The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Terminator Salvation (2009)

Movie #19 of 2026:

Terminator Salvation (2009)

A competent action spectacle that finally shows us John Connor in his element as a resistance soldier (though not yet a leader) in the post-apocalyptic future that the franchise had repeatedly warned us was looming. That’s a reasonable premise to explore and one that never plays like much of an empty nostalgic retread, although it threatens to jettison the primary hallmarks of the series in the process: the pursuit of a single unstoppable killer across an otherwise-recognizable modern world, the time-travel paradoxes, the fish-out-of-water comedy, and so on. This is a grim and serious installment — as perhaps over-emphasized by the desaturated visuals — and it largely works as a story about humans fighting back against the deadly robots who have destroyed their civilization. I’m just not entirely sure it feels like a Terminator film.

The plot splits its attention between Connor and a new character Marcus, who seems to have slept through the doomsday of Terminator 3 and its aftermath. He’s eventually and unsurprisingly revealed to be a cyborg, but the ultimate goal that Skynet is aiming to achieve with him proves oddly elusive. (He’s an infiltration unit designed to lure the main protagonist into a trap, but he’s alone with John at several points when he could easily just assassinate him himself. The machines likewise have Kyle Reese in their custody for a long while without killing him, which is not a mistake the Terminators we’ve seen before would ever make. It’s also not explained why that random teenager is supposedly the #1 target on their hit list, and if that means they know of his importance to the past — which the hero is trying to preserve to keep himself and humanity’s chances of survival alive, but which the mechanical beings technically need to maintain for their own existence as well, as established in Terminator 2.)

Such logic gaps drag the experience down for me, as does the acting. Sam Worthington’s American accent comes and goes, Christian Bale as the latest John Connor has seemingly no modes beyond his basic scowl, and Linda Hamilton as a voice on tape is the only returning actor from any previous release, although the CGI effects at putting young Arnold’s face on a T-800 are reasonably effective. The end result delivers more of a generic dystopia than a must-watch continuation of the saga, but it’s at least marginally better than I had remembered. I give it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Red Box by Rex Stout

Book #61 of 2026:

The Red Box by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #4)

These 1930s mysteries remain solid enough as a sort of American pastiche of Agatha Christie, but so far they’ve failed to hit the heights that she could periodically achieve for me. The premise to this novel, for example, is initially interesting — a young woman dies eating a poisoned chocolate intended for someone else, who is subsequently killed by different methods — but the eventual resolution feels frankly a bit absurd. (The culprit’s motives at least are relatively straightforward, but exactly how our eccentric agoraphobic detective Nero Wolfe deduces it all from the comfort of his brownstone seems to rely on guesswork and flimsy pseudo-psychology like why the second victim gave a favorite employee diamonds rather than another stone.)

The character work continues to be the best part, as wryly narrated by the investigator’s assistant Archie. Accompanying his boss on a rare excursion outdoors, for instance, he intentionally drives into potholes whenever the latter offers one of his maddeningly obscure hints about the case, which is a fun bit of petty revenge. But overall, I’d have to say this is a straightforwardly forgettable kind of story.

[Content warning for incest and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 5

TV #18 of 2026:

Abbott Elementary, season 5

As a sitcom, this series has always had a somewhat tenuous connection to any sort of grounded reality, but like The Office, it feels as though the comedy is getting broader and the characters more flanderized as the program ages. So here, for example, the teachers spend a few episodes relocated to an empty shopping mall while their school is under repair, and Mr. Johnson’s date to the Janitors Ball gets canceled when all attendees are rerouted to clean up the crash of a semi-truck full of glitter bombs. That’s the kind of zany logic that wouldn’t have flown in earlier seasons, and it’s matched by low-effort episodic premises like a trip to the DMV that suggest the writers might just be running out of story ideas about elementary education.

In other developments this year, Janine and Gregory get more serious about their relationship, with a nice arc surrounding their moving in together. Unfortunately that’s balanced by a random breakup later on that the scripts never manage to sell as well-motivated or likely to stick, which sure enough, it doesn’t. Overall it’s a fairly aimless run for the show, still generally enjoyable to watch — minus a few inane corporate product placements for Wayfair and the latest Avatar movie — but not landing nearly as strongly as it did in its prime.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Moonwar by Ben Bova

Book #60 of 2026:

Moonwar by Ben Bova (Moonbase Saga #2)

Author Ben Bova’s novel Moonrise was a somewhat scattered prelude about life in a near-future lunar settlement, but it built nicely to the situation that’s front and center for this sequel: the facility’s leaders declaring their independence from Earth, so as not to be bound by an international treaty banning the nanotechnology that their systems require to operate.

