Stuff I Watched: Late August-Late September

 It's more stuff I watched.  Hooray.  Since football season has started, I have watched fewer cheap action movies on Hulu and so forth.  Lucky for Phantom Readers...who will never read this anyway.

See How They Run:  I think I saw a few commercials for this but it's the type of movie that wasn't in theaters long so even if I wanted to go to a theater it probably wouldn't be that convenient.  But now it's on Hulu so I could watch it.  It's what you could consider a spoof or parody of Agatha Christie mysteries like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, which Kenneth Branagh recently remade as star-studded movies.  Though saying "spoof" or "parody" might make you think it's slapstick when it's more subtle.  It feels mostly like if Wes Anderson was making one of those Branagh movies.

Wes Anderson regular Adrien Brody is one of the stars as a sleazy Hollywood director in London to adapt The Mousetrap, a play adapted from one of Christie's books.  The play has run for 100 shows and shows no sign of slowing down, which is bad for the movie, which can't start production until the play is done.  During a party, Brody gets into a fight and later turns up dead in the theater.  Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell doing a passable British accent) is called in to investigate along with Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) who is perky, ambitious, and eager-to-please while Stoppard is more world-weary and hungover.  We soon see that Stoppard is not as brilliant as Poirot but not as dumb as Clouseau either.  They interview suspects, follow leads, and take a few wrong turns before the big finish.

I really enjoyed it.  One of my Facebook "friends" was less impressed.  A lot of it probably depends on how much you like those Agatha Christie books.  I thought it was fun and actually better than Anderson's recent Asteroid City or David O Russell's Amsterdam, which both have a similar vibe but were longer and more ponderous. Ronan is brilliant and Rockwell is really good as well, though I had to go to IMDB because I didn't recognize him with the mustache and accent.  It's only like 100 minutes too so not very long. (4/5)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:  Mutant Mayhem:  I don't know by now who has more cinematic reboots:  Batman or the Ninja Turtles.  This is at least the 4th attempt and the second animated one after the largely forgotten TMNT earlier in the century.  There was the first live action one in the 90s and then the Bay-produced live action reboot in 2014.  This time around it's Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg writing and producing and using animation like Sony's Spider-Verse movies.

In this rejiggered origin story Baxter Stockwell isn't turned into a fly but instead spills the ooze into the sewer to create the turtles after some shady company tries to steal his work.  There's a 15-year jump to when the turtles are teenagers and have been trained to fight via YouTube videos mostly.  As far as that goes, the origin of Splinter and them becoming ninjas is pretty flimsy.  They could just as easily become boxers or wrestlers or MMA fighters.  Eventually they meet a young reporter and try to stop a criminal known as "Superfly" because he's, you know, a fly.

The movie's message of tolerance and working together is hammered home pretty obviously.  The individual personalities of the turtles isn't really made that clear; when Leo says that Donnie has read a ton of comic books it basically comes out of nowhere because it wasn't really established that clearly.  It really relies on what you know about the characters from previous incarnations.  

It's not a bad movie, especially for younger viewers or maybe those who aren't overly familiar with the previous versions.  It's fun, turn off your brain popcorn entertainment with a good, albeit obvious message. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  the cookie scene promises that Shredder will appear in the next movie, which was already greenlit though since this didn't break a bunch of records and probably won't win an Oscar, I'm not sure if they'll really go through with that.  Besides writing/producing, Seth Rogen voices Bebop the mutant warthog; he previously voiced Pumbaa the warthog in the 2019 Lion King so he's kinda typecasting himself.)

Hypnotic:  This came out in theaters in June I think but flopped and so was on Peacock a couple of weeks ago.  The movie is by Robert Rodriguez, who made his name in Mexico with El Mariachi and then crossed over to America with Desperado, neither of which I ever watched and then those lame Spy Kids movies and teaming up with Quentin Tarantino on Grindhouse.  More recently he did Alita Battle Angel and The Book of Boba Fett but anyway, this stars Ben Affleck as a detective whose daughter went missing.  Or did she?  There's a bad guy (William Fichtner) who comes after Affleck and a "psychic" who teams up with him.  The title comes from these people with essentially the superpower to create "hypnotic constructs" that are basically like the Matrix only without needing a computer.  The whole thing tries to be like The Matrix and Christopher Nolan's Inception and maybe Tenet but it ends up about as lame as Mark Wahlberg's Infinite on Paramount+ last year or so.  It tries twists and twists and twists within twists but instead of exciting it's mostly just tedious. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  Jeff Fahey of Lost, Lawnmower Man, Darkman III, and Rodriguez's Machete has a small part near the end.  A cookie scene involving Fahey sets up a sequel that will probably never happen.  If you don't have Peacock, the movie will probably go to Amazon Prime in a couple of months.  If you don't have that maybe just use a Redbox rental--a free one if you get one.)

The Wrong Mans (Season 1):  This is basically like if Edgar Wright had adapted one of those Alfred Hitchcock "ordinary man is wrongfully accused of something and goes on the run" movies like North by Northwest.  Which, why hasn't that happened yet?  This Hulu original action comedy series from 2013 features Sam (Matthew Boynton) and Phil (James Corden) as a discount Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.  After witnessing a car accident, Sam finds a phone.  When he answers it, a voice tells him they have his wife and if he wants to see her again he'd better pay.  But Sam hasn't got a wife.  He's the wrong man--get it?  Soon Sam and Phil are stumbling into an international plot involving Chinese gangsters, Russian gangsters, Russian spies, and MI5.  It's pretty funny in how out of their depth they are but it's not stupid funny.  There are also a few serious parts and plenty of violence.  Like most British series there's only 6 episodes in the season. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  the Chinese gangster is played by Benedict Wong, aka Wong in the MCU, and one of his henchpeople is played by Christina Chong, aka La'an on Strange New Worlds, though she only gets like 2 lines or so.  I had no idea James Corden had been in anything before he started hosting late night TV; he's actually not bad in this.)

The Wrong Mans (Season 2):  At the end of season 1, Sam and Phil were in Phil's mom's car and it was shown to have a bomb planted on it.  Season 2 starts with them "dying" and being put in sort of Witness Protection in Texas--actually South Africa.  When Phil finds out his mom is sick, he and Sam start trying to get home, which involves a Mexican cartel, a stint in prison, a French secret agent, and more!  There are only 4 episodes and the 4th episode wraps everything up pretty quickly.  Really this could have just been a movie since it's less than 2 hours.  In the end it's all a bit silly and completely unbelievable at this point.  Not that it's bad; it's still pretty entertaining.  But it's probably just as well there wasn't another season. (2.5/5)

Assassins (2023):  This cheap movie featuring Bruce Willis is more sci-fi than action.  Basically imagine if instead of going back in time, Quantum Leap had Sam jumping into people and then murdering other people.  A woman named Alexa's boyfriend fries his brain doing that and so she's recruited to go undercover as various people to try to kill a bad guy.  Bruce Willis is her boss who of course doesn't do a lot.  It's the kind of thing that would be better if it had more money for better actors and effects.  But I'm definitely going to use the concept for a gender swap story. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Dominic Purcell of Prison Break, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow plays the bad guy.)

The Ritual Killer:  A cheap thriller on Hulu starring Cole Hauser and Morgan Freeman.  An African killer (former NFL star Vernon Davis) is killing women and children in Mississippi to give their power to rich people.  It's kind of gross and dull.  The attempt to give Hauser a tragic backstory is muddled.  There's something about a daughter with seizures and a wife maybe and suicide or something.  Morgan Freeman is a college professor whom Hauser goes to and later gets more involved, which is also muddled.  To justify the Italian financing there's also a detective in Rome investigating women the killer has abducted and killed.  I'm not really sure why a South African businessman is in Clinton, Mississippi except it's cheap to film there.  The whole thing was a pretty dull affair. The end involving Hauser eating a pair of eyes really makes no sense; it's the kind of tacked-on ending someone probably just thought would be cool.  (1/5) (Fun Fact:  If I had been one of the eight or so people working on the script I would have had a potential victim, probably a young girl, escape and find Cole Hauser and while working to find the killer they bond and help him get past the death of his daughter.  It's not an original idea but less muddled.)

