The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (2018)

Movie #16 of 2022:

What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (2018)

An interesting but somewhat scattered retrospective of Star Trek’s DS9 series, almost two decades after it went off the air. The actors are older (and for some, out of their familiar alien makeup), but they and the writers and producers interviewed for this documentary plainly have a lot of lingering affection for the title. They praise its darker themes and serialized plots, which seemed out-of-place on network TV during the original run from 1993 to 1999, but have continued to attract new viewers like me in the years since, as the media landscape has shifted more towards that sort of vision. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like everyone involved has too big a chip on their shoulders about the show’s early critical reputation — contemporary fans may have complained that it wasn’t proper Star Trek, but the program still aired 176 episodes over seven seasons. It’s hardly an obscure cult classic!

This film raises some compelling points about how Deep Space Nine provided groundbreaking representations of its African American characters, but also acknowledges that it could have done better on LGBTQ issues. Although there’s no discussion of the transphobia and rape culture on display in the episode “Profit and Lace” — just a comment that the humor is “too broad” — both Garak actor Andrew Robinson and showrunner Ira Steven Behr express the regret that his recurring Cardassian ally with a fondness for Julian Bashir was never made explicitly gay in the scripts. But it’s generally a pleasant sequence of interviews, other than when actress Terry Farrell angrily disputes the circumstances under which she left the role of Jadzia Dax.

The strangest thing about this movie is that it’s not only a look backwards at the show. Several new (and bad) musical numbers are debuted for some reason, and there’s a lengthy running segment involving the writers figuring out what they would do to continue the story in a hypothetical eighth season that picked back up now, twenty years after the finale. It’s charming but weird to see them discussing, say, Ensign Molly O’Brien serving under Captain Nog, and it adds up to a feeling of looseness about this overall endeavor. It’s all fun enough, but I wouldn’t say it’s a must-watch for fans.

[Content warning for graphic footage of white nationalist rallies and some of the killings that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Beginning by K. A. Applegate

Book #148 of 2022:

The Beginning by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #54)

Well… Here we are. Sixteen months later, I have finally finished my full reread of the complete Animorphs saga, and am ready to review its final volume. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Thematically as a series, Animorphs has always been focused on the deep trauma of war. On the bloody reality of combat, and the lingering stress that follows in its wake. On gray morality with no easy answers, and living with yourself after making the tough calls; on the loss of innocence, and child soldiers as a metaphor for anyone forced to shoulder adult responsibilities too early. It’s no wonder, then, that this last title wraps up its big battle against the Yeerks, the resolution to the cliffhanger of the adrenaline-laced previous installment and basically the plot of the entire franchise, by about 15% of the way through the text. What came before was the winding story of a group of human teens thrust into the role of resisting and defeating those alien invaders. What follows here is the somber fallout.

Some of this is purely logistical: how will the surviving protagonists strike agreeable terms with the Andalite fleet that had been coming to scour the earth, and how will humanity adjust to the knowledge of extraterrestrial life and the existence of new interplanetary trade and tourism partners? What future is there for the Yeerks, Taxxons, and Hork-Bajir left behind on the planet? What will life look like for the Animorphs, now that the whole world knows their names, faces, and accomplishments? What can they possibly do next, given the sheer impracticality of ever resuming the quiet existence they’d had before the war?

The answers to that last question are fun for readers to learn, at least as far as Marco is concerned. He embraces the celebrity of it all, earning millions in brand endorsements, book sales, and movie rights. (His autobiography is called The Gorilla Speaks. I love it.) He dates models, drives sports cars, and lives in a mansion with a butler he calls Wetherbee. Cassie too is energized by the new opportunities available to an Animorph, although in true Cassie fashion she pivots into a quieter government job as Undersecretary of the Interior for Resident Aliens. And back home on the Andalite planet, Ax has been promoted to prince, given a hero’s welcome, and made captain of his very own starship! It could all be seen as hokey wish fulfillment and an overly-rosy ending, were it not for how the humans clearly remain haunted by their experiences and worried about their friends who have recovered even less. As Cassie notes a year after the ceasefire, she and Marco are “in some way the only two real survivors.”

