TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights:

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: Sorcery and Small Magics, by Maiga Doocy

 A whimsical romp combining familiar tropes with inventive charm.

Tropes are not rules, and they are not poison. They are tools, shortcuts to simplify some elements of plot construction by using familiar component parts. They are pieces of mating plumage, which signal to the reader that the author is engaging with a particular set of expectations. Maiga Doocy has a deft hand at deploying tropes to advantage in Sorcery and Small Magics, so that the story felt comfortable without being stale, full of familiar bits of structure that guided my expectations along familiar paths, while allowing me to be surprised by inventive bits of character or world-building that filled out the details.

We open with a Magic School™ setting, in which Leovander Lovage and Sebastian Grimm are Rivals™, nearly Enemies™, who have been snarking at each other their entire time at school. In full fairness, this is on Leo, because Leo is kind of a jerk who can’t resist picking on straight-laced and reserved Grimm; and indeed his juvenile shenanigans have put him on the edge of expulsion if he doesn't shape up. Now they are in their last year of studies, preparing for the Trials™ which will determine their magical futures. Leo, with an aristocratic and respected magical lineage, is skilled at small magics (charms and cantrips), but useless at Grandmagic, as larger spells are called. They always go wrong, someone gets hurt, and so he’s sworn off them, which means his career options are limited. Nevertheless, he’s rich and privileged, so that’s not really going to be a real problem for him. Meanwhile, Grimm is serious, highly skilled, and fully invested in making a name for himself – which is important, since he comes from a much less privileged background.

Through a reasonably plausible but also entertainingly contrived accident, Grimm inadvertently casts a spell on Leo that renders Leo subject to every one of his commands. Whatever he orders, Leo must obey, and if Grimm gets too far away, Leo suffers increasingly agonising discomfort that becomes life-threatening. Such spells are highly, highly illegal, so rather than go ask for help, our boys decide to keep it secret while trying to work out how to undo this curse on their own.

This premise could absolutely be a paint-by-numbers enemies-to-lovers forced-proximity magic-school romantasy. But because Doocy uses the tropes as tools, rather than crutches, instead it’s something a bit more inventive. For example, the Quest™ to undo the spell takes Leo and Grimm out of school, so really only the opening scenes make use of the familiar Magic School trappings. Further, every element of the world-building is constructed to reinforce their character arcs, which lends a really pleasing coherence to the story. This is most obvious in the magic system. In this world, magic requires two types of people to cooperate in order to cast a spell: scrivers, who write the spells, and casters, who actually cast them. Leo is a scriver, and Grimm is a caster, so in addition to the Forced Proximity™ of the curse, their complementary skills also add a structural component of Working Together™.

This magic system is itself deeply intertwined with the best bit of the setting: the Unquiet Wood, a wild forest whose dangers are walled off from the domain of humans by a boundary that is constantly refreshed by governmental magician teams. But the boundary is not perfect, and when magical influences slip through, the results can be deadly: blights that destroy crops and ruin whole towns, poisonous flowers that will kill a person in hours. Yet the magic can also be wondrous, and a whole economy of Unquiet Wood foragers makes its living by venturing past the boundary and collecting magical artifacts. A single wing feather of a griffin can be a vitally important magical tool in spell casting.

So naturally – naturally – Leo and Grimm find that the only path to undoing their curse takes them into the Unquiet Wood, where various eventualities cast light upon their magical capacity, their relationship, and the true nature of the Unquiet Wood.

One thing I quite liked about this book was the absence of any real antagonist. Leo and Grimm get into their current situation through a genuinely innocent misunderstanding, and the solution that they seek is accomplished by acting in good faith with everyone they meet. Sometimes they are collaboratively working together to solve mutual problems, but sometimes people just help out out for the sake of helping.  The baseline assumption of this book is that most people are Good, Actually. It's not quite the same as Cozy Fantasy, which tends to focus more on importing rituals of self-care into fantasy land (coffee, baking, books, cushions, cats, hygge, etc.), but it's still a comfortable worldview to spend a few hundred pages with.

