The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Secret Identity by Alex Segura

Book #104 of 2023:

Secret Identity by Alex Segura

[Disclaimer: I won a free paperback copy of this title from the publisher Flatiron Books on Goodreads, in exchange for an honest review.]

For many readers, the natural comparison point for this 2022 novel will be The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning story about a pair of fictional comic book creators in the 1940s and 50s. Unfortunately, it’s a parallel that does no favors for author Alex Segura’s work here, about an aspiring comics writer in 1974. Carmen Valdez is a compelling protagonist, a gay Cuban-American woman working as a publisher’s secretary while trying to break into her male-dominated field, but there’s little of Chabon’s expansive alternate history, evolving character arcs, or thematic weight to her tale.

The main problem with the narrative is that it just lacks all sense of urgency. Our long-suffering heroine is approached by a colleague who wants to collaborate with her in secret, which she reluctantly agrees to. The superhero line they create together is a hit, but he’s shot dead before revealing her involvement to their chauvinist boss. She then theoretically faces two important tasks: figuring out who killed her co-writer and finding a way to take over the ongoing writing assignment herself. But in practice, she doesn’t really do much to proactively advance either angle, instead generally sitting back and letting other people (read: men) make choices for her while she mopes about an ex-girlfriend who’s unexpectedly come into town. She doesn’t try to make maneuvers and build alliances at work to win the gig even when she learns of the hack who’s been chosen in her place, and she only half-heartedly carries out any kind of investigation into her friend’s murder. Eight months go by before she even thinks to check his apartment for clues!

Carmen is well-drawn as a character, as is the historical New York City setting, and what we hear of her superheroine creation The Lynx is pretty neat, too. Example pages from the comic are peppered throughout the text, both demonstrating what makes it special and drawing pointed parallels between the two women’s respective situations. But she just doesn’t act like the star of her own adventure, and when the villainous plot is finally unveiled, it honestly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as motivation for either making money or killing someone. So although the better qualities of the book are enough for me to give it a rating of three-out-of-five stars on the Goodreads scale, I’d have to say that the flaws are all too apparent.

[Content warning for suicide, gore, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek: Short Treks, season 1

TV #49 of 2023:

Star Trek: Short Treks, season 1

I wasn’t sure what to expect of this series going into it, and I’m still somewhat bemused after finishing this quick debut season. It turns out to consist of only four episodes, each about ten-to-fifteen minutes long and spinning off in some way from Star Trek: Discovery, which had recently finished airing its own first year. The first and last of these installments, about Ensign Tilly and Harry Mudd respectively, take place in some undetermined time after we’d last seen those characters (but presumably before Discovery season 2), while another is a flashback origin story for Saru. The second episode, Calypso, is the most intriguing, gradually revealing itself to be set in the far-distant future when only an advanced A.I. remains aboard the otherwise-derelict U.S.S. Discovery as it picks up a passing escape pod. The title suggests a retelling of the passage in Homer’s Odyssey when a temptress waylays the wandering hero, but in practice the plot is gentler than that and speaks to a genuine connection between the two characters. It’s a well-acted showcase for Aldis Hodge and raises some very interesting questions of the canon, particularly as it appears to represent the latest period of Star Trek yet to be portrayed in any show.

The other three episodes aren’t as gripping, but they’re all fine in their own way. Saru’s seems a bit of a retcon — I don’t remember any mention before this of him being the only Kelpian in Starfleet, or that his species is pre-Warp — but not egregiously so, and his new history adds valuable shading to his personality. The Mudd and Tilly adventures meanwhile don’t tell us much we didn’t already know about them, but they’re entertaining enough in the moment (contingent on a viewer’s tolerance for those particular focal figures, I suppose).