The Lion King 1 1/2:  I came across this one night while browsing the Disney+ catalog.  It's a 2004 movie (probably straight-to-video) that retells the 1994 movie from Timon and Pumbaa's perspective.  We get a little background on Timon's family, but not Pumbaa's, because that would be too tragic I guess.  A lot of it is only slightly less annoying and terrible than the Timon & Pumbaa series I watched a few episodes of.  There's a lot of the same thing where Timon is just a total jerk to Pumbaa, who is clearly the smarter and more sensitive one; he just lacks Timon's confidence.  If you're over 8 this probably isn't that entertaining. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  Most of the original 1994 cast returns except James Earl Jones or Jeremy Irons so they don't use Mufasa or Scar or for obvious reasons Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the young Simba.  Julie Kavner of The Simpsons and Jerry Stiller of Seinfeld play Timon's mother and Uncle Max.  Periodically Timon and Pumbaa stop the movie and we see them sitting in front of the screen as silhouettes like Joel/Mike and the bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, though they don't make any commentary while the movie is running.)

My Dog, The Thief:  When I was browsing the Disney+ catalog, I came upon this 1969 Wonderful World of Disney TV movie.  I was only interested in it because I've liked St. Bernards since watching Beethoven in the early 90s.  This is a forerunner to that as it involves a St. Bernard but the story is more like Turner & Hooch in that the dog is sent to live with a bachelor who has his life turned upside-down by Barabbas the St. Bernard.  There's also a crime involved as Barabbas inadvertently steals a valuable necklace from a couple of dimwitted crooks.  Corny, badly-acted mayhem ensues!  Besides the lovable, huggable St. Bernard there's not a lot to like about it unless you really want something silly and forgettable. (2.5/5)

Rehearsal:  This 2015 movie--or TV movie?--was recently added to the Movie House app so one night I watched it.  It's surprisingly not bad.  A British theatre director (Bruce Greenwood) is doing a production of Chekhov's The Seagull to save a dying theater.  To secure funding, his partner Clive--partner in both senses--agrees to let action star Blaise Remington star in it.  He also gets casting approval, which he uses to cast a former high school drama teacher who only came to escort her roommate.  Blaise and the director butt heads while Blaise gets close to his co-star and has to choose between Hollywood and the show.  If you thought Birdman was too existential and weird, then you'd probably like this as it's more mainstream but hitting many of the same points. (3/5)

Don't Make It So Hard to Do the Right Thing

 Back in 2009, I think I was going to move to a smaller apartment and I had some furniture I wanted to get rid of.  Unlike a lot of people in apartments I didn't want to just go put it in the dumpster (or next to the dumpster) since most of it was in good shape.  But I only had a Pontiac Bonneville that couldn't haul the furniture to a donation site.  So I called the Salvation Army and a fairly rude woman scheduled an appointment at a really shitty time.  It was worse than the cable company because it was 8-4, or basically all day.  I'm supposed to take off a whole day of work to donate furniture?  And the kicker:  since I lived on the second floor I had to bring everything down to the ground or they wouldn't take it.

Whaaaaat?  So I have to take time off my job and carry a bunch of furniture by myself just to do the right thing and not just throw it in the dumpster.  Real nice.

I figured if I had to take time off work and carry the shit myself anyway, why not just go rent a van and put the shit in it and drive somewhere on a Saturday afternoon?  Right?  I think the van wound up costing me like $60 for a few hours to take it to a different thrift store, not those Salvation Army jerks.  I didn't bother calling them to cancel so when they showed up at the appointed time I wasn't there.  Probably not nice to take revenge on a charity, but they weren't exactly charitable.

It's kind of the same thing when I cleaned up my closet and found all my old cell phones going back to like 2008.  I was looking for how to recycle them and one place I looked up online wanted like $60 to buy a UPS box to ship them in.  WTF?  I could probably buy another cell phone for that and just toss these old ones in the fucking dumpster.  At Walmart there's a kiosk for selling old phones but you know these ones I have aren't worth anything because they aren't recent iPhones or Galaxies.  Where I used to work there was a donation box to give old phones to the troops; it'd be nice to find something like that where I can just drop the things in without dicking around with a kiosk or paying a bunch of money.  Or I can just toss them in the dumpster on the way to my car.

Since I got rid of local TV from Comcast, I've been using the Fox Local app on my Roku to watch the morning news.  (You can also use the Tubi app that also has other channels.)  One of the commercials is will.i.am reading a "poem" that's in no way a poem saying that black people are dying at a higher rate than others from colon cancer and need to get tested.  There's another ad from the American Cancer Society with a schmaltzy theme song and telling people to get tested for cancers.

Hey, that's great, buuuuut just nagging people to get tested is kinda disingenuous.  I mean, this isn't Star Trek TNG where you can just walk down to sickbay and have Dr. Crusher run a mini-flashlight thing over you and instantly tell you you've got cancer somewhere and then give you a hypospray to fix it.  "Getting tested" can be an expensive and time-consuming process.

Every morning I want to tell will.i.am that maybe the reason so many black people are dying isn't because they don't want to "stand up to cancer" but that to get tested, especially for colon cancer, can be pretty fucking difficult.  I mean I got the instructions for a colonoscopy six months ago.  You've got to get a prescription for something to give you super-diarrhea, you can't eat solids the day before, you have to show up at like 6am wherever they're doing the procedure, and you've got to have someone there the whole time to take you home.  Even if you have good insurance and a support system it can be difficult to do all the stuff they want you to do before, during, and after.  

Now imagine you're a single black woman in Detroit or Flint or Saginaw with a few young kids and a job working at a restaurant or retail and you have to do all of that stuff.  You probably don't have great insurance or a lot of money for out-of-pocket costs, it's probably hard to get a day or two off from your job, and it's probably hard to find someone to look after the kids.  So, yeah, maybe that's why black people are dying and not that they don't want to "stand up to cancer."

Instead of nagging people to "stand up to cancer" or "get tested," could will.i.am and the American Cancer Society actually do something to help the problem?  Like maybe provide money, transport, and child care so people can actually go get tested and stand up to cancer?  "Creating awareness" is nice, but oftentimes awareness isn't the problem.

The problem is so often we make it hard for people to do the right thing.  Besides what I've talked about, near the start of the pandemic there were these commercials in Michigan for recycling raccoons, which doesn't mean how to dispose of roadkill.  It was this group of raccoons in cute outfits telling people how to recycle.  But it really just emphasized the problem with trying to recycle:  it's too complicated!  I mean some plastic you can put in and some you can't and who's going to spend their time sorting  all this garbage?  And you have to clean all your garbage before you can recycle it.  Yeah, that's what a busy person wants to do after a long day:  clean the garbage.  These "Papertarian" commercials with Retta are kinda similar in kinda making me not want to recycle.  I mean you've got to cut up your boxes--all your boxes--and flatten them and blah blah blah.  Or you can just throw the shit in the trash can or dumpster and be done with it.  And we wonder why people don't recycle.

It's been the problem for a while with alternative fuel cars that they're too expensive, hard to recharge, don't get great mileage, don't go very fast, and don't hold much cargo.  Electric cars are getting better in terms of mileage, speed, and cargo room but they're still expensive and still can take a while to charge.  That makes it hard for a lot of people--like me--to switch even if we want to.

So, yeah, the problem is so often we make it too hard for people to do the right thing.  Then wonder why they don't and just grab some easy reason like people are lazy or no good.  Instead of making those ASSumptions, maybe we should find ways to make it easier for people to do the right thing.  Not things like whining on a blog no one reads.  I mean, this isn't even creating awareness, is it?

Workshopping a Joke Highlights the Importance of the Order of Words

 A couple weeks ago on Facebook I saw this article for the satire site The Onion:

Ha ha, OK joke, but immediately something hit me:  there's a better way to word this!  So here you go, a slight revision:

I just think it works better because it sets you up to think one way and then pivots to do a one-eighty.  "Topher Grace Comes Out in Support of Danny Masterson...Getting Electric Chair."  So if you're a slow or careless reader your first reaction might be, WTF?  He supports Danny Masterson the rapist?  Then you see the end of it.  Oh, I see what you're saying.  Ha ha.  Fooled me for a second there.  The original headline doesn't really have the possibility of doing that.

