The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Movie #5 of 2024:

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

A welcome bounce back for the series. Like its two predecessors, there’s a fatalistic darkness to this Apes film, but it’s carried off better here in balance with a certain comic playfulness. The producers wrote themselves into a corner by concluding the prior adventure with a bomb blowing up the entire planet (and presumably all our known characters with it, though several had already been shot to death by then), but this next sequel concocts an ingenious solution to that problem: time-travel! Since chimpanzee scientists Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius were conveniently absent from the final act of Beneath anyway, this script establishes that they were working with a genius friend on patching up the crashed spaceship from the first flick. Somehow, the three apes were able to launch it into orbit just before the doomsday weapon went off, and thus got to watch the world explode as they retraced Taylor’s trajectory backwards through space to modern Earth.

It’s a tad silly, but a great setup for the plot that follows. In a nod to the climax of the original novel — in which the hero flies home to discover that apes have taken over in his absence — this movie starts with contemporary humans swarming a spacecraft that’s just landed in the ocean, only for the astronauts to remove their helmets and reveal that they’re apes (and to cue up the title card with a funky 70s soundtrack). Though initially hesitant to disclose their intelligence and power of speech, the “apestronauts” ultimately do just that, setting them on an arc somewhat analogous to how Taylor was treated by their kind back home. Here, though, they’re welcomed as celebrity sensations after the initial disbelief and shock, and viewers get a rather glorious montage of their ensuing shopping spree and media blitz.

Cornelius and Zira have been staunch allies for the humans in the franchise all along, but their promotion to central protagonists is a good one. From this point forward, the Planet of the Apes series has its sympathies pretty firmly on the side of the apes, with humanity at large cast as the intolerant xenophobes (offset by the occasional exceptions in the role the chimpanzee couple used to occupy). Plus, by sending a small company of apes out of their home society and into the present day, this particular movie gets away with a significantly smaller makeup and sets budget, much like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home or Galactica 1980.

The humans grow more worried about their visitors the more that they let slip about their own time and what they know of Earth’s history (some of which, unfortunately, seems to contradict the state of ape knowledge established in the first film). The new origin story for apekind: a plague killed off many animals, prompting humans to turn to our primate cousins for pets and then slaves. Eventually an ape named Aldo learned to say “no” and began a revolt movement, leading to the downfall of our species and its civilization.

Though those events are far in the future, the president’s scientific advisor Otto Hasslein — name-dropped in both previous movies for his theories on relativistic space travel — fears that Zira’s unborn child will represent a bridgehead force precipitating man’s early decline. The apes are interrogated more harshly, with a specific focus on the devastation they witnessed in the war and Zira’s confessed medical experimentation on live human subjects. Hasslein ultimately procures authorization to neuter the chimps and end their pregnancy, spurring them to break out of their government holding facility and go on the run before he can. Though the scientist is ordered to take the fugitives alive, he instead shoots Zira and her newborn baby and is subsequently killed by Cornelius in revenge, who then gets slain by sniper fire himself. So much for our heroes, once again.

It’s the third downbeat ending in a row for the franchise, but there’s one further twist before the credits roll. Earlier Zira and Cornelius had stayed briefly at a traveling circus where an ordinary chimpanzee had recently given birth herself, and it’s now revealed that the two mothers swapped babies off-screen. Milo — named for their companion who died in a mishap near the start of the film — is the infant who’s still alive, and the movie ends with him exclaiming, “Mama! Mama!” in a manner eerily reminiscent of the doll Taylor found back in the Forbidden Zone that proved ancient humans could talk. It’s not quite a Terminator-style causality loop, but it does appear that Hasslein may have inadvertently helped bring about the exact fate he was trying to prevent. All in all, a neat little piece of science-fiction.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Movie #4 of 2024:

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

From one of the best movies in the franchise to probably its very worst. This first Planet of the Apes sequel is a real head-scratcher, and it’s a testament to the strength of the original (and the profitability of branded merchandise, one might imagine) that the series continued at all after this. Former star Charlton Heston reportedly wanted nothing to do with a followup, and only agreed to return for a minor role if his character Taylor could be killed off, presumably so that no one would ask him to be in any further installments. Accordingly, he’s there at the beginning of the script and then at the end — where he does in fact die — with the question of his fate in the meantime helping to drive the main storyline.