My biggest critique of this program, which I hope gets rectified later on, is that neither the name nor the format requires it to be this beholden to Star Trek: Discovery alone. It would be a great platform to tell these smaller stories with characters from across the franchise history, much as Big Finish does with its similarly-named Short Trips range of Doctor Who audio dramas, and it’s odd that only Discovery gets that honor in this initial go-round. That results in a weaker anthology than it could have been, not to mention one that’s difficult to rate with so few stories included. Nevertheless, I feel generally positive towards the experiment, and Calypso is a genuinely impressive move in the overall Trek narrative. I’ll go with 3.5 stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Wednesday, season 1

TV #48 of 2023:

Wednesday, season 1

A pitch-perfect Addams Family update, made even stronger by the choice to focus on the title character alone. While her relatives are also included on the series, they’re generally relegated to a few quick scenes that are charming but don’t overstay their welcome, a structure that allows the girl to command our attention without the distraction of juggling full subplots for everyone else. It’s a breakout, bravura performance from star Jenna Ortega, whom I’d previously only seen as a child actress on Jane the Virgin (and SNL host, I guess), following the spooky teen as she is sent to a new high school and swiftly finds herself at the center of an occult murder mystery.

There’s so much to love here, from this version of Wednesday herself — not merely a sardonic goth but plainly neurodivergent as well, with her intense interests, discomfort with physical affection, and difficulty reading social cues — to how she’s positioned as an outcast among outcasts, somehow the weirdo in a student body of werewolves, gorgons, psychics, and sirens. The surrounding worldbuilding is light but interesting, and the whodunnit storyline plays out just as its genre should, with an abundance of off-color suspects and a steady progression of competing clues. Wednesday is a capable and clever investigator throughout, but the scripts are careful to give her humanizing flaws and have her experience her share of losses and setbacks as well. The voiceover further emphasizes her status as noir detective — or neo noir, like early Veronica Mars — offering world-weary commentary on those same disappointing developments. The result is that her tenacious pursuit of the truth feels wholly earned, in addition to simply being entertaining to watch as her droll wit and flat delivery skewers a variety of would-be authority figures.

Above all, this is a funny show, with plenty of off-beat comedy from the protagonist and others. A specific shout-out on that front is due to Victor Dorobantu as Thing, an actor who’s able to express surprising amounts of humor and emotion in a performance that’s been green-screened out to only his detached hand. The rest of the cast is pretty fun too, including a special role for Christina Ricci, who famously played the young antiheroine herself back in the two 90s movies. And while it’s an easy layup to cast ringers like Luis Guzmán and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Gomez and Morticia, given how little they’re involved in the main narrative, they do a great job in their minimal screentime to flesh out that aspect of the family and contribute to the testy relationship that their daughter clearly feels towards them.

Although I correctly predicted the villain reveal(s) well in advance, the final clues and red herrings are still enjoyable to see fall into place alongside the other interpersonal arcs that have to get resolved by the end of these eight episodes, like Wednesday’s romantic foibles or evolving Odd Couple dynamic with her chipper werewolf roommate. Executive producer Tim Burton ensures that the visuals are his usual quirky gothic feast, and the whole thing is just a delight through and through. I’m so pleased with this as a standalone feature, but also thrilled to see that it’s been renewed for a second season.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Book #103 of 2023:

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean #1)

The majority of this fantasy novel is pretty terrific, a fine addition to that thriving sub-genre of speculative fiction about specialized academies that blatantly allow/encourage/require their enterprising cadets to murder one another to get ahead (Ender’s Game, Battle Royale, The Scholomance, Red Rising, etc.). In this case, the students are enrolled for a chance to become dragon-riders, the most prestigious order of their nation’s military, and the training is literally cutthroat for the limited number of matches available. The protagonist is at a distinct disadvantage here, both by being physically smaller and weaker than her peers and by having been suddenly thrust into the program after years of assuming her parents would let her study to be a scribe instead. However, she proves to be a determined and capable young woman in this new arena, and her fierce embrace of the curriculum’s challenges is quite endearing. Author Rebecca Yarros also draws on her background as a romance writer to pen a scorching enemies-to-lovers arc with the resident bad boy, the captured son of an executed rebel leader.

