The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 9

TV #59 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 9

Narrowly more good than great in my opinion, and certainly less innovative than the Third Doctor’s first two seasons, which radically overhauled the series on several levels and then introduced the delightful recurring villain the Master. The main change this year is just that the Doctor seems free to travel in his TARDIS again — which probably helps the earthbound UNIT stuff from growing stale, but does somewhat reduce the distinctiveness of this particular era, now that the protagonist is back to the same business as his predecessors.

Still, the show is in a comfortable rhythm at this point, and no individual story is too awful, even if some of the script ideas exceed the effects budget rather spectacularly. (I challenge anyone to take Kronos seriously in The Time Monster, flailing around in that absurd costume. It can’t be done.) There are loads of fine moments, especially among the major cast members, who are feeling pretty well-drawn overall. It’s a nice hangout season, but ultimately not a favorite of mine.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
THE MUTANTS (9×15 – 9×20)
THE SEA DEVILS (9×9 – 9×14)
THE TIME MONSTER (9×21 – 9×26)

★★★★☆
DAY OF THE DALEKS (9×1 – 9×4)
THE CURSE OF PELADON (9×5 – 9×8)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1

TV #58 of 2023:

Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1

I can’t complain too much about this show. It’s an animated half-hour comedy that, sure, makes me laugh most episodes. But I don’t think it’s really living up to its mission or its potential, at least in this first year.

The series takes its name from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that broke from that program’s typical convention by focusing on a group of characters who would ordinarily be in the background of the action and showing how they faced their own unique challenges and still meaningfully contributed to the success of the bridge officers we’d normally be following. This cartoon likewise places us among the menial workers on a Federation starship, though the contrast is less effective since we don’t already know the upper ranks on the U.S.S. Cerritos (and since the ship itself is situated as a bit of an underdog in the fleet).

My main issue here is tone. It feels reductive to say that this doesn’t feel like Star Trek, when the whole point is obviously to present a different sort of take on the usual material. And I do admire the ways that the writing finds to skewer some of Starfleet’s traditional pompousness! There are also some fun fan-service references, like a cutaway scene of Q’s shenanigans or a minor character insisting Wolf 359 was an inside job. But the scripts sometimes lean a bit too far in portraying a fundamentally cynical and harsh moral universe, in my opinion. Star Trek generally reflects an optimistic look at humanity’s future among the stars, so what are we to do with a schlimazel like Brad Boimler, who basically gets penalized by the narrative again and again for the apparent fault of trying to do his assigned job and advance in his career?

His crewmates fare somewhat better. Tendi and Rutherford aren’t treated nearly as cruelly by the plot, although again, the implication seems to be that Boimler’s flaw is caring too much, in a franchise that has previously always expected and rewarded that kind of behavior. Meanwhile the last lead Beckett Mariner is a new type of Star Trek hero, a competent badass who does get promoted for her efforts but then inevitably acts out in order to get busted back down. That leads to some entertaining story moments, but I find her a little tiring and underwritten as a character, especially when so many of her antics come at Brad’s expense. Her connection to the ship’s captain is similarly an interesting idea that doesn’t really go anywhere just yet.

I’ve seen some comparisons of this show to Rick and Morty, and I’m not familiar enough with that other series to weigh in on whether that’s the strangeness I’m sensing in its DNA or not. But there’s definitely something that’s holding me back from embracing it to the degree that its clever humor should rightfully merit. (That closing joke about the Enterprise finale and theme song, for example? Delightful.)

Still, it’s early days yet! Barclay was abused by TNG in his first few appearances too, before Trek found a way to organically develop and redeem him. I hope a similar grace can eventually be found for the animated denizens of these lower decks.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: System Collapse by Martha Wells

Book #127 of 2023:

System Collapse by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #7)

The second half of this latest Murderbot adventure lives up to my high expectations for the series, but the first part is an experimental departure that doesn’t really work for me. We start in media res, with the neurodivergent cyborg showing unusual signs of trauma, then jump backwards to where the storyline properly begins. Only, we’re still in the dark about whatever happened just prior to that, which the narrator literally designates as “[redacted]” and doesn’t explicitly reveal until much later on.