But when I mentioned this, you'd think I had just said the Earth is flat or vaccines don't work or whatever from how people piled on me.  Couldn't even consider the possibility that it might be better.  Nope, just circle the wagons and attack.

Besides just the personal attacks you get people trying to think and/or be clever.  "It's almost like it's a satire site."  Yeah, I'm not saying it's not and also that has nothing to do with it and also my satire is better.  Or someone else said they thought it sounded like the electric chair was a massage chair, but really that's true of the original headline if you choose to think of "electric chair" that way.  And then just other people cleverly going, "Nuh-uh!"

You'd think people who read a satire site would have more of a sense of humor and not take workshopping a joke so seriously, but nope.

I suppose my loyal readers will support...the original headline.  See?  I set you up to think one way and then BOOM! changed direction.  That's gold, Jerry!

Of course in writing the order of words can be important whether you're writing a joke headline or just a regular sentence.  Also on Facebook, someone pointed out how in English we don't say "green great dragon" we say "great green dragon."  Then there are things like parallelism where if you want to list a few different things you make them have some kind of similarity.  Like if you say, "He went to the closet to fetch a red umbrella, a brown overcoat, and a black pair of galoshes."  They all have "a" and a color.  That's just a basic and possibly wrong example but you can look it up if you want.

Sometimes you might even break the "rules" in order to word things in a more effective way.  We all know about how "passive voice" is bad.  "The dog was walked by Bob." is clumsy and overly wordy.  But there are times when you might want to do something passive intentionally.  Like if you're revealing a surprise:

He opened the door.  Standing in the rain was Linda.

vs

He opened the door.  Linda stood in the rain.

The second way is technically right and "active," but the first way maintains the surprise just a little bit longer.  It puts the reveal at the end of the sentence for a little more dramatic effect.  You could very well have a chapter break there to help maintain the drama a second or two longer.

I thought of a couple of cinematic examples like my example.  For instance there was that now-famous scene in Love Actually where the woman opens the door and  Andrew Lincoln is there with some signs to confess his love.

If writing this you could say:

She opened the door.  Andrew Lincoln stood there with some posterboard signs.

Or you could say:

She opened the door.  Standing there with some posterboard signs was Andrew Lincoln.

Or there was that now-famous scene in that one movie where the girl goes to the window and John Cusack is holding a boombox playing "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel.

If writing this you could say:

She went to the window.  John Cusack stood on the ground, holding a boombox playing "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel.

Or you could say:

She went to the window.  Standing on the ground, holding a boombox playing "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel was John Cusack.

You see what I mean?  Breaking the "rule" lets you maintain the suspense for a slight bit longer.  In movies this can be accomplished by having the camera not show someone's face right away.  It might show their back or their feet or something and then work up to showing their face in a dramatic reveal.  Which is probably more effective in movies because you can milk it longer.  In books you can do something like this if you just refer to the character generically with pronouns like "he" or "she" or reference them like "the man" or "the woman" or something that doesn't give a name or description.

Anyway, when you're editing, look for those instances where juggling the order of words might have more of comedic or dramatic or whatever effect.  Just don't mention it to readers of The Onion. [eye roll]

A Quick & Easy Way to Rate Books

 I wish I'd had a handy graphic like this before the Andrew Leon Debacle(TM)

I saw this on Amazon Vine and just repurposed it for books by crossing a few things out and putting new text in.  I just did it on the quick in Google Slides.  I could have hidden the old text better but I kinda liked leaving it somewhat visible so you can see what it's supposed to say.

Anyway, think of that the next time you're giving a rating to a book.

Happy Friday.

Good Omens 2 is Unnecessary But Mostly Fun

 

On July 28 Amazon dropped Good Omens 2, the six-part sequel to the original Good Omens based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett.  The novel from the late 80s was about the angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley teaming up with some humans to cancel the apocalypse.  The series stayed pretty close to that.

There was never a sequel to the novel.  I'm not sure if Gaiman and Pratchett ever had serious discussions, though certainly both were plenty busy from the 90s until Pratchett died in 2015.  Because of this, I wasn't all that hyped on a sequel series.  I mean it would pretty much by definition be exceeding the book and with Pratchett dead it was pretty much Gaiman's show.  He did write most of the first draft of the book, but Pratchett was the one who really molded it into a finished product.

Anyway, that's why when the series dropped I didn't rush out to watch it.  Eventually I didn't have much else to do so what the hell--pun intended.  I watched it in 4 days since all the episodes were available and they were only an hour at most.

This second series sets its sights a bit lower than the first one.  There is no apocalypse to prevent.  Instead, the bone of contention is that the angel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) has gone missing.  He turns up naked and with no memory in London, near the bookstore Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) runs.  As Heaven and Hell start looking for Gabriel, Crowley (David Tennant) helps his buddy Aziraphale to create a miracle that hides Gabriel from both sides.

Then there are four more episodes that in hindsight don't really matter much.  A copy of Buddy Holly's "Every Day" leads Aziraphale to Edinburgh and a bar called The Resurrectionist.  There's also a statue of Gabriel in the cemetery there.  In a flashback we see Aziraphale and Crowley meet the original "resurrectionist," a surgeon who had people bring him dead bodies to use as cadavers for medical training.  We also get the story of Job, where Aziraphale and Crowley fool the angels to save Job's children.  In 1941, Aziraphale and Crowley meet some Nazi agents in London; the Nazis are killed but come back as zombies to spy on Aziraphale and Crowley as they perform a "catch the bullet" trick as a warmup act for strippers.

While Aziraphale is in Edinburgh, Crowley is trying to get a record store owner Maggie (Maggie Service) and coffee shop owner Nina (Nina Sosanya) to hook up so Heaven and Hell will think that was the miracle they created.

Meanwhile the demon Shax raises a demon army to attack the bookshop and find Gabriel.  And the dim angel Muriel is inexpertly spying on the bookshop as "Inspector Constable."

There are a lot of pieces and it's one of those unfortunate mysteries where once you get the solution you realize almost none of it actually mattered.  I mean, they didn't even need to leave the bookstore to find out what was going on with Gabriel.  During a standoff at the end, everything is explained and once you think about it, you realize most of what happened was fun but not really important--like this season itself.  It was basically a whole aquarium full of red herrings.

The end at least temporarily breaks up the Aziraphale and Crowley bromance and promises that a third season could do something bigger.  So like Avengers Age of Ultron this was really more of a placeholder season just helping to set up the bigger event.

Overall I enjoyed the show but like I said in the title, it's really not a necessary extension of the original.  Sheen and Tennant are great separate and together, but it's a shame we have to focus so much time on Maggie, who's pretty much a nonentity, and Nina, who's just unpleasant.  Hamm is mostly befuddled as he blunders around the shop.  The flashbacks are neat, but they don't really add anything.  As I said, the solution was right there the whole time like Poe's purloined letter.

I'd like to see a third season but I hope it does set its sights a bit higher.

(PS:  One thing I don't understand is why they keep saying Maggie's store has no customers.  Vinyl is huge right now.  Gaiman seems like the type to have a lot of vinyl so I'm not sure why he wouldn't know that.  Unless maybe she's not selling the right kind of vinyl?  I dunno.)

Needle in a Timestack Was Worth It for the Notes Alone

Needle in a Timestack: And Other Stories by Robert Silverberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like most short story collections there are good stories and not as good stories. None I'd say are really bad. Some are obviously a little dated as they were written in the 50s or 60s. Nothing I'd say that's really offensively dated like ethnic stereotypes but most of the main characters probably are white, straight, and male. You can complain if you want, but it is what it is.

I bought it because I'd watched the 2021 movie made from the title story and wanted to see how it compared. Since it's a short story and the movie was about 2 hours long, there's a lot more detail in the movie but the framework is pretty much the same.