And it's worth noting that this theme — that people are Good and Cooperative, Actually — serves as a structural glue to many elements of the plot and setting. It underlies the duality of the magic system; it shows up in the actions Leo and Grimm take, and the bargains they strike with other people they meet during their quest; and I would bet folding cash that it will also turn out to be the solution to the current deadliness of the Unquiet Wood. This world is built on combining unlike things to build something larger, not walling them off from each other. So despite the crossbow bolts that start flying in the climax, no one is really operating out of malice here. It’s a kind book, peopled with basically good folks — yes, even the ones that need to get fed to monsters have Reasons. It is entertainingly written, tightly plotted, and not (quite) as predictable as you’d expect from its component parts. I expect to read the next books in the series with great pleasure.

--

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

Highlights:

• Slow-burn stormcloud/sunshine order/chaos romance
• Whimsical, charming setting and magic
• Effectively deployed tropes
  

Reference: Doocy, Maiga, Sorcery and Small Magics [Orbit 2024].

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

Review: Jujutsu Kaisen - Season Two

A nihilistic departure from the edgy optimism of the first season.

When Jujutsu Kaisen arrived in the anime world, it became an instant hit. Fans were drawn to show’s edgy, elevated execution of the traditional shonen elements. Shonen anime often contain a central protagonist who is optimistic and heroic (Naruto Shippuden) or cynical and heroic (Bleach), and who has an interesting ensemble cast of scene-stealing characters, along with layers of complicated villains, intense battles, devasting family secrets, and extensive and powerful character arcs. Jujutsu Kaisen Season One gave viewers many of the things they loved about Naruto, but delivered it in a sleeker, edgier story with incredible art design and fantastic music. But Season Two of Jujutsu Kaisen makes a significant shift in both tone and storytelling style.

Season One Recap – Pink-haired Yuji Itadori is a strong, athletic high schooler being raised by his dying grandfather. After school, he attends his friends’ “occult club” meeting where they accidentally unleash a violent monster who begins to kill his classmates. To save them he consumes a dangerous artifact, the mummified finger of Sakuna, an evil supernatural being. As a result, Yuji is possessed by the villain Sakuna but can also harness his power. To everyone’s surprise, Yuji is strong enough to bring the violent Sakuna’s psyche under control. He is able to save his classmates and work alongside his new ally, Megumi (a sorcerer / monster-slayer) to defeat the attacking cursed creature. “Curses” are murderous monsters created by the negative emotions of humans. It’s a fascinating commentary on human thoughts.

Unfortunately, like Naruto in Naruto and Naruto Shippuden, Yuji now has a violent demon sharing space in his mind and his body. This means he is going to be executed…eventually. In the meantime, Yuji is sent to Jujutsu High School to learn how to be a sorcerer (curse-slayer) and save the world along with his new first-year classmates: fierce, outspoken Nobara and moody, deadly Megumi, all under the guidance of Satoru Gojo, their blue-eyed, blindfolded, irreverent teacher and mentor. In the course of Season One, Yuji builds bonds with his teammates and mentors, connects with his other classmates, and encounters life-changing conflicts while he struggles to maintain control of the monster inside him. Despite the grim premise, Season One maintained an unexpected sense of humor—simultaneously edgy, likeable, violent, and clever, with great character development.

Season Two is such a significant shift in the tone and storytelling style that it almost seems like we are watching a different show. The season begins with a multi-episode prequel arc about Yuji’s all-powerful young teacher, Satoru Gojo, and his deteriorating best-friendship with soon-to-be villain, Suguru Geto. However, the friendship between the two men is mostly just told to us and Geto’s sudden pivot from “save all humans” to “kill all humans” is so abrupt that it requires more of a willing suspension of disbelief than the fantastical magic systems that define the show.

