TV Review: Phantom Lawyer

Lawyers, ghosts and lots of emotional intensity in the latest fantasy K-drama

Lawyers are awesome, but they tend to be, at best, background characters in speculative fiction. With a few notable exceptions, including Daredevil and She-Hulk, lawyers are not normally the heroes in fantasy adventures. So, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the premise of one of the latest K-dramas, Phantom Lawyer. Netflix’s Phantom Lawyer is a sweet, change of pace adventure about a newly minted attorney who can see ghosts. As a result, he quickly gets caught up in each deceased person’s need for justice. Despite its cozy comedy set up, each segment delivers plenty of adventure and drama, as well as a big emotional hit that will have you reaching for your tissues.

Newly licensed lawyer Shin I-rang is smart, kind, and personable, but he is rejected for employment by all of the law firms in town, despite his solid qualifications. He soon realizes his misfortune is due to the reputation of his beloved father who died years ago as a disgraced, corrupt attorney. (Put a pin in that because it will drive much of the narrative in the later episodes.) I-rang decides to open his own firm but can only afford an office building previously owned by a shaman. The space is haunted by the spirits of various ghosts who appear only to him and can involuntarily possess him at times when the ghost gets particularly stressed out. Although I-rang is initially reluctant to interact with them, he gradually builds connections with various ghosts who need resolution and justice before they can move on to the afterlife. With the help of a priest who was previously a shaman, I-rang begins to understand the strangeness of his encounters with dead people. Each ghost’s story is explored and resolved over two episode segments in the sixteen episode series. Most stories are murder mysteries but some ghosts die in other ways that are still entangled with a resolution in the justice system. I-rang is frequently opposed by the no-nonsense, high powered attorney Ha-Nyun. Over time she becomes disillusioned by her firm’s tactics and becomes intrigued by I-rang’s unique ability to access hidden information about the deceased. This leads to jealousy from her managing attorney whose father is a former close friend of I-rang’s disgraced father. Although, I-rang initially keeps the ghosts a secret, he eventually reveals the truth to his supportive brother in law who is a part time actor. The brother-in-law is primarily a comic relief character who uses his acting skills to help I-rang in various schemes to help his dead clients. I-rang also regularly enlists the aid of a progressive priest, Father Matthew, who is an ex-shaman and helps with managing the ghosts transition to the afterlife. Ha-Nyun and I-rang are both often aided by the support of the by-the-book police investigator Kim Hyun-Woo, whose quiet awesomeness makes him one of my favorite characters on the show. There is a very slow burn enemies to love-interest story between Ha-Nyun and I-rang, and both Ha-Nyun and I-rang bond over their own emotional trauma from the death of close family members.

The series is primarily a comedy but each victim’s story involves significant emotional intensity that catches you by surprise as the plot evolves. Unlike most traditional murder mysteries, the victims in Phantom Lawyer take an active role in seeking their own justice, often directly helping with the investigation and supporting I-rang when he gets discouraged. This self-determination keeps the story positive despite some very stressful circumstances. Each two episode segment involves the death of a completely different type of character and has a Law & Order type set up with a death and mystery. However, in addition to each victim’s story, the series has a larger story arc for both Ha-Nyun's personal tragedy and ultimately I-rang’s confrontation with his dead father. These big story arcs add depth to the series with both the extra layer of plot and the intense emotions.

However, despite the clever storytelling, the show’s primarily comedic tone wears thin at times and the obligatory hijinks sometimes slows the pacing of the story. If you are watching Phantom Lawyer with subtitles on Netflix, you may want to set the show to 1.25 and speed throughout any extended shenanigans and then slow back down to normal speed when the real action and emotional intensity resumes. Fortunately, lead actor Yoo Yeon-seok does a great job of delivering the physical humor of being possessed by a range of characters (from a grumpy ancient shoemaker to an angsty teen girl K-Pop star to an energetic grade schooler) while also pulling off intense tear-jerker moments. There are also some moments where both Ha-Nyun and I-rang make dangerous choices that seem particularly unrealistic given their day jobs as lawyers.

Despite some pacing issues, Phantom Lawyer is an entertaining foray into lawyers as heroes and the law as a heroic option in a fantastical story. The focus moves beyond the technicalities of courtroom arguments and shows each victim and each surviving family member as authentic human beings. The series doesn’t shy away from the sad stories and upsetting fact patterns that unfortunately reflect the reality of life. But, by giving the victims a voice and some onscreen self-determination, we get a story that is ultimately uplifting and satisfying, especially if you’re a fan of lawyers.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Balance of comedy and emotional intensity
• Skippable hijinks
• Clever storytelling with plenty of adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

Film Review: The Sheep Detectives

A lovely whodunit that could have gone farther with its material

I’m torn baatween two imperatives. On one hand, the movie adaptation of a novel should baa able to stand on its own, and therefore baa analyzed apart from the source material. If I follow that line of thought, the movie The Sheep Detectives is an adorable cozy comedy with an interesting message about the value of growing from painful memories. On the other hand, the only reason I wanted to watch this movie was baacause I loved the novel Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann and its sharp observations about the dark facets of the human heart. If I follow that line of thought, the movie does the novel a disservice by sanding down all its sharp edges and turning a smart literary experimentation into a more inoffensive family-friendly story.

