Friday, June 28, 2024

Recap: The Acolyte Episode 5 — Night

The master is finally unmasked in this week's brutal and action-packed episode filled with jaw-dropping surprises and kick-ass lightsaber dueling. 

Last week's cliffhanger of an episode left us at the precipice of an epic battle between a team of Jedi and and the mysterious, be-masked master who wields a red lightsaber. When it starts, it's intense, and made me realize how much I'd been missing wild, colorful, lightsabers-akimbo battles à la the arena fight scene in Attack of the Clones.

The master takes care of nearly all of them with ease, and we haven't seen this many Jedi deaths in Star Wars since Order 66. The way the master fights is unlike anything I've seen in Star Wars, and even Yord comments on this —"He doesn't fight like us." 

He wields his saber with such brute force that he's completely outmuscling the Jedi, who tend to use their weapons in more fanciful, artistic ways. If the Jedi are gymnastics, the master is Crossfit. 

Midway through the battle, Sol orders Yord to take Osha back to the ship. They retreat reluctantly as the Jedi battle wages on. Watching Sol fight the master is pure Star Wars, and its a pleasure to watch.

Meanwhile, Padawan Jecki is battling Mae, despite the fact that in the last episode she decided she was done with following the master now that she knows her sister is still alive. 

Despite these good intentions, though, it is still true that Mae has killed at least two Jedi in cold blood, and Jecki is a space cop that's been tasked with bringing her in. Mae may not want to continue doing evil acts of vengeance, but she definitely doesn't want to go to Republic jail, either. She manages to handcuff Mae but is interrupted by the master.


Now, we get to watch a young, green padawan hold her on against a possible Sith lord, and the ensuing lightsaber battle is stellar. Watching Jecki wield two smaller blades presages Ahsoka, and it's great to see live. Sol rejoins her duel and it's hard to watch them still not continue to get the upper hand — this master is strong.

Finally, they succeed in damaging his mask so that it falls off — and it turns out the master is Qimir (Manny Jacinto). We love a surprise reveal! And then seconds later, he kills Jecki (RIP you were too good for this world, girl). 

Sol demands to know who this dude is and what he's doing with the Force. He says, "Jedi like you might call me...Sith." He wants the freedom to wield his power the way that he wants — apart from the Jedi. He wants an acolyte to train, but Mae betrayed him. And now that Sol and the others have seen him maskless, he has to kill them all. 

This show has expanded on the lore of the Jedi in one key way for me — as quasi-fascist guardians of who can wield the Force. In earlier movies, this idea was glossed over. Younglings were selected and they showed up at the Temple, end of story.  

But there's more to it than that. With Mother Aniseya and her coven, we got a glimpse of other non-Jedi Force users that were persecuted and forced to live in hiding. Now, the master shows another side. He says that he'd be called Sith, but that may not be what he considers himself. Maybe he just wants to do passionate, angry Force wielding but stop one foot short of pure evil like the Darths. 

Is this fair? Who are the Jedi to say that they are the only ones to be trusted with the Force? It's an interesting questions that I'll be thinking about for a while.

The battle resumes, and Yord is also killed. This episode has been an absolute blood bath for the Jedi!

Osha stuns Mae as she runs aways, and Sol continues to fight the master sans lightsabers with some brutal MMA moves. Osha then sticks a lit-up Pip (her beloved handheld droid) onto the master's back to attract the man-attacking moths that live in the trees, and he gets dragged into the sky.

Mae returns and knocks out Osha and Sol this time, and Mae cuts her hair (first ever coif performed with a lightsaber) and steals Osha's clothes to masquerade as her. This is some serious soap-stuff twin shenanigans. 

Mae-as-Osha and Sol return to the ship, but Bezil, everyone's favorite little bear guy, finds Pip and recognizes Osha's scent — but notices something's off. 



Also we learn that the master wasn't killed off so easily by killer moths. He's fine and most likely going to keep looking for Mae.

That's all we get for this week! It'll be interesting to find out where the story goes from here. This almost seems like it could have been a much later episode. 

Damn, was it entertaining though.

--

The Math

Baseline score: 9

Bonuses: This episode is 75% epic lightsaber battles; Jecki and Yord paid the ultimate price but will ride shiny and chrome in Valhalla; an extremely buff Manny Jacinto

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, Vidalia onions, and growing corn and giving them pun names like Anacorn Skywalker. 

6 Books with Samantha Mills


Samantha Mills is a Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning author living in Southern California. You can find her short fiction in Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and others, as well as the best-of anthologies The New Voices of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023. Her debut science fantasy novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, is out now! You can find more at www.samtasticbooks.com..

Today she tells us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I am about halfway through Road to Ruin, a debut fantasy novel by Hana Lee. I saw it described as a high fantasy bisexual Mad Max: Fury Road and had to check it out. And so far, it is delivering on that promise! The main character, Jin, is a magebike courier delivering questionable cargo across the monster-filled wasteland, including some ill-advised love letters. The action kicks off when a high-born client begs Jin to help her escape the city, and they set off into the storm-torn wastes together. I’m digging the action and worldbuilding and am eager to see where it goes.





2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I am really looking forward to Countess by Suzan Palumbo. I have been a fan of Suzan’s short fiction since “Tara’s Mother’s Skin” appeared in PseudoPod in 2020, and snapped up her short story collection Skin Thief last year. I was pretty excited to find out she has a novella coming out this September! Her work is always weird, unsettling, and tragic. Countess is undoubtedly going to be in that camp as well—it’s being described as a queer Caribbean space opera version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I love all of those things so that’s an auto-buy for me.

 

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. I read the first book, The City of Brass, in 2019. It was a ton of fun, with evocative worldbuilding, fun characters, and lots of drama, and I wanted to know what would happen next. But, in classic Sam fashion, I kept chipping away at the other first-books-in-series on my towering TBR pile and didn’t immediately pick up the rest of the series. In late 2020, when I was losing my mind with cabin fever and pandemic stress, I nabbed The Kingdom of Copper from the library and found myself fully immersed and blessedly distracted for the first time in months. I devoured that book, immediately dove into The Empire of Gold, devoured that book, screamed in delight that it actually stuck the landing, convinced my sister to read them all, screamed with her a bit… Anyway, it was a real bright spot in an awful year and reminded me of the power of escapism and big, ambitious storytelling. 

