The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

Book #123 of 2022:

Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

An interesting collection of essays, each one focusing on a different woman from Greek mythology and exploring how she’s changed from her earliest surviving depictions through to popular culture impressions today. The focus of the project is already somewhat automatically feminist, but author Natalie Haynes further utilizes a keen lens for how sexism — both historical and modern — has affected our perceptions of these figures. The text thus offers a reclamation of sorts, although even its most radical assertions are well-sourced in research and plausible reading between the lines of antiquity.

This work hasn’t wowed me as much as the writer’s own novel-length attempt at retelling the Trojan War from a variety of female perspectives, A Thousand Ships, but it’s certainly worth the read for anyone into gender studies and/or folklore.

[Content warning for rape, incest, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Book #122 of 2022:

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

A neat little character study of a modern “vegan” vampire — her own term, although she actually means that she drinks pigs’ blood to avoid feeding on humans — who despite her unique circumstances is as overwhelmed and directionless as any other 23-year-old unpaid intern. I especially like her resigned observation that vampires in fiction always seem to be independently wealthy even when their morals, like hers, preclude them from killing and stealing from their victims. Unfortunately the story around this heroine never really grabs me, and it feels as though there are too many open questions and plot avenues remaining when the novella draws to a close. I was enjoying the narrative voice and would’ve happily continued reading on, but I’m a bit dissatisfied with this title as a finished product.

[Content warning for gore, sexual assault, disordered eating, gaslighting, and racism.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 6

TV #39 of 2022:

Better Call Saul, season 6

An utterly masterful end to one of the great modern dramas of our time. This Breaking Bad prequel about Walter White’s shady lawyer has always been stronger than anyone could have predicted, and its final outing is truly one of its best. At long last we learn why certain figures like Nacho Varga and Kim Wexler weren’t around during the events of that parent show, and while the answers are predictably sad, their specifics are gripping to watch unfold. Even BCS original Howard Hamlin earns a certain dignity in his ultimate fate, and it’s a testament to how thoroughly this series has built up its world that viewers likely feel a pang at the prospect of leaving the law offices of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill for the very last time.

Not everyone’s story concludes here, of course. As a prologue to an existing text, this program has also been fleshing out the origins of particular Breaking Bad characters like Mike and Gus whom we know — spoiler alert — will survive their present straits only to come to an unhappy end further down the line. In that context, this final season works to seamlessly bind them to their paths ahead, presenting each with possible off-ramps to lay aside their respective missions and walk away with their lives. Instead they decline those opportunities and agentively choose to stay in the game. These men are thus doomed not by some abstract tragic flaw or random chance, but by the active choices they make that set them on an eventual collision course with that corrosive catalyst named Heisenberg.

As for Saul himself, this series has always aimed to chart his downward trajectory from the corner-cutting but fundamentally decent Jimmy McGill to the jaded crook who suggests killing Badger in one of his earliest Breaking Bad scenes. He too makes rash decisions that lead him in that direction, but he’s also perpetually ground down by a world that won’t allow him to be any better. His tragedy, I’d argue, is that his moments of weakness continually come at the worst possible time, and for six seasons, we’ve watched the deepening repercussions of his moral descent on the extended Albuquerque community around him. That’s been regularly juxtaposed against both a thematically-similar backstory of cartel infighting — which on a practical level could sometimes feel too removed from our main protagonist, but comes together beautifully / awfully this year in one sudden horrendous instant — and brief yet stark looks into his post-BB future of bleak midwestern anonymity.

One of the smartest and riskiest production choices, though, is that that familiar structure of Better Call Saul’s prequel mode only lasts for the first nine episodes of this run. At that point, we are effectively caught up with the original timeline, and the creative team realizes there’s little to be gained by the overlap beyond a few fun scenes that can plausibly fit around previous ones. For the last four installments, therefore, we are suddenly thrust full-time into the black-and-white world of Gene Takevic, the latest iteration of our many-named hero. And while BCS the prequel has clearly always been positioned as a tragedy for everyone involved, BCS the sequel has the freedom to maybe allow for a different sort of ending. And that restores quite a lot of agency to a character who has long shown himself alternately able to self-destruct, able to repent, and most of all, able to surprise. There is literally no way of predicting as we watch which version of him will definitively close out the title (and likely this whole long-running fictional universe).

I won’t give away the ending, except to say that I adored it, and not only for some great callback cameos. It’s a finale as fittingly slow-paced as the show leading up to it, and one that takes the time to explicitly ruminate on regret and wonder whether people can ever really change their nature. If you’ll indulge my own look backwards, it seems to me a perfect reflection of the themes I laid out in my review of season one:

“Better Call Saul, by contrast [to Breaking Bad], is all about change. And choices. Its own protagonist is actively seeking to be a better person, only for a cruel universe to strike him down for it again and again. There’s great dramatic irony in this being a prequel, since the audience knows Saul Goodman as the jaded figure he’ll be in 2008 when his storyline intersects with White’s. But when we meet him here in 2002, he’s still going by the name Jimmy McGill, and he’s so much more earnest and decent than anyone could have imagined. True, he’s already bending the truth as well as the law, but he continually surprises us with hidden depths and the lengths he’ll go to on behalf of his loved ones and clients.