"The Secret Sharer" at the end was probably the best one.  Ironically I'd say the characters are most fleshed out; it's ironic because one character in the story literally is a disembodied consciousness with no flesh. "Ishmael in Love" was the funniest one as it concerns a dolphin in love with a human woman--as told by the dolphin.  And it's not THAT kind of love so get your mind out of the gutter.  "Call Me Titan" was another fairly funny one about a Titan (sort of like a kaiju from a Godzilla movie) who's freed from his prison only to find the Greek gods gone as the world has changed.  "The Reality Trip" was pretty fun; it's about an alien pretending to be human sort of like Resident Alien; only instead of murder it's about how the alien becomes the target of a pesky human woman.  "There Was an Old Woman" was somewhat funny in that it's about a woman who makes like 30 different clones to raise on a farm in Wisconsin and assigns each one a career path--which they all end up hating, along with her.

"The Pain Peddlers" was ahead of its time as it's basically about a reality TV show where they do surgeries live on the air.  It's told from the perspective of a guy who pays families to let their dying relatives appear on the air.  In a Twilight Zone-type twist he gets a comeuppance.  "Absolutely Inflexible" is another one with a Twilight Zone-type twist leading to a comeuppance, only it involves time travel.  "Entropy's Jaws" is a much longer story with a similar time travel theme.  "Defenders of the Frontier" was decent but a little too long.  It's about a group of soldiers who have basically been abandoned in a desert frontier and have to decide whether to try to go home or stay where they are.

"Pope of the Chimps" was a good one and not too long either.  It's about how the death of a human caretaker prompts some chimps in a zoo to create a sort of religion.  "Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another" is pretty interesting.  It's about creating simulations of historical figures, sort of like in the holodeck in Star Trek TNG and came out about the time that show first aired.

"This is the Road," a fantasy one with a bunch of characters in a wagon was the worst just because it droned on and on without a lot of point. There are a few more that are just forgettable as in I really do not remember what they were called or much of what they were about and in a couple of weeks will likely have completely erased them.  A couple involved time travel and one involved a guy who kills his wife's lover and goes on the run, which if it hasn't already been a movie would be a decent one in the style of Philip K Dick ones like Minority Report or Paycheck.  

I always like in short story collections, especially with authors who have been around for decades, when they put notes in. Not only does it tell you how the story came about, it also provides some insight into the publishing business back in the old days. When Silverberg started there were a lot of science fiction magazines to publish to, which is how he got experience and money to continue writing while also doing longer projects, which were probably easier to get published back then than today.

Interestingly, the title story did not exist until the 3rd edition of the collection. As Silverberg tells it, his editor just plucked the title out of the air for a short story collection and ran with it in 1966 and then eventually there was a second collection markedly different but with the same title. Only later did he conceive the title as an actual story after an incident at a sci-fi convention and sold the story to Playboy in 1983--when you could still do things like that.  An unnamed movie studio optioned it--twice--before John Ridley, the writer of 12 Years a Slave finally bought it and turned it into a movie. Though unfortunately that movie came out in pandemic times so it was largely forgotten.  But a third short story collection with this title came out; it's the first to actually feature the title story as the title story.

Silverberg also talks about "The Road to Nightfall," which involves cannibalism in post-apocalyptic times, that was deemed "too dark" for anyone to publish until a friend--a young Harlan Ellison--helped to get someone to publish it.  The result isn't bad, especially if you're a fan of post-apocalyptic stuff.

For the price I paid this was definitely a good deal just for the notes alone.

That is all.



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Continuity, Shmontinuity: Elseworlds Comics Are Where It's At

 I'm sure I'll get no comments because I used the magic word:  comics.  Ewwww, we don't want to talk about that.  Really though this is an entry about storytelling in general.  Not that that will make anyone care either.

A couple of weeks ago I read Arion's review of Fantastic Four:  Life Story.  This is a non-continuity story, an Elseworlds story as DC used to call them.  I haven't read that story but it's similar in concept to Spider-Man:  Life Story, which I did read and love.  That miniseries used the concept of letting Peter Parker age in real time from the 60s to 10s and incorporated a lot of popular Marvel/Spidey stories like the Clone Saga, Secret Wars, and Civil War.

The cool thing about it and about the Fantastic Four version from what Arion said is that since it's not part of the official continuity, the authors are free to do what they like and they can change things or even kill someone off.  And in these comics, when someone is dead they stay dead; they don't come back from a parallel universe or time travel or Lazarus Pit or whatever stupid thing.

So like I was saying on Arion's entry it raises the stakes.  Or in some cases it creates stakes.  I mean you read a normal Batman or Superman or Spider-Man comic and if the character "dies," you just yawn because you know Bruce, Clark, or Peter will be back.  They always are.  When Marvel "killed" Ms. Marvel this year there was a collective yawn because everyone knew they were bringing her back, which they did like 3 months later.  It's like a joke in the Family Guy version of Empire Strikes Back when they're in the asteroid field and Peter (as Han Solo) says, "We have 4 of the 5 main characters here.  I think we'll be all right."  You know they aren't going to kill the main characters (at least not for long) just like you knew in Voyager or Gilligan's Island they wouldn't get home until the final episode or in Smallville he wasn't going to really be Superman until the end.  They can tease the audience but we know the deal.

In a non-continuity comic, you don't have that reassurance.  Characters don't have to stay the same age.  They don't have to survive.  Superman and Lois won't always be together.  Peter and MJ won't always be together.  In the case of the Fantastic Four one, Reed and Sue won't always be together.  Virtually anything can happen.  The only assurance you have like with the Spider-Man one is that he'll live until the final issue.  I mean it couldn't be "Life" Story if he was already dead, right?

Besides that, what I like about for instance some of Tom King's "Black Label" stories for DC like Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (maybe eventually to be a movie!), Mister Miracle, or Strange Adventures is he can do things differently and have a complete story arc because there's no need to worry about carrying on for 1000 more issues.  There's no "event" to tie into or spinoffs with a dozen other titles.  It's all nicely self-contained in a few issues.  And the author can interpret or reinterpret the character as he/she sees fit.  Which for me as a reader makes it more satisfying.  I don't have to know much that came before.  I don't have to worry about collecting 15 other side issues to get the whole story.  I don't have to worry that what I just read will get retconned by the next author.  For someone like me who because of time/money can't be a full-time reader it's the best way to read comics.

But of course this doesn't only apply to comics!  Any long-running series can get burdened by continuity after a while.  I loved the Wingman series by "Mack Maloney" but eventually the books really started getting dumb as the author(s?) had to start finding new bad guys.  Then they basically did a soft reboot in book #9, another in book #14, and another in book #17.  Each time they didn't restart the whole thing but in book #9 the Nazis/Japanese have taken over America Man in the High Castle-style, #14 is a parallel universe where WWII is still kinda happening, and #17 is another parallel universe sort of like the original but not entirely.  Plus there was the spinoff Starhawk series set in space.

Since I stopped reading them a long time ago, I don't know how many times they've had to soft or hard reboot the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.  I don't know how many of those Mack Bolan Executioner books there are at this point or if they've soft/hard rebooted those.  There are a bunch of James Bond books, Jason Bourne books, and Jack Ryan books even though the original authors have been dead--about 60 years in the case of Bond--and again I'm not sure if they sometimes reboot those or they just keep droning on and on.

After the success of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy in the early 90s, Star Wars started pumping out books that were all supposed to be connected.  One problem with continuity is when you have different authors.  Some (like Zahn) are good and others (Dave Wolverton) are not.  A bad author can come in and like a relief pitcher in baseball just completely fuck things up and that's when you've got to do a corrective story or an outright retcon.  Like how they had broken up Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade so when Zahn came back in the late 90s with two new books, he got them back together.  And then Disney took it over so all those books got erased and they started over again.

In 2011 I decided to spin off the sixth Scarlet Knight book--Future Shock--into a self-contained story called The Night's Legacy.  It was my own sort of Elseworlds or Black Label or whatever thing.  Instead of setting it in the future, I just set it in the present and focused on Emma's daughter, Louise, who has to take over as the Scarlet Knight after her mother is crippled.  There were some good things about this experiment like being able to rework the characters a little and not having to include some other characters like the witches.  I had some creative freedom to really focus on the parts of the story I most liked, which was really Louise--now Lois--having to find her way as a hero in her own right.

