Manga Review: Before You Go Extinct

An incisive, heartfelt plea for the worth of useless actions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

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

Microreview: The Last Movie Ever Made

At the end of the world, art may not save us, but it will prove that our lives meant something

One morning, every human being on the planet hears a voice in their head. It's not a hallucination: it's a public service announcement. The simulation that hosts our universe will be shut down in a few weeks. Be sure to say your goodbyes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

To prevent mass chaos, the people running the simulation have dialed down our rebelliousness. They want none of that rage against the machine, thank you very much. We're expected to just go gentle into the night.

And yet, one man will spend his last days ensuring that his brief stay among the living will leave a mark. Our protagonist, Marshall, is a complete nobody. But in the face of eternal oblivion, that's what we all are. Regardless of his complete lack of talent, friends, or any redeeming qualities, he will stop at nothing to finally make the movie he left unfinished years ago. It's not a good movie, not even a good concept. But it's his movie. That it matters to him is enough. That hopeless scream against the void is the premise of the indie film The Last Movie Ever Made.

Now, to be clear, the fact that you're making sincere art doesn't automatically mark you as a good person. Marshall has learned the same narcissism he criticizes in his mother, and the way he gathers his moviemaking crew exposes the faults of character that have left his life stranded and directionless. He does acquire a more mature perspective about himself during the runtime of the film, but it's still an indictment of his person that it took the end of the world for him to begin that process.

Art is meant to be useless, if you go by Oscar Wilde's word. Nothing will change because of Marshall's movie existing. It won't convince the makers of the simulation to keep us alive. It won't buy our reality even one more day. When everything ends, so will art. So why bother?

The Last Movie Ever Made rejects that question. Its position is that it's precisely because we are limited and ephemeral that art is worth the effort. In fact, our finitude is what makes art valuable. It doesn't even matter that the beauty we create is doomed to fade away. It suffices to elevate the universe, to be a place where beauty once existed, as opposed to one that never had it.

It's a pity that the script doesn't maintain a firmer grasp of its own theme. The character of Marshall lacks consistency from one act to the next because the plot requires his immediate world to warp itself around his goals: one day, his ex-wife is angry at him for caring more about finishing his movie than about her recent family tragedy; a few days later, she happily stays for his sake and dismisses whatever her family supposedly meant to her. This muddles the film's earlier point about the lines that Marshall has crossed for his art. It's as if the fact that everyone will soon die rendered moot any consequences for repeated misbehavior on Marshall's part.

The film is made with almost the same simplicity with which Marshall makes his. The characters' situation already carries enough emotion without any need to punctuate it with fancy camera tricks, digital effects, or even a relevant soundtrack. This is a bare-bones production whose only ambition is to say what it means, and it succeeds at that.

In a possible parallel with the larger premise about a computer program coming to an end, the film's third act begins when Marshall's computer crashes and most of the scenes he's shot are lost. At that point in the story, it appears that his entire life's work has been for nothing. Even if he were to start again, he may not have enough time before the universe is shut down. There you have the human condition in a nutshell: We never know whether it makes sense to try, because none of us is promised there will be enough time.

So what does Marshall do? He tries again. Of course he tries again. Because that's what humans do when confronted with the absurd. Because, although no human effort can destroy death, art is the one human effort that death can't destroy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: Harold and the Purple Crayon

A character who can create anything goes in search of his creator

Think of the character Harold in Stranger than Fiction, who learns his life has a narrator, and is desperate to go on living. Think of the character Augusto in Miguel de Unamuno's 1914 novel Mist, who learns that his life has a narrator, and is desperate to not go on living. Think of Daffy Duck in the short Duck Amuck, shocked at the revelation that an artist armed with a pencil can freely create or destroy his existence.

But also: think of the NPC Guy in the film Free Guy, who learns that his life is scripted by computer code, and decides to seize independence. Think of Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, who learns that his face and his voice belong to an actor, and decides to fulfill his mission no matter what. Think of Douglas in the film The Thirteenth Floor, who learns that his life is a digital simulation, and decides to go out into the real world. Think of Giselle in Enchanted, thrown out of a fairy tale into the endless whirlwind of modern urban life, and decides to search for happiness.

But also: think of Akira Kurosawa turning Van Gogh's paintings into whole worlds to get lost in. Think of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel that becomes real and traversable. Think of Cursor in Automan, able to create any object by drawing its outline. Think of Sphere and the cursed power to make imagination real.

Breaks in the boundary between fiction and reality have a long tradition going from Pygmalion and Galatea to Deadpool and She-Hulk. The classic children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson is, like The Thirteenth Floor and Wile E. Coyote, a two-layered instance: it shows a drawn child who is able to draw things into existence. Its recently released film adaptation adds one more level: the child, now grown up, reasons that, if he can interact with the things he draws, he should be able to interact with the one who drew him. What ensues is an understated but deep exploration of the possibilities of fantasy.

In the movie, soon after Harold emerges from the world of the book into the real world, he runs into an aspiring fantasy writer whose style is the polar opposite of Harold's. Harold comes from a cute, whimsical picture book meant to inspire little kids. His nemesis in the film writes edgy grimdark with world-shattering weapons and unpronounceable names. In a literal case of the pen being mightier than the sword, Harold's sweet imagination proves capable of defeating the most twisted creations of a would-be tyrant sorcerer.

The genius part of the movie, however, isn't even in this unsubtle commentary on fantasy subgenres: it's in Harold's quest to meet his author. As it happens, Crockett Johnson has passed away. At first, this news leaves Harold feeling without purpose or direction. But he eventually learns that he doesn't need a creator when he has his own power of creation. In other words, the movie is presenting us with the provocative argument that to live under existentialism is basically to apply Death of the Author to reality. You are your own giver of meaning and your own interpreter.

Harold and the Purple Crayon coats these philosophical insights under shiny layers of common slapstick and fish-out-of-water misunderstandings. But even allowing for the contrivances of a fantasy for kids, this one is so full of them that one is tempted to suspect that the movie is deliberately drawing attention to the fictional quality of its setting, a version of Providence RI that seems to consist of just half a dozen blocks, judging by how frequently the characters run into each other when it's convenient for the plot. More care is employed in handling the parallel between Harold's sense of cosmic abandonment and his human friend's grief over his dead father. It's not only picture book characters who need to learn how to live by their own guidance.

It's a fortunate authorial choice to keep the plot at the right scale for human-sized drama. Other authors might have made Harold's all-powerful crayon end up in the hands of military tech researchers or something like that. It's a mistake that can happen in live-action adaptations. Instead, to stage the climactic conflict between tonally incompatible versions of fantasy keeps the ideas of the film at the right level of abstraction. It's not about what you'd do if you had a magical item that could create anything. It's what you'd do if you removed the restraints of your imagination. Some come up with gritty worlds of endless battle and hypermuscular champions. Others think beyond those limitations and come up with purple ice cream. I know which one I prefer.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

On the bittersweet sincerity of Carol & the End of the World

Yes, yes, we know, the world is ending, but do you really need that bucket list?