Those scenes can get fairly graphic, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, yet rings oddly in a story that otherwise has so many traditional YA hallmarks. (The heroine is twenty, but she’s very much coming of age and learning to push back against her mother’s generation in this book. She’s even caught up in a tired love triangle for a while, although the other fellow isn’t ever sold as a convincing alternative in my opinion, even before he turns more controlling and unwilling to listen to her on anything.) I’d also critique the ending for being too fast-paced and filled with hairpin twists that aren’t given enough room to be properly unpacked, from character betrayals and big secrets coming to light to Sandersonian-style reveals about worldbuilding and societal misinformation. And I wonder whether the general’s daughter is the most effective choice as a viewpoint into all this: she gradually learns, predictably enough, that there’s more to the rebellion of the backstory than she’s been told all her life, and that the rebels’ orphaned children are not necessarily evil, but a plot that rooted readers in that group’s perspective from the start might have been more engaging. As written, this is somewhat like a version of The Hunger Games set in the Capitol that only belatedly incorporates an outsider like Katniss.

Those nitpicks aside, I have generally enjoyed this title, and especially getting to know Violet, her friends, and the local dragons, who can psychically bond with their chosen humans and bestow magical gifts upon them. There’s a lot that the volume does well, both in service to the immediate narrative of her first year in the training corps and in setting up threads for the remainder of the series. It’s a little too messy for me to give this effort my highest rating or a complete rave review, but I’m definitely looking forward to the sequel.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4

TV #47 of 2023:

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4

I gather conventional wisdom holds that the latter two seasons of this TOS prequel series are better than the first, and sure, I’ll mildly agree to that. The writers understand their characters and the other strengths (and limitations) of the program a little more clearly now, and there are some serialized plot arcs that allow for interesting and meaningful stakes. Personally, though, I still found the penultimate run to be among the weaker Trek efforts overall, and this last one is yet more uneven in comparison to that. Eschewing one big continuous storyline like the Xindi threat, it instead presents a sequence of two- or three-part episode strings, which tend to be both fairly discrete from one another and rather variable in quality across the year.

The two hours spent in the parallel universe, for instance, work well on their own and as a follow-up to the classic outings “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Tholian Web,” but they’re utterly disconnected from anything else in their own show. No actual Enterprise characters appear — only their Terran Empire equivalents — and the events never cross over to impact the main continuity in the slightest. It’s a good microcosm of the season as a whole, really, yet still better by itself than certain other stories this year, like the hasty wrap-up of the temporal cold war or the attempt to finally and laboriously explain on-screen why Klingons didn’t have their now-standard forehead ridges in their earliest appearances in canon. It’s a new anthology approach to the narrative, and a bit of a mixed bag by result.

There’s not much of a grand conclusion or send-off to the enterprise (sorry), either. The literal finale is almost hilariously inept in that regard, jumping forward by six years for the starship crew and then representing not even a proper last adventure for them but only an inspirational holodeck reconstruction accessed by TNG figures in the distant future, during the events of their own episode “The Pegasus.” Unlike the earlier stunt casting of Brent Spiner as the ancestor of Data’s creator, which is otherwise in service to a solid piece of Enterprise storytelling, this nostalgia bait reads as a simple effort to remind fans of a show and cast that they probably liked much better and robs a few would-be important developments of the space they’d need for full effect. Even given my many critiques of this title as I’ve watched through the thing, it’s an unnecessary and insulting disservice in its final hour — and perhaps speaks to why this would wind up being the last new televised Star Trek for a hiatus of a dozen years.

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

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 4 > 2 > 1

TV Review: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, season 1

TV #46 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, season 1

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. There’s a lot of things I enjoy about this unexpected Netflix revival, which aired in 2016 after the original WB/CW program ended in 2007. In a review at the time, I mentioned:

“It really feels like ten years have gone by for these characters. So many TV series that get brought back after a long absence either try to act like no time has passed (e.g. Arrested Development) or make it into a reunion where most of the characters are seeing each other again for the first time since the show ended (e.g. Veronica Mars). But watching Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is like watching the latest season from a world where the show never went off the air.”

