TV #29 of 2024: Star Trek: Very Short Treks, season 1 These five digital shorts are silly and explicitly non-canonical, but I’d say they’re worth checking out for Star Trek diehards, especially given the minimal time commitment (about 18 minutes for the entire run, which you can find in this official YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLufIO1FTWFz_8X1Tmh3BAlJpqNadViR-E). Commissioned …
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TV #28 of 2024: Doctor Who, season 1 We have, for some reason, started over again with our numbering for this long-running science-fiction franchise, so that there now exists Doctor Who season 1 – 26 (1963 – 1989), Doctor Who season 1 – 13 (2005 – 2021), and a new Doctor Who season 1 – …
Book #90 of 2024: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm by Greg Keyes A surprisingly strong media tie-in novel, especially compared to the same author’s more aimless later work, War for the Planet of the Apes: Revelations. Like that volume, this one is aimed at bridging the gap between the events of two …
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Book #89 of 2024: The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown I love the initial premise of this novel, and I still feel like many of its subsequent elements have some potential charm to them. But the execution is beyond abysmal, beginning with the heroine with a severe case of written-by-a-man-itis: “She caught her reflection …
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TV #27 of 2024: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 4 Still a loving and satisfyingly funny low-stakes riff on the Star Trek franchise, but not quite as tight a production as the last couple seasons (especially following the phenomenal crossover “Those Old Scientists” on Strange New Worlds). There’s an overarching storyline involving ships of various …
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Book #88 of 2024: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo I know from her publicity materials for this standalone adult fantasy novel that it’s a very personal project for author Leigh Bardugo, drawing on her own family history for its tale of a sixteenth-century converso (a member of Spain’s Jewish population or their descendants, whose ethnoreligious …
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Book #87 of 2024: Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki This story seems like it fundamentally shouldn’t work, and yet it pretty much does, and rather gloriously throughout. One heroine is a trans teen runaway, fleeing her parents’ domestic abuse and refusal to accept her identity. Another is the elderly mentor she finds for …
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TV #26 of 2024: Classic Doctor Who, season 12 A bright new era for the show, with incoming Fourth Doctor Tom Baker — still many viewers’ platonic ideal of the gallivanting Time Lord hero, who would go on for a record seven seasons in the role — making an immediate impression. This initial material doesn’t …
Book #86 of 2024: Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #44) This final Hercule Poirot novel is not one of the better mysteries in its series, relying as it does on an implausible understanding of psychology for a serial killer’s eventually revealed motivation and means. It can also be frustrating to read, …
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Book #85 of 2024: A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #1) This YA fantasy novel grows on me as it goes along, but the first quarter or so of the text could really have been tightened up. That’s how long it takes for the story to spring its basic premise, introduced in …
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