I don't think I'd do anything like that for Chance of a Lifetime, but I could do something like that for the Girl Power stories where maybe I could just focus on one of the characters and redo the origin and stuff.  Maybe even not make it a gender swap.  I'd probably focus on Midnight Spectre just because she's my favorite--her and her girlfriend/sidekick Melanie, which I kinda did in Justice for All but not really.

Anyway, if you're not a comics reader, checking out the non-continuity stories is a lot easier than trying to read in-continuity because it is self-contained.  Besides the ones I've mentioned some good ones are Superman:  Red Son, All-Star Superman, Kingdom Come, Batman:  Vampire, and Gotham by Gaslight.  And while I've never really liked The Dark Knight Returns it's obviously a big deal as far as Elseworlds stories go.  Many of them are probably available from your local library even. 

Reading is FUNdamental! [/PSA]

Is Elon Musk the Key to a Green Lantern Movie?

I've not made it a secret that I think Hal Jordan's Green Lantern origin is a bit of an anachronism these days.  I wrote a blog entry about in 2021!  I mean the whole test pilot thing is not nearly as big of a deal as it was in the 50s when they first used it.  That was back in those Right Stuff days when they were trying to break the sound barrier and then get a man to space before the Russians. Those days are long over though.

But one day after Cindy commented on my review of Top Gun Maverick, which I facetiously said could have been a Green Lantern origin story, it finally hit me:  traditional airplane test pilots are not a big deal, but you know what is?  Space planes!  You now, like Space X and Virgin Galactic and that Blue thing of Bezos.  And that's how you make the origin less anachronistic.

So you just say Ferris Industries (I mean by now they'd probably be much bigger than just airplanes) is testing a new space plane for tourists and supplies and crap.  Hal is the pilot and there's probably an unfortunate co-pilot.  Hal takes it up and then is about to hit space when something goes wrong and the space plane goes out of control.

It ends up in deep space, where it's soon attacked by some alien bad guys.  Hal does what he can to avoid them but the space plane isn't designed for deep space or fighting.  The ship takes a few hits and the co-pilot guy dies--I said he was unfortunate!  Before the ship can be completely destroyed though, Abin Sur shows up.  In protecting Hal, though, he's mortally wounded and the ring goes to Hal.

Then Sinestro shows up to take care of the bad guys and take Abin Sur to be buried or whatever his species does.  Hal doesn't know what to do and Sinestro tells him to ask the ring.  Hal puts the ring on and it keeps him alive and gives him some basic instructions.

Another Lantern shows up to eventually take him to Oa where he's enlisted in some basic training with a few other new Lanterns.  They're drilled by Kilowog on how to use their rings and all that.  Hal worries about what's going on back on Earth.

Once his basic training is done, Hal gets to ride with Sinestro as he investigates who killed Abin Sur and why.  Sinestro is a real hardass  and he and Hal really don't like each other.  Eventually Hal finds out that Sinestro is the one who sent the aliens to the Solar System to kill Abin Sur.  The aliens used Hal's ship as bait to get to Abin Sur.  Sinestro kills the alien and then Hal has to go on the run in a universe he really doesn't understand with the rest of the Corps hunting him, because who are they going to believe:  a long-time member of good standing like Sinestro or the new guy?

Eventually they end up on Earth with Hal facing down a whole ton of Green Lanterns led by Sinestro.  But Hal's refusal to back down starts to convince the other Lanterns to back off.  Sinestro gets pissed and ultimately starts attacking the other Lanterns, convincing them that Hal is innocent.  Hal beats Sinestro and cements his place as a Lantern.  Sinestro is imprisoned but maybe in a cookie scene someone can help him escape to form his own Corps.

Or whatever.  I think that's a little more workable origin for Hal Jordan.  Thanks Elon!  And Branson.  And Bezos.  All the billionaire jagoffs herding us towards an Expanse-type future.

Yet More Reasons Amazon is Your Frenemy if You're An Author

 By now I've done sort of a series on how Amazon is your frenemy when it comes to selling books.  Sure they let you use their site and you make some money, but their incompetence, draconian rules (that they don't even understand), poor service, and lackluster tech can also screw you over.  Here's another case for the file.

If you "follow" authors on Amazon, you should in theory get emails when that author has a new book coming out.  Which for James Patterson or Stephen King might send you an email every two weeks.  Or for GRR Martin you might get one a year--and that's probably just an anthology he "edited" or a reissue of an old book.  I follow Eric Filler and it was always kind of neat to get a "New From Eric Filler" or "Coming Soon From Eric Filler" email to see what was being sent to my 2292 "followers" on Amazon.

(If you haven't already, you can check how many followers you have through Author Central.  For now anyway it's the first box under the menu.)

Looking at my AOL account where I get Amazon emails, I didn't always get a Coming Soon/New email for my books, but I got one or the other for most of them until April.  Then from April 12th until July 12th (when I complained) I got none at all.  Granted I didn't do any books the end of April or start of May, but by the end of May I had started putting out books again.  There should have been something, you'd think, right?

I knew it would be pointless, but in July when I really noticed it, I decided to email.  And of course someone in India gave me some stupid boilerplate email about how it can take "up to 60 days."  So I reply that it's been more than 60 days for some books.  And get back a silly reply that "he'll bring it up at the next meeting."  Yeah, right.  

Why this annoys me is that while I'm sure most of the 2292 "followers" are not actively following, that's still about 4.5 times the number of followers as my newsletter.  So obviously I'd like to be getting emails to those people so at least a few might buy my books.  Or read them through Kindle Unlimited.  Something to get me some freaking money.

What else annoys me is:  why is this a problem?  I doubt some asshat in India has to actually hand-key the email the way I do my newsletter.  It should be an automated process.  If it's not then you're doing it wrong, Amazon.  And obviously they were doing it, so why did they stop? 

And it's not just for me.  I've noticed a distinct lack of emails from other authors I follow.  Some of them release a new book every week and yet I'm only getting emails from Amazon about one of their books maybe once a month.  Meanwhile others I still get pretty consistently.  So there's obviously something fucked up on Amazon's end--again.  But because you can't ever talk to anyone who can actually help you, no one's ever really going to do shit unless someone there accidentally stumbles across it or maybe someone with more influence than me publicly shames them.

Really I think the only other possibility is if AOL just isn't delivering some emails; it'd be nice if I could compare notes with some other "follower" of mine to see if they're getting different emails.

The "60 Days" thing is pretty annoying too.  I mean 60 days after a book is out, it's pretty well dead, so there's not much point sending an email then.  It's like that for a lot of things.  Imagine if a movie studio said, "We won't promote your movie until 60 days after it's out."  That would be absurd.  And, again, it shouldn't be like someone has to go put it together from scratch and send it.

Anyway, I took one of their KDP surveys and said if they're not going to send these emails then they should just give authors the tools to do it themselves.  I suppose they'd say that some authors might use it to spam people.  But I don't need the actual mailing list; just give me a button through KDP to let me alert new readers when I have a new book dropping.  I mean isn't that the whole fucking point of letting them "follow" me in the first place?  So my loyal readers will know when I have a new book for them to read?

For a big-time author this isn't a really important issue because they can advertise in ways that will make people aware otherwise.  For small-timers like me it's nice to have a free tool to help spread the word.  As I always say, people can't buy something if they don't know it exists.

And while I'm ranting, Amazon's redesigned author pages are fucking garbage.  Like the KDP Reports, they're pretty annoying and virtually useless on mobile devices.  It's also so clumsy to use if the author has more than like 10 books.

Let's look at one who isn't me for a change.  I bookmarked Carl Hiaasen's page so I could check to see if he has any books on sale that I might want to buy.  So first you get this, which has a row of books but no prices, so that's no help:

Then it puts them up by "Popularity" as default and doesn't show every book.  Nope, you've got to go to "See All" and then guess what?  It kicks you back to the top and you've got to start over again!

