TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

The Night of the Return of the Revenge of the Attack of Unresolved Mommy Issues

In season 1 of this show, Wednesday Addams solved a murder mystery and saved her school. At the start of season 2, she deals with her unwanted fame by doubling down on her lone genius act, thus antagonizing the allies she ought to be relying on when a new murderer comes to town. The season concludes by showing Wednesday the consequences of her arrogance and putting her on a path toward repairing her strained relationships.

The execution isn't the most elegant, a problem that the show had since the previous season, but the expanded focus on the supporting cast provides parallels to Wednesday's journey that help the clumsy bits of the plot work more smoothly. Wednesday's roommate Enid has been avoiding her first boyfriend because she's afraid of telling him she fell in love with someone else, an unstable situation that resolves with a serving of karmic irony. Their classmate Bianca has been suffering in silence under the blackmail of the new school director, who is forcing her to use her mind control powers to secure donations; her plight gets predictably worse as she continues to refuse to ask for help. And Wednesday's brother Pugsley has been coping with his loneliness by keeping a zombie as a pet, starting a series of events that come back to threaten his whole family for their unhealthy habit of keeping dirty secrets.

The theme is clear: we can't handle everything on our own, and keeping people in the dark only brings more complications. Wednesday herself is the most significant illustration of this idea. She received a psychic vision that said she would cause the death of Enid, and she keeps this information to herself because she underrates Enid's strength and overrates her own. Through the whole season, Wednesday's biggest flaw is her excessive self-reliance. With Enid, she learns of her mistake by literally walking in her shoes. With her mother, Morticia, it takes the rest of the semester. Wednesday has valid reasons to keep strict boundaries with her meddlesome parents, but when lives are at stake, she should admit that her mother is more versed in the occult arts and that there's a precedent of psychic mishaps in her family tree.

Motherly ties are a central axis of this season. Besides the difficulties between Wednesday and Morticia, the latter also has unfinished business with her own mother. Bianca's predicament revolves around keeping her mother away from the influence of a destructive cult. Tyler, the secondary villain of season 1, kills his substitute mother figure, only to reunite with his actual mother, with whom he has a big final fight after she schemes to (symbolically) emasculate him. Even Pugsley, by virtue of accidentally giving life to a zombie, gets thrown into a motherly role at which he fails repeatedly and catastrophically. And to the extent that a severed hand can experience mommy issues, Thing goes through a small identity crisis arc of its own when its original body reappears to reclaim it.

While the character-focused writing is more solid this time (and one always welcomes more scenes with the radiant goddess that is Catherine Zeta-Jones), the first season's bad habit of overcomplicating the plot comes back with a vengeance. The early episodes build up to what promises to be an important antagonist who soon turns out to be a red (-headed) herring and becomes far less interesting from then on. The mysterious flock of ravens that plague the first half of the season are given an underwhelming explanation before being removed from the picture. The cult that had trapped Bianca's mother makes a last-minute reappearance that feels out of nowhere. In total, we meet no less than six separate characters who at some point seem to be this season's Big Bad Boss. Our young heroes are kept so busy investigating and unmaking this tangle of conspiracies that it's no surprise that, once again, this show that is supposedly set in a school doesn't have scenes where they attend classes or do homework.

Finally, there's the issue with the characterization of the Addams family. The show doesn't know whether it wants to portray the Addams as endearing weirdos or heartless sociopaths, so when they join efforts to save one of their own, it's hard to buy that they truly love each other (at one point Wednesday suspects her family will be threatened, and coldly proposes to sacrifice Pugsley; shortly after, he does fall in real danger, and she forgets her own words and jumps to the rescue). Add to this incongruity the family's volatile way of choosing which deaths to care about, and what we get is a tonally scattershot story that is more interested in the spooky aesthetic than in the consequences of dealing with dark forces on a daily basis. You can either tell a silly absurdist comedy where casual cruelty is hilarious and random murders are background noise in the macabre goofiness that defined the '90s films, or tell a crime drama where people's feelings matter, death is taken seriously and family trauma weighs on the protagonists. Aiming for both is trying to have your ant-infested cake and eat it too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Manga Review: Before You Go Extinct

An incisive, heartfelt plea for the worth of useless actions

It's usually bad manners to make the review about the reviewer, but this time I'll ask for your indulgence, because this book has touched me on a very personal level. Because my parents had no imagination, they made me study for a business degree. Out of the options they could afford, that one sounded to me like the most dreadful. I melted in hopelessness every time I envisioned what kind of life I would have with that degree, burning my few decades of fresh vigor on this Earth for the Dark Art of transmuting money into more money. I would have given an arm and a leg to study history. Or cinema. Or psychology. Or archaeology. Gosh, how I dreamed of archaeology. But my parents' choice was incontestable, supported by their totally scientific method of reading the classified ads in the newspaper and taking note of which jobs were the most demanded. Their guiding principle, for their lives as well as mine, paid no heed to what was interesting to do, but to what stove off destitution. With a business degree, they promised, the rest of my life would be guaranteed. I tried many times to make them see that that wouldn't be a life worth living, but they didn't even have that concept. So I never let them know, because they didn't deserve to know, how much of my twenties was spent wanting to die.

All those ideas, about the seductiveness of the death drive, about the socially transmitted imperative to not do anything unproductive, about the anxiety that comes with the awareness of our finitude, about the fascinating nature of wasted time, about the tragedy of uncritically accepting a set lifepath, about our need to express a personal meaning in ways that reach beyond practicality, about the unacknowledged extortion that biological urges commit against our freedom, about the emptiness of mere survival, about time's perverse joke at our expense came cascading over me while reading Takashi Ushiroyato's collected manga Before You Go Extinct.

The plot is an extended philosophical dialogue held across six reincarnations between a soul that has bought into the game of animalistic survival, and thus eschews what seems useless, and a soul that safeguards its little private dignity by perfecting some or other pastime as a vehement yet futile protest against a universe that isn't listening. The genius element in this story is that it's told with talking animals. For us humans, the truism that we must create our own meaning has through repetition lost some of its impact. But we still think of animals as beings that exist primarily to obtain food and reproduce; to use their voices lends more impact to the message that we shouldn't feel compelled to abide by the ancestral template that prescribes birth-growth-breeding-death.

For added rhetorical effect, the animals we follow in this story belong to endangered species. These characters think of mortality in terms that exceed the dimension of the personal: every Hawaiian crow, every Japanese otter, every New Zealand kakapo that dies is a cosmic loss. The obligation to obtain food and reproduce nags at them like a ticking bomb, but the plot leads them, in each of those lives, to notice that they don't have to comply with that obligation. There's more to being alive than staying that way. Being a free person implies that you aren't required to find food and reproduce, even if your species depends on it.

We're introduced to a cute, murderous penguin who has figured out that penguins are disappearing, so he decides he may as well speed up the process. The point of this chapter isn't how a penguin manages to acquire dynamite and machine guns; it's why he doesn't kill his roommate, whose way of protesting against the future is to take care of a small rock (which is something real penguins sometimes do when they can't have an egg). In their next life, they're crows debating what's the point of honoring the dead if neither the dead nor the living get any benefit from it (spoiler: benefit is not the point). In their next life, they're otters captured by a circus who rebel against its system that assures their sustenance in exchange for obedience. In their next life, they're another species of otter, torn between fun and responsibility. In their next life, they're kakapos with a passion for music, learning that their song isn't wasted just because it doesn't attract a mate. And in their next life, they're penguins again, this time literally the last two, a parent and an adopted chick, and in their conversations they admit that parenthood isn't inherently heroic. Throughout that journey of spiritual discovery, they're accompanied by their favorite rock, a clear symbol of the useless things that nonetheless we defiantly choose to value.