I don’t often have time to reread books, especially beefy trilogies, but I just convinced my husband to start the series and join the family fan club. Watching him read it is giving me the itch to pick them back up so we can discuss all those twists and turns!

4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

I wish I could write anything like The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi. The initial setup is straightforward: a scholar marries a beautiful, mysterious woman. She has only one rule: do not ask questions about her past. He tries to keep his promise, but when circumstances bring them both to her childhood home, he can no longer resist the urge to learn the truth about his wife and the crumbling manor in which she grew up. It is a gorgeously written novel that unfolds like a fairytale. Does that make it fantasy? I don’t know! But it revels in language and atmosphere and storytelling in a way I found enthralling. It does something I am not yet capable of doing: be quietly compelling. By the end I was clutching the book in my hands muttering, “I want to do that. Why can’t I do that??”

 

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?


Hogfather by Terry Pratchett will always hold a place of honor in my heart. I stumbled onto it in junior high. I had picked up Good Omens on a whim in some Christmas or birthday book buying spree, and it was so funny I had to go check these authors’ other work out. Neil Gaiman’s books did not look funny, but Terry Pratchett’s sure did (sorry Neil, I did come back later!) The first solo Pratchett book I grabbed was The Last Continent. I had no idea who any of these characters were or why this random wizard was stranded in fake Australia, but I was still so entertained that I begged for more of them, this time paying more attention to publication date!

Death quickly became one of my favorite characters, and Hogfather was the bludgeon I used to recruit my school friends and siblings into joining my new obsession. Some of my fondest memories are of reading the entire book to my younger brother and laughing over it together. When I spot that dogeared copy on my shelf, I remember all those evenings sitting in his bedroom sharing this new world I had discovered by accident, and I can’t wait till I can foist it upon my kids.


6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

I have a book! It’s called The Wings Upon Her Back and it just came out this April. On one level, it is a fantasy novel told in two timelines, about a warrior who is cast out of her sect and must fight the system she once upheld. On another level, it is about hero worship, intergenerational trauma, and how to come back from utter disillusionment in the ideals of one’s youth. There are sleeping gods and an entire city caught in the clutches of an abandonment crisis. There are towers built to the heavens, a fight for the right to be heretical, and also a bunch of body modification.

To put it another way: if this book were being recommended by a dramatically deep-voiced action movie trailer narrator, he would declare: Zemolai did terrible things to earn her wings. How far would she go to get them back? And then right when you settled in like, oh ok this is an action movie, he’d break character and yell: bam! here’s a philosophical treatise on the nature of cities and gods. That’s The Wings Upon Her Back.

Thank you, Samantha!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.


Thursday, June 27, 2024

Final thoughts from the First Contact project

Or, how we agreed to give ourselves extra homework for a month

There's a risk, for people new to speculative fiction, to stay stuck in the big classics. I've seen it manifest especially among literary types, who at a minimum have heard of Verne and Orwell and Tolkien and Asimov and Dick and Le Guin. The risk consists in becoming satisfied with the classics and therefore exploring no further. I don't warn against this scenario out of a wish to police people's joy; what I wish is to share the very best that our field has to offer, and we're fortunate to live at a time when the very best that we have is not the classics. There's no need to advise newcomers to read I, Robot when there's Murderbot.

I came up with the First Contact project to avert the opposite risk in myself. I'm reasonably familiar with what's going on right now, but I'm very behind in my knowledge of genre classics. And just as one must guard against irrational predilection for the past, one must also notice when the present is given undue weight. If I seriously intend to recommend Murderbot over I, Robot, the intellectually honest course of action is to know I, Robot and to know why I'm declaring it skippable. It's not enough to marvel at the quality of our current Rainbow Age on its own merits; I also need to understand how it improves upon bygone Gold and Silver. My love for The Expanse grows even stronger when I realize how much it's not like Flash Gordon.

Each of us at Nerds of a Feather had specific personal reasons to select the classics we've discussed over these recent weeks. Some of us went into it in the spirit of correcting a personal oversight; some of us wanted to give a new subgenre a long overdue try; some of us decided to heed the popular acclaim for a certain title; some of us stumbled upon something completely new and jumped by instinct. There were many possible posts there simply wasn't enough opportunity to write; in my case, I would have liked to sit and watch a lot more B monster movies. But I'm very satisfied with the list that resulted. I give thanks to my fellow reviewers for their curiosity and their openness to this little experiment. These are the works we've made First Contact with:


Books:

Dragonflight

Foundation


Movies:

Akira

Brazil

Flash Gordon

Labyrinth

Metropolis

Nosferatu

Porco Rosso

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Terminator

Westworld


Video games:

Mass Effect Andromeda


POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Ultraman Rising

Enjoyable, angsty, trope-filled, family-friendly cuteness. 


Ultraman is a long running Japanese superhero franchise. It's sort of like Power Rangers with the superhero protecting people from Godzilla-like creatures known as kaiju. The concept is decades old and has had many variations of live action, animation, and books. Netflix previously did three seasons of an Ultraman animated series. Netflix’s new Ultraman Rising, an animated, family friendly, feature film, is the platform’s latest variation. If you’ve watched the recent Netflix Ultraman television series, the new Ultraman Rising is substantially different in plot, theme, tone, and animation style. However, the backstory basics of the reluctant, artificially super-powered son taking up the hero title from his father, remain the same. Ultraman Rising is the sort of brightly colored, feel-good, animated film that I normally find cloying and predictable. However, I found myself surprisingly drawn to the angsty family dynamics of the story. The theme of “family” is overtly woven throughout the film via the villain, the hero, and the kaiju “monsters.”