The result is a neat political thriller, very reminiscent of my favorite arc on Babylon 5 when that station likewise breaks away from the corrupt planetary government. The self-styled “lunatics” have few weapons with which to defend themselves against an aggressive military force of U.N. peacekeepers, but they do have the home advantage and the scientific know-how to engage in clever resistance tactics while stalling for time and trying to win the war of public approval back on the ground.

Some of this feels a little dated a few decades on, like the communications blackout that the United Nations is able to get all news agencies to abide by, and the writer’s characters continue to display a higher libido than seems appropriate for either their circumstances or their professional responsibilities. But overall, it’s a great plot, and one that rewards loyal readers by bringing back a minor figure from the otherwise-unrelated title Mars. With an MCU-style crossover like that, it’s the first time that Bova’s Grand Tour has felt like a cohesive series to me and not just a random group of stories all set around a vaguely common theme of early space exploration. I never read much further than this before, so I’m hoping that’s an atmosphere that’s kept up as the wider saga goes on!

[Content warning for racism including slurs, gun violence, rape, suicide, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked 1 > 2

Book Review: Doctor Who: Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans

Book #59 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans (Virgin New Adventures #13)

One of the better entries that I’ve read in this 90s spinoff series so far, and especially notable for a few fun developments on the side. First, this is the sole VNA novel written by editor Peter Darvill-Evans, and so offers an exceptionally clear demonstration of his vision for how these stories were meant to continue the Doctor Who franchise following its cancellation on television (in both the main text and an even more direct afterword on the subject). The Seventh Doctor, for instance, is by now a master manipulator who sets long chains of events into motion and then follows through to clean up the consequences, often with a false air of innocence and a ruthless alien morality driving his actions. He’s particularly motivated to protect humanity’s timeline from the malevolent interference of other time-travelers, since — in a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy — he’s become so intimately involved with the species over his lengthy association with us.

Here, his interest is in an emerging gestalt intelligence on a distant corporate-run colony world, although as usual, he keeps his exact aims pretty close to the chest. Having finally cured his TARDIS of its lingering instabilities — which sadly never amounted to much across the past few installments — he’s able to fall into the customary Doctorish pattern of arriving somewhere new, talking to the locals, and toppling the neighborhood tyrant. He’s aided in this effort by his current companion Professor Bernice Summerfield, but also by her predecessor Ace, who makes a triumphant return after three years apart (or six months for readers and roughly half that time for her friends). In her absence she’s finished her transformation from the plucky teenager she was on TV into a grimmer and battle-hardened young woman, and has joined up with a squadron of space marines who are on their way to the planet to investigate its mysteries.

Rounding out the party is Abslom Daak, a brutish fan-favorite antihero from the pages of the Doctor Who comic books. His inclusion is kind of silly — his whole gimmick is that he’s a dedicated Dalek killer, and those enemies aren’t even present in this particular adventure — and though Ace spends the volume trying to keep him alive because she knows he dies in glory elsewhere, she’s ultimately unsuccessful only to learn that he’s a clone whose death won’t impact the course of history anyway. Still, it’s a neat and then-unprecedented crossover that serves to mutually reinforce the canonical nature of both the comics and this sequence of novels.

The plot isn’t the most original, but it’s fine enough as a backdrop for these elements, not to mention the returning cyberpunk era setting and a certain toxic lesbian relationship that the characters encounter. I’ve enjoyed the work for itself and for what it represents alike, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of “New Ace” (as the fandom calls her) in the sequels ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, sexual assault, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Homicide: Life on the Street, season 3

TV #17 of 2026:

Homicide: Life on the Street, season 3

At 20 episodes, this is Homicide’s first full-length season, following two with 9 and 4 respectively while it was still an uncertain property on the bubble of cancellation. It’s another strong one, taking advantage of the greater space with more serialized arcs — though they didn’t always air in the right order — and experimentation in format like stories that decenter the main cast or end without a suspect getting caught for their crimes. I don’t find the running subplot of some of the detectives buying a neighborhood bar to be particularly enthralling, but it’s nice to see major cases take weeks to resolve and serious injuries linger to the extent that they should. And in a further sign of the program’s growing popularity, it has a brief crossover with Law & Order (a cameo drop-in from Chris Noth as Det. Mike Logan), which would prove to be the first of several such connections and culminate in Richard Belzer’s John Munch joining the Special Victims Unit spinoff after this series ended.