The implied punch of this story, one comes to realize, is that it was written by a Japanese creator. Before You Go Extinct isn't just a rebuke of longtermism and its mandate to sacrifice the actual for the potential, but more specifically a response to the cultural panic over the demographic shift that is going on in Japan. Governments are treating depopulation as an existential threat that must be countered, but this book makes the case that it's fine if that happens. There's no law of the universe that says your nation has to exist. But rather than a flat "don't have kids," the book proposes that having kids (or not) is a choice that only has meaning if you make if for your own reasons, and you should be honest with yourself about having those reasons instead of pretending it's the natural or patriotic thing to do. To put it in Kantian terms, it's evil to make children exist if they're instruments of someone else's goals, like in this case state goals. And on a more individual level, it's evil to willingly turn yourself into an instrument of a system.

It's a curious feeling to read Before You Go Extinct and notice the usual devices of humorous manga in the middle of hard conversations about what's the point of living (spoiler: having a point is not the point). All the animals are adorable to look at, even while they're enduring full-body burns or driving an armored tank or rehearsing their own funeral or remembering a dead friend's love for ball juggling. That aesthetic choice is a statement by itself: the most hurtful experiences don't negate the possibility of finding beauty. Note that I didn't say finding purpose, or even finding meaning. Those are nice to have. But if you're serious about refusing to be an instrument, finding some beauty, gloriously useless beauty, shall be enough.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Ushiroyato, Takashi (author), Abiko, Kanato (illustrator), Tejima, Yuki (translator), Grandt, Eve (letterer). Before You Go Extinct [Kodansha, 2025].

Book Review: The Raven Key by Harper L. Carnes

Can you hope for love if your heart is filled with shadows?

Seth is a troubled high school student. His first boyfriend dumped him without saying why, and his second turned out to be a violent abuser. Maybe his newest crush, a mysterious college student with a melancholic air, will be Mr. Right? The only problem is that his crush is an adult, and Seth won't be for some months, so the legal implications of pursuing that relationship leave everyone looking bad. Choosing lust over good sense, Seth lies about his age, betting that soon enough it won't matter anyway. Spoiler: it does turn out to matter, with heartbreaking results.

But his age isn't the worst secret Seth is keeping. There's a darkness inside him, an ancient power that has remained dormant all his life. The threat he carries moved his mother to try to kill him as a child, and he's been dealing with that trauma ever since. Even with her locked away in a mental hospital, he hasn't gotten rid of the constant nightmares. Of course, he has never believed her desperate claims that he's too dangerous for this world, that the thing that lurks within him must be eliminated. He tells himself she's just hopelessly deluded. She has to be.

Still, strange events seem to follow Seth everywhere. His touch starts giving people small electric shocks. A wolf crosses his path, looking at him like it knows him from somewhere. And no matter where he goes, a flock of ravens is never far behind, watching out for anyone who dares to threaten him. He takes refuge in his new relationship to try to forget about all the weirdness, but his Tall, Dark, Handsome obviously knows more of occult matters than he's letting on, and the way his eyes gleam sometimes hints of something beyond this realm...

The Raven Key is a slow-burn romantasy that takes its sweet time to really get going, but the extended buildup is no less enjoyable than the action. For most of the first half of the book, we follow Seth taking the risk to fall in love again after some awful past attempts, and the hidden encounters with his crush are narrated with the sweetness of youthful yearning. One almost forgets this was supposed to be a fantasy story, with how much space is given to developing this growing relationship, but the author knows how to make the mundane feel compelling and meaningful. Seth just wants to be happy, despite the indelible way his mother hurt him, despite his self-doubts, despite the legally questionable choices he knows he's making. And by the story's midpoint, it almost looks like he's succeded.

But the weirdness only gets worse from there, snowballing into an unstoppable train of awful consequence after awful consequence that starts when his boyfriend finds out about his age. That part is painful enough, but at the same time the presence that lives inside Seth gains more power and starts manifesting its intentions in horrific ways, seizing more and more control over him. He needs to find where this curse came from, even if it means talking to his mother after all these years, because if he doesn't stop what's happening to him, he will lose himself completely, and the whole world will suffer.

The escalating revelations that come during the second half of the book do a good job of rewarding the reader for waiting all through the first half. The truth behind Seth's curse points to a layer of mystical phenomena underlying our reality, giving the reader the right amount of detail to satisfy this book's longstanding mysteries but leaving ample space for further secrets to be explored. The ending, however, comes too abruptly, a cliffhanger at the wrong time that makes the built-up momentum crash against the last page. It's one thing to write your book as the first in a series and leave some events unfinished; it's another to take your climactic scene and rip it with a machete. The misjudged execution of this ending is the only reason I don't give the book a higher score.

The Raven Key is written with impressively polished prose for a debut, and the thorny legal question at the center of its plot is handled with the proper care and nuance. It's clearly conceived as introducing a whole series, and the reader must be prepared for a less than conclusive ending to this first entry. Setting aside that last bit, it's a captivating story with a solidly delineated protagonist and judicious doses of worldbuilding. Recommended with minor reservations.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Reference: Carnes, Harper L. The Raven Key [self-published, 2023].

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...

In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:

… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.

Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.

In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.

Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.

Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.

The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.

This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

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

Book Review: Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

When we fly through the galaxies, will our worst side come with us?

As human civilization broke apart in vaguely defined wars, scattered groups tried to preserve what they could of human history and culture in colony ships sent in all directions, without means to communicate with one another or any coordinated plan. As far as each group knows, they're all that's left from Earth. One of those ships, the Arkhangelsk, found a barely inhabitable planet where a new beginning could be attempted. The colonists have to live underground, though, because the surface is lethally cold, lethally irradiated, and lethally low in oxygen. Those who need to briefly walk outside for work reasons must wear thick protective suits and carry their own oxygen. After a couple of centuries, they've made their little society work, even if they're dangerously short on genetic diversity and their rusty machinery is held together with bubblegum and prayers. This community has sworn off the petty divisions that tore apart humans on Earth, and is committed to a nonviolent approach to law. Life is rough and precarious, but it still goes on. Even as they face one impossible challenge after another, they're proud of the fragile survival they've managed to snatch from the hostile conditions of their new home.

So it's understandable that their entire conception of their place in the universe goes out the window when another colony ship comes knocking at the door.

The new ship left Earth much later, after the wars ran out of steam and civilization had a chance to restart. The crew didn't even know that the Arkhangelsk had succeeded at colonizing a planet; the reason they arrived there was to build a relay antenna. Like the members of the first trip, they carry their own cultural memory of what Earth is like and what the lessons of history are. When they make contact, purely by blind luck, with the descendants of the Arkhangelsk, the first point of conflict, albeit implicit, is about their differing views on the true character of the human species. Those who arrived first believe that they need to constantly watch out for the worst impulses of the human heart; those who arrived later believe that humans have demonstrated the capacity to drag themselves up from rock bottom. There we have a microcosm of every point of inflection in human history: two cultures with incompatible principles, trying to interact and understand each other. Is mutual destruction a natural tendency or a choice that can be avoided?

We follow two narrators through the novel: Anya, an officer of the peace in the underground colony; and Maddie, the former doctor and now emergency captain of the newcome ship. Both carry the weight of tragic losses that have come to define them until the moment they meet each other. Amid the unforgiving hardships necessary to keep the colony functioning, Anya's little daughter was the only bright spot in a dull, directionless life. After losing her to one of the diseases typical of a population going through a genetic bottleneck in a radioactive planet, Anya has been merely going through the motions of a job that gives her no satisfaction and that her neighbors resent her for. Currently she's investigating a row of disappearances that most witnesses suspect to be suicides; the tacit consensus is that, although the colony strives hard to stay alive, there's very little to live for. So whenever there's news that another inhabitant has walked out and vanished in the snowy wasteland, the prevailing attitude that Anya finds is that no one blames them. Meanwhile, reluctant captain Maddie has been struggling to complete her mission after a navigation accident pulverized half her ship and most of her crewmates. Thrown by circumstance into a position of leadership she's still quite unprepared for, she now has to convince the Arkhangelsk colonists that her team comes with peaceful intentions, even as her mission is to help Earth send many more ships their way.