The best part of the extended prequel episodes is the story of Megumi as a young child, Megumi’s violent, cynical father Toji, and how the father and son intersect with Gojo in a life-changing way. After an extended set up of Geto as a remorseless, smirking villain we get a time-skip to the present where we finally reconnect with the Season One trio of Yuji and his friends Megumi and Nobara. However, we only get a brief moment with them including a confusing introduction of an old classmate of Yuji who then disappears entirely from the story. In a few scenes, we move into the bulk of Season Two, a nihilistic, violent series of multi-episode long fight scenes, minimally explained villainy, and such extreme violence that I felt like I was watching Attack on Titan. Season One and Season Two both have lots of violence, but Season Two lacks the character-driven plotting and humor that Season One so effectively wove into the main horror elements.

In Season 2, Gojo’s frenemy, Geto’s, body is now possessed by another villain but everyone refers to him as Geto for convenience. On Halloween night, Pseudo-Geto and his minions trap thousands of festively costumed humans at the Shibuya Train Station in order to lure and trap Gojo. Gojo is believed to be the only one powerful enough to stop them so they use the trapped humans as bait and hostages to capture him so they can destroy the world without Gojo interfering. The plan results in a lot of carnage which is made more surreal by the brightly colored and often humorous costumes the unsuspecting party-goers are wearing. This attention to visual detail is one of the many ways in which the art design of Season Two is outstanding and riveting. From the sweeping views of the nighttime cityscapes to a carefully animated shot of the wide, lengthy almost golden staircase of the Shibuya train station, Season Two is a feast of thoughtful and immersive animation.

The main problem of Season Two is the plotting. Yuji, Megumi, and Nobara are no longer fighting as teammates but are separated from each other. Additionally, there are so many minor characters thrown into the narrative that viewers might repeatedly find themselves googling unfamiliar names. With so many key characters available, it’s confusing that minor players got so much screen time. Nobara, who is such a well-written, strong female character, is largely removed from the main story except for a few ill-fated fight scenes.

But, despite the gory, nihilistic tone of the second season, there are several elements and scenes that maintain the show’s intense appeal and explain its return as the 2024 winner of Anime of the Year.

In one story arc, the young sorcerer, Ui Ui, has an intense worship-like love for his super strong, monster-fighting older sister, Mei Mei. Mei Mei’s tone is always seductively calm regardless of the creatures coming at her or the creepy adoration of her little brother. In the midst of a fight, Mei Mei, needing a human sacrifice to succeed against her opponent, turns to her young brother and serenely asks, “Ui Ui, will you die for me?”

In another fight scene, a curse technique resurrects Toji, Megumi’s long dead father, and the two enter into a protracted battle unaware of the other’s identity. In another excellent scene, an injured, bloodied Nanami (Yuji’s business-like mentor) simultaneously walks through the haunting, dark subway station while also walking an uncomfortably bright beach, uninjured, wearing his business suit which is too warm for him. Both moments are overlaid on each other. After so many intense visuals, fight scenes, and overt horror, the simplicity of the overlaid moment is tragic and beautiful.

After protagonist Yuji sustains a near-fatal injury, the murderous monster Sakuna escapes Yuji’s control and lays waste to the Shibuya station using Yuji’s body as executioner. The close murders are shocking and terrifying and the final cataclysmic devastation is extremely powerful. At the same time, Megumi decides to sacrifice his life to create an avatar powerful enough to defeat the rampaging Sakuna. We see the epic clash between Megumi’s monster and the unleashed Sakuna. The lengthy battle is filled with astonishing visuals of the fighting and of the resulting destruction. Megumi’s strength, even though he’s unconscious, fuels Sakuna’s long-running obsession with him.

At the end of the battle with Sakuna, the art design of the devastation is terrifying in its controlled boundaries. Sakuna’s decision to inflict death and destruction go to an exact point, leaving a clear line of delineation between the survivors and the decimated. It’s a creepy way to show that everyone’s fate (of survival or death) is entirely in Sakuna’s hands. When Sakuna releases back to Yuji, the resulting emotional response is heartrending for Yuji as the panned out destruction blows him away. The music in this scene is fantastic. The haunting, driving beats of the show’s opening song circle back to the viewers as a devastated Yuji pleads for his own death.

