TV Review: Washington Black

Slavery, steampunk, spirituality and science combine in a unique coming-of-age story about the search for knowledge and family connection

Washington Black is a steampunk-style adventure about Wash, a young Black boy trapped in brutal, violent slavery in 1800s Barbados, whose life is changed by his time with Titch, an idealistic but insecure inventor whose family owns the plantation where Wash is enslaved. The idea of a Disney-esque slave story may give viewers pause, especially with what initially seems to be a guilt savior trope in the premise of the story. However, Sterling K. Brown’s presence (behind and in front of the camera) grounds the story, as does the fact that the series is based on Esi Edugyan's gorgeous Booker Prize finalist novel of the same name. Ultimately, Washington Black is a story of self-determination, community, and creativity in the face of unimaginable odds.

The short, eight-episode series is primarily told in two timelines: childhood flashbacks and adult present in the life of the protagonist. George Washington Black, (wonderfully portrayed by Eddie Karanja), nicknamed Wash, is a ten(-ish)-year-old enslaved child on a brutal plantation in Barbados. He is cared for by Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a sturdy enslaved woman who tells Wash stories of her/their original home in Dahomey. The slavemaster, Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), is particularly brutal in his abuse of the plantation slaves, leading some to commit suicide. But Kit tells Wash that if they die, they will wake up in their old home in the beautiful Dahomey.

Things change for Wash when Erasmus’s brother, Christopher Wilde (Tom Ellis), arrives at the family’s plantation to work on his invention of a flying machine. He takes an interest in Wash because the child is clever, and is the right size to balance his flying machine. When another plantation family member dies in Wash’s presence, Wash is falsely believed to be the killer, so Titch flees the island with him by using their newly created flying technology. Their journey takes them to many locales and dangerous adventures as Wash grows into a talented engineer and scientist. However, his relationship with Titch struggles under the pressures of their fugitive status and Titch’s own insecurities.

In the present timeline, Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) is now a young man living under a different name in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is mentored by Medwin (Sterling K. Brown), an older Black man who helps former slaves get to freedom and find their place in Halifax’s substantial and multicultural Black community, of which Medwin is the de facto leader. Wash meets Tanna (Iola Evans), a biracial young Black woman who is passing as white and traveling with her white scientist father (Rupert Graves). Wash and Tanna share an interest in science and are attracted to each other despite multiple barriers, including Wash being stalked by a relentless Javert-like bounty hunter (Billy Boyd) and Tanna being trapped in a forced engagement to William McGee (Edward Bluemel), a wealthy young British benefactor with his own strange secret.

There is a lot to like about the series, despite some shortcomings. The fantastical flying machines and other devices that propel the characters to their next adventure add a whimsical feel to the story, which is odd, given the grim premise. Throughout the show there is an appealing contrast and overlay of spirituality and scientific exploration, both of which require faith, imagination, and commitment from Wash. Additionally, we have a classic coming-of-age/journey narrative in the spirit of The Wizard of Oz or The Snow Queen, where Wash travels to new locations on his journey (from England to Dahomey, from the Caribbean to the Arctic) and meets interesting and supportive characters along the way. In particular, he encounters a new member of the African diaspora in each adventure, including a West Indian pirate queen and female warriors in Dahomey. Other important side characters include Gaius (in the past) as the observant, well-spoken, seemingly aloof house slave in Barbados who secretly keeps an eye out for the other enslaved people; and Angie (in the present), who is the sharp-tongued but kind maternal figure who runs the restaurant and who acts as an alternative to Wash’s original maternal figure Big Kit. The collection of diverse but connected characters adds to the fantasy folktale feeling of the story, as does Wash’s spiritual visits with the dead in the spiritual realm, and the implied mystical identity of Wash’s father.

On the other hand, many of the more central and grounded characters are introduced and then abandoned in the later episodes. This is particularly true of Medwin, who seems like a central character both in terms of the show’s narrative structure and in terms of his unwavering mentor relationship with Wash, particularly as an alternative to Titch and Titch’s insecurities. Tanna’s fiancé McGee is another key character whose surprising backstory is intriguing and highly entangled with Tanna and Wash’s relationship. However, he soon disappears from the plot with barely a one-sentence explanation. Tanna and Wash’s courtship progresses at a leisurely pace to the detriment of other key story elements, making the overall pacing of the story uneven, especially in the later episodes.

The abrupt and abbreviated treatment of many of Washington Black’s interesting characters and storylines indicates that a longer series might have created a more interesting exploration of the themes of racism, belonging, identity, betrayal, and scientific curiosity. Fortunately, the series has a satisfying ending that brings Wash’s tale full circle. Washington Black acknowledges the harshness of slavery and racism, but also opts to focus on relationships and optimism and to keep the onscreen violence moderate. This is in contrast to the novel, which has graphic content. As a result, the show is an intriguing confluence of adventure, romance, steampunk technology, and social commentary that is unique in contemporary storytelling and is certainly worth the journey.