After all, this is also a story about the grind, about putting an unfathomable amount of effort into a task in the hopes of achieving some sublime reward. That’s true in a macro, thematic sense of the hero’s futile journey toward self-improvement, as well as in the smaller moments of hustle that we get to see him employ. Jimmy is willing to do the work, even while he’s hindered by his own worst impulses and the people like his brother who can’t see beyond his past as a small-time con artist.”

Those strengths have been present all along, as has the steadfast core of Jimmy within Saul within Gene. This series owes a massive debt to Breaking Bad and can’t really stand without it, so deeply are the two entwined logistically and in plain thematic conversation with one another (not to mention the common writers, producers, cast, cinematography style, and so on). But I will always cherish this follow-up more, and love that its gentle absurdist streak gets the final word over its predecessor’s stricter nihilism.

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

This season: ★★★★★

Overall series: ★★★★★

Season ranking: 3 > 6 > 4 > 2 > 5 > 1

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien

Book #121 of 2022:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (Rats of NIMH #1)

I’m happy to revisit this beloved childhood classic today and discover that yes, it’s still an outstanding (though quick) story. The characters make an indelible impression, and the structure is fun, with a relatively lengthy nested narrative that’s just as compelling as the supporting frame around it. In the present plot, the protagonist is a widowed fieldmouse whose youngest child is too sick to travel from their winter home, which the family will need to do soon to avoid being plowed over by the local farmer. She bravely steps further and further from her comfort zone to find a solution, eventually intersecting with the other titular party, a secretive community of rats who live nearby. And then they show her technological wonders and explain their origins via that extended flashback, relating how they were once experimental subjects who grew more intelligent than their researchers realized and ultimately used those skills to break free and create a new home for themselves.

That education and escape from captivity is the core of the book, and it’s rendered as thrillingly as any jailbreak in fiction, while never losing the overarching stakes of young Timothy’s health, a crisis that’s subsequently returned to and resolved. Along the way there are new dangers that emerge for the mice and rats alike, and the entire venture ends on a bittersweet yet triumphant note.

The worldbuilding of these creatures’ society is simple yet effective, skillfully conveying their lived reality with a minimum of exposition, and the publication only really shows its half-century of age in some creaky paternalism here and there. (The heroine is great and repeatedly passes the Bechdel test, but the male figures dominate events and make passing reference to the more frivolous pursuits of “the wives” of their colony.) I also think author Robert C. O’Brien could have hit his intended moral of the value of hard work over lazy reliance / stealing from others a bit less stridently, given the problematic potential implications of that assertion, but at least that’s a concern that will likely pass over the heads of his primary audience.

For the most part it’s a lovely tale overall, and although I don’t intend to continue on to the two sequels written by the writer’s daughter Jane Leslie Conly after his death — or the animated Don Bluth adaptation of this volume that adds an unnecessary and bizarre supernatural element — it’s been a joy to see the original again with fresh eyes.

★★★★★

What We Do in the Shadows, season 2

TV #38 of 2022:

What We Do in the Shadows, season 2

Another great yet too short season of this hilarious undead mockumentary. (Ten episodes may not be enough space to develop and deliver a truly superb storyline, especially given how meandering this series tends to be. I love the characters and laugh a lot at their antics, but I’m holding off a five-star rating until we get a run that impresses me with the plotting just a bit more.)

The main throughline here, following up on a clear strength from the previous year, is Guillermo the familiar, who is under-appreciated by his master and now learning that he has an unfortunate talent for vampire-slaying to boot. His dynamic with Nandor is not quite romantic, but it does read as a marriage of sorts, particularly as things get increasingly rocky and the servant starts standing up for himself to ask for better treatment. I wouldn’t call this queer-baiting exactly — there’s a few totally casual remarks about Nandor having sex with his housemate Laszlo, and the whole vibe of the program feels pretty open-minded on that front — but I’ll be interested to see whether or not that central relationship gets reframed as explicitly non-platonic at some point later on.

