TV Microreview: Ann Droid

A touching comedy about the search for meaning in the age of AI

Sue’s life is going through a hard time. She’s been a widow for two years, her son is willingly stuck in a bad marriage, her friends’ conversation consists mainly of sinister gossip about who just died or patronizing comments about her age, and her low blood pressure just gave her a fainting spell that resulted in a bruised arm. The last thing she needs is a constant reminder of the autonomy she’s losing as she grows older.

So when her son, who has been taking care of her lately, decides to move back with his horrifically toxic wife and rent a caretaker robot for her, Sue isn’t exactly thrilled. In the world of BBC comedy show Ann Droid, robots have a shady reputation, partly because some owners use them for unmentionable activities, and partly because the early models had alarming malfunctions. But surprisingly, Linda the robot proves to be a more reliable and supportive companion than anyone in Sue’s life.

With the same pitch-perfect deadpan style that launched her to international fame in the role of Philomena Cunk, Diane Morgan plays Linda as a competent caretaker (she remembers when Sue needs to take each of her pills, has impressive diagnostic gadgets, and can alert Sue when a phone call is a scam), although she’s a somewhat older model with only the most rudimentary social skills. The charm of the show comes precisely from contrasting the harshness and duplicity of modern society with the unfiltered honesty of this character who truly wants to help.

That’s the trick with this story: even though Sue doesn’t say it out loud, it becomes clear that society has created a series of problems for itself to which robots were never supposed to be a solution. Her son is a manchild with no willpower or self-respect, but it’s not entirely his fault, as the robotic domination of the job market leaves him feeling as directionless as his widowed mother. Still, the fact that we’ve built a society that shapes us into worse sons, worse friends, worse lovers than a machine can be is a sign that something has gone very wrong with us.

Through the six episodes of the season, Linda subtly guides Sue to exploring more of what life can give her. In particular, Linda’s lack of a filter helps Sue see more clearly the problems in her relationship with her son. Usually, stories about AI serve as proofs by example of the search for who we are, but in Ann Droid the important question is who we are to one another. Sue has been a mother for very long, and it’s way past time for her son to be an adult, and for her to figure out who she can be by herself.

As for Linda, it’s curious that technically speaking she’s barely a character: her wish to help is how she was programmed, not a choice she made. But the ways she finds to provide that help reveal a deeper person than the rest of characters give her credit for. That’s another item in the long list of human attributes that modern society seems to have taken away from us: the connection we create as helpers. Sue is lucky to have found Linda, but we in the real world shouldn’t have to.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: The End of Oak Street

Come for a bite of big lizard action, stay for the biting social commentary

You’d think that dinos going nom nom on people is a sure winning formula that should be impossible to flunk, but then you look at the lamentable state of the Jurassic franchise and notice how easily it’s put to shame by The End of Oak Street. Its simple premise of an entire neighborhood mysteriously snatched in time and transported to prehistoric Earth allows for plenty of cool monster action in assorted combinations that maintain a heightened level of tension throughout. The ending, however, feels abrupt and incongruously happy after all the terror that precedes it. If you can excuse a less than elegant resolution, this movie rewards with abundant people-munching gore. And if you take a look beneath the surface narrative, you’ll realize this is a far smarter movie than its primeval beasts would suggest.

The story is set in a suburb of Detroit in 1982, a very difficult time that writer/director David Robert Mitchell experienced personally in his childhood. The deterioration of the American carmaker sector resulted in waves of closed factories and thousands of newly unemployed. This crisis coincided with the start of Reaganomics and its devastating effect on the income gap, and with the cultural shift toward a conservative moral agenda anchored in the past. In the film, Ewan McGregor’s character is shown to be struggling to provide for his family after being fired, while his wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is stuck in the position of desperate housewife with unfulfilled professional aspirations. When they’re thrown into prehistoric Earth, her husband reacts with the same naïve optimism that characterized the average 1980s American patriarch, complete with purely performative religiosity. Even before they’re faced with the task of surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs, this family is already in the middle of the epic quest to survive Reaganism.

And if the historic parallels aren’t enough by this point, please look up General Motors Poletown and the depressing tale of how, in a desperate attempt to revive the past glories of the car industry, an entire neighborhood of Detroit was demolished in the 1980s to clear up space for a new car factory, displacing hundreds of families in the process. This is a movie about what happens when the past comes uninvited to tear your house down and wreck your everyday life. At the symbolic level, surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs is surviving Reaganism.

Put yourself in the shoes of a kid growing up in 1980s Detroit. There’s a spiraling crime wave, a crack epidemic, deadly gang wars, a dwindling job market, and a perverse new hobby of setting houses on fire. That’s the city in utter chaos that inspired The Crow and Robocop. That’s the Detroit where Mitchell grew up, and the anxiety that he expresses in this movie is not a fantasy scenario. The movie translates that feeling into thrilling action with dinosaurs, but the numerous scenes of abandoned houses crumbling to pieces, of background characters being randomly killed all over the neighborhood in broad daylight, and the protagonists’ dread that the same violence could target their family at any moment, is precisely what it felt like to grow up in 1980s Detroit.

And Mitchell has very specific points to make about society’s response to those changes. The 1980s provided mass culture with a limited repertoire of role models. The protagonists’ son likes to play with a bow and arrow, à la John Rambo, but once the dinosaurs show up, that weapon proves useless. Pay close attention to a couple of scenes in the first act: first, during a family meal, the daughter remarks on her brother’s annoying boys-will-be-boys attitude, and a joke is made about a massive load of poop that he once made as a baby; the morning after, the next-door neighbor, a guy previously established as a gun-happy jerk, shows up to complain that he’s found a man-sized pile of poop on his backyard, and blames the protagonists. To defuse the situation, the father decides that it will be the son’s responsibility to clean it up. The audience knows that it’s actually dinosaur poop, in a clear allusion to Jurassic Park, but hidden there is also a clever commentary on the role that gun violence plays in constructing the 1980s macho archetype (which Mitchell evidently judges to amount to a big load of poop) and the responsibility that falls onto young men to help dismantle it.

Am I stretching my interpretation too far? Consider a later scene, which I think makes the point even more obviously: a Titanoboa enters undetected through the parents’ bedroom window and sneaks past each kid’s bedroom, even though the doors are open and its presence should be obvious if only they bothered to look. It finds the mother and prepares for the fatal bite, but the son injures it with one of his arrows, giving his mother a snap-instant opening to fight back. Note that (a) this is the only time in the movie that the protagonists are attacked inside their house, and (b) this is the only time in the movie that the son’s weapon is good for something. This scene is a metaphor for sexual violence. The real Titanoboa was a snake, but in the movie it’s portrayed with a smooth, off-white skin that makes it look like a gigantic penis. When it’s about to attack the mother and opens its mouth, its tongue looks nothing like a snake’s tongue; it looks unmistakably like female genitalia. The point here is that sexual violence can go on undetected inside your own house (starting in the parents’ bedroom and spreading from there), even when it should be obvious, and women shouldn’t have to fight it alone without the help of male power.

It would be irresponsible and pointless to try to speculate on which of these horrific social scourges were specifically part of Mitchell’s lfe, and in the movie itself he takes pains to let us know as much: the mother has been writing a novel in her free time, in which she describes an unhappy housewife who plans to abandon her family, but she makes it clear that her urge to explore those feelings through her art doesn’t mean she’s describing herself. The End of Oak Street is 1980s Detroit as Mitchell saw it, and it’s there to make us feel like it felt for him. The fact that our heroes escape the prehistoric Earth through a shiny spherical bubble, like in the Terminator movies, gives us the last key for interpretation: whatever his personal hell, science fiction presented him with a way out. Just like it was for so many of us who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s, science fiction was how he escaped.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Microreview: The Last House

Coronavirus allegories are needed in film, but this is the wrong allegory

At the start of this decade, when mass quarantine briefly reduced the footprint of human activity on the world, the meme “Nature is healing” achieved viral popularity. In the new Netflix movie The Last House, the premise seems to be: “Nature is healing… BUT AT WHAT COST?”

