The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: American Gods, season 3

TV #30 of 2024:

American Gods, season 3

Better than season 2, but ultimately unable to cross that elusive threshold from good to great, especially in comparison to the masterful first year of this loose Neil Gaiman adaptation. The perpetually troubled production swapped showrunners yet again for this final run, which really doesn’t feel like it was intended to be the actual conclusion of the program and certainly doesn’t come close to the endgame of the original novel. Bilquis’s arc in particular winds up going nowhere, laying tracks that might have been interesting later on, had the series not been canceled a week after the finale aired. But with her journey belatedly ending here, it all seems largely pointless.

The degree of cast turnover is also disappointing: Orlando Jones’s Mr. Nancy goes entirely unmentioned, Mousa Kraish’s Jinn has likewise vanished (though at least his absence is textually-addressed, despite being unmotivated and leaving his main scene partner Salim more adrift than usual), and Crispin Glover’s Mr. World suddenly has several additional avatars that he cycles between, which is similarly unjustified in the text of the scripts but is presumably a creative choice to accommodate the primary actor’s schedule. Perhaps such issues were unavoidable, but the result is that this universe feels smaller than ever on-screen, with both divine factions often reduced to just a couple people standing around talking.

The best part of this season, besides Shadow’s new haircut, is that it finally adapts the Mike Ainsel / Lakeside subplot, which adds a nice structure to events. It’s a little weaker than on the page — positioning Marguerite as a love interest for the hero could work, if only it were set up well enough for the turn from her initial mistrust to be believable — but the basic framework of the missing teen and the idyllic midwestern town still delivers, and the local busybody Hinzelmann (now a middle-aged woman instead of an elderly man) is a hoot as always. But otherwise the plot isn’t as immediately compelling; Mr. Wednesday’s long-simmering war against the new gods somehow remains eternally stuck in its planning and recruitment stage, and Laura is as lost without Sweeney to bounce off of as Salim is without the Jinn.

The background premise of deities made sentient and corporeal by human belief and subsequently dwindling once the power of that faith wanes is inherently promising, and individual scenes still offer striking imagery to illustrate that core theme, even this late in the game. I will truly miss this version of these characters and all the added diversity, no matter the many wild story changes and my preferring the book to the show overall. But at the same time, I’m happy to be done with the thing at this point.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, torture, homophobia, racism, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 3 > 2

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Book Review: Yendi by Steven Brust

Book #93 of 2024:

Yendi by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #2)

Published in 1984, this second Vlad Taltos novel is a prequel that’s lighter on the worldbuilding lore, taking us back to earlier in that assassin / crime boss’s career when the antihero was running a smaller territory and hadn’t yet married. In fact, he meets his future wife Cawti over the course of this book — as established in the first volume, she’s initially hired to kill him, though luckily the contract is negated when both parties die and get magically revivified — and their instantaneous romance is probably the weakest part of the story. The immediate attraction between these two rival professionals is fine, but declaring love and intention to marry after knowing one another for only a few days? That’s a lot harder to accept, and author Steven Brust doesn’t do a good enough job of selling it, in my opinion. Even with the knowledge that the characters are still together later on, it feels like there should be some narrative comeuppance for how swiftly and completely the protagonist trusts this new femme fatale love interest who swoops into (and temporarily extinguishes) his life.

The rest of the plot is more engaging, although like Jhereg, it ends with some abstract intricacies of Dragaeran politics that mostly track but aren’t especially interesting. The main premise here is that Vlad has gotten into a turf war with someone trying to muscle into his area, and that’s a fun thread of moves and countermoves to watch play out, as well as a nice change of pace from the more straightforward mission he was paid to carry out last time. Overall this title isn’t the best example of its genre or even its series, but the fantasy mafia vibes remain compellingly distinctive.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students by J. Reuben Appelman

Book #92 of 2024:

While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students by J. Reuben Appelman

This true-crime title is pretty slim, despite how much time author J. Reuben Appelman spends on describing the victims’ backstories. He painstakingly walks through the police bodycam footage from when officers were called out to their house earlier in the year on a noise complaint, for instance, even though that has nothing to do with the students’ subsequent murders or their suspected assailant. He even delves into their old social media posts, dragging out Facebook quiz results, tween Instagram captions, and high school essay responses as though they’re at all relevant for understanding the four college-aged adults who were killed one night in 2022. (He also drastically overestimates the fame of this incident, saying at one point that a particular event happened “before most of the world knew” the name of one of the murdered girls.)

