The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: What If…?, season 2

TV #62 of 2023:

What If…?, season 2

Not nearly as impressive as the first year, which was a neat concept for a show but already had some issues in the execution that are worsened here. I swear, I’d feel so much more favorable towards this series if it truly were the anthology that it’s pitched as: just a sequence of kooky standalone hypotheticals untethered to the prime continuity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And some episodes still deliver on that! I love the one where a young Mohawk woman Kahhori — the first MCU superhero not based on a preexisting comic book character, apparently — inherits the power of the Tesseract and stops European colonialism in its tracks. Elsewhere this season, casting Happy Hogan as the star in a Die Hard pastiche (against Justin Hammer trying to take over the Avengers tower) is another fun outing that lightly bends its familiar elements well.

But a full third of these episodes follow Captain Carter, a returning heroine from the year before. Don’t get me wrong — I like Peggy Carter a lot, and it’s great that Hayley Atwell continues to voice the role. But the premise of What If…? shouldn’t feature this much of a recurring cast, and it’s sort of wild that she’s who Disney has decided to cement as our primary protagonist here, given how they canceled the much better live-action Agent Carter series back in 2016. (Seriously, Kevin Feige, you and Atwell both seem to love this character. It’s not too late to bring back her original show for a belated third season on Disney+!) It’s also frustrating how Marvel is telling two different stories about the multiverse / branching timelines practically back-to-back right now — the second season of Loki ended about a-month-and-a-half before this one began — and they neither reference one another nor even seem to be operating under the same set of basic worldbuilding rules.

One episode in this batch, “What if… the Avengers Assembled in 1602?,” takes a pretty obvious inspiration from Neil Gaiman’s comic run Marvel: 1602, to somewhat mixed effect. I definitely appreciate the adaptation choice to have a certain figure be an amnesiac, rather than the more problematic version on the page, but almost nothing else of the plot or Gaiman’s clever character reinventions (or scathing critique of contemporary American power) has been retained either. In fact, by pitching the ‘what if’ as two distant eras unexpectedly merging together, rather than heroes being born so far ahead of schedule, the show writers lazily avoid having to come up with as many inventive historical variations. They can, for instance, just give Ant-Man his usual suit powers rather than finding a way to actually fit him into the 17th century setting.

And that’s this program in a nutshell, unfortunately. The components are there for a stronger product than we’re currently getting, and the specific drive to wrap everything in a larger, universe-threatening plot results in eventual endless scenes of action-figure laser blasts with minimal personality or thought behind them. It’s not all bad, but it’s far from the showcase for off-the-wall franchise material and explorations of divergent fates that it once seemed it could be.

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Defiant by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #4)

Book #136 of 2023:

Defiant by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #4)

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

A generally satisfying finale to author Brandon Sanderson’s YA space opera Skyward, following three previous novels and a sequence of tie-in novellas cowritten with Janci Patterson. The wider ‘Cytoverse‘ that began with the 2008 story Defending Elysium will apparently continue in the form of a sequel Sanderson/Patterson series called Skyward Legacy, but this installment brings to a close our protagonist Spensa’s fight against the oppressive Superiority and the inhuman extradimensional delvers. Her special cytonic powers have continued to grow, but the writer tosses reasonable obstacles her way for this final adventure, including a newfound morality that makes the once-bloodthirsty teen soldier increasingly reluctant to take more life and anchors her resolve to rescue the various beings held trapped and subjugated by her enemies. It’s legitimate character growth amid pulse-pounding action, and definitely a step back up after the somewhat-aimless and exposition-heavy penultimate tale.