Later, after Yuji regains control of his body, he has a final showdown between the long-time villain Mahito. During a climactic scene, the subway station transforms into a surreal winter-scape of desolate winter trees, deep white snow, and hunting wolves.

Overall, Jujutsu Kaisen’s powerful use of visual storytelling through its incredible art design make Season Two terrifyingly appealing, but the nihilistic change in both tone and plot may leave some viewers emotionally exhausted.

--

The Math

Highlights:

· A nihilistic departure from Season One
· Incredible art design
· Limited character development in favor of action

Nerd Coefficient: 7 

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

Review: Underland by Maxime J. Durand

A cosmic horror setting without cosmic horror characters is a brilliant combination

You may remember that in 2007, Brandon Sanderson wrote that magic in fantasy stories should have logical rules that make sense, and later, in 2012, N. K. Jemisin wrote that the whole point of fantasy stories is that magic exists beyond all logic and sense. With all due respect to the inimitable quadruple-Hugo-and-quadruple-Locus winner, on this specific topic of fantasy literature the esteemed Ms. Jemisin is totally wrong and Mr. Sanderson is totally right. Magic is more interesting (rather, it's only interesting) when it has rules. And one demonstration of the wonders that can result from a strictly systematic magic system is Maxime J. Durand's dark fantasy novel Underland.

Originally posted as a web serial, Underland follows the quest of multiclass summoner/necromancer Valdemar to find a new world for humankind. Centuries ago, an evil moon blocked out the sun, dooming the world to the terrors of the night. Suddenly overwhelmed by unimaginable monstrosities, civilization quickly collapsed, and humans migrated to underground caverns where they'd be safe from the cold and the ghosts that roam the dead surface. Once resettled, humans discovered the magical potential in their own blood, and used it to rebuild a semblance of the stability they had before. Today the human territories are under the absolute rule of Dark Lords, immensely powerful mages with debatably compatible agendas. But other creatures already lived in the Underland before humans arrived, and some aren't willing to be nice neighbors. To be fair, too often humans haven't shown the noblest behavior toward other sentient creatures. What looks like peace conceals numerous tensions that may snap at any time.

But the worries don't stop at the mundane. In their study of magic, some have unwisely contacted extraplanar powers that can't be trusted, much less controlled. Such spells have been declared illegal, but that hasn't stopped the proliferation of clandestine cults that seek an escape from life underground. One cult in particular involved an entire family, the Verneys, who were exterminated by an order of knights dedicated to keeping those mysterious entities from invading the living world. The only survivor from the Verney family was Valdemar, back then a child, who now secretly experiments with planar travel to find a more inhabitable place for humankind to move to. Suspected of trying to continue his criminal family's loathsome rituals, he's been put under arrest, but one of the Dark Lords has taken an interest in his abnormally strong magical skills and has offered him the tools to finish his research... at an unspecified price.

Web serials are usually friendly bedfellows with fanfiction, and Underland unapologetically bears the marks of its self-published origins. The novel is evidently shaped by Dungeons and Dragons: its setting brings to mind the classic Underdark expansions; it is populated by the usual suspects—dark elves, dark dwarves, troglodytes, golems, and liches; some of the extraplanar locations namedropped in the text resemble those used in the game; and the plot is punctuated by quests, side quests, and downtime training. The rest of the worldbuilding samples liberally from Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the Lovecraftian corpus to depict a setting precariously enveloped by unsuspected powers that are just one wrong incantation away from crossing into material reality.

The prose in Underland is effective at setting a macabre tone. Consider this chapter opening:

He dreamed of rats that night. They crawled in a grotesque pit dug in black oily stone, squeaking and gnawing on the flesh of the innocent.