In his place, the film introduces Brent, another crash-landed astronaut from our time who looks hilariously similar to Heston, though with approximately half of the natural charisma. The logic here is strained: Taylor’s crew in the last movie was supposed to be on a colonization voyage at relativistic speeds, with no hope of ever returning to contemporary Earth, yet Brent now says that his own mission was launched to find out what happened to theirs. Whatever strange force sent the one ship hurtling back to our planet in the far future has apparently struck the second one as well, and so the newcomer finds himself retracing Taylor’s steps almost exactly.

He runs into the mute woman Nova, now wearing Taylor’s identifying dog tags, and accompanies her to the nearby city to seek out the chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius. They’re as delighted as they were over Taylor to meet another talking human, and they show him on a map the Forbidden Zone where the other man was heading. While there, he overhears that a gorilla army accompanied by Dr. Zaius will soon be marching into the same area to investigate certain illusions that have been reported, looking for the resources that they may be hiding and to confront any responsible beings who dwell there.

Just ahead of the soldiers, Brent and Nova stumble into a dilapidated New York subway station, and his reaction to the discovery that he’s back home again is pretty muted compared to Taylor’s anguish at the end of the previous movie. And here’s where things take a serious turn for the surreal, as the pair discover a civilization of mutated psychic humans there underneath the irradiated desert, complete with fleshy masks to appear normal and worshiping a giant doomsday bomb.

Most of this is far less interesting than the film imagines, with not enough runtime spent with the actual apes or the thorny philosophical and ethical musings that elevated the Heston feature. The returning characters all feel flattened into caricatures, and the mutants are too weird and uniform to stand out as distinctive personalities themselves. It’s a pale imitation of what made Planet of the Apes tick, and a dreary miscalculation of what divergences from the formula would be entertaining.

The simian army soon arrives underground, as the mood of the piece grows ever more nihilistic. Under the telepathic influence of his captors, Brent is forced to strangle and drown Nova and fight against Taylor, and although the three of them survive that particular encounter, they are each subsequently shot and killed as the gorillas open fire. As Taylor succumbs to his wounds, he curses at Zaius and presses the control panel to ignite the weapon, which blows up the planet as promised. Cut to a blank screen with an ominous voiceover declaring, “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-size star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” Roll credits, where we see that the mutants have been listed under names like Fat Man and Negro. Somehow, the studio would go on to make another three direct sequels.

A lot of this seems like it might have worked on paper. Tone down the outlandish campiness of the future mutated humans, give everyone involved more sustained characterization, and tie back to the events of the first film more closely, and the basic plot points could have been sound enough. (Dr. Zaius, once a complicated antagonist who buried the knowledge that humans can talk and suspected Taylor came not from space but from a tribe in the Forbidden Zone, now gives absolutely no indication of that history here where it would seem highly relevant.) The new lore about the ape Lawgiver is nice, as is the mirage of his statue bleeding. I like that Nova gets to blurt out Taylor’s name before she dies, implying that the devolved humans aren’t a totally lost cause, and it’s nice to see the two chimp allies again, although they don’t get to interact with Taylor and disappear from the script well before the end without any particular closure.

Mostly, though, this is just a mess.

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (1968)

Movie #3 of 2024:

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Over half a century on, this first Apes film holds up remarkably well. It’s that tricky blend of smart and thrilling, the big-budget equivalent of Star Trek: TOS, which was airing on TV at that time. The ape costumes and makeup are believably immersive, while the worldbuilding details of simian society are likewise fleshed out enough to feel like a distinctive cultural environment. The script is also well-paced, building from a reflective philosophical tone to bursts of frenzied action and back in steady cresting waves. In fact, the title of the piece gives the premise away significantly in advance, especially for an audience familiar with the franchise that followed. For the first half-hour or so of this initial movie, the three astronaut characters believe they’re the only humans on the planet where they’ve crash-landed, and it’s even longer before any of the intelligent apes actually arrive on the scene.

Soon after, we’ve whittled our focal cast down to just Charlton Heston’s Taylor, subsequently joined by the important resident non-humans. The structure of the plot is brilliant here, as well — having received an injury to his throat in the hunt that occurs a quarter of the way through, he spends the next quarter of the text as an abused prisoner, as unable to speak out to prove his intelligence as any of the devolved chattel humans like Nova around him. It’s a kafkaesque nightmare experience that results in him recovering enough to finally shout his classic line, “Take your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” at approximately the halfway mark of the overall runtime.