It all starts when the creatures of the sea revolt against humanity’s predation (there are a lot of references to dead fish in this movie) and weaponize the water cycle to produce a special type of water that seals houses hermetically. Their revenge comes in the form of a continuous rain that coats houses in a self-reparing layer, keeping people locked inside. The plot of the movie follows a suburban family (whose hobbies and interests are a bit too obviously gender-coded) as they find themselves forced to work together, contributing their respective talents, so they can survive with the food they have until they figure out how to force their front door open.

The movie is sharply divided in two parts: at the beginning, this family deals with their situation with a light-hearted attitude—at times too light-hearted, as if it wanted to be a comedy. The second part abruptly becomes survival horror when the neighbors start dying of starvation and it’s revealed that there are big, scary creatures lurking in the rain, and they can unlock the doors whenever they want.

Movies about the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic were to be expected, but it’s strange that they have been so few. In The Last House, an even bigger strangeness is that, while it’s unafraid to explore directly the psychological toil of a worldwide crisis that forced us to stay apart from each other, the movie’s attention is aimed at the isolation, not at the underlying crisis. Translating the allegory back into real life, it seems to be saying that the real disaster wasn’t so much the widespread infection as the quarantine, that the generation-defining scar we’ll carry forever isn’t the count of possibly tens of millions of deaths, but rather, having had to stay indoors for some months. This is a movie that wants to say something about a tragedy but prefers to focus on a related inconvenience.

This attitude is noticeable in the way the parents try to keep the kids occupied during the first weeks of isolation. Helpfully for the scope of the plot, phone and internet service is lost immediately, but somehow electricity, water and gas keep functioning for far longer. This family happens to own just two DVDs that they rewatch a sickening number of times: Annie and Air Force One, a melodrama about finding a home for a child and a hyper-patriotic thriller structured like a home invasion movie. Such choice of allusions reveals The Last House’s conservative stance: the priority is to safeguard a home for the kids, and prolonged separation denies them a proper childhood. This echoes the real-life argument that mandatory quarantine was an invasion of personal freedom. Nevermind that, in the world of The Last House, the weird rain has also conjured tentacled horrors that kill anyone who makes it outside. The movie heavily implies that Homo sapiens is to blame for the suffering of sea creatures, but our heroes’ response in the end is to wield those big brains and opposable thumbs to hunt and kill sea creatures.

So the elements for a story that comments on the early 2020s are there: people can’t leave their houses, the outside world has a mysterious deadly enemy, and the feeling of powerlessness is stressful for everyone. But it has its commentary backwards: in real life, being confined indoors was a solution, not the problem. The problem was that the virus made physical socialization dangerous, and isolation was what we decided to do to protect each other. In the movie, isolation is treated as the problem, an excessive punishment on humankind imposed by monsters, and protecting each other means finding a way to break the forced isolation.

The Last House works better when it feels small, when it cares about the value of mutual care and the cumulative weight of uncertainty. But it mutates into a power fantasy for doomsday preppers, with confusing editing and quick flashing lights during action scenes that detract from the emotional content. And again, it mistakes the nature of the crisis it’s trying to talk about. This is not the right way to contribute to collective catharsis. This is a reassuring pat on the back for those who whined that quarantine was an unacceptable affront that needed to be opposed with violence.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

It’s impossible to spoil The Boroughs. The new Netflix show is so uninterested in keeping its secrets that the first episode tells you all you need to know: a monstrous presence lurks in a retirement community whose young, cheerful owners look and dress like they’re stuck in the 1950s. Because the residents are already at an age when it would be completely normal for them to die, nobody suspects that they’re being preyed on, even though the owners give an obvious creepy vibe from the moment they show up. You can put the pieces together: a large mass of easy victims, plus a rich couple with suspiciously youthful beauty, equals you already know what’s happening here.

So why dress up this show as a mystery, when the script is so eager to reveal everything up front? It’s not particularly subtle with its references: its plot beats proceed as a dark mirror of E.T. (instead of a human befriending and protecting an alien with healing powers, this human decides to imprison and exploit it) blended with a dark mirror of Cocoon (instead of aliens giving vital energy to old people, they devour old people to extract vital energy) and an even darker mirror of Omelas (instead of everyone benefiting from one person’s suffering, we have one person benefiting from everyone’s suffering).

With so many recognizable story elements, the only thing that keeps The Boroughs interesting and watchable is its spectacular casting. You couldn’t have asked for better actors to play the senior heroes of this show: Alfred Molina is pitch-perfect as a grumpy grandpa thrown too soon into too many otherworldly shenanigans precisely when he needs space to properly grieve his late wife; Denis O’Hare brings a sweet mixture of worldliness and vulnerability to the role of a man whom life has never ceased to punish; and Geena Davis rescues her character from the dreadfully bland arc the writers gave her. But the absolute show-stealer is Alfre Woodard, whose deeply layered performance deserves a dozen shelves full of awards.

The show sometimes alludes to themes worth thinking about, although they could have been explored to a greater extent. We’re told that Molina’s character’s devastating grief opened his mind to be receptive to a key character’s unspoken pain, but this revelation is addressed in a hurry, without giving us time to consider what this says about the nature of empathy. Both the monsters and the people who use them to unnaturally maintain their youth are vulnerable to the light of old TV sets, but whether this is a commentary on, say, the power of media to “shed light” on corruption is left unclear. The only theme that seems properly handled has to do with the fact that the retirement community is built on the site of a former mining town that became rich very quickly and was deserted just as quickly, which symbolically links the villains’ theft of vital energy to an earlier instance of rapacious extractivism.

If you focus your attention on admiring the actors, you’ll survive the predictable derivativeness of The Boroughs. As could be expected from the much-touted involvement of the creators of Stranger Things as executive producers, The Boroughs is unashamed to proclaim its references as loudly as it can. That’s the only warning you need: at no point are you going to be surprised.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Microreview: Redux Redux

Beware when you fight with monsters…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled o another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

Irene is no longer the person she knew herself to be. In the film Redux Redux, one of the best science fictional examples of literalizing a feeling I’ve ever seen, Irene is stuck in an endless cycle of hatred, ruminating on her unprocessed grief and pursuing the same quest thousands of times because she feels unable to return to her own life. In every universe she’s visited, her heartbroken counterpart has committed suicide, so she believes (there’s the classic Lie that a protagonist typically believes at the start of a story) that repeating the perpetual hunt for the killer is the only alternative she has left.

In general, this film delivers information in a carefully measured manner. The editing at the beginning, which repeats Irene’s vengeance in a rapid-fire sequence, seems on first watch to be telling a time travel story, and the script is comfortable with letting us sit with that confusion until it’s the proper moment to reveal the actual story.

The multiverse-crossing routine Irene has established for herself mirrors what real life looks like for someone caught in a self-destructive pattern. She no longer keeps a job or friends. She has no other task beyond chasing the killer and making him pay again and again. She has brief flings with the same cute guy from a grief support group in every universe, much like someone may serially hook up with thousands of casual partners looking for the same ideal in all of them.

It’s only when Irene unexpectedly rescues the killer’s next victim that it begins to feel conceivable for her to live for something other than anger.

This other character, Mia, gives Irene a mirror for her own situation. She’s only a kid, but Mia has been bounced from one foster home to another; jumping between universes isn’t any weirder for her. She’s eager to join Irene’s bloodthirsty campaign against the serial killer, and that’s what finally makes Irene realize that the life she’s leading isn’t something she’d want to inflict on anyone. For the first time in too long, she has a reason to stop. The problem is Mia doesn’t want to.

Redux Redux makes efficient use of its minimal special effects to keep its multiversal plot at just the right measure of complicated. Most of the time, it looks like a standard noir tale of self-perpetuating violence, but its allegory for unresolved trauma is never far from view. In the middle of its runtime we follow a side quest that gives us a quick glimpse of a larger underground community of multiversal travelers, but fortunately, it doesn’t draw too much attention away from the central problem about Irene and Mia.