And that brings us to Rachel. Are we deep enough into the review yet not to accidentally spoil anyone? Rachel’s death aboard the stolen Blade ship at the beginning of this novel is absolutely gutting, even on a reread where I knew the entire time through the series where her story was headed. The worst part is that it’s a perfect endpoint for her personal arc of discovering within herself a ruthlessness, a passion for bloodshed, and an utter lack of caution that works for her right up until the moment it doesn’t. At several points in the previous volumes, she and the others have uneasily wondered how she’d ever adjust to civilian life after the war. It’s fitting that we’ll never know, and that her execution functions as one last great consequence for the team — and specifically for their leader Jake, who ordered his cousin onto that ship in private to kill the Yeerk controlling his brother Tom, knowing she was unlikely to survive. It’s a terrifically cruel writing choice that she succeeds in her mission — with the help of Tobias, guiding her from helplessly afar when she’s blinded by snake venom — but is forced to demorph to escape her injuries, and so faces her fate as a human surrounded on all sides by Yeerks in battle morph. So too is her killer’s salutation of “You fight well, human” and her short exchange with the Ellimist as already previewed in his Chronicles (without her name attached). I hate this chapter. It’s probably one of the strongest and most effective in the entire series.

In the aftermath of losing Rachel, Jake and Tobias are devastated in two very different ways. Tobias retreats into life as a hawk, cutting off all contact with the rest of humanity and trying to forget himself as a simple creature of the woods. Rachel was his primary link to his old identity, and without her or the ability to forgive Jake, he has no wish to function as even remotely human again. Meanwhile Jake carries on in his own depressive funk, making public appearances when he needs to, but feeling empty and shattered by his actions. He never does get back together with Cassie romantically, presumably due to those feelings of guilt and depression, and she eventually moves on to date someone else while he spends his nights in disguise at Rachel’s grave. “That’s how I felt now, pretty much all the time,” the young former general reflects. “Dark. Dull. Slow and stupid. Distracted, but not by anything in particular. Just like there was something else I should be thinking about but I couldn’t recall what it was.” I don’t know if author K. A. Applegate — aka the married team of Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, which I guess I should mention for one last time — has firsthand experience with such mental health struggles, but it’s certainly a description that rings true to my own.

Jake is preoccupied with the deaths he orchestrated of Rachel and Tom, but also with his impulsive command to flush seventeen-thousand helpless Yeerks out into the vacuum of space in the penultimate novel. In my previous review, I was blunt in calling that act a mass murder and a war crime. That’s an accusation that becomes textual here, and although it comes from the legal team for Visser One, captured and on trial in the Hague for his own foul deeds, it’s not one that the teenager can easily shake. His friends may protest that the charge is too harsh, and the series ultimately doesn’t come down one way or another on the question, but I appreciate that it’s raised and considered at all, and that Jake is troubled by the event and his xenophobic motivations for it regardless. One last ethical conundrum for the group, with perhaps no clear right answer.

Plotwise, all of this is a little thin and oddly structured. We’re hopping around from character to character like a Megamorphs in all but name, and there are three big time jumps in the novel — first one year, then two years, then six months — meaning that this single book alone spans more time than the previous 53 in the main series combined. Unfortunately, the rush to cover such a long period results in a lack of immersive depth, and the impression that we are just checking in on the Animorphs periodically rather than truly following their adventures anymore. There’s not even much morphing of note that goes on after the Yeerk Empire is shattered, although the effort to snap Jake out of his depression by forcing him to morph into a dolphin is nice.

Near the end of the span covered by this story, Prince Aximili is still hunting through space for the lost Blade ship when he encounters a new hostile threat and is taken captive. And our human heroes, now 19 years old and settling into their post-Animorph lives one way or another, must rejoin to stage a rescue attempt (except for Cassie, whom Jake asks to stay behind in recognition of the good she’s doing and the reality that she doesn’t need a new cause as much as the rest of them). That involves some sharing of feelings and unloading of trauma, but all the getting-the-band-back-together sequence really achieves is sending the male Animorphs off into space alongside two new human helpers and an Andalite nothlit, on a ship they name the Rachel (and a mission that’s amusingly and loudly not sanctioned by the Andalite leadership despite plainly having their complete unofficial cooperation). Marco hitting on the sole female crew member is probably the only real sour note in the book for me, but we honestly don’t get to know the three newcomers well enough for any of them to particularly register.