In the world where Carol Kohl lives, the days of humankind are numbered. A rogue planet will crash against Earth in just a few months, and there's no way to avoid it. Governments have collapsed; money has lost all meaning; shops and streets have become lawless playgrounds; and everyone is frantically squeezing all the excitement they can get out of their precious last months.

Everyone except mild-mannered, gentle Carol. If you ask her what she wants to do with the quickly shortening rest of her life, she'll have a hard time deciding what to say. While her parents are out on a cruise ship with their new lover, her school friends are going on spiritual self-discovery adventures, and her sister paraglides across the world, Carol would rather just sit at a cafeteria and have a relaxed evening. She has no stomach for wild parties or car races or last-second impulse tattoos. That whole "seize the day" ethos ends up seizing too much of you. Yes, life is short and we only get one, but what's the rush? You may call Carol depressed, but isn't it a sign of a deeper malaise to be constantly in a state of pursuing the next exhilarating, unforgettable thrill?

However, even Carol eventually finds her bliss, and it's hidden in what is apparently the only company still in operation. Every morning, she puts on her business suit, drives through the noise of improvised concerts and public orgies, under the ever-growing silhouette of the approaching planet that will put an end to everything, and sits at a desk to look at a computer screen and type numbers. What does the company sell? It doesn't matter. It's not the result that motivates her to get out of bed. It's the safety of the familiar. It's the distraction from the imminence of death.

Carol & the End of the World weaves the most caustic nihilism with a deep compassion in an unlikely mix of emotional punches that hit hard, but never low. If, as the scriptwriting manuals say, true character is manifested at times of crisis, this animated limited series pushes its characters to the ultimate stress point and forces them to disclose their sincerest selves. But Carol doesn't even need to be at the top of the world to show us who she is. We hear all the time of people who go windsurfing and mountaineering and backpacking in search of awesome, but what of those who are satisfied with nice? What right does the adrenaline junkie have to pity the tranquil?

The treatment of characters in Carol & the End of the World is a difficult needle to thread: the script is funny enough to let us see them at their limit, but aware enough to not fall into mockery. We're meant to laugh at the absurdity of mortality, but not at these characters who are doing their best to keep their head in one piece while civilization falls irreversibly apart. It's as if the plot of Don't Look Up happened to the cast of Please Like Me. It's simultaneously hilarious and painful and ridiculous and poignant and impossible and true. It's beautiful.

Of the works of science fiction that delve into social commentary, the best are those that describe the real, everyday world at just the right distance to expose the strange bits we haven't noticed. Yes, this life is indeed very weird. We're not all that different from the inhabitants of Carol's world; the only change is that their memento mori is plain to see, a huge ball of rock hanging in the sky. So the question that this show is asking us to consider is not "What if we had a permanent reminder of our mortality?" No, that's already the world we live in. We already know our time is finite, and we're bombarded with exhortations to make the most of it.

Nor is the question "If we know for a fact that we're going to die, why hasn't our society blown up like this?" No, it's not that, because, again, that's already the society we have. We're awash in the cultural messages that warn against regret and urge us to collect souvenirs of what this world has to offer. Every bookstore has its version of "1001 dishes/museums/singers/beaches/cocktails you have to try before you die." But do we have to, if we're being honest? Why treat life as a scavenger hunt game where you're counted as a loser until you've done it all? What's so wrong with wanting little?

Despite Carol's quiet contentment at finding a thing to do with her final days, the office atmosphere can still use some improvement. And here is where Carol shines: what she brings to work is a dose of much-needed human connection. Keeping your mind distracted from the ever-present horror of death won't do the trick; you need others to endure it with.

Which is basically what life in this world of ours feels like. It doesn't matter if you suspect everyone else is having more fun than you. It doesn't even matter if they truly are. Sometimes sitting on a park bench and having a soda with a stranger is enough. Sometimes late night TV is enough. It's all going to vanish in the end anyway. Faced with the approaching shadow of eternal oblivion, the fact that there's a you at all is enough.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Trite Planet

Sometimes what works in one medium doesn't translate well

With the webcomic Strange Planet, first published on Instagram and then in book format, cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle has become the rare success story where a comedian has proved able to sustain a career based on knowing exactly one joke. His featureless blue aliens lead entirely ordinary lives, doing the same things humans do, but speaking with a degree of technical precision that exposes how abnormal our assumptions of normality truly are. Pyle has discovered how to milk the same gimmick a million times, creating a surprisingly caustic style of humor clothed in pastel. From innocent slice-of-life scenarios, Strange Planet can go into some really dark insights, a remarkable feat of tonal balancing without which it wouldn't have become so explosively popular.

The Sisyphean frustrations of parenthood, the masochism of gyms, the self-inflicted heartbreak of fandom, the paradox of sad music, the lovable chaos of pets, the inevitability of aging, the nonsense of social niceties—through Pyle's lens, human existence ought to look alien to ourselves. We do have bizarre customs we rarely pause to question. Strange Planet bites gently, extending us genuine empathy for the many ways we've made our world needlessly complicated.

This year, Strange Planet has been adapted into an AppleTV+ series, and the translation from comic strips to animated episodes has not done it any favors. The first shock to the viewer is the selection of voices for the blue aliens. A crucial ingredient in the Strange Planet recipe of humor is the distancing effect of watching nonhumans perform and judge human actions. They look alien, and when you read the comic, they (presumably) sound alien in your head. But the animated series gives them normal human voices (sometimes too normal), which deflates a huge part of the punch of the jokes.

Another self-sabotaging choice is to eschew the comic's tried-and-true observational style of comedy and adopt instead a blandly wholesome, almost didactic tone, with every episode imparting a life lesson of profound significance to the characters, who never have worries beyond those of comfortable middle-class urbanites. The only dramatic ingredient that opposes their desires is their own limited perspective. This is not a self-contained environment like Sesame Street; this is presented as an entire society in all its complexity, yet no one harbors any malice, no one is hostile, no one knows hate. Strange Planet uses the aesthetic presentation of a children's show to speak to an adult audience. Imagine the world of The Invention of Lying populated entirely by clones of Mr. Rogers.

In these confusing times of meta-post-irony, more sincerity is always welcome, but this series has zero subtext. There's nothing to interpret. If you've ever read a writing guide warning you to not make your characters always spell out what they're feeling, Strange Planet is the demonstration of why that advice exists. By tuning the characters' emotional openness up to eleven, Strange Planet (the show) loses the ironic spice that makes Strange Planet (the webcomic) unique. Since the moment he posted his first blue alien jokes in 2019, what Pyle has been doing, intentionally or not, is to gradually codify a highly specialized language that only makes full sense when parsed in contrast with the readers' ordinary language. When his comic calls a suntan "star damage," it is funny because, in order to decode that unusual phrasing, we're forced to acknowledge an inconsistency in our own preferences. But when the animated series presents an entire civilization that routinely calls a suntan "star damage" as an accepted fact of life, the joke lands dead on arrival.