Regardless, this is a comedy first and foremost, and the jokes remain fantastic. Haley Joel Osment and Mark Hamill each turn in some uproarious guest spots, and the regular cast easily matches them. The energy draining Colin Robinson is promoted at work and gains unfathomable power over everyone. Nadia acquires a creepy doll possessed by her own dead spirit. Laszlo runs away by donning the disguise of blue jeans and a toothpick in his mouth, which seems to honestly fool other vampires into accepting him as “normal human bartender Jackie Daytona.” Such absurdities fuel perfectly fine individual half-hours of sitcom television, but they’re not on the level of the arcs being drawn for Guillermo (and to a lesser extent Nandor), which I’d say is a slight weakness in the writing. Still, I am enjoying this show and would continue to recommend it for anyone who can handle the occasional splash of gore.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart

Book #120 of 2022:

The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart

The Paradox is a hotel for the clients of the world’s only time travel agency, which the government runs next door, and January Cole is its head of security — which means that in addition to all the regular service industry headaches, she also has to deal with more particular problems like guests smuggling dinosaur eggs out of the distant past. Or radiation spillovers that cause time to suddenly lurch forward. Or both at once, so that there are now full-grown utahraptors stalking the halls. She’s also journeyed throughout history so much herself that her mind is starting to come causally unstuck, seeing visions of previous and future events that she can’t always distinguish from her immediate reality. But since those glimpses are often of the dead girlfriend who’s the lost love of her life, she’s doing everything in her power to downplay her medical condition and keep the job that lets her stay there to see her. Of course, she needs to find a way to avoid her own death that she’s now seen coming, too.

Oh — and the feds are preparing to sell the wormhole technology to a private bidder, several of whom have gathered with their respective entourages at a moment when the Paradox is already overcrowded due to a rash of canceled and delayed departures. And someone seems to be trying to kill them, in a way that the security cameras somehow can’t detect. And there are reports of ghost sightings, including that of the hotel’s founder who mysteriously vanished years ago but may have hidden clues to the secret project she was working on beforehand. And soon everyone is trapped inside by a snowstorm, which is always a nice touch for any sort of murder mystery.

So this novel has a lot going on, and that’s not even mentioning the protagonist’s AI drone companion or the social commentary that author Rob Hart includes about the entitlement of the uber-wealthy. Despite all the chaos and the mind-bending plot, however, it all just about works to tell a remarkably distinctive techno-noir. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, and our heroine is the traditional hardboiled detective figure, doggedly pursuing her investigation whilst getting progressively bloodied and battered both by suspects and by the bureaucratic interference protecting their interests. It’s altogether a neat blend of genres and a fun story, albeit one that can sometimes seem a bit hard to follow.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 1

TV #37 of 2022:

The Lincoln Lawyer, season 1

Netflix’s adaptation of this twisty legal thriller is a lot of fun, aptly capturing and balancing the protagonist’s brilliance in court and vulnerability outside it. I’m particularly impressed with how the program has turned out, given some of the unusual production constraints placed upon it. This first season is based on Michael Connelly’s second volume in the series, The Brass Verdict, which I imagine was done in part to minimize comparisons with the 2011 Matthew McConaughey film, since that covered the events of book one (although this is intended as a reboot, not a sequel to that). The novel also heavily features hero Mickey Haller’s half-brother, LAPD detective Harry Bosch, whose TV rights belong to Amazon for their own streaming shows, so he’s had to be replaced with a brand-new cop character here with less of a built-in connection for Mickey or the audience.

Despite these setbacks, the title delivers, and arguably better than its source material. I love that — unlike in the movie — Haller has been faithfully written and cast as Latino, and actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo does a great job in the role. But I also really enjoy how the story is given time to unfold over the entire 10-episode run, resulting in a procedural that can explore each distinct stage of a trial at length, rather than rushing through a new case from start to finish every hour. The lawyer’s explanatory conversations with his towncar driver — likewise a new/composite figure — add a nice regular framing device, too. Executive producer David E. Kelley has clearly learned from his experience heading up The Practice and Ally McBeal back in the 90s, and the result is a real thrill for viewers.

[Content warning for drug addiction, gun violence, domestic abuse, and human trafficking.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie

Book #119 of 2022:

Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #32)

I generally enjoy a good Agatha Christie mystery, but the eventual solution to the case at the heart of this story from 1952 feels a bit too convoluted and contrived for me. As its alternate title Blood Will Tell might suggest, there’s a lot of hogwash throughout the book about children being fated to follow in their parents’ footsteps, adoptions not representing genuine relationships, and other such tedious bits of pseudo-psychology. (Poirot is only even brought in to consult on the matter because the investigating officer thinks that the suspect initially arrested and convicted for the crime just doesn’t have a killer’s demeanor, whatever that means.)

We also get the return of the writer’s transparent stand-in Ariadne Oliver, previously seen in 1934’s Parker Pyne Investigates and 1936’s Cards on the Table, and that’s a character I’ve never wholly loved, especially when her primary function seems to be to air the novelist’s own grievances about how her works have been adapted. It’s overall a somewhat unsatisfying read, with only the detective’s fussiness over his quaint lodgings standing out as particularly remarkable — and that not exactly in his favor, either.