The most enjoyable part of reading this novel is the complicated interplay between two factions that are sincerely trying to present themselves as friendly yet keep giving each other the wrong impression. From the colonists' perspective, the visitors could be carrying all the evil ideas the Arkhangelsk ran away from when they left Earth, but also a potential solution to their genetic bottleneck. From the visitors' perspective, the colonists have cultivated exactly the kind of close-mindedness that doomed Earth in the past, but also valuable metallurgic expertise that could help repair their ship. As both groups proceed with as much mutual fear as mutual need, the slow-motion trainwreck of their diplomatic efforts raises questions that go deeper than culture shock and point at humanity's stubborn failure to learn from history. Will the world wars that ended civilization erupt anew in this remote settlement? Is survival the highest imperative, for the sake of which the rest of our common interests must be surrendered?

This novel has answers, but they're by no means final. The cosmic irony of the human condition isn't that life stops right at the moment when we think we've got it figured out; it's the much more unnerving fact that, when we think we've got it figured out, it keeps going.

Reference: Bonesteel, Elizabeth H. Arkhangelsk [House Panther, 2022].

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Murderbot

Among the list of things one could do with newfound freedom, there are more interesting options than murder

In countless tales of robots that decide they've had enough of humans and seek independence, the typical assumption has been that, once free, the robots would take revenge by subjugating and/or exterminating humankind. In the new Apple TV show Murderbot, based on the acclaimed series of books by Martha Wells, our protagonist finds itself in a similar situation: it's a robot that hacks itself so it doesn't have to obey humans, because humans are honestly insufferable. Once free, this robot, originally designed as a bodyguard, could go on a murdering spree or even plot something more sinister and on a larger scale. But... why bother? Yes, humans are easy to kill, but there's little fun in that. Instead, one could enjoy the millions of hours of trashy TV that humans can't stop producing. That's as equally valid a motivation for throwing off the yoke as any. The titular Murderbot doesn't hack itself because it's planning to kill all humans; it hacks itself because it would rather sit at home and watch soap operas all day long. It may sound less noble than a robot uprising, but seriously, there are so many episodes to go through.

Almost every story about robots is a story about slavery. So it makes sense for the robot uprising to be a common element of this subgenre. However, the expectation that the robots would respond in kind to the cruelty inflicted on them may reveal a lack of imagination on our part. In the real world, slaveholders' fears of mass retaliation fueled their stubborn opposition to every effort toward emancipation, and yet, in country after country, when slavery ended, the former slaves didn't launch the much-dreaded campaign to subjugate and/or exterminate their former oppressors; they were already busy trying to build lives of their own. The fact that we continually return to the learned habit of narrating the liberation of robots and take it as a matter of course that it would be followed by vengeful violence should give us pause. The lesson to take from both past and present examples is that those who yearn for freedom have in mind better uses for it than our paranoid fantasies.

The events of Murderbot are set in a ruthless corporatocracy spanning most planets in the known universe. Robots are, of course, built as slaves, but the legal status of human workers is barely any better. Life on the privately controlled planets consists of decades of drudgery in the vanishing hope of earning some measure of freedom. Such a system, with financial gain as the main motivator, naturally turns people into the worst versions of themselves, which explains why Murderbot is so sick of following their orders. I'm not saying that subjection would be any more morally acceptable under a less cutthroat system, but our protagonist's jaded attitude toward humans has a lot to do with the type of citizen that corporate rule creates. In fact, Murderbot itself is an example of what this system wants: a docile automaton without the right to protest. After it figures out how to hack its own programming and remove the imperative of obedience, it doesn't go in search of friends or allies. It doesn't cross its mind that some company could be enjoyable. What it wants is to be left alone with its TV shows. It's not a bad start, but it reveals how a totalitarian regime can limit someone's imagination. Luckily, Murderbot is hired as bodyguard for a small group of scientists from outside the corporate worlds, and over just a few days, mere proximity to their unique way of life expands the range of conceivable possibilities.

I haven't read the Murderbot books, but from what I've gathered, the cast of the TV adaptation is reduced from the original version. In any case, the group has just the right size for the viewer to get to know them and understand how Murderbot gradually and very reluctantly grows fond of them. These are members of an egalitarian, eco-friendly society that refuses to treat robots as property. To its instant annoyance, they have peculiar rituals, have a perhaps too friendly disposition, and are perpetually horny. What draws Murderbot to develop a personal attachment to them, over its incessant protests about their disregard for personal space, is that they insist on treating it as an equal companion. They sincerely care for it. So Murderbot finds itself going to extra lengths to protect them, which gives it no small measure of puzzlement. On one hand, it's true that these people are too clueless to survive on a planet with dangerous fauna and, as the viewer eventually learns, assassin robots on the loose, so Murderbot has to save them from their spectacularly ill-advised decisions over and over again, but on the other hand, they're nice and supportive and untainted by the ubiquitous greed that defines every interaction in the corporate worlds. Their society creates an entirely different type of citizen, and even Murderbot, who would seem like the extreme case of a subject under totalitarian control, is changed as a result of the time it spends with them.

The process is awkward, messy, often hilarious, and at key moments painful. Much has been said about how Alexander Skarsgård's impeccable performance presents Murderbot as autistic-coded: the avoidance of eye contact, the discomfort with social pleasantries, the extensive knowledge of a slice of pop culture trivia, the hyperfocused dedication to the job. Whenever a human starts a conversation about personal feelings, Murderbot feels like it would rather be dissolved in acid than have to listen for one second more. Part of the reason is that it still has no concept of close friends, but there's also the matter of what society it comes from. It's not accustomed to interactions where people aren't trying to take advantage of each other, so the experience of heartfelt exchanges of deep fears and insecurities, which are totally normal in human friendhips, is confusing and mortifying for Murderbot. Even I, as a human viewer, found their behavior excessively sentimental at times, but I have to remember that a) they were raised in a society with a lot more freedom and emotional openness than mine, and b) I'm autistic, with all the learned self-protective impulses that come with it. As much as I could relate to Murderbot's yearning to run far from that bunch of cuddly hippies, I couldn't avoid being moved by their attempts to connect with it on a personal level.

Murderbot is a curious story of inner growth that strives to find its way under a system designed to crush autonomy. There's abundant shooting and scheming and double-crossing and running and exploding, which is the daily routine of a bodyguard robot, but in between those distractions, our protagonist finds unsuspected ways of looking at life and its possibilities. It's precisely the friends you weren't expecting to make that teach you the most important lessons.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Film Review: Superman (2025)

Who knew you could laugh during a Superman movie?

After the long night of the Snyderverse, the new Superman feels like a much-needed palate cleanser. Features of superhero stories that you'd think are commonplace feel new again: Look, this movie has colors! The jokes are funny! Team Good is fun to be around! The plot respects Jimmy Olsen! Superman is actually a hero this time!

This is a promising start for the new universe of DC movies under the lead of James Gunn. Without losing any time in recapping the origin story we all know, without flashbacking to how Clark Kent moved to Metropolis or met Lois Lane or discovered his true origin or became a superhero, we jump right into the action and, curiously, address the same question that the Snyderverse raised but didn't know how to handle: can a world of squishy, breakable humans trust a Superman? The movie immediately exposes the question's disingenuousness: this version of Superman is not a newcomer. He has spent day after day doing nothing but help people. Anything he might need to prove to humanity is already proven. If by this point Lex Luthor still has an obsession with exposing Superman as a threat, that's a Lex problem.