Such is the conundrum baafore me.

The novel and the movie share a simple central plot: when the shepherd George turns up dead one morning, his sheep decide in their baareavement that they will investigate the truth of what baafell him and who was truly baahind it. As it happens, George used to read crime thrillers aloud to his sheep, so they know a thing or two about detective work. It’s somewhat harder to do when you don’t have opposable thumbs, but they manage to strategically eavesdrop on the right human conversations to uncover what happened. Baawilderingly, the movie manages to change absolutely everything else: the manner of his death, the reasons, the suspects, and the entire flow of the investigation. The version of George in the novel isn’t the impeccably kind caretaker shown in the movie; he took some nasty secrets to the grave. Plus the individual sheeps’ personalities are far more varied, and there is assorted commentary about small town life and organized religion. There’s drug smuggling, adultery, and additional dead people. The movie is baareft of all that.

And yet I know that none of it should matter, baacause the quality of a movie adaptation has nothing to do with its fidelity to the original. A movie’s only duty is to baa a good movie on its own. And on its own, it’s well made: the jokes are effective, the talking animals look realistic, and the new version of the mystery is compelling enough, with the requisite confusions and detours to mislead the sheep, who then have to race against the clock baafore the wrong person is sent to jail. What’s curious is that the script heavily expands on some elements of sheep society that get mere passing mentions in the novel, such as the widespread prejudice against lambs born in winter, the baalief that a sheep’s fate in the afterlife is to baacome a cloud, and most notably, their ability to willingly forget sad memories. Lo and baahold, this is one edge the movie does have over the novel: whereas the novel uses the sheep as a device to look at the baafouled defects of humanity through an unconventional lens, the movie is more interested in developing the sheep themselves as characters.

As much as the movie sanitizes the story for child viewers, it can’t sweep the core plot point of the shepherd’s death baaneath the rug. So it needed to find a way to tell a story about death while staying family-friendly. That’s where the sheep’s forgetting power comes into play. Sheep are traditionally a symbol of innocence, but they only stay innocent baacause they make themselves forget anything too distressing. The movie makes it the measure of a sheep’s personal growth when she chooses to not forget her shepherd—even after seeing his corpse, even after finding ugly facts about the sheep farming industry that challenge her religious ideas about the Great Baayond. And that’s a precious lesson for the child viewers: baaware the temptation to run away from hard truths. Life has some very sad moments, and it does you no good to pretend they’re not real.

The Sheep Detectives executes baafittingly the modest job it sets for itself as a cozy comedy, although I still baagrudge it for not staying closer to the novel’s darker tone, which is especially ironic in view of the movie’s message that you shouldn’t avoid the unpleasant thoughts that from time to time baaset all of us. The novel was certainly not aimed at children, but even in a family-friendly adaptation, they don’t deserve to baa kept in baanightedness about the baadaggled parts of life. I’m not trying to baasmirch the movie’s quality or baalittle its achievements, I baaseech you to please baalieve me, but with such a strong source material, I think that this time it’s appropriate to baamoan the missed opportunity, the wasted potential of what could have baan.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

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.

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

After a bold and successful first season, Wednesday has returned to Netflix with a suitably creepy new adventure. For those unfamiliar with the series, Wednesday is the latest iteration of The Addams Family, the creepy, wealthy, cynical, and humorously ghoulish family that evolved from classic New Yorker cartoons to a 1960s sitcom, to numerous feature films, and now to a daughter-focused, light-horror, Netflix series. In season one, teen daughter Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is sent to Nevermore Academy after her defiantly macabre behavior gets her in trouble elsewhere. Nevermore is an isolated academy for “outcasts” who, in this setting, are teens with supernatural identities such as werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires, witches, etc. Cynical, dour Wednesday must adjust to life on the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired campus while reluctantly accepting the friendship of her sunshiny roommate Enid (Emma Myers), and solving the mystery of a serial killer who is deceptively hiding in plain sight in the town. She approaches the challenge with her signature combination of intelligence, clairvoyance, and fearlessness.

In season two (part one), Wednesday overuses her clairvoyance and begins to suffer physical consequences including crying or bleeding black tears and becoming exhausted and passing out. Meanwhile, as she returns to school at Nevermore, she is irritated to discover that she is now a beloved celebrity on campus. But, there is a new mysterious killer in town, assassinating people via a swarm (murder) of crows and also overtly stalking Wednesday. When Wednesday has a vision of Enid’s death, she becomes determined to use her clairvoyance to find the killer and save Enid. This puts her at odds with her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is openly worried about Wednesday succumbing to the same obsession, psychosis, and physical harm that Morticia’s sister Ophelia suffered. As a side story, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls at the school and accidently creates a murderous zombie from a long dead Nevermore student. With multiple killers, stalkers, and high stakes crises, Wednesday quickly moves towards a mid-season climax in which yet another killer joins the chaos.

