The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 2

TV #49 of 2024:

Babylon 5, season 2

This science-fiction series has been steadily improving and growing darker in tone, but I’m still not ready in this second season to bump my critical rating up out of the midrange three-star tier. At its best, I’m really interested in the larger serialized story that the show is telling, with alien politics breaking out into all-out war, an unknown enemy faction skulking in the shadows, and intrigue and corruption back on earth interfering with our protagonists’ ability to keep the peace. I also appreciate the structural choice of turning the villainous Ambassador G’Kar into a compelling noble hero this year, while his counterpart Londo Mollari shifts from buffoonish comic relief into an even greater antagonist.

But the writing is just so heavy-handed throughout, and so indulgent in some of its worst and hokiest impulses. (Space angels! Techno-mages! Literal Jack the Ripper, still alive in 2259!) My mind keeps comparing this program to its similarly-premised — and potentially lightly plagiarized — contemporary Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which got its own silliness out of its system much quicker than this. Babylon 5 may be capable of comparable greatness at this point, but it feels like the scripts are still haphazardly throwing everything into the mix to see what will work from week to week, rather than committing to the elements that plainly already do.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the show’s abrupt replacement of its star actor between seasons (without any significant explanation at the time; later attributed to the departing fellow’s private mental health struggles). That would be an unfortunate situation for any TV production to face, but many titles have nevertheless come up with a smoother transition of leads than the Sinclair/Sheridan swap here, which receives no particular story buildup at all and thus awkwardly requires the season premiere to explain away the station’s new commander and all the dropped arcs and interpersonal dynamics involving the old one. Another performer decides to leave near the end of this run, and is likewise given a sudden exit in the span of a single episode, revealing that their character’s whole personality to date was a hypnotized construct that’s now been discarded. It’s not a serious storytelling moment or instance of honest emotional truth, and it flies in the face of the show’s reputation as a “televised novel” with an intricate five-year plot planned out. (Three decades after the fact, my hot take is that if the overarching plan was truly that thorough and sacrosanct, they should have simply recast those roles instead of scrambling to concoct seemingly last-minute contingencies.)

To some extent, these difficulties mark Babylon 5 (1994-1998) as a transitional piece between two different styles of TV-making. Such cast upheavals wouldn’t be out of place on shows of that era like Star Trek’s The Next Generation (1987-1994) or Voyager (1995-2001), but B5 seems to have aims at a more mature form of serialization common to subsequent series like Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), where major departures build gradually and provide room for the remaining characters to process the impacts of the fallout. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t have quite the necessary toolkit to reach those heights.

For better or worse, it’s a product of mid-90s network television, pushing the boundaries of the format at times but generally being held back by its episodic strictures. The genuinely interesting worldbuilding is often presented in dense monologues rather than incorporated organically. A lesbian relationship can be hinted at obliquely but always deniably. And the most humanoid female alien is inevitably given a makeover and repositioned as / reduced to a love interest for the main male hero. At least the season finale ends on the one Jewish character lighting Hanukkah candles, a promising sign that the writers aren’t merely paying lip-service to notions of diversity and inclusion.

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

Book #176 of 2024:

Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive #5)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

Another 1300-page epic fantasy tome that very nearly justifies its massive length. (I listened to the audiobook on 2.5x speed, which still took literally 24 hours to complete.) The extended climax of this novel showcases author Brandon Sanderson at his best, ricocheting in a wild crescendo among his diverse cast of heroes who are all facing various crisis points, in exciting action sequences that also carry important implications for the future of the Cosmere franchise at large. It’s a thrill to reach that stage of the plot, and while impatient readers may chafe at the slower setup to get there, I assume the audience has self-selected enough by now that anyone sitting down to enjoy this fifth Stormlight volume — which also pays off threads from other Sanderson stories, including the quasi-canonical Dragonsteel Prime — knows full well what they’re getting into and is prepared for the long haul.