But there’s not much else to this book, either due to the writer’s own limitations or the inherently scant material available. A suspect was arrested only six weeks after the killings, and while the circumstantial evidence that Appelman describes seems convincing, the individual in question hasn’t confessed or even been brought to trial yet. Meanwhile, the sensationalized account of the crime scene reconstruction is grisly, but not especially distinctive against other reporting from this genre.

The most interesting thing about this volume may be its brief discussion of the horde of ‘citizen sleuths’ who took up the matter, swarming on the small Idaho town to record self-promotional podcasts and TikToks, interview/harass potential witnesses, and gleefully speculate about the dead and their surviving loved ones in dedicated subreddits. That’s an ugly side of modern society that could help differentiate this case from similar previous slaughters, both causing undue suffering and interfering with official law enforcement investigations, but Appelman doesn’t really dig into it any further, let alone grapple with his own role as a part of that ecosystem. With more distance and time, this could have been a significantly stronger work.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland

Book #91 of 2024:

A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland

I’m so torn in my reaction to this fantasy novel, which is very well-written but absolutely not my thing in a rather unavoidably central way. I love all the worldbuilding details, the queer representation including a trinary-split gender system, the political intrigue, and especially the characters — the prince’s panic attacks that he sees as a moral flaw of cowardice, his arc of learning to respect himself, his valet / bodyguard’s own journey from disdaining his charge to recognizing his worth in turn, and so on.

But I find myself unable to get past how their dynamic blossoms into physical desire and eventual romance, which feels like a major abuse of the royal’s position for him to become involved with an underling in that fashion. The text doesn’t treat this behavior as toxic at all, even though it’s a clear pattern with the protagonist having already slept with another of his guards (problematically framed as a more worldly seducer) in the novel’s backstory. Instead, the two men are presented as essentially equal prospective partners for whom simple logistical challenges arise from the one’s rank and the other’s sworn duty, without ever engaging in the question of implicit coercion and pressure. Indeed, the story is related through third-person limited narration, where both characters appear totally into the attraction when they’re not denying it to themselves. But the underlying power differential bugs me, as does the fact that it goes utterly unaddressed.

This element is particularly disappointing given how I’ve seen author Alexandra Rowland mention both Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor — two of my very favorite examples of the genre — as among their inspirations for this work. Those titles are likewise built around compassionate models of loving fealty, but in each case, the relationship between the liege lord and his vassal is intimate yet firmly platonic. The overstepping of that boundary seems more appropriate for a what-if fanfiction, as do a few fairly tropey developments like the pair realizing their chemistry whilst pretending to be a couple to throw off pursuers, and subsequently harder to accept as part of the core narrative here.

Or that’s my personal taste as a reader, at least! I suppose I’ll grade on a curve based on how much I like everything else in this piece, and on how I sincerely acknowledge the unfairness of judging a book for not telling the story you wanted it to, rather than how well it’s told the version that it has. But this won’t go down as another favorite for me.

[Content warning for torture.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)

Movie #15 of 2024:

Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)

Okay, I like this. I don’t love Babylon 5 as a franchise quite yet, but this TV pilot movie is a solid setup for the sci-fi framework to follow. If I were a Warner Brothers executive in the 90s, I likely would have ordered a full series on the potential of this initial release as well. It’s very reminiscent of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to me, which I understand is not necessarily a coincidence — this title aired midway through the debut season of that other one, with its own first season a year later, but they were obviously in development at the exact same time. And since Paramount initially passed on the Babylon 5 pitch before commissioning DS9, I know there’s an argument to be made that the Trek producers might have poached certain elements that they liked without attribution, whether consciously or not.

Or it could just be a fluke. Regardless, both shows are set on a space station outpost where multiple alien cultures clash and political intrigues abound, but as a viewer I watched through Deep Space Nine without any knowledge of Babylon 5, so I’ll try to keep the comparisons out of my reviews on this side now in turn.