And that remains largely true, even coming directly from a rewatch of the older seasons this time. The primary driver of that verisimilitude is in the returning cast: not just the main actors, but all of the smaller supporting roles around them that help make Stars Hollow seem like a living, breathing community. Some of those familiar faces only pop in for a quick scene or two — presumably due to their other commitments, especially for performers like Jared Padalecki and Melissa McCarthy whose careers had taken off over the previous decade — but they collectively work to flesh out the enterprise considerably. I can’t help but compare this to another recent TV sequel, the mediocre Justified: City Primeval that tried to get by with only bringing back its core protagonist, and vastly prefer this approach. It’s simply great to get to check in on so many beloved characters throughout this four-part miniseries.

As for the weaker elements, well… I suppose it wouldn’t be Gilmore Girls if there wasn’t some degree of random manufactured drama hanging over the affair. Four 90-minute episodes paradoxically represent both too much and too little of a canvas here. Certain character beats seem rushed and ill-supported, while the program indulgently lingers on wackier moments that should have been trimmed, like Taylor’s awful Stars Hollow musical or Lorelai’s bizarre ‘Wild’ excursion (a plot device that already seemed dated in 2016 and is downright creaky when viewed today). Overall, I think the winter and spring segments are significantly better than the two quarters that follow them — and not just because that first half directly confronts the absence of patriarch Richard Gilmore, whose actor Edward Herrmann had passed away in the meantime. They also spend more of their runtime catching viewers up on what everyone else has been doing since 2007, and thus don’t have as much room for the sort of petty new fights (between Lorelai and Emily, between Lorelai and Luke, between Lorelai and Rory, etc.) that get picked later on.

I don’t really mind the very ending, though I know it remains divisive among fans. Likewise for the younger Gilmore’s aimlessness throughout the year, which might be disappointing given her promising early academics, but seems to me relatively in line with the struggles she evinced in the last few original seasons. Still, I wish this project didn’t ignore how Rory is the same age now that her mother was when that older show began, which could have been a productive lens to filter the nostalgia that a revival like this is inherently built upon.

Overall, though, there’s plenty here for anyone who loved the classic run of the series, and the production stands as a welcome return for writer-showrunners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, who were infamously fired before the start of work on the last season back then. It’s fitting to have them as the creative force behind this follow-up installment, especially if it’s meant to stand as an overall finale to the extended franchise.

Will we ever get more Gilmore Girls? Seven years further on (and in the midst of an ongoing writers and actors strike), the prospect of reassembling the entire cast again seems somewhat unlikely, and Kelly Bishop in particular isn’t getting any younger. I could maybe imagine a ‘next generation’ approach sometime down the road that more explicitly slots Rory into the former Lorelai role with a teenage child of her own, but is anyone really clamoring for that sort of sequel if it couldn’t have all the old familiar figures? For those of us who love the series, all the original episodes are always there to return to, and I can personally attest that they hold up pretty well. Generally speaking, this miniseries does too.

[Content warning for fatphobia / body-shaming.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 8

TV #45 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 8

The Third Doctor’s sophomore season leans into the strengths of the previous year, which showed how the venerable sci-fi program could adapt its time-traveling and space-hopping premise to an earthbound format, with the hero assisting the UNIT military forces fend off alien invasions. He’s now joined by new companion Jo Grant, a plucky youngster who doesn’t quite fit in with the army setting but whose beaming face would endear her to audiences and the Doctor alike. She’d stick around on the show for another few years, and ultimately cast as wide an influence over the continuing franchise as her eventual replacement Sarah Jane Smith (as proved by her triumphant return on the latter’s modern spinoff series).

But the major innovation of this season is of course the Master, a Moriarty / Blofeld figure set up to be the protagonist’s nemesis and opposite. A Time Lord who’s just as brilliant but utterly ruthless, he represents a funhouse-mirror foil of the Doctor, which is a device that the writers hadn’t really explored before. He makes an impression in the first serial, but then sticks around for every further story this year as well, constituting an ongoing threat that is again unlike any recurring villain or monsters previously seen on Doctor Who. He’d return many times after this, even regenerating to be portrayed by multiple actors like his enemy, but his original version is everywhere in this debut sequence, played archly by the talented Roger Delgado. The impact to the canon can’t be overstated, yet neither can his immediate contributions here. Sometimes the primary antagonist, sometimes a side complication, and occasionally even a reluctant ally, he’s exactly the addition that the UNIT era needed to remain fresh.