It’s not that nothing much happens until the last few hundred pages, but this installment even more than its predecessors is pretty heavy on flashback scenes (as it would have to be, since only ten days pass in real time across the entire book). We finally get an origin story for the mysterious Szeth, fleshing out both him and his home culture of Shinovar, but also witness eras in the distant past, with new details about the shattering of Adonalsium, some of the other resulting Shards, and the founding and breaking of the Heralds’ Oathpact on Roshar. This is the area of the text that most feels like it could have been tightened up, to me; although the information is interesting, it’s presented in visions to characters who can’t affect events any more than we can, which winds up seeming like endless inert exposition regardless.

Still, the work is compulsively readable as ever, and the writer continues to improve his representation of marginalized identity topics, including gender transition, mental health struggles, neurodivergence, physical disabilities, dissociative identity disorder, same-sex attraction and romance, and beyond. That level of commitment is rare in the genre and welcome from such a blockbuster bestselling author, even if it occasionally means wondering whether it really makes sense for people in this setting to have words for things like therapists or placebos alongside their medieval-esque technology.

Overall, it’s the pivotal moment that was promised, bringing to a close the first arc of the planned ten-book Archive series. After this Sanderson has indicated he’ll be writing further Mistborn and Elantris sequels before returning for volumes 6-10, so it may be a while until we see these particular protagonists again, assuming none of them make cameo appearances elsewhere in the meantime. But if there’s one thing we Cosmere fans are good at, I suppose it’s waiting.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 3

TV #48 of 2024:

The Lincoln Lawyer, season 3

Somewhere between three and four stars for me as a viewer, but I’ll round up due to my enjoying this TV outing more than the novel it’s based on, Michael Connelly’s fifth Lincoln Lawyer story The Gods of Guilt. (That means the Netflix series has now adapted books 2, 4, and 5, with #6 The Law of Innocence set up for next time in the closing minutes of this one. I’m excited as that’s my personal favorite of the lot, involving the protagonist getting framed, arrested, and placed on trial himself, although as of now the streamer has yet to officially announce a renewal for another year. But this would be an awkward and terrible place to end the show, so let’s hope they come through eventually.)

Picking up from the season 2 finale, Mickey’s former client Gloria Dayton has been murdered, and the man charged with the crime has hired him as defense attorney. A twisty conspiracy involving a crooked DEA agent is gradually revealed, while some character-driven subplots play out in the background. My favorite of these is a new invention for the adaptation: a relationship with the prosecutor Andrea Freeman, who doesn’t even exist in the source material. But she’s a fun contrast for Haller, and while the sparks that flew between them as opposing counsels last year seemed wholly professional, turning things romantic once there’s no more conflict of interest is a reasonable development to keep her around on the program.

The best part of this production remains its hero’s cunning courtroom tactics and how he manages to stay narrowly inside the bounds of legal ethics and the law — at one point this season, he says to someone on the phone, “I need you to tell me ________” so that he can plausibly inform a judge he’s been told the claim in question, even though he has no reason to believe it’s true — in his noble pursuit of justice for his clients. The worst part is when the episodes occasionally pause to deliver a fawning heist-like recap of some strategy the characters just pulled off, which feels like undeserved bragging over how smart the writing supposedly was. But overall, I continue to appreciate this title and long for the rights issues to be resolved so that it can properly cross over with Amazon’s Bosch franchise like the Connelly novels do.

[Content warning for homophobia, domestic abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase

Book #175 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase

In my opinion this is the best of the three original Fifteenth Doctor novels released this year (i.e. not counting the episode novelizations), for the simple reason that author Abi Falase does a better job than the other writers at capturing the distinctive happy-go-lucky tone of the latest Time Lord and his friend Ruby Sunday, rather than having them seem like a generic Doctor-companion team. The timing may be largely to thank there, as the two previous titles were put out alongside the TV season starring those protagonists, giving Ruby Red‘s Georgia Cook and Caged‘s Una McCormack little if any time to incorporate the duo’s on-screen characterizations into their manuscripts. This next volume, published five months later, presumably didn’t place a similar constraint upon Falase.