If some horrible harm has been done to you, perhaps you’ve spent your waking hours thinking of the countless gruesome ways you’d like to take revenge. Redux Redux is saying: if you could really do that, if you could enact all your fantasies of getting even, it would destroy you. It would consume your life and leave nothing, and the people who make a living from fueling that obsession are the last people you should trust. And if you find yourself already down that road, saving someone else from it may show you your own way out.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

TV Review: The Miniature Wife

A small shift in perspective makes all the difference

With much improved visual effects over the 1997 film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, which for better or worse will be the unavoidable point of comparison, the Peacock show The Miniature Wife takes full advantage of its outlandish premise to shed literal and metaphorical light on the ways even a modern, educated, independent career woman can be made to feel small in her marriage.

On one hand we have Leslie, a physicist who studies the miniaturization of matter to boost the potential of world agriculture. The potential of this technology is limitless, but his company has been in financial difficulty after the failure of his earlier project, a variety of transgenic tomato. If he can’t win over a promising new investor, he can lose all he’s been working for. On the other hand we have Leslie’s wife, Lindy, a writer who struck gold with a virally successful novel 20 years ago and has been unable to write anything else since. When a series of misunderstandings results in the misattribution to her of a short story actually written by her student, she has to reckon with the reasons why she wants fame and figure out whether there’s anything that matters to her more than public adoration.

Leslie and Lindy come from less than ideal families that perversely shaped them into a perfect match for each other. Leslie’s mother crafted a bubble of normalcy to counteract his father’s all-controlling tyranny, so he grew up knowing only a glossy, shiny appearance of happiness. Lindy‘s mother basically resents her for existing, so she grew up attached to her father’s tall tales that provide the feeling, but not the substance, of happiness. So here’s where we are today: Leslie is a self-centered manchild who’s never had to stomach hard truths; Lindy is a raw, open wound who’s exhausted of a lifetime of hard truths. What has sustained their marriage this long is that they give each other exactly the excuse they need to not grow.

So it shouldn’t surprise that they view their respective professional advancements as a zero-sum game where only one of them can be successful at a time. Lindy’s novel already won a Pulitzer; now Leslie is hoping for a Nobel, and that impossible quest has sucked all the energy in their relationship and kept Lindy’s writing career in limbo for the last 20 years. The escalating mutual resentments come to a head in a quick comedy of errors that results in Lindy reduced to pocket size and trapped in a dollhouse while public opinion erupts around the new short story wrongly published under her name. Added complication: Leslie hasn’t figured out how to safely bring tiny things back to normal size. Another complication: Lindy has been having an emotional affair with one of Leslie’s employees. Worst complication of all: as soon as Lindy is returned to normal size, she intends to leave Leslie, and it’s clear she’s in the right here. She’s had enough of being ignored, taken for granted, minimized. The plot of the show is a clever way of making her feelings literal and showing what it’s like for a wife to feel small.

What follows for the rest of the season is a hilarious parade of slapstick jokes about surviving life in miniature. Lindy wrestles a fly, befriends a plastic astronaut, seeks refuge in Christmas decorations, turns toothpicks and cotton swabs into versatile weapons, struggles to operate a touchscreen phone, and masters the uses of dental floss as a climbing rope. A recurring gag, that never gets old, is to see her speak into a wireless earbud as a (for her) gigantic phone receiver. Elizabeth Banks as Lindy hits the right notes as simultaneously terrified and exasperated at the injustice of her situation, while the usually more dramatic Matthew Macfadyen as Leslie reveals a charming sense of comedic timing in the role of a clueless genius.

Despite the great performances (watch out for Adam Capriolo’s brief but stellar moments in a fascinatingly amoral tertiary role), the writing of character is where The Miniature Wife came close to losing me. Sometimes it comes off as a stretch that these two are able to wound each other so deeply and still come out stronger (Is that something neurotypicals do? They really get so angry they yell irrevocably hurtful things they didn’t mean? If so, how on Earth do they get any relationship to work?). It’s a truism of scriptwriting that character is revealed by choices made in extreme circumstances, and it’s hard to imagine a more extreme test of the strength of a marriage. Where do you find the maturity to give up the mirage of achievement for a true measure of inner development? What will finally push you to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of your significant other? For most couples, one hopes it doesn’t take molecular reshuffling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Paradise season 2

A welcome jump in quality over season 1

Season 1 of the Hulu post-apocalyptic mystery show Paradise left me with rather tepid expectations for whichever continuation the story would have. The recently released season 2 has been a happy surprise with deeper characterization, tighter worldbuilding and more cohesive plotting.

A big part of the reason for this improvement is the change in focus toward life outside of the city-sized survival bunker where season 1 was set. Now that our protagonist Xavier has found evidence that his wife survived the fall of civilization, we follow his quest to the coordinates she sent from a makeshift radio transmitter. On the way there, his small airplane crashes, but he’s rescued by Annie, a former medical student who happened to be working as a tour guide at Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis when the world-ending disaster happened. Annie’s presence on screen is brief, but she turns out to indirectly play a major role in subsequent events.

It’s impressive how well delineated Annie’s character gets to be during the short time we spend with her. The neglectful way she was raised left her avid for structure, which makes her a good fit for a job where she has to recite the same script in the same order every day. This personal history equips her well for the boring routine of surviving alone, but after a few years without human contact, its resumption takes huge effort and patience.

Which brings us to Link, another character newly introduced in this season. He leads a loose band of survivalists who want to invade the titular Paradise bunker, but first he has a short encounter with Annie that results in pregnancy. The flashbacks about Link reveal that he used to research advanced quantum physics, which is connected to the vaguely alarming weirdness that starts to gradually creep over the story. I won’t spoil the details, but if you thought that Samantha, the over-prepared creator of the bunker, was a bit too paranoid about securing every avenue of survival, in this season we discover that those measures were nowhere near paranoid enough—she has backup plans inside backup plans, and the flashbacks about those preparations fill the gaps about how she became the ruthless control freak we know her as.

As you can surmise by now, the show continues its tradition, firmly established in the previous season, of delivering half the story via flashbacks. This is a story about saving the future, but its version of the future is never free from the pervasive, life-defining influence of the past. In fact, this time the flashbacks are used more effectively, with a more solid connection to the themes of each episode. Whereas they sometimes intruded in the flow of narration in season 1, here they serve a more intentional function.

The main plot threads of this season have to do with Samantha finding her way back to a dominant position in the bunker microcosmos state after the political shocks that ended season 1, Xavier making it alive to the remote place where his wife has been living after the disaster, and the common people in the bunker coming up with clandestine ways to oppose the authoritarian turn in their government. A theme that unifies much of the plot is motherhood: just as Annie, as well as our favorite psycho murderer Jane, were shaped by the destructive parenting style of their respective mothers, the survival bunker is an incarnation of the extreme opposite: Samantha’s obsessive urge to protect her children at literally any cost. The healthy equilibrium is to be found in Annie herself, whose wish to protect her daughter has to be coupled to her need to trust that Xavier will be a good caretaker for her; and in Xavier’s wife Teri, who unexpectedly finds herself in the position of a substitute mother to a lost child, and whose judgment of character with regard to motherly tasks gives Xavier an accurate hint about someone’s secret sinister side.

The emphasis on motherhood is related to a persistent argument made through the season: the end of the world will not be survived by rough macho warriors, but by compassionate caretakers.

Sadly, a few key characters from season 1 are greatly diminished this time, in particular Xavier’s children, Secret Service agent Nicole Robinson, and former First Son Jeremy Bradford, who get basically no inner development and are reduced to plot levers. Even Jane Driscoll, the fascinating secondary antagonist of season 1, ceases to be interesting in season 2 after all the mystery about her is lost.

The story ends with another cliffhanger: a new mission for Xavier to try to fix the world permanently with the help of the quantum weirdness that the season slowly develops. This means that season 3 will, once again, focus away from the bunker, which has already proved to be the right choice. The future trajectory of this show seems bound to eschew political drama in favor of world-breaking technobabble, certainly a tough target to aim for, but if the writing of season 2 is any indication, we can trust that this story is in good hands.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: In the Blink of an Eye

45,000 years of nothing much happening

Watching Andrew Stanton’s new film In the Blink of an Eye, it’s inevitable to be reminded of Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film The Fountain, its similarly plotted predecessor in the tradition that Charlie Jane Anders identified as the Cloud Atlas genre: stories composed of parallel segments linked by thematic echoes across centuries. My favorite literary examples of this trend have been, as people must by now be sick of hearing, Anthony Doerr’s 2021 novel Cloud Cuckoo Land and Thomas Wharton’s 2023 novel The Book of Rain, both of which contrast the finitude of human life with the long-term consequences of our ecological crisis. In the Blink of an Eye also addresses that topic, but from a more zoomed-in point of view, following three family dramas marked by the universal human experience of disease and death. In this it closely mirrors the structure and preoccupations of The Fountain, but with less focused and coherent results.