Young Kenji Sato lives with his baseball loving mom and his superhero dad in Japan. Kenji’s dad is Ultraman, a megazord sized superhero who protects Japan from the giant kaiju monsters who periodically appear and wreak havoc. Both parents are kaiju experts and Kenji makes clear in the opening monologue that kaiju are neither villains nor heroes. After an attack by a kaiju (Gigantron) interrupts their idyllic family evening, the story time skips twenty years. Kenji (Christoper Sean) and his mom (Tamlyn Tomita) have moved to the U.S. where Kenji has become a major league baseball superstar and is estranged from his father. However, after his mother’s mysterious disappearance and his father’s crippling injury, Kenji is summoned back to Japan to take on his father’s Ultraman responsibilities. All of this backstory happens in the first couple of minutes of the film. 

The real plot begins when Kenji returns to publicly play baseball in Japan and secretly (and unhappily) take on the Ultraman role on the side. During the course of defending a kaiju attack, Kenji comes into possession of an orb that hatches into a baby kaiju. The giant and adorable baby kaiju instantly bonds with Kenji and (for reasons that are unclear) he decides to hide it and take care of the baby himself. In the course of the film Kenji must deal with an angry military leader (Keone Young) in pursuit of the baby kaiju; his never-ending Ultraman obligations; his grief over the loss of his mother; and his bitterness towards his estranged father (Gedde Watanabe); all while enduring his exhausting day job as a major league baseball player. 

In a world where many of us feel exhausted by the pressures of work, family, social responsibilities, and other duties, Kenji’s struggles to handle it all effectively resonate beyond the cute, cartoon environment. An interesting plot element is that Kenji has such a sense of duty, that he leaves his superstar life in America behind and immediately complies with his father’s request even though he despises his father and doesn’t want to be Ultraman. When he struggles in his new roles, the community in Japan feels comfortable directly criticizing him as a superhero and as a baseball player. Instead of motivating him, the in-his-face insults cause him to retreat to mediocrity in both arenas. Speaking to Ami (Julia Harriman), a reporter, Kenji notes that he faced racism in the U.S. which caused him to overcompensate with excellence. Kenji later reveals that his intense pursuit of baseball stardom was an effort to get his father to notice him.

In the film, as in real life, parenting is shown as a collection of joy, frustration, and difficult choices. Kenji’s father chooses to leave his family so he can protect them. Kenji’s parenting of the baby kaiju moves from nurturing her to teaching her how to leave him and live without him. Dr. Onda, the film’s Javert/Ahab inspired antagonist, is grieving the loss of his wife and child to Gigantron’s original rampage and wants to use the baby to destroy all kaiju. Gigantron wants to find and protect her child. In the final, climactic battle scene, each participant is, in their own way, fighting for their family.

Despite the appeal of the core themes, there were many distracting plot inconsistencies. Kenji’s dad ages very dramatically after the timeskip—twenty years is a long time but it’s not that long. Additionally, since Kenji is annoyed by his Ultraman duties and initially has the support of the military-style Kaiju Defense Force (KDF), it is unclear why he chose to keep the baby instead of handing her off to the KDF. Later, when the baby kaiju gets loose, she destroys property in a way that would be devastating, but everyone seems okay. And, unlike the Netflix series, this Ultraman has no team. He is managing everything completely alone, in the family’s high-tech lair, with help from no one but his floating AI, Mina (Tamlyn Tomita). When Ken needs parenting advice, he’s forced to turn to Ami, the no-nonsense reporter who is also a single mom. There is also a side story about Kenji’s Japanese baseball team (ironically named the Giants) which wraps up a little too easily.

Ultraman Rising is ultimately a kids superhero film, so a willing suspension of disbelief and tolerance of extreme cuteness will be needed. Fortunately, Christoper Sean’s portrayal of Kenji Sato delivers enough heart to hold the story together as he ranges from egotistical superstar to grumpy new dad to insecure hero. Despite the outlandish story and the extreme animation style, the overall effect is very relatable.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:
  • Intense animation style
  • Great family pressure commentary
  • Extreme baby dragon cuteness

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

First Contact: Nosferatu

The classic that codified vampires on screen for all eras

Previously in the First Contact project…

We've discussed how German Expressionism used extremes of shape and shadow to convey emotional content. Well, what better medium to tell a story about hungry things that lurk in the night? The 1922 film Nosferatu, an illegal adaptation of the novel Dracula (the ensuing copyright lawsuit forced the studio to declare bankruptcy), keeps its most iconic images confined to one short, climactic scene. But what a scene! Making the most of the technological possibilities of the time, the ending of Nosferatu uses one of the most effective tools of horror: suggesting instead of showing. It's just a silhouette moving up the stairs, just a silhouette extending toward a door, just a silhouette grasping a heart… and this little trick suffices to represent the supernatural profanation that has taken place. It's a master class in using a minimum of visual cues and letting the actual horror play out in the viewer's mind.

Nosferatu has both the strengths and the defects of a freestyle adaptation. It omits a handful of superfluous characters from the novel and streamlines the plot down to its basic components. The details that it adds (the references to occultism, the plague outbreak, the town's hunt for a scapegoat, the new method for defeating the vampire) are a natural fit for the heightened sentimentalism of this movie's tradition. However, the character of the young real estate agent who brings the purchase papers to the count's castle is made less interesting in this version. In the first part of the novel, the growing sense of dread comes from reading this character's gradual suspicions about the count's private habits. Nosferatu portrays him as blissfully oblivious to what's going on under his nose. Once the count settles into his new property, the novel switches to detective mode as our protagonists track down his movements and begin strategizing a way to kill him. In Nosferatu, the answer is conveniently found in a literal Monster Manual that the young man already owned, and the count jumps straight to the final confrontation as soon as he moves in. In striving to lose no time, the movie loses much of the novel's suspense.

The least enjoyable part of Nosferatu is the underwhelming way it ends. The method for defeating the vampire is too passive, and the special effects used for the vampire's death by sunlight are disappointingly simple, especially when seen just moments after the expert play of shadows that precedes it. Romanticism is all about feels and vibes, so a damsel's self-sacrifice is par for the course, and the script gets bonus points for the brief dialogue at the beginning where dead flowers foreshadow the loss of something beautiful, but, as I said above, the final scene is where you find the bits that you'll remember.