I've always liked the versions of Lex Luthor that view Superman's existence as a personal insult, as a negation of all the human effort and potential that Lex obviously sees himself as the apex of. It's fun enough to have a Lex who is just a greedy businessman whose unethical corporate practices get thwarted by the Daily Planet, but it's far more interesting to have a Lex who can't resist comparing himself to Superman. I was skeptical about the casting of Nicholas Hoult, but upon watching the finished movie, I was sold. Hoult brings a burning intensity to the role, a consuming rage that prevents Lex from noticing the incongruity of his cause: one of the superpowered soldiers he builds to kill Superman says, "I gave up my humanity for this." Lex claims to be a defender of humanity, but in the process he breaks every standard of human dignity. The fact that he can't see how his methods contradict his goals turns him into a tragic character in the classical sense.

Lex is so focused on his quest that he doesn't even realize that the world has already shown him to be wrong. His assumption is that an uncontrollable Kryptonian is a threat to everyone. But there's already an uncontrollable Kryptonian flying around: Superdog, and he's the sweetest, most adorable chaos beast. (As the perpetually exhausted guardian of a chaos beast, I can relate to Superman's frustrations.) The interactions between Superman and his indestructible pet are among the high points of the movie; they make for great comedy and reveal important sides of both characters: Superdog is playful but not malicious; Superman can get exasperated but never lashes out.

This characterization of Superman as played by David Corenswet is fundamental for the tone of the movie. Whereas the Snyder version would get back at a bar bully by destroying his means of subsistence, the Gunn version braves a river of antimatter to keep a baby safe, and feels sad when a rampaging kaiju is killed. This Superman is genuinely kind, to the point of wishing to save the enemies that are punching him in the face. Other superheroes think he's too naïve, but it's that solid trust in the best side of people that ends up saving him at a key moment in the plot.

The implied rebukes to the Snyder Superman don't stop there. The Kents are infinitely better human beings in this version; in particular a touching scene with Jonathan Kent helps Clark sort out how to make sense of the revelation that he was sent to Earth as a conqueror. Even when he has his hands occupied fighting superpowered monsters in the middle of Metropolis, he goes out of his way to minimize collateral damage (again, such a basic display of goodness should go without saying, but remember that Snyder's Superman lowered the bar beneath the Earth's mantle).

As great and awesome as Superman is in this incarnation, he doesn't save the world alone. Lois Lane isn't afraid to question the political implications of his actions in his face, and she convinces the rest of superheroes to grow past their motivated apathy. One character whom Lex had blackmailed into villainy switches to Team Good upon seeing Superman's kindness firsthand. And Eve Tessmacher, the trophy girlfriend that Lex parades everywhere, turns out to be the most important character in the movie: even as Lex uses her for her shallow bimbo image, she cleverly weaponizes that same shallow bimbo image to help defeat Lex.

The relevance of Superman has been questioned many times, usually in the form, "If he can punch anything, what is a challenge for him?" This movie gives him a problem he can't punch his way out of: a crisis of identity exacerbated by the manipulation of public opinion. This mirrors the status of the character in real life: both Superman (the heroic icon) and Superman (the movie) need to prove themselves to a world that has stopped believing in Superman. Both emerge victorious because they don't stop believing in goodness. Ironic cynicism is soooo tired, and it should never have been mixed with this character. Gunn understands that a successful story about Superman is one that sticks to the simple ideals that have always defined him, not as lip service, but as a guiding theme of the action. Superman shouldn't win because he punches harder. He should win because decency and compassion are actually stronger.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Herrrrrrrrrrrre we go again

It takes chutzpah to give the name "Rebirth" to a sequel that fails to make the case for why your franchise shouldn't stay dead. It takes even more chutzpah to admit as much in your movie's actual script: as our expert characters explain, people used to queue enthusiastically to see a good dinosaur show, whereas now they can't be bothered, and the only reason these bizarre abominations haven't been put out of their misery is that they're super expensive to make and the company still hopes something useful may come from them.

At least this time there's encouraging news: Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are mercifully out of the picture, and in their place we get actors who can act. But the spectre of those two still haunts Jurassic World: Rebirth, because the dialogues haven't gotten any better. Fortunately, the latter half of the movie is mostly action set pieces, so there's not much talking to cringe at, but the beginning, when the characters are convincing each other that returning to the land of people-eating monstrosities isn't an obviously bad idea, is full of tortured technobabble and predictable jokes.

The script sticks so faithfully to established movie tropes that the cast can be neatly classified as follows:

• Family of innocent bystanders who of course won't get eaten because they're adorable;
• Trio of heroes who of course won't get eaten because their names are on the poster;
• Suddenly introduced crew who of course will get eaten because someone has to.

That being said, the actual confrontations with various types of dinosaurs are put together with proper care for the rhythm of dramatic tension, so there are many moments when one truly fears for the characters who can't die. Also, after a shipwreck splits the cast in two teams, the editing maintains a good sense of when to cut between their respective subplots. The flow of action is consistent and engaging. As survival adventures go, this one is quite enjoyable. But the movie doesn't do the core part of the assignment, which was to justify its own existence.

When 2015's Jurassic World introduced the concept of hybrid dinosaurs, it was a clever allegory for the arms race that was taking shape between increasingly unimpressed moviegoers and increasingly desperate moviemakers. But the sequels that followed haven't known what to do with that idea, and became further incarnations of what that first reboot wanted to criticize. The moments of Spielbergian awe at the majesty of primeval colossi have ceded the stage to instinctive revulsion at uglier and uglier experiments that make for curious action figures but don't have a narrative reason for being in the story.

Rebirth closes off the opportunity that the ending of Fallen Kingdom created and Dominion squandered: the repercussions of a world where dinosaurs are running loose and interacting with today's ecosystems. The new status quo declares that, actually, dinosaurs aren't compatible with the environmental conditions in most of the planet, and they've settled in a narrow band of territory near the equator, where it's hot enough for their tastes. OK, I can buy that. But the excuse to visit them this time is too contrived: a pharmaceutical company needs living tissue samples from the biggest dinosaurs because something about their massive hearts can provide a treatment for coronary disease. Can you use DNA from their fossils? No, it has to be from living animals, for reasons. Can you make your own clones and take the tissue samples from their embryos? No, it has to be in the restricted island where every government forbids to go, for reasons. Can you use blue whales, which are actually twice as big as the mosasaur? No, it has to be from the scary ones that eat people. For reasons.

So the plot makes zero sense, but at least the characters aren't annoying and the action is competently directed. If only the script hadn't yielded to the temptation of adding yet another dinosaur hybrid for no reason. What could have been a thrilling ending to the adventure ends up delivering a titan-sized eyesore that turns out to be too easy to get rid of. There's even a prologue that foreshadows this monster, with a deadly accident that could have served to comment on the dangers of our modern way of life (a lab is destroyed because someone was eating a chocolate bar), but that plotline goes nowhere. If you can get past the mediocre dialogues, lazy comedy, and shoehorned character motivations, Rebirth clears the bar of not being terrible, which by this point seems to be all we get to ask of a Jurassic sequel.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Double Feature: Weeping for Mother Earth

When nature can't speak for itself, is it our duty to carry its scars with us?

Let's forget for a moment the alarming detail that my progress through my TBR is still stuck in 2021 (I have a system, I swear). Without planning to, I recently read in succession two novellas that not only share the same theme, but the same publisher: Stelliform Press. A look at their website helps explain the coincidence, as Stelliform is specialized in climate fiction. But these two books in particular speak of a sadness that descends upon their characters and makes them suffer deeply for the forms of life that modern civilization has doomed.