This happens because, in the adaptation, the language is no longer the joke. The characters have gained backstories and motivations beyond the snippets we get in the comic. With those extra layers of dimensionality, the peculiar way they speak becomes the least interesting thing about them. Now they have jobs, and neighbors, and chores, and marriages. They're no longer generic abstractions of the human experience; now they're particular individuals.

It's a substantial change, but it's a requirement of the television medium; the alternative, if a more faithful adaptation had been the goal, was to plan each episode as a half-hour anthology of sketches, and that would have quickly gotten tiresome for both the writers and the viewers. The aliens' function in the story is no longer that of cerebral overanalyzers of human activities; now their function is to be relatable stand-ins for the viewers. The Strange Planet comic strips work best when we're supposed to laugh at the blue aliens. The problem with the show is that it wants us to laugh with them. They have difficulties! They're just like us! And that's what ruins the joke.

Once the blue aliens are full characters with plot arcs, the viewers form certain expectations of resolution, and the show commits yet another mistake on that front: every single episode has exactly the same emotional journey. Plot A and Plot B are so prominently delineated that they become a predictable element of the show, distracting from whichever of the two is being told at the moment. In both plots, someone is struggling with a source of anxiety, they explore why their usual coping strategies don't work, they gain an unexpected insight from a different angle, and they go on with their lives with no further conflict. What tries to be a sweet character beat comes off as reheated melodrama; what is intended as a life-changing realization feels like a Hallmark Channel platitude.

I'm not saying that it's pointless to attempt to make comforting comedy; at least it's not always artistically pointless, and it's definitely never ethically pointless. This decade has been kicking us with punishment after punishment; no wonder the mood of this generation is a state of perpetual exhaustion. One notable response of today's art to a world that is crumbling down is to give us a breather, to serve us hot cocoa and cookies, because life is just too much. And Instagram webcomics have risen to the occasion; just look at the pure gentleness in Mrs. Frollein, Dinosaur Couch, Wawawiwa, or Sarah Andersen. But Pyle overestimated how compatible his creation would be with a cozycore aesthetic, and how much adult viewers needed to hear the most condescendingly basic pop psychology advice.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Futurama is back, as sharp as ever

The world of the 31st century feels even closer to ours

Depending on how you keep count, this is season 8 or 11 of Futurama. After being killed and revived twice, it makes sense that this time the series has some things to say about the state of television, corporate whims, and the meaning (of lack thereof) of death.

For example, episode 1, "The Impossible Stream," makes fun of streaming media and the trend of show revivals. Note how trivial it is to bring Calculon back from robot hell and how Bender shrugs off the death of a TV director, while Fry briefly appears to have died, just to show up unharmed. There's a theme being built towards, but it's not evident in the first viewing.

Episode 2, "Children of a Lesser Bog," resumes the hanging thread of the tadpoles spawned by Kif back in season 4. The bulk of the plot deals with the usual antics of new parenthood, plus a brief legal drama with a disappointingly deflated resolution, but there's also a point at the beginning where Kif's hundreds of tadpoles are eaten by various swamp predators until only three survive. This incident is portrayed as normal in Kif's culture, but one has to wonder about a civilization where this degree of child mortality is acceptable. Again, this is all part of an overarching theme. Earlier in the same episode, Kif intentionally lets a man die as part of a rescue mission.

Episode 3, "How the West Was 1010001," is all about the Bitcoin fad. This one must have been easy to write; Bitcoin is laughable enough in itself. The Planet Express crew visits a town that has reverted to Wild West technology because "mining" consumes all electricity, which provides a believable excuse to call back to the aesthetic of Gold Rush movies. Several minor threads converge in a massive shootout, but the final scene reminds us of all the minds lost to Bitcoin. This is shown for laughs, but it's connected to the growing interest of the season in how we react to huge personal losses. The news of a whole planet being destroyed, with a population of 50 billion, is likewise treated as a minor affair.

Episode 4, "Parasites Regained," goes even more personal: Nibbler's brain is being eaten by worms. In a parody of the Dune movies, our heroes battle armies of microscopic beasts in the desert sands of Nibbler's litterbox. After perhaps too many toilet jokes and a couple mystical visions, the day is saved. Nevermind that Nibbler ate a whole person in broad daylight with no consequence.

Episode 5, "Related to Items You've Viewed," has a thinly disguised Amazon devour the entire universe yet everything stays the same.

Episode 6, "I Know What You Did Next Xmas," is about the, honestly, overdue murder of Robot Santa Claus, who somehow has been allowed to go on a violent rampage every year. As this episode involves time travel, we once again encounter Futurama's established lore that successive restarts of the universe are identical and thus interchangeable. To Professor Farnsworth, to watch whole generations rise and fall seems to be an amusing spectacle.

Episode 7, "Rage Against the Vaccine," is a not very successful parody of the disinformation crisis during the present pandemic (yes, I said present, because it's not over). This episode has the same director as "Children of a Lesser Bog," which may explain why the ending falls a bit flat. Here the plot point to keep in mind is the callousness of negationists whose words literally cost lives.

Episode 8, "Zapp Gets Canceled," hinges on a scheme by the Democratic Order of Planets to trick the natives of a peaceful planet into surrendering their air.

By now you may protest that it's surely a stretch to focus on so many minor deaths when it's already known that Futurama uses a zany, absurdist style of humor. But then we get to the crux of the matter, the weird and experimental Episode 9, "The Prince and the Product," where the season-long theme is finally explored in full: does death matter all that much? Early in the episode, three nameless royal guards in the service of the King of Space are crushed under the Planet Express ship, with no one even commenting on it. A few minutes later, the King coldly sends his son to die in combat, and the Prince's fiancée ends the episode untroubled by his death.

To underscore this theme, the episode is interrupted by three fictional commercials, featuring the Futurama cast as windup dolls, car toys, and rubber ducks. And here the plot applies a much closer focus on the triviality of death. In the first commercial, windup dolls turn out to be able to reincarnate, so it doesn't matter if they lose power. In the second commercial, parts of dismantled cars still retain their consciousness when taken apart. In the third commercial, a war between toys leads to the revelation that toys can reproduce. In each segment, and also at the end of the episode, this idea of the cycle of death and return is expressed via the recurring motif of loop-de-loop acrobatics. The fact that the entire cast of Futurama is involved in each tale of death and return may allude to the diminished impact of each cancellation and un-cancellation of the show. Futurama has already died and come back before. Should we care?