The author knew to keep the alluring aesthetic of cosmic horror without the worst ingredient of cosmic horror, which is its attitude. This is a world of gory witchcraft, unnatural transformations, painful rituals, obscene ruins, threatening dreams, widespread pestilence, boiling blood, imprisoned demons, moldy tunnels, abhorrent experiments, and costly secrets. And yet, the author is deliberate in his selection of focus characters. Even though the book's setting has all the recognizable signs of cosmic horror, its characters are very emphatically not cosmic horror characters. Even though nothing more than a thin veil separates visible reality from tenebrous chaos, the mages we meet in this novel don't adopt the attitude of helpless desperation that is so annoying in traditional cosmic horror. They don't believe that the hidden forces that control the universe are beyond human comprehension; they don't accept the eternal superiority of the ancient gods; they don't fear the mysterious; they don't tremble in awe at the unearthly. It's like walking through the tired grimness of Black Mirror and finding Ted Lasso living there. With a beautiful, admirable ethos of humanism, these characters approach the unknown and make it known. Instead of submitting to the supernatural, they study it, find its practical applications, deduce its laws. These mages may be gifted with fantastical powers, but their sharpest tool is human reason.

And here we arrive at the greatest pleasure of reading Underland: watching our protagonist use creatively the rules of magic to make up combinations of spells that are wholly surprising yet follow logically from the established facts. It's an irresistible type of nerdy catnip to inhabit the inner thoughts of a smart hero as he reasons his way out of impossible plights. Either with inventive solutions born from a desperate moment of improvisation, or with procedures coldly planned with meticulous care, Valdemar is an inspiring hero who understands the unlimited power of lifelong learning.

His impressive talents notwithstanding, Valdemar is far from a perfect person. The execution of his entire family has stunted his ability to form connections to other people, and in some scenes his unconventional moral intuitions come off as appallingly heartless. At the same time that he makes progress in the challenging techniques of advanced sorcery, he undergoes an equally strenous education in interpersonal contact. It has a moving effect to watch this formidable spellcaster, who is no stranger to commanding demons and transmuting his blood into an interdimensional portal, discover for the first time the simple joy of making true friends who support his dreams without judgment.

Although the text always highlights the moral questions where Valdemar's position has defects, it's worth noting that, as a whole, the society of Underland rests on some surprising assumptions that go against the grain of what fantasy literature has usually considered acceptable. In Underland, to seek immortality is not viewed as inherently evil. Multiple methods exist to cheat death, including soul receptacles, mechanical bodies, youth potions, and even undeath, which causes no scandal. It's actually taken for granted that everyone who can afford it will resort to one of these methods, and that it would be inexcusably foolish not to. This is another manifestation of the novel's underlying humanism: just as mystery is the enemy, and thus shall be overcome, death is the enemy, and shall likewise be overcome.

Underland is the first part of a duology that continues in Underland 2. The reader must be warned that this novel ends in a cliffhanger, but what a howling hell of a cliffhanger it is. Now, it may be argued against this choice of ending, and against the novel in its entirety, that the author relies too much on the fact that Lovecraft's œuvre has become public domain, and such an accusation wouldn't be without merit. The reader may also feel distracted by the repeated appearance of narrative conventions inherited from Dungeons and Dragons, which carry unwelcome baggage in the form of bioessentialism, territorial expansionism, and unquestioned monarchism.

Once these missteps are admitted, there remains plenty to enjoy in Underland. Its unusual treatment of the aesthetic of cosmic horror is a refreshing change of direction from the undue reverence that puny mortals are typically expected to profess for the darkness. Even in the deepest bowels of the earth, the undying flame of human reason lights the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Durand, Maxime J. Underland [Podium Publishing, 2022].

It was the wrong call to age up Wednesday Addams

The success of a character like Wednesday Addams depends on a very precise comedic style that does not pair well with contemporary young adult tropes

Tim Burton has only ever told one story: the outsider misunderstood by the world. This lifelong obsession has sometimes given spectacular results (Beetlejuice, Batman 1 and 2, Big Fish), and, at other times, regrettable embarrassments (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland). So every time he announces a new project, the gods of art play Russian roulette. His new Netflix series, Addams Family spinoff Wednesday, is, much like Burton himself, an acquired taste. Like all acquired tastes, it demands a willingness for masochism. Imagine a chronically sedated Sabrina Spellman shambling confusedly into the nonstop glitter fashion gala of Monster High and you'll get an idea of the fundamental problem with Wednesday. Some stories succeed at straddling tonal ambiguity; this one ties narrative tone to a rack and mercilessly turns the pulley until it snaps.