The back half of the story continues the legalistic madness, and is where Planet of the Apes shines as a funhouse mirror for the racism and opposition to science of our world. While the chimpanzee researchers Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius are soon convinced that Taylor is telling the truth about his origins, the orangutan politician Dr. Zaius stubbornly refuses to accept it and instead moves rapidly against them. The astronaut is forced to defend his humanity — as it were — in open court, regardless of the inherent absurdity there.

Ultimately, of course, the finale delivers the infamous twist that the titular ‘planet of the apes’ has been Earth all along. Taylor and his new friends were right when they insisted that the evidence supported their heretical theory that the humans of this world had a thriving civilization before the apes did, but he’s been wrong to think that his spaceship traveled hundreds of lightyears away on its relativistic journey through space. In some fashion that the movie does not explain, the rocket apparently got turned around and deposited him and his crew right back where they started.

That reveal is so well-known at this point as to be baked into people’s general understanding of the series as depicting a future Earth where the apes are in charge, but it’s worth unpacking to consider in its original context. Parallel / contingent evolution was rather commonplace in science-fiction of that era, which often populated alien planets with human-like beings and other lifeforms that looked much like our fellow animals on Earth. By convention, the coincidence was typically ignored, much as this film ignores how the apes’ written and spoken language is somehow exactly identical to Taylor’s.

The original tension of Planet of the Apes, beyond the immediate plight of the protagonists, was the fear that if apes on that distant world overthrew the humans there, the same fate could easily happen to us back here (with a reasonable reading of the subtext being a strained metaphor for twentieth-century race relations). In fact, in the French novel that the movie is based on, the surviving astronaut races home in the end to warn his compatriots about the danger he’s witnessed, only to find that he’s too late and the same ape revolution happened while he was away. La Planète des singes was not our world, and contemporary audiences in 1968 had no reason to expect that the adaptation would shake out any differently. The twist in the Rod Serling screenplay plays brilliantly against that expectation, capping off the enterprise with that iconic shot of Lady Liberty, a moral about humanity’s fatal embrace of nuclear weapons, and Charlton Heston kneeling forlorn on the shore.

What a movie! It’s no wonder so many sequels and reboots have followed, loose as the ongoing storyline and franchise continuity have occasionally grown between them.

[Content warning for sexism, gun violence, and biomedical experimentation.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

Book #74 of 2024:

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie (Tommy and Tuppence #5)

This 1973 title was the 74th and final novel that author Agatha Christie ever wrote, in addition to the last in her sequence of Tommy and Tuppence adventure stories. (Unlike for her better-known detective series, she did not set aside any additional installments for posthumous publication.) I won’t speculate about the writer’s declining mental faculties at this stage of her life as I’ve seen other reviewers do, but I will say that this book is easily the worst of its lot and a bit of a sour note to end on.

Among its stronger qualities: our married protagonists have continued to age, and are now moving into a new home in their 70s. Their banter back and forth is as affectionate as ever, and their instincts as retired spies / investigators remain relatively sharp. I also love their dog, whose perspective in a few key scenes is a fun change of pace for the narrative.

The premise is both absurd and poorly developed, however. In examining the books that the previous owners have left behind in the library, Tuppence discovers a secret message in one of them: underlined letters that spell out, “Mary Jordan did not die naturally. It was one of us. I think I know which one.” She eventually learns that the woman in question was a spy during World War I, and that the boy who owned the book perished soon afterwards himself.

Two former intelligence agents happening to uncover a relevant plot at their doorstep is as silly as those times when Poirot or Marple stumbles across a fresh murder whilst on holiday, and the actual investigation here mostly consists of asking older folks in the community what they remember from long ago (and receiving contradictory information in reply). The couple’s own contacts in the business, meanwhile, are justifiably convinced that the Beresfords know more than they’re letting on about the affair and have moved into this particular address specifically to pursue the case further.

Yet it’s not entirely clear what that pursuit entails. They’re not seeking to identify the killer — nor do they, in the end — and the clues that they find are largely other things that have been left sitting in the house for decades, suggesting that no one cares any longer or has ever bothered to cover their tracks. Nevertheless, someone in the present day is apparently trying to stop or even kill the heroes for looking into the matter, though their motivation isn’t explained and their traps are so ineffective it’s a wonder that they’re noticed at all.

