The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 7

TV #41 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 7

It’s certainly far from Gilmore Girls at its peak, but I don’t believe this final season deserves quite the low reputation it maintains in certain fan circles. Not-so-behind-the-scenes drama may be to blame — the CW network rather infamously fired showrunner/creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and head writer Daniel Palladino and then later canceled the program outright, leaving this year as the only one not produced under their creative leadership. It generally still has the same feeling and rhythms, though, and it’s not as though the remaining producers (or actors) were unfamiliar with the series or obviously poor stewards for it. The finale in particular is a very satisfyingly emotional send-off to the entire enterprise, as great subtext under the development of Rory graduating from college and going out into the world far from Stars Hollow. Could everyone’s stories have continued on after this, if the show had gotten renewed? Sure, and I think the eventual Netflix revival speaks to that. But this is a logical place to leave the Gilmores, at least for a while, and season 7 takes advantage of that built-in catharsis.

The material leading up to that point is a little shakier, however. This run is also notable for the increased presence of Rory’s dad / Lorelai’s ex Christopher, and if it’s interesting to see the show bend its usual formulas to accommodate him, the petty jealousy he has with Luke gets old fast, and a lot of the subsequent fights and resolutions come off as somewhat arbitrary. The same goes for Rory and Logan, and I really don’t care for the subplot where her old friend Marty comes back as a manipulative liar and entitled Nice Guy™, fun as it is to see a young Krysten Ritter in that corner of events. Still, I like the quiet tragedy of where the relationship with Logan leads, especially as a counterweight to the expected emphasis in the closing episodes that Lorelai’s perpetual will-they-won’t-they partner Luke is who she’s ultimately meant to be with. Yet overall the writing skews the happily-ever-after endings that some viewers might have wanted for these heroines in favor of more nuance and ambiguity, which feels like a bolder and more honest note to me. Their respective journeys will go on, just with less time shared together and without us here watching.

(Meanwhile two different recurring female characters have unplanned pregnancies that they’re initially resentful about, and April’s mother has to be taken to court to maintain Luke’s custody rights. There’s an odd sexism and puritanical vindictiveness to elements like that if you think too hard about them in aggregate, but again, it’s not so removed from the program’s history under Sherman-Palladino, which repeatedly seemed to punish Paris for her own sex life.)

In general, however, this season doesn’t make too many major missteps, other than perhaps under-utilizing Richard and Emily, whose final scene is a reminder of how powerfully they could pull on the emotions of the younger Gilmores (and how scathingly funny Emily could be to the last). I’m glad to have stuck with it for this rewatch, and as my ratings below indicate, I wouldn’t even consider this to be the weakest of the show’s original seven outings. We’ll see how I feel about coming at A Year in the Life with fresh eyes, next.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked:

3 > 2 > 4 > 1 > 5 > 7 > 6

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TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 2

TV #40 of 2023:

The Lincoln Lawyer, season 2

Overall I enjoy this legal procedural, but this sophomore season hasn’t impressed me quite as much as its first year did. Both runs are built around a single big case (drawn from a single Michael Connelly novel each time), but this one doesn’t kick off until the end of the second of its ten episodes. There’s less structure to every individual hour too, whereas previously each seemed to focus on a separate aspect of the central trial. And while the series debut utilized the hero’s driver Izzy as a legal neophyte he could share explanatory exposition with for the audience’s benefit, this follow-up swaps her in that role for secretary-turned-paralegal Lorna — which is rather different from the written version of events, and in practice often feels like the characters telling one another things they would clearly already know.

Other changes from the source material are more cosmetic: Mickey was romantically involved with Lisa Trammel before she became a client, her associate Henry Dahl (né Herb, in the book) produces podcasts now instead of movies, and so on. Generally, though, it’s a faithful adaptation, although the choice to use story #4 The Fifth Witness right after #2 The Brass Verdict draws an unfortunate parallel between the two similar endings that had more space between them in print.