But I do have to give them credit for recently adding a box to show only Kindle Unlimited, Kindle, paperback, mass market paperback, audiobook, or hardcover:

This is good for me when I just want to see Kindle options especially because authors who have been around for a while like Hiaasen, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Stephen King, or whoever will have tons of books in paperback, hardcover, etc and if you sort by price it'll bring up some ancient paperback going for $0.01 used or something.  This way I can select just Kindle and sort by price and it might not be 100% accurate but it's better.  Or if you have Kindle Unlimited you can just check the box to see those books you can read in KU.

On Hiaasen's page when I was browsing, I noticed something weird, which is a book they list as Hiaasen's but is clearly not:

If you look at the book's page it's clearly a completely different book by a different author.  But the paperback is an edition of Hiaasen's book.  Before you think the unknown author did something untoward, what happened is someone at Amazon (or the publisher) put the paperback of an edition of Hiaasen's Skin Tight as Skintight and so some glitch at Amazon then merged it with Skintight by this John Brackett instead of Skin Tight by Hiaasen, which is here.  

I've had similar problems with some of my books.  One day I noticed Naughty or Nice by Ivana Johnson suddenly had dozens of reviews.  I looked and saw the reviews were talking about a different book called Naughty or Nice.  I sent a message and they got that one untangled.  But for some reason they still have Shrinkage and The Swapping Edge tangled up so that there are reviews for The Swapping Edge on Shrinkage and Amazon tells me I bought The Swapping Edge in 2020 when it wasn't released until February 2022!

I have to think at some point (or multiple points) someone(s) at Amazon screwed up some code and a bunch of books got tangled together.  And since Amazon is too big to check its own work, it's up to authors and readers to find these mistakes.  Then getting anyone to actually DO anything about them can be a real challenge.

You really have to wonder how Amazon ever got to be one of the biggest retailers in the world with stupid shit like this.  But then this is also a humongous retailer that has used the same clumsy, asinine system of navigating multiple pages since pretty much the 90s:

I mean if you only have 4 pages to go through that's fine, but when there are hundreds of pages of results, this is almost impossible to go through.  Why not let people jump to a specific page?  Like on Vine, what if I want to skip to page 300?  I can't.  I'd have to go one-by-one through all those pages until I got there.

Why would I do that?  Because in that case it's largely sorted by release date so I might want to see some older things.  In other cases maybe you're searching for a particular book or song and there are a lot of results and you want to skip to an author/band that's farther down the list but not at the end.

The point being it seems like an easy fix but Amazon's hubris and complete lack of customer service and basic common sense prevents them from making even these simple fixes.  Someday maybe a new big fish will come along and finally swallow them, but until then us minnows are the ones getting turned into chum.

Tortured marine life metaphor!  Boom!

Strange New Worlds Season 2 is Mostly Decent

I forget the actual date season 2 of the Star Trek prequel Strange New Worlds began to air.  (From the picture I guess it was June 15th.)  I watched the first episode and then decided to wait until later to binge the rest once the whole season was out.  So now I can start talking about it.

The first episode is kind of a fake-out as you'd think they'd wrap up the cliffhanger at the end of the previous season where Una "Number One" Chin-Riley was arrested for being an Illyrian, who use genetic modifications that Starfleet doesn't allow.  

Instead, Pike leaves the ship to go find a lawyer for Una and leaves Spock in charge.  And when they get a transmission from security chief La'an indicating she's in trouble, Spock and the other main characters steal the ship like a bastardized version of Star Trek III.

Which really gets to one of my main problems with the show, mainly that it's a prequel.  Including original characters like Spock, Chapel, and Uhura has this unfortunate effect of devaluing the original series itself.  Because now we're saying Spock didn't really learn to be more human from Jim Kirk; he learned it from Michael Burnham and Christopher Pike and the prequel Enterprise crew.  Chapel and Uhura's inclusion is less problematic because they didn't do a whole lot on the original show with those characters.  Still, it increasingly makes it seem like Kirk was the coach who takes over a loaded team and wins a championship, which kind of lessens his greatness.  Mini-rant over.

Anyway, I didn't really understand the whole thing with Chapel and the doctor taking some kind of drug like Venom in Batman comics that suddenly made them totally badass; it's even green like Batman comics!  I'm not sure we really saw that before in any of the shows but my knowledge isn't exactly encyclopedic.  I was one of those who was happy to have more TNG-era looking Klingons back versus those weird ones in Discovery.  Overall I'd say this was just OK. (2.5/5)

The second episode finally resolves the Una problem.  As you'd figure, it gets to be a courtroom battle.  Star Trek series have done legal episodes a few times so it was not that unusual.  The lawyer Pike recruits uses a clever tactic to get Una reinstated, something akin to Miracle on 34th Street.  Which a really good scene might have been if like in the 1994 version one of the judges had told Una's lawyer that they really wanted not to convict Una because she's a good officer but they can't just invalidate the law because they don't like it--you listening Supreme Court?  (Of course not.)  Una's lawyer basically gives them that same way of being able to reinstate Una without having to rule on whether the law against augments should stand or not.

For me the problem with this episode was the lack of a real B-plot.  Series like DS9 would do that a lot where there would be the main plot or A-plot of whatever big thing was going on and then there'd be the secondary plot or B-plot involving some of the other characters.  Like on DS9 there might be a Bajoran religious thing for the A-plot and in the B-plot something about Jake and Nog getting into some kind of trouble and then maybe the two plots would dovetail together at the end.  In the case of this SNW episode there's really no B-plot.  Once he recruits the lawyer, Pike mostly just sits there watching the trial except for a couple of brief discussions about why he shouldn't testify.  A couple of times they tease that La'an might find someone who leaked what Una is but that didn't really happen.

There's a nice payoff but it would have been good to involve the rest of the cast in something. (3/5)

The third episode is one of those "let's save money by traveling to near-present day" episodes.  In this case, La'an finds a dying time traveler, who gives her a device.  After he dies, everything changes and while she's on the Enterprise, it's Jim Kirk in charge and it's not Starfleet, it's the United Earth Forces or something like that.  In a Pleasantville kind of setup, La'an and Kirk are fighting for the device when it goes off to send them back to Toronto in close to the present.

There's a little bit of the usual stuff where they have to find clothes (by stealing them whilst framing someone else) and Kirk makes money by beating people at chess, which is a good reminder for those who thought he was just the pretty boy who seduced green women and fired phasers all the time.  Then it starts to get into the main plot of trying to foil an attack.  Which then becomes one of those "if you went back in time would you kill baby Hitler?" things only with La'an's distant relative instead of Hitler.  Some of the stuff kinda invokes the "temporal Cold War" stuff on Enterprise that my sisters watched a lot more than I ever did.

Anyway, while I mostly liked the episode it felt a bit long and there are a couple of instances where they hand wave details that are sort of unbelievable.  First, La'an and Kirk have no ID and no credit cards but they can check into a nice hotel?  Dumpy motels will let you pay in cash but there are no really nice hotels that would let you just pay cash with no ID and no credit card for incidentals.  So how did they get in there?  Scene missing!  And then they just go to Vermont and hand wave it by saying they bribed a border guard.  Seems a little too easy considering there was just a "terrorist" attack on Toronto.  You'd think American border security would tighten in case the attackers tried to go south.

Again there was a nice payoff as La'an contacts the real Kirk and confirms that reality is back to normal.  For obvious reasons the rest of the cast isn't really involved, so this time it didn't really matter. (3/5)

The elevator pitch for the fourth episode:  What if there was a whole planet where everyone was like the guy in Memento?  That's basically what happens when Pike, La'an, and the doctor go down to a planet called Rigel VII.  Some "radiation" there causes everyone to lose their memories and so they have to create reminders for themselves of who they are and what they do and stuff.  Then the phenomenon starts spreading to the Enterprise.  This would actually have been a good concept for a Voyager episode because then the Doctor could have been the only one not affected and had to find a way to save everyone.

