The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★★☆

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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.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

Book #93 of 2023:

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

I only learned after finishing this 2019 horror novel that it’s a loose sequel to Arthur Machen’s 1904 story “The White People,” and I wonder if some of my frustrations might have been mitigated by that additional context. As is, this later work has a solid setup of a protagonist going through the house of her recently deceased hoarder grandmother and discovering uncanny happenings in the woods nearby, but the execution here strikes me as more silly than scary, especially as the narrator keeps ominously repeating the phrase she’s seen in her step-grandfather’s feverishly scribbled journals, “and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones” (which again, apparently comes originally from Machen). What little tension would remain is thoroughly punctured by the irreverent comedic tone adopted throughout, which seems a poor fit for the plot at hand.

On a similar note, much of the middle section of this text consists of a) the heroine reading from b) that relative’s descriptions of c) a book he half-remembers about d) a girl who recounts e) spooky stories she’s heard from her nursemaid… and so on and so forth. The core concept of a fairyland that’s outlived its original inhabitants and is now occupied by their mindless creations could be interesting, but by the time we get there we’re nested so deep in that recursive structure that it’s hard to appreciate any meaningful stakes to the overall affair. I’m pretty underwhelmed by the piece as a whole.

[Content warning for body horror and gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Shield, season 7

TV #36 of 2023:

The Shield, season 7

The penultimate sixth season of this police drama was its weakest in my opinion, and this final year takes a little while to shake itself back into gear. Early on, there’s a continued focus on the macguffin of a blackmail box (or as I kept mishearing it, “black mailbox”) that improbably contains dirt on a wide range of L.A.’s elected officials, which is a bit abstract of a threat concept to be worth investing our energies in. Luckily things take a turn about midway through, and from there on out The Shield is as thrilling and compulsively watchable as it’s ever been. The ultimate fracturing of what’s left of the Strike Team has been a long time coming, and while none of those gentlemen exactly deserve a happy ending, there’s still a tragedy in the dissolution of their former bonds, as well as the question of how many innocents they will manage to drag down with them.

So many great moments come in the last few episodes of this series, from Vic’s underhanded deal with ICE and overdue admission of his crimes, to the ironic twist of his eventual fate, to Shane and Mara’s increasingly desperate attempts to get away from it all and their own heartbreaking last scene that gives the finale its title. As ever, the anti-copaganda stance of the program is clear: these particular abusers were enabled by the power of the system, as we see in the immediate difficulties they face when some of them have to start operating without a badge, but their less corrupt peers are no heroes either. The whole department is ineffective, self-serving, and complicit in racist violence, and we have no reason to believe that Vic was the bad apple that made them that way, or that they aren’t representative of similar forces across America. In the end certain perpetrators are brought down, but there’s no sense of justice in any of it — just a lingering bad taste and a feeling that no meaningful problems have been solved or progress made. A powerful, sad, and bitterly funny thesis statement, bolstered by some of star Michael Chiklis’s best acting work yet. I don’t know that I would ever be drawn to watch this show again, but this was a phenomenal endgame for it.

[Content warning for racism, gun violence, gore, torture, rape, suicide, drug abuse, domestic abuse, and death of a young child.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 5 > 1 > 7 > 4 > 2 > 3 > 6

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 6

TV #35 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 6

Another season that’s entertaining on the surface, especially with the built-in viewer investment in these characters, but frustrating in terms of underlying logic and plot structure. Certain choices feel like they’re being imposed externally by the writers, rather than arising naturally from the individual personalities on screen, which… obviously is the case for all such fiction, but the artificiality is generally masked better than this. Rory drops out of Yale and goes to live in her grandparents’ pool house, Luke delays marrying Lorelai and insists on keeping some pretty big secrets from her, and none of it quite matches the folks we’ve spent years getting to know by this point.

A few developments this season scream of a desperate ploy for wider audience appeal, too. Lorelai adopts a dog with absurdly wacky behavioral issues! Luke finds out he has a kid who’s coincidentally like a precocious preteen Rory! You can almost see the network notes being handed down here, and would-be major moments like the titular pair of protagonists reuniting after so long apart land hollowly, since their separation was so poorly motivated in the first place. Another theoretically triumphant scene shows the younger heroine somewhat annoyingly wearing down a newspaper editor to give her a job — which she’ll somehow manage while also restarting her college career and participating in the school paper? — only for that side hustle to never again be shown or mentioned.