Expectations were always going to be unfairly high for this series. In the 1990s, Christina Ricci set the absolute platinum standard for the role without breaking a sweat. This new version has found a talented performer in Jenna Ortega, whose perfectly timed microexpressions reveal just the right hint of vulnerability behind Wednesday's mask of aloofness, but she's been given bland, repetitive lines that quickly get exhausting and put the comedy in the wrong place. We're supposed to be moved to laughter by Wednesday, not at her.

A character like Wednesday needs to be handled like Marvin the Paranoid Android: it's best enjoyed in moderation. The film version was an alarmingly jaded child whose brand of humor worked so well because it was the pinch of spice in a varied recipe. Here, as the main entry, it's indigestible, all the more so because this Wednesday is almost a grown-up, but her characterization didn't mature accordingly. The absurdist glee of watching a 10-year-old play with knives is broken when it's a 16-year old doing it. Suspension of disbelief is a rebellious bird, especially in fantasy, and a hundred times more when the fantasy is set in our world. The same lines that caused a blend of shock and delight when delivered in the innocent-sounding voice of a child cause annoyance when heard in a monotone from an edgy teen who discovered goth four decades late and made it her sole personality trait.

This misfire in characterization extends to Wednesday's choices, which invariably clash with her peers' attempts at contact. In the films, Wednesday was never surprised by her emotions. She was fully at home in her dark psyche. Sure, she was a sociopath, but she was self-aware enough to tell when loyalty mattered. Netflix Wednesday is a sociopath, period. She's so busy denying her emotions that she fails to notice she's controlled by them. She accuses those closest to her of outrageous acts of manipulation while engaging in Olympic-level manipulation herself. In her quest to solve a series of murders and, of course, prove everyone else wrong, she never realizes that her own inflated ego is the biggest obstacle.

Wednesday works better when it's a detective story than when it's an angsty soap opera, which is a pity, because the mystery ceases to be mysterious halfway through the season, and the teen drama is Riverdale levels of insufferable. The script relies on so many clichés that by the middle of the second episode the viewer has effectively received an accelerated course in snarky comebacks. It must be admitted that the writing quality improves considerably in the episodes not written by the Gough-Millar duo. (Why on Earth would you entrust this franchise to the creators of Smallville, who also happen to be the same guys who sincerely believed The Sword of Shannara could ever be adapted into something decent?) In particular, writer Kayla Alpert does an admirable job with her scripts for episodes 3 and 4. However, the show is generally more interested in aesthetic than substance.

John Scalzi has described this show as "Spooky Daria Goes to Gothwarts," and that would suffice as a review. However, it's important to delve into why Wednesday doesn't work. Let's make an effort to suspend disbelief and forget about the most blatantly broken parts. Let's forget for a moment that you can't hurt swimmers by dropping piranhas in the pool because chlorinated water gives fish blood poisoning. Let's forget that Nevermore Academy has so many special day events that basically no studying ever happens. Let's forget that the Nightshades super-hidden room loses all its aura of secrecy and becomes a regular hangout spot like the town cafeteria. Let's forget the extraordinarily offensive portrayal of mental illness. What, exactly, is missing in this formula?

The key to the humor of the Addams depends on the contrast between their weird customs and "respectable" society. The fact that the series presents a "Nancy Reagan High School," only to throw it away before the opening credits of the first episode, shows how much the creators missed the clear opportunity of showing Wednesday where she would stand out the most. Instead, they dilute her uniqueness by putting her in a whole school of monsters, but at the same time dilute the monsters because otherwise they'd outshine her. We're expected to just believe that the place houses hundreds of vampires, werewolves and assorted magical misfits, but we get to see almost none of that.