Eventually this iteration of the team finds the unsettling gestalt entity that’s apparently assimilated Ax, leaving us with one last sight of these figures on the brink of yet another battle. In the closing lines, Jake snaps an order to ram the Blade ship and Marco notes how much he looks like his dead cousin right then. Like the finale to the TV show Angel, the tale ends on a cliffhanger just before the fight begins, forever cementing the outnumbered heroes as valiant warriors in our minds.

A lot of this is great and a fitting conclusion to the epic saga that’s preceded it, although everyone’s parents are curiously absent throughout. The visser’s host body Alloran is freed after decades of infestation! The majority of the defeated Yeerks and Taxxons choose to become nothlits and we ignore the genocidal implications of that and the fact that it negates the Iskoort connection that the Ellimist set up in book #26! Wealthy Andalites visit earth solely to morph human mouths and taste our cuisine! The Hork-Bajir move into Yellowstone National Park with Cassie’s assistance! The Chee opt to remain in hiding for some reason! Stephen Spielberg makes an Animorphs movie with Marco as technical advisor!

Still, I’ll confess to wanting more closure, more of a throughline to the extended denouement of this novel, and more thrilling heroics before it, not to mention a lengthier lead-up to the mysterious new villain at the end. (The Angel finale has its detractors, but at least it was building off several long-running plot threads. This business with The One truly comes out of nowhere.) In a closing note, Applegate writes, “I figured the Animorphs should go out the same way they came in: Fighting.” A subsequent follow-up posted to a fansite explains in more depth why the ending needed to be complicated and painful, apparently in response to complaints from her unsatisfied young readers: “So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.” And that’s reasonable enough, but I can’t help but think that the delivery on the page is a little choppy compared to this series at its absolute best.

[Content warning for body horror, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Postscript: Thank you so much for joining me in this reread of a series that meant so much to so many of us in the late 90s / early 2000s! I’ve really loved revisiting these books and building out a space here to work critically through what has and hasn’t succeeded for me as an adult reader, both in my reviews and in the engaging comments that people have often left in the replies below. At a minimum, I appreciate your indulgence in putting up with the clog in your social media feeds as these recap-reviews grew steadily longer the deeper I got into the books.

Ordinarily when I finish a series, I like to rank the different individual volumes, but that seems exceedingly difficult with a franchise this massive. So here’s just a recap of my ratings by tier:

★☆☆☆☆
Alternamorphs #1 The First Journey

★★☆☆☆

#28 The Experiment, Alternamorphs #2 The Next Passage, #37 The Weakness, #47 The Resistance

★★★☆☆

#6 The Capture, Megamorphs #1 The Andalite’s Gift, #9 The Secret, #11 The Forgotten, #12 The Reaction, #14 The Unknown, #15 The Escape, #17 The Underground, #20 The Discovery, #23 The Pretender, #27 The Exposed, #32 The Separation, #35 The Proposal, #36 The Mutation, #38 The Arrival, #40 The Other, #41 The Familiar, #42 The Journey, #44 The Unexpected, #46 The Deception, #48 The Return

★★★★☆

#2 The Visitor, #3 The Encounter, #5 The Predator, #10 The Android, #13 The Change, #16 The Warning, #18 The Decision, #21 The Threat, #24 The Suspicion, #25 The Extreme, #26 The Attack, #29 The Sickness, Megamorphs #3 Elfangor’s Secret, #30 The Reunion, #31 The Conspiracy, #33 The Illusion, #34 The Prophecy, #39 The Hidden, #43 The Test, #45 The Revelation, Chronicles #4 The Ellimist Chronicles, #49 The Diversion, #50 The Ultimate, #51 The Absolute, #54 The Beginning

★★★★★

#1 The Invasion, #4 The Message, #7 The Stranger, #8 The Alien, Chronicles #1 The Andalite Chronicles, Megamorphs #2 In the Time of Dinosaurs, #19 The Departure, #22 The Solution, Chronicles #2 The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Chronicles #3 Visser, Megamorphs #4 Back to Before, #52 The Sacrifice, #53 The Answer

In terms of books with primary narrators, I guess that means I’d rank them Cassie > Tobias > Ax > Jake > Marco > Rachel on average, although they all have their share of greatness.