Episode 10, "All the Way Down," gives us the answer, but it's not an easy one. Professor Farnsworth creates a simulation of the universe, including digital versions of everyone in Planet Express. This leads to a snowball of existential questions that results in the show all but stating that the characters of Futurama know they're not real, but that doesn't make their experiences less valuable. They may vanish any moment, or they may remain suspended in infinitely slowed time; that makes no difference from their perspective. What the season treated as a repeated joke, this idea that death doesn't matter, now makes a peculiar kind of sense if seen from the other end: life is what matters. Yours may end now or end in a hundred years, and that doesn't change its worth. You may even discover that your reality only exists in someone's computer, and that doesn't change anything about you.

This resolution is a beautiful callback to the end of the previous season, where time stopped in the whole universe except for Fry and Leela, who got to experience a full lifetime together. This new ending (of what is just the first part of the season) reintroduces the same idea: time appears to prolong in one level of reality while whole generations rise and fall in the next level up. The viewer's circumstances aren't too different. An inconceivable number of deaths are happening right now across the universe. All you have is now.

Futurama will be back. Or not. Enjoy it while it's still with us.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

You'll love the winner of the second Self-Published Science Fiction Competition

Rory August's novel The Last Gifts of the Universe is a beautiful exploration of the idea of joy in the middle of cosmic abandonment

I have a soft spot for self-published science fiction. I know first-hand the stress, the insecurity, the persistent sense of disorientation, the all-devouring doubt that is the bane of the aspiring author. To watch self-published books succeed fills me with warm fuzzies.

Full disclosure: I participated in the second Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. But this article is not about me. This is about the very deserving winner, Rory August, for their spectacular space opera The Last Gifts of the Universe.

In a far future when, seemingly by pure luck, only one starfaring civilization remains, space archaeologists jump from planet to planet trying to figure out what killed every other sentient species that ever existed. Scout, our protagonist, works for an organization called the Archivists, collecting technological relics that might contain data from the last days of each world they find. Along with their brother and their unfailingly opinionated cat, they climb, rappel, tiptoe, crawl and jump across the ruins of advanced societies that were mysteriously wiped out thousands of years ago. If any of those ruins happen to contain intact hard drives, Scout hopes, maybe those alive now will learn from those historical records how to avert the same fate.

However, the focus of the novel isn't so much on the strategies for defeating the strange world-burning entity that's been extinguishing sentient life, but on the significance that it may have for every small, fragile person to know that death is coming and no one knows what to do about it. This is a practical way for an author to link the larger drama to the individual drama: the characters cope with the death of civilizations by relying on the same emotional tools that we use to cope with the loss of loved ones. Scout is still mourning their mother, and through the text it becomes clear that the author wants to compare the techniques of archaeology with the process of mourning: digging up old belongings, trying to ascertain their function, undusting fragments of letters, debating for decades what this or that odd phrase may have meant, choosing what to preserve and what to give up.

With this strong thematic parallel, the novel suggests that knowing your world will die is no different from knowing you'll die personally. We can choose, through the mementos we leave behind, to perform our ultimate gesture of love. If true love doesn't expect retribution, then love for coming generations is the truest form, because it can't possibly receive any retribution. And still, knowing this, knowing there's no reward or acknowledgment, we are capable of loving the future. We are capable of leaving the best of us for the benefit of those yet to come.

The point of The Last Gifts of the Universe isn't how to stop death. No one has that answer. Rather, this is a story about how to build the fortitude to keep doing what matters to you even when you have the certainty that you'll vanish forever. What Scout finds in this mission not only reaffirms their sense of the importance of recovering what's left from the dead, but also gives them some much needed comfort in the knowledge that those who preceded us wrestled with the anxious questions that plague us, and we can find strength in what they chose to transmit to us. This is not only a precious view of our finiteness in a hostile universe, but also a precious gift from Rory August to their readers.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: August, Rory. The Last Gifts of the Universe [self-published, 2022].

Microreview: In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

After robots have learned from humanity to love, can a lone human then learn it from robots?

With the word robot coming from the Czech for "servitude," it seems inevitable that stories about artificial intelligence will continue to deal with questions of control and freedom. The genre has oscillated between the moods of Frankenstein and Pinocchio: one day we dread that a being we can't control will want to control us, and the next day we cheer for a being that has cut its strings. In these periodic oscillations, retreads are inevitable. One day we meet the Terminator; the next we meet Astro Boy. And there's Megatron and there's Baymax. M3GAN and CHAPPIE. Lore and Data.

OK, but what happens when Pinocchio falls in love with the Terminator?

TJ Klune's new novel In the Lives of Puppets retells Pinocchio with the twist that its protagonist is a human boy with an artificial father. Victor, the human, lives in a forest paradise like those of fairy tales. The days go by in a placid bliss of fresh air, fresh food, gentle company and no worries. Giovanni, the robot, has taken care of Victor with selfless devotion since he was a baby. The shelter they've built among the trees is all they need to be happy. Until the killer robots come looking for trouble.

The journey that Victor then begins is a good illustration of the plot device that pairs world discovery with self-discovery. He didn't have a human to learn to be human from, and yet there's something in him that no killer robot can destroy. The love that he's received from his robotic father and his robotic friends is as real as the love that a tall, dark, handsome strangler sparks in him. As he investigates the true history of the world outside the forest, he also learns to assert where he fits in the posthuman order and who he wants to be.

It's a difficult needle that the author threads here. Learning to mature as a person is challenging enough; doing so when everyone you meet in your journey is a static thing incapable of growth raises the difficulty to epic. And yet, in his interactions with robotic culture, Victor manages to gain a clearer perspective of his identity, his hopes, his desires, and his limitations. It's a very indirect way to form a sense of humanity by contrasting it with everything it's not. The robots share with Victor their second-hand impressions of what humans are like, but it's up to Victor to try and guess how accurately those interpretations may reflect real humanity and how much of that information feels right for him.

It's not like Victor is fully disconnected from human culture: robots are, after all, a human product, inevitably shaped by all our biases and weaknesses. Robots also form personal bonds and ask themselves about their future. But without a human heart (and here's where the novel veers into science fantasy territory), none of the answers has meaning. The plot makes much of the importance of a human heart in the development of an authentic self, and your mileage may vary depending on how comfortable you are with the whole notion of genetic memory.

Questions of scientific rigor aside, In the Lives of Puppets does a stellar job of characterization. You watch Victor evolve and acquire a deeper, richer personality with each big moment of his quest. And his companions are a delight to read. Ratched is a cuttingly sarcastic robot nurse who may or may not actually have an empathy protocol, but who clearly does have an alarming predilection for drilling, while Rambo is an adorable refurbished Roomba who is too pure for this world.

And then there's Hap, the mysterious decommissioned robot that Victor finds, repairs, and teaches to love. This romance subplot suffers from monumentally gnarled power dynamics that are never acknowledged or addressed, which, on top of the novel's tendency to make too many lewd jokes at the expense of its asexual protagonist, makes the reading experience a lot less enjoyable than it had the potential to be. In the Lives of Puppets is a rough gem, full of hidden value obscured by uneven facets that needed more aggressive polishing.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Klune, TJ. In the Lives of Puppets [Tor, 2023].

