The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 13

TV #24 of 2023:

Bob’s Burgers, season 13

As usual, this family cartoon is again riding the bubble between a three- and a four-star program for me. I’ll round up on this occasion, because even though I don’t have much new critical insight to offer, enough of these individual episodes seem to stand out as among the better of recent years. Given the agelessness of the characters over time, we may not believe Louise in “The Show (and Tell) Must Go On” when she bemoans her upcoming last presentation of that ilk, but there’s still the appearance of growth for her, as well as effective tugs on the heartstrings in installments like “The Plight Before Christmas” or “Show Mama from the Grave.” And hey, it’s nice for Bob — with some help — to finally get one over on Mr. Fischoeder in “What a (April) Fool Believes,” even if we can presumably guess that it will do little to alter their underlying dynamic.

As the first season to follow the movie, this year also features an update to the sequence of disasters in the opening credits, which goes a long way towards making the show feel fresher. It’s a jolt of added energy to start off each story, and a reminder that even this late in its run, there is still a possibility of change for the Belchers and their extended town community.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 5

TV #23 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 5

This final season perpetuates a lot of my existing frustrations with Six Feet Under, and as I watched, I expected that I’d probably give it the same two-star rating that I handed the previous year. The characters are all melodramatic and self-sabotaging far more often than they’re compelling protagonists by this stage, and the show has long passed the point where it’s able to wring much pathos from the established nature of the funeral home setting or any particular client of the week. Luckily the last few episodes mark a step in the right direction, by means of a sudden personal tragedy for the family that in many ways forms a natural bookend with a parallel development back in the pilot. Here again, the survivors are forced to pull together, to confront their own mortality, and to consider the ways in which their paths going forward will be forever altered by the new absence. It’s a melancholic mood I wish the series had been able to maintain throughout.

Before then, however, we have the latest wave of Fisher / Chenowith / Diaz nonsense to sit through. Claire’s dating the walking red-flag Billy, then later drops out of art school and throws a tantrum that her trust fund won’t pay for her nebulously hedonistic lifestyle. In an out-of-nowhere twist a la Pacey in the later seasons of Dawson’s Creek, she ultimately gets a random corporate job and starts a new romance with a guy who’ll always be Danny from The Mindy Project to me. Meanwhile, Nate is feuding with his pregnant wife and falling for his ex-stepsister, which won’t even be the most incestuous thing that the writers decide to spring on us. David and Keith have the most reasonable plot of becoming new parents, while Ruth is mainly just bitter and complaining about everything these days. Rico spends most of the season trying to win back his wife’s affections, although it mostly seems like she just gets tired of fighting him. And as ever, all these folks are still regularly seeing daydream visions of various dead people who function to express their deepest fears.

It’s all fine or at least not too awful, and the ending really does help draw the story together. But I’ve never been as satisfied with this show as it patently is with itself, and I’m happy to finally put it in my rear-view.

[Content warning for gun violence, homophobia, drug abuse, and suicide.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 1 > 5 > 4

Book Review: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #70 of 2023:

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

The concept of an afterlife where everyone ages in reverse (until becoming a baby again and getting sent off to earth to be reborn as someone else) is neat, but I’m less sold on the rather generic plot that this novel provides as our lens into that setting. The 15-year-old protagonist can moreover be a bit obnoxious, and I hate that she’s given a 35-year-old romantic interest, even if his heavenly body appears 17 by the time they meet. I also feel like the most interesting aspect of this story doesn’t arrive until more than halfway through, when his wife dies and the spouses who have been apart for nine years must sort out their feelings and decide if they want to be together again in the hereafter or not. But that’s ultimately a pretty small portion of the narrative, and of course is wrapped up in a needless YA love triangle to boot.

Stronger worldbuilding might help matters, both to make Elsewhere a more distinctive environment and to cut down on the bizarre elements like talking dogs and body-shaming mermaids that don’t make any sense with the other rules we’re given. But overall, this 2005 title is a far cry from the talent author Gabrielle Zevin would later bring to her 2022 work Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug abuse, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron

Book #69 of 2023:

My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron

This YA novel reimagines Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with both Henry Jekyll and the narrator Gabriel Utterson cast as queer Black teens, whilst retaining the Victorian London setting of the gothic original. I value the added diversity and the attention author Kalynn Bayron draws to that period’s racism and homophobia — clearly a worse monster than Hyde in this version — and I’m especially struck by her choice to present the infamous transformation serum as a twisted sort of conversion therapy, which Jekyll’s scientist father hopes will suppress the boy’s natural sexuality.