Season one was a funny, clever, horror mystery with lots of red herrings and lots of adventure. However, season two intensifies the emotional investment of the characters. Instead of directly rehashing the same type of plot, season two builds on certain elements of the first season but takes the storytelling in a more character focused direction. A major driving force of the current season is Wednesday’s friendship with Enid. Instead of Enid being a comedic foil or general annoyance to her, Wednesday’s determination to protect Enid emphasizes Wednesday’s emotional evolution in the midst of the mayhem and cynicism. Conversely, in season two, Wednesday has a degenerating antagonistic relationship with her mother, even as Morticia struggles with anger at her own mother. The multi-level mother-daughter conflicts, and the mutual insecurities that fuel them, is a secondary driving force of the story. Despite these meaningful emotional overtones, the show still has plenty of action as Wednesday deals with a primary murderous stalker, as well as a creepy fangirl stalker (a show-stealing Evie Templeton) and the fallout of her little brother’s accidental zombie creation.

While the core adventure and emotional overtones are solid, the show sometimes suffers from an overabundance of side plots which can, at times, be distracting and does periodically slow the pacing of the primary story. In addition to the main storyline, we also have Pugsley’s rampaging zombie, Enid’s love triangle with Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), a newly arrived music teacher (Billie Piper), and a mysterious psychiatrist (Thandie Newton) at the town’s high security psychiatric hospital. There is also a bit of social commentary regarding the way Bianca (Joy Sunday) is manipulated by the new Nevermore headmaster (Steve Buscemi) who uses her status as a scholarship recipient to exploit her for financial gain. And we have Bianca’s issues with protecting and hiding her mother. Most of the stories are entertaining, albeit voluminous, with the possible exception of Pugsley’s zombie, which is often a bit campy despite being a poignant representation of Pugsley’s relatable feelings of awkwardness and isolation as he begins the new school.

Despite being a teen adventure, Wednesday is also a horror comedy series, which means several characters meet their demise onscreen in horror film ways. Fortunately, the actual gore is kept to a PG safe minimum. This balance of intensity makes the show a satisfying and entertaining gothic adventure without becoming overly graphic. Overall, the first half of Wednesday Season 2 is off to a promising, albeit overstuffed, start with solid acting and entertaining plotting as things move from bad to worse for Wednesday.

Highlights:

• Escalating emotions
• Lots of subplots
• Clever, funny, horror adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Murder Your Employer, by Rupert Holmes

Don't take the title literally

I must confess I read this book for the title. There is a certain hilarious bluntness in the name Murder Your Employer that most books vaguely gesturing in that direction would pad over in the name of politeness. Not so here: this is a book about, among many other things, a character inflicting fatal violence against the man who employs him. I also have to say that the man who wrote this book (also the man who wrote the Pina Colada song) is named Rupert Holmes, which is the best name I have ever seen for a crime writer (‘Rupert’ sounds like a character in an Agatha Christie novel, and ‘Holmes’ from the eminent Sherlock). So long as you have ‘Holmes’ you’re set, and ‘Rupert’ is wonderfully Victorian-sounding.

But regarding the actual book: this one is set in the years after World War II. It feels to me as a sort of invocation of Chandler American Time, as TVTropes calls it, the golden age of the American crime story. Holmes takes a particular delight in subverting the perceived glamor of those years, where prosperity for one caste was held up by the suffering of all the others. The book begins with a man trying to murder his employer and failing; clearly, the years after the good war were not good for everyone. It is after that failure where the McMasters Conservatory enters the picture.

The McMasters Conservatory is the only institute of learning in the world where the prime course of study is that of how to commit murders and get away with them. There is a particularly funny bit at the beginning where the Conservatory boasts of its famous alumni, and this includes many luminaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (another good reason to set this book far enough in the past: Holmes can make that joke without being sued!). The book goes out of its way to prevent anyone from knowing where the Conservatory actually is physically located, and this can be very funny sometimes. What it reminded me of was the John Wick movies, where there is this truly massive amount of worldbuilding that does not involve a single actual supernatural element, so far as I can tell. The result of this is a story whose first half or so feels like a dark parody of a campus novel, but with more dead people. It’s a compelling, amusing juxtaposition, one with shades of the rite-of-passage plots many young adult stories do (but, again, with more dead people).

Holmes varies the format from standard crime stories of this sort; a good chunk of the book is composed of a publication from the press of the McMasters Conservatory (side note: I love how that word ‘conservatory’ is used, as if murder were another type of musical work—it’s an art, according to McMasters, without question) about its own history (all appropriately laudatory, all properly wry, as is best). These bits give you a much fuller sense of the subterranean world of homicide that this book depicts; this wouldn’t be as fun without knowing the aforementioned luminaries who had attended McMasters. It also allows amusement through its self-aware tone; imagine if you were reading the Lockheed Martin website where it obliquely and in a darkly humorous manner alluded to the dead Yemeni children that are the inevitable result of the company’s policies, and you’ll get the gist of it all. Furthermore, the entire book is a packet of sorts, composed of interviews with three graduates of the homicidal program that allow for a diversified look at the people that are produced by the institute.