With that being said, however, I’m not especially impressed with the actual story here, which falls into the competent-yet-forgettable zone of the heroes investigating a strange situation and helping to resolve it, with a twist at the end that doesn’t land with much impact. A prosperous world of alien telepaths is brewing discontent among the have-nots! It’s fine, and firmly in the standard sci-fi wheelhouse for Doctor Who plots, but there’s nothing here that’s gripped me beyond noting that the time-travelers sound more like themselves on this particular adventure.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron

Book #174 of 2024:

Artifact Space by Miles Cameron (Arcana Imperii #1)

This 2021 space opera debut exhibits one of my favorite sort of plot structures, which is to drill down into the minutiae of daily life in a strange environment while major storylines play out slowly in the background, surfacing occasionally but only really growing in importance when the climax of the tale finally approaches. Think Harry Potter, or Ender’s Game — the latter of which feels like a particularly apt comparison given the militaristic sci-fi atmosphere of this title, although the heroine is an older teen navigating her junior officer position on a merchant spaceship, rather than a child genius in tactical school.

For Marca Nbaro, there are actually multiple serious crises brewing around her. First, she’s forged the credentials that got her posted to the Athens to begin with, and lives in fear that the shipboard AI or one of her new peers will uncover and discredit her. She was driven to lie in order to escape from a powerful enemy she made back in her hardscrabble youth orphanage, who remains intent on revenge. And as she seeks to put all that behind her, a more immediate threat emerges in the form of a shadowy faction sabotaging and destroying the city-sized greatships like hers, presumably for rival commercial reasons. Although our protagonist isn’t initially on the villains’ radar, she’s plucky and capable enough that she soon finds herself the target of several personal assassination attempts as well.

Mostly, though, we are following this young woman from shift to shift and over many combat exercises as she gradually makes friends and becomes more comfortable in her own skin, which is always a thrilling arc to experience. The narrative doesn’t linger on the character’s trauma from the backstory, but her learned responses to it are well-developed and make her an interesting figure to behold: rash and brave one moment, yet skittish of emotional intimacy the next. It’s been a joy to watch her prove herself against the ever more dire circumstances facing her, and I look forward to seeing how that element continues to progress in the sequel(s) ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, sexual slavery, and revenge porn.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

Book #173 of 2024:

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

I feel as though this 2014 volume has given me immense insight into the people I know (or even suspect) have suffered traumatic experiences as either children or adults, as well as made me more mindful of how I approach my own life and parenting style. It’s a thorough overview of how the human body reacts physically to mental or emotional stress in regular measurable ways, and should put to bed the idea that any such problem can ever be dismissed as being solely an artifact of someone’s mind. Even destructive behaviors like self-harm, eating disorders, or anger and violence against others can be understood as quasi-rational reactions to stimuli that the subconscious brain doesn’t know how to process in any other way.

Author Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is a career clinician who has researched these matters extensively, and he explains plainly both how trauma functions differently from typical memory formation and recall and how various psychiatric treatments can manage to bring the suffering under control. He also walks a fine line between describing the chemistry of why antidepressant drugs are effective and making a case that they merely suppress symptoms whose root causes should properly be mitigated and resolved through therapy.

It’s a heavy read, necessarily full of documented instances of domestic abuse, incest, pedophilia, rape, gun violence, loss of children, wartime atrocities, and beyond. Although most of these examples eventually result in a degree of healing for the doctor’s patients, the details can be excruciating to hear — which admittedly emphasizes their power to trigger panic in those affected individuals when future occurrences resemble them somehow.

The text is occasionally repetitive, as though the writer intended the chapters to be read independently rather than straight through, and I’m not totally convinced by his discussion of recovered memories, which I believe to be a more debated if not outright discredited topic in the field than he suggests here. Nevertheless, it’s overall a remarkably clarifying title.

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 3

TV #47 of 2024:

The Umbrella Academy, season 3

As a series, The Umbrella Academy has benefited from the time it’s had to develop its main characters, who are interestingly dysfunctional and comfortably grown into their respective superpowers at this point. But the plot around them is a mess, simultaneously dragging on and seeming to reinvent itself every few episodes or so. This year features so many slow scenes of people sitting around talking in an otherwise empty hotel — due to Covid filming restrictions, presumably — which on the one hand gets to show off the aforementioned personal interactions rather nicely. But on the other hand, it’s never clear what motivations are driving a certain key figure in the storyline, nothing ever feels especially urgent or actionable, and the whole situation gets increasingly untethered from any sort of logical reality, even without mentioning the ludicrously quick romance and wedding near the end.