I’m still missing the presence of the attorney’s half-brother Harry Bosch, not included in Netflix’s license due to his own ongoing franchise with Amazon, but I’m definitely engaged enough to continue watching if the streamer commissions any more of this show. The final scenes here seem to set up book #5 The Gods of Guilt as the next plot the program will tackle if the production does go forward, so I only hope that it lasts long enough to get to my favorite #6 The Law of Innocence after that.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 3

TV #39 of 2023:

Seinfeld, season 3

This 90s sitcom remains just funny enough to keep watching, without really blowing me away. My favorite episodes from this third year are probably The Parking Garage and The Limo (featuring future Six Feet Under star Peter Krause!), with The Stranded (featuring future The Shield star Michael Chiklis!) also worth a watch for that casting note alone. But the average half-hour is merely decent, and I wouldn’t say any of them are better than season 2’s The Chinese Restaurant, which is the program’s high-water mark of quality so far for me.

Some of the material simply hasn’t aged well, making jokes out of sensitive subjects like suicide, but even the stuff that would be generally fine to air today is very hit-or-miss in terms of its actual humor. And the misses tend to revolve around either Jerry’s hoary observational standup routines or Kramer’s wacky shenanigans, two major elements in pretty much every installment. I keep hoping that each will improve as the show goes along, but so far they just haven’t for me — and based on the bigger and bigger laughs he’s getting from the studio audience whenever he bursts into the set of Seinfeld’s apartment, that kooky neighbor is presumably only going to get wilder from here on out. So I’m not looking forward to that, much as I understand the impulse of the writers to lean into their clear breakout character.

On the bright side this season, there’s a little bit more continuity and callback references than I had expected for a TV comedy of this era, plus the introduction of the recurring role of Newman. It’s still ridiculous how many romantic partners the main cast are running through, most only for a single episode, but the occasional indication that people on this show can remember the events of previous weeks is definitely appreciated.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and threat of gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #97 of 2023:

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Three-out-of-five stars, which as usual is the hardest rating for me to articulate / justify in the space of a review. This horror title doesn’t make any major missteps, other than perhaps a bit of a drawn-out beginning. It’s a mid-90s period piece set in Mexico City, although that doesn’t wind up shaping the plot especially much, and the two protagonists are childhood friends now in their late 30s: one a scandal-ridden actor and the other a cash-strapped sound engineer, who learn that the former’s neighbor is an obscure director whose movies they loved when they were younger. Upon growing closer with him, they discover that the older man still has a reel of his infamously unfinished and supposedly cursed final production. Of course, when the unlikely trio dig it out and begin working on the project again, calamity soon returns.

It turns out one of the other producers was an occultist (and a eugenicist), and he’s not nearly as deceased as he should be. Various spooky shenanigans occur, the creepiest of which are the ways in which the aforementioned dead guy seems to be subtly influencing the heroine’s perceptions and thought processes after she reads some of his old spell-laced writings. But I don’t love how the characters are always snapping at one another, and the novel overall lacks that elusive special element that would really make it stand out from its genre for me. Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia has gotten there before in works like Certain Dark Things or Mexican Gothic, but this latest effort doesn’t seem like it will prove quite as memorable as those.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Vengeance of Orion by Ben Bova

Book #96 of 2023:

Vengeance of Orion by Ben Bova (Orion #2)

This first Orion sequel is interesting in its own right, but not nearly as good as its predecessor. That previous novel introduced humanity’s demigod champion by hurtling him progressively backwards in time, having to stop an adversary in each era determined to throw history off its tracks. Here, the character starts the book by materializing in the twelfth century BCE on the outskirts of Troy, where he soon finds himself caught up in the events of The Iliad. And I do mean those precise events — for about the first half of this story, author Ben Bova is basically just retelling Homer with a new viewpoint protagonist in the mix. And that’s the period he stays in for the rest of the volume, although after the city falls he moves on to help the Israelite tribes conquer Jericho and ultimately winds up navigating political intrigue in ancient Egypt. (In an afterword the writer justifies the sieges of Troy and Jericho potentially overlapping historically, though I feel that was probably a more reasonable conjecture upon publication in 1988 than it seems today.)

There’s a certain fanfic vibe to some of this, or perhaps teen boy wish-fulfillment, given how the muscular hero manages to attract the beautiful Helen to his bed. And while I appreciate the implication that one of Orion’s new friends will go on to become the famous blind poet, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost of so many pages rehashing what will be a familiar plot to most readers. The warrior’s own ignorance on that front is odd, too: he plainly has some memory of his prior lives, referencing advanced technology and quoting from the Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” but he doesn’t seem to have heard about any of the Greeks or Trojans beforehand or know how their legendary conflict will end. It’s also very frustrating to see him so cavalier about rape as an inevitable consequence of war, at one point even acknowledging offhand that the soldiers under his immediate command are likely engaging in that act while pillaging after a conquest. Do something about that, buddy!