The Big Door Prize will make you reconsider your life choices

Since we already let machines run our daily affairs, why not let them run our lifepaths?

In the remote town of Deerfield, the place where grand aspirations go to die, people could use a jolt of motivation. So one day, a mysterious machine appears in a grocery store. For a few coins, it reveals to you what your potential is in this life. And what each inhabitant of Deerfield does with the machine's verdict forms a fabulous mosaic of character studies. What if you life potential demands that you leave everything behind? What if it's a life-threatening adventure? What if it's where you already are? What if it's in your past, where you can no longer go? What if it's beyond human capability? What if it's what you used to want and gave up on? What if it's what you secretly fear to be true?

I don't know what secret recipe Apple TV is hoarding, but somehow they keep producing some of the best science fiction series out there. For All Mankind, Severance and Hello Tomorrow! would suffice to draw the attention of any science fiction enthusiast, but their new series The Big Door Prize does something really special. With the light-touch addition of the tiniest of speculative elements, this story pushes the lives of an entire town sideways, dissecting their unconfessed inner demons and casting a compassionate eye on their frustrations.

The standard dictum on characterization is that a character's true self is revealed in their choices. What The Big Door Prize adds to this rule is having the characters learn in advance what their true self is meant to be, and from then on we follow how they respond to that statement. You see, the thing about stories with prophecy is that the character's actions in response to the prophecy are themselves part of the prophecy. If a machine that reads your lifepath tells you that your best potential is superstardom, but you already peaked in your teens, that doesn't exonerate you of responsibility for what you do with your present. If the machine tells you that your best potential is fatherhood, but your wife died years ago, what you do with that information may show bits of what kind of father you might have been.

Now, to be clear, the series never confirms that the machine is accurate. It always repeats the same verdict if you consult it multiple times, but how it knows what to say to each user is anyone's guess. It's equally fascinating to watch the responses of those who believe the machine as those who don't. Over the course of the season, people may suddenly end their marriages, or change careers, or make outlandish purchases, or radically revise their image of themselves. In a curious way, this story serves as a didactic demonstration of one of the principles of good writing: choice is more appealing than fate. It doesn't actually matter how the machine works or where does it get its predictions from; what matters is the reaction of someone who chooses to trust the machine, and of someone who had no direction in life, and of someone who wants to prove the machine wrong, and of someone who would prefer an open future without constraints.

The Big Door Prize has abundant love for its characters, and where it's most visible is in its protagonist, the moral anchor played with delightful sincerity by Chris O'Dowd. It's always refreshing to find a comedy that doesn't rely on detached cynicism, and this role of an unassuming schoolteacher in search of a purpose is written with such maturity and performed with such charm that the surreal shenanigans of the rest of the cast are made more credible because he's there to drive the emotional content down to earth. These are characters who were living on autopilot, who for the first time are given a hint that they can choose to live differently, who might otherwise have gone on for years wondering what if. But for some, that broadening of possibilities carries its own shadow of dread. For some, it would have been preferable to never know they had a choice. For some, to glimpse their other available lives is too scary to bear.

Who is the machine to tell them who they can be? How much does it really know about them? And why should anyone take its verdict seriously? The collective response to the machine is volatile, an agitation waiting to happen, a potential mass that only needed a little stirring to undergo chain reaction. More than what the machine says, the significant event for each of its users is the way their interiority is affected by an external perspective. It's terrifying to consider that we don't fully know ourselves, that we may need help in figuring out what we're capable of. It's terrifying to suspect that we would have been happier in another life. The threat that the machine represents is bigger than discovering another option; it's discovering that there are options. It sounds like a simple idea, but perhaps we don't act upon it as often as we should. After all, if you're convinced a machine can't possibly know your potential, why would you go ask it?

The Big Door Prize explores what happens when people are invited to look in the mirror. It carefully untangles the reasons why we lie to ourselves and sometimes pretend we're satisfied with things the way they are. It questions the criteria we use to label some choices sensible and some others absurd. And above all, it suggests that we shouldn't need a magical machine to wake us from the unexamined life.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' comes to terms with death

Existential anguish has never been this funny

Your favorite fearless hero is back, and he's going through a crisis. After eight feline lifetimes cultivating fame and glory as a daring bandit/swashbuckler/adventurer, Puss in Boots is suddenly confronted with the hard reality of death. He's down to just one life, and for the first time, he's terrified.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a surprising entry in the Shrek franchise. After the end of a century of fantasy dominated by Disney, the first Shrek's acerbic irony made it feel fresh—even if it soon became its own type of stale. Fortunately, The Last Wish doesn't follow that formula. Snark and detachment are thrown out the window (and good riddance!), because this is a movie about death, and to deal with death, you can't do less than open sincerity. With commendable transparency, the movie shows us a hero confronted with his vulnerability, stripped of the pretense that his popularity can keep saving him. The invincible monster slayer is finally afraid, and that makes him feel more real.

Of course, the fact that you're making a movie that takes its theme seriously doesn't mean you can't also make a gut-burstingly funny movie. And here too, the writing deviates from Shrek's juvenile style. The Last Wish goes through the usual repertoire of slapstick violence, but at key moments, it uses its comedy to enhance the point it's making. Unusually for this franchise, in this movie the jokes do a big part of the telling of the story.

In the first act, once our protagonist has been forced to acknowledge his mortality and admit that his hedonistic lifestyle was nothing more than a denial mechanism, his first choice is to hide in a cat shelter. Everything is provided for him: he has a roof, abundant food, warm mittens. But, as he soon realizes, that's no life worthy of the name. The answer to the dread of mortality cannot be to give up agency and let all your choices be made for you. In a joke that tells more than it seems on the first hearing, he's forced to stop using the human toilet and promptly shown the litter box. His line at that moment is, "So this is where dignity goes to die."

Dignity is the key idea here. When we're faced with our state of cosmic abandonment, we may feel what Søren Kierkegaard called the dizziness of freedom, and owning it takes a degree of moral fortitude we're not usually taught to build. When Puss in Boots retreats to the cat shelter, he's taking one of the easy ways out: the abdication of choice. But you cannot cease to make your own choices without also ceasing to respect yourself. The prohibition of using the human toilet can be read as a snapshot of a bigger truth: if you renounce responsibility for your life, you're also renouncing your humanity. An ideal place where you don't have to make any effort is not a place suitable for humans. The safe, comforting refuge will not satisfy you.