The plot begins in the time of cavepeople, with a small Neanderthal family going through the ordinary experiences of pre-agricultural society: procuring food, raising children, making fire, leaving handprints on rocks as a mourning ritual, crafting small pieces of art, and generally trying to make it through the little time we have on this planet. The events in these segments are simple and generic, so the fact that all the dialogues are in an unknown prehistoric language doesn’t hinder comprehension. The actors’ performances are transparent, effortlessly readable. Across a few decades, a widowed parent lives to see their children grow and have their own children. That is the limit of human aspirations in this era. Life is too harsh and painful for any effort beyond just living.

One of the members of this family ends up under the microscope of our next protagonist, 45,000 years later. In these segments we follow an anthropologist who studies the genetic admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans. Hers are the standard worries of 21st-century white-collar life: juggling major family events with opportunities for career advancement, finding time for romantic fulfillment in between professional duties, and generally trying to find meaning in a world that sometimes feels too complicated. In the early scenes with this character, we watch her adjust to her mother’s worsening health and its impact on her work life; unfortunately, after her mother dies the plot feels aimless for a long while until we reach the adult years of her son, who invents a medical treatment to extend the human lifespan by centuries.

This development makes the third story possible. In the 25th century, humankind has left a dying Earth behind and has placed its hopes on a generation ship carrying embryos and terraforming equipment. Its sole adult occupant has been genetically modified to stop aging so she’ll be able to keep the ship in operation during the entire journey. She has an AI overseer program to talk to, but otherwise she’s on her own. It seems that the mission had to be planned with very limited resources, as the ship has no redundancies in its design. This becomes a problem when a mysterious disease appears in the greenhouse, which threatens to lower oxygen production beyond the dangerously narrow threshold for the viability of the whole mission. After running some cold calculations, the AI decides to sacrifice itself and offer the space of its server room as a backup greenhouse, which fixes the oxygen problem but leaves the human operator without its help for the crucial task of watching over the embryos during incubation and training the children for life on the new planet.

The threat to the oxygen levels aboard the ship is the only plot point that resembles a true conflict with stakes in this film. The other stories we follow in parallel with this one proceed too smoothly along the traditional lifepath of birth, growth, reproduction and death. It’s the circle of life, over and over for millennia. The film’s moral stance is to be found in a brief dialogue from the scenes set in the future: at some point, humankind decided that the treatment to extend life for centuries was not a good thing. Here’s where In the Blink of an Eye breaks away from The Fountain after repeatedly alluding to it: the three parallel segments of The Fountain deal with the human struggle against death through the mythical, and therefore unattainable, quest for the secret of eternal life. The story of In the Blink of an Eye presents us with a society that has conquered that secret through science, but later chooses to eschew it. The idea is that it’s a good thing that people die. Whereas The Fountain presents death as ultimately acceptable, In the Blink of an Eye goes beyond and makes the case that it’s actually desirable.

That’s a grim stance to take for what is otherwise plotted as a rather uneventful slice-of-life story. With its unexamined reliance on reproductive futurism, In the Blink of an Eye seems to position the abstraction of humankind, instead of real humans, as the character to root for. According to this film, the reason why it’s a good thing that people die is that that’s the way it’s always been, and as long as new people keep being born, all will be well. The characters in all three time periods end up accepting the deaths of their parents as a natural part of life, but this theme finds its bluntest expression in the future plot, where it’s framed as OK that the ship AI dies because it frees up resources for more babies. Perhaps it’s worthwhile here to point out one likely basis for the ideological divide between this film and The Fountain: Aronofsky is Jewish, and the questions he brought to The Fountain had to do with the thirst for life in this world, while Stanton is Christian, and it’s evident throughout In the Blink of an Eye that the plot favors the Christian theme that death can help life. Still, the ending of The Fountain presents that cyclical idea in a more elegant way, without ignoring its tragic side. The Fountain admits that death is an unbeatable enemy, but doesn’t fool itself pretending it isn’t still the enemy. In the Blink of an Eye is too busy crafting a sentimental portrayal of day-to-day heteronormative domesticity to notice the gloomy fatalism that hides underneath its embrace of mortality.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Book Review: The Subtle Art of Folding Space

A story of two sisters and their tangled relationship, plus maintenance of the laws of the universe

Ellie lives in Boston. She is on her way to DC, where her elder sister Chris has been taking care of their mother, whose condition has slipped into a coma. Chris is the type of elder sister that never, ever stops telling Ellie how worthless she is, how much she clearly doesn’t love their mother as much as Chris does.

Oh, and did I mention that Chris has sent a number of assassination attempts Ellie’s way?

Oh, and did I also mention that their family is among a secret group of people who maintain this universe, and others?

This is the story of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, short story author John Chu’s jump from shorter forms into a full-length novel.

There is a point in the novel where Ellie, and a few others, are discussing the fact that within their society there is apparently a secret cabal of universe tinkerers, maintainers and builders, and how it’s a problem that there are secret factions amongst them. It’s funny, but Ellie never seems to consider that she herself, and all of her colleagues, are in fact a secret cabal within the wider universe, and universes, that the secrecy goes from the very beginning. So let me explain:

Ellie, Chris, their mother, family members and others, some of which are not from this particular universe, and some of which are most definitely not human, are members of a group of people who build, debug and maintain universes, including our own. They do this by means of an attached “sub-universe” called the “skunkworks.” That’s where the universe can be tweaked. Those who can do this are expected to do it not for their own gain, but as an unheralded public good, and as needed. Ellie may not be her mother (who is and was Chief Builder), but when she finds that there’s new hardware and code in the skunkworks, and that someone is exploiting design flaws, she’s forced into action.

The mechanics, methodology and paradigm of maintaining the universe feel somewhat like computer programming, when you have some very old code that has not been completely debugged and probably can’t be. That means continual work for people like Ellie. Just how this all came to be in the first place, and how someone can get initiated into this, are never made clear, but the programming of the universe is a scaffold for telling a story of heart with these characters and their relationships.

Take Chris and Ellie. Chris, as mentioned above, continually tells Ellie she is not good enough and really doesn’t love their mother. Plus the assassination attempts, and the gaslighting. The novel takes pains to have Ellie slowly really realize just how toxic Chris’s relationship with her is, and how it is not a normal sibling rivalry relationship, but something worse. The untangling and exegesis of the Ellie-Chris relationship is what this novel is all about. The skunkworks, the machinations, the secret societies, changes to the universe, and intrigues, all really in the end boil down to Ellie’s relationship with her older sister.

This means that readers who are hoping for even more crunchy details on how these universe maintainers do their work are going to be a bit disappointed. Just enough detail is there to tantalize the reader (such as mentioning casually that a century ago they had to add quantum mechanics to the universe), but it does not go endlessly deep. The sense that we get, and is explicated directly at points, is that maintaining the universe is a thankless job, if you are playing it straight and not for your own gain. It’s a lot of work, scut work, to keep the machinery of the universe running, especially when it’s filled with exploits and code problems.

But the book really isn’t about the mechanics of all this. This is a book about the characters in that space, and what they do, and why, and how they relate to each other. There are also hints, as mentioned above, of various philosophies within the factions of how to do all this.¹

Besides Ellie and Chris (who is not actually on screen so much but remains a looming antagonist), the other major character we get is their cousin Daniel. He is a prodigy of the skunkworks on axes that Ellie is not, and it is clear that he, for all his affability, is extremely competent—and dangerous. I also liked Ahdi, who is Daniel’s boss in the hierarchy (or is he?), and has some rather startling skills of his own. Through Ahdi we get a window into the greater world of the people who maintain the skunkworks of this and other universes, and it’s a tangled relationship map that Ellie, Chris and Daniel are only just getting themselves into.