This was the last year of the show’s original run helmed by creative team Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, forced out during negotiations as the WB became the CW, and conventional wisdom holds that the following season was a weaker echo of the program’s early strengths. But in my view on this rewatch, the decline in quality started well before then.

[Content warning for fatphobia, racism, transphobia, and alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan

Book #92 of 2023:

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan

A scathing account of the abuse that runs rampant in the TV and film industry, drawing on hundreds of interviews across more than a decade of author Maureen Ryan’s investigative journalism career. Some sources have gone on the record for this book, but many remain anonymous out of a quite reasonable fear of reprisal. Likewise, the writer calls out plenty of serial harassers by name, but is forced to keep circumspect about the identities of others whose sins are not yet documented well enough to safely bring to light. Her main focus, however, is on the culture in Hollywood that not only allows such awful behavior to exist in the upper ranks, but often seems to even flat-out encourage and reward it. (The most infuriating element of this coverage is the revelation of how much has been public knowledge or an open secret among insiders for years, to no apparent ill effect for the abusers.)

It’s a book written by a media critic who loves her subject dearly, and who is righteously indignant over how many people have been hurt and cast aside in bringing those wonderful stories to life on our screens. She takes us inside the toxic work environments of shows like Sleepy Hollow and Lost, where even viewers who objected to periodic racist, sexist, or homophobic plot developments would likely be surprised by how much open bigotry was directed at the cast and crew members of the affected marginalized groups. She documents nauseating instances of Weinstein levels of sexual harassment/assault and bullying by top-level creatives, and how with few exceptions these men have been protected and promoted by virtue of producing box-office success. And in the closing chapters, she muses on the ways some individuals have started rejecting this system and offers concrete suggestions for how their peers could follow suit.

Little of this reporting is brand-new for this volume, but it’s effective — if incredibly disheartening! — to see it all laid out so clearly. Fans who can stomach it should read the horrid details for a beginning understanding of the human cost behind their favorite entertainments.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

Book #91 of 2023:

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

The latest Kickstarter novel from author Brandon Sanderson falls somewhere between the last two in quality for me. I don’t think it’s as strong a story as Tress of the Emerald Sea — nor that it would work as well for readers unfamiliar with recent cosmere developments / revelations of ‘realmatic theory’ in the Stormlight Archive and such — but it improves as it goes along and is substantially better throughout than The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. I’ll give it 3.5 stars, rounded up.

Like Tress, this is a tale in the writer’s broad cosmere continuity conveyed to us by that rascal Hoid, an unreliable narrator and minor character in the present affair. Mostly the plot follows the two title figures, whose lonely souls somehow become entwined despite their living on apparently separate worlds. Yumi is a sheltered priestess of sorts whose position is exalted yet grants her no real control over anything in her life; the painter is an underpaid service worker who patrols the streets to guard against supernatural threats. Their respective magics seem unremarkable to each yet fairly wondrous to the other, and after their lives come crashing together, they learn to appreciate both whilst unraveling the mystery of their connection — which finds them taking turns being relegated to a ghostly presence no one else can see while the other one occupies their normal physical space.

As usual for Sanderson, there are some eventual twist reveals concerning the underlying worldbuilding and rules to the magical systems, but he also finds time to focus on mental health issues like executive dysfunction and ruminate in not-too-subtle subtext on certain contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence (aka, how art created by humans is more meaningful than anything formed by mindless machinery, precisely because people invest it with meaning). This isn’t the deepest of the writer’s own creations, but there’s an interesting pan-Asian feel to the narrative in the form of hot springs, chopsticks, ramen shops, and so on, and he acknowledges several manga and JRPG titles as among his influences in an afterword.

Because this is all being told to us by an in-universe character prone to embellishment if not outright dishonesty, it comes — again, like Tress of the Emerald Sea — with a notable asterisk for whether the events of this story can be accepted at face-value as canonical. At a minimum, it doesn’t seem like anything here will wind up important to the broader cosmere saga, but if you’re a fan of Hoid and his Cryptic associate Design, this is a fun side adventure in which they play a supporting role to the slow-building romance between the titular star-crossed couple.

[Content warning for those romantic interests pretending to be siblings at one point.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Goldenhand by Garth Nix

Book #90 of 2023:

Goldenhand by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #5)

My original review of this novel from shortly after its publication in 2016:

“A triumphant return to the Old Kingdom, finally resolving the fate of the lost Abhorsen, Clariel. (Note: Clariel’s early life is described in the prequel novel which bears her name, and which should definitely be read prior to this book.) So many old favorites return in this story, but author Garth Nix continues to deepen the worldbuilding of the series and introduce compelling new characters as well. I wish that the central villain had had more of a presence throughout the novel, but otherwise Goldenhand was an absolute delight. And it feels less like an epilogue than the earlier novel Abhorsen did, so hopefully there will be further Old Kingdom stories coming out from Nix in the years to come. Goldenhand demonstrates decisively that the setting still has plenty of tales left to tell.”