Another crime worth noting is the waste of such great actresses as Gwendoline Christie and Catherine Zeta-Jones. As the school headmistress, Christie looks adequately professional and in control, but the routine of the responsible adult exasperated by the meddling kid gets old very fast. For her part, Zeta-Jones is exquisite as always, but the character of Morticia is properly defined by a mischievous joie de vivre that is nowhere to be seen here. Mercifully, Christina Ricci is given a part worthy of her acting powers, and it's a treat to watch her channel Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her with such uncanny ease.

The problem with Wednesday is that it commits the cardinal sin of trying to be cool but obviously trying too hard. It's only saved by the murder mystery, which provides enough misdirections and credible suspects to maintain interest, but that is a plot that didn't have a reason to happen in the Addams world. The Addams Family requires a fine-tuned ear for dark comedy, an elusive lightning that has only struck twice. This attempt feels like yet another generic magical school filled with horny teenagers, with the aggravating factor that a severed hand manages to express more emotion than the protagonist's resting bored face. We're constantly told that this family likes macabre games, but in the end, the only one being tortured is the viewer.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10. Meh, good enough.

Bonuses: +1 for Danny Elfman and Chris Bacon's music, +1 for a well-designed murder mystery, +10 because it's always a joy to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones in anything.

Penalties: −1 for dull dialogue, −1 for wasting literal hundreds of monstrous characters we never see being monstrous, −1 because the makeup for Zeta-Jones is far too lazy, −10 because it's past time horror stories stopped taking so many liberties with mental illness.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10, and just barely.

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

Microreview [book]: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

The Scholomance's potential is squandered in the dead angles of its worldbuilding.

Sometimes, books are very easy to talk about, and reviews write themselves: things are great (or maybe not great, but still notable), and I am very excited to point them out! Other books are not easy to talk about, and when that happens it's usually a failure to connect: a book that was probably fine, but which left me without much that I'm desperate to convey about it, and looking for the right words to describe the experience is a more active challenge. And then... then you get books like A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik's latest offering. This book is hard to talk about because, wow, where do I start.

Well, let's start with the basics. A Deadly Education is set in a magic school with the horror dialled up to eleven: set in the Scholomance, a school which annually scoops up a mostly-preselected group of magical teens from around the world and dumps them in an educational facility mostly located in a void dimension (which, in turn, is located in the UK, because where else would a magic boarding school be??). There appears to be a fully fledged, functioning society beyond the walls of this magic school, but we only catch glimpses of it through flashback, because for four years the students of the scholomance are locked in without adults, holidays or even any school supplies that aren't either brought in through freshers or provided at the whims of the school's magical replenishment. This is because in this version of our world, magical kids are walking magnets for various magical monstrosities which view them as soft, tasty targets to devour. The school is supposed to protect them from this fate, but monsters are nothing if not persistent, and every year only a fraction of the top class gets the opportunity to graduate, and an even smaller percentage makes it through graduation, because graduation (you guessed it) involves even more monsters.

The reader is guided through this nightmare scenario - in a lot of descriptive first person prose - by El Higgins, a Junior year student (sure, this international magical boarding school in the UK has an internal structure based on the US high school system, why wouldn't it) who is fighting an uphill battle not just to stay alive against the monsters, but to do it alone, while trying to control a magical aptitude that wants to push her towards being mana-sucking evil sorceress with an arsenal of destructive spells. El hasn't made any friends during her stay at the Scholomance so far, but she's biding her time for a big magical gesture that will make everyone around her pay attention and ask her to join their team for graduation, maybe even getting her into a wealthy, protected magical enclave in the process. Complicating this plan for survival is Orion Lake, her year's big superstar, whose own affinity means that he's saved an impressive proportion of his own year from being snacked on by monsters before graduation. That's great news for everyone who hasn't been a monster snack, but bad news for the class about to graduate, who are facing an unusually busy and hungry graduation "ceremony" when they leave the school.