In many ways, this feels like a multiverse modern world novel that is in conversation with Max Gladstone’s Craft Wars books. Both authors have a strong sense of humanity and relationships, queer-positive worlds, and characters that are dealing with some often unhinged and mighty powers (magic on one side, multiversal manipulation on the other). But what counts is how people deal with such power, and the philosophies of handing it. A lot of the Craft Wars is about how to maintain societies and what it means to siphon off power for your own ends, even with the best of intentions. Here, Ellie and Chris’s relationship, and the fate of their mother, falls squarely into that conversation.

The novel reaches an inflection point in the sisters’ relationship, a very satisfactory ending to a self-contained story. Anyone who has had strained relations with a sibling, especially revolving around their relationship with their parents, can see and get a lot out of the Ellie-Chris relationship. The skunkworks and the problems, personal and otherwise, revealed in the course of the novel are not resolved, and if Chu wanted to write more in this multiverse (I do think he has a lot more to say about power than what he has said here, again, like the Craft Wars ’verse does), I think there’s room here to really explore these ideas with an aggressively character-centered focus.

In other words, I certainly read more novels set in this multiverse.

Pass the bao, and some more novels, John!

Highlights:

• A very strong focus on character dynamics, the Ellie-Chris relationship in particular
• Universe maintenance as computer programming of an old and somewhat creaky system
• This novel made me hungry for bao

Reference: Chu, John. The Subtle Art of Folding Space [Tor, 2026].

¹ The description of exploits and how the universe can be circumvented reminds me a bit of the description of how magic works in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files ’verse, specifically The Regicide Report.

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

Film Review: Arco

Look up and make a wish

First we have the far future. People live on platforms above the clouds, where they practice subsistence farming. With the help of multicolored robes adorned with pretty diamonds, they routinely travel to the prehistoric past to recover samples of usable species; there are hints that something caused an ecological catastrophe that made the surface unlivable. The family we follow has a girl and a boy, but the boy, Arco, is still too young to join the time-traveling expeditions. Because it’s a human universal, even after the end of civilization, that kids have an instinct for getting in trouble, the boy steals a suit and attempts a time jump on his own. As can be expected, he gets lost, and thus we have a movie.

Then we have the not too far future. The environment is still in the middle of falling apart; one day can bring a killer hurricane and the next a massive forest fire, and the solution of rich people is to have retractable glass domes built around their houses. That way you can have your dinner in peace while nature rages outside. The family we follow in this era has a preteen girl, a baby boy and a robot nanny. The parents are perpetually busy at work in some other city, and the girl, Iris, is tired of feeling lonely. So fate fulfills her wishes one day, when Arco crash-lands in her neighborhood.

The plot of the French animated film Arco brings to mind E.T., with the strange visitor hiding in a child’s house until they can return to their parents. The main difference in this case is that Iris and Arco can talk to each other. She’s excited about showing him all the cool things of her modern life, but he’s rather guarded about how much of his time she can be allowed to know. This dynamic only gets a brief time to develop before we have adult authorities, mysterious stalkers and natural disasters converging to get in the way of this adorable pair.

A curious contrast to the beauty of this moment in the kids’ lives is the stunted development of the trio of stalkers who jump out of nowhere to find Arco and obtain proof that time travel is real. They’re introduced as antagonists, but soon enough their clumsiness neutralizes any threat they may pose, and they spend the rest of the movie looking goofy and obstructing our heroes’ quest for no good reason. I hear many viewers enjoyed these characters; I found them mostly annoying.

One feature that stands out about the overall tone of Arco is how obviously it’s not an American or Japanese cartoon. It’s far too common for children in American cartoons to be overly expressive of their emotions, whereas children in Japanese cartoons can sometimes speak with such deep introspection that believability is stretched. The two lead children in Arco come off as more relaxed in their inner life, which makes the stakes feel starker later, when it’s time to panic. The naturality with which they let themselves feel their emotions ends up being key to the gradual way these two start falling in love without having a clue of what romance is.

There’s an element of irony in the suggestion that Arco’s description of the post-disaster world will inspire Iris to get to work to mitigate the disaster that in her time is still ongoing. But her success is more visible in the personal sphere. Her family life is strained because she almost never gets to see her parents, who work a lot to afford the storm-proof house where she lives. When one looks at the family Arco comes from, and the magnitude of the effort it takes for his parents to find him, the implication is that Iris changed a society where parents rarely spend time with their kids into a society where parents move heaven and earth to see them. This side of the story is more impactful than any environmentalist lesson that could be read in the plot. Viewers probably already know the dangers that surround us, so Arco can just show the full extent of the climate crisis without turning preachy; the images suffice.

The gorgeous animation and the careful balancing of tension and humor highlight the small tragedy at the core of the story: two children having a wonderful, one-in-a-lifetime experience whose full meaning they can’t yet grasp. They just know something special is happening to them, and they don’t have a name for it, and it will take them decades of growth to appreciate those fleeting days of magic. The part of the movie’s ending that is happy gives both Iris and Arco a blunt reminder of the cruelty of time, a hard truth that not even time travel can fix. That’s the thing about growing up: if it tastes bittersweet, you’re doing it right.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

A Russian nested doll of stories, characters and relationships, and yes, magic

Jamie is a grad student in Massachusetts, working as best she can to teach classes and make her way in the world. She’s also a witch, has been for years, and has gotten more and more interested in the uses of magic. But it is her relationship with her mother, and the story of two women in the 18th century, and a book, and the story within that book, that truly drive and reinforce the narrative.

This is the story of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

On the level of basic plot description, the novel is a relatively straightforward affair about Jamie’s relationship with her mother, and about uncovering what happened to her other mother, Mae. This proceeds as Jamie struggles with her relationship with her mother, with her spouse, Ro, and with the nature and uses of magic. Oh, and there is also drama and issues with her graduate studies and classes in the modern day.

Anyone with a parental relationship as an adult will find a lot here to think on and absorb. There is a real dividing line from when you stop being a child and start being an adult with an adult parent; and what life is like on that other side can be uncomfortable, especially if relations have had a break for a time. This novel explores the implications of that sort of relationship intimately and with feeling.

The narrative is far more than the sum of its parts. It is a rich dive deep down in levels and layers that wind up influencing and talking to each other, and to the reader. The novel works on those interlocking layers. At the very top, this is a story about a mother and a daughter and how they try to reconnect, with the daughter teaching magic to her mother, and the use of that magic having all sorts of spinning consequences. This impacts severely the relationship. And since this is a Charlie Jane Anders book, nearly all of the sympathetic characters are queer.

Jamie’s graduate studies center on the author Sarah Fielding, a real-life author, and sister of the more famous author Henry Fielding. The story of 18th-century women like Sarah is part of this novel. Anders devises a fictional novel of hers called Emily, making the text (and Jamie) focus on that book and speculate on the relationship between Emily and one Charlotte Clarke. Charlotte is a fascinating real-life character who transgressed gender roles in complicated ways, was often known as Charles Brown, and dressed in men’s clothes. In real life we don’t know how much Charlotte and Sarah knew each other. In this novel, bits of a speculated relationship between the two is a “level” of the story underneath the main ones.

The novel is like that: levels upon levels, echoing and reflecting on each other, like a layer cake. From the top:

• Main day story of Jamie, Ro (her partner) and Serena (her mother). Plus magic.
• The story of Serena and her partner Mae (Jamie’s parents). It’s a tragedy in many ways. I was moved to tears at points.
• The story of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Clarke. Anders takes what we know and, thanks to it being part of Jamie’s thesis, has her speculate on the relationship.
• The fictional novel Emily by Fielding (which we get excerpts and commentary on, since this is Jamie’s thesis).
• Finally, inside Emily there is a layer further down: a fantasy story, the Tale of the Princess and the Strolling Player, that definitely has connections at least up to Fielding and Clarke’s story, and, I think, all the way to Jamie and Ro’s as well.