Nevertheless, I’m not sure the book as a whole works for me. It sticks closely to the classic plot beats, which means both that the storyline is pretty predictable for readers who know the older one and that this take on the protagonist likewise doesn’t learn the big secret until the very end. For modern audiences for whom Jekyll and Hyde are household names, this creates an impatient feeling of waiting for the characters to make the connection and finally realize what story they’re in, which does little to endear us to the hero. A work that took greater liberties could have mitigated that effect, not to mention spent more time with Gabriel processing the fallout of the revelation.

This is the sixth title in Macmillan’s Remixed Classics line, but the first one that I’ve read myself. (Each release is by a different marginalized writer and stands unconnected except for the general approach of reclaiming and reinterpreting the text in question.) I might try some of the others, but I wouldn’t recommend this one too highly.

[Content warning for sexual assault and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Visions, season 2

TV #22 of 2023:

Star Wars: Visions, season 2

I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I like this second year of the experimental Star Wars anthology, given how lukewarm I felt towards the first season. As before, these episodes are short anime films, each from a different production studio, handed free reign to remix and reinterpret the classic sci-fi universe without worry of fitting into existing canon. Yet whereas the first batch seemed to fly too far under that creative freedom, mimicking the aesthetics and surface concepts of the franchise only — “operating under rules so altered that you’d be hard-pressed to ever justify why” the stories are being labeled as Star Wars at all, as I complained in my review — these new releases strike me as rather more restrained. It’s not a lack of worldbuilding either, as the environment of each piece here is instead quite intricately constructed. But more of these plausibly feel like they could have happened in that galaxy far, far away, and it turns out that that’s an important element I need in a tangential work like this.

The visuals are great too! Even the entries like “Sith” that I’m more neutral on are incredibly fun to watch, and my favorites like “In the Stars” and “The Bandits of Golak” are simply bursting with color and fun design choices. I also feel like the scripts are more satisfying overall, generally managing to tell a complete plot in twenty minutes or less and avoid seeming like a mere proof-of-concept. For all these improvements, four-out-of-five stars for the season appears wholly appropriate. Well done, everybody.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

Movie #4 of 2023:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

Another rollicking cosmic thrill ride, and one that doubles as an apparent farewell to this creative corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Never say never where comic book characters are concerned, but with visionary director James Gunn now working for the DC competition, this sure feels like the intended finale to its loose trilogy.) With that in mind, the film expects the audience to have done their homework coming in, remembering not just how this ragtag crew joined into a found family and their subsequent exploits together, but also the details of how Peter left earth in the first movie, how the team set up camp in the floating skull Knowhere in the holiday special, and how there’s a variant of Gamora who doesn’t really know the others running around now, having hopped over from a separate timeline in Avengers: Endgame. It can be a lot to keep track of, especially if you haven’t seen some of those older features in a while.

And yet the main thrust of the script is wholly original, smartly filling in the backstory of Rocket the talking raccoon, a figure who had previously been used largely as comic relief. If you think it was a risk for Marvel to make a movie featuring this character so prominently back in 2014, the choice to raise his profile from sidekick to full-on protagonist here might surprise you as well. But in practice, that transition reads as perfectly natural, and his arc — the most dynamic one in the movie — generates great pathos as we learn more about his painful origin and see him finally stop fleeing from it.

Structurally, the story plays out along twin lines, intercutting scenes from Rocket’s heretofore-unseen past with his friends’ efforts in the present to find a way to save his life while he lies convalescent. To do so they need to clumsily break into a secure alien facility, bicker constantly, and ultimately face off against the animal’s twisted creator. The plot may be a tad overstuffed, but it has all the things we love about this team’s previous adventures, right down to the classic music drops, wisecracking banter, splashy color palette, and comedically inventive combat sequences.

Besides Rocket, the Guardians aren’t necessarily faced with the most meaningful personal conflicts, and I specifically dislike the pushy Nice Guy vibes of Peter insisting to the new Gamora that she could grow to love him like her other self did and the times that the narrative seems to validate him for it. Certain departures at the end strike me as poorly-motivated too, for while the team isn’t disbanding after this, some of the individual members voice their decision to step away, and not all of that registers as actually driven by the heroes themselves rather than the studio and/or the actors. (Although as a Doctor Who fan, I guess I should be used to those cast change moments sometimes coming out of left field at a story’s end.) If there ever is a Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 4 in the MCU, it will likely be with a distinctive new roster, somewhat analogous to the turnover that the Avengers are currently undergoing back on earth.

Overall this is probably a bit less fun than the first two films, especially given its darker themes, but it’s a welcome bounce back from the empty spectacle of the Disney+ holiday special, which I felt revisited the IP without managing to say anything new with it. That installment from last year could be safely skipped at the cost of only some slight disorientation here, but if you care about these characters and what they mean to each other, you should definitely catch this follow-up.