Apart from the titular villain, the quality of the acting is nothing remarkable. The suffering damsel knows clearly what her role is: to look vulnerable and helpless. She spends the movie visibly sighing with the oh so tragic demeanor that in any other movie would presage a death by tuberculosis. The friends she stays with for most of the runtime are basically skippable, and the madman who waits in jail for the count's arrival comes off more as comic relief (and possible anti-Semitic caricature) than as a supposed secondary antagonist. The young man who visits the count at his castle is consistently clueless, even cavalier about dining with an undead abomination, and after he returns home, he ceases to have any impact on the story. Only the sailors who unwittingly transport their killer do an interesting job in terms of acting, and they're promptly dispatched offscreen.

What Nosferatu lacks in scriptwriting it makes up for in visual memorability. Orlok, Nosferatu's substitute for Dracula, has a fantastic design. Cadaveric yet imposing, frail yet ravenous, this is a monster perfectly made for silent cinema. It's impossible to avert the eye from his unnatural presence, enhanced by a judicious dose of the stop-motion technique in some scenes. The performance is deceptively simple: his facial expressions don't hint at any reasoning intelligence behind the appropriately dead gaze he wears at all times. It's as if the rats that travel with him, spreading his curse of pestilence, had eaten his eyelids and left a hollow, desiccated set of eyes to haunt mortals with. That said, it's regrettable that Orlok's look also happens to match several anti-Semitic clichés. The Germany that birthed Nosferatu had a long and painful road ahead before reckoning with its theretofore unexamined prejudices.

To a viewer of this century, Nosferatu isn't exactly scary, much less after the many ways its memetic potential has been reused and remixed. Vampires have been everything: sublime, detestable, pitiful, sexy, cartoonish, fearsome, pathetic, elegant, repulsive, otherworldly, relatable, beastly, aristocratic, demonic, sparkly, allegorical, ostracized, dominant, solitary, clannish, contagious, playable, killable, dateable. To watch Nosferatu after seeing the plethora of movie vampires that followed grants a humbling perspective on what infinite malleability can result from a modest first showing. By virtue of its own, small addition to vampire lore (killing them with sunlight), it taught writers that more variations were acceptable: garlic, crosses, holy water, silver bullets, dead blood, a lucky roll of Turn Undead. Carmilla, The Vampyre and Dracula brought vampires from the obscurity of folklore into world literature. But it was Nosferatu that positioned them as staples of pop culture. If for nothing else, we must thank it for that.


POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Orphan Black Echoes

A fast-paced melodrama replaces the intellectual puzzle box of the original series.


Orphan Black Echoes is a sequel to the 2013 hit series Orphan Black starring Tatiana Maslany. Maslany received an Emmy Award for her clever portrayal of several characters on the show. The original series follows an ordinary woman, Sarah Manning, who suddenly encounters multiple versions of women who look just like her. The women discover that they are clones and that much their lives and relationships are not what they seem. They band together to solve the mystery of who they are while trying to protect the very different lives they have built for themselves. The first two seasons of the original Orphan Black presented an innovative type of television series: a fascinating combination of police procedural, psychological thriller, sci-fi puzzle box, and found-family introspection, with Tatiana Maslany simultaneously portraying streetwise Sarah; uptight soccer mom, Alison; hippie scientist Cosima, and quirky, violent Helena, among others.

Orphan Black Echoes takes place initially in 2050. The new show is the story of Lucy, a woman who wakes up in a lab, not remembering who she is, what year it is, or anything about her past. The pilot episode begins with Lucy in a faux homelike setting where she awakens feeling disoriented. A kind doctor (Keeley Hawes) asks questions to get Lucy oriented and tells Lucy she’s had a “procedure” which is why she can’t remember. The doctor is deliberately vague about what the procedure was. Despite the doctor’s gentle voice and attempts to be calming, Lucy quickly gets frustrated by her brain fog and devolves into shouting things, like “why can’t I remember?” and smashing lamps. We soon find out that she is in a giant lab where humans are 3-D printed to create organs needed for transplants. Lucy is handed a photograph of a young child and asked if she can remember the child. Although she can’t, the question lets us know that this is not Lucy’s first rodeo as 3-D print / clone. Lucy manages to make her escape and the story fast-forwards two years to 2052, where she is living an idyllic life with a kind single dad, Jack (Avan Jogia) and his deaf, school-aged daughter, Charlie (Zariella Langford). If you are a fan of the original show, this sweet setting immediately sparks suspicions that there is more happening than appears. As expected, the people in the big, science lab come for her, putting her happy, found-family setting at risk and nudging her to finally solve the mystery of who she is.

Echoes is fast paced and entertaining but it lacks the thoughtful, puzzle box approach of its predecessor and lacks the mesmerizing acting by Tatiana Maslany which defined the original show. Echoes is much more of an in-your-face show. There is no subtlety and there are very few twists and surprises. For the most part, it is an adventure / chase film focused on a character with whom the audience has not yet truly connected but, hopefully, at least identifies with enough to stay interested between the dramatic scene breaks.

Unlike Sarah’s streetwise cleverness and deception in the original series, Lucy gravitates to impulsive, emotional responses. In the first episode, when Lucy cannot remember who she is or where she is, she immediately starts breaking things in the room and then takes off. Later in the show she takes a child hostage and holds a gun to the child’s head before kidnapping her. Despite a few opportunities for obligatory moments of kindness with her boyfriend’s hearing impaired daughter, Krystin Ritter’s Lucy is portrayed overall as unstable, impulsive, and violent. The intensity is appealing but the effect is ultimately a completely different type of show from the original Orphan Black.

The audience is also given repeated, melodramatically vague flashbacks to feed the tension in the story: a knife dipped in blood; memories of neon pink liquid on Lucy’s hands or on her face as she emerges, baptism-like, from a pool of pink goo that represents her creation (or recreation). The visuals are cliché but still fun. The antagonists also get a bit of screen time, clarifying the business, science, and social motivations behind Lucy’s creation.