What this entry does best in my opinion is expand the sci-fi worldbuilding of the series. In the first book we met Orion’s creator Ormazd, who took his name from the Zoroastrian god of light but was actually revealed as a far-future evolved / transcended human. Other beings of his ilk were alluded to, but the only one featured was the narrator’s main love interest Anya who was time-traveling along with him. Here Bova includes a whole bunch more of them, along with the confirmation that they’re the original inspirations behind the deities in every earth religion that recognizes any. The Golden One now calls himself Apollo, but also Jehovah and Amon. Anya is Athena, but also Isis. And they have a string of peers present at Troy — Zeus, Hera, Hermes, etc. — who likewise are all represented among the depictions of holy figures Orion later sees in Egypt. That’s a heady concept that rather blew my mind as a younger reader, and it remains a neat facet to build into genre fiction today.

Unfortunately, the narrative structure supporting that revelation is somewhat less impressive, especially compared to the expansive terrain of the previous tale. I still like this installment and have enjoyed revisiting it decades after my first reading, but it’s not quite dazzling enough to merit higher than 3-out-of-5 stars on the Goodreads scale.

[Content warning for fatphobia, slavery, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Barbie (2023)

Movie #5 of 2023:

Barbie (2023)

Heartfelt, hilarious, and swathed in a vivid color palette — this movie about the titular doll isn’t really meant for the kids young enough to play with her, but it is very much a feel-good female empowerment hit for the rest of us. In this story all the Barbies live in a placid plastic wonderland, but when one of them starts having thoughts about death and similar existential crises, she must travel to the real world to find the person inadvertently sending those feelings her way. The result is a fun fish-out-of-water adventure — my mind kept comparing it to Elf, perhaps due to the presence of Will Ferrell — followed by a surprising ‘Scouring of the Shire’ pivot when the protagonist returns to discover how Barbieland has changed in her absence.

There’s also some frank discussions of how hard it is to navigate society’s conflicting patriarchal expectations of women, a touching mother-daughter relationship, a scathingly funny takedown of bro culture and its touchstones, and a great message about finding your own path rather than settling for someone else’s idea of your happily-ever-after. The film threads a careful needle between celebrating Mattel (who of course co-produced it) and calling out the company for the ways in which their products haven’t necessarily always helped the feminist movement. The nostalgia factor is important too, with genuine discontinued models and accessories like Earring Magic Ken adding nice specificity to the humor of the piece.

The production could probably stand to be tightened up or revised in a few places. I think the biggest misstep is the treatment of Mattel’s corporate headquarters and employees, which are rendered in a comedically heightened style that doesn’t fit with the rest of the “real world” and weakens the implicit clash between Barbie’s reality and ours. The script also sometimes loses track of this element, checking in on the bumbling CEO and his underlings after far too long has passed with no indication of what they’ve been doing in the meantime. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling’s Ken is also a bit ill-defined — I like his arc and where it eventually leads, but it’s odd to me that he’s already so uneasy at the start, before the inciting incident that sets Margot Robbie’s Barbie in motion. Barbieland is initially presented as perfectly static and pleasant, and while I appreciate how the ending winds up returning and critiquing that, I’m not sure it’s thematically coherent to have one of the Kens there in a quiet crisis even before the main Barbie.

All that having been said, I had a good time with this one, despite presumably not being quite in the target audience (or caring about the memes linking it with Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan biopic that happened to hit theaters around the same time). And although I roll my eyes at complaints that stories like this are too woke or man-hating or whatever, I do wish it could have veered a bit more away from the gender essentialism, wherein all the Barbies and Kens fit squarely in those separate tribes without much in common across them and the heroine’s big closing moment of self-actualization is — spoiler alert — related to her reproductive anatomy. Still, perhaps the flaws are only fitting for a movie whose ultimate moral is that it’s okay to be a little imperfect among life’s messes.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

Book #95 of 2023:

The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman (Blacktongue #1)