And while I think that could be an interesting new character note for the rogue AI, in practice I find it mostly a frustrating distraction. (The same plot beats of the protagonist’s unexpected emotional struggles and fear responses could have been presented straightforwardly, rather than coyly framed as supporting a mystery whose ultimate answer isn’t particularly revelatory.) Once that element is cleared up and the sci-fi action settles back into its usual groove, I like the book a lot more, although the crew subsequently staying up all night to make a documentary is still a little goofy. Overall it’s not bad, and I continue to enjoy spending time in Murderbot’s head, but this is definitely my least favorite installment yet.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss

Book #126 of 2023:

The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss

An interesting novella focused on the minor character Bast from author Patrick Rothfuss’s ongoing / long-dormant trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicle. I have a few outside complaints about this title — it’s the second such side release for the series, all while readers have been waiting since 2011 for the third and final novel to end Kvothe’s saga, and it’s basically just a revised and expanded edition of the writer’s short story “The Lightning Tree,” which I’d read back in the Rogues anthology many years ago — but setting those issues aside to take the project on its own terms, it’s a fun little piece that doesn’t require any particular background knowledge.

Whether you’ve encountered him before or not, the protagonist is clearly some sort of supernatural yet innocent-appearing trickster figure, written off as a bit daft by the adults of his village whilst sought out by their children as an entertaining storyteller who can be bargained with to solve all manner of knotty problems. (Left unspoken is how that understanding must fade as the latter folks grow into the former, though I suppose it could be attributed to either magic or a natural forgetting process.) Some of his solutions are sorcerous, but most simply stem from his wits and his insights into human nature. We follow him over the course of a single day as he enacts several of those stratagems, requesting a price from one supplicant that inevitably winds up instrumental in helping another one later on. It’s lightweight but charming overall, although it touches on a few sensitive topics I’ve noted below.

I can’t remember at this point how the present book compares to the shorter original version, and I’ll again express my frustration that there’s still no signs of The Doors of Stone, but this is a fairly pleasant cozy fantasy read in and of itself.

[Content warning for domestic abuse and a few scenes of one person spying on someone else bathing, though that all turns out to be consensual in the end.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Star Beast (2023)

Movie #7 of 2023:

Doctor Who: The Star Beast (2023)

Doctor Who is back! In so many ways. David Tennant has returned to the starring role he held in the early days of the modern series (as we learned he would when Jodie Whittaker regenerated at the end of her own run last year), and he’s joined now by Catherine Tate reprising her old part as his companion Donna Noble. Her mum Sylvia is here too, which really makes it feel like their era again with all the associated family bickering. And of course, the show itself has been off our screens for 13 months — the longest gap it’s had since the so-called Wilderness Years when the franchise was officially canceled and dormant, pre-2005.

But the biggest return to form might well be behind the scenes, with former showrunner Russell T. Davies stepping back into his old position there as well. His successors Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall had their own particular strengths, but Davies always excelled at the quieter domestic moments that helped flesh out his supporting cast into more than just roughly-interchangeable plucky assistants. That’s immediately evident in today’s special, as is the producer’s commitment to inclusivity of various identities. Our new UNIT scientific advisor is in a wheelchair. Donna’s teenage daughter is trans, and it’s something that deeply informs her character and her relationships. Davies is a pro at not just writing such diversity into his scripts, but also having it register beyond a one-line background note.

The plot feels like classic Davies Who too, though it’s technically an adaptation of a Doctor Who comic strip sequence from 1980. (Blame the Time War or the Flux or whatever if you need an explanation for how both stories can be canonical, with the Fourth and Fourteenth Doctors each having a similar encounter with the Meep, an alien neither of them has met before. The franchise has gone to that well in the past and surely will again at some point.) It’s a simple story of a crash-landing creature hunted by adversaries who turns out to be more than it initially appears, but that’s the sort of basic canvas where this creator often thrives.