To that I would add on this 2023 series reread, with the earlier volumes fresh in my mind: in addition to Clariel (published in 2014), the beginning of this one draws heavily on the events of the 2005 novella “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case,” which makes the success of Goldenhand all the more remarkable for its writer coming back to those characters after so long away. Nick is much more compelling of a protagonist now than he was in Lirael (2001) / Abhorsen (2003), and his deepening romance with Lirael is probably the best love story Garth Nix has ever written — though that’s an admittedly low bar! I also really appreciate how she’s grown in competence and confidence since her introduction, as particularly underscored by a homecoming scene to the Clayr’s glacier and the confrontation it allows there with the outdated impression of the young woman some of her relatives still hold.

The ending of this novel cribs a little off The Return of the King, with a pair of heroes on a quest to destroy the latest magical macguffin, all whilst their friends make a bold stand with an outnumbered army, trying to hold the line until the distant mission can be accomplished and the enemy’s strength mystically shattered. But Nix is hardly the first fantasy author to borrow from Tolkien, and the plot device works fine even warmed-over like this. Overall I think this title succeeds better than Clariel, and would recommend its continuation of the saga for any readers who enjoyed the previous installments.

[Content warning for body horror, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Classics Omnibus Volume 1 by Pat Mills, John Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Dez Skinn, Paul Neary, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, John Ridgway, Bryan Hitch, and Steve Parkhouse

Book #89 of 2023:

Doctor Who: Classics Omnibus Volume 1 by Pat Mills, John Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Dez Skinn, Paul Neary, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, John Ridgway, Bryan Hitch, and Steve Parkhouse

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This 2010 anthology gathers 19 comic book stories by a variety of authors and artists, originally published in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine between 1979 and 1988. And while I wouldn’t necessarily call any of them essential for fans, they collectively represent a fascinating look at a somewhat obscure corner of the long-running sci-fi franchise. There’s the Doctor’s first canonical companion of color Sharon Davies, introduced 28 years before Martha Jones on TV. There’s the ultimate fate of Jamie McCrimmon, erstwhile companion to the Second Doctor, coupled with a surprising revelation about the origins of the villainous Cybermen. There are several plots that couldn’t have aired on the contemporary show, due to either budgetary considerations or the level of just plain weirdness possible on the written page with less direct BBC oversight (or both, in the case of fan-favorite companion Frobisher, a shapeshifting alien whose natural form looks like a regular earth penguin). And there’s The Star Beast, the storyline that introduces the infamously innocuous-looking furry megalomaniac and war criminal Beep the Meep, set to make his live-action debut later this year in either an adaptation or sequel to that tale. (The publicity remains unclear.)

It’s sort of an odd collection, and the criteria for inclusion are not particularly obvious. There are installments here with the Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors, along with their companions K-9 and Peri — plus those I’ve already mentioned — but not always in order and with plenty of remaining issues from the same eras left out. The quality is definitely variable from sequence to sequence too, as is the length, with some adventures spanning only a few pages and others representing the kind of serialized fiction that would have played out over many months in the original format. But I’ve enjoyed seeing this side of a series so dear to my heart, and would recommend it for any comic readers looking to explore the wider Whoniverse.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie

Book #88 of 2023:

The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #9)

This 1962 novel, published in the U.S. as simply The Mirror Crack’d, offers a fun little murder mystery that’s kept me guessing throughout. No one seems to have had any motive that could account for the neighborhood woman’s death at the house party of a glamorous movie star resented by many — so was the wrong cup poisoned, or is something even stranger afoot? Luckily Miss Marple is on hand to push the police in the right direction and conduct her own discreet inquiries, all the while dodging the ageist attentions of her fussy nursemaid. The solution to the puzzle doesn’t quite play as fairly as I’d like, relying as it does on the heroine’s background medical knowledge that isn’t actually introduced to us as a proper clue in the plot. (Or perhaps the key piece of information was less obscure in the original time and place of publication?) Yet regardless, the characters are engaging and the setting captures a nice snapshot of how author Agatha Christie’s iconic quiet English villages were changing as the twentieth century barreled along. I appreciate the slight ambiguity of the ending, as well.

[Content warning for suicide and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