end. Instead they mostly shoot the breeze and good-naturedly rib each other until Mikey’s bipolar disorder finally causes the eruption that audiences will have been expecting all day.

Overall it’s fine, but not remotely revelatory. This is basically how I felt about the Breaking Bad movie El Camino, too: a neat chance to spend a little more time with certain characters that we like, but not a missing piece of the story that feels necessary to return to or is going to radically change our understanding of anything. It’s just a shaggy detour that would have fit in as a regular installment of the program whenever, much like the other Mikey-centric hours that we’ve occasionally gotten. The actors deliver the material well, and it does flesh out the contours of the toxic ‘cousin’ relationship a bit better, but it never seems essential enough to merit the unusual circumstances of its production / release.

[Content warning for ableist slurs and drug and alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Book #69 of 2026:

Platform Decay by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #8)

I didn’t care as much for the experimental seventh volume of this series, but I’m happy to report that this next installment finds our misanthropic neurodivergent security cyborg back to its usual exasperated self. The plot is relatively straightforward — rescue and extract a group of humans in what passes for its extended social circle from a heavily-guarded space station — but it escalates nicely from scene to scene as the protagonist overcomes various tactical challenges, checks in with its new mental health regulation subroutines, watches a few episodes of its programs during the occasional moments of downtime, and tries to pretend that it doesn’t have feelings. A few pieces of larger continuity carry over from the previous stories, so I wouldn’t recommend anyone start the books here, but this hits the sweet spot of a sequel for me in delivering what I like while still pushing forward into newer territory.

I don’t know if author Martha Wells has a planned ending in mind, or how the Apple TV show (which I haven’t seen) might be influencing that, but for now Murderbot remains a must-read for me.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane by Suzanne Collins

Book #68 of 2026:

Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane by Suzanne Collins (The Underland Chronicles #2)

Overall a decent middle-grade adventure sequel, although not really as entertaining or imaginative as its predecessor. The first volume established the existence of the ‘Underland’ beneath New York City, and ended with the revelation of a further prophecy there concerning our eleven-year-old hero Gregor. He now returns in pursuit of his kidnapped sister, and though he soon learns that she’s been abducted by allies to keep her safe, there is still another epic quest awaiting him. To a large extent it reads like a basic repeat of the previous plot, except for the protagonist and his giant bat Ares spending more time getting to know each other and processing the fact that he’s some sort of preternaturally-talented berserker in combat.

These books are short enough that I’ll probably go ahead and polish off the last three titles at some point too, but nothing about this installment feels like a story that urgently needed to be told. I assume it’s not a good sign that I’m much more interested in the boy’s family money struggles and kindly neighbor back home than in any of the latest action below the ground.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