The early seasons of the original Orphan Black explored different forms of feminism manifested through the various lives of the clones as they support each other. In contrast, Orphan Black Echoes, feels more like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an exploration of an artificially created person searching for meaning and self-determination while fighting against its creator. It’s an interesting concept delivered in an action drama package. Orphan Back Echoes is not as clever as the original series but it is entertaining enough to pass the time when you need an adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:
  • Questionable protagonist
  • Cliché elements
  • Entertaining action but not groundbreaking

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Film Review: Tuesday

Death comes for us all ... in bird form?


Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, says the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer. As my seventh-grade history teacher (a man who, in retrospect, influenced me perhaps the most of any teacher I had) memorably said, you have a one hundred percent chance of dying. We are so afraid of death that we want to anthropomorphize it, in any number of ways so we can feel like we are hating an entity and not a process, not an inevitability. Such is the core anxiety of the film Tuesday, released in 2024 in American cinemas, co-produced by A24, the British Film Institute, and the BBC, and directed and written by Daina O. Pusić.

Tuesday is set in contemporary London, starring an exhausted mother named Zora (Jula Louis-Dreyfus) caring for her teenage daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), the latter of whom is disabled, requires a wheelchair and spends much of her day in bed, dying of an unspecified terminal illness. There has been a widening gulf between the two, as Zora spends more and more time outside of the house working (or so she says), leaving Tuesday to her own devices and to the care of Nurse Billie (Leah Harvey). Tuesday, understandably, has begun to grow resentful, wishing to spend more time with her mother. This is the situation that has come to pass when Tuesday meets a talking macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene), capable of growing and shrinking at will, that is essentially an avian grim reaper. Perhaps a bigger cause of concern is that he brings bad news: Tuesday’s time has come.

What ensues is a deeply weird but nevertheless enthralling examination of how people cope with death (or, more often than not, try to defy it, all for naught), and also that of family. When I tell you that the grim reaper is literally a bird, I assure you that is not even the most bizarre thing in this film. I am uncertain, while I write this, how much of this weirdness I should reveal, but take my word that it is goddamn bizarre, and I say that in the most complimentary way possible. Wikipedia calls this film a ‘fantasy drama,’ but I think there’s a good argument for horror; many scenes are deeply unsettling, and may be too intense for those who are averse to some things. There is some gore, albeit relatively tame, and something that could be called body horror if you tilt your head to the side, and overall that horror is more existential, more about reminding you that your day, too, will come.

On one level, this is a story about family, and how families can become deeply toxic. Tuesday is a teenage girl who, through no fault of her own, cannot be independent, at least in her current state. Her mother brings in the house’s income, prepares her food, and even helps her bathe. As has happened with many caretakers of children who are disabled (including those such as autism, like myself), Zora has something of a martyr complex, an overweening sense that she possesses her daughter, and has elevated that possession into a core of her identity. This becomes problematic whenever she has to confront the fact that her daughter is a human being with her own wants and needs and view of the world. This is what renders the arrival of Death, in bird form, so stark: Tuesday has accepted her fate, more or less, the sort of acceptance that comes with living with a disability day in and day out. It is Zora, not Tuesday, who has to rage against Death incarnate, with very strange results.

I appreciated how Tuesday, the film’s disabled character, was never reduced to a stereotype. She is not turned into inspiration porn; indeed, she is at her end, as so often comes early with disabilities, and she has the sort of wry exhaustion that comes with living with disability that doesn’t get portrayed in the media much. Yes, we know that our lives are often miserable, but we want to live through them on our terms, not the able-bodied, neurotypical world’s standards. She has a mischievous streak, and a clear resentment towards her mother that I found her to be totally justified in having. She is a victim of circumstance and of parental abuse, but she has found a way to be fully human in spite of all it.

There’s something about making Death a macaw that is so effective and so eerie, in a way I can’t quite place. It is also the source of so much of the film’s awkward, vaguely surreal humor, such as when we discover Death’s musical tastes. There are a number of amusing moments (and some more unsettling moments) involving how Death can change its size, a metaphor perhaps for the myriad ways death can come for us. It can be gradual, or it can be sudden, or it can be bit by bit and then all at once, but it comes all the same.

There’s a truly sterling bit in the middle of the film that I don’t want to spoil, but it comes after Zora has tried to do away with Death. It is a very high-concept sequence that brings out the theme of death and its importance in humanity’s entire set of worldviews. It is a sequence about how everything ends, and how we need to accept that, as the alternative leads to all sorts of pain. It is hands down the most unsettling part of the film, with a particular unmoored sensation to it that reminded me of the best SCP articles, particularly the reality benders. My desire to let the viewer find out for themselves at complete odds with me as a critic here. Perhaps that’s a good sign.

Tuesday is a heavy film, a peculiar film, an odd film, an unsettling film. It’s fittingly so, as death is all those things. It is a film that I found to be absolutely worth the money, but it is one that may be overwhelming for some people. But perhaps that is also fitting, as death is, in some ways, an overwhelming of the bodily systems that keep us alive, by time or by chemicals or physical force or by whatever else befalls us.That’s what made Tuesday such a captivating film. If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend it.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Quick round: My recent readings

What a time to be a nerd. These days it looks like people from everywhere are producing an endless wealth of speculative fiction, and my ever-growing TBR pile has become an ominous reminder of the finitude of life. And yet, all through recent months, I've managed to steal a few minutes here and there to catch up with the interesting titles I've come across. Here's a quick round of things I've been reading up to this point in the year:

The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi
(Tor, 2023)

For generations, in exchange for desperately needed water, the City of Lies has been forced to pay the Ajungo Empire with the tongues of its people. But one child risks going on a journey across the desert, hoping to find water elsewhere. The story unfolds with the texture and cadence of ancient myth, even as it deals with the quite modern evils of state propaganda, predatory trade agreements and the suppression of dissident voices. Of particular merit is the characterization of the protagonist, whose growth from nothing to people's paragon follows a natural emotional progression. Within the limited size of a novella, the author finds space to speculate on the ways that the deeds of flesh-and-blood people can become part of a community's traditional tales and, eventually, end up joining the ranks of mythical heroes.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
The Last Dreamwalker by Rita Woods
(Forge Books, 2022)