The end gives a spotlight to the annoying helmswoman but then they cheap out by not showing the ship flying through the asteroids so much as her flying the ship, which is mostly just pushing buttons or moving icons with her hand or whatever.  The rest was pretty blah.  Even for a Trek show I'd say the science here was pretty dubious.  I mean there's "radiation" that makes you forget but if you go inside one place your memories heal?  Uh-huh, sure.  That's some Silver Age Stan Lee bullshit there.  (Not ragging on Stan Lee but that's the kind of bullshit they did in comics back then, like the Fantastic Four being created by "cosmic rays" or Spider-Man being created by a radioactive spider or the Hulk being created by gamma radiation.  This episode definitely leans into that sort of pseudo-science.)

I would say this was a pretty forgettable episode.  Get it? (2/5)

The fifth episode has Spock turned into a full human on the eve of a big important meeting with his Vulcan fiancée's parents.  The concept was similar to a Voyager episode where something split the half-Klingon engineer into a full Klingon and full human, which was probably better than this.  There were some funny bits, but I kept thinking that the year before they did an episode where Spock and his Vulcan fiancée switched bodies so this was kind of in that same area.  And then at the end Spock and T'Pring go on a break so he can make out with Chapel.  Cue the Friends theme song!  Ugh. (2.5/5)

The sixth episode was pretty boring.  I figured it out about ten minutes in.  The ship is trying to get a deuterium cloud mining station online and Uhura starts hallucinating stuff.  Immediately I thought, "There are aliens in the deuterium clouds!"  And guess what?  There are aliens in the deuterium clouds.  It was one of those things where it dragged on so long I started to wonder if they might come up with something else but nope.  They mentioned the Gorn so I wondered if maybe hidden Gorn were somehow messing with people, but nope.  After all the stuff with the "10-C" aliens on the last season of Discovery who communicated in some weird way, this felt pretty derivative.

The only thing that salvages this at all is the first real in-continuity appearance of James T Kirk.  The first appearance last year was in an alternate future and the second appearance was in an alternate timeline.  So other than a brief cameo at the end of that third episode this year, we hadn't really seen him in the main Trek reality.  The big deal for fans then is that he meets Uhura and tries to help her figure out what's going on and then at the end of the episode he meets Spock and he, Uhura, and Spock are sitting together.  Squee!  While it's nice getting a spotlight for Uhura, this was really just too derivative. (2/5)

The seventh episode was the one that really made me want to watch this season:  a crossover with Lower Decks!  It starts in animation with Mariner leading the usual Lower Decks team down to the surface of a planet with a "time portal."  When Boimler stands in the thing and gets his picture taken, he's beamed back in time--and into live action!  To Boimler the crew of the Enterprise are legends while they just think he's weird.  And you know what they say:  never meet your heroes.  Then Mariner also beams in to "rescue" Boimler and only makes the situation worse.  It gets even worse when Orion pirates steal the gate.  But of course everything works out in the end in a pretty brilliant way.

This episode was really all I hoped it would be:  funny without being too stupid.  They really managed to weave the two shows together without it feeling unnatural even though one is live action and one animated.  I suppose some people might find that jarring, but I didn't.  And there were some good messages and character development.  It's too bad they didn't do a live action Rutherford and Tendi but that might have been more expensive and the actors might not have been able to do it.  Still, for me it was the best of the season. (5/5) (Fun Fact:  they do the credits for the show in animation, complete with a giant alien worm/bug thing biting the Enterprise's nacelle.)

The eighth episode reminds me of a meme I saw on Facebook that said how they did a comedic episode and then a violent war episode and then a full-on musical.  Which is true.  This is the middle of that trio.  (Though really you could say the first 4 episodes are mostly serious and then the fifth one isn't serious and then the sixth is serious and then funny, serious, funny, serious to finish.)  After the comedy episode this one is largely a flashback to the Klingon war that started in Discovery.  It's brought on by a Klingon ambassador arriving on the ship who is known as "the Butcher of G'Jal" but has since become an advocate for peace.  Those who were in the war like Ortegas, Chapel, and Dr. M'Benga are definitely not happy to see the guy again.  In flashbacks we see a lot of 23rd-Century M*A*S*H* stuff and then in the present M'Benga and the ambassador have a violent confrontation that leads to the ambassador's death.  The incident is quickly swept under the rug with Chapel covering for her boss.  There have been whole Trek episodes dealing with murder investigations so it seems weird to deal with that so quickly.  Anyway, it was a huge tonal shift and a little weird when they show the Discovery Klingons in the intro and then the revised version in the episode.  It does at least tie into that first episode by talking about how M'Benga got the Venom-type stuff.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Clint Howard appears in the flashbacks as "Buck," the human in charge of the military camp.)

The ninth episode veers back to funny with a musical.  Seriously.  Some weird "improbability field" causes people to break into song.  Even Kirk, who visits again, gets to sing a little.  I suppose we're all lucky they didn't do this on TOS so we didn't have to hear Shatner try to sing.  They did a good job of mixing up the song styles from more traditional to more modern.  And in the end there's a big one to collapse the anomaly that even gets the Klingons singing, though not in opera like DS9.  This does sort of tie up the thing with Kirk and La'an that began in the third episode, though didn't he not know about Carol Marcus being pregnant with his son?  Is he going to think she lost the baby?  I also wondered why during that conversation they didn't sing; I thought maybe that would be a key to it but it wasn't.  Anyway, it was fun though just try not to remember that in the last episode the doctor straight-up murdered someone and now they're singing and dancing. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  the opening credits theme is done in an acapella style.)

As the final episode is the final episode it's time to get serious with a bunch of action.  So the Gorn are back!  This time they invade a colony that is technically outside Federation space and conveniently looks like a Midwestern small town so they don't have to make as many sets.  Chapel and Pike's girlfriend, the captain of the Cayuga, are there when the Gorn invade and destroy the Cayuga.  So the Enterprise has to ride to the rescue, but they can't just go into orbit because the Federation is too chicken, so they have to infiltrate with a shuttle flying through the debris field.  In looking around, Pike and the shuttle crew find a young engineer who speaks with a Scottish accent.  Yup, Scotty has arrived.  With Scotty's genius, they find a way to hide from the Gorn.  Meanwhile the Enterprise figures out how to drop the saucer of the Cayuga onto a Gorn jamming tower.  Everything probably could have ended fine but they introduce some complications at the end so it can be a cliffhanger.  See you next year!  Or whenever with the strikes going on. (3/5)

Overall I mostly liked the season.  It's still not really my favorite of the new Trek shows.  I like Lower Decks more because it's fun and not a prequel.  It's too bad Discovery is ending in the next season because I liked the last few seasons for the most part and it had a more consistent story instead of the episodic nature of SNW, but I suppose people like that because it's like TOS, TNG, or Voyager.

Unless you count a deuterium cloud or subspace anomaly they still haven't really gone to many Strange New Worlds on Strange New Worlds.  Rigel VII was pretty much it and it was one of my least favorite episodes, so maybe they shouldn't bother.  The prequel stuff kinda bothers me sometimes and now we've got Scotty along with Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and Kirk.  How long until we get Bones and Sulu?  Maybe they can get a teenaged Chekhov in too.

Other than his relationship to the Cayuga's captain, Pike doesn't get a lot of focus in this season.  Maybe since we know his future the writers don't care that much about developing him.  After the trial in the second episode, Una doesn't really get much focus.  Spock/Chapel, La'an, Uhura, and Dr. M'Benga get the most spotlighting in pretty much that order.  The new engineer Pelia isn't given a lot of screen time, maybe since Carol Kane is old and we know she's just a placeholder until Scotty can be tapped as the chief engineer.

It Hits Different When You're a Fan

I've probably been burned enough times that I don't get excited about a lot of trailers or posters or announcements anymore.  I mean sometimes they'll announce something and it never gets made.  Or there's a cool trailer but the show or movie sucks because all the good stuff was in the trailer and it might not even be in the show or movie.  So when they advertise something like Ahsoka or the latest Marvel movie I just say, "Meh.  Let's wait and see."

But a few weeks ago I actually did get excited about something.  I went to IMDB to look something up and there was a banner ad for The Winter King on MGM+.  And my thought was, "OMG, is that THE Winter King by Bernard Cornwell?"  And the next screen on the ad said, "From the author of The Last Kingom."  And then I'm like, "OMG!  OMG!  OMG!"  Not quite dancing and screaming like when I was a kid on XMas morning, but still pretty excited.  Finally someone adapted my favorite Arthurian book series!