[Content warning for gun violence, alcohol abuse, animal biomedical experimentation, genocide, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers

Book #68 of 2023:

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers (Zamonia #1)

[Updated version of my review from 4/23/2020]

I absolutely adore this wild and whimsical adventure novel, detailing the tall-tale nautical escapades of a talking blue bear. (Life inside a stable tornado! The famous dueling liars of Atlantis! Impressment on the biggest ship in the world! Microscopic mini-pirates!) The tone is somewhere between The Phantom Tollbooth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — including quirky cartoon illustrations like the former and the latter’s gimmick of regular encyclopedia entries interrupting the narrative — and author Walter Moers displays an endlessly clever inventiveness both in the outrageous situations that Bluebear encounters and the hilarious puns and other gems of wordplay that populate the linguistic landscape of this setting. Translator John Brownjohn also deserves a shout-out here, for finding so many English ways of channeling that spirit of fun from the original German text.

Structured like a short story collection, albeit with continuity of protagonist and some delightful eventual callbacks, this book is really just such a joy to read and reread. It’s technically a spinoff prequel of the title character’s appearances on a variety of children’s television shows (presumably constituting the remaining 13½ lives, as we’re told here that bears like him have 27 in total), but I’ve never seen any of those and I still love this volume to pieces. If it’s an origin story, it’s one focused on our hero learning valuable performance skills from a succession of eccentric teachers, which stands just fine on its own as an offbeat bildungsroman.

I’m not as enamored of the later installments in the series, which follow different individuals in the wider world of Zamonia without much of a common plot, but I’ve come back to the ursine captain time and time again. It’s a little disappointing on the current passthrough to realize how male-dominated it is, with even the minor background figures almost inevitably described as men, yet I can’t help but give the work my highest recommendation regardless.

[Content warning for fatphobia.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix

Book #67 of 2023:

Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix

Overall I would say that this book of short fiction — most but not all of it situated in either fantasy or an adjacent genre — is a success. The strongest piece is probably the novella that opens the work and gives it its title / place in author Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series: “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case,” which follows the character through an adventure back home in the non-magical country of Ancelstierre after the events of the novel Abhorsen. I don’t have much patience for Nick in that book or its predecessor Lirael, where he’s under a bewitchment to be the unwitting dupe of the villain for the majority of the plot, but this slimmer installment redeems him as a hero completely, presenting him as tireless, brave, and endlessly resourceful as he attempts to stop a rampaging monster from wreaking greater havoc. He’s different from the necromancer protagonists we’ve seen tackle these problems in the past, with no enchanted bells or other tools beyond his quick wits. I almost wish we could have gotten a story like this before his introduction in the main saga, to better establish (and underline the loss of) who he is outside of Hedge’s control. If you’re a fan who’s never read this one, it’s well worth seeking out.

The remaining contents are shorter and not quite so striking, in addition to being unrelated to the opening ‘tale of the Abhorsen.’ But generally they’re still enjoyable, and the volume as a whole doesn’t feel as uneven to me as the writer’s later collection To Hold the Bridge. I’ve even had fun mapping out all the possible branching pathways of the comical choose-your-own-adventure game “Down to the Scum Quarter,” despite its tongue-in-cheek tone not being my favorite approach to this kind of thing. So although the primary appeal of this book for most readers is presumably the Old Kingdom tie-in which takes up the first third of the text, I’d recommend sticking around for the rest as well.

[Content warning for right-wing extremism, child endangerment, gun violence, gore, and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 4

TV #21 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 4

I think this is where Gilmore Girls turns a corner for me in terms of my appreciation versus enjoyment of the characters and the ongoing slice-of-life narrative around them. It remains a strong series, and this year in particular does a fine job of navigating two big changes for our two heroines: Lorelai opening up her own inn and Rory going off to college. In fact, there’s an even bigger plot of alienation and anxiety surrounding the younger woman, although it’s deployed gradually and skillfully enough that it’s easy to miss the signs until you remember / realize where they’re inevitably heading — with her back in the arms of the exact wrong guy.

That arc is honestly an excellently written tragedy in miniature, as is her mother’s doomed romance with Richard’s business partner Jason (whose fussy peculiarities are a delight and mark him as the latest figure on this series who’s undiagnosed but probably on the autism spectrum, even if he doesn’t quite seem convincing as her type). I get why Rory would retreat towards the perceived safety of a former boyfriend; the scripts succeed in making that register as a believable choice for a person in her position to make. But I don’t like it! I don’t like him, I don’t think it’s a smart or healthy decision for her, and I join Lorelai in feeling disappointed in her daughter over this development that closes out the season finale.

To the extent that we’re rooting for these protagonists and not just being entertained by their foibles, it’s a letdown and a fairly big change for a program that’s previously seemed built around either celebrating Rory’s achievements or else commiserating when things don’t go her way. We’ve seen her face setbacks before, but there’s a new strand of self-sabotage here that’s truly somewhat unsettling. I don’t think it’s a flaw in the show per se, and maybe a move like this was even necessary to keep it from growing too stale. It certainly adds dimension to her character, and will be important for understanding her path going forward. Yet it puts the viewer at more of a distance from the Yale freshman as well.