A few casting changes mark the year as well. Reportedly to improve the gender ratio, the new character of Lt. Megan Russert is introduced, while Jon Polito as Steve Crosetti becomes the first original star not to return (so chosen due to NBC not liking his physical appearance, allegedly). In seeming protest of that network decision, the writers turn his departure into a tragic suicide, spending the hour when his squadmates learn the news on a fittingly somber tribute to the man. Actors Daniel Baldwin and Ned Beatty would also choose to leave at the conclusion of this run, although I don’t know yet how that will be handled on-screen.

Notable guest stars this time include Steve Buscemi, John Waters, Bruno Kirby, and Jerry Stiller, while Beau Felton’s previously unseen wife finally appears to give more shape to his nebulous unhappy marriage. It’s a fine outing all around, and one that continues to offer interesting predicaments beyond the typical limitations of a tidy police procedural.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski

Book #58 of 2026:

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski

This is an incredibly long novel — 1232 pages in hardback; 58 hours to listen to the audiobook on regular speed — that in my opinion never quite manages to justify its heft. It’s a pretty straightforward story, especially compared to author Mark Z. Danielewski’s infamously experimental House of Leaves: two teenagers in 1982 Utah rescue a pair of horses that their legal owner was going to slaughter, then lead them through a difficult mountain pass to reach a national preserve where they can roam free. Unbeknownst to the young thieves, they also make convenient scapegoats for a murder that happens soon after their departure, leading to an angry posse stirred up by the real killer on their trail.

The effect reads a lot like vintage Stephen King, and was obviously strong enough for me to finish the thing despite its size. But I have a hard time accepting the sixteen-year-old protagonist as such a riding and shooting prodigy, and I don’t care much for the device the writer uses of regularly interjecting random asides of opinions from future strangers as a sort of ramshackle Greek chorus. (Apparently the teens’ ordeal will someday be so well-known as to be the subject of countless songs and paintings and academic papers and beyond. There’s one late stretch of the narrative devoted to an entire art exhibition on the matter that feels particularly egregious and interminable.)

Still, when it sticks to the central action it’s a decent western / wilderness survival tale, and I like how the characters are accompanied by the ghost of a dead friend only one of them can see, who in turn reports that he’s joined by an additional spirit invisible to the living as well. Plenty of individual moments within that framework are striking, but I’d look far more favorably on the title at a fraction of its length.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, child sex abuse, racism, homophobia, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Movie #18 of 2026:

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

This third Terminator feature is a deeply cynical film. It would almost have to be, since series creator James Cameron famously considered the story to have finished with the exemplary Terminator 2: Judgement Day in 1991 — and so for the new rights holders to reopen the franchise a decade later, without his involvement, it reads as a pretty naked cash grab rather than an organic continuation or a next chapter that really needed to be told.

It doesn’t help that after two movies that grimly implied the timeline can’t be changed, T2 ended on a genuine triumph for humanity. The apocalypse had been averted, and Skynet’s deadly robots wouldn’t be brought online after all. But you can’t have a Terminator movie without Terminators, so here they are again: both Arnold Schwarzenegger as another T-800 reprogrammed to protect the young John Connor and newcomer Kristanna Loken as a more advanced model opposing him. It turns out that their dystopian present was merely pushed back, not prevented, and the “Terminatrix” even succeeds in her first few assassinations of Connor’s future lieutenants in the modern day. In other words, history apparently can be rewritten, but maybe just to the benefit of the machines.

Our returning hero (now played by Nick Stahl) isn’t one of the T-X’s targets, because he’s been living off the grid and has no known location that his enemies could pinpoint. But by either coincidence or fate, he connects with an old flame (Claire Danes) right when she comes under the crosshairs of the cyborg killer and the Schwarzenegger character shows up to defend her, leading the three of them to flee their shapeshifting pursuer in a dim echo of the previous installments.