There is a certain element of wish fulfillment here; all the prominent victims of McMasters graduates are terrible people. In the world of Murder Your Employer, the most fantastic element, the most spellbinding departure from the real world, is that these awful people get lethal consequences for their actions. Of course, it is not only death that comes for them, but several more inventive schemes that make the murder feel ever sweeter. Yes, there is schadenfreude, and yes, it is not the finest expression of human emotion, but there is a certain visceral pleasure in seeing the plots come together. They become labyrinthine, like the works of demons sent specifically to torture specific awful people, and you may end up agreeing with the people who run McMasters that murder is indeed a work of art. Holmes certainly puts his best foot forward here.

Aristotle described catharsis as the way that tragedies can relieve emotions in the viewer (he was discussing this in a theatrical context) via the depiction of action and particularly the conclusion of the action (the word ‘catharsis’ originally referred to ritual purification). Digging deeper into the book, and why it works, may bring up unpleasant aspects of the human psyche, namely why we like reading about murder to begin with. A lot of it is simple curiosity from people who fortunately do not need to be exposed to truly awful things day after day, and the exposure to these things sates inquisitiveness and relieves boredom. All the murders are intensely cathartic, showing Holmes’s skill, but it may occur to those of us familiar with the works of Bertolt Brecht and his ‘distancing effect’ that this may well be the only way the book could have seen print, or perhaps written at all. Even the title is unabashedly provocative, hilariously so, reminiscent of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, where he argues that the culture industry under late capitalism creates nominally anti-establishment works that serve to temper the rebellious instincts of the people. There’s a tension here that I’m not really sure Holmes actually intended between the provocativeness of the title and the resolution of the story.

Murder Your Employer is darkly funny, exquisitely plotted, and deeply atmospheric in the way the best crime stories are. All crime stories are heavily about setting, and this book practically drags you into this grotty world of professional homicide. The whole thing just works, in a way that is so twisty that to give too many more details would spoil it. But one thing to conclude this—don’t take the title literally.

Reference: Holmes, Rupert. Murder Your Employer [Avid Reader Press, 2023].

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

Film Review: Time Cut

A weirdly addictive slasher, murder mystery, time travel homage to old-school Disney Channel Movie storytelling

Do you remember what you were doing in 2003? Flip phones, low rise jeans, bright pastels, Kim Possible and Lizzie McGuire. It’s weird to think of 2003 as retro or historical, but for the purposes of this story, it is. Time Cut is a time travel, coming-of-age, slasher drama that takes viewers on a nostalgic tour of the early 2000s while trying to solve a teen’s violent murder by a mysterious serial killer.

The story opens in 2003, with a prologue introduction of the triggering incident: the murder of popular high schooler Summer Field (Antonia Gentry). Summer is at an unauthorized party to de-stress after the murder of three other close friends. While she’s there, a creepily masked killer finds and kills her outside of the gathering. Then the story skips ahead to 2024, when Summer’s younger sister, teen-aged Lucy (Madison Bailey), is living in the shadow of her death. Lucy was conceived after Summer’s death to be a replacement daughter. However, her parents preserve Summer’s room as it was when she was murdered in 2003. Her parents are trapped in twenty years of grief and, as a result, they are simultaneously overprotective and emotionally distant with Lucy.

Lucy stumbles upon a time machine hidden away in the same place her sister was murdered. The time machine is inexplicably just sitting there in a public location, barely out of view. She inadvertently triggers the machine and accidentally ends up in 2003 just a few days before Summer’s murder. Lucy gets a chance to meet her long-dead sister and see the reality of who Summer truly was rather than the idealized version portrayed by her parents. While there Lucy meets brilliant and nerdy Quinn (Griffin Gluck), who becomes her confidant, she meets Summer’s inner circle of obnoxious, self-absorbed bullies, and she gets caught up in the serial killer chase while trying to solve the murder mysteries and trying to get back home. As is often the case in stories like this, viewers will need a willing suspension of disbelief, not for the fantastical elements, but for the practical ones, such as why the time machine is so easily located and how Lucy is surviving financially in the past.

Time Cut feels like an old-school Disney Channel movie (except done as a slasher film with time travel elements). The film leans heavily into the post-Y2K teen drama style of acting and storytelling. Summer is the popular girl with one quiet friend, Quinn, whom she exploits. Summer and Lucy bond over teen angst, and Summer, bewildered by Lucy’s boxy 2024 pants, decides to give her a fashion makeover, complete with upbeat movie montage music. The sweetness of the time-loop sisters’ budding friendship is contrasted with Summer’s intense obsession with remaining popular. As a result, she is complicit in the cruelty of the bullies against Quinn, despite their longtime friendship; she’s willing to use Quinn to cheat on her homework; and she hides her feelings for her friend Emmy. The cutesy teen elements are also deliberately contrasted with the ongoing threat of the serial killer and the succession of violent, on-screen murders. Fortunately for the squeamish, the gore is kept to a minimum, and some (not all) of the scenes are cut away.

The film does a surprisingly good job of keeping viewers guessing until the very twisty ending. Time travel films always ask the same questions about whether we should change the past and what will be the fallout from doing so. Time travel stories, like vampire stories, typically have a universal set of rules that can’t be broken without consequences. Time Cut opts to acknowledge, and then do away with, some of the traditional time travel rules. As a result, we never quite know what to expect as the characters navigate the murder mystery they are trapped in.