Overall rating for the Animorphs series: ★★★★☆

Book Review: Babel: an Arcane History by R. F. Kuang

Book #147 of 2022:

Babel: an Arcane History by R. F. Kuang

An exquisitely slow-burning fuse of a novel, presenting the 1830s education of a young Chinese-born translator and eventual radical at the fictional Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University. In the alternate fantasy universe of this setting, cognate pairs across languages have magical power, proportional to the semantic distance between the words when etched onto bars of silver. (So for example: the English definition of “agony” has drifted far from the Greek “ἀγωνία” denoting a competition or struggle; setting them in silver and invoking the English can provoke immense suffering in an opponent.) It’s a fascinating concept for a reader like me with a background in linguistics, and the whole book is stuffed full of author R. F. Kuang’s education and clear deep thought on matters of language, as befits a cast made up almost entirely of scholars like herself.

However, the wizardry element is ultimately a mere sideshow, with its mechanisms not even explained to the protagonist and his fellow students until their second year of schooling, about 30% of the way through the text. Before and after then, they are studying their assigned tongues — multilingual fluency being necessary both for casting the spells and for devising new ones — but generally focusing on more immediate practicalities. The overall genre vibe is part boarding-school bildungsroman, part ‘dark academia’ of shadowy societies and unhealthily codependent cliques, and part wholesale critique of empire, colonialism, and capitalism at large. Over the years, Robin and his friends face significant individual racism directed at their respective backgrounds, but they also come to articulate and act upon many key objections to the society around them.

I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever read a story quite like this, even with the growing anticolonialist streak in speculative fiction of the past decade. It blends something like The Traitor Baru Cormorant‘s all-consuming quest to take down an oppressive superpower from the inside with the doomed fatalism of Rogue One‘s understanding that such an uneven mission against institutional might can only end in death, yet still must be assayed. And there are deaths aplenty here, each one cruelly gutting in its own way, despite Kuang pulling back from the horrors of rape and other atrocities seen in her earlier Poppy War trilogy. Because the writer centers her characters throughout, they’re never lost in all the heady political commentary, and readers remain tightly bound to the perspective of a lonely boy dragged to a foreign country, impressed into service on its behalf, and expected to feel grateful for the opportunity. His gradual awakening to that offense and commitment to instead burn everything down is phenomenal to watch unfold, building to a climactic general strike and revolt that could shake the world. (The full title of the work is, apparently, “Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.”)

I’m not surprised to see in Kuang’s author bio that she has Masters degrees from Oxford and Cambridge herself, and is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale. This is a tale that could only have come from someone enmeshed within academia, capturing so many authentic details of that lived experience and turning the rigors of its analytical frameworks on the flaws of the university model itself. Her fictional scholars must grapple with their privileges and the harm they cause in a process as painful as it is in real life, and some, heartbreakingly, never do learn to accept marginalized testimony as authoritative. There’s a terrific takedown of white feminism in particular — that focus on opposing sexism solely through a white lens, thereby missing and thus reinforcing the ways in which people of color are hurt by constructions of whiteness and the ways in which women of color experience sexism intersectionally with discrimination on race — and yet in Kuang’s hands, it somehow always feels personally rooted to the well-drawn character personalities and never an artificial or didactic insert.