On its own terms, this film introduces us to the setting, the factions, and a few figures who will presumably be important going forward, but it’s not always the most elegant in its scripting. There are a lot of scenes where one character tells another something that they logically ought to have already known, serving the transparent function of providing that exposition for the audience’s benefit rather than actually moving the plot along. The acting doesn’t all feel keyed-in either; a few of the performers are either stilted or overly sardonic in their line readings in a way that I hope gets ironed out later on. And the immediate story is pretty bare-bones, concerning an assassination attempt on a newly-arrived ambassador and its subsequent investigation, which doesn’t go anywhere interesting except for temporarily implicating the guy who appears to be our main protagonist. It’s not great science-fiction at this point, but it’s definitely promising for the road ahead.

★★★☆☆

Star Trek: Done!

Stop the clock! Eight years after I decided on a whim to start watching the Star Trek franchise from the very beginning, I’ve finally done it. I’ve seen all of Star Trek now.

And because this is how my brain works, I’ll give you my subjective ranking of the various shows, by tier.

TIER 1: THOSE WHO BOLDLY GO

1. Deep Space Nine

2. Strange New Worlds

3. Lower Decks

4. Short Treks

TIER 2: THESE ARE THE VOYAGES, ALRIGHT

5. Voyager

6. The Animated Series

7. The Original Series

8. The Next Generation

9. Very Short Treks

10. Prodigy

TIER 3: IT’S BEEN A LONG ROAD, GETTING FROM THERE TO HERE

11. Enterprise

12. Picard

13. Discovery

TV Review: Star Trek: Very Short Treks, season 1

TV #29 of 2024:

Star Trek: Very Short Treks, season 1

These five digital shorts are silly and explicitly non-canonical, but I’d say they’re worth checking out for Star Trek diehards, especially given the minimal time commitment (about 18 minutes for the entire run, which you can find in this official YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLufIO1FTWFz_8X1Tmh3BAlJpqNadViR-E). Commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Trek: The Animated Series in 2023, they utilize that same artistic style in service of some much more absurdist humor, with an impressive assortment of guest actors reprising their roles from across the franchise. There’s Ethan Peck as Spock from Discovery / Strange New Worlds, his SNW castmates Bruce Horak as Hemmer and Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura, Doug Jones as Saru from Discovery, Jonathan Frakes and Gates McFadden as TNG‘s Riker and Beverly Crusher, Connor Trinneer as Trip from Enterprise, Armin Shimerman as Quark from DS9, Noël Wells as Tendi from Lower Decks, Angus Imrie as Zero from Prodigy, George Takei as Sulu from TOS, and Ethan Phillips as Neelix from Voyager. Something for fans of every era!

It’s a love letter to Trek as a whole, sort of, although it’s pretty lightweight in both tone and runtime. I chuckled throughout, but I wouldn’t come close to calling it an essential watch or anything.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Doctor Who, season 1

TV #28 of 2024:

Doctor Who, season 1

We have, for some reason, started over again with our numbering for this long-running science-fiction franchise, so that there now exists Doctor Who season 1 – 26 (1963 – 1989), Doctor Who season 1 – 13 (2005 – 2021), and a new Doctor Who season 1 – ? (2024 – present), along with all the holiday specials, spinoff shows, canonical-except-when-contradicted licensed novels and audio dramas, and so on. It’s a lot to keep track of, and while I understand the reasoning behind setting the count back to season 1 to make the series seem more welcoming to fresh audiences, that sort of flies in the face of a show about the fifteenth-ish incarnation of its time-traveling alien hero, who regularly references the adventures he’s had in previous lives (and who was introduced in the course of an episode last year that brought back… okay, you know what, never mind).

The point is, modern Doctor Who is a glorious mess, and I’m not sure calling this run season 1 instead of season 14 or season 41 actually renders the situation any less confusing. But let’s dive in!

If you are a newcomer, I’d say this is as fine a place to start as any, near the beginning of a specific protagonist lineup. As noted above, the Fifteenth Doctor made his debut in December 2023’s The Giggle, with his companion Ruby Sunday following later that month in the subsequent special The Church on Ruby Road — which Disney+ currently lists as both a separate “Special 4” entry (paralleling “Special 1” The Star Beast, “Special 2” Wild Blue Yonder, and “Special 3” The Giggle) as well as episode 1 of the current season. The doubling-up is as weird as the rest of this marketing, but I do think Church fits cohesively with the episodes that follow, establishing not only the Doctor’s latest costar, but also her family, a certain neighbor, and her mysterious past. Start there, rather than with “Space Babies,” when the series picked back up this May.