The basic premise kicking off this run: the siblings have returned from their trip to the 1960s only to discover that something they did while preventing an apocalypse in the past created an alternate timeline, Back to the Future Part II style. In this version of the present, their dad adopted seven different children instead, while the Umbrellas (save Ben) were apparently never born at all. The precise mechanics of that are eventually more or less explained, but there are plenty of questions that aren’t, from the lingering issues behind the kids’ creation and the death of their original brother Ben to new implications of recent developments, like whether the Sparrows existed in the initial course of events and why Reginald didn’t adopt them or Lila to begin with.

There’s also a bizarre coincidence at the heart of everything, in that the hotel that Klaus randomly suggests they crash at — with what money I don’t know; these weirdos and their bank accounts literally don’t exist anymore — happens to be the one designed by their father and housing a portal to another dimension with a maguffin button that can reset the universe, which turns out to be necessary as there’s a steadily expanding black hole thing eating away at the world outside the building. It’s yet another doomsday scenario that isn’t fleshed out nearly enough to make sense or register as meaningful for the protagonists, and the dwindling cast results in a feeling of squandered potential as so many individuals take their abrupt exits as the season goes on.

On the acting side, Justin H. Min gets to stretch his performance muscles more to play the Sparrow iteration of Ben, and Elliot Page’s transition gets mirrored on the screen, with his character likewise coming out as trans and changing his name to Viktor. The latter isn’t anything I’ve ever seen done before on TV, so kudos to the writers for that, and I guess it’s fitting that with so much else going on in their lives, the other members of the Hargreeves family are instantly accepting and understanding of the name and pronoun change. It may not be the most plausible coming out story, but in a setting with aliens and talking chimps and time travel and the rest, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (And we’ll pretend that a haircut alone explains Page’s new look, just like we suspend our disbelief that Number Five’s actor Aidan Gallagher has supposedly only aged a month since the show began.)

Where does the program go from here, for its final truncated batch of six remaining episodes? I have no idea. This one ends on a cliffhanger teeing up the next status quo, but I’m not really sure what resolution for any of these malcontents would even look like. I hope we the audience finally get some definitive answers, though.

[Content warning for body horror, incest, sexual assault, ableism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Meltdown by Chris Archer

Book #172 of 2024:

Meltdown by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #10)

A weird end to a chaotic series, and probably the first one that really earns the “Mindwarp” title. These books have always been like a middle-grade sci-fi sampler project, and so it’s only fitting that the final volume introduces its younger readers to another few classic genre tropes on the way out. First, the story starts with its heroine Toni waking up in a hospital, where she’s told that she’s just confused, her powers aren’t real, and none of the adventures she’s been on with her friends truly happened. It’s gaslighting, as that ploy always is, but before she sees through the illusion she’s introduced to a man calling himself Chris Archer, who says that her memories are a fiction she’s read in the Mindwarp novels he’s written.

The meta twist is fun, but it falls apart the longer you think about it and doesn’t ultimately add much to the plot. (Same goes for a surprise appearance of a choose-your-own-adventure choice late in the text, where both branches turn out to be a dream and lead to the same place after all.) The bigger issue is that by the time the protagonist has figured out it’s all a lie and escaped from her capture, the book is already two-thirds of the way done. That’s the bulk of the finale spent with just one character, and the remainder with everyone else comes across as a perfunctory rush to tack on a conclusion that only vaguely resolves the wider narrative. There aren’t really any satisfying callbacks to earlier installments, farewells to previously recurring characters, or payoff to arcs like Toni and Jack’s flirtatiously squabbling banter. The other kids don’t even get one last heroic use of their special abilities, although Toni’s electricity-manipulation and time travel at least get a solid workout.