It’s not a flawless execution. The beginning is a little creaky with how it introduces everything, presumably to provide context for wholly-new viewers and jog the memories of casual fans who may not have even thought about the Nobles in over a decade. And the conclusion, while it belatedly addresses and resolves the controversial way in which Donna was originally written out of the show, nevertheless seems a bit easy to accomplish and without enough of the necessary fallout the Doctor should properly deserve for his role in events back then.

But overall, the hour impresses. The effects budget is bigger than ever, and Fourteen channels Ten’s familiar mannerisms while still feeling like someone who’s lived many lives since then, which is no easy feat for either the actor or his writer. This is the first of three such adventures Tennant and Tate will be having to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who this fall, and there’s an open question hanging over this outing as to why exactly the regenerated Doctor got that old face back and soon bumped into Donna Noble. (I imagine the all-powerful Classic villain the Toymaker will turn out somewhat to blame, as he’s due to appear in the final installment, but that’s not textual at least for now.) Yet even with that mystery staying unresolved, this is a confident launch to a new epoch of Doctor Who, when all episodes will be available same-day to the wide audience on Disney+ outside the UK. Like the show at its best, it’s a heady blend of beloved elements from across its rich history and exciting new directions for where things could go from here. That balance isn’t always accomplished, but The Star Beast gets there for me.

[Content warning for gun violence and transphobia including deadnaming.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Stephen Leeds: Death and Faxes by Brandon Sanderson, Max Epstein, David Pace, and Michael Harkins

Book #125 of 2023:

Stephen Leeds: Death and Faxes by Brandon Sanderson, Max Epstein, David Pace, and Michael Harkins

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first credited author of this book.]

This audiobook production is set within Brandon Sanderson’s existing Stephen Leeds / Legion trilogy, and an afterword makes it clear that he really only licensed out the characters and series premise to the other three writers listed on the cover. The result is a pale imitation of what made the earlier books work — to the extent that they do; I have mixed opinions on those original novellas myself — with a drearily slow investigation and a love interest so poorly written that I was erroneously convinced she would turn out to be a villain in disguise, especially after the protagonist immediately starts referring to the hacker he’s tracking as a man, despite not having any evidence as to the suspect’s actual identity. The tech-thriller genre and the concept of the hero hallucinating imaginary subject matter experts are inherited, but not taken anywhere new or interesting this time.

My ratings for the associated Sanderson stories have ranged from two stars to four, and since this volume is unequivocally worse than all of them, I suppose I have no choice but to give it my lowest possible score in turn. That’s an unfortunate surprise, as I’ve liked some of the author’s previous co-written ventures, like Sunreach with Janci Patterson or Dark One: Forgotten with Dan Wells, although I now suspect those were truer collaborations than this. Still, it’s certainly given me pause about jumping on any future titles just because they carry Sanderson’s name on the front. It hurts me to say this about one of my favorite novelists, but he’s really damaged his brand for me here.

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

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: Orion Among the Stars by Ben Bova

Book #124 of 2023:

Orion Among the Stars by Ben Bova (Orion #5)

Author Ben Bova’s time-traveling super-soldier Orion was originally introduced as an agent who could be sent by his all-powerful Creators to anywhere in the continuum that was in some way under threat, but for the most part, each subsequent novel in the series has ended up stranding him somewhere in earth’s ancient past in our comfortable established history. This fifth volume is a welcome change from that pattern, finding the hero instead placed in a thrilling military sci-fi adventure, where he commands a squadron of beleaguered troops in a desperate interstellar war. His arrogant overlords are as demanding and inscrutable as ever, and his star-crossed love interest is absent as usual, but the plot rhythms are all different, and the unfolding story allows for some interesting new worldbuilding including a loose Lovecraftian tie-in. Swapping swords for blasters hearkens back to a certain memorable epoch near the end of the first book as well, not to mention other genre touchstones like Starship Troopers, and is theoretically a great step forward for the saga.