To some extent, Sanderson is repeating his old familiar tricks. Spensa and Jorgen’s dynamic in this volume is strongly reminiscent of other couples he’s written like Vin and Elend in Mistborn (he the bookish introvert forced to assume a leadership role; she the hotheaded warrior who loves him but refuses to listen to his orders). And the aerial dogfights, while still entertaining, aren’t ever elevated beyond the tactics we’ve seen again and again in the earlier stories. There are a few minor twists to keep us on our toes, but the general aim of the plot is simply to reunite the heroine with her friends, show off what she’s learned in the meantime, and set her up to save the day. It sounds basic, but it’s carried off well, if a cut below the author at his best. I’ll probably check out the next books when they come out, but this honestly would be a fine place to end the overall saga. Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

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

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1 > 4 > 3

Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road (2023)

Movie #10 of 2023:

Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road (2023)

Disney+ has decided to label this festive Doctor Who outing as Special 4, which suggests a certain close continuity with the recent David Tennant / Catherine Tate trilogy that doesn’t really pan out in the episode itself. Instead, as expected, the script is pitched more as a clean break and an ideal starting point for brand-new or lapsed-and-curious viewers. You don’t have to know that this Doctor is the fifteenth (at least) incarnation of that role, or anything about regeneration or Time Lords at all. As in previous companion and Doctor introductions like “Rose” back in 2005, the episode hooks us on the characters’ charisma and chemistry with one another, along with the basic plot formula for the franchise. Bad guys show up, ushering an audience-identification figure out of her ordinary life; a charmingly quirky stranger swoops in to foil their plans.

That’s not to say that this is a reboot that’s setting previous canon aside. Long-standing audiences will find that returning showrunner Russell T. Davies is firmly committed to incorporating his predecessor’s “Timeless Child” revelation of the Doctor’s adoption into the protagonist’s ongoing characterization, but it’s not presented as a lingering story concern — just a note that happens to parallel his new friend Ruby Sunday’s own murky origin. That, by contrast, is set up as a bit of a mystery that future installments will presumably continue to explore. It also represents a synthesis of the typical Davies / Chibnall tradition of introducing a fairly grounded companion with Steven Moffat’s more magical, fairy-tale approach. The blonde 19-year-old Ruby may resemble Rose Tyler at first glance, but she’s actually a paradox of the universe like Amy Pond or Clara Oswald — already marked for a special fate before she ever steps into the TARDIS, where now the Doctor can help her unravel that puzzle. Most importantly, though, she’s plucky and clever and a great match for Ncuti Gatwa’s star power. The new Doctor has less to prove, at least for me, but he continues to be a joyful force who’s clearly thrilled to be on the scene and facing down a high-stakes yet ludicrous threat.

The goblins add to the heightened fantastical atmosphere, of course, as does the Christmastime setting. (Again, if you’re looking for continuity ties, perhaps their existence stems from the previous Doctor invoking superstitions back in Wild Blue Yonder. But that connection isn’t essential or explicitly made for us here.) Doctor Who specials around this season are often a little looser, but they’ve seldom been as campy as this one, with an airship of cackling creatures causing mayhem and kidnapping babies to feast on the ensuing chaos energy. That’s the sort of premise that needs you to get on its level to appreciate, especially once the big musical number arrives and our heroes start singing along. It’s bonkers and honestly not my favorite vibe for the show, though I think the internet chatter about possible antisemitic undertones was overblown. But it’s exhilarating in its way, and a good demonstration of why Ruby would get caught up in this particular Doctor’s whirlwind.

(A shout-out to her adoptive family, too. One thing I’ve really missed while Davies was away from Who was the attention he gives to fleshing out a companion’s homelife like that. I don’t know how much we’ll be seeing of Carla and Cherry going forward, but they already feel more substantial than the relatives left behind under his successors. The casual representation remains great too, giving us a multigenerational, multiracial, single-mother household with no particular attention called to it. Likewise Ruby’s trans bandmate, whose presence indicates the RTD2 era is going to prioritize inclusivity even when it’s less of a plot point than it became in The Star Beast. All of these signs are as welcome as the sheer Doctorishness of things like anti-grav gloves and the Time Lord “learning the language of ropes.”)