Highlights:

• Quirky steampunk tech
• Interesting but underused characters
• An exploration of slavery and racism and self-determination through a PG lens

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

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.

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.

TV Review: Bet

A live-action version of the quirky anime

Gambling as a passion, an addiction, or as a means to an end is the theme for the new Netflix series Bet. Bet is a live-action version of the quirky anime Kakegurui, a story of an elite private school where intense gambling is encouraged and the results are dangerous and cruel. However, new arrival Yumeko is serenely and eerily comfortable with the wild atmosphere. She fearlessly engages with the most sadistic opponents while building a bewildered crew of friends who try to avoid becoming collateral damage. The original show is a psychological thriller—creepily intense and substantially deranged. The live-action adaptation has a similar vibe, especially initially, but eventually evolves into a traditional Mean Girls-style teen drama.

In Bet, Yumeko (Miku Martineau) is a new student at St. Dominic’s, an elite private school where wealthy families send their children to learn cutthroat leadership skills via nonstop gambling. Yumeko’s sweet and seemingly friendly nature stands out in sharp contrast to the other cynical students, who range from terrified or cautious to lethal and cruel. But beneath her charming exterior, Yumeko is also a fearless and consummate gambler. At St. Dominic’s the top winners financially earn a spot on the manipulative student council, while those with the highest losses and debts become degraded servants known as “house pets.” Shortly after arriving, Yumeko gains an ally in Ryan—Ryoko in the anime (Ayo Solanke), a house pet she is kind to and for whom she uses her gambling winnings to free from his bondage to the cynical and cruel Mary (Eve Edwards), who also becomes a reluctant ally and frenemy. However, in Bet, unlike the anime, Yumeko is more than a gambling addict: she is driven by revenge. Despite her talents, she is opposed by the colorful characters on the student council, including violent Dori (Aviva Mongillo), dramatic Suki (Ryan Sutherland), self-absorbed Chad (Dorian Giordano), mysterious Riri (Anwen O’Driscoll), and her sister, the dictatorial Kira (Clara Alexandrova), the president of the council. In her quest for revenge, Yumeko secretly enlists the help of a loner classmate, Michael (Hunter Cardinal), much to the dismay of the now lovesick Ryan. Michael becomes a confidant in Yumeko’s true strategy, even as his own motivations remain unclear.

Unfortunately, the story takes a turn, moving from a quirky, engaging character study to a straightforward assassination plot that feels strangely superficial and decidedly juvenile. As the series progresses, the plot requires a willing suspension of disbelief as the story drifts towards hijinks rather than more abstract psychological intrigue.

Recreating an anime for live action is always a challenge due to pressures of fan expectations, the difficulty of creating believable visuals in a real-life setting, and the challenges of executing an appropriate acting style. Bet does a nice job of capturing the essence of the original lead characters, including the confident and mysterious Yumeko, insecure but loyal Ryan (Ryoko in the anime), and cynical and pragmatic Mary. Miku Martineau’s Yumeko is particularly appealing with her thoughtful portrayal of a consummate manipulator. However, although the premise of Bet remains the same as Kakegurui, the plot has some significant changes. Michael is a new character who adds additional complications to the story. Yumeko is addicted to the rush and danger of gambling, but in Bet, she uses gambling as a specific tool for revenge for the murder of someone she loves. Having this new layer of motivation would normally be a great way to create more emotional investment and suspense, but the execution would have been better served by leaning into the subtlety and psychological thriller elements of the source material. Instead, the live-action version descends into direct and less suspenseful assassination attempts. The initial edginess of the show’s adult language and sexual inuendo is eventually undercut by the PG nature of the crimes that occur. Additionally, Kakegurui uses fantastical effects to explore the inner workings of the characters’ thoughts and their intensely passionate responses to risk. In Bet, this visual technique is mostly omitted, so the fantastical elements of the story are primarily displayed through the unusual character visuals.

Despite these changes, Bet is still a better adaptation of Kakegurui than prior versions. The acting and creative casting of Bet makes the series reasonably enjoyable. However, fans of Kakegurui will likely be disappointed by the shift from the edgy, disturbed, magical realism elements of the anime. Instead, we have an interesting premise that ultimately abandons psychological terror in favor of a more direct and traditional murder. By playing it safer with the writing, Bet ironically avoids the risk of telling an unusual story in an unusual way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Creepy academic setting
• Disappointing stylistic shift midseason
• Engaging characters

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

Film Review: Thunderbolts*

Who will gain the world, and who will lose their soul?