Anyway. Nice to check in on Tommy and his missus one last time, but their best days are firmly behind them at this point.

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 3 > 4 > 2 > 5

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Phaser Aliens & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens

Book #73 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Phaser Aliens & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens

A new audio production collecting six previously-published Doctor Who stories, one for each of the first half-dozen incarnations of that sci-fi franchise’s Time Lord hero. It’s an interesting snapshot of the series history, since the contents were originally written contemporaneously from 1965 to 1984 — and so in the earlier entries, the protagonist is sometimes called “Dr. Who” instead of “the Doctor,” his ship is sometimes just “TARDIS” without the definite article, and he’s strongly implied to be a human from Earth’s future rather than any sort of alien, because such continuity details either had yet to be solidified on-screen or were simply not a concern for the BBC editorial team at that point.

On their own merits, the tales are all fine but somewhat unremarkable. I’m at a loss as to why these particular titles have been selected for a new life in 2024, although the cynical part of me notes that none of the original authors are known and wonders if that played a role in their curation, to minimize the payout of royalties. The audiobook features the voice talents of actors from across the classic and modern eras of the show as well as the licensed Big Finish spinoffs, which I suppose is a further draw. But overall, this is a pretty insignificant and forgettable collection.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

Book #72 of 2024:

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1)

This is currently my very favorite book, which I’ve now read twice in as many years. What follows is an updated version of my original review:

The Hands of the Emperor is a wonderful warm hug of a novel, rich in characterization and gentle affirmation of community trust. It’s rare for a 900-page fantasy tome to feel so cozy, let alone to forgo any significant romance or acts of violence throughout its duration. But this self-published 2019 work is remarkable in any number of ways, each more endearingly quaint than the last. I am honestly not even sure that I would say it has a plot, although events do gradually unfold in support of the central character arc: a quietly effective middle-aged civil servant belatedly earning (or realizing he already has) the love and admiration of his colleagues, his far-off relatives, and his boss.

It’s an incredibly slow unveiling. Cliopher Mdang, private secretary to the ruler of the entire world, spends the first quarter of the text escorting his liege on an incognito holiday, the result of a breach-of-protocol invitation blurted out upon a stroke of insight about how lonely the other man must be in his peerless existence under elaborate courtly taboos, unable to be touched or looked directly in the eye. The two have known each other for decades — or possibly even millennia, as time has fractured in the cataclysmic backstory and now passes slower in some parts of the realm than others — but their relationship has previously only ever been professional. We essentially get to meet His Radiancy the individual as Kip does, whilst simultaneously getting a feel for the viewpoint protagonist himself and the dazzlingly intricate worldbuilding details that author Victoria Goddard has devised for the various cultures of the setting.

The tone here is something like The Goblin Emperor crossed with The West Wing. Or the musical Hamilton, if it weren’t a tragedy and showed its title figure as more in touch with his island origins like Disney’s Moana. It turns out that in his rise through the levels of government, our hero has been subtly reworking that system, pushing for law and policy changes that will contribute to a more equitable society. Inspired by his distant egalitarian homeland, he’s rooted out corruption, instituted a universal basic income, improved the postal and transportation services, and implemented countless further such ideas that in an aggregation of incremental steps have functionally revolutionized the empire. It’s a rejection of grimdark cynicism, a hopepunk ode to the fundamental principle of good governance’s ability to help people, and it’s absolutely riveting to see in action, especially once its unassuming architect starts being openly acknowledged and rewarded for it.

This is also a story about cultural conflicts: about coming from a small backwater province to the capital of the known universe and facing misunderstanding and scorn for the customs of home. About keeping those folkways kindled inside as a guiding beacon, and ultimately proving that oral traditions are not primitive but lavish and meaningful and preserved over generations as a powerful representation of identity. About finding a way to make Kip’s family understand why he left and everything he’s accomplished in the wider civilization, and about his personal journey to realize how he needs to be a better advocate for himself in their eyes.