Time Cut does not always have the best storytelling. There are plot holes, inconsistencies, and story elements that will require a willing suspension of disbelief. But, despite these shortcomings, it does manage to be confusingly addictive all the way to the end. And it provides a healthy dose of turn-of-the-century nostalgia.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

• Low gore
• Twisty plot
• Nostalgic appeal

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

Book Review: Jack Glass, by Adam Roberts

A structurally clever tripartite trio of space mysteries, whose culprit is known from the start without giving anything away

Cover design & illustration by Blacksheep Design

 

Adam Roberts has been on my radar for several years, now, due to his striking way with words. He’s got several blogs, one of which is mostly siloed off for reviewing SFF in an entertaining and quirky way (his discussion of Ad Astra springs to mind). He also is a dab hand at a sonnet, and has done more than one take on Ozymandias (as so many people in my internet circle seem to have done). So it’s clearly high time for me to move from sipping his literary contributions to the internet, into a big slurping quaff of his long-form fiction.

Jack Glass is, as I rather expected it would be, extremely clever. However, I was rather disappointed with several character elements. I don't usually mention flaws first, but if I get started on what this book does well I'm going to forget about them entirely. Indeed, I'm writing this paragraph last, because I thought I'd finished this review and then remembered, 'oh. . .  right' and had to go back in! So: if you like character work, you might be disappointed by this.One character is present through 2/3 of the book and yet never really does anything to justify her presence, until a very tropey reveal at the end that felt quite lazy. A different pair of characters enjoyed a relationship development was set up with a stronger foundation throughout the book, but still felt icky and wrong and weird in a way that left a bad taste in my mouth.

But! If you like structural cleverness--and, better yet, cleverness that isn't in any way smug--this book is a great ride. The structural gimmick is foundationally tripartite. The plot proceeds in three parts; each part is a whodunit, or a locked room mystery, or a prison escape. Or—as the prologue makes clear—all three at once. And, to give us even more of a head start, the whodunit is always known from the start: Titular Jack Glass is responsible for the central murder(s) in each part, in one way or another. The fun is in seeing all the bits come together.

The development of this structural conceit is, on reflection, extremely skillfully done, especially because the form of the different plot archetypes varies in overtness. In the first part, all three are easily identifiable. Jack Glass (or Jac, as he’s known in this portion), has been captured, tried, and sentenced to an 11-year prison sentence (prison story: check). The nature of this prison sentence reveals a lot about the dystopian economics of humanity’s far-future in our solar system. Humans have taken to the stars, but their existence there depends on a combination of three things: raw materials, energy, and labor. Raw materials are scarce---Earth’s exhausted, and harvesting them from asteroids is expensive. Energy is scarce and also expensive. But labor! Labor is cheap and ubiquitous. People keep on multiplying; there is no end to them; and they are always desperate. So if you want to do something cheaply, you don’t throw technology at it; you don’t throw robots at it. Technology and robots require resources: raw materials and energy. No, it’s cheaper to throw people at the job. In this timeline, AI is never going to take our jobs. Worse, the power structures are such that the vast, struggling population will be too constrained by the difficulty of not dying in space to have much hope of any sort of successful revolution or restructuring of governance. Not unless something pretty big changes . . . (hold that thought).

So: developers contract out prison labour, seal them in an asteroid (locked room: check), and come back in 11 years to see if the prisoners have managed to terraform it into a living habitat that can be sold to wealthy people who want a second home. If the prisoners have died, oh well, darn, there are plenty more where they came from. If they survive, great! Set them free, sentence served, and sell the asteroid for money. These circumstances are stressful, to put it mildly, and our small group of 7 prisoners do not deal well with the stress. Things go about as you might expect. There is conflict., bullying, madness, and eventually murder. I should mention that there is also desultory sexual assault which is treated not as a source of trauma so much as a disagreeable but unavoidable circumstance to be endured. The eventual culmination, in which Jac does indeed escape, leaving only dead bodies behind him is---no, settle down, relax, this is not a spoiler. We’re told right at the start that he’s the one whodunit (check). Anyway, even though I knew in principle what was coming, I still yelled out in horrified delight when I saw how the details worked out. I’m not entirely sure that that anatomy would work in the way described, but I also didn’t really care.

The second part shifts its perspective to a young girl, Diana Argent, about to turn 16, and one of two heirs to an extremely high-up family, one of the top echelons of governing clans. Diana is very bright, adores murder mysteries, and is having a rough time at the moment, since she’s been forced to spend some time on Earth to become re-accustomed to Earth gravity. She finds this extremely trying, raised in zero-g as she has been, so she is naturally thrilled to discover a murder (whodunit: check) amongst the servants who have accompanied her to Earth, right in their own monitored living quarters (locked room: check). A murder of her very own to solve! What fun! It plays right into her specialty, which is understanding and reading the undercurrents of relationships and motivations among people.

Diana is accompanied by her older sister, Eva, whose interests are much more esoteric. Eva is working on her 7th PhD in astrophysics, which focuses on so-called ‘champagne supernovas’, or supernovas that are extremely rare, and involve stars exploding with much more energy than their mass would seem to allow. But Eva has a sense, an idea, a hunch, that somehow this seemingly dull murder, which is clearly the result of some tedious emotional conflict among the servants, is related to her work on champagne supernovas.