The youthful energy on-screen is fun. Millie Gibson is the first Gen Z lead for the show, while Millennial star Ncuti Gatwa — first Black actor to play the main role — is, at 31, only a few years older than Matt Smith was for his own TARDIS debut and substantially younger than most of the other Doctors have been. Together, these two friends travel the stars as is the program’s typical MO, navigating the Doctor’s time machine across reality, stumbling into strange circumstances, and rectifying whatever evil they find there. It’s a familiar formula for long-time fans, but pretty well-executed throughout. My biggest complaint is that a few of these episodes feel as though they’ve been somewhat cut down in the final edit, perhaps because the producers thought they’d have a longer runtime available. Thus we often start these plots with the heroes already on the scene in media res, rather than interacting casually in the TARDIS before leaving to get their bearings and notice the weekly threat. Generally the stories aren’t too hurt by this change, but it’s noticeable and unwanted, at least for this viewer.

The episodes themselves are good, although I want more of them; there’s only eight, not counting Church, which is part of a wider trend towards shorter TV seasons in recent years that I’m not especially fond of. Even with such slim pickings, however, a few entries like Boom (a Steven Moffat script that keeps the Doctor stuck standing on a landmine for most of its runtime), 73 Yards (a Doctor-lite episode to accommodate Gatwa’s filming commitment on Sex Education that becomes a powerhouse folk horror showcase for Gibson in his absence), and Rogue (a Bridgerton sendup featuring a male love interest for the Time Lord) stand out as likely classics for this young era. Meanwhile a mystery of a repeating cameo guest star plays out largely in the background, which feels of a piece with previous season arcs from returning showrunner Russell T. Davies. It all wraps up satisfyingly enough, though probably more so if you’re a fan of the old Fourth Doctor years of the show in particular, given the ultimate identity of the villain in the finale. Audiences who haven’t seen the Classic program should still get the general gist, however, much as was the case during “Utopia” and the episodes that followed it in 2007. And there’s even a thread or two left purposely open to feed future speculation at the end, which is always nice.

Overall: Doctor Who is back, baby! With just six months to go until a Moffat-penned Christmas special and season 2 (as I suppose we must learn to call it) having reportedly already wrapped filming. It’s a great time to be a fan.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, racism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm by Greg Keyes

Book #90 of 2024:

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm by Greg Keyes

A surprisingly strong media tie-in novel, especially compared to the same author’s more aimless later work, War for the Planet of the Apes: Revelations. Like that volume, this one is aimed at bridging the gap between the events of two films in the modern Planet of the Apes franchise: in this case, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). Released a few months ahead of the latter, in functions in part as an extended (re)introduction to two characters who would play an important role in that movie — Dreyfus, leader of the remnant of humanity eking out an existence in post-apocalyptic San Francisco, and Koba, bonobo lieutenant to Caesar in the liberated ape troupe nearby.

One interesting element here is that both those figures wind up functioning as eventual villains in the film, yet are still rather sympathetic heroes when we meet them on the page. That shouldn’t be too surprising for audiences like me coming to the book after having previously seen the movie, since one of the strengths of that script lies in how its antagonists are generally presented not as evil or overtly cruel, but simply as reasonable yet scared people whose priorities are in conflict with Caesar’s. And in this prologue / prequel, of course, such tensions have not yet arisen, though certain latent trajectories are already being set. So the human is a former police chief turned mayoral candidate, the ape is a newly-freed laboratory subject still processing a lifetime of abuse, and both are easy to root for (along with Caesar and a handful of other viewpoint protagonists not featured in the movie series) as the story unfolds.

Another aspect of this text that I love is how, despite its full title and the presence of Dreyfus, it is written less as the setup for Dawn and more as a direct sequel to Rise. Ten years pass off-screen between those installments, so there is plenty of potential plot that could be spun to link them more tightly. Yet audiences don’t particularly need to know the exact circumstances that lead into the later piece, while the immediate aftermath of Rise is inherently pretty compelling. (Amusingly, the main human characters in the two respective movies, Will and Malcolm, are nowhere to be found in this novel.)