This 2021 fantasy debut has all the gore of the grimdark subgenre, but it skillfully avoids the cynical nihilism that I’d consider typical of such properties. Instead, the tone here is more akin to The Lies of Locke Lamora — archly comic and creatively profane, but deeply rooted in the vulnerable heart of the protagonist, an enterprising thief who’s just too clever for his own good. The wry inner voice of that title figure is a continual delight, and I appreciate that while the plot around him has the general shape of an epic quest, the narrative is more interested in the relationships that are building up among the characters and unafraid to pursue a few extended side adventures with them. The resulting rhythms are somewhat like those of a tabletop roleplaying campaign, which may be a sticking point for certain readers but strikes me as a refreshing and engaging choice.

The worldbuilding has some interesting cultural details and background flourishes, like how humanity barely survived a string of bloody wars with the goblins, an often-comical species that have never been more terrifying than they are here. Amid that setting, the hero attempts to waylay and rob a stern paladin, only to find himself dragged along on her mission to restore her queen to a far-off throne, under secretive orders from his powerful guild leaders who plainly have ulterior motives in facilitating the journey. They acquire a blind cat and other further companions along the way, not all of whom survive the experience, and the overall novel feels self-contained in how its story resolves, yet has been marketed as the first in an eventual series. I know I would definitely return for a sequel or two.

[Content warning for cannibalism and threatened / implied rape.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Secret Invasion, season 1

TV #38 of 2023:

Secret Invasion, season 1

This latest Marvel series, set in the modern-day but picking up plot threads from the 90s-set Captain Marvel movie, is a tediously dramatic and joyless affair (with Olivia Coleman’s cheerfully ruthless British intelligence commander providing the rare bright spot). It starts with a bold premise: the shapeshifting alien species the Skrulls have grown their population on earth to a million, all posing as humans and thoroughly integrated into our society, and a new radical leader among them is pushing to wage war and overthrow us. I’ll even give the show credit for largely avoiding the antisemitic implications of the lizard-people-secretly-running-the-world angle, and at its best, it dabbles in the paranoid conspiracy genre that Marvel already perfected back in the HYDRA takeover of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where any apparent friend could in fact be a hidden enemy operative.

The execution here is miserable, though. Two recurring characters from elsewhere in the MCU do turn out to be Skrull imposters, but we never learn how long ago they were replaced / whether the earlier adventures we’ve seen were really with them or not. Three other figures from previous titles, all women, are brought back only to be ‘fridged’ — unceremoniously killed off seemingly just to further a male associate’s angst — though one of those is later revealed as a feint and reversed.

The plot itself revolves around Nick Fury’s personal history with particular Skrulls, but much of that happened off-screen, which dampens the impact of developments here. The inclusion of a handful of flashbacks and a whole lot of exposition gamely tries to fill in the backstory, but it feels like a simple highlights reel rather than a meaningful segment of the narrative. And absent that weight, the actions of Nick’s adversaries and allies alike in the present have no clear gravity of their own. That’s even setting aside the villain’s bizarre scheme to turn himself into a Super Skrull with “Avenger DNA” — as though all superpowers reside in one’s genetic code, or as though unpowered people like Tony or Clint would have anything special in their biological profile as well — or the laughably random writing choice to have this antagonist use DNA from Groot and Thanos’s servant Cull Obsidian when the Avengers macguffin is initially out of his reach. I can handle a degree of technobabble hand-waving in my superhero stories, but everything about this element is silly and inevitably reduces to the standard CGI slugfest.

But that’s reflective of the scripting on this miniseries overall. There’s also a lengthy subplot about a certain Skrull infiltrator trying to mislead the White House into launching nuclear weapons, but never any indication of why the president himself couldn’t be captured and replaced. Or why professional thorn-in-the-side Nick Fury couldn’t, for that matter. With such a vast army of potential perfect duplicates at his command, why is Gravik wasting any time trying to trick specific humans into doing what he wants? The writers don’t seem to know or care.