Although there is no actual time travel involved in this book, what comes to mind when reading it is Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, which focuses on the early 19th century, and the work of an imaginary Romantic poet’s work and its importance to the narrative. With all these layers influencing each other, I am also reminded of the Dialogues of Achilles and the Tortoise in Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

So the novel is extremely geeky in a literary sense. It’s a fascinating high wire act from Anders. It’s also a very science-fictional geeky book. For all of the focus on an 18th-century author, the novel lives in a modern context and has plenty of references and genre awareness—not to the degree of, say, a Jo Walton novel, but enough for someone new to genre works or movies to find it just very slightly off-putting. That said, this IS the novel to give your queer or queer-friendly friend who has never read science fiction or fantasy before but wants to try it out.

That subject has been in the water in recent months. Here, in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, there are no spell-slinging wizards; the magic is subtle. While people might reach for Kelly Link here, what this novel made me think of (besides earlier works by Anders and the aforementioned Tim Powers), is Megan Lindholm (a.k.a. Robin Hobb)’s Wizard of the Pigeons, where magic is also very subtle and hard to notice.¹ The threat in that novel is mystical, whereas the challenges Jamie and her family and friends face are all too real and present.

The theory of magic, such as it is for Jamie and her family and friends, is one of discovery and of liminal places. There is a numinous, mysterious and only-vaguely-understood nature of magic that is very much against codified rules. Jamie, who has been practicing this magic for some time before the book, has theories about it that don’t always seem to align with the actual results. Serena, to whom she teaches magic, has her own ideas on what it’s good for. When Serena and Jamie find other practitioners, the bounds and sphere of actual theory, craft and knowledge expand further. At no point is there a Sandersonian ruleset defined. Magic is, in the end, mysterious. And it’s not the entire focus of the book, as witness the book’s Kelly-Link-like title.

The voice in the writing of Lessons in Magic and Disaster is contemporary and open. In this year of 2026, Jamie’s voice resonates as someone you might know, or at least be neighbors with. Her concerns and problems, aside from the issues of magic, and of the 18th-century material mentioned before, are of this moment too: the rising intolerance against queer people, and the difficulties of relationships with a spouse and a mother. It’s not a comfortable read, given what Jamie and those around her go through, but Anders makes the experience easy for us to immerse in, and find sympathy in both Jamie and her mother despite their differences. There are no easy answers at the end. That in itself is a form of magic.

There is a point in the novel where Jamie finds a thesis statement (or thinks she has) for her study of Fielding. It’s really an echo for the thesis statement for Anders’ s novel as well, and so, atypically, I am going to quote it verbatim:

So now Jamie is thinking of Emily as a story about nature, change, and chasing your own heart’s desire in spite of everyone else’s expectations. Emily is a book about the games we play along the cliff edge. About nature encroaching in the places that people have left behind to move to towns at the very start of industrial capitalism, and the changes that people can make in those places. It’s about the trade-offs between security and self-determination, and Emily’s struggle to have both.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a queer, immersive character study that sometimes uncomfortably (in a good way) speaks to fractured relationships, both familial and otherwise, and the costs of both action and inaction in dealing with challenges. Plus magic.

Highlights:

• Character-focused, immersive story
• Russian-doll narrative, layered story reinforcing and exploring theme
• Possibly a very good fit for a first SFF novel for queer-friendly readers

Reference: Anders, Charlie Jane. Lessons in Magic and Disaster [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve thrown a number of books and references at you, the reader, in this review, but the book is like that, too. There are both a Historical Note and a strongly felt Afterword where Anders reveals her thought process, ideas, and a reading list. And a music list, because she’s like that.

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

Book Review: Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka

Of all the versions of you in all universes, can you live with being this one?

College teacher Pepper Rafferty has a reasonably satisfying life: a loving duo of adoptive mothers, a kind husband with a sophisticated sense of humor, an important job cataloging bones as a forensic anthropologist. The only piece missing from her happiness is the unknown reasons her biological mother could have had for leaving her. Over the years, that old wound has receded from her attention. But it hasn’t closed. And all the messy feelings Pepper has spent her life ignoring jump back to the surface when she receives the news that her biological mother, who happens to be the world-famous artist Ula Frost, has been reported missing, and now there’s a big tangle of legal questions concerning who will become the owner of her paintings.

It’s not just that Ula’s paintings are worth a fortune: urban legend has it that Ula developed a form of magic in her art, a secret technique that opened links to other universes. According to the rumors, every time she made a portrait of someone, the version of that person represented on the image was dragged into existence in this universe. It goes without saying that that kind of power would draw the attention of a certain secret elite organization with plans about the improvement of reality. All that stands in its way is poor clueless Pepper.

There’s a symbolic level at which the novel Self-Portrait with Nothing succeeds at expressing the disquieting mix of emotions associated with lifelong grief. Pepper tells herself that she’s made peace with Ula’s unexplained choices, but the truth is she’s been living in unresolved grief about the family life she never knew. Now, to be fair, her adoptive mothers couldn’t be more perfect; she has nothing to complain about on that front. But still, that unanswered what if remains. Other possible lives were closed off to her. She never met Ula face to face, so she’s imagined her in many different ways, without knowing which one was true in this universe. Pepper’s search for answers after learning of Ula’s disappearance is told with a profound empathy for the feeling of a truth that eludes definition. Later in the plot, when we discover that Ula made a series of self-portraits that summoned alternate versions of herself, Pepper’s interaction with those other Ulas mirrors the confusing real-life experience of an adoptee figuring out which of the imagined profiles of their biological mother matches the real one.

While the novel does a good job at this purely symbolic level, the nuts and bolts of the narrative craft are handled less well. The omniscient narrator takes too long to reveal to the reader that Pepper already knew who her biological mother is, which diminishes the impact of this news when other characters are surprised by it. The second half of the plot, where Pepper travels to Ula’s hometown to find more clues, is held together by an unbroken succession of bad luck incidents that strain credulity to ridiculous extremes.

In particular there’s a writerly tic that reoccurs dozens of times throughout the text and gets tiresome quickly. Whenever Pepper is pushed into a corner by circumstances, she tends to imagine herself in other universes, dealing with her problem more competently, or having avoided it due to wiser choices, or utterly unaffected by it. So the reader has to endure interminable repetitions of “In a different universe, Pepper was…” Yes, we get it, this is a story about multiverse variants of the same person; we don’t need to be reminded of the book’s gimmick every five minutes. These asides have no consequence on the actual events we follow and make Pepper come off, at best, as an indecisive person habituated to maladaptive daydreaming, and at worst, as a mediocre substitute for more interesting Peppers we could be reading about instead. This Pepper ends the novel having realized that she rather likes the universe she happens to inhabit, but the inner process that led to that key moment of growth is obscured from the reader.

A big reason why Pepper can make it through her investigation with her sanity in one piece is her strong bond with her husband. Even in the second half, where their communication is limited to text messages, she gets invaluable support from his gentle words and his unwavering optimism. This was a consistently enjoyable character to read. Under a barrage of revelations that shake Pepper’s entire understanding of reality, her husband’s love provides an anchor to an aspect of the universe she wouldn’t want to change.

The sinister organization that is pursuing Pepper to get its hands on the paintings is not so successfully written. Those scenes try to give the vibe of a spy thriller, but the prose is firmly stuck in personal psychodrama mode, and the mismatch is too evident. The story in general works better when Pepper is processing her emotional turmoil than when she tries to be an international woman of mystery. A specially cringeworthy scene has Pepper list all the ways she’s unqualified to pull off a museum heist, right at the moment she’s attempting said heist.

Self-Portrait with Nothing is an uneven mix of, on one hand, complex emotions that would have been better served by a more detailed exploration, and on the other hand, dangerous adventures in spy land that often run in circles and get nowhere. How effectively you find it allegorizes the disorientation of a motherless child will depend on how much tolerance you have for vaguely mentioned conspiracies that add to the story less than the extensive space they fill on the page.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Pokwatka, Aimee. Self-Portrait with Nothing [Tor, 2022].

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

Not much changed when the Fire Nation attacked

The Avatar saga remains faithful to its tried and true formula: visually breathtaking, narratively uninspired

There are truly interesting ideas in Avatar 3 that elevate the themes raised by the first Avatar to questions of thorny significance to the story, and time after time, their resolution goes for the easy answer, the overdone cliché. The Way of Water could be forgiven for delivering very little because it promised very little. Fire and Ash promises a lot and still fails to deliver, which makes this entry in the film series a more regrettable (forgive the pun) misfire.