And—because it’s hardly a surprise when a hint like that is dropped—I can confirm that they are related, and Jack Glass is involved. I repeat: this is not a spoiler. We know this from the start. The fun is in seeing how it all comes together. In particular, it’s interesting to see how the three plot archetypes are realized in this part. The locked-room element of the mystery is straightforward. The whodunit is a smidge shifty, and requires a bit of squinting before you can satisfy yourself how it is that Jack is responsible. But the way in which this is a prison-plot is a substantially more nebulous. One interpretation is that all of Earth, with its unbearably oppressive gravity, is a prison that Diana can’t escape. Another interpretation might equate her responsibilities to family and governance with a type of prison Or perhaps you prefer to equate the biologically enforced inequities of this world (the servants are literally drugged to love their masters) as a prison of the soul. But there is yet another interpretation, which becomes particularly salient in the third part, which I think might be the intended one.

In the last bit, Diana has joined forces with Jack. Together they are looking into the idea that something pretty big will need to change if the solar system’s power structures are going to be rearranged. Whether that something is based on technology or on people is a matter of some debate, which ties back rather nicely into the economic theory presented to us in the first part, setting the scarcity of resources and energy against the ubiquity of labor. I can’t give any real details about the culmination of this part, though, because they build on the revelations in the second part. Suffice it to say that, again, the locked room archetype is straightforward, if whimiscally futuristic; the whodunnit holds no surprises; and here the nature of the prison is undeniably identifiable, even if it is buried under a bit of philosophical interpretation.

I’m sorry to be so cryptic, but I don’t believe in spoilers. And I promise, it’s harder on me than it is on you to behave in this way. It’s actually rather maddening, because I am dying to discuss it with someone! Ping me on mastodon---my profile details are at the bottom of this review---when you’ve read the book! Let’s chat!

--

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

•     Clever tripartite structure
  
•     Economic dystopia
  
•    Locked rooms, prison escapes, and whodunits
•  Weaker on the characters
  

Reference: Roberts, Adam, Jack Glass [Gollancz, 2012].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Review: The Apothecary Diaries

An appealing fantasy mystery dealing with difficult issues of gender and class through the eyes of a young apothecary

There’s no such thing as a perfect anime, but The Apothecary Diaries comes close. It is a balanced series that’s charming without being sappy, edgy without being nihilistic, and a show that has truly mastered the art of the super-slow-burn friendship/romance. In the last year, we have had the exhausting intensity of heavy hitters like Jujutsu Kaisen and Attack on Titan as well as a profusion of intensely romantic or adorable anime such as My Happy Marriage, Spy x Family, and A Sign of Affection (all of which are enjoyable). The Apothecary Diaries stands out as an appealing choice for those who want something completely different: clever crime writing, complicated puzzles, and a pair of lead characters navigating upsetting situations with wit and pragmatism as they unravel mysteries both around them and about each other. But, overall, the show succeeds thanks to its smart, savvy, sarcastic protagonist, Maomao.

The Apothecary Diaries is set in a fictional, ancient land ruled by an emperor. Maomao is a clever, educated seventeen-year-old girl living with her apothecary father in an area known as the pleasure district, home to fancy brothels where time with brilliant and gorgeous courtesans can be purchased for a high price. In a town known for beauty and pleasure, Maomao is a girl obsessed with poisons and drugs. Her life takes a turn when she is kidnapped and illegally trafficked to be an indentured servant at the emperor’s palace. Despite her plan to keep a low profile in her new environment, she soon gets drawn into palace intrigue when the emperor’s children (by his various favored concubines) become critically ill. Maomao is able to quickly solve the mystery, anonymously warn the concubines, and quietly get back to her menial tasks. But there’s another super-smart resident of the palace, the ethereally beautiful guard/eunuch Jinshi, who, like Maomao, is more than he seems. Jinshi tricks Maomao into revealing herself as the secret hero and promotes her to a job more suitable to her intelligence. As a result, Maomao is called on to solve a series of mysteries including poisons, murders, arson, and ghosts. But the show’s biggest mystery is the truth about Maomao and about Jinshi. The pair are alternatively allies, enemies, and cat-and-mouse competitors.

Jinshi is one of the palace guards assigned to protect the emperor’s four favored concubines, who each live in their own lavish households around the palace. Jinshi’s main power is, ironically, his incredible beauty, which constantly has men and women swooning. He is able to mentally manipulate others into complying by just looking at them (like a Jedi mind trick), creating a “glamour” effect. However, Maomao is immune to his charms and eyerolls him whenever he tries to control her. She acknowledges Jinshi’s astonishing beauty, but considers it a waste of DNA since he is a eunuch. Or is he? Jinshi is smart enough to know Maomao can help solve the crimes occurring in the palace and soon figures out that she can’t resist a mystery, especially if it involves poisons.