Above all, I would say that this is a book about being seen and accepted and loved for who you are. The evolving dynamic between Cliopher and the Last Emperor is not romantic — and I’ve heard that in the sequel, the diligent bureaucrat is more explicitly characterized as asexual — but it is deeply intimate and a model of trusting fealty as the lord and his loyal aide come to reveal more and more of themselves to one another. The meaning of the title is twofold: Kip both serves as the metaphorical hands of the Emperor in interpreting and enacting his will across the kingdom and yearns to be able to grasp His Radiancy’s actual hands in friendship. The catharsis of when he finally does, along with several other key moments in the long path there, is emotional and soothing and genuinely heartfelt. Adults being competent at their jobs and earnestly decent to the fellow souls in their lives! Is that what people mean when they describe genre fiction as wish-fulfillment?

There is some periodic darkness, on the margins. The trauma of the Fall that most characters lived through continues to affect them, and the protagonist feels intense isolation and survivor’s guilt that has to be carefully unpacked and confronted, with the occasional panic attack along the way. The possibility of suicide is raised obliquely in passing, and we learn that his former superiors used to torture their political enemies, in the old days before his reforms. One minor character comes from a tribe that engages in sacred ritualistic cannibalism, while another gets casually deadnamed at first mention, although there’s no indication of any transphobia that would give that act the same violent impact it carries in our world. (“Clia was [__] originally, but she changed her name when she was of age to declare herself a woman.”) I raise these issues to respect reader sensitivities, but in general, I’d say that they only cause the pervasive spirit of humanitarian acceptance that powers the novel to stand out more clearly.

This was my initial introduction to both Goddard as a writer and her broader Nine Worlds saga, and having subsequently now read eleven of the other titles in that continuity before circling back around to this one — everything but At the Feet of the Sun and the Greenwing and Dart, Tales from Ysthar, and The Red Company Reformed subseries — I still think it’s probably the best entry point for newcomers. The rest have generally been great as well, though, and they’ve definitely added delightful further background context for me on this reread. Like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nine Worlds series is less of a single unfolding narrative and more of a loose configuration of smaller contained stories that’s forgiving of practically any reading order but builds in enjoyment the deeper you go and the more connections you start to spot. Nevertheless, my personal recommendation would be to begin right here, with a thoughtful islander striking up an unprecedented conversation with his lord.

★★★★★

Book Review: Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson

Book #71 of 2024:

Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds #2)

Not quite on the jaw-dropping level of its predecessor, which juggled an action-packed plot across multiple parallel worlds with ease, but still an excellent bit of science-fiction in its own right. We’ve shifted protagonists for this sequel, following a genderfluid servant of the warlord emperor on one particular planet (introduced as a supporting character before) as they face incursions from yet another dimension. Previously, the technology that enabled such multiversal travel required one’s doppelgänger in the destination plane to be dead in order to function, with the traveler essentially filling the void upon arrival. This new antagonist civilization, however, has devised a means to kill off the duplicate as part of that process, resulting in a string of violent deaths and lookalike enemy agents hiding the evidence to infiltrate the hero’s society.

It’s a largely character-driven story, made up of a cast of marginalized people processing their respective traumas in ways that aren’t necessarily always the healthiest. As they negotiate existing class tensions in their dystopian desert community alongside the newer existential threat from the outsiders, they inevitably hurt and betray one another in escalating fashion as the crisis worsens. The result is an angry and often uncomfortable read, especially for how it reframes and casts doubt on some of what we thought we knew from the previous novel — certain negatives turned to positives in the eyes of the different narrator, for instance, and the former heroine’s idealism viewed far more cynically. (Both books do stand alone fairly well, but obviously you’d be missing a lot of background context if you jumped into the series here.) Luckily author Micaiah Johnson is as sharp as ever, and while there’s little of the Mad Max spectacle that the setting perhaps deserves, the work nevertheless crackles with a desperate and furious energy.

[Content warning for racism, misgendering, police brutality, torture, body horror, domestic abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 3

TV #18 of 2024:

Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 3

A satisfactory enough conclusion to this corner of the Star Wars franchise, but not one that really pushes the titular characters anywhere exciting. Mostly, the season seems built to lay plausible retroactive groundwork for the infamous “Somehow Palpatine survived” line from the movie The Rise of Skywalker — though the finale hilariously does pull back from that and never explicitly confirms that the ‘Project Necromancer’ research with its suggestive name and interest in clone DNA was aimed at ultimately resurrecting the Emperor. Instead, it just turns out to be an arbitrary stumbling block in the plot to get the protagonists locked up, escaping, captured again, and so on throughout this final year.