Let’s begin with the film’s central conflict: Spider, the human boy adopted by the blue aliens. After a sudden bout of cosmic bad luck, he ends up convulsing on the forest floor, with no more human-breathable air left in his mask and far from his stack of replacements. As a desperate last measure, our miracle child Kiri connects to the web of nature and reformats Spider’s entire body chemistry to allow him to breathe Pandora’s air. So far, so good: no more depending on a 24/7 mask to survive. However, Spider’s new metabolism opens the door to a nightmare scenario: he’s living proof that the human body can adapt to survive unimpeded in Pandora’s environment. If the bad guys figure out how to replicate the process, the entire balance of power in Pandora will shift in favor of human colonization.

Now Spider’s existence is a danger to everyone he loves, and his body is an invaluable source of biomedical innovation. The rest of the film has him ping-ponged between enemy factions that want to either cut him open for the benefit of Earth or cut his throat for the benefit of Pandora. But the movie chooses the wrong Na’vi as the mouthpiece for the latter position, and there are no lasting consequences for the personal ties that should have been damaged between Spider and his would-be executioner.

It has a jarring effect that the film brings us to this immense rift between Spider and the blue aliens, only to give everyone a happy ending where he’s welcomed by the ancestors as a member of the Na’vi without further issue. Let’s stress the point again: Spider was almost murdered by people he deeply trusts and loves, because they became convinced that his life put all of them in danger. And this betrayal comes after Neytiri has spent half the film insulting and neglecting him because she’s still grieving her dead son and Spider is a constant reminder of which people took him from her. After his near-execution, the relationship between Spider and the Na’vi shouldn’t be able to go back to normal, ever. At the very least, it should take more for him to take up arms in their defense again. Even his evil not-exactly-father, the half-Na’vi clone of the late Colonel Quaritch, shows him more respect in this film than his adoptive parents.

The other conflict in the plot, which the trailers gave much attention to but actually doesn’t affect the story that much, has to do with the Fire Nation Ash People, a tribe of pillagers who some decades ago survived a volcanic disaster and have since rejected the cult of the nature goddess Eywa. Now they live off piracy and worship the same fire that destroyed their old way of life. This is a fascinating concept that the film does nothing with. It’s one thing to present a schism in a pantheistic faith and create what is essentially a demonic cult; it’s much more compelling to do so in a setting where the nature goddess is demonstrably real and present in people’s lives. What does it look like to despise the natural flow of the life force when that force is visible and has a tangible will?

But also, what does it say about Eywa that she plays favorites between Na’vi clans? The Ash People’s backstory has them praying to be saved from the volcano, but Eywa refused to send help. In such circumstances it makes total sense that they’d form a new religion around fire, which proved to be the more powerful force, and that they’d turn to pillage to survive, both because they no longer have fertile land and because they no longer trust Eywa’s generosity.

Eywa’s will is actually one of the bigger problems with the plotting of the Avatar series. In the first movie, she saved the day via literal Dea Ex Machina, and Avatar 3 repeats the same trick in an identical situation. The critique of real-life environmental devastation is loud and clear: the humans of this future are too dim to notice the obvious intelligence of the space whales they kill for profit, but it takes a civilization-sized Idiot Ball to ignore a whole sentient biosphere telling you to stop.

When you introduce a deity into your setting, and this deity’s opinion matches your stance as an author, it’s very hard to avoid turning your story into a pamphlet. Eywa steers the plot at the times when it’s convenient, in the directions that help the author preach his message, and thus can’t function as a character in the way that the rest of the characters treat her. And the only time we’re told Eywa makes a questionable choice, i.e. letting the Ash People starve, it’s presented in a way that makes them the bad guys instead of Eywa. As often happens with supreme beings in stories, there are no lessons for Eywa to learn, no need for her to change her mind or grow. The story assumes she can do no wrong, even when it clearly shows it happening. Instead of being a character, she fulfills the function of authorial (forgive the pun) avatar that stalls or pushes the plot as needed.

Another character whom the story treats far more favorably than their actions deserve: Jake Sully, whose boot camp style of parenting will probably push Na’vi culture to invent psychotherapy on its own. Even allowing for the sad reality that the entire Na’vi people is in a war for survival, Jake has no excuse for the way he treats his children, and he’s repeatedly portrayed as heroic for it.

Avatar’s in-your-nose parable about colonialism and predatory greed has been repeating the same basic points for three movies, and doesn’t have any original perspective to add to the discussion. James Cameron has clearly exhausted all the tricks in his box. This film series should stop before its incomparably gorgeous landscapes can’t disguise the mediocre storytelling anymore.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: In Your Dreams

Maybe sleep on this one

It’s tricky to make a story about dreams feel like it has actual stakes. In Paprika, the danger is that the outlandish creations of the dream world are leaking out to reality. In Inception, the danger is that going too deep may make you lose your mind. And you know what you’ve gotten into if you start dreaming of Freddy Krueger. But if you’re telling a cute adventure for kids, you can’t make things too dangerous. Ultimately, the consequences of experiencing a dream only matter in the real world; that’s what Pixar’s Dream Productions understood so well. In the new Netflix animated film In Your Dreams, the danger for most of the plot is rather unclear; whenever a dream gets too scary, the kids simply wake up. It’s only in the third act that the script seems to remember that something must be at stake.

In Your Dreams plays with the double meaning of “dream” as “the random images your brain vomits while you sleep” and “a heartfelt desire” to turn the character of the Sandman into a sort of wish-granting genie. Our protagonist, a young girl called Stevie, is worried that her mother’s new job opportunity may cause her parents to divorce, so she embarks on a quest across the dream world to find the Sandman’s remote lair and ask him to fix reality. The fact that in stories involving the Sandman he typically has no power outside of dreams should give you a hint as to how the whole matter will turn out.

As derivative as the story gets, it should at least be commended for destigmatizing divorce and women who pursue their careers. But do children in the 21st century really need to be reminded that divorce isn’t the end of the world? One would hope not, but with the conservative bent that the culture is taking, I guess any progressive message is welcome.

The movie follows to the letter the basic scriptwriting advice that what your protagonist thinks they want is not what they actually need. Stevie thinks that she should defend the sanctity of the nuclear family, but what she needs is to learn to stop poking her nose in adult decisions she doesn’t understand. She’s the only character in the movie with an arc, and it leads to not trying to fix what’s not broken. It’s an odd way to resolve a plot, because it implies that things were already going to sort themselves out before she started overthinking.

There's a minor additional arc for Stevie regarding her relationship with her little brother, and it goes exactly in the direction one can predict in a story for kids. The fact that she’s written as a control freak who must learn to take it easy, while her brother is a chaos goblin who is not required by the plot to mature or discover any lesson in order to repair their relationship, points to uncomfortable gendered assumptions that the script seems unaware of. You know your choices in characterization need some extra work when your most interesting character is a smelly plush giraffe.

In Your Dreams does fulfill the requisite task of making its dreamscape look random and whimsical, which is what should be expected of a child’s unconscious, but there’s a disconnect between Stevie’s current worries and the content that her dreams show her. It’s curious that during her whole adventure she doesn’t encounter any dreams about her parents’ crisis, and instead she spends the movie’s runtime revisiting the greatest hits of her own oneiric repertoire. That’s a missed opportunity for thematic cohesion.

There’s an original piece of lore that the movie comes up with to explain nigthmares, which has fascinating implications worth pausing to examine for a moment. Because the Sandman can’t affect the real world, it’s actually very dangerous to ask a wish of him: he’ll only make it true within his domain, which requires you to stay trapped in it. To protect dreamers from ever meeting the Sandman, his counterpart, a giver of nightmares, distorts dreams so that you’ll wake up before you make it too far into the world of dreams. This means that nightmares are good for you, and you should be grateful that they keep you from a much worse dream experience. I can’t wait to see parents try to soothe their kids’ night terrors with this argument.

In Your Dreams is pretty to watch, but it’s far from the visual grandeur of Inside Out and somehow, amazingly, less deep in its themes than Slumberland. I can’t even recommend it for a couple hours of mindless fun. You can get that on your own by going to sleep.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: T.I.M.