[Content warning for homophobia and xenophobia.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Live from the Space Stage: A HALYX Story (2020)

Movie #13 of 2022:

Live from the Space Stage: A HALYX Story (2020)

This feature-length documentary, produced by Kevin Perjurer of Defunctland and available free on that YouTube channel, is a loving deep dive into an incredibly obscure topic: the rock band HALYX, a sci-fi themed act that performed nightly on the stage in front of Disneyland’s Space Mountain throughout the summer of 1981. The music and the talent were real, but the entire ensemble was manufactured by executives at Disney, who cast the performers and dressed them up in a vibe clearly indebted to Star Wars. The bassist was costumed as an off-brand Wookiee, the keyboardist a robot, and the percussionist an acrobatic amphibian who cartwheeled and flipped around the stage. The guitars shot lasers. It sounds like something I absolutely would have adored, though it disappeared into obscurity after a record deal fell through and the seasonal engagement at the park was never renewed.

For this film almost four decades later, director Matthew Serrano has tracked down and interviewed nearly all of the parties involved, from musicians to producers and a few super-fans, all of whom seem thrilled to share their memories of the short-lived but beloved project. There’s an unfortunate hole in the retrospective in the person of lead singer Lora Mumford, who passed away in 2011, but her surviving bandmates honor her in their recollections, and the movie is well-constructed to weave everyone’s contributions together into a clear, informative, and entertaining narrative about the group. This is likely to remain the definitive account of HALYX, given the age of its participants and the scarcity of preserved documentation from that era, and I’d say it’s well worth a watch for anyone interested in theme park history.

[Content warning for a poorly-aged song entitled “Jailbait”]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Diversion by K. A. Applegate

Book #118 of 2022:

The Diversion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #49)

I’m surprised that series author K. A. Applegate didn’t claim this volume to write herself, and particularly that it was assigned to ghostwriter Lisa Harkrader, who had previously only penned Cassie’s eminently skippable Australian visit in #44 The Unexpected. Here, the plot is much more critical, finally delivering on the tension that’s been inherent in this franchise from the start. The Yeerks have at long last discovered that the resistance fighter “Andalite bandits” stymying their invasion of earth are actually human, and the team must flee for their lives, sacrificing the final vestiges of normal teenage existence they’d been able to preserve until now. (For Marco and especially our narrator Tobias, of course, that threshold has already been crossed a while ago.) Because their enemies are everywhere, the kids will now live out the rest of the war in hiding: unable to go to school, or hang out with friends, or essentially do anything that isn’t directly related to the mission. They’ll never again gather for strategy briefings in Cassie’s barn either, which really feels like the end of an institution.

So it’s a major coming-of-age moment, doubled by the fact that the heroes are also coming clean to their families, realizing that they’ll be taken as Controllers if not extracted to safety too. Those scenes have likewise been on the horizon for forever, as seems necessary for any teen like Buffy or Spider-Man who moonlights at saving the world under the noses of their loved ones but must eventually fill them in about that mature responsibility and risk. Only here, there is the added danger that the Animorphs still don’t know if any of their relatives have already been compromised when they spring the news on them. I won’t spoil precisely how that plays out, but readers who have made it this far can probably guess that the effort will result in some collateral trauma rather than a clear-cut success.

Still, any of the protagonists could have headlined this stage of the story, and Jake might even have seemed the most appropriate choice, given the complicating factor of his brother Tom, the known Controller. The reason it’s a Tobias novel — the last one narrated solely by him — is that it also sees the return of his absentee mother Loren and a belated explanation for why she abandoned him as a child. It turns out she was rendered blind and amnesiac in a car accident when he was a baby, which is an okay retcon, I suppose (and at least isn’t as random as Rachel’s own short-lived amnesia back in Megamorphs #1 The Andalite’s Gift, although there is some definite ableism in how the woman’s disabilities are treated by the authors). Because she lives locally and can be traced to her son via his blood and her medical records, the hawk boy elects to save her even as the villainous forces are closing in. And thus, Elfangor’s old human companion from The Andalite Chronicles becomes the first new recruit since David to be gifted the morphing power, using it immediately in a desperate bid to evade capture and escape.

All in all it’s a pulse-pounding adventure that still finds time for its lead character to stew over his abandonment issues and seek some measure of confrontation and catharsis. I just wish we were told more about how the Yeerks figured out their opponents’ species, not to mention the reactions of Tom or Chapman or Visser One (né Three) when they learn of their exact identities and ages. And I don’t remember, perhaps that’s ahead in a sequel! But the only bad guy with any personality in this book is a one-off flunky, and the omission of any antagonist with an established history against the group represents an unfortunate weakness in the telling of this momentous turning point in the series narrative.

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

★★★★☆