If I have one small and selfish complaint about this project, it’s that we don’t get to see enough of the linguistic magic on display. The worldbuilding is especially disappointing on that front, since it’s hard to imagine how an alternative history could cleave so closely to our own after millennia of sorcerers practicing their craft. But the implicit criticisms of contemporary society probably do land better this way, and the multitude of genuine quotes included herein speaks to the lengths of scholarship that animate the novel. Comparisons to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell therefore miss the mark for me despite a shared predilection for footnotes, as Babel cites the actual literature rather than an elaborate invented counterpart, but I’ve enjoyed this read tremendously regardless.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, slavery, drug abuse, suicide, gun violence, torture, and gore.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Star Trek: Voyager, season 5

TV #46 of 2022:

Star Trek: Voyager, season 5

Another solid serving of 90s science-fiction, still satisfyingly tighter all around than this show’s early years. I’d call it a minor step down from the season before, however, which felt more ambitious with its introduction of Seven of Nine and her personal arc of reintegrating into humanity. This run adds a few recurring elements that I appreciate to the series worldbuilding, like the “Captain Proton” holodeck simulation, but overall there’s not much of a serialized story going on at this stage. I also would have preferred less of a focus on Naomi Wildman, who appears in six different episodes this season and brings back some of my old Wesley Crusher questions about what a child can productively do aboard a military spaceship other than dubiously appeal to a wider network audience.

On an episodic level, my favorite installment of this outing is probably 5×10 “Counterpoint” with its expertly-crafted twists and its theme of resistance to genocidal fascism, but I’ve also enjoyed the time-travel adventures of 5×6 “Timeless” and 5×24 “Relativity” and the quasi-AUs of 5×14 “Bliss” and 5×18 “Course: Oblivion.” That’s more individual hours than I’d ordinarily highlight in a Star Trek review — which speaks to the growing reliability of quality on this program, but also to its lack of much to talk about on the larger plot front.

[Content warning for self-harm.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

Book #146 of 2022:

Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians #6)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.]

Middle-grade book series are odd, in that their release schedule often outpaces the age of their target audience. That’s particularly the case for the Alcatraz Smedry sextet, which published its first four novels annually from 2007 to 2010, then a fifth volume in 2016 and now this final tale after another six years. Yet the main characters are still 13, as readers who have grown up over the past decade-and-a-half may be frustrated to find (especially after being primed for increasing maturity in the progression of certain other children’s fantasy series). The Alcatraz books do get somewhat darker and more mature as they go along, but they never lose the tween zaniness inherent to a premise of evil librarians secretly ruling the world or heroes with special powers like “getting lost,” “breaking things,” and “arriving late.”

Those goofy Smedry talents have always been the primary appeal of these stories to me, and my biggest critique of this finale is that we mostly just see repeats of earlier ones, rather than much in the way of new inventiveness. There’s also not really any noticeable payoff from the switch to a new narrator perspective, or from the contributions of co-writer Janci Patterson following five installments from author Brandon Sanderson alone. This title offers a solid conclusion to the remaining plot concerns, and I’m glad we finally have it in our hands after such a long wait, but I’m not seeing anything on the page that would clearly justify that delay. I suspect the series might work better overall for people who are able to read the story straight through, whatever their age at the time.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked:

4 > 3 > 2 > 6 > 1 > 5

Book Review: A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith

Book #145 of 2022:

A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith

This 1984 bestseller about a fictional family’s frontier history is required reading in many Florida schools, which is where I first encountered and absolutely loathed the title. But it has plenty of accolades and its fair share of adherents, and so I’ve always wanted to return and reread it as an adult, to see if my teenage self was perhaps too harsh a critic. Having done so now, I will grudgingly concede that it’s probably not the worst novel I’ve ever read — but it still leaves much to be desired.

I’m not sure of the exact audience, to begin with. There’s a lot to criticize in the flat characters with little interiority, whose dialogue largely consists of declarations of what they’ve just done or are about to do, but that would be more acceptable in a novel for younger readers. (And indeed, I’ve seen people saying they were assigned the book as low as 4th grade, although it was in the 10th grade pre-AP curriculum for me.) At the same time, however, the subject matter seems somewhat inappropriate for small children, with lynchings, racial slurs, underage sex, domestic abuse, and gun violence including the gory shooting deaths of multiple humans, horses, and dogs. Not to mention the hundreds of pages about cattle-herding, which can be tedious at any age! With such conflicting signals, it’s not clear who author Patrick D. Smith ultimately thought he was writing for here.