This takes us to another key theme of the movie: satisfaction. The writers made the perfect choice of villains for this story: Goldilocks and Jack Horner, archetypes of perpetual insatisfaction. Goldilocks has enough, but she always finds something to criticize. Jack Horner has everything, but he's always greedy for more. Both represent anomalous strategies for coping with the irresolvable insatisfaction of finite life. And both fall into the same mistake when they decide to chase after the wishing star. For Puss in Boots, this is an attempt to replace mundane hedonism with transcendent hedonism—to pray to the heavens for more chances. But it's not a solution: there's no magical fix that will make everything just right. The problem is not that you haven't found your wishing star. Goldilocks is unsatisfied because she has impossible standards. Jack Horner is unsatisfied because he's never needed to make an effort. Puss in Boots is unsatisfied because he can no longer keep telling himself that he'll always have more time. The three of them are looking for the wrong remedy to a nonexistent problem.

I call it nonexistent because the finitude of life is not a new calamity that suddenly befell us; it is the way reality is. It is the normal. It is what is. As existentialist philosophers pointed out, mortality only becomes a problem if we delude ourselves into thinking we can change it. Try as you might, you can't outrun the icy hand of death.

In his essay Summer in Algiers, Albert Camus spoke about the finitude of human life in these terms: "if there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another life and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have." Our protagonist's quest to regain his nine lives with a miracle is a Quixotic impossible, a desperate last recourse to regain the ability to delude himself. But having his gaze fixed on a star has distracted him from the mundane beauty he already has. He has allowed his legend to supplant his facticity, and now he's unhappy because he can't live up to an idealized self-image that he knows is false.

A brilliant way Puss in Boots: The Last Wish integrates existentialism into humor for children is in the device of the map to the star. Each character sees a different map, with a different emotional tone. This is an effective way of symbolizing how, even if we have similar ideals of happiness, the road to get there is unique to each of us.

What our hero learns at the end of his personal journey is that the quest for perfect satisfaction cannot be completed in a finite world. Death only stops being an adversary when you stop trying to deny it. That's the key to contentment when all you have is one life. And that's how you speak to children about death: with the maturity and honesty that the topic demands.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 because we should celebrate every time a story targeted at children is unafraid to talk openly about death, +1 for the beautiful art style, designed with a resemblance to expressionist brushstrokes that enhance the emotion of each battle by making it feel intensely personal.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Camus, Albert; Kennedy, Ellen Conroy [Translator]. Lyrical and Critical Essays [Vintage Books, 1970].

'Exception' raises questions about humanity's right to live

This existential drama unfolds at both the individual and the civilizational level

A story can be written about the worth of humanity in which cloned bodies with copied memories ask themselves pointy questions about the authenticity of their identities and the consequences of reversible death. Also, a story can be written about the worth of humanity in which a space colonization project sends the last surviving members of our species to another planet and we need to weigh our survival against the fragility of an alien ecosystem. Either of those choices could address such heavy issues as our place in the universe, our sense of importance, our responsibility to other living creatures, and the dangers of hubris.

The fact that the new Netflix production Exception goes for both approaches at the same time and weaves them into parallel thematic threads speaks to the ambition of series creator and screenwriter Hirotaka Adachi. While cloning is a fertile topic for a discussion of personal dignity, and space colonization offers a comparable opportunity to explore collective dignity, a story that takes cloned characters and puts them in the middle of a space colonization plot is a potent combination and an authorial statement that promises a multifaceted view of the issue.

This is a daunting task for a limited series of just eight episodes, but Exception fulfills this mission admirably. The plot is presented through what one might call bifocal lenses: at the micro level, we have the story of a botched cloning that results in a bizarre creature of hideous appearance that gives rise to doubts about its humanity and, therefore, its inherent worth; at the macro level, we have a political disagreement over the moral acceptability of invading an intact biosphere to settle the human species and refound civilization. The later reveal that one of these problems gave rise to the other closes the circle of this subtle but effective narrative experiment.

Although these questions have been a staple of science fiction for a long time, Exception manages to make them feel fresh while still leaving them without a definitive answer. The botched clone is alternately treated like a wild animal, a mere inconvenience, a defective copy, an abomination, a funhouse mirror, and a travel companion. The four protagonists have long debates about what to do with it, and the rounds of arguments and counter-arguments force them to reevaluate their own status as living beings. In a closed environment with finite resources and high tension, should someone's right to exist depend on their ability to contribute work? Are replicas of human beings in a position to judge the quality of an allegedly bad replica? Is the worth of a clone measured by its fidelity to the supposed original? If it's a trivially easy procedure to unmake and remake clones, is death an effective punishment?

As the story progresses, its scope expands and we're faced with new and equally thought-provoking problems: in a universe with other forms of life, is humanity's survival a moral absolute? Is it honest of us to reserve to ourselves the answering of that question? Do our past crimes against nature factor in that moral calculation? Should other species fear humanity?

One twist that complicates this topic in an even thornier direction is the backstory that explains that humans left Earth because robots took over it. The unspoken implication is that at least one other culture has already judged it's more deserving of life than us. Before the protagonists can even formulate a rebuttal to that challenge, the show presents them with a harder one: does nonintelligent life also get a say on how much value our survival should have?

How we answer the micro problem informs which answers are possible to the macro one. It won't do to assert human dominion over the nonhuman when the line between the two gets so blurred that we can no longer decide who gets to redraw it. The protagonists cling to a sense of humanity that has been fabricated for them, with aspirations and attachments not uniquely their own, and with a material existence made possible only through technology, which means that any redefinition of "human" they construct in order to justify their self-esteem and their personhood must automatically apply to the defective copy as well, and once that threshold is crossed, human primacy is left without a logical foundation.

The plot resolves by offering an answer but recognizing that it cannot be objectively true. Our survival must prevail, but that tells us very little if we are the ones affirming that value. Of course team human will cheer for team human: we can make no other choice (at least none that preserves our ability to make choices), and no one else can do it for us (because whoever tries to decide our worth immediately violates our worth). The question is not for others to get involved in, but we cannot be trusted to be impartial. The situation is thus rendered exposed: we can never know what humanity is outside of what humans believe about it. What Exception proposes, given the impossibility of an absolute pronouncement, is a plea for epistemic humility. If we must judge ourselves (and it is inescapable that we must), let us not forget that we are biased. If our species must exist (and as long we are in charge of the question, the question is already moot), let us be neither ashamed nor proud. We are precious to ourselves and redundant to the universe; the fatal error is to get those two confused.

Exception handles its subject matter with surprising depth for its short runtime, but the ending is so fitting that nothing more needs to be added, a reassuring demonstration that a self-contained series that knows when it has said all it has to say is still possible in the streaming era. The animation style is, admittedly, an acquired taste, but it doesn't distract from the arguments going on in each episode. The gory horror is not too shocking, and never self-indulgent. This is primarily a science fiction of ideas, a birefringent look at the contact surfaces between humans and beyond humans, and at the circumstances that can turn that contact into violence.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for expertly creating and maintaining thematic resonance.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

'Paper Girls' is a more honest look at the 80s generation

If 80s kids must write stories that look back at their young selves, why not make it literal?