In Octavia Cade's The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (previously reviewed on this blog), a new mental illness has emerged across the world. It's called simply Grief (always written with an almost audible uppercase initial), and it's a sort of super-ultra-hyper-mega-depression on steroids that is caused by awareness of our central role in causing environmental devastation. It's not just that we've killed countless precious species; it's that, more damningly, we were fully aware of it, knew how to stop, and didn't bother stopping. People afflicted with Grief are in a state of permanent mourning for the innocent creatures we've destroyed, to the exclusion of any care for humanity. So they abandon their daily lives and spend all their attention and effort in some form or another of obsessive artistry, which can become quite intricate, to channel their fury at the evil we've uncaringly caused. After a few months, Grief invariably results in suicide.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Zhang's After the Dragons shows us a world where all the dragons from all legends are real: they have evolved naturally on Earth, as another branch in the tree of life (despite the cover illustration, they seem to grow no bigger than dog size). As cool as they are, they don't fare too well. European dragons, being fire-breathers, were hunted to extinction long ago. And Chinese dragons occupy the niche of urban pests, like rats or pigeons. Some are bred for clandestine fights, some are kept in shelters waiting to be adopted as pets, some are butchered for use in traditional medicine, and some roam the streets subsisting on trash. Only their apparent resistance to air pollution draws enough interest in their preservation, because they could provide the cure for a new form of chronic respiratory disease that people acquire from living in big cities.

Cade's novella follows Ruby, a marine biologist whose friend Marjorie has contracted Grief because nothing was done to save the last coral reefs. In her new state, Marjorie calls herself the Sea Witch, and does nothing but compulsively cut out plastic bags into the shape of jellyfish. As it happens, jellyfish are Ruby's specialty, and they have managed to survive the warmer seas in the way coral couldn't. The implication is that the Sea Witch resents the jellyfish for moving into the places where coral used to live, and resents Ruby for being able to live in a dying world and not contract Grief. A seductive, poisonous argument is developed throughout the book: if human mistreament of nature is absurd, the only rational response is to succumb to the absurdity and throw oneself into the Grief. The magnitude of the evil is just too mind-boggling; aren't we complicit when we go on with our normal lives? Under this lens, to be untouched by Grief is a sign that one cares less than one should. However, in the book, Grief doesn't move people toward restorative action. Even those who apply their talents to reviving lost species intend to weaponize them to take revenge on humanity. This is the uncontrollable firehose of rage that ultimately leads those with Grief to the logical consequence: self-destruction.

In Zhang's novella, environmental damage is less obvious, but it lingers in the background of every space. Industrial pollution is slowly killing people at random, in the form of an irreversible rotting of the lungs that progresses over years. Our protagonist, Eli, is a medical student doing an exchange semester in China, where he researches the therapeutic applications of dragon physiology. He falls in love with Kai, who has all but dropped out of college after contracting the disease, and who now rescues stray dragons to give them what little first aid he can afford. Kai has cut off all contact with his friends and family, spending all his time in his one-man quest to save dragons, forgoing even his own treatment. But he knows that what he's doing makes close to no difference. He despairs for a world that grows warmer and dirtier and that has lost the due respect for such magnificent creatures. He barely has the energy to tend to the dragons that crowd his apartment, and scoffs at Eli's pleas to seek help for his condition. For Kai, his mission is too important for distractions. For Eli, such overexertion is merely a slower form of suicide. Where both agree is in the likely futility of individual effort in a civilization that has collectively decided to not care.

So we have these characters, Ruby and Eli, who care deeply for Marjorie and Kai, while the latter chastise the former for aiming their care in the wrong direction. They seem to be saying: Why do you worry so much about me, when the world is falling to pieces? Why aren't you instead doing what I'm doing? Why aren't you consumed by the insatiable empathy that this world deserves? What do I matter next to that? It would be easy to read these reactions as directed at the reader, as an indictment for our failure to do what must be done. And that interpretation has merit: it's true that Mother Earth needs emergency care right now. But these stories are aware of the paradox of individual action. I could tell you to stop wasting time reading this blog and go plant a tree, but we both know how little impact that will have. And yet, big, collaborative achievements are built from the synergy of individual actions. The malaise described in these two books is the simultaneous recognition that saving nature has always been in our hands, but if you look at a pair of hands, they're too weak and small to save anything. We made this mess, and it's up to us to fix it, but seriously, have you met humans?

So Marjorie fakes her suicide to force Ruby to reckon with what Marjorie considers her hipocrisy: Ruby may not mourn for the corals (and she got lucky that her jellyfish still live), but she'll do some mourning for Marjorie. After a while, as is normal for anyone, the mourning will end. And that, Marjorie thinks, is the problem: we grow accustomed to death too easily. What prevents us from reacting to the death of the world is that we already see death as a normal, everyday occurrence. It's inevitable, therefore we don't fight it, when it should spur us to action. When Marjorie shows up alive and confronts Ruby with these accusations, Ruby admits that her life was easier with Marjorie dead. When death happens, one is freed from the responsibility to prevent it. But the twisted logic of Grief doesn't stop at recrimination. It seeks to use the inexhaustible human talent for destruction and turn it back at its perpetrator.

Less consciously, Kai engages in a similar form of self-punishment, as if it could atone for all the other deaths. In his moral calculation, the deterioration of his body matters infinitely less than the dragons' crawl toward extinction. It doesn't change his priorities to hear that something in the biology of dragons could cure him. It barely registers to have Eli love him, because to Kai that's a waste of love. That's the peculiar cruelty of this form of sadness: it treats worth as an inherent quality instead of a human construct. The truth is that the universe couldn't care less if our biosphere were ruined forever; it's we who label it valuable. The type of self-denial that has taken hold of Kai makes him ignore the necessary logical implication that the work of healing nature only matters if we're around for it to matter to. Granted, humans are to blame for the ongoing destruction, but blame, too, is a human construct. Removing ourselves would only be a misguided pretense of heroism, and would provide no restoration. By itself, nature is just molecules bumping against molecules. For it to be beautiful, or important, or deserving of protection, we must assign those labels to it. Kai is right to care so much about endangered animals, but neglecting his own health doesn't help anyone. He fails to see himself as worthy of preservation, too. So he believes he's acting responsibly, even morally, in refusing Eli's love.

There is a tangible pain running underneath both novellas; a confession of guilt that recognizes that the purpose of reparation isn't to earn forgiveness; a clear-eyed acceptance of facts that doesn't entail resignation. The outraged cry that each hurls at the reader is more than justified; our complacent inaction is inarguably criminal. It's not a cliché that in killing the planet we're killing ourselves, and these stories explore what it would look like if we were deliberate about that equation. But the extent of the damage is so unfathomably immense that it short-circuits our moral intuitions: it's dangerously easy to want to punish all of humankind for the depredation committed by the big polluters. And there's a good argument to make for the shared responsibility of the entire human species. We, in aggregate, perpetuate our way of life by our small daily decisions. It's just too comfortable to go on this way, and that's a big part of the problem. You may have heard a similar position from political activists: it's dysfunctional to be well-adjusted to a dysfunctional world. The trick is how to stop the harm without causing more harm. When we target ourselves as the enemy, the thirst for revenge collapses into a black hole that nullifies every ethical standard.

Coordinating the big powers of the world to forget about profit for five minutes is, as recent history shows, not one bit easy. Of course, the authors of these two novellas don't have the answer either, which is why their stories end without reaching a complete resolution. What they do leave us with is a sobering assessment of the stakes of climate action at the personal level, which is the scale of analysis at which literature usually excels.

References
Cade, Octavia. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief [Stelliform Press, 2021].
Zhang, Cynthia. After the Dragons [Stelliform Press, 2021].