Despite their great character chemistry, Maomao is the primary reason the show is so memorable. Her arms are covered in self-inflicted wounds from her poison experiments. She is incredibly insightful and knows how to read a room, whether she is scrubbing floors with other scullery maids or standing in front of the emperor. She is willing to secretly rebel, manipulate allies, and sneak around to investigate when needed. But she knows enough to remain artificially subservient in public, often bowing her head and blandly repeating catchphrases like “I am but a humble servant” when she’s annoyed, especially at Jinshi.

On the surface, the show is a puzzle box mystery where each episode builds on the others. Viewers gradually realize each successive mystery is connected to the next one and to the two main characters, who are more than they seem.

Beyond being a clever crime drama in a gorgeous historical setting, The Apothecary Diaries delves deeper into difficult questions of gender, exploitation, and self-determination. Every episode has a written disclaimer reminding viewers that the characters are fictional and are not based on real people or true events. It’s an interesting warning about the troubling content wrapped in comedic banter. The emperor’s four favored consorts are given labels (such as “Virtuous,” “Pure”) and lavish households, but their worth depends on the ability to deliver an heir. The courtesans in the pleasure district are paid to entertain men who ultimately aspire to buy them out. Maomao, who has intentionally avoided the courtesan path to pursue medicine, ends up kidnapped and sold to the palace as a slave. In a poignant scene, she dismissively tells Jinshi of her illegal enslavement. Tears trail down his face as he is horrified to realize that her presence is not voluntary indenture but a crime. Maomao tells him to wake up to the reality of how women and the poor are treated. Despite all this, the show emphasizes feminism in the face of objectification. In one episode, a trapped concubine finds an unorthodox way to free herself and reclaim her independence. In other episodes, the alluring courtesans who helped raise Maomao and the submissive ladies in waiting at the palace all support and protect Maomao when she needs them.

Maomao’s pragmatic, emotionless affect reflects the need to steel herself against the shallow, manipulative world around her. The only thing that makes her truly smile is the chance to test out poisons or solve a mystery. She is the heroic center of the story, but she is surrounded by appealing side characters, including the mysterious Jinshi; the kind concubine/consort Gyokuyo; Gyokuyo’s cadre of humorous, doting ladies-in-waiting; Jinshi’s clever bestie Gaoshun; and the love-struck palace guard Lihaku.

The Apothecary Diaries has been a breakout favorite for anime fans looking for something new. If you are new to anime and looking for a manageable, gateway show, this favorite on the Crunchyroll streaming service is a great intro. Its relatable characters, clever mysteries, and hilarious and heartbreaking stories make it one of the best shows in recent years.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Humorous and heartbreaking
• Difficult themes on gender and class
• Clever puzzles and likeable characters

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

Review: Lavender House by Lev A. C. Rosen

 A 1950s murder mystery that queers all your expectations.

One of the big things about period detective fiction is they all do a great job of crafting a vibe, an atmosphere. Someone calls a woman "doll", and suddenly my mental images of the book shift to black and white, everyone's sitting depressed (or possibly just repressed) at a bar in a fedora or a red dress with a thigh slit and there's smoke in the air and clouds in the sky. It just all comes with the territory.

What's so fascinating about Lavender House is how neatly it overturns some of these expectations, with the tiniest of twists, while still occupying and playing with the same tropes and ideas.

Specifically, we meet our protagonist drinking to forget in a bar, and a beautiful woman sits herself down next to him and asks him to do a job... but she's gay. He's gay. And suddenly the narrative shifts entirely. We've overturned the core relationship dynamic of the noir detective, so where do we go from here? It's a seemingly small thing, yet one that not only changes the content of the story - which is unsurprising - but also the entire feeling of the setting, of the type of book. It takes all of my issues with a certain sort of historical detective story and makes me re-examine them entirely, and I find that, when that landscape of attraction is changed, so too is the feel of the whole world.

And on this bedrock of delightful uncertainty sits Lavender House. In some ways, it's a standard murder mystery - rich family, house out in the countryside, a whodunnit, secrets behind closed doors, some upstairs/downstairs drama, learning about the detective's life as he learns about the lives of the victim and suspects, clues slowly seeping out until the answer becomes clear, a red herring or two. All the good stuff. If we just examine it as a murder mystery, we find a very competently built plot, with some compelling characters you find yourself doubting - but not wanting to doubt - and a substantial setting that leaves plenty of scope for the petty grievances and betrayals and heartbreaks that are the necessary backdrop to any investigation. Which isn't to play it down - as a murder mystery it is very well done - just not really outside the scope of the normal. I could pick up any number of books about dead rich people in the UK, the US or anywhere else, and find something that does just a good job of puzzle and clue and reveal as this does.

What I'd be much less likely to find is one that does all the peripherals quite so well as this. And it's in the peripherals that I found most of my joy in reading Lavender House.

Firstly, of course, it's a book about queerness in 1950s San Francisco. And that's already interesting - it's managing the balance really well of the terrible state of culture and law for queer people at the time with acknowledging that they were nonetheless there, and there was culture and life and joy to be found amid the awfulness. And in that dual reality - of hardship and of joy - is the divide between our protagonist and those he encounters.