I think it is fair to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been flailing around since Endgame. The decade’s worth of intertwined storytelling across several film series culminated in a bang, and everything since then, entertaining as it may have been, has lacked a spine that made it satisfying, like before the big angry purple guy. In that regard, it’s like the Star Wars sequels in that it has been reasonably entertaining but lacking any real direction, any underlying idea that the whole enterprise was aiming towards, anything that it really wanted to say (the Star Wars prequels, for their myriad sins, certainly were saying something). As of May 2025 I am happy to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is slowly getting back on its feet with Thunderbolts*, directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo.

The film’s cast is primarily the dregs of previous movies and shows, side characters who had chips on their shoulders and had beef with the heroes in one way or another. In that subtle way, this movie flips the script of the previous movies, where the antiheroes are now, for better or worse, the heroes, and have to save the world because nobody with a purer heart is available at the moment. They are a rowdy, cantankerous bunch, most of whom have been working as contract killers on the behest of those with great ambitions and deep pockets. What holds for a lot of them, most cuttingly Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, is a profound sense of moral injury. As defined by the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

Pugh does an admirable job of depicting someone who is haunted by her own livelihood. She has killed, stealed, destroyed, in the name of her own survival. In a pivotal early scene, she asks her handler if, after this last job, she will get a more public-facing role where she gets to do things that are more obviously good. Her handler tells her ‘yes,’ but being in the beginning of the movie, this inevitably does not proceed as she would hope. Instead, she is forced to confront the monster she really served as it threatens, quite literally, to destroy her.

Such is the same with the other reluctant heroes. John Walker has much the same dilemma as Yelena, following from his actions in Captain America and the Winter Soldier, as does the Winter Soldier himself, now elected a member of the House of Representatives for a district in Brooklyn. More generally, these are workers in a bloody, violent line of work who have been alienated from their labor and are now reckoning with how that has ruined them psychologically, spiritually, and all too often physically.

All these characters have their foil in the film’s antagonist, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played with compelling coldness by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has been involved with the same world of espionage, subversion, and bloody murder that our heroes have been in, but unlike them, she has no symptoms of moral injury because she never had any morals to begin with. If there was ever a self in those eyes that cared for the world, for other people, it has long since been crushed under the treads of ambition and American policy.

(De Fontaine, as she quite loudly insists upon being called in a Congressional hearing in the film, is a personality I am far too familiar with. When I was in college, I knew a lot of people like her who have since gone into the Foreign Service or other wings of the American terror state. I used to be one of them; being from the DC area and growing up among its striving middle class, government service was the most admirable thing imaginable, the State Department and the Department of Defense and the armed forces most admirable of them all. They were the great bulwarks against the world’s barbarian hordes, the farmers who tilled the shining city on the hill. But in my reading of history, I read of how the Nixon Administration actively supported genocide in Bangladesh so that the Pakistanis would be an intermediary in the lead-up to his visit to China. I decided my morality would not let me work for such people. Gaza has, to my dismay, only proven me right).

De Fontaine is such a compelling character because she is the sort of person who runs the American terror state, the sort of person who can talk in the abstract morality common in American propaganda, and adept at contorting it to make murder sound respectable. In that regard, she resembles more the lackwits that surrounded Joe Biden as he let Gaza be razed to the ground. She is fluent in doublespeak, and in that regard I think she would be considered too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ‘woke’ for the new Trump administration. She, like Debora Lipstadt, would find surprising agreement with Trump in the abduction and disappearing of pro-Palestinian activists; she just wouldn’t like the fact that he was so gauche about it.

Completing the sturdy triangle of character that holds the movie up is Lewis Pullman, who plays this film’s version of Bob Reynolds, or Sentry. He is a young man with a life lacking much warmth and color, and as such ended up falling in with a government experimental program to produce a super soldier more powerful than even Captain America. He is a character that reminded me very much of Doctor Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, particularly one line said by Wally Weaver:

"I never said, 'The superman exists and he’s American.' What I said was 'God exists and he’s American.' If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments’ consideration, then don’t be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."

In this regard, Pullman’s Sentry is not in himself breaking new ground. What is new is how he reacts to becoming a godlike being: Doctor Manhattan saw his power, and the strings behind the puppet show of the universe, and saw that all was vanity; in doing so, he still comes off as someone who found a way to reckon with all that. Sentry, on the other hand, could not handle it, and had a psychological break. He is aimless, adrift, and not sure what he should do with his power. This makes him a prime target for radicalization by an unpleasant group, like a terrorist organization or criminal gang.

And, to be provocative, what more is the CIA than a particularly well-funded terrorist organization? Indeed, the entire apparatus of the American security state could be considered a terrorist organization, having been birthed to exterminate the indigenous and terrorize its Black population, and later turned those guns abroad. A good chunk of the movie is De Fontaine grooming Sentry into such a position, offering him compassion and community if he accepts the role of America’s ultimate weapon. As is common in this country, American national interest and common decency are conflated as the same thing, and he is pulled into the vortex where morality is sacrificed because it offers him purpose.