So welcome back, Doctor Who! Ruby and the Doctor will return sometime in the spring, where they will have further adventures throughout time and space. We’ll probably learn more about the girl’s birth parents, and why she was abandoned as an infant. We might encounter surprising revelations about her elderly neighbor who’s oddly knowledgeable about TARDISes, or that might wind up just a throwaway Davies gag to rile up the fans. Either way, the new team seems competent and fun both on-screen and behind the camera.

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

Book #135 of 2023:

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #3)

Romantasy is the buzzy new publishing genre these days, but for me personally, the fantasy elements always take priority over the romance ones in such a blended work. For that reason, I’ve grown less enamored of this particular trilogy as it’s gone along, with its explicit bedroom scenes feeling increasingly irrelevant to the high-stakes plot of the villains trying to steal all the Edwardian world’s magic for themselves.

Our protagonists this time are two characters introduced in the previous volume, a rakish lord and a lower-class newspaperman who now find themselves swiftly drawn together romantically amid the scramble with their friends to beat the antagonists to the last maguffin. The couple’s dynamic involves lots of dominance-and-submission roleplay, and while I appreciate their careful negotiations of safewords and consent — not to mention the reveal of Alan’s literary alter ego, which extends their personal history back further than either man initially realized — it’s ultimately all a distraction from the worldbuilding premise that drew me into these novels in the first place. I still like the series overall, and the original novel specifically for how its slow-burn character arcs scaffolded the emerging wider story, but these sequels have unfortunately offered diminishing returns for me as a reader.

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

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

TV Review: Animorphs, season 1

TV #61 of 2023:

Animorphs, season 1

I’ll admit, I went into this 90s Nickelodeon adaptation rather skeptically. I’m a big fan of the original book series about kids turning into animals to fight an alien invasion, which I felt held up pretty well on a recent adult reread, whereas I remember giving up on the show in frustration after only a few episodes when it first aired. Luckily I’m more forgiving now about some of the changes that irked me then, and I do think the program grows into itself as it goes along. Still, I can’t honestly call this great television.

The budget is the first big issue. It likely always would be, and I’m sure some of the transformation effects were cutting-edge for their era, but I’m actually somewhat charmed by how much of the morphing here happens off-screen, along with the creative decision to just have all clothing shift along with a person rather than worry about depicting the logistics of leotards and shredded outerwear and the like. Visser Three and Ax spend most of their time in their respective human morphs, which seems like a reasonable concession to the realities of the production and those characters’ abilities to emote (at the slight expense of story logic for when they’d more naturally be in their Andalite forms). It’s also a shame that we get no Taxxons and basically no Hork-Bajir as muscle for the body-snatching Yeerk invaders, but again, I can see the justification behind simplifying the enemy threat and saving a bit of money by having the bad guys almost all appear human. What we do glimpse of the various alien species doesn’t inspire much confidence or live up to the books at all.

The non-human morphs are a problem, though — a combination of stock footage, poorly-trained animal performers, tinted ground-level camera work, and the occasional static prop, as when Marco clutches an obviously stuffed toy to his chest that’s supposed to be Cassie in skunk morph. I’ll give the directors credit for trying, and I don’t know if there’s even a great alternate way that they could have rendered some of those moments instead. But as in the novels, it’s the human interactions that tend to hit the hardest — when the weight of the world comes crashing down on these reluctant teen warriors — and not when they’re turning into lizards and mice to scurry after someone. We’re not getting the big battle scenes anyway, so I almost wish the series had leaned more into the theatricality of having the kids simply talk about the results of their missions rather than showing them directly (although I can understand why the network would have considered the use of live animals as a key selling point).