Yes, I know, it's yet another show about the 80s, but this one doesn't pretend it was a glorious time to live in. Each generation is handed their own rough deal, and the one that befell us 80s kids was to witness the beginning of the end of upward mobility, the rise of trickle-down Reaganomics, and the social damage caused by moral panic. We have, to put it mildly, a lot of baggage to process. To complicate matters further, we are now entering our middle-age crisis phase, which is why the world has been subjected to so many nostalgia stories this decade. We've seen the return of Ghostbusters, Full House, He-Man, Saved by the Bell, Top Gun, The Dark Crystal, DuckTales, and Baywatch, and we'll soon see the return of Willow, Quantum Leap, and Max Headroom. And of course, Stranger Things aspires to be the distillation of the entire vibe of the era.

So what does Paper Girls bring to the conversation about the 80s? For starters, it's not nostalgic. Its intention is not to make you feel warm and cozy about your childhood. It recognizes, and assumes that so do you, that the 80s were an awful decade. And so were the 90s. And so is the 21st century. There were never any "good old days." Whenever you are, that is your present, and in any present, life is hard. Having friends certainly helps, but the demons you carry are still yours.

Where Stranger Things tries to portray teen friendships as the foundation on which personal growth happens, Paper Girls demands that its characters first grow in order to learn to bond. Stranger Things takes kids who were already best friends and throws the end of the world at them. In Paper Girls, dealing with the end of the world is what turns the kids into friends. The interactions are more organic, the group dynamic is more realistic, the thought process behind hard choices is more compelling. Characters in Stranger Things are designed to allude to the archetypes of 80s movies. Characters in Paper Girls are designed to feel like people.

The other thing Paper Girls does with the 80s is turn the whole exercise of looking back into a two-way conversation. Our nostalgia binge is full of commentary on the 80s, but the use of time travel in this series allows the 80s to comment back. Generations are put face to face and given numerous chances to question each other, to try to figure out where things went wrong, and ultimately, to try to understand each other. Again, life is hard; it is in every decade. Much of the resentment and blame and scapegoating that one generation can hurl at the previous one or the next one can be explained by the failure to remember that life for them is hard too. We forget it so much that we often direct those hard feelings at ourselves.

Dialogue scenes between different versions of the same character are the best moments of the series. It's one thing to feel disappointed in yourself, and it's another to hear your past self or your future self say it to your face. It's a humbling experience to be shown a wider view of your life trajectory and discover that, every time you think you've got this life figured out, you're wrong. You may even convince yourself that the aspirations you ceased to have are no longer important, but the version of you that had those aspirations was no less real than you are now. Likewise, the person you will become may have valid complaints to make about the direction you went. You are your own harshest judge. If anyone has the right to be brutally honest about your mistakes, it's you.

This type of interaction intensifies the emotional stakes of Paper Girls to the limits of what the dramatic medium permits. In any narration it's normal for characters to challenge and call out each other, but it creates a very different dramatic situation to have a character argue with their own self. Science fiction uses this trick all the time, because it works really well, but very few stories have done it to the extent that Paper Girls does. To realize the fantasy of knowing your future opens the door to forms of vulnerability and introspection that would have been harder to achieve in more conventional coming-of-age stories. The focus of this series is not who will win the temporal war, but rather who these girls are capable of becoming.

Not that the temporal war plot is unimportant. It takes place in the background, as the excuse that allows for all the inner drama to happen, but it illustrates quite plainly the meaning of the story. It's a war between youngsters who want to improve the world and elders who want to keep it the way it's always been. In other words, the eternal struggle of every generation as it grows up and tries to reclaim its place. It's easy to imagine a window into the past and the future, but it takes a rare dedication to sincerity to let the past and the future judge us. And surely we'd have as many reasons to judge them in turn. But once you've had that conversation, once you've sat the child and the adult in the same room and given them time to scream their grievances and shoot their missiles, where do you go from there?

With the tease for a season 2, the plot of Paper Girls is not over yet, so it's premature to venture an all-encompassing interpretation. But isn't that the way life feels all the time? You don't have the full picture until it's over, and you never know when that is. You can only walk the road you see immediately ahead. When are you done growing up? You never know for sure. When are you complete? Maybe you already were and didn't know it. One reason why it's dangerous to view life as a story is that, for any present moment, the story is incomplete. And that's terrifying, because with enough time, you may become a completely different person. You may regret it. Or you may be glad it happened. Or you may not even have the chance to reflect on it.

Paper Girls takes the anxiety of our always incomplete story and makes it tangible in the conversations between child and adult. Now that we're inundated in reminders of the 80s, it's refreshing to have this series point out the folly of yearning for the past. You are the person you are. To truly return to the past, you'd have to forget everything you are now (a scenario that the series makes literal). That's what the obsession with 80s nostalgia has failed to understand: if time travel stories have taught us anything, it's that getting stuck reliving the same experiences is hell. We need to let the past be past. We need to live. That's the simplest message a story can carry, and perhaps the most essential. The road is not finished, and we can't see where it ends, but as long as we're on it, we need to live.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the refreshing emotional honesty that has been so lacking in the 80s nostalgia subgenre.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

'Eternals' wants to save the superhero genre from itself

It's doubtful that Marvel Studios will appreciate, or even understand, what Eternals has to say about the horror of living in a superhero franchise

It's a revelation to see how much Eternals is unlike the rest of the MCU. It feels strangely like a normal movie, which shouldn't be noteworthy, because we really shouldn't be this accustomed to expecting characters to smash each other in the head in every scene, but to follow the discussion around Eternals is to realize how severely the MCU has warped our way of watching. It is the first MCU movie to get a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes (48% at the time of writing this review), which makes it, completely undeservedly, the worst-rated entry of the MCU (not counting television). Upon closer look, the criticisms thrown at Eternals reveal a particular type of anger, which stems from a particularly twisted set of expectations. Supposedly, Eternals believes too seriously in its themes, has too much talking, is too abstract, leans too far into substance, is not violent enough, has too many feelings.

Let it sink in that this is the rare superhero movie directed by a woman, and reread those complaints.

In fact, those are exactly the qualities that make Eternals one of the most important entries, and I'm not exaggerating, in the history of the superhero genre. It wasn't until I watched Eternals that I noticed how tired I was of Marvel's trademark ironic detachment. It's refreshing to have characters who don't hide behind a barrier of quippy banter, who aren't afraid to own their emotions, who care about what their battles say about who they are.

Solid characterization was always going to be difficult. Eternals had to fulfill the mammoth task of being simultaneously the origin story, the teamup blockbuster, the team breakup tragedy, and the world-ending epic for an entire new crop of ten almost unknown superheroes, in a cinematic universe that pretends every obscure character needs A-lister treatment. But there was no alternative; it wasn't viable to introduce these characters in their respective solo movies, because their place in the fictional world makes no sense outside of this team. Perhaps Eternals would have achieved better pacing as a Disney Plus series, but as one single movie, it's remarkable that it manages to make almost all of its heroes feel like full persons. And it does so via relevant moral disagreements.