Much has been made of Sentry’s arc as a metaphor for depression or mental health struggles more broadly, and it is right in that regard. However, the criticism I have read has not gone the next logical step down that road, in terms of how those mental health issues can be exploited to advance evil goals. What De Fontaine does to Reynolds is straight out of the radicalization playbook, done by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS and state terrorist organizations like the CIA. She does it because she has the resources to fill a psychological need in Reynolds that broader society cannot; see how common similar messages are in military recruitment ads (such as “be all you can be,” originally from the 80s and recently resurrected) for a display thereof.

Much of the drama of the latter half of the film is on whether Bob Reynolds has enough of his basic human decency to stop what he is doing, placing him in between the namesake team, who have made that realization, and De Fontaine, who has denied it is even a question. There is another character that is interesting in that regard, and that is Mel, De Fontaine’s personal assistant, played with a certain bookish intensity by Geraldine Vinaswathan. She felt like someone who could have been in my very year in college, who grew up in the world I did, and idolized the abstract idea of service that I did, but took far too long to notice the morally compromised nature of the job. As the film goes on, she slowly comes to the realization that she has sold her soul to the devil, and then finds, first with trepidation and later with more intention, a way out of the bargain. She is a relatively minor presence, but the most familiar to me.

This is an aside, but it is interesting that this movie came out so close to another film about the morality of working for the CIA: The Amateur, directed by James Hawes and starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne. Malek plays a CIA operative whose wife is killed by what turns out to be a CIA operation’s collateral damage, and goes against both the killers and foes at the Agency to avenge her. Both films wrangle with how moral it is to work for such an organization; ultimately, The Amateur trusts the process enough to see ‘adults in the room’ set things right (after a lot of violence, of course); in Thunderbolts*, the process is revealed to be untrustworthy, and the adults in the room are the enemy. I am frankly surprised, in a positive way, that the big-budget superhero film is more radical than the smaller spy thriller.

I would go so far as to state that, in the right hands, Thunderbolts* can be as radical as Andor in taking aim at the oppressive structures that envelop us. The film takes time and pains to remind you that there is always a choice to either surrender to tyrants or to fight the evil before us in the name of common human decency. Still being a mainstream film, the ultimate conclusion involves a certain compromise, although a far more justified compromise than many similar films would advocate for. It is a film that is willing to look at what created the whirlwinds of danger that are raging around us, and gives you an honest answer. For that brutal honesty, as much as its thrills, it earns the title of best MCU movie since Endgame.

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

TV Review: The Eternaut

The end of the world feels different when it's the Third World that's affected

A pioneering work of Argentinean science fiction, The Eternaut is a serialized comic strip published during the late 1950s and endowed later with a prophetic aura when its author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, was kidnapped by his country's far-right dictatorship because of the political content of his stories and his participation in an armed resistance group linked to Liberation Theology. Just like what happened with his four daughters and sons-in-law, Oesterheld was never seen again. His legacy as a writer, however, has prevailed and risen to the status of legend.

After decades of frustrated attempts, The Eternaut has finally been given the live-action treatment, in the form of a Netflix series whose first season has just been released, while a second one is on its way. It tells the story of a group of middle-aged Porteños suddenly caught in the middle of an anomalous climatic event that, while devastating on its own, is only the prelude to a much bigger threat: an invasion of Earth by mind-controlling aliens. The source material also contains elements of time travel and multiverse travel, but the show's first season only gives very indirect hints of those plot points, preferring to start on a firm grounding by focusing the story on ordinary people's Herculean efforts to stay alive, stay together, and cling to hope.

Oesterheld wrote his masterpiece during the early period of the Cold War, when the terrifying prospect of nuclear fallout and nuclear winter was just entering the public consciousness, but his version of it is much more dramatic: the mysterious snowfall that opens the narration kills instantly with the slightest touch. That's the reason for the iconic image of the protagonist wearing a diving mask that used to appear on the covers of The Eternaut's collected editions. It's also an example of the story's aesthetic, distinguished by the creative use of common tools repurposed to deal with a world-ending catastrophe. The choice to follow characters with no specialized expertise or ties to the centers of power also sets The Eternaut apart from the tone that has become usual in the apocalypse disaster genre.

Because the process of adaptation inevitably recontextualizes every story, the TV version of The Eternaut doesn't evoke the fears associated with the Atomic Age that were so relevant to the comic's first readers. Instead, the imagery of snow in the middle of summer brings to mind the nightmare predictions about global climate change; the dread of stepping outside, the masses of dead bodies and the ubiquitousness of protective gear dig into the unhealed wounds we still carry from the coronavirus quarantine; and the scenes of social disintegration and the downfall of modern civilization carry painful echoes from the violent protests that shook Argentina as a result of the collapse of its economy at the turn of the century.