The characters are presented more or less as they are on the page, and many of the episodic plots are taken right from the books, at least after some initial nonsense about an invented Andalite disk maguffin that the heroes and villains keep trading back and forth (the reason I quit the show in the first place, if memory serves). The worldbuilding isn’t as well thought-out, though, with weird details about Yeerk biology and culture that contradict each other or generally don’t add up to a convincing whole. It’s not just that certain elements have been changed from the books; it’s that what’s offered instead often comes across as a little half-baked.

The tone is off as well, as though aimed at a slightly younger audience than the novels. Visser Three never gloated like a Power Rangers villain quite so much in print! And the Yeerk Controllers were much more secretive about their operation too, in addition to not giving themselves away by acting stiffly and tugging on their earlobes after being infested. (The whole point of the paranoid atmosphere of K. A. Applegate’s work, and why it succeeds as a neat metaphor for typical feelings of teenage alienation, is that anyone could be an adversary in disguise.) The show simplifies and flattens all that, much as it substitutes actual deadly combat for the supposed battle morphs simply snarling and chasing off the bad guys. There’s no real body horror, or gore, or existential dread, or torture, or any of the other heavy themes that the book series dealt with on a regular basis. It’s all a bit cartoonish by comparison.

Regardless, the program has its charms, lightweight and throwback as they are. I don’t know that it would be appealing enough for non-readers, but it’s better as both an adaptation and a story in its own right than I thought it’d be, at least over these first 20 episodes. (A truncated second season of 6 more would follow; I’ll get to those at some point too. I hope they come to a stronger resolution than this first year, which ends suddenly on a random cliffhanger.) Watching it today is a frustrating experience, however, as the Freevee / Amazon Prime streaming service has most of the episodes mislabeled and thus out-of-order. For future reference, here’s the actual listing:

My Name is Jake, Part 1
My Name is Jake, Part 2 (labeled as 6)
Underground (labeled as 2)
On the Run (labeled as 3)
Between Friends (labeled as 4)
The Message (labeled as 5)
The Escape (labeled as 11)
The Alien (labeled as 12)
The Capture, Part 1 (labeled as 7)
The Capture, Part 2 (labeled as 8)
The Reaction (labeled as 13)
The Stranger (labeled as 9)
The Forgotten (labeled as 14)
The Leader, Part 1 (labeled as 10)
The Leader, Part 2 (labeled as 16)
Tobias (labeled as 15)
Not My Problem (labeled as 18)
The Release (labeled as 17)
Face Off, Part 1
Face Off, Part 2

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 3

TV #60 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 3

Discovery’s messy second season ended with the ship jumping far away from the familiar, and this next year quickly confirms that the crew have arrived in the distant future, 900 years after their original era directly preceding TOS. That’s a smart writing choice on a couple levels to address issues that this series has had since its debut. The advanced technology that the modern effects budget likes to show off no longer needs to be justified in the context of a prequel scenario, and the plot and worldbuilding possibilities are likewise much more expansive without the existing franchise continuity boxing them in. This is more or less the latest moment in time that Trek has ever depicted, which gives the scripts a greater feeling of freedom than they’ve ever had before.

I’ll also give the show credit for sticking to its dystopian elements, as my initial assumption at the revelation that the Federation has been shattered by a mysterious event a century ago was that our heroes would spend the season somehow reversing that and aborting this timeline, much like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. did when it sent its own team into a cataclysmic future for season five. (I also half-expected protagonist Michael Burnham or a relative to wind up responsible for the catastrophe, given that it’s been nicknamed the Burn.) While Michael and her shipmates do investigate the incident and discover its cause — which is deeply silly, unfortunately — it eventually becomes clear that the new interstellar and political landscape is here to stay. The central storyline goal for the crew heading into the finale isn’t to undo the Burn; it’s to survive the attack of a dangerous villain on the scene. I wish that could have been made clearer earlier on, but it retroactively makes the setting a bit more interesting once we’re convinced it won’t all be wiped away.