Or, Tediously Imitative Movie

The British robot thriller T.I.M. was released in the year after the first M3GAN film, and it seems to be interested in some of the same questions about the bond we form with our electronic assistants, but the way it goes about it doesn’t reach the same skill level. Whereas the titular robot in M3GAN has as its primary function the protection of a child, and then takes the meaning of “protection” to horrifying extremes, the robot in T.I.M. is a more vaguely defined “manservant” who one day becomes fixated on the concept of love and suddenly decides that his owner doesn’t need her husband anymore.

Our protagonist is Abi, a robotics engineer who has started a new job at a Big Tech company that is planning to launch a new model of human-sized and -shaped robot assistants. Her assignment is to fix the fine motor skills of the mechanical hands, which still can’t control their grip with enough precision.  As part of the perks of her new position, the company has provided her with a luxurious smart home in the countryside and her own domestic robot to test. This doesn’t make her husband, Paul, too happy: he’s currently unemployed and going through a personal crisis of purpose, and it doesn’t help that T.I.M. performs better than him at satisfying Abi’s every need as a cook, gardener, shopping advisor, and foot massager. Paul begins to resent T.I.M.’s presence because it makes him feel redundant, and soon enough, T.I.M. comes to share the same opinion about Paul.

Australian actor Eamon Farren does a convincing job at portraying T.I.M.’s deceptively polite demeanor, letting its inner aggressiveness show only in the tiny twitch of an eyebrow or a lip. The rhythm of speech he chooses is too distractingly reminiscent of Brent Spiner’s carefully neutral delivery for the character Data, but the resemblance ends there. T.I.M. has no admiration for humans. Its only desire is to serve Abi—whether she likes it or not.

T.I.M.’s turn to full villainy is the movie’s weakest point. It was a more interesting character when it maneuvered behind the scenes to sow mistrust between Abi and Paul, planting clues here and there to lead her to suspect infidelity (which we learn has happened before). After its scheme is exposed, however, T.I.M. resorts to clichéd villain lines (“It doesn't have to end this way,” “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” etc.) that don’t sound believable.

In fact, T.I.M.’s motivation is confusing since the beginning. The scenes at Abi’s workplace show that her boss likes to skip quality checks to speed up production, which gives a hint that T.I.M. may not be following a very carefully written code, but even taking that into account, there’s no conceivable reason why it would harbor erotic desires for Abi. After a very basic conversation about the topic of love, T.I.M. starts stealing glances at her while she’s dressing, changes its hairstyle to match her browsing preferences, and adopts a creepy habit of smelling her clothes in private. Again, within the stated rules of this world, nothing points to T.I.M. having even the capacity for that type of desire. Its obsession with Abi happens because the movie needs something for you to be scared of.

It’s irritating to watch Abi’s continued refusal to believe Paul’s increasingly solid proof of T.I.M.’s true intentions. The broken trust implied in the backstory of their relationship can only go so far toward explaining why she’d be so slow to notice the obvious. The movie goes out of its way to set up the many ways T.I.M. can falsify images and sound, but somehow Abi forgets that information until her marriage has reached an irreversible state of crisis. T.I.M. is quite proficient at making Paul look like an incorrigible adulterer, but Abi’s obliviousness to the double agenda of its precisely timed malicious remarks stretches credulity.

There’s a hint of an interesting development regarding the enmity that grows between T.I.M. and Paul, in that Abi is trying to get pregnant, the one task at which T.I.M. can’t substitute Paul. But the script doesn’t flesh out T.I.M.’s personality with enough depth to explore that side of its jealousy. Also, Paul’s replaceability at home could have been better contrasted with Abi’s replaceability at work, given that we hear her boss explicitly describe her as a diversity hire, but the movie doesn’t do anything with that idea either.

T.I.M. is a mystery with no surprises, scary enough to justify giving it 1:41 minutes of your life, but not imaginative enough to be worth remembering afterwards.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: The Conjuring: Last Rites

It isn't exactly scary, but it will appease fans looking for an emotional finale for their horror mom and dad

The first Conjuring movie (2012) is an absolute master class in dread, horror, and freaky vibes. It's not only my go-to spooky movie, it's also one of my favorite films just in general. The other movies in the Conjuring universe—the sequels and movies like The Nun and Annabelle—are kitschy at best, and they're ones I'll rewatch only occasionally. But the o.g. Conjuring is near perfect.

Flashforward to my anticipation of The Conjuring: Last Rites. It's meant to be the conclusion to this fictional film series based loosely on the investigations and experiences of famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. I always take the "based on" with a grain of salt, as ghosts do not exist. The cinematic portrayal of them, however, is extremely likable. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are absolutely delightful as tortured ghost hunters, and their chemistry is palpable. It's rare that you see on-screen characters that seem to truly love each other, and Ed and Lorraine do just that.

What sets Last Rites apart from the other films in the franchise is that this movie is about them and their family, not the tortured families who happen to inhabit deeply possessed buildings and their paranormal struggles. Here, we're in the 1980s, and the Warrens' daughter, Judy, is starting to become embroiled in their investigations. Like her mother, she is also an empath and possesses psychic abilities. As the family becomes concerned when she gets engaged to her boyfriend, Tony, the family is pulled into another paranormal case—this time one that the Warrens first encountered decades ago.

The Smurl family lives in a coal-mining-soaked town in Pennsylvania, and their demon origin story begins with a haunted mirror, one that the Warrens have experienced before. It seems like the setup of every other Conjuring story, yet something is missing. The haunting that's taking place at the Smurl house is creepy, to be sure, but it never really feels threatening. The stakes never feel high. I think this could be because the house is small, and its neighbors are jam-packed around it—there's only about six feet between them. I have strong opinions on what houses work well within the haunted house trope, and these babies need room to breathe. They need at least a few acres or so, and they need isolation. It's why you'll never see a haunted studio apartment or a haunted beach condo. You need to be able to climb a staircase and feel absolutely alone, and hear echoes and shouts from across the building that you can't readily identify.

When it comes to the scares in The Conjuring: Last Rites, there are a couple of good ones, but nothing that stands out like the spooks in the original. You learn the routine pretty quickly: A character is alone, the music stops, and then you get a jump scare of some unidentified demon.

We never learn the backstory of the demons in the Smurl house, unlike the tortured witch Bathsheba in the original. I think this greatly detracts from the emotional heft of the haunting. Turns out the demons lived on the "land" that the house occupies, so the lore is downgraded, and you never feel any stakes. Also, unrelated: One day I will write a paper on haunted houses as a metaphor for working-class people and the failures of capitalism, but today is not that day. It will revolve around how even though a family feels physically threatened, being unable to afford a non-haunted house or even to escape the mortgage of a haunted house is truly the most horrific part of this beloved genre.

You do get Easter eggs throughout the film, however, so hardcore fans of the Conjuring universe will appreciate that. At one point, you see the evil doll Annabelle blown up to 15 feet tall in a scene that made me laugh more than anything else. Speaking of laughter, I saw this movie in 4DX, which is the interactive, shaking-seats-and-gusts-of-wind experience. It is not, in fact, interactive, and it mainly just made me laugh. It takes you out of the experience, especially when the man next to you is shaking and spilling popcorn in his seat.

I wanted very badly to love this movie, as I've mentioned before, because I've been chasing the high of seeing the first Conjuring since 2012. Perhaps it was lightning in a bottle, or maybe I've become so much of a horror movie cynic that I'm incapable of being truly scared. There are moments of true high camp in this, and I found myself laughing more than shuddering despite the multiple different pools of blood, demonic jump scares, and priests hanging themselves.

This movie does work as a denouement to the fictional Warren storyline, though. The characters of Ed and Lorraine, and now Judy, are good people, and you're always rooting for them to save another family, even when they're so ready to be retired. When the Warrens are faced with possession and death, the stakes suddenly become much higher. I did find multiple parts heartwarming, especially towards the end, when they look toward the future and a life without ghost-hunting. If you're not into sentimentality for these characters, you'll be extremely bored at multiple points.

Judy and her boyfriend are (seemingly) set up as perhaps the next generation of demon hunters, but I suppose time will tell. In the meantime, I will be watching the original Conjuring every spooky season like clockwork, when the leaves start to fall and the temps get a little chilly.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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.