The result is big and loud and not particularly well-thought-through when you stop and consider the logic of it all, like why the latest time-travelers have been sent to this specific moment. It ends, again rather pessimistically, with the malevolent A.I. dropping nukes on the world as it was seemingly always going to do, and the human protagonists securing only the meager victory of having survived and positioned John as the potential resistance leader he’ll need to be. It’s also noteworthy, in a piece that insists impending disasters can’t be stopped, how he’s told his older self is dead in the era when the Arnold-bot originates. And the script establishes that his mother died sometime after the last movie too, which feels like a disservice to Linda Hamilton as the original heroine of these things.

Amidst all that, there are some attempts at humor and titillation that mostly fall flat. (You can practically hear the studio executives breathlessly pitching this sequel as, “This time the Terminator is a girl!” especially given how the agents from tomorrow always arrive without clothing.) Guns are fired and cars are crashed, and it’s a competent enough action blockbuster overall, I guess. But it’s quite the comedown from what we’d seen in this setting before.

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins

Book #57 of 2026:

Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins (The Underland Chronicles #1)

A pitch-perfect middle-grade portal fantasy, in which our eleven-year-old protagonist stumbles into an underground world via the basement laundry room of his New York City apartment building. There he discovers giant talking animals like cockroaches, spiders, and bats, a strange civilization of humans, and a prophecy that seems to indicate he’s to be their warrior hero savior. He first rejects this role, but when he learns that his father who disappeared two years ago is alive and being kept prisoner in a neighboring kingdom of rats, he accepts the locals’ offer to join him on a rescue mission.

That quest honestly could have been a larger part of the plot, as it feels like it’s still just getting going when everything suddenly wraps up. But I understand the need to keep things shorter for the younger audience, and at least there are several sequels ahead, although this initial volume stands relatively fine on its own. Overall it’s a great time! I especially like the character of Gregor’s toddler sister who falls into the Underland with him — so often as a parent I feel as though kids that age are written rather poorly in fiction, but she’s a believable little tyke in both her behavior and her sibling dynamic with her big brother.

I’m not seeing much in common between this story and the author’s better-known Hunger Games novels (besides the fact that the various factions aren’t either all good or all evil), which are the only other titles I’ve read from her. But it’s nice to find she has the range to do something so radically different, and do it well. I’ll be coming back for the rest of the series for sure!

[Content warning for domestic abuse and child endangerment.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves by Arik Kershenbaum

Book #56 of 2026:

The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves by Arik Kershenbaum

I’ve really enjoyed this 2020 nonfiction title, in which an evolutionary biologist provides his informed speculations about the potential nature(s) of extraterrestrial life. He does this by describing a wide sample of the myriad beings that share a planet with us already, the fundamental principles of natural selection that have produced them (and that we would expect to be universal), and the additional sorts of creatures that might arise under different constraints than the Earth’s.

The primary focus here is on function over form. Legs have evolved independently in our ecosystem multiple times, for instance, because there’s a great evolutionary benefit to being able to move across a surface with less friction — and therefore an alien world would likely exhibit that type of appendage in some of its lifeforms, even if they don’t appear quite like any that we can see closer to home. Dr. Kershenbaum also points out repeatedly that evolution doesn’t work towards any particular end goal: small changes accumulate over eons into larger ones, but each successful mutation in the moment is simply one that serves to help an individual better survive and/or reproduce in its given environment.

We are thus unlikely to find the kind of telepathy so popular in science-fiction, because there’s no clear chain of incremental advantages that would ever produce such an ability in the aggregate. For a similar reason, we would not predict species to evolve wheels, or supersonic speeds, or so on, despite the fanciful inventions that sometimes populate our stories. And because the exact chances that led to intelligent, social, speaking tool-users that look like us were so hyper-specific to our own random development, interstellar visitors we may someday encounter who embody all those same behavioral traits are almost certainly not going to resemble the near-humanoids of Star Trek or the like. But with the writer’s guidance, we can at least begin to imagine what attributes we might plausibly have in common with them and where we will probably differ.

Overall, it’s a fun read. The author openly admits to glossing over the finer details of the scientific theories that he relates, and as someone with an academic background in linguistics, I noticed several such omissions in his discussions of language, animal communication strategies, and how something like either might manifest out in space. I would have preferred a more thorough approach myself, especially there, but he does acknowledge that he’s intentionally dropping nuance to make the text more accessible, and he includes ample citations for anyone interested in reading further. The end result is breezy and charming, while still feeling well-grounded in the available facts.

★★★★☆