On the downside: plot and character beats still aren’t being given enough room to breathe, which often makes key developments feel arbitrary and artificial. Certain details of the 32nd century don’t have much personality beyond Generic Dystopia, either. And while there are a few cast shakeups this year, the departures aren’t especially well-motivated or emotional the way that I’d prefer for serialized television. At least the newcomers are neat, including a person I believe is Star Trek’s first openly nonbinary cast member / character.

Overall, this isn’t a great outing for the program, and it’s certainly nowhere near the propulsive twists that powered season one. But it’s a big step back in the right direction after a much weaker season two and the similarly-underwritten first run of Star Trek: Picard.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan

Book #134 of 2023:

Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan

In 1990, reporter Ellen McGarrahan witnessed the state of Florida’s botched execution of death-row inmate Jesse Tafero. (The electric chair sparked and caught fire, ultimately taking seven minutes and three separate jolts to execute the prisoner when it should have taken less than one minute and only a single shock.) The incident clearly traumatized the author, especially after new evidence emerged to suggest the dead man might have been innocent of the charges against him — the 1976 murder of two police officers at a traffic stop involving Tafero, his girlfriend, her baby and 9-year-old son, and a family friend.

McGarrahan switched careers to become a private detective, a route that eventually led her to go back and look into the case. Four decades later, she dug into the files and interviewed all the surviving witnesses, trying to finally get to the bottom of the matter and free herself from the ghost she’s felt haunting her over the years.

As a book, it’s a mixed effort. The true-crime details are interesting, if sometimes presented less straightforwardly than I’d like, as are the more memoir-like passages where the writer reflects on why the investigation is so important to her. It’s impressive how far she goes to track people down, even to the middle of the Irish wilderness or a LARP event in Australia, and her note about how much evidence has been lost over the years is rather trenchant. (She has a trial transcript, for instance, but none of the original exhibits that would help a reader interpret the lawyers’ comments.) But it never seems like her search really lands anywhere substantial. Instead she repeatedly asks someone questions, gets contradictory answers, and then frets about whether they’ve told her the truth or not.

Her eventual determination is that yes, Jesse probably did kill the two cops, after either Sunny or her boy distracted them by firing a taser in their direction. But all three adults in the car were drug runners with organized crime connections, with plenty to lose if law enforcement inspected the contents of the vehicle too closely. And with so much conflicting testimony, so long after the fact, we’ll likely never know for certain which of them pulled the trigger(s) on that fateful day.

It’s not a great conclusion to the narrative McGarrahan has built for us, and I can’t shake the feeling that the facts of the case are not what truly bothered her all these years anyway. In my opinion, it’s the horrific way that she saw a man tortured to death in front of her, regardless of his guilt or innocence: an event that literally caused her to flee her relationship, her profession, and even her whole time zone to reinvent herself in California. A work that dug more deeply into the personal angle of that, or into the justice of the death penalty itself, might have been better than this muckraking road trip that sets out to definitively identify one bad guy over another and then doesn’t even manage to accomplish that goal.

[Content warning for sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Third Girl by Agatha Christie

Book #133 of 2023:

Third Girl by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #40)

A fine mid-1960s title from author Agatha Christie, although at this point she’s clearly struggling to understand the contemporary counterculture youth movement. So there’s some silly depictions of nihilistic young people and their supposed drug habits throughout, and the mystery itself hinges on a few instances of poorly propped-up false identities that you’d really think detective Hercule Poirot would start seeing through earlier than this. Still, I appreciate that he’s here poking into things for the entirety of the story — along with Christie’s recurring self-insert novelist character Ariadne Oliver — rather than swooping in near the end, and the premise is at least an interesting one. A distraught teenager approaches the old Belgian with the extraordinary claim that she thinks she’s murdered someone, but then vanishes before offering her name or any further details. Who was she, and was she honest, or confused, or playing some odd deeper game? Poirot is on the case, and so of course are we.