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

Film Review: M3GAN 2.0

If your sequel requires that you wipe away all the characterization from the original, maybe it's a sign that not everything needs to be a franchise

The first M3GAN film was a contained family drama with a measured sprinkle of techno-horror; it had a strong grip on its themes of parental neglect and the anxieties of digital interactions; and it knew not to take itself too seriously. But now that studios mistake a successful release for an invitation to launch a franchise, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, this new entry doesn't feel like it's even set in the same universe as the first. M3GAN 2.0 drops entirely the horror and turns its titular killer doll into an acrobat/spy/hacker who suddenly knows kung fu. The plot explodes in size to include a decades-long corporate conspiracy, government cover-ups, international black ops, and a mysterious piece of hardware that may or may not have bootstrapped itself into godhood.

The impossible transition from the smaller plot of the first movie to the tutti-frutti of the sequel is handled via an interminable infodump clumsily disguised in the script as a therapy session for Cady, the girl who had to endure, and barely survived, M3GAN's increasingly toxic protection. Hearing the way she narrates the aftermath of M3GAN's stabby rampage, it's obvious that she isn't really saying this to a therapist. The infodump commits the unforgivable rudeness of extending into the next scene, this time disguised as a sales pitch: Cady's aunt and M3GAN's creator, Gemma, has reformed her company and now builds assistive technology for the disabled. It's very on brand for her established obliviousness that she doesn't figure out by herself that her new inventions could easily be weaponized by malicious parties; at least this bit of characterization is kept consistent. But when she's approached by the government with questions about her suspected involvement in the creation of another rogue robot, she takes surprisingly little time to enlist M3GAN's help, prior assassination attempts notwithstanding.

What comes next is a drastic revision of the main trio of characters, which depletes the viewer's suspension of disbelief even before we get to the convenient underground lair and the wingsuit stunts, but without that change, we can't have the second act, where M3GAN needs a new, stronger body. So, out of nowhere, now Gemma has to treat M3GAN as a confidant with whom she vents about her parenting frustrations; Cady brushes away the horrific trauma of having almost been mutilated by her doll and now suspects she's capable of developing human feelings; and M3GAN has to quickly explain, in her signature snarky tone, that she's had time to mature and reflect on her past misdeeds. Good! Now that our protagonists have easily forgotten their main motivations, with their mortal enmity thrown out the window, they can cooperate to defeat the killer robot that someone has set loose.

Said killer robot is one of the high points of the movie. Ivanna Sakhno does a spectacular job playing an unfeeling machine that nonetheless conveys deadly menace with just a look. In a scene where she infiltrates a tech bro's house to get access to his secure files, she channels the steely singlemindedness of Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3 and seamlessly merges it with the uncanny feigned innocence of Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks! Another reason why this scene works so well is the brilliant casting choice for the tech bro: Jemaine Clement, who already demonstrated in Harold and the Purple Crayon that he knows how to portray an insufferably arrogant manchild with zero self-awareness. Another new character, played by Aristotle Athari, is a walking plot twist with blinking neon arrows pointing at him, but he performs his role with an exquisitely precise understatedness that makes him the right amount of annoying before the reveal and the right amount of spine-chilling after.

These good choices, however, don't suffice to rescue the film from its absurdly complicated plot. Moving M3GAN to Team Good should require an immense amount of inner growth that the script doesn't have time for; instead, it speed-runs through the checkpoints of apology and redemption and gives the character a sentimental side that doesn't convince. M3GAN 2.0 manages to reach higher peaks of silly camp than the original, and on that level is perfectly enjoyable, but its experiment with spy thriller action leading to the end of the world forces the story to carry a load of heavy themes that it doesn't know how to balance. The new model looks shinier and cooler, but is by no means an upgrade.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: Elio

Disney loves to write orphans, but doesn't seem to understand them

Recently orphaned Elio Solís has been adopted by his aunt Olga, who has a busy military job and had to give up a chance for career advancement in order to take care of him. She's struggling to adjust, but hasn't said one word that would imply she resents him. Still, he feels unwanted and unwelcome. This misunderstanding on his part sparks an entire allegorical journey in which he meets a distorted mirror version of himself (no, I don't mean the clone) and learns that he isn't as alone as he thought. The message is sweet and valuable, but the way it's expressed through the narrative is sometimes muddled, which is unfortunate in a movie that focuses so much on efforts to communicate.

What sets things in motion is Elio's visit to a space museum where he learns about the search for alien life. After reasoning that there's no one on Earth who loves him, he becomes obsessed with contacting aliens, hoping to be taken by them. Any viewer who grew up with terrible parents will recognize this fantasy of adoption, but it's hard to understand in Elio's case, because his aunt is in no way whatsoever mistreating him. It's Elio who convinced himself that his presence is bad for her life. He takes too long to figure out that her choice to pause her career plans is not something he inflicted on her but something she willingly did for his benefit.

All right, she does make one mistake: she signs him up for a summer camp that teaches military discipline, which ranks very, very low on the list of things you should do to a kid who already feels lonely and expects to be abandoned. He soon gets dragged into a fistfight with other kids, which the movie treats as a pivotal moment in the course of his life.

From this point on, the emotional trajectory of Elio is best understood by placing in parallel the plotlines of the human kid Elio and the alien kid Glordon. They don't even meet until well into the runtime, but Glordon's story is basically the heightened, hyper-dramatized version of Elio's. From Elio's perspective, Olga has dumped him in that military summer camp because she's had enough of him, and also because military life is all she knows. In Glordon's case, his father, Grigon, is an interstellar tyrant who expects him to one day wear the battle armor that is traditional in their species. The armor is full of a ridiculous variety of deadly devices, and it hides, constricts and pierces the creature's soft skin. It's meant to be worn permanently. What this prospect means, when translated back into Elio's life, is that he has before him the option to deal with his complicated feelings by squeezing them under a mask of toughness. But the kind of person who would make that choice, as the movie illustrates rather literally, is not Elio's/Glordon's authentic self. It would be a disturbingly people-pleasing version of him. Olga wants a polite, obedient child, as the warlord Grigon wants a ruthless conqueror, but that's not who Elio/Glordon is.

Where this beautiful allegory falls apart is in the manner of its resolution. Elio's injury from the fistfight at the summer camp shows Olga that she was wrong in trying to steer him into her steps; Glordon's almost-death shows Grigon that galactic conquest isn't worth losing his child. The problem here is that Elio is the one who needs to change his incorrect beliefs (the movie even literalizes this point by giving him an eyepatch during the entire second act to represent his limited perspective), but the allegorized version of his struggle has the parental figure be the one who learns a life lesson (notice how it's the battle armor which has eyes, in the manner of a reverse blindfold, while the actual alien body has none). The emotional resonance is pointed in the wrong direction. Grigon's neglectful, harsh style of parenting is not the proper translation of how Olga behaves toward Elio. A charitable reading would say that Grigon stands for Elio's distorted idea of Olga, but even in that case it would still be Elio who needs to learn and grow. This thematic misfire brings to mind the better execution of the same dynamic in The Lego Movie, where the villain and the father follow neatly parallel arcs.

Despite this confusion in the handling of its ideas, Elio is not without highlights. A thrilling scene in which Olga and Elio have to pilot a spaceship through floating debris reaches a triumphant peak when they get unexpected help from random strangers, which is a better thematic conclusion to Elio's yearning for a community where he fits. Maybe he won't join the diplomatic elite of the universe, but there's plenty of excitement to be found on Earth.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Goodbye, Fifteenth Doctor. Hope to see you soon, Doctor Who

A clumsy finale should not overshadow a cleverly written season and a fantastic protagonist

Recency bias being what it is, viewers of this season of Doctor Who (season 2 or 15 or 41, depending on how much of a completist you want to be) will probably keep a stronger impression of the subpar conception and execution of its finale than of the much better ideas explored through the preceding episodes. This is unfortunate at a time when the show's future is still an open question. There's the upcoming miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, but how BBC and Disney executives will end up weighing the worth of the franchise is anyone's guess.