Maybe the choice to postpone all the time travel and multiverse travel until a later season was made to carefully steer the show's reception by today's viewers, who are yet to recover from Marvel exhaustion. This frees up much-needed space for the story to explore its large cast, which the production team has described as a collective hero as opposed to Hollywood's individualist bent. Much of the runtime is used in portraying the complicated evolution of personal relationships put under a strain that no amount of decades of closeness can prepare anyone for. Lifelong friendships are tested by the primal struggle for survival, and viewers can identify moments in the story when a survival strategy based on competition is pitted against one based on cooperation. Some pillage and some share; some swindle and some trust; some would sacrifice others for any reason and some would sacrifice anything for others. It's a truism of scriptwriting that true character is revealed at moments of crisis; in The Eternaut, a persistent state of crisis spreads everywhere and in doing so lays bare the spirit of a whole community.

Also, the tension is skillfully handled with a steady series of escalations: at first, the characters' sense of urgency is about staying indoors and not touching the deadly snow; next, about finding survivors without attracting the notice of hostile neighbors; next, about avoiding capture by the alien monsters that overrun the city; and finally, about thwarting the mind control conspiracy that might bring about the defeat of humankind. For us watching in Latin America, it's an added bonus that the action involves characters whose outlook on life and sensibilities are closer to ours. We've always watched the end of the world happen in New York or London, and such locations may as well be Mars to us. Bringing The Eternaut to worldwide streaming is one more step in the march of the ongoing Rainbow Age of science fiction, one of whose main features is what I like to call opening up the future to the rest of the planet. It's no small thing that this time, for a change, the heroes defending Earth speak Spanish and listen to tango.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: The Electric State

It's almost admirable how completely this film wastes a great concept

In an alternate 1990s, after an almost-successful robot rebellion was crushed with the last-minute help of human-operated telepresence drones, the defeated robots have been exiled to a huge secluded area in the southwestern US, and it's declared illegal for robots to be anywhere else. For some unexplained reason, this blatant act of forced displacement is called a peace treaty. Anyway, the plot proper begins when a runaway robot sneaks into a teenage girl's house and claims to be remotely operated by the little brother she thought had died years before. So she runs away with the robot, since she doesn't like her foster family anyway, and teams up with a smuggler who can get her into the zone where the surviving robots are confined, because that's where her brother's body is being kept. During this rescue mission, they uncover the evil secrets of the company that provides the world with telepresence drones, and create a new state of affairs where robots have a better chance of being free.

This rather average-sounding summary doesn't do justice to how aggressively generic the new Netflix film The Electric State is. Its cardboard characterizations, absolutely predictable beats, self-sabotaging style of humor, uninspired action sequences, unforgivably misjudged casting, overwritten dialogues, and toothless politics would suffice to render it just another forgettably mediocre Netflix production. What sets this disappointing exhibit of laziness apart is the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of the far more interesting illustrated novel of the same title published in 2018 by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. While the Netflix version goes out of its way to sand down its own themes and confine itself to family-friendly palatability, the source material was a scathing portrait of American modern vices: ubiquitous advertisements, irrational consumerism, and self-absorbed numbness. None of that commentary survives the adaptation process, because God forbid a Russo brothers character feel a true emotion or express a controversial viewpoint. The version of The Electric State they deliver is an empty carcass painted over with a cartoon smile.

Instead of its paint-by-numbers attempts at comedy or pathos, what actually reaches into the viewer's soul about this film is the unbelievably expert degree to which it avoids sparking any interest or empathy. Its happy scenes feel bland, its sad scenes come off as glib, its surprises are derivative, its scary bits are more deserving of embarrassment, and its appeal to righteous indignation doesn't know which value to care about. It's as if the Russo brothers had deliberately designed an experiment to craft a film that leaves every human emotion untouched. It doesn't even manage to provoke a memorable negative reaction: it should be boring, but it's too absurd for that; so it should be irritating, but it's too insecure for that; so it should be tiresome, but it's too scattershot for that; so it should be confusing, but it's too preachy for that; so it should be offensive, but it's too insincere for that. This production so fundamentally misunderstands what makes movies work that it may as well have been made by its robot characters.

To mention just one of many missed opportunities: in 2005's The Island, a universally and justly disliked movie, the villain has a henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, until the henchman has a moment of reflection and realizes that he, as a Black man, has a common cause with the targets he's chasing. He rebels against the villain explicitly because he knows what happens when a category of people is treated as less than people. As it happens, The Electric State also has a Black henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, and he also ends up rebelling against the villain, but somehow the movie never makes the obvious connection. The reason given for this plot point is the least imaginative possible. It should be cause for alarm for any movie that The Island has a clearer sense of its own stance than you.

Even with the mangled plot that was used instead of the original, The Electric State could have made urgently relevant points about the evils of inventing separate categories of personhood, the possibilities of resistance under total oppression, the temptation to replace the harshness of real life with a soothing fantasy, or the danger of inputting profit and human life in the same equation. This could have been a strong story, both by its own merits and in relation to our times. But perhaps it's an even more telling reflection of our times that the duo of the most successful directors in the history of cinema have settled for building the appearance, rather than the intention, of having something to say.