So the present tale traces the downfall of human civilization in the wake of the deadly virus that also amplified ape intelligence, and for a 2014 title, it’s fairly electrifying to read after living through the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our plague’s fictional predecessor is far more fatal, but the commonalities like the politicization of facemasks, the swift overwhelming of hospital capacities, the general social unrest, and the conspiracies about quarantine orders are certainly striking. Meanwhile a dogged reporter is trying to learn the truth behind the recent ape attack on the bridge and why the local government is covering it up, a primatologist and a reformed poacher get tasked by a shady paramilitary group to help track down the animals, and the apes themselves are attempting to get their bearings and establish what their new life will look like, free from human captivity. An air of tragedy hangs over the entire contingent from our species, who like the cast of Star Wars: Rogue One are doomed by the narrative to lose everything as their inevitable fate plays out.

It’s not quite an essential read, even for fans, and obviously most moviegoers will have gone into Dawn without ever being aware of this publication, let alone having read it (whereupon they and readers alike will wonder what’s up with Malcolm’s remarkably thin backstory). But it’s a worthwhile entry in the overall Apes saga, slowing down to explore a key moment in time that the movies quickly glossed past.

[Content warning for gun violence including against children, suicide, torture, and implied rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

Book #89 of 2024:

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

I love the initial premise of this novel, and I still feel like many of its subsequent elements have some potential charm to them. But the execution is beyond abysmal, beginning with the heroine with a severe case of written-by-a-man-itis: “She caught her reflection in the mirror on the back of the door and regarded herself dispassionately. She was always slightly disappointed whenever she saw herself in reflections or photographs. To her own eyes she was too tall and too thin. She thought her hips were too narrow and her chest too flat, and her eyes were big and wide like a startled deer’s. She never wore makeup, because she had never really learned how to do it, and her blond hair was always flying off in different directions no matter how much she brushed it.”

So that’s not a great piece of characterization to start from. But the plot is weak too, with an astonishing degree of important points that fall apart upon a moment’s consideration. This is, as it turns out, a story about time travel, even though that aspect doesn’t appear anywhere in the publisher’s official description of it. The titular book that the protagonist receives from a dying acquaintance doesn’t merely open any door to anywhere in the world; it can also reach anywhere in time as well. (Or theoretically, at least. For all their wide-eyed talk about the possibilities of this power and how people would kill to possess it, the characters never once visit the future and go no further than 50 years or so into the past.) Among collectors of such magical tomes, many don’t think this particular volume exists, and when speculating about it before it’s discovered, one remarks confidently that traveling back in time would surely represent a closed loop, with the traveler unable to change established events. The opposite he dismisses as “what you see in science-fiction stories” — ignoring the many entries of that genre that are very much built on the drama and irony of time travelers going up against immovable fate — and his baseless supposition about how it works in this reality is for some reason taken as fact by his friends. And even when the evidence does belatedly support that claim and everyone knows that history is truly fixed, several of them continue to fret about somehow altering the timeline. They also neglect to use the magic to investigate a pressing mystery when possible, and there are multiple instances of fakeouts with illusions from a different special book, making witnesses and readers believe someone has been violently killed when they are ultimately rescued by a time traveler later on.

I realize that was a long and esoteric paragraph, but I wanted to get all my frustrations with that part of the novel out of the way so that I could move on to discuss a few other weaknesses. Let’s talk about how when the hero learns that two young women have found the wonderful Book of Doors, he casts a spell on one of them to make her forget ever meeting him or learning about the text, supposedly for her safety. It’s an arrogant act that could be frustrating yet understandable in an intentionally flawed character, but makes no sense when he doesn’t likewise dispatch her roommate — the one I quoted earlier looking into her mirror to neg herself — in the same way. (It’s not like the book is bound to her or anything! Her protection is from simple plot armor at this point, and because she’s already become his designated love interest.) The first girl subsequently gets magically tortured by a villain with pain so extreme it makes her lose control of her bladder all over herself and breaks through the other guy’s memory block. So what was the point, if not simply an excuse for author Gareth Brown to write a woman in agony? She’s also one of the people who gets pretend-murdered by a bloody gunshot to the head, right in front of the friend who’s just lived through a decade in the past trying to find a way back to her. Which I don’t mind spoiling for you, because it’s such a cheap trick to play on our emotions.

What else? The antagonists are egregiously racist and sexist, descriptions of one person are fatphobic from everyone’s POV, and the heroine who finds herself stuck for ten years waiting to catch back up with the present seemingly spends that whole time romantically fixated on the brooding older man who upended her life and only knew her for a day or so before they got separated. It’s a real mess, and a waste of what could have been a fun concept in other hands.

★☆☆☆☆