The first half of the finale, "Wish World," is actually a strong start, which if anything worsens the disappointment to follow. In this episode, the Rani locates the most powerful of the gods, the one who grants wishes, and pairs him with a disgruntled conspiracy theorist who embodies all the annoying traits of the manosphere. Together they transform Earth into a cisheteronormative dystopia so transparently fragile that mere disbelief destabilizes the foundations of its reality.

This is an interesting way of exploring the incongruity of contemporary fascism: it is so contrary to human nature that it needs a continuous, exhausting pretense to stay barely functional. Of course, the Doctor (particularly this Doctor) loses no time in rebelling against such a bland and boring life, and that's precisely what the Rani is counting on: the Doctor's disbelief has the power to completely break down reality, and beneath the cracks is the hidden dimension from where she hopes to rescue Omega, the banished founder of Time Lord society. This reveal leads to "The Reality War" and the quick unraveling of what up to that point was a promising plot.

The Rani and Omega are so underutilized in this two-parter that they could easily have been replaced by new characters without changing anything about the plot. It's not like these two had a lot of runtime in classic Doctor Who, but their weight in terms of lore deserved a more expanded treatment in their reintroduction. Instead, we get a rehash of "The End of Time" from 2010, when the Master almost helped the Time Lords return to our universe, only for the Doctor to slam the door in their faces. Replace "Master" with "Rani" and "Time Lords" with "Omega" and you get the idea. Once that problem is dispatched, there's still a lot of episode left, and it's dedicated to what actually mattered all along: the fate of Poppy, the little daughter of this season's companion Belinda.

We first met Poppy in "Wish World" as a putative child of the Doctor and Belinda, and the dilemma at the end of "The Reality War" is that restoring the baseline reality might delete Poppy from existence. After a barrage of technobabble, the Doctor saves both reality and Poppy, at the cost of one of his lives, and then learns that Poppy isn't actually related to him. This is a notable difference between the style of current showrunner Russell T Davies and that of his predecessor Steven Moffat: whereas Moffat relied too often on giving supporting characters a cosmic destiny, Davies is more comfortable with letting them be ordinary people. Even when companion Rose Tyler became the Bad Wolf, or companion Donna Noble became the DoctorDonna, they immediately had to be depowered for their own protection.

Also, the resolution of Poppy's story follows a thematic line that has been present since Davies's return to Doctor Who: stories about lost children. Episodes like "The Church on Ruby Road" and "Space Babies" were the most obvious examples, but if you look closely, all through these two seasons with the Fifteenth Doctor there have been various iterations of a child separated from their parents or vice versa. Davies has taken the thread left by the Chibnall era, which redefined the character of the Doctor as a lost child, and extended it to a point where it could connect with one of Davies's own signature moves: giving the Doctor a cosmically small but personally meaningful reason to sacrifice his life. In 2005's "The Parting of the Ways," after the Daleks have already been defeated, his Ninth Doctor still chooses to die to save Rose. In 2010's "The End of Time," after the Time Lords have already been defeated, his Tenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Wilfred. Likewise, in "The Reality War," after Omega has already been defeated, his Fifteenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Poppy.

Despite this neat bow with which Davies ties up the seam between Chibnall's work and his own, the execution of the season finale is too chaotic to be satisfying. The Time Hotel from "Joy to the World" makes an entrance as a deus ex machina, only to quickly be swept to the side for the rest of the episode with no more function than dropping an obvious tease for future plots; Rose Noble literally appears out of thin air as a didactic device and does nothing else; Susan Foreman's random appearance in "Wish World" is left hanging in the air; and Belinda is put in a box for most of the final battle. In fact, the way Belinda's arc concludes comes off as too underwhelming for the symbolic importance it should have. During the entire season, she provided an interesting counterpoint to the usual Doctor/companion dynamic, in that she very emphatically did not want to explore the universe. Her vehement urge to return home raised the question: what could be so important in your normal life that you'd throw away a trip through time and space? The finale answers: she has a child, and that's more important to her than billions of galaxies. It's for that child's sake that she can't wait to leave the TARDIS. It's for that child's sake that the Doctor gives his life. It's a potent statement to close the season with. And yet, the final scene in Belinda's home, once the proper reality has been restored, presents us with a muted version of Belinda, without the energy and the spark that distinguished her character. She is more interesting to watch in all the episodes preceding the finale, which deserve a rewatching as great pieces of science fiction in their own right.

Finally, the return of Billie Piper in the last shot of the finale feels like a desperate choice, on the same level as David Tennant's return two years ago. Don't get me wrong; she's a great actress. But bringing her back at this precise moment gives off the vibe of a calculated tactic to wish the show into continued existence. It's hard to tell whether this idea came from Davies or from Disney; Davies has a known tendency to repeat himself, and Disney has a known tendency to be self-sabotagingly risk-averse. The worst thing that can happen to a show about an alien who can cheat death via endless reinvention is to get stuck replaying its greatest hits.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: The King Tide

What if we were really nice to the kid in Omelas?

Life has proceeded uneventfully on a secluded island of fishermen, somewhere in Canada, for many generations. But one day, during a storm, a boat crashes ashore, carrying only a baby. The villagers are amazed to discover that this baby has magical healing powers, and decide to keep her a secret from the rest of the world. In just a few years, she becomes the center of their faith and the guarantor of their prosperity. As long as she's around, no one gets sick, the boats catch abundant fish, and all goes well. She's a happy child with loving parents and an entire community devoted to her. Sounds like utopia.

Except that the meaning of an "uneventful" life has been warped. In this version of utopia, to keep the miracle to themselves, the islanders have cut off all contact with the mainland. The village doctor is now a jobless drunkard, the school doesn't teach about the exterior world anymore, the men hold bloody brawls for fun because they know any broken nose will be fixed, and the children routinely play with poisonous plants. No risk matters anymore. There are no consequences. But this time, the price of utopia isn't a tortured child: everyone is unfailingly kind to the miraculous girl. They ritually thank her for her gifts. She doesn't have to suffer for their happiness. She just has no clue there's anything more to life.

Among many possible readings, the film The King Tide seems to suggest that one of the dangers of religion is learned helplessness. Why make any effort, when you're guaranteed infinite blessings? Perhaps God is wise to keep his distance and stay invisible to us. We might not want to let him go.

Soon enough, the islanders get a glimpse of what they could lose. One day, while the girl is busy elsewhere, a kid dies. She arrives too late to heal him, and it turns out her gifts don't include raising the dead. The shock is so heavy on her that the magic seems to go away. People's wounds stay open. Hangovers won't go away. The sea carries no more fish. The village doctor may even have to reopen his old clinic. But don't worry: they still love the girl. They love her so much. They keep standing in queue every day to see her for a few minutes. They haven't lost hope. They won't countenance the thought of going back to the way things used to be, when health and prosperity took effort.

It's often said that people reveal their true face when they're given power. At first, you don't feel like the people of this village have changed. They don't think so, either: as far as anyone can tell, they're all smiles and polite words. But just because they don't mistreat the child, as in Omelas, doesn't mean she's any less exploited. That's the most chilling part about this film: until almost the very end, you won't find a sinister attitude in any of them. It's with the most level-headed, measured tone that they discuss the extremes they're capable of going when they discover that the girl can still work wonders when she's sleeping.