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Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Film Review: Mickey 17

The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility

I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.

In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.

This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.

Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.

Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.

(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)

When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.

So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.

That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.

At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Captain America: Brave New World

Neither brave enough nor new enough

There has always been a tension in how a particular sort of liberal-leaning-leftist viewer has perceived the character of Captain America (and I absolutely include myself in that qualification). As an American, particularly a Filipino-American, there is a part of me that has been seduced by America’s self-flattering myths, and perhaps worse, wants to be seduced. As stirring old Red Army marching songs make you want to believe in the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union and forget about the Holodomor and the Rape of Berlin (I’m reminded of what Joseph Goebbels said about Battleship Potemkin: “anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film”), the best Captain America media makes you want to believe in the old pablum about the land of the free and the home of the brave, and forget about the carnage in Gaza. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers certainly made you want to salute Old Glory, to believe in white America’s view of itself. He (Evans and Rogers both) is what the twentieth century would have called “All-American”—white, blonde, and wholesome. In the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney made Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, which attracted aplomb and controversy as he is Black. Mackie and Wilson get their first spin at the role on the big screen in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World.

This is a movie that, for better or worse, has a very defined place within the broader mythos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen people frustrated that it is in some ways a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the only time Edward Norton ever played that role. It is a film I confess to have enjoyed. The ties to that film are made very clear by virtue of the very important role of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, now played by Harrison Ford in his gruff twenty-first-century demeanor. The thematic thread that connects this film and the Hulk film is that they are focused more than other MCU entries on the interaction between superheroes and the United States government. The film uses some of these connections in smart ways, but those who wanted a broader political statement will see any such statement hampered by the politics of the plot, and the politics of The Walt Disney Company.

It is Ford’s President Ross around which so much of the film’s themes rotate. He has served in a number of incidents involving superheroes and their adversaries, and he has parlayed that into a successful presidential run. As you would expect, he has skeletons in his closet that come into play over the course of the story, all running through high-level politics. He is a geopolitical hawk and a loud personality, reminiscent of a certain current occupant of the Oval Office, but compared to that one, Ross is so lucid I would pick him in a heartbeat. The film portrays him as a deeply flawed, ambitious man, obviously a climber. But it also gives him a moral core, a certain sense of decency, that he can act on when prompted enough, especially by Sam Wilson. It is there that the film becomes divisive.

Walking out of the theater and later discussing it with a friend as I drove him to a board game night, I concluded that Captain America: Brave New World is an enjoyable enough supervillain film whose politics I disagree with; my friend said that is what he expects of MCU movies, and I can’t really disagree with him. I like Sam Wilson in this role as a patriotic hero, and Ford is good as Ross. The action is well done, with appropriate weight given to punches, and there is a very good scene involving fighter jets. None of those are really the issues I have with this film. The issues come from the fact that I studied international relations in college with plans to join the US Foreign Service, until I read about the Nixon Administration’s support of the Bangladeshi Genocide so that it could keep Pakistan as an intermediary during the leadup to Nixon’s visit to China, was terrified at the prospect of becoming another Archer Blood, and then decided I couldn’t morally accept such employment.

I think this is a good time to note the presence of Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Shira Haas, who has been the subject of some internet controversy. The character Ruth Bat-Seraph is a form of the comic character Sabra, who in-universe is Israeli, as is her actress. The name ‘Sabra’ refers to a prickly pear native to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, often used as an affectionately jocular autonym referring to how Israelis are said to be prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Certain groups on the internet find her name deeply offensive, as Sabra is also the name of one of the refugee camps (along with Shatila, which is commonly mentioned in tandem) in Lebanon, where Israeli-backed Maronite militias slaughtered innocent Palestinians and Lebanese Shias (a fact that directly preceded the founding of Hezbollah) during the Israeli invasion of that country in the ’80s. The character was created two years before the massacre, so I am confident that the name is a coincidence. Its actual portrayal in the film is rather bland, frankly; anything of real interest, including the name ‘Sabra,’ is hacked off in an attempt to dodge controversy in light of the Palestinian Genocide; she is mentioned to have been born in Israel in a way that perhaps vaguely refers to the Mossad’s reputation, but I can’t really detect any commentary beyond that. I don’t view the presence of an Israeli character in itself to be offensive (much as I don’t find the presence of a Russian character, vis-à-vis the invasion of Ukraine, to be offensive in itself), but I have seen her presence brought up in broader (legitimate) critiques of how Disney relates to the Israeli government. All told, the whole thing has amounted to a tempest in a teapot.