At its best, this series managed to fill in some interesting worldbuilding gaps about the galaxy’s transition into the early empire, but that’s a function that’s had diminishing returns across its run, as have the personal arcs of its various heroes. I can’t say that the show overstayed its welcome, and the episodic stories have generally continued to deliver the requisite thrills, but it’s drifted pretty far from appointment viewing even for diehard fans.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

Book Review: Book of Time by John Peel

Book #70 of 2024:

Book of Time by John Peel (Diadem #11)

The middle-grade / YA Diadem line was released in waves under a succession of publishers: first Scholastic for the original six novels from 1997 to 1998, then Llewellyn (who gave the saga a temporary new subtitle of “Worlds of Magic”) for the next four from 2005 to 2006. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes either time, but the final sprint saw author John Peel self-publish two additional installments in 2012 as a single bound volume, which I have to imagine was intended to wrap everything up.

…and it’s unfortunately not very good, at least in this front half. The bones of a story are here in #11, but it’s really only a promising rough draft at best. An editor was sorely needed: for the many typos and awkward phrasings that riddle the text, for the inconsistent tone to the previous adventures, and for all the basic scene and plot mechanics that are confusingly presented herein.

It’s a shame, because this is the sort of premise that should be an easy layup for a seasoned writer so deep into an ongoing serialized project. We pick up a few dangling threads from before, with a shadowy foe scheming in the wings and Score reeling from the revelation that Shanara — spoiler alert — is his long-lost mother from his girlfriend Helaine’s homeworld. The antagonist is revealed to be an agent of Destiny, whose consciousness somehow survived her mortal fate back in book #6 and is understandably now bent on revenge against the heroes, while the earth boy is angry about all the lies and demanding that his duplicitous parent explain herself. Yet when she tries to summon a vision to do just that, the villains twist the spell to send the party hurtling back in time to the Diadem’s ancient past.

Pixel, Jenna, and Shanara find themselves at the height of the Triad’s power from the initial series backstory, when the tyrants’ servant Sarman had yet to betray and overthrow them to seize the mantle on Jewel for himself. The Three Who Rule are cruel torturers, as we see firsthand when they create the incorporeal Oracle from the shade of a man that they just slaughtered and wish to continue abusing. But the future visitors worry that if they do anything to intervene in such atrocities, they’ll disrupt the proper flow of history and perhaps paradoxically prevent their own births. Meanwhile, Score and Helaine have arrived centuries earlier on Ordin, where they learn that Traxis and Sarman were both members of the royal family as well (Queen Shanara’s brother-in-law and his cousin, respectively) before they ever set their sights on conquering the wider Diadem. The testy lovebirds likewise cannot alter the course of known events, which makes for a somewhat flat narrative even if it didn’t end on a cliffhanger with so much unresolved.

Most of this could have worked, with a little polish. Take out Score’s anxiety that people will think he’s gay for kissing Helaine-dressed-as-Renald, the totally unnecessary use of the r-slur, and Jenna’s sudden insecure cattiness; clean up the action so that it reads more clearly; give the protagonists actual accomplishments and meaningful obstacles to overcome instead of reducing them to passive witnesses… These are the kinds of things I might have suggested to raise this sequel to the level of its predecessors, if I had been the one tasked with editing such a flawed manuscript. Too bad nobody else seems to have gotten the gig, either.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 3

TV #17 of 2024:

Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 3

This season starts out a little slowly, but it certainly hits its stride again by the end, with the episode set on Deep Space Nine and the one with the unexpected return of wayward ensign Peanut Hamper as particular formula-breaking standouts. At its best — and a lot of this run is up there! — the animated Star Trek comedy is both telling lovingly esoteric jokes about the franchise lore and spinning engaging new stories to further develop its characters. At this point, the crew of the Cerritos (the titular bottom ranks and the bridge officers alike) have been through so many adventures together that the ship’s initial characterization as a place for perpetual second-stringers doing all the boring work no longer really makes sense, so it’s good to see the show / the other people in Starfleet recognizing that and shifting the framing accordingly.

(Would I still watch a series that was legitimately about the unsung menial side of life in Trek’s version of the future? Absolutely. But it’s also great for these heroes to actually get treated as such while they continue to riff on the absurdities of the science-fiction universe around them.)

★★★★☆