It’s better as a story about her than as an ending, and I suppose I might be grading on a curve for the intended audience when I award it a passing grade of three-out-of-five stars. This is a series that’s alternated between good and great for me, even coming back to finish it as an adult reader, but it’s sadly unable to stick the landing in the ultimate analysis.

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 6 > 3 > 5 > 9 > 7 > 2 > 1 > 8 > 10 > 4

Book Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Book #171 of 2024:

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The language in this 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner is undeniably lovely at times, but as a whole, I’m afraid it’s rather bounced off of me. The structure and length is one issue: this is a very long book, and it spends almost its entire first third — seven hours of the audiobook at regular speed — on a succession of vignettes that don’t have any connections whatsoever beyond the focal characters all feeling some loose affinity for trees. These eight chapters read like discrete short stories, and while the novel eventually brings certain protagonists together, it’s a pretty slow and pointless-seeming start. (There’s no universal predicament they’re all responding to, either, like how the pandemic in Stephen King’s The Stand makes a similarly disjointed approach come across as generally unified. These folks are all dealing with their own localized concerns.) Even once the main plot arrives, some of the strands from the beginning never are more than tangentially connected to the rest.

This is also a title that asks a lot from its audience, and not just for the time commitment and degree of patient trust involved in initially waiting for the project to get to the point. Over the course of the tale we’re invited to sympathize with suicide attempts, artificial intelligence, and acts of eco-terrorism, and to find it reasonable that activists would chain themselves to trees or live up in them for months to stymie the logging industry. Even for a reader concerned about climate change and naturally predisposed towards environmentalism, it’s a bit of a stretch, to say nothing of a few goofier elements like the character who claims to be able to hear the secret voices of forests after receiving a near-fatal electrical shock or the one whose professional therapy involves silently staring into her clients’ eyes. There’s a subtle air of nihilism throughout the enterprise too, as people repeatedly suffer from accidents and other turns of misfortune for no greater apparent narrative purpose. Meanwhile, multiple men become romantically infatuated with younger women who are either less interested or uninterested in them at all.

Despite everything, I kept reading, which I suppose must be a testament to author Richard Powers in some fashion. I did feel invested enough to continue following these various lives and want to see if/how matters would resolve for them. But ultimately, the aggregate effect was too compromised to make a major impact on me.

[Content warning for ableism, racism, sexism, gun violence, police brutality, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 15

TV #46 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 15

This is the halfway mark of Tom Baker’s record seven seasons as the Fourth Doctor, and despite his ongoing popularity in that role, it’s also unfortunately where the shine starts to come off. Behind the scenes, Graham Williams replaced Philip Hinchcliffe as producer, and the series shifted away from the gothic horror that had marked the former’s era towards more of a lighter comic tone. Nowhere is that more representative than in the Time Lord’s latest companion, debuting in the second serial of this year: the robotic dog K-9, who seems pitched specifically to appeal to younger audiences and presumably sell them some toys.

In truth, I don’t mind K-9 as a character. I always appreciate when Doctor Who varies up the typical companion dynamics, and both he and the futuristic ‘savage’ Leela (returning from last season and departing at the end of this one) help bring a distinctive energy to the screen. But the humor around the tin dog can be pretty broad at times, and Baker responds by dialing up his own comedic performance to match it. It’s no wonder that we’d soon see Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame come and write for the show, although no one of his caliber is penning the jokes just yet.

The stories are mostly adequate, with one standout as a holdover from the Hinchcliffe regime and a couple weaker efforts. The franchise history gets plumbed a little bit, bringing back Sontarans for the first time in three years and revisiting Gallifrey for a semi-sequel to last season’s adventure there, but overall the Doctor is facing forgettable humanoid threats on a noticeably lower budget. It’s not exactly the program’s finest hour.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL (15×9 – 15×12)
UNDERWORLD (15×17 – 15×20)

★★★☆☆
THE INVASION OF TIME (15×21 – 15×26)
THE INVISIBLE ENEMY (15×5 – 15×8)
THE SUN MAKERS (15×13 – 15×16)

★★★★☆
THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK (15×1 – 15×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]