The case of Ruth Bat-Seraph is emblematic of a broader problem with the film, going right down to its foundations. The whole plot is framed as a single bad actor within the US government exploiting the weakness of a flawed politician who nevertheless has some decency. There is never, at any point, an attempt to interrogate the structures of the American government that could make any of this story, any of these deceptions and deaths, possible. The film comes closest through the abandoned super soldier Isaiah Bradley, played by Carl Lumby and imported from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it never goes as far as it really ought to have. Such a critique would have been extremely relevant given the American-backed razing of Gaza, but there is absolutely no engagement as to why this country, founded on slavery and genocide, feels entitled to bestride the world as a colossus, murdering tens of millions without accountability. There is no attempt to see how this corrodes a nation’s morality. The first sequence of the movie is set in Mexico, and another is set in the Indian Ocean. The film is just close enough to realizing that corrosion, as Aimé Césaire so boldly put it in 1950’s Discourse on Colonialism, but the film is simply not brave enough.

That is really the core issue with the film: it is not brave enough (ironic, given its literal title), and it really doesn’t bother being new enough either. By the end of watching it, you will have spent roughly a hundred minutes with a reasonably entertaining superhero movie, which is about what I expected. The problem, ultimately, is that this movie was exactly what we expected it to be, and nothing more.

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Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Review: The Monkey

A darkly funny adaptation of the classic Stephen King short story about a demonic toy—from the director who you brought you Longlegs

One of the all-time classic horror tropes is haunted or cursed objects—from the classic 1902 short story The Monkey's Paw to my personal favorite as a child, R.L. Stine's Goosebumps classic Say Cheese and Die.

Osgood Perkins, fresh off of last year's delightfully disturbing Longlegs, is trying his hand at the cursed object trope, and has adapted The Monkey, a classic Stephen King short story about a cymbal-clanging, demonic toy monkey that brings death wherever it goes.

His take on it, however, is less foreboding and more darkly absurd—and at times rip-roaringly funny. I say this, of course, as a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan, so I realize my gallows-humor take may not be representative of the average person. I laughed A LOT throughout its tight hour-and-a-half runtime, as did most of the audience on the sneak-preview Thursday night pre-premiere showing in Atlanta.

The Monkey is not like Annabelle, which offers a different take on an evil toy, and instead is more akin to the entries in the Final Destination franchise with its shockingly horrific deaths. The story centers on two twin brothers who experience a lifetime of tragically random deaths because of the monkey's presence. Whenever its key gets wound up, within a matter of hours someone close to it will die—horribly, grotesquely, and painfully. There's not too much plot to speak of, mostly just our hero trying to stop people from turning said key.

The pleasure in watching comes from the shocking kill scenes, which are extremely creative and a master class in depicting truly messed-up ways to perish. It's gory, but in an over-the-top sort of way, like the final fight scene in Kill Bill Volume One. I never squirmed or got grossed out, and if you need recent comparison, it's got maybe 5% of the gore of The Substance, which is nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Do with this information what you will.

Overall, it's a fun ride that scratches the itch of missing spooky season. I always love a good trip up to Maine in a Stephen King adaptation, and the set and production design is fantastic. There's also some great cameos—we get brief comedic performances from Adam Scott, Elijah Wood, and Tatiana Maslany. The tone may not work for a lot of people, but folks who like their horror with their tongue planted firmly in cheek will enjoy it.

Baseline Score: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Dog Man

Let's pretend the unsanctioned decapitation didn't matter, and let's have a deep conversation about parenthood and growth

First, a confession: it's been a long time since I've tried a story targeted specifically at very small children. I'd forgotten the tons of suspension of disbelief required to simply sit and enjoy the mayhem. But apparently, from what I can gather, there's been some great storytelling going on in that area, with the likes of Peppa Pig and Bluey straddling the line between wholesome and topical, and even commentators finding fuel for discussion in the politics of Paw Patrol. So I guess I should start paying more attention to that segment of SFF.

Another confession: what drew me to the new DreamWorks animated film Dog Man wasn't this realization of a gap in my screen watching record, but simple morbid curiosity for how a production for kids was going to handle its spectacularly gruesome premise: the titular hero is a Frankenstein-ish monstrosity built by sewing the head of an almost-dead dog onto the body of a (now most definitely) dead man. Dr. Vladimir Demikhov would be proud. Because this is a fun adventure in bright colors, the movie cheerfully brushes away the obvious questions about animal cruelty or the fact that a man has been decapitated to create this abomination. Look, a dog walking on two legs!

Following the long and rather strange tradition of severely injured characters technomagically transformed into obligate crimefighters (think of The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop, Inspector Gadget, M.A.N.T.I.S., Max Steel, or Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex games), Dog Man promptly resumes the frenzied chase for an evil cat called Petey, whose crime is... getting revenge on Dog Man, I guess? We aren't told what was the original misdeed that kickstarted this cycle of dramatic arrests and creative prison escapes, but the sequence is undeniably funny.

(Also, let the record show that I protest this slander against cats.)