The social attitudes are possibly worse. This is very much a white man’s story, and while Smith is conscientious to showcase his settler protagonists as inexplicably ‘colorblind’ in their acceptance of other races, they’re completely indifferent to both sides of the dawning Civil War at the start of the text, and never express anything more than mild indignation that their Black and Indian friends are treated differently by the rest of ‘civilized’ society. The minority figures also lean towards cartoonish stereotypes, and the few women in the tale are categorically introduced to fall promptly in love and become devoted helpmeets to the menfolk. Meanwhile, those men are rugged individualists out of the classic libertarian mythos, shunning all community outside of the household and casting all laws and governments as interchangeable intrusions in their lives.

As for the plot: this is a multigenerational saga spanning from 1858 through 1968, following a grandfather, father, and son in turn as they doggedly overcome a variety of setbacks to build their wealth and grow their footprint in the new state by constructing homes, making a living as cowboys, and later tending to a crop of orange groves. The best part of the project, and the main reason I’m ranking it as highly as two stars, is the intimate look at Florida’s natural wildlife (and to a lesser extent, a sanitized version of its history). Although the cast is invented, the settings are real, and there’s a frisson of pleasure at seeing familiar place names and plant/animal species in a context like this. On the other hand, the writer’s focus on specific technical details of trade goods and the like is sometimes so intense as to be laughable, as though this were the novelization to an Oregon Trail video game or something.

The structure’s a bit weird, beginning with the youngest scion as an old man, then flashing back two generations for the majority of the work. By the time that original hero takes center stage again, we’re down to the final 10% of the novel, and now skipping years or even decades with every subsequent chapter. As a result, we never really get to know this last MacIvey as well as his forebears, which makes it hard to connect with his end-of-life regrets and chastisement at his fellow developers for letting the ‘old Florida’ slip away. That’s nominally the entire point of the volume, but it doesn’t land — no pun intended — in such a rushed format.

So. Hardly a classic, and yet I can understand why local educators would be drawn to it when teaching about the area, and I suppose its wilderness survival adventures could be exciting in a Swiss Family Robinson sort of way. But I maintain it’s the worst thing I ever had to read in high school, and it had some serious competition on that front.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 8

TV #45 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 8

I seem to have liked this season better when I watched it upon airing in 2018, given my review back then:

“I don’t have much to say about this season of Bob’s Burgers that doesn’t apply to the show at large, but it remains impressively strong this late in its run. Top-notch, character-driven comedy that somehow hasn’t worn out its welcome despite the general lack of any sort of ongoing plot or narrative stakes. I think it’s the character work that really powers this show: the main cast has grown naturally over time, and the extensive bench of supporting characters all have a great comic specificity to them. If Bob’s Burgers can keep effortlessly hitting this level of quality, I’m happy to keep watching.”

While I generally stand by all that, I think my tastes have shifted enough towards serialization in fiction that I’m less satisfied now by the absence of apparent ambition in a stretch like this, and by the sense that Bob’s Burgers is somewhat coasting on its established reputation at this point. Watching 150+ episodes in about as many days has also tended to drive home this program’s typical plot formulas, and although I still tend to like what they produce, I’m not as delighted by it as I could be in the show’s prime, when it felt as though the writers were regularly digging in and pushing the ensemble forward as well as nailing all the jokes.

With a few exceptions like “The Silence of the Louise,” “V for Valentine-detta,” and “Something Old, Something New, Something Bob Caters for You,” the installments in season 8 just aren’t making me sit up and pay attention like television can manage at its best. I continue to enjoy the cartoon in this era, but I wouldn’t say that I necessarily love it anymore.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Happy Endings, season 1

TV #44 of 2022:

Happy Endings, season 1

This sitcom launch from 2011 is fine, but somewhat unremarkable. Although it improves over the course of these first 13 episodes — not that original audiences would’ve fully realized, with the season airing all out of its intended production order — I still feel as though I don’t really know these characters all too well in terms of their personalities, jobs, general life goals, inter-group dynamics, and so on. In my mind as I’ve watched and thought about this show, I keep comparing it to New Girl (which began later the same year) and How I Met Your Mother (a 2005 debut), two series which seemed much better defined along those dimensions right from the start. Also, even with streaming services restoring the episode lineup, there’s not much significant plot across this initial run, either in overarching developing stories or even simple callbacks and recurring guest roles. The main throughline is the fallout from Dave and Alex’s failed wedding in the pilot, and that doesn’t particularly impact anyone else before long.