Every third daughter of a third daughter in this lineage of Black women can visit other people's dreams and influence their actions via their subconscious. A catchy premise, but one the novel doesn't develop much. While the author takes care to show the inherited pain of this family, especially in chapters set centuries in the past, the story moves too slowly and the conflict lacks intensity. The protagonist has just buried her mother and learned that she's inherited a house in South Carolina. From then on, most of the wordcount is used in creating a grounded picture of the Gullah landscape, climate, language, rhythm of life and customs, which isn't without literary merit, but what is supposed to be the plot (a lifelong resentment between relatives) barely happens at all, and its resolution lands without impact.
Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.
Food for Thought by Ariana Ferrante
(Brigid's Gate Press, 2023)

Limos is the goddess of drought, barrenness, starvation, and withering. Demeter is the goddess of agriculture, fertility, abundance, and blooming. They have always been opposite forces: the hunger and the feast, need and satiation. Divine decree forbids them from ever meeting, because no one knows what disaster may result from their contact. Will desire and satisfaction annihilate each other? Or will something more interesting happen? In this little book, the myths of Erysichthon and Persefone are retold from the point of view of Limos, to whom mortals pray only when they have an enemy to destroy. Through her burgeoning obsession with Demeter, she discovers that even the all-giving mother of crops can yearn for things she can't give to herself. Luckily for both, Limos knows all there is to know about unmet wants.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
Sunflowers Rise in a Midnight Sky by Avery Davis, illustrated by Tang Wei
(self-published, 2024)

In this fantasy poem, accompanied by drawings made with delicate sensibility, what is merely imagined in dreams comes to life. Purple grass, purple cows, winking shadows, polka-dot flowers, cats that tell jokes, trees that dance, ladybugs wearing lipstick, violinist birds, frozen water that turns into cake, gigantic lollipops, flying popcorn, mutable words, spiders made of diamond, mermaids that sleep on seaweed, dancing berries, tunnels made of water... all in the span of one night. Reality opens a brief door to impossible wonders until the sun rises again. Even the adult reader will be charmed by this exuberance of childlike fancy.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
Nature Fights Back, edited by Nikki Mitchell
(self-published, 2023)

From five-eyed rabbits to all-devouring storms to city-sized snails to robot-worshiping birds to armies of walking fish to forests capable of holding really long grudges, this charity anthology of short fiction enumerates the grievances our planet could raise against our irresponsible ways and then relishes in the description of each form of vengeance we deserve to have befall us. As may be expected, many of the stories are set in post-apocalyptic climate dystopias, typically with survivors trekking long distances through the ruins of civilization. The overuse of this image gives the book an air of tedious repetition, sometimes punctuated with a bit too much glee at the skewering of Big Bad humans. This book is best read on those frustrating days when the world seems too broken and your inner misanthrope needs validation.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

The Loneliness of the Abyss by Dimitris Vanellis and Nikolas Kourtis, translated from the Greek by Abraham Kawa
(Europe Comics, 2023)

A Greek legend tells that Alexander of Macedon found an elixir of immortality, but his sister accidentally drank it in his stead. Cursed by the gods to roam the seas forever, she's now a dreadful menace to any sailors unlucky enough to run into her and fail to tell her what she wants to hear. In this stunningly illustrated comic, done in a deliberately limited palette that accentuates the contrasts of tragic emotions, the monster reappears in the present day. What do you do when you meet a legend? Do you feed her delirium to save your life, or do you risk her wrath to seek your freedom? Whichever your choice, remember: tales of the Greek gods very rarely have a happy ending.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
The Quavering Air by Simone Snaith
(Broken Wheel Books, 2023)

More a D&D campaign log than a novel proper, this is the story of a band of heroes recruited from across the known world to fix a cosmic misalignment that has opened a portal through which infernal pests have started an invasion. From what I can guess, there are apparently two planets that must never come into contact, and the key to keeping them isolated is to guard two big clocks that must always remain mismatched. However, the richly evocative worldbuilding is relegated far into the background, because our confusingly named and therefore easily confusable heroes must roll for initiative in almost every chapter. There are tantalizing allusions to the nature of this universe and the various creatures and intelligent beings that inhabit it, but the author was more interested in describing complex (and admittedly well executed) fight scenes than in telling a story.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree
(Tachyon Publications, 2023)

In the days preceding the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, a psychic girl and her little brother become orphans and must flee an intolerant town. Luckily, they are adopted by a kind man who was passing by. Less luckily, they run into a pair of scoundrels trying to capture a human/fish hybrid they plan to display at a freak show. This novel skillfully immerses the reader into the perspective of a psychic who is too young to process mental content like an entire town's prejudices or a road bandit's murderous intentions or a sapient animal's instinct to rejoin the herd. Apart from some extended and awkwardly placed flashbacks, the main plot covers just a few days in the children's lives, but the brilliantly chosen turn-of-the-century setting was the kind of time when world-shattering change could happen in the blink of an eye.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
The Island by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant
(Sterling and Stone, 2023)

What begins as a very interesting surreal allegory for the clashing desires inside the human mind ends up unraveling into a too obvious didactic device. Our protagonist is a widowed father whose shameless infidelities pushed his wife to suicide, and now he's stuck without knowing how to process the guilt he still refuses to admit to himself, or how to keep raising his daughter without hurting her any further. But we only learn all this by the book's midpoint; the beginning is a fantasy tale of two equally powerful gods who don't know why they've been confined to an island to do meaningless, repetitive work for eternity. Turns out this fantasy represents the turmoil in the protagonist's head, but by the time we have the full picture, what follows is the kind of trite, saccharine claptrap you find in the self-help aisle of the bookstore.
Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.
Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd
(Pushkin Press, 2024)

Proving for the trillionth time that the best stories are those about stories, this short but delightful book quickly proposes several questions to the reader: Can we record the process of learning a language in real time? Can it be done in the same language that is being learned? Is knitting like writing? And if so, is it translatable? Are there books that can only be understood in specific situations, like being on a plane or under a cat? And how can such books be written? By following the shifting and nebulous identities of a nomad writer, a detective of writers, and perhaps a couple more hard-to-identify bystanders, we may catch some priceless ideas the way one catches a butterfly: with a delicate net, preferably one woven from thoughts.
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.
The Living and the Rest by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
(MacLehose Press, 2023)

Like any work of magical realism, it all seems normal enough at first. A literary festival gathers authors from all over the African diaspora on a little island just off the Mozambican coast. As they exchange opinions on writing, publishing, and African identity, a mysterious storm cuts off the island from the rest of the world for days on end. Soon the authors start seeing their characters walk on the street as if they were real people. Time dissolves as if erased by the rain, and some characters find the story of their entire lives, extending even into the future, inside completed novels. It becomes impossible to tell literary inventions apart from flesh and blood, and the difference no longer matters. For all they know, the outside world may as well have ended.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.


POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Monday, June 24, 2024

Book Review: Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee

 Sometimes it's impossible to resist comparisons.


I loved Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series. They have a gloriously sink or swim quality to the worldbuilding that is somewhat marmite, but worked extremely well for me. Do I have any idea what exactly calendrical rot is, or what the weird gun thing looked like? No, no I do not. But do I care? Also no. It's a series that delights in immersion, and if you're willing to roll with it, the rewards are really rather worth the cost of entry.

But why does that matter for Moonstorm, an unrelated novel starting a new series, in a totally different, world? Well... it shouldn't. But it was impossible, while reading, not to compare it to the author's previous work. And it was not a totally flattering comparison.

Moonstorm follows Hwa Young, a teenager in a military academy whose most treasured dream is to become a lancer pilot - elite fighters in spacefaring mechs that are gundams by another name - after being rescued by a lancer pilot from the destruction of her moon. To do this, she must keep hidden her background from that moon, as a clanner, a group deeply opposed to the empire, and whose differing beliefs generate a different gravity from the empire's own rituals - a difference that cannot coexist. After an unexpected attack on the city her academy is based in, she ends up in the imperial fleet with a shot at a lancer and her dream... but all is not what it may seem. Shenigans ensue, and so forth.

At first glance, this seems much more adventure plotty than Lee's other work, but if you stop to think about that ritually generated gravity, you might begin to see the connection to Machineries of Empire, a series also interested in collective rituals, heresy and culture clash in a very literal sense. While there it may be calendars and here gravity, much of the core themes feel similar, and in theory, I was just as interested in this... except that it rather suffers in the execution.

Where Machineries forces you to go with the flow, eschews explanation and laughs in the face of exposition, Moonstorm stops, especially early on, to try to hold your hand through all of the tech and ritual. Lee wants you to pause and understand (or understand as much as is ever the case in the sort of space opera with alternate world future tech spaceships). We get a protagonist - a young protagonist, 15 years old for much of the story - who has a limited view on her world, both from her age and her unusual background, and has to learn about it at pace to manage her way through the situation she lands in. And so we get a story that watches her do just that, watches her ask questions, gets her rote responses, exposition, and authority figures or friends with implausible hacking skills just... explaining stuff. Even basic things. And it just does not work for me at all. There's so much in tone, in setting and in theme that evokes Lee's previous work, but does not capture the magic of that glorious opaque setting, and so forever feels overshadowed by it, especially when the explanations veer towards the patronising. And I get it! The protagonist is a random teenager! She will need many things explained to her... but not quite so many things as she gets, and it starts to push the boundaries of my suspension of disbelief at times, that the scope of her ignorance and her role in the story, in the military she's being pulled into, can coexist as they do.

And then... the explanations also don't quite go far enough. We exist in this strange, awkward hinterland of having had some things pointed out to us, being handheld through them, but never having any of them developed in any sort of depth. The ideas around gravity being generated by collective will - by community unity - are genuinely fascinating, and I would really love to see these dug into deeper, especially as they become critical to the plot in later parts of the book. But they're just... not. I understand the basics, but have none of the development that might have made those explanations all worthwhile. Similarly the lancers - we know what they are, more or less, but there ends our understanding of them within the setting. There's a vague sense that being a pilot in one is prestigious in some way, but no real development of that meaning. What does it mean, socially, militarily, and so forth, for Hwa to become one? Where do they fit into the wider world? So many questions of a sort that, in other stories, I've seen Lee answer with deft understatements, building up an intuitive picture of a world fully lived in by actual people, with actual lives. And so absent here.

Alas, this is not the only issue the story faces. Hwa is something of a difficult protagonist in a number of ways. Her motivations and choices seem erratic, sometimes including behaviour that goes against her own aims without being emotionally grounded in the story. I don't mind characters who act out of character, if the story does the work of showing why, of giving the reader the feeling of their choice-making. It's just when it feels pulled out of nowhere, and you end up with a character who lacks a coherent core, because they're never allowed to settle into themselves. Add to this her emotional uh... inexperience, let's say, and it makes her something of a struggle to sit with - the other characters are such closed books to her, and our view of the story so limited to her own scope of understanding, that I felt claustrophobic within that perspective at times, desperate to see the world through another character's eyes, to get a more grounded, more nuanced awareness of what was going on. Not even in the sense of grander events or understanding politics. I just wanted someone who wasn't quite so oblivious to the threads of social nuance that were, presumably, happening around her.

What we get of the secondary characters is so tantalising as well! I want to know them! There's Bae, the aloof rival who we start to get the tiniest hints of a more humane core to by the end of the book. There's Eun, the more experience lancer in their squad who clearly has trauma from previous battles, his own outlook on military politics and the role of lancers, and just a wholeass personality... and we barely get access to them because Hwa's interest in the world is so cored down to a very few people and things. She supposedly - by her own words and thoughts - feels a quick and deep emotional connection to her squad, feels bereft when separated from them, but when members of that squad face or suffer catastrophe, we see none of it in Hwa's emotional narrative. Nothing lingers. Nothing seems to touch her. Even Geum, Hwa's best, closest, dearest and only friend, often remarked as precisely such, shows up sporadically in both the narrative and Hwa's thoughts, when zie would be of use to the plot, and then is gone again until the next time zie's needed.