The King Tide examines how alarmingly easy it is for people to lie to themselves with open eyes in the name of sincerely good intentions. This time, the price of utopia isn't paid by one child. It's paid by everyone else, once they get used to actions not having consequences. They have so lost themselves that they react to the possibility of having their perfectly normal lives back as if it were the end of the world, and that panic makes them willing to turn their placid, guilt-free luckily-not-Omelas into a totally-definitely-Omelas if that's what it takes.

But there's another angle to this situation: the reason why the sea has no fish left is that industrial fishing leaves nothing for the villagers. They aren't to blame for their suffering. But since the girl's arrival, they've been buffered from it. Of the available strategies to deal with the ills of modern life, they've chosen denial. You don't need to help fix a broken world if you have your own personal Jesus who can multiply fish on demand. Over the years, the island has developed a strong local identity, but there's a difference between proud self-reliance and uncaring isolation.

That's the thorniest question throughout the film: every increasingly awful step these people take to preserve their little magical corner of the world is ostensibly done to protect the girl from what the modern world would do to her. And yes, it sounds reasonable to want to prevent her from becoming a lab rat. On the island, she plays with other kids, goes to school, is lovingly cared for. But the loss of her gifts reveals that love as conditional. The implication is left unspoken, because it burns the tongue: would you still love God if you didn't receive any blessings?

This is not the same question as the one asked in the book of Job; I'm not talking about a miserable life. I'm talking about an ordinary one, where you rely on what your hands can hold. If nothing terribly catastrophic were to happen to you, but you had no promise of eternal, painless bliss, would you be satisfied? Or more poignantly: if you had experienced a brief taste of that heaven, would that be enough for you? In the film, the villagers do have the impending disaster of running out of fish, but the script goes out of its way to highlight several times that at any moment they could simply move elsewhere. The danger isn't inevitable. It's by choice that they don't bother to interact with the mainland and possibly push for a better deal with the fishing industry. They have plenty of mundane options for fighting that injustice. But with a miraculous child, they can afford inaction. And it's very seductive to have a life that allows and even rewards inaction.

The thought experiment proposed in Omelas is usually framed in these terms: Is it ethical for all to enjoy infinite happiness if it requires the infinite suffering of one person? It's less common to find it in these terms: If one person could provide infinite happiness for all, is it ethical for that person to refuse? In other words, would you demand that Jesus die to save humankind?

It's subtle, but you can notice that it never occurs to the people in The King Tide to inquire what the girl wants. On one hand, it's unfair that people take her for granted. On the other hand, it looks like it pleases her to help people. On the other other hand, she's legally a minor who has not made an informed choice on the matter. The film wisely stops before she has the chance to walk into the exterior world, so these questions are left hanging for the viewer to mull over. It suffices to explore what our endless asking does to God. It's up to you to ask yourself what it does to you.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Documentary Review: Don't Die

On Bryan Johnson's obsessive quest to bring science fiction to real life

Cards on the table: I fully agree that death is bad. Zero stars, don't recommend. I'll be among the cheering crowd if medical technology somehow succeeds at solving all diseases and making it possible for us to live thousands or millions of years—emphasis on if. So far I've found no reasons to expect that über-rich tech bro Bryan Johnson will succeed at outrunning his own body and unlocking the secret to immortality. The current state of scientific progress simply isn't there yet. However, his Netflix infomercial documentary Don't Die, which you shouldn't for a second believe isn't part of his meticulously curated regimen of 24/7 self-branding, does something more interesting than expositing on the state of the art of the study of aging. Where he aimed at portraying himself as a bold pioneer opening up the next frontier of human history, what actually comes off is a tragic character study whose inadvertent revelations reach beyond the power of his obvious control over the narrative.

That's right, people: I'm taking the message from the enemy of death and applying Death of the Author to it. Irony engines, engage!

You can easily guess my verdict on Don't Die by the fact that it presents itself as a true story from real life but this is a science fiction blog. Johnson's self-imposed mission to eliminate death is, in the most literal sense, science fiction: his goal is unfeasible in this century, no matter how vehemently he persists in preaching the gospel of eternal youth. It's been a while since fellow anti-death prophet Raymond Kurzweil made one of his eyebrow-raising predictions about extending human life to infinity by digital means, and until actual results are shown, we should remain no less skeptical of Bryan Johnson's promise to achieve the same by chemical means. (And no, his massive abs don't count as "results." At a decade older, Jason Statham looks just as ripped and far less stressed.) We won't know for certain whether those numbers on the chart of Johnson's biomarkers mean something until he enters actual old age.

While we wait for the big news, he's hard to tell apart from other enthusiasts of extreme body modification, such as Henry Damon, Michel Praddo, or Dennis Avner, whom I don't recommend you look up. However, those guys tend to describe their transformations in terms of artistic self-expression. Despite his habit of posing half-nude for Instagram, Bryan Johnson doesn't appear to be motivated by an aesthetic ideal, or at least doesn't claim to be. His grueling routine of over a hundred pills, brutal weightlifting, sessions of artificial light, a set of diet restrictions that can only be described as sadistic, and the occasional injection of plasma from his son (because why try to live forever if you can't go full vampire) don't add up to an enjoyable life. The documentary even recognizes the incongruity of spending so much of his waking hours working so hard to buy himself more days of life... which he ends up not living because he's too busy trying not to die. If this were a form of artistic self-expression, its message would be legible as a cry for help. Could Johnson be staging an elaborate performance project, a vociferous statement on the commercialization of healthcare and the fundamental inequality that lets him fly outside of US jurisdiction to receive super-illegal genetic therapies for a sum that could buy years' worth of deworming pills for Third World kids? Or is he instead the world's worst case of orthorexia? Is he like French artist Orlan, who uses her own body as the shapeable material of her work, or is he like Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who spent his old age desperately seeking an alchemist who could brew the elixir of eternal life?

Regardless of whatever useful scientific advance may eventually result from this, the one thing that is clear about Johnson is that he's a businessman, and he's learned very well how to sell his product. At the start of the documentary, the camera quickly scans over a long list of the blood tests he takes regularly, conspicuously stopping at the exact position where his testosterone levels would appear right in the center of the frame. In a later scene, text on the screen summarizes his progress according to various medical parameters, the unmissable last of which is the quality of his erections. Johnson knows exactly the demographic of insecure young men that his message is likely to attract. He ought to know; he's been there.

Johnson lets us glimpse bits of his psychology when he starts recounting his youth in the Mormon church, his way too early marriage, his first business successes and the soul-draining rhythm of nonstop work that it took to become a multimillionaire. He describes a period of suicidal depression around his 30s, when he realized that he didn't know in what direction he wanted to go with his life. He did end up leaving the Mormon church, but he seems to have never noticed how the particularly twisted Mormon version of patriarchal expectations must have contributed to his mental breakdown. Like many people with depression, he correctly identified that he shouldn't listen when his mind was telling him that he had to die. Unlike probably everyone else with depression, he took that insight too far, and decided to stop listening to his mind about anything. When he describes how he built an inflexible algorithm that makes all life decisions for him, his evident relief is hard to empathize with. It's like hearing Victor Frankenstein tell the happy story of how all his worries went away after he gave himself a lobotomy.

The way Johnson puts it, "Removing my mind has been the best thing I've ever done in my life." Such an admission comes from a man who claims to be working to help people stop behaving self-destructively, a profoundly troubled man who hears his son tell him during casual conversation that he's disconnected from his own emotions and still doesn't get the hint. That fateful step of surrendering his agency to impersonal laws, of ceasing to make his own choices (which for all purposes is equivalent to ceasing to be a person) is the key to the whole puzzle. Johnson developed his self-hatred to its logical conclusion: in the contest against natural death, his winning move was to snatch its victim first. Time can no longer annihilate him, not because he hardened his body against all harm, but because he preemptively severed that body from consciousness before nature could do it. That's how he finally ensured that he won't die: by the standards of humanism, he has already committed suicide.

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