I might be at a disadvantage here as a viewer, since the program this comedy probably most resembles is Friends, which I’ve seen almost none of. (Please don’t take this as an invitation to convince me to change that! If I were interested in watching it, I would have already.) I say that because the overall vibe seems to be just an insular group of six, uh, buddies hanging out a lot, with all other people kept at a distance and any concerns easily pushed aside for the latest round of in-joke shenanigans. On the other hand, I understand that that classic series did incorporate plenty of serialized storytelling throughout its tenure, so I’m hopeful that Happy Endings develops along similar lines over the next 44 installments despite not appreciably doing so in what I’ve seen thus far.

Another area where I’m lukewarm and hoping for improvement is in the representation of Adam Pally’s character Max. While I’m glad he isn’t a token stereotype — like the main other gay person we meet appears to be — I’m not thrilled with how his friends / the scripts regularly invalidate his identity with comments like, “You’re a straight guy who likes dudes.” His scene when he comes out to his parents is nice, at least. But TV has come a long way in the past decade, and it’s rather jarring to dive back into punchlines built around ignorant and essentialist views of sexuality.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

Book #144 of 2022:

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers (Monk and Robot #2)

This Monk and Robot sequel retains much of what I enjoyed about the setting in the original novella: its “warm hug of hopepunk goodness… rooted in empathetic respect and curiosity toward different cultures,” to quote from my review last year. This is still a very pleasant vision of a leftist utopian future, where community networks of mutual aid have taken the place of money, every sort of personal identity appears cherished, and people are free to seek their bliss in any way that doesn’t harm someone else. And with its ongoing loose story of a nonbinary monk and their robotic companion, this series is probably the only one out there whose two main characters use they/them and it/its pronouns, which continues to feel fresh and exciting as a writing choice.

With all that being said, however, the first book’s subplot concerning its human protagonist’s depression and potential suicide provided a sharp bite to help offset the more saccharine elements, which is sorely missing here. Beyond a short passage that finds the robot considering whether the morals of its kind would allow it to repair itself with organically-derived materials rather than surrender its damaged body for deconstruction, there’s little here to seriously challenge the heroes, resulting in a somewhat placid read. I like these figures and their world, but I need more from the plot than this volume is ultimately able to offer.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Daughter’s a Daughter by Mary Westmacott

Book #143 of 2022:

A Daughter’s a Daughter by Mary Westmacott

This 1952 title is a decent character study, but a thoroughly unpleasant and exasperating read about a toxically codependent parental relationship. The fifth of six novels that author Agatha Christie published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott — at this point merely an affectation, after the British press had disclosed the writer’s true identity in 1949 — it presents a middle-aged widow and her teenage daughter, each of whom can’t help but hypocritically meddle in the other one’s romantic affairs. (Somewhat awkwardly, Christie reportedly based the younger woman on her own child, who later refused to grant rights for any theatre in her lifetime to ever put on the authorized stage adaptation.)

If I had to pick sides in this squalid Gilmore Girls melodrama, I suppose I’d say that the nineteen-year-old is generally the more reasonable of the pair. Although children shouldn’t really have a say in who their parents date / marry, it’s pretty absurd that the mother meets a stranger, falls in love, gets engaged, and sets a wedding date for the following month all while the girl is off on a skiing trip with her friends. The most powerful part of the story is the tense household struggle that develops between these two and the new fiancé upon her return, but I’ve found the lengthy fallout after that crisis inevitably comes to a head to be less interesting and mostly just sad.

[Content warning for drug abuse.]

★★★☆☆