Which is the second thing - Rosen does a frankly amazing job when it comes to characterisation. Every single person we see in any significant detail, and particularly Andy, our detective, and the residents of Lavender House itself, feels rounded, full and human. Some of this is par for the course for a good mystery, because you need to understand the people who might have done the murder to try to piece together the clues (hopefully just before the detective solves it on the page, so you can feel smug). But Rosen takes it that step further, and where some stories might have a house full of the haughty rich, where motives are understood intellectually, but emotionally speaking it's just a puzzle, he manages to make them all genuinely sympathetic, at least for a time. At several points in the story, I cared about who had done the murder less for the challenge of solving it and more because I was really invested in these characters I cared about not having done it please and thank you. And this I find rare, and wonderful, especially in the murder mystery genre.

Because here's the thing - and this is far bigger than can be grappled with in a single review about a single book - murder stories need to be humanised. There's a lot of terrible, grisly, cold and emotionless discussion of murders, rendering them only puzzles to be solved and obsessed over, whether in or out of fiction. And then in some cases, we push it so far in that murder becomes "cosy" - a soft, comforting genre of story where death is just a necessary premise, and the human cost is hidden in the setup, likely off page. It's not even really important except as a motive force for the plot. But if we want a story that feels real, that feels human, then that human cost needs to weigh on the page too. We need to feel like the dead were people, whose ties reach out into those who remain in the story, and critically that the murderers are people too. That complexity is the antithesis of the Scooby-Doo style mask-off reveal, where the moment the truth is known the culprit drops their own façade of humanity to become a cackling, amoral villain, but the crux of why these stories are so interesting. They're all people, doing people things for people reasons. And they feel more people when we understand them, not just logically but emotionally, especially when we don't agree with them. A senseless murder is no good story at all.

And this, Rosen has grasped fully. When we are at that point in the story where we still don't know who it might be, it is incredibly easy to care about so many of the characters, so easy to see where their insecurities, uncertainties and grudges come from. We feel like anyone could have done it, and if they did, we'd see why they were pushed to that point.

Of course, our detective gets exactly the same treatment, but from a very different angle. We meet him at a low point in his life - as we open the very first page, he is contemplating suicide because of what has happened to his career in the police - and watch him build himself back up through the course of solving the murder. We watch him begin to care about the suspects, just as we do. We also see that he, like them, is far from perfect, and has done many things we may judge, may not condone, but nonetheless understand.

And herein lies the third thing Rosen has done so well - and again is found so rarely. He genuinely interrogates the structures within which we find our characters (and their general archetypes). For Andy, our detective, this means getting to grips with the moral weight of being a gay man, in an anti-gay world, in a world where the law gleefully and regularly commits violence against queer characters. He has his reasons - of course he does - but those are never used as a carte blanche for the choices he's made or the ramifications they may have had. He has to face up to the fact that he was complicit in the system that has hurt and killed people like him. He has to face up to the fact that there may be no forgiveness from some quarters for that. And he has to face up to the fact that he might still be there, might never have pulled himself out of that complicity, but for circumstances conspiring. There are no simple answers to his moral situation. And nor are there for our - however beloved - suspects. Because they too are complicit in their own injustices. This is a small, sheltered house whose safety is bought by financial security. They have made freedom - each in their own way - to be themselves, but their is always a cost. Whether in bribes to the police for absence of scrutiny, or lip service to societal norms, or in aggressively playing the part of heteronormativity outside the confines of their sanctuary, no matter the cost, there is always a price to be paid, and there is a mark on each of them for their privilege. We see them for themselves, but we also see them, see the house, through discussions with the servants, who have their own place in the system, their own view of the injustices in the world around them, and whose voices are given the weight they deserve.

Almost everyone in the story is queer. But no one is given a free pass for it. Everyone is scrutinised for the harms they commit by their place in the world, even as we acknowledge their oppressions, and the sympathy we feel for their positions never excuses their privilege. The rich country house isn't merely a setting for the story, but the whole architecture through which to examine the world and the characters. And in this, Rosen has done what makes Lavender House truly stand out from the crowd. Because for all this examination of privilege, this acknowledgment of intersectionality, and this genuine weight to the moral questions of the book, somehow the story never falters in pace, in readability, and in due consideration of the mystery at hand. It is both a genuinely critical, thoughtful story while being a fully engaging murder mystery.

If I had any criticism - though it isn't much - I might say that the reader feels a little too in the dark about who might be the murderer for a little too long. The clues are not always paced quite so well as we'd like. But the ultimate reveal is handled well and smoothly, with sufficient drama, and the ending is satisfying, so with all the rest the story is doing, it feels very easy to forgive.

I have seen this book often likened to Knives Out, and I think the comparison falters when it comes to humour, which is my primary thought about Knives Out. There is a common thread in their examinations of wealth and privilege, but the difference in tone is a stark one. Don't go into this wanting either constant humorous undertones or the savageness that underlies the film's examination of wealth. See instead - as is present in Knives Out, though less prominently - a great deal of human sympathy, human feeling, and a murder mystery dedicated to a critical examination of what that genre truly entails. I can't wait for the next one.

--

The Math

Highlights: Moments of genuine complexity and interest, a compelling cast of characters, a nuanced view of the queer world of 1950s San Francisco

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Lev A C Rosen, Lavender House, [Forge, 2022]

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