[Content warning for gaslighting and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings

Book #132 of 2023:

100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings

A breezy survey of different ideas about the hereafter: both those of various world religions and the ones dreamed up for particular works of fiction, from Riverworld to Dead Like Me to San Junipero to Defending Your Life. (Spoiler alert for some, like The Good Place or Lost, although author Ken Jennings does manage to discuss The Sixth Sense without giving away its notorious big twist.) It’s all interesting enough, but there’s no deeper analysis here to bring out universal themes or even sort the entries into smaller common groups.

Indeed, my biggest issue is that the ordering of these items is pretty haphazard throughout. The first third of the text deals with the spiritual claims of actual practitioners — problematically / artificially divided between “mythology” and “religion” — with the remainder then sorted into chapters on the depictions of afterlives from books, movies, music and theater, etc. That means that lightly-divergent spins on the same reference point like the traditional Christian cosmology are scattered across the book, when they instead could have been centralized together to easily compare and contrast. More confusingly, some fictional universes are split into multiple ‘places’ for the alternate destinations they depict, while others are not — and because each chapter’s contents are alphabetized, that results in for example Dante’s visions of the Inferno, Paradise, and Purgatory being presented separately as #40, #46, and #48 in the overall work.

(The alphabetization is also a strange choice given that some of the locales seem to have been informally-named by Jennings himself, e.g. The Bogus Journey from the Bill and Ted movie of that name or Canine Heaven from All Dogs Go to Heaven. Assuming that the intent of arranging each chapter alphabetically was for ease of the reader looking things up, that seems like a further misstep on his part.)

The aggregate effect of these issues is that the book winds up feeling somewhat underbaked to me, despite the breadth of information and the inherently-appealing topic. It reads more like the Jeopardy! mainstay showing off his surface-level trivia knowledge than ever seriously engaging with the material or reflecting on what we can potentially learn from it. Humans plainly have a recurring cross-cultural preoccupation to tell stories about what happens after we die, but this writer is content to merely summarize a hundred or so of them for us.

[Content warning for suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine

Book #131 of 2023:

Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine

I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just such a work — a rendition of the Trojan War through the eyes of three women at the heart of the besieged city-state. Together the kidnapped Helen, her sister-in-law Andromache, and their servant Rhea offer us an immersive view of the Bronze Age society that debut author A. D. Rhine (a pen name for the team of Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson) has extrapolated from various mythological, historical, and archaeological records.

The ensuing worldbuilding is interesting, but the result is too far removed from traditional accounts of the siege like Homer’s Iliad. This is somewhat a matter of taste, but in my opinion, a successful retelling either presents a familiar tale from a different character angle or else fills in the existing gaps in the narrative with plausible additional material. It doesn’t explicitly contradict what’s been established before except to intentionally raise questions of honesty and bias in the earlier narrator(s). I know that mythology is an inherently fluid, oral tradition and that Homer isn’t the absolute authority on the war from his stories, but I’m at a loss here as to how we should interpret radically new inventions like a plague ravaging Troy or Paris trying to poison his way up the line of succession. So many of the standard Trojan plot points have been stripped away that the remaining elements are almost a distraction whenever they do appear. The Greek forces are particularly missed, as they are mostly cast as a distant impersonal threat and given no substantial individual characterization until very near the end.

If this had been a reimagining simply inspired by the Trojan War and set in an entirely-new fantasy world, I’d probably feel a lot more charitable towards it (though the lack of closure in the final pages would likely still bug me). As is, it’s too well-written to rate lower than three-out-of-five stars, but it never manages to come together in a satisfying fashion for me, especially compared to the excellent 2019 Natalie Haynes book A Thousand Ships that likewise retells this conflict from a women’s perspective. I could easily see other readers liking it a lot more, however, if they don’t approach it with the same preferences I’ve brought to the experience.

[Content warning for sexism, domestic abuse, rape, pedophilia, torture, claustrophobia, slavery, and gore.]

★★★☆☆