Much of this could have worked, in theory. Samuel L. Jackson makes the most of his material, which is the meatiest he’s gotten yet for a role he’s played since 2008 and finds Fury scrambling without his customary easy answers. Emilia Clarke seems to be having a good time in this new franchise too. The story around them could have been a tight thriller that asked relevant questions, in an age of deepfakes and alternative news, about how we can ever trust what we see and hear. Instead, Marvel went with an AI-generated intro sequence and apparently put just as little effort into developing the rest of the show.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 1

TV #37 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 1

This 2017 launch is the first of the ‘new Trek’ shows, bringing the sci-fi franchise back to the small screen for the first time in more than a decade since Enterprise ended. It’s a somewhat mixed result, but largely a rollicking experience, with a very propulsive serialized plot to keep viewers engaged. I believe I called every major twist except the identity of the emperor well in advance, but I appreciate that the narrative was built around those pivot points, which are still fun to watch play out even when predicted correctly. And the new characters are generally fine, with Michael Burnham — played by Sonequa Martin-Green, the first woman of color to anchor a Star Trek series — a particular standout. (Any discussion of Discovery’s on-screen representation is going to need to grapple with the program’s penchant for killing off its minority roles, however. At least some of them get to pop up again during a delightful extended stay in the classic mirror universe.)

As for the negatives, sometimes this show moves so fast that it doesn’t have time to establish its settings, conflicts, or relationships to any meaningful depth. The decision to write this as a prequel ten years prior to the start of TOS is rather baffling, too. The technology is all wrong, for starters — while modern effects could of course go further than those of the 1960s in portraying alien species and space battles and whatnot, it seems a significant continuity error to populate this period with more advanced Starfleet tech than has ever been shown before, without any explanation on-screen. Are we supposed to conclude that holograms and spore drives and such were available in Captain Kirk’s time, and just never used or mentioned for some reason? It’s bizarre, and quite a turnaround from Enterprise, which for all its faults did aim to portray its own prequel era as less technologically-developed.

The payoff for setting a story in this specific moment is unclear as well. Burnham was raised as the Vulcan Sarek’s ward — and thus an adopted sister to the unseen Spock — but that seems like a retcon for its own sake and perhaps indicative of a lack of faith among the production team that their work could stand independently of such explicit fan-service. A lot of this debut season is spent on Klingon politicking and that species warring with the Federation, but those events could have happened at roughly any point in the established canon. If anything, it feels implausible to squeeze them in here, when we know that a cold war between the two galactic civilizations will be in place just a short while later.

I’m aware that that’s a little nitpicky, but I think the concerns are merited for a production like this, which could have easily been written as either a distant sequel or an altogether original sci-fi piece to avoid all those considerations. The producers instead specifically chose to position it as a prequel within the existing IP, and that comes with certain obligations to respect what’s gone before and explain away any apparent contradictions. Based on its initial year, Star Trek: Discovery is so far failing to meet that goal.

But again I come back to how entertaining this title is from scene-to-scene, especially if you can shut off that fannish part of your brain clamoring for explanations. (The entertainment value of that time loop episode alone is top-notch.) It taps into the core themes of the franchise, like a hopeful and inquisitive outlook on the future and a belief that diversity is a strength, and it’s a well-crafted genre vehicle with a solid cast. Ultimately I’m comfortable giving it a rating of three-and-a-half stars rounded up, with the wish that the writers would try just a bit harder on the remaining seasons ahead.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Flux by Jinwoo Chong

Book #94 of 2023:

Flux by Jinwoo Chong

This sci-fi novel gets stronger as it goes along, yet it’s still weirder and more confusing than it needs to be. The full premise isn’t nailed down until fairly late in the text, but generally speaking, it’s the story of a queer Asian American whose amoral employers are doing something to make his consciousness come unstuck in time. The main narrative repeatedly jumps months ahead or backwards and repeats entire scenes with minor variations, which successfully disorients both narrator and reader alike. There are also two other protagonists we split focus among — one a young boy and one an older man — and you can probably already guess how the three of them are related. This is a book about time-travel, after all.

Ultimately I like the result more than I dislike it. Using the genre trappings to explore childhood trauma is a major strength, and I also like the running element of the old ’80s cop show that looms large over the lives of fans who remember it (and who later have to grapple with #MeToo allegations concerning its star). There’s a fun Theranos vibe to the primary hero’s shady workplace, and some interesting plot twists, especially near the end. Yet overall, I think this title would have worked better if debut author Jinwoo Chong had constructed it in a more straightforward fashion that didn’t keep us in the dark on key pieces for so long.

[Content warning for gaslighting, suicide, and death of a parent.]

★★★☆☆