As a rule, the MCU has very badly dropped the ball when trying to grapple with the ethics of superheroism, opting for a juvenile power fantasy every time it has played with hard dilemmas that called for a more thoughtful approach. Eternals sees the oversimplistic moral calculation of Avengers: Infinity War and raises a more pointed set of questions: if heroes have a responsibility toward living beings, does that extend to future lives? And should their concern for those potential future lives outweigh the importance of present ones? And does it matter in the decision if the future lives are thousands of times more numerous than the present ones that may have to be sacrificed? These are not the speculations of fantasy. The problem of the potential value of future lives is an extremely delicate point of contention that has been debated by philosophers for decades, and that has had, still has today, and will continue to have real consequences for real people.

It will be argued that these are unnecessarily heavy interests for a movie where a character is called Sprite and another has pew pew fingers. But Eternals doesn't fool itself. It knows that the MCU is a ridiculous place to ask the big questions. In fact, the conscious mismatch between its themes and its setting is a central part of how Eternals is made, and it shows precisely in the characters of Sprite and Mr. Pew Pew Fingers.

On one hand, Sprite is an illusionist. Over the centuries of the Eternals' mission on Earth, she has been feeding the human hunger for inspiration via stories. If the Eternals are behind all our ancient myths, Sprite has been behind the telling of the myths. On the other hand, Kingo is a movie actor and director. He used to live in hiding with Sprite, but became tired of hanging in the limbo between truth and deception. So he opted for full-time deception: he's been pretending to be a dynasty of Bollywood stars for roughly a century. Indeed, both are beings of legend: Sprite cannot have the normal human experience, while Kingo doesn't even try. They exist in the world of stories.

This matters because, in Eternals, what threatens to invade the physical world is the world of stories. Our heroes yearn for normality, but beasts that belong to primal nightmare keep interrupting their dates, their family meetings, their careers. This occurs more explicitly with Kingo's sudden interest in filming his friends. The Eternals' lives become a threatened home, not unlike the fortress Phastos has built in his house: a shelter of domesticity besieged by conventions of cinematic spectacle that are emphatically unwelcome. These characters are trying to go through their lives, but their boss Arishem needs them to stick to their predefined roles, while Kingo keeps annoyingly insisting that their lives be made into a movie. When the obligatory faceless monsters show up during a family discussion in the Amazon jungle, they don't feel like an adventure, but like an inconvenience. Eternals is a movie, and it has superheroes, but it resents having to be a superhero movie.

Now why would a Marvel production want to do that?

Because Eternals, you see, is actually about the horror of being a Marvel character.

Most hero stories are about the search for purpose, but few dare address this openly the despair of having your purpose written in a script. The surprise reveal of this movie is that the titular Eternals don't exist to be full persons, but to be action figures in a war with a preordained result. They're not meant to have lives; they're just meant to make it to the end of the world and then be refurbished and repainted for the next end of the world, with nothing left of their previous personalities. Much like the tragic heroines of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, they're created to be pieces of cosmic machinery in a plan guided by the most ruthless of utilitarian calculations. The awkward excuse for their absence from every other Avengers-level crisis refers back to the same metanarrative directive: those other conflicts were not about them. They were not their story.

If you've ever wondered why Tony Stark went back to superheroing after burning all his suits in Iron Man 3, as if he had forgotten his entire personal growth in that movie, here's the explanation: as a Marvel character, he's not allowed to have an inner life. He just has to make it to the end of the movie and go back to the makeup department to get ready for the next movie. It's only in Eternals that this curse is shown in its full monstrosity: Marvel characters are doomed to repeat the end of the world again and again, and all the lives they're supposedly saving only have value as food for the cosmic machine that controls their fates.

Marvel fans complain that not enough stuff blows up in Eternals. Yes, that's the whole point. Stuff blowing up would just be another repetition of the endless cycle that makes the MCU a Gnostic hell, its characters trapped by a heartless creator who only cares that the rules of the game be obeyed. Ajak and Ikaris constantly refer to Arishem's Grand Design. Well, the Grand Design is the MCU and its voracious need to keep growing by recycling its heroes, throwing them at one cataclysm after another, because that's the only way it can feed itself. This movie is so informed by the obligations of franchise that its new slate of heroes drop onto the world from a literal floating slate. The Eternals' rebellion against the Grand Design (as well as their repeated destruction of Kingo's cameras) symbolizes Eternals' resistance to being a Marvel movie. These characters don't want to be action figures. Fans who complain that the Eternals always want to discuss their feelings miss the point: that's what characters in a story are supposed to do. It's not that the movie lacks a villain; the established rules of MCU storytelling are the villain that gets in the way of these heroes' happiness. It's nice that Ajak decides that Earth is worth saving, but it's depressing that the reason why she decides it's worth saving is that it produced superheroes.

This symbolic framing of Eternals as a war waged by Marvel characters against Marvel Studios helps decipher what otherwise are incomprehensible character choices. Kingo's puzzling exit from the final fight is actually in consonance with the rules of his assigned role: as the character who is most aware of the conventions of superhero fiction (it's no coincidence that his superpower is making literal pew pew fingers), he chooses the right moment to leave the movie and repackage himself for the next one. He survives by following the game. Sprite goes the opposite way: her victory is that she's no longer a Marvel character. She was stuck as an unchanging piece in a game she didn't ask to play. So she wins by refusing to play any longer.

Give some thought to the fact that what saves Sprite, and the world, is the power of transformation. The message couldn't be clearer: the MCU needs to change, because the alternative is the existential abomination (and the narrative laziness) of treating people as instruments. It's a horrifying twist that Arishem, the ultimate producer of the show, gets to literally take these characters out of the movie and dress them up again for their assigned roles in the next one.

Coming to terms with that absurdity is the breaking point that drives Ikaris to kill himself after his defeat: the people of Earth were never people to him, just instruments. Accordingly, he saw his own life as a mere instrument of the Grand Design. Once the mission was frustrated, he couldn't accept that he was responsible for choosing his own purpose; he needed to have it scripted for him. So he followed the plot of his own myth, and flied toward the sun. (Director Chloé Zhao knew exactly what she was doing when she took inspiration from Zack Snyder's Man of Steel when designing her nihilistic and ultimately self-negating version of Ikaris, because that is the logical consequence of a Snyder-style Superman.)

This is the kind of shaking up that the MCU desperately needs. This is the kind of outsider perspective that can save superhero movies from endless self-cannibalization. But in all likelihood, Marvel executives (and fans) will bemoan the lack of explosions, fail to get the intended warning, and go back to the regularly scheduled show. They don't want to miss the end of the world—again.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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