This first part of the movie goes like a breeze and helps the viewer get used to the lightning pace of the story. Not only are we treated to a beautiful picture-book art style, with clouds that look like crayon scribbles and canine howls that visually reach from one scene to the next; we're asked to switch off our brains and delight in the rapid succession of cuteness and absurdity and pathos and newfound joy.

Petey the cat only changes tactics when he runs out of ideas for increasingly wackier doomsday machines (I am impressed by his seemingly infinite R&D budget), and when he tries to create a duplicate of himself, he ends up with a child duplicate of himself. And that's when the actual theme of the movie is presented to us. This is more than a slapstick series of loud, splashy cartoonish antics. If it were only that, it already does it pretty well. But what Dog Man is actually about is the question of inborn tendencies vs. conscious choice.

Little Petey is sweet, friendly, optimistic, and without one drop of cynicism. He can see the best side of the worst people. Adult Petey, the typical jaded edgelord, wants to teach him that life is the opposite of that. But after a messy series of mishaps, Little Petey gets the chance to spend some days living with Dog Man. And Dog Man is going through the same identity crisis: does he want to be a policeman with serious obligations, as his human part, or a fun-seeking dog, as his other part? His canine instincts have already interfered with his duties too many times by now, but he doesn't know what other job to do.

I find it reassuring that Dog Man acknowledges the difficulty of this question. It even introduces a quick subplot about adult Petey's father that helps the young audience get a sense of how learned mistakes can be perpetuated across generations. Evil, as the plot demonstrates, is more a matter of actions than one of immutable nature. So is love. That's a precious message to present to the children who will be too amused by the endless gags to notice upon first watching. But a few years from now, when they want to revisit the immensely entertaining experience that was Dog Man, they'll find the strong heart that was beating at the center of it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Dune Prophecy

We travel back in time 10,000 years before the Kwisatz Haderach to learn about the origins of what would become the Bene Gesserit—and get Game of Thrones-level chicanery and angling. (Spoiler-free)

In both Denis Villeneuve's and David Lynch's film versions of Dune, we get fleeting glimpses of the witchlike Bene Gesserit. We can see that these dark-clad, mysterious women are controlling the puppet strings of emperors and the great houses, but we don't real insight into their machinations.

An origin story focusing on why, and how, they came to be is the focus of Max's new series Dune Prophecy, which is set about a century after the Butlerian Jihad in which humans defeated thinking machines and banned AI technology. The planet Wallach IX is home to the Sisterhood's school, where women are trained in truthsayers to serve the great houses of the Imperium.

The show centers on Valya Harkonnen, the Reverend Mother of the Sisterhood. Played immaculately by Emily Wilson, she is ambitious, conniving, and Machiavellian in her approach to not only extending the influence of the Sisterhood but also in taking personal revenge against House Atreides, whom she blames for her family's fall from grace and exile.

When a Sisterhood-arranged marriage between the emperor and a great house falls apart due to treachery, chaos threatens the order, resulting in a series of plots, subplots, and flashbacks concerning Valya and Tula. It all gets very confusing—not unlike watching Game of Thrones for the first time—and Max very clearly is trying to launch this as the next Game of Thrones (despite already having one in the form of House of the Dragon).

What I love most about this show is how the Sisterhood is portrayed like the Jedi Order in the prequel Star Wars movies, and it's made me think more critically about both. This description, for example, can literally apply to either: "A quasi-religious organization with no external oversight that puts members of its order in positions of great power throughout the galaxy."

To be clear, I still think that the both the Jedi and Bene Gesserit are awesome, but it'd be naive to think that they're unproblematic. Modern storytelling has gotten really good about morally gray characters—the days of Pure Good Guy (Batman) vs. Pure Bad Guy (Joker) are long gone, and in their stead are the Jamie Lannisters, Walter Whites, and Omar Littles of the world.

As we learn more about the Sisterhood, we see that they are engaged in galaxy-ranging eugenics (I'm calling it as I see with their breeding program), covert political manipulation, and, sometimes even murder. This, of course, doesn't mean I won't root for these space witches, but it is something to think about. Truly good characters are boring, as we have learned from prestige TV over the years.

In terms of look and feel, it's no Villeneuve Dune—but the sets and product design feel futuristic enough that it's not a distraction. There's a scene in episode 6 where we finally see space folding around a heighliner for the first time and it's absolutely incredible. The only scenes where I'm taken out of the universe are the ones set in the bar/nightclub. It feels chintzy and like something out a Syfy original movie from the '90s.

The pacing is a bit hit-or-miss (I had to rewatch the first episode twice to really get into it because it's so exposition-heavy), but each successive episode picks up steam and gets you more invested. Overall, though, it's an enjoyable watch and a different take on Dune for those who, like me, have read one Dune book and really enjoyed the movies, but aren't as well versed in all the lore from Frank Herbert's other books. Hell, I'm now inspired to pick up Dune Messiah.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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