El is a rather dense and self-sabotaging protagonist, so when Orion starts showing an interest in her - first as a suspect in another student's murder, but then as, shock horror, an actual friend - she decides this is terrible, actually, and spends a lot of time trying to shake him off. But it's too late: Orion's interest in her gets El noticed by the wider student body (especially the students of the elite New York enclave to which Orion belongs) and also pushes her to start thinking about choosing her own friends, notably artificer Aadhya and dark-mage-gone-clean Liu. Readers who are wondering if maybe this is the book where Novik will push these interesting female relationships into the foreground over having the day saved by heterosexual attraction: sorry, nope. El's chosen friendships do play an important role, but they're ultimately second fiddle to her relationship with Orion and the plots surrounding that, and it's El and Orion - from among the main cast, at least - who end up saving the day.

This book has been strongly criticised for its handling of race, and particularly one thoughtless (by the author's own admission) and racist passage involving Black hair. Beyond this, there's been a range of reactions, both positive and negative, from reviewers of colour reacting to the broader setting and how the international setting of the Scholomance is handled. As a white reviewer, it's not my place at all to pass judgement on the points raised, but there's no escaping the fact that El's world is a mix of the kind of diversity you get on Captain Planet or the Star Trek bridge, with students from every continent and culture apparently converging in this corner of Void!Britain and slotting into a mostly homogenised school culture. Language is a big part of spellcasting, and most students, El included, have a curriculum focused on learning as many languages as possible in order to cast spells in them. There's also a very obvious but unremarked upon prevalence of white characters in the key positions of power (the New York and London enclaves) that El finds herself butting heads with. El herself is mixed race, but was raised by a white British mother and rejected by her Indian relatives due to her magical affinity. There's nothing inherently problematic about that - characters of colour shouldn't have to justify themselves with some threshold of cultural performance to exist, and there are plenty of mixed race and diaspora people who grow up without strong cultural connections to some or all of their heritage. But it's impossible to ignore the fact that real world prejudices and inequalities do appear all around this worldbuilding, even if the setting is supposed to be divorced from that context. 

As a reader, my reaction to those prejudices being replicated in an ostensibly representative text is to look to whether I trust the author to be doing something intentional and therefore potentially worthwhile: is this book trying to say something, or am I just experiencing the author's dead angles replicated on the page? Passages like the description of locs, or another moment where El identifies a language worksheet as being "modern" Arabic because it has cartoon depictions of terrorist acts on it, make it really hard to interpret A Deadly Education as doing anything but the former. And, sure, there's a lot of books and authors out there doing worse things, and caring a lot less - and in many ways, it's A Deadly Education's commitment to trying to imagine a genuinely diverse, international magic school that makes its dead angles so obvious - but that doesn't make the failings here less disappointing, especially as this is a book that had resources for sensitivity reading.

Frankly, this kind of thing leaves me tired. The Scholomance is an interesting take on a trope that still has great potential, but I don't want to read about societies of international sorcerers, and their special magic schools in a story that expects white wizards of the US and UK to be the centre of power within that international system. It doesn't help that, despite enjoying her previous work, there are other elements in the kinds of stories Novik seems to want to write that are exhausting to me too: I am tired of having interesting relationships between women dangled in front of me and then pushed aside for heterosexual pairings that are at best "meh" and at worst super creepy, and I'm tired of stories that subvert their subgenres on the surface while still being tied to the same patriarchal nonsense as their predecessors. A Deadly Education is, in many ways, an enjoyable book: a bit grim, a little slow to start, and very invested in its explanations, but ultimately a lot of fun. But as a multiple award winner and nominee, I think Novik's work asks to be held to higher standards than that, and this is a book that falls short in a number of unfortunate ways.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 El is an entertaining, if dense, narrator to follow around the Scholomance, and her relationships with Aadyha and Liu are fun to watch

Penalties: -2 racist slip-ups and apparent unconscious biases make it hard to trust where this is going; -1 I simply did not ask for another Naomi Novik book where the main character gets into a heterosexual romance with the embodiment of the patriarchy

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Reference: Novik, Naomi. A Deadly Education (Del Rey, 2020)