Other love stories at this juncture are hit-or-miss. The conflict between Richard and Emily after everything falls apart with Jason is interesting, not only for rocking what’s heretofore been a happy marriage but also for Emily’s stubborn streak in not deigning to explain herself to Lorelai despite clearly being in the right. Luke’s decision to finally pursue his own longtime romantic interest is heartening, and will obviously be pretty relevant next year. On the other hand, Lane’s boyfriend being long-distance all season — sometimes mentioned but never seen — plays weirdly, and while I understand that the actor had other commitments as the star of The O.C. and that the Gilmore Girls producers were likely hoping that he could eventually return, it’s a disservice that leaves her a little adrift. Still worse is Paris’s relationship with a professor — which Rory objects to, but only on the grounds that he’s too old and that she’s initially cheating on someone else to be with him. There’s no effort to square that last part with Rory’s own later actions or confront her with her hypocrisy, and no judgment whatsoever of how unethical and abusive it would be for a tenured professor to date a college freshman. Paris is instead positioned as the weird and inappropriate one in their dynamic, and that’s a really frustrating writing choice.

Kirk also gets a girlfriend this year, which… sure, is fine. He’s still the sort of breakout character who works best in small doses, and you can sometimes feel the writers straining to come up with reasons to include him in a script that will justify his place in the main cast. But he’s not too obnoxious overall.

I could nitpick some more — I don’t think Jess is well-used this year, especially when he’s been such a strong foil for Dean in the past — but in general, I’m not unhappy with this season of Gilmore Girls. The story is going to some exciting and/or upsetting new places, while remaining true to the heart of its characters. I might appreciate it more than I’m enjoying it at this stage, but I can’t deny that it’s a quality piece of serialized entertainment.

[Content warning for underage alcohol abuse.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 6

TV #20 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 6

The end of an era for the show, in several different ways. This 1968-1969 run is the final year to be aired in black-and-white, and from a modern perspective, it contains the last episodes that are missing from the BBC archives, with only the audio recordings remaining: 2 out of 8 installments of the Cybermen serial The Invasion, which is generally pretty excellent regardless, and a whopping 5 out of 6 from the space opera-y story The Space Pirates, which feels so visual-dependent that it’s hard to fully appreciate today. And of course, this is the final outing for the Second Doctor, along with his returning companions Jamie and Zoe.

While the series had already gone through one such recasting of its central character back in 1966, that had occurred mid-season and retained the other main cast members at the time, as well as the overall structure and appearance of the program. Patrick Troughton may have taken over as the Doctor, but his subsequent adventures were more-or-less in line with his predecessor’s, piloting his TARDIS time machine to some predicament in the future, past, or present at the top of the serial and then departing once the crisis had been resolved. And although that general plot pattern would eventually return, it’s brought to a halt here in the magisterial finale of The War Games, which finally reveals details about the hero’s people the Time Lords amid the Doctor’s abject terror at having to call on them for support. For his nobility he is punished with a forced regeneration and sentenced to exile on earth, where next season would find the Third Doctor in full technicolor supporting the UNIT team against the invading baddies of the week. It’s the biggest upset yet for a show that by this point had already established a reputation for surviving change both on-screen and off.

Like a lot of Troughton’s era, this year shows a certain predilection for the ‘base under siege’ plot archetype, and few of its serials stand out as highlights. The Mind Robber’s trip to ‘the Land of Fiction’ at least is weird and pleasingly meta, but not all of it works for me, as some parts are a bit ungrounded and silly in the Celestial Toymaker fashion. And The Invasion provides a great blueprint for those upcoming UNIT days (and why its commander, the returning Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, would be such a valuable friendly foil for the Doctor). But overall, this is just solid late-60s sci-fi with some interesting wrinkles around the edges. Some of these serials may seem to overstay their welcome at 8 or even 10 episodes — after this, the writers would never again stretch material for a single story past 7 — but the longer ones are also my favorites, so it’s hard to say that that was the wrong approach for them. If anything, some of the weaker tales this season might have benefitted from a little more time to flesh out their components into something more distinctive. Still, it’s not a bad farewell showcase for the Second Doctor and this wider paradigm for the series.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
THE SPACE PIRATES (6×29 – 6×34)
THE DOMINATORS (6×1 – 6×5)
THE KROTONS (6×19 – 6×22)
THE SEEDS OF DEATH (6×23 – 6×28)
THE MIND ROBBER (6×6 – 6×10)

★★★★☆
THE INVASION (6×11 – 6×18)
THE WAR GAMES (6×35 – 6×44)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

[Content warning for gun violence.]