The five serials in this run range from solid to excellent, and I especially love when the Time Lords meddle in the Doctor’s exile: warning him about the Master’s arrival in Terror of the Autons and even temporarily staying his sentence to allow for an old-fashioned journey off-planet in Colony in Space. We don’t meet any more iconic creatures this time around — though Axos perhaps comes close — but the Master is terrific and the Autons hold up well in their second outing. Overall it’s another fine year for the show.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
THE MIND OF EVIL (8×5 – 8×10)
THE DÆMONS (8×21 – 8×25)

★★★★☆
THE CLAWS OF AXOS (8×11 – 8×14)
COLONY IN SPACE (8×15 – 8×20)

★★★★★
TERROR OF THE AUTONS (8×1 – 8×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆

TV Review: What We Do in the Shadows, season 5

TV #44 of 2023:

What We Do in the Shadows, season 5

Another delightfully funny season of this vampire comedy, and one that finally pulls the trigger on a long-mentioned possible direction for the show. (I’m trying, as ever, to avoid major spoilers in the space of a review.) Guillermo starts the year keeping a big secret from the others, and in a nifty bit of structuring, they gradually learn it one-by-one over the course of these ten episodes. That creative decision yields much more interesting scene combinations and weekly plot premises than if either a) he was hiding it from everyone else the whole time, or b) they were to all find out at once. And of course, Nandor is the last to be clued in, as his relationship with his familiar has the most built-up drama and pathos behind it. Whether you ship them romantically or not, those two men mean something to each other, and the writing sharply recognizes this by saving their big emotional confrontation for the finale.

I’m not thrilled at how, like the baby Colin story before it, this one ultimately resolves by reverting back to roughly the old status quo, nor that the issue of romance is left in the subtext, where it’s languished since long before both Nandor and Gizmo were confirmed as canonically queer. I don’t need them to get together, but I would like for the series to actually engage with that question rather than just occasionally having the camera linger on an unguarded moment of pining or a revealing turn of phrase.

Meanwhile, the Guide and Nadja have mini-arcs of their own this time, although they’re a bit one-note and I saw their respective endings coming pretty far in advance. Laszlo and Colin have even less current focus, but as ever are both great as consistently-entertaining punchline machines. While overall this isn’t my favorite run of the program and I wish it could have had a more propulsive ending to it like the one beforehand, I’ll readily acknowledge that I’ve laughed throughout, and that the show remains as surprising and fresh and hilarious as ever. Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Justified: City Primeval, season 1

TV #43 of 2023:

Justified: City Primeval, season 1

This eight-episode miniseries roughly works as a standalone crime drama, but it doesn’t feel much like Justified. And by pedigree, it isn’t: it’s an adaptation of an unrelated Elmore Leonard novel, onto which Raylan Givens has been somewhat awkwardly grafted as a new protagonist for this 2023 production. Up until a coda in the last fifteen minutes of the finale (which I would recommend fans take the time to check out, my other comments here notwithstanding), he’s the only returning character from the original FX run.

This series is set in the present day, but also fifteen years after we last saw the deputy US marshal in 2015 — a bit of chronological weirdness that seems to have been thrown in just to allow the casting of teenage nepo baby Vivian Olyphant as her father’s daughter. She’s with him initially as he gets caught up in a messy situation in Detroit, but then blessedly vanishes for the majority of the plot.