It’s unfortunate (and hard to ignore on a reread) that the most promising aspects of this title do not in fact ever amount to anything in the final remaining sequel, but that’s hardly a fault here and now. On its own terms, it’s a neat little space opera in miniature — somewhat dated to its 1995 publication year, but overall one of the better Orion installments. You could read just the debut novel and this one and walk away satisfied, I think.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, racism, Islamophobia, mention of rape, and mention of violence against children.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards

Book #123 of 2023:

MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards

A lengthy and informative behind-the-scenes account of the movie and TV juggernaut known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with plenty of in-depth production details that I didn’t previously know, despite my being a pretty big fan of that series and having seen every single entry released thus far. The authors do a good job of relating the unlikely history of the record-smashing franchise born from a struggling comics company, especially when it comes to contextualizing the existing superhero adaptation landscape at launch, the complicated character rights with Marvel products like Spidey and the X-Men at rival studios, and the relative obscurity / unpopularity of now-household names like Iron Man and Captain America. (The former, in fact, was apparently only greenlit as the centerpiece of the interlocking saga’s debut film after a survey panel found he was the hero that kids were most interested in playing with as a toy upon hearing about the various powers of all the different options.) The whole enterprise was a bigger gamble than it might seem in hindsight, and was certainly less well-planned than the producers have liked to claim in public.

All of that is interesting to learn as a rags-to-riches triumph that perhaps carries the seeds of its eventual self-defeat — the Marvel machine scaling up to a pace where quality controls suffered and individual creators felt stifled under the uniform house style and the weight of connected continuity obligations — but as a book, this project is considerably hampered by its rather arbitrary 2023 publication date. The writers cover everything up to when their manuscript was presumably due in to the editors, but troubling later events like rising villain star Jonathan Majors getting arrested on assault charges or the newest Ant-Man sequel underperforming at the box office obviously don’t have the necessary distance for a full reckoning. This year could well be a turning point for the MCU, but this particular title isn’t capable of providing the definitive narrative of that as it does for the franchise’s origin story.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie

Book #122 of 2023:

At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #11)

This… is not a mystery. It’s not even a spy thriller or an in-depth character study, two other genres where author Agatha Christie dabbles on occasion. Instead it’s the story of a police inspector immediately suspecting an outlandish criminal conspiracy involving the staff and many guests at a prestigious hotel and then uncovering just enough circumstantial evidence to prompt one of the perpetrators into confessing that he’s right. Miss Marple is there on the fringes of the case as well, although she doesn’t contribute much overall.

While a couple elements suggest a more typical whodunnit — the protagonist is brought into the affair when an old priest goes missing from his room; later in one of the final chapters, a security guard is shot dead by a temporarily-unknown assailant — we’re offered little by way of concrete clues, and the main character’s initial theory of wrongdoing is never challenged. It’s a maddeningly bizarre scheme, too, with doppelgangers providing alibis and identical cars with similar license plate numbers further confusing witness testimony, all to rob a train and smuggle the loot out of the country via luggage leaving the hotel. Everything is needlessly complex, and the whole novel feels like just an excuse for the writer to dwell on the sort of ornate hospitality establishment from her younger days that was then going out of fashion. It’s an evocative setting, and Marple herself is fun as ever, but the plot is far too thin to be effective.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly

Book #121 of 2023:

Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #7)

Author Michael Connelly’s latest novel delivers another solid installment of courtroom drama that never quite twists in an unexpected direction or otherwise kicks into any higher gear. The plot: attorney Mickey Haller is contacted by a woman serving time in prison for killing her husband, who protests that she’s innocent and wants him to represent her in her appeal. And then he does, with the help of his half-brother Harry Bosch as the lead case investigator. It’s all pretty straightforward, without even any real mystery over who the true culprit must have been, and overall seems like a weaker retread of when the two protagonists first teamed up to work together back in 2015’s The Crossing (when Harry was a lot more conflicted about assisting the defense after decades as a homicide detective for the police).

Connelly is a competent writer who rarely disappoints and occasionally manages to stand out as exceptional within his law-and-order thriller genre. This new title isn’t one of his best, and the ending feels particularly abrupt, with the resolution to a few open matters suggested but ultimately unconfirmed. Still, the book’s presentation of all the procedural beats of its central trial is good enough to get a passing grade out of me. An easy three-out-of-five stars.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