Original 1995 Cover

Since no one who ever stops by this blog knows what I'm talking about, let me give you a little background.  The Winter King is book 1 of "The Warlord Chronicles" by British author Bernard Cornwell, who's mostly known for his Sharpe's series about a Redcoat in the Napoleonic wars or something--I never read those.  The three books were I think written in the 90s and I stumbled across them back in high school or college and was instantly hooked on them.  They're basically a retelling of the Arthurian saga only with realistic storytelling.

The books are set in 5th Century Britain, which has seen the decline of the Roman Empire and has been left to sort itself out in the aftermath.  There are various kingdoms in what we know today as England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, most of them under the rule of the "High King" Uther Pendragon--Arthur's father.  But hordes of Saxons have begun landing and colonizing from Scandinavia or wherever, wanting to take the land for themselves.  There's also a lot of internal strife between the traditional pagan religions and the upstart Christian church.

Born into this is Derfel, a former Saxon slave who grows up in Avalon, a tower and farms owned by Merlin.  Merlin is a Druid, most of whom were wiped out by the Romans, similar to the Jedi in the Star Wars universe.  Derfel has a crush on Nimue, but she wants to be a wizard or whatever they'd call it then, so she can't really be with him.

Eventually Derfel becomes a warrior and part of Arthur's army, soon becoming a trusted friend and warlord in his own right.  Old Derfel, now a Christian monk, is used as a framing device as he sets down the story of Arthur while the Britons face their last days.

The three books then retell the whole Arthurian saga that you might be familiar with from Excalibur or things like that.  Only, again, it's a lot more realistic.  There's not really a sword in the stone or magic or any of that jazz but there are all the traditional characters.  Only some like Lancelot are not like we typically think of them.  Basically Lancelot is a preening, treacherous asshole.

A long time ago on a visit to Canada I actually bought all three books in mass market paperback, but I think I gave them away at some point, which is too bad because it would help to look through those again.

Anyway, I watched the first two episodes on Amazon Prime Video and wasn't too disappointed.  But as the title of the entry suggests, you watch things differently when you're really a fan of them.  I mean when I watch something I'm a little familiar with like Ms. Marvel or She-Hulk I might note some differences or similarities to the source material, but I don't really care.  If I'm not familiar with it at all then I really don't care.

But when you are really familiar with it, you really want things to be like the source material.  The first thing I noticed was they aren't using the framing device with Old Derfel.  Maybe they think it's too expensive or too time-consuming.  I don't know, but I do like the framing device in the books.  It helps to add an extra layer of pathos as Derfel looks back and realizes where things went right--and where they went so wrong and how quickly the Golden Age of Camelot fell apart.

The rest of it was pretty good.  It mostly just focuses on Arthur being banished by Uther and Derfel being rescued by him as a boy and growing up in Avalon, though it takes an 8-year jump because I guess they don't want to spend too much time on that part.  And then Derfel meets Gawain to start his training to be a warrior.  After the 8-year jump, Uther's wife gives birth to Mordred (the second one actually) who is to be the heir to the throne but has a clubfoot.  

The next episode gets dark as Uther dies and one of the guys he has take an oath to protect young Mordred instead goes to Avalon to kill the baby--only he kills the wrong baby.  Then rapes Nimue.  Yeah, they don't call it "the Dark Ages" for nothing.  Then Arthur shows up in a scene that was a little cheesy in how over-the-top it is when they focus on him.

The show is probably more Vikings than Game of Thrones or like Cornwell's other ancient British series The Last Kingdom in that there are kingdoms and fighting with swords and stuff but no dragons or magic or White Walkers or any of that stuff.  And definitely not that much like Power of the Ring on Amazon in that it's just humans, not dwarves, elves, orcs, or Hobbits.

When you really are watching as a fan, diversity casting can be a lot more annoying than in other times.  I don't really care if elves or Hobbits are black; I mean it's a fantasy world so what does it matter?  And in the Thor movies they can say it's really an alien planet, so fine, whatever.  In this case it is a more realistic setting, so when they make Merlin black it annoys me a little.  Though since the Roman Empire stretched from Northern Africa to Scotland it is at least plausible that Merlin could be black and he is supposed to be an outsider, so making him black does really make him an outsider.  Though I'm not sure there's any historical proof to suggest there were any black Druids.

But it gets me thinking, "Shit, what's next, casting an Asian for Nimue?"  Thankfully they didn't do that.  Not that I hate Asians, but it's 5th Century Britain; how the fuck would someone from China or Korea or Japan or wherever get there?  Then you'd have to have some awkward backstory completely outside the books to explain how her family were traders and their ship got wrecked and baby Nimue drifted a long while until she was found by Merlin or some such garbage just so they can check a box on the affirmative action list.  And then I hate myself thinking that way because to someone else it seems racist and xenophobic when really I just want some fucking verisimilitude.  Because this isn't fantasy or science fiction; this is historical fiction.

That's the kind of stuff you deal with when you really love something and while you want it to be a movie or show, it can also be kind of annoying in that no movie or show is ever going to live up to your expectations.  So besides diversity casting, I think, "Eddie Marsan is too short to be Uther."  I mean I get they needed someone with a little name recognition but Uther should really be some big thug like Vinnie Jones; someone you could really believe could beat the snot out of Arthur and threaten other kings and lead an army.  And the white chick they got to play Nimue has too many freckles.  I like freckles but maybe not that many.  They really needed someone a little more Goth-looking.  If she were younger, Helena Bonham Carter would have been great for that.  The discount Christian Bale guy they got for Arthur was OK.  (Actual Christian Bale would have been great for Uther if he'd bulked up a little; he wouldn't have even needed to tone down his natural accent.)  The guy they got for Derfel was OK but he doesn't show up until like 2/3 of the episode is over so I can't really judge much yet.

And I will be judging because probably the only thing I've wanted adapted more than this are Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books.  I mean Disney did a shitty version of The Black Cauldron in the early 80s but I want a real live action adaptation of ALL the books.  I mean, why the hell would you start with book 2?  You wouldn't start adapting Harry Potter with the second book, would you?  SMH.  And those are fantasy with magic and stuff, so if you want to cast black people and Asian people and whatnot, go nuts.  Interestingly, the Prydain books are based on Welsh mythology and much of The Warlord Chronicles takes place in Wales, which is why most of the castles in both are referred to as "Caer" something or other.

So what book series are you obsessed about that you want adapted? 

Behind the Scenes of the Previous Entry

 Happy Labor Day!

In the last entry I wrote about how I thought Emma Earl and Peter Parker would be friends and wrote a story idea of how they could meet and go on a date.  Then at like 11pm the night before it posted I thought of using the Wombo AI to try to make a picture of it.  Here was the first thing it came up with:

The Spider-Man is good but the girl doesn't really look like Emma and she's not supposed to be wearing a Spidey costume.

Here's some other stuff:

The top one is pretty good but I don't really like the bottom one.

That's nice except it's supposed to have 2 people and why does she have 3 hands?

It's nice except the guy isn't supposed to have red hair

There's supposed to be 2 people at the table

What the heck is in her mouth?

Again there should be 2 people

It's supposed to be a guy and girl and the glasses look weird

It's OK but again there's supposed to be 2 people!

I finally went with this one because it was pretty close (though Peter's hair is too red) and it was getting late.

I mis-captioned it "My DINNER With Spider-Man" instead of "My DATE With Spider-Man" but whatever.

As always, dealing with these things can be pretty frustrating sometimes.  Getting it to understand concepts like there are two distinct people:  Spider-Man or a brown-haired man with glasses and a redheaded woman with glasses is really a hassle.  Instead of having just one box to type in I don't know why they don't have multiple boxes where you can put in all the qualifications to break it down better.  I mean it's just not that smart to interpret things.

Maybe Midjourney is better.  Or maybe I'm just not writing my prompts right.  Anyway, there you go, some bonus content.