That setting is odd. It doesn’t resemble the version of Detroit previously seen on Justified, nor do we hear from/about any affiliated people like Wynn Duffie who could have plausibly been included in the current affair. Moreover, the titular ‘city primeval’ never gels together into a firm sense of place or shared identity among its residents, as was very much the case for the original Harlan location, which could almost be described as a Justified character in and of itself. I had my share of critiques about the former show, but most folks there were on a specific wavelength of clever, funny, and profane that’s unmatched by any such commonality across this program’s Detroit. What makes the people here different, both from what we might expect and from what Givens is used to in Florida and Kentucky? Is the main villain particularly suited to the spot, the way Boyd Crowder and Raylan both were to Harlan County? Show us! It all just feels so drearily generic.

(I think I also had an easier time suspending my disbelief that everyone knew each other and would wind up involved in one another’s subplots in a small community like that; the number of coincidental connections in a big metropolitan environment this time doesn’t seem nearly as natural. In the first episode alone, Givens is randomly attacked by a criminal whose lawyer turns out to also represent the guy who later kills the judge of the earlier case who was recently the target of an unrelated death threat Raylan was looking into. Phew!)

The primary focus of the story is on that killer, a chaos agent whom local law enforcement seems unable to bring to justice. That element could work if he were positioned as a remotely effective antagonist, but instead he seems to survive and thrive based largely on luck. If anything, Clement Mansell resembles the sort of grandiose wannabe who would roll into Harlan, assume he’s smarter than everyone else, and end up killed in an episode or two by the canny operators like Boyd who know the lay of the land so much better. The original Justified would have chewed him up and spit him out in no time flat, which makes it frustrating to see him presented as relatively untouchable here.

Eventually that storyline wraps up, and the show ends on a sequence that, without spoilers, feels much more in line with what a viewer might expect of this franchise. Is this whole thing just an extended and rather digressive bridge to a potential further Justified title, one that could function as a truer sequel to the old Kentucky days? The ending succeeds as a general proof-of-concept for what might come next, but the hours leading up to it are too weak to justify (sorry) not just starting from that point for a follow-up instead.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Doom’s Day: Four from Doom’s Day by Darren Jones

Book #102 of 2023:

Doctor Who: Doom’s Day: Four from Doom’s Day by Darren Jones

Doom’s Day is a Doctor Who transmedia event, meaning an ongoing storyline that plays out across multiple different platforms, from comic books to video games to novels and beyond. Theoretically, each installment is self-contained enough that it can be enjoyed in isolation, but with deeper connections to the others for more dedicated fans to spot. The overall plot to this particular series, as I understand it, is that an assassin named Doom is being chased by the personification of death itself, who will kill her in 24 hours unless she manages to find the Doctor first. She has a list of missions she’s attempting in the meantime — which also might be temporarily holding her fate at bay? — and a vortex manipulator that she’s hoping will help her track down the wayward hero.

If my summary sounds a little unclear or uncertain, it’s because this audiobook, which spans hours 16-19 of the titular day, doesn’t really do a great job of introducing the situation to readers like me who skipped the earlier releases. I’ll extend the benefit of the doubt and assume that my frustrations and open questions are addressed elsewhere, but the fact remains that this title isn’t nearly as standalone as it’s been advertised to be. It’s certainly much worse on that front than the previous such multi-platform project that this franchise attempted, the uneven but interesting exploration of the universe’s ancient history in Time Lord: Victorious.

Absent the context of the larger arc (and ignoring the punny play on the name of the 1982 Fifth Doctor serial Four to Doomsday, which is otherwise unrelated), this book isn’t particularly noteworthy or impressive. I don’t feel invested in Doom as a protagonist with meaningful stakes on the line, and her specific outings here are serviceable filler at best. It’s fun to see original companions Ian and Barbara on a romantic cruise after their time with the First Doctor, and returning fellow hired gun Brian the Ood from Time Lord: Victorious is delightful as always, but nothing about these cases leaves me curious as to Doom’s origins or her ultimate destiny. (Instead, her late encounter with the Twelfth Doctor, whom she brushes off as not the right incarnation she wants, is an incredibly frustrating closing note.)

I’d love to study the BBC’s internal figures on who’s in the audience for this sort of thing, and whether they’re generally satisfied by the exercise or not. Personally, I’m not seeing the point of it.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