And that's the thing - this is an intensely plot-driven narrative, to the detriment of nearly all else. The world-building gets somewhat short shrift, despite the potentially interesting hooks, and the politics of both the military and the broader world pop up only as strictly necessary. The people are puppets moved to position to allow the plot to progress, and then discarded off stage in between times, allowed very little for themselves beyond their role in Hwa's narrative. Which could work - and has, in many stories - except the plot isn't all that great either. There are a lot of fairly predictable turns to it, following the well-trodden path of many an adventure story of an outsider trying to fit in and finding out the world is not entirely what they thought it was. Almost all of the twists, such as they are, feel very well telegraphed ahead of time, and so there's none of the suspense that this kind of action romp would truly need to propel it forwards. You know what's happening. The story never plays with those expectations. And so when you get there, really somewhat later than you'd have liked, it's just a bit anticlimactic.

And then when much of the theme, the worldbuilding, the little twists of phrasing, when everything in the background is yelling out connections to an existing work that did do all of that, that made me care about characters who were complex, flawed and emotionally accessible, that made me fascinated with a baffling world, that made me invested in politics that felt deeply plausible, that gave me twists that left me genuinely shooketh... the comparison switch in the brain cannot be turned off, no matter how hard I try.

Would I have loved this book if I'd never read Yoon Ha Lee before? No, I don't think so. It needed just that bit more substance for me for that to be on the cards. But I'd have trundled along through it perfectly content, even if when I closed the final page I had no real expectation of remembering it or continuing the series. But it would have been fine. I'd have had fun. I wouldn't have been disappointed. And that's what I am now, knowing what I know, with the context that I have. And that's so much worse.

--

The Math

Highlights: fun gundam-style setting; interesting ideas about ritual-powered gravity

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Yoon Ha Lee, Moonstorm, [Rebellion, 2024]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Friday, June 21, 2024

Recap: The Acolyte Episode 4 — Day

Blink and you'll miss it this week! Episode 4 is only 34 minutes long but packs a few fun surprises.

Last week, we ended on the discovery of a Jedi Wookiee. Episode 4 opens on an overview of his daily routine, as he seems to be living the life of a forest hermit on Khofar not unlike the future fates of Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi (man the Jedi are a bit of martyrs, aren't they?)

We get to see him make a salad (interesting cuisine for a species I had assumed would be carnivorous) and piddle about doing domestic tasks. On the wall we see the same spiral symbols of Mae and Osha's witch coven — what does this mean? The Jedi on Brendok for those tragic events clearly have been struggling with some strong emotions. 

Jedi Besties

Back on Coruscant, Osha watches a youngling training class before chatting with Jecki. The two say goodbye, and Osha states that finding Mae is the Jedi's problem now, though she's grateful to have found out that her sister is alive after all these years. This scene is touching, and I'm coming to really like these two young characters. 


Jecki is a wonderful addition to the list of Jedi we've come to know over the past nearly 50 years, and I'm rooting for her. There's something very Spock-like about her that I find charming, and she's also a hardworking and very competent Jedi. 

These days, we're spending more and more time with the Order as the Disney Star Wars canon grows, and we're getting to dive in much deeper to their faults (hubris and space cop-ism being chief among them). We also get even more a glimpse into their humanity (using this term loosely since there's more than just human Jedi of course). 

They were never — and are never — going to be perfect warriors for the Republic that fan may have once though they were. They're not droids, after all. And despite striving for detachment and unwavering loyalty and obedience, they're still going to make mistakes and commit sins. I know many hardcore fans remain continually dismayed by the portrayal of the Jedi as less than perfect, but I'm here for it. 

What About the (Potential) Sith Attack on a Wookie?


Elsewhere on Coruscant, a group of Jedi comprising Ki-Adi-Mundi (everyone's favorite long-lived conehead Jedi from the prequel trilogy) Vernestra, and Sol discuss the dark threat that Mae poses. 

In a classic attempt of covering up internal strife, Vernestra declares that they'll not be informing the High Council about a potential new Sith master — they'll take care of it themselves so as not to inspire fear or mistrust of their order. C'mon guys, this is a bad idea. She dispatches a team of Jedi to track her down and bring her in. Sol agrees, feeling that there is in fact still good in Mae, convinced that she is simply a pawn of the master.

Back on Khofar, Mae and Qimir set out to find Kelnacca, the Wookiee Jedi, so Mae can kill him without using a single weapon, the most recent quest given to her by masked, red-lightsaber-wielding master. Qimir reminds Mae of her deal she made with the master, as it appears he's starting to realize her discovery of her sister may be affecting her resolve. He confesses to also owing the master something, stating that "You know, he collects people." 

Qimir is sort of a neutral character when it comes to motivation, kind of like Han Solo in most of A New Hope. Manny Jacinto is absolutely knocking it out of the park with this character, and he's a joy to watch.

The Jedi team is close behind them, and both groups have entered into what is very clearly inspired by the fire swamp from A Princess Bride, right down to the bugs of unusual size. They've employed the use an animal-like tracker named Bazil, which is a fun little character straight out of Guardians of the Galaxy

Mae, approaching Kelnacca's abode, has a change of heart and strings up Qimir, confessing her desire to abandon her relationship with the master. We love a "there's still good in her" prophecy coming true.

All of our characters meet at once chez Kelnacca, and Mae discovers him dead from a lightsaber slash to the chest. He's here. 

In the final scene, we witness a team of Jedi stand up to the master, and we get our first good look at his helmet. It's no stormtrooper or Darth Vader helmet — it's something much more sinister, a cross between EV-9D9 and Venom. The teeth, however, aren't biological, they're screws and metal meant to approximate a rictus grin. 

As the Jedi rush him, he forces pushes them meters back with a flick of his fingers. The credits roll. I cannot WAIT for the next episode. 

--

The Math

Baseline score: 8

Bonuses: Finally seeing the big sith (?) baddie up close was pretty fun; the expedition on Khofar felt very Star Wars

Proto Gonk droid count: A big old goose egg again.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, Vidalia onions, and growing corn and giving